“Making mistakes right up to the last minute, wasn’t he?” Tony said, pushing the dust, smoothing it out with the sole of his shoe. “Always so sure people were going to surrender.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
Tony shrugged. “What do you want me to say? Should I make a speech about our heroic dead? He was just taking a walk.” He came back toward her. “He should have stayed back at Corps, as the Sergeant said.”
“The Sergeant didn’t say that.”
Tony shrugged again, impatiently. “He intimated as much. All the others—the sensible ones—stayed there. They weren’t fearless and cheerful and democratic …” Tony grinned harshly. “And they’re back home today.”
He swung around and looked at the crossroads. Then he bent into the back of the car, under the lowered canvas top, and felt around for a moment and came up with a thin, jointed jack handle. He straightened it out and locked the joint. It had a curved end and now it looked like a cane in his hands. He leaned over again and he came up this time with a bottle in a straw jacket. He took the jacket off and Lucy saw that it was a bottle of brandy, still sealed.
“For cold nights and thirsty travelers,” Tony said, tossing the straw jacket into the ditch, and holding up the bottle. “Do you happen to have a corkscrew on you?”
“No.” Lucy watched him, puzzled and suspicious.
“That’s a mistake,” he said. “One should not be caught out in France without a corkscrew.” He went to the middle of the road and stared down at the surface. Then, with the jack handle, he began to write in the dust, slowly and carefully. Curiously, Lucy came up behind him to see what he was doing.
Oliver Crown, he was printing in the dust in wide, evenly spaced letters. Husband. Father. He hesitated, the jack handle poised. Then he added one more word. Negotiator, he wrote. When he had finished that, he stepped back a little, cocking his head to one side, like an artist criticizing his own work. Then he stepped up again and drew a box around the inscription. “That’s better,” he said. He went over to the side of the road and bent down and knocked off the head of the brandy bottle against a stone and came back and carefully poured brandy, in a series of little spurts, along the lines of the letters.
“To make it stand out,” Tony said, “for all the world to see.”
The brandy smelled strong and sweetish in the heat and when Tony had finished with the letters he had enough left over for the frame. For a moment, the memorial looked permanent and sensible, darkly outlined in the glittering dust.
When he finished, Tony straightened up. He looked at Lucy, his face strange, sad, pulled into a tortured grimace. “Something had to be done,” he said, standing there with the jagged-throated bottle in his hand.
Then Lucy heard the sound of footsteps, many footsteps, shuffling in a rough irregular rhythm, growing stronger and stronger. She looked up. Over the edge of the rise a banner was showing, small and triangular, carried on a staff. A second later, uniformed men appeared over the rise, marching in a column of twos, coming out of the shade of the trees, moving swiftly. Lucy blinked. I’m imagining things, she thought, they stopped marching a long time ago.
The columns came closer and then she began to laugh. The uniformed men coming sweatily over the rise, with their banner before them, were boy scouts, in khaki shirts and shorts and packs, led by a scout master in a beret. Lucy went over and leaned against the car and laughed uncontrollably.
“What’s the matter?” Tony followed her and peered at her closely. “What’re you laughing about?”
She stopped. She stared at the approaching columns. “I don’t know,” she said.
She and Tony stood against the car, off to one side, as the boys came up. They were between thirteen and sixteen, red-faced and thin, long-haired and knobby-kneed and serious under their packs. They looked like the sons of barbers and musicians. Without paying any attention to what was under their feet, they marched over the inscription in the dust, on which the brandy had already dried. They raised a small cloud as they passed and their boots and stockings were powdery gray. They stared admiringly from their sweating, unformed faces at the pretty little car and smiled gravely at the foreigners. The scout master saluted solemnly and said “Bonjour” and looked curiously at the bottle in Tony’s hand.
Tony said “Bonjour,” and all the boys answered him in chorus, their voices high and choirlike over the scuffling sound of their boots on the road.
They marched purposefully against the walls of the town and after they had gone a little distance down the straight white road, they were no longer children, but soldiers again, weary and lonely in the hot sun, but determined and potent under their packs, with their banner in the van. Tony and Lucy stood silently watching them until they disappeared into the town, which received them in silence.
Then Tony tossed the bottle away, into the hedge.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we’re through here.”
“Yes,” said Lucy. In utter weariness, her feet shuffling through the dust, she started back toward the passenger’s side of the car. There were some loose rocks on the edge of the ditch and her high heel turned on one of them and she stumbled and fell, heavily, on her hands and knees, into the dust of the road. Stunned, feeling the pain begin in her knees and the palms of her hands, and the shock spreading dully up her spine and in her brain, she stayed that way, her hair hanging down over her eyes, panting, like an overburdened and exhausted animal.
For a moment, Tony looked down incredulously at his mother, awkward and in pain, fallen at his feet. Then he bent forward and put his hand on her shoulder to pick her up.
“Let go of me,” she said harshly, not looking at him, her head still down.
He stepped back, listening to the dry, tearless sobbing of her breath. After a while she put out her hand to the car bumper and slowly and heavily pulled herself up. Her palms were bleeding and she rubbed them on her dress, leaving dusty red smears on it. Her stockings were torn and a little blood was seeping from the broken skin of her knees. She pushed at herself with blind, clumsy movements of her hands, and suddenly she seemed old, bereaved, pitiable, struggling to hold on to the last remnants of her courage and endurance.
He made no move to help her, but kept staring at her, his face set, as the new image of his mother, bloody, vulnerable, stained with dust, took possession of him. Watching her straightening her dress with ungainly, sexless, un-womanish movements, and bending over heavily to scrape the blood off her knees, he had a vision of her old age and her death, and remembered, in a wave of pity for them both, the night he had slept out under the stars on the glider on the porch and had listened to the owl and had decided to become a doctor and invent a serum against mortality. His eyes blurring with tears, he heard again the owl’s call, and remembered the deathless monkey, and his selection of candidates for everlasting life, his mother, his father, Jeff, himself. And somehow, in the confusion of memory and the final overrunning of long-held defenses, it was not only himself in the glider, but his son, too, magically thirteen, and his twin, dispensing immortality in accordance with the stern rules of love and watching his mother, light-footed, soft-voiced, cherished, coming across the misty lawn from her lover’s bed to kiss him good night.
He went slowly over to her and took her hands, one after the other, and carefully brushed the dirt from the wounds. Then he pushed her hair back from her forehead and with his handkerchief wiped the sweat from her drawn and aging face. Then he led her to the car door and helped her in. He stood over her briefly, as she looked up at him, the pain draining out of her eyes.