by Amanda Dykes
“When I was a girl, I became lost in the woods. Very close to home, but it was growing dark. I heard a pack of wolves about and took shelter inside of a very tall, hollow tree. It was like a house, its outside hiding its inside until you looked at it just so, and saw the opening. I called it le cœur, for the way the hidden inside was like a heart. A safe place. All the life and branches around it protecting a perfect hideaway, and all the life of the tree coming from inside. It was my fortress that night, with the wolves prowling. I spent the whole night there, finding solace in that refuge. After that, the forest always felt safe to me, though I knew there was danger. But . . . there are those in this war who are more monster than man,” she said at last. “I do not know if they came to war that way, or if the war made them so. It was my—my—” she stumbled over her English, and she winced as she chopped up the coming word—“un-for-tu-nate fate to meet one in the woods. He appeared wounded. I approached him to help.” She let the statement hang. “He . . . did not need help.” I imagined two unseen worlds playing out into the night from the loft doors where we were perched, one from each of us. From hers, a world of brokenness and betrayal, spinning like blue threads into the night. From mine, red searing ropes of justice.
Hers found mine, there in the black night, and silenced them, blue threads coiling around boorish red vengeance with what she spoke next.
“But it is not mine to change what has happened,” she said. “I cannot. It is mine to walk through what will come.”
She said it so simply, with so much resolution, it smote me. How many times had I woken in a sweat from scant sleep, visions of Saint-Mihiel tearing my mind to shreds? And how many times had I boarded it shut and closed my eyes to what was ahead?
And yet here was someone who had faced her own war. Alone. And who was choosing life, and life, and life again, with every step she took, though it cost her all she had. Choosing not to live in the moment that had to be seared into her memory. Choosing not to pry her own eyes open against sleep, lest she find herself flung back to the scene in her dreams.
It was very clear, then: One of us was a warrior. And it was not me.
My instinct was to gather her up, carry her through, protect. But watching her now, crowned with moonlight and courage, I saw clearly that she had already placed her care in the hands of another.
“You have been a gift, Matthew Petticrew. But you know—you know that the things you are trying to do have already been done?”
I studied her. Wanting to understand.
“There are none who can undo the past. But there is one who will carry the pain of it. He knows too well the sting of injustice. No, more than that. The blood of it. But with it, He bears the scars of his own injustice with the same hands that carry me now. And the same hands that have made this little one.”
With so much tenderness it made me ache, she rested a hand on her stomach, swollen somewhere under the folds of her dress. The gesture of a mother for her child.
What would my own mother have given to be able to live on and show that love to Celia? Bitterness ate at me like acid—for Mr. MacMannus and for Mira’s attacker. But here Mira sat—the one who truly had every right to be bitter—and in her steady, quiet way, with her steady, wide eyes . . . she wrapped something so fierce and pure around that bitterness, it smote me again.
“Do you know how I know these things?” she asked.
Throat throbbing, I shook my head.
“I know because He sent you. You picked me up and carried me to my home. I suppose you never stopped carrying me. It is what you are doing even now.”
“Not doing a very good job of it, am I?” I said, rubbing my temples with my fingers. “If I was, I’d have you home by now. To Paris.” And to someone who would know what to do if these pains of hers kept on, and led to the inevitable event. This, I didn’t say.
She looked out to the night. “Perhaps I am home,” she said. “I do not know this place that Henry speaks of. The story he has told.” She wrinkled her brow. “It fits, like a piece of the puzzles my Papa used to create. But I do not know it. This château he tells of, it is no more a home to me than this barn is.” She laughed softly.
“If this barn feels like home to you, maybe we’re more alike than we know,” I said.
“Yes?” She waited, her heels knocking softly against the stone wall outside as her legs kicked, keeping cadence with the frogs singing their night song.
“I lived above a stable pretty much my whole life,” I said. All it took was a little tilt of her head, an invitation, and somehow I was telling her all of it. About Mrs. Bluet and blueberry buckle, and Mr. Haggerty and his garden sermons. About Celia and the racetrack, the way she flew and pulled the old bedsheet behind her, looking like a muddy angel running around and around.
Mira smiled. “I think I would like your Celia.”
“She’d like you,” I said, and smiled thinking of my sister. Truth was, if she showed up here, she might just scare Mira out of her wits with her bounding ways. But it was those ways that had gotten her through our toughest years. And now she was in Paris, the very city we were headed for. I’d written her a few days back, hoping against hope that she’d meet us there.
A breeze tumbled in, waking the creaky hinges of the hayloft doors, and sending a shiver through Mira. She rubbed the heel of her hands in her eyes, and I kicked myself for keeping her awake. She, more than any of us, needed to rest.
But there was something hovering, still, over the two of us. A wondering, and while I couldn’t cover her with my jacket or build her a fire to keep her warm, lest it alert our location, I could at least tuck this assurance about her. Lay that furrowed worry on her forehead to rest. Assure her that I would hold fast to the secrets she had told me and hold them with care. That what she’d confided, her voice so laced in shame, served only to astonish me the deeper at her strength.
“Thank you,” I said.
“What thanks do I deserve?” Mira’s head tilted, listening.
For so many things. For the way this war and all its horrors, its atrocities, the things that plagued me, parted like the Red Sea as she walked through with a courage so bright I could nearly feel it, driving me like a militia man’s drumbeat.
That was what I should have said. But the drumbeat drove words away, and all I could think to say was, “For telling me.”
She stood slowly, as if each joint in her body felt every movement keenly, and returned to her pallet. “It is good that someone knows,” she said. “For the child, I mean.”
I nodded and waited. She seemed ready, if reluctant, to say more.
“You . . . are a man to trust, Matthew.” She pressed her eyes closed, as if doing so both sealed the statement and sent it into the cosmos as a desperate wish. It cost her much.
That night, sitting in the old hay of an empty horse stall and pulling out the scrap of metal to occupy my hands engraving, I made a promise. As the rest of the barn slumbered, its creaking beams and hinges bore witness as I swore, in the stillness, that for the rest of our journey, come what may, I would do anything in my power to try and make her claim true.
24
George
“Welsh rarebit,” I said. The four of us approached Épermay—not a village, praise be to the heavens—but a true town, with a train depot and all manner of civilization. And restaurants. As George the Fifth is my king, and as surely as the day is bright, this town must have food. It must. Food such as Welsh rarebit, more’s the glory.
My belly ached at the thought of a hot meal, and I intended to plant great aspirations in my traveling mates.
“Pardon?” Hank the Wet Rag said, and adjusted his spectacles higher on his nose.
“Ah,” I clutched my chest. “Get your pen out, mate, for here at last is something noteworthy for you to record.”
He obeyed, warily, keeping step.
“Now. Welsh rarebit. You take the bread—and you’d better be sure it’s crusty and fresh. None of this nation bread th
ey’ve been trying to sell us in the other towns.”
“Pain national,” Hank said. “National bread. It’s the law.”
“It is a pain, yes. Law be hanged. None of that. Get some real bread. Toast up a slice or four. Then get your chef to spread this divine stuff on it—a mix-up of cheese and mustard and some sort of spices or another. Slather it on and don’t be shy. Then, it gets blistered beneath a flame until it’s golden and melted enough to bring a man to his knees. That is what we’re going to find in Épermay, my good man.”
“Hate to break it to you,” Matthew said, bringing his stride up to walk with us. “But I don’t think Épermay is populated by an abundance of British pubs. Or illegal forms of non-ration bread.”
“Just you wait,” I said, adding a good bit of brow-waggling to boost the fellow’s confidences. “Just you wait.”
As it happened, Épermay was populated by something glorious, but it wasn’t melted-cheese pub bread. A corps of nurses flooded the streets and with them a scent most heavenly. Lovely faces every which way, and did we remember, up till now, that uniforms could be crisp and clean and not drenched in mud and varying unmentionable substances? I elbowed the others, making sure they saw. Hank was busy staring hard at the ground, bashful fellow that he was. Matthew stood alert, scanning every face as if they might hold answers to a piercing question.
As we drew closer to the train depot, another wave of people disembarked. These, the trench-weary. They looked like walking skeletons, gaunt and haunted. Or in some cases, not walking at all, but borne on stretchers. Some flooded into a delousing tent. Others to a hospital set up in an old bank.
And among them, the civilians, the townspeople who tried to carry on with some semblance of normalcy while feeding and housing the soldiers.
In a vineyard, worlds collided as workers plucked grapes from a harvest, while a stone’s throw away a division performed drills, and I was thrown back into our days at Plattsburg.
Come evening, before curfew, the soldiers would be able to attend theatres, hole up in libraries, play cricket with local children, or whatever game the French liked. Croquet, I suppose. That sounds rather French. In short, they would be allowed to do other normal-life things to try and remind them, between trench shifts, that they were still human.
It was the wounded that jarred me. I had seen plenty, said prayers and holy-like words over many, at Saint-Mihiel. But seeing the wounded here, away from the front, against a backdrop of stony buildings and blooming flowers, drove question marks into me in ways I did not entirely know what to do with. Forcing me to see this clash of worlds. How so much good and so much bad could be alive together in the same universe. Which was terribly somber of me to think, and it spoke of things deeper than I knew how to handle.
I wished, fleetingly, that I had a wise and holy man I could pose these questions to.
And then I remembered, I was that wise and holy man. Supposedly.
“It’s me!” I said. “It is I.” Hank looked askance at me. He was always looking askance. Why did he not look reverently at me?
Perhaps I should find a real reverent and holy man while I was here. I had much to ask and much to learn. But first, we checked in with the AEF tent and were assigned to a local billet. A farmhouse that would lodge us for a night or two, feed us.
As we approached it, following the sound of geese squawking in the yard, I wondered briefly if the mistress of this manor knew anything of Welsh rarebit.
She did not. She fed us a midday meal of salted potatoes, after which Hank the bookworm disappeared to the local library—“for research,” he said, and I shouldn’t wonder if the word was stuck somewhere in the bridge of his nose. It earned him free passage, though, and Matthew the maddeningly ambiguous soldier tasked me to “stay with Mireilles,” while he went off to do something or other in the town.
The town where the nurses were. The shoe-shiner. The bands playing and probably pastries flowing and I knew not what.
So I sat with the Angel and thought perhaps she’d sing me a tune or two if I tapped my foot in time, but she and the woman of the house took to scrubbing things. Scrubbing!
I did not entrench myself in a war and come all this way to watch scrubbing take place and feel the dry taste of potato skin push away all hope of Welsh rarebit.
So. I took my leave of the ladies, seeing that Mireilles was well situated and seemed cheerful enough. “Au revior, les poules!” I said, rather proud of so resourcefully commandeering the French word for hens in the absence of one in my repertoire for ladies. Hens were ladies, after all. It might be I could use the same tactic to charm some of the American nurses with my command of the local language.
Thus, I took myself back to Épermay.
The sun was shining on the road, and the vineyard workers had disappeared. The soldiers who’d been drilling were vanished. All signs pointing to a grand soirée surely taking place in town.
And yet when I reached the heart of the city, the place where flats above shops, a steepled church, and completely un-cratered streets made one feel as if they had touched into a war-less land, at last . . . there were no pastries flowing in the byways, nor music piping, nor nurses chattering away.
“Hello?” I said to the town.
Quiet, you, the town seemed to stay back. A moustached man poked his head out of a door and prattled something that I had no earthly hope of following.
“Yes,” I said, nodding and grinning. “Oui!” And then, “Where is everyone?” I gestured at the empty square.
He prattled something again, gesturing at the buildings, the sun beginning its slow decline from afternoon into evening. He raised two looped fingers from a flat hand, mimicking the drinking of tea. “Le Goûter,” he said.
This, I understood. Tea ran through my veins. And if I was not mistaken, this good man was extending glorious hospitality and inviting me to enjoy this French version of the auspicious pastime. This explained the absence of any people in the town—they were all busy partaking in tea time. At least something was still right with the world.
“Merci,” I said, jubilant, and started toward him. But he pulled his door closed, holding out a hand to wave me off from inside his window.
I hung my head. Alone and hungry in this town that had felt so full of promise, with all hope of tea removed by a bearded stranger.
So, I wandered dejected into the square, a tree-lined patch of green. And that was when I spotted them.
A man and a woman, sitting on a bench, their voices low. He leaned toward her to hear what she was saying, and she gestured greatly as she spoke. She was of the sort who spoke with her hands, I thought, and when she turned her head, I caught sight of white-blond hair and punch-red lips. I stopped in my tracks. Why, she was beauty itself. And, more than that, with the spark of life in her wide green eyes and a naïve sort of innocence in the joy behind her smile, she was life. Life itself! The essence of Diana, Aphrodite, Athena, Juliet, Cleopatra, Guinevere, and all those other timeless sort of names. I didn’t know one from the other, but I knew that surely all women of might and myth must be rolled up into this singular being before me.
I pounded with the pulse of a man whose breath and heart have been irrevocably stolen. I took a step forward, thinking surely, any moment, she would lock eyes with me. Be summoned to my being, as I was to hers.
She moved. Even her movement was grace. All thought of Welsh rarebit flew into the wind, for what cared I for pastry and cheese now? This is it, I thought. She was shifting, her grey jacket belted neatly against her figure, an arm cuff declaring her a part of the Red Cross.
And then—she embraced the man. I saw his face.
It was Matthew Petticrew.
The mongrel.
“Hallo, what’s this?” I hollered, feigning a friendly laugh and hurrying their way. The woman pulled away from him, looking shocked either at my appearance or at my timely presence in rescuing her from this fiend.
“Chaplain George Piccadilly,” I said, bowing
before the wondrous creature.
“Piccadilly,” she said, trying the name out, perhaps with matrimonial thoughts.
“Has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?” I flashed a broad smile.
Matthew mumbled something about a circus and its monkeys belonging back there.
“For the last time, Piccadilly is not that sort of circus,” I said.
“Well, I was just thinking how uncannily like our name it sounds,” the woman said.
“Our name?” I inclined my head. She looked to Matthew. Surely she did not mean he was her—why, her husband, of all things.
And him, making friendly with the Angel of Argonne, all this while. With a woman like this looking at him so adoringly. “What’s this?” I said, making my voice as grumbly as he was wont to do. “Eh, Petticrew?” I clenched my teeth and clenched my fist, ready to bring justice down upon his sorry head. “You never mentioned you were married.” I pulled back my fist. Waited for him to rise.
He did, at the slow speed of treacle.
I released my fist, full force, letting it fly right at his blastedly set jaw. The lady’s gloved hands flew to cover her mouth.
Time slowed, my fist still moving toward its mark. Pride surged at her reaction. She was about to see what a true man was made of.
Just as my fist made to land a glorious blow—Matthew stopped it. Raised a hand, expressionless, and deflected my arm.
“She’s my sister, you idiot,” he said. Offering his arm to the woman, he made to walk away.
“Matthew!” she said, looking back and tearing herself from him. Stubbornness ran in their family, it would seem. “You’ve hurt him!”
I hadn’t known I was shaking my hand, attempting to rid my knuckles of the crunch they’d suffered. She clasped it, examining it and pressing it between her two hands.
“He’s fine,” Matthew said. He hesitated, less sure, and added, “Right?”
“What happened?” This, from a third voice, as feet pounded up the gravel path. Stuffy old Hank Jones, a book and a paper tucked under his arm. “You alright, George?”