by Amanda Dykes
“Oui! How are you, Aline?”
A string of exclamations followed as she left the window abruptly. I smiled, knowing she had not abandoned me. She was only drawing away in order to draw nearer. It was her way.
True to that way, she came bustling through her shop, out into the night where a bell rang when she opened the door. A blanket of words enveloped me right along with her generous embrace.
“Mireilles!” she said, bracing my shoulders and holding me at arm’s length to assess me. “You are a twig! Come. We will get you fed.”
I was certainly no twig, though my face had looked wan and gaunt in that rippling reflection. She ushered me into the shop, lighting a candle at one of the two little round tables. “It is not what it should be,” she said, reappearing from behind the counter and sliding a plate in front of me.
“Not what it should be? Aline! This is the feast of a king. I have not dined so well since . . .” I shook my head, uncertain. We had run out of wheat a month ago. The closest thing I had had to this was the boiled potato cooked up by the American men yesterday. A kind gesture to be sure, but in my grief, I had hardly tasted a thing.
“This is so generous,” I said.
“Nonsense. It is three days old. Three! It would be bad enough if it was a day old. Never underestimate the power of fresh bread, mon papillon.”
My hand froze halfway to my mouth. I had not been called so for three years. Not since Papa left.
Her hand reached over. I thought she meant to grasp mine, to squeeze it in comfort the way I imagined a mother or grandmother would. But instead she nudged it up to my mouth. “Eat!” she said. “I will not have you melt into nothing before my eyes.”
I ate. Half of me feeling guilty that I was partaking and the soldiers were not. But I would rectify that. I had a little coin. I could buy them a loaf, as thanks for seeing me safely here, and bid them adieu.
A twinge of sadness surprised me, and it was the serious soldier’s silent, sad eyes that were at the root of it. I took a bite and chewed slowly. Perhaps I should go to Paris with them, after all.
A pain in my belly told me otherwise. Where had such a thought come from? There was nothing for me there. No, this was best.
“Aline,” I said. “How are you?” I repeated the question. I needed to know before I could ask what I meant to of her. I had always thought of her as a sort of godmother, like the cinder girl in the storybook. And she had always had a sort of magic about her, though it took the form of flour instead of fairy dust. Even so, I did not know how to ask if I might stay, when I had nothing to offer but my own two hands and whatever work they might give.
“I am well, mon chérie. I am well. These are trying times, no? But as you see, the bread must be baked, and that is a gift.”
“And the flowers must be planted, I see. Your boxes look beautiful.” They were dripping with sweet white blossoms, and the warmth of the setting sun nudged their honey scent inside the windows she had cracked open.
I took another bite, willing the crunch of the crust to last. Picking up each last crumb from the cracked plate with my fingertip, savoring them as they melted away in my mouth.
“Just so,” she said. “The sun does not cease to shine just because there is a war. And neither do bellies stop growling at supper. So, we plant our seeds, and we bake our bread, and there is life in these things. It is good. Good to have something to set our hands to. Which reminds me, it is time for me to set the dough to rise for the morning baking. Come! You remember how? Of course you do. Eat and then come. We will talk as we work. You will tell me of your Grand-père. How is he?”
I grasped my dish and followed her into the kitchen. I forced myself to tell her of Grand-père.
She stopped her bustling and turned her large brown eyes on me, cupping my face with her weathered hands. Hands that trembled. How had I not noticed before?
She spoke no words of comfort. Perhaps she understood there were no words. Perhaps, like us all, she had run out of words for the never-ending loss of the war. She only held me, and beheld me, for a very long time.
And then she handed me a bowl. “You stir,” she said. She pulled down a sack from a shelf and I marveled at her strength. She had aged quickly in this war, as so many had. Her hair snow white and that hand trembling every moment. But she was strong, lifting that bag down.
Only when she set it in front of me did I see that it had perhaps not taken so much strength. It was nearly empty. “Shall I get another?” I said, gesturing to the back, where she kept her stores of flour sacks.
“No need,” she said. “Or rather, no use. There is not another. But we will make do with what we have, and it will be good.”
“The grain,” I said. It was what was harvested here, in the fields beyond the village. Surely that was what the women at the fountain had been working on even today. “Shall I fetch you more from the mill?”
She laughed. “Only if you can beat the soldiers to it,” she said. “They take it for the men at the front. They leave some, and we get by. It is just . . .” she fluttered her hand, searching for an explanation. “The way of things, now. The soldiers need to eat. They protect us.”
I winced. “Soldiers.” I thought of the three who would soon be looking for me. How long had I been gone? Time slowed here, and I had lost all sense of it. I would have to come to my point soon, so that I could release them of their sworn duty.
“Yes. But we get wheat from time to time and when we do—” she twirled her hand over the small room—“I bake! And the villagers come. They have been so good to old Aline. Monsieur Terret gave me his shoelaces for a loaf last week. See?” She pointed at the windows. “I am now able to draw my curtains up and keep them there by tying them with the laces. Do not worry, I washed them four times! And Mademoiselle Brodeur traded me a promised sack of wool from her sheep, when next she is able to shear them. So I shall be warm by and by, you see.”
Her joyful tone, though very true, began to open my eyes. Madame Aline, my old friend, was on hard times.
“And . . . do you need help here, in the bakery?” I asked, perhaps too hopeful.
“I? Not I. But when I do, I call upon my boarder.”
“You have a boarder?” My voice sounded small.
“Oui. The daughter of the tailor, you recall him. He is gone, now, I am sad to say.”
“To the front?”
She hesitated. “Oui . . . and since, gone on to heaven.”
The words pummeled the breath from me. A vision of my own father, of the lantern hung and lit for him, unanswered. There was hollow sorrow inside of me when I thought of him and could not—would not—put words to the creeping, growing sense of knowing that visited me often.
I knew, in some part, what it was to lose a father. And the girl, the tailor’s daughter—she was much younger than I. A child, still. Aline had taken her in . . . her “boarder.” Able to pay less than shoelaces and sacks of wool. And consuming far more.
Aline did not need another mouth to feed, even if I could somehow help.
My eyes were opened and my heart was crushed—for Aline, for the empty grain sack, for the girl with no home who was perhaps even now upstairs. And yes, perhaps selfishly, I was crushed for myself, too. For having nowhere to go, for the unseen things I carried with me and did not know what to do with.
“What is your question, mon chérie?” she asked me, resting from her kneading of the meager loaf.
“I—” I looked around, searching for something. I did have one thing I could still ask, though I hated to take anything from her. “I am with three soldiers,” I said. “They . . . are hungry. Can I buy a loaf from you?”
“Nonsense!” Her hands flew up, scattering flour over her already-white hair. “You will not pay. Take this. Take it and be well,” she said, thrusting a broken half-loaf into my arms. “And you will come and see old Aline again very soon, yes? From that cottage of yours?”
I nodded, wishing it might be so. Not telling her th
at my home was likely occupied, even now, by an enemy who would take everything they could from our land. Who had already taken so much.
“Go. Take that to your soldiers, and return. You will sleep here tonight. I will make you a pallet, like when you were a tiny thing.”
And so I did. I took a meager broken loaf to three grown men who approached the fountain in the dark. I motioned to where I would stay and managed to help George understand the word dormer. They made camp beneath a tree at the end of Aline’s road. And in the safety of the boulangerie, in the quiet of the dark with tiny crickets singing through the cracked window—a miniature symphony with courage enough to play in this war—I lay upon a blanket on the floor and wept silently.
Tomorrow, I would go onward toward Paris. How, I did not know. I lay still in the dark, pain settled in my bones. My feet, my back . . . my heart. I was stuck. I could not turn back. I knew not what lie ahead. And as the night stretched on into darkness, my future unfurled into an aching dark question mark, too.
16
Matthew
Again, sleep did not come. I did not want it to. I thought of the journey ahead, of the haunted ways of the girl Mireilles. I thought of her home, her sudden loss of so much. And I remembered keenly what it felt like to have a home ripped out from under you.
I closed my eyes to rest them. They ached from the constant surveying of our surroundings. I saw the way Mireilles walked—not just on our journey, but her way of being. Strong, savvy, and yet I caught a flash of fear in her eyes every now and then. She, like me, was ever vigilant. Every sense alert, planning for any possibility.
I prayed she would rest well tonight. I prayed I wouldn’t fall asleep—and that somehow I would rise with my senses refreshed. As if I’d slept a thousand nights. Mr. Haggerty used to tell me tales whenever I helped him as a boy in Maplehurst’s many gardens. One of them was of a widow who had nothing, but whose supply of oil to make bread for her and her child never ran out, no matter how many loaves she baked. “You remember that, Mr. Matthew. The God who’ll do that will watch out for you just as well, mark my words. Nothing too hard or far for Him to do.” I never realized, back then, that he was infusing my soul with truth I’d need one day. That he preached to me there in the garden mud just as sure as if he’d worn a clergyman’s collar and I’d sat in a pristine pew.
Rest my body and keep me from sleep, I prayed.
Pulling Chester’s artillery shell from my haversack and my knife from my jacket pocket, I turned my thoughts to Mireilles and set to carving. She was a curiosity, according to Henry and his notes. I didn’t like it, the way he jotted things down, watching her through his glasses. Always with respect, but always with that look on his face as if she were a puzzle and he had to solve her.
Her song wound through my memory. Her voice so pure, high notes clear and minor notes embodied with care, stepping into a swirl that reached into my chest and wrapped itself around the beating organ inside. From there it traversed my veins, on out to my fingertips and into the etching I now set my hand to.
I thought of her with her matches this morning. She’d been so deep in thought she didn’t realize, I think, that her mouth moved around silent words as she counted them like her last coin: un, deux, trois, quatre . . .
And then she’d sacrificed one. Her box and tray were worn next to nothing. Enough print remained that I could barely make out the type upon it: Bessette Match Factory, Purveyors of Pure Light. London. A different design than those of the same name I’d seen soldiers light their cigarettes with. Same company, but this box from another time.
My fingers stilled. I knew, then, what to do with the artillery shell.
The song wove through me again. My voice tried to match it, and I quickly decided I should stick to carving rather than trying to hum. Then again, my pitiful off-key attempt might do a good deal to keep the enemy far from us.
The hours passed quickly, with my hands pinpricking a design and cutting metal, bending it into shape, gentling sharp edges upon unsuspecting rocks. My injured hand forgot its ache a bit, and forgot its tremor entirely, as if this new movement of bone and muscle were easing it—even if only centimeter by painstaking centimeter—away from its place of constant pain.
The shell was far from finished, but it began to take shape. I buried the excess scraps of metal in the soil as dawn broke and two foreign sounds greeted me: birdsong and kitchen clatter. I elbowed the others awake—Hank blinking bleary eyes and George mumbling off-key notes of ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay as he fumbled into consciousness. We straightened ourselves up as best we could, draping mess kits and canteens about us and approaching the bakery, the source of the kitchen clatter and—what magic was this?—the sweet smell of cinnamon.
We were swept into a universe where words meant little, but growling stomachs and the miracle of steaming pastries on plates set before us bridged any language obstacle. Blessed silence as my comrades and I inhaled, followed by a robust melody of French declarations as an older woman thrust other goodness in front of us: plums, which she packed into our sacks and patted as if to secure them there. She whisked away our canteens and disappeared, bringing them back heavy and cold. And finally, she approached very slowly, holding what appeared to be an old paper to her heart before pulling it slowly from herself and reverently placing it before us on the table.
A map.
Hand-drawn.
Mireilles looked concerned, shaking her head and giving it back to the woman, speaking something about l’amour. Even I knew what that meant: love.
The older woman, Aline, nodded, and slid it back toward us. I didn’t know what it all meant. Perhaps the woman’s true love—a husband lost, maybe—had drawn it.
“She wants us to take it,” George said around a mouthful of pastry. I kicked him under the table, and he gulped the rest of his bite down. “She says it’s the best way to Paris.”
We had a map from Captain Truett. But well did we understand the inestimable value of local knowledge. They knew highways and byways, shortcuts and perils, far more than any foreign distant maps could attempt to. This was their home.
“Thank you,” I said earnestly and hoped she understood how much I meant it.
She nodded. And with a hand to Mireilles’s shoulder and tears in her eyes, she uttered three English words, painstakingly: “Go . . . with . . . God.”
“What did she mean?” George said an hour later, when we had left the village behind us and were well on our way. “Go with God.”
“You’re the divinity school graduate,” Hank said. “You tell us.” We were spaced out, the three of us. Henry taking the lead with Madame Aline’s map in hand. George, following strides behind. Then me, and Mireilles, always a few steps behind. When I slowed, she slowed. When I quickened, so did she. Where we could not converse, our footprints did the talking, tracking one another without missing a beat. Always with two yards at least in between us, by her design.
She was paying attention every second, always on heightened alert. Perhaps she was not so different from us soldiers, after all. I knew the toll that took on a mind, on a body, and worried for her.
“Heaven if I know,” George answered Hank and grinned. “See that? I did learn something in divinity school. One does not talk about the nether regions of the universe flippantly.”
I rolled my eyes. “I think that applies to the lofty regions, too.”
George plowed forward, kicking a pebble. “‘Go with God,’ the lady said. What does that mean? How does a mere man go with the supreme being of the universe? Is He not outside of time and place?”
“Careful,” I said. “You sound like a true theologian, Chaplain George.”
“See here, I’m only trying to get a handle on the things we chaplains are meant to say, and what they’re meant to mean, and all of that. I thought I was in divinity school to work one day each week and avoid the war. It seems I was wrong. So? What say you?”
I inhaled, thinking of our own country minister back in Gre
enfield Springs. How he took his sermons on the footpaths and into simple conversations with country children like me and Celia, or old men and women, or whomever he happened upon. By listening, first. Then by speaking, usually in truths he seemed to know from living them and dwelling in them, not solely philosophizing about them.
“I think it means to walk as if He is right there with us.”
George looked puzzled. “The supreme being who is outside of time and place, right there with us.”
I nodded.
“Right here in a turnip field,” George reiterated, incredulous. “Or—” he sniffed the air—“an onion field, more’s the pity?”
“Yes.” It was beautifully preposterous, the truth of it. Beside me, Mireilles had slowed her walk and seemed to be concentrating hard on each step. I slowed to match, trying to respect the space she had placed between us.
“You mean to say that though a war wages and cathedrals abound, He is here in the dust?” George kicked up a cloud for emphasis.
I didn’t answer at first. I was watching Mireilles, trying to discern what thought so occupied her. She looked . . . pained.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “In every place.” Especially the dust.
Mireilles stumbled, steadied herself on a post at the wayside. I reached out to brace her elbow, and she recoiled quicker than I knew possible. She turned her eyes up at me, and they flashed first a fearsome warning and then softened to regret. Frozen in place, I gestured to show I meant to help her.
George rambled on, speaking in half-sermons, half-blasphemies, none the wiser that he had no congregation. To his credit, when he realized something was amiss, his concern appeared genuine.
“The angel,” he said in a loud hiss of a whisper. “Is she alright?” He knelt before her. I didn’t know whether to roll my eyes at his dramatics or envy his open outpouring and the way it seemed to touch her—for there, in the midst of whatever distress she was enduring, the corner of her mouth turned up.
And soon, so did she. Straightening her whole being, brushed off her dress and apron. She even took care to rather—I don’t know the word, maybe fluff?—her skirts around her, away from herself, and I thought again how out of place her clothing seemed. The fashion of ballrooms some years ago, though decidedly worn.
