Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  Excavating for a mine

  Dwelt a miner forty-niner,

  And his daughter Clementine.

  “Oh My Darling, Clementine” was one of the songs Johnny Clay and I used to sing when we were little because it gave us the spooks and made Sweet Fern have fifteen fits. For some reason it came into my mind before any of my own songs that I’d written myself.

  I looked down at the captain and suddenly I felt woozy from all the blood. So much blood.

  A voice said, “Keep singing.” It was one of the agents from the belly of the plane—I could tell from the gray-green parachute smock he wore—and he was standing over the captain, wrapping him in bandages from his kit, his hands covered in blood. So much blood.

  I said, “What?”

  He said, “Sing, goddammit.” His voice was cool and even and sounded French. In the dark of the cockpit, I could only see the red of the blood, the white-red flash of antiaircraft fire.

  Ruby lips above the water,

  Blowing bubbles, soft and fine,

  But, alas, I was no swimmer,

  So I lost my Clementine.

  I pushed the bomber up and onward. I thought, Please, Jesus, if you can hear me. Help me get us out of here.

  I looked at the Frenchman. His hands were working, working. I said, “Is he okay?”

  There was blood everywhere. The Frenchman had his hands pressed against Captain Baskin’s neck. Second Lieutenant Glenn was behind him now, and then so was one of the other agents, handing him bandages from their kits. The Frenchman said, “Sing.” His voice was a command, as if he were used to giving orders and having them followed.

  Oh my darling, oh my darling,

  Oh my darling, Clementine,

  You are lost and gone forever,

  Dreadful sorry, Clementine.

  To my right I heard a pop—like a distant star exploding. I thought: I wonder what that was? I wonder if a star makes a sound when it dies? I wonder if we’re hit? I wonder if I’m hit? I wonder if I’m dying right now, just like a star? I could smell the blood. I could feel the wet of it all the way over in my seat, in my lap, flowing down my arm. I could almost taste it.

  And then there was nothing but blackness.

  SIX

  Suddenly I felt a sharp sting on my cheek. I tried to hide my face by turning in to my shoulder, but there was a sting on my other cheek, as if someone had taken a hot poker to it. I was weak and I was weary, and I didn’t have much breath left in me, but I threw back my head and screamed.

  A voice said, “Be quiet, idiot girl. Chut! Chut!”

  I started coughing from the smoke, from the fire, but when I tried to keep screaming, I couldn’t. The smoke was filling my lungs like air in a balloon so that all the breath was squeezed out of me and I felt as if I were drowning, or being smothered by a pillow. I shouted, “Please don’t let them burn me alive!”

  “No one is burning you alive, you fool.”

  And then there was another sting against my cheek, and my eyes opened and all I saw were flecks of light, just like lightning bugs, coming at me out of the dark. I was hot, so hot. I felt like I was on fire. I could hear a crackling and hissing, and then I turned and saw where it was coming from. It was a giant bonfire—flames bursting up from the ground, climbing into the sky.

  I sat straight up, trying to get to my feet, my body throbbing and aching and stinging, and saw a face, strange and exotic. It was a serious face, an angry face, with something simmering in it that made me think of an animal. The eyes were dark and burning, the lips full, the cheekbones high, the eyebrows arched. At first I thought it was the devil himself, and before I could scream, a hand went over my mouth. I was sitting on the ground and he was kneeling over me, and I thought, Dear Jesus, he’s going to kill me. I wanted to bite him, to kick him, but I couldn’t move my body. It was as if I were underwater or in quicksand or stuck in the muddy bottoms of Three Gum River. And then I knew I wasn’t in hell. I was in France, and that bonfire was my B-24.

  Little by little, I could feel my body waking up. First I felt pinpricks of pain in my right ankle, then a sharp pang in my knee. A soreness in my hip, an aching in my wrist, a throbbing in my shoulder. A sting on my right cheek and my left cheek. A dull pounding in my head.

  I said to the Frenchman, “Did you slap me?”

  He said, “Yes. Shall I do it again?” I wasn’t sure he was French at all. Maybe Spanish. Or from a place where gypsies lived.

  I said, “Why would you do that?” I wished I could slap him back, right across the face, but I couldn’t move. My whole life, no one had ever slapped me.

  He said, “We must go. Can you walk?” He stood, blocking out the sun. But no, it wasn’t the sun; it was another great burning ball of fire. The other half of the B-24, I thought. I started coughing again. He swore, but the words sounded like nonsense words. The only way I could tell he was swearing was because of the tone and because of the look he wore on his face. He walked around behind me and pulled me up. I went dizzy, holding on to his arm, and then I looked down and saw the blood.

  I said, “I’m dying.”

  He said, “C’est seulement une égratignure. It is just a scratch.” He put my left arm around his shoulders and started half-walking me, half-dragging me, fast as he could, away from the fire. Smoke was everywhere, billowing and pillowing around, filling the air like fog.

  He kept dragging me along, bumping me over stones and twigs. He had the stealthy, swaggering walk of a panther. We were in the woods somewhere, surrounded by tall, slim trees, thick as soldiers on a battlefield. Beech trees, I thought. We had ones just like them in North Carolina. And other ones. Tall trees. So tall. Where was the sky? Where was the moon?

  I said, “What day is this?”

  “July fourteenth.”

  I said, “Where are we going?” The night air closed in around me.

  “Away from here. The Germans will see the fire. It is only a matter of time.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Dead. All but you, me, and my team. The ones who made it.”

  Captain Baskin. Second Lieutenant Glenn. The gunners, the bombardier, the dispatcher. My crew. Everyone dead. Everyone gone.

  Fifty miles later—or maybe it was fifty yards—he dropped me onto the ground as if I were no more than a sack of potatoes. A shadow came out of the trees, and before I could scream again I saw that it was one of the other agents, dressed in the same gray-green parachute smock, and that he’d been shot in the eye. He’d made himself a patch from a bandage and spots of red were seeping through.

  He said, “The goddamn radio’s blown to hell. How am I supposed to let London know what happened or tell them where to drop supplies? All I’ve got left is this.” He held up a square of silk that looked like a very small handkerchief, but it was covered in writing. “How am I supposed to help us without a fucking radio? We don’t know where the Krauts are or where headquarters is and we don’t even know where the fuck we are.” He was American. He had a face like a boxer’s, nose and chin jutted out to spite the world. He was lean and wiry and looked as if he were ready for a fight. He took off his helmet and threw it on the ground and I saw that he had a wild shock of dark hair.

  The Frenchman said, “We will borrow a radio where we can. My aid kit was lost in the crash. Do you have an extra bandage?” The boxer threw him the whole kit, and the Frenchman stood, sorting through it.

  I said to the boxer, “Your eye is bleeding.” I reached out like I could touch it all the way from the ground, and like I might somehow be able to fix it.

  He said, “Who the hell are you?”

  The Frenchman said, “Our copilot.” He tore the bandage in two and wrapped one of his hands, which was red from the blood.

  “Great job on the landing, sister.”

  The Frenchman said, “Enough.” He wrapped the other hand.

  Before I could say anything, two more shadows came out of the trees. The taller one said, “Crown, Gelman, Miles, Sterling
, Chapman—all dead.” These men wore the same gray-green smocks. The taller one was dark and built like a truck. His face was scarred and craggy, as if he’d been left out in the sun too long, and there was a bandage just above one knee, where he was bleeding. The shorter one was short, with thinning hair and the nervous look of a mole. One of his arms was wrapped in a makeshift sling.

  The short one said, “Who is she?” He was British.

  The Frenchman said, “Our copilot.”

  “We can’t take her.”

  “We cannot leave her either. Not for the Germans to find.”

  They started pulling off their parachute smocks. The craggy one rewrapped his leg and then he dug a hole, and the men threw the smocks into this. The flight suit was warm and waterproof and I was chilled from the night, from the damp of the air, from crashing, from almost burning to death. I didn’t want to take it off, but I knew we had to bury the smocks so no one would see them. I pulled off my suit and handed it to the craggy one. He dropped it into the hole and covered it up with dirt.

  The other men bent over the ground and started sorting through the gear, tossing the things they didn’t need or couldn’t carry into a pile while the craggy one dug another hole. When it was ready, they threw everything in.

  Suddenly a fifth man appeared from out of the trees. He was as handsome as Tom Buccaneer, a hero in dime-store romance novels who always saved girls by throwing them onto the back of his horse. This man had white-blond hair and a strong, square jaw. He looked as if he should be wearing shining armor instead of an army uniform.

  He said, “As far as I can tell, we’re at least fifty miles west of the drop. We’ll put as much distance between ourselves and the plane as possible. The Germans know we’re out here, and even though we managed to get far afield from the zone, they’ll have seen the flames, and, if they haven’t yet, they’ll find the crash site.” He was American too, and other than a scrape on his neck, he didn’t seem to have a scratch on him. He looked at me then, as if he was only just noticing me, and said, “You took over the plane when the captain was killed.”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He shook my hand. “Good work, soldier.” And then he smiled and it was the glittering smile of a movie star.

  I thought, Thank God you’re here. The others were glaring at me as if I’d shot them down myself. It suddenly dawned on me that I was alone in enemy-occupied France with five strange men. I didn’t know the area, barely knew the language, didn’t have a weapon, didn’t have any clothes other than my Santiago Blues.

  The Frenchman, who seemed to be in charge, said, “We need to keep moving.” He looked at me. “Can you run?”

  I felt myself bristle. I said, “Of course.” I tried not to think about the fact that I was hurt and bleeding.

  He looked at Tom Buccaneer then, waiting.

  Tom Buccaneer said, “Let’s go.”

  We’d lost our food and water in the crash, not to mention all sense of direction. No one seemed to know where we were, not even the Frenchman, who was at least in his own country. When it was clear he didn’t know where we were going, except away from the crash—that none of them did—I said, “Wait.” I didn’t look to see if they’d stopped, if they were listening. I reached into my pocket and felt for my compass, the one Ty had given me, and held it as steady as I could in my palm. As far as I could judge, the plane had crashed to the west or southwest of the drop; it was hard to know how many miles. My hand was shaking and I held it steady with my other one. I squinted at the sky, at the stars, at the moon. I’d grown up in the woods. I’d learned to find my way home by the streams and the sky.

  When the compass pointed northeast I said, “This way.” And this time I took the lead. The boxer grumbled, but Tom Buccaneer told him to shut up before he shut him up, and from then there was only the sound of our footfalls and our breathing. Each of the men wore a pistol on his belt and extra magazines, and each one carried a large rucksack. I wished I had my pistol, the one they’d issued me for the B-17, but they’d taken it away once we landed at Prestwick.

  For a while we followed a creek bed, ducking through brush and bramble, and when this ended we kept pushing forward through the trees. I thought: I am in a forest in France. I am running from the Germans. I’m with strange men I barely know. I am a weapon of this war.

  We ran for hours, until the woods thinned out and suddenly, spreading out in front of us, was the flat land of a farm, a little thatched cottage in the distance, outlined against the sky, a rickety half-timbered barn behind it. My nose wrinkled at the smell of cows and chickens and fertilizer and something else—something sweet and bright, like sunshine on Fair Mountain: apples. Tom Buccaneer stopped and held up his hand. We all froze in our shoes and listened.

  He said, “We should tuck in here for a couple of hours, get some rest,” and I was glad he’d said it because I was so weary, counting every step, and I didn’t think I could walk much longer.

  The Frenchman said, “We should keep going. We do not know how near the Germans may be.” His voice was edgy. I thought, So Tom Buccaneer is the one in charge, and the Frenchman hates this.

  Tom Buccaneer said, “We’ll go back in the forest and take shifts.”

  We ducked into the trees, where the air was fresh and cool, and where the only smell was of leaves and dirt and us. The men, all of them, were filthy and bloody, scratches on their faces, uniforms raggedy and torn. I thought for the first time about how I must look—hair wild and windblown, lipstick faded off, dirt on my clothes, on my skin, dried blood on my uniform, on my hand. We opened our survival kits. All I had was a stale chocolate bar, and I chewed on this, making sure to take my time with it, to chew each bite fifty times, because I didn’t know when we’d find more food or water. I didn’t say one word because I was scared to ask another question, to have them see how green I was.

  While we ate, the Frenchman, in a voice as low as the breeze through the leaves, told us stories about France. As he talked, he pulled off his helmet and set it on the ground. His hair was as black as the devil’s cave, up on Devil’s Courthouse back home. He told us about the Hundred Years’ War, William the Bastard, who later became known as William the Conqueror, Joan of Arc, Napoleon Bonaparte. For as cool and swaggering as he seemed, there was a weary air to the Frenchman, as if he’d been fighting in this war for fifty years, even though he couldn’t have been much more than thirty-five.

  After we were done eating, Tom Buccaneer said, “We’ll take shifts. At first light, we go in search of the Resistance.”

  The short man, the British one, said, “She’s injured. We don’t want her bleeding on the run. She’ll only slow us down.”

  Tom Buccaneer said to me, “You’re going to need to take off that jacket.” He pulled a bandage from his pack and wrapped my arm, up around the shoulder, just under my sleeve.

  The boxer said, “We can’t take her with us.” Then to me: “Look, sister, we can’t guard you and hold your hand. We ain’t goddamn babysitters. We don’t take prisoners because we got enough to do out here without looking after someone. We’re fighting for our own lives.”

  No one said anything. The Frenchman sat watching me, his mouth still, his eyes dancing, almost like he was amused, almost like I was some sort of prey.

  The boxer said, “When paratroopers jump behind the lines, you kill everything between you and your objective, and that includes pilots.”

  Tom Buccaneer said over his shoulder, “That’s enough.” He looked at me and, even though there was only moonlight and starlight, I could suddenly see how clear and blue his eyes were—so clear and blue that they were almost eerie. “You have my permission to ignore him.” I thought, That’s exactly what I plan to do. “Now,” he said, “where are you from?” He tied the bandage good and tight.

  My arm shot through with pain and I sucked in my breath. “North Carolina.”

  “Southern belle.” He said it like this explained everything, then added, “I didn’t even as
k your name.” He smiled, broad and blinding, brighter than the moon. I thought he was the best-looking man I’d ever seen. He held out his hand to me. “Captain Perry O’Connell.”

  I said, “Velva Jean Hart.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Velva Jean Hart.” He nodded at the others—the boxer, the craggy one, the Brit, and the Frenchman. “Barzetti, Ray, Coleman, and Gravois.” Then he said, “I’ll take first shift.” He took off his jacket and held it out to me. “You can use this as a pillow.”

  As I lay down, the men gathered in a huddle, the captain shining a flashlight over the compass Barzetti was holding—Ty’s compass. My compass, which I’d let them borrow even though they’d done nothing but complain about me. Someone said something about needing to reach Rouen by the nineteenth, before it was too late, so they could get there before the Allies and be ready. I closed my eyes and thought, Be ready for what?

  They took stock of the things that we’d carried away from the crash and those we hadn’t, the things they’d buried and the things they’d kept. Coleman said he was short on detonators and would have to make some of his own. Ray said his rifle had made it, but he only had half the ammo. Barzetti complained about the radio again.

  Then Coleman said, “What are we going to do with her?”

  Barzetti said, “We leave her here. Let her find her own way.”

  The Frenchman said, “We are not leaving her in the woods.”

  The captain said, “She’s the reason any of us survived.”

  I opened my eyes, careful not to stir, careful not to give myself away. Gravois said, “We will drop her with the first Resistance group we find. They can get her back to England.”

  They were finished then, and everyone but the captain stretched out on the ground to sleep. Gravois was a few feet away and Barzetti, Ray, and Coleman just beyond him. In a moment, I heard a snore, but the Frenchman lay flat, arms folded underneath his head, glaring up toward the stars. He was staring up at the sky just like he could see over it and past it and right into the heart of Hitler himself.