At the Edge of Summer

Maman wrote to me of Christmas at Mille Mots. Her household had swelled to include three families of refugees—two Belgian and one French from near Saint-Quentin. Five children among them, so the hearth again had a row of shoes lined up, waiting for Père Noël to fill with nuts and candy. Not like Christmas used to be, she wrote. We didn’t have much of a réveillon feast. A goose couldn’t be found in all the valley, but we had a pair of chickens stuffed with prunes. Oysters, chestnuts, a fine Bayonne ham I’ve been saving.

My mouth, rusty with the taste of stale water and dried bread, watered.

The five little ones were worried they would be without Christmas this year, so far from their homes. The oldest amongst them is only eight and still has nightmares of his house burning. I hope to distract them. I gathered up the children and they helped me arrange the crèche. They implored me, and so I brought in some clay from the garden and sculpted five new santons to tuck around the manger. Do you remember when we used to do that? How many shepherds in the crèche have the face of my Luc?

She tried to sound dismissive, as though Christmas just wasn’t what it used to be, and maybe it wasn’t. But to me, reading her letter in between trudges through knee-high snow, through the half-frozen mud beneath, eating cold turnip and barley soup, my only carols the shells overhead, it sounded perfect.

Christmas passed by and, in the damp thaw of spring, I got leave, at last.

I arrived at a château edged in daffodils, ringing with the sound of laughter. Gray icicles melted from the roof. Overhead a swallow arched across the aching blue sky. Like a cool wash of water, the laughter, the yellow and blue, the soft dripping of the icicles, sluiced away the past ten months. In front of Mille Mots, I was cleansed.

As I stood on the front walk, breathing in tranquility, the front door pushed open. A boy in short trousers, followed closely by two curly-headed girls, tumbled out onto the lawn. He had one of my old footballs tucked under one arm, and the girls were in hot pursuit. I watched as the children, pink-cheeked and laughing, disappeared around the side of the house.

“They remind me of you and Clare.” Maman stood in the open doorway. “Younger, yes. But always off looking for adventure.” There were new lines on her face, and had she always been so small? But she was Maman.

I stepped forward, uncertain.

“Mon poussin.” Her voice broke with a little ripple. “Oh, my Luc.”

I let myself be drawn into the peace of the château.

—

“Your papa is happy,” she said later, as we walked arm-in-arm through the tangled hopefulness of the rose garden. The two Belgian women sang as they spread damp shirts on the lawn to dry. “Is that strange, to find satisfaction in war?” Children’s shouts drifted from the riverbank.

“He’s doing what he loves. And, besides, they all say that La Section Camouflage is a cushy job.”

She frowned. “Cushy?”

“One of those colonial words that the Tommies use.” I shrugged. “It means easy, soft, comfortable.”

“Easy?” She bristled. “Claude’s work isn’t easy. It’s important.”

“Of course.” I stepped carefully around a fallen bird’s nest. “On the battlefields, men are right out there in the open, for God and the Germans to see straight and clear. There needs to be a way to camouflage that.”

“It’s the perfect job for him.” She tipped her face up to the sun. “Art, innovation, and the discipline of the army.”

It was perfect. So perfect that, at times, I was envious. While I crawled through barbed wire and slept on dirt and loaded my rifle with cold-numbed fingers, Papa was in a well-lit room behind the lines, painting and drawing and designing, all in the name of patriotism.

“Both of you are staying safe, that’s all that matters.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “You’re not so near to the front lines, are you?”

Carefully worded letters gave that impression, I knew. I didn’t intend to be deceptive, at least not at first. But I didn’t want Maman to worry. So I wrote about the food (“not nearly as good as Marthe’s”), the conditions (“rainy, but hoping for a break in the weather”), the uniforms (“finally, they’ve replaced the garance red!”), and the future (“when this is all over, Cairo? You’ve always wanted to see the pyramids”). I didn’t tell her anything that was really happening.

“Not so near,” I lied, glad she wasn’t looking at me. “Really, it’s almost…cushy.”

She nodded with satisfaction. “And have you seen your papa often?”

There were soldiers stretched across half of France. Had she not read a newspaper in eight months? Not once looked at a map? “Maman, no. He’s in a different unit. He’s posted near Nouvons and I’m…” I couldn’t tell her how near to Mille Mots I was. “I’m somewhere else.”

A furrow appeared at the edge of her brow.

“But I hear much about the camoufleurs,” I said in a rush. “And once I even saw a group of them. They’d built a tree stump, all out of metal, but painted to look like bark and smoke and battlefield ruin. They brought it out to our line.”

“A tree stump? I thought they were painting barricades or designing uniforms.” She frowned. “Why would they need a tree stump?”

“A listening post? A sniper perch?” I shrugged. “Nobody tells me. But I saw them with that make-believe stump. They came in the dead of night to spirit it out into No-Man’s-Land.”

“No-Man’s-Land…”

“That’s the space between the trenches. That’s where the fighting is. It’s where the camouflage is needed most.”

She ground to a halt. “Cher Claude, he goes so close to the battles?” Her face had gone gray as smoke. “But isn’t it dangerous?”

Dangerous would be more than tiptoeing out to place a fake tree stump. Dangerous would be going full into the zone between the trenches, weapon drawn, waiting for the shots directed at you. It would be creeping with half an ear on the shells in the sky, half an eye on the guy next to you, half a heart on your mission ahead. It would be leaving behind anything personal, any letters or photos or incriminating addresses, on the chance that you were captured and put everything you loved at risk. Dangerous would be what I did every day out there. “Not at all.”

She suddenly threw her arms around me, an uncharacteristically desperate gesture. I hadn’t told her about the splinters up and down my back, the ones left after a tree had shattered next to me. The nurses didn’t have time to get them all. As Maman’s fingers clutched my neck, I winced. She felt the tension and pulled back.

“Luc?” she asked, searching my face.

Her hand was still on my back, and I bit my tongue. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a little sore, I suppose. A soldier’s life.”

She twisted me around and peeled back the top of my collar. I didn’t know what it looked like but I knew what she was seeing when she gasped. Against my shirt, my back felt like a porcupine.

“It’s nothing, really,” I said. “Only splinters. I used to get them all the time, remember?”

She took off her glove and felt underneath my collar. Her fingers were cool, like when I was a little boy and came to her, ill, scared, heartbroken. Sitting near, smelling like La Rose Jacqueminot and comfort, those cool fingers stroking my face and arms and back were better than any medicine. There was a lump in my throat and I didn’t know how it got there.

“My boy,” she said. And, at that moment, that’s all I needed.

—

Maman had the copper bathtub brought up to Papa’s studio, where the afternoon light stretched yawning across the room. I couldn’t lay in it, not enough to soak my whole back, so I sat on the floor in front of her chair. She dipped a washcloth into the warm saltwater and held it against my skin until some of the splinters, soft, worked their way to the surface.

“I saw something in your face, you know.” She squeezed the cloth in the basin and brought it again warm against my back. “I’ve always known when you were lying to me.”

“Maman, I’m not. I just—”

“Shhh.”

Water dripped down the curve of my spine. “It’s really not as bad as it seems.”

“Is that what you think?” Her voice was tight. The heat of the washcloth disappeared. “That this seems somehow worse than it is? I’m picking wood out from my baby.”

I’d seen men leave pieces of themselves on the battlefield. All of themselves. I didn’t answer her.

Around me were the shapes of my childhood. The skeletons of easels. Neat stacks of canvases. Moth-eaten armchairs and scroll-armed sofas. A tarnished cauldron. The head of a papier-mâché dragon. The trunks of costumes, the garishly painted swords and helmets, the swirls of silk scarves tied here and there. The props of a theater, in the studio of an artist. I’d grown up within it.

“I come up here more often these days.” Maman dropped the washcloth into the basin with a soft splash and picked up a pair of curved tweezers. “I know that things are dreadful out there. It’s a war, after all.” I bent my head closer to my crossed legs. “But here, safe in the château, surrounded by the beauty of Claude’s art…I can forget.”

For a quiet space of an afternoon, so had I.

“I try,” I finally said. I felt her tweezers against my back. “There’s art, even where I am.”

She paused. “Truly?”

“When we’re en repos, we stay—” I caught myself before I revealed troop movements. “We stay in a rocky area. Some of the men, they carve straight into the rock. The sound of the chisels against the stone, the smell of broken limestone, it all makes me…it makes me feel like I’m home again. Like I’m a boy again sitting beneath the worktable in your studio.”

Behind me, Maman had quieted.

I cleared my throat, embarrassed at my little admission. “There’s some real talent there. Men carving things that could find a place in Monsieur Santi’s gallery or one of the others on the Quai du Voltaire.”

She tapped the tweezers against the side of the basin.

“Insignia, rolls of honor, tapestries in stone. Memories of the things they left behind.” I rubbed at the damp hair at the nape of my neck. “One solider has been working on a wall with an allegory that would impress even Papa. Dancing peasants, toppled towers, swans, laurels, falling moons, Death crowned in crows’ feathers. Every time we are en repos, he adds a little more to the wall.”

“What have you carved?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I tensed as her tweezers found a deep-seated splinter. “I don’t know how to do that. I’m not the sculptor in the family.”

“You’ve watched me enough. You know the technique. And you’ve always been able to see beyond the two-dimensional.”

I didn’t tell her how my fingers traced the grooves in the stone walls, how they twitched to pick up a chisel, how they once drew Mille Mots in the dust on the floor of the caves. “I can’t.” A soldier who was never really an artist to begin with, he had no business taking up space on the walls of the cave. He wasn’t the person to leave a memorial behind. “But you could sculpt. You should. You used to be magnificent.”

I thought she’d bristle at the instantly regretted “used to,” but she was pensive today. “I’ve thought about it. After I made those little clay santons for the children at Christmastime, it was like something had been reawakened. I hadn’t sculpted in years, you know.”

“I know.” I looked around Papa’s studio, where she’d moved her tools all those years ago, where there’d always been a block of granite, half roughed out. It was all still there, the block covered over by a dust-choked cloth. “Then why haven’t you?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. “It was so long ago. My art was a piece of my past, a piece that I had to put away as I grew up.”

“Papa never asked you to.”

“He didn’t have to.” Her words were steady, but her tweezing became more fierce. “He needed me at the desk, managing things. I knew that. The household needed someone not always lost in a fairy-tale world.”

I turned. “Do you know why I never wanted to enter art school? Why I never sought that future?”

The sunlight touched her graying hair with gold.

“It was because you stepped out of that future and into another. You put art aside in favor of practicality. I grew up watching you make do with Papa’s art rather than make your own. And be happy with it.”

“I was happy.”

“Did Papa and the household need you all that much?”

She stopped and put the flat of her hand against my back. “You needed me.”

“Not anymore.” I caught her hand. “I’m grown. I’m gone. Why not now?”

“You come to me with a back full of splinters, and then you tell me you’re grown and gone.” She took my shoulders and turned me around. “You still need me.”

I’d spent all these months protecting her, hiding from her the dangers I faced every day. Dodging shells and death, and then writing to her about last night’s cabbage soup.

She searched my eyes. “Luc, stay.” Her grip on my shoulders tightened. “I’ll watch you, I’ll hide you, I’ll keep you safe.” Her voice cracked. “Please.”

Instead of answering, I stood and went to the shelf where her old tools waited, shrouded. I took down the bundle, wrapped in soft cloth, and unrolled it on the floor in front of her. A dozen narrow chisels, a mallet, rasps and rifflers. Tools that hadn’t been touched in a decade and a half. She watched them warily.

“Take them up again.” I picked up the slender point chisel and opened up her hand. “In all of this ugliness, you need a weapon. You need to find beauty.”

She closed my fingers around the chisel. “I think perhaps you need it more than I.” Her hand wrapped around mine, around the faded ribbon still tied, and she pinched the inside of my wrist. A silent entreaty to stay safe and do my best. To be a good Crépet.

“I promise, Maman.”