by Ryan Byrnes
Someone rapped softly on the shop door, and I turned to see a face through the glass.
Mr. Stoker.
Our eyes met. It was too late to go upstairs because he had already seen me. I turned the knob and opened the door, but he did not cross the threshold. I realized I was still wearing Father Carmichael’s jacket. I stared at him, not sure how I should be feeling. Dawn was hours away, but Rodney could wake at any moment—maybe he was already awake. Maybe he had already told. Maybe that’s why Mr. Stoker was here. But no, he didn’t know. I could see it in his face. His heart was still open, still soft, still vulnerable and bleeding. This was my only chance to convince him. I had saved his son. Now I needed to save mine.
“Come in.” I motioned him in, and he took off his hat.
“I just came back from Doctor Abbot’s.” He stared at the ground, wringing his hat in his hands. “I sat over Rodney’s bed all evening, changing his bandages, watching the bleeding finally stop. It will be some time before he is fit again, but Abbot thinks he will likely recover completely. I thought you would want to know.”
“That’s wonderful. Has he stirred?”
“Yes. His eyes opened, and I spoke to him.”
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The clock carried on. A quarter to one.
“W—what did he say?”
“His voice was too weak to speak, so he only mouthed words, which I could not make out. But I made it clear to him that he is in good hands and has nothing to worry about.”
“I’m so glad to hear it.”
Something moved inside me, a dread I had never felt before, a directive that made me sick. The situation was already too far gone for me to look back. If I didn’t act now, it would be too late.
“Mr. Stoker, you look exhausted. I have some tea prepared, if you would have it.”
“No, I mustn’t stay long. Margie is waiting for me.”
“Please. It’s the least I can do, considering. I will feel terrible unless I can offer something more. After all, it’s the moral and ethical thing to comfort our neighbors.”
Mr. Stoker puffed out his ample chest and stood tall, shoulders back. His wife had always treated me as if I were a leper, but the very important Mr. Stoker had rarely had anything to do with me at all. And now he was here in my house. In the middle of the night. How odd.
“Well, I guess I should, if only to ease your own considerable pain, Mrs. Baker. So yes, I will accept your offer and share some tea with you.”
So that was his prime motivator—morality. Ethics. Being the pillar of the community who always puffs out his chest and declares his intent to do the right thing for God and King. Take that away, and he’d be lost. Vulnerable. Susceptible.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
I led him into the living room, where he sat on the sofa. Then, going into the kitchen, I poured the tea. The kettle was still on the stove and the water still hot. I took a key out of the pocket of my skirt and unlocked the padlock on the medicine cupboard above the stove. Hands trembling, I pulled out the cork to Luther’s sleeping syrup, which I sometimes gave him when he had fits in the night. I let it drip drip drip into Mr. Stoker’s tea, enough to knock him out for at least an hour or two, along with ample honey and a squeeze of lemon to disguise the taste. I took a deep breath and set his cup on the saucer.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Ten till one. I swallowed and made the sign of the cross. Oh God, will I ever be forgiven for this? It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if I burned in hell, so long as Luther was not locked away in the asylum.
“Here we are,” I said, walking out into the living room. I handed him the cup and saucer and sat next to him, so close our thighs touched.
He took a sip and paused. “Thank you,” he said. He looked around the room, then back at me. He took another sip as the silence stretched between us. I could see the pallor of worry on his skin. I’m sure he could see the same on mine.
“Mrs. Baker,” he began, “I only intended to stop by briefly to tell you that—”
“Yes?”
He stared blankly at the empty space in front of his eyes, forgetting for a moment what he was going to say. He took another sip. And then another as if to fill the awkward silence. He stared at my leg touching his and cleared his throat. His eyes began to travel slowly upward until he caught himself. “I—I was going to establish that there are no hard feelings between our families. I was a boy myself once and know how boys roughhouse. I do not blame Jim for hurting Rodney, so there is nothing to forgive. Nothing for you to worry over.”
“If only that were true.”
“What?”
“You know, this isn’t my jacket. Father Carmichael gave it to me. Could you give it back to him for me?” I pulled off the jacket, revealing my silk slip and bare arms, both stained with his son’s blood.
“Why, I—” Mr. Stoker’s eyes dropped down to my bosom and then slowly moved back up to my face. His eyes drooped as he fought to stay awake. He shook his head as if to clear it, then slapped his cheek and yawned. “Mrs. Baker … what I mean is … what I mean to say … what is wrong with … Did you put something in this?”
His words were muddled and the cup and saucer slipped out of his hand and fell to the floor, spilling their contents on the rug. He stared at it for a long moment, and then looked up at me, eyes unfocused.
I wanted to beg his forgiveness, but that would not have accomplished anything. I had to be cold, as cold and hard as necessary. And I had to make sure that this man would never be an obstacle to my son’s wellbeing.
“Luther was the one who pushed your son, Mr. Stoker. “Rodney and Jim were roughhousing, but Luther didn’t understand. He thought Rodney was truly hurting Jim and so he pushed him. He didn’t mean for him to get hurt, but it was Luther. Not Jim. It wasn’t just two friends roughhousing.”
Mr. Stoker’s eyes went wide. “What are you saying?” He tried to stand.
“I’m saying that if Rodney wakes up and remembers what happened, that if the truth comes out and you think to take legal action against my son, I’ll tell everyone.”
He pushed himself to his feet, wobbled, and grabbed the lampstand to steady himself. “Tell everyone what?”
“That you came here in the middle of the night to take advantage of a defenseless widow.”
“But I never—” His words were slurred, and before he could take two steps, he fell to his knees, pulling the lamp down with him. He looked up at me one last time and collapsed on the rug, snoring.
Bong.
The clock struck one o’clock.
~ THE VILLAGE ~
In the quiet moments just before dawn, when the first rays of warmth broke through pink-feather clouds hanging over Bath Street, a fat man stumbled down the cobblestone, holding his tweed cap tight to his head, yawning, and sticking close to the shadows in the alleys behind the garden fences. He was missing a wedding ring.
In the garden behind Baker’s Sweets, a woman knelt in the spring loam. Parting the soil, she took a gold wedding ring from her pocket and planted it as she would a seed. From a second-floor window, two curious eyes watched from behind the curtain, arms clutched tight around A Tale of Two Cities.
The woman in the garden stood, brushed her dirty hands on her skirt, and headed back inside.
On the village green, fat robins hopped to and fro looking for breakfast, ready to greet the new day. The last vestiges of dirty ice hiding in the shadows of cold alleys melted into dark stains on the pavement, drained down gutters, and trickled into the River Leam.
CHRISTMAS EVE, 1914
THE WESTERN FRONT
~ RODNEY STOKER ~
Exploding shells rattled my legs, my ribs, and my teeth. Reaching a hand to my ears, I felt warm blood. Warmth—warmth. I still had feeling left.
“Luther,” I croaked, “Luther.”
He was a motionless lump, rolled over on his belly, pressed right up against me. Oh God. Was he—?
I have
no idea how long I laid there, the world flashing white and black with shell bursts, but I only managed to discern three thoughts from the jumble.
Appleby was standing right in front of the guns when the shell hit so there’s no way he survived. If Appleby is dead, then the others probably are too. That means we are alone, and nobody is coming to rescue us.
Each thought took eons to take shape. I grappled for more, but everything slipped away in the fluctuating darkness and blinding white. I struggled to breathe. My voice was all but gone; pain came out in wheezes of spittle through gritted teeth. Each drop of rain or snow or falling debris burned.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
The rest of the prayer escaped me, and my brain prompted me to repeat the words on its own accord. Luther’s face was hidden—his body dark and unmoving. And he had not written the letter to his mother.
“Forgive me, Constance Baker, full of grace; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”
The night flashed white with manufactured light as a flare rose into the sky like the Star of Bethlehem. A rising plume of dirt flew over us, and through some force of will I don’t understand, I grabbed Luther’s arm and dragged him with me as I rolled into the crater that had opened up behind me. The dirt settled back to the ground, half-burying us in our graves like a heavy blanket to block out the stinging air. To rest. I was a boy, cozy under blankets on Christmas Eve. I recalled Christmas Eve service, at midnight as Father Carmichael paced at the front of the church in his vestments. The church walls, the ribbed and cavernous belly of a whale, swallowed me up like the tales of old. The walls rose to the cloudy blanket in the pale hours of the coming day, crisscrossed with smoke trails from rockets and aeroplanes and mortars. I closed my eyes again, ready for a long, long rest.
Something moved and my eyes once again struggled open. Luther. He rolled over and sat up, cradling his head. He looked at his hands and his side, finding no wounds, and then caught sight of me. Barely breathing, I eyed him from beneath cracked lids.
“Rodney Stoker?” he mouthed. “You are hurt.”
He leaned in closer. When I didn’t react, he waved a hand in my face. Then, he kissed my forehead. With cupped hands, he removed the dirt from my still-breathing corpse, then stripped off his coat and laid it over me.
The white eye of noon hung in the now clear sky. Shells flashed in the distance. Every time a bomb sounded, Luther convulsed, pressed his hands against his ears and rocked back and forth. I watched him do that for hours as I slipped in and out of the dark. Finally, a lull in the fighting came. Luther struggled to his knees and then to his feet, poking his head out in the clear daylight, glancing over to where our boys sat in the pillboxes. Then he turned and looked back at the Germans. Back and forth he looked, his head ticking and tocking like a metronome. Then he decided to make a run for it, and started to scramble up the side of the crater.
“Stay,” I wheezed, my voice like two scraping stones. I threw my arm out to grab Luther’s ankle, the pain of movement slicing through me like a bayonet’s blade.
“Wait for dark … they’ll see.” I knew his nerves were screaming at him to run for the trench, but he stopped and looked down at me. “Stay. Stay for your mum,” I said. “Write that letter. In my pocket.”
“I don’t know my letters!”
“I know. I’m going to help, remember? Help me get the paper and pencil.”
He slid down beside me and, gently, reached into my trouser pocket and pulled out the stationery and pencil.
“Help me sit up.”
“You’re hurt, Rodney Stoker.”
“Nothing we can do about it right now.”
With difficulty, he helped me to a sitting position, slipping the pencil and paper in my trembling hand.
“Pretend she’s here. What do you want to tell her?”
“Tell her I’m scared, Rodney Stoker. Tell her I don’t know where I am or what’s happening to the world. Tell her the people don’t want to kill each other, but they don’t know how to stop. Why do they only love things that aren’t real? Rules aren’t real. Countries aren’t real. People, people are real! Catch people when they fall! Hug people when they’re sad! Laugh with people when they’re happy! Is that so hard?”
I gritted my teeth as I tried bringing the pencil to the paper. For every word Luther said, I made sure to scribble something. My hand was trembling too much to write anything legible, but Luther didn’t know that. So long as he kept talking, here, away from the crater’s lip, I kept scribbling. A shell fell nearby, and the Earth shook, and he slammed his palms to his ears, shrieking and weeping and rocking, nose running, eyes red.
My voice was barely more than a raspy croak, but I tried to comfort him, to keep him from leaving our crater. “Keep talking. Think of your mum, now. Your mum.”
He shouted fragments of words between infantile sobs, and I kept scribbling, pinning the stationery against my knee for a writing surface.
Another bomb, closer this time, knocked Luther on his back. He righted himself, plunged his hands into the mud, and pulled out two clumps. Tearing off chunks of it, his hands worked hard, spinning, rolling, flattening between his palms, churning out little marbles, little truffles that he laid in rows on the ground. Sobs punctuated his sentences, and he shouted staccato phrases that undulated in his throat and burst out his mouth like a sing-song lamentation.
“Tell her Rodney Stoker is afraid of me because I don’t follow the rules. Tell her to stop following the rules that make her afraid. Tell her everyone is afraid of each other and they cry and point guns and think they are always right about everything. People who are big have big ideas that are too big to fit. Tell her everyone is afraid of themselves because they don’t know who they are.”
Luther wiped his nose.
“Tell her sometimes it’s not so hard to stop being afraid; all you have to do is be smaller and quieter than scary things so they can’t find you. Tell her it is good to live, to be happy and sad with people who work together and take care of each other, and they don’t know it because they are not small and quiet enough and are always yelling the loudest because they think it makes them right, but they don’t even hear their own words. Tell them all to be quiet inside and to listen so they don’t have to be afraid.”
For every bomb that fell that day, every cracking of the Earth itself, I flinched and waited for the end while Luther wept and rocked and made mud truffles. Appleby once told me that each time you’re near an explosion, a little part of your brain rattles out of place and sort of drowns in fear. During heavy shelling, you have to keep your cool, or else your whole brain will drown in its own fear. He was right. I could feel the little parts of my brain screaming at me to run and hide, for to stay was certain death, but to run back to the trench was an even more certain death. And besides, I could no more run than I could be crowned king of the British Empire. Fear wrung me out. Adrenaline ran dry, and darkness seeped into the edge of my vision. My legs went stiff, and I dropped the pencil and couldn’t bend my arms to pick it up. They paper fluttered away and the whole world was muted, a silent film, as Luther Baker and I waited for the end and everything spun and shattered around us.
~ JIM BAKER ~
I checked my watch. At this rate, I’d make it to Luther by the next morning. I slipped out the door and hopped off the train where my boots sank into an inch of mud. There was no shortage of mud in France; in fact the whole train yard was a frosted, churned-up mud pit. My fingers numbed in the freezer-burned air. I turned back and faced the train, not sure if I was supposed to hang back and help Private Roberts unload the post or not. Eeh. It’s his job, I’ll just leave him to it.
I pulled my boots out of the muck and suction-cupped my way across the muddy expanse, over to the cluster of buildings and the shed full
of lorries. Guessed right—it was the post office. I told them my name and turned in my papers, and they held up their monocles to squint at them, and told me to come back at noon. Sure thing. Outside the post office and the warehouses and the depots, I found a dirt road that led into the nearby village of Hazebrouck. Maybe I could find a cafe there or something.
As I walked, I felt the ground rumble. I looked up, thinking a bomb was coming for me, but a few seconds passed, and nobody else panicked. I supposed it must be normal, this close to the fighting. On the horizon, I could see a grey smudge of smoke. That must be the front.
The town smelled of manure. It was a small cluster of homes and telegraph poles and shops rising out of a turnip field patchwork. Each home had a Christmas wreath on the door and smoke chugging out the chimney. I passed a group of children playing soccer with, of all people, a British soldier, and I wondered what would happen to the Moreau sisters. From the shop windows, a group of women looked on, arms crossed. An old lady was walking on the street near me, and I gave her a wide smile.
Around the corner, I chanced upon an open café with a nice courtyard where soldiers reclined at tables.
“Beer,” I said, slapping a few coins down on the counter. I was apprehensive that the barkeeper would not understand English.
“Not enough. You want beer, you pay more.” He held out his palm. “Only place for miles you can buy.”
“Keep your beer, then,” I shrugged. “Don’t want to bargain with you. You got water?”
The bartender glared but poured me a short glass of water and slammed it down on the counter. I walked over to an empty table, listening as the other patrons talked about their days.
“The hospital is plenty busy; they’ve been shelling since last night.”
“So much for Christmas cheer.”
“Who’s in your shift?”
“Mother Brand is leading it, which I guess is nice. She tends to keep people from losing their heads.”
