The First of July(121)

“It’s going to be all right, Leo,” he said softly. He picked up the sabots, and they were off into the night.

They walked out of Corbie, not along the main road, which was heavy with traffic, but back down the track to the river. It was dark and rough going and Leo was heavy. Jean-Baptiste stumbled a few times, but he could soon hear the water. The little boy occasionally muttered syllables that Jean-Baptiste could not understand, but he seemed to take this nocturnal adventure in his stride. Only once, as an explosion sounded close to them, less than half a kilometer away, Jean-Baptiste judged, did he worry about the great responsibility he had taken upon himself. It was hard enough contemplating a dangerous journey alone; but with a small child, how could he keep them both safe? But what was the alternative for either of them? Once on the river, he felt, they would be safer. The river would take them with it.

He had to stop and put the boy down a couple of times, and Leo clung to his knees while he drank from the canteen. How did the young, slender mothers he’d seen before the war cope with their babies on their hips all day?, he wondered.

He followed the river west until he saw the island. He set Leo down with some relief and walked over to the willow that had harbored Sans Souci while everything else in his life had fallen apart. He unhooked the bailer and emptied the boat of black standing water and its mulch of leaves. Before the war, it had been a matter of a few minutes to launch it, almost skimming the grass as if to return it to its home on the water; but the boat had settled into the mud and vegetation for at least two years now and wouldn’t budge. He crawled around it on his knees, suddenly desperate to free it, tearing at the most obvious obstructions. Then he reached up, lifted out a rowlock and dug around the keel with its metal prongs, careful not to damage it. It was still dark now, but he needed to be well clear of Corbie before the nuns woke the children. By dawn, anybody might see him.

He pulled again, bracing his feet against the roots of the tree, and the boat creaked. He had a sudden vision of it all falling apart, into a pile of planks; but just as he was having serious doubts, it started to move and, once it started, he found himself trying to keep hold of the gunwale to prevent it launching itself and floating north without them. He couldn’t risk putting it into the river and leaving it for an hour to make sure it was sound and had no leaks. He had to chance that even if it did, he could bail more quickly than it would take on water. Behind him, Leo was becoming restless. He kept moving away, or picking up dirt, so that Jean-Baptiste had half his eye on the boat and half on the child. He gave the boy a little drink of water and handed him some bread. Leo gnawed at it but seemed as interested in playing with it as he was in swallowing it. He said something that sounded like “bread.” Jean-Baptiste smiled. “Yes, bread,” he said. “Clever boy, bread. You eat it so that you’re strong.”

A single flare shot into the air to the east. He had no choice; he couldn’t control the boat on the water and the child on the land at the same time, so he threw his sabots into the boat, then reached forward, scooped the boy up, lifted him in too, and, standing with one foot in it and one against the bank, he thrust it away from the shore. With a last creak, the boat made a final splash into the water, some of which broke over the prow, and was immediately pulled into the current. Again, he felt a surge of anxiety, but he knew this boat, this river. Picking up an oar, he pushed Sans Souci free of the obstructions that projected from the bank and into the side channel down the length of the island.

He moved his brother onto one of the two blankets on the duckboards of the boat, where he thought he would be safest, and tucked the other blanket around him. The boy was alert, watching him continually. He made little noises from time to time, but was strangely unperturbed by this sudden change in his fortunes. The boat had left the midstream island behind it now, carried smoothly on the current. He wasn’t sure if the sky was lightening to the east, or whether the strange color of the night clouds was simply a byproduct of the fighting, but he hoped to have made some distance by daylight. Tomorrow they would reach Amiens. They could rest by day, find food, perhaps. Every kilometer he rowed was farther from the battlefields and farther from the sisters. His brother would never return to the orphanage. He owed that to his mother and to Dr. Vignon. The Somme would take them northwest. Laporte had said it was impossible to reach the coast, but Laporte was dead and nobody knew the habits of the river like Jean-Baptiste. It might be impossible for a heavy barge, perhaps; but with a light, shallow-bottomed rowing boat, over many weeks, surely it could be done.