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.
“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez que je fasse avec lui?” Her friend asked gruffly what she expected him to do with Henry.
Henry felt more and more like a mangy alley cat no one wanted.
The girl bristled and answered curtly that she didn’t expect any favours from him. She was taking the American to the nuns. They could figure it out.
The young maquisard laughed and joked that the nuns would see how well he said his prayers before deciding his fate. Then he took her hand and kissed it, telling her to be careful.
One of the leader’s companions grabbed his elbow and said, “Si elle va à Vézelay elle pourrait apporter les trucs de radio à Bernard.”
The girl’s friend frowned and shrugged off his subordinate. The companion had wanted the girl to carry radio parts to a man named Bernard. Her friend didn’t like the idea at all.
“Elle passera presque sur les lieux du massacre et trop proche des Allemands à Château-Chinon. Non.” He turned to the girl and told her again to go hide with the nuns.
Henry gladly turned to leave, relieved to be away from men who knew his shame, relieved to be avoiding a town the maquisard said had a German garrison in it. But the girl didn’t budge. She wanted to take on the mission.
She spoke in a tumble of words, telling him she’d carried parts before tucked in her umbrella and bicycle basket.
“Pas cette fois-ci, mon enfant,” the young man answered. “C’est trop dangereux en ce moment.”
The girl turned red. Her boyfriend had called her a child. Lord, Henry could only imagine what Patsy would do to him, if he ever called her that.
The girl swung back to slap the maquisard. He grabbed her hand and grinned. She only proved his point, he said. She acted like a child.
He let go of her arm and marched himself and his team away down the hill, over the next, and then they were gone.
The girl stood seething, breathing hard until they disappeared. She whirled on her heel and ran, skirt and hair flying. Henry started after her.
“Wait!” he cried. In his sad shape, he’d never keep up.
She didn’t.
Henry struggled after her, calling again, just when he knew he was going to faint or vomit.
Finally, she halted. Her fists clenched by her side, she stormed back to Henry. He was bent over, breathing like a horse about to die.
“Vite. Do you understand? I have to be rid of you so that I can fight les Boches. I want to kill as many as I can.”
Henry straightened up, panting between words. “No, you don’t. It won’t make you feel as good as you think it will.”
“And how would you know, thief?”
“Look, I’m not proud of what I’ve done to survive. But I’ve seen a lot of things you haven’t.”
The girl narrowed her eyes and slid up close to him. “I saw my mother killed because she would not let a convoy of drunk Germans into our home. They shot her dead, then they ran into the house. One of them finished the meal she was eating just before. When they left they took everything – the pigs, the cows, the silver. Everything except my hens and my fruit trees. Last month, in Dun-les-Places, the Nazis said we shot at them from the church tower. They hanged the priest from that tower. Then a Gestapo informant pointed out people who helped the maquis. The collaborator grew up with those people, ate supper with them, worshipped God with them. The Nazis shot them all – thirty people – in front of the church. My eighty-year-old uncle was one of them. I went to Dun-les-Places to find my aunt and bring her home to live with me. Their blood is still on the church walls.
“I have seen all this. Last month, I am seventeen. I will kill every Nazi I find and every collaborator. And I will smile when I do it.”
An awful silence hung between them. Henry couldn’t take his eyes off those furious yellow-green ones. He was horrified by what she reported, by what she planned. He wanted to run far away from her fury and at the same time he wanted to hold and comfort her. His confusion kept him immobilized, wordless, arms by his side.
Then they heard gunshots.
The girl’s eyes darted to the horizon behind Henry. “Mon Dieu. André.”
She brushed by Henry and ran, ran again with skirt and hair flying. This time Henry managed to keep pace.
They came to the top of a hill and could see a jeep flying up the road, pursued by two brown-and-black camouflaged trucks and four German motorcycles. A heap of men clung to the open back of the jeep, some firing back towards the Nazis. Their aim was terrible because of the wild jolting of the jeep. The Germans were closing in fast.
Just then three small figures rose up out of the grasses.
“André!” the girl screamed.
BOOM!
The first German truck exploded into flames and careened off the road. André’s group must have thrown grenades into it. The second truck screeched to a stop. A dozen soldiers jumped out and opened fire into the wheat field. The maquis jeep turned left, roared into the field across the road, looped back and tried to mow down the Germans caught in the crossfire between them and André in the wheat field.
The girl began to run.
This is suicide, Henry warned himself. But he ran after her, watching the skirmish unfold before him.
German soldiers screamed, fell, and writhed on the ground.
Frenchmen screamed, fell off the moving jeep, and slammed down dead on the roadway.
A dozen yards from the fighting, Henry caught up to the girl. He tackled her to the ground. “Crawl,” he whispered.
They shimmied through the grasses to the first of André’s companions. He was dead. “Non, non, non,” cried the girl. She thrashed on.
Henry paused over the dead maquisard. No beard on his face. Another teenager robbed of the chance to live his life.
Henry picked up the boy’s gun. As he yanked it up, the dead boy’s hand fell limply from the trigger to his belt. It bumped against a grenade.
Henry’s heart hammered against his chest. A grenade. He’d never used one. Pull the pin and throw, right? That’s all there was to it. Henry glanced back up to the fight. The French were definitely outnumbered. The jeep doggedly kept circling the German truck and the soldiers huddled beside it, but one after another the maquis fighters were being gunned down. Soon the jeep would be empty of French fighters. A grenade that found the right mark might save them.
Henry no longer needed his father’s voice to prod him in life-or-death circumstances. He picked up the grenade. It was heavy, cold, scaly. It felt like a thing of death. Henry pulled the pin, stood up, and hurled it.
BOOM!
The explosion knocked Henry back and over. His head hit the ground hard and the world went black.