was lunging at Sister Hilda. Not physically coming up and over the table but by flicking his eyes, puckering his mouth, flexing his shoulders. It was embarrassing and stupid. If he had had a Somerset Slugger, Josh would have been tempted to whack Birdie along the side of the head.
â
John Brownâs Body
by Stephen Vincent Benét,â declared Sister Hilda, her eyes fixed on the book in front of her. âItâs about the Civil War, isnât it? Yes, Iâm sure it is. We read parts of it in high school. John Brown was an Abolitionist and he was hanged for treason.â
âThatâs right,â Josh said. âHe led a raid against a federal arsenal in West Virginia.â
âHarpers Ferry, I believe,â said Sister Hilda.
âYes, maâam, thatâs correct. They said he was a lunatic, but who are we to say anything about that?â He smiled.
She laughedâpleasantly, personally, almost intimately.
Josh certainly didnât blame Birdie for lusting after this woman. Her laugh, like her voice, was as much a treat to listen to as her person was to look at. He had told Birdie that a Somerset Sister was like a hospital gray lady, but there was absolutely nothing gray about Hilda Owens. Her bright hair and silky skin and round lips shouted with color, as did the yellow-and-green flowered cotton dress she was wearing this morning. Josh figured her age at about twenty-five. She and her banker husband, who somebody said was at least fifteen years older, had moved to Somerset only a few months ago from Kansas City. Calling her Sister Hilda didnât seem right for such a pretty young woman. That name would better fit an ugly old woman in her fifties or sixties.
â âInvocationâ is the first section,â she said. âThatâs where I will begin, right at the beginning. Is that what you had in mind, Josh?â
Josh said that would be splendid, thank you, maâam.
Keeping her head and bright blue eyes down, she read:
âAmerican muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art,
Because you are as various as your land,
As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,
Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,
As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,
And native, too, as the sea-voyaged roseââ
âNo! The blood! Donât shoot no more!â
Josh hammered Birdie hard on his head. âNo more screaming now, no more!â
Sister Hilda had stopped her reading. âWhatâs wrong, Josh?â
âThis poor young man sees horror every time his eyes close. The poetry. . . . Well, it must have set him into a doze or something.â
Birdie, eyes open now, was smiling at Sister Hilda. âThatâs right, maâam. I am so sorry that my lunacy affected your beautiful reading of that story. I was having trouble following what was happening.â
âItâs not just a regular story. Itâs poetry. I thought you said the other day that you loved poetry,â she said sternly to Birdie.
âI do, I do. But I have trouble sleeping because of my sickness, so I am always sleepy even though I canât go to sleep.â
âThatâs the way I used to be too, Sister Hilda,â Josh said, trying to be helpful. âIt takes time for patients like us to work through their horrors. I am trying to help Birdie here deal with his. But he is a very bad case, as you can see.â
She returned to the book.
âSwift runner, never captured or subdued,
Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,
That half a hundred hunters have pursued
But never matched their bullets with the dreamââ
âThe blood! No!â
Josh again hit Birdie, causing the young manâs screaming to stop.
A bushwhacker appeared from behind Josh and Birdie. âYou all right in here, Sister Hilda?â he asked. âI heard some yelling.â The