Free Flying Crows by Jim Lehrer

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€œ
John Brown’s Body
by Stephen Vincent Benét,” declared Sister Hilda, her eyes fixed on the book in front of her. “It’s about the Civil War, isn’t it? Yes, I’m sure it is. We read parts of it in high school. John Brown was an Abolitionist and he was hanged for treason.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Josh said. “He led a raid against a federal arsenal in West Virginia.”
    â€œHarpers Ferry, I believe,” said Sister Hilda.
    â€œYes, ma’am, that’s correct. They said he was a lunatic, but who are we to say anything about that?” He smiled.
    She laughed—pleasantly, personally, almost intimately.
    Josh certainly didn’t 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 didn’t seem right for such a pretty young woman. That name would better fit an ugly old woman in her fifties or sixties.
    â€œ ‘Invocation’ is the first section,” she said. “That’s where I will begin, right at the beginning. Is that what you had in mind, Josh?”
    Josh said that would be splendid, thank you, ma’am.
    Keeping her head and bright blue eyes down, she read:
    â€œAmerican 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 rose—”
    â€œNo! The blood! Don’t shoot no more!”
    Josh hammered Birdie hard on his head. “No more screaming now, no more!”
    Sister Hilda had stopped her reading. “What’s wrong, Josh?”
    â€œThis poor young man sees horror every time his eyes close. The poetry. . . . Well, it must have set him into a doze or something.”
    Birdie, eyes open now, was smiling at Sister Hilda. “That’s right, ma’am. I am so sorry that my lunacy affected your beautiful reading of that story. I was having trouble following what was happening.”
    â€œIt’s not just a regular story. It’s poetry. I thought you said the other day that you loved poetry,” she said sternly to Birdie.
    â€œI do, I do. But I have trouble sleeping because of my sickness, so I am always sleepy even though I can’t go to sleep.”
    â€œThat’s the way I used to be too, Sister Hilda,” Josh said, trying to be helpful. “It 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.”
    She returned to the book.
    â€œSwift 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 dream—”
    â€œThe blood! No!”
    Josh again hit Birdie, causing the young man’s screaming to stop.
    A bushwhacker appeared from behind Josh and Birdie. “You all right in here, Sister Hilda?” he asked. “I heard some yelling.” The