The Second

The sulfur had followed him all the way from Auxonne, and now, in the last hour of the road home, it hung over the vineyard rows the way smoke hangs over a battlefield the morning after. The sun was where it was supposed to be. It did not look like the sun. It looked like a coin that had been left in a fire.

Siméon set his pack by the stable door and stood a moment in the yard where he had grown up. The regiment had given him twelve days, and the road out had taken most of them. His mother had prayed for forty. He had told her God gave what God gave.

He had not told her that on the road home the birds had already gone quiet, or that the cattle he had passed in the fields lay where they had fallen. He had not told anyone. Some things a man carries where his mother does not have to look.

Nicolas was inside the stable with the animals. Colas, they had always called him, since he was small enough to sit on the mounting block. Siméon heard him before he saw him, the low steady voice a farmer uses when he does not want the horses to feel his own worry. When Colas came out, he was wiping his hands on a rag, and the light in the doorway caught his face, and for a moment his brother looked older than Siméon had ever seen him. Then Colas grinned.

"You look like a man about to say something noble," Colas said. "Please do not."

"I was not going to."

"Good. I would only mock you for it later."

They stood in the yard and did not speak. Siméon watched a hen pick at nothing near the wall. The sky above them was the color of a sheet left too long in the ashes. Somewhere north of them a cow lowed twice and then stopped.

"Papa is thinner," Siméon said.

"I know."

"His leg."

"I know."

"The coins I gave him. It was my duty. Do not let his pride refuse."

Colas laughed once, a short laugh, and shook his head. "You give me hard work, little brother."

"You wanted to be the eldest."

"I did not want to be. I was."

Siméon looked at him then. Really looked. The rims of his brother's eyes were red, whether from the fog or from what the fog had taken he could not tell. But Colas was still Colas: the broad shoulders, the calm hands, the mouth that would not stay serious for long. Siméon told himself that whatever the fog was doing to the fields, it would not touch a man built like this. He seemed, standing in the doorway of his own stable on the land he was born to inherit, as permanent as the wall behind him.

"Promise me," Siméon said. "Take care of yourself. At least half as well as you take care of everything else."

Colas gave him the look he had been giving him since they were boys, the one that meant he was about to say something unserious to keep a serious thing from becoming heavier than it already was.

"Je suis invincible. Have you not heard?"

"I have heard nothing of the sort."

"Then you are behind on the news." Colas cuffed his shoulder, the same cuff he had used when they were nine and eleven. "I will stay healthy. Because you are coming back, little brother. And I want you to see what we have saved."

Siméon meant to answer. Nothing came. Colas looked at him a moment longer and then opened his arms, and they held each other in the yard with the sulfur sky above them, and it was the kind of embrace that is strong and wordless and not nearly long enough. When Siméon stepped back, Colas was already turning toward the stable, and Siméon was grateful, because a man his brother's size does not need to be watched while he composes his face.

That evening they sat at the table where they had sat all his life. His mother served without speaking. His father drank little. Colas ate what he could.

"There is a girl in Rennes," Siméon said, when the silence had gone on long enough. "Her name is Laure. She was born here. Her cousin writes that she is waiting."

Colas smiled the smile a man uses when he does not have another one. "A soldier and a romantic. I am glad for you, little brother."

"Papa wrote that there was a girl for you too. A cobbler's daughter."

His mother's hand paused above the pot. His father looked down at his plate. Colas set his cup down.

"Élise," he said. "Her name was Élise."

Siméon waited.

"The fog took her. She was one of the first. Two months ago."

He did not weep. He pressed a fist against his chest, not against a cough but against something deeper. He looked at Siméon, and his eyes were level.

"Her mother has not spoken since the day of the burial."

Siméon had no answer to that. No one did.

"When she died, I refused to believe it. Some days my heart still forgets how to beat."

Siméon reached across the table, put his hand on his brother's wrist, and left it there.

Outside, the bell rang the hour. The sound came thin through the fog.

At first light his mother was in the kitchen. She had a cloth in her hand and she was folding it and unfolding it. She fussed with the collar of his coat as if she were sending him to school. Her fingers stayed a moment at his cheek.

"Return to me, mon cœur. Do your duty. But come home."

"Of course, Maman."

He did not tell her about the birds.

On the road, the fog thickened by the hour. He walked past a stone fence where three cattle had lain down in a row and not gotten up. He passed a well someone had covered with a plank and a rock, the way you cover a thing that has gone bad. In one village, a woman, crossing herself, watched him from a doorway and said nothing. He nodded to her.

Auxonne rose out of the murk on the fourth day like a fortress somebody had drawn from memory and gotten wrong. The walls were the walls. The sky above them was not any sky he had grown up under. He gave his name at the gate. The sentry, a boy from Besançon he half-knew, took a long look into his eyes.

"You do not look rested, Gaugien."

"I am not."

"None of us are."

Inside, the drills went on, because drills always go on. He greased axles until his shoulders locked. He drilled recruits under a sun that gave up early. In the evenings Vincent found him and walked beside him without speaking, which was Vincent's particular kindness.

The snowstorm came in on the last night of November. By morning the road to Rosières was gone. By the first week of December the Saône was solid enough to walk on. By the second week no one was walking anywhere.

Captain Bonnay sent for him on the morning of the tenth. Vincent walked him to the door and then stayed at the threshold, because Vincent had understood before Siméon had.

The captain was at the window. He did not sit. He kept his hands clasped behind his back, and the pale winter light took the shape out of his face and left only the outline.

"There is news from Rosières-sur-Mance."

Siméon waited.

"Your brother. Nicolas."

"Yes. What of him?"

Bonnay turned from the window. It was the turning that told Siméon, before any word. A man does not turn from a window slowly for good news.

"Siméon. I am sorry. He died on the second."

For a moment the room was the room. The desk was the desk. The light on the floor was the light on the floor. Siméon heard himself say something. It came out of his mouth without passing through him.

"No. You are wrong. Colas is not dead. Colas cannot be dead."

He shook his head. He stared at Bonnay. He was waiting for the correction, the retreat, the small word that would put the world back the way it had been thirty seconds ago.

Bonnay did not answer, which was the answer.

Vincent stepped in from the threshold and put a hand on his shoulder, not to comfort him yet, only to keep him upright, because Vincent had seen this happen to other men and knew the order of things. First the legs. Then the rest.

The legs went. Vincent held him. A sound came out of Siméon that he did not know he owned, not a sob, something older than a sob, the noise a house makes when a beam gives. The tears came without permission, and he did not lift his hands to hide them.

"My brother. My brother is dead."

He heard himself again, from a distance.

"I have to go. I have to go home. Oh God. My mother. My poor mother."

Bonnay spoke firmly.

"You cannot. Travel is forbidden. The roads are buried. No leave is being granted this month. You would not make it halfway."

Siméon tried to move. Vincent stepped in front of him.

"Too many are dying this winter. You know I would carry you home myself if it were allowed."

Something inside Siméon locked. Not acceptance. Something colder than acceptance. He was a soldier, and duty had just become a wall. He forced the grief down into his ribs because there was nowhere else to put it.

Bonnay's voice softened, only slightly.

"Many men receive bad news and must still serve. You are not alone."

Siméon looked at the snow falling beyond the window. The Saône was solid. The roads were gone. Somewhere on the other side of a country made of ice, his mother was washing her son's body, had already washed it, or was sitting at a table, not moving.

"No," he said. "But my family is."

That night he lay in the bunk with his boots still on. The barracks were full of the small sounds of men who did not know yet. Someone coughed. Someone turned. The fire had gone low.

He tried to see his brother's face. He could see the shoulders. He could see the hand wiping itself on a rag in the stable doorway. He could not see the face. He tried again. He got the grin, and then the grin was gone before he could hold it.

He understood, in the dark, that this was the first thing grief took. Not the man. The picture of the man. Colas would come back to him piece by piece across the years, a laugh here, a shoulder there, but tonight, in the first hours, his brother had no face.

He turned toward the wall. He did not sleep. He listened to the other men breathing. He did not envy them because some of them would learn what he already knew in the morning.

The winter did not end. It went on being winter the way grief goes on being grief, without asking permission.

He did his duties. He drilled recruits whose hands shook from cold. He greased axles. He mended a caisson wheel twice because the first time he had done it wrong. Vincent stayed close without saying so. In the evenings the two of them sat by the fire and did not talk about Colas, because talking about Colas would have required Siméon to have Colas, and Siméon did not have Colas anymore.

He wrote to his mother once. He tore it up. He wrote to her a second time and did not tear it up, but he could not send it either. The roads were still gone, and by the time it reached her, she would have endured the worst of her grief without him. So he kept it in his coat.

Nights were the worst. He would lie in the dark and hear the wind, and somewhere beneath the wind he would hear a laugh he would never hear again, a short one, the laugh Colas had used at the stable when he said Je suis invincible. The laugh had been a joke. Siméon had not laughed at it enough. He had not laughed at it enough was the sentence he could not stop saying inside his own head. He had not laughed at it enough.

The thaw came in April. The Saône cracked open one afternoon with a sound like a door being kicked in, and within a week the roads were mud instead of nothing, and within two weeks leave was granted, and he walked home.

The country he walked through was sick. Vineyards still lay blackened. Wells still stood covered with planks. The wooden marker at the cemetery behind the church at Rosières had his brother's name on it and nothing else, no dates, no verse, only Nicolas Gaugien.

He knelt. The ground was cold under his knees, and the wet came through his trousers.

He had thought he would speak. He had rehearsed sentences on the road. None of them were available to him now. What came out of him was smaller than a sentence. It was only his brother's name, twice, and then his brother's name a third time as a question, and then nothing.

After a while the weight settled. Not lifted. Settled. Into a shape he could carry inside his ribs the rest of his life without having to look at it every hour. He understood, kneeling there, that this was what men meant when they said a man had lost someone. Not the losing. The carrying.

He stood up. He put his hand on the wooden marker once, the way he had put his hand on Colas's wrist at the table.

He walked back to the house. His mother was waiting on the step. He held her a long time without speaking. His father stood in the doorway behind her and did not come forward because he understood that a mother needed to go first.

In the days that followed, there was work. He hauled dead animals to the pits others had dug, and his mother walked behind him sprinkling holy water and whispering apologies to each one. He cut stakes. He turned earth that had not been turned since October. He mended a fence he could have mended in an hour, and it took him three.

One afternoon the weight came for him again, and he went where he had always gone when the weight came for him. His grandfather's cellar. The air was old oak and the vinegar breath of casks that had held little more than hope through the winter. He sat on an upturned barrel and put his hands over his face.

He did not hear the steps on the stairs.

His father stood a long moment, leaning on his cane, outlined in the dim light.

"This was his place too," his father said. "Colas knew every cask. He knew which ones to tap first, which ones to let sleep."

He limped forward and rested a hand on a barrel the way a man rests a hand on the shoulder of an old friend.

"After you left for the army, he told me this is where you would come when you were thinking too hard. He said, if you ever need to find him, Papa, look among the casks first."

That was the sentence. Siméon wept without covering his face. His father did not look away.

"He was the best of this land," his father said. "It loved him. And he loved it back."

Siméon nodded.

His father took a labored breath.

"The land does not care for our grief, Siméon. It only knows who tends it. It needed Colas. Now it needs you."

"I know, Papa."

"Do you? You chose the uniform. There is honor in that. But that life is over. Colas held this land together. Now it falls to you. Now you must choose it, not as a soldier on furlough, but as its master. I am an old man with a bad leg. We will do it together. But you must be here."

Siméon looked at the barrels. He looked at his father, thinner than he had ever been, one hand on the cane, the other on the oak of a barrel Colas had known by name.

"Papa. My name is on the roll at Auxonne. I pledged eight years to the King. That promise must be fulfilled first."

He waited for the argument. It did not come. His father's shoulders lowered, not in surrender but in the acceptance of a man who has been given a truth he can live with.

"A promise to the King is a promise before God. It must be honored. I would not have a son of mine be an oath-breaker."

"Then I give you my word, as your son. When my service is done, I will come home. For good. Until then, whenever leave is granted, I will be here."

His father nodded once. He did not speak.

When Siméon climbed the stairs, the sun felt less harsh. Of the herd, one cow and one pig remained, both sickly but alive. His mother was at the fountain drawing water. She turned when she saw him. She smiled.