The Ragged Edge of Night(15)
“He hasn’t heard me, anyway,” Al says. “It’s a mercy. Paul can talk and talk, and never shut his mouth.”
“You have a big responsibility, looking out for your brother and sister.” The green thread in Anton’s sewing kit is not the right shade to match Maria’s dress, but it’s the closest one can hope to find. Textiles do not come readily to hand these days.
Al makes no reply, and so Anton begins to stitch. He watches Al from the corner of his eye as he works. The boy depresses the valves of the cornet, slowly and carefully, one after another. They make a softly hollow sound, a faint, padded sticking and tearing.
After a while, Anton says, “I can see that you do a good job of keeping your family safe. That’s honorable work—a man’s work.”
“You didn’t seem worried to hear that our town has a gauleiter.”
He hears the boy’s unspoken question. Why aren’t you frightened? Are you so loyal to the Party that you have nothing to fear?
“I’ve dealt with my share of gauleiters before.” His tone is conspiratorial. “And men worse than they, too.”
Much worse. But the SS won that encounter, didn’t they? The sight of the boys with the instruments in their hands scours Anton with fresh pain. He watched the last children who ever held those instruments loaded onto a gray bus. They all went, trusting and smiling, as was their nature—skipping past the men with guns. Men who herded them into the belly of the hearse. Trusting and smiling, while Brother Nazarius and the rest of the friars quietly pleaded, or placed themselves gently in the way, only to be pushed aside by the muzzle of a Karabiner. Stand in my way again, and I’ll run out the bayonet. Cold steel pressed hard into Anton’s chest.
The needle pricks him, and he pinches his thumb against his fingertip until the bleeding stops.
“You needn’t worry,” Anton whispers to Al. “Herr M?belbauer answers to his ambition, but I answer only to God.”
Al puffs out his chest. He is pigeon-breasted, like his wiry stepfather. “So do I—only to God.”
“You’re a good boy. I’ll be very proud to be in your family.”
He holds up Maria’s dress, and Al and Paul both examine the hem. Except for the off-color thread, it is perfectly repaired.
Awestruck, Paul says, “But men don’t sew!”
“This one does. When I was a friar, I did all my own sewing. I had to; a friar has no wife to do his mending.”
The youngest boy goes wide-eyed. Somehow, in whatever discussion the family has had about Anton and the pending marriage, the fact that he was once a friar has escaped Paul’s notice.
“You might learn to sew, Paul,” Anton says, “so you can help your mother and Al. Then they won’t be so tired all the time. A big, strong boy like you—I imagine you could be a great help to the family. Wouldn’t you like that, to help like a grown man?”
“I’ll do it, if you’ll teach me how.”
Anton ruffles his pale hair. “One of these days, we’ll have a sewing bee—just we two fellows. It’s not as hard as it looks.”
Paul stares for a moment at the cornet, still clutched in his big brother’s hands. “Will you teach me to play music, too?”
Anton folds the dress carefully and passes it to Paul. “Maybe I will, little man.”
5
Beyond the road, in the shadowed confines of the churchyard, wind bends the grass that has grown up, knee-high, between the tombstones. The stones are so old you can no longer read the words carved into their faces. “Sacred to the Memory” and “In His Will Is Our Peace”—lichen has pitted and degraded every surface. If Anton were to touch a stone, run his hand across a face where once a name was written, he would feel granite crumbling to dust. The yard needs cutting, but no one will do it now. It is late. Dusk has settled in, a restless purple half-light below a shy white sickle of moon. The wind tugs at his hat; it rattles the stork’s nest like bones against the flat, colorless stone of the bell tower. The breeze pushes Father Emil’s robe against his legs. The priest works in near darkness. Across the churchyard, above it, the sloping shoulder of a hill lifts its ancient burden toward the sky: a black vastness of woodland. At the foot of the hill there stands a wall—age uncountable, old beyond knowing—and spilling down the wall, a heavy curtain of ivy. Wind stirs the ivy leaves and reverses them, bottom to top, silver undersides exposed. The priest is cutting back the ivy, clearing the way around a steel door set into the wall, sunk into the hill. He moves with the stiff, sharp gestures of reluctance.
Despite the dim shadows of dusk, Anton can tell the wall and hill and ivy are each too old, too long-established, to be reactions to our present difficulty—the Tommies with their cardboard airplanes. But the door—the door is new. Steel rivets shine, even in this pale disjection of moonlight. Does some cave or tunnel wait back there, dug into the hillside and smelling of ancient earth, lined with blankets and lamp oil and tins of food, a bulwark against British retribution? Out here in the countryside, tunnels run from town to town, a warren of hidden passages through which, in ages gone by, pilgrims or messengers in medieval tunics crept, lit by the sallow fires of smoking torches. Those tunnels would make fine shelters when bombs fall.
By chance, the priest pauses in his work and looks up. He sees Anton standing there, thin and stretched, pale as a specter among the graves. His body makes an involuntary jump; the trimmer falls from his hand into the long grass underfoot. But then with a laugh, charming self-deprecation, he waves in greeting.