by Amanda Dykes
Perhaps Hank’s theory wasn’t so farfetched, after all.
She began to walk again, this time in front of me. And though she put on a good show of bravery, and though certainly that bravery was real, I didn’t miss the way she limped slightly.
What fools we were. What oafs! The three of us were by now accustomed to long marches and having trained ourselves to ignore blisters and bless calluses.
She, this woman of the woods, would not have the same calluses protecting her feet.
Ahead, I saw another ruins on the horizon. “Let’s stop there for lunch,” I hollered ahead, and Henry, head bent over the map, waved a hand in agreement.
But before we reached the wrecked building, the sound of something familiar tread into our hearing: feet. Hundreds of them. Marching in time with one another and with a mission.
17
Singing. The soldiers were singing, marching on to war, stars in their eyes. Was it only three months before that that had been our battalion? Like boys off to camp, some game of capture the flag. Elated at the chance to save the world, or at least a part of it.
I saw it on their faces. Ruddy-cheeked, some of them, and some smattered with freckles. All of them wide-eyed and eager. I tried to be cynical. My thoughts tried to spin words out like if you only knew.
But those thoughts ran up against something between them and me. An invisible mirror that acted as a time machine, too. Showing me a version of myself from months ago.
One of them, a fellow maybe twenty years old, nodded and saluted each of us, a big grin on his face. When he got to me, that grin tugged down, tempered.
And I knew. He’d seen it, too—the mirror, the time machine between us. Only when he looked at me, he was seeing a future version of himself.
And what he saw ripped the ground right out from under him.
I tried to undo it. I smiled, if you can call that mangled attempt a smile. The muscles in my face didn’t really remember how to do that, and they felt like rubber and doubtless appeared so, too. The soldier looked aghast, unable to look away, and tripped so close to me that all it took was one lunge to brace him.
He gripped my arm, his uniform immaculate, a dark green that seemed to hold life. It crossed my own uniform, that same green but faded, stained, torn, as if it had lived a hundred unkind years.
He was back on his feet and had released me in less than a second, but that image—our arms crossed, my uniform against his—was burned in my mind.
Henry had caught up with the officers and was showing them our maps, probably consulting with them to hear what they knew of the road ahead of us. In exchange, he’d tell them of the road ahead of them. The men were given leave to fill their canteens in the creek by the road and take some rest.
Mireilles hung back, and I didn’t blame her. To be plucked from the quiet of the woods and then deposited in a veritable current of soldiers . . . all of whom seemed transfixed when they saw her. A living puzzle, and—none of us had to say it—a beauty. She spread her worn skirts out and eased herself into the shadow of a tree, waiting.
“What happened?” the young man who’d tripped said. He reminded me of Celia, the way he honed in on my bandaged hand. Even in those two words, I could hear the South coming through, his words as long as his lopsided grin. He’d filled his canteen and returned to me, his initial shock at the sight of us now tempered into earnest curiosity.
I shrugged. Sifted through what to tell him. “The front,” I said at last, opting for the simplest answer.
“Can I have a look?”
Well, no, I wanted to say. I wanted to shove that bandaged hand deep into the ground, hide it, let them go on their way and forget about these fingers that still trembled at the strangest times, though most danger was gone.
But that would’ve made more a spectacle than letting the guy just satisfy his curiosity and be done with it. I held my hand out, palm up, and peeled back the dirty gauze.
He sucked in breath like he’d been the one lashed deep. “That’s a nasty one,” he said, eyebrows raised as if impressed. “You clean it?”
I nodded. I kept it clean as best I could, out here on the road. It was better than the trenches, that much was sure.
“What about you?” I said. I was the worst conversation-maker in all of history, but posing questions was a deal better than answering them and being under scrutiny. “You’re headed there,” I said. A question, but a statement. We both already knew exactly where there was and exactly what his answer would be.
That initial spark returned to his face. “That’s right,” he said. “Name’s John Maddox. We’re headed there to give the others a rest. Sounds like that’s you,” he said, his smile full again. “Got any pointers for us?”
Pointers. The only pointers there were weapons, and he’d learn that soon enough.
I shrugged. To the side of the road, a flock of sheep bleated, eating grass like all was as normal as could be in the world. The scene sliced clean away when I blinked, that green grass flashing into colorless dirt, the blue sky swallowed up by dark. How long, I wondered, would memory keep doing this? Showing up and slashing into the present?
John Maddox of the South was watching, his study of me growing serious again. “Say, you okay?”
I nodded, swallowed back a swig of water from my canteen. I looked over to Mireilles’s tree and didn’t see her. She was near, though, I knew.
Think. What could I give this person before me? What, when I had nothing?
“Pointers,” I said, forcing a thoughtful lightness into my voice. “Whatever happens out there, I guess—just know you’re not alone.”
Maddox nodded thoughtfully, a bit of a joke in his eyes as he surveyed the ranks of men around. “Got it,” he said. “Not alone.”
My face burned. I was no good at this. “I mean . . .” How to tell him? How to equip him without scaring the living daylights out of him? Without robbing him of maybe the only day or two left of that naïve hope written broad as daylight on his freckled face?
I remembered Mr. Haggerty. “Sometimes there’s a dark so thick you just know,” he’d told me when I’d gotten locked in a garden shed by accident. He heard my fist pounding on that door and let me out, then plucked me up when he could read the fear on my body that I wouldn’t give voice to. He set me on a rock in the sun and sat right beside me. “Sometimes there’s a dark so thick you just know that the God who made light with His own two hands—with just His words—is going to plunge right into that dark to find you. You remember that, Mr. Matthew.”
He always called me that. Mr. Matthew. Like I was somebody.
His words came to me now, pounding on the tails of those memories of no-man’s-land.
John Maddox was waiting, beginning to look concerned that perhaps my hand wasn’t the worst-injured part of me. And maybe he was right.
I blew out my cheeks, shaking the cloak of it all away. “Right. Pointers,” I said. “When you go over the top, it’ll probably be dark.”
Maddox nodded gravely, as if committing my words to a permanent fixing place inside.
“Remember that light was made for dark,” I said. I repeated Mr. Haggerty’s words to him. They didn’t sound as weighty or convincing coming from me as they had coming from the old gardener back home. It was painfully clear I was trying them on for size, slipping my feet into them and finding them too roomy for my meager faith. I sounded even less convincing than when George Piccadilly bandied holy words about.
But it was all I had to give. Words that weren’t yet mine, but that I was learning to grow into. If I could learn to believe them . . .
Maddox nodded, repeating a few back. “Plunge right in,” he said. “I like that. You mean I shouldn’t be afraid to plunge right in when the time comes, too, right?”
I smiled, sad. And nodded. Because sure, there was plenty to be afraid of. Plenty of real, awful things. But maybe, after all, it wasn’t about the presence of danger, but the presence of a God who would plunge right int
o it beside you.
Something in me twisted, thirsty to believe that. For the bringer of light to fling the shadows far, far from me.
“Right,” I said at last. “Right.”
Plunge right in.
I held on to those words like a battle cry when the fresh battalion left, leaving us all in an eerie quiet there on the road. When Mira approached quietly, her eyes settling on me. And when Henry told us, maps spread out and glasses pushed up, that the only way forward was to the village of Beaulieu-en-Coteau.
He grew grave as he said so, and even Mireilles went as white as a sheet.
“What is it?” I asked, surveying the two of them.
Mireilles swallowed.
Henry scratched his head. “It’s—well, according to the captain who just left—it’s . . .”
“Piège mortel,” Mira murmured.
George leaned in, going serious. Stammering over his coming interpretation. “A death trap.”
18
Mira
Coming into Beaulieu-en-Coteau was like stepping into one of Grand-père’s stories. Only I am sad to say, I was thankful he did not have to see it. Much better to be walking the streets of gold than to come into a place of so much silent anguish. Surely here, the rocks cried out, toppled as they were. Remnants of homes and churches and streets and shops all tossed together.
My foot caught and I stumbled, catching myself against an oddly leaning tower. A chimney, I realized. Stones so warm that for a moment I could nearly hear the crackle of the fire its hearth once housed. Or, I realized with horror, from a blow that toppled it so soon in the past. I pulled back my hand with the thought of it and it landed on something solid.
It was Matthew. Monsieur Petticrew. He caught that hand and held it, steadying me, steadying the race of my heartbeat. It was the sun that warmed those stones. Nothing more. The sun, the sun, the sun. I told myself so with each step. What had Matthew said to the happy soldier? Light was made for dark. He did not look as if he believed it, but the words sank into me and made me thankful for the sun. They gave me courage to take one more step, and another after that.
It was unsettling, walking in this place. Unreal, and in some ways, too real. Too like what life felt like now.
We walked on, him releasing me once I had my balance. The quiet hung heavy, urging a soul to burrow into the lost places.
Of all the things here that unsettled me, it was the look on George Piccadilly’s face that did so the most. Such a jovial fellow was he usually, the first to whistle a tune or pipe a joke into the moment. But now he looked grave. Almost green around the mouth, or perhaps his pallor was merely a reflection of the destruction around.
He caught me looking and was quick to smile that dimpled smile of his. “Be careful,” he said, gesturing at the stones, and at the jagged horizon of the town all around us.
I nodded.
We turned a corner, following Henry’s lead. And there, perched right in the rubble, stood a table with a white tablecloth and a tea set. Wooden chairs, a few of them splintered or broken in various places, stood around the table, and a hearth nearby testified that once this was a kitchen. Somebody’s home.
Where were they now, the ones displaced? I searched the ruins as if they might, impossibly, harbor them, these invisible, home-less people, whose loss I understood.
Instead, three uniformed men bedecked in medals sat around the table, bent together over a map between them while their servants—what was it they had called them? batmen?—stood at the ready to pour more tea or save their lives, whichever the given moment called for. Such a vignette of finery, there in the rubble, was jarring.
Henry-or-Hank stopped in his tracks, as did we all.
“What’s this?” one of them said. “Yanks in the field, is it? Well, don’t just stand there, come and have a bite!”
His accent, though cheery, sent a sudden cold chill through me. It was the same as George’s—but I was growing used to George, hearing the accent less and the man more. I knew it was not this new man’s fault that my body reacted so. Perhaps, in time, it would not.
My soldiers, as Aline had called them, hesitated only a moment before advancing. The dining officers began to disperse a bountiful amount of food. Matthew spotted me standing still and caught my eye, motioned me over to a chair.
I sat cautiously. I felt badly doing so; I was an imposter here. But oh, did my feet ache, and my whole body, so that it stepped away from the protests in my mind and sat down despite myself.
Unpacked before us were sandwiches, canteens full to the brim of water. And somehow, miraculously—apples.
I held mine, turning the bright red of it over and over in my hand. It seemed a jewel, deeper red than rubies I had seen drawings of, here against the backdrop of destruction.
“Is she quite alright?” one of the men said, his accent striking me again. The British are allies, I reminded myself. They had given more to our country, I knew, than I could begin to comprehend. Still, I clenched the apple tighter at the sound of his voice. They are just words, I reminded myself.
Matthew, beside me, noticed my stiffness and looked concerned. He looked from me to the British men, his brow furrowed. He was a quiet man, but he saw much. I could not have that. I gave a small smile, hoping to put him off the trail of whatever he thought he was seeing.
George opened his mouth to answer their question as to whether I was alright, and I slumped a little in my chair. Here it came, the effusions of the Angel of Argonne and the exposure of this fabled history of my family’s. I was just a girl from the woods who collected walnuts and pine boughs. I did not know what to do with these adornments of fanciful story.
“She’s great,” Matthew said. And left it at that. George clamped his mouth shut, hearing the finality in Matthew’s tone. I blessed them both for it.
They talked on about the journey to Paris. The men told them of places to go and things to see there, of how it would do them good, remind them that life was still going on, away from the horrible front.
Henry, all the while, took notes with his little pencil in that notepad of his, managing to keep looking at the men even as he wrote. It had the strange effect, I noticed, of leading the men to speak on, perhaps to say more than they should.
One of them leaned in, answering one of Henry’s questions as though betraying a great secret. “Look around you, my good man,” he said. “This place is deserted. Changed hands between French and Germans at least sixteen times over the past three years. You’d think such a thing would do a village in . . . and maybe it will. But see that?” He pointed to a silhouette on the horizon. A spire, rising from the tower of a church. “There she stands. Holes poked in every wall, windows long blown to bits—but that is a beacon of hope. If that little church can stand through all of this . . .” He whistled low. “There’s no telling what can happen.”
“But remember this place isn’t as deserted as it looks,” one of the other men said, warning in his voice. I shivered. “Take care, young men. Beaulieu-en-Coteau is wrecked, and it’s French territory sure as can be now, but the Germans haven’t forgotten when it was theirs. They haven’t forgotten it sits directly on their route to Paris. Their end goal. Scouting parties and snipers still come, and don’t forget that.”
The apple was heavy in my hand, suddenly.
A great rolling overhead snatched all eyes to the sky, looking to pinpoint its source. But for once, thanks be to God, it was true and real thunder.
I smiled. Never had I been so glad, so relieved to hear thunder.
Matthew, his face turned entirely to the sky, smiled as a raindrop splashed him right on his cheek. He wiped it away and looked at it in astonishment.
“Rain,” he said, as if he had caught a diamond from the sky and not just a very plump splash of water.
The sky unleashed, then, and the batmen and officers said a hurried good-bye, packing up their mess kits and tea set, disappearing to heaven-knew-where. George hollered a hearty farewell aft
er them, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a certain look of homesickness on his face. “Good fellows, those,” he said, his accent markedly thicker than before. “Good chaps.”
“I’ll follow,” Matthew said. “They know this place; they’ll know good shelter.”
I did too, though I could not tell him so. I had never before come to Beaulieu-en-Coteau, but this was my country and finding safety in unlikely places was my homeland. As Matthew Petticrew set off, his green-grey uniform blending into the colorless ruined city, I followed.
19
Matthew
“I’ll follow,” I said. “They know this place; they’ll know good shelter.”
I started after the English officers, got three strides in, and heard a slight sound behind me. It was Mireilles, following me.
I started again, sure I was mistaken.
The sound continued, light footsteps. She blinked hard in the rain and lifted her chin, defying any protest I might give.
But I gave it anyway. “You’ll catch your death,” I said. “If you stay under the outcropping with those two, you’ll be dry, at least.”
It was at the words with those two that she broke her gaze, let it skitter across the rubble. In the silence, I heard her loud and clear. She’d rather traverse jagged fallen rocks and toppled buildings in the pouring rain than be left alone with the men.
“They’re good fellows, I promise. George is a bit of a dunce sometimes, sure, but aren’t we all?”
I knew she couldn’t understand but hoped she might find comfort in my tone, my gesture toward them.
Her features softened. I remembered Celia, how she’d wake me up, tugging at my blanket whenever the wind howled through our stable loft and scared her imaginings into action. It had always amazed me, how sitting and just talking with her, telling her silly tales or truest tales or ridiculous jokes and riddles helped her remember she was home and she was safe. And what amazed me more—which I had never, ever let on—was that when I’d been scared myself, the simple act of caring for another in their own fear helped me feel that same safety, too. I wondered, sometimes, if God let our fear collide in the night to shatter it away for both of us.