annashay 
In 1939, a devout Catholic is exasperated by the prospect of another war between France and Germany, and the impact it will have on his family and his borderland home, Alsace.
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By the fall of 1939, Philippe Gardeau was convinced he was the only man who’d learned from his sins.
He might be just a launderer in a village in the forested Vosges mountains of Alsace. But from the cramped back room of the laundry he’d owned since the war, scrubbing stains that his two machines hadn’t managed to clean, he’d repented more in his thirty-nine years than the Third Republic had in seventy. France had forsaken the Church generations ago, lost Alsace to Germany in 1870, and rushed headlong into a devastating war in 1914 to get it back – when Germany sent Alsatians like Philippe to the trenches to fight for the privilege of staying German.
Philippe hadn’t minded when France had won and reclaimed Alsace. He and his wife, Jeanne, prayed that France’s victory over Protestant Germany heralded its return to the Church. For twenty years, they’d herded their five children to Mass and urged them to pray for France.
But France hadn’t rewarded their faith. Instead, it built a concrete barricade through the Vosges and boasted that it was salvation against Germany. That might save France. But if Germany wanted to cross the Rhine, it wouldn’t save Alsace.
Philippe had ranted as much on his weekly Thursday trips into the valley, delivering laundry to the wealthy farmers who’d been friends of his father’s and knew the vineyard Philippe’s father had owned before the pandemic killed his parents.
Surely you’re not surprised we’re in the middle again, Philippe? These farmers laughed over sylvaner and choucroute. Alsace is a beautiful woman between two greedy men. No room in her for the innocence of maidenhood.
That sordid metaphor proved Philippe’s point. War with Germany won’t fix France’s problems with socialism and immorality.
As he drove his sputtering Citroën truck back up into the mountains, Philippe knew he could complain to Jeanne about these farmers’ faithless crudeness. She’d rub his shoulders; they’d make love and thank God for children finally old enough to sleep through the night.
But when Jeanne met Philippe at the front door of their laundry that second Thursday in October 1939, her stricken face killed any hope of that.
Jeanne whispered, “Louis got a draft notice. He’s deferring university.”
Jeanne clutched the patched left sleeve of Philippe’s jacket. He’d foregone a new one so Louis, their eldest, could have a new suit for graduation from lycée. Philippe had never gotten that far in school. Louis was bound for even further – the University of Strasbourg. Or had been.
As if anticipating Philippe shaking her off, Jeanne tightened her grip. “The university’s evacuating to Clermont-Ferrand. He’d rather fight.” Jeanne’s large dark eyes flashed warning. “It’s not the war you fought, Philippe. The Maginot Line will protect him -”
Philippe stormed towards the stairwell that led to their home. Jeanne’s whispered pleas for peace faded into the din with their three youngest bickering in the garden.
Louis sat at the wooden kitchen table, shoulder-to-shoulder with the second eldest, Henri, chatting until they registered Philippe in the doorway.
“I have loads from the valley,” Philippe snapped at Henri. “Go sort them.”
“It’s nearly dinner,” Henri retorted, nodding at the baeckeoffe on the stove that filled the kitchen with the aroma of onions, garlic, and pork bubbling in a riesling-drenched broth. Henri was eighteen, the age Philippe had been in the trenches. Henri’s eyes, mocking and defiant, were blue-green like Philippe’s, framed by silky light-brown hair that reminded Philippe of how gray his own had become.
“I don’t see you helping your mother make it. Go.”
His younger son dismissed, Philippe whirled to the elder. Louis’s eyes, implacable and righteous, were dark brown like his mother’s. He was nineteen, the age Philippe had been when he’d returned from the trenches and learned his parents had died, that his family’s survival depended on selling his father’s vineyard and finding another living to earn.
Louis had been schooled by Jesuits, so Philippe tried reason first. “You can’t sacrifice your future for another pointless war between France and Germany.”
“What more does Hitler have to do for you to realize what’s happening?” Louis cried.
The baeckeoffe threatened to boil over; so much for reason. Philippe snatched ragcloths and lifted the pot, steeling himself not to be distracted by Louis’s borderline rants about Germany, Jews, Communists, deviants.
But Louis sighed, “It’s too late to argue. I report the day after tomorrow.”
Baeckeoffe sloshed onto his bare wrist; Philippe gasped in shock and pain. Louis grabbed a damp cloth, but Philippe jerked it from Louis’s hand and flung it against the wall. No wound compared to what Louis was inflicting.
Still, it burned, and Jeanne wouldn’t like a damp cloth on the floor. Wincing, Philippe stooped and pressed the cool linen to his wrist.
Louis pointed a reproachful finger at the small wooden table by the front door. Atop it rested a framed family photo and a 77-millimeter trench shell casing with St. Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orleans, carved by teenage Corporal Philippe Gardeau.
“Have you forgotten her?” Louis cried. “She knew some things matter more than peace.”
The burning in Philippe’s wrist flickered through his veins, even to his sunken cheeks. Her copper long-lashed eyes and Cross of Lorraine emblazoned on her chest had long ceased inflaming him. The truths She’d kept, and the lessons he’d learned, lay seared in Philippe’s heart.
But like the flames that had killed Her, despair that Louis had learned the wrong lessons didn’t just burn – it suffocated. Philippe managed to gasp, “I told you -”
Until Jeanne appeared, drying parsley from the garden with her apron. “We have two more dinners as a family. No war at our table.”
Philippe had never defied Jeanne. But as he seethed through dinner, baeckeoffe and pinot noir untouched, he kept his eyes on the Maid. Suppressed tears fueled rage roiling his guts. The Jesuits had taught Louis nothing about war or courage. Philippe probably would’ve been shot for treason if his German superiors had caught him engraving this symbol of Catholic France into their property. But the Maid kept him safe. After Germany surrendered, he’d started home, across the mine-and-corpse strewn fields of northern France, with Her in his rucksack.
Nothing, not even Joseph, had led Philippe off that path.
But maybe the Maid, or Joseph, or both, were why, at four in the morning, Philippe climbed the steps to the attic bedroom where his sons slept, shook Henri awake, and whispered, “We’re going on a drive.”
Philippe met U.S. Army Sergeant Joseph Hall on the semi-frigid February morning in 1919 when both men had been released from the hospital in Reims.
Reims had been a mistake. He’d lacked French currency but hoped his French was good enough to beg for scraps from cafés. Instead, French soldiers had spotted his German uniform and attacked him, kicking, punching, cursing, Pig, rapist, cathedral-bomber, as Philippe tried to shield his face and cried Alsacien!
Philippe awoke in the hospital with a cracked skull and three bruised ribs. He spent five weeks recovering, then, three with the influenza he’d contracted from the other patients. Joseph spent only two weeks there with the flu, but both were discharged the same day. Joseph had hobbled after Philippe, yelling, in abysmal French, “Alsacien! Drink for your savior?”
Faith in Joseph had been another mistake. But Alsacien convinced Philippe that perhaps this wiry, strawberry-blonde American with his earnest blue eyes – who looked about his age, nineteen – wasn’t completely full of shit.
“Sorry, I don’t have any money,” Philippe apologized in English.
Joseph laughed and shoved his hands into his pockets. “If you can speak English, I can pay for drinks.”
Joseph did most of the talking in a café in the shadow of the ruins of the cathedral, as Philippe’s legs cramped underneath a small, splintered, rickety table and Joseph stretched his short ones and downed cognac. Joseph’s breath settled feathery and gray-white on the dirt-and-rain-streaked windowpane as he told Philippe he’d heard Philippe cry Alsacien, assailed Philippe’s assailants, then whisked Philippe unconscious to a hospital.
“My mom’s family’s from Alsace,” Joseph explained cheerfully, but sobered as he winced at Philippe’s uniform. “Guess I’d have been in your uniform, if they’d stayed.”
Joseph proffered a cigarette with an apologetic shrug. Philippe accepted, though no apology was needed. This American didn’t understand Alsace if he thought Philippe cared who’d won this war. He just wanted to be home, with Jeanne, and never leave her or Alsace again.
Joseph grinned. “I’m going to Alsace, to see my ancestral home. Be my guide?”
Maybe it was that grin, or the wine, or the hope that an American might protect him from French beatings. But Philippe, warmed, agreed.
Joseph kept talking on the train to Verdun. His mother’s grandparents had left Alsace in ’72 and settled somewhere called Ell-uh-noy, which “looks kinda like this place, but, flatter.”
Philippe didn’t follow most of his chatter, but pretending he did was better than looking out the window at muddied, bombed-out, barbed-wire-laced fields. Only as they pulled into Verdun – when Joseph said his mother died when he was born, and he’d never met her family – did Philippe notice tears dotting Joseph’s long lashes and freckles on his prominent cheekbones. Philippe felt, to his horror, something else, underneath his rucksack in his lap, that needed to settle before he stood.
Philippe blurted, “My fiancée’s an orphan.”
The train slowed, and with it Philippe’s pulse, convincing himself that getting closer to Alsace just meant he’d been thinking about Jeanne.
Joseph stayed silent for two days afterwards, through Lorraine, as they hitched rides from farmers towards the Vosges. Don’t wander off the paths, each farmer warned. Landmines.
After they’d hopped off the last wagon before the mountains, Joseph broke his silence with a scoff. “Do they think we’re idiots?”
Philippe sighed. “The old warn to feel important.”
They chuckled in shared youth and loped a few paces before Joseph said, “Tell me about your fiancée – besides that she’s an orphan.”
March had brought patches of green peeking through the Vosges’ brown – and warm weather that left Philippe sweating and groping for words to describe Jeanne. How her doelike brown eyes beamed over candlelight and Dumas novels as she teased him for his imperfect French. How her dark, lavender-scented curls tumbled down her back when she unpinned them with him in his bed after his parents and sisters had fallen asleep. How her murmurs pleasejustthisPhilippejustthisplease swirled low and mellifluous as they moved hands between each other’s legs until each cried out into the other’s shoulder. How she laced her rosary around her small, smooth, pale fingers in the pews after confession, and Philippe’s eyes watered with incense and aching for her fingers to repeat what they’d just been absolved of doing to him.
Philippe stomped up the rocky path, ignoring Joseph’s expectant smirk. “She’s a saint.”
He’d been baptized, but his family hadn’t been religious. Only Jeanne – with her books and sweet-smelling curls and loving hands – had brought faith into his life. The trenches had proven the hell France had made without faith in its saints. He needed to get back to his saint.
The rocks gave way to mud; Philippe clutched a tree branch for balance. Joseph struggled to brace a foot on a slender, rain-slicked sapling and grunted as he yanked his bootlaces. “Faithful, then,” Joseph snorted. “You hope.”
Philippe barely caught Joseph looking stricken before he stormed ahead. He didn’t let himself hope that Joseph would follow him as he stomped uphill. What an odd thing to hope for, that Joseph would follow him. But the faster he walked, the sooner he’d reach the pass – and the sooner he’d reach Jeanne.
Neither man spoke again until they’d reached the pass. Sandstone cliffs and sprouting trees sloped downwards, towards gently rolling, and slowly greening, foothills, into greener fields stretching out to the Rhine.
Joseph clapped Philippe’s shoulder; his breath was hot in Philippe’s ear. “Someone back home broke my heart. Didn’t give me the right to insult your girl.”
Philippe broke away towards the shade of a tree. “I gave up my inheritance for her.”
He plucked one of the few apples dangling from the tree overhead. Strange they’d grow this high, this early, but he felt faint, surely with hunger. “My parents became her guardians just before the war. We fell in love. But Jeanne’s French. My mother’s father was a German baron. He insisted Alsace was German; any children of mine had to be.”
The apple tasted bitter; fear of poison overcame hunger. Philippe spat it out. Joseph brandished a flask and lit a cigarette. “Your granddad sounds like a prick.”
Philippe accepted the flask. “He’ll pay. The French won’t let him stay in Alsace.” He stifled a wince at the schnapps’ fumes and the memory of his last fight with his grandfather.
Bed her all you want. The old man had poured him a second glass of schnapps in a green-stemmed glass. But I won’t feed French bastards.
Philippe – tipsy, humiliated, but not enough of either to tell his grandfather how careful Jeanne was to avoid children – summoned Dumas’s romantic heroism. How dare you insult my fiancée. Our children will be Alsatian, and they’ll die before they take money from you.
His grandfather tugged his white whiskers. If you’re a father, you’ll wish you’d been more careful with your words.
Joseph sprawled next to Philippe. Philippe’s rucksack stayed nestled between his thigh and Joseph’s. Philippe prayed to forget what his trench shell inside held: a Fromms packet, one of twenty an officer had doled out whenever the unit went to the brothel. Philippe had chosen Jeanne and Catholic morals and traded godless German prophylactics for cigarettes – except one.
Schnapps – and Joseph’s knee brushing his – emboldened Philippe to tell the truth he’d been rehearsing for Jeanne. “I don’t want children.”
Joseph puffed the cigarette, knee unmoving. “Does she?”
Philippe flushed at Joseph’s nerve and the prospect of confessing to the handsome American: Not without marriage – which is why I’m still a virgin. “She wants me.” He rummaged through his rucksack for the gift he prayed would convince Jeanne he loved her and God, but to just agree to a Fromms, once, and they’d discuss children later.
Joseph snickered at the Maid. “Is that a saint? I’m Lutheran.”
Philippe scowled. He’d figured Joseph was a heretic, but Joseph might’ve learned something from months in France. “Jeanne d’Arc saved France. She’ll be a saint soon.” He rubbed a smudge on the helmet. “But my Jeanne’s saint enough.”
Joseph grinned, tracing a finger along the inside of the cylindrical hollow. “And you’re enough for her?”
Philippe ignored his knotting stomach and throbbing throat and prayed She ran too deep, too dark for Joseph to see the Fromms.
Joseph tapped the edge. “Bet you can’t throw this thing twenty meters. If you can -” He slung an arm over Philippe’s shoulders and winked. “Maybe you’ll convert me. I’ll confess my sins to your Saint Jeanne before you both bathe me.”
The copper slid sweaty against Philippe’s fingers as he suppressed the retort, Not how the sacraments work. But – if he could bring Joseph home – tell Jeanne he’d converted a Protestant – a miracle, even proof of God’s blessing for the Fromms – keep Joseph a bit longer –
Choosing faith, Philippe swung his arm back and let St. Jeanne fly.
The earth gave way in a flash of light and heat that sent the men flying. Philippe’s palms scraped against gravel. Cool, damp mud squelched between his fingers as he slid downwards.
He’d flown like this once, in this same flash, in the trenches, when Private Ulrich had thought he’d seen a bunny. Private Ulrich was Alsatian, two years younger than Philippe. He’d loved animals, especially rabbits from his family’s farm. The other soldiers bullied him. Philippe had felt protective of him.
But when it mattered most, Philippe hadn’t been protective enough. They’d been alone in their trench while the other soldiers had been at the brothel. As Private Ulrich had wandered towards the bunny he claimed he saw, Philippe – reading Jeanne’s letters, heading to his bunk to fantasize about doing to her what the soldiers were doing in the brothel, praying the private wouldn’t follow – had sighed. Don’t get close to the wire –
Then there’d been the same horrible sound, and only tinnitus in Philippe’s left ear and the conviction that he shouldn’t be a father reminded him that Private Ulrich had existed.
Both his ears rang now – until a moan penetrated them. Joseph lay ten meters away, face gashed and as caked with mud as Philippe’s. There was no sign of the shell. St. Jeanne – with Fromm – was surely buried in the river of gravel that met a ten-meter sheet of granite where the path had collapsed. If the two precipices left hadn’t been so jagged, you might think a rainstorm or an avalanche had cleaved the path in two. Easier to believe that than believe any army would mine a path where any man, woman, or child might walk.
Philippe staggered across the gravel river. It rose higher towards the left precipice, the one he needed, going south. But that dribbled into a puddle of loose, smaller rocks that covered a steeper rock before it reached the precipice, impossible to climb.
That left the granite wall in front of him. He’d never climbed a mountain, but it was his only choice. Philippe eased a foot into a crevice and hoisted himself up until he reached the left precipice – back on the path.
Ten meters below, Joseph stumbled up the river of gravel. Philippe scooted onto the rock, one hand on the path’s edge. “You can’t climb that. It’s all loose gravel!”
Joseph, heedless, lunged up onto the rock, and slid backwards atop the gravel. He cursed, legs flailing, fingers scraping against rocks. Philippe groaned, slid downward, and gripped Joseph’s waistband. He tugged Joseph upwards even as Philippe himself slid farther down and shoved Joseph’s ass as hard as he could.
“I won’t make it,” Joseph moaned, sliding downward.
“Shut up, keep moving,” Philippe yelled, feet scrambling for traction, hands fumbling to grip Joseph’s small ass underneath his balloon-thighed trousers. Maybe it was a sliver of a groove in the rock that his left toes found. Maybe Private Ulrich was offering redemption. But Philippe got energy for one final push, legs churning against the rocks, enough for Joseph to heave himself over the edge onto the path and pull Philippe with him.
The path was too narrow for Philippe to roll off of Joseph. His chest pressed against Joseph’s, their hands intertwined in the dust. He found breath to gasp, “I told you -”
Joseph brushed a lock of hair from Philippe’s forehead and whispered, “My saint.”
Philippe lost air. When his lips met Joseph’s and Joseph’s tongue brushed against his, he’d have years to breathe and blame himself – but no time in the minutes that followed.
No time to answer the French growl, “The fuck?”
Or register the two French soldiers hovering over them. Or protest when Joseph cried, “Fucking German attacked me!” Only time to hold his arms over his head when the soldiers rained down blows.
When Philippe came to, he was still on the path, alone, bleeding. He staggered down it until he reached a creek. He waded into the still-freezing water, stripped off his uniform, and thrashed the cloth against rocks until the blood spots faded to brown. Even as he did, he watched the waves bubble and froth, praying in vain for the Maid to reappear in the currents.
By the time the sun set, Philippe had been at his family’s sandstone, tree-clustered villa for an hour – an hour into knowing his parents were dead.
His sisters burned his uniform while he showered behind the barn outdoors, savoring the water and soap and smell of smoke. Tomorrow, he’d grieve his parents; the day after that, figure out survival. He’d be so busy with grieving and surviving he’d never think about Joseph again.
With the water rushing over his head, he didn’t hear Jeanne approach, and nearly shrieked when her arms wrapped around him, her naked torso pressing his bare back.
Jeanne slid her hands underneath his. “Who left these wounds on you?”
Callouses laced her hands instead of rosary beads. An hour ago, she’d led him to the crosses that marked his parents’ graves, saying only, No undertaker would come. He didn’t need to ask to know her hands had dug those graves.
Jeanne’s wet dark curls were brittle, but Philippe still inhaled lavender when he pressed his lips to the ones that clung wet to her neck. “French soldiers saw my uniform. I’ll heal.”
Philippe caught her by the waist as they kissed and Jeanne pulled him onto the grass, slick flesh on slick flesh, her legs splayed underneath him.
“Please -” Jeanne murmured. Philippe braced himself for justthisplease, but she reached between his legs and whispered, “No more waiting -”
“Wait,” Philippe heard himself gasping, cursing the lost Fromms, trying to disentangle his body from hers and the truths he owed her from truths he prayed he didn’t.
He propped himself up in the spring grass, brushed damp strands from her cheeks, even as the memory of Joseph’s fingers in his hair lingered.
Jeanne kissed his hand. “I know I was afraid of children.” Her eyes in the sunset still beamed exactly like they had over candlelight and Dumas, but the teasing in her voice was gone. “But you left, and the world was dark, and I realized – if our children would be lights in the darkness – then I shouldn’t be afraid.”
This saint was wise, warm, and asking for no confession – only faith. Philippe surrendered and thought no more about Joseph or Fromm as she brought him into her. His saint had all the truths he needed. Lessons from the war were his to keep.
In 1939, the Vosges gleamed red and gold in the rising autumn sun. Philippe pulled the Citroën off the road. France had repaired what the mine had shattered, but Philippe remembered.
“We’ve never done a father-son hike,” Henri smirked as they left the truck.
Henri had left his jacket in the backseat; Philippe snatched the cigarette case he knew Henri hid in the left pocket. “I’ve been busy cleaning clothes to feed five children.”
Philippe lit a cigarette and savored the nicotine with his teenage son’s sullen silence. “A kilometer north, take the path west ten kilometers. You’ll reach a pass, and a path to Lorraine.”
He passed the cigarette to Henri. “I know your greatest fear is growing up to be me. So when the time comes, run, and Germany won’t put you in a uniform like it did to me.”
Henri took the cigarette, though his fingers shook. “That’s defeatist.”
“If it’s defeatist to remember France can lose wars, all Alsatians are defeatists. But remember St. Jeanne, even if France doesn’t. She guided me back to Alsace. She’ll guide you out.” Philippe glanced sternly at his son. “What did I tell you children She taught me?”
Henri took another puff. His fingers steadied as he met his father’s gaze. “‘Don’t go off the path.'”
They passed the cigarette back and forth before walking back to the car, as Philippe thanked God the son who’d looked most like him had heard the Maid’s reproach.
In April 1940, Louis was captured by the Wehrmacht.
A few weeks later, just before sunrise, came a German airstrike. It started with a shrill, screaming sound – the Stukas, more terrifying than anything Philippe had heard in the trenches. Then, for five seconds, nothing, then, ear-splitting explosions.
Jeanne ran for the girls. Philippe scrambled to the attic for Henri and his third son, Daniel, ignoring bruises the walls left on his arms as they buffeted him from side to side. When he reached the attic, Daniel was clutching his drawing portfolio and his asthma cigarettes.
“Henri’s gone,” Daniel gasped.
Another screaming sound came. Philippe roared, “Downstairs.”
They made it down to the kitchen when another explosion shook the house. Philippe dragged his son to the ground, tried to cover Daniel’s slight frame with his own.
Ten centimeters from his head, the front table wobbled, and with it, the St. Jeanne shell. Pleading breatheDanieljustbreathe, Philippe lunged upwards, clasped the Maid, and dragged himself, Her, and Daniel to the staircase to the cellar.
They huddled in the cellar for several days. Jeanne made everyone pray rosaries. Philippe murmured Ave Marias, eyes on his children’s faces twisted in fear, smiling reassurance he didn’t feel as his head pounded with each boom. Damp earth shook beneath his feet, and the house and business he’d built for this family shuddered above them all.
Ten rosaries later, Philippe was German again, and a Gestapo major, flanked by two Wehrmacht soldiers, was pounding on his family’s front door.
Philippe’s rheumatism had tormented him for two straight nights. He rose, stiffly, and motioned Daniel to the corner, to the secret room off the cellar. Daniel couldn’t run with his asthma; he’d have to hide to avoid conscription.
Philippe hobbled upstairs, clutching the St. Jeanne shell, his wife and daughters in tow. If his children listened to him, maybe they’d live to be the lights their saint mother had dreamed of.
The major spoke only High German, which Philippe knew some of, Jeanne very little, so he interrogated only Philippe at the kitchen table.
“Your son Louis escaped from his POW camp last week.”
Philippe eased onto the bench across from the major, shoulders slumping from pain, head swimming in shock he knew he shouldn’t feel at Louis’s recklessness.
But it took the major picking up the St. Jeanne shell he’d set on the table for Philippe’s head to clear. “Why do you have this?”
Through rheumatic pain, Philippe summoned enough righteousness to draw his shoulders back. “Because this is a Catholic house.”
The major frowned and probed the dark hollow inside the shell. Philippe’s own fingers knew by heart the edges at the bottom the major was feeling. He immediately adopted a more placating tone to distract those profane probing fingers. “It was a wedding gift.”
It had been waiting for Philippe and Jeanne on the steps of the villa when they returned from their wedding vows, as soon after Easter as a priest would marry them. Jeanne declared it a miracle. After she’d gone to bed, Philippe had probed its depths and found no Fromms.
Instead, he’d found – and kept hidden – the yellowed piece of paper the Gestapo major smoothed on the table before him.
Phil,
One of the Frenchies we met on the mountain found Her. I bought Her back. Though he’d found something awfully non-Maidenlike in Her that he insisted on keeping. Not very Catholic, but what does this heretic know?
I regret how I left things. But I realized, then, what it means to be Alsatian – being many things, but having to choose all the same. I chose survival. Whatever you choose, I hope you find peace in the choice.
Yours,
Jo.
The major tapped the paper. “A wedding gift? This letter’s addressed only to you.”
“It’s from someone I knew in the war.”
“It’s flirtatious.”
“Is that a crime?”
Philippe immediately regretted asking, remembering an argument when Louis had yelled, Germany’s sending Communists and homosexuals to concentration camps –
Don’t say that in this Catholic home! Philippe hissed.
“Concentration camps?” Henri challenged.
Ignoring him, Philippe demanded of Louis, How do you know what – that – is?
Reproach flared in Louis’s eyes. I know no one deserves to be locked in a cage and beaten and starved. Including men who kiss other men.
Philippe, eyes on the Maid, hissed again. No cage is worse than burning in hell.
Philippe muttered, “Josephine was American. I was young. I learned from my sins.”
The major snickered and folded his arms across his skull-medal-adorned chest. He raised his eyebrows upstairs, where Jeanne’s and the soldiers’ footsteps and voices could be heard. “Germanization will require adjustments. Undesirables – Jews – socialists – French – will have to be expelled into France.”
Philippe’s throat went dry. If the Germans detained him for deviance, maybe his children wouldn’t even miss him. Deporting their mother was another story.
The major held up his palms. “I’m just saying your family’s cooperation will matter. Because I will visit, again, until I find Louis.” He pocketed Joseph’s letter. “‘Jo’ can stay between us men.”
He smirked in farewell. “I hope she was beautiful.” He strode downstairs and yelled for the soldiers to clear out.
Philippe placed the Maid back on her perch and knelt. He prayed for visions of his sons. Of Henri running where Philippe had walked. Of Louis dodging captors. Praying they’d be safe even if they scoffed, thinking of him, The old warn to feel important.
Jeanne knelt next to him and placed, next to the Maid, the framed photo of their five children. Daniel, in long dark curls Philippe wished he’d cut, arms wrapped around Henri and their elder girl Sylvie, preening in her borrowed dress from a wealthier cousin. Henri, arm around Louis. Louis, smiling solemnly but hugging their youngest girl Eveline, who’d had to be coaxed to smile because Sylvie teased her about her two front adult teeth growing in.
“I grabbed it going to the cellar,” Jeanne whispered, saving Philippe the shame of confessing that he hadn’t noticed it missing when he’d grabbed the Maid.
Jeanne began a rosary, lacing the beads around her fingers, roughened and reddened with lye like Philippe’s. Her Latin was rapid as ever. Her eyes – resting on their five children in black-and-white, lights in the darkness – blazed with desperate pride. She’d given Philippe faith. He’d kept it. And Alsace would keep Jeanne. Whatever sins Philippe had to commit to ensure that happened, he’d remember any lessons learned. He wouldn’t let the Maid – or Louis, with his mother’s eyes, his solemn smile, his new suit and diploma wasted – reproach him for his faith.
Philippe gripped his copper Maid, slid his fingers underneath Jeanne’s rosary beads to meet the indents they’d left in her flesh, and rasped prayers for the surviving.
