From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
Time passed, took all. Time was free of allegiance or enemy.
It had been another dark winter full of rain all throughout France; the crops would be sparse again. Starvation would continue to stipple the countryside. Taxes would be raised once more, the English would commandeer the bulk of the food and supplies for themselves, plague would move from one pocket of the country to another like a drunkard on an evening stroll.
This was our province of life, this morning damp and nightly chill. To find an entire family dead at the side of the road—that deadly coupling of starvation and exposure—became common enough. We were familiar with it by now.
I was fifty years old when word came of Joan’s capture outside of Compiègne. Esme was kneading dough on the table near the hearth when I told her, her arms dusted in flour. Logs hissed wet in the fire, gave little warmth.
“The Burgundians got her,” I said. “She surrendered. There’s talk that she was abandoned there by her own men. A trap.”
“Good,” Esme said, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. She had in recent years found an uncharted pool of bitterness within herself; its depth would sometimes surprise me. There had been no word from Riva or Jehanne in years; our mother had died from pneumonia the previous winter, a heavy cough that hollowed her from the inside out. Esme spent those last weeks with her as our father continued taking walks into the countryside with his tankards of wine. As my mother’s illness grew, my father’s walks became longer and longer until one dismal gray afternoon Esme had pronounced her gone, and my father bore the news wordlessly as he tottered in the doorway.
“You and Geoffroy will dig a grave,” Esme said to him, her eyes glinting with fury. I’d knelt next to my mother on her thin pallet next to the hearth; she had grown birdlike in her thinness, so brittle in her ending days. I found it incredible that either she or my father had survived as long as they had. “I have some coins for the priest to say some words,” Esme said, her voice growing thick.
“Small use,” my father slurred, unable to look at us.
“Use enough,” Esme hissed.
We buried her in the field beyond and the priest took our money and said some words. We hoped to purchase her some kind of entry into a world kinder than this one.
Even Luc was gone now, he of the bloodlust and teeth like magician’s dice, having been knifed in a tavern dispute a decade before. Esme and I were all that was left now. I was a busy man, the only seasoned executioner for a hundred miles in any direction.
“They’re saying that this Cauchon’s in Paris shitting himself,” I said, grinning and furious. “That he’s gleeful with it. There is talk of paying a ransom and trying her for her crimes.”
“Of course they will. And of course they’ll lord it over us.”
“Unless the King intercedes.”
Esme with her little fists against the dough. “Charles? Will he?”
I shrugged. “With the English already here? Sleeping in our beds? No. No, I doubt it.” A wing of hunger fluttered in me. Even now, with just Esme and me, we still knew paucity. We knew the taste of broth and bread that surprised with its flavors: acorn, thyme, dandelion. Wheat and bread had grown monstrously expensive: Esme cut it with whatever ground meal could be found. The joints in her wrists were pronounced knobs, the veins blue and winding beneath her skin. Both of us were riddled by then with arthritis. This was our province.
She turned back to the hearth. “They left another one,” she said quietly.
I stiffened, my hand unconsciously going to the scabbard on my thigh. “When? Where?”
“Outside. Out back.”
“What was it this time?”
“A hen. Spiked to the butcher’s block.”
My first thought, in spite of it all, was of food. Esme read the look immediately and shook her head.
“It was long rotted, Geoffroy.”
I laughed, incredulous. “And you heard nothing? A rotting fowl nailed to the cutting block? Pounded in?”
Esme turned on me then. She had become so thin; the blades of her cheekbones, hair listless as straw. “There are things, Geoffroy, to be done here. Every day. The garden. The cooking. Sewing. A fence post leaned and I fixed that. I’m well versed by now in the constant difficulty of making something”—she slammed a bowl of stew down in front of me—“from nothing!”
There was a time where I might have said a word and all might have been well, but that time had passed. We had both curled into the shells of ourselves. She said, “Your job is the torture and murder of men, Geoffroy. Mine, it seems, is all else.”
I rose and drew my hand back, already sick of myself, and Esme flinched and brushed her hand against the simmering cookpot. She hissed in pain, held her fist to her narrow chest. I lowered my hand, ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“They don’t want us here,” she cried.
“We’ve lived here our entire lives, sister. This is the life we were handed.”
I looked out at the dim palette of night. A log popped. The crops would flood, I was sure the English would continue to come, and what little food there was would continue to rise in price and scarcity. We were already fighting and dying over scraps, rats seeking the highest point in a sinking ship.
I strode out, grateful for the rain’s chill, the water cool down the back of my neck.
My father had not been sighted since the day of my mother’s death. We had buried her, he and I, and returned home. He’d taken a walk later that evening with his wine and had never returned. Gone like smoke. Leaving me to my legacy.
• • •
We rode three to a seat in the tow truck, the van hooked and trailing on two wheels behind us. Roseburg seemed couched in a valley of fields and grasses so dry they could ignite with a hard stare.
“Just so you know,” Vale said, his hands locked around his knees as he sat between us. “We’re on a time schedule. I need to be in Los Angeles in two days.”
“Pain in the ass flying these days,” Gary nodded. “That’s for sure.”
Gary’s shop was a weathered two-bay garage on a gravel lot outside of town. Behind the shop were knots of crabgrass growing into the links of cyclone fencing, blackberry bushes scattered amid clots of rusted cars.
Across the road was an A-frame building called the Tip-Top Lounge, its lettering fashioned to look like sawn logs. Next to that was a two-story motel built with a 1950s bomb shelter aesthetic in mind, equal parts concrete and corrugated tin. Nothing else but the tidal roar of the freeway. Valley grasses so crisp and pale they looked nearly white. A ragtag armada of pickups sat around the parking lot of the restaurant. The motel seemed desolate, possibly abandoned.
Gary backed the tow truck up, maneuvered the van into one of the garage bays. Stepping out of the truck into the dimness, I was struck with how quiet things were. A man across the road came out of the Tip-Top and ambled toward his truck and I could hear every footfall on the gravel.
Gary took another plug of chewing tobacco from a tin in his back pocket. He spat into a coffee can in the corner and stood there in front of the van, his hands on his hips. Surveying. Finally he said, “You guys feel free to go on over and get some dinner. I’ll find that pump and get to work.”
Vale started to say something and I put my hand on his arm. “Let’s let him get to work, Mike.”
We trudged across the road toward the restaurant, Vale cursing under his breath. Crickets had by then begun their whirring in the grass. Vale had his shoebox tucked under one arm. He looked angry, but more than that he looked pale and used up, sick.
The Tip-Top had lace doilies under the sugar shakers. At the register, a pie wheel sat next to a coffee cup full of American flags. Booths lined three walls of the restaurant, with a scattering of tables in the middle. A counter faced the kitchen, and upon entry, Vale and I were soundly ignored by the half dozen old men perched there. Opposite the booths was a doorway marked Lounge. Vale saw that and swiped a hand down his mouth.
“Order me some pie, Marvin. I’ll be out in a sec.”
I felt time running down the hourglass, but what else could I do? Vale in the lounge seemed like a bad idea, but obviously trying to commandeer my destiny had never worked out particularly well. Vale, I knew, wouldn’t veer. He was locked into something bigger than himself. I took a seat at a booth and the waitress walked over with a menu and a pot of coffee, watching Vale push his way through the lounge doors. “Anything to drink while you look at the menu, hon?” She sounded catgut-tough, forty years of Pall Malls working their magic.
“Water’s fine.”
“Your friend joining you, or is he drinking his dinner tonight?”
“That’s a good question. I’m not sure.”
“I’ll check back in a minute.”
When she did, Vale had yet to come out of the lounge. I ordered blackberry pie. Out the window the last bit of daylight was thumbed pink and orange against the crest of the hills. I could dimly see the van in Gary’s garage across the road. It’d been a long time since I’d felt this way, wanting to live. Felt anything beyond contempt and those few invigorating moments of righteous fury.
A pair of headlights wound themselves up the road and a truck spackled in gray primer screeched into the parking lot, hitting the brakes so close that I could hear a spattering of gravel thunk against the side of the restaurant.
The driver of the truck jumped down from the cab. He was wearing cowboy boots and, chubby as he was, had packed himself into a pair of crisp blue jeans that looked like they’d been vacuum-sealed on him. He reached into the truck, showing a generous cleft of plumber’s crack, and came out with an aluminum baseball bat from the floorboard. With his baseball cap and patchy red beard, he might have graduated high school a few hours before. He certainly looked dumb enough.
The waitress stormed out from behind the counter and threw open the door, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t you dare, Casper. Don’t you do it.”
The guy hiked up as much of his jeans as he could. Through the door I heard him say, “If he wants to come out and talk about it like a man, I’m all ears.” He spat out an impressive jet of tobacco juice onto the gravel. “Otherwise, I’m going in there and cooking up a nice shitkicking soufflé.”