by P. S. Duffy
The road dipped past an eclectic collection of stone and stucco cottages at the end of which she turned up a hard-packed sand path. Bound on either side by thin lengths of wire stretched between fence posts, the path ran up behind the dunes toward a bluff. Sharp sea grasses brushed his legs, but it was the barbs on the wire fencing that brought him to a stop. Fresh salt air swept down the dunes. He lifted his head. There was no sound of the sea, just the wind rushing the grasses along the tops of the great rolling dunes. No voices, no gunfire, no shells. Just wind. Salt wind. He felt himself pinwheel through space.
TENDING TO HIS pigeons in a shelter at the side of the cottage, Paul had his back to them as Angus and Juliette approached. But at the creak of the bicycle, he came out, shielding his eyes. He was in his usual short trousers, suspenders, sagging striped socks, but on his head was an army helmet. When he saw Angus, he ran full out, the helmet bouncing to the ground behind him. He put on the brakes, retrieved the helmet, and then ran again holding it on his head with one hand, the chinstrap flapping against his neck. When he got to them, he stopped short, saluted and said, “Bienvenu, Lieutenant!”
Angus fell to one knee and held out his arm. Paul let himself be hugged, but only for a second. He kissed his mother on both cheeks, saying, “Maman! You have bring him home. I knew it one day!” He clapped his hands.
Paul had, of course, known Angus was in the military hospital. “It kill me, see? I talk to Nurse Lovell. Maman says do not go. Now you are ready. You are here!”
Angus struggled to stand. He took the helmet off Paul’s head. Paul put it right back on. It was disturbing how well it suited him. Then he and Juliette led Angus inside the cottage. With its beamed ceilings and whitewashed walls and painted furniture, it had none of the gloom of Juliette’s dark, high-ceilinged house in Astile. Paul wanted to drag him everywhere, out along the headland, down to the beach, out to the shelter to visit his pigeons and the fat hens, out in the field to meet Sabine’s twin goats. But Juliette, pumping water for Angus, told him to stop. There would be time later.
Handing him the cool glass, Paul stared at him with concern. He looked trop pale, he said. Angus gulped down the water without stopping, and followed it with another. He must have looked as debilitated as he felt because Juliette immediately said he must lie down on the bed he’d share with Paul. Paul said he’d be happy with quilts on the floor, so Angus could spread across the bed that night, and for all the nights that Angus was there.
They led him up an enclosed stairway that opened to Paul’s room. Late afternoon sun through the dormer window bathed the walls and sloping ceiling with creamy light. He dropped his pack by the bed. A gentle push from Juliette, and he sat down heavily on the patterned quilt, warm from the sun. She smiled down at him. “Sleep,” she said, unlacing his boots. And then she steered Paul out and down the stairs. Angus closed his eyes and fell back across the bed, drunk with the sun’s warmth and the trace of a breeze against his face.
Paul shook him awake two hours later for supper. When they came down, Sabine breezed in with a painted mouth and a patterned shawl that she flung off her shoulders while Juliette cooked. She resembled Juliette, but only vaguely and in a blousy way. Her chin was rounder, her smile more forthcoming, her color lighter, and her hands more square. She sat at the table, set her foot on the rung of the chair next to her, lit a slim cigar and cast an approving glance at Angus, whom she’d already seen through the door the day he’d stopped by the shop. He bristled as she remarked on the width of his shoulders, the breadth of his knees beneath his kilt, the strong jawline, as if considering a mule she might or might not buy.
Sabine took no notice of his discomfort. She opened a bottle of Pommard she’d brought, and carried on in French and English while Juliette and Paul set plates and forks on the table. She said she was off to Paris the next day and would close the shop for the entire weekend, and maybe a day or so beyond that. She was off, she said, to check on a lead for another shop on a well-known Parisian street where she could provide a variety of beauty treatments the likes of which the stinking philistines of Saint-Junien would never appreciate. So, she winked, that would leave half the bed she shared with Juliette empty. Ah, poor, dear Juliette, she said.
Juliette ticked her tongue and set out a platter of sausages, fresh peas, mushrooms and browned onions. Sabine got a long loaf of bread from her bag. Juliette told Angus that Sabine’s lead in Paris was in the form of a “friend”— “Oui! Un ami!” Paul chimed in enthusiastically—who would provide the shop if Sabine would marry him, or so he said.
Sabine broke in to say there was plenty of space in his rooms for Juliette and Paul. He was making money even now, and one day this criminal war would end. When it did, the women of Paris would want to celebrate in style, and she’d be there to provide it. The first thing she’d do was cut off their long, tiresome hair. And if the Germans were to enter Paris, the first thing she’d do was cut off their heads! At this they all had a laugh.
Pouring more wine into her glass, Sabine said she was capable of far more than any of them knew, and, lifting a hunk of sausage from the serving dish, said that her ami, if too old for the army, made up for it in other ways, one of which was to understand the need for women to feel beautiful, which Juliette, by the way, might want to investigate. She then paused for breath, a crunch of bread and several noisy gulps of wine.
Juliette leaned back from the table and reached for a candle on a dish on the cupboard behind her. If embarrassed by Sabine, it was only Angus’s presence that made her so, Angus thought. As different as they were, there was no doubting their bond. Juliette placed the candle in the center of the table and leaned in as she lit the wick. The candle flamed up and her skin took on a peach glow. She sat back. Angus forced himself to keep his eyes on the flame.
Sabine pointed at his arm and asked how it happened, when would it get better? He gave them the short version, which amounted to “bayonet to the shoulder following Vimy. Hospital. Treatment . . . seems to be helping.”
“Ah, Veeemy! You are a hero! A Canadian hero! Nous aimons les Canadiens!” Sabine said. “So manly! Find me one that wants to desert, and I’ll cancel my trip to Paris and run away forever! No need for love in the bargain.”
Juliette rolled her eyes.
Paul explained that before the war, Sabine had been in love with a round and sturdy man who must go unnamed. He stood and circled his arms and thumped from side to side in imitation. Sabine laughed and clapped her hands. “Perfect! Parfait!” Paul sat back down. He said the man was from Alsace-Lorraine, and on the eve of the war had joined the German infantry and was killed in the Argonne. Sabine was very sad but then canceled her mourning, Paul said, because by then her bastard husband had been killed also, and Paul’s father, too, perhaps by Sabine’s soldier. Who had killed who? No one could know.
“Nothing but loss,” Sabine said, pushing her plate away and allowing Angus to light her a cigarette from his packet. Exhaling, she said, “But we make our choices, no? To be dead or alive. I am not dead yet, so I choose to be alive.”
“Me, too!” Paul said.
“Hush! It is not for you! Here,” Juliette said, indicating the dishes. “This is for you.” He whistled and raised his eyebrows, but began clearing the plates. “It is not just a choosing,” Juliette said.
“Oh, mais oui, it is. We choose to be alive while we are here. Or not. Do you not agree, Lieutenant?”
Angus sat back and lit his own cigarette. “Some things can sap the life out of you . . . can make you—”
“Pathétique! Make you what? Do you think you have no hand in your destiny? You are a leaf on the wind?” Sabine asked impatiently.
“No—”
Sabine broke in, gesturing at Juliette. “I say to Juliette, if you have no plan, there is no future. But you must feed the present or you will have no future. ‘Before’ and ‘after,’ what are these? They are today, right now. You must find today, eat it up and swallow it.” She removed a trace of tobacco from her tongue
and flicked it toward the candle. “The pain is there. Of course. Who does not suffer?” She shrugged. “La guerre, is this new? It is always so. One war, another war.”
“And I say, Sabine, you think I have no joy?” Juliette said, pulling Paul close.
“You have no dreams, Juliette. For yourself, for the boy.”
“We hold on,” Juliette countered. “It is enough.”
“Oui! Exactement! At this you are an expert. All of France is joined, hand by hand, holding on. It is our humanity, non? We hold on to each other. But we must do more, we must use our heads, not scratch in the dirt like chickens. You disapprove. What can I say?” Sabine leaned over and cupped Juliette’s chin in her hand, “You, tu es ma . . . um, what is it that the English say? Ah yes, ma boussole morale. But I, too, must make my way—for you and for me, and the boy.”
Juliette held Sabine’s wrist and they linked hands. Then Sabine stood and announced that she must now retire to pack her satchel, for tomorrow she would grab their future. Juliette began the dishes and said it was a good time for Paul to show Angus his pigeons.
“What did that mean, ‘ma boussole morale’?” Angus asked as he pulled the planked door shut behind them.
“ ‘Boussole’—um,” Paul made a circle in the dirt and an N. “Nord et sud. You see?”
“North and south. Compass? Ah, moral compass?”
“Oui. Compass, boussole. What is moral compass?”
“Someone whose soul points to true north,” Angus replied, but by then Paul was scampering to the shed. The pigeons grew animated as he approached, waddling in place, cooing and poking their beaks at the chicken-wire fronts of their crates. There were three of them. Paul explained that there had been four, but that poor Babette had died. Killed, he said, somberly. By soldiers.
“What? Shot down?”
Paul shook his head sadly. The pigeons, which were Sabine’s and which she had given to him, had been taken away by the BEF, “British bastards,” because they thought perhaps Sabine was a spy.
“A spy?”
“Oui. She had the pigeons. She had the letters from the ami in Alsace, in the German infantry. Maybe she sends the pigeons over, too, they say.” But, he went on to explain, there was no other evidence, and so Sabine was not shot. Très bon. But the pigeons were forgotten at the army camp and not returned. Paul was furious. He got them back later, but by then poor Babette had died of thirst because these bastards did not give her water. Three remained—Édouard, Papete and his very favorite, Angelica, close to death herself.
Angus shook his head. “Evil,” he said.
“Oui, très mal, but . . .” Paul looked up at Angus, hardly able to contain himself. He was, he said, helping to train carrier pigeons with none other than an Allied signals corps. He lifted Angelica out of her crate and stroked her. “I am good with pigeons. I speak to them. They speak to me.”
“A member of the signal corps! Congratulations!” Angus said. “Tell me first how you got the pigeons back.”
“Ah. Très facile,” Paul said. “First, I offer the stupid sergeant some excellent vin. Sabine has it a very long time from her ami in Alsace, Rudolph. Shhhh . . . we do not say his name. The sergeant take off the cork and sniff and smile and drink. But he wants more. So, I offer packets of Players.” Paul held out three fingers underneath Angelica for emphasis. “Trois! I get them from a corporal for a jar of honey and two postcards of women with”—here he set Angelica back down and cupped his hands at his chest—“poitrines.”
“Women with breasts?”
“Oui. I find the postcards under a tent in Astile. I am sorry to let them go. Très belles. The sergeant is nearly all okay. He smoke his cigarette. He drink the wine. He drink some more. But he will not give me the pigeons. I see Édouard and Papete and Angelica, but Babette does not move. I want to hit him on the head with the bottle. But I give him ma meilleure offre . . .”
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
“Silk pantalettes. Sabine’s! I hold them up. Ooh la la! He grabs. I stuff them in my pocket. He chases me, but he stumbles with the wine. He says okay, okay. He dance with the pantalettes on his face, like this.” Paul turned his head up and circled with his arms out. “I take Édouard et Papete et la première étoile, Angelica, and he say it is fair and no one will know and no one will care. I say in French that he stinks and Babette is dead.”
Angus shook his head. “What did Sabine have to say about the silk drawers?”
“She say she would give all her pantalettes for Édouard and Papete by themselves! And go naked under her skirt forever for Angelica.”
As if in appreciation, the pigeons cocked their heads and cooed all the louder.
“So now you’re training pigeons for the BEF signal corps?”
“Non! The CEF! Maintenant, je suis Canadien, moi! Two times a week.” Even his milky eye seemed to shine. “They give me a helmet. They pay me.”
“I salute you, Signal Corps Private Raffarin!” Angus stood erect and saluted with his left hand. “I’m surprised you’re not with requisitions, but that will surely come.”
Paul laughed and said, “I do not know this requisitions. One day you will salute with your right hand, non? But now you have one hand and I have one eye.”
“That’s right,” Angus said, holding his sling. “Together we are one—”
“Soldiers! We are soldiers!”
Angus nodded and smiled. Paul introduced him to Sabine’s hens clucking in the small barn next to the shed, and to some pole beans, and to the rooster, standing on the wheelbarrow, to the goats, one gnawing on a tattered fishing net, and to a row of onions growing in a box. The cottage and barn were once Sabine’s husband’s, a man who tried to be a fisherman, Paul explained. This husband beat her and then was killed in the war. Paul said Sabine was happy because she could feel good about the fat Alsatian, and she hoped he had killed the bastard husband. “Rudolph was the one she loved, the only one she will ever love, even if he is a German,” Paul whispered. “She says she does not need to love again.”
Angus looked across the wild field at the point where the bluff met the horizon and dropped to the sea, to the edge of nowhere.
He lit a cigarette and handed it to Paul for a drag. Paul followed his gaze across the headland. “You wish to go there?”
“Think we have time before it gets dark?”
“I am not afraid of the dark!” Paul ran toward the house. “Maman! Maman!” he shouted.
She joined them. Buoyed by Paul’s enthusiasm, Angus matched his pace, and the three of them followed the rutted trail through the grasses and scrub brush. Various paths forked off to the right and left. Not far from the point, the one they were on widened. A narrow branch angled off toward a railing and a long flight of steps leading down to the beach. They kept on toward the point. Rabbits streaked ahead, crisscrossing the path. Paul flicked on Angus’s torch and tried to follow them with the beam as they jumped the brush. Juliette told him to keep the light on the trail. Twilight gave way to night as they reached the point. Angus could just make out a thin line of white surf breaking some fifty feet below. There was no moon, and it was almost too windy to hear the sea rolling in, but he could sense the swells beyond as if he were in them.
For a time they were quiet, then Paul looked up at Angus. “Lance Corporal Havers?” he said.
Angus took a deep breath. The word “dead” didn’t come easily. But he didn’t need to say it. Paul asked how it happened.
“He was shot. Killed at the same time I was wounded.”
“He was . . . Havers when he—?” Paul asked.
“Said so with his last breath.” Angus kept staring ahead, then dropped his gaze. “I never should have let him—”
Juliette put her hand firmly on his arm. “Havers. It was his choosing, non?” she said. “C’ést ce qu’il a voulu.”
“What he wanted,” Paul repeated.
What he wanted, what he needed. But at what cost? Angus thought of those last breaths
and his last words. “He called me by name at the end,” he said.
The wind billowed up from below the bluff, whipping his kilt around his legs and the hair across Juliette’s face. She turned away and faced the wind, but he caught her words, “You were with him. He was not alone.”
The three of them, Paul in the middle, leaned into one another and let the stiff wind push against them.
SLEEP ELUDED ANGUS that night. When they got back to the cottage, everything seemed heightened and simultaneously diffused. The blue of the kitchen chairs, a dusky gray-green in the lamplight, seemed richer, more saturated in color. The lingering scent of fried sausages and onions, pleasing before, enveloped him now in a soft embrace cut through with a painful awareness of Juliette’s every movement, the low music of her voice, the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, her silver rings, her every breath in and out. He claimed exhaustion. Paul arranged a bed of blankets for himself on the floor. They opened the window and the breeze blew in. After some chatter, Paul settled into a gently snoring sleep, his arm around a rag of a stuffed bunny, the helmet on the floor next to him, the stiff patch of white hair sticking out from the quilt.
Angus sat on the bed in the dark and removed his sling. The soft salt air touched his face with day’s end, and a memory of the swing up to the mooring, the drop in the wind, the drop of the sails, a wave from Davy and Putnam coming in on the Glory B, the silhouette of tall masts against the dying sun, its last rays catching the crust of salt crystals on the compass, and the long afterglow filling the sky, casting the harbor in pearl-pink luster. There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams . . . dreams of a place he might as well have made up and that was moving on without him. When Simon had been about six years old, leaping about the boat, playing some pirate game, he’d stopped suddenly and lifted his head as if listening to something. Something far off that only he could hear. His eyes had grown distant, his expression utterly calm. And in it, Angus had seen something of the man he would become.
