Frank waits for the coming storm, but a stranger arrives.
Song of Heaven
The cottage, nestled among the redwoods on the Scottish hillsides, is where Frank had lived for sixty-two years, since a week after he married. Before two children had grown, before the graying of hair, before the buckle in his spine and before he needed a stick to walk out.
Frank, well he didn’t need too much. He pitied people that lived in the cities. Theirs, his and his wife, Megan, before she died several years back, had been a mountain way of life.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he lifted a mug to his lips, sipped his tea and felt tired. Outside, a brilliant, sunny, fresh, clean air day was beginning. The hillside fair sang with the sound of summer and was dutifully dressed in pinks and golds, reds and browns. But Frank smelled something. He smelled rain; it was on the air as a breeze sifted in through the open window.
The August days had been hot and heavy, and he had spent more than a couple of evenings sat in his rocker on the porch, listening for the first rumblings of thunder in the distance. Yesterday, when it came, it was a long growl, then a louder slap that shook the sky. The air, thick with mischief, had stopped the birds singing. The tingle on Frank’s skin told him that the storm would be back tonight, having first collected up the day’s mugginess.
Frank loved the summer storms, living in the thick of things when the weather swept up from the glens. It inspired him.
Lightning unzipped the sky, lit up everything, and occasionally hit the brae. Most mornings now he took his tea outside because he could watch the wonder of nature without the dirty windows in his line of vision. Whenever a storm blossomed, Frank recalled the times he and Megan would sit out on the porch. Together watching the ponderous clouds roll in from afar, coming to strike at the mountain, blanketing, softening, or sometimes so dark with noise, trying to force the mountain aside.
But those clouds never did move the mountain, and nothing the mountain ever did moved Frank from it.
By evening, Frank’s nose had forecast correctly. ‘Thunder is the song of the Heavens,’ he would tell his wife, who was less than enthusiastic about coming storms, preferring to stay close to the Aga and comforting Bonnie, their faithful old Labrador retriever. Not Frank, he remained on the porch, rocking in his chair, feeling the cloud-born reverberations as each drumroll meandered menacingly up the brae.
Frank settled into his chair on the porch.
The heat was oppressive. A bright flash of lightning lit up the hillside, but the peel of thunder did not immediately follow. Frank figured the storm was still about ten miles away. It had been an exhausting day. He could still feel pain in his right arm.
Frank had often been surprised by the mountain, nature being what it is, but walking through the trees, he watched a lone figure coming toward the cottage. It was so unexpected he thought he was dreaming. Was this man looking for shelter? Only a mad man would come up the hill knowing the power of the expected storm. He watched and waited for the man to come to him.
Frank didn’t feel well enough to stand, to greet the stranger.
“Cannae help you, laddie?” Frank asked.
The young man looked up, smiled, and kept on coming. “Looks like it will be a good show,” he said, a laugh in his voice.
“What’ll ye be doing this far up the mountain in this weather? Are ye mad?” Frank said.
But the man just smiled. “I have my reasons,” the stranger said but explained nothing more.
“Could I by chance sit awhile and watch the storm pass?” He asked.
Frank nodded, “Aye, you’ll do me no harm to sit. My name is Frank.”
The stranger sat down, then, looking up at the sky he said.
“It is beautiful here, Frank. I could stay here forever. Have you always lived here?”
Frank nodded, rocking gently.
“Never wanted to live anywhere else. You?” He asked.
The stranger shook his head.
“No, Frank. I came from a distance.”
Frank didn’t care where the man had come from. Having company was friendly. If the man didn’t want to talk, fine. Sometimes he and wife sat many awhile and never said anything. Never much need to. She died right here on the porch.
The storm broke with a fury even Frank had never seen before. The sky was alight with the flashes of lightning that separated the sky from the heavens. He had never seen one as violent in all his years, but he loved every moment of it. He would no doubt never see the like of this again. He did feel sorry for the people in the valley, as this sort of storm could cause damage.
Throughout the whole thing, the stranger never spoke a word. Frank had almost forgotten he was there, but he was, just watching the sky, and not saying a thing.
As the lightning flashes got farther apart and the rumblings fainter, Frank rose unsteadily out of the chair.
“I think that’s it,” Frank said.
“Yes, Frank. Time to be moving on. How’s that pain in your left arm?” He asked.
Frank looked at the man, he had not known the stranger’s name. How did he know about his pain?
“Do you really not know me, Frank?”
Right then, like it was a dream, Frank heard soldiers yelling, screaming out, and then came a smatter of machine-gun fire. Frank froze to the ground, he was twenty-three years old, ‘please God, don’t let this be happening,’ he muttered. Two soldiers lay across the roadside, not moving, so whatever motivated Frank to go from under the truck was something only God had any control over. Frank scrambled, crawled, squirmed his body along the ground, taking cover behind shell-shattered homes; their occupants fled. Frank hollered…
“Peter, Simon… answer me, lift an arm if you can hear me.”
There was no movement. The men were dead, he thought, but it wasn’t enough. Frank had to know, he had to know for certain, and he made a dash to the next broken building, sparking another splash of machine-gun fire that whistled all around him until impact. He felt a jolt that knocked him backward into a doorway, then the radiance of pain, then the taste of the lead, the heaviness of a bullet in his chest, blood clouding and filling his lungs, tears burning in his eyes, and anger in his heart.
Frank never imagined not making it to his pals, and if he couldn’t help them he would die beside them, so he pulled himself forward, the dust matting his blond hair, his young life ebbing.
Just yesterday, the three of them were having a beer together, talking about home. In a week they were due to go on leave. He wanted to be back among the harmonic elevations of Scotland, his homeland, drinking with is pals. Frank wiped the blood from his mouth, feeling it might choke him, his guts on fire…when suddenly another body dropped down beside him, it was a medic.
“Hold this to your chest,” the guy yelled.
Frank grabbed whatever it was and pushed it against the bullet’s entry point.
“What’s your name soldier?” The medic asked, keeping his Thompson pointed toward the direction of fire.
“Frank, sir. Frank McCloud.”
“Okay, Frank. Those poor guys must be your mates, right?”
“Yes sir, if you can help me get to them I’ll be the most grateful bastard in the world.”
The medic rested his hand on Frank’s head; sweat ran like a river from the lad’s brow.
“They’re in another place, Frank.”
“No… no… they get to go home, sir. I promised. I promised them, we’re going home lads. We’re going to Paris, to Rome; we’re going to be free men. They are still alive, still running through the glens, Kings of life, my friends. They are still alive, they are!” Frank turned painfully onto his belly, gritting his teeth, clawing at the dust, pulling, aching, hurting, dying there in the rubble of a land that was not his own.
“Frank… listen to me,” the medic said, “I’m the only one you can be free with now. You can’t stay here anymore, don’t listen to anything but what is in your heart,” the medic said. Then, the medic collected Frank up into his arms and ran with him.
“No, no, leave me; leave me with my friends, sir. I beg you!”
But darkness was approaching, and his life was rolling away like a cool wind.
When Frank opened his eyes, he was in a medical facility. A nurse cooled his brow with water.
“There you are! You’ve been unconscious for two days, Frank. Try not to move too much,” she said. “My name is Megan, I’m your nurse.”
Frank was already thinking: seeing it happen in his mind, his friends falling under fire; ripped open under a hail of machine-gun fire. He heard their last breath, last sighs, bodies shot to pieces. He swore once this war was done he’d never harm another person, no matter what the circumstances, yet he stood there, seeing those boys, his pals, and wished he’d been the one to die instead. There was no law, no preparation; no telling what takes over when fear for one’s life is put on the line. They were dead, killed by men with boy’s faces, and blood surged as he asked himself, why?
“Your friends were lucky, too,” The nurse said, lifting her eyes in the direction of the beds next to Frank.
“Simon and Peter have been telling me all about you, Frank. How you lifted them off the streets as though they were nothing more than feathered birds,” she said.
Frank looked in the direction to where the nurse’s eyes had lifted. The two young men, Peter and Simon, both bandaged, both smiling, were lying beside him.
“Peter… Simon… what the hell… I thought you… I thought…” And emotion overtook him, and for a moment he felt like he was sleepwalking, dreaming, needing to touch them…in another world.
“Hell, we ain’t missing out on no trip home, Frank. You’re our flaming fairy godmother!”
“But…” and then he remembered, “the Medic… the guy who helped me…” Frank’s eyes returned their quizzical stare toward the nurse.
“Easy now, Frank, don’t stress. You need to rest now. Here, you need to keep this. It saved your life,” she said and folded a misshapen silver cross into his palm.
Two years later, Frank placed that silver cross into Megan’s hand on the day they married.
Frank was brought back to the present by the last peel of thunder as it disappeared over the back of the mountain.
“You’re the Medic,” he said. “But…I’m an old man now…but you…?”
Something deep in the stranger’s eyes told Frank all there was to know.
“We going to follow that storm?” Frank asked.
“For a while, Frank. For a while,” the stranger said.
A heart wrenching, poignant story. Your vivid descriptions, like those of the storm, were superb. I'm not sure if medics carried rifles. Maybe just pistols. But, if as the story suggests, the medic was an angel, all bets are off.
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