A Green and Ancient Light (5 page)

She shooed a beetle off our canvas. “I don't even remember now.”

Mr. Girandole spoke as he emptied his bucket. “You'd gone out to play in your new shoes and lost one under the hedge, and you tore your dress on the fence.” He looked away suddenly. “At least, so you told me once, I think.”

Grandmother chuckled. “If you say it was so, it was so.” To me she added, “Girandole remembers everything.”

We worked then in silence. My mind was busy, thinking of Mr. Girandole's goat-like legs, of his Cinderella story . . . and of the monsters in the grove's half-light. At last, I said to Grandmother, “That's all the people are afraid of—those statues?”

“That's all I know of that could have started their foolishness,” she said. “Old stone shapes in a forest.”

Every now and then, Mr. Girandole would bound toward the pilot and wave his arms to drive off the crows, who were hopping nearer and nearer in the branches.

“His eyes should be safe enough behind those goggles,” remarked Grandmother.

“All the same,” said Mr. Girandole.

After a moment, Grandmother looked at me and said, “There's a riddle to it, though—that garden of monsters. The longer you look at it, the more questions it raises. It's a big mystery, a puzzle that wants a solution, though I can't guarantee it has one.”

I waited for her to say more, but typically, she didn't.

There was so much I wanted to know, but it seemed rude to ask. Did Mr. Girandole have those feet because he was born with a deformity, like a boy at my school whose right arm was withered and small? Or was he really a different sort of person entirely, like Cinderella?

*  *  *  *

“All right, then,” said Grandmother, when we'd emptied a last canvas-­load of earth into a pile that was over knee-high. “See if you can wake him up. If not, we're back to where we started.”

Dusting her hands on her skirt, she looked at Mr. Girandole and me until we went hunting for sticks and pebbles and started aiming them once more at the man hanging above us.

“Hey!” Grandmother yelled at him. “You! Wake up!”

A few of our tosses clopped, not too hard, against his jacket. At first, I thought we'd taken too long, that he was dead; but after a minute or two of being pelted, he lifted his head again. He seemed to have trouble focusing, and he'd grown paler. At some point, he had pushed the goggles up to his forehead. His eyes, clearly visible for the first time, made him look gentler than the enemy faces on posters. He was younger than I'd thought, too.

Grandmother had been digging inside her carpet bag, and now she held a ball of twine that I remembered seeing in the kitchen—
string she saved from grocery parcels, all tied together into one much-spliced strand of unknown length. Keeping the string's loose end in her hand, she gave the ball to Mr. Girandole to throw.

“Catch this,” she ordered the pilot.

Mr. Girandole's first throw was perfect, the ball hitting the man square in the chest, but the pilot seemed not even to have seen it coming. He didn't so much as raise his arms, and the ball dropped back to the ground, string unwinding.

I retrieved it, hurrying to gather up the loose coils and rewind the ball, which had become tiny. Next, I took a turn, sending the ball up to a zenith near the man's arm. He took a feeble swipe at it, but again the ball came down uncaught.

Having an inspiration, Grandmother instructed Mr. Girandole to throw the ball over the man's head, between the two straps of his parachute.

Mr. Girandole managed it nicely, and now the twine, completely unwound, ran from Grandmother's hand, over the pilot's shoulder, and halfway to the ground again, the free end floating on a draft.

Grandmother told the pilot to take a firm hold of the string, and he did so. When Grandmother tied her end to the brush knife, I finally saw her plan.

“Pull this up,” she commanded him. “Cut the straps.”

The pilot understood, seeming to find new strength. Mouth set in concentration, he hoisted the scythe-like instrument up to himself. Grandmother had tied it just below the crescent blade so that it hung handle-down, jiggling and swinging as it rose.

“Don't drop it,” Grandmother said.

He grasped the handle and tipped back his head to examine the parachute straps.

Grandmother called, “As soon as you start to fall, throw the knife
that
way.” She pointed across the glade, away from us. “Don't land on it.”

“Not stupid, Grandma,” the pilot said, beginning to saw at one strap.

“How am I to know that?” Grandmother said, folding her arms and watching critically.

The two crows cawed and flew away.

I didn't know if the man would have the strength to free himself, but Grandmother kept the brush knife sharp. Soon, the first strap parted. The pilot paused to grin at us. His face glistened with sweat as he set to work on the second.

With a ripping and a snap, the last strap separated, and the man finally completed his fall from the sky. He didn't throw the brush knife far, but far enough. He flopped into the dirt pile, sending dust and leaves flying.

Because of his injured leg, I supposed, he screamed through clenched teeth and passed out again, lying spread-eagled on his back.

“Well done, M ——!” said Mr. Girandole with enthusiasm, patting Grandmother's shoulder.

She carried the carpet bag over to the man's side and rolled up her sleeves. “Now we see if he's savable. We'll need a fire.”

“I laid the wood already.” Mr. Girandole pointed toward the trees through which he'd arrived earlier. “It only needs lighting.”

“See to it. Wash out that bucket in the stream and get some water boiling in the pan. We'll need all the water you can bring us, so fill the bucket again, too.” Grandmother handed him two potholders. “When it's ready, bring it here.”

With a nod, he hurried off at a trot, the bucket swinging from his arm. I allowed myself to stare at his retreating shape, intrigued by how nimbly his strange legs carried him over the roots.

Grandmother had me take one edge of the canvas, and we shook it hard, beating it as clean as we could. Then we spread it beside the pilot for a work-space. She took her shears and cut the pilot's pant leg open from ankle to hip.

“This will be an awful sight,” she warned me, and it was. As she peeled back the soaked cloth, we could see sticky blood still welling from at least two jagged wounds in his upper leg. I thought I'd been ready for anything, but I had to look away, and for a moment I thought I would be sick.

“Sometimes, it's best not to eat breakfast,” Grandmother said quietly, thumping my back.

“Did another plane's guns do that?” I asked when I could speak.

“I don't think so,” she said, “because his leg's still here. Some­thing exploded—maybe flak. He may have metal or glass in there. We can't see much till it's clean.”

She snipped through the ties of a protective vest and unzipped his leather jacket beneath, pulling it open and passing her sun-browned hands over his shirt, along his sides, up to his armpits. She told me to undo his chinstrap and pull off the leather hat, which I did without much trouble. The man was no more than thirty. He was going prematurely bald, with a point of hair on his forehead and a much scarcer patch behind that.

Grandmother's fingers found blood oozing from three more places; in all, the pilot had injuries to his right leg, right side and shoulder, and his neck below the left ear, though that last one seemed little more than a graze.

Lifting his head, Grandmother poured something into his mouth from a dark brown bottle which bore no label. The smell of its contents made my eyes water. The pilot coughed.

“Can you hear me?” Grandmother said, in the tone she used when talking to Mrs. O ——, who was hard of hearing. “What is your name?”

“R ——,” he said, breathing heavily, blinking up into the leaves, where his parachute hung in an undulating white ceiling, the ­bundles of cord swaying. The pilot smiled faintly and raised one finger to point upward. “Circus. Circus tent.”

“Yes, well, R ——,” Grandmother said, “you must make a decision. Do you want our village doctor? He will come here if we ask him. But he is an important man with a position—he will report you to the Army.”

“No!” The pilot shook his head. “No doctor.”

I looked anxiously at Grandmother.

“The other choice is that I can try to stitch you up. I've delivered babies, and I sewed up my cousin once, on a farm. But I'm no doctor. We can't take you to the village. You may die.”

R —— seemed to be searching for Grandmother's hand. She didn't help him find it. “Fix up me,” he said. “Please. You, please. No doctor. No Army.”

Grandmother sighed and pushed the bottle's neck against his lips. “Then you'd better drink a lot of this.”

We waited for Mr. Girandole. The sun had climbed much higher; it was mid-morning. An engine droned in the distance. We'd heard and seen so many planes that we recognized it by the sound as a cargo plane.

What was happening scared me. If the Army or the police found
out that Grandmother had helped an enemy pilot—or even failed to report him—she would be arrested. I had no doubt that any one of our neighbors in our position would have gone immediately to the police office and turned the matter over.

I saw Grandmother watching me. “Do you think this is wrong?”

Wordlessly, I shook my head no.

“I'm not fighting a war,” she said. “Nor is this man now. These woods are not a battlefield.”

I nodded agreement.

“Where is Girandole?” she muttered. “I hope he's not sitting there staring at the pan. They never boil when you do that.”

“Why didn't he lay the fire closer?” I asked.

“I expect he was afraid this man might wake up and see him.”

I gnawed my lip, and at last I came out with the question I really wanted to ask: “What
is
Mr. Girandole?” But at that moment, he came trudging into the glade, holding the steaming pan between the potholders, the full bucket dangling from his arm.

“Good.” Grandmother leaned close to her patient. “R ——? Are you good and drunk?” He moaned as she pried the bottle from his fingers, checked the amount of liquid inside, and re-capped it. “He ought to be,” she said.

R ——'s eyes were closed, and his breathing seemed more regular.

“Oh, my!” said Mr. Girandole when he saw the pilot's mangled leg. He backed a few steps away.

Grandmother drew out a metal soap box and we washed our hands as thoroughly as we could with the cold water, each taking our turns pouring dollops from the bucket over the other's hands. For good measure, we splashed and rubbed our hands with the alcohol, too, then used more soap.

Next, she produced a clean rag. I marveled at all she'd thought to bring in the carpet bag. I'd seen her make rags by cutting up threadbare clothes that were beyond repair, saving the buttons from shirts in an ornamental lidded tin. Satisfied with the pan water's temperature, she soaked the rag and wrung it out over the pilot's leg wounds, rinsing them clean. I winced at the sight.

Mr. Girandole retreated to a rock and sat down, facing toward the trees.

The injuries were bad. They looked deep, and it seemed to me that some of the flesh was missing. There was an awful whitish layer of something exposed—muscle or fat or deep tissue—that should never be seeing the light of day.

“Maybe this is too much education for you,” Grandmother said, giving me the rag to hold and telling me to keep it off the ground. It was so hot, I nearly shrieked; I couldn't imagine how she'd swished it through the pan and wrung it out. I tossed it from hand to hand until it had cooled a little.

She fished in the carpet bag, came up with a pair of tongs like those I'd seen my mother use for handling canning jars, and steeped them in the hot water. “Do you want to sit over there with Girandole?” she asked.

“I'm all right,” I said.

“Then put the rag in the pan and take off his jacket. We've got to do that shoulder before the water gets cold.” She'd produced a needle and a spool of thread. As I wrestled the flak vest, gun holster, and jacket off R ——, she threaded the needle and dropped it, thread and all, into the water, leaving the thread's end hanging out over the side as a way to retrieve it.

R —— didn't come fully awake, but he groaned as I shoved him
around, his head lolling. Blood dripped from his neck wound, and his shirt's right sleeve was drenched. By the time I had the jacket off, my hands were sticky with blood. I looked at them in dazed revulsion.

Grandmother tossed me a dry rag. “Wipe them on this, and then spread it under his shoulder so he's not lying in dirt. And cut his sleeve off.”

Mutely, I nodded and set to work.

“If you can spare me,” said Mr. Girandole, “I'd best put out my fire.”

Grandmother was too busy to answer him. After a moment, he stood up—but he had gone no more than two steps before Grand­mother called him back. “There's too much bleeding here for me to stop with a needle and thread,” she said. “Take the brush knife with you. Get the blade red hot, and bring it back here quick.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Girandole, looking queasy. He picked up the long-handled knife and hurried off.

I couldn't watch as Grandmother probed with the tongs, searching for shards of anything that might be in the pilot's wounds. But even with my head turned, the wet sounds drew icy sweat from my pores.

“Wring that rag over this,” Grandmother ordered. “I can't see what I'm doing.”

I tried to rinse the wounds without looking as she went in with her fingers, pulling out jagged pieces of black metal.

“If we don't bleed him to death, it'll be a miracle,” she muttered. “The blood can't congeal with all this water.” Finished with the leg, we worked on the shoulder, where Grandmother found more shrapnel. By the time she'd finished, she had quite a collection of metal shards.