by Lou Cadle
“Certainly was mine last night when you freed me. Today, I’m not so sure about. How can I possibly hurt more today than yesterday?”
“I made you walk a lot. And you have been lying on the ground.”
“This barn floor is the bloody Ritz compared to that cell they had me in. Not that I got to sleep a lot.”
She scooted around him and grabbed her valise. Her radio case, she kicked some straw over. “Give me your shirt, and let me help you up.” She unbuttoned the cuff.
He handed the shirt to her, but the instant she took it, his arm fell heavily, as if holding it up there had drained the last of his strength. “I’m afraid I might need your help walking.”
“There’s no shame in it, Will.”
He reached for the stall door to steady himself. She held on to the door so it wouldn’t swing away while he grabbed it with both hands and hauled himself upright. “Okay, I’m going to drape the shirt over you and button the top button. Let’s get you around to this wall. There you are. Rest right there for a second. And then we’re walking to the house. It’s not far, I promise. And then you’ll have a nice comfortable chair, or maybe even a sofa.”
“Right-o,” he said. They made it to the door, where he leaned against the wall while she opened the door. She helped him outside.
They made their way slowly to the house. The old woman was nowhere to be seen. Will staggered to the side once, but she managed to keep him upright. The strap of the valise had fallen down her arm and the thing kept hitting her in the thigh, not hurting, but irritating her unreasonably.
She realized the lack of sleep was getting to her, making her more emotional. Easily irritated. Easier tears. And breaking further her inner barrier against caring for Will.
She left him leaning against the wall of the house by the steps, and tapped on the back door.
“Come in,” the woman said. “I already said to come in. You don’t need to knock like the rag seller.”
Getting Will up the two steps to the house was the hardest part of the journey, but finally, he was inside.
The old woman took a look at him and grabbed him by the other arm, leading him over to a chair. “Sit before you fall down.”
“Thank you,” he said, in his bad French. He probably hadn’t understood what she’d said.
“He doesn’t speak French?”
“I speak a little bit the French,” he said, apparently having understood that much.
“So you’ll have to translate,” the woman said to Antonia.
Antonia nodded. “I have a shirt in here that I’ve used for rags. If you have a pair of scissors, I’ll cut the rest up.”
“I have an old sheet for bandages, but he doesn’t seem to be bleeding. Sorry to say, the water will be a while getting hot. The big pot, at least.” She pointed to an old stove, wood-fired. On the top there was a small saucepan, a kettle, and a large pot, big enough to make soup for a dozen in the family. The kettle was already steaming a bit.
“I’ll make you both porridge, but only after we’ve looked at his wounds,” she said. “I don’t want him to sick it up if we have to hurt him.” She brought a lantern over, lit it, and turned it up. “How did you get so bruised?” she asked Will.
Antonia interpreted all that.
“Tell her,” Will said.
“You tell her, and I’ll use your words.”
“The Germans had me for several days. I don’t know how long. They questioned me, and this is how they question people they think are spies.”
“Aren’t you a spy?”
Antonia kept translating.
“Not a very good one, it seems,” he said. “I’m not even a soldier. How much should we tell her?” he asked Antonia.
“As little as possible,” she said. In French, to the old woman, she said, “He’s neither spy nor soldier.”
“Then you’re the spy,” the old woman said.
“Yes,” Antonia said. “He was here for only a week on a technical matter, and now he needs to go back.”
“A hard week for him,” she said.
Antonia interpreted that for Will.
“Not how I expected my first week ever in France to be. I’d hoped to see the Eiffel Tower and the Mediterranean Coast, not the edges of Gestapo boots.”
“This is a burn,” the woman said, pointing to a wound.
When Antonia had interpreted, he said, “Oui. One of them put out his cigarette on me. Sort of as punctuation to his questions.”
Antonia translated to French, trying not to think about the content of what she was saying. She was tired, and too emotional, and the last thing Will needed was her falling apart right now.
“I’m going to go get a rag, and a towel, some soap, and some iodine,” the woman said. “Undress him. All of it.” She left the room
“She said—”
“I understood the gist of the first part. Iodine. Going to sting, isn’t it? But what did she say at the end?”
“To get you naked.”
“I’ve heard about this sort of thing in France. Two women get you naked.…”
She knew he was joking out of nervousness. “Don’t let her hear you say that. She might know English,” she said, “and I’m the one who’ll have to listen to her scolds. Stand up, and I’ll get your trousers.” She kneeled in front of him and untied his boots.
“I say,” he said. “This is not how I imagined it.”
Her tone was gentle. “Quit imagining.”
“Impossible,” he said, giving it the French pronunciation. But he stood, holding on to the table, and let her start to undress him.
She unbuttoned his trousers and tugged them and his underpants down at once. She gasped and sat back with a thud when she saw his genitals. His testicles were swollen beyond recognition still, and the bruising had begun to turn every color of the rainbow, yellow and purple and blue and green.
“Pretty bad, eh?” he said. “I can’t promise you they’ll ever work again.”
“They will,” she said. “They will.” She had no idea what this damage would do to him, but she knew he needed to believe he’d heal. “Time and rest will help. I’m sorry I made you walk so far.” And she was glad she’d taken the ride last night, despite the risk.
“Does still hurt quite a bit,” he said.
“Can you stand a moment more?” she asked.
“If I must.”
She crawled around to look at his backside. They had kicked him in the lower back, over the kidneys. The area was black and blue, and the bruises ran up to his ribs and down to his thighs. Around his side was the bullet wound—two of them, actually, entrance and exit. They were red and ugly but healing. There were rows of regular bloody wounds on his flanks, perfectly circular, that she couldn’t explain. “Okay, sit,” she said. She tugged at his boots, pulled his trousers and undershorts over his feet and shoved them to the side. There were dots of blood inside them.
She wanted to bend over the filthy clothes and cry. But she swallowed hard twice, and sternly told herself to keep her emotions under wrap. This wasn’t about her and her feelings. It was about Will and his being injured. She needed to hold herself together and help him.
“I’ll check the water,” she said, getting up and turning away so he couldn’t read her thoughts on her face. She touched the outside of the kettle. It was so hot, she snatched her hand back. “Feels good to be warm, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Easy for you to say. You have clothes on.”
She gathered her self-control and turned to face him.
The old woman came in and took a look at them. She must have read on Antonia’s face how close she was to breaking, for she said, “Go up the stairs and into the first room on your left. There’s an old quilt hanging over the back of a chair. Get that.”
She didn’t interpret for Will but went to run the errand. She needed to get better control over herself. Yes, he was hurt. Yes, the bruises, the burns, the swelling in his groin must hurt him terribly. But i
t wasn’t her who hurt, and she had to quit letting it get to her.
What kind of beasts—men themselves—would kick another man in the bollix repeatedly? She couldn’t imagine. Then she remembered how happy she’d felt about killing the two Nazis. She’d been ready enough to torture the scientist as well.
And if she ever had a chance to get back at whoever had done this to Will, she’d take it, and feel just as gleeful about inflicting pain on them as they no doubt had felt while doing this to Will. Nazis were monsters, yes. But she was a monster as well.
She was a monster on the right side of the war, the right side of history. It wasn’t much of a comfort, but it was all she had to cling to, to separate herself from those other monsters.
She found the quilt and saw a mirror. She walked over and looked at herself. There were dirt smudges on her face, and her hair was a tangle. There was a brush and hand towel in her valise. When they were done doctoring Will, she’d clean herself up a bit.
She came down the stairs and heard the two of them talking. “Ow, dammit,” Will was saying, in English.
“Oh don’t be a baby,” the old woman said in French. “My uncle caught his arm in the steam thresher. This is nothing compared to that.”
“Son of a—a gun,” he said. “I hate iodine.”
Antonia entered the kitchen with the quilt.
The old woman looked up, seemed to approve of whatever she saw on Antonia’s face now and said, “Set it aside. Get the water, one of those rags, and bathe him. Don’t wash off the iodine I just applied. Those bits I cleaned first. Work around them.”
There was already a wet cloth, stained pink throughout, on the table. The old woman had been cleaning his wounds with it. She grabbed a new rag, reached to the saucepan, and dipped it in. The water was warm, and the desire to give her own face a good wash hit her again. But Will came first.
He had scooted far forward on the chair and was leaning over while the old woman tended to his back. “Start at his feet,” the old woman said. “We need to get all of him clean. But his bollix, I’m not sure what to do about them. It’ll hurt to even wash him, and there’s no cut to be stitched that I can see.”
“Probably we should let him wash them. He knows how much pressure he can bear.”
“Not getting shy on me, are you?” the old woman said.
“No, Madame,” she said. She felt as if she was being ordered around by a harsh schoolmistress. It was easy to fall into that old role.
“Take the whole saucepan to the table so you can dip the rag.”
“Yes, Madame.” Antonia grabbed the saucepan with the rag, took it over and put it down on the floor on a dry rag. The handle was hot and started to hurt her palm at the end. She put it down on another rag on the floor, dropped to her knees again and picked up the soap, making a lather.
“What are you doing?” Will said.
“She said to bathe you, starting at the feet. So I am.”
“Well, I—son of a mother-loving—!” he finished, rather loudly.
“Pay attention to what I’m doing, not to what she’s doing,” Antonia said, picking up his foot and washing it. It was strangely intimate, despite the old woman’s presence, and despite that he was in pain and making it known from time to time with gasps or curses. It soothed her to do the simple job, clean, dip the rag and squeeze it, wipe off the last of the soap, dip the rag again, soap his skin and clean another few inches of skin. Repeat and repeat the simple task. And to not think about how hurt he was.
“All right,” the woman said. “You can have him lean back, if he can bear it. That’s all I can do for his skin back here. But he needs to be clean before he gets into one of my beds, and I want to wrap his sides. And ask him if he’d feel better if he had on tight drawers, or loose ones, or nothing at all.” She left.
Antonia repeated all that, adding, “She’s insisting on your being in bed. It’s dangerous for her, more so than your being in the barn. If they catch you here, they’ll send her to a work camp, and at her age, she’ll surely die.”
“That woman? Ha!” He shook his head. “She’ll be running the place inside of a month.”
“How I wish that were true.”
“You watch. If they do ever jail her, she’ll be the one planning the breakout.” His tone changed. “It’s amazing how good she is at making herself understood in French I don’t understand.”
“Maybe your French is getting better.”
“I think I recognize the impatient tones of an angry granny,” he said.
“I was thinking schoolmistress.”
He smiled, then winced as something hurt him. Maybe the smile itself had.
She was above his knees now. “I need to know if I can touch you there.”
“Under normal circumstances, I would beg you to. But not now, I’m afraid. You’ll have to trust me to wash myself. In fact, I could finish the rest, but I rather like your doing it.”
“As long as I’m not hurting you.”
“Just my heart,” he said. “And in a good way.”
She tended to the patch of skin she was washing and shook her head.
“Go back with me,” he said.
“Go back?”
“To England. It’s too dangerous here.”
“My job is here, in France.”
“I hate that. The thought of them catching you, and doing to you what they did to me? I can’t bear it.”
“I’m none too enthused about the idea myself,” she said, trying to keep the words light. “So I will try my hardest not to be caught.” She had washed as far up as she dared. Rinsing the rag again in the now-dirty saucepan of warm water, she looked up. “If you can, stand up and I’ll get the backs of your legs.”
He did so. Much of his lower back was iodined. She washed his thighs and buttocks She had him sit and pointed to his groin. “Are you ready to?”
“I know how to bathe,” he said. “And if you don’t mind, turn away.”
“All right.” She let him have the semblance of privacy. She walked over to a window and pulled back the curtain. “It’s a fine day outside.”
He gasped in pain.
She winced along with the sound. “I think spring is here. Could you smell it in the air?”
He said nothing.
“I like autumn best. You?”
“Winter,” he said, and his voice was strained with pain. “I like skating. I like most of the chores of mending. That’s how I grew to want to be an engineer, that winter fixing. I don’t like—ah, shit, that hurt—going out at dawn to crack the ice for the stock. But otherwise, the ranch was less work in the winter, and the days were shorter. I liked taking a potato to bed.”
“A potato? As a late meal?”
“No. As a foot warmer. The central house was still warm enough, but the fires would be banked at bedtime, and by morning it would be so cold, you didn’t want to get out of bed. But at night, as it cooled off, the potato warmed your feet. And then Mum would peel them all in the morning and fry the insides up with back bacon and onions. Heaven, even though we were all shivering around the stove while it was warming up again.” He sighed heavily. “Okay, you can turn around now.”
She did, watching him, seeing the strain on his face. “You’ll heal, and you’ll be fine,” she said again.
“I hope so. I’d planned to use all that again one day.”
“I’d had that thought myself,” she said.
He looked up at her, his gaze intense.
The old woman came back in with an armful of things. “Done? No? Wash his chest too. Damn, do I have to do everything here?”
“What now?” Will asked.
“We’re shirking our duties.” To the old woman she said, “He wanted to wash his own private parts.”
“If he can do that, he can do his chest and arms too. While he’s finishing his bath, you can find the porridge on the shelf in that dented canister. There are bowls over the sink, in the cabinet there. Make two bowls of porridge. I don�
��t have any sugar or cream, sorry to say.”
“Anything will be wonderful,” she said. “I’ve not eaten in twenty-four hours, and he may not have in many days.”
“Make his thin. I don’t want him getting sick all over my clean floors.”
“I will,” Antonia said. She translated for Will the order to finish bathing his chest and arms, and she set about finding the oatmeal and making two bowls of porridge. It smelled wonderful when the hot water from the kettle met the flattened oats. Her stomach twisted in hunger.
When she looked up, Will had apparently finished bathing himself, for the woman was getting him into an old flannel shirt. It looked soft, and it was two sizes too big for Will. She also had socks for him, and a choice of underwear. Will chose none of them.
The old woman said, “If he doesn’t want to wear those, he should wrap the old sheet around himself. I don’t want any blood in my bed.”
“Perhaps we should go back out to the barn after we eat,” Antonia said again.
“Nonsense,” the woman said. “Get one good day’s sleep, both of you. Let me check his wounds again tomorrow morning. Then you can do whatever you want.”
“You’re too kind,” Antonia said. She carried the bowls to the table.
“I’ll get the spoons,” the old woman said.
The two of them ate, and then the woman directed them to the parlor and a sofa. Will settled down on the sofa, Antonia covered him with the old quilt, and then she went back into the kitchen to clean up. The woman bossed her around.
“I don’t know your name,” Antonia said.
“Should you know it?”
“No,” Antonia said. “I’ll call you Auntie. How’s that?”
“I’m not your aunt!” she said, as if it had been an insult to suggest it.
“Then what should I call you? It is safer for you if I do not know your real name.”
“Call me Madame Formoy,” the woman said. It was equivalent to the surname Farmer in English, her occupation. “Now you should get to bed as well. You can use my bedroom.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll just lie on the floor by the man, in case he wakes and needs me.”
“Suffering for love, eh?” She shook her head. “Never a good idea.”