by Amanda Dykes
The man groaned, speaking something indecipherable. He shifted, slightly, his face now toward us.
I stilled. I knew this man. I had seen him only twice, but they were the two moments that had altered the course of my life. First, by sending me from the Argonne with my three brave guides, and later, by helping me to gather my courage to leave that train in Épermay.
Captain Jasper Truett.
46
Captain Jasper Truett
A woman spoke. Muffled and far away, sweetness in this dark. June? It had to be June. Amelia was too small, forever a child. Unless—unless by some miracle it had all been a nightmare, and she was grown and well and hadn’t been taken too soon. She was born too soon, that much I remember clearly. I’d paced our floorboards like a madman for worry of her. When was that? It seemed so close it could have been this morning, and so far it could have been twelve lifetimes ago.
I could picture my wife’s smile as I paced. She had a smile that could rival the sun for lighting up a man’s world. Her name matched the dawning of summer, and it fit her. I saw that June-smile now, her holding Amelia, all swaddled in white like a tiny little bride. “See, Jasper? See, I told you all would be well. How could it not be, with such a soul in the world?”
The memory snapped away, and I floated over it somewhere, watching Amelia grow, seeing June’s smile. All my imaginings, the ones that have haunted me this decade and more, had grown faces and voices and I watched them turn, page by page, before me. That smile that lit the world, how it continued brave and true, even when I was gone. Amelia, dimpling cheeks the same way, twirling in gold like she was made for sunlight and it was made for her. Writing letters to her daddy by speaking them to the clouds, thinking I’d catch those words she tossed into the sky, wherever I was. Her mother, transcribing the words to paper so that I would, indeed, catch them.
I didn’t write back. I never wrote back. She couldn’t read, I told myself. And what was more, I was an idiot when it came to words. Never knew what to say. But I could gather her up in my arms and hold on tight, and so I’d save my embraces for when I saw her and could wrap her up like a father should. Afterward, I’d kicked myself until my heart bled for my stupidity. How hard was it to pick up a pen? It was infinitely harder not to. Or at least to live with the consequences after.
The picture snapped into flames. Hot flames that made me swim in sweat even as I dreamt. I knew I was dreaming. I knew this was not real, though once it had been. I heard Amelia’s cries, saw June dashing through fiery rooms, and I wanted to yell at the fire to stop. It was as if the sun had come down and trapped itself in our home to have that showdown with June’s smile, and June had rushed headlong into the inferno to pull out our tiny little Amelia, that tiny little bride. Only this time, she was swaddled in bedsheets, arm splayed into the hot air and hair hanging down as June took her out.
I suffocated with the scene of it every night and every day, just as the smoke suffocated them. They made it out—but too late.
And I’d been wandering in the wake of that fire, a trail of smoke, ever since. I was full of vengeance for a long, long time. But how does one fight smoke? How can a man pin it down and claim retribution?
He cannot. It only chokes him more, the futility of it, and drives him mad.
It was in the depths of a forest in France that I finally met that smoke face-to-face. Gas, yes, but I knew it for what it was. The hand of death, just like what had come for my girls.
It was headed for Matthew Petticrew and Chester Hasenpfeffer. And when I saw it there, yellow-green and sickening in the way it crept in a slow, silent dance of toxic mist, I knew.
I saw Matthew take off his own mask. I watched him lock his own death sentence into place as he locked his mask around Chester.
He went down, there behind that green curtain of tree branches. My own pulse pounded with the battle cry that had sent me into these dark woods: fight for life.
Everything slowed as everything sped up. I was there in a split-second, diving for the boy. The new groom, the father with a child soon coming, or maybe already here. He would go to that child, the way I had not gone to Amelia.
My mask was on him. Barely. And none too soon. I went down, slamming the ground as pine needles and old leaves softened by winter flew up in response, confetti in the air between us. My compass tumbled out into the debris, resting atop the ground. A gut-blow.
Fight for life. It was the plea of my own life. And I would close my eyes around the image of a young man starting where my own life had once ended: on the beginning edge of fatherhood.
I felt my breathing slow. I turned my head with the last strength I had left and lay face-to-face with the old brass compass. Tarnished and tired, its needle moving in the blurry darkening vision before me. North . . . by northwest.
“Simple as that, and you’ll find us.” My June.
And while my body entered a desperate struggle, something else happened. Above the gas, below it, around it—however it came to be, something else swirled in and through me. As if a Good Father, somewhere, tucked me in. I, a child; He, the silent, valiant vanquisher of anguish.
I knew only one thing in that moment.
Peace.
And now I laid in limbo, that same peace about me. It wouldn’t be long now. Time had no place here, and I was close, so close.
The voices grew clearer.
“See?” that sweet, low voice said. The Angel of the Argonne. None could forget that voice. “Because of you,” she said.
I felt something, then. Someone picking up my hand, my arm along with it, and moving it to my side. Something was placed upon it—something with that same warm peace that shrouded this place.
It stirred. A tiny sound, that of a baby. A pure song in this great dark. Like its mother. The great peace grew thicker.
This, then, was what I had missed. The coming back, the being there. The holding of a young life that was meant for holding.
“Papa,” Amelia had said to me, that last good-bye. “Papa, come home soon.”
I could picture her. My Amelia. Held in the arms of a Father . . . arms that now reached out to me.
The spent old battle-worn body that held me was parched of air. Fading, fast. I summoned that metal courage one last time to push out last words. . . .
“I’m coming.”
47
Matthew
“Tell me,” Mira said that night.
We were in the garden behind the château. She had been spending time here, tending the wilderness that it might stay wild. A refuge to life in this place.
Wind brushed over the tops of the growing things. Some lifeless, clacking together lightly. Some supple, a gentle whisper. I was learning to see with my ears, and though it felt foreign in some ways, it also felt, oddly, like putting spectacles on over long-nearsighted eyes. I had always heard before I’d seen. Now, the sense was sharpening.
She leaned her head against my shoulder and smelled of honey. Had she always smelled so? She waited. “Tell me,” she’d said.
So I did. I told her all. Of the Argonne and Chester. Of awaking in the forest to find a mask secured on me . . . and Captain Jasper Truett—the very same one I’d studied in the papers as a boy—beside me, barely alive. Of the field hospital after, and the journey here.
And then I asked the same of her. Holding her hand as her hand held the baby’s head. “Tell me,” I said.
She did. Of the coming of the child, of the night shrouded in thunder and the air “laced in rain,” as she said.
I knew that sound, that smell. I remembered it well, and how the gas crept in beneath it. I had thought I was breathing my last . . . and a world away in an old château in Paris, a little life was breathing its first. It had been out of thick darkness that I had gasped unexpected breath and returned to the land of the conscious. I was in a mask—but did not know how. I was alive—but could not think how. And the sights before me, they were beginning to blur. I thought I saw the Captain, then Che
ster. I uttered a prayer before darkness reclaimed me, and I did not wake again until the field hospital, where I learned three things:
Chester lived.
I was blind—whether forever or just for now, I did not yet know.
And Captain Jasper Truett was on death’s door.
Celia found us in that hospital, and in that happy authority of hers, arranged for us all to come to Mira, to this house of healing. She knew that one of us would not leave that house alive, if he even made it that far.
I count it a miracle that he did. And I pray his home-going, this night, was the miracle he had been awaiting for so long.
None of us had spoken since the captain had truly breathed his last. There was stillness here in the garden, bursting with untold things between me and Mira, inviting us in.
I didn’t know much of hearts. I was only simple Matthew Petticrew, the kid who used to lie on his belly in the dirt to hear the hoofbeats of horses. But maybe those hoofbeats had taught me something of heartbeats, after all. Mine, just now, was not so much beating as it was bleeding with longing to hold Mira and to hold her child. But—was it my place? I had clung to the thought of the child, but was that fair of me? To consider myself a father?
As if she heard this battle flowing from within me, she slipped her hand beneath mine, letting the baby’s head rest in my palm.
“Your son,” she said. Two words, breaking the silence. Breaking the dam within me, ushering in a flow of utter inadequacy, of gratitude that swallowed me up. And the crippling realization that this child in my hands was an entire life, waiting to be lived.
As the world outside these walls raged in the wake of a war that had taken life upon life upon scores of life . . . as it reeled in the face of a sickness sweeping the lands and snuffing out breath . . . as each new gust of wind picked up spent ash from fires and rubble even as the soldiers marched home . . . here was something good. Pure. True.
I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t held a baby since Celia, and even then, Mrs. Bluet had laughed, though kindly, at my awkward young boy-sized arms and their attempt to cradle her. I’d hardly dared to imagine what it would be like to hold one as a man. And certainly had never imagined doing so with bandages wrapped about my eyes like a mummy. I would scare the poor creature to pieces.
But he did not seem frightened. And the sky didn’t split open and rain down a sudden burst of knowledge of how to do this, how to be here. That palm, holding that sweet head with the softest tiny patch of hair atop, did not brand me Father. I had the sudden conviction that I would surely drop him. I could carry live ammunition over miles and not falter, but a human child? Weeks old, and in these hands, with unseeing eyes?
He was doomed.
Seconds crept on, and my thumb stroked that little head, sleeping soundly. I had never felt something so . . . soft.
“Am I doing it right?” I said, clearing the catch in my voice.
Mira’s laugh was soft. “Yes,” she said. “He looks as if he has been waiting for this.” Her voice took on a strain of wonder. “He has never rested so deeply as this, Matthew. It is as though he has been waiting for a part of himself.”
My throat burned.
“Waiting for you,” she said. She sounded happy.
Something strange happened, then. I had never felt it since I was five years old, digging dirt-caked fingers into the windowsill and watching life through a golden window. And I had never thought to see it again. But as I sat there between the child and Mireilles, I could so clearly imagine a picture of all that I heard and felt:
A mother, happy. A baby in her arms and mine, all wrapped up in a worn scrap of blanket—or rather, a scrap of a certain colorful balloon, my fingers attested, running over rows of stitching softened by time.
And her smile—deep as the Marne and wide as the Argonne, falling right on me.
We sat there a long time. I couldn’t see the stars’ movements in this eternal night of mine. But when even the frogs and crickets began to tire of their songs and Mira shivered beside me, I knew it was late.
I leaned forward, over the still-slumbering child. “What’s his name?” I asked.
There was a long quiet, and then that voice that had come to me in another darkness, in what felt like an eternity before, spoke. “I named him for his father,” she said. “I named him for you.”
I sputtered my own name out, clumsy as all get out. “M-Matthew?”
“Well, the proper French, you know. Matthieu.” I could hear the smile in her voice, gentled soon into a serious tone. “I want him to know of the man who gave his life to him. Who chose him.”
My throat burned. It was so much. Too much. To be spared, to be here, to have a human life placed not just in my arms but in my very life. “And—and his second name?”
A pause. “I do not know what that is,” she said.
“A middle name? First name, middle name, surname.”
She laughed again. “You Americans are funny creatures,” she said. “Is one name not enough?”
“I thought the French had long names. Even more than us, sometimes.”
“Perhaps sometimes,” she said. “Aline once told me of baptism names, of stitching on the names of ancestors and godparents. But no—what did you call it?—middle name.” She shivered, and I shifted the baby into one arm, so that I could wrap her in my other. She seemed to sense the thoughts weighing on me. “Would you like him to have a middle name?”
I felt odd speaking it. As if it might disrespect what had transpired in the hours before. But the thought would not leave. The picture of a man who’d give anything to be there for a child. Who had made it possible for me to do so.
“I was thinking of . . . Jasper.”
It was probably sacrilegious, somehow, giving a name so soon after the namesake had passed on. My face burned, and I made to move my arm so that she wouldn’t feel trapped, somehow, by my idea.
But she caught that arm, and held it fast. “It is perfect,” she said quietly. “Matthieu Jasper Petticrew.”
48
George
“By George, I think they’ve got it,” I said, peering out the window. The lovebirds sat in the garden like some old Paris scene in a painting somewhere. If someone were to paint them now, they’d probably be hung in the Victoria and Albert like a tribute to this dreary old war.
“Get away from there.” Henry crumpled up and tossed a paper at me from across the study. “Don’t you think they’ve earned a little privacy?”
“No such thing in this war, mate,” I said. “Besides.” I sniffed. Blasted tears. I’d made it into the woods and back without so much as a tear and that scene of the lovebirds was going to be my undoing? “Better take what you can get out of a time like this. Not much good to come out of all we’ve seen.”
“Maybe,” Henry said, his pen stopping for a blessed half-second.
“What’s this?” I asked, snatching up the paper from the desk in front of him. “Another ‘Dear America’? I thought you’d said your piece.”
Henry was up in a flash, lunging for it. He snatched it back but left a corner of it in my hand.
I cleared my throat. “‘Dear Celia,’” I read.
“Quit it.” Henry strode to the window, a tangle of history books and heart.
“Now who’s the one spying on the lovebirds, eh?” I elbowed him and handed him back the corner. “Who’s Celia?”
Henry looked at me like I’d banged my head on a crowbar somewhere.
“Ah,” I said. “Yes, that’s right. The nurse. Sister to the soldier. You and she have an understanding?”
He set his chin, not answering.
“Well, good. She seemed a peach of a girl.”
Henry muttered something.
“Eh? What’s that?”
“Nothing,” he said. He drew in a deep breath, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I saw they ran your last letter,” I said. “That took some courage.”
He shook his head
. “Can’t believe I sent that in,” he said. “But it’s a fitting way to go out.”
“Don’t tell me they gave you the boot, old boy. Did they kick you out?”
Henry laughed, his whole expression amused. “Would you believe they want me to stay on? Said I’d found my voice for editorial, and they’d never had such a wide response to a piece.”
I nodded in exaggerated approval. “So, you’ll be moving to Washington, then.”
“Not on your life.”
“What, then? New York? Chicago? You’ve got offers from all the big papers, do you?”
He looked at the floorboards. “Well . . .”
I picked up a book and whacked the Wet Rag’s arm but in a good way. “You do! You do, and you’ll be the next Pulitzer, and I’ll be able to say I knew you when you spent all your time abroad buried in bookstacks in dusty old village libraries.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets, and a smile tugged at his mouth, wonder of wonders. “I . . . I’ve got to see a farm about a cow,” he said. “That’s how this all started. I’m going home.”
49
Mira
December 25, 1918
“You’re sure you want to go back.” Matthew’s voice was tender. He’d been quiet for most of this journey back to the Argonne.
It was Christmas. Little Matthieu’s first. And though we had much—so much—to fill us with joy, there was also much that we mourned.
Grand-père, who lay buried here in the depths of these woods. Jasper Truett, whom George and Henry had brought back here before their home-goings, to be buried among the men for whom he had given so much. His grave was unmarked but for a simple cross, like so many others. But still we wished to honor him, somehow.
And Papa. If I closed my eyes, I could see these trees as they once had been: tall and alive, strong. Like Papa. And if I closed my eyes, I could tell myself what had driven me here—it was time to say good-bye, once and for all.