Her voice had broken. Her eyes clawed at him. “He was a good mon, sir, so good to me. We — I jus’ seventeen in Bridgetown and he say he love me, all the time he say he love me, and I don’t know what dat is, I don’t know, I still don’t know. .”
She was sobbing now, her chest heaving and both hands gone to her eyes. “A good mon,” she kept saying, “he was a good mon,” till John stepped forward to open the door on the deputy’s furious red face and the people crowding in behind him, strangers come to share in the outrage, and all he could think to say, the aggrieved victim, bereft and inconsolable, was “Take her away.”178
At some point, his sister was there with something in a cup for him to drink and then she took him upstairs to the bedroom and laid him down on the bed by the darkened window, and for some strange reason, as she turned off the lamp and stood silhouetted in the light of the door, murmuring the sorts of things only women can command in times of heartache and affliction, he called her Kitty. “I’ll be all right, Kitty,” he said, though he knew he wouldn’t be, and as he lay there sleepless, listening to the voices in the dark and the breathless haunted groans of the two survivors laid out in the parlor (Fritz, who would recover from his burns and a forearm shattered in his plunge through the window, and Lindblom, who would die by morning), she began to emerge from the shadows, Kitty, not Mamah, and wasn’t that the strangest thing? He saw her whirling away from him in the blue satin gown her mother had made her, Cosette to his Marius, and half the girls there were Cosette while the boys favored Valjean and Javert, Kitty, with the elastic limbs and the red-gold hair that piled up like waves on a beach. .
In the morning, the sun rose out of the hills in a dark bruise of clouds and the clouds spread over the valley like a stain in water. By noon, it was like dusk. He felt the humidity the moment he rose from his sweated sheets, heavy air bearing him down and his shirt wet before he put it on. He’d fallen into a dreamless sleep sometime in the early hours, listening to a solitary bird — a whip-poor-will — riding up and down the glissando of its liquid notes till he’d gone unconscious along with it. He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but when he woke he was fully and immediately present. He knew where he was and why he’d come and that his loss and misery were continuous and that he wouldn’t taste his breakfast or his lunch or his dinner either.
He tried to comb his hair, but it was a snarl, and when he lifted his arms to smooth it back he was assaulted by his own odor. He smelled of yesterday’s sweat, a deep working stench of fear and uncertainty that no soap or eau de cologne could ever drive down. For a moment he thought of going down to the lake for a swim, but that wouldn’t be right either, not if Mamah couldn’t join him or her John and her Martha — no, he would wear his odor, deepen it with the sweat of digging, the pickaxe riding high over his head as he stabbed at the earth and loosened the teeth of the yellow rock that lay clustered there along the black gums of the soil, because every grave was a mouth that opened and closed and swallowed till there was nothing left.
There was breakfast. A hush of voices, people tiptoeing round the house like ghosts of the departed. He sat for a moment with Fritz — the hair gone, the scalded scalp, gauze pillowed up like a spring snowstorm — but the boy didn’t seem to recognize him. Then he went out into the yard to smell the thin poisonous odor of the smoke that still rose from the ruins across the way, and there were people here as well, too many people, and so he walked down the hill and back up again to Taliesin and into the burned-out courtyard. That was where Billy Weston was, both his hands bandaged and a white surgical strip wrapped round his skull so that he looked like a casualty of the war. Frank saw the blood there, a slow seep of it accumulating at the temple, a wound that would never heal. “Billy,” was all he could say, and Billy, a rake in one hand, the streaming hose in the other, could only nod in return. For a long while they just stood there, side by side, and then they bent forward and began to rake the ashes.
In another place, all the way across the world in Paris, where the talk was of nothing but the war — the insuperability of Plan 17, the fierceness of the French cavalry and the defects of the German character — Maude Miriam Noel was just sitting down to breakfast at the Café Lilac. She’d chosen a table under the awning, out of the sun, though the day was lovely, so tranquil and warm you’d never know a war was going on not a hundred and fifty kilometers away. It was her skin. She’d been out for a walk along the Seine the day before, and though she was wearing her hat and carrying a parasol, she hadn’t bothered with gloves because of the heat, and now the backs of her hands were red — or worse, brown. She’d rubbed cold cream on them, but she couldn’t help noticing the faint rippling of the flesh there — wrinkles, they were wrinkles — and that worried her, worried her deeply. Old women had wrinkled hands, parchment hands (“Lizard skin,” as Leora used to joke all those years ago when they were both young and could barely conceive of what a wrinkle was, at least in relation to themselves), and she wasn’t an old woman. Not in fact or by any stretch of the imagination. Men stopped to stare at her as she went down the street, and not simply men of middle age, but young men too.
But here was the waiter. A little man — so many of them were little men, not simply among waiters or the French, but men in general, so very pinched in spirit and disappointing when you most needed them. This particular waiter — Jean-Pierre Something-or-Other — had stared into her face on innumerable mornings through all the seasons of the year, at least since she’d moved into her little apartment at 21 rue des Saints-Pères, with the window boxes trailing blood-red geraniums above the antiquités shop so crammed with marble and pictures in gilded frames it could have been a museum itself, and yet each time he presented the menu with a “Bonjour, madame,” it was as if it were the first, as if he’d never laid eyes on her before, as if she were a mere tourist and interloper. Which infuriated her. She’d complained about him to the management on more than one occasion, but the management, which consisted of a terminally weary old lady in a stained blue kerchief (yes, with lizard hands and an eternally dripping nose) and her entirely deaf husband, hadn’t seemed moved to do anything about it. And so here he was. And here she was. Because she’d be damned if she’d go even half a block out of her way to the next café—this one was hers, her territoire, and she was willing to fight for it. Or at least endure a certain degree of rudeness, day after day, meal after meal.
The waiter handed her the menu as if he’d just found it in the street, and she waved it away — they both knew perfectly well that she’d all but memorized it and wanted only deux oeufs, poached, accompanied by a pair of those little English sausages and the sauté of tomatoes, avec café noir sans sucre. They both knew, and yet every encounter was played out as if it were the first, as if they were players in an Oscar Wilde farce. Then the waiter was gone and at some point the coffee appeared and she reached beneath the table for her bag and the newspapers Leora had sent her from Chicago. She liked to keep up on events in the States, especially now that the war had broken out, but she always had, because as Frenchified as she’d become she was still an American girl at heart, Maude Miriam Noel, the Belle of Memphis. Just the other night, at a gathering in her flat over a very nice Beaujolais and croquettes of crab she’d produced herself, an Englishman by the name of Noel Rutherford—Noel, and wasn’t that a cozy coincidence? — had told her how utterly charming her accent was. “You’re from the South, I presume,” he’d said—“Richmond, perhaps? Or perhaps deeper? Let me guess: Charlotte? Savannah?” And she’d smiled up at him — he was tall, lean, with that constricted muscular energy so many of the English seemed to cultivate, his hair as sleek and dark as an otter’s, and she’d begun to see real possibilities in him — and positively drawled, “Oh, no, honey, you’ve got me awl wrong. I’m a Memphis girl.”