Behind the Bonehouse (23 page)

“I hated it. I got sick as a dog. I made a complete fool of myself and couldn't even remember half of it. And it made getting over Nate a whole lot worse.”

“Right. That's what Alan's gonna think in the morning. It mustta been a desperate kinda thing he did tonight, but I'm tellin' you, it ain't in him to make a practice of it. I've seen drunks all my life, and I've overindulged myself from time to time, when I was a youngster, before you was born. I grew up and got over it.”

“He's old enough to know better.” Jo started crying again, and struggled to stop, then drank the rest of her water. She gulped and sighed, and shook her head. “It's kinda like the straw that broke the camel's back.”

Toss didn't say anything for a minute. He lit a cigarette, and clicked the lid on his Zippo back and forth, while Jo pulled herself together.

“You know, I was born in nineteen hundred. I turned eighteen the last year of World War I, and I went right out and enlisted. I never went overseas. I spent most of my time in Kansas, carin' for a bunch a cavalry horses on a post in the middle a nowhere.” Toss stopped then and smoked for half a minute. Then turned and looked right at Jo. “Your mother ever tell you 'bout me bein' engaged?”

“No! Are you kidding? I never heard a word.”

“Well. I was. I knew Margaret from the time I was two or three. Church socials. Going to a one-room schoolhouse. She was older than me, three years, and she was way smarter. I used to listen to her recite, and answer questions real good, and work problems out on her slate, and I marveled at how quick she was, and how pretty, and good, and sensible, and all. I won't say she didn't have a temper.” Toss snorted quietly, and clicked his Zippo, and sat for most of a minute.

“She had a brother, who was younger like me, who had a real ugly harelip, and kids, being the nasty little brutes they are, they'd tease him, and make fun of the way he talked. He never seemed to pay it much mind himself. But Margaret couldn't stand it, and she bloodied more than one nose, and I helped too, a time or two, when some cuss had it comin'.” Toss chuckled and stubbed out his cigarette, and rocked his chair back on its back legs, swaying it forward and back.

“I don't know what it was she saw in me, but she saw somethin'. She went off and got trained as a nurse, and come back just when I was fixin' to enlist. I asked her to become my wife, and Margaret … Margaret agreed.” Toss was quiet again. Staring at the sky.

Jo held her breath as she watched him, in a haze of light from the house. He'd never said much of anything about his past—not in her whole life—and she knew it meant more than she could understand, and she had to meet it just right.

“I reckon you know there was a big Spanish flu epidemic, hit right that year, brought back by our boys from France. Folks was dyin' like flies. Just like flies. A
quarter of a million
right here in the States. Millions of folks died around the world. Think about that for a minute. Two hundred and fifty thousand folks—right in the blink of an eye. The schools got closed for a whole year. Families got wiped out. Two, three, four generations. And my Margaret, she died nursin' the sick, with me out there in Kansas.”

“Oh, Toss. I'm sorry. I had no idea.”

He nodded, she could see it in the light from the hall. But he didn't say another word till he'd lit another smoke. “I was real upset. Real upset. I'd loved her as long as I could remember. I did. But the worst of it was … and I'm gonna tell you this 'cause you need to hear it. But I've never told nobody else, and I ask you not to repeat it.”

“I won't. I promise.”

“The worst of it was, there was this secret, hiding, cowardly piece in me that was actually kinda relieved.” He stopped. And Jo held her breath. Before he started again. “Lord help me, Josie, but I was real afraid of the responsibility. Of having a wife and kids. Of providin', and makin' a home. I felt like I might not make good, or do it right, or live up to the way I wanted to be, and that Margaret'd look at me one day, and wish she'd chosen another.”

“Toss—”

He held up his hand, with the Lucky in it, and Jo shut her mouth. “Not trying was safer than failin'. And I've lived that way ever since. I've squired one lady or another, from time to time. I've had me someone for companionship for awhile. Someone to flirt with, and go out dancin'. But I made damn sure I was never responsible for another human being. And I done that outa fear and cowardice, that's shamed me all my life.”

“Toss, you take such responsibility for the horses, and the folks who own them, and the help—”

“That ain't the same thing. It ain't. Alan ain't like me, Jo. He takes on folks and cares for 'em, and puts himself on the line. I reckon he worries about you and Ross, and what this'll do to you, way more than he thinks about himself. He don't moan and whine. He takes it in hand.”

“I know. I agree. That's why it felt so awful seeing him get drunk.”

“Give him some leeway here, honey. It'll be fine, I'm tellin' ya.” He took another drag, then crushed the butt on the porch floor with an old scuffed boot. “'Nother thing I never told ya. Last time I talked to Tommy on the phone. Prob'ly a month 'fore he was killed, he told me 'bout Alan. 'Bout how he reckoned the two of you would fit real good together. Told me how Alan had thrown himself on some woman in France and took the blow from a grenade himself. That he was a man who'd stand up, and do his Josie proud.”

There were tears on Jo's face again, and she wiped at them, and blew her nose, before she said, “Thank you. I appreciate you talking to me.”

“Least I can do.”

“Uncle Toss?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

The silence went on for almost a minute, and then he said, “I love you too. You're all I got in the world, girl. All I got in the world.” He stood up and leaned back like his back hurt, before he said, “I don't reckon Abby's gonna foal tonight, but I better get back and check.” He coughed then, long and hard, as he started down the stairs, before he said, “I'll look in on Tracker too and get him fed and watered.”

Then he was gone. Boots swishing through the unmown grass. Crunching away across gravel.

Saturday, May 9th, 1964

When Jack and Camille had met at Flocelliere, when they'd settled in the sun, down the hill a little behind the ruins of the oldest part of the turreted stone chateau; when they'd sat self-consciously, catching glimpses of each other, and looking away as though too much might be said by half-familiar faces expecting to see the past; when they'd leaned back in old wicker chairs by clipped box parterres where sorrel and strawberries and tarragon grew, where they wouldn't be seen by the Vicomte or Vicomtesse, or any of those who worked for them; when they talked about the white puppy first, who'd followed them down the hill—there was wonder, and worry, and interest between them that Jack had let himself hope for, but hadn't begun to expect.

First they talked about the early eighteenth century painting she was restoring—the woman in a sweeping dress of deep teal silk, that might've been an unattributed Fragonard, which Camille would finish varnishing by noon the next day. Then they touched on their lives since the war, quickly, lightly, without detail or emotion. Finally they turned to Tours in '44, and the treachery that destroyed the Touraine Resistance.

They worked their way slowly and carefully, as the sun sank beside them, to Jack's suspicion that Henri Reynard had been the traitor. He told her eventually, as the air grew chilly and her eyes disappeared in the night, that being suspected had tortured him for years. That he'd drunk himself nearly to death, living in a shack in a North American forest, that he'd only stopped two years before and begun to reclaim his life.

Camille listened, and nodded, and told him what she had witnessed during and after the war—the lives warped and lost and perverted, the souls saved and restored, the joy and gratitude that abounded in some, in spite of hatred and horror.

But it wasn't until the next afternoon, as Jack drove them northeast on winding roads as narrow as farm tracks, that Camille told him she knew for a fact that her former husband, Henri Reynard, had told the Gestapo and the Tours police where the Resistance would be meeting. He'd deliberately made Jack the scapegoat and laughed when he'd told her how he'd arranged his alibi.

She'd left Henri long before that conversation, but he'd still chosen to appear from time to time, and it'd been in the middle of a terrible fight, early in 1945, that she'd accused him of having engineered the Gestapo raid and the death of Jean Claude Lebel.

Henri had admitted it, three-quarters drunk and bragging, telling her how clever he'd been—claiming it'd been a political necessity, and a fine example of the political will that revolutionary history demands. The kind of will and vision she would never have.

He'd said his goal, and that of countless others, was a people's postwar France, and that leaders like Jean Claude Lebel who opposed the Communist wing of the Resistance had to be eliminated for the ultimate good of the people.

He'd said too that he'd ensured her release, so what more could she have asked?

Camille had long before filed for divorce, and it came three months later. Yet, he'd pounded on her door late one night a month after it was final, and shouted his way in. He said he knew she'd never reveal that he'd helped the Gestapo. He “knew” full well she still cared for him, no matter what she claimed. And more importantly still, she had no proof of his guilt. It never would be more than her word against his, and his political supporters would systematically destroy her if she spoke out against him.

Camille stared out the window for a minute, as she brushed a shred of lint off her sleeve and smoothed her dark green linen skirt down below her knees. She told Jack then that Henri had tried to establish a political career—first locally, then nationally—but had never achieved any sort of success. Not even in the Touraine, in the whole of the Loire Valley, where his leadership after Lebel's death had alienated rather than unified.

Camille had sat quietly again, while Jack drove. She'd sighed and blown her nose, and folded her hands in her lap, before she went on to tell Jack that Henri had moved to Paris in 1948, and married a wealthy leftist dilettante, and had lived with her on Isle Saint Louis in a grand apartment two blocks north of Notre Dame.

He'd done fashion photography, using her family connections with the haute couture community, which couldn't have been easy to explain to his leftwing friends. But the day came when his wife threw him out. And where he went from there Camille had never heard. She'd tried hard not to know, deliberately choosing to distance herself from their mutual friends.

Jack asked if she thought she could find out where he was now.

And she'd said she could try, once she got home to Esvres sur Indre where she'd rented an old grist mill, twenty-five kilometers southwest of Tours, outside the tiny village. “Could I perhaps persuade you to converse in English? I would like an opportunity to improve my grammar.”

“Isn't that where Henri said he'd been—at Esvres sur Indre? And that he couldn't have gotten back to Tours in time to have told the Gestapo where the Resistance was meeting?”

“Yes. The one who swore Henri was there was nothing but a petty crook who lied in exchange for black market goods. It-tis only a … how do you say? … only a coincidence that I now live in Esvres sur Indre. A childhood friend purchased the mill, and refurbished it after the war. He allows me to rent three floors in a building that … is it sets or sits? Off on one side?”

“Sits.”

“Thank you. There I have a studio, and a comfortable home. From there I travel to fulfill commissions, or restore those sent to my studio.”

Camille turned and looked at Jack, and her eyes were hard, and uneasy. “Why is it you wish to locate Henri? I cannot see that there will be a legal means for him to be punished. We have no … how would you say? … no evidence of his guilt? The governments of France too, ever since the war, they have hidden all actions then, to protect our collaborators no matter their crimes.”

“I want to look him in the eye and tell him what I think of him, and maybe even knock him down, if he reacts the way I think he will.”

“And how is that?”

“With arrogance and contempt.”

Camille nodded, and looked out the window. And there was silence again as Jack turned onto a one-lane road running through rolling farmland. Several moments elapsed uneasily before she placed her handkerchief in her purse, and reapplied her lipstick. Then she told him he was welcome to stay in her apartment at the mill while she telephoned those she knew who might help her find Henri. “There are two bed chambers. You must not feel an imposition.”

“I'd like to. Thank you. Thank you for helping me. I was afraid you wouldn't, him having been your—”

“It is nothing. You deserve to accuse him to his eyes.”

“So much for bourbon.” Alan was sitting at the dining-room table, toast and strawberries in front of him, a mug of coffee in his hand, staring painfully across the old walnut table at Spencer Franklin. “My stomach's not doing well.”

Spencer laughed, uncharacteristically softly, and said, “Mine too. And I left Toss to take care of Tracker. How could I do that? We're old enough to know better.” He smiled, as though his eyes hurt, and drank all of a tall glass of water.

Jo walked in, carrying Ross, and her own second cup of coffee, and said, “Don't expect any sympathy from me.” She'd laughed when she'd said it, and tried not to look as though she were gloating.

Spencer said, “By the way, do you know if the police checked the phone records to find out if Carl called you that night? To get you out to that farm so you wouldn't have an alibi?”