“What? What? Absolutely not!”
The judge coughed. “Unless you have anything pertinent to the proceedings, I shall continue with my final comments and ruling.”
“I do!” shouted Godewyn.
Axe shot him a stern look and said, “Be quiet, Godewyn.”
“You do?” said the judge.
“Yes, I do! I … I understand you have taken this man’s word at face value,” said Godewyn, pointing across the room at Elmo. “You have … you are going to … you believe him!”
“Without any contravening evidence, yes, that is the court’s ruling,” said the judge.
“I have contravening evidence!”
“Sit down, Godewyn,” hissed Axe. “Please. It’s over. This is not what I want!”
Godewyn leaned toward Axe. “I will not let that man take your land. Your father’s land. My friend’s!”
“Sir, you will address the court. If you have evidence, I am willing to hear it.”
“I do, Your Honor. I know this man. I have known him his whole life. He is my neighbor. There was a time when he was a good neighbor.”
Godewyn turned to speak directly to Elmo.
“You were, Elmo. You were a good neighbor. Maybe you never liked to share a joke, you were always a serious man, but that’s all right. The world needs serious men. What matters is you were decent. Knew right from wrong. You helped people when they needed help.
“I was pleased for you when you married Hettie. I told you so. You deserved happiness. And heaven knows, you loved her, Elmo. It was plain for all to see. But what you did …”
Godewyn shook his head. He turned to face the judge.
“This man cannot be trusted, Your Honor. I wish there was another way …”
“Go on, Mr Faas, or the court will rule,” said the judge.
“His wife, Hettie, she was pregnant. Very excited. A new family, about to have the first—it’s an exciting time! Well, about five months in, Hettie went downhill. Became very sick. Very. De Clercq was the doctor at the time. He didn’t know what it was, but he was worried. We were all worried. She became very pale and thin, even as the fetus grew. Her pulse was worryingly weak. But the baby was strong. The heartbeat was strong. Like the infant growing inside was sucking the very life from her.
“It got to be that De Clercq thought it too dangerous for her to continue with the pregnancy. Now, I’m a veterinarian, Your Honor, and my wife, Esmee, she’s a midwife, delivers all the babies in the area. Between the two of us, we’ve seen it all. There was a risk, all right, but also a chance.
“Hettie, she wanted to take the baby to term. A good Catholic woman, she was. Devout. She knew every word of her Bible, so she knew there’s no caveat about it being all right to take a baby’s life, even if it is to save the mother. Refused to entertain it, Your Honor. But him,” said Godewyn, and he turned and pointed at Elmo, who would not return his gaze, “he loved her too much. Loved her too much. Couldn’t face the possibility of a life without Hettie in it.
“He made the decision for her. Against her will. Made her abort the fetus, and then he lied to her parents, said it was a natural miscarriage. That was only the first lie, Your Honor.
“Hettie was never the same after that. A shell of the happy woman she’d been. I don’t know why, but she didn’t fall pregnant again. Maybe she didn’t want to, or maybe it was fate, tried and couldn’t, had her one chance and never again.
“And then … then …” Godewyn shook his head. “Elmo thinks I don’t know. He thinks nobody knows. But I do. I know.” Godewyn stared at Elmo. “I know, Elmo, I’ve always known.”
Elmo sat down. He curled in on himself, his shoulders, back, neck and arms rounding. It could have been a child sitting there. A funny little balding Belgian child. A sad and lone and scared child.
“Mr Faas. What is it that you know?” said the judge.
“Elmo said Hettie fell from a horse and broke her neck. But she didn’t. He lied. She killed herself. She killed herself because of him. Drank a bottle of morphine stolen from my black bag when she came to visit my Esmee. And he lied about it to her parents. To the Church. He had his reasons. No doubt he had his reasons. But he lied. Maybe even to himself.
“I always felt sorry for you, Elmo. I did. But that, and now this … you’re not the man I knew. This man is all bitter and twisted. A liar. And now a thief! I won’t stand for it. I won’t stand for it, Elmo!”
Godewyn stood as tall as his body would allow. He faced the judge.
“Daan Lancelin would never have agreed to sell, Your Honor. He told me so a dozen times. He’d worked too hard for what he had. Elmo wants Daan’s land—rightfully Axelle’s land now—because it’s where Hettie grew up. It was her father’s land before he got sick with the arthritis and sold. He wants it out of some sort of twisted loyalty to Hettie, but he cannot have it, Your Honor, because … because that man is a bald-faced liar!
“That’s my contravening evidence. He’s a liar. An abject, wretched liar.”
Godewyn sat down, utterly spent.
The judge leaned back in his large wooden chair. He said nothing for the better part of a minute.
Finally, he leaned forward and said, “Mr Uffe, can you answers these accusations—accusations that draw serious doubts about your good character?”
Elmo did not look up. He did not move as he muttered under his breath: “Swearing, deception, murder, stealing, adultery. Employ violence, so that bloodshed follows bloodshed … bloodshed follows bloodshed …”
“Mr Uffe?”
“… bloodshed follows bloodshed …”
“Then I take it you cannot. In which case, your character is impugned, and this court has no option but to find you an unreliable witness. It is with your own testimony that this case stands or falls, Mr Uffe. For that reason, it must fall. Without further and better evidence, I have no choice but to dismiss your claim. The court finds for the defendant.”
The judge rapped his gavel. It was done.
Axe did not move. Godewyn took her hand and led her from the court the way a nurse leads an old woman with dementia. Axe looked up, to where Elmo had been seated. He was gone.
“We won, my dear,” said Godewyn. “You won!”
But it did not feel that way to Axe. And then she remembered Michel. She grabbed hold of Godewyn.
“Where is he?” she whispered.
“Yes, yes we must talk. Come.”
43
Elmo sat on the block of wood that Axe and her father before her used to chop wood. He watched and waited. To anyone who might look across from the barn, he was obscured from view behind a line of low shrubs and the chicken pen.
There was no one there to see him, anyway. It was just Elmo and Monster, the predictable three-legged dog that had known him since it was a four-legged pup. Monster sat in front, chewing a bone that Elmo had brought just for that purpose. He rested his hand on Monster’s head and ruffled his fingers through her hair.
Probably celebrating. That’s all right. I’m just a servant now. A servant of His will. A servant can wait all day and all night.
He put bottle to lips and let hot spirit wash his throat.
He chooses the appointed time. He judges with equity.
This was the time. He did not feel impatient. He could wait however long it took. There was nothing left in the entire world, except this.
The one who endures to the end will be saved.
He picked up the rusty hatchet lying in the dirt. Felt its weight. The handle was light, the head heavy. How it should be. It had outlasted Daan Lancelin, and it would outlast Axe. A bit of rust along the blade would soon scrape away with use.
If the axe is dull and he does not sharpen its edge, then he must exert more strength.
Elmo had anticipated her fiancée being there. He had not been with them in the court. Elmo would have dealt with him. Scraped away some of the rust. He had already found him guilty by association—a snap judgment, a summary judgment
, just like he had been given in Roeselare.
He continued to drink. He had not been drunk for the better part of three years. There was a time when he had done a lot of drinking, though not in public. Not to anyone’s knowledge, though maybe to Godewyn’s. The snoop seemed to know everything everyone did.
The old fool should leave alone and not meddle and not tell lies.
Elmo could not think exactly which parts of what Godewyn said in the courtroom were lies. It was beside the point. What mattered was the overall sense of it. The ill of heart with their deceitful tongues had a way of mixing truths together in a way that formed a falsehood.
Eloquent lips, godless fool.
And she let him. It was no better than telling the lie herself. She had connived, and a person could not get away with that. There had to be a punishment.
Of course, he would give her a chance. He was a reasonable man. It was the thing Hettie said she loved most about him, so it was the thing he had come to take most pride in. Even drunk, he could be reasonable. Give Axe a chance to do the right thing and admit the mistake. Give Hettie’s land back.
If she repents, she doesn’t have to perish.
Elmo looked at the bottle. He was not meant for the bottle. The drink had done him no good. He liked it well enough. He liked the release as it took hold, that let the unbearable tension he felt unwind to a point where he could breathe. Hell, there had been a second or two here and there when it had let him forget.
But he could not help himself. Could not stop while it was still good. No matter what he told himself, he always drank till his anger and grief flooded back. The shock of that much pain entering his body was always bad. It made him dangerous. The worst of it was when he burned his house down. Even that was not so bad. Not compared with today.
He knew it was not just them, that it was the sum of his entire wretched life caught up to him. But they were in front of him.
Everything has its appointed time.
Elmo figured now he was plenty drunk. Not too drunk, not to the point where a man lost his focus and intent. He blinked and checked his glasses were on, then checked his vision. Plenty sharp. And his mind—plenty clear. He knew what had to be done.
He heard a horse’s hooves and a cart’s wheels on the gravel, and of course Godewyn’s voice. They were coming.
He put the bottle on the ground, careful not to spill the last few mouthfuls in case he needed more when done. Yes, he would need more when done.
He took the hatchet in hand. He would give her a chance to do what was right. Then, depending on what she did, he would do what was right.
44
“I would say that tonight you should sleep easy now this Elmo business isn’t hanging over your head, but I know you won’t. There’s no such thing as only good, my dear. One gets and one takes the good with the bad.”
Godewyn patted Axe on the back. She tried to smile, but only managed to look more disconsolate.
“If they were still looking for him when we left, he must have found a good hiding place. Just think: he made it all those miles across the front, so this—this is nothing! Outwitting a few Germans in a city. Bah! Easy. He will be back,” said Godewyn, raising his curled finger to the sky the way a parliamentary debater finishes a great oration.
He lowered his finger. “All right. I’d best go save Esmee from Ken, or perhaps Ken from Esmee. He would have earned his keep today, I’m quite sure! No doubt he will return with some baked goods, if I know my wife. And almost half a century of experience says I do. Good evening, Axe. I will check in tomorrow to chat with Michel,” said Godewyn and winked.
He mounted the steps of the buggy. He took the reins and made a clicking sound in his cheeks and the horses set off for home.
Axe stood in the same spot for a long while, looking up and out. She slowly turned a full circle. Though the trees and verdure appeared soft and vibrant in the orange twilight, it was hard land to farm. It yielded no bounty without blood, sweat and tears.
It certainly had the blood and the sweat, and now it had the tears. Axe had been keeping it together for the sake of Godewyn, but finally the enormity of it all surged through her. Emotion swelled her chest and pushed up her throat. She let out a little falsetto whine as she dropped to her knees. Slow tears crawled her cheeks.
All of it was present now. The sense of loss as she thought of her parents, who deserved so much more than struggle and hardship in their final years. The worry for Michel, who might already be captured, might already be dead or dying. The heartbreak of what she had learned of Elmo and his dead wife. The injustice of what transpired in the Roeselare court, letting Godewyn eviscerate a man on her behalf as she sat by, letting it happen.
And perhaps more than anything, there was the sadness accompanying the monumental realization: the land did not belong to her. Not merely because it was Elmo’s, though she knew it was, despite what any court said.
It was because she did not belong to it. Not anymore. Through loss and grief and sadness, Axe felt she had discovered something profound. Something simple and yet life-changing: the land did not matter. It should never have mattered.
It had been the people and the lives associated with the land, and they were gone. Only their memories persisted, and not in the soil of the top enclosure, not in the pile of stones that had been their home. In her mind.
He could have it, and all the pain that went with it, for Elmo was trapped by his fealty to dirt and rock. Trapped by a wretched idea—that by tending field, fence and garden he could somehow honor people and memories, and keep alive a reality long since passed.
She remained on her knees, her eyes closed but for the aperture through which tears squeezed, letting herself feel it all. At some point she heard a sound; Axe opened her eyes and looked up. She saw Monster. She blinked and rubbed the wetness away from her eyes.
In doing so, she did not see the movement further behind, the movement of a man cloaked in shadow. She only saw her three-legged dog and her wagging tail, the wag of a happy if guilty animal.
“I was wondering where you were,” said Axe. She knew not why, but she felt unexpectedly joyed to see Monster.
The dog hopped forward, her mouth holding tight to her bone. She stopped in front of Axe and balanced on three legs, her head low, her eyes darting up to her master, then at the ground and back up as she waited for the pat that came.
“Where did you find that? Did you save it? You’re a clever girl,” said Axe, scratching Monster.
Axe was still on her knees when Monster’s head perked up. An ear twisted. Axe heard it, too. The engine of a motor vehicle.
Axe stood. It was too rare an event to ignore, and under the circumstances it seemed ominous. If they had found Michel and not killed him on the spot, then he had talked. No other possibility was remotely plausible. With the punishments they could and would inflict—punishments that broke body first, then spirit—a man could be made to say anything. She would not blame him for giving her away.
Axe thought about running, leaving it all behind and just running. She was not attached to any of it, not anymore. But that would mean leaving Michel and Ken, and that she could not do.
Her responsibility was absolute. She had given safe harbor, and it was her lot to see that through. No matter how strong, resolute, smart and resilient both men, they existed precariously as foreigners in a dangerous land.
Axe looked at Monster, at the bone hanging from her mouth. She remembered how Yetzel had often brought bones to buy her loyalty. Had he been there earlier? She looked closer. It was not discolored or textured like the bones Monster sometimes dug up.
Then surely it had been Yetzel. Which meant it was probably him now, returning. That was not so bad … not so bad as Michel being captured. And yet her pulse quickened and she thought about going to the barn to fetch the rifle.
No. She had managed to placate him before, and she would do it again. Michel and Ken depended on it.
The car pulled up and t
he engine cut. The silhouette of a single man was visible. The door opened and the man exited.
Axe was not surprised when she saw it was Yetzel.
45
He smoothed out his uniform and strode forward with long steps until two yards from Axe. His mouth formed a crisp line of intent. He met her eyes and stared, as if waiting for her to speak. He waited so long that she did.
“Yetzel. What is it that … what do you want?”
“I am going to give you an opportunity, Axelle. The opportunity to speak the truth. If you do, if you tell me the truth, I will help you. I have the power to make your problems go away, because … because I am a compassionate man, and our friendship, though strained, endures. It can. But only if you are truthful.”
“I have always been truthful with you, Yetzel,” said Axe, a lie that came so easily that even she believed it true, and perhaps it was, for telling falsehoods to men who demanded impossible truths was not a matter for the conscience. It was a matter for the flesh, for survival—and anything that let one survive could not be a lie.
But Yetzel shook his head. “No. No, Axelle. That is not …” He closed his eyes in a blink of overlong duration. When he opened them, he smiled.
“Let us begin again. A second chance. A rare second chance from a man who does not give them. This will be your last opportunity, Axelle.”
“But Yetzel—”
“No! You are not listening! I know, Axelle. I know,” he said, mouthing the sounds with exaggerated movements of his lips. “The man you called your fiancée. He is nothing of the sort. He is not Sven. He is not your fiancée from Rotterdam! Admit it to me now, Axelle. Admit it, and I can save you. But lie …”
Then it was over. He knew. Axe stared at Yetzel as he shook his head like a disappointed parent, like a scorned lover, like a confused child who could not accept a hard truth. He knew … but he did not want it to be true. He wanted her to tell him whatever it was that would allow him to forgive her.
This entire time she had thought him like all the others. Just another man in a uniform who wanted to fuck anything that moved. But he was even more pathetic than she had imagined possible.
Michel And Axe Bury The Hatchet (The French Bastard Book 2) Page 19