Achille

“Le petit à Octave.”

It came down the cellar steps at two in the afternoon, from the top, from the daylight, and Lucien was asleep on the sacks in the corner and was awake before it had finished, sitting up, with his heart going, because nobody in the whole of Belgium had any business saying that.

Octave’s boy. The lake shore’s name for him. The name he had had since he was born, on the planks between the galleries, from old Tregre and old Bazile and the widow Fontenot and the Robichaux and everybody, before he was Lucien or Lucky or Frenchy or Private Prudhomme or anything; and it came down the steps of a cellar under a village with no houses in it, behind a wall of mud, in Flanders, in a voice he had known since he was six.

He looked up.

There was a man at the top of the steps against the grey light. Thin. In a greatcoat with the collar up, and a helmet, and a rifle slung, and a corporal’s stripes on the sleeve, and mud to the thighs. He was standing very still at the top of the steps, looking down into the cellar, the way the Guardsmen looked along the top of the wall, without his head moving.

“Achille,” said Lucien.

The man came down the steps.

---

He was older.

That was the first thing, and it was the only thing for a long time, standing at the bottom of the cellar steps in the light from the doorway with the Guardsmen asleep on the sacks round them, and Harlan sitting up now on his sacks in the corner, watching. Achille was older. Not by a year and four months. By a great deal more than that. His face had gone thin and brown and hard, the way the faces of the Guards had gone, and the two thin grey sergeants at Smoky Hill, and Sergeant Hodge’s; and there were lines in it, round the eyes and down from the nose to the corners of the mouth, in the same places as the lines on the face on the bay horse at Smoky Hill, and the face of Lucien’s father. He had a moustache. He had never had a moustache. His eyes were the same, black, quick; and they were not the same at all, because they did not stay on anything. They went along the walls of the cellar, and the doorway, and the roof, and back to Lucien, and away, all the time, the way the Guardsmen’s went along the top of the wall.

He was twenty-three. He looked like old Bazile’s son, who was forty.

He looked at Lucien for a long time, at the bottom of the steps.

Then he put his hand out, and took hold of the front of Lucien’s tunic, in his fist, hard, the way you would take hold of a rope that somebody had thrown you from a boat; and held it; and did not say anything.

“Tu m’as trouvé,” said Lucien. You found me.

“Je te l’avais dit.” I told you I would. His voice was the same. Lower. Rougher. The same. “C’est pas un grand secteur.”

It’s not a big sector.

---

They walked along the back of the dunes.

Out of the Eye’s sight. Sergeant Hodge said they could; he had gone up the cellar steps while Lucien was finding his boots, and was standing at the top with Achille when Lucien came up, and he looked at Achille, at the stripes and the mud and the face, for a long moment, the way he looked at feet, and then he said back by stand-to to Lucien, and nodded to Achille, once, the nod the thin grey sergeant had given Harlan by the gas hut at Smoky Hill; and went back down.

So they went along the path behind the high dunes, in the sand, with the coarse grass bent flat by the wind on either side and the sea on the other side of the dunes, loud, a long hiss and roar going on and on. Harlan came. Lucien had not asked him and Achille had not asked him; Harlan had got up off his sacks and put his boots on and come up the steps, and Achille had looked at him, the whole length of him, up, a long way up, and then at Lucien, and had said nothing, and Harlan had walked a little way behind them on the sand path the whole time, as if he were not there.

They did not talk at first. Achille walked with his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat and his head down and his eyes going along the tops of the dunes, all the time, and Lucien walked beside him, and the sea went on behind the dunes.

Then Achille stopped, where there was a gap in the dunes, a low place, and went up into it, through the coarse grass, to the top; and stood there, looking out.

Lucien went up after him.

It was the sea. He had heard it every day and every night for five weeks and he had not seen it since the ship. Grey. The sky low and grey over it, and the sea grey under it, going away to the edge of the world, flat and wrinkled, and the long low waves coming in out of the grey, one after another, slowly, and going up white on the beach below them, which was wide, and wet, and empty, with rusted wire on it in long tangled rows going down into the water, and iron stakes, and at the edge of the water a thing that had been a boat.

Achille looked at it.

“Ça regarde toujours pas,” he said, at last. It still doesn’t look back.

“Non.”

“Je viens ici. Des fois. Quand on est en arrière.” I come here. Sometimes. When we’re out of the line. “Je le regarde. Une heure. Deux. Je sais pas pourquoi.” He was quiet for a while. “Il a rien à me dire. C’est peut-être pour ça.”

It has nothing to say to me. Maybe that’s why.

---

They sat in the gap of the dunes, in the sand, out of the wind, with their backs to the slope and the sea in front of them.

Achille took out a cigarette and lit it. His hands shook. Lucien saw it and did not look at it. The match went out twice in the wind, and Achille swore, quietly, the way the lake shore swore, in English with the French round it, mais goddam, the way his father had sworn at the Daigles’ boat; and the third match took, and he drew on the cigarette for a long time, and let the smoke go, and the wind took it.

“Corporal,” said Lucien, in English. He touched his own sleeve, where the stripes would be.

Achille looked at his own sleeve, at the stripes, as if he had forgotten them.

“Y avait personne d’autre,” he said. There was nobody else. The same as in the letter. “Je suis le plus vieux de la section. J’ai vingt-trois ans.” I’m the oldest in the section. I’m twenty-three. He drew on the cigarette. “Les autres sont nouveaux. Du draft. De partout. Y en a un de Tennessee qui parle pas un mot de français et qui pleure la nuit. Y en a deux de Lafayette. Y en a un de Thibodaux qui a dix-huit ans et qui me dit Monsieur.” He let the smoke go. “Monsieur. À moi.”

Lucien did not say anything.

“Ils nous ont remplis,” said Achille. They filled us up. “Comme vous-autres. Avec le draft. Asteur la Première Louisiane c’est la moitié de Louisianais et la moitié de n’importe qui. Le lieutenant de Shreveport donne les ordres en anglais. Personne les répète.” He looked at the sea. “On a encore le nom. On a encore le pélican sur le badge. On a le nom.”

We still have the name. We still have the pelican on the badge. We have the name.

---

He gave Achille the socks.

The third pair, the last of Madame Lemaire’s, in the brown paper, that he had kept against his chest for five weeks without opening, for this. He took them out of his tunic and held them out, and Achille looked at the brown paper for a long time and did not take it.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“Des chaussons.” Lucien heard himself say it and stopped, and nearly laughed. “Des chaussettes. Tu m’as dit. Dans ta lettre. Apporte des chaussettes.”

Achille took the parcel. He tore the paper off with his shaking hands and looked at them, the grey Belgian socks, thick, smelling of sheep and somebody’s kitchen in Ostend.

He did not say anything for a while.

“T’as écouté,” he said, at last. You listened.

“Oui.”

Achille held the socks in his hands. Then he put them inside his greatcoat, against his chest, the way Lucien had carried them, and buttoned the coat over them, and put his hand flat on the outside of the coat for a moment.

“T’as toujours écouté,” he said. You always listened. “C’est ça ton problème.” That’s your trouble.

---

Harlan was sitting a little way off, on the slope of the dune, with his long legs drawn up and his arms round his knees, looking at the sea. Achille looked at him. He had been looking at him, on and off, since the cellar; the quick black eyes going to him and away and back, the way they went to everything.

“C’est lui?” he said. That’s him? “Le Suédois? Que ta grand-mère m’a écrit?” The Swede? That your grandmother wrote to me about?

“Il est pas suédois. Il est de Nebraska.”

“C’est pareil.” It’s the same thing. Achille drew on his cigarette, and then said, in English, louder, across the sand, in an English that was harder and more American than it had been on the step under the gallery in June of last year: “Hey. Nebraska.”

Harlan turned his head.

“You’re the one,” said Achille. “Calls him Lucky.”

Harlan looked at him for a while, with his patient face.

“Yes,” he said.

Achille looked back at him. A long time. The two of them looking at each other across the sand in the gap of the dunes with the sea going on below; and Lucien sitting between them and not saying anything, because there was nothing he could say that would be any use.

“Is he?” said Achille.

Harlan thought about it. He thought about it the way he thought about everything, slowly, as if it were a field and he had to walk the whole of it before he said what it would grow.

“So far,” said Harlan.

Achille looked at him a moment longer. Then something happened to his face. It was not a smile. It was the place where a smile had been, once, on the step under the gallery, the corner of his mouth going in; and it was there for a moment, and gone.

“Good,” said Achille. “Keep him that way.”

“I mean to,” said Harlan, and looked back at the sea.

---

He asked about the boat.

He asked about everything. He asked the way a man drinks water who has not had any for a long time: all at once, and too fast, and then more. The boat. The lake shore. The camps. Mémère. Old Tregre and his knee and old Bazile on his bench and the Robichaux girl who was to marry the boy from Mandeville. Ti-Paul. The widow Fontenot and the dog. And Lucien told him, all of it, everything that was in the blue letters, in the tin box he did not have with him and did not need; and Achille sat in the sand with his cigarette and his eyes on the sea and listened, and every now and then he said ah oui or c’est vrai? or nothing, and once, when Lucien told him that the widow Fontenot’s dog had stopped sleeping on the planks and slept on her step now because it had given up waiting for the streetcar, he put his hand over his eyes and kept it there for a while.

“Et le bateau?” he said.

“Elle est sèche. Papa dit qu’elle est sèche.” She’s dry. Papa says she’s dry. “Ti-Paul a goudronné la couture à tribord. Personne lui a demandé.”

“Ti-Paul.” Achille let his breath out. It was nearly a laugh. “Ce petit-là.”

And then Lucien told him about the hook.

He had not told anybody. Not Harlan; not Sergeant Hodge. He told Achille. About Théo Glapion in the dark on the forward well deck with the ship burning a mile off, and the Louisa Street wharf, and his father in his canvas coat at five in the morning with the hook in both his hands and his head bent over it, saying something to it, very low, every morning, so that the men of the gang laughed at him the first days and then did not laugh any more.

Achille did not say anything at all.

And then Lucien took the letter out of his tunic, his grandmother’s last letter from Kansas, and unfolded it, and showed him the bottom of it. The capitals. Crooked, going uphill, with spaces between them as if they did not know each other, and the hole at the top of the A where the nib had gone through the paper, and the little blot round it.

ALLONS

Achille looked at it for a long time.

He took it out of Lucien’s hand, very carefully, by the edges, the way you would take a thing that might break, and held it close to his face, in the grey light, and looked at it; and his hands, holding it, did not shake at all. Lucien saw that. For as long as he held the blue paper they were still.

“Ton père,” said Achille.

“Oui.”

“Ton père a écrit ça.”

“Toute la soirée. Mémère l’a écrit et il l’a copié.”

Achille held the letter. Out over the sea a gull went over, low, and turned, and went away along the beach over the rusted wire.

“Mon père m’écrit pas,” he said. My father doesn’t write to me. “Il peut. Il sait écrire. Il a été à l’école des Frères jusqu’à douze ans. Il m’écrit pas.” He can. He knows how. He was at the Brothers’ school till he was twelve. He doesn’t write to me. He looked at the capitals. “Et le tien peut pas, et il l’a fait.”

And yours can’t, and he did.

He gave the letter back. He folded it first, along its folds, and gave it back, and Lucien put it in his tunic and buttoned the pocket; and Achille’s hands, when he took them away, were shaking again.

---

“Tu m’as dit que tu me dirais,” said Lucien. “Le 9. Dans ta lettre. En février.”

You said you would tell me. The ninth. In your letter. In February.

He had not meant to ask. He had meant not to. He had decided, on the sand path, walking, not to ask, and he had asked.

Achille did not answer for a long time.

He finished the cigarette. He put the end of it out in the sand, carefully, pressing it down with his thumb, and then he sat with his hands between his knees and looked at the sea, and Lucien thought he was not going to say anything, and was glad.

“Gustave Tregre a pris trois heures à mourir,” said Achille.

Gustave Tregre took three hours to die.

He said it in a flat voice, the voice old Tregre read the lists in, so as to get through it.

“Dans l’eau. À vingt pieds de moi. Dans le noir. On pouvait pas aller le chercher, la mitrailleuse balayait. Il appelait sa mère.” In the water. Twenty feet from me. In the dark. We couldn’t go and get him, the machine gun was sweeping. He was calling for his mother. “En français. Maman. Maman, viens. Comme un petit. Trois heures.”

The sea came in on the beach below them, white, and went out.

“Et les Français l’entendaient,” said Achille. And the French could hear him. “De l’autre bord. Ils étaient à cinquante pieds. Un a crié, ta gueule. Shut up. Et un autre a crié, laisse-le, c’est un gosse. Leave him, he’s a kid. Et le premier a rien dit après.” He stopped. “Et puis Gustave a arrêté.”

And then Gustave stopped.

Lucien did not say anything. There was nothing in the world to say. He sat in the sand beside Achille with the sea in front of them and thought of old Tregre on the wharf in January reading the list in the same voice as all the others, and taking his spectacles off, after all, at his great-nephew’s name, and standing with them in his hand.

“C’est pour ça que je les écoute plus,” said Achille.

That’s why I don’t listen to them any more.

He said it to the sea.

“Au commencement je les écoutais. Comme dans ma lettre. Je t’ai écrit ça. Ils parlent, ils chantent, ils nous crient des choses. Le même langage. Je les écoutais toute la nuit.” At the beginning I listened to them. Like in my letter. I wrote you that. They talk, they sing, they shout things at us. The same language. I listened to them all night. “Asteur je les écoute plus. Je les entends, je peux pas faire autrement. Mais je les écoute plus.” Now I don’t listen to them any more. I hear them, I can’t help it. But I don’t listen.

He turned his head and looked at Lucien. For the first time since the cellar his eyes stayed on something.

“Ton Hodge m’a dit,” he said. Your Hodge told me. “En haut des marches. Pendant que tu mettais tes bottes. Il m’a dit ce que tu fais la nuit.” At the top of the steps. While you were putting your boots on. He told me what you do at night.

Lucien did not answer.

“Fais attention,” said Achille. Be careful.

“C’est un poste d’écoute. Je reste couché. Je bouge pas.” It’s a listening post. I lie still. I don’t move.

“C’est pas de ça que je parle.”

That’s not what I mean.

Achille looked at him with his black eyes that had stopped moving.

“Quand tu les écoutes trop,” he said, very low, “après, tu peux plus.”

When you listen to them too much, after, you can’t.

He did not say what you could not. He did not need to. Lucien sat in the sand and looked back at him and knew exactly what you could not, the way he had known what his father meant by celui-là, il connaît; and he thought of Pépère and his forty cows and ma Marthe, and the Parigot and Lulu at the laundry, and Marius and the pointus and nous autres, les pêcheurs, and the singer a long way along the wall towards the Eye, singing his grandmother’s song with amie instead of ami, in the dark.

“Je sais,” he said.

“Non,” said Achille. “Pas encore.”

No. Not yet.

---

The light was going. It went early now, at four, the short grey day of the Flemish winter going out of the sky over the sea, and the sea going from grey to darker grey, and the wind coming up colder off it. Harlan stood up on the slope of the dune and looked at the sky, and at Lucien, and did not say anything; and Achille saw him do it, and stood up too.

“Stand-to,” said Achille. “Moi aussi. J’ai trois milles à faire.” Me too. I’ve got three miles to go.

They went down out of the gap in the dunes onto the sand path.

At the place where the path forked, one way to the village and the cellar and the other along the back of the dunes to wherever the First Louisiane was, Achille stopped. He stood on the sand in his greatcoat with the collar up and his hands in his pockets and the socks buttoned inside against his chest, and looked at Lucien.

“Écris à Mémère,” he said. “Dis-lui que tu m’as vu. Dis-lui que je chante encore. Pas souvent.” Write to Mémère. Tell her you saw me. Tell her I still sing. Not often. “Dis-lui pas le reste.”

“Non.”

“Et dis à Monsieur Octave…” He stopped. He looked at the sand. “Dis-lui rien. Il sait.”

Tell him nothing. He knows.

He turned and went along the path, away, along the back of the dunes in the last of the light, thin, in his greatcoat, with his rifle slung, not looking back; and Lucien stood at the fork and watched him go, the way he had watched the train go out of the station in July of last year with Achille at the window.

Twenty yards along, Achille stopped. He turned round.

He did not wave. He took his hand out of his pocket and pointed. At Lucien. Straight at him, along the sand path, in the dusk, with his arm out and his finger out, the way he had pointed from the window of the train at the station in July, when there had been nothing else to say; and held it there, a moment, pointing.

Then he put his hand back in his pocket and went on along the path, and the dunes took him.

Harlan was standing beside Lucien at the fork. He had been there the whole time. He looked along the empty path where Achille had gone, in the dusk, with the sea loud on the other side of the dunes, for a long while.

“He’s not doing so good,” said Harlan, quietly. “Is he.”

He had said it in Kansas, at the edge of the grass, about a letter. He said it now about a man. Lucien did not answer, the way he had not answered then.

“He’s alive,” he said.

“Yes,” said Harlan. “He’s that.”

They went back along the path to the cellar for stand-to.