by Suzanne Weyn
He knew this song was right. Emma needed to be out of the cold water. He had to see how bad her wounds were, how much blood she'd lost.
Just ahead, they came to a swirling eddy in the river. A tree had fallen into the water. Reaching out, he was able to grab hold of it to keep from moving with the rushing current.
Still holding tight to Emma, he dragged them both along the tree until he was able to sit in the shallow water. He pulled her up so that she was half on land and half in the shallow, watery banks because right then it was the best he could do; he needed a moment to recover.
He shivered in the cool morning air. Untying his shoes, he emptied the water from them, tied the laces together, and slung them around his neck. Pulling off his undershirt, he rang out the water from it before putting it back on. As much as he longed to collapse there awhile, he couldn't leave Emma in the bracingly cold river water.
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He lifted her, carrying her to a dry patch of long grass and carefully laying her on it. Her blouse was torn and blood-soaked, exposing the place where the bullet had gashed her arm. He hoped it wasn't lodged inside the skin. He didn't think it was.
The river had washed them of mud and it had washed her wounds out too.
She'd been knocked out a long time.
Why wasn't she waking up?
Suddenly cold with fear, he put his thumb on her jugular vein.
He didn't feel a pulse. He put his hand on her heart.
"Aw, c'mon, Em, give me something," he urged, fighting panic.
Nothing.
He checked her mouth to make sure she hadn't swallowed anything in the river that was stopping her from breathing. No. "Em, wake up!" he shouted, shaking her.
Kneeling beside her, he thumped her heart hard with his fist. He thought he heard the sound of bone cracking. He drew back, horrified by what he'd done, but then forced himself to keep on with it, remembering the training he'd received in the army.
He threw all his weight onto her, pressing with both his palms, pumping them, trying to force her heart to start beating once again.
She couldn't leave him now. She loved him. She'd said it. She'd kissed him.
Throwing his head back, he began to sing a
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healing song his mother had taught him. She'd learned it from her great-grandmother, a Natchez medicine woman. He'd heard her sing it, asking the Great Spirit for help. He threw his head back and sang the song in a plaintive, heartfelt wail as he pumped at Emma's heart.
Finally he felt it--just a blip, at first. Then stronger. Her heart was pumping on its own.
Collapsing at her side, his own heart pounding wildly, he stayed there feeling his heartbeat gradually normalize. She turned her head to him and blinked.
He brushed some wet hair from her forehead.
"Are we alive?" she asked him, her voice a rasp.
He smiled softly back at her. "I think so, Em. But maybe we'd better go ask the queen."
The next day was clear with rolling white clouds, and though they slept through most of it, they were aware that poppies and daffodils were everywhere, growing wild all around. He stayed up long enough to find berries and dandelion greens for a meal. Though it didn't quite quell the ache of hunger, it was enough to keep them alive. And dandelion greens worked as a blood purifier. They'd help her fight infection.
He did the best he could to tend her wounds, glad to find a balsam fir tree with some sap still in a cut in its bark. He got as much of the sap as he could and smeared it over the cuts, knowing it would help heal.
While she slept, he built them a raft, lashing
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branches together with his shoelaces, unraveled thread from his socks, and strips torn from his pants and the bottom of her under slip. As the sun set, he pushed the raft to the riverbank and carried Emma to it, settling her as comfortably as he could before pushing off with a thick fallen branch.
The river was filled to overflowing from all the rain and rushed along quickly, carrying them, he calculated, closer to the port town of Dunkirk. The last he knew, the Allies still held Dunkirk and they would be safe there.
"How are you doin', Em?" he asked her as she lay on the raft.
"Tired. It hurts when I try to turn." Her voice lacked strength and she was pale; it worried him.
"You sleep, then," he advised, arranging his jacket over her like a blanket. "The river will carry us."
Reaching out, she put her hand in his, letting sleep take her once more. The sunset darkened, and while the moon rose, he held her hand, watching the moonlit scenery go by. It was an incredibly beautiful country. It seemed all wrong that it should be so torn apart by this war.
When he'd traveled north up the Mississippi he'd later gone up the Ohio River by raft. It was gorgeous country too, but back then he hadn't had the eyes to appreciate it. He'd only cared about getting to his destination. But now the natural richness all around overwhelmed him. All that he'd seen of the war had changed him.
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As he sat guard beside her sleeping figure, he understood for the first time that it was not only the war that had made him alive as never before to the beauty of the world; his love for Emma had re-created him. The love she returned to him had done it too. Their love for each other had worked the magic.
He'd drifted off to sleep on the raft beside Emma but awoke with a start. In the dawn's first light he could make out buildings lining the shore: shops, a church, taverns, bakeries; two-story establishments of all kinds. Back in the trees were houses. He'd stopped at Dunkirk one night when he first came over from England. He recognized right away that the river was taking them into Dunkirk's waterfront. "Em, wake up, sug. We made it."
She stirred, propping up sleepily onto her elbows and smiling.
The chugging engine of an approaching boat made them look over to it. Four British soldiers stood in the boat's stern with their rifles slung across their backs. Jack waved to them, sweeping his arms wide.
Two of the soldiers readied their rifles, pointing them at Jack as the boat pulled alongside the raft. "It's all right sir, I know this fellow," one of the soldiers said.
"Kid!" Jack cried happily.
"He's with the British Fourth Army, sir," the Kid
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continued to tell his captain. "He saved my life when we were both captured by the Germans."
Jack saluted the captain. "Welcome home, soldier," the officer replied, returning the salute.
"My friend here, Miss Emma Winthrop, is injured and needs care right away," Jack told the captain. "I request help in lifting her onto your boat and getting her to a hospital."
Kid was the first one down to help. Together, he and Jack got Emma onto the boat. "I have information regarding the upcoming Allied advance," Jack told the captain.
"How did you know about that?" the captain asked.
"I heard about it from the Germans."
"Let's get ashore and hear what you have to say right away," the captain said.
Jack sat beside Emma, who had been laid inside the boat's small cabin. He took her hand, squeezing it gently.
"Are we okay now?" she asked, gazing up at him.
"We are right as rain, Em," he replied.
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EPILOGUE London, November 1918
Emma stepped off the ship in Dover. She hadn't been back in England in over a year, not since she signed up to join the U.S. Army Signal Corps and had gone back to the Western Front in France to help with the war effort.
The Americans had joined the war in 1917 and formed the Signal Corps, recruiting women who were fluent in English and French to work the switchboards and relay messages between the advancing American, English, Canadian, and French troops.
How ironic, she'd written in one of her many letters to Jack. You're serving in the British army and I'm in an American unit with other women who are, for the most part, Americans. It doesn't matter, though; we're all on the same side. The cond
itions are very hard here though I am sure they are worse for you. We sit at our switchboards for long hours and relay messages, often having to interpret. We even have to 192know about military terms and weaponry in order to make sure our interpretations are understandable. Helmets and gas masks hang behind our chairs and make me think of you and all you are going through. How I long to see you again.
They were able to see each other for a day in Paris in 1917. It was July 6, her nineteenth birthday! The greatest birthday gift she could imagine was being there and sitting in a café on the Champs-Élysée with him. When it was time to read the menu, he took out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and hooked them on. "The eyes never fully came back the way they were," he explained. "I suppose I got off easy, all things considered."
"I like the way they look," she assured him sincerely. He looked so tired, though. The endless fighting was taking such a toll on him. He was thin and pale.
"It can't go on forever, Em," he'd said that day as he kissed her good-bye outside the café; but she'd begun to wonder if maybe it could. "When this is over, I'll come find you wherever you are," he promised.
"That might not be possible," she pointed out.
"Leave it to me," he'd assured her. She'd come to trust him completely. If he said he'd find her, he would.
Finally, though, on November 11, the war ended. It took almost two weeks more before she could get to Calais and get a boat across the channel to Dover Beach. In the two weeks, she kept searching for him among the lines of moving troops plodding home, hoping for a message or for his sudden appearance.
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She kept pushing the thought out of her mind that he might be dead.
He couldn't be dead.
It would be more than she could stand if he was dead. And yet so many were.
The crowd disembarking from the boat had begun to disperse as their friends and relatives arrived to pick them up. She'd sent her father a telegram telling him that she had a friend who would bring her home, as she wasn't sure exactly when she would be arriving. Once she'd booked passage on the boat, she'd sent one telegram after another to the Fourth Army trying to tell Jack where she was. Every day she'd gone to the telegram office in Calais hoping for a response, but none ever came.
She spied a stand of motorized taxi cabs over by the tariff house. When she'd left, horse carriages were still in use. Though she'd seen motorized ambulances in the war, the motor cabs reminded her too much of the armored tanks both sides had begun using toward the end and she didn't welcome the thought of getting into one.
It didn't appear that she had much other choice.
With a sigh, she began walking toward the stand. She was nearly to the taxi when someone stepped into her path. "Welcome home, Em."
Emma blinked hard, not sure at first that he was real. Then he smiled at her and her sense of unreality gave way to a wave of nearly overwhelming joy. Throwing herself into his arms, she showered him with
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kisses, holding him tight as if to make sure he'd never go away again. Tears of happiness flooded her eyes.
"Hey, now, no crying," he said softly.
She wiped her eyes. "It's all right," she assured him. "I'm just so glad to see you--so glad."
"I know. Me too," he replied, and she saw a glint of wetness in his eyes, as well. He enfolded her in his arms, an embrace she never wanted to end.
Only afterward did she notice the medal on his chest. It was a bar from which hung a gold cross with a round middle. In the golden round center of the cross a crowned lion posed proudly with the words FOR VALOUR underneath.
"The Victoria Cross!" she cried. It was England's highest honor for gallantry in the face of the enemy. "It's wonderful, but what did you do to get this? I'm so glad I wasn't there to see it."
He laughed his familiar, raspy chuckle. "But you were there, Em, every step of the way."
"I was?"
"I got this for crossing enemy lines to warn the Allies that the Germans already knew the timing of the advance they'd planned. They figured we saved a lot of lives by doing that. By rights, you should have one of these too, so let's say we share it."
She entwined her fingers through his and laid her head on his shoulder, so happy that he'd come back to her, healthy and strong, with his love for her still alive in his heart.
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About the Author
SUZANNE WEYN is also the author of The Night Dance, a retelling of the Grimms' fairytale "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," intertwined with Arthurian legends. Her other young-adult novels include the romantic comedy South Beach Sizzle, written with Diana Gonzalez. Suzanne's science-fiction thriller for young adults, The Bar Code Tattoo, was selected by the American Library Association as a 2005 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. The Bar Code Rebellion is the sequel.