Under a War-Torn Sky (6 page)

Henry stood his ground. He had no other options. It was obvious that his ankle needed tending. And clearly the cyclist had already seen him, standing there in a flight suit. Even if Henry struggled into the forest to hide, it would be a simple matter for the man to alert police to his whereabouts.

As the bicyclist neared, Henry racked his brain for the French word for help. He'd had four years of French in high school and been one of Miss Dixon's prize students. Not many of the farm boys attending his tiny, rural high school had thought much of learning a sissy-sounding foreign language. But Henry had wanted to travel the world. He loved French. He'd worked hard to conjugate verbs correctly. He memorized whether words were feminine, needing
la
in front of them, or masculine, requiring
le
. Whenever he wanted to impress Patsy he'd throw some French at her. He'd do Miss Dixon proud –
if
this man spoke French.

A few yards short of Henry, the bicyclist dragged his foot along the road to stop. He was small, grey-haired, with spectacles atop a rather long nose. A black French beret on his head gave Henry hope he was in the right country. He took a deep breath to slow down the wild thumping of his heart.

“
Bonjour, monsieur,
” said Henry.

The old man made no reply.

Henry thought a moment and decided to say that he was American and hungry. He couldn't remember the word for hurt. “
J'aime American. Je suis femme.
”

The man still said nothing. He just studied Henry.

Henry repeated himself, not realizing that in his nervousness he was mixing up his words.

The man looked at the ground and shook his head. Then he sighed and said in excellent English, “I guess I must help you. What is the matter with you? You like America, yes, but you do not look like a woman to me.”

Henry caught his breath with relief. “Is this France or Switzerland?”

“You are in Alsace,” the man informed him. “Do you know what that is?”

Henry wasn't sure.

“Do they not teach you history in America? This is a French province Germany has invaded over and over again. Most people here have some German blood in them, but not by choice. There is much hatred between us. Even so, when Hitler annexed Alsace four years ago, many people welcomed the Germans' return. They are impressed with the Nazis. So disciplined, they say. To me the Germans are
les boches
– swine.”

Henry shifted uncomfortably. Did they really have time for a political history lesson right now?

The Frenchman smiled. “I forget myself. I am a teacher.
Was
a teacher. The Nazis took my students for their army. They went to the Russian front. I think they must be dead.” He scanned the horizon nervously. “Come.” He gestured to Henry to follow him.

The teacher set off on his bicycle. Henry staggered to keep up. “Pah,” the teacher grunted in irritation. “You are hurt?”

“Yes. My parachute was shot. I hit the ground too hard. Sorry.” Henry realized his injury endangered the old man even more.

“Get on the bicycle.
Vite, vite
.” The teacher patted the handlebars. Henry braced himself as the Frenchman pedalled, struggling with the weight. It was a slow, bumpy, painful ride. The wheels were wooden. The German army had confiscated all rubber for their tyres.

“We go to my school. It is outside the village. If we meet someone, take bicycle and go to forest. I do not know what the townspeople would do if they caught you. Americans bombed Mulhouse very badly. People are sick of the fighting.”

On base, Henry and his fellow airmen had always thought of beating the Luftwaffe, knocking them and their guns out of the sky. They saw it as a constant, brutal cockfight between plane crews. He'd never really thought much about the people they were trying to liberate, or what their struggles must be on the ground under a war-torn sky.

“We're coming,
monsieur.
Soon, I promise.”

“Ah, yes,” the man nodded and smiled sadly. “But can you bring back my students?”

It was so dark by the time Henry and the teacher made it to the schoolhouse that they didn't see the huge black pigs until they crashed into them. Henry hit the ground on his bad ankle, in a tangle of hooves, muck, and wheels. Frightened, the pigs squealed, trampled him, and pinned him beneath the bicycle.

“God Almighty,” Henry cried out and clutched his shin. “Get off! Get off!” he screamed.

“SHHHH!” the teacher hissed at him. “
Ferme-la!
”

But Henry was already silent. He had passed out from the pain.

When he opened his eyes, Henry saw a huge bell hanging over his head. He strained to focus. The room had many windows and was lit only by starlight. Was he in a bell tower?

He struggled to get up. Poker-hot pain ripped up his left side and slapped his brain into remembering. The air battle, his plane, Dan, the Messerschmitt, his mangled ankle all rushed back on him. Henry buried his face into the blanket he lay on. “Let it be a bad dream, Lord.”

“It is not,” said a voice from the shadows. The schoolteacher arose. “I hide you in my school. Foot is bad. Perhaps broken. Our doctor was commandeered into the Nazi army. The Gestapo has arrested the only man who might have helped you. I think I must get you to a hospital. I worry the leg will grow an infection.”

“What hospital?” Henry asked. He looked down at his ankle. The skin was streaked blue and purple.

“Bern is closest and safest. And your government has a presence there.”

“Switzerland?”

“
Oui.
”

“How will I get there?” Henry knew the borders were closed, guarded by Germans on one side and Swiss on the other. The Swiss were adamant about maintaining their neutrality, sometimes even shooting down American bombers flying over their country. Would they really let him in?

“I am not certain. I have never done this before,” said the teacher. “But it is time for me to take action. I watched them take my students and did nothing. An old man's fear. Tomorrow I will know how to proceed. Now you eat.”

The teacher handed Henry a plate of food – fried carp, sauerkraut (the Frenchman called it “
choucroute
”), and pale-yellow cheese. The food was ice-cold. Henry realized that he must have lain unconscious a long time while the teacher kept watch over him. “
Merci, monsieur,
” said Henry.

The schoolteacher grimaced at Henry's Tidewater drawl. “Try not to speak.” He opened the bell tower's trap door and disappeared.

Henry pulled out his survival kit and found a second syringe of morphine. He injected the medicine and choked down the Frenchman's food.

His ma would be getting a telegram in a few days. Missing in action, it would say. Missing, lost, maimed. With no one to help him but a wizened old teacher who couldn't stop talking history. What did history matter these days?

Panic kept the words swirling in Henry's head:
Missing in action.
Henry imagined his father's snarl:
I told you, Lilly. I knew he'd never make it. You gentled him too much. Never let me make a man of him.

Henry clamped his hands over his ears. He'd spent his life trying to prove himself to Clayton, to seem worthy of his respect even if he couldn't win his father's love. He'd thought joining the Air Corps would do it. But Clayton had shouted at him: “Boy, you gonna throw away that scholarship to the university because a bunch of foreigners are fighting
again
? People who don't have anything to do with this family, this farm? They don't even speak English, most of 'em.”

Henry had simply nodded his head, yes.

“Then you haven't learned anything from me,” Clayton had snapped, and stormed out the back door.

Lilly had tried to ease the rejection. “I'm real proud of you, honeybunch,” she'd said.

Henry rolled over and pushed the blanket around in an attempt to make it a better buffer between him and the wooden floor. “I will make it, you old buzzard. I'll show you.”

Henry longed for his uncomfortable cot back in England, even the stench of wet socks. His bunkmates would be checking his footlocker now. They'd be divvying up his long johns and extra T-shirts. He hoped someone would mail the letter he'd almost finished to Patsy. Maybe Sarge would. He should have left a note somewhere in his trunk asking that Patsy's letters be sent back to her to keep, just in case, in case he didn't…well, just in case it took him a while to get back.

He saw Billy's face, Paul's, Jimmy's. He had no idea how many of his crew had made it out of the plane. He'd seen Fred's lifeless body as he and Dan struggled to the bomb bay, but no one else. “Please, Lord, let some of them have made it to the ground alive.”

He couldn't bear to think of Dan and pretty baby Colleen. How would Rose raise her alone?

Henry's leg was aquiver with pain. But the morphine was taking effect. He couldn't hold his eyes open. Henry slid into sleep, seeing pilots who had made it back from their mission, gathered around the piano in the officers' club, singing: “‘We are poor little lambs, who have lost our way.'”

Henry awoke to the sound of fluttering wings. He squinted against the brilliant morning light that flooded the bell tower. Hovering over him in the window directly above his head was a pair of huge, creamy white wings. They stretched out six feet from tip to tip, and were backlit by a halo of golden light.

“Am I dead?” Henry rubbed his eyes.

The wings fluttered once more, making a soft rustling sound. Henry propped himself up on his elbows to gaze at what had to be an angel. It had a long downy neck and great, black, soulful eyes. “If God will give me wings like that I won't mind dying so much,” Henry whispered.

“
Clack,
” the angel squawked at him.

“Excuse me?”

The angel swung his head all the way round to face Henry. “
Clack, click, click, clack
.”

Henry stared. The angel had a strange, long, orange nose. Henry rubbed his eyes again, then shaded them against the blinding shafts of light that spilled around the angel.

The nose was a beak. The angel was a bird, a huge white bird.

Laughing, Henry fell back onto his blanket. His laughter tripped into a sob and then into a strange, anxious wrenching.

The trap door of the bell tower swung open. “Shhhh,” hissed the schoolteacher. “Are you delirious?”

Henry shook his head and pointed to the window. But the bird had jumped off the sill to the roof immediately below.

The teacher rushed to the window. “She is back! My stork.
Bienvenue, ma belle!
” He turned to Henry. “This is a very good omen. Always this stork has migrated from Africa to nest on my school's chimney. But for two years she and her mate have not come. I feared soldiers shot them or that they stayed away because they knew France had gone mad. Perhaps her coming foretells the beginning of the end for Hitler.”

He eased himself down to the floor beside Henry. “We must take courage from her. Birds know when the season is turning.” He looked at Henry's ankle. “We have a long way to travel. Do you have the strength?”

Henry sat up. His leg throbbed. He was sick to his stomach and sweaty. He felt like crying. Did he have the strength? Not really. But Henry knew that wasn't the right answer. He thought back to the time he'd been ploughing the fields by the creek and a water moccasin had bitten him, right above his high-top boot. If he hadn't fought his fear and nausea and ridden the mule up to the farmhouse for help, he'd have died at fourteen from a snakebite. It'd been the one time Clayton had admitted that Henry had some sense.

Henry could tell this situation was the same. This old man was risking his life to help him. The least he could do was hold himself together. Henry straightened his back. “I do if you do,
monsieur
.”

The teacher nodded in approval. Then he unwrapped the bandage he had put on Henry the night before. Henry bit back a shriek of pain.

“I think the bone sticks out here,” said the teacher, pointing to a nasty bulge beside Henry's anklebone. He rewrapped Henry's ankle with a rough-hewn splint and a clean cloth. “There is no way you can walk. We cannot take the bicycle. Too slow. Too obvious.” He took out a small loaf of bread from his pocket and broke it. He handed half to Henry and slowly ate the other himself.

“Perhaps there is a better way, yes? The Grand Canal d'Alsace passes here and goes into Basel, a city just inside Switzerland. I have a cousin who fled Alsace for Basel when the Nazis invaded us. Back then the Swiss still honoured the
Niederlassungsvertrag
– the agreement between our countries that said French and Swiss people could be citizens in either land. The agreement dates to the French Revolution,” said the old man, again playing teacher.

“But we must be careful. The Swiss attitude has changed. They are afraid Hitler will invade them. The Swiss government does nothing to look as if the country favours the Allies. My cousin writes that some of them agree with Hitler's racist ideas. They have put up barbed wire along much of the border. At first, when the Nazis started deporting French Jews, Switzerland let them enter as refugees. But it is a small country. So many came, now they may enter only when Jewish groups already inside can pay money to support them. Their justice minister said, ‘
Das Boot ist voll.
' The lifeboat is full.”

He shook his head sadly. “If you had come down in Switzerland you would be in no danger. But if you surrender to the border guards they might turn you over to the Germans. No, we must slip past the border guards somehow. In Basel, my cousin will shelter us. And then from Basel, we must find a way to Bern. But first I must get a boat, without being arrested.” He smiled ruefully at Henry.