by Amanda Dykes
I narrowed my eyes, watching him run roughened hands over the creature’s twitching coat, his dark hair tousled but his stance sure.
I approached.
“Everyone else looked west when the gate fell,” I said. I let my question hang unspoken, another test. If he would answer without my having to spell it out, all the better.
“Sounds ricochet,” he said simply. “I looked to where it had to have come from.” He shrugged one shoulder. “There is no metal in that direction. The tents are canvas. There’s plenty of metal over there”—he lifted his chin toward the horse pens—“and the hill beyond the tents acts like a wall to bounce the sound off of.”
Aware of his surroundings—check.
Keen insight into geography and terrain—check.
Calm in a crisis—check.
Able to command respect without belittling his charges—check.
I looked closer at him, taking in his appearance. Sleeves rolled down, buttons fastened. Trousers laced and shoes shined—though there was little shine left in them. He had all the markings of a soldier whose uniform represented duty, honor, and country. Head up, shoulders square. All textbook markings of a man who’d studied up on how to bear himself as a man in uniform.
But he wore no uniform. Those sleeves had been cleaned, but that cleaning hadn’t been enough to scrub out the markings of a life hard-lived. Those trousers were laced, but that did nothing to hide their threadbare knees. These were civilian clothes.
“You say you’re not registered?” I asked. If that was the only issue, that was solved easy enough.
He shook his head. “I’m only here to deliver a few of the horses,” he said. “Up from Harvard, with some of the fellows from there.”
“So, you are a Harvard man,” I said. Most of the boys here were. Recent graduates bound to be bankers, editors, businessmen, spending their summer training. Putting in the work to make sure America would have officers if the time came. “If it’s a matter of needing to register, I can point you to—”
“I’m just the groom.”
And I was sixteen again, standing in front of Theodore Roosevelt himself, alongside athletes and cowboys all vying for their place in his volunteer cavalry. They’d rattled off cities. Names. Events. All manner of escapades that had readied them to be part of the Rough Riders. Then he’d gotten to me and all I could tell him was I’d ridden the rails. A rail-car rat, homeless and too young at sixteen. “Maybe I’m just a kid,” I’d admitted. “But nothing’s beat me yet, and I’ll make sure it stays that way.”
I could kick the young me, speaking to T.R. like I knew something, like I was somebody. But whether from a fleeting lapse in judgment or something else, he’d let me in and I’d never looked back.
Even when I should have.
“Just the groom,” I repeated the kid’s words. “What’s your name, son?”
“Matthew Petticrew, sir.” He swallowed. “Captain Truett.”
He made himself taller when he spoke my name. Like he knew me and cared, for some reason, what I thought.
Truth was, I didn’t know what to think, other than that we needed good men and I had been dead wrong about this one on my first impression of him. This guy had what we needed. A bit muddied beneath the surface, maybe, but we could bring it out in him. That’s what Plattsburg was for.
“Do you want to join the training?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
He swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, let’s make that happen.”
I turned on my heel and took three steps, registering quickly that he did not follow.
I turned to face him. His face was beet red, but he held his head high. “I can’t pay, sir.”
I studied him a second or two. I wasn’t letting this one get away. He belonged here, as much as I belonged all those years ago with T.R. in Havana.
“Follow me, Petticrew. I’ll pay.”
His already-round eyes grew a few sizes. “But you can’t—”
“‘Yes, sir,’” I said. “Get used to saying that.”
A half smile, and he caught up. “Yes, sir. Captain Truett, sir.”
I stifled my own smile. Couldn’t let the men see me smile, not for at least another two months. A good dose of fear and trembling was what they needed to ready them to lead, to step into this role themselves.
“Will there be cavalry?” he asked. “Sir?”
I twitched my mouth to the side to lace my answer with some element of compassion. “Afraid not, son. Not from here. The war started out strong with cavalry, but horses in battle are sitting ducks now, with all the tanks and trenches. Machine guns, barbed wire—horses over there at this point are more used for transport.”
He nodded. “Transport.” He spoke as if to fix the word as his destination. But I had a feeling . . . this one was destined for more. Transport was important, no question. But a calm in the storm like he had just shown, we’d need that in the trenches. This one would be no private. This one would be no transport officer.
Matthew Petticrew got registered that day, and it both boosted my hope and weighed down something else inside of me. When they all retired to the barracks after taps that night, I heard snatches of laughter and voices float from different tents. And despite the fact that they should be adhering to strict curfew and I should be putting them in their place, I thought—good. Let them be green-gilled and let them laugh as long as they could. There’d be time enough for the rest, later.
As for me, my sleep came late, as it always did. And with it, like always, visions of my Amelia. At the edge of every thought buried beneath ice-thin sleep, with those blue-as-sky eyes. Might be one of these young fellows here would’ve caught her eye. She’d have been about that age by now.
Maybe they weren’t all bad.
The sun would climb up again tomorrow, and those blue-sky eyes would peer at me from the shadows where they were not, again, and maybe I wouldn’t want to swivel the artillery at the sun so fast.
Maybe I’d be a better man.
Tomorrow.
5
George Piccadilly
1917
Two Months Before America Enters the War
“Foster, scare up some olives and tell the orchestra to play another, will you?”
“I did not think clergy were in the habit of . . . carousing,” Foster said. “Sir.”
I shot him daggers. He knew as well as I that I would never darken the door of a church, much less shadow a pulpit from the place of a preacher, despite the collar that declared the contrary. A collar I’d left in my room at Harvard for the summer, heaven be thanked.
“Olives are grown in the Holy Land, Foster. Very pious and all that. Nothing could be more fitting.”
He bowed, then disappeared through the tent flap.
The whole thing was a riot, really. A manservant in a tent. A hooligan—yours truly—thrice removed from the ancient British institutions of Oxford, Cambridge, and the Imperial College of London, in that order, and thence sent to America to earn a divinity degree, all as part of an elaborate scheme perpetrated by the further-ups (Mother and Father, primarily Mumsie) to avoid the to-do on the battlefields of France. Clergy are exempt from the war, after all, and America will not touch the war with a ten-thousand-foot pole. A double measure of safety for my mother’s son, or so she believed when she cooked the sparkling scheme up.
If she could see me now.
One must make the best of one’s circumstances, and so here we are.
It wasn’t my fault that I lost a bet at a game of cards. It was the luck of the draw, I say! I plead innocent. Quite innocent, for I had no money on the table, so truly it could not even be said that this student of divinity was gambling. But the stakes were high, it seems, as the fellow I was playing with had a bee in his bonnet for recruiting fellows for this training camp. I wagered, I lost, and so here I stand. Ready to train for a war I shall never see, under the guise of training for a life in clergy, which I likewise shall neve
r see.
But I could rally the boys here. I could rummage up olives and a Victrola, and some dance partners too. Not to boast, but many-a-girl has carved a special place in her heart for George Piccadilly, and I for them.
In the meantime, I’d made a chum, his name being Maxwell. Or Matthew. One or the other, not that it made much difference. He walked around looking as if every step was a mission that might rescue the world at large or like he was searching for something with the fire of a thousand suns, poor chap. Nearly incinerated this whole place. I tried to do my bit to lighten the fellow up. He wasn’t a bad fellow. Just seemed to have a ghost at his back, or a hole in his heart, or one of those timeless literary struggles Professor Milton was always pontificating.
Anyway, he was a good fellow to know, even if he was a bit on the serious side. Wouldn’t even take a bet I placed with him to have the loser break rank and do a jig during drills. He was the reason we needed olives and music. He embodied the human struggle! The plight of the world! He needed merrymaking. Or marrying, though I couldn’t imagine what girl in this wide world would sign on for a lifetime of his solemn-faced looks. Maxwell, Matthew, whatever his name may be, I’d help the fellow out. Anyway, they’d have us calling each other by surnames soon, I shouldn’t wonder. Seems the military thing to do.
Military! Clergy! and Me! The unholy trinity! Well, they said all this war talk would come to nothing. Soon I’d be headed back to jolly old England. Unscathed, un-warred, and with a belly quite full of olives.
Until then, we’d conduct our drills. I might don my collar. They might call me chaplain, if they wish. I might even be able to muster a prayer or two, from the old Psalter they had us memorizing at the Imperial College, before the porcupine incident got me booted.
And further until then, I’d do as the song said. It spoke of war and it included mention of jam, so that sounded smashing to me.
As soon as reveille has gone
We feel just as heavy as lead,
But we never get up till the sergeant
Brings our breakfast up to bed
What do we want with eggs and ham
When we’ve got plum and apple jam?
Form fours! Right turn!
How shall we spend the money we earn?
By George (that’s me!), I’ve got it, I thought. In answer to the sage song’s question: I henceforth would spend my money on bets, rather than betting promises. Things like “Certainly I shall enroll in the training camp!”
And I would keep my eye on Maxwell-Matthew. He seemed to know a thing or two about surviving this place. Which is all that shall be needed, as this country refuses to enter the war, anyhow. It shall all come to nothing, mark my words.
6
Mira
1918
4 Years Since the War Has Come to France
The last refuge in the world.
So Grand-père has called our home, always. And always, I have promised it would be such to Papa when he came home from the darkness. He disappeared into the woods four years ago now.
Four years is many days. It is also 807 butterflies passing through our woods—and those are only the ones that I saw and counted. I told each one, “When you see him, tell him we are waiting. Tell him I will leave the lantern out for him. Tell him his papillon will fly him home.”
And so I do. Though I have not ventured to the eastern edge of the woods since the day of the metal beast, still I keep a vigil for Papa. Every night at dusk, for so many days that I have left girlhood far behind, the fairy tales darkened and dim, I have hung the lantern on the arch tree. I have lit it, watching my little matchbox grow emptier each time, willing my hope not to do the same.
I extinguished the flame only when the sun lit the sky the next day. Sometimes, to save matches, I lit it the next evening with a twig pulled from our hearth fire, which is kindled with leaves and grasses I find, and with steady dedication from Grand-père’s weathered and weary hands, which work with vigor to spark warmth from sticks. In this, he finds purpose. A flicker of joy upon the face of a father whose son has gone away and whose life, in the missing of him, is aching, aching, so very much.
But we press on. It is our part, Grand-père says. Ours to carry on, because to carry on is to hope. I have taken over Papa’s rounds through the woods, gathering what I can. And the two of us, we have gone to market once a month. Two days’ journey there and two and a half days’ journey back, for we always stop to fill our empty satchels with apples from a grove of wild trees along the way.
But much has changed. A year ago, we no longer had empty satchels on the way back, for the village people no longer bought our goods. They looked upon us with kindness but sadness. They had nothing to buy with, nothing to trade. They had had a scare—nearly been overtaken by the Germans. And it was then that we knew how close the war had come. It was on our doorstep, just as Papa had feared.
Still, I hung the lantern every night. For if the Germans were near, perhaps Papa was, too. He could come home, even if for a night. I imagined it a hundred times: I would make for him his favorite—tarte aux pommes. Golden buttery brown batter bubbling up around apples sliced and laid out like sunlight upon the water, in waving rows. It would tempt him to stay longer, but he would be valiant and go, I know.
And then came the true reason to wish him home: Grand-père fell ill. As the thunder tearing through the skies grew closer from the north, his heart grew sicker, and his mind wandered. He spoke to me now in ways I did not understand, as if he had slipped into the pages of his old fairy book. Only the things he spoke of, I could not find traces of in the book’s pages. If I could, I would read it to him. Perhaps then, he might have some relief. He spoke of a glowing city, of a grand ballroom, of a great wrong. Of never returning, lest the city be swallowed again. It tormented him, and though I tried, I could not ease his anguish with any of my words, nor my singing.
This night, I did not put the lantern up, for I did not wish to draw attention. The sounds were too fierce, the shadows moving through our woods did not belong here. I ventured far from the cabin with the old rifle in hand, tracing the sounds. I became as a shadow, so that the voices would not see me, if indeed they had eyes.
They were men, uncoiling wire. Digging, speaking words I did not know that sound angry. They turned this land into a field of weaponry, laying traps for their enemy. Barking at one another, “Nein! Nein!”
Some of them looked so cold in their eyes. I wondered what those eyes had seen to make them so lifeless.
But by the sadness I glimpsed on the faces of some of them, I wondered—are they not their own enemy? For they looked defeated and hopeless. Just as I felt.
But these . . . these are the men Papa went to fight. To keep them far from us. These are the men who cast a shadow over our friends in the village.
And yet—so many of them, they are just boys. Younger than me, even. If I had a brother, he might look like them. What do they know of life? What do I know of life? Perhaps we know more than our fair share, and in that, I wish I could give them something. Take away the sorrow. Send them to their homes, to their mothers and sisters and sweethearts.
But what have I to give?
I slipped back into the darkness, back to our home. The last refuge in the world. I drew every window curtain, snuffed out every candle, and listened all night to the sounds of Grand-père’s labored breathing, carried in spats by the sound of guns in the distance.
Help would not come. I knew this now. It was only me. The stories and tales that had spun in sun-shafts around me all my life . . . they had long fallen silent.
The sun awoke the kaleidoscope through that ancient kitchen curtain. It pooled in colors and light that made my soul ache, for the color had gone out of this world. Grand-père . . . he slept upon the floor, just where Papa used to sleep. Leaving the bed open for the son who would not come.
I took the kaleidoscope scrap of fabric down and hung it on my waist, for my apron had worn out long ago. There would be
no more pools of colored light . . . and there was work to be done.
7
Matthew
Saint-Mihiel, France
September 13, 1918
When I looked back, the moments lined up like stairs, one step to the next: that night on Mother’s porch, Celia entering the world. Our home above the stable, the goodness in a simple barn. The new Mrs. MacMannus sending toxic looks our way, packing us off. Me arriving on the steps of Harvard University, all its ivy-clung walls pointing me to the tack room at the stables there. I was allowed to sit in on classes and learned quick to bathe first, so that I didn’t fill up the lecture halls with “horse stench,” as the Brit said, shoving my shoulder like we were best friends. Still, I stood out, with my worn tweed suit, there among the others whose mounts I would kneel before to excavate muck from horseshoes.
A pack of the students began running regularly, training for the war we would not enter. I watched them from afar at first, and then the pounding of their feet rumbled down the rise and into my own feet until I was there too, running with them. Hearing of a training camp back in New York.
And so I arrived at Plattsburg and Captain Truett—the one whose tales of heroism had stood in the gap when a real father was absent—found me a place there for one summer, and then another. Letters flying between Celia and me all the while, as she made her way through her medical training and I made my way from camp, to school, to camp, to school—passing right past Maplehurst each time. I was stuck in a vortex. It was enough to drive a man mad, make him feel caged at the starting gate, awaiting the sounding bullet for his race.
Then it happened. America—the unswervingly neutral country in this war of the world—declared war. All because of unseen weapons beneath the sea, submarines attacking our ships. Our president asked Congress for a declaration of war . . . and then he went home and wept.
But this was it. This was what I’d been waiting for. A way to break out of this cycle, out of this gate. To do something that meant something.