The First of July(112)

He walked to the edge of the low wall. None of the men in the garden looked up. He didn’t know what to do. He took a deep breath, and it set his cough off. He had to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. The sun was in his eyes and he squinted to the bedroom windows. Then somebody tapped him on the arm, their approach so quiet he jumped.

“Jean-Baptiste?” It was Madame Petitbon. She had been old when he had been a child, and she seemed not much older now. She wore the remnants of traditional local dress, and her lips had disappeared into the cavern of her mouth.

“Is it you? My poor boy,” she said. “Poor child.”

She looked down at his bare feet, puzzled. He found himself struggling not to be overwhelmed by emotion. Somebody had welcomed him.

“We all thought you were dead,” she said, reaching up and stroking his arm.

He shook his head.

“And grown so tall. And a soldier?”

“Injured,” he said, his voice ragged. He wanted to touch her in return. “My mother?” He willed himself to ignore the expression on her face. “My mother must have gone?”

She was silent, her black eyes never leaving him. “My poor lad,” she said in the end. Her hand reached out again. Then, wearily, “She’s gone, yes. Gone to our Lord and his blessed mother and all the angels. Nearly two years ago now.”

The muscles of his face were pulling it in directions he couldn’t control. For a few minutes he could think of nothing to say. “My mother,” he said, finally.

After a few more minutes, he said “Why? She wasn’t old.” And then without meaning to, he said “Why?” again, like a small child.

“She died with the nuns,” the old woman said and pulled her gray shawl around her, her eyes sliding away from him. “She was not a bad woman. Always a good neighbor.” She patted him on the arm a few times. Then she took his hand in her tiny dry one. “She always missed you,” she said. “She’ll be looking down, glad you came home.”

But what home was there? No mother, no house, the town full of the British and at war? Now tears filled his eyes. He screwed them tightly shut but still felt tears escape.

“Talk to the nuns,” she said. “Talk to Father Lefroy. He buried her. November ’14. Leaves everywhere. Cold. She’s in the churchyard.” Her face brightened. “You can go and see her, tell her all about it. No cross there, but she’s on the right near the gate. Next to old Godet.” He felt her move away and looked up to see her shuffle off across the road.

He wiped his face on his sleeve again. It was filthy. He was filthy. And it had all been for nothing. He might as well have gone back to fight. Vignon hadn’t known, and the thought of Vignon’s act tightened around his heart. She’d died only months after he’d left. She had looked well, seemed so strong, but perhaps he had never really looked at her? At least she had never heard of Verdun, of the losses and the lives of daily horror. She never had to imagine that or imagine him there.

He was gripped by a pain of regret that almost stopped his breath: not just his chest, but his whole body was tight and frozen, as if fingers were digging into the back of his neck, paralyzing him. He tried to stop the trembling by wrapping his arms tightly around himself, but felt dizzy and lowered himself to a squatting position. But at that moment, Madame Petitbon reappeared with Madame Laporte at her side. The older, smaller woman seemed to be supporting the raw-boned, black-frocked Madame Laporte, who held out a pair of well-worn sabots.

“My Lucien’s,” she said. “He won’t be needing them.”

He leaned against a wall; there was a faint smell of baking bread. Out of nowhere, there was his mother making him a bowl of hot chocolate for breakfast on his saint’s day. He thought that had been before his father died, before times got harder though happier. The memory of her patching his blue school pinafore, of her watching him from the doorstep, the doorstep just across the street, as he walked to classes: the same route he had just taken. Keeping him safe. Another image hit him, each one like a blow. Perhaps the last time he saw her before Vignon. Before it happened. She was squinting as she read a book, leaning toward the oil lamp. Now he thought it was a new book. Remembering the poetry he’d found in the doctor’s boat, he wondered whether Vignon had given it to her. She had been the only daughter of the mayor’s chief clerk in Amiens, and she had been properly taught to read and write. Her favorite cousin had married a rich Englishman, she’d told him when he was a boy. It was then that he’d gotten it in his mind to row to England and find her.