The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [35]
A heavily dressed man opened the door, and the tan mutt rushed in with him and a woman dressed in pale green. A babble of energetic French followed, and Marshall sensed seriousness but not immediate danger. The man left then, with the dog.
After he ate the bread, Marshall was shown where to empty his chamber pot. The woman in green dipped hot water from a cauldron on the stove into a handled jug, and she gave him something like a dishcloth that he understood to be a bathing towel. There was soap and a razor in the room upstairs. He took the jug and the towel upstairs and gave himself a spit bath. Later he brought down the chamber pot and emptied it. The women looked up from their work, stared at him as he passed through, then bent their heads again.
Marshall had nothing to make the hours pass. Over and over the plane slid into the field. Over and over he ran through the woods, smelling the smoke from the plane. He couldn’t remember when he knew he was afraid. He thought he was more afraid now, looking back.
The red-cheeked boy, dressed in brown baggy pants and a cap. The cigarette. Webb and Hootie lying on the ground. The plane burning.
Everything Marshall owned now was in his pockets. There was the yellow card with a few French phrases to use in case he was shot down in France. The silk map, the first-aid items, the tube of condensed milk. Because he wasn’t supposed to be caught with the map, he worked at memorizing it. It was so intricate, the print so small. He needed better lighting. He sat on the floor against the wall, staring at the blue floral bouquets of the wallpaper. He tried to focus his mind by counting the bouquets.
He heard shouts in the street. He heard a horse clopping along, dragging a cart of some sort. Through the tiny window he could see an arc of the street and a wedge of open field. He could see the traffic pass. Occasionally he saw a group of children walking by. Their spontaneous giggles and laughter charged him with a bit of hope.
IN THE EVENING the women closed the shutters and drew the dark drapes to conceal the candlelight of the kitchen. He was brought downstairs to share a rabbit stew with the eight family members—the four older women, two young girls, and their parents. Reticent, Marshall observed them. His knowledge of French collapsed under the rush of their conversation. He learned to interpret tones if not their run-together words. He saw their skeptical looks, the gestures they made over their food. He could tell when they were talking about the Germans. The Germans apparently took the family’s goose for their Christmas. The Germans gorged on chocolate! Chickens! Butter!
The women in black had an authority that made the girls and their mother cower. There were no young men. The women barely spoke to Marshall, but when he tried to draw them out with his makeshift vocabulary, they modestly but eagerly queried him about America.
“FDR? Connaissez-vous FDR?”
“Shirley Temple?”
No one in the family revealed their names except for the man, Reynard. He was short and slender, with knobby hands. He pulled a leather wallet from his pocket and showed Marshall his identity papers. He pointed to his photograph, his name, his occupation, his citizenship. He flipped through the papers quickly.
“À Paris,” Reynard said. “In Paris you will obtain the fausse carte d’identité.”
“À Paris,” they all said, nodding in assent.
They were saying he would need a false ID card.
Every evening he heard German soldiers marching through the village on night patrol, singing a mournful song that sounded like homesickness itself. Warmth from the evening fire drifted up the open stairway door to his garret. He crept out and sat on the stair.
Sometimes he heard the Luftwaffe overhead, a nasty roar that he could feel in the pit of his stomach.
At night the face in the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190 visited him, a fighter pilot who had suddenly, briefly, flown alongside the stricken Dirty Lily. Their planes