Under a War-Torn Sky (14 page)

There were a few more chores to finish in the growing twilight. Henry was careful to keep to the shadows and not walk far in the open. The child frequently stopped to listen to the air, cocking his head. Each time he did so, Henry's heart pounded.

“What is it?” he finally asked. “
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
”

“
La patrouille
.”

“A patrol passes here?” Henry swept his arm along the sight line of the road.

“
Oui. D'habitude à cette heure-ci. Il faut retourner à la grange.
” The boy pointed towards the barn.

Returning to the barn before a patrol showed up seemed like an excellent idea to Henry. He turned to go. But it was already too late to reach its safety. They heard the sound of a car and motorcycle rushing up and over the hills just beyond the barn.

The boy's mother must have heard it, too. She appeared at the front door and called, “
Pierre?
” Then she spotted Henry. “
Vite! Vite!
” She beckoned them to her.

Henry clutched the boy's hand and sprinted for the house.

At the door the mother grabbed Henry by the collar. “
Stupide!
” she cried. She crammed him behind the thick wooden door, leaving it ajar so that light from her lamps spilled out from the cottage. She threw a soccer ball at the boy. Despite her panic, she spoke to him in a soothing voice: “
Vas jouer là-bas, chéri.
” The boy darted to the stone wall and started playing, kicking the ball along the road.

Within moments, the German car and motorcycle pulled up to the farm's gate.

The woman smoothed her black hair, took a deep breath, and stepped out. She called the boy in for bed as if no one else were there, “
Pierre, mon chéri! C'est l'heure du coucher!
”

She pretended to notice the four soldiers for the first time. “
Bonsoir, messieurs. Voulez-vous acheter des oeufs?
” She walked down to the gate.

Eggs.
Henry could translate the final word she spoke. Is she going to try to sell them eggs?

One of the soldiers stepped out of the idling car. He wrote something down on a pad, tore off the paper and handed it to her. A requisition, Henry figured. The jerks don't even pay her.

The mother leaned down to talk to the boy, who ran back into the house. He came back out cradling an armload of large, brown eggs.

She carefully laid the eggs in a basket the soldier held. Then he said something else Henry couldn't hear. The mother vehemently shook her head. The man took a threatening step towards her. The boy took her hand and pulled on it.

What is it? Henry worried. What should he do?

Again, the mother whispered in the ear of her son, who this time ran towards the barn. A few minutes later, he returned, carrying one of their precious hens. As he handed the hen over to a private, the boy let go early enough to ensure that the hen beat the German's face with her large, strong wings. Henry smirked. The boy had spunk, all right.

The patrol commander bowed his head formally at the mother. Then they drove off. Henry felt himself take a real breath of air for the first time in ten minutes.

Hand in hand, as if there were no urgency at all, the boy and his mother walked back to the house. Then she closed the door and glared at Henry. She was trembling all over. She forced herself to speak in a contained voice, but it shook with anger.

“
Tu ne dois jamais le mettre en danger!
” she said to Henry. She touched the child's head, then her heart, then the child's head again, and added with great emotion, “
Il est tout pour moi! Comprenez-vous?
”

Henry understood her face. Her boy was her life. She couldn't bear it if something were to happen to him. Henry knew if they were caught, he'd most likely be sent to a POW camp. But the mother, the boy, and the grandfather could all be executed.

Henry nodded at her. He'd never be that careless again.

Henry had remained with the boy and his family almost a month. He couldn't understand exactly what they told him about the delay. But it seemed that a unit of Germans had camped where he would pass as he continued southwest along the underground's escape route. He'd need to stay put until the French could either find him a new route or until the Germans had moved on.

Except for the hours he spent locked inside the stone wall, Henry enjoyed this time. No bombing missions. No reports of friends killed, disfigured, lost. No need to pretend to be a man enjoying war, happy to be shooting other boys out of the skies.

The farm reminded him of home, and he was growing fond of the boy. They continued to teach one another French and English, laughing over their poor pronunciation. They even played ball in the hayloft. “Bohwl,” the boy called it.

One late afternoon, as the two tossed a ball back and forth, the child's mother silently eased herself up the hayloft ladder. The boy threw the ball at Henry, who let it bounce off his head. “Aaaah,” Henry cried. He fell to the ground and pretended to lose consciousness.

The boy hurled himself on Henry. “Up, pilot!” He tugged on Henry's shirt.

“
RRRROOAARR!
” Henry shot up and grabbed the boy playfully. “I've got you!”

The child shrieked with laughter. He squirmed away and grabbed fistfuls of hay to fling at Henry. Henry threw armloads back at him. A flurry of hay filled the air.

“
Chéri,
” the boy's mother called quietly.

Henry and the boy froze. Clouds of hay drifted down around them, covering their heads with spiky fluff.

The mother fought off a laugh and held her hand up to reassure them. “
Ne vous inquiétez pas.
” She motioned for her son to come to her.

“
Oui, maman?
”

She spoke to the boy about his grandfather and of an errand. She paused and glanced at Henry, who had brushed himself free of hay, embarrassed to look so childish in front of her. He understood her to mean that the grandfather was sick. She added, “
Emmène le pilote avec toi.
”

The boy grinned. “
Je peux, vraiment?
”

The mother smiled and stroked his cheek. “
Oui, mon petit.
”

The boy pointed to the hills, to Henry, then to himself. “
Avec moi!
” he told Henry with excitement.

His mother then cautioned him to be serious about the job she was sending them on.

“
D'accord,
” the boy answered. To Henry, he said, “
Mon gardien. Pas de bêtises.
”

Henry was to go along somewhere as protection, no playing around. “Where?” he asked. “
Où?
”

The boy pointed to the outside. “
Les pièges.
” He dropped to the ground and crawled like an animal, then pretended to choke.

He must mean traps, thought Henry. His mother wants to give the old man meat. The woman's affectionate smile for her son faded as she looked at Henry. She studied him a long moment before speaking. “
Suivez-moi.
”

Henry followed her down the ladder and to the grain bin. This was the closest Henry had gotten to her except for the night the patrol had passed. The light was fading in the barn as twilight approached. But he could see that her dark eyes were large and pretty, her skin smooth and unlined. She couldn't be more than twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. She was an awfully young widow.

The mother lifted the heavy wooden lid to the grain bin. It was as big and deep as a desk. When she leaned over into it her feet left the ground. Henry fought the urge to grab her, to keep her from dropping in headfirst. She made a racket, shovelling through the heavy grain.

What was she doing? She was grunting and yanking on something. Henry reached over to help. Surfacing in the golden oats was the butt of a gun. Together they dragged it out.

Henry was amazed. This was no farmer's shotgun. This was a British Sten gun. It was a great black thing as long as Henry's leg. It had a kickstand at one end and a pepper-shaker-like cone at the other. Two triggers unleashed bullets in bursts. The only way the mother could have this kind of automatic gun was if she had picked it up from a weapons drop. Before he had left England, there was talk around the base of the British beginning to parachute supplies to the small guerrilla groups Henry now knew as the
maquis.
It was unbelievably dangerous for her to have such a gun if the Germans ever searched her place. There'd be no pretending then that she knew nothing of the Resistance.

Suddenly it dawned on him. She was probably storing all sorts of weapons. Several times as he lay in his hiding hole he had watched the farmhouse through his peephole. Twice he'd seen men come to the back door. She had given them large bundles. They'd hurried up into the hills. She must be supplying a
maquis
group somewhere with food. She wasn't just a sympathetic mother, taking pity on a lost American boy. She was fighting the war as actively here as he had fought it from the skies. Only her battle seemed scarier, somehow. At least he had a crew with him. She did her part so alone. Secrecy was everything. And if she made a mistake, the price was her son. At least Henry had never had to worry about his actions endangering Ma or Patsy.

The mother handed the powerful weapon to him, clearly as protection if they ran into a German squadron. Henry couldn't help asking why she took such enormous risks. “Why do you do this?
Pourquoi?
”

She stroked the boy's hair. “
Pour que mon fils puisse respirer l'air de la France libre. Il ne sera jamais un esclave des Boches
.”

Free French air for her son; no Nazi enslavement.

Henry and his pilot friends had always seen themselves as the saviours of France. He was ashamed of their arrogance. He felt like saluting her as he shouldered the heavy gun. She had already loaded it.

The moon was rising as Henry and the boy climbed over the last fence of the farm. Before them the earth rolled in soft knuckles of green. The meadow was knee deep in grass and wildflowers. Here and there Henry spotted red clover, blue cornflowers, and pink and white orchids. The settling dew strengthened their sweet scent. Henry sucked in the air greedily. The earth was such a beautiful place. He tried to ignore the weight of the gun on his shoulder.

“What are we looking for?” Henry asked the boy.

“
Des lapins
,” he answered.

“Rabbits.”

The boy repeated the word and Henry nodded. “You'll be able to be a diplomat when this war is over.”

The boy took Henry's hand. Henry realized the only words he had probably caught were “the war”. Probably best not to even think about the war being over, if it ever would end. He had no idea how to translate what he meant anyway. Instead Henry said, “You are very smart.” He tapped the boy's forehead. “
Tu es très…mmm…
”
–
he pronounced the word the French way
–
“
intelligent
.”

The boy smiled.

Rabbit. Henry's mother had made delicious Brunswick stew with rabbit, tomatoes, corn, lima beans, and broth. Henry had loved it. He wondered how the boy's mother would cook it. It would be the first fresh meat he'd had for weeks. The farm's cows were for milk, the chickens for eggs. The sows had just had their babies. The family lived off soups mostly: leek, cabbage, carrot. Henry could tell he was losing weight.

Behind a boulder, jutting up grey and hard among the sea of flowers, the boy checked his first trap. It was just a little rope noose hung on a stake with a carrot stub in front of it. Nothing there.

They walked on. Henry kept checking the horizon. A little ways ahead of them was a narrow road, churned into mud by passing vehicles. German troops no doubt. The French walked, rode their rickety bikes, or used ox-drawn carts.

Without a word of warning, the boy ran to the road. What was he doing? Henry chased after him. The boy came to a three-pronged road sign. When Henry caught up, he could read on it: Pont-en-Royans, La Chapelle-en-Vercors, Vassieux-en-Vercors.

“
Aidez-moi, s'il vous plaît
,” the boy said as he tugged on the post. Together they twisted and twisted it so the arrows pointed in the opposite direction. “
Pour tromper les soldats Allemands,
” the boy said, and darted across the road to the other side.

It will confuse more than just Nazis, Henry thought. He made a note never to trust road signs when he started walking for Spain again.

They checked two more traps. Both were empty of their bait. Some animal had enjoyed a free meal. They moved up through a pine forest now. Their feet moved soundlessly on the carpet of needles. Henry wondered if they'd hear anything coming. The moonlight barely cut through the trees. More than once, Henry stumbled and banged his head on low-hanging branches.

Finally, they found a trapped rabbit. It was long dead, hanged on the rope. “
Merci mon Dieu pour ce repas,
” the boy murmured in prayer, crossing himself as he pulled the fat hare off the line and tucked it into a canvas bag.

They headed back in silence.

As they walked, the hair on the back of Henry's neck began to bristle. A chill rippled through him. He tried to shake off his fears, but instinct shouted at him that something wasn't right. Henry grabbed the boy's shoulder to stop him and put his fingers to his lips. Henry listened and listened and listened to the cool night air. Nothing. Well, maybe he really had gone flak-happy and lost his nerve.

He took two steps forward, but froze when he heard a
SNAP.
There were a few moments of silence, then came another loud
SNAP.
Something was coming towards them – something tall enough to break off branches as it moved.