A Shop Shut for a Season

Cherbourg fell at the end of June, and we heard about it the way we heard about everything that was not in our own field: late, in pieces, from a man who had it from another man.

The guns to the north had been going since the landing. The infantry had been fighting their way up the peninsula towards the port, through the hills and the forts round it, with other batteries than ours, and we heard them every day, a long rolling noise over the horizon behind us that never stopped. Then one afternoon in the last week of June it stopped. We noticed it the way you notice a clock that has stopped. Baca stood up in the pit and listened.

“Somebody quit,” he said.

In the evening a corporal from the signals came along the hedge on a motorcycle and stopped by the gun for water, and Baca asked him.

“Cherbourg,” the corporal said. “It’s ours.”

“That’s the port,” Peter said. “That’s the whole point of Rollo. The captain had it on the model. A deep harbour, so they don’t have to bring everything in over the beaches for ever.”

“Not much of a port.” The corporal drank and wiped his mouth. “The French blew it before they gave it up. All of it. The quays, the cranes, the locks, the big sea wall. Sank ships in the entrance. Mined the water. Engineers are saying weeks before a ship can get in.”

“So we came all this way for a harbour,” Baca said, “and they broke it.”

“That’s about it.”

Gaines said, “And the town?”

“Bad. No water. No food. People coming up out of the cellars and standing in the street looking at it.” He gave Baca the can back. “That’s all I’ve got.” And he kicked the motorcycle and went off along the hedge.

I have read since that it was much as he said. I did not see it. We never went north. Our guns faced south, into the hedges, and stayed facing south, and Cherbourg was a noise that stopped.

---

I came to the farm on the evening of the twenty-eighth and found them packing.

Not all of them. Perhaps a third of the families in the yard were tying up bundles and loading carts, and the committee woman with the book was going from one to another, arguing, and the rest were sitting and watching. An old man on the straw by the arch caught my sleeve as I came through and said something with Cherbourg in it, and fini, and made a movement with his hand, away, as though he was brushing crumbs off a table.

The Morels’ cart was by the wall where I had mended it. Auguste was lashing things onto it, the pot and the bundles and the old woman’s chair, and Lucien was helping him, and Madame Morel was standing beside the cart with her arms folded, watching them do it.

Lucien saw me and came over. He was not laughing.

“Jim. We go. Demain.” He searched for it. “Tomorrow. Saint-Ouen. On rentre à la maison.” He pointed at his mother. “Maman a décidé.”

“Why?”

He looked at his mother, and back at me, and said a sentence slowly. I did not understand it. He said it again, slower, with his hands, and I still did not, and he made a noise of disgust at both of us.

“Wait,” I said. “Peter. I’ll get Peter.”

“Oui. Peter. Vite.”

I ran most of the way.

---

When we came back the cart was nearly loaded. Madame Morel was still standing beside it with her arms folded. Peter went straight to her, not to Lucien, and said, “Madame,” and then a good deal more. She listened. Then she answered, shortly. Peter spoke again, longer, and his voice went up a little, and she answered again, shorter.

“What’s she saying?”

He did not answer me. He was still looking at her. Then he said, without turning round, “She says a shop shut for a season is a shop gone.”

“What?”

“Une boutique fermée pour une saison, c’est une boutique perdue. That’s what she says. That’s the reason.” She was speaking again, and he gave it to me as it came. “If the shop on the square is shut through the summer, the village will learn to go to the shop in the next village. Or the market in the town. Or the man with the van who comes round now that her husband has no van. By the autumn they’ll be used to it, and they won’t come back, and the shop will be finished. It’s been open since her grandmother’s time. It’s all they have.”

“Does she know what’s down there?”

Peter asked her something. She answered without unfolding her arms.

“She says the war is going away now that Cherbourg has fallen. She says the village is ours again. The infantry took it on Monday. A man came up from there this morning and told her. The house is standing and the shop is standing and she is going to open it.” He took his glasses off. He did not polish them. He held them in his hand. “She says she did not wait all these years for the Americans to come so that she could sit in a barn and watch her shop die.”

I looked at her. She looked back at me over Peter’s shoulder with that square closed face, and waited, as if it was my turn.

“Monday’s two days ago,” I said. “Tell her it’s Wednesday.”

“Wheeler.”

“Tell her. Tell her they go forward a field in the morning and come back a field at night. Tell her nobody holds anything down there for two days. Tell her what the infantry look like when they come back past the gun.” I did not know where Saint-Ouen was. It was off the edge of any map I had seen. But I had been firing into those hedges for two weeks. “Tell her the front isn’t a line, it’s a place, and it moves, and her village is in it.”

Peter told her. He told her better than I had, I am sure, and longer; he went on for a long time, and I heard non and dangereux, and the name of the village several times, and a word I had learned was hedges and a word I had learned was shells. She listened to all of it, quite patiently, with her arms folded. When he stopped she said one sentence, and turned, and went back to the cart.

“Well?”

“She says she’s heard all that,” Peter said. “From the committee. From two American officers. From the policeman. From the priest. She says she’s grateful. She says she’s going home in the morning.”

---

Then he went after her.

He went round the cart to where she had begun lashing the old woman’s chair, and stood in front of her, and said, “Madame, le village est sur la ligne. On le prend, on le perd. Les obus tombent tous les jours. Vous ne pouvez pas y aller.”

She pulled the rope tight. “J’ai entendu, monsieur.”

“Madame, le village est sur la ligne. On le prend, on le perd. Les obus tombent tous les jours.”

She did not answer. She passed the rope under the chair and brought it up the other side.

“Le village est sur la ligne, madame. Les obus.”

I did not have the words, but it was the same thing the third time, word for word, only faster. Auguste stopped what he was doing and looked at him. Lucien looked at me.

“Peter,” I said.

“On le prend, on le perd. Vous ne pouvez pas.”

“Peter.”

He did not hear me, or did not stop. His voice had gone high and thin, the way it never went, and his hands were shaking, and he had his glasses in one of them. “Madame. Le village est sur la ligne.” Madame Morel finished the knot and did not look at him.

I took him by the arm. “Peter. She’s decided.”

He looked at me as though he did not know who I was. Then he looked down at his glasses, and put them on, and looked at Madame Morel. She had finished with the chair and was standing with her hands on the back of it, looking at him. She was not angry.

He said, in English, quite quietly, “She doesn’t understand.” Then he walked away across the yard and out through the arch.

Nobody said anything. Then Madame Morel spoke to Lucien, a few words, and Lucien came over to me and put his hand flat on his own chest, over his heart, and patted it fast, the way you would show a heart going.

“Ton ami. Peter.” He pointed at his mother, and patted his chest again, the same. “Maman aussi.” Then he pointed south, down the road, and walked two fingers along the side of the cart. “Mais elle part.”

---

It was a long June evening, the kind they have up there, light until nearly eleven. The loading was finished. Auguste had sat down on a bundle and gone to sleep with his hands on his stomach. The old woman was asleep in her chair on the cart, already lashed in, as if she meant to be ready. Madame Morel sat beside her with her hands in her lap, awake, looking at nothing.

Lucien said something to his mother, and she nodded. He took a bottle out of a bag on the cart, and held it up to me, and jerked his head at the arch.

We went out and up the lane behind the farm to a gate at the top of a field, where you could see a long way south in the evening light, over the hedges, field after field of them, going off blue into the distance to where the smoke was. We climbed up and sat on the gate. Lucien held the bottle up between us.

“Le cidre de la boutique.” He knocked on it. “La dernière. Last. Le dernier tonneau, la dernière bouteille.” He tucked it under his arm and ran on the spot, puffing out his cheeks and his stomach, and it was Auguste running from the shop with the bottle, and I laughed. “Mon père. Under the arm. Et moi, je la garde.” He held it to his chest: kept. Then he pulled the cork with his teeth. “Pour ce soir.”

“Tonight,” I said.

“Tonight.”

We drank it out of the bottle, passing it back and forth. It was very strong and very dry and tasted of apples and wood. I have not tasted anything like it since.

He drew the square of Saint-Ouen for me in the dust on the top of the gatepost with his finger. “L’église.” A square. “La boutique.” Another, opposite. “Le café. La pompe.” A dot. Then he put his finger on the shop and moved it to one corner. “Ma fenêtre. My window.”

“My window,” I said, and showed him with my hands where mine was, at the farm, under the roof, over the kitchen.

“Et les vaches? Combien?”

“Nineteen.” I held up my hands, and then my hands again.

“Les noms.” He pointed at my fingers. “Names.”

So I told him the names of the cows, all nineteen, one after another, counting them off on my fingers, and he listened with his head on one side, and when I had done he said, “Encore,” and made me say them again. When I got to Bathsheba the second time he stopped me.

“Comment?”

“Bathsheba.”

“Bath-sheh-ba.” He said it again. He said it to the field. He said it with the bottle in the air, as if he was toasting her, and nearly fell off the gate. “Bath-sheh-ba!”

Then he made his plans. He made them mostly in French, with his hands, and I got them as near as I could.

“Après la guerre.” He pointed south-west. “Saint-Lô. L’école normale. I go. Je serai instituteur.” He mimed a man at a blackboard.

“Schoolmaster.”

“Schoolmaster!” He wrote on the air. “Les enfants de Saint-Ouen. Les calculs.” He tapped his head. “Sums. Comme il faut. Properly. Pour faire les comptes de leurs mères.” He mimed an envelope, and a pencil, and turned the envelope round to show me, and I laughed. “Et après,” he said, and pointed west, a long way west, over the hedges and the sea. “America. Lexington. Je viens voir les vaches.” He held up a finger. “Surtout Bath-sheh-ba.”

“All right,” I said. “And when it’s over I’ll come back to Saint-Ouen and buy something in the shop.”

He followed it with his eyes on my hands. “You. Buy? Dans la boutique?”

“In the shop.”

“Quoi? What?”

“Eggs.”

He laughed so much he nearly fell off the gate, and I had to catch his arm, and then he did fall, and stood in the grass laughing up at me, holding the bottle, and climbed back.

We made more plans after that, with dates, and laughed at them, with the guns going off to the south of us.

When the bottle was finished he stood up on the gate and threw it as far as he could into the field, and we listened to it land. We went back down the lane in the dark.

---

Peter was by the gun, rolled up in his blanket, awake. I sat down on the trail.

“You can’t make her stay,” I said.

“I know that.”

“She heard everything you said.”

“I know that.”

“You said it five times. I counted.”

“Six.” He did not move. “It’s her shop, Wheeler. I know. You don’t have to say it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were.” He lay there a while. Then he said, “It doesn’t make it right,” and turned over, and went to sleep, or pretended to.

In the morning he checked his sight twice, and said nothing about it, and neither did I.

---

They went that morning. I was not there. The battery was firing from first light, and I could not get away, and I stood in the pit cutting charges and thought about the cart going down the road south, with the old woman in her chair and the wheel I had mended going round, and Auguste walking beside it, and Madame Morel in her man’s cap, and Lucien pushing, talking to all of them.

When I went to the farm that evening the place by the wall was empty. There was a mark in the dust of the cobbles where the cart had stood. The committee woman with the book was still at her table, and I went and stood in front of her.

“Morel,” I said.

She looked in her book, and found the place, and turned it round and showed me with her finger. There was a line through their names, all four of them, and a word written after, and the name of the village. I had that word by then. It meant returned.

“Saint-Ouen,” I said, out of my twenty words. “C’est bon?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she shrugged, the way they do, with the whole of the shoulders, and said, “Là-bas, monsieur? Là-bas, c’est la guerre,” and went back to her book. I did not understand it.

I walked back up the lane in the long evening to the battery. The guns were firing south over the hedges. I stood behind ours for a while, holding a round, and looked south, and I did not know which way Saint-Ouen was.