“Are we veering toward Argentat?” Père panted his inquiry. “I’ve lost all sense of direction, though I was born not so far south of here.”
A memory from the day her instructor pulled out a map of France came to Kate. He told the agents to memorize all twenty-one regions, focusing on the Auvergne, the Limousin, and the Midi-Pyrénées.
“Picture the Department of Limousin and the Auvergne as a peasant’s straw hat. The Midi-Pyrénées, taken with the Auvergne, resembles the American state of Kentucky, but conjure your own image.”
The instructor pointed to the Department of Lot and let his wooden pointer linger there. “The Gestapo has difficulty navigating such high country, but not the Maquis—a camp between the Lot the Cantal is impenetrable to the Nazis.
Kate’s word picture had come to her in a flash. Taken together, the Auvergne and the Limousin resembled the straw hat Addie plopped on her garden scarecrow a couple of summers ago, and her crooked kitchen stovepipe modeled the elevated Midi-Pyrénées perfectly.
Their guide chose a cow path to the right, crossed over a meadow and plunged almost straight up, following a vine-enclosed path.
The wizened man attempted to encourage Kate and Père “This way takes less time.”
“If we live through it.” Père muttered.
Steps away, their guide plunged through a ravine, where a hidden stream soaked Kate’s espadrilles. The threesome formed a shadowy line through chestnut shadows, making progress across a pebbled expanse. Soon, a homestead appeared, and their leader paused at a small barn. A scrape answered his hesitant taps.
Kate braced herself. Then someone struck a match and a dim lantern glow revealed a face. Little more than a girl, in normal times she would be in pigtails and a school uniform.
But fear lined her darting eyes, and the old man rasped something to her. Then he added, “Père Gaspard, this is my granddaughter.”
Père nodded to the girl. “Bonjour, my child.”
In the deepest shadow behind an upturned wheelbarrow, something stirred. Then came a catlike hiss and a shuffle. Under a black coat, glistening feral eyes shone below a halo of graying hair.
The man continued, “Viviane found this woman in our chicken coop this morning. She’d killed one of the hens and was trying to pluck it. Something has sent her off into another world.”
He motioned to Viviane. “Come, child. You have done well.” He lifted his grizzled chin toward Père Gaspard.
Viviane reached her hand toward the woman. “Indeed, Madame Lamouette, they can work miracles. I have seen...”
The woman gave a shriek and sprang at Père. Little Viviane leaped back in terror. The woman’s thin fingers stretched out like claws.
“May you rot in hell, priest!”
Her spittle hit Kate’s cheek. Viviane shushed the woman and pulled at her arm. “Her name is Lamouette.”
The woman shoved Viviane aside and stepped into the light from the open door. “Because of a priest like you, I live, though my family perished. A priest in Saint Jouvent sent word—my mother was dying, and begged for me to come. How could I say no?”
As though putting words to her story strengthened her, she began to pace. “For three days she struggled for every breath while the priest fluttered about, hoping to pry one or two more sous from us.
“Maman was wealthy before the German vipers descended. By the time she breathed her last, the priest had vanished, so Maman died without last rites.” She paused inches from Père and thrust her forefinger in his face. “He stole that consolation from her.”
Père’s silent stance seemed to quiet her.
“That, I can forgive. What I cannot forgive...” She fell to her knees and dug at the floor.
Kate knelt and wrapped her arms around the miserable woman. She thrashed, but Kate held tight. And then the story tumbled out in sobs and howls.
“The Germans separated the men from the women and children, took the men to barns, and the others to the church—hundreds of them. They told the children to sing as they marched. My son Henri would have obeyed ... such an obedient lad.” For a moment her tone softened.
“I can picture the scene—the young men surely helped my blind husband to the barn, into the trap those swine had set.”
“They killed them all! Machine gunned them, torched the buildings ... my sweet little Henri...”
She broke free and charged Père again. “Where was God then?”
Père reached for her, but she shrank back and turned on Kate. “You resistors—that is why they murder everyone. Merde! Their blood be upon you!” Finally, she pitched forward in a faint.
The grandfather held Viviane close. “Thank heaven.” He turned to Père. “What shall we do with her?”
He could not wait for a reply. “Perhaps we find a safe place for Viviane, lock Madame in this shed and return for her...”
Père nodded. “Oui, a safe place...”
And idea occurred to Kate. “I can go with him and Viviane, Père.”
The old peasant studied her. “About a kilometer away, a maison de la Résistance has sheltered others in need.”
“Yes, this is where I belong.” Père sank to the earth beside Madame Lamoutte, and the grandfather wasted no time starting out with his granddaughter and Kate on a different path from the one that led them here. Near a stone house, he gestured to Kate and Vivianne to wait and went ahead, but soon returned and lifted the little girl.
A diminutive woman welcomed them, brought warm milk and bread, and whispered something to a younger woman who disappeared into another room.
When Viviane’s grandfather finished his portion, he rose. “I must return to Père and Madame, but we will come back for you.”
After he left, Viviane ate, too, and soon slept. The woman beckoned Kate through a short door into a room cloaked in steam.
“Ici, vous prenez un bain, Mademoiselle.”
Here, you may bathe. The words swam in Kate’s head as the woman bade her remove her filthy clothes. She left with them over her arm, and in a trance, Kate immersed herself—real soap, a scrubbing brush, and the sweet smell of lavender.
Half an hour later, in a pair of trousers and flannel shirt the woman had left on a trunk, Kate studied her face in a misty mirror.
“Yes, I do recognize you.” She pulled a brush through her hair, fashioned a single braid, and entered the kitchen to ask after Viviane.
“Still, she sleeps. Perhaps you would like to join her?”
A bed with a fresh-smelling coverlet—how could this be true? Thinking she could never fall asleep, Kate sank into the luxury, and a quote from one of her instructors entered her thoughts. “If you recall your Roman history, you may remember the playwright Plautus. He wrote, ‘consider the little mouse, how sagacious an amimal it is which never entrusts his life to one hole only.’”
Ah...so many holes she’d visited. She wakened only when Viviane's grandfather entered the house.
The woman roused Viviane, and Kate quickly dressed in her own clothes, now clean and dry. She accepted a food bag and thanked the woman for her kindness.
“Such is the way of war. One comes, another goes, and we do what we can.”
When she inquired about Madame, Père shook his head. “We could only listen to her again before she ran off.” He held up his palms. “Sometimes my training does me no good at all.”
All the way back to camp, Kate luxuriated in the feel of the breeze against her skin. But the camp buzzed with news of Oradour—tales wrapped the place like fog and partisans spoke in hushed voices.
“It happened yesterday, but the smoke still rises ...”
“A few children escaped and one or two adults. Only charred buildings remain.”
The words seared Kate’s heart. She had clung to the hope that Madame Lamoutte, in her feverish grief, had been mistaken.
Père Gaspard fell in with a group they passed, but Kate continued on to her cave. Would this unthinkable news have reached London yet by the hand of some other operator?
The British had faced such horrors—her days of joining Mrs. Tenney in her air warden duties, with bombs falling in the night, came to mind. The citizens had cursed the Germans, yet banded together, as she pictured them doing even now, with V-1 rockets killing hundreds more.
The War Ministry once again posted warnings and notices in the tube stations, as people descended on them late each day, hoping for a safe night huddled together underground. And the Prime Minister continued to address his people—another speech to sustain them through the second Blitz. Through all its history, the English always summoned words.
But for this face-to face slaughter of women and children in Oradour, Kate could find none.
~
Just when Domingo thought he must be near the camp, sounds of a struggle wafted from some brambly growth staggering a rise. His ears told him only one person writhed a few meters beyond. Panting, moaning, wriggling against metal, then silence. He continued in that direction.
Then he spied an airplane wing stuck three-quarters of the way up some saplings. He traced the plane’s track all the way back through the woods and waited, his heart in his throat.
When sounds came again, he climbed a sturdy chestnut sapling. Ander taught him well—always seek the highest place. June sunshine amplified the foliage, making it difficult to gain a clear view, but what showed through dappled leaves left Domingo breathless.
The airplane had crashed some time ago, the only sign of life a shivering blood-soaked arm. Mangled aluminum trapped the rest of a man’s body.
Deathly pale against his brown leather jacket, the hapless flyer seemed to aim his hand for a rectangular black box, perhaps a motor. A short scope and long silver bolts stuck out from dark protrusions on the mechanism’s side. Domingo shinnied down and knelt as close as he could to the injured fellow.
Blood-matted hair, hazel eyes, and a fist-sized bruise from temple to jawbone. But those eyes still radiated purpose.
Only one English word occurred to Domingo. “American?”
The soldier blinked and gestured toward the black box. “Bombardier ... have to destroy...”
Intent on keeping him alive, Domingo paid no attention. He’d never witnessed such severe trembling, and opened the man’s leather jacket to a puddle of flesh, blood, and bone. He tore off his shirt to cover the poor fellow.
“I will... get you out.” The English words sounded stilted, but the man understood.
“Too late...” He hooked Domingo’s arm with his hand and strained his eyes toward the black box. Seconds later, they rolled back in his head.
Domingo supported his neck. “Here. Let me...”
The man gasped. “Top ... secret.... destroy ...”
For a moment, his final breath hovered in the airy warmth. Then, with a shudder, the bombardier slipped away in Domingo’s arms.
Salt filled Domingo’s throat and tears stung his eyes. From the land of Katarin’s birth, this fellow offered himself for la France, for him, grandson of Aitaita Ibarra of the Basque regions near the Pyrenees.
For his cantankerous people, conquered and divided between countries throughout the ages, for France, split into political regions and departments and now ruled by malicious oppressors, this American gave his life. Domingo bowed his head. Greater love has no man than this ...
He closed the bombardier’s eyes, as Père Gaspard would do and made the sign of the cross. Les inconnus...Pere spoke of common French citizens, but this American, too, qualified. Perhaps his family would never know the story of his sacrifice.
No one ought to die like this way, an ocean away from his birthplace. But the brave fellow wore no identification—strange. Domingo carefully positioned the bombardier’s head in the rubble and crawled through the sharp metal mess. He eyed the object that held the American’s attention to his last breath. Cast iron.
It weighed far more than any radio or ammunition crate he’d hauled away from a parachute drop, more than that heisted pack of gold bars. He braced his feet and brought the box to his waist. Panting, he hoisted the box from the wreckage and hauled it a few meters beyond the airplane.
A vague recollection of an invention Père Gaspard described surfaced then, something about the need to level a bomber and measure the wind. The alignment of gages and lenses intrigued Domingo, but how to destroy them with only his knife and small pistol, an M1911? Petra said its bullets would fell a Nazi with one shot, but what good would bullets do now?
Besides, a shot might alert the Milice or Gestapo to the crash site, and that would not do. The partisans must get here first.
Destroy—twice the bombardier used that word. There was a small shed about five minutes down the trail—maybe a tool lay in there. Domingo ran full force and returned with a sledgehammer. His first blow crushed the eyepiece on top, his second, a recorder at the lower right.
The impact reverberated up his arms, but he imagined the American smiling. With no deep water nearby to drown the box, Domingo rummaged through the rubble and found a piece of metal to dig a hole behind a large rock. Every few minutes, he paused to listen, until finally, he half rolled, half carried the apparatus and shoved it in. Dripping with sweat, he shoveled earth and green moss over the depression before hefting more large rocks over the area.
For a moment, then, he hesitated, looking back at the American. “I buried your secret, and I will bury you, too...”
With vultures already circling and no way to remove the body, he wrangled a large piece of steel from the other end of the debris to cover the fallen warrior. As he pushed it in place, something metal glinted up from the earth, and Domingo retrieved it—the impact must have blown this small rectangle from its chain. Calvin R. Pierce Numbers then, and Catholic.
“Had you grown up here, you might have attended my parish.” Domingo bit his lip. “I’ll bring some men to help, and the enemy will never find a trace of you.”
For once, speaking his thoughts aloud brought Domingo a measure of comfort. One more set of human eyes would accompany him now—hazel eyes. But at least this man had not died alone. If only he could pool all the losses of this war into one and bury it as he had that bombsight.
At the camp, he enlisted the cook and two others. Back at the crash site, they entombed much of the charred bomber, along with the bombardier and two other crewmembers.
Gathered around the grave, someone whispered, “Repose en paix.” They stood in the afternoon stillness for a full minute. Then someone made a move, and they returned to the trail. Domingo brought up the rear, relieved that no one engaged him in small talk.
Rest in peace ... In Katarin’s native tongue, the bombardier's farewell would sound like this. But peace seemed otherworldly now, entirely at odds with this confused earth. Her smile flitted through Domingo’s consciousness, but the bombardier’s final pleading expression overwhelmed all else.
Heaviness of heart slowed Domingo’s pace. How much more suffering could his country embrace? The Great War, the horrible fighting in Spain, and now this present endless debacle drenched the land in blood. Graves everywhere, and the news from the northern beaches listed tens of thousands more.
Eventually he caught up with the rest, and twilight followed them into camp. One of the men showed Domingo to a tent. He collapsed in sleep, but the bombardier’s countenance still accompanied him. Perhaps these eyes would take the place of the American pilot he had left behind under that rotting carcass so many months ago.
The pilot's comrade had said, “You can come back for him later—otherwise, we’ll all die.” But even so, had he made the right choice?
Once, Domingo startled awake, hardly aware of his location. After he oriented himself and settled back under his blanket, a lone star peeked at him from the heavens. Then a newfound realization gripped him. The peculiar essence burrowed deep inside, a fresh yearning he had heard others voice, but never before entertained.
Yet certainty rode this unexpected new longing. He wanted to go to the far-away land of America.