Yours Is the Night Read online

  A love letter is cherished for generations, read until it’s yellowed and crumbled, and remembered long after the lives are gone. A love letter tells truth, even when it’s hard.

  The following is not a valentine. The following is a love letter.

  Please. With respect, I ask of you: Deliver it to its intended, in full.

  America: Your Men

  By Henry Mueller

  (Not Hank Jones. Please.)

  Dear America,

  You have known me, America, as Hank Jones, your trusty war correspondent. I come to you today, hat in hand, to say that the man behind these words is someone far more ordinary. Henry Mueller, the farm boy from Virginia, who got his book learning from the village library and read Homer while milking cows.

  You might say I fell off the turnip truck.

  That may well be. And maybe I hit my head a time or two in the fall, but I landed smack-dab in the middle of the War of the Nations.

  I don’t have much to offer in a place like this . . . but I have my pen, and I have the truth. I will give you both, and beg your ear to hear and your heart to understand.

  Imagine the earth. The most beloved patch of it that you’ve seen or known. Perhaps your beloved patch is Manhattan, with brownstones rising and the smell of fresh-baked bread in the air. Perhaps yours is a bungalow-lined street in sunny California, where you can hear the ocean and taste the salt spray. Perhaps, like me, it’s an alfalfa field where you’re glad to rise early and glad to hit the hay “tireder than dirt,” as my father likes to say, because it’s a good and honest life that means something. Wherever your most beloved patch of earth is, fix it fast to your mind’s eye.

  Now, gouge that patch of earth deep and wide with trenches. Have you ever seen an ant hill in a jar, the sort that schoolchildren study? The way the tunnels are networks, crossing and bridging, taking up the whole of it? Do that to your patch, but sized for men instead of ants.

  Now, strip away the trees, for in our imaginings, the shell fire of France has come to your beloved patch. It obliterates the greenery. It buries life-forms of every kind. Dogs, horses . . . men.

  Now, imagine the best man you know. Husband, brother, son, friend—whoever he may be. Imagine him in that earth. Imagine him clutching all that he holds dear, examining it against the backdrop of that shell fire, and deciding yes. Yes, it is worth it. To go over the top. To risk all for the sake of what and whom he loves.

  This is war. This is a gentle comparison, harsh as it may seem. I will not tell you of the sights, the sounds, the smell, the sickness. Your boys, America . . . they have borne it for you and would not wish it upon you.

  But I will tell you of one man. One of the best men I know. We nearly lost him last week in the depths of a forest. In truth, we know it is only a matter of time before we do lose him to the effects of what he faced. I will not tell you where, or this will be censored . . . and you deserve to know. As much as he deserves to be known.

  He was a man of few words and great passion. But though he will soon be lost, he will not be forgotten.

  America, I ask of you: Will you remember him? This moment, wherever you are, will you stop and give thanks for him? When his time comes, very shortly now, he will have died the one way he would have desired to: in helping someone. Giving his life for theirs. If you want a man to represent your boys, to show you courage and deepest sacrifice, don’t look to Hank Jones, Uncle Sam’s nephew. Look to this man who gave all in the woods.

  America, we talk a lot sometimes. We’ve got a lot of war posters and war songs and war efforts. Sure, maybe it’s how we do our part and get through and help our fellow man. But, America—we are broken, too. Let us not pretend we do not see the open wound that this war is in each of our hearts. The shadow of fear it casts, the ravenous hunger for lives that it feeds but can never fill.

  But in that shadow, I wonder if I could cast some light, too. It is men like my friend, sacrifices and stories like his, that take the dregs of destruction and redeem them into hope. This present time—the machinations of war, the ravaging of disease, the never knowing what will happen next—it would have us believe that there is no hope.

  But it overlooks a man who will give everything in order to offer another man life.

  It is the oldest, truest story. And I see it—we see it—more often than we can say. This present time—the giving of life, the mining for light in the darkest trenches, the never knowing what will happen next—it whispers to us of a love given to us each, long ago, in the ugly dark of Golgotha.

  The place of the skull, reclaimed to be the place of life.

  We are one step closer to coming home. The battalion I am attached to pressed through, at no small cost to them, and we will continue to await and fulfill orders. I, with my pen. They, with their rifles.

  Your boys, America . . . this is it. This is their moment. For better or for worse, if they rise or if they fall, your boys are strong in their brokenness. You have much reason to be proud.

  I reread it before wiring it. It wasn’t what they wanted. It wasn’t even yet what I wanted, could not do them justice, though I’d tried with everything I had left. It would be censored and changed in a thousand different ways. But it was real. I prayed a bit of that truth would find its way to the paper. And that the man it spoke of would be seen and honored the way he deserved to be.

  I thought of Celia Petticrew. “Let Henry Mueller have his say.” Her last words to me before we’d parted. I cringed, thinking that this might be the first true thing of Henry Mueller’s that she’d read. Would that it could be much better news. Would that it could comfort her. She deserved it.

  Still, her words gave me the courage to wire the article and launch it with a prayer that its recipients would find hope in it.

  The Argonne had changed us. Perhaps someday I’d write more of that. But, for now, to share more of it felt like opening a place to the world that belonged to no one but us. Sorrow would be our companion long, long after this.

  44

  Mira

  November 11, 1918

  The city was afire with joy. On this, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year . . . the war would stop. “Cease fire,” they call it. Armistice. My home, my Argonne, my Matthew—whatever happened there, it had led, at last, to an end.

  I wanted to plunge into the joy, too. I wanted to line the streets of old Paris, wave flags with the rest of them, and search the faces of the soldiers who were to march.

  But just as much as I wanted to, I wanted not to. For as long as I did not know, there was hope.

  There had been no letter from Matthew. No news of his being. We had heard bits of the Argonne. Many, many fallen there. But when I closed my eyes, I could only see him there, crouched over Grand-père’s grave, those somber wide eyes looking at me.

  “Come back to me,” I whispered. And with it, with a desperate plea to heaven to stitch our two bodies back together the way our hearts were stitched already, I left Château Fontinelle. I forced one foot in front of another, again and again, to see the river of soldiers flowing into the city. Medaled and proud, wounded and well, all manner of men from all of the allies.

  I bundled my wee one next to my heart in a sling of muslin borrowed from the nurses. “Come, mon papillon. We shall meet your papa.”

  Please, God. I prayed that I spoke no lie.

  Paris was alive with a bubbling, flowing current of jubilee. It was a fool’s errand, I soon realized, to try and behold the face of every soldier who passed by. They were swept up in the thanks of the people, French girls looping their arms through the men’s by the handful. And these, just the first wave of soldiers who were to come, returning triumphant from the front.

  But no Matthew. Not in the marching lines, not in the grinning faces of soldiers riding atop cars, not in the throngs that moved like one great being. There was something so beautiful in the joy that seemed to infuse every stone and every bone in this city. It came, I thought, fro
m living what they could not bring themselves to believe. A walking state of wondrous disbelief. Never have I seen such a thing before.

  A man bumped into me and after righting me, he braced my shoulders like we were old friends. He, with his cane and white beard and fisherman’s cap, speaking so quickly I could not understand. He spun us around in a dance, right there in the streets, patted my wee one’s head, and skipped off with a laugh that I would never forget.

  Bounced between shoulders and pressing on to the Pont Neuf bridge, I made my way to the Île de la Cité. It drew me, this river-island, to where the Seine parted around it like an ancient, immovable ship. The river sloshed up onto the walkway as if it, too, could not contain its joy this day.

  On quieter days, I could stand at the stern of that ship—a little patch of grass with trees bundled in. They called it the Square du Vert-Galant. I made my way through the throng there now, slipping into my willow fortress beneath a looming tree whose branches fell like rain into the currents below. Downstream, at this end of the island. Flowing on into the unseen in a way that made me believe, even for a moment, in the future.

  As the water tugged and pulled and let the willow branch tips meander upon its surface, it tucked me into a wall of leaves. I closed my eyes, as I always did there, and inhaled the scent of them. Soil. Bark. Leaf. Water. I yearned for home and could imagine myself back in the Argonne, back in another tree-refuge.

  The willow was not my refuge tree, the one that had protected me all through the night from the wolves, but it shared a kinship with it. Today, though, even when I closed my eyes, I could not summon the picture of my wooded home. Others pressed in, too, eager for the shade. There was noise—everywhere, noise. Accordions piping happy tunes, sudden choruses of men breaking into song. A symphony, cacophony. I loved and loathed it all at once. For this—this was sheer joy. Liberation. Freedom! Life that these people had never dared hope for.

  The city rejoiced and my soul betrayed them, mourning for the forest home that was forever lost. I made my way past the arches of the old bridge, where ancient faces carved in stone watched my journey to the other end of the island. Up the streets to where flying buttresses soared from Notre Dame, where bells rang free and melodic, pealing with abandon, a song held captive for years released at last. The awful faces of gargoyles, crouching there like guards, seemed to hiss at the distant, fading war.

  The island and all its bridges bustled with parasoled women and brass-buttoned policemen. A little dog yipped as a boy held a biscuit and stooped to break off a piece for him. Everywhere, joy.

  But still, no Matthew.

  I crossed back over the Seine, walked the streets until I could walk no longer, and returned in a daze to the Rue de Arbre. It was eerily quiet, here, all the people gone to be a part of the celebration.

  I slowed, not wishing to arrive back on the steps of the château. It felt less a home every time I came back and had no word of Matthew. A few remaining leaves twirled down from oaks, my quiet companions dancing their slow dance in the wake of the frantic flurry of Rue Royale, where the revelers were. No lamplighters tipping canteens as they lit their beacons, no brassy triumphant bugle tunes but for those in the faraway echoes.

  Hearing the singing so far away, now, it was much like my hope. There, but . . . fading. The babe stirred next to me and gave a tiny whimper. It troubled me, that sleep came so fitfully to such a small creature. With all of the noise, it was understandable, but the wee thing seemed always to be this way, even from birth. Claiming rest here and there in little snatches, but never deeply.

  I wondered sometimes if it was because of me. This land of unrest that I lived in, which sent me into pacing, dreaming up too many different endings to our story. The little whimper came again, a reminder that I must not continue to live in the shadowlands of not knowing. I knew that we may never find out about Matthew. I had heard stories in buckets from the nurses—of soldiers they could not identify, deaths they could never send word of because the families were unknown. And how would anyone know to send word to me, but for Henry or George?

  My heart twisted at the thought of Henry’s quiet ways and George’s smile that made you love him and roll your eyes at him in the same breath. What of them? Had they come out of the forest? What of the kind captain from the train in Épermay?

  My footsteps became heavy with the thoughts, the singing fading into the quiet shuffle of my feet, alone, upon stone steps. I placed my hand on the doorknob and hesitated. I knew what I would find inside: more joyous sounds, men bolstered by the news of the victory. It was good! It was very, very good. I told myself so. They needed this and deserved it.

  But when I entered at last, the creak of the door hinges echoed in eerie quiet.

  Something was wrong.

  Hushed voices, somewhere upstairs. Two soldiers in bedraggled uniform, each seated on one of the square pillars at the bottom of the stairs. So much like those gargoyles I’d just left behind at Notre Dame, standing guard in their grotesque appearances over something good and true and beautiful. These men were like them. Like statues, that is. Still in stature and grey in pallor, bearing the marks of this grotesque war.

  One of them lifted his face toward me.

  My heart nearly stopped. “George?”

  He stood, and I crossed the room to see if my eyes, indeed, deceived me. For this somber-faced man could not be the jolly, grinning Englishman who had taught my wounded mind not to run at the sound of that accent.

  He took my hand but would not meet my eyes with his.

  The baby stirred, lips parting in slumber in the sling. George looked at the child, wordlessly, stifling a sound within him that I did not wish to know the reason for.

  Henry had risen from the other pillar and joined us. He, breaking silently out of his reticent ways, ran a bandaged hand over the child’s back.

  Neither spoke.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Please. Say something.”

  For the longer they did not speak, the heavier my spirit grew.

  Steps on the stairs above stopped their words before they came, and I looked up. Sister Marion saw me and froze. “Mireilles,” she said. “Good. You’ve come. Follow me.”

  I know not how I came to be there, at the top of the stairs. Nor how the long hall vanished away, depositing me at the threshold of the library.

  We did not house patients here.

  Everything had been speaking truth to me since I entered the château. In the absence of words, I knew their actions were meant as considerate kindness. The hush of the house. The somber respect of the men’s postures. Sister Marion’s usual flow of chattiness curbed into tender concern. All leading me here, to a private place in this very public house.

  It all pointed to a truth I did not want to know.

  Still, I dared to beg God, in that silence, for a miracle.

  I entered the room. Two cots were tucked against the far wall, each one positioned so that their occupant’s head would see out the window.

  The cot on the right was empty. But a man lay very still on the cot nearest the bookshelves. His head bandaged, along with his leg. I stopped in the middle of the room, watching to see if his chest rose and fell.

  It did. Barely, and in intervals so irregular my eyes begged to look away, to unsee him. But my heart drew me nearer, desperate to know at last.

  The man faced the wall. I could not see his face, and my eyes swam. I lifted a hand, hovering it over his shoulder. Summoning my courage and a thousand prayers.

  45

  I laid my hand upon his shoulder. The man did not stir.

  “Matthew?” I said, my voice a near-whisper. Sister Marion approached, laying her hand on mine.

  “Mireilles,” she said. “It is not . . . this man will not . . .”

  I shook my head. I would not hear the words spoken. “Matthew,” I said, a little louder this time.

  Noises sounded behind me, but I did not register them. Not beneath all the pounding from my soul.

/>   And then came a voice. I didn’t dare believe it. “It should never have been him.” The voice—surely, surely it was Matthew’s—came from behind me.

  I spun. And there he was. Bandages wrapping his face about his eyes, round and round. But the set of his mouth, the frown that was somber but gentle—it was, undoubtedly, him.

  “Matthew,” I breathed. “It is you.” The words floated from my mouth and sounded so very silly and so very far away and yet they kept coming. “It is you,” I said again, dumbly, as I crossed to meet him. I picked up his hand in mine, just holding it. I needed to feel him, his fingers in mine, and even when I did, I could not believe it.

  No amount of blinking could have held back the tears, then. It only sent them cascading down my cheeks silently, where his hand lifted and caught them. As his fingers touched my face, his chin—so strong, always—trembled. A very deep battle waged within this man so dear to me.

  It was then that my thoughts, muddled as they were, finally cleared enough to put questions to words. What had happened to him? These bandages—what were they? And what of the man on the cot?

  “Matthew,” I said again, universes of words aching from those two syllables. They asked—What has happened? They poured over him—You are here. You are safe. And they begged of him—You are safe, yes?

  The man on the cot groaned, and Matthew’s expression fell.

  Sister Marion bustled to the cot and helped him shift. In the doorway, Henry and George stood, hats in hand. Faces grave.

  I was standing right in the middle of a tangled tale, and I did not know what it was.

  “What has happened?” I said at last.

  Matthew, unseeing, lifted his other hand to find my face until his warmth cradled me. His fingers were rough and torn by the war, by the woods, by all that had brought him to me. I lifted his fingers and kissed them, forgetting a moment that we were not alone.

  The clouds shifted outside, sending a slice of sunlight through the broken stained-glass window, setting us in a kaleidoscope of broken color. Together, we approached the man upon the cot.