Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  The day Bena comes running home from town, she looks like such a madwoman that Idette thinks, That’s it, all three gone! Virgie’s out wandering, and the shop is empty but for Idette and Mignon. The Germans have fled east, Americans not yet arrived from the west, and it’s the first sunny day after weeks upon weeks of rain. Bena charges in, bell ringing like an alarm. “A mob,” she cries, “at the café—” Panting, wild-eyed, face twitching in fear, Bena tries to convey what they must understand: “There’s a mob coming—for people who . . . Monsieur from the granary . . . Madame Bijoux from the school . . . men from that dairy . . . and the Maquis—the police took Sylvie, blocked the exits, the windows were open, I heard—”

  Idette wants to smack her, but only shrieks, “Speak!” Uncomprehending, Bena stops. Isn’t she speaking? She draws a breath. “A crowd—in town. Coming for girls, women—who’ve had relations with Germans. Pulled into the street . . . Bijoux had a scissor—chopped Sylvie’s hair, shaved . . . what they’re doing. To the ones who’ve been with Nazis. They’re coming here now.”

  Idette whirls on Mignon with a whisper so shrill it’s a hiss. “Go to the barn. Hide in the loft, under the hay, so they won’t find you. Be silent. You hear me? Go!” And Mignon, eyes splayed in terror, gasps and runs for the barn. Idette turns to Bena. “You, go! Hold them off!”

  But Bena doesn’t understand. “Hold them . . . ? What do I—? How—?”

  “I don’t care!” Idette cries. “Fall down like you’re dead. Give your sister time to hide.”

  Thus is Bena ordered out the door onto rue des Brebis. She can’t see the mob yet, but Bena knows what Idette doesn’t, but what someone else might: Mignon’s not the only Armond who’s been with a German. There may be Fourniers in the mob who know exactly what happened on the awful bedspread in that awful room. They might be after her, not Mignon at all, and Bena’s not standing around waiting. She runs and turns sharply down the side street. There’s been so much rain that the ground is mud, and her shoes sink, slowing her flight. Midway down the street, she ducks into an archway, tugs the little door there, and slips through, shutting it behind her. She thinks to bar it somehow, but with what? She runs on. When the alley gives way to an open path she keeps her head down, heart hammering, feet tripping. Were it not ghastly it might be funny: slapping in sludge, her shoes and socks enormous with mud. But if she can get to the barn, Mignon will take Bena in her arms, wipe the mud from her face, and Bena won’t make a sound; she’ll stay perfectly quiet until the mob’s gone. Mignon will know what to do, and Bena runs toward her, plotting as she goes: if the rope’s not down, she’ll go under the barn.

  The brush out here is overgrown with blackberry brambles, thistles, and stinkweed. Burrs stick to Bena’s skirt, thorns grab her hair. There’s a muddy ditch behind the barn, a bomb crater that’s filled with slop in all this rain, and Bena scrambles on hands and knees up the side, trying to think what she’ll do if the barn corner’s too eroded to climb through, the rope too rain-slick to climb.

  But it won’t be the rope or the corner crevice in the end. In the end Bena will climb from the ditch and see her sister, but the angles will all be wrong, and because of the erosion, and the bombings, and all the rain, the ground’s slope will seem different—Bena’s climbed from a ditch that didn’t exist a month before. The angles are wrong and Bena’s confused, because what is Mignon doing outside? She’s supposed to be hidden in the hayloft. And Bena knows then she’s deluded herself: Mignon won’t know what to do; she can’t even get herself out of sight.

  And then Bena understands. It’s just a change in perception, an optical illusion. Bena sees her sister outside the barn and she can’t see the rope with the footholds. Then the picture shifts, and her sister’s outside, but she’s not on the ground. And oh, there’s the rope! It is hanging down after all! But it’s hanging down taut. It’s hanging down looped. It’s around Mignon’s neck—Mignon, who’s swaying.

  Later Idette will say that Bena’s screams led them to the barn, but from inside the fence, from the yard, they can’t see Mignon, so they don’t know until they climb to the hayloft and see her framed in the window, a gruesome portrait: Girl, Hanged. With one hayloft ladder and many people trying to climb, several minutes pass after Idette understands what’s happened but before she sees Mignon. The mob is disappointed: chase a girl down to humiliate her and she goes and hangs herself and spoils everything. They disperse, but this remains: Bena on the ground under Mignon’s dangling feet, Idette in the hayloft knocking her head against a beam. They’re like this for some time—Idette, Bena, and Mignon. The mob’s not alerting the authorities; no neighbors rush to see what the ruckus is about. So Bena and Idette stay as they are—Idette sweating in the stultifying hayloft, Bena curled in the wet dead grass—until Virginie wanders home. Finding the shop and house empty, she strolls toward the barn calling, “Maman? Mignon? Bena? Allo!”

  Idette is shocked into motion. “Virginie!” she cries. “Virgie, reste là! I come!” Maniacal now, she hurtles toward the hay window as if to fling herself out, but instead hisses down to Bena: “You, stay! Stay with your sister. Reste là. I get the police. You stay!” Idette takes one last look at Mignon, a survey, then says, “And get that ring off her finger—it’s worth something.”

  The next thing Bena hears is Idette walking the path with Virgie, saying, “You come with me, we’re going to town,” and Bena understands that Idette means for her to stay with Mignon. Stay with your sister, your dead sister, and pry that fake engagement ring off her dead hand so we can sell it to buy food. Bena stares, frozen, into the crabgrass. She watches ants scale blades like great monuments, up one side and down the other, as she tries to figure out—it’s too horrible, too horrible to imagine, and yet she must figure out how to get the ring off Mignon’s finger before the authorities come cut her down and carry her away. This task, in the end, will involve entering the barn through the corner hole, climbing the ladder to the hayloft, and hauling the ladder up behind her to lower it out the window beside Mignon’s body. Bena must then climb down the ladder to retrieve the ring. The horror of it is inconceivable, though there’s one tiny blessing: Mignon’s grown so thin since Karl’s death that the ring is loose and comes off easily. This is the universe’s one small stroke of kindness toward Bena Armond.

  Virgie is with Idette at the police station, and though Idette hasn’t told her what happened, neither can she shield Virgie from events as they unfold. In the station, Idette has Virgie wait on a bench by the door while she approaches a desk and speaks to a clerk. A call is then made and a flurry of movement ensues. In its midst, Idette grabs Virgie up and they’re shuttled to a car and rushed back to rue des Brebis, siren shrieking, gratuitous ambulance on their tail. Virgie never sees Mignon’s body, so never has to know what Bena so definitively knows, and this is what enables her story: Virgie decides that Mignon has staged her death. Last month’s letter from Karl was written in code, detailing his plans for their escape from France, and Mignon’s pain was not due to the death of her true love, but the realization that joining Karl would mean leaving her family forever, and leaving them thinking she had died by her own hand. In the weeks after Mignon’s death, Virginie is almost happy, wafting about with some of her old buoyancy, like a friendly and benevolent ghost.

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1944, the tanks roll up and stop outside town, its streets too narrow to pass, and like the Germans in 1940, the Americans enter on foot. Liberation is oddly less festive than invasion—they weren’t all so tired back then. Now the town is liberated, yes, but the war’s still on, soldiers in the streets, foreign tongues at the café calling to Bena: Hey gorgeous, sit a spell with your savior. Have a drink on the U.S. of A. Set that gorgeous rear right down here and tell Uncle Sam where it hurts. And Bena could barter her company for a meal or a drink, whatever they’ve got, but she’s too sick to want food and too queasy to care. Especially in the mornings.

  It’s all too clear where this is going, no? Another month
passes, the Americans are still in V——bourg, and Bena still hasn’t bled. Like the Allied troops, halted by the Nazis just west of the Moselle, so too is this cluster of cells stuck in Bena’s uterus, and neither squadron is going anywhere soon. American GIs dig in their heels—in Lorraine, on the Meuse and Moselle Rivers, in the Argonne—just as those cells are hunkering down. The troops can’t move because they’ve run out of fuel. The Americans’ August sprint across France has raised logistical problems: their men have made it to the Moselle, but the Allies have yet to command the necessary northern ports to get supplies to said men, so everything’s coming via Normandy, mostly by plane, and that’s no short haul. The troops are fine on rations—they seized some German storehouses in Reims and will be eating sauerkraut and tinned fish until victory and beyond—but it’s gas they need, and gas they await in every village west of the Lorraine front lines.

  Meanwhile, the French police are getting reestablished, regaining control, and their main initiative is action against those French citizens who’ve disgraced their nation. Like the mob that came for Mignon, the country needs to place blame, and with the Germans gone, they turn on their own: anyone who’s aided, abetted, or made things easy for the Nazis during occupation. They can’t go arresting everyone who’s consorted or fraternized with Germans, or all France would be in the slammer, but they can pursue those who’ve clearly, outwardly benefited. Like the tailors of rue des Brebis. It’s not punishment enough that Jean and Michel have been gone for years, that Fiji and Mignon are dead, and that Virginie is mad. Never mind that the Armonds have seen nothing of their own profits. They have, have they not, received ongoing aid from one Karl Perlmutter? Is Madame Idette not the Nazis’ favorite French seamstress?

  “Madame is needed for questioning,” says the constable when they come for her. He’s nervous and young, with a silly mustache he’s acquired for its insinuation of authority.

  Idette, not cowed by this teenage figurehead of martial law, or his mustache, says she’s sorry, but she has a business to run. She gestures to Virgie. “And I can’t leave her on her own.”

  The constable looks smugly pleased. “If she’s ill, should she not be in the hospital?”

  “We can care for her here at home,” says Idette. “Thank you for your obvious concern.”

  “But you’ll not be at home, Madame, as you’re coming to the station with me. Now.”

  Idette flinches like he’s spat at her. “And who will look after my daughter, Constable?”

  He flips open a notepad, shuffles pages. “By my count, you’ve one child yet unaffiliated with the Nazis. Perhaps Bernadette will look after her sister while you’re occupied?”

  Idette sneers. “If you can find the little whore.” Is this just habitual nastiness? Or a notion that whorishness might rule out Bena as Virginie’s caretaker? What does Idette know?

  The constable’s smile is repulsive. “We’ve picked up your little whore at the café. Perhaps some greater domestic responsibility is just what young Bernadette needs.”

  Idette is led to the V——bourg jail, where she spends two nights “under investigation,” until she and forty-odd others board a train for a “detention center,” location unknown. Bena will never see her again. When they come for Virgie, they don’t even need a straitjacket. She goes willingly, thinking she’ll be taken to Michel. Hope is mad, and only the mad can hold on to it.

  So Bena’s left alone on rue des Brebis with the rabbits and Chou-Chou, trying not to lose her mind. She can’t tell one bunny from another—can barely distinguish one day from the next—but somehow there are always enough that she can kill one each morning—skin it, cook it, and have something to eat, however unappetizing, every day—and the dams keep having more kits. She lets them grow as big as she can so they’re worth the considerable effort it takes to get their meat, and if they’re getting fat eating their own babies, so be it. These rabbits are her salvation, and though she despises tromping out to cull one for her daily meal, they feed her, and come winter they’ll keep her warm, too. She salts the hides and lets them dry and cure a bit before she adds them to the blanket she’s making—a blanket no one can force her to send to any prisoners of war. They’re her rabbits, and it’s her damn blanket!

  Huddled by the stove, wrapped in the stinking rabbit throw, Bena has a vague idea that this baby in her might be her ticket out of France. If only it were an American’s baby . . . Pregnancy turns many women into blithering idiots, let alone one carrying a Nazi’s baby in post-liberation France, but it’s a while before Bena has this fairly obvious revelation: her baby’s not going to emerge saluting Hitler. Any number of these soldiers could be its father.

  At first she looks for tall—that’s her memory of Diederick: tall. He had—has? Is he still alive? Will she ever know?—fairish skin, brownish hair. Unable to conjure his face, she just looks for tall, until that seems arbitrary. Thinking too much makes her lose focus and hope. She only needs a man who might plausibly have fathered this baby—that is, one of the men she takes upstairs to bed on rue des Brebis. The more men she gets upstairs, the greater her chance of escape.

  Here’s one now, stepping into the shop, sitting to pry off his mud-caked boots, remove his threadbare socks. They reek of rot. He lifts this evidence of his desperation, asking, “Is there something you can do?” Of course, yes, she can soak his putrid things on the stove—she’s been pulling the barn down board by board and burning it for fuel. Bena takes the soldier’s boots and tells him: “Go upstairs to the bed with the rabbit fur blanket. Get in and take everything off.” She’ll wash it all and darn the holes, the least she can do for a man who might come to believe he’s the father of her unborn child. It’s no trouble getting men into bed. Bena’s got quite a belly on her these days, but it’s been a long war, and these men are just boys, and there’s not one of them thinking, This dame looks a little pregnant, if you ask me. Most are so young they’ve hardly seen a naked woman before, and certainly not a naked pregnant one. All women’s bodies are foreign—the swell of this one’s abdomen no odder than the rolls of another’s chin, a bony back, a bulbous bum. The soldier of the gruesome socks buries his face in Bena’s hair as if it’s lovely and clean. He’d’ve made a nice husband, but she’ll never again lay eyes on Sherman T. Singleton. There’s always the next, though, and they do keep coming. Robert G. Cass. Theodore H. Barkey. Burt Mothersbaugh. Harold R. Fine. David I. Daley—names stamped on their dog tags. They arrive with their buttonless coats and their toeless socks, and she sends them upstairs to sleep, grateful and naked, under the rabbit fur quilt while she works on their clothes. Some bring soap, otherwise she simmers their things on the stove, a witch’s cauldron of bloody, muddy undershirts and piss-stinking, shit-reeking long johns. She hangs them to dry by the smoky kitchen fire, and when the man wakes up she’s beside him in bed, and he reaches to take her into his arms and make love to this plush and generous woman.

  Fall turns to winter, U.S. troops moving up into the Ardennes forest to fight off the last Nazi offenses: the Battle of the Bulge, that most miserable military action. V——bourg is far enough from the front to be mostly safe, and near enough to be useful, so it becomes a staging ground for troops preparing to enter the fray, as well as a stop on their way back out. Many leave as corpses, but for the survivors V——bourg becomes a sanatorium town, GIs convalescing in the schoolhouse cum Nazi headquarters cum American hospital, and this evolution is useful to Bena. Men she’s known on their way to battle are turning up again. She checks the hospital every day, and the incoming trucks, her belly concealed under wraps, her desperation harder to hide. Townspeople talk: What’s under there? Who is she looking for? But can anyone possibly suspect how many different men she’d be most relieved to find?

  The first to show up is Pfc. Dave Daley. Sweet, fair-haired, from Hartford, Connecticut, he gazes up dreamily from a bed in the old school gym, his face lighting in apparent recognition of Bena, though he seems very ill. If not for his name at the
foot of the bed Bena would not have recognized him. She has diligently recorded all her men’s names on a page from an accounting ledger she keeps folded around the photo she found in the hayloft after Mignon died. Karl’s letter Bena burned, but the photograph she keeps, along with Mignon’s ring that Idette never got a chance to sell, both wrapped in her list, safe among the names of the men who might be her salvation. When a man makes love to her on rue des Brebis, after he’s asleep she writes down his name, adding him to the list she’ll know by heart as long as she lives. She recites their names in her mind as a mantra, a k’an-hua, a sad and desperate meditation koan. But when Bena sees Daley, D., printed on a bed chart, you’d think he was the love of her life—her Dave! Alive! She leans close to his drawn face, nose and cheeks white and scaly with frostbite, and whispers in what little English she has, “David? I Bernadette, le tailleur . . . ? I make wash the clothes . . . ?” She rubs together the ends of her scarf. “Bernadette?”

  And Dave Daley’s face lifts in what might be a smile. He whispers, “Bernadette.”

  “Oui!” she says. “Yes, Bernadette,” and Dave Daley breathes in, as if to savor a perfume. “David, I tell you something,” she says, and he nods. “Dave, I . . . you.” Gently, she touches his face, then takes his cold arm and, glancing around cautiously, puts his hand to her belly. She says, “Baby.” She says, “C’est toi le père, David. Yours. Baby,” watching his face for some sign of comprehension. “Open the eyes, David,” she pleads. “Open the eyes. Tu es le père. You baby.”