At the Edge of Summer (18 page)

He grit his teeth until the other poilu passed. “Or maybe
Joyeuse.
” Charlemagne's legendary sword. “Would I be stronger?”

With bent head, I went to retrieve his canteen.
You are,
I wanted to say to him.
Sometimes I think you're stronger than me.
But I passed it to him with a nudge to the shoulder. “The strongest person I ever knew was a girl. I don't doubt that she could attack any man who looked at her sideways.”

He looked wistful. “Clare?”

My smile slipped.

“And you?” Candlelight flickered on his face. “What would you carve?”

“Summer,” I simply said. The one summer when the world was perfect. When I seemed right on the edge of the future. The one summer before things began slowly crumbling beneath my feet. “I'd carve summer.”

A
t first the post office told me that there were no letters. We'd been gone from Laghouat for almost two years. Surely something came in that time. Surely Luc had written. Oily black clouds were rolling in across the city and I begged Grandfather to ask again. To plead.

Finally the postal clerk, an elderly Algerian who probably wanted nothing more than to go home early and take a nap, sighed and shuffled back to wherever they stored years' worth of uncollected mail. Grandfather patted me on the shoulder. “They'll be there.” I watched the minutes tick by on my watch, a splendid man's pocket watch bought from the junk market in Constantine that I wore on a chain around my neck. He patted me on the shoulder again. Outside, the sky rumbled. Grandfather began tapping his acacia walking stick. He didn't like to be wet. I shook my watch to be sure it was working.

Finally he shouldered his walking stick.
“Excusez moi!”
he called towards the back. “My good fellow!
Allô?
”

Date palms shuddered in the lift of wind.

The man finally came back, slowly, a small packet of letters in his hand. Not even enough for a canvas sack. “This is all we have. I spent much time looking.” My watch would agree, but the crumbs of sugar littering his drooping mustache gave him away.

He handed them to Grandfather, but I pounced and thumbed through the meager stack. A few from the University of Glasgow, where he used to lecture, two from Mrs. Pimms, our ancient housekeeper in Perthshire, a half-dozen from friends of his (“Ah, young Toshie wrote?” he cried, seizing on one), and, at the bottom of the stack, one for me from Luc. One. Nearly two years, and only one letter.

The rain started as we left the post office. I held my one letter against my chest and ducked my head against the weather. Was it a dismissal? A disappointment? A hopeful finger-crossing? As we slipped in through our door and shook off our hats, I looked at the postmark. It had been sent four months ago, the day the war began. Spattered with rain, the envelope had transferred its ink onto my blouse.

I waved a hand at my ink-stained chest. “I should go see about…”

“Go.” Too impatient to find a towel, Grandfather was drying his hair with a tablecloth. “I know you want to read your letter without an old man staring at you.”

I fetched him a cotton towel from my little improvised washstand and then shut myself in my room.

The letter inside wasn't long, scrawled on one side of a thin yellowed page numbered xii in the corner. Luc, the rule-follower, had defaced a book for me. I slid off my stained blouse and sat on the bed in my camisole to read it.

The script was smeared from the rain. It couldn't be from tears, not with solid, dependable Luc Crépet behind the pen, but his words trembled. He must have written it the very moment war was declared.
I don't have their courage,
he wrote.
I don't know how my tale will end.
I wanted to reach through the paper, through the four missing months, and take hold of him. I wanted to tell him that I would be fine, that he would be fine, that someday we'd both return to Mille Mots and sit beneath the chestnut tree. Even if it was a lie.
I can think of no better standard to carry into war than the memory of your face.

As if I could forget his. A day didn't go by in those two years that I didn't think of Luc, of the way he watched me with those owl-brown eyes, the way he always stood near me, close enough to touch, not close enough that I'd have to worry he would. He'd held my hand on four occasions; I could still remember the way my fingers felt in his.

I wrote to him. Of course I wrote to him. Piles of letters with our precious store of Alizarine ink and paper. I wrote about the seemingly endless camel rides, until my backside ached and my arms itched. The oxen with their curved horns that carried our boxes strapped to their humped backs. The pith helmet Grandfather bought me, like an inverted soup bowl. In it, I felt like a true adventurer. The round, grass-roofed huts where we stayed in each village. The dugout canoe we took down the Senegal River. The donkeys and goats and the one tame lion weaving in and out of the scattered buildings. The naked children standing in the mud at the river's edge. The carved wooden skull mask, traded from an old man along the river for a little sketch of France. The insects. Oh, God, the insects. The sudden fever, where, sweating on a bullock hide on the floor of a hut, I lost track of days. The letters that I planned to mail in one great stack when we reached Saint-Louis at the end of the river. The letters, all lost when one of our canoes overturned. I could only cling to Grandfather, soaked and still weak, watching them float away, one by one, in a trail of white squares.

When we reached Saint-Louis, we finally saw a newspaper. We heard what we hadn't in our meandering year and a half on the river, swatting away mosquitoes, sleeping in huts, and transcribing Berber. We heard that while we were gone, the world had gone to war. In a café, as French as any in Paris, we spread out newspapers and read while our bitter coffee grew cold. The newspapers were in French and out-of-date, so we read through weeks of news at once. Things growing tense in Paris, war declared, young boys marching from train stations in their uniforms of blue and red. Those first battles, in a rushed and bloody autumn—Tannenberg, the Marne, Arras, Ypres, the Aisne. So many other names, scattered across France and Belgium, that I cut a map from a newspaper and marked each and every one with a blot of ink.

Grandfather hung his head over the newspapers at that little café table in Saint-Louis. “Thanks to God that your father wasn't sent to this. Maud, she never could have borne keeping house by herself.”

The first he'd spoken of my parents in years. “Mother has borne being alone for enough years, hasn't she?”

He curled his tattooed hands around the coffee cup. “Not the being alone, but the managing. Though Maud would never admit it, your father, he was a steadying influence. Without him, the household would have crumbled.”

“But, without her, it did.” I leaned back in my chair and spread my fingers wide on the café table. “When she left, Father did, too. He retreated into himself.”

“Sometimes we need people without ever realizing it,” he said, with a bowed head.

I ran my finger over my map and sent up a quiet prayer.

So many blots were near to the unassuming peacefulness of Mille Mots that I wrote to Madame immediately, asking for news. I didn't ask after Luc, but I hoped she'd read it through my words. I didn't know where to write to him.

Though I wished it was more, to find even that one letter from Luc waiting in Laghouat was more than I expected. Only one to let me know that, at the start of the war, he was still safe. Only one to let me know that he hadn't forgotten me.

I tucked it in my camisole, close to my heart, and buttoned on a fresh blouse. Out in the lounge, Grandfather, draped in a loose cotton robe, sat on one of the low sofas, his own letters spread out.

“This is a blessed mess. All of it.” He ran a hand through his damp hair. He needed a trim. “Glandale says the classes are nearly empty. The school has sent all the boarders home. The German master—do you remember Grausch?—he was sacked. His replacement is teaching Flemish. Flemish!” He tossed aside a sheet of paper. “And Johns, his sons are joined up, all six of them. One lost already at Arras.”

I pushed aside pillows and dropped onto the squashy sofa. A mug of tea steamed quietly by the brass pot. “Luc wrote.”

He nodded. “And?”

I swallowed. “He's gone to war.” I shrugged. “What did I expect?”

“A chance to realize what was happening. A chance to know there was a war on before he said goodbye.”

I let my fingers trail over the scattered envelopes, strewn on the cushion between us. “You receive nothing but bad news, I receive a goodbye. All reminders of how the world changed while we were gone.”

“Ah, it's not all bad news.” He picked up an envelope. “I heard from Charles Rennie Mackintosh. You remember Toshie? Was a draftsman with your father at Honeyman and Keppie when they were apprentices.”

Mr. Mackintosh was an architect of note and a familiar visitor at our house, all of those times he wanted to escape Glasgow to bemoan the lack of appreciation for bold architecture. “You knew him, too?”

“Not well.” He traced the edge of the stamp. “I met him at your parents' wedding.”

I poured myself out a mug of tea. Mint. “Kind of him to write.”

“He's in Suffolk right now, but is putting together a little exhibit. With so many men gone, he thought to highlight the work of some of the women at the Glasgow School of Art.”

I brought the mug up to my face and inhaled the sharp steam. “Mother loved it there, didn't she?”

“Maud was a whirlwind when she was feeling creative. Yes, she loved it.”

“Then why did she leave school?”

“You know the answer to that. She met your father. She had you.”

“She was only there for a handful of years. Less than that. How much could she have learned?”

“How much could
you
learn from one summer and a few missives?” He slid Mr. Mackintosh's letter back into the envelope. “She produced plenty. And that's why young Mackintosh wrote. He asked for permission to exhibit a few of Maud's pieces.”

All of those times I'd watch Mother through the window, sitting in front of an empty easel. “Do any still exist?”

“They do.” He crushed the envelope in his fist. “Ah, but they're at Fairbridge.”

I pulled a pillow closer and tucked it up on my lap. “Grandfather, we've been away for a long time. At some point we need to stop wandering and return home.”

“Home?” He tossed the letter next to the teapot. “The world—”

“Is our home. I know.” I pressed my lips to the hot mug, took a scalding sip. “I don't want to return to Fairbridge any more than you do.”

He exhaled. “I know.” He stared out the window, at the rain falling straight down. “Staying away, it doesn't help. We can't avoid sorrow.”

“Have the past three and a half years been sorrowful?”

He reached out and touched my hand. His fingers were cold against mine. “Of course not. But things will change, whether we're there to see them or not. Look at what we missed while we were wandering in the wilderness.”

“Not everything has changed. Some things are constant. Today is Christmas Eve.”

“Ah, so it is.”

“Merry Christmas, Grandfather,” I said, and in my mind I sent out another.
Merry Christmas, Luc, wherever you are.

M
aman wrote to me of Christmas at Mille Mots. Her household had swelled to include three families of refugees—two Belgian and one French from near Saint-Quentin. Five children among them, so the hearth again had a row of shoes lined up, waiting for Père Noël to fill with nuts and candy.
Not like Christmas used to be,
she wrote.
We didn't have much of a
réveillon
feast. A goose couldn't be found in all the valley, but we had a pair of chickens stuffed with prunes. Oysters, chestnuts, a fine Bayonne ham I've been saving.

My mouth, rusty with the taste of stale water and dried bread, watered.

The five little ones were worried they would be without Christmas this year, so far from their homes. The oldest amongst them is only eight and still has nightmares of his house burning. I hope to distract them. I gathered up the children and they helped me arrange the
crèche
. They implored me, and so I brought in some clay from the garden and sculpted five new
santons
to tuck around the manger. Do you remember when we used to do that? How many shepherds in the
crèche
have the face of my Luc?

She tried to sound dismissive, as though Christmas just wasn't what it used to be, and maybe it wasn't. But to me, reading her letter in between trudges through knee-high snow, through the half-frozen mud beneath, eating cold turnip and barley soup, my only carols the shells overhead, it sounded perfect.

Christmas passed by and, in the damp thaw of spring, I got leave, at last.

I arrived at a château edged in daffodils, ringing with the sound of laughter. Gray icicles melted from the roof. Overhead a swallow arched across the aching blue sky. Like a cool wash of water, the laughter, the yellow and blue, the soft dripping of the icicles, sluiced away the past ten months. In front of Mille Mots, I was cleansed.

As I stood on the front walk, breathing in tranquility, the front door pushed open. A boy in short trousers, followed closely by two curly-headed girls, tumbled out onto the lawn. He had one of my old footballs tucked under one arm, and the girls were in hot pursuit. I watched as the children, pink-cheeked and laughing, disappeared around the side of the house.

“They remind me of you and Clare.” Maman stood in the open doorway. “Younger, yes. But always off looking for adventure.” There were new lines on her face, and had she always been so small? But she was Maman.

I stepped forward, uncertain.

“Mon poussin.”
Her voice broke with a little ripple. “Oh, my Luc.”

I let myself be drawn into the peace of the château.

“
Y
our papa is happy,” she said later, as we walked arm-in-arm through the tangled hopefulness of the rose garden. The two Belgian women sang as they spread damp shirts on the lawn to dry. “Is that strange, to find satisfaction in war?” Children's shouts drifted from the riverbank.

“He's doing what he loves. And, besides, they all say that La Section Camouflage is a cushy job.”

She frowned. “Cushy?”

“One of those colonial words that the Tommies use.” I shrugged. “It means easy, soft, comfortable.”

“Easy?” She bristled. “Claude's work isn't easy. It's important.”

“Of course.” I stepped carefully around a fallen bird's nest. “On the battlefields, men are right out there in the open, for God and the Germans to see straight and clear. There needs to be a way to camouflage that.”

“It's the perfect job for him.” She tipped her face up to the sun. “Art, innovation, and the discipline of the army.”

It was perfect. So perfect that, at times, I was envious. While I crawled through barbed wire and slept on dirt and loaded my rifle with cold-numbed fingers, Papa was in a well-lit room behind the lines, painting and drawing and designing, all in the name of patriotism.

“Both of you are staying safe, that's all that matters.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “You're not so near to the front lines, are you?”

Carefully worded letters gave that impression, I knew. I didn't intend to be deceptive, at least not at first. But I didn't want Maman to worry. So I wrote about the food (“not nearly as good as Marthe's”), the conditions (“rainy, but hoping for a break in the weather”), the uniforms (“finally, they've replaced the
garance
red!”), and the future (“when this is all over, Cairo? You've always wanted to see the pyramids”). I didn't tell her anything that was really happening.

“Not so near,” I lied, glad she wasn't looking at me. “Really, it's almost…cushy.”

She nodded with satisfaction. “And have you seen your papa often?”

There were soldiers stretched across half of France. Had she not read a newspaper in eight months? Not once looked at a map? “Maman, no. He's in a different unit. He's posted near Nouvons and I'm…” I couldn't tell her how near to Mille Mots I was. “I'm somewhere else.”

A furrow appeared at the edge of her brow.

“But I hear much about the
camoufleurs,
” I said in a rush. “And once I even saw a group of them. They'd built a tree stump, all out of metal, but painted to look like bark and smoke and battlefield ruin. They brought it out to our line.”

“A tree stump? I thought they were painting barricades or designing uniforms.” She frowned. “Why would they need a tree stump?”

“A listening post? A sniper perch?” I shrugged. “Nobody tells me. But I saw them with that make-believe stump. They came in the dead of night to spirit it out into No-Man's-Land.”

“No-Man's-Land…”

“That's the space between the trenches. That's where the fighting is. It's where the camouflage is needed most.”

She ground to a halt. “
Cher
Claude, he goes so close to the battles?” Her face had gone gray as smoke. “But isn't it dangerous?”

Dangerous would be more than tiptoeing out to place a fake tree stump. Dangerous would be going full into the zone between the trenches, weapon drawn, waiting for the shots directed at you. It would be creeping with half an ear on the shells in the sky, half an eye on the guy next to you, half a heart on your mission ahead. It would be leaving behind anything personal, any letters or photos or incriminating addresses, on the chance that you were captured and put everything you loved at risk. Dangerous would be what I did every day out there. “Not at all.”

She suddenly threw her arms around me, an uncharacteristically desperate gesture. I hadn't told her about the splinters up and down my back, the ones left after a tree had shattered next to me. The nurses didn't have time to get them all. As Maman's fingers clutched my neck, I winced. She felt the tension and pulled back.

“Luc?” she asked, searching my face.

Her hand was still on my back, and I bit my tongue. “It's nothing,” I said. “Just a little sore, I suppose. A soldier's life.”

She twisted me around and peeled back the top of my collar. I didn't know what it looked like but I knew what she was seeing when she gasped. Against my shirt, my back felt like a porcupine.

“It's nothing, really,” I said. “Only splinters. I used to get them all the time, remember?”

She took off her glove and felt underneath my collar. Her fingers were cool, like when I was a little boy and came to her, ill, scared, heartbroken. Sitting near, smelling like La Rose Jacqueminot and comfort, those cool fingers stroking my face and arms and back were better than any medicine. There was a lump in my throat and I didn't know how it got there.

“My boy,” she said. And, at that moment, that's all I needed.

M
aman had the copper bathtub brought up to Papa's studio, where the afternoon light stretched yawning across the room. I couldn't lay in it, not enough to soak my whole back, so I sat on the floor in front of her chair. She dipped a washcloth into the warm saltwater and held it against my skin until some of the splinters, soft, worked their way to the surface.

“I saw something in your face, you know.” She squeezed the cloth in the basin and brought it again warm against my back. “I've always known when you were lying to me.”

“Maman, I'm not. I just—”

“Shhh.”

Water dripped down the curve of my spine. “It's really not as bad as it seems.”

“Is that what you think?” Her voice was tight. The heat of the washcloth disappeared. “That this seems somehow worse than it is? I'm picking wood out from my baby.”

I'd seen men leave pieces of themselves on the battlefield. All of themselves. I didn't answer her.

Around me were the shapes of my childhood. The skeletons of easels. Neat stacks of canvases. Moth-eaten armchairs and scroll-armed sofas. A tarnished cauldron. The head of a papier-mâché dragon. The trunks of costumes, the garishly painted swords and helmets, the swirls of silk scarves tied here and there. The props of a theater, in the studio of an artist. I'd grown up within it.

“I come up here more often these days.” Maman dropped the washcloth into the basin with a soft splash and picked up a pair of curved tweezers. “I know that things are dreadful out there. It's a war, after all.” I bent my head closer to my crossed legs. “But here, safe in the château, surrounded by the beauty of Claude's art…I can forget.”

For a quiet space of an afternoon, so had I.

“I try,” I finally said. I felt her tweezers against my back. “There's art, even where I am.”

She paused. “Truly?”

“When we're
en repos,
we stay—” I caught myself before I revealed troop movements. “We stay in a rocky area. Some of the men, they carve straight into the rock. The sound of the chisels against the stone, the smell of broken limestone, it all makes me…it makes me feel like I'm home again. Like I'm a boy again sitting beneath the worktable in your studio.”

Behind me, Maman had quieted.

I cleared my throat, embarrassed at my little admission. “There's some real talent there. Men carving things that could find a place in Monsieur Santi's gallery or one of the others on the Quai du Voltaire.”

She tapped the tweezers against the side of the basin.

“Insignia, rolls of honor, tapestries in stone. Memories of the things they left behind.” I rubbed at the damp hair at the nape of my neck. “One solider has been working on a wall with an allegory that would impress even Papa. Dancing peasants, toppled towers, swans, laurels, falling moons, Death crowned in crows' feathers. Every time we are
en repos,
he adds a little more to the wall.”

“What have you carved?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I tensed as her tweezers found a deep-seated splinter. “I don't know how to do that. I'm not the sculptor in the family.”

“You've watched me enough. You know the technique. And you've always been able to see beyond the two-dimensional.”

I didn't tell her how my fingers traced the grooves in the stone walls, how they twitched to pick up a chisel, how they once drew Mille Mots in the dust on the floor of the caves. “I can't.” A soldier who was never really an artist to begin with, he had no business taking up space on the walls of the cave. He wasn't the person to leave a memorial behind. “But you could sculpt. You should. You used to be magnificent.”

I thought she'd bristle at the instantly regretted “used to,” but she was pensive today. “I've thought about it. After I made those little clay
santons
for the children at Christmastime, it was like something had been reawakened. I hadn't sculpted in years, you know.”

“I know.” I looked around Papa's studio, where she'd moved her tools all those years ago, where there'd always been a block of granite, half roughed out. It was all still there, the block covered over by a dust-choked cloth. “Then why haven't you?”