by Amanda Dykes
I cleared my throat. “Was it not a good day in the woods?” His satchel was often full to bursting of walnuts and other foraged items.
His smile did not fall, but it changed. It looked like one of Grand-père’s creations, carved into wood.
“No walnuts today,” he said. “But every day the woods are good to be in.”
I tried to match the gravity in his voice. “Because we are safe here,” I said, echoing what he had told me so long. Papa had always said it was so. La maison vous attend toujours. And it is true—home waited for me, always.
He said we are safe here, but there were things that did not make sense. Why, if we were safe, did Grand-père set traps in the ground long ago, before I was even born? Why did he sometimes stop in the middle of speaking, as if he had just heard something, and pin his eyes on his rifle upon the wall?
“Yes,” Papa’s words said. No, said his eyes as they darted around our patch of home, to the edge of the green trees all around. They hugged our home, wrapping us up like the way Papa tied a small box with burlap for me, the ends in a funny bow, every Christmas.
I had not seen this look before, him so wary.
“Papa,” I said, feeling safe in his arms. But the question did not come. I tried to pull it out, as I had every day back to when it first planted itself deep. Years ago, it was. But it was the sword Excalibur, stuck in stone.
“Papa,” I tried once more. He sensed it was heavy, this question, for he held me close.
I closed my eyes. Pulled hard on the question. Forced my voice around it. And Excalibur came loose.
“What is it we are safe from?”
He stopped. Eyes searching mine, hands on my shoulders.
“Much,” he said. And I heard in the sorrow of his voice that there was much, though I knew already he would not speak it into shape. “But . . .”
I held my breath. Perhaps he would tell me, after all.
He opened his mouth.
“Franz!” Grand-père hollered from the door, and the glass castle of that almost-truth shattered into a thousand pieces. He summoned us in, and the shards were left there to vanish.
They argued again that night. But it was not over who would sleep upon the bed.
Tonight . . . tonight there was desperation in their voices, not fondness. Desperation sprung from deep feeling, dropping words off when they could not continue. They believed I was asleep. That I did not hear whispers shot like arrows. Talk of unspeakable things, of German armies marching into villages in Belgium and turning them into wastelands before heading toward France. Of the human hearts and lives that were destroyed far more than the crumbled stone buildings left in their wake. Of things I would never forget, though I wished to. Things that Papa could barely speak, and when he did, his voice cracked like clay.
Grand-père did not believe it, that they snuffed the life out of these places—and did worse, too. Things so terrible, he lowered his voice to a whisper and I could no longer hear.
But well did I hear Father’s next words.
“I must go.”
I scrambled to see through the knothole in the wall, made myself silent and invisible, though my chest pounded: No. No. No. Along with my wild heartbeat, just so.
Grand-père protested. Called him a fool, hissed a question—“You would leave this place? The last refuge in the world?”
“Why do you think I must go?” Papa snapped, his shoulders rising and falling fast. He picked up the fire poker to stir the coals, and this time the old three circles came fast, with a jab of frustration at the end.
“Absurdité.”
“They march for Paris, Father.”
I watched Grand-père sit, drop his head in his hands. “Again,” he said, so ragged it sawed through my knothole, made me draw back. “All of this . . .” He swept his hand over the room. “Only for history to repeat. Will that city never be safe?”
Silence billowed.
“When?” Grand-père said, barely scraping the word out.
“Now.” Papa sat beside Grand-père. His voice sad, but kind once more. I do not know how, but in the stretch of wordless sea, with the fire snapping inside and the wind shuddering the walls from the outside, the men understood one another.
When the sunlit kaleidoscope awoke the next morning, it was upon Papa that it fell. He had slept on the bed, across the room, and I imagined a battle for the ages must have waged after I’d fallen asleep to make it so, with Grand-père emerging as the victor. Papa sat on the edge of the bed, looking into the colorful light.
I made myself silent as I approached. I wanted to see him, hold his hand, keep him always. I did not want him to disappear like Mama.
But beside him sat a lumpy satchel, all drawn up for travel.
I tripped. Un-invisible. He turned and his eyes were red.
“Mon papillon,” he said. A name he spoke to me every day but never like this. Never like he meant to cradle my whole self, for always. “You keep the fire lit now, yes?” He slipped something into my palm. His matchbox, the wooden sticks inside rattling around inside just like my shaken soul.
It was thus that he left. Quiet words exchanged with Grand-père outside, a solemn wave, a sure and steady gait carrying him away.
When my senses caught up to my sorrow, I ran after him, hollering.
“Papa! Papa!”
He paused at the edge of the clearing.
I looked to the matchbox in my hand and then at him. “I will,” I said, holding up the box. “I will light your way home.”
He fixed his eyes on me as if he were etching me onto his very heart. I was doing the same of him. And then, with a nod and a few steps more, the trees swallowed him up—and he was gone.
I watched for him. I took his forest satchel and gathered walnuts as he used to, every week venturing farther east, in the direction that he had gone. I only hoped for some small glimpse of him, perhaps waving at me from across the valley, a promise that he was well. From the edge of the Argonne I could see the winding blue of the Meuse meandering though green fields but not a hint of Papa. I always stood there a long time, in case he should come up over the rise and find me.
One day, when he had been months gone, I fell asleep waiting. It was spring, and the grass was softer than my own mattress at home, sun warm upon my face. A songbird trilled and a breeze blew sweet with the scent of lilac. In this world, this moment, I could hardly believe the things Papa had spoken of. This “Great War,” as the people at the market in the far village called it.
And so I fell asleep thus, with sweet smells and bright things as my lullaby. Perhaps we were closer to a fairy tale than the horror of nightmares, after all. Perhaps . . .
When I awoke, it was with a jolt, dread deep down. Something was not right. I stayed as still as I could, listening. Feeling. A rumble, as if the ground beneath me had come alive.
“Papa?” I listened. “Papa!” Flipping over on my belly, I soaked in the rumble, the sound of homecoming. A vision of a hero from one of the old stories, riding home upon a steed—victorious after battle—filled my head.
I inched my way to the top of the rise, ready to pop up and surprise him, waving with all my might. But as it grew louder and closer, my smile melted. That was not the sound of a horse. But . . . what, then? The river, breaking through a great dam, somewhere? About to flood? Or a plow, perhaps, if a mule were pulling it very fast indeed. I had not seen farmers hereabouts, but perhaps they were venturing farther to find fertile land.
Or—a recollection of one of the girls at market, pointing me to something called an auto car. A wealthy landowner of one of the vineyards had got one and it stood shiny and black on the cobbled street. She described to me how it sounded like the wind coughing up gravel when it was running.
It seemed more farfetched to me than all the tales in Grand-père’s books, this notion of a carriage with no horse. But perhaps they used them in this war. Perhaps Papa had got one too, and it was bringing him home even now. If I had not been pe
trified I would have laughed, picturing the man of the woods, wrangling a metal steed with an engine instead of a heart. I would never see such a thing, I was sure. The Argonne was no place for the auto car.
Clutching the earth until dark soil crammed beneath my fingernails, and clutching hard the last shred of hope that perhaps it was Papa, I peeked over the rise.
My eyes flew open and I stumbled back, all thought of stealth replaced by sheer shock. My pulse pounded, telling me to run. Run.
And I did. It was not an auto car. It was—it was—I could not fathom what it was, hovering above me like a great metal dragon about to descend. As if someone had taken an auto car and removed its wheels and given it great revolving belts instead that dug into the land and spat it out like bullets, climbing down crevices and up ridges as if they were nothing. Preparing to squash forest girls as if they were nothing.
I am nothing, I thought, wishing it might be true. Invisible. Please, make me invisible, I prayed, running and running and running all the while and not looking back until I reached the wood’s edge. I hid in a stand of trees that surely could not be taken by such a creature and watched. The great metal dragon lumbered toward me and then turned, skirting the woods and going south.
It would be hours before my breathing slowed and my heart landed back inside my chest from wherever it had run off to during our great escape. “Our,” because it leapt so far out of me that it became a separate being. It returned, though I had doubted it would. I told Grand-père of it, ready for the censure I would receive for venturing so far from home.
But I received no such censure. Only deep, deep sadness in his eyes. “It is here,” he said. “The war has come.”
4
Captain Jasper Truett
1916
Plattsburg Training Camp, New York
One Year Before America Enters the War
The sun rose again. I had half a mind to point the artillery at it and let her rip. But these green-gilled college boys need light to figure out which way is up, so here we went again.
They came in spades to Plattsburg, those Harvard and who-knows-where kids, lining up with eyes wide as dinner plates to register. Part of me wanted to lift their caps up and see what was inside their university-stuffed brains, what they were thinking. Maybe all that studying had choked out their common sense. But part of me wanted to clap them on the back and say “good on you” for showing up, and honestly, too. It was better than I’d done when I was near their age. Sure, I’d “showed up” back then—all the way from the rails I’d made my home, down to Cuba with the Rough Riders—but I’d lied to do it. Said I was eighteen and thought it was convincing. Maybe it was—maybe a life like mine ages a kid quick. Kid or not, I thought I knew a thing or two back then. Turns out I still don’t know a thing or two.
Go easy on them, I reminded myself. Having dinner-plate-wide eyes wasn’t a crime. Showing up to volunteer for training even when no one thinks we’ll enter this war wasn’t a crime. They were here. No one made ’em be here. Good on them. My job was to make sure they were ready for what they couldn’t even imagine.
They had a long way to go, it was plain to see. I had a mental checklist of what a good officer should look like if he was to be effective in warfare:
Constantly aware of his surroundings
Keen insight into geography and terrain
Calm in a crisis
Able to command respect without belittling his charges
The list went on, but even these four items had me looking around at the trainees and trying not to get swept under in the sea of hopelessly naïve faces. We had our work cut out for us, that was certain.
One of them kept craning his neck toward the stables like he was a giraffe and thought he maybe belonged over there, too. Out of habit I pulled my compass from my pocket and ran my thumb over its not-so-smooth-anymore surface. Like it might help him find his way.
“Barracks are that way, kid,” I said. He had the good sense to nod and veer off that direction. Some of them laughed and joked like the Plattsburg training camp was child’s play. That one, the one with the stables set in his crosshairs, seemed to at least understand the gravity of all this. There was a war raging, and though America at large thought we’d have nothing to do with it, the tightness in my belly told me otherwise. I knew it was just a matter of time . . . and time was ticking.
He hesitated, looking back at the stables. Most of the boys made a beeline for the white-peaked tents of their barracks, the closest thing to home they’d have while here. They’d paid for the privilege, after all, right out of their own pockets. Preparedness, preparedness, preparedness at any cost—even when the country was not funding its own training for the army we’d need if—when—we jumped into this war.
So here we were, training anyway.
Except for him. He seemed . . . lost.
“Hey, kid,” I said. He straightened, as if his whole body saluted me. I could at least point him to his unit’s barracks.
“Orders,” I said, holding out an expectant hand.
His jaw twitched. “I—” His vision sought my uniform, trying to find a name. A horse released a powerful neigh from the stables, and he jerked his attention in that direction. This one would need all the help he could get. I should’ve been brought low that these were our prospects for an officers’ training camp. Officers, for Pete’s sake. But something in him harkened to the old me, the clueless kid who’d battled at San Juan all for the chance to ride a horse into history.
“Son,” I said. “Captain Truett. If you’ll show me your orders, I can point you where to go.”
His eyes snapped back to mine, alert and alive. “T-Truett?”
I checked my pocket watch. “Yes, and if you’ll—”
“Captain Jasper Truett.” He spoke again and gulped. I looked at him. He gawked. “You—you’re Captain Truett.”
“Seems so. Now, son, you’ve got to get to your barracks or you’ll miss your own company commander’s orders. If you’ll show me your orders . . .”
He shook his head quick, to pull himself out of his stupor. “Sorry, sir.” He had a fierce gaze, when it wasn’t muddled by whatever had claimed him five seconds earlier. That sort of gaze—the kind that could pin a man fast and cut away any nonsense—was the kind that would serve him well in commanding privates. If, indeed, he was to be an officer one day. Stranger things had happened.
“I don’t have orders,” he said at last.
“You have orders,” I said. “When you registered for the training camp, they sent them to you.”
He hung his head, breaking eye contact for the first time. “I’m not registered.”
As if in reply to this revelation, a sudden clatter sounded, startling the whole camp. All the men near us froze and looked to the west, where the deafening blow seemed to originate.
But the one before me looked the other way. To the east. And he took off, vanished from my sight in a split second.
My eyes were on him, my feet pounding fast to catch up. He was either extremely dense or extraordinarily sharp, and I would find out which. After the disaster at hand, which was presently pounding directly at us.
The clatter had come from the stable area, where a fallen gate, half entombed by rising earth and still sliding, clanged again as it collided against a panel of metal paddock.
A horse bolted straight toward the barracks with the whites of its eyes flashing, panic infusing each hoofbeat with terrible strength.
The creature would tear right through the tents, tear them down, trample anyone inside without even batting one of those wild eyes.
Men dove in frantic escape, making way like Moses and the Red Sea. And still the other one ran straight into the fray until it was just him and the horse. Soon it would just be the horse. It would pound him to a pulp.
“Move!” I shouted. “Now!”
He did not move. He stood fast, locking eyes with the mad creature. He held up his hands as if in surrender. Slowly, stea
dily.
The horse did not slow.
“Whoa,” he said, moving his hands back and forth.
A split second more and he’d be trampled if he didn’t dive out of the way like the others had.
Move, I wanted to shout again. But something stopped the word in my throat. Something in the kid, the way he stood with eyes wide and stance firm.
Every instinct told me to slam into him, pummel him out of the way. But just as my muscles poised like springs to lunge, the horse veered. Reared. Hooves large in the air, the mass of the creature huge as it hung above us and released a trumpeting neigh before landing again to a cloud of dust. It pawed and grunted, eyeing the kid as he stepped to the side of it, hands still raised.
He gave it a clearance that made no sense to me. Dive in, grab its lead, get that maniac fenced in and quick, that’s what made sense. I made to do so. But at the first sight of my movement, the horse skittered to the side.
The kid moved one of his upheld hands toward me, slowly, his message clear. No. Calm, steady, but assured. No. And I felt it, hanging in the air with the smell of horse and sweat and dust: Not yet. He kept his eyes fixed on the beast and waited.
The whole camp watched with bated breath. The kid held an entire platoon of officers and trainees in the calm authority of his silence—and more than that, in his unflinching, singular focus.
He took one step. One. And the horse lifted its head, wary. He took another, this time edging toward the back of the horse—and waited.
The horse turned his head, fixing its eyes on the kid, as if realizing its life in this moment belonged to the only one in the camp who approached when all others fled. Belonged, safely.
The kid patted his leg softly, drawing nearer and nearer to the beast, speaking in slow, low tones . . . until the severed rope of his lead was, at last, in his hands.
Palpable relief washed out and over the sea of men from the epicenter of the kid and horse.
These men would train and test and we would separate wheat from chaff over these summer months, all so we could see the mettle of each one. Who would withstand, who would not. Tests, every moment, drilling or resting. This horse—it had put this man through the gauntlet of tests all in the space of seconds.
