by Amanda Dykes
The woods were big. Really big. This I knew and tried to believe we’d been safe until now. She’d been safe until now.
But we did not come to be safe. We came to do what needed to be done.
I looked at the little house that seemed straight out of the fairy-tale book Mrs. Bluet gave to Celia and me. Here it stood, right in path of the front’s encroaching rumble from one side, and silent death creeping through the forest from the other.
There was only one thing to do.
“We have to tell Captain Truett.”
14
Captain Jasper Truett
I dreamed of them again. Dreamed a memory. My June, and sweet Amelia, just three years old. I was home for Christmas that year, miracle of miracles. June had cut her own tree and bedecked it with diamonds. Diamonds, right there in the shack she’d moved into as a young bride. Might as well have been a palace, the way she didn’t blink twice at the general cloud of bachelor life that marked the place. I’d done my best to sweep it up, wipe down walls, and do some other things that felt domestic to try and ready it for her, but I knew the truth and so did she: a two-room house in the Carolina woods was a far cry from the pristine pillared Charleston mansion she was accustomed to. God bless her, she hadn’t blinked twice. Had only brushed her palms together with gumption and gotten to work, transforming it from little better than a cave into a real home.
It was only for a time, I’d promised. My girls deserved better, and they’d get it. This was just for a time. Which turned into a time, times, and half a time, as the Good Book would say. Much too long. But what did June do? Complain?
No. She disassembled a necklace and strung her Charleston diamonds on our Christmas tree. Sold a few of them, too, to afford the bright brass compass she’d wrapped in a scrap of dishcloth and tied like all the treasure in the world, leaving it beneath the tree for me. “To find your way home to us,” she said when I opened it. “I checked the globe: north-by-northwest, from you to us. Panama to North Carolina. North-by-Northwest. Simple as that, and you’ll find us.” She smiled, the sort of smile that’d stop a man in his tracks and take his breath, too.
In the dream I scooped up our small Amelia and it felt as real as when it happened, fifteen years ago. A newspaper with bold letters proclaiming the news from Kitty Hawk just days before: two brothers had lofted a flying machine into the air.
Men, flying.
“Look, Amelia,” I’d said, hoisting her onto my knee and pointing to the sketch in the paper. She mimicked my gesture, tapping her little finger on the paper.
“Bird,” she said, beaming at me with her proud pronunciation of the word.
I laughed and it was so full it ricocheted on my insides, on out into the world.
“Right,” I said, leaning down until her tiny ear brushed my lips. “Like a bird,” I whispered, then spoke low, waiting to see what she’d do. To Amelia, all the world was magic. “But this machine flies people into the sky. They call it a flyer.”
She tilted her head, eyes wide and mouth agape.
“Would you like to fly?” I asked her.
“I can’t fly,” she said, smile dimpling into her plump pink cheeks and shaking her head so fiercely her curls veiled her face.
“Are you sure?” I picked her up, loving the feel of her feet kicking in excitement. “One . . .” I swung her. “Two . . .” I swung her higher in my arms, scooped around her to keep her safe and let her fly, all at once. “Three!” We launched, zooming around the tiny room as June clapped from the stove and Amelia’s laughter pealed out, lighting our universe. I flew her around to the candles in the room, letting her blow them out and laughing when she declared she flew through the clouds as I flew her near the trails of smoke swirling above the extinguished luminaries.
That night as I tucked her in, sure from the way her head had grown heavy on my shoulder by the fire that sleep had long since claimed her, she fluttered her long lashes open and laid a hand on my cheek. Cupping it with trust and adoration I did not deserve.
“You fly back to us soon next time, Daddy,” she said. “Soon . . .” And her sleepy voice trailed off.
I woke to the sound of planes tearing the sky open above me and to the approaching forms of two men who were about to find their commanding officer sleeping.
My face was wet.
This was why I longed for sleep but rarely slept. I could visit the good years, there . . . but I could not hide the effects of it on my face. It was as if my body knew, before my mind did, that I would awake to every bit of it vanished. My bit of paradise—a stolen piece I’d never deserved—obliterated by my own stupidity thirteen years before. And my men did not need to stumble upon a commanding officer with blasted tears on his face.
Vaguely I became aware of a presence nearby. I cleared my throat and ignored my wet face, standing swiftly and surely. This was what my men would need to see. My hand slipped inside my jacket, feeling the warm old brass of the compass and retrieving it. I opened it and snapped it shut again, letting the swift, sure click proclaim my presence for them, too.
Two lumberjacks—Petticrew and that chaplain—stood before me in the uniforms of American soldiers and spouted the most preposterous excuse for abandonment I’d had the privilege to hear.
I’d seen it in the face of every soldier since we crossed over the ocean: disillusionment. They’d thought they were coming to be heroes, with visions from their boyhood of valiantly riding into battle. And what they’d found was a war of machines and a cloud of poison gas. Of darkness and hunger, explosions and commanding officers asking, ceaselessly, everything of them.
Some went mad. Some adjusted. And some—well, this was a first, I had to admit.
“A regular damsel in distress,” I said, dubiously.
I looked to the maps spread on the table made of crates, the yellow light swinging above us as an artillery shell hit nearby. I had no time for nonsense. I’d lost enough time sleeping when I should have been strategizing. Word had it the enemy was planning another attempt for Paris, and we’d need every last resource to outwit and outman them. The sooner I got these men back to the trenches and out of this space, the better. I needed a revelation, and fast. The maps were beginning to blur before my eyes. “You think you’re knights in shining armor?”
“No, sir.” This from Petticrew, who at least stood at attention, except for his hands, which were oddly behind his back instead of at his sides. He’d come a long way from the lost kid at Plattsburg. He’d been made for this. A fact that filled me with pride and dread.
“Well, one doesn’t wish to boast, of course, but more than a few people have told me I resemble Lancelot.” The Briton spoke. Every time he spoke I wondered how he ended up here, with us, and not a blight upon his own army.
“Lancelot.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Of King Arthur’s Court,” I said.
“The very same.” He stood taller.
“The one who betrayed his own king and friend in the worst of ways.”
Piccadilly the Briton stammered, floundering like a beached fish.
“What he means, sir,” piped up Petticrew, “is that we believe we can get the woman to safety, and quickly. The next village, perhaps.”
Piccadilly leaned in and spoke out of the side of his mouth to his friend. “But Jones said the family palace was in Paris.”
“A palace. In Paris. This gets better and better,” I said. “And at what point does the lady kiss a frog and turn him into royalty?”
Piccadilly laughed. “Well, now, no one is presuming, but I certainly wouldn’t be one to object if she—”
Petticrew cleared his throat. “He means we sound like we’re spouting stories.”
“That’s easy enough to fix, I’d say. Come with us.”
Suddenly the maps on the table before me did not seem so urgent.
“Do you mean to tell me,” I said through gritted teeth, “that you have brought a civilian—a woman—to the front?”
&n
bsp; “No, sir.” Petticrew. He didn’t mince words and stood up to own his actions—even if they were the most preposterous thing I’d encountered yet. “We didn’t bring her all the way. But we couldn’t leave her alone, with the enemy encroaching on her cottage.”
I considered, then nodded. It was unconventional. And yet it was why we were here: to protect the innocent. To turn the tide of this war, even if for one soul.
“Very well,” I said. “Take me.”
I hadn’t been above ground, out of that dark hovel of an officer’s quarters, in a week at least. It didn’t help that it was noon and the sun had chosen that moment to emerge from its own cloudy cave.
Petticrew slowed his pace in front of me, looking at the men in the trench ahead and then back at me, and I nearly collided with him.
“Onward, Petticrew.”
He looked to the side. “Yes, sir.” But he didn’t budge.
“Well, what is it?”
He did some kind of grim-lined smile, like he had to tell me something but didn’t want to. He lifted his cuff to his face and rubbed.
I spread my stance wider, wrinkling my forehead in question.
He tapped his cheek.
“Something wrong with your face, Petticrew?”
Eyes to the side, he looked like he didn’t know how to answer that. “I, uh . . .”
“Well? Spit it out, son.”
Flustered, he did. “Not my face, Captain.”
He let his meaning hang and pointed at the shard of a shaving mirror one of the privates had mounted in the mud.
Living in the ground left a man’s face good and dusty. And if a good and dusty face went and cried like a baby in its sleep . . . my face was as mapped and dry-rivered as the papers I went cross-eyed studying every day.
I took my palm to my face and rubbed it good, trying not to think on how Petticrew and Piccadilly had seen it and not said a word. It was in character for Petticrew . . . and I admit, loathfully, that my respect for the buffoon-chaplain went up a few notches.
Petticrew had walked on, good man. Pulling myself up, clearing my throat, I followed. Refusing the rapid-fire blinking that wished to clear my vision, I followed the two some distance to the edge of the woods and into its boundary.
There, I found the blithering journalist, Hank Jones, pacing.
I seethed.
“You brought a civilian from her home, to the front, and left her with the man who will plaster the entire United States with the tale?” My career in the military was over. There would be such outcry over this.
Maybe it was just as well. What had all my dedication won me, after all? Medals, honors, more prestigious missions—but it had robbed me of more.
“He’s not so bad,” Petticrew said, measuring his words. “I don’t think he plans to write any of this.”
“You ‘don’t think,’” I said. “Precisely.”
Jones froze when he saw us, looking to his left furtively, where indeed stood a woman among a stand of trees. She had her palms to them and was looking up into their waving branches, watching them as intently as my boys in the watchtowers trained their eyes on low-flying planes.
“Amelia.”
The low-toned word was out before I knew it. How many times had I pictured her, what she would look like now . . . and now here was the living, breathing picture of what I had so long envisioned my daughter to be like.
Same dark hair. Same blue-as-sky eyes. My thumb went to the small indentation where the compass latch lay and pressed it. Click. It opened, along with a crack somewhere inside of me.
“Sir?”
Petticrew’s voice inserted itself into the flash of memory. I saw my girl, slipping into the Carolina woods, long curls flying and laughter trailing like the robe of a queen. I saw her mother run after her, reaching back to grasp my hand, as she had a thousand times. And I saw that same hand let go, finger by finger, when I left again. Felt Amelia’s little-girl lips press against my cheek to say good-bye. Laughing, still.
“Sir?”
I had half a mind to slug the man, snatching me out of the memory. But the images vanished like vapor, and before me stood the young woman.
Not Amelia, I told myself, in no uncertain terms. Amelia was gone. This girl before me, she had a faraway look, as if a spark had gone out somewhere inside. Amelia never appeared that way . . . but I knew too well how that felt.
“You said something, sir?”
I cleared my throat. “How long will you be gone?”
Petticrew’s face registered confusion.
“If you go. When you go.” I barked, trying to regain my composure. “When you take her. How long before you return.”
“I—I don’t know, sir. The next village is a few days from here, I think.”
Days. That wasn’t good. But what could I do? Send her off alone into a war-torn land that would eat her alive?
Not a chance.
Though the way she scanned the front, the way it all registered on her features into a strange mix of compassion and quick comprehension, I wouldn’t be surprised if she showed us all up and survived that journey with more savvy than any of us.
My mind kicked into gear, working the pieces of this puzzle just like the maps back in the trenches.
I paced. Drilled the men for answers—where is she from? The woods. Before that? Nowhere, they thought. As far as they could tell, she’d lived there always. Her family before that . . . in Paris. Probably. Where would she go? An old family estate, perhaps? They didn’t sound convinced and therefore weren’t very convincing.
I wanted to send them. To get the girl to safety. Return this fabled personage to her inheritance, apparently. If we could not give France complete victory now—or perhaps ever—then perhaps this was something we could do.
I’d get upbraided from headquarters, if they were wrong. Raked over the coals and torn to bits, sending perfectly battle-able bodies on a wild-goose chase.
I said as much.
Matthew Petticrew didn’t budge but didn’t speak, either. He appeared to be scouring the scene beyond us for further argument. I was surprised the trees didn’t burn down right then and there under the intensity of his gaze. Their leaves shivered—perhaps in relief—as that same gaze shifted to the reporter.
In a stride, Petticrew thrust his hand out. The two seemed to converse in a silent tug-o’-war staring match, and then the reporter placed a book in Petticrew’s waiting hand.
Petticrew strode over to me and held it out until I took it, reluctantly. Something was afoot here that I would doubtless regret.
And all the while the Amelia look-alike was watching, her presence cinching my lungs, scrambling my thoughts and tossing them back so many years.
“What’s this,” I said, refusing to open the book.
Petticrew looked at the reporter, then tipped his head at the book. Pleading.
“If I may, sir . . .” the reporter said. He approached, glancing at my hand, which iron-gripped the open compass.
No, you may not, I wanted to say. His words were trouble. Always. I’d seen it in the paper and had little use for more of them. “Speak on,” I said anyway. It’d buy me time to think.
He launched into a story from forty-some-odd years ago. His limbs came to life, hands gesturing. Even the girl watched him warily now, her eyes fixed on him in keen study.
She caught me watching her and averted her gaze back to the trees, attempting to look clueless.
I wanted to laugh. Amelia had done that when I’d caught her as a tot with a chubby finger in the cherry pie and she’d looked horrified at her hand, as if it had acted of its own accord.
“And then there are her grandfather’s notes, sir.” Jones motioned to the book again. “Schematics and strategy—it looks like he took the whole Prussian invasion and dissected it in the years that followed. It reads like a guide for how to prevent such an invasion again. It’s . . . I’m no military expert, sir, but for what it’s worth, I believe this is one for the h
istory books.”
I stopped pacing. I opened the book, slowly. “History books,” I said. Forget history books. If this was what Jones said it was . . . this could be the making of history right now, right in this moment. If Germany was intent on attempting invasion again—I flipped through the pages. Scanning the diagrams, the notes. Looking closer. Scanning again.
The reporter was right. And though I hated to own it, he was maybe not as useless as I’d judged him. Maybe.
In truth . . . this was pure genius.
My thumb tapped the glass of the compass. The journalist leaned in, peering at it and narrowing his eyes.
“If I may, sir, I could even show you how our present position aligns with potential strategic positions for . . .” he rambled on, gesturing at the compass.
“It doesn’t work,” I said, hammering a nail into the coffin of that idea fast.
He looked puzzled. “The position?”
“The compass. No need to show me.”
“It’s broken?” Hank Jones said, leaning forward, viewing it through his spectacles.
“Yes. Long since.” And if a man like me ever even had a heart . . . that broke the same day.
“I might be able to fix it, if you don’t mind me taking a look.”
“There’s none who can fix this, son.” I snapped it closed, stuffed it back inside my jacket. By the place a heart would’ve beat.
“I just mean if you’ll let me try . . . I’m not an expert, sir, but I might get it to where it regains some of its function.”
“It functions just fine,” I muttered. Broke it might be, but it still did its job. It reminded me.
I pulled in a breath. “Clock’s ticking,” I said, indicating I recognized that time was imperative in this scheme of theirs. And redirecting the journalist’s thoughts, I hoped.
The-girl-who-was-not-Amelia had to get out of here. Far, far, far from me . . . from those memories. They’d bind me tight and render me useless if I didn’t take care.
