Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  It was my turn to be stunned. “He . . . what?”

  I felt Nate tense. “Cal came back to France?”

  She nodded, melancholy and confusion in her troubled expression.

  Nate pushed back his chair and took a couple steps away from the table, away from Lise, away from a revelation that was likely as incomprehensible to him as it was to me.

  I stood too and stepped toward her. “When?”

  “I think it was still 1944. He just—walked through the gates one day in November . . . maybe December.”

  I shook my head. “He left his wife and daughter behind . . .”

  “I didn’t know.” Her voice was still soft, still incredulous. “I didn’t know he had a family.”

  Nate came to stand beside me.

  “Tell us what happened,” he said softly. “When Cal came back—tell us what he was like, how long he stayed.”

  “It’s too late for Darlene now,” I added. “But we’d still love to know.”

  Lise closed her eyes and breathed for a while. When she opened them again, she seemed determined to tell his story.

  We didn’t go back to sit at the table. It never crossed our minds. We stood by the kitchen window as she began to speak of the man I’d spent months trying to track down.

  “He walked through the gates with only a knapsack on his back,” she said. “I thought I was dreaming and just stood there and stared at him. Then I shrieked for Albert to come see. He must have thought I was in trouble. He came stumbling out of the stables and just . . . froze.

  “When I asked Cal what he was doing here, he shrugged and said something like, ‘I thought you might want to see a carousel.’” Lise smiled and shook her head at the recollection. “I’d told him when he was here during the war that that was the first thing I’d do when it was over. And that’s all he said to explain why he came back. It took a while, but we did make it to the fair in Bayeux. I rode the carousel, oh, probably twenty times. It was the only trip we ever made with Cal.”

  There was so much I wanted to ask. Seventy-six years of history couldn’t be retold fast enough to assuage the deep thirst for answers choking me. “So Cal just . . . stayed?”

  “Yes. Albert had moved into the house by then, and Cal took his old quarters off the stables. There were still Americans everywhere in Normandy—headquarters and clinics and troops helping us to rebuild. But Cal stayed with us. If Americans came by, he hid in his quarters or stayed out in the fields. We had firm orders not to mention his presence. He’d come back as a civilian, not as a soldier.

  She looked at us, gauging our reaction, and added, “He stayed for thirty years.”

  I nearly lost my balance, but Nate reached out to steady me.

  “Thirty years?” My question was sharp with disbelief. “Three-zero?”

  She nodded, and I wondered if the sadness in her eyes was about Cal or Darlene.

  “Please,” Nate said. “Tell us about those years.”

  Lise frowned a bit as memories surged back. “For a while, after the war, I’d still hoped that my father would come home from the camps in Germany, but I knew in my heart that he wouldn’t. Every day was a struggle before Cal returned. Trying to run a farm—trying to resurrect a farm that had been starved into ashes by the Occupation. Most of our livestock was dead. Our horses . . .” She looked upward as the images in her mind seemed to overwhelm her. “The Germans had killed all our horses when they fled on the morning of D-Day. I can still picture them hanging dead from their leads.”

  Nearly a full minute passed before Lise spoke again. “Then Cal came back,” she said. “He walked into Aubry-en-Douve without an explanation. Just a dogged determination to make our lives better. And that’s what he did. He worked day and night to help us get the farm up and running again. Crops. Eventually horses. Cows—which meant milk, cheese, butter . . .”

  Her smile faded as her mind wandered back to the days after the invasion. “He barely ever left the grounds. Nose to the grindstone, right? I tried to—I don’t know—lighten him up. Introduce him to people. But he was . . .” She sighed. “From the moment he got back, the light had gone out of him. He was walled off, reclusive. Much older than his years, but also kind. Helpful. Protective. He never spoke of himself. He never spoke of the war. He never participated in any of the ceremonies or commemorations and would get angry if anyone suggested it.” She shook her head. “All those chances to be with other American soldiers again, but he was a ghost when he came back. This farm was his world. And keeping it running—I think it was the only way he could live with his memories.”

  An owl hooted in the distance. We stood in the castle’s kitchen in silence, contemplating the enormity of Cal’s sacrifice.

  Lise must have seen something in my expression. “This is a lot to take in, isn’t it.”

  “I’m just . . .” I hesitated. “I’m just trying to make sense of it. His returning here and staying for—three decades?” I was dumbfounded.

  Lise cocked her head and seemed to realize how shocking her revelations had been to Nate and me. “I suppose it won’t make sense until you know what happened before that. When he was here during the war.”

  “Are you comfortable telling us?” Nate asked, concern for the elderly woman in his voice.

  Lise nodded. “Yes—but not here.”

  She walked across the foyer to the living room beyond it. We followed, and I wondered if Nate’s legs felt as unsteady as mine. I looked into his face and saw intrigue and confusion. Something of the awe I felt too, that we were finally—against all odds—getting the answers Darlene had sought.

  Lise led us to a spot toward the back of the room and pointed down. “This is where it happened,” she said.

  I remembered it from our previous visit—an area where some old floorboards had been preserved, while portions around them had been removed. “Cal said so little after his return that I quickly learned to pay close attention to what did come from his mouth. Do you see that darker patch on the original parquet?” she asked.

  Nate crouched down and saw it before I did. “These stains?” he asked, outlining an elongated, deeper-hued blotch that straddled several boards.

  “My husband and I were contemplating restoring the floors. This was maybe fifty years ago—when I was twenty-nine or thirty. I hated those stains and their reminder. I just wanted to tear up those boards and replace them. The memories they evoked . . .” Lise’s gaze had gone distant as she relived the past. “We were standing right here, considering our options, and Cal said, ‘History’s stains illuminate the future.’ It came out just like that. Just those few words and then he walked away.” She shook her head. “‘History’s stains illuminate the future.’ What could we possibly answer to that?”

  Lise sighed and crossed her arms, contemplating the dark blotches at our feet. “So the floors stayed. We seldom used the formal living room anyway—too many memories, right?”

  Her smile was melancholic. Her eyes soft with remembering. “Eventually, my old friend Lucien bought the castle and its grounds from us. By then, the farm was more of a hobby than a breadwinner. My husband and I were doing fine, me as a schoolteacher and him as a civil engineer, and we decided to try city life for a while in Caen.

  “But when I learned that our property was on the market again last year . . .” She shook her head. “I couldn’t help myself. I’ve been involved with veterans my whole life,” she said. “To love Cal was to love them all. And the prospect of turning this place—the land he saved from the Nazis first, then from bankruptcy when he returned . . . to turn it into an elegant refuge, a bed-and-breakfast for the GIs and their families who come back all these years after the war. It was a ‘no-brainer,’ as you Americans say.”

  She pointed at the parquet in front of us. “Those stains had to stay, though. I had Jean-Marie work around them, as they are the essence of Cal McElway’s heart.” She looked at me, confusion once again darkening her face. “A heart, I now realize, he might have
left back home when he returned to us.”

  “What happened here?” Nate’s voice had a somber, awed tone that echoed the turmoil in my mind.

  Lise led us back to the kitchen. We sat around the table and she closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she said, “Cal was a good man. Honorable. Courageous. Responsible. I think it’s because he so thoroughly embodied those traits that what happened here on June 7th was such a shattering thing . . .”

  Chapter 37

  Albert lay on the ground, bleeding from a bullet to the shoulder, and Lise knelt beside him. She pressed her hands to his wound, trying to stem the flow of blood, her face distorted by a sort of silent hysteria. Albert hadn’t moved since he’d been shot, but his eyes were open and aware.

  Sabine sat not far from them, a hand cradling the side of her face, the imprint of the Wehrmacht’s fist already an angry red welt on her cheekbone. The Germans Cal had shot with Albert’s hunting rifle lay on the floor in front of her, while a handful of villagers huddled around the injured in their ranks. The rest watched the standoff with tortured expressions that spoke of utter fear and helplessness.

  Lise’s plea for Otto not to shoot seemed to have gotten through to him. He looked from Sabine to her terrified sister, and Cal saw something in the German’s posture change. It might have been the months he’d spent under the girls’ roof that gave him pause. Or maybe a flicker of compassion overriding the darker impulses of survival. Whatever it was, Otto began to lower his weapon. His finger never leaving the trigger, Cal did too. Slowly. Warily. Suspicion brittle in the space between them.

  “Vas-t’en!” Sabine ordered, wiping her bleeding mouth with her hand. She glanced at Albert and Lise, then looked back at Otto with undisguised repulsion. “Leave!” she spat again, pointing at the door.

  After a brief hesitation, a muscle pulsing in his jaw, Otto stepped backward toward the entryway. For a moment, Cal dared to hope that the confrontation would end there. That Otto would simply walk away.

  Then Buck came lurching through the living room doors, hurling obscenities.

  “Buck, no!” Cal screamed, but the shock of the second American’s entrance was too much for Otto’s nerves. He jerked his weapon upward and something slammed into Cal so hard that it threw him back, his head hitting the angle of the alcove wall behind him. He saw Buck’s first shot strike Otto in the chest.

  Then the world went dark.

  “Monsieur Cal?”

  It was a frightened voice. A small, shaken, pleading voice. Cal pressed his eyes closed and tried to remember. It took a few seconds for his brain to make sense of the circumstances—for memory to fill in the gaps his mind was skipping. When the image returned of Buck storming through the living room doors, he sat up so abruptly that pain ripped through his synapses. He glanced down. His right arm was badly damaged. A bullet had grazed his chest and blown through his bicep, probably taking pieces of the humerus with it, and someone had tied a twisted piece of cloth above the wound to slow the bleeding. Given the intensity of the pain he felt when he inhaled, he suspected that the bullet had broken a rib as well. Cal attempted to move the injured limb, but the motion made him gasp. When he tried to spread his fingers, they barely responded.

  “Monsieur Cal . . .”

  He turned his head toward Lise’s voice, squinting at the spot where Sabine and Albert had been before Buck’s eruption into the living room. What he saw drove the breath from his lungs and brought the details scrubbed by trauma flooding back to his reeling mind.

  Despite the pain clawing at him, Cal began to drag himself toward the little girl. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, her face pale, her lips trembling, her red eyes haunted with confusion and disbelief.

  She held her sister’s hand in both of hers—limp, bloodied. Someone had draped a beige sweater over Sabine’s face, but the long brown skirt and scuffed shoes extending beyond its hem were unmistakably hers. The scarlet red soaking through the wool and pooling beneath the fourteen-year-old’s body threatened to hurl Cal’s mind back into unconsciousness.

  “They shot my sister,” Lise whispered, her gaze begging for him to come closer yet. She didn’t let go of Sabine’s hand when Cal reached her. She just leaned sideways into his chest and began to sob.

  Something instinctive overrode Cal’s concern for his own injuries. He wrapped his good arm around the child and drew her close, nestling her head under his chin, ignoring the pain spearing through the right side of his body.

  Albert sat on the floor a few feet away, propped against a banquette as blood seeped slowly through the bandage wrapped around his shoulder. He stared in abject horror at Lise and Sabine. The man whose stoic countenance hadn’t slipped since Cal’s arrival at the castle looked demolished now—disfigured by a grief so unbearable that his body visibly shook as his tears fell from shell-shocked eyes to leathery cheeks devoid of color.

  “You are one lucky mongrel,” Buck tossed over his shoulder as he entered the room, stalking to a courtyard-facing window and peering cautiously outside. He looked back at Cal, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “No Krauts in sight, but there’s no tellin’ if they’ll come back.” He cocked his head. “When you’re done playing Daddy, maybe you can get yourself upstairs and keep an eye on the back fields . . .”

  Cal ignored him, his attention so focused on the girl whose tears had soaked through his shirt that nothing else could register. He held Lise close until she stirred and pulled away. She hunched her small frame over her sister again, hiccupping on subsiding sobs—an orphaned child mourning the last vestige of her family. Cal scanned the room. There was blood on the floor where the Germans had fallen, but their bodies were gone.

  “Dead,” Buck said, following his gaze.

  Lise added in a raspy, barely audible voice, “Lucien’s father . . . and some other men. They took the boches away to bury them.” There was confusion in her eyes. Shock and pain. She bit her lip and seemed to search for words. “But—I did not let them take Sabine.” Her chin quivered as she brought her sister’s hand to her cheek, the torment of loss darkening her gaze.

  Cal smoothed a hand over her hair, unable to speak. A handful of villagers still sat in the living room, shell-shocked and wan. They neither spoke nor moved. Their eyes were unfocused, their jaws slack, and their shoulders slumped. Beyond despair. Beyond hope too.

  Cal shifted his attention to Albert. “You need to put more pressure on that,” he said, motioning to the blood dripping down his sleeve. The old man didn’t look up. His eyes were on the red pool beneath Sabine’s body.

  Cal saw more blood on the expanse of floor between him and Albert. “Who else?” he asked the elderly Frenchman. He pointed toward the evidence of injury or death, hoping the old man would understand his question.

  When Albert didn’t respond, Lise murmured, “One lady, Sylvie, and two monsieurs.”

  Failure slammed into Cal like a physical force. It indicted and shamed him. It broke him.

  “C’est de sa faute,” Albert murmured.

  When Cal glanced at him, he found the old man’s eyes on Buck. There was something hopeless in the sag of his shoulders and the gauntness of his face.

  “What did he say?” Cal asked Lise.

  “He said it’s his fault.” She pointed her chin toward Buck, anger flashing in her eyes. “He’s the one who made—” She swallowed hard. “Who made this happen.”

  The paratrooper still stood guard at the window, apparently unfazed by the carnage. “Just did what I had to do, kid.”

  “I want him to leave,” Lise whispered so softly that Cal nearly missed it. He turned toward her and she said it again, more loudly this time. More defiantly. “I want him to leave.” There were traces of Sabine in the statement.

  “Lise . . . he was trying to protect you.” Even to his own ears, the words sounded hollow.

  “I want him to leave!” she repeated, this time loud enough for Buck to hear.

  He turned from the wi
ndow, eyes narrowed on the girl, and pointed at her with his free hand. “Hey, you’re lucky I was here, little lady!”

  “Shut up, Buck,” Cal said, fury like acid in his veins.

  But Buck had more to say. “Without me and Cal here, you’d all be dead!” He pointed at the few people still in the room. “You Frogs’ll thank us later. Just you watch. History will say that we were the heroes here!”

  “Shut. Up!” Cal yelled, his voice shaking with the horror of the death he’d been unable to prevent, the devastation provoked by Buck’s reckless bloodlust. Anger scorched its way up his throat. He was opening his mouth to excoriate his comrade when a small hand clutched his arm. He looked down into Lise’s wide, brown eyes.

  “Crie pas,” she whispered, pleading on her tear-stained face. “Please—don’t scream anym—”

  Buck’s sneering voice cut through her plea. “And no, it wasn’t me who killed your people, little girl. The Krauts did!” He speared a finger toward Cal. “And your hero here—he’s the one who shot your sister.”

  The orange hues of early dawn tinted the horizon. Buck still roamed the castle, going window to window, as if a German attack was imminent. The villagers had no such concerns. Those who hadn’t departed under cover of darkness lingered in rooms and hallways, dozing fitfully or staring straight ahead with vacant expressions. The fear that had permeated the space since Cal’s arrival had been replaced by something darker.

  He’d found refuge upstairs. He sat on the floor in the corner of a small bedroom, the pain in his chest and arm dwarfed by the tumult in his mind. He knew he should be planning his and Buck’s next move, plotting a route that would get them to Carentan, but he couldn’t get past the paralyzing trauma of anguish and disgrace.

  He’d killed a child. He’d killed Sabine.

  He could recall it all with stunning clarity, now that his memory had fully returned. Otto’s bullet slamming into his chest and arm, the reflexive pull of his finger on the trigger, and his shot going wide as he went down. He hadn’t seen it hit Sabine, but there was no doubt in his mind that his rifle had been pointed in her direction. Cal felt pummeled by the realization. Eviscerated. Wrecked.