He comes to her on the second day of spring, four months after the war has ended, when the magnolias have bloomed and the cherry blossoms are starting to flush along the length of the lake at the edge of the property. He carries a worn out green army bag and the newspaper clipping with her advertisement.
He doesn’t speak beyond the usual responses to the brief interview questions, but she can see in his eyes that he needs this. Needs to be able to make something flower and grow after years spent killing in the empty muddy fields of France. Something soft hides behind the tragedy in his eyes and she shows him the dilapidated greenhouse in the back and hands him the packets of seeds that she’s been able to keep through all of the years since those first shots were fired and the first row of vegetables plundered.
He stays out in the empty stables, there are no horses or cows anymore, but only an old goat that begins to follow him around like a horned hound dog. She brings him sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and dinners covered with embroidered linen. He always returns the dishes washed and stacked and folded, waiting on the top step of the back porch by the kitchen.
There are few words in the beginning. The silence stretches between them like the sunset shadows, comforting and warm and not altogether unexpected. There is rain and thunderstorms at night, and she doesn’t hear the screams of his nightmares because her own are loud enough to drown out everything else. There is sunshine though, and flowers too, and as the days begin to lengthen, the memories that haunt them both begin to fade.
The first real conversation she has with him occurs when she finds him dropping off his pile of cleaned supper dishes and linen on the back porch, and she catches sight of a jagged cut along the inside of his left wrist. It is scabbed and clearly a few days old, but the skin around the wound is red and inflamed and she knows the look of infection even without her years of wartime nursing.
“Your arm, let me take a look.” She says, stooping to pick up the dishes and leveling him with a stare that brokered no argument.
He hesitates, one foot on the bottom step of the porch but already angled away from her and back towards the greenhouse. The goat stands guard silently behind him.
“Thank you,” he says after a too long moment of thought and he steps forward and takes the dishes from her hands before she can say anything else, and follows her inside.
It is the second time that he has ever stepped foot inside the house, after that first interview he never saw the need to return. So after he has placed the dishes on the sideboard by the stove, he follows her to the big sink at the back of the kitchen and sits in the chair she points to. He waits patiently and quietly as she gathers her kit from the cupboard in the hall. The sun is starting to set in the window in front of him and it casts a soft haze of golden light across his face.
“What happened here?”
He shrugs, a gentle lifting of his shoulders and he places the wrist in question on the stone countertop. “Accident. I was digging up part of the rotten fencing out by the lake and got caught up on the wire.”
“You should’ve come to me, I would have helped.”
“Nothing serious, nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before either.”
The war sits unspoken between them, and they both know of what the other might have been through, what they each may have seen, but there is a huffing of breath and catching of eyes and they silently agree they don’t need to say anything more.
She dips a clean linen into a small bowl of fresh water and dabs at the crusted scab running alongside three inches of veins on the inside of his wrist. It loosens enough to peel away and the raw wound is exposed with only the briefest hiss of pain. The fingers on his left hand twitch as she flips to a clean edge of cloth and begins to clean methodically around the edges of inflamed skin. There is a small brown bottle of liquid that she next splashes onto the cloth and he bites down hard on his lip when he feels the burn of alcohol, forcing himself to keep his arm still upon the countertop as she disinfects the wound.
“Where did you learn to make fresh croissants?” He asks when she finishes the cleaning and reaches for a jar of sticky white medicinal paste.
“My mother grew up in Paris with an uncle who ran a bakery in Montmartre, and she brought the recipe with her when she moved here. I think they may have been the first thing I ever made with her. She always said the secret to a good croissant was cold butter and hot marmalade.” She smiles as she warms the paste between her fingers before gently applying a liberal amount to his arm. “I didn’t think I would remember how to make them after so long, but my hands remembered what to do even if my mind hadn’t quite caught up.”
He sits and listens with a tilt to his head and his eyes fixed on the smooth circular pattern of her fingers against his skin. The paste is cool against the burn of the cleansing alcohol and he feels the muscles in his arm relax against the stone. When he speaks, his voice is low and even and colored with fondness.
“My sister loved croissants, she used to demand them on her birthday and my mother would walk to the next town early in the morning to have some waiting for her when she woke. I remember she would hit me when I tried to steal an extra helping of her birthday croissants. She would hide them away from me all day, but in the end she’d always split the last one with me. I never got them for mine you see, it was always for hers.” There is a dimple in the corner of his small smile and she is seeing it here now for the first time.
“And what did your mother bring you for your birthday instead?”
“Seeds.”
“Any kind in particular?”
“Whatever was in the market, which tended towards tomatoes and peppers and occasionally daffodils and primroses, but my favorite year was the peonies.”
“I don’t think I have any peonies here.”
“I put some in out next to the road, you should see them soon.”
There is another soft hiss of breath caught between teeth as she ties a white bandage around his lower arm and knots it tightly into place. The white fabric stands out in sharp contrast to his garden stained shirtsleeves, rolled up to his elbows and crinkled all along his arms.
She hands him the little glass jar of paste. “Don’t take the bandage off tonight, but tomorrow clean the wound and rub a pea size amount of this along the edges. It should help with the infection,” she instructs, and she tidies up the cloth, the bowl of water, and the little brown bottle of alcohol. “It’s not deep enough for stitches, but-” and now she reaches to place the back of her hand across his forehead and she pauses when he flinches slightly but continues when he gives her a small nod a moment later. “You don’t feel warm so luckily you’ve avoided a fever, but let me know if you’re feeling anything out of sorts.”
She doesn’t let her hand linger on his forehead, wary now because of his reaction. And she’s seen that look in his eyes a thousand times in a thousand different faces scattered across the battlefields of Europe. He shutters it quickly but not fast enough for her to miss, and she sees the touch starved loneliness and fear that hides there, burning beneath the painful memories dredged up by blood and wounds and wire fencing.
But there is nothing that food cannot fix, and she clears her throat and nods towards the covered basket on the opposite table. “You can stay and have another one if you’d like, I was going to make a pot of tea.”
He stretches from the chair and bows his head in her direction, “thank you but I have a few more things to do before it gets dark, I appreciate your help.” He tucks the jar into his pocket and moves towards the back door and he has become the silent gardener once again.
She watches him leave, the golden sunset paints fire along his back and his shadow is long as he crosses the grass back towards the greenhouse. The goat follows close behind.
There is no thunder that night, only a cloudless sky full of moon and stars. It is quiet but for the low hum of nature through the open window, so when her nightmares come thick and fast and heavy, her scream is carried on the wind to pierce the night air like a siren before the storm.
She wakes panting and clammy with sweat, clutching her chest as she heaves and rolls out of bed to the floor with a thump. She scrambles to her knees and in her panic she knocks against the little side table by her bed and the glass bottomed lamp tips and shatters across the wooden floor. She chokes back another sob, her hand flying to her mouth to quiet the broken noise that is whining low in her throat. She sees shadows across the walls and the moon is bright overhead.
There’s a clatter in the hall and suddenly her door is flung open and he is standing there, wielding a shovel with both hands and scanning the room with practiced eyes. He finds her huddled against the wall and he quickly crouches to lower his makeshift weapon. He remains stooped over, his feet are bare and his hair falls around his head in wild disarray, but his eyes fix clearly upon her. The space between them in the room is small but it is a gulf of memories that separates her in this moment in time and space.
He whispers her name gently, soft as a sigh falling from his lips. She jerks and meets his eyes and her own are blown wide, her pupils eclipse the dark irises despite the brightness of the moon.
“You are safe,” he whispers, “you are home and there is nothing here that will hurt you.”
He shifts forward and spreads his hands wide, placating as if she were a skittish horse. She looks at him but doesn’t seem to recognize him and she shuffles away until her back hits the wall. She curls her legs up in front of her, tucks them inside of her nightgown, wraps her arms around them, and in that moment she looks like a child.
“You are safe,” he repeats, and he folds himself down in front of her, crosses his legs beneath him, places his hands in his lap. “You are home.”
She blows a trembling breath of air between her lips. She doesn’t unfold from her clutched position against the wall, but she lifts her head and shakes it in a small gesture of grief and frustration.
The night is quiet around them, broken only by the gasping puffs of her breathing that is still a little wild and uneven. They sit like that, bathed in moonlight and shadow, for a moment that seems to stretch to eternity. But he is patient and he understands this feeling more than anything and he knows that time is something that will always be needed.
The window is behind her and so he tilts his head and stares out into the darkness of the night sky. Even though the moon is bright and waxing towards full, he can still pick out the familiar constellations of Ursa Major and Cassiopeia. He traces down from there and finds Orion and his shining belt of stars. From there it is easy to find Cygnus and Canis Major. Polaris as always is a beacon in the north. He breathes soft and even and eventually he hears her calm her own breath to match his. When he looks to her again, she is still shaking but her eyes are clear.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs.
He shakes his head, “you have nothing to apologize for.”
“No, I am. I’m sorry for waking you.” She huffs and unfolds herself from the wall. Her hand snakes up to swipe at her eyes and she looks angry at herself.
“I see things too, at night when it’s too quiet and I’m alone. There is no shame in the memories.”
“You don’t know the things that I see,” she hisses between clenched teeth.
“I don’t need to know to understand.”
She looks at him and sees him as if it is the first time again. In the silver light, she can see the faint line of a scar on his upper lip, another at his temple that crosses beneath his hairline, another clean against the line of his jaw that breaks the pattern of fuzzy beard growth. His hands are folded in his lap but the backs of them are weathered and roughened and lined. The white bandage circling his lower arm from that afternoon is stark against the paleness of his skin.
“No, I suppose you don't,” she whispers.
He drags the soft knitted blanket that covers the foot of the bed down to the floor and drapes it across her shoulders. Cautiously, carefully, eyes looking for permission and mindful of the shattered remains of the lamp, he shuffles so that he is sitting on her right with his back leaning on the wall and his thigh brushing her own.
“When I was young, my older brother would hide beneath my bed and grab at my ankles to scare me. I was terrified of monsters and I would hide under several layers of blankets, even in the middle of summer. I was always sweaty, but I knew I was safe that way.” He rests his head against the wall. “He had me convinced for years.”
“Did you ever catch him at it?”
“The last time he did it, I kicked him in the face and broke his nose.” He laughs quietly at the memory, a rumbling hum of sound from his chest. “I admit that I wasn’t entirely apologetic about it at the time. It healed mostly straight, but he would always tell the ladies that he broke it in a dramatic bar fight instead of admitting the truth.”
A shy smile flits across her face as she watches him close his eyes, dimples creasing his cheeks. She shifts so that she leans lightly against him.
“I don’t have any siblings, never did. There were times that I was glad that I didn’t, but often I found myself alone. And then I found-” her voice cracks but she clears it quickly and continues, “I found happiness and comfort, and everything was beautiful. For a while. But now I’m alone again.”
He tilts his head and looks at her. “You don’t have to be alone, if you don’t want to.”
He is bold, he knows that. There are rules to things like this, society and propriety and all of the careful trappings of civilization. But they’ve both seen the cruel limits of humanity, when the rules of society were lost among the bloody trenches. What do rules mean in the face of that tragedy? Who can fault him for asking for comfort, or for offering it in return?
She rests her head on his shoulder and pulls the blanket closer around her, part of it drapes across his lap. Her trembling has eased and she is a welcome warmth along his side.
“Thank you.”
And they sit there together until the sun rises behind them.
:) Kathryn