Abbeville (12 page)

“It will be all right,” he told Cristina.

“I think it is because I want it too much,” she wept.

“We both do,” he said.

As they kept trying without success, Karl began to feel that somehow he owed a debt to fortune, that Cristina's grief was the price of his success.

One spring morning they were having breakfast on the porch, a breeze blowing in the fresh smells of newly plowed soil sprouting with life. Then another smell came. Cristina stood and pointed to smoke rising behind the elevator.

“Oh, my God!” she said.

Karl ran down the steps and raced across the prairie. A small crowd had gathered on Main Street, where an oily fire smoldered in front of the bank. Old Henry Mueller stood there, along with Will Hoenig, Georges Chartiens, Pierre Cordeaux, and Robert Schlagel. As Karl drew closer, he saw that their attention was not on the fire but on something beyond it.

The crowd parted as he crossed the street. That was when he saw it. In a different context the straw figure might not have frightened a crow. The effigy was dressed in a suit, vest, shirtfront, and tie. A sign pinned on the shirt said simply, “La Boche.”

The thing swung by the neck from a cord strung over the electrical light above the door of the bank. Its head, a simple bag packed with straw and painted with a crude, cruel face, hung limply to one side. Karl walked up and yanked it down. The head pulled off and rolled to Chartiens's feet.

“Do you know who did this, Georges?” Karl asked.

“It does not matter,” said Chartiens. “It is a blot on all of us.”

Karl threw the figure into the smoldering fire. The straw burst into flame.

“Go home, everyone,” Karl said. “Let this burn out.”

“I'm not sure it will,” said Mueller.

For weeks afterward the mark of that day lay before his eyes every time he entered or left the bank—a dark scorch upon the earth. Eventually he dug it up and turned it under, leaving a mound of fresh dirt. Within days an idea began to form.

When he wrote for information, he gave the bank as a return address so Cristina would not be alarmed. One response came from Donellan and Shaw Ambulance Service. A few days later the
Trib
carried a story datelined Paris about the valiant American lads of the organization, who were putting it on the line on behalf of the British, French, and Italian doughboys in the trenches. Karl took it as a sign.

He told Cristina that night.

“You've given up on me,” she cried.

“It will be one year,” he said. “No more. I promise.”

“I am already past the time,” she said.

“Maybe what I'm doing will lift the curse,” he said.

“There is no curse, Karl,” she said. “The curse is me. You will go to France and find someone else.”

“There will never be anyone but you,” Karl said. “You know that isn't why I need to go.”

“To help save the French?” Cristina said. “They're the ones who hung that awful thing in front of the bank.”

“It was one or two men.”

“But they all know who it was,” she said.

“It isn't so easy to see into other people's hearts,” Karl said.

Cristina spoke her next words so softly that Karl could barely hear them.

“I can't see into yours anymore,” she said.

Opinion in town was divided when Karl let people know of his plan. Simon Prideaux said it was a sly trick to get customers, and it
was a fact that a number of the French who had left Karl did come back. The Germans were puzzled.

“You are almost forty, Karl, too old for such folly,” said old Henry Mueller. “And anyway, it's not our war.”

“It will be,” Karl said.

“I'd worry about leaving a pretty wife all alone,” said Mueller.

“We'll be fine,” said Karl.

“And if you get killed?” Mueller said.

“I won't,” said Karl.

“But why take the risk?” Mueller asked.

Karl did not even try to explain the intensely physical relationship he felt between the risk and what he hoped would be its reward.

As the time of his departure approached, he and Cristina somehow rediscovered the closeness and joy that they had lost to trying. It made leaving more difficult, but it was sweeter than anything they had felt since the death of their son.

K
ARL DID NOT LEARN WHAT CAME OF IT
for many months because Cristina was too superstitious to write him about it. Only when the baby was nearly due did she send him a letter with the wonderful news. In the meantime, Karl had sailed across the Atlantic, passed through Paris, and ended up mired in Verdun.

When he finally got her letter, his first impulse was to return home immediately, but then he became seized with doubt. If he shortchanged fortune now, what had happened to Karl Jr. could happen again. So he stayed, tending not so much to the living as to the dead.

Many days he had to drive the stiff, bloating, soul-fled remains of French soldiers wrapped in canvas to their last resting place, a field well behind the lines, to be laid in a neat grid of graves. But then it rained torrentially and there was no way to dig a hole deep enough to keep the corpses from floating to the surface. Still, you could not leave the dead where they fell for the artillery shells to bury and dig up again, bury and dig up.

“What do you expect me to do with those?” said the French Army corporal at the gate of the cemetery, water cascading off his helmet.

“What is right,” said Karl.

His French came easily now that he used it all the time. Flawless would not be the word,
sans défaut
. The academicians in Paris would have scowled at his soldier argot, but it was good enough for him to pass as Charles Pietre.

Of course, at first there was no mistaking him as anything but a Yank. The Frenchmen he had come to help had made fun of him, but they never suspected his origins were with the Hun.

“Do what is right, eh?” said the French corporal. “Nothing is right in this place.”

The horses shivered and took a couple of steps backward. Karl pulled up on the reins.

“What do you propose I do with them?” said Karl, gesturing over his shoulder to the cargo in the wagon with its big red cross.

The corporal looked at him with the expression used by every banker who has ever refused a needy man a loan. Karl climbed down off the wagon. The corporal moved faster than you might have thought the mud would permit and put out his hand to keep Karl from opening the rear door.

“Do you expect me to take them back to the trenches?” said Karl.

He pulled sharply on the door of the wagon, surprising the corporal, whose hand slipped on the wet surface. When the door swung open, the smell struck like a blow. As Karl reached in to grab one of the corpses by the boot, he heard the unmistakable tick of metal against metal.

“Are you ready to die for them?” the corporal said.

When Karl moved away from the door, it swung shut of its own weight. He climbed into the box and picked up the reins.

“Tell the others,” said the corporal.

“Maybe I will tell them to come armed,” said Karl.

He twitched the reins and got the horses started. They were not eager to move, but he maneuvered them in a wide circle past the corporal, who kept his pistol trained on Karl.

The rain pinged off Karl's helmet like shrapnel and rolled frigid down his back. The horses pulled the wagon with as little sense of where they were headed as their driver. Then, through the gray curtain of rain and war smoke, he made out the shadow of a spire. He gave the reins a snap. The horses' gait picked up for a moment, then settled back.

When he reached the church, Karl alighted and secured the horses to the trunk of a dead tree. He did what he could on the wet steps to clean the mess off the bottom of his boots, then pulled open the heavy wooden door of the sanctuary and stepped inside. The only light came from the votive candles.

“Hello!” Karl called. His voice echoed. Beyond it he could hear the rain pounding against the roof high above, the rumble of distant guns. “Is anybody here?”

Something moved in the shadows.

“Hello there,” he called again in French.

“Calm yourself,” came a tiny, ancient voice in reply. “God can hear a pin drop. There is no use bellowing.”

Now he could see a small figure coming toward him.

“The guns must deafen Him,” Karl said.

The man dragged his left foot. When he laughed, it came to Karl from several directions at once, like birds in the rafters.

“My little trick,” the man said. “I am sure the masons arranged the effect to suggest His omnipresence. And, of course, to frighten and delight the children.”

When the man stepped closer to the light, Karl could see that he was wearing a long black soutane. The gold cross hanging at his heart was large. It caught the glow of the candles and sparkled.

“You have come a long way,” said the
curé
.

“The battlefield is not so far,” said Karl.

“You have an accent from nowhere,” the
curé
said. “I have heard certain Canadians, but it is not even that exactly. You have come such a distance that I have never heard anyone quite like you before.”

“America,” said Karl, and the word was sweet on his lips.

“Ah,” said the
curé
. “Tell me, what were you fleeing?”

His thin lips bore the slightest semblance of a smile.

“Fortune,” Karl said. “I have had great success in everything but starting a family. My son died only a week after he was born. I thought maybe it was because I'd had been rewarded too much and risked too little. Now I have received a letter from my wife that she is pregnant. I suppose that by this time the birth has happened. I have no way of knowing.”

“Then why are you here?” the
curé
asked.

“I am afraid that anything I do might curse us again,” he said. He was beginning to sweat in his greatcoat. “Do you mind if I take this off?”

“So long as you also take that metal thing off your head,” said the
curé
.

Karl reached up and snatched off the helmet, which had become such a part of him that he had forgotten he had it on.

“I have the remains of several soldiers in my wagon,” he said. “I need to give them a proper burial.”

“There are military cemeteries,” said the
curé
.

“I was turned away,” said Karl. “The man at the gate said the weather was too inclement.”

“How ungenerous it was of these soldiers,” said the
curé
, “to give their lives for France on one of its least attractive days.”

“I cannot bring them back to the front,” said Karl.

“Of course not,” said the
curé
, “but they can find rest anywhere, you know. The soul flies up. What is left is the chrysalis of the moth.”

At first Karl had trouble with the word in French.

“The what?” he asked. “Excuse me. My American vocabulary.”

“You know a moth?” said the
curé
, patiently, joining his hands backward at the thumbs to make a pair of wings.

“Like an angel?” said Karl.

“It lives at night and is attracted to the flame,” said the
curé
.

“Ah, yes,” said Karl. “Now I understand. The soul flies upward toward the flame.”

“Here, come with me.”

To the right, through a big open wooden door carved with figures, stretched a dark corridor. At the far end light spilled out from a doorway. Half-a-dozen candles flickered in a tiny room. In the corner of it glowed the embers of a cooking fire. Karl felt his collar beginning to dry in the warmth, the feeling coming back into his toes. Above the stove hung an iron cauldron on a pivot. The
curé
limped to it and looked into its depths, as if he might see the future there. Then he went to a large earthen jar that sat on the floor, covered with a circular wooden cover. From it he ladled a fair quantity of water into the cauldron, which he then lifted off its pivoting arm and placed directly on top of the stove. From a pile of logs he chose two and set them atop the embers, which he blew to life. The sparks flew up.

“The warmth,” Karl said. “You are very kind.”

“It is not often that I have a visit from an American who has been entrusted with France's glorious dead,” said the
curé
.

Karl was surprised at the sarcasm.

“You do not see glory in their sacrifice?” he asked.

The
curé
ladled some steaming water into a cup, into which he then spilled a quantity of tea leaves. When he had stirred them under, he handed Karl the cup.

“Theirs is only sacrifice,” he said. “The glory belongs, as all glory does, to France.”

“Had she any choice but to defend herself?” said Karl.

The
curé
repeated the process with a second cup, sipping it before he answered.

“Did you have a choice in coming here?” he asked.

“I could have just left the bodies somewhere,” Karl said. His eyes slipped to the floor. “I actually thought about it.”

“I mean coming to France,” said the
curé
.

“I felt a powerful need,” Karl said.

“And now?” said the
curé
.

“I'm not sure anymore what good I do,” Karl said. “They die with or without me.”

“You were drawn to the suffering,” said the
curé
. “You flew toward the flame and have been touched by it. We will put your friends in the catacombs. Perhaps we will find something on their persons that will tell us whom to notify so that their kin will know where they have found peace. Now, finish your tea and we will begin.”

The
curé
insisted on following him to the wagon, despite the difficulty he had walking. Karl threw the first corpse onto his shoulder.