Without a word, they cut him free from his lines and lift him on to the stretcher. The pain is almost enough to make him black out once more, but something makes him want to be strong in front of these two quiet men. He bites his lip and focuses on the white clouds floating in the blue sky above him as they carry him out of the wheat field.
Half delirious, he looks at the sky, his real home. That is where I should be, he thinks. In the blue heavens, the engine growling in front of me, the wind whistling behind me. It was why he joined the Royal Air Force, really. If he was going to fight, and if he might be going to die, at least he could fly like an angel first.
That is where I should be. Up there.
But now he is earthbound, and worse than earthbound, for he cannot even walk. He is a worm, stuck to the surface of a ball of mud.
Very soon, the rescue party of silent men and tongue-lolling hound steps across a low wire fence at the edge of the wheat field, and onto a path that winds beside some woods.
They turn down another track, and craning his head to one side, the airman sees they’re heading for a farmhouse.
It’s very early still. He can’t see his watch, but he can tell from the angle of the sun, from the smell of the dew evaporating off the grass, from the morning calls of the cockerels in the farmyard.
A woman runs out of the farmhouse, looks down at him briefly, and nods to the older man.
“Quickly,” she says.
They carry him into the kitchen, set his stretcher on the table, and then lift him off and sit him in a large wooden armchair. He winces as they support his bad leg on a small stool, but he’s determined not to fuss.
“Flight Lieutenant D. Thompson, 331st Fighter Squadron,” he says, as smartly as he can, then immediately realizes he’s being an ass. He’s not facing the secret police. Standing looking at him are three farmers, a middle-aged man, his wife, and their son. All three are mystified.
He smiles.
“Call me David,” he says.
The farmer nods.
He looks at his wife. “This is Rebecka. This is Benjamin. My son.”
He puts a hand on the young man’s shoulder. David can’t get up but he holds out his hand. The farmer doesn’t take it, just stays where he is.
“I am Erik,” he says.
He doesn’t smile.
Four
When David wakes again he is in a bed.
He has no idea how long he has slept. After they’d brought him to the farmhouse, Erik had sent Benjamin back to the wheat field to collect the airman’s equipment.
David had told Rebecka how to administer the morphine, and within moments of the injection, he’d started to feel very drowsy, the exhaustion and shock catching up with him.
“We will hide your parachute,” Erik said. “And your equipment.”
But Flight Lieutenant David Thompson was already asleep.
“Well,” said Erik, shaking his head, “so it is.”
* * *
David wakes now in a large but simple room, barely more than a peasant’s dwelling. The mattress he’s lying on is filled with straw, he’s underneath a plain white quilt, stuffed with goose or duck feathers; he can hear both birds in the farmyard.
He might have slept for twenty-four hours, which seems likely as he’s desperate to pee. Which presents a problem, since he cannot walk.
He hears voices downstairs, cannot make out the words, but the voices are raised, arguing.
He hears a door slam, and a few minutes later, footsteps in the corridor. The door opens.
Rebecka pokes her head around the door, expecting to find him asleep still.
“Oh!” she says. “So you are awake, after all.”
“Never felt better,” he lies.
“We thought it best to let you rest for as long as possible.”
“That’s very kind. You’re very kind, in fact. I don’t know how I shall be able to thank you.”
Something passes across Rebecka’s face. She comes into the room, and begins fussing and tidying, and he has a chance to appraise her. She has an honest face, he thinks. She is tall, very tall in fact, and strong. The word sturdy pops into his head.
He realizes that they have undressed him; all his clothes hang over a chair by the bed neatly. On the top of the pile, even his camouflage pattern silk scarf is precisely folded.
He feels the need again, and coughs.
“I wonder,” he says. “Call of nature, you know?”
She looks at him blankly, then realizes what he means. She reaches under the bed and pulls out a large china pot.
“Do you think you can manage?” she asks.
My God, he thinks in horror, is she offering to help me?
He smiles. “I’ll find a way,” he says briskly.
She leaves, and he performs his task. Every second is agony.
When it is done, he collapses back in bed, beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
I should have gotten her to give me another jab, he thinks, but very soon he begins to get sleepy again anyway.
As he drifts back to the blue dreaming heavens once more, his eyes fix on his clothes, on the remains of his equipment pack, and he notices something.
His pistol is missing.
Five
When he realizes that they have given him their own bedroom, Flight Lieutenant David Thompson insists on being moved to another room, any other room.
There is a long argument, and finally, as he starts to hoist himself out of bed, saying he’ll crawl if he has to, they relent.
* * *
A while later, he hops down the corridor with Erik on one side and Benjamin on the other. They have to hop sideways as the corridor is so narrow, but very soon he is lifted into a smaller bed in a smaller room.
Now he realizes that it’s Benjamin’s room, and he starts to protest again, especially as they’d passed the closed door of presumably another bedroom on the way down the corridor.
“You are our guest,” Benjamin says, putting his hand on David’s forearm. “And you are ill. It is summer, and I’ll be quite well in the barn. The hay has just been cut, last month, and it makes a very soft bed. You should see the hares run as we cut the hay! It’s my favorite job. How they run! Crazy!”
The young man prattles on and on, and before long, David has even forgotten what it is they were arguing about.
Rebecka appears in the doorway, with the morphine vial and the needle.
“You are an angel,” David says, for the pain has gotten worse again, but as he falls asleep, three things worry him.
He has done nothing about finding out where he is.
The pain is still awful, and there is very little morphine left.
And they are arguing again, downstairs. He knows that they are arguing about him.
Six
Next day, David feels well enough to get up for a while.
They carry him downstairs and he sits at the kitchen table, in the big armchair, with his foot straight out in front of him, on a cushion on a stool.
Rebecka is cooking at the stove.
Erik and Benjamin have gone out; always working.
David knows how much work there is to do on a farm; when he was a young boy he used to spend his summers in Devon, staying on a farm. He has no idea now, thinking about it, why he went there. His parents were somewhere else. But then, his parents were always somewhere else.
It was while he spent those summers on the farm that he knew he wanted to fly. He can remember, clearly, drinking milk while sitting on the back doorstep of the farmhouse. The milk was still warm from the cow, and as he sat there, it must have been early evening, he guesses, dozens of little birds flew around his head. They were swifts, nesting in cracks in the eaves of the farmhouse.
At that point, he’d never seen a plane, but when he did a year or so later, he knew that’s all he wanted to do with his life. That, and to fall in love.
Somehow, he knew that when he was a young boy, too.
&nbs
p; * * *
His memories are brought back to the present.
“At least, let me do something,” he says to Rebecka. “I feel terrible just sitting here, watching you all working.”
Rebecka shrugs, goes to the pantry, and returns with a large basket of peas, still in their pods. Skilla briefly lifts his head from where he sits, under the kitchen table, at David’s good foot.
“You can shell these,” she says. “You know how to do that?”
David can see she’s only teasing, but he feels slightly nettled.
“Yes,” he says. “I know how to do that.”
For a while, they work in silence, David shucking the peas into a white bowl, letting the empty pods lie on the table, and Rebecka chopping and grinding at the stove, where a pot is simmering. There is a strange smell, but David doesn’t really notice.
His mind is on other matters.
“Why are you arguing?” he says. “You’re arguing about me, aren’t you?”
“No…” Rebecka says, but she is interrupted.
“Yes,” says Erik, suddenly filling the doorway. “We are arguing about you.”
David drops his pea pods and raises a hand.
“Listen. I am very grateful to you both, to you all. But what can I do?”
He looks at his ankle, realizing he actually has no idea how long a broken ankle takes to heal.
“You should not have come here,” Erik says, barely hiding his anger.
“I didn’t exactly choose to come here,” David says. “Come to that, I’m not exactly sure where here is.”
“Here,” says Erik, coming into the kitchen, “is somewhere that is not part of your war. We have not chosen to fight and kill each other. We want to remain out of your war. Neutral. And yet, your war comes here anyway.”
David shakes his head.
“So what would you have me do? I’d like nothing more than to fly away, I promise you that. Just give me my pistol back and I’ll be gone.”
Erik grunts, turns, and washes his hands in the sink.
Drying them, he turns back to David.
“I dropped your gun in the sea,” he says. “It is part of your war, your life, not ours.”
“What do you mean by ‘my war’? The enemy…”
“The enemy? There are two sides fighting in this war, are there not? But yes, though we said we will not take part, we have your enemy on our soil anyway. They should not be here, but there are reports of them all along the coast. And they hunt for the enemy soldiers. For airmen whose airplanes have crashed. Just like you. And they will come looking for you, and then your war will come here, to Blest Island.”
He bangs his hand on the table in front of David, so hard that the white bowl wobbles.
He leans down in front of David.
“I want no part of it.”
He turns and storms from the kitchen.
Now angry himself, David calls after him. “Where is my pistol? What have you done with my pistol?”
But Erik has gone and, cursing his ankle, David cannot follow.
Rebecka stands at the stove still, her back to the scene, her shoulders trembling.
Seven
The days pass.
With each day, David’s ankle is healing.
The morphine has run out, but in its place, Rebecka has been feeding him a constant supply of a special black tea. Every day she chops and grinds at the stove, concocting that rather strange-smelling liquid in a small pot.
Although it smells unpleasant, David has to concede that the tea more than takes the edge off the pain.
“It’s something my mother used to make us when we were ill,” Rebecka explains. “And her mother taught her, before that. We have this very special flower here, it only grows on the western half of the island. Nobody knows why but it will not grow on this side. Look.”
She holds up a very bizarre looking flower. It is purple-black. He thinks it looks like a dragon’s head.
“It can work miracles, you know, if prepared properly,” she says.
He even wonders if it is helping his ankle to heal faster, for after a couple of weeks, he can hobble slowly down the corridor, and even get downstairs, though that hurts a lot.
* * *
The days pass.
They give David some old clothes of Erik’s to wear. Just to be on the safe side. They are big for him, and he feels silly. And more than that, it’s odd to wear another man’s clothes, especially when that man seems to hate you. But it makes sense.
“Maybe Benjamin is more your size,” Rebecka says, looking him up and down. At that moment Benjamin walks into the kitchen.
“Well,” says Rebecka, “Speak of the Devil and his horns appear. What do you think, should we give David some of your clothes instead?”
“I think he looks just fine as he is,” says Benjamin solemnly, and then bursts out laughing.
Rebecka chases him off, batting at his head with a large wooden spoon.
* * *
The days pass.
David gets better, but the mood in the house gets worse.
The arguments continue; David can hear them at night, along the corridor from his room. He knows he needs to do something, but he has no idea what. When he can walk, he can just walk away, even if it means walking into captivity. Or worse.
Over mealtimes, no one speaks.
Even Skilla is quiet, lurking in the shadows under the table.
* * *
Eventually, David can stand the atmosphere no longer, and after they have finished their evening meal of chicken stew and black bread, with great effort, he stands up.
He looks at the three whose lives he is endangering.
“Throw me out,” he says. “I can’t bear this, and I can’t be responsible for your safety. Put me in a cart and drop me back in the fields somewhere. I’ll fight my way out of this. I’ve done it before.”
He has done no such thing, but it makes him feel brave to say it.
No one says anything; then finally, Erik clears his throat.
“Sit down, David Thompson,” he says.
Then Erik gets up, and leaves.
“Benjamin, help your mother,” he says, as he goes. “I have work to do.”
Rebecka puts her hand on Benjamin’s shoulder.
“Go with your father,” she says. “I can manage here.”
When the men are gone, David sits again. He does so with great relief—he is almost weeping from the pain of standing on his ankle.
“What is it?” he asks, when he gets his breath again.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not just this war. This war that you say you are not a part of. You may not want to be a part of the war, but you are part of the world. And the world is at war. It’s not a question of what you want.”
Rebecka says nothing. She clears up for a while, then turns to look at David, dishcloth in hand, leaning back against the sink.
“Erik says…”
“What? That I am dangerous? That I will get you into trouble? He might be right, you know. Maybe you should listen to your husband. Throw me out before soldiers come looking for me.”
“No one knows you are here.”
“Are you sure? What about the other villagers? Did no one see me arrive? Is no one wondering why Benjamin is sleeping in the barn on sacks of grain?”
Rebecka doesn’t answer that.
“He is not a bad man,” she says instead, quietly.
“I never said he was.”
“But you are right. It is not just the war. None of us want the war, but, you are right, there is something else.”
David feels the tension in her voice, and feels his own heart beating. He knows what she is about to say.
“You may have seen there is an empty room upstairs…”
She stops, puts a hand to her mouth, shakes her head, and clears her throat.
“Benjamin is—was—not our only child. We had a daughter, too. Her name was Sarah. She was twelve y
ears old. One day, two summers ago, planes flew overhead. They were being chased by your people. They were fighting.”
Her voice lowers a little, but she presses on.
“We were out in the fields, we ran for cover. Then the planes dropped their bombs. Benjamin says they only did it to be lighter, so they could fly faster, and escape. He has read about it. And they did escape, but they let their bombs fall on the island first.”
Rebecka’s voice is a whisper now—David’s own heartbeat is louder than her words.
“Sarah was at the farm. She ran to the woodsheds. One of the bombs fell right there.”
She turns back to the sink, wringing the dishcloth.
“That is why Erik is so angry. This war, that none of us want, took our girl away from us. What had she done? Why her?”
She looks David in the eye, tears running down her face.
She whispers, “Why?”
Eight
The days on the farm pass, as if no war had ever existed.
Erik and Benjamin work endless hours in the fields; Rebecka runs the house and the farmyard.
They are indefatigable, tireless, stoic, and given the tragedy of their daughter, David decides, they are still people with life inside them.
Only once does he hear anything like a complaint.
“There’s much to do,” Rebecka tells him one afternoon, as she makes his special tea. “Always so much to do on a farm, but nothing compared to when we harvest the wheat. That’s when the work really starts.”
Even then, David detects no self-pity in what she says. It is simply their life here, on the island, on the farm.
“When do you cut the grain?” David asks. He is struck by a desire to help. If it’s not too soon, his ankle might be better enough.
“After the grain moon.”
“The grain moon? What’s that?”
“Just what it says. We still use the old names for the moons here, the full moons. They come from the land, from life on the land. Calf moon, when the animals give birth, leaf moon, when the leaves return to the trees. The flower moon. Grain moon.”
David nods, thoughtfully.
“I like those,” he says. “I like those a lot. And when is the grain moon?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Rebecka says, and David knows then he won’t be able to help.