by Amanda Dykes
The words stopped. Her head tucked beneath my chin, her hair smelling of lavender and soot. Her shoulders trembled as if the strength she wore like a cloak had finally dropped away, snatched and singed by a flaming zeppelin. It was as if a dam broke within her, and all the grief, betrayal, heartache, loss—the gentle, lilting, somber way she held memories of her grandfather, her father, her forest home, and the budding sense of wonder for the child within her—moved like currents and set her to shaking. She stood upon an invisible crossroads.
And I held her.
This is it, I thought. This was the place—this moment, this nameless field in the middle of France where I didn’t know which way was up—this was why I had come. What I had been born for. Who I had been born for.
I’d combed racetracks and picked Harvard horse hooves and saw Plattsburg sunrises and tromped into another world in a forest far away . . . all for Mireilles.
Please. I prayed. A plea with a thousand endings. Please let me stay, God.
It seemed a forward prayer. And to own the truth, I didn’t quite know all that I meant by it. Let me live? Let me be a part of her life? All I knew was that those currents, as they churned, showed me the tangle of her battle. I yearned, with a pounding of my pulse and a conviction of my being, to stand in that battle. To fight alongside her. For her. With her.
We stilled, the grass reaching up tall around us, sky gentling above where only a short time before, it had been torn in two by fire itself. From where we stood, we could see that in Épermay, smoke had settled and all was quiet. We could see the road in the other direction, winding around a stand of trees, off toward a river in the far distance. Beyond, though we could not yet see it, awaited Paris.
And in between . . . there was us. Frozen in time, right there in the soft grass.
She looked at me, searching. She did not speak for a long while. As if she, like me, feared that words might shatter the elusive peace of this moment. She pulled in a deep breath, her exhale shuddering a release of so very much.
Heaven help me, I ached for her in the depths of my soul. It was more than wanting to kiss her. More than a lonely soldier enjoying the gentle presence of a woman. It was—it was everything. Encompassing. Asking to be in her world. A world so broken, so much taken from her. A yearning to somehow be part of the un-breaking. Or to sit amid the rubble with her, to feel her lean against me. To give something of myself—my own broken, incomplete, imperfect self—to her.
In the distance, the sound of glasses clinking together, toasting beneath the evening sky, sounded. A gathering of souls, knit together to launch a husband and wife off into their life together.
Unbidden, the vision flashed before me: Mira, a bride. Mira, happy. It was so clear a vision, it would be engraved upon me for the rest of time. There was no coming back from this place. From her.
Evening wind lifted her hair, blew it back from her face. And wouldn’t that be her way? To have the wind for a veil, the grass for a gown. Beholding her here, so slight in stature and too lovely for this world, I wondered if she would blow away, too. Just be scooped up in the air and carried away somewhere good, somewhere with sun and silence, no curtain of shrapnel falling always, everywhere.
That wind came under and around me, too.
We did not have that land of sun and silence, nor absence of shrapnel.
But she was here.
And I was here.
Her shoulders released from a locked hold into something easy. Like she was recalling, after a long while without air, how to breathe again.
She did. She breathed in the wind. My arm brushed hers. She didn’t stiffen or move away, as she so often had on our journey. I wanted to hold her. But it would be too much, I knew. And I—who was I, after all? To wish myself upon this wind-driven creature? My own boyishness burned itself into my lungs. I had never so much as danced with a girl.
Mira. I thought, and realized I spoke it, too. Her eyes were worlds, searching mine.
My free hand lifted to her face, knuckles brushing a dark curl from her cheek. Ever so slightly, she leaned into me, my palm opening to cradle her.
So soft, she was. She, whose life had been chiseled by the elements and framed by tragedy. Whose home had been ravaged—whose very self, too. Whose life was also changed by the trenches, the dying of men, the destroying of life.
I cannot account for it now. Why I leaned in, when all logic told me not to. Why she, too, drew in as if made to fit there. How my lips met her dark hair, first, and then her forehead. Gently, for she was treasure. Meeting her, discovering her, my chest pounding. How warm she was, how true. And how I lingered there, and with a wave of longing—to protect, to be hers, to be known by her—I met her lips. Soft, and sweet, and lingering. So like her song in the night. So pure it cut through agony and dared me to hope again.
She leaned into me, head upon my shoulder, her curls against my face.
I didn’t know how long we stood there. I knew her train was to have left at midday, and the sky above us was slipping into corals and reds to rival the poppies at our feet, as if it, too, had caught the embers of the zeppelin.
She finally pulled back, and we stood long in the silence. “Matthew Petticrew,” she said at last. “May I stay with you?” She pulled back and paused. “May I go on with you and the others?”
Yes.
Yes.
I had to get the word out, an intensity that was gathering the longer it was trapped. I had to keep her from blowing away.
I took a deep breath. Cupped the gentle curve of her face in my hand. And spoke it as simply, as purely as I could.
“Yes.”
33
Henry
YOUR BOYS, AMERICA!
October 4, 1918
By a humble observer
What if I told you, America, that at the crossroads of a nondescript corner in the middle of France, you would see a singular story unfold? What if I told you of a village descended on by a flaming zeppelin? What if I told you of me, emerging from the dark recesses of the little library there, blinking in the blinding light of two suns: one blazing from a blue sky a million miles away, and one in the shape of a long airship, crashing into the train station and the street before me?
Well, I will. I will tell you all of that, and I’ll tell you how your boys, America, poured from every corner and cranny of that town. Some on leave, some in training, some in transit—all of them jumping in to the conflagration. Squelching fires, capturing enemy soldiers, and taking a catastrophe in hand in order to bring peace. They, shoulder to shoulder with the brave people of the village and vineyards, did a great work today.
I will tell you one more tale, too. When all was extinguished and everything put to rights but for the metal skeletal corpse of the burned-out airship—which, even as I write this, perches upon the train platform it tried to consume—I witnessed two further astounding incidents.
One was a previously floundering fellow who singlehandedly altered the course of that ship and the course of that day. He rose up, the good man, and found courage he hadn’t known he was in possession of. And with it, he walked into a village given over to chaos. That soul found that his uncanny way of lifting a scenario with jovial words and an emerging honesty that seemed to astound even himself was apparently, astoundingly, made for just such a situation. Characteristics that stuck out like odd limbs on a person bumbling through the corridors of life, until he found that they weren’t odd limbs at all, but rather the carefully crafted shape of himself, molded to fit like a puzzle piece into this moment. His purpose. He poured himself out: helping children up, stopping to ask after women searching frantically and men driving on in blind and dumbfounded purpose.
He begs the question of me, and perhaps of each of us—what if what we believe to be our shortcomings, our oddities, are actually purposeful quirks that suit us for the moments we were made for?
He accompanied me, after that long day, out of the village. It was there, at a crossroads, that we saw
a sight we will never unsee. A soldier, one of yours. Standing beside a woman whose entire universe has been upturned by this war. It was a simple image, but beneath it is the truth of a man who crossed the world to find her, and enter into her brokenness, and ask to carry her to safety.
Just one person, giving everything he has for another.
It’s why we joined this war, America.
And it’s a story that reaches far, far into each one of us.
“What’s that?” George Piccadilly snatched the paper out of my hands as we made camp near the crossroads, in the trees.
I yanked it back to safety. “Nothing that concerns you.”
And maybe nothing that concerned the Washington World, either. But at least I could try. The thought of Celia Petticrew telling me to let Henry Mueller have a chance had urged my pencil to keep scratching out words. There were stories worth hearing, and in order for them to be heard, they had to be told.
I needed to try.
But I didn’t have to let George know what I’d written about him. It’d send him flying higher than the zeppelin he’d brought down. Today had changed him, and was changing him still. He was still his knuckleheaded self, but all that nonsense was tempered by something more.
“Where d’you suppose they’ve gone off to?” he asked, gesturing up the small hill where we’d spotted Mireilles and Matthew. “Gone to fetch some beef broth and soufflé, do you suppose?”
Perhaps he hadn’t changed so much after all. I dug in my haversack and shoved a carrot at him.
“Mmmm. So much better than soufflé,” he said and snapped off a big bite of the carrot, chomping with an incorrigible grimace and prodigious volume.
It was dark before the two pilgrims returned, something different about them. Like a spell woven thick but invisible, though neither would speak of it. We all sat around a small fire, shielded enough that it would not be easily spotted from the road, and talked long about the events of the day. The sky had fallen, quite literally, and we’d lived to tell. All of us were scratched and banged up, plenty of scars to bear tales. But all of us oddly light, as we began to realize we had survived something so horrific.
The next two days carried us on in like manner, following the course of the Marne River. It would take us nearly to Paris, and soon. The farther we got on our journey, the less we talked, each of us registering that this brotherhood—and sisterhood—had an end in sight. Mireilles, especially, grew quieter with every step. And so did Matthew, who watched her—watched all of us, really—with growing concern. I wondered if he was thinking as I was: that the end of it would lead us right back to the beginning . . . where it might end us for good.
34
Mira
I remember well the tale of the girl and the road. How the sun spilled over the pages of Grand-père’s book as I would lay across the floor and run my thumb back and forth over its planks, smoothed by our footsteps over the years at home, and wonder when my feet would carry me out into the wide world.
And now here I stood, the road stretching far behind me. I had taken a journey. I had, I suppose, sought treasure, like the girl in the pages. And now, rising before us in the distance, were the city walls of Paris. My treasure was not of coin or gem. It was that of life.
I felt the little one quicken inside of me and wondered if she or he could also hear the raging river before us. It was all that stood between me and our destination now. The only obstacle left for us to cross.
I turned around, forsaking the roar of the river, to hear the men. They stood scratching their heads, pointing at different places in the river, and studying Henry’s map. Trying to find the best way to cross the waters of the Marne.
I smiled. The soldier who could outwit an entire clutch of Germans, Matthew “Catch-a-Crew” Petticrew, as the others had told me. The journalist who held the heart of a nation but was too bashful in person to speak to a girl. And the awkward, buoyant chaplain who had traveled all this way and stumbled upon his own faith during the journey. They were good men, the three of them. And they had come a long way from the bickering trio they had been when we began. As I watched them study the river and join their ideas together to build a bridge of ideas where the true one had been washed out . . . I thought that they were like friends, but so much more. They were brothers.
Fondness for them each warmed me and set my heart to swelling. They felt like brothers to me, too.
Matthew caught my eye and let his gaze linger. Reading me, as he did. My heart quickened, too. Perhaps . . . perhaps he was like something more than a brother.
Brother, friend, or anything more, it was for this reason I knew I had to set these three companions of mine free. It had come upon me slowly the past two days, this realization. I had taken them for too long . . . and taken more of Matthew Petticrew than I ever should have. I had made it harder for him. I knew it to be so, and it twisted something inside of me and made it difficult to breathe.
I approached them, picking up my mud-drenched hem. “It is alright,” I said, clutching the map and pressing it gently toward Henry. “I will go on from here alone.” I infused a lightness and assuredness into my voice, though I did not feel such. I felt only sorrow and trepidation.
Henry looked puzzled, pinching the side of his spectacles and bringing them closer to his eyes. George looked quite as if he did not catch my meaning, grinning his dimpled grin. And Matthew . . . Matthew was stricken.
“It is alright,” I repeated. “The Marne, she is much like the Meuse.” I named the river that snaked past and within the Argonne. “I am watching her currents; I can see where to cross.” I narrowed my eyes, forcing myself to look away from Matthew and to gaze downstream, where the wide expanse grew wider and the currents spread out to a calmer pace. “There,” I said, shielding my eyes from the bright reflection of the sun. “I can cross, and then go on to the city, and I’ll be—” Home was the word that fit there, but it did not feel true. “I’ll be in the great Paris!” I opened my palms, showing all would be well, that the conclusion of the story was at hand.
I said nothing of how the thought of the city—of all the people, the buildings, the noises and smells, and a château I knew nothing of—made me ill inside.
They took turns protesting. We had come this far, they all said in their own ways. They would see it through.
Matthew’s words from the night at the billet, when he pulled the bits of earth from my open palm, rolled over me again. “I’ll see you home, Mira.”
I had known, then, that would never be our story. My story was already written. I ran my hands over my stomach to remind myself of such, and I started out toward the Marne. If I stopped for goodbyes, I would crumble.
But I should have known those stubborn boys would not go easily away. They followed me, protesting. George put himself between me and the river, swearing he would lie down and allow himself to be a bridge before he’d see me tread these waters alone.
I laughed gently. “But don’t you see?” I beheld each one, lifting my hand to their cheeks, one at a time. “That is just what you have done. You have been the bridge from past to future. All will be well.” My voice wavered, betraying me.
Henry dropped his gaze. He did not pull out his notebook. He—why, he lifted his hand quickly and swiped beneath his eye. Quiet Henry, who felt so much more than his printed words let on. “Continue to write,” I said to him, gripping his hand for a moment. “This is a hand that is changing the world. Do not give up, Henry Mueller.” He met my gaze, at my use of his full, true name. “Hank Jones will step aside—I feel it.”
George made a show of trying to lie down and be that bridge he’d promised. “Do not dare to lie in that mud, George Piccadilly,” I said. “Wherever you go, there are those who will need a voice of hope. You will not want your mouth to be caked over with mud from the Marne. You will need it to speak.” And I believed it. He had stumbled into faith in the unlikeliest of ways and told us it all had to do with a sheep he’d had a conversation wi
th just before the zeppelin took the skies. He said that if a donkey could speak in the Bible, surely a sheep could be “a divine instrument of change in a thickheaded chaplain’s heart. Miraculous creatures, in point of fact.”
And then there was Matthew.
My Matthew.
So much a part of me that when I opened my mouth to let the words come out . . . they would not come. He already had them, just as he already had all of me. Just as those words he’d spilled on the streets of the ruined village, before he’d known I understood a bit of it, had begun to stitch us together. Just as my story, spilled into his heart and held there, so securely, so tenderly, had caught me forever.
I only squeezed his hand. I could not, for all the world, have offered any words right enough to this man.
So I spoke the hardest ones I would ever speak to him. And the last.
“Good-bye, Matthew.”
I dared to look at him and knew in that instant I should not have. The depth of those dark blue eyes, his desperation to understand, to change my mind—it would be the end of me.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “For every moment.” Every moment had changed everything. Had changed me.
I tore my gaze from him and felt the beginning of the tearing in my heart, too. I stepped into the Marne.
35
Matthew
The waters rushed cold around me, but I hardly felt it. I followed Mira as the others watched on. I knew they were concerned for her. I knew that they knew, somehow, that I would be the one to go after her.
Even the river seemed to know it. The currents were shallow and gentle at first. Mira, remarkable Mira, did know how to read the waters. She was fast in traversing them. Too fast.
“Mira!” I said, tripping on a root or a rock halfway across the expanse, trying to catch her. She was far ahead of me, the distance growing swiftly. It hit me with a fierce blow that this could be it. I really could be losing her. She, stubborn, determined, strong soul that she was, could be across to the other bank in a matter of moments and disappear into the bustling city beyond before I could stop her.
