Madame Verhaeghe

The farm was the last one before the rise, and the barn was for soldiers and the kitchen was not.

She made that clear on the first morning. She did not need any language to make it clear. She stood in the door of the kitchen at seven, when the third platoon of C Company came out of the barn across the yard in the cold with their mess tins to go to the cookhouse in the town, a small old woman in black with a white cap and a face like a winter apple, wrinkled and red; and she stood with her arms folded across her chest in the doorway of her own kitchen and looked at them, the whole platoon, as it came past her door, and the look said it. Not in here.

Kerrigan said good morning to her. She looked at him. He did not say anything else.

“Flemish,” said Sol Weintraub, very low, going past. “They speak Flemish here. It’s like Dutch. She won’t understand a word.”

The farm was called Hof Verhaeghe. It said so on a board over the gate, painted, very old, the paint gone in places, and the name on the board was hers; she was the widow Verhaeghe, the corporal with the billeting list said, and the farm had been her husband’s family’s for three hundred years and was hers now, and the Army paid her fourpence a night a man for the barn and she did not want it. That was all anybody knew about her. She was sixty-eight. She lived in the farmhouse alone, except for a boy of twelve who came across the fields from the town every morning to help with the cows, and an old dog that lay in front of the stove and did not get up for soldiers.

The barn was enormous. Brick, with a roof of red tiles that came down nearly to the ground, and great doors on both sides, and straw, and the smell of three hundred years of cows; and the third platoon of C Company slept in the straw in rows, in their greatcoats, with their rifles beside them, the way men must have slept in barns since there were barns and armies. It was dry. That was the thing. After the line, after the shelters behind the traverse and the pump house and the cellar under the village, it was dry, and the straw was dry, and you could lie in it on your back with your boots off and look up at the beams of the roof going away into the dark, and nothing was wet anywhere, and you could hear the cows breathing on the other side of the wall.

Lucien lay in the straw on the first night and could not sleep for the dryness.

---

He spoke to her on the second morning.

He did not mean to. He had not meant to speak French to anybody in Belgium after Madame Lemaire; he had thought about it, in the cellar under the village and in the pump house, and had decided that it was safer not to, because of what Achille had said. But he came out of the barn at six, before the others, because he always woke at four and could not lie in the straw any longer, and went across the yard in the dark to the pump in the corner by the kitchen wall, to wash; and she was there.

She was at the pump with a bucket. She was working the handle, an old woman in the dark in the cold, and the handle was stiff and she was leaning on it with her whole weight and the water was coming in little gulps, and she was saying something to it under her breath in her own language, short, hard, the way his father swore at the Daigles’ boat.

He went and took the handle.

She let go of it and stepped back and looked at him, in the dark, very sharply, with her arms folding themselves across her chest again; and he worked the handle, and the water came, and filled the bucket.

“Voilà, madame,” he said, without thinking.

She stared at him.

He heard what he had said, and stopped, with his hand on the handle. And she went on staring at him, in the dark, by the pump, for a long time, with her winter-apple face not moving at all; and then she said, slowly, in French, with an accent he had never heard in his life, thick, slow, from the back of the throat, as if every word were a stone she had to lift:

“Vous parlez français.”

“Oui, madame.”

“Vous êtes Français?”

There was something in the way she said it. He knew it at once. It was the way the men in collars had said les Français on the wharf in June of last year, the way Kerrigan said the British.

“Non, madame,” he said. “Louisianais. D’Amérique.”

She looked at him for a moment longer. And then something in her face let go, not much, a very little, the way the knot in a wet line lets go when you get your thumbnail into it.

“Ah,” she said. “Bon.”

She picked up the bucket.

“Venez,” she said, over her shoulder, going to the kitchen door. Come.

And he went into the kitchen.

---

Her French was not his. It was not the Parigot’s or Pépère’s or Marius’s, or Madame Lemaire’s either. It was a French that had been learned.

He heard it at once, sitting at the table in her kitchen in the dark at six in the morning, with the stove lit and the old dog lying in front of it and a bowl of coffee in front of him that she had poured without asking. She spoke French the way he had spoken English on the wharf when he was twelve: carefully, word by word, finding each one, putting them together in the right order the way you lay sandbags, each one over the join of the two below; and with her own language underneath it all the time, pushing up through it, in the sounds, in the thick slow vowels at the back of the throat.

“Ici,” she said, “on parle flamand.” Here we speak Flemish. “Le français, c’est pour le curé. Pour le notaire. Pour le juge. Pour les messieurs de Bruxelles.” She poured herself coffee. “Je l’ai appris chez les sœurs. À Bruges. Quand j’étais petite fille. On nous tapait sur les doigts si on parlait flamand en classe.”

French is for the priest. For the notary. For the judge. For the gentlemen from Brussels. I learned it from the nuns. In Bruges. When I was a little girl. They rapped our knuckles if we spoke Flemish in class.

Lucien put his bowl down.

“Ma grand-mère,” he said, “elle a appris chez les sœurs aussi. Les Ursulines. En 1844. La sœur était de Normandie. Elle disait que notre français, c’était pour la cuisine.”

My grandmother learned from the nuns too. The Ursulines. In 1844. The nun was from Normandy. She said our French was for the kitchen.

Madame Verhaeghe looked at him across the table, over her bowl.

“Et votre français à vous?” she said. And your own French? “C’est pour quoi?”

What’s it for?

He thought about it. He thought of the captain in the hut by the water tower, and the cellar under the village, and the pump house.

“Pour la cuisine,” he said. “Et le lac. Et les enfants. Et les morts.” For the kitchen. And the lake. And the children. And the dead. And then, because it was true: “Et pour écouter les Français. La nuit. Asteur.”

And for listening to the French. At night. Now.

She was quiet for a while. The dog sighed in front of the stove.

“Les Français,” she said. “Ils sont venus en quatorze. Par ici. Avec leurs pantalons rouges. Ils parlaient la langue des messieurs. La langue du curé et du notaire.” The French came in fourteen. Through here. With their red trousers. They spoke the language of the gentlemen. The language of the priest and the notary. “Ils sont entrés dans ma cuisine en la parlant. Ils ont pris mes vaches en la parlant. Ils ont tué mon fils dans le champ là-bas en la parlant.”

They came into my kitchen speaking it. They took my cows speaking it. They killed my son in the field over there speaking it.

She did not point. She did not need to. Lucien looked at the window, at the grey coming up over the yard, and the fields beyond it, flat, going away to the rise.

“Et vous,” said Madame Verhaeghe, “vous venez dans ma cuisine, et vous prenez la pompe, et vous la parlez aussi. Et c’est pas la même.”

And you come into my kitchen, and take the pump, and speak it too. And it’s not the same.

“Non, madame.”

“Non,” she agreed. She looked at him over the bowl with her small sharp eyes. “Vous la parlez comme moi. Comme une chose qui est pas à vous. Comme un étranger.”

You speak it like me. Like a thing that isn’t yours. Like a foreigner.

He did not know what to say. It was not true; it was his, it was the first thing that had ever come out of his mouth; and it was true, because here, in this kitchen, in Flanders, with the Parigot forty yards off across the water talking like the consul’s secretary on Royal Street, it was not his at all. It was the kitchen’s. It was the lake’s. It was an old woman’s at a window, and a dead woman’s, and a boat’s.

“C’est à nous-autres,” he said, at last. It’s ours. “À ma famille. Au lac.”

Madame Verhaeghe looked at him. Then, for the first time, she nearly smiled; the winter-apple face creased, all of it, at once.

“Nous-autres,” she said. “Ah oui. Les sœurs nous tapaient sur les doigts pour ça aussi.”

The nuns rapped our knuckles for that too.

---

She fed him soup.

At noon, on the second day, when the platoon had come back from the cookhouse in the town with the stew that was not stew, she stood in the kitchen door and looked across the yard at the barn, and said vous, and pointed at him, and went in; and he went in after her, and the others in the door of the barn watched him go with their mouths open.

It was soup with a bone in it.

He knew it before he tasted it. He knew it from the smell, coming off the pot on the stove when she lifted the lid: a ham bone, the bone from the week, boiled all morning with beans and cabbage and onions and a carrot and whatever else there was, thick, the way his grandmother made the gumbo z’herbes on Holy Thursday with every green thing in the garden; and Madame Verhaeghe put it in a bowl in front of him at the table with a heel of brown bread, and sat down across from him, and watched him eat it.

He ate it. He sat at her table in the warm kitchen with the old dog in front of the stove and ate soup with a bone in it, and he thought of Pépère.

He could not help it. He thought of Pépère at two in the morning at the French wall, forty yards across the water from the pump house, in the cold, saying in his deep slow voice that when he was a boy at home they had soup with beans in it and a ham bone and cabbage, and that ma Marthe made it like that still, every Sunday, with the bone from the week. He thought of ma Marthe at a stove in the Berry, in the middle of France, with forty cows and three children and an old mother, making this.

He put the spoon down.

Madame Verhaeghe watched him.

“Ça va pas?” she said. Something wrong?

“C’est bon,” he said. “C’est très bon. C’est…” He did not know how to say it. “Il y a un homme. De l’autre bord. Chez les Français. Je l’entends la nuit. Sa femme fait ça. La même. Avec l’os de la semaine. Il en parle.”

There’s a man. On the other side. With the French. I hear him at night. His wife makes this. The same. With the bone from the week. He talks about it.

Madame Verhaeghe looked at him for a long time.

She did not say anything about it. She got up and took his bowl, which was not empty, and filled it again from the pot on the stove, to the top, and put it back in front of him; and sat down again, with her arms folded, and watched him until he had eaten all of it.

---

She had two cows.

There had been thirty. There had been thirty cows at Hof Verhaeghe, and a bull, and horses, before the war; the French had taken the horses and twenty of the cows in the October of 1914, with a paper that said they would be paid for, and the shells had killed four, and the rest had died in the winter when there was no fodder, because the lower fields, where the hay was, were under the sea. Two were left. They stood in the end of the barn behind a wooden partition, and the boy of twelve from the town milked them, and Madame Verhaeghe sold the milk in the town for more than it had ever been worth in her life, and it was not enough.

One of them was sick. Harlan saw it on the second day.

Lucien did not know how. Harlan went through the partition at the end of the barn on the Tuesday afternoon, without asking anybody, the way he had gone out of the hut at Smoky Hill to the edge of the grass, and stood looking at the two cows for a long time with his hands in his pockets; and then he went to the nearer one, the brown one, and put his hand on her flank, and ran it along her side, slowly, and down her leg, and lifted her foot.

When Lucien came through the partition he was crouched beside her with her foot in his hands, looking at the bottom of it.

“Tell her,” said Harlan, without looking up. “Tell the old lady. Her foot’s bad. She’s got a stone in it, or something worse, and it’s going bad. She’s been standing off it. That’s why she’s thin.”

Madame Verhaeghe had come to the door of the barn. She stood there with her arms folded, looking at the tall American boy crouched in the straw with her cow’s foot in his hands.

Lucien told her.

She looked at Harlan for a long time.

“Il est fermier?” she said. He’s a farmer?

“Oui, madame. De Nebraska. En Amérique. Son père a onze vaches. Et un taureau.”

She came into the barn, slowly, and stood by the cow, and looked down at Harlan with her winter-apple face. Harlan looked up at her.

He did not say anything. He did not have a word of French or of Flemish and she did not have a word of English, and he did not need one. He showed her. He held up the cow’s foot and pointed with one big finger at the place, and then he put the foot down, very gently, and stood up, and made a movement with his two hands that meant a knife, a small one, and then a movement that meant cleaning, and then a movement that meant tying something round, a cloth, a bandage. And then he looked at her, and waited, the way he waited at the firing point with his eye on the target.

Madame Verhaeghe looked at him.

Then she went out of the barn and came back with a knife, a small one, very sharp, and a bucket of hot water from the stove, and a clean cloth, and a tin of something that smelled of tar; and she gave them to Harlan, and stood in the straw with her arms folded and watched him do it.

It took an hour. The cow did not like it. Harlan talked to her the whole time, very low, in his slow flat voice, the way he had talked to Lucien in the gas hut: steady, now, steady, girl, it’s all right, nearly done, it’s enough; and the cow stood for him, trembling, with her head round looking at him, and let him.

When he had finished, and tied the cloth, and put her foot down, he stood up and wiped the knife on his trousers and gave it back to Madame Verhaeghe, handle first.

She took it. She looked at the cow, standing on all four feet in the straw. Then she looked at Harlan.

She said something to him in Flemish. Short. Lucien did not understand a word of it; nobody in the barn did. Harlan did not understand it either. He nodded, as if he had.

“What’d she say?” he said to Lucien, when she had gone.

“I don’t know. It was Flemish.”

Harlan thought about it.

“Sounded like thank you,” he said.

---

The lower fields were under the sea.

She showed him on the Tuesday evening, from the top of the rise behind the farm, in the last of the light. She did not say why she was taking him. She put on a black shawl over her cap and went out of the kitchen door and across the yard and up the track behind the barn, and looked back once at him, and he followed.

From the top of the rise you could see a long way. Back towards the line: the flat country going away, fields and ditches and rows of bare trees, and then, a mile off, where the ground dropped a few feet, water. A sheet of it, grey, flat, with the stumps of hedges in it in rows, going away out of sight towards the dunes and the line and the Eye.

“Quarante hectares,” said Madame Verhaeghe. Forty hectares. “Les meilleurs. La terre noire. Le foin, le blé, les betteraves.” The best. The black earth. The hay, the wheat, the beets. “Mon mari l’appelait le jardin du bon Dieu.” My husband called it God’s garden.

She looked at it.

“On a ouvert les écluses en quatorze,” she said. “Pour arrêter les Français. La mer est entrée. Elle est jamais ressortie.” They opened the sluices in fourteen. To stop the French. The sea came in. It never went out. “Quand la guerre sera finie, ils fermeront les écluses, ils pomperont. Et la terre sera salée. Dix ans. Vingt. Avant que ça repousse.”

When the war is over, they’ll shut the sluices, they’ll pump. And the earth will be salt. Ten years. Twenty. Before anything grows again.

Lucien translated it for Harlan, who had come up the track behind them and was standing a little way off, very tall, looking at the water.

Harlan did not say anything for a long time.

“I said that,” he said, at last. “To you. In the line. That it’d be salt.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know she’d know it too.” He looked at the water, and then at the old woman in her black shawl beside Lucien, looking at it. “Course she knows it. She’s known it three years.”

---

The inspection was announced on the Wednesday.

Lieutenant Whitcomb announced it, at noon, in the yard of the farm, to the third platoon drawn up in the mud in two ranks, with a paper in his hand and his face shining the way it had shone on the parade ground at Smoky Hill reading the pamphlet about the bayonet. The General was coming. Tomorrow. He was going to inspect the battalion, in the field behind the town, at ten in the morning, in full kit. Every man. The General himself.

“Him,” said Kerrigan, out of the side of his mouth, in the rear rank. “Again.”

“Third time,” said Sol Weintraub.

And then Sergeant Cutter, standing behind Lieutenant Whitcomb, stepped forward one pace, and looked along the two ranks of the third platoon, at their feet. At their boots, in the mud of the farmyard. One pair after another. He did not say anything for a long time.

“You will clean them,” said Sergeant Cutter.

Nobody laughed. Nobody in the third platoon of C Company had ever laughed at Sergeant Cutter. But something went along the two ranks that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else; because they knew. All of them. They had all seen it, at Smoky Hill from the third rank and at Ostend from the foot of the gangway and on the sheet in the hut by the station on Sunday night: a grey man on a bay horse, a grey man by a motor car, looking at boots.

So they cleaned them.

All afternoon and all evening, in the barn, in the straw, by the light of lanterns, with anything they had. Mud first, with sticks and knives and fingers, the mud of the line that had got into the stitching and the eyelets and the seams. Then dubbin. Then polish, which nobody had, until Kerrigan went into the town with four shillings that had been collected in a helmet and came back with six tins of black polish and a Belgian boy of nine who wanted to watch. Then brushes, and rags, and spit, and more polish, and more spit, until the barn smelled of it, and the boots of the third platoon of C Company of the Second Kansas stood in a row along the wall in the lantern light, black, gleaming, the way the boots of the Guards had gleamed on the fire step on the first morning.

Lucien did his with Sergeant Hodge’s tin of whale oil first, the last of it, for the leather. It stank. He did not care.

Madame Verhaeghe came to the door of the barn at nine o’clock and stood looking at it: forty American soldiers sitting in the straw by lanterns in their socks, polishing their boots, in silence, with a kind of terrible concentration.

She looked at Lucien.

“Qu’est-ce qu’ils font?” she said. What are they doing?

“Le Général vient demain,” he said. The General is coming tomorrow. “Il regarde les bottes.” He looks at boots.

She looked at the boots, and the soldiers, and the lanterns, for a long time.

“Les généraux,” said Madame Verhaeghe, at last, “c’est tous pareils.” Generals are all the same. And then, after a moment, in a different voice: “Mon mari regardait les sabots des vaches. Toujours. D’abord. Avant le reste. Il disait qu’on connaît une bête par les pieds.”

My husband looked at the cows’ hooves. Always. First. Before anything else. He said you know an animal by its feet.

She went back across the yard to her kitchen.

---

He wrote to his grandmother at her kitchen table, at ten, on the last of the blue paper but three sheets.

She had said he could. She had come back to the barn door when the boots were done and said vous, and pointed, the way she had for the soup, and he had gone; and she had cleared the end of the table and put the lamp on it and gone to sit by the stove with the old dog and her mending, and left him there.

Mémère,

I saw Achille. He found me. He said he would and he did. He is a corporal. He is thin. He has a moustache, you would not know him. He says to tell you he still sings. Not often.

He stopped, with the pen over the paper. He did not write the rest. Dis-lui pas le reste. He did not write Gustave Tregre, or the three hours, or the man who said ta gueule and the man who said laisse-le, c’est un gosse. He did not write quand tu les écoutes trop, après, tu peux plus.

I am writing this at a kitchen table in a farm in Belgium. The lady is a widow. She is Flemish and she speaks French like a thing she learned from the nuns, the way you did, and she rapped her knuckles for nous-autres too. She gave me soup with the bone from the week in it. Harlan made her cow well.

Tomorrow the General comes again.

Tell Papa I saw the sea. It does not look back. Tell him I still know where the shallow places are. Tell him the eels here are the same.

He signed it. He looked at it for a long time. Then, at the bottom, under his name, where she always put the line for his father, he wrote a line for his father too.

Dis à Papa: allons, asteur.

He blotted it and folded it.

Madame Verhaeghe got up from the stove when he stood. She went to the dresser at the end of the kitchen, and opened a drawer in it, and took something out, and came back, and held it out to him in her old red hand.

A medal. A small one, oval, of tin, worn nearly smooth, on a loop of black thread. The Virgin, with her hands out, and letters round the edge that he could not read in the lamplight, in Flemish.

“C’était à mon fils,” said Madame Verhaeghe. It was my son’s. “Il l’avait pas, le jour qu’ils sont venus. Il l’avait laissé sur la table. Ici.” He didn’t have it on, the day they came. He’d left it on the table. Here. She put it in his hand and closed his fingers over it with hers. “Vous, vous l’aurez.”

You, you’ll have it.

He thought of the women of the lake shore at the Cabildo in June of last year, giving the men of the First Louisiane medals of the Virgin to sew into their caps. He thought of the widow Fontenot at the top of her steps on the morning of the train, who had not given him anything, and had said one sentence.

“Merci, madame,” he said.

He put it in the pocket of his tunic, the left one, over his heart, with the letters, his grandmother’s and his father’s and Achille’s, and buttoned it.

Madame Verhaeghe nodded, once, sharply, as if a thing had been settled; and went back to the stove, and sat down, and took up her mending, and did not look at him again; and he went out across the dark yard to the barn, where forty pairs of boots stood gleaming along the wall in the last of the lantern light, waiting for the General.