Quill Pen Scratchings

Chapter 20

Edmund really didn’t want to stay in the café by himself, but he needed somewhere to sleep while he tried to get a train ticket to the south.  Once he got to the town, and then to the café, he walked directly to it, dreading the moment he opened the door and saw it empty.  He took his key from around his neck and turned it in the lock.  It clicked hollowly in the door.  He turned the knob and stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him.  It still held residual warmth from that morning.  He looked at the bed that Clemence had neatly made a few hours before, and up at the apron that she had hung on the wall after making breakfast for them.  The room seemed like a tomb to him. He put down his bag and stepped back outside and locked the door. 

He walked to the train station and was able to get a ticket to Paris the next afternoon.  From there he could get to wherever he needed to go.  He laughed as he thought briefly about Tino and his pile of naked women.  He walked for a while around the deserted and destroyed streets of Bar le Duc.  He didn’t want to go back to the café.  He found a family of an elderly couple and a woman and two young children who were struggling to recover some precious family memories from their destroyed house.  Edmund volunteered to help and spent the afternoon climbing over the wreckage of their lives and piling what looked to Edmund like broken junk into a pony cart.  It is what Clemence would have done.  The woman who was the mother of the children told Edmund that her husband was at the front and still alive, or at least she had not heard that he was dead.  Edmund pulled a rag doll out of the wreckage and wiped it off as best he could and then called the woman’s little girl to him and held the doll out to her.  She ran up to it and grabbed it out of Edmund’s hand and then ran to her mother, crying violently. The woman looked at Edmund as if to apologize and said ‘thank you’ to him.  The day wore on, and the family seemed to have found everything they thought they would find, and they offered him dinner, but apologized that they could not offer him a place to sleep for the night since they were staying in the garden shed until they left the next day for family in the south.  Edmund assured them that he had a warm place to sleep, and thanked them, but refused their offer of dinner. 

He said goodbye and they all kissed his cheeks and cried and thanked him for his help.  He went to Saint-Etienne.  Most of the people who had been there that first night were gone, though a few remained.  Red Cross nurses were making a stew over an open fire at the front of the church.  They handed Edmund a mug full, which he drank as he walked into the church to get warm and to sit for a while.  He found a seat on a pew near the front and drank his soup and looked around at the stone carvings and at the stained-glass windows which were growing dark in the dying light. 

When he finished the bland broth, he leaned his head forward on the back of the seat in front of him and said a prayer for Clemence, for his mother and even for Tino, and for all of those who he had loved who were now gone.

He arose and walked back to the café in the last of the evening sun.  It was dark when he opened the door and stepped inside.  He tripped over his duffel bag and, cursing, walked to the stove and opened the firebox.  Embers remained glowing in the dark.  He walked out the back door and brought in an armful of wood and kindling and slowly built up the fire to keep him company.  Soon the warmth was spreading through the room, and Edmund walked around and lit a few of the lamps so he could see.  The silence was overwhelming.  Everywhere he looked he saw Clemence and saw the absence of Clemence.  She had told him that she left some food for him in a stone box outside next to the back door where it would stay frozen.  He decided to save it for tomorrow.  He sat down in the chair by the small table where he had eaten his first meal there and looked around the room.  Only the crackling of the fire broke the quiet.  He sat for a while and tried to remember what Clemence felt like, but he could not do it.  Judging by the light outside, it was still very early, but, having nothing else to do, he decided to go to bed.  He stood and took off his clothes and felt his skin grow taut in the cold.  He lifted the nightshirt off of the peg by the door where he had hung it yesterday, and slipped it over his head.  He looked at Clemence’s shirt hanging also and lifted it off the peg and held it up to his face and inhaled deeply.  The smell brought her back to him for a brief moment.  He hung it back on the peg and walked around and turned out all the lamps.  He took her photograph out of his bag and set it on the floor and slipped into the icy sheets.  The smell of her in the bed was overwhelming, and he drifted off to sleep laying on his side looking at her portrait. 

In the morning, he rose early and dressed in the clothes that Clemence had given him and walked to the cemetery where Knox was being buried.  He arrived just after the ceremony began.  All the remaining pilots, and several crewmen were there, and Edmund walked up behind them and listened to the priest deliver the eulogy, he bowed his head and said a prayer for Knox and for his family, and then he crept away before it was over.  No one saw him come or leave.  He vowed to himself that when he got back to America, he would find Knox’s family and tell them of the man he was and what great things he had done. 

When he got back to the cafe, he built up the fire in the stove and then took a pot out of the stone box that Clemence had left for him. He put it on the stove top, and soon the kitchen was filled with the familiar smell of Clemence’s cooking.  He stirred it continually and then poured it into a bowl and sat at the table to eat.  He filled a glass with water from the well outside as there was no more wine left in the cellar.  He sat Clemence’s picture on the table opposite him as he ate.  After he finished, he washed his dishes and cleaned up and made the place look as it had when Clemence left it.  He packed his things back into his duffel bag and walked to the door.  At the last moment, he picked up her nightshirt and folded it neatly and put it in his bag as well.  He took one final look, trying to fix the image of the room where he had been so happy in his memory.  He stepped outside and shut the door and locked it tight, putting the key back around his neck and under his shirt.  It was cold for a moment and then he couldn’t feel it anymore.

He walked to the station, and his train was already waiting.  He climbed aboard and found a window seat in an empty compartment. 

As the train pulled away, he thought about what he was leaving behind, and what he was going to.  Marseille, Clemence, and at some point, he knew, a ship back across the ocean.  But not back to the home or the past he had known.  That world was gone like the trees that swept past his window and faded into memory.

The End