Under a War-Torn Sky (23 page)

And Pierre. What of little Pierre? Had Barbie figured out the link between Madame and Pierre's mother?

Once, Henry spent the day in a rolling landscape of wheat fields, a chequerboard of bounty in shades of new green and harvest yellow that rippled gently with the breezes. He lay down in the thigh-high wheat, relishing the feel of the sun on his bruised face. Yellow-and-black butterflies fluttered above him. Ladybugs and metallic-green beetles crawled about. It reminded him of the hayfields at home, of the hours he and Patsy had hidden in the tall grasses watching ants come and go. It was the one time he slept soundly.

The distant grinding of car gears awakened him. Henry sat up only to hurl himself down again immediately. A German patrol was coming up across the hills towards him. Henry realized that he lay only a few yards away from the road. He ripped off the bright red sweater and squashed it under his chest, wishing he could slither into the cracks in the sun-baked ground. But the wheat, tall and thick, stood like a curtain around him and hid him from view.

The car passed by quickly. Henry caught the sound of young male voices singing. It was choral music of some kind. It reminded Henry of the Vienna Boys' Choir he'd heard on the radio at Christmas. Their voices raised in such gentle songs, they sounded so innocent. Did those boys and the sadistic Gestapo officer really serve the same leader?

Henry pressed himself down until the car's coughing and wrenching faded away. Flattened like that, his eyes completely level with the earth, Henry spotted a huge black beetle with inch-long pincers waddling towards him. He reached out and grabbed lunch.

“Thanksgiving dinner,” Henry whispered to himself. “Pretend it's Ma's turkey with all the trimmings.” He broke the beetle in half and popped a piece in his mouth.

The beetle shell crackled as he chewed. Henry retched over the prickly feet still squirming against his tongue. But he swallowed. He could feel it bump and slide down his throat. He closed his eyes and held his breath to manage crunching up the second half.

Henry avoided the small, fairytale castles with golden-brown mortar and cone-shaped roofs that peppered the hills. He figured they would have been taken over by German officers. Mostly, he headed for large, prosperous-looking houses surrounded by high stone walls that protected orchards within. Cherries were ripe now and the graceful trees were low and easy to climb.

One night, in such an orchard, Henry nearly fell as he swung himself up onto the first branch of a small tree – a tree he could have easily scaled as a six-year-old. He was dangerously weak. What little food he found often came back up an hour later or ripped through him – he had dysentery.

He pulled off a cherry and stuck it in his mouth. He chewed it halfheartedly. Its sweetness meant nothing to him. He spat the pit into his hand and examined it in the moonlight. A lump of blackened, hard nothing, thought Henry. You're like this pit now, Forester, skin and bones, no heart, no hope, no mission, no nothing. His hand snapped closed to a fist. He shut his eyes and tried to dismiss the thought: I'm not going make it, Ma, am I?

THWACK.

Something hard and sharp thumped Henry's shoulder.

THWACK.

Another on his chest.

Henry looked around frantically. What was it?

THWACK.

“
Voleur! Ne touche pas à mes cerisiers!
”

Henry located the voice – a small figure in the shadows of the stone wall. In his current state, Henry assumed everything was scrounging for food like a barn rat. He snarled, “My tree. I'm not sharing.”

The figure stepped towards him. It was a clear night and the light of the moon and stars lit it up. The figure was a girl in a nightshirt and sweater. She held another stone in her hand. But she did not throw it. “This is not your tree,” she said in heavily accented English. “Get down.”

The sound of his own language thrilled Henry. He dropped to the ground in a tumble and staggered to stand up.

“Would you like it if I came to your home and stole your food?” asked the girl. “We have little enough to eat as it is.”

Henry froze at the tone of her voice. Her voice had a defensive harshness to it, like older women he'd met and then avoided in English pubs. But this was no woman. She was slight. Her hair floated thick and dark to her waist. She was sixteen, seventeen tops, Henry reckoned. What should he tell her? He instinctively trusted her age, but not her voice. That voice was tinted with suspicion and rage.

She repeated her question. “Would you like it?”

Her words shamed him. Henry hung his head. “I am sorry. I am so hungry.”

The girl did not relent. “That sweater is very pretty, handmade. It was probably a woman's favourite. You cannot get scarlet yarn these days. Do you think she misses it?”

Henry felt sick with embarrassment. “I – I – I –” He shook his head. Tears welled up in his eyes.

For several moments they stood in silence. Finally, when Henry thought he could no longer bear the weight of her eyes on him any more, she spoke again, grudgingly, and with a different tone of voice: “
Cerises
will make you ill. Come in the house.”

The girl led Henry through a great room with a cavernous fireplace. Worn tapestries hung on the walls and stag antlers above the doors. They came to a simple kitchen. She lit a candle and set it atop the wooden table, motioning for Henry to sit down.

He caught his breath at the sight of her in the candle's glow. She had a French beauty about her that Henry was coming to appreciate. Black arched eyebrows that had never suffered tweezers accentuated large, almond-shaped eyes. Her nose was prominent, long and straight, giving her a dramatic profile. Her lips were full and sensuous in a way a lot of people back home called trashy, especially when poor farm girls had them. Patsy had lips like that. He had always liked that about her, because she seemed so completely unaware of their exotic prettiness.

The girl looked up at Henry and again he was startled, this time by the colour of her eyes. They were a clear, yellow-green, almost amber, like cat's eyes. He'd never seen eyes like that. They turned cold when she caught him looking at her face.

Without speaking, she cracked two brown eggs and cut thin strips off an old ham that was nearly down to the bone to make an omelette. Henry trembled at the sizzle of butter, the smell of frying meat. He tried hard to eat politely when she set it before him, but he inhaled it. Within moments he had finished. Again, he hung his head in embarrassment.

In the great room next door a grandfather clock
tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock
ed.

Henry concentrated on the little blue flowers on his empty plate, tugged nervously on the bottom button on his stolen sweater, wishing like mad he could tear it off and magically appear before this girl in full uniform, clean and brave.

“Pilot?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why are you here? Why do you wear a woman's sweater?”

“I – I,” Henry stammered, afraid to tell her the truth. Could he trust her?

He glanced up at her again. She sat ramrod straight, on the alert, with her arms folded tightly across her chest. Her eyes bore into him. His eyes hit his plate again. He shrugged, like a schoolboy caught in misbehaviour he couldn't explain for fear of getting playmates in trouble, deep trouble.

The clock ticked loudly and the girl continued to stare at him with a thoughtful, contemptuous look. A look that told Henry she was trying to figure out what in the world to do with him.

He waited and waited, listening to the clock.

Finally it struck the hour –
bong-bong-bong-bong.

Four a.m.

The clock's chiming saved him. The girl sighed. “I am tired. I must get up in two hours to open
la boulangerie
.” She paused. “Tomorrow I take you to Vézelay, to Basilique-Sainte-Madeleine. The nuns can decide what to do with you. They help ones like you.”

She picked up the candle to light her way upstairs. “You may sleep on the bench.” She nodded towards the corner.

The girl and the light slid out of the room.

Henry didn't have the energy to walk to the bench. He laid his head on the cool wooden table. Nuns? He'd never met nuns before Switzerland. They seemed kind enough, but cool and intimidating, like this girl. Dan had certainly been full of stories of them – rulers coming down on schoolchildren's knuckles when they'd misbehaved, threats of damnation if they couldn't recite their catechism.

Dan. Henry rubbed his forehead hard back and forth on the table to push out the memory of Dan plummeting to earth. He had travelled such a trail of death and sorrow. Henry knew if all the images – of Dan, of Billy's last breath, of Pierre clinging to his mother, of Madame being tortured, of the men he'd killed – ever caught up with him at the same moment, he'd never be able to take another step. He was running from them as surely as he was running from the Nazis.

When Henry awoke, he found a small loaf of bread beside his head. A note scribbled on the back of an envelope read: Stay inside. He turned it over. The envelope was addressed to Claudette Besson, St-Benin d'Azy, Nièvre. Careless of her to leave something with her name on it, thought Henry with surprise. He tore it into little shreds and piled it beside his plate for her to throw away.

Henry ate and dozed again. He was aware of someone moving about upstairs, but he stayed rooted to where the girl had left him for fear of doing something wrong. He also didn't want her to think he was prowling her house to steal something.

The girl didn't return until midafternoon. She carried a half dozen loaves of long French bread under her arm. She also brought a man's undershirt and a jacket. When Henry unfolded it he saw that it was a waist-length khaki jacket of a British pilot's uniform. There were several bullet-size holes across its chest. Henry pushed his finger through one. The jacket's owner must have been shot dead. Henry hesitated to put it on, superstition overwhelming him.

“I could find nothing else,” said the girl matter-of-factly. “It is better than a woman's bright red sweater, yes?”

Henry nodded, swallowed hard, and put it on.

They left immediately. Henry reached out and ran his fingertips along the ancient stones of a small tower as they passed through the estate's gates.

Without looking at him, the girl said, “That part of the house was built in one-thousand-ten. My family lived here that long, and stayed when the English occupied Burgundy. The walls are here still, even with men and their wars.”

Her bitterness chilled Henry. He tried to charm her, saying, “You speak English very well,
mademoiselle
. How did you learn?”

The girl pursed her lips then answered tersely: “At the convent school. I was a novice before the war.”

“A novice?” Henry didn't know what she meant.

“
Mon Dieu. Dois-je risquer ma vie pour un tel ignorant?
” The girl muttered to herself about having to put up with an ignorant heathen and refused to answer or look at Henry.

Henry told her in French that he did believe in God. He just wasn't Catholic.

The girl stopped abruptly. Henry hoped for praise for his French. Instead she said, “Then I know you are a fool. If God exists, how could all this happen?”

After that, Henry kept his mouth shut. He knew better than to worry a wasps' nest. He'd learned to keep clear of ornery moods as a child, to avoid trouble with Clayton. He followed a few steps behind this girl. She never once turned back to check and make sure he was still there.

The road they travelled worried Henry. Although the landscape looked serene as the earth swept itself up in gentle hills, he could tell this was a main thoroughfare linking the small villages that nestled in them. Wouldn't German patrols use it? The girl had been so naive about that envelope, was she using any caution? It was still daylight. They'd be easily spotted. Henry hadn't killed two men just to get caught and tortured again.

She carried the loaves of bread. Was she planning to waltz into the next village and make deliveries with him tagging behind in a British flight jacket?

“
Mademoiselle
, I…”

Turning around with a menacing look, the girl pointed her finger at him and then held it to her lips.

She kept walking. After a while, she began to whistle. It was a song Henry had learned in grade school: “
Sur le pont d'Avignon…
”

Henry stopped in his tracks. This girl was dangerous. Either she was leading him into a trap or she didn't have the foggiest idea how to keep herself out of trouble. He'd seen how hatred and anger made people foolishly brazen. None of these explanations for her behaviour reassured Henry. Should he run?

The girl kept walking and whistling. Suddenly she, too, stopped. She cocked her head to listen. Faint, in the distance, came a whistled answer: “
Sur le pont…
”

She moved forward again. Henry now dawdled several hundred feet behind the girl. She hadn't looked back for him yet. He followed cautiously, keeping distance between them, unsure what he should do.

The girl turned off the road and waded into a wheat field. Henry crouched down to watch what happened.

Up popped a man. Another. And a third. They were heavily armed with straps of bullets crisscrossing their chests. She embraced one and handed the loaves to his companions.

Maquis.
Henry sighed in relief. Why hadn't she told him? Or at least hinted that she knew what she was doing?

He stood up. Henry felt more than saw three guns whip up to take him down.

“
Non!
” she shouted, then said in quieter voice, “
Il est avec moi.
”

The young man she had kissed waved Henry over. Henry hung his head in dismay as the girl explained how she had found him, dirty, sick, stealing fruit from her orchard. Did she have to tell these men how low he had sunk? At least she pitied him enough to leave out the detail of the woman's sweater.