The First of July(114)

His brother. A brother. His mother had had a baby. Another lurch as he realized the father must be Vignon. He was torn between wanting to run out of this grim place to somewhere where he could take in all that she had told him, and wanting to see the child.

“Well?” the nun said.

“What is his name?”

“Leo,” she said.

He must have looked surprised. “He was born in November, on the feast of St. Leo,” said the priest. He lowered his voice. “Your poor mother succumbed the following day.”

“She had lost too much blood,” the nun said, curtly.

Standing there with a single shaft of sunlight cutting a diagonal line across the floor, he had a sudden vision of blood. Not the blood he had seen everywhere in the last two years, but that of his father. In his memory, his gaze traveled once more from the soles of his father’s boots up to the red halo spreading outward from his dark head as it lay in his mother’s lap, staining her white apron. And he heard again the screaming—not at the end, as she was cradling his father’s body in her arms, but as he hit her and as he fell down the stairs.

And then, years afterward, there was Vignon. Kind, clever, fastidious, full of stories—not all of them true. Smelling of violets and reciting poetry. Had Vignon known he was a father, or had he, too, left her, never knowing his fate?

“Now I’d like to see my brother,” he said.

“He’ll be asleep,” said the nun, dismissively. “It’s hardly convenient.”

Father Lefroy looked anxiously from her to Jean-Baptiste, nodding his head as if hoping he might be seen to agree with both of them.

“All the same,” Jean-Baptiste said, “I wish to see him.”





CHAPTER FORTY


Benedict, France,

July 1–2, 1916


THEO WAS WHIMPERING IN HIS sleep. He lay on his back in his gray undershirt and drawers, one arm thrown back, his hand loosely closed, his stubble dark against his white skin. Benedict watched his chest rise and fall, each exhalation seeming to catch briefly. The fingers of Theo’s bad hand hung over the edge of the iron bedframe. His leather jacket, gloves, balaclava, and boots had been discarded on the floor, and his bottle of Macallan, the top off, was just within reach. Benedict reached down, picked up Theo’s drooping arm, and laid it across his chest. The hand was cool, the scar from the lost finger and the puckered one up his forearm quite healed and neat. He touched the web of ivory ridges very gently with his finger. Then he turned the hand and, with a single finger, stroked the tributaries of blue veins running under the fine skin of Theo’s inner wrist. The fingers opened very slightly, but Theo slept on.

He stood there for a second, remembering Theo’s long fingers moving over the notes or reaching to pull out or depress a stop, his feet in control of the pedals, his face utterly focused. Yet it was aeroplanes that had given Theo a happy war; and despite fear, discomfort, horror, Theo had survived. To be near him was, briefly, to share his armor of euphoria.

Benedict had a swig of the whiskey before putting the cap back on, then made up one of Theo’s powders. The liquid stung his mouth ulcers, but he swilled it around his mouth, hoping it might be some kind of cure for the pain and nausea of his broken arm. He was very thirsty, but he lay on his back next to Theo on the bedstead, gazing through the hole in the roof as the threads of clouds and smoke blew away and the stars came out, while the noise, which had become part of him, rumbled and crashed and wailed like a departing storm.

When he opened his eyes, it was morning. Theo, his uniform, and the bottle were gone. Benedict was due at H.Q. at 1000 hours, and he thought he could probably get that far and have his wound dealt with properly. He got up, feeling abominably weak. There were bloodstains where he had been lying, but the bandage seemed to be dry. He needed a bath, he thought, and looked for a paper spill to light the Primus stove. He picked up some torn paper from under the discarded bottles in the long-dead cottage hearth. It seemed to have been a letter, and he could see at once that it was in Theo’s strange new handwriting. While his mind was still casting about for some justification for looking at a discarded private letter, he was already starting to read it. While the water was coming to the boil, he walked outside. What he was reading was more of a journal entry, but by a Theo who had become a stranger.

We were on the first patrol today—those parasols—sometimes they’re clumsy things, but I felt like a great bird soaring among others of my family. In all that chaos and death, the people having fled, their animals having gone or perished, the birds stayed—thrushes, skylarks, blackbirds singing their hearts out. And I was privileged to see what no man was born to see—the map unfolding beneath me, the whole salient with its fields and hills, marshes and forests, traversed by trenches, blown apart by man, the fine threads of rivers running like veins and blocked with death. Yet where we would all cease to be, in an hour or a week or in half a century, this would all return. Oxen would pull the plow, trees would bear blossom in spring, fruit in autumn, enough villagers would return to repair their violated cottages, women would hang linen on a line, priests cling to a faith undented by shrapnel, uncorrupted by gas. The river would flow clean and fill with fish. But now it was as if, having become a bird, I was transported into a dark fairytale. Giants walked the earth, the pounding of their footsteps reverberating horribly. Banshees wailed, and silver razor rain fell incessantly. There were no princesses in towers: the towers were long shattered and the briars around them barbed metal. I flew on, higher, 4,000 feet. I was seeing the greatest unleashing of power man had ever created, in a machine that could itself, like God, deal death from above, and then, after dawn, I turned south and saw a world end as even that land ceased to exist.