Ballard blinked and ran a hand across the stubble of his short hair. With that action his smile began to return. The sadness in his eyes remained, but only a person intimately related to that sadness could recognize it. “Sure,” he said. “Flop in my place. There’s a sofa and a chair. The bed’s mine. Man, I ain’t so nice that I’m giving up my bed.” He laughed again.
Joe and Quire thanked him.
“I’ll be home in the early hours. We’ll talk when I wake up, not too damn early though. I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know about Champagne, but I want to hear what you have to say. I’d like to know who laid out my camarades like that.”
The other musicians, all Negros, began to warm up their instruments, and Ballard excused himself. He drank a quick shot of Absinthe without the water chaser, shook his head, and yelled, “Thaat’s riight, man. I’m coming.”
He shook hands again with Joe and Quire—sealing a deal—and clapped Quire once more on the shoulder before returning to his drums. Picking up the sticks, he said to the crowd, “Damn, let’s gooo.” The band hit it hard and the floor was again crowded with dancers, crowded so tightly that people basically moved in place.
Joe looked for the beautiful woman and her lucky man but they were not on the floor. He saw them heading for the front door, the woman wearing a green hat and a wrap around her shoulders. The man had on his overcoat and held the door for her. The lucky bastard.
It was an hour past midnight before Joe and Quire, both at least an hour past drunk, left Zelli’s. The cold night air with its pretentions of rain slapped Joe hard, but not hard enough to sober him. They walked erratically down the sidewalk to Ballard’s apartment, which was not far away. There was little more than a bed, a sofa, and a chair in the single room, a drum set, a coal stove for heat, and a table with chairs. “The man lives Spartan,” Joe said after Quire turned on the light, a single bulb hanging bare from the ceiling.
They flipped a coin. Joe won the sofa. He lay down and, surprised at how tired he was, began to drift toward sleep almost as soon as his head hit the sofa’s arm. He dreamed of his father’s ranch in the hills of Colorado where spring rains cleaned the arroyos and brought color to the fields of grasses and flowers. From them, the grasses and flowers, and also the juniper and sage and pine, the full aroma of spring would wake him to ride all day long in a lengthening sunlit day. He had that dream, a good dream. Later that night and through that night, he had bad dreams that did not wake him only because he was so used to bad dreams.
Even with his exhaustion and his depression and his dreams and his drunkenness, Joe did not sleep long. He woke soon after the sun, still drunk, to find Quire standing backlit and naked in front of an open window.
“I thought the full moon set with the rising sun,” Joe said, sitting up on the sofa and stretching his neck, feeling a deep and dark pain in his eye sockets.
Quire turned around. “Damn, man, I couldn’t sleep. Not with thinking about that battle. The war was bad enough on its own, but what happened to Ballard and your friend and others at that battle. It worked on me like a canker.”
Joe nodded in confirmation. He spoke low and plaintively, “That day seems to have worked under a lot of people.” He rubbed his eyes, tight with dried mucus, and his hair, matted. He began to pull on his pants. He had a trip ahead of him which he looked forward to and might find sleep on the train, the lolling movement rocking him like a baby in its buggy. Sleeping like a baby with few concerns was something he had not done in a long time.
Joe added, “And put some clothes on, for Christ’s sake.”
Quire laughed. “Jealous,” he said and walked to a table where there was a water bowl to splash water on his face. “I remember,” he said as he combed water through his hair, “when my mother accidentally broke a thermometer and the mercury in the bulb got to her ring. Nothing she could do to stop it from just eating that ring until nothing was left. That’s what this reminds me of. Someone broke it open and it’s begun to corrode whatever it touches.”
“Doesn’t bode well for you and me, does it?” Joe sat on the edge of the sofa, working some moisture into his mouth while watching a cockroach move in quick spurts, starts and stops, along the baseboard.
“Then why’re you head-long going into this scrape, taking a train today to get yourself even deeper?” Quire asked. He had slipped on some pants but sat with no shirt on and tapped out a thin cigarette from a pack of Gitanes on the table, placed it in his mouth and lit it using a silver lighter. With the first drag he coughed hard and phlegmatic and crushed out the cigarette and said, “Don’t know why I even try.” He coughed again to clear his throat and spat into his handkerchief.
“Damn, man, can’t you boys shut up?” Ballard raised his head from the sheets. There was another form under the sheets as well, but she kept herself hidden, not even unfolding the sheet to expose her face.
Ballard sat up with his back against the wall, the sheet down around his hips. Several scars were apparent on his chest and stomach, knife scars and shrapnel and bullet scars raised like hills and dikes against the dark surface of his skin. His muscles were corded and he was thin. “You say you going somewhere?” he asked Joe.
“Yes,” Joe said. “I’m taking the train to Tours.”
“Why’s that, man?” He took a pack of Gitanes from the table next to him and shook one out. He lit the cigarette and inhaled with his eyes closed then exhaled like a junkie.
“Dillard lived in a monastery there until recently. He might have left some things behind. Maybe a copy of the manuscript.”
“You need someone to go along with you?” Quire asked. He sat hunched over the table, looking like he had just ridden in on a rail.
“No,” Joe answered.
“Good,” Quire said and meant it. For every beer and absinthe that Joe had drunk the night before, Quire had downed two. Joe could see that he was a man of amazing capacities when it came to alcohol, but even Hercules met his match. He sat with his elbows on the table, his hands cupping his head.
“I should be fine. Nobody but you two and Marie Dillard know that I’m going to Tours.”
Quire raised his head, his eyebrows cocked. “You’re sure about her?”
“Not an inch.”
Quire nodded and returned his head to his hands. He raised his head again and winked at Joe, a smile spreading across his face. “I need something,” he said. “Either breakfast or a little of the hair of the dog.”
“I got me a bottle here,” Ballard said. “We should take us a nip to warm our bones. Then there’s a bakery down around the corner, not one of the French bakeries with those little petits fours and flutes of bread, but a bakery where you can get a real breakfast. Bacon and eggs and bread, and beans, even if you don’t want them.”
“I’ll begin with the bottle,” Quire said, and Ballard tossed a pint bottle of amber liquid underhanded to him. Quire uncorked the bottle and took a good drink. “Shit-goddamn,” he said. “That’s good Scotch.”
They shared the bottle. Joe also passed around the photographs and his notes and told them Huntington’s story of Marcel. They speculated, each offering his own scenario. When they had finished their conjecturing, Joe again rolled everything into the inside pocket of his overcoat.
They dressed and left the apartment, the lump under Ballard’s sheets never raising her head to look at them. The day was cold but the sun was warming the street. The bare linden trees along the street glistened and dripped on the sidewalk. They walked a short distance to the bakery, ordered their food, and took large white bowls of coffee with them to sit at a window table.
Quire took out his pack of Gitanes, and Ballard pulled the fixings to roll his own cigarette. Quire placed his cigarette unlit in the corner of his mouth and left it there and like that. After Ballard had finished rolling his and had lit the cigarette and took a deep drag, he sighed. Joe sat and looked out the window at people beginning their days at work.
“You two weren’t
there at the Champagne, were you?” Ballard asked and blew out a plume of smoke.
They shook their heads.
Ballard did not wait for Joe to ask about the battle. He began talking like a man telling his single, most abiding secret, low, solemn, in halting starts. “It was lethal,” he said. “We thought we had it, though, from the very beginning. Five days of artillery pounding the Germans. The night before, all damn night long it went on. We were sure that whatever Germans had been over there were dead. We were told that there weren’t more than a skeleton force in their trenches to begin with, and with the artillery, we figured our worst troubles would be avoiding the mud. Right after sunrise they blew the whistles and we went over the top. I was with the Foreign Legion at the time, damn fine group of men. We begin to trot across the clearing, not going too fast and certainly not a damn bit worried, and then the Germans opened up with their Bergmanns and their oh-eights and then from far away their Whizz Bangs. Shit, man.” He shook his head slow and steady before continuing. “It all turned bad. A disaster. How they survived the artillery I don’t know, but they did. I knew right then that they knew we were coming, that they had planned the day on top of whatever had been planned by our generals. The boches called in artillery, which they weren’t supposed to have, and every shell crater and twig of a dead tree and mound of dirt seemed to be sighted in. There wasn’t no place to hide.”
Ballard stopped talking for a moment, taking a long, deep breath and then another long drag on his cigarette. He looked at Joe, and Joe could see the pain of memory in the man’s eyes, yellowish and bloodshot. There was a distance in the man’s eyes that would always be there, a distance between any moment Ballard lived and the time before the war. It was a distance caused by having seen humanity at its worst.
He began again. “Whole sections of our line fell at once, some falling in rows and others on top of one another like cord wood. The machine gun fire was so thick, so constant that the dead, lying there on the field, were hit time and time again, rolling around like target shooting cans. Pieces of their bodies were shot off as they lay dead. Some of the men still charging lost limbs as they ran. I was covered in blood and mud from the shells landing around me. There weren’t more than a dozen of us when we reached the wire. It was that way all along the line, and we had to turn around and run back through the same damn firing. There were two hundred men in that company of legionnaires who led the charge, and at roll call that night we had eight. Eight. Shit.”
Joe was no longer hungry, but he ate for something to do. None of the men looked at each other as each relived his own terrible violence. Joe had not been at the Champagne, but he had witnessed the carnage at a lesser scale, had seen the bodies immolated and heard the sounds of a world lost to destruction.
After several minutes, Joe said, “That was a bad day.”
Ballard said, “There ain’t much else you can say about it, brother. It was as bad as they get. One thing, though,” he said, pointing at Joe. “You find the man responsible for setting up les boches on that morning, and I want in on it. I want to see his eyes when I bleed the life from his body. You promise me that.”
Joe nodded. They spent the remainder of their breakfast in silence. After, Joe thanked Ballard for the place to stay and told Quire he would be in contact as soon as he returned from Tours that evening. Joe left, taking the Metro across the city to the Gare Montparnasse.
Police stood in pairs throughout the station, talking between themselves or watching the women walk past. Joe kept his distance as he weaved through the crowd. He walked past a cart of trunks, mostly Vuittons, to the train, found his compartment. Within minutes, the train jerked to life and began its steady climb to speed.
An older couple shared the compartment with him. They also shared their bread, cheese, and wine with Joe. He spoke with the couple in French, as much as he could, before they sank into a private conversation. He was left to himself. They were interrupted once when the porter arrived asking for tickets. Each gave the porter a ticket and then settled back into their seats. Joe sat next to the window and looked out.
He watched as the train passed through an industrial part of Paris and then finally into the country, farms and open landscape, inviting even in its winter gray. The transition was not gradual. Joe could have stood on the boundary had the train stopped and allowed him to. There was a factory with steam and smoke rising from tall chimney pipes and then a set of railroad tracks and then a field and then farms. Joe had seldom seen things as delineated and wished that other things in the world were also so easily distinguished.
People worked their land or rode on carts loaded with a morning’s cutting. Later, as the train neared the Loire Valley, Joe wondered at how much more abundant was the landscape there than in Paris. It was December and deep within winter in both places, but Paris held a gray cast within its darkened cityscape while the expanding valley along the Loire River showed its fertile heart just under the barren ground. The soil was dark with humus and rain and lay ready for the next spring’s renewal. There was a promise in the land.
The train thrummed along. A recent rain left the landscape glistening and beautiful. Watching France pass outside his window, Joe realized that something had changed in him as well. There was reason for his journey, a quest. He cared about discovering a truth, the reasons for what had happened on a field in France in 1916. Discovering that would lead him to other truths as well. Even though he was not there, it still mattered to him. Nothing had really mattered to him since sometime during the war. Since then he had lived as though anesthetized.
There, with the hum of iron wheel on iron rail, he felt like he might relax for a moment. He was becoming a participant again.
At Tours, he took a cab from the train station to the monastery on the other side of the great walled city, traveling the old roads of cobbled brick and stone that pilgrims hadwalked over for centuries. Even in the middle of the day in the third decade of the twentieth century, the city looked Medieval and old with its small, winding roads, high walls, and stone fortress-like buildings, some still with defensive battlements atop the walls. The walls of the monastery stood two stories high, covered in ivy with mother vines thick as Joe’s thigh. Moss clung in the shadows. Small parts of the wall had crumbled, leaving piles of tailings. The large double doors at the front, thick wood and iron bars like a castle’s portcullis and with gatehouses to each side like those of a barbican, with square Judas holes at eye level, prevented easy entrance. The wood was old and age-weathered but solid and the iron bars guarding the Judas holes had colored a patina almost black over the years. Above the doors, engraved in the stone and almost faded to nothing, was the abbey’s name, Abbey de St. Martin de Tours.
Joe pulled on the leathered handle of a chain. A series of bells rang just inside the door. He could not hear movement from behind the heavy doors but felt that he was being watched. His hair stood on end and he wanted desperately to drop and hug the ground, but stood and waited, looking around and seeing arrow slits through which a person might spy. He looked up at the overhang of the barbican and saw the murder holes above him, and he thought that every century has its own implements of death and the turn from one century to another did not just bring advances in medicine and arts but also advances in the implements of war. And as men at war always had, like dogs they howled.
The square window-door opened, although Joe could not see into the shadows behind. A man spoke softly in French through the barred opening, asking who he was. When Joe answered in English, he heard a shuffling, followed by the voice of another man, this time in English. He asked Joe what he wanted at the Abbey. Like the first man, he remained within the shadows.
“I have come to see Paul Dillard’s room,” Joe said, adding, “His sister wired you about my coming.”
There was no answer, but Joe could hear the muted discussion between two men.
“Mademoiselle Dillard has asked me to retrieve his materials from the abbey.”
; “Why does she wish to have them?”
He stepped closer to the opening. “Her brother was badly injured in a fire at his home in Paris. He is in the hospital.” Joe improvised. “She wants him to have his things with him. He has nothing after the fire, and she hopes these things may help him.”
More muttering, one voice raised and then silenced. The small square door was pushed but not entirely closed. Joe could hear the voices of several people in consult, disagreeing but not in heated exchange.
Finally, the small door shut, followed by opening of the large wooden doors. They were pulled back at the center only far enough for Joe to enter, swinging in like irrigation gates and closing immediately behind him as though to allow as minimal an amount of the outside into the sanctuary’s courtyard. He entered but was not allowed to walk into the courtyard as three men in cassocks stood with him, not threateningly but still fencing him against the door.
“We have strict rules about attire in the abbey,” one of the men said. Like the others, he kept himself hidden within the folds of a hooded cassock. “Please remove your overcoat and hat. Are the soles of your shoes hard?”
Joe nodded, “Yes. Leather.”
“Your shoes as well.”
Death of a Century Page 19
