A Star for Mrs. Blake (32 page)

“Has he answered your question, dear?” Bobbie asked gently.

Wilhelmina didn’t respond. Another local blue bus went by, kicking up pebbles. Its driver honked at Émile, who was squatting against a wheel, smoking a pipe. He gave the thumbs-up.
Tout va bien
.

Hammond looked at the others. “Who’s ready for a picnic?”

It was high noon and they were burning in the sun. Cora spotted a bunch of wild strawberries by the side of the road and went to pick them, handing round the tiny fruit so that the women entered the bus
with a taste like sweet candy teardrops on their tongues. Wilhelmina kept looking back at the trees in the distance.

“I had a letter,” she said. “They told me that where Bradley died was in a field, with a farmhouse and a cannon. Is that near here?”

“Most likely it is,” said Hammond, and guided her back on the bus.

The map showed a picnic spot a few kilometers away. On one side of the road was an uncharted farmer’s field—on the other side, dense woods and a stream that looked promising. When the bus pulled into a turnout, they could hear the cooling sound of rushing water. Émile helped the ladies along a short trail that ended at a flat slab of rock overlooking a waterfall gently sluicing into a deep green pool, in which they could see the alluring shapes of well-fed trout. Sunlight warmed the rock and filtered through the canopy of beech trees.

“It’s a Renoir!” Bobbie exclaimed when the wicker baskets had been unpacked and the food laid out on the blankets. The hotel, perhaps overestimating the effect Griffin Reed’s article would have on their occupancy rate, had sent terrines of country pâté, hard-boiled eggs, cucumber salad, cheeses, baguettes both plain and filled with meats, and individual fruit tarts wrapped in cloth.

Minnie peeked at hers. “Who likes peach?”

Hammond offered to trade his blueberry.

“Peaches any day,” he said robustly.

“Wild blueberries are the best for pies,” Cora said. She took a careful bite of the famous French tart crust. “They put in a lot more sugar than we do. And they use real butter, not shortening. No wonder,” she said admiringly. “Sammy used to love my wild-blueberry pie.”

“And who picked the blueberries?” Bobbie teased.

“Who do you think? You’d never get Sammy to stay long enough to do a whole pail. He’d eat it all right, but spend every waking hour down at the cove. He loved his model boats.”

“You let him become spoiled,” Bobbie said.

“How can you not spoil them?” asked Katie.

“I’ll tell you how,” Bobbie said. “The Bible, soap, and spinach!”

They all laughed.

“Looking back,” Bobbie continued, “at that long march through childhood—the illnesses and worries about school and if he’s making the grade, and the types of friends he has—all of that—I wish I hadn’t been such a martinet. I wish that Henry and I’d had more time together and just … more fun.”

“We can all stand to have more fun,” Hammond said, and began to undo the buckles on a large wicker basket lent by the hotel that looked as if it belonged on an African safari. He got the thing open. Inside were compartments for glasses and a bottle of Champagne.

“Thank you, but we couldn’t,” Wilhelmina responded sweepingly, as if they were at a formal dinner.

Bobbie laughed. “Of course we can!”

Minnie looked worried. “Not in the middle of the day. We’ll get the collywobbles.”

“This is the region where they make the best Champagne in the world,” Hammond said. “Case closed!”

He popped the cork in an arc into the woods. Lily drew the glasses out from their sleeves inside the basket.

“To all of us who have shared this pilgrimage. It’s been a privilege,” he said, and they all toasted. “To your brave sons.”

Minnie’s chin began to tremble.

“Oh, stop it, Minnie,” Bobbie scolded. “I remember my boy in the sunlight, don’t you? I thought you Jewish people have a word for it.”

“L’chaim?”
asked Minnie doubtfully.

Bobbie looked stumped. “Yes, that!” she said enthusiastically. “Down the hatch,” she added and tossed back the Champagne.

Lily said she was going down to the water. Hammond watched as she leaned against a tree and discreetly lifted her skirt. Bending one leg while balancing on the other, she unrolled her stockings one by one, stuffed them in her shoes, and pressed her bare toes with pleasure against the smooth rock, running her fingers through her golden hair, shaking it out with abandon. She couldn’t have looked more fetching or less like a second lieutenant army nurse. He was wondering idly if
he could change her mind about the doctor at home when she shattered that thought by inviting everyone to come down to the water.

“It’s lovely and cool down here,” she called, waving.

Katie and Wilhelmina were on their way but Minnie’s eyes were drooping.

“That cocktail went to my head,” she said, dragging a blanket to a bed of leaves. She lay down, careful to tuck her dress discreetly around the marbled flesh of her calves, and was instantly asleep.

“Aha!” Katie pointed. “She snores! You tell her. She snores!”

Cora got up and brushed herself off. “I’m going to explore.”

“Hold up, Mrs. Blake. Let’s check the map,” Hammond said, producing it from the haversack on his web belt, which also held a canteen. “Yes, it’s okay if you go up there a bit,” he said, indicating a trail leading to a rise. “It’s been cleared of ordnance. Just stay on this side of the road.”

“Do you want to come, Bobbie?” Cora asked.

Bobbie declined. She’d already gotten out her sketchbook and pencils.

“There are flowers here I’ve never seen. They may be a species of iris.”

“Don’t go too far,” Hammond cautioned Cora. “We have to get back on the bus in ten minutes.”

Cora gave him the “okay” sign. He counted heads. Wilhelmina and Katie were taking off their shoes. Standing in the middle of the stream, Lily looked dreamy and at peace. She was holding the skirt of her dress above her knees. The water made respectful ripples around her legs, and inside the white uniform, her body was outlined by the sun.

Hammond tore himself away from the view. “Mrs. Olsen?” he asked. “Need a hand?”

“I’ll be along presently,” she said, fussing with the sketching kit. “Trying to get myself organized.”

Just as she was about to join them at the stream, Bobbie noticed a large stand of what looked like bellflowers across the road. They were much more vigorous than anything she’d seen at home—at least three feet tall, with large cone-shaped flowers in deep blue hanging
along the stalks. They’d make a wonderful composition, she thought, a striking mass of violet against the yellow straw. She decided to skip the gathering at the stream and capture it on paper. She was accustomed to doing whatever she liked, and damn the torpedoes.

In short order Cora was out of sight of the picnic spot, relieved to be away from the forced companionship and the closeness of other female bodies. To be alone and in the woods was a luxury that she missed. For several minutes she followed a trail that went uphill and then leveled off into a thick oak forest. Strangely, she didn’t hear any birds. The trees were weak and thin, not like the solid pines of Maine; these were saplings, she realized, that must have grown up since the war. That meant this area had been under fire. Slowly a chill crept through her. She could still hear the stream below but she was up high enough to look through the gaps in the trees and see the field on the other side of the road on which they had driven. A familiar shape rose in her mind—the shape of Sammy’s last moments.

She only knew them as an outline gleaned from a couple of paragraphs. She’d been working in the cannery when the second letter came—the one from Sammy’s sergeant. It was official, typed on letterhead, and arrived a month after the hand-scrawled notice of death. It was still early winter but there’d been a break in the frost, so she could stand outside comfortably just in her sweater and gut-soaked apron. The sergeant was writing to provide details in order for her to know the extent of Sammy’s heroism.

Because of his skills with a rifle, Private Blake had been sent with six other men on a scouting mission to determine whether the Germans occupied a tiny village near a stream (the sergeant had written “a flood”) called the Moussin. It was a risky mission because they had to cross open fields. They’d gone almost two hundred yards before being cut down by a machine gun nest, just as Hammond had described it, hidden by grass. Sammy was killed between the hill and the flood; nobody in the scouting party made it to the village and apparently the effort to secure to it was abandoned.

Cora stood motionless in the fungal heat rising from the forest floor. It was still incomprehensible that she was standing under the French sun, on French soil, close—maybe just beyond these very woods—to where her boy’s life was ended. She’d so often seen him being shot in dreams, hit and floating to the ground. She’d dreamed it all in silence and there was no pain on his childlike face. But there was so much pain as she stood there. She was like a lightning rod for pain. Her soft woman’s body seemed to fill with the silent wasted loss of hundreds of thousands of young men whose nonbeing was as tangible as the missing generations of oak trees.

Her feet were moving on their own. One foot stepped forward, the other swung through to the next step. The ground was spongy and her attention turned to not tripping on the briars that crept along the ground. Her eyes fell on hard chalky-white shards that looked out of place in all that green. She picked them up and fingered the ridged surfaces. Could these be seashells? Instinctively she looked at the sky for gulls. That’s how you found broken shells back home; the gulls would drop them on the rocks near the sea. But there were no gulls or rocks or ocean for hundreds of miles. A few paces on she spotted a lead ball the size of a marble that, when she picked it up, was unusually heavy in the palm of her hand. It must be from what they called a shrapnel shell, she realized—hundreds of bullets were packed inside to explode in all directions into peoples’ flesh. She dropped it and focused on the forest canopy in order to calm her breath.

She recognized that she was on top of a berm, like a spine that followed the curves in the hills. On one side, where the hill fell away, she could make out that the ground had been dug into dips and folds, and was undulating in an unnatural way. The foliage that covered it seemed to grow in a zigzag pattern. She felt the familiar hum that always guided her through the Maine woods. She got her bearings. If she’d remembered correctly the way Lieutenant Hammond had described the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, this would have been the enemy’s position. She was looking at German trenches.

Those were the trees where they would have strung barbed wire, with openings in the wire and machine guns aimed at the gaps, so that
when the Allies advanced, they’d be herded into the bullets like animals to a slaughterhouse. She turned from the ridge and made a pact with her fear to walk five more minutes before turning back. Then she would have seen everything she had come to France to see. The hum had deserted her, replaced by a disorienting wail. She was stopped by an impenetrable stand of blackthorn, dense spiky branches like the vines that grew over Sleeping Beauty. She understood the story for the first time. Only imaginary fairy-tale magic could cut through such deeply rooted evil. There was evil all around. Something had turned the birch trees lurid green. The bark was emerald when it should have been white, probably, she realized, from the copper in all the shells that must be in the ground. And just on her left was an enormous crater, a perfect circle scooped out of the earth at least fifteen feet deep and twenty feet across, halfway filled with seedlings and forest debris.

She turned around where the brambles blocked the way. If she’d gone a little farther she would have come to an intact German bunker the Americans had failed to blow up when they liberated the area, now infested with bees. She would have made out old wooden beds and realized that young men had slept there, and that if they’d taken off their helmets in the semi-dark, she would have seen hollow pairs of human eyes.

Cora came back to the picnic spot stunned by her discoveries. She wanted to grab Hammond and take him up there and show him everything so he could explain, in that excited voice she’d come to trust, what had happened and why. To tell Bobbie all about the crater and confess the strange thought she’d had, that little Sammy and his boyhood friends would have loved that big hole, would have slid down on their heels and dived headlong into the leaves.

The ladies had already returned from the stream. They were moving slowly, grumbling about mosquitoes, seeming to still be dazed from the heavy lunch and afternoon heat while Hammond and Lily folded up the blankets.

“Where were you?” he asked sharply.

“Just up there.”

“I was about to go after you.”

Cora told Hammond she’d found some trenches and a giant hole. “What was it?”

“Most likely from an American howitzer. The Germans were up here for four years,” he said, as if she should have known. “They chopped down trees for barracks and brought in supplies on a small rail train, built communication lines. They were always one skip ahead.”

“How could they do all that without anybody knowing?”

He shook out a blanket.

“They had collaborators,” he said darkly. “Where’s Mrs. Olsen? Didn’t she go with you?”

Cora shook her head. “Isn’t she with you? Look what I found.” She opened her hand and showed him the white shards. “How do you think they got there?”

“Those are oyster shells,” he said distractedly.

“I thought so!”

“The Germans used to eat oysters and drink schnapps. They said the oysters gave you the passion to fight. And the schnapps got you drunk so you could. Anybody seen Mrs. Olsen?” Hammond asked to no reply.

“She probably went somewhere to pee,” Lily said. “Should I go look?”

Hammond picked up his web belt and took a drink from the canteen that was attached. He looked at his watch. “Damn it to hell,” he remarked crossly. “We’re supposed to be on the way.”