She put her apron on again and prepared the coffee— a bitter coffee of chicory that no amount of sugar, if they had had sugar, could sweeten At least, she thought, it was better than the coffee they'd had last month—a nearly undrinkable coffee made of malt. She moved back to the window and watched for her husband. She didn't know where he was or even if he would be back. He had left the barn more than an hour ago. He hadn't stopped to tell her why.
In the morning, he'd gone to the barn as he always did for the milking. They had had seventy cows before the war began; now they only had the twelve. The Germans had taken the rest. Henri spent most of his days tending the tiny herd and repairing simple farm machinery—a difficult task since parts were nonexistent. He had to fashion his own parts, design them, hammer them, from old pots or kettles or buckles, anything that Claire could spare from the house. Once he had taken her ladle, a pewter ladle with a long handle that she had brought with her to the marriage, and they had fought over the ladle until her anger had subsided. He had needed the ladle more than she had; it was simple.
She didn't like to think of what it must be like each day for Henri in the barn. Perhaps he had been drinking from the barrels already, and she wouldn't blame him. The air was frozen arid raw, and sometimes it was colder in the barn than it was in the fields.
Behind the bam, they had the one truck, which they never used. There was no gasoline for the Belgians, but Henri had kept the gazogene, for emergencies. Surprisingly, the Germans had not taken the truck for themselves, although the soldiers sometimes commandeered it for a week at a time. Delahaut had escaped the fate of some towns. The Germans didn't billet there. The accommodations in St. Laurent were better.
Claire removed the brick from behind the stove and retrieved her book. That December she was reading English. Sometimes she read Dutch or Italian or French, but she preferred reading in English when she could get the books. She liked the English words, and liked to say them aloud when no one was in the house:
foxglove, cellar, whisper, needle.
She could read and speak English better than she could write it, and she was trying to teach herself this skill, though she had to be careful about leaving any traces of written English or the English books themselves in the house. She wished she could read in English to the old woman upstairs, but the woman's first language was Yiddish, to which she had retreated from the Flemish. Together they could communicate only in German, which seemed to distress them both.
She sat down at the oak table and held her book open with her crossed arms. The book had been given to her by an English gunner who had had to parachute out of his plane and who had broken his collarbone when he landed near Charleroi. She remembered the gunner, a thin, spotty-faced boy who'd been at school when he'd been called up. He was ill suited to be a gunner—you could see that at once—a reed-thin boy with a delicate mouth. In his flight suit he had two books, a prayer book and a volume of English poetry, and when he left, he gave the book of poetry to Claire. He said he'd already read it too many times, but she suspected that was not quite true. She wondered where the boy was now. She was seldom told the fate of the people who passed through her house, often never knew if they made it to France or to England or if they died en route—shot or betrayed. She knew the beginnings of many stories, but not their endings.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil….
She liked the few poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins the best, even though she could not understand them very well. She took pleasure from the sound of the words, the way the poet had put the sounds together. Often she didn't even know what the words meant. She thought she knew
shook,
but she wasn't positive. But
foil?
Yet she loved the sound of
shining from shook,
liked to say this aloud.
She felt then, within her abdomen, a downward draw and pull, a signal that soon, before nightfall, she would begin to bleed. Reflexively, she crossed herself. She shut her eyes and whispered a prayer, words of relief more than of faith. Although she was careful during the, time she might conceive, putting Henri off with a sequence of subtle signs—a slightly turned head, a shoulder raised— she could never be quite certain, absolutely positive. She did not want to conceive a child during the war, to bring a child into a world where one or both parents might be taken during the night, where a child could be left to freeze or burn, or might be cruelly injured by the planes overhead. The very air above them had been violated. She herself had seen the dirty smudges and the lethal clouds. She was not even sure she would have a child after the war. Sometimes she thought that the weight of the stories that had passed through her house had filled her and squeezed out that part of her that might have borne a child with hope.
She needn't have been so worried this month though, she thought to herself. She counted. It couldn't have been more than four times. Henri was often gone late into the night with the Maquis, and she sometimes thought that the war, and what Henri himself had seen and heard, had affected her husband as well.
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim….
She had tried to imagine England, but she couldn't. Even when the English boys told her stories of home, she could not bring the landscape into focus. And the stories were often confusing. Some were of stone cottages where, in the boys’ memories, the gardens always bloomed, even in the winter; and others were of city streets, narrow streets of cobblestones and darkened brick houses.
The sound of bicycles rattled on the gravel drive, startling her. Claire swept the English poetry book onto her lap under the table. Henri and Antoine Chimay entered the kitchen. Each of them was carrying children's school-bags. Henri was breathless.
“Claire.”
“What is it?”
“A plane.”
“A plane?”
“Yes, yes. A fallen plane, in Delahaut.”
“English?”
“American.”
“American? Any Survivors?”
“One is dead. One almost dead. There might be eight others.”
“Where is it?”
“On the Heights. The others are probably in the wood.”
Henri and Antoine lay the schoolbags on the table.
“We need you to hide these,” Antoine said.
Henri looked at his wife as if to say he was sorry. “The barn is best,” he said instead.
Henri was flushed—from the effort of the bicycle ride or his agitation, she couldn't say. He was older than she; he would be thirty-two in the spr. The features of his face seemed to have broadened with age as they oftdid in the men of the village. It was as though, in face and body, Henrid finally filled out to the shape he would retain as a man throughout his lifetime—stocky like his father, barrel-chested, his shoulders round and solid. He had thick brown hair the exact color of his eyes. A V of hair, like a tail feather, fell forward onto his foreheaShe had begun to notice that there was a tooth to one side of his mouth that was darkening. She wondered if it caused him pain; never complained.
“I have to go now,” he said. “I don't know when I’ll back.”
Claire nodded. She watched as her husband and Antoine left the house and remounted their bicycles. She hid the book of English poetry behind the brick. She put her coat on and lifted the schoolbags into her arms. Upstairs, through the floorboards, Claire thought she could hear the old woman crying.
Darkness between the trees, a false night. It was somebody's birthday in the kitchen. His mother was at work in the courthouse, and his father was not yet home with the stink of meat in his skin. A song from somewhere. From the children's faces leaning toward the candles. And Frances, who had made the cake, bent over him so that he could smell her warm breath at his cheek and whispered to him in the din: A wish, Teddy. Make a wish.
When he cried as a boy, it was Frances he went to.
The ground was hard marble. From time to time he heard a distant shout, a call, a branch cracking from a tree. The cold made the branches snap, like fire did.
He had dragged the leg, a dead soldier, how many feet—a hundred? a thousand? No sun to tell him his direction, the compass button smashed. He could be headed into Germany, out of Germany, no signposts on the trees to mark the way.
When he broke his arm, falling from the tree, it was Frances who sat with him, played gin endlessly at his request. Frances who was tall like himself and had his face, but misaligned. His mother sometimes whispered that Frances would never marry.
His lower leg was stiff and swollen. The knee would not bend. He wondered if a kind of rigor had set in.
He would have liked a cigarette. Wasn't that what they gave the dying?
If he wasn't found, he thought, he would die before morning.
Yet he was terrified of being found. An unfamiliar helmet. The muzzle of a gun pressed against the skin under his shin.
On Stella's porch there was a swing. It was last night; or last month, and she sat beside him in a thin cotton dress. Her skin was tanned in the hollow above her breasts, and her legs were bare beneath the skirt. He thought, oddly, of a girl on a bicycle, with bare legs falling, scraping her knees. She was a girl, still, even then on the porch. Was that why he had hesitated? The skirt billowed out like a parachute and hid her legs.
That was his nickname when she was a boy. Teddy, Frances called him that. Stella called him Ted.
His hands had frozen into cups. He dragged himself on his elbows. Inside his flight suit, there was a photograph. He lay back, exhausted. Perhaps he would sleep or had slept. He fumbled with the zipper of the flight suit with his frozen fingers, but they did not work. Inside there was a photograph of Stella.
The sky above the trees was the color of dust. Sometimes there were pallets of oak leaves, and they helped him slide. He wondered, when he heard a distant voice, if he should shout for help. There were procedures. What was the procedure for freezing to death in the wood?
It was 1936 or 1937. He forgot the year. Matt, his younger brother, in a rage, running up to his room, Ted's room (Teddy's room then?), and destroying all the model airplanes, hung on delicate threads from the ceiling, each wooden model laboriously assembled and painted, the models bought with money Ted had earned in the fields, the planes made and collected over many years. From below, Ted heard the sound of rage, feared the worst, then went up into the devastation in his room. Splinters and tangled threads, broken wings on the bed. A thousand hours smashed. He made a vow then never to speak to Matt again, ever, and he hadn't until the morning the train came to take him off to war. He stood on the station platform, shivering with his mother and his father and with Frances, who was weeping openly, wishing the train would come, dreading the goodbyes. Then he turned, said to Frances, I’ll be right back.
He sprinted the distance, easy for him, he had won the 440 at the state championships and gone off to college on the strength of his legs. He ran past the farms and the farmhouses, the sun just coming up over the fields at dawn, raced up the steps of his own house, white clapboards with a porch, once a farmhouse, now just a house like the others at the edge of the small Ohio village. He found Matt in bed still.
He shook his hand. He said goodbye.
What was the row about? He couldn't remember now. A silly row. And Matt had been just a kid.
He wondered if he would ever run again. Walk again. Would they take the leg?
Who was
they?
He had seen the young men with the trousers folded and neatly pinned, passing through, going home. Warnings of what was out there.
But you didn't think of that. You drank gin made from grapefruit juice, 150 proof, and hoped they didn't wake you in the middle of the night while you were still drunk.
Anything to escape the fate of his father. The village butcher. His hands in the entrails of animals. Dead flesh always under his fingernails. The stink of meat never left him. Or did Teddy simply imagine that?
His father drank Seagram's. All night.
Ted came to, realized he had slept. Or had passed out. The pain came in waves. He wished his leg would freeze altogether, go totally numb like his fingers.
Where were Case and Baker and Shulman? Case had a shot-up arm, Shulman had been limping badly. Tripp had had blood on his flight suit. Were they found, lost, dead?
It was a toss-up now between a cigarette and a glass of beer.
The thirst had announced itself suddenly. Not a good sign. He propped himself up on his elbows, looked at his leg. There was blood soaking the leg of his flight suit. He couldn't move his foot or feel it.
Were there cigarettes inside his flight suit? He couldn't remember. They might as well be diamonds in a safe. With Stella's photograph.
Her photograph was like all the others he had seen. Creased, worn at the edges. The creases skimmed across her neck.
Why, on the porch the night before he left, why had he not taken her hand, led her away from her house?
Something in him had hesitated.
Foolish, he thought, lying on the frozen ground, these moral quandaries. Hadn't there been thousands of men making love that night, simply to say they were alive?
He imagined his hand sliding up Stella's bare leg, under the parachute skirt.
Was it possible there were people on the ground when he gave the order to jettison the bomb load? It looked like farmland, endless fields, but the cloud cover was so thick he couldn't really tell, except when he came in low, and saw patches of field. The bombardier said it was just field. There wouldn't be people on frozen fields in December. Couldn't be.
He should have kept one canteen.
He drifted, dreamed of parachute silk. He was unwinding a woman and she was smiling, looking at him. He was on his knees, unwinding, but there was so much silk, endless layers …
He came to sharply. He had heard something, he was sure of it. Footsteps. Not in the dream.