plowing, the unguided horse still choosing its own unerring way, no longer a straight course now but weaving, at times almost doubling on itself though Picklock could still see nothing. ‘Dud shells,’ the stranger explained. ‘Fenced off with flags until they finish getting them out. We just plow circles around them. According to the women and the old men who were here then, the whole war started up again after that recess they took last May, right in that field yonder. It belongs to some people named Demont. The man died that same summer; I guess two wars on his land only a week apart was too much for him. His widow works it now with a hired man. Not that she needs him; she can run a plow as good as he can. There’s another one, her sister. She does the cooking. She has flies up here.’ He was standing now, peering ahead; in silhouette against the sky he tapped the side of his head. Suddenly he swung the horse sharply away and presently stopped it. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘About fifty metres yonder on that bank dividing us, there used to be the finest beech tree in this country. My grandfather said that even his grandfather couldn’t remember when it was a sapling. It probably went that same day too. All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get him up. You dont want to waste any time here either.’
He showed them where his plow had first exposed the corpse and he had covered it again and marked the place. It was not deep and they could see nothing and after this length of time or perhaps because it was only one, there was little odor either, the long inextricable mass of light bones and cloth soon up and out and on and then into the folds of the ground-sheet and then in the cart itself, the horse thinking that this time surely it was destined for its stall, trying even in the soft earth of the plowing to resume its heavy muscle-bound jog, Morache closing the hedge gate and having to run now to catch the cart again because the horse was now going at a heavy canter even against the lines, trying again to swing into the farmyard until the stranger sawed it away, using the whip now until he got it straightened out on the road back to St Mihiel.
A little more than four hours but perhaps it should have been. The town was dark now, and the bistro they had started from, a clump of shadow detaching itself from a greater mass of shadow and itself breaking into separate shapes as the nine others surrounded the cart, the cart itself not stopping but going steadily on toward where the carriage in its black pall of bunting had vanished completely into the night. But it was there; the ones who had remained in town had even drawn the nails again so that all necessary was to lift off the top and drag the ground- sheeted bundle through the window and dump it in and set the nails again. ‘Drive them in,’ Picklock said. ‘Who cares about noise now? Where is the brandy?’
‘It’s all right,’ a voice said.
‘How many bottles did you open?’
‘One,’ a voice said.
‘Counting from where?’
‘Why should we lie when all you’ve got to do to prove it is to count the others?’ the voice said.
‘All right,’ Picklock said. ‘Get out of here now and shut the window.’ Then they were on the ground again. The stranger had never quitted his cart and this time surely the horse was going home. But they didn’t wait for that departure. They turned as one, already running, clotting and jostling a little at the carriage door, but plunging at last back into their lightless catafalque as into the womb itself. They were safe now. They had a body, and drink to take care of the night. There was tomorrow and Paris of course, but God could take care of that.
Carrying the gather of eggs in the loop of her apron, Marya, the elder sister, crossed the yard toward the house as though borne on a soft and tender cloud of white geese. They surrounded and enclosed her as though with a tender and eager yearning; two of them, one on either side, kept absolute pace with her, pressed against her skirts, their long undulant necks laid flat against her moving flanks, their heads tilted upward, the hard yellow beaks open slightly like mouths, the hard insentient eyes filmed over as with a sort of ecstasy: right up to the stoop itself when she mounted it and opened the door and stepped quickly through and closed it, the geese swarming and jostling around and over and onto the stoop itself to press against the door’s blank wood, their necks extended and the heads fallen a little back as though on the brink of swoons, making with their hoarse harsh unmusical voices faint tender cries of anguish and bereavement and unassuageable grief.
This was the kitchen, already strong with the approaching mid-day’s soup. She didn’t even stop: putting the eggs away, lifting for a moment the lid of the simmering pot on the stove, then placed rapidly on the wooden table a bottle of wine, a glass, a soup bowl, a loaf, a napkin and spoon, then on through the house and out the front door giving onto the lane and the field beyond it where she could already see them—the horse and harrow and the man guiding them, the hired man they had had since the death of her sister’s husband four years ago, and the sister herself moving across the land’s panorama like a ritual, her hand and arm plunging into the sack slung from her shoulder, to emerge in that long sweep which is the second oldest of man’s immemorial gestures or acts, she— Marya—running now, skirting among the old craters picketed off by tiny stakes bearing scraps of red cloth where the rank and lifeless grass grew above the unexploded shells, already saying, crying in her bright serene and carrying voice: ‘Sister! Here is the young Englishman come for the medal. There are two of them, coming up the lane.’
‘A friend with him?’ the sister said.
‘Not a friend,’ Marya said. ‘This one is looking for a tree.’
‘A tree?’ the sister said.
‘Yes, Sister. Cant you see him?’
And, themselves in the lane now, they could see them both—two men obviously but, even at that distance, one of them moving not quite like a human being and, in time nearer, not like a human being at all beside the other’s tall and shambling gait, but at a slow and terrific lurch and heave like some kind of giant insect moving erect and seeming to possess no progress at all even before Marya said: ‘He’s on crutches:’ the single leg swinging metronome and indefatigable yet indomitable too between the rhythmic twin counterstrokes of the crutches; interminable yet indomitable too and indubitably coming nearer until they could see that the arm on that side was gone somewhere near the elbow also, and (quite near now) that what they looked at was not even a whole man since one half of his visible flesh was one furious saffron scar beginning at the ruined homburg hat and dividing his face exactly down the bridge of the nose, across the mouth and chin, to the collar of his shirt. But this seemed to be only outside because the voice was strong and unpitying and the French he addressed them in was fluid and good and it was only the man with him who was sick—a tall thin cadaver of a man, whole to be sure and looking no less like a tramp, but with a sick insolent intolerable face beneath a filthy hat from the band of which there stood a long and raking feather which made him at least eight feet tall.
‘Madame Demont?’ the first man said.
‘Yes,’ Marya said with her bright and tender and unpitying smile.
The man with the crutches turned to his companion. ‘All right,’ he said in French. ‘This is them. Go ahead.’ But Marya had not waited for him, speaking to the man on crutches in French:
‘We were waiting for you. The soup is ready and you must be hungry after your walk from the station.’ Then she too turned to the other, speaking not in French now but in the old Balkan tongue of her childhood: ‘You too. You will need to eat for a little while longer too.’
