“Because I can’t; that’s part of the deal. You need to know some things, and I can’t tell you others.”
I looked down at the envelopes. The larger ones were numbered one to three. I’d sliced open the first the minute we’d gotten into the car. There was a long letter inside. I’d read the first two pages but then stopped. It was almost too much to take in. At the beginning, my grandfather had written that I could share some of its contents, just those first pages, with my parents. I’d noticed Mom eyeing me in the rearview mirror a couple of times while I’d been reading, glancing away when I’d looked up at her; and Dad had even cocked an eye in the mirror, pretending that he was turning in his sleep. I’d never known him to snooze in the car before.
“Well, what can you share with us, Master Murphy?” I’m sure he was annoyed that Grandpa had told me to withhold information from him and Mom.
“Well, you know about the seventh grandson.”
“Yes, dear,” said Mom. “Your grandfather told us a while ago.”
“He gave us all tasks.”
Dad kept looking out the window, as if he were only mildly interested. “Are those the undertakings that the lawyer was talking about?”
“What do you mean by tasks?” asked Mom.
“Well, they’re adventures, assignments, tests—however you want to put it—for all seven grandsons.”
“I don’t get it,” said Dad.
“Grandpa said there were things he hadn’t accomplished, if you can believe it, things he wanted to do during his life, but never did. Things left undone.”
“That is hard to believe,” said Mom.
“So?” asked Dad, turning around and looking at me.
“We—my cousins and I—are going to do them for him. Or at least try to.”
There was just the sound of the car moving along the highway for a few seconds.
“I hope these aren’t dangerous things,” said Mom.
“You’re both supposed to go with me.”
“And help you do what?” asked Dad.
“You don’t help me. You just go with me.”
“Okay,” said Mom. “Would it be too much to ask where we are going? How long will the drive be?”
“To France.”
“France?” they both sputtered.
“This summer, to a place called Marseille.”
“The ls are silent, dear. You should know that.”
Mom had made me take private French lessons once a week from the time I was about seven. It was her way of keeping me Canadian, or so she said. Not that she was even remotely bilingual herself. She hadn’t even been any good at ordering lunch in Montreal when we visited the French-Canadian province of Quebec last year. I didn’t listen much to the woman who taught me. It wasted my free time. And there weren’t any marks to be had either.
“Okay, Mar-say,” I said with my best French accent.
“That’s on the southern coast,” said Dad. “Your grandfather flew reconnaissance missions in that area in the Second World War.”
Like I hadn’t been told that a million times, right from the lips of the war hero himself! Iceland, East Africa, France, the tales were endless. Not that I hated hearing them: they were actually pretty wicked, but I could have done with fewer renditions, despite the fact that they came in useful whenever I wanted Vanessa to give me a moment of her time. She really had no interest in talking to me. (Not that most sophomore girls talked much to sophomore boys anyway, unless you were somehow supercool.) She’d only listen to me if she heard me talking about Grandpa’s time in France or Dad’s exploits in the Gulf War. “It’s so romantic,” she said once. “They’re like heroes from another time.” She was a very proud American and often wore jeans that had a stars-and-stripes patch sewn on just above her butt. Her dad had been in the National Guard and had about fifty Support Our Troops, America First! and Peace Through Superior Firepower decals on their car. He was an executive of some sort who worked for the Republican Party in our district. I remember the day Dad showed up at school in his United Airlines pilot’s uniform. Vanessa came right over to talk to us and stayed for a while. And the time Grandpa dropped by to pick me up after class, she immediately asked to be introduced to him. “So, you are David McLean,” she said, her voice rising a little. “I’ve heard so much about you!” Of course, he regaled her with some pretty dramatic tales. He had a way with the ladies, right to the end. She told me later that he didn’t look a day over sixty.
It didn’t hurt that Grandpa had actually done his flying for the US Air Force during the Second World War, drawn there because he had some American business connections, signed up a little late and liked the sort of firepower and advanced technology we had in our planes. (David McLean always liked to go as fast as he could.) He’d had a grandfather who was a US citizen, which he said helped him get in, but in those days just about anyone who wanted to enlist was apparently welcome. Vanessa thought it was awfully moving that a Canadian would fight under the US flag and then “be so brave!” Little did she know that he wasn’t the biggest fan of “you Yanks,” as he liked to call us.
My girlfriend, Shirley, who is in tenth grade too but pretty down-to-earth and cool with dating a guy in her year, didn’t fawn over Dad or Grandpa at all. Shirley was nice and polite every time I had her over to our place. She was great, and I really liked her. She was an excellent friend and quite good-looking, but she didn’t light up a room like Vanessa. If the Big V had been in my house or in my bedroom like Shirley’s been a couple of times, my place would have been glowing. I had kissed Shirley, more than once and with some feeling, with Mom and Dad just down the hall. It was pretty good. But sometimes I imagined it with Vanessa, and man, that just sent me over the moon. If that ever happened, even once, or even almost once, I would have tried to commit it to memory—exactly how she smelled, how she felt, how she looked in my room at that moment.
“I’ll read you the first page,” I said, turning my attention back to Mom and Dad.
“Are you sure you should even do that? Maybe you should keep it all to yourself,” said Mom, letting her displeasure show in her voice. I could understand. Her father was excluding her from something that was important to him.
“Just listen. This is pretty incredible.”
Dear Adam,
By now you have seen me blathering on in the video about how much I love you all. Sorry about that. But I DO love you. And I hope you love me too and that our bond will grow even more as the years go by, especially after you have done the things I am asking you to attempt in these letters. If you decide to take on what I am suggesting, you will go on a journey into my past and into my mind. It will help you with your future.
I spent a long time thinking about what I wanted you to do, Adam. I’ve come up with something very important, very private. It is fitting that I’m asking you, of all my grandsons, to do it. It will show you a side of me that you’ve never seen before, a side that I’m ashamed of.
This is your task, sir.
Actually, it’s three tasks, of ascending difficulty. I’m not sure you can accomplish any of them, but I’d like you to at least try the first one. It is a momentous assignment in itself, a mission that may be too much for you, that I may not have the right to ask of you. Its details are in the following pages. If you cannot complete it, there will be no shame and I (up in heaven or down below or wherever the hell I am) will completely understand. But if, somehow, you are able to find the courage and imagination to do it, you can then go on to the second task, outlined in envelope number two.
Though I trust in your abilities, I truly doubt that you can complete the second adventure—it is beyond difficult, even more challenging than the first.
Assignment three is in envelope three. Finishing it, I must say, is virtually impossible.
You may only open one envelope at a time, after the task in the preceding one has been accomplished. And you may only unseal the last envelope—the small white one—in the unlikely event you
complete the first three assignments. If you stall at a level, you must end your adventures there. Destroy the contents of the envelopes you haven’t read. I will rest uneasily if you do not obey these rules.
All your expenses will be covered. You should start your journey as soon as you can.
Here’s how to begin:
Fly to Marseilles, France, with your parents. My lawyer will arrange and pay for your flights. Your parents are to book a room in the nicest hotel in the city and have the holiday of their lives in the south of France. They are to make themselves available to you by cell phone at all times. But they are not to help you in ANY way with your tasks.
Once they are settled, you are to travel, on your own, half an hour north of Marseilles to the beautiful old town of Arles and take up residence in a hotel there. This will be your headquarters as you pursue your adventures.
Please keep the next pages to yourself.
There was silence in the car when I finished.
It was curious to me that I was to start my assignment in France. Of all the stories Grandpa told, he was most vague about his experiences in that part of Europe. He used to give us all sorts of details about his other adventures, but when it came to France and the Second World War, his tales weren’t as personal. He mostly spoke of the mind-blowing planes he flew and how his comrades survived dangerous situations. Usually, all he said about himself was that that he had been shot at while flying over France (he described it really well—it sounded terrifying) and that his plane had been hit hard more than once. But those stories seemed to end rather abruptly, petering out without resolutions, him still in the sky, never suffering further trouble, nor even limping back to his base. Mom said that, like many veterans, he found it difficult to talk in exact terms about the horrors he may have seen. Now I was wondering if there was a lot more to it than that.
“Well, that’s interesting, very interesting,” said Mom. “Another ‘side’ of himself? And what’s he ‘ashamed’ of?”
“Indeed,” said Dad. “I knew Dave probably kept some state secrets, some inside air-force things, but I didn’t think he was hiding any big personal ones.”
“Well, it appears he was—more than one,” snapped Mom.
But I was barely listening. I held the next pages in my hands. There were quite a few of them. I wasn’t surprised at that—Grandpa always had a lot to say. I picked up the first one and began to devour its contents.
FOUR
THE FIRST ENVELOPE
This is difficult to even write. Don’t EVER show this to anyone. Burn it when you are done, whether you accomplish the assignment or not. You know a tiny bit of this, but not all of it, not the important parts. I will tell it from the beginning, leaving everything in this time. Here goes:
During the war, I was stationed on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. We flew secret reconnaissance missions over southern France from there, over the area then called Vichy. The French hadn’t exactly set up a Pittsburgh Steelers defense against the Nazis at the beginning of the war and got their butts kicked quickly. Hitler and his psychos overran their country in a heartbeat. And a whole whack of the French just kind of let him do it and then made an alliance with him with the cooperation of France’s greatest general from World War I, an ass named Pétain. Together, they agreed that a big chunk of southern France would be run by the French, a sort of “Free France” or “Free Zone.” Of course, that was a joke, since it was really a Nazi-dominated area, and believe me, there was nothing “free” about that.
It was a pleasant place for most of the war, and the French who lived there just kind of went about their business, far from the battlegrounds, ignorant of what Hitler was doing to the Jews and the violence he was perpetrating on us and the Allied Forces all over Europe. (Canadians, of course, were in the big fight from the get-go; then you Americans came on board a few years later, after the Allies had held the fort and suffered terrible losses, and you “won the war for the world,” as you guys like to say.)
But there was an underground war going on in Vichy too. Not all the French were avoiding the conflict. A significant number were very brave and became members of the French Resistance, who fought the bad guys tooth and nail, secretly, risking their lives by helping spies and committing guerrilla warfare against the Vichy government, its military, German soldiers and officials.
Then there were the REALLY bad guys: French Nazis who formed a militia called the Milice. You may have heard of the Gestapo and the SS, the German state police known for their black uniforms and skull-and-crossbones badges? Well, the Milice were just as evil, maybe worse. They hunted the French Resistance fighters like dogs, and when they caught them or anyone else who helped the Allies or Jews, they tortured them and murdered them without thinking twice. Everyone in southern France was terrified of them.
By late in the war, the tide was turning against the Nazis, and by early June of 1944 we’d landed in Normandy on the French coast across from England—that was the big D-Day invasion. But we still needed to know more about the enemy, where their strengths and weaknesses were, so we could overrun them, sweep across France and into Germany, and take them out for good. In Vichy (by then directly operated by the anxious Germans) things were getting bad for the Nazis and their supporters. They and the Milice knew the end was coming, and they were all desperate, which made them even more vicious.
This is where I come in.
There I was one night, flying over southern France in June of 1944 on a reconnaissance mission, gliding as quietly as possible, getting low but not too low, taking aerial photographs of enemy locations, looking down upon the land of the Milice and the Nazis.
Then someone put a round of anti-aircraft bullets into my engine. It was a funny thing. Everything was quiet until they hit. Suddenly, there was a sound like big mosquitoes coming up from the ground and in an instant everything was on fire. The plane did a nosedive and I couldn’t stop it. I was scared, but I did what I had to do, what I’d been trained to do. In seconds I was out of the aircraft and into the sky, just me and my parachute.
Down I went, down toward the land of evil. It was just about dusk, the perfect time to get pictures and yet not be observed particularly well. I couldn’t see much below me, just fields.
I knew I was somewhere over Arles.
“Learning anything new?” asked Dad.
“Yeah, a bit. It’s pretty good.”
“Good?” asked Mom.
I looked out the window. We were somewhere between Hamilton and Niagara Falls.
“Just let me read.”
I landed in an open field, which wasn’t a good thing. I had noticed an area nearby that was full of trees—turned out later to be grapevines—and tried to steer toward it, but couldn’t quite manage it. We hadn’t spent much time on parachute training, so I hit the ground at a pretty good rate, and awkwardly, and busted my ankle.
I figured I was a goner. As I was rolling around in the grass, trying to gather up my chute, I was half expecting to see a bloodthirsty contingent of Milice coming at me, lights blazing, guns trained. And sure enough, within seconds, someone appeared. He was alone, but armed. He had an ax in his hand and he looked at me with what appeared to be terror. His eyes were almost bulging out of his head.
At first I could tell that he wasn’t sure what to do: yell that the enemy had landed, kill me or save me. He chose the last option, motivated by a goodness deep within him and a hatred of what Hitler had done to his country and to others. He was an angel. Jean Noel was his name. John Christmas. And when he appeared, I received the greatest gift of my life.
He was as strong as an ox, with hard-calloused working hands on him like mitts on a gorilla, and he dragged me into the vineyard, out of sight. He knelt down, his face up close to mine and spoke in a whisper, his eyes still fearful.
“Jean Noel,” he said. “Okay. Okay?”
“David Adam McLean, US Air Force.”
He returned to the open field, stuffed my para
chute under his arm, came back, got me to my feet, braced me with a shoulder and walked me the five miles to his home, looking back with almost every other step.
I learned later that he had been clearing dead vines with his ax that night, toiling extra hours for a rich Nazi sympathizer. His own tiny farm was about two acres, on which he and his wife Yvette kept about a dozen chickens, a few pigs, two cows and a workhorse. He plowed an acre and a half with that horse, and used the poor beast for transportation whenever he hitched her to his little wagon to go to market in Arles, about ten miles away. Their house was made of stone, maybe five hundred years old, smaller than your garage. It had a low ceiling and just two rooms, one that served as their kitchen-living-and-dining room and another where they all slept. They had two small children, a boy and a girl. When we arrived, Yvette, a pretty lady, a little plump and wearing a dirty apron over her tattered blue-flowered dress, put her hands on her cheeks and began to cry. “Non, non, non, non, non! Non, Jean!” She kept her voice low but she was still screaming. She pulled the two children close to her.
But Jean had made up his mind, and that is why you, Adam, are alive today. Because the Milice would have killed me the minute they saw me. No, that isn’t correct. They would have tortured me first. And they would have tortured and killed Jean too, and done worse to Yvette.
The stone-floored and stone-walled room felt damp, but there was a lovely smell of a wood fire and wonderful home-cooked food in the air. I could see a butter churner and a loom in the cramped quarters. Jean immediately threw my parachute into their fire.
So, that was where I lived for the next month, as my ankle healed. Not exactly in the house though. After they had quickly fed me stew and homemade bread, mixed with a little cheap red wine, Jean checked that it was safe outside and then took me just a few strides to his little barn. It was made of stone too and housed the horse, two cows, the few pigs and those chickens. I would get to know them well, know exactly when the rooster crowed each morning, and learn to live with the smell of manure in that damp, dark place. He helped me over the fence that contained the pigs and we slopped a few paces through their cramped pen, past the big sow and her piglets and then over the next fence, this one covered with webs of fine wire, into the tiny area at the back where the chickens were.
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