The Language of the Dead (35 page)

Seitz's last mission had left him feeling terrified of returning. But being terrified didn't get you excused from duty. Now, he literally began to quiver with fear as he turned the plane west, toward
Southampton. A minute later, the sky around him began to flash with the exploding shells of British anti-aircraft fire.

That morning, the RAF had reopened Cloverton airbase, which now sounded the signal to scramble. Two dozen pilots, Charles Graham among them, sprinted onto the patched airfield and climbed into their Spitfires. Emily's murder, and the murder of his unborn child, had quietly shocked Charles to his soul. As a consequence, a strange kind of lassitude had overcome him and he'd decided that he no longer cared if he lived or died, which, in the macabre, caustic, unrelenting actuality of life and war, made him lethal.

Vera stopped, her figure suffused in moonlight. Arthur's sudden appearance frightened her. Her first thought was that she'd been stupid to come up the hill alone—stupid to believe that the only thing she had to fear was the Germans.

“Have you come up here to meet him?” Arthur asked. “A little secret tryst, then? We used to have secret trysts, Vera. And you enjoyed them.” His voice contained a hint of menace.

Vera told herself that she must be bold—that she must not show Arthur that she was frightened. She glanced at the path in front of her for something she might use to defend herself and saw the stub of an old oak branch lying about four feet away.

“Go home, Arthur,” she said, calling up the most authoritative tone that she could muster. “Leave me alone.”

“I don't take orders from you.” He glanced toward the wood and said, in a high-pitched voice meant to be a parody of hers, “Peter! Oh, Peter! I'm ready. I've got my knickers down. Come bugger me!” He turned toward her and laughed wickedly.

He took a step toward her; his pinned-up sleeve swayed like a pendulum. Vera quickly moved toward the branch and picked it up. She held it up as if she meant to strike Arthur with it. “Stay away from me,” she said. She heard in her voice the fear she felt in her heart.

Arthur moved another step closer. “Give me that!” he commanded.

“Stay back,” Vera said.

“I said to give me that.”

Peter watched them from behind an oak tree ten yards away, though neither of them knew it.

Arthur leapt toward Vera with alarming speed, reaching toward her with his lone arm. Instinctively, Vera closed her eyes and swung the branch.

A bomber exploded to Seitz's right and plummeted out of sight in a dozen pieces. “Fucking hell,” yelled his navigator, whose name Seitz suddenly could not remember.

Then something rocked the rear half of the Heinkel, throwing Seitz toward Henning.
That
was the man's name—
Henning
. Seitz smelled something burning. He straightened in his seat and tried to bring the plane under control, but the machine fought him. He smacked the wheel and cursed it.

They were nearly over Southampton and the Spitfires from Cloverton were in among them now. “Get us the fuck out of here!” Henning yelled.

Seitz heeled the plane to the north, as he'd done the last time they'd flown above Southampton. And, just as last time, the Heinkel miraculously began to climb. Seitz put all of his strength into keeping the plane steadily moving upward, away from hell, which seemed to have swallowed them.

He told himself that he must stay focused on surviving. He remembered that the last time he'd turned east, away from Southampton and the ack-ack, then south for the Channel. And he remembered the bombs—he'd nearly forgotten to jettison them the last time. He heard the sound of the man in the roof turret fire his gun. Charles Graham, in his Spitfire, had fallen in behind the Heinkel. Seitz yanked at the wheel and the plane began to track back toward the southeast, in a wide turning arc that would take them directly over Quimby.

Graham fired a brief burst of his 20mm cannon at Seitz. The shells ripped into the tail of the plane and set it aflame.

“Shit!” Henning yelled.

Seitz remembered the bombs. They were at twelve thousand feet and over Quimby. “Release!” he yelled.

Vera felt the weight of the branch strike Arthur.

She opened her eyes to see him staggering backward, away from her, his face bleeding. He put his hand up to his face, as if he were trying to keep it from falling away from his head. He looked for an instant at the sky and said “Bloody hell.” He was only three feet from her. Vera raised the branch, preparing to strike him again.

Peter watched.

Seitz shoved the plane east, hoping to make a circle and lose the British pilot who was trying to kill him. He did not know what else to do. But the ploy proved useless. Graham picked him up easily in the bright moon, just as Seitz was heading south again. He flew at the Heinkel from nearly broadside and fired his cannon. The shells ripped into the bomber's cockpit and blew Henning's head off; Henning's head landed in Seitz's lap. But Seitz also was dead; the big shells had ripped into the right side of his body just as he was beginning to say the Hail Mary. The bomber burst into flame.

The bombs from the Heinkel struck the ruins of the old grain mill in Quimby and fell among the decrepit mill houses, exploding with terrifying, deafening blasts, throwing tons of stone and mortar and rotted wood in every direction and shattering the windows of every building within a quarter mile. Three of the bombs hit Mills Run, sending up colossal plumes of water and mud. And some, too, burst in the wood by the old foot trail, felling and splitting trees. And a single bomb fell among George Abbott's ghostly sheep, vaporizing them in an instant and leaving a smoking crater in the meadow. The crows roosting in the dead sycamore took to the air, screaming.

Vera, Arthur, and Peter looked toward the place where the blasts had come from. For an instant, none of them understood what they'd just heard—knew what had occurred. Then the truth dawned on them. Vera dropped the branch. “My God,” she said.

Arthur looked to the west, his mouth hanging open, almost stupidly. Peter remained crouched behind his tree. Throughout Quimby, people sat up in bed with a start, an instantaneous anxiety sweeping over them.

A small explosion lit the sky to the southwest for an instant—a flash only. The three looked toward the explosion and saw a burning plane falling, like a flaming comet, heading for the western edge of the village and the Lears' farm. The plane disappeared behind the wood by the mill and hit the ground, sending up a mushroom-shaped inferno of smoke and flame well above the tops of the trees.

“Father,” Arthur said. He stumbled, then began to run across the meadow toward where the plane had fallen.

“My God!” Vera repeated. She saw Arthur moving away, down the hill, through the darkness.

BY THE TIME VERA REACHED THE HIGH STREET, KNOTS OF PEOPLE
had begun to hurry along it, some in their pajamas and sleeping gowns, toward the places where the explosions had occurred.

The western horizon was red from fire and the smell of smoke permeated the air. The sight of the plummeting plane spooled over and over in her mind. It seemed to have been headed directly for the Lears' farm.

She reached the steps of the Parish office and began to turn the crank of the siren for all she was worth. It started with a low whine but quickly wound up to its full deafening wail. She cranked the siren for a full minute, until she felt that her head might burst. Then she let the handle go and ran up the steps to the office and the phone. She called Southampton to report that the Germans had hit Quimby—that bombs had fallen on the village.

“It's burning!” she shouted into the telephone.

“Assistance is on the way,” the female voice on the line said. “Keep your head, my girl. People are depending on you. Good luck.”

Vera strapped on the metal Great War helmet and set out in the direction of the chaos.

The mill was burning to the ground rapidly, the fire sweeping through the dry, rotted beams and timbers. A group of roughly twenty local men, and a few women, had gathered on the stone bridge over Mills Run by the time Vera reached it.

“I've called Southampton,” she told them. “Help is coming.”

Quimby had no fire engine; it depended on the one from Moresham. Vera had not thought to call Moresham. She hoped the woman in Southampton would.

The group decided they must let the mill burn, as it directly threatened no other inhabited buildings in the village. A large, stout man who was unfamiliar to Vera reported that an airplane had hit the Lear's farmhouse, plowed right into the bloody place; he didn't know if the plane was German or British; the house had gone up in a ball of flame; Lear and his boy had had no chance, the man said.

“I saw Arthur Lear on the High Street just a few minutes ago,” Vera said, lying slightly.

“Are you certain it was him, miss?” the stout man asked.

“Yes,” Vera said. “He was running toward the farm.”

“We must do what we can to contain the fire until the truck from Moresham arrives,” someone said. Another suggested they call the Hampshire police.

The group dispatched two men to go door to door in the village to ensure that no more casualties existed beyond those they knew of—Noel Lear—while the rest went toward the farm. On the way, Vera searched for some sign of Arthur. She expected to see him staggering toward them, his face still bleeding from the blow she'd struck him. Or he might have fallen somewhere, unconscious.

They reached the edge of the village, from where Vera saw the farmhouse burning furiously. Bits of burning wreckage lay strewn
about the yard; the barn also was burning. The fire seemed to suck in all the available oxygen around them.

“Where is young Lear, then?” the stout man shouted to Vera.

Vera looked at the burning house, a feeling of disbelief and terror rising within her. She thought she knew now where Arthur was. But she looked at the man and shouted, “I don't know.”

An hour later, Lamb and Marjorie arrived in Quimby in Lamb's Wolseley. Harding had called in to say that a German bomber had crashed into a farm near Quimby and that several other buildings were damaged. That's all he knew at the moment. He thought Lamb would want to know. “I'm sorry, Tom,” he'd added.

Lamb had hung up the phone in the hallway by the kitchen and run upstairs to dress. Marjorie was sitting up in bed. He sat next to Marjorie and told her what Harding had told him. “Vera is all right,” he said, as if he knew this definitively. He couldn't bring himself to say differently.

“I'm coming with you,” Marjorie said. Before Lamb could answer, she was out of bed, headed for her closet.

They entered the village from the east, on the side opposite from where the bombs had fallen; Lamb parked the Wolseley by Blackwell's cottage and he and Marjorie fairly jogged toward the farm, holding hands, each of them keeping their worst fears to themselves. They soon found Vera working a bucket line that was having no success containing the fire in the farmhouse. The pump truck from Moresham had arrived, as had Harris and a cadre of Home Guard men and women from nearby villages and hamlets. The fires burned with such ferocity that Lamb felt as if they had entered hell as they approached the farm.

“Vera!” Marjorie yelled and ran to her. Lamb followed.

Marjorie gathered Vera into her arms; Vera's face was black from soot and smoke.

Vera didn't answer. She'd learned ten minutes earlier that someone had seen Arthur go into the fire after his father. In her mind, she saw him
staggering down the path with his head bleeding—heading toward his death, his stubbed arm dangling. Since, she'd moved in a stupor of disbelief and conflicted emotion. Had Arthur gone into the house because she'd struck him such a violent blow in the head, ruining his bearings and better judgment? Or would he have run in after his beloved father regardless? Then again, he might have killed her had she not defended herself against him. As her mother held her, she began to cry—for Arthur and for herself.