The Wheel

I have written the date at the top of this page three evenings running and then gone out to the barn. My mother noticed, and asked whether I had stopped, and I said I had not. The people who come into this account here, I will put down as they were that day.

---

I went looking for eggs.

By the middle of June the battery had been in the same field for four days, on the southern edge of the beachhead, with the guns facing south into the hedge country, and the war in front of us had stopped going anywhere. We fired every day at things we did not see. The infantry went forward a field and came back a field. Every evening the cook gave us the same thing out of the same tins, and on the Thursday evening Baca looked down into his mess tin for a long time and said, “I’d give a week’s pay for an egg.”

“Two weeks’,” Brandauer said. “For a real one. With a yolk.”

“They’re all real ones, Karl. That’s what an egg is.”

“The powder is not real.”

“The powder isn’t an egg,” Baca said. “The powder’s a rumour about an egg.” He lifted a spoonful and let it fall off. “Somebody told a hen about the war, and that’s what came out.”

Gaines said, without looking up, “There’s farms.”

“There’s farms full of Frenchmen who’ve had four years of every army in Europe through their henhouses. You go and ask them, Gaines. Take Karl. He can ask the hens.”

I said, “I’ll go and see.”

I had cigarettes. I did not smoke, and I had been saving them the way everybody who did not smoke saved them, because in France a packet of cigarettes would buy almost anything. I put four packets in my jacket and went to find Ridley. He was sitting on an ammunition box with his notebook.

“Sergeant, I’d like to go back down the lane. There’s a big farm by the road, about a mile.”

He looked at me, and at my jacket, where the packets made a square, and at the sky. “Back by dark.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

---

It was not a farm, or it had stopped being one. It was a big Norman farm of the kind they have there, a square of buildings round a yard, the house on one side and the barns and the cider house and the stables on the others, with an arch through the middle of one side and a pigeon house on top of the arch. I came through the arch and stopped.

The yard was full of people. There must have been two hundred of them: women and old men and children, and a few younger men, sitting and standing and lying in the yard and in the open barns and on the straw, with their things round them in bundles and baskets and suitcases tied with string. There were handcarts, and prams with no babies in them but full of pots and bedding, and a goat on a rope, and a great many chickens in crates. At the far end, at a table under the arch of the cart shed, a man and a woman with armbands were writing names in a book, with a queue in front of them, and a policeman of ours was standing beside them looking as if he would rather be anywhere else.

I went over to him. “What is all this?”

“Collection point.” He jerked his chin at the table. “The Normans run it. Their committee. The provisional people. That’s what the armbands are.”

“Who are they all?”

“Folks from down south. Down where the line is.” He watched the woman write a name. “Shells start coming through the roof, they pick up what they can carry and walk north till somebody stops them. This is where somebody stops them. She writes them in the book, they get fed out of the cider house, and they wait.”

“What for?”

“Son, if you find out, you come and tell me. Some of these have been here a week. Some came this morning.” He looked at the square in my jacket. “What are you after?”

“Eggs,” I said.

He laughed, not unkindly, and I went back and stood in the arch with my cigarettes.

---

The handcart was just inside the arch, to the left, against the wall. I saw it because it was tipped over on its side with one wheel in the air and the other off, lying on the cobbles, and a young man of about my age was kneeling beside it trying to put the wheel back on and swearing at it, very quietly, in French. Saloperie, he was saying. Saloperie de roue.

I could see what was wrong from where I stood. The pin that held the wheel on had sheared, and somebody had stuck a nail through the hole in its place, and the nail had bent, and the wheel had walked off the end of the axle and hit the cobbles and split its hub along the grain. You could not put that wheel back on with a nail. You needed a proper pin, and you needed to bind the hub before the split went any further, or it would come apart the next time it hit anything.

I went over. I knelt down on the other side of the cart and pointed at the split in the hub, and then at the bent nail, and said, “No good.”

The young man looked at me. He was thin and dark, with black hair falling over his forehead and a narrow, quick, clever face, and he looked at my uniform and my helmet and my face with his mouth a little open. Then he looked at the hub, and back at me, and said, “Ah, non. Non, non, non,” and a great deal more, very fast. I caught non six or seven times and clou twice, which I learned later was the nail, and the rest went past me like a train. At the end of it he threw up both hands and laughed. I laughed too.

I had my knife, and in my pocket I had a length of wire from the battery’s telephone line that I had picked up that morning because it was good wire. I held up the wire and the wheel and showed him with my hands what I meant to do.

“Oui! Oui, oui. Allez-y.”

“You hold that up,” I said, and showed him, and he held the cart up, and went on talking.

He talked while I bound the hub. I wound the wire round and round it, tight, and twisted the ends with the pliers on my knife until the split closed, and he told me something long with a hand in it going up and coming down, and something else with a noise in it like a shell, and then he asked me a question and waited.

“Nearly,” I said.

He nodded hard, as if nearly was exactly what he had been saying.

Then I needed a pin. There was a broken harrow against the barn wall, an old one with its teeth rusted, and I went over and worked one of the teeth loose, which took a while, and he left the cart and came with me, talking, and came back with me, talking. The tooth was too thick. I held it up against the hole to show him, and he said something to the nearest children, and they laughed.

“It’s too thick,” I said. “I know.”

“Oui!” he said, delighted.

I took it to a stone mounting block by the house door and filed it down on the stone, rubbing, for perhaps twenty minutes. A ring of children stood round to watch, and the goat got loose from its rope and tried to eat my sleeve. The young man went back and held the cart up the whole time, and talked the whole time: to me across the yard, to the children, to an old man on the straw who shouted something back, and to the goat. “Et toi, laisse-le tranquille!” The goat did not. Every so often he stopped and looked at me, as if it was my turn, and I said, “Nearly,” and he said, “Nearly!” and went on. In twenty minutes I did not understand one word of it.

When the tooth was thin enough I put the wheel back on the axle and drove the tooth through the hole with the heel of my boot, and bent the end over with a stone, and we let the cart down. It stood. He pushed it a yard, and pulled it back, and the wheel went round and stayed on.

“Formidable,” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder, and turned and called across the yard. “Maman! Viens voir!”

---

That was the first time I saw Madeleine Morel.

She got up from a bundle against the barn wall and came across the yard. She was not tall, and she was very straight, with a square, strong, closed face, dark eyes, and dark hair going grey pulled back tight, and she wore a black dress and a grey cardigan with the elbows out and a man’s cap on her head. I thought she was about forty-five. She was forty-seven. She looked at the wheel, and at the wire, and at the tooth from the harrow, all of it, carefully, the way my mother looks at a seam somebody else has sewn. Then she looked at me. She did not smile. She nodded once and said, “Merci,” and turned and called back across the yard, and two more people got up from the bundles.

One was an old woman, so bent that she walked with her face towards the ground, with a stick, in black from her head to her feet and a black shawl over her head. The young man went and took her other arm and brought her across, very slowly, and sat her on the edge of the cart, on the bundles, and she sat there with her hands on her stick and looked at me out of a face like a dried apple and said nothing at all. The other was a man of about fifty, short and broad and round, with a red face and a bald head and a big grey moustache, in a waistcoat and his shirtsleeves, who came across the yard with his hand already out.

“Ah, merci, merci, mon gars!” He shook my hand and went on shaking it, and talked, and looked at the wheel and laughed and slapped the cart, and looked at me and talked some more.

I stood there being shaken by the hand by a man I could not understand, with an old woman looking at me and a young man laughing and a woman in a man’s cap watching me without any expression at all. I got my hand back in the end, and pointed at myself, and up the lane towards the battery, and held up one finger.

“My friend,” I said. “He talks. Wait here.”

The young man understood that at once. “Ami. Oui!” He pointed at the cobbles, firmly. Here. They would be here.

---

I went back for Peter at a run. He was sitting on the trail with the French grammar.

“There’s a family at the farm,” I said. “I need you to talk to them.”

He looked up. “Is this about the eggs?”

“It was.”

He put the grammar in his pocket and came. We were back in the farmyard in half an hour, and it was getting on towards evening, and the family were sitting round the cart eating something out of a pot. The round man got up when he saw me and did the handshake again, and then did it to Peter, and went on talking through it, and Peter said, carefully, “Bonsoir, monsieur,” and began a sentence about me.

The round man answered him before he had finished it. It was a long answer, and a warm one, and Peter looked at him as though he had been hit.

“Pardon?” Peter said. “Encore une fois, s’il vous plaît?”

The round man said it again, slower and louder. Peter frowned and tried something; the round man said something back; the young man laughed and said something to his father, and his father laughed too and slapped Peter on the arm.

“Well?” I said.

Peter turned round. “It isn’t French. Or it is, but it isn’t the French I’ve got.”

“You talked to the widow in the orchard for ten minutes.”

“The widow spoke French. This is Norman. It’s what the country people talk here.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “It’s French the way Brandauer’s German is German. Older. Slower. Half the words are different. I’m getting one in three.”

“Which one?”

“Never the one that matters.”

Then the young man said something to Peter, slowly, in a different voice, a schoolroom voice with every word finished. “Pardonnez mon père, monsieur. Il parle comme à la maison. Comme ça, vous me comprenez mieux?”

Peter’s face cleared. “Oui. Oui, beaucoup mieux.” He said to me, “He’s changed. He’s talking the way they teach it at school. I can follow that.”

“Did you ask him to?”

“No. He heard.”

After that it went better. The young man talked to his father in Norman and to Peter in French, and Peter talked to me in English, and things went back and forth along the line like rounds from the truck to the gun, badly and then less badly, the way it does.

The young man put his hand on his chest. “Lucien. Lucien Morel.” He pointed round the cart. “Mon père, Auguste. Ma mère. Ma grand-mère, Madame Lefevre.”

I said, “James Wheeler.”

He tried it. It came out as something like Jamesse, and he shook his head at it.

“Tell him Jim,” I said.

“Jim,” Peter said.

“Jim!” said Lucien, as though I had given him something, and that was what he called me from then on.

“Where are they from?” I said. “Ask him.”

Peter asked. Lucien took the packet of cigarettes out of the top of my jacket, which I had forgotten was there, and a stub of pencil out of his own pocket, and wrote on the back of the packet, and gave it to me. Saint-Ouen-des-Vergers.

I read it out. Lucien put his hand over his eyes. He said it for me, properly, and I said it after him, and he said it again, slower, and I said it again, and Auguste laughed so much he had to sit down. I still cannot say it. He has tried to teach me in four letters.

“Saint Ouen of the Orchards,” Peter said. “Vergers are orchards.”

“Where is it?”

Peter asked. Lucien pointed south, over the roofs of the barns, towards the noise. “He says twenty kilometres. Twenty-five. Call it twelve miles, perhaps fifteen. In the middle of the hedges, on a little hill. A church, a square, an orchard on every side.” Lucien was still going. “And the shop.”

“What shop?”

“Theirs. On the square, opposite the church.” Auguste had begun to count on his fingers, and Peter tried to keep up with him. “Flour. Sugar. Coffee. Salt. Oil. Tinned things. Candles. Thread, I think. Nails. Soap.” Auguste had run out of fingers and started again. “The newspaper. I don’t know that one. Wheeler, he’s going to list the whole shop.”

Madame Morel said one word to her husband, in Norman, quietly. Auguste stopped, and laughed, and put his hands down on his knees.

“What did she say?”

“I think it was ‘enough’.”

Lucien said something then, looking at his mother, and she answered him shortly, and he told Peter.

“It’s her shop,” Peter said. “Not his. It was her parents’, and their parents’. The name over the door is still Lefevre. The village always called it Lefevre’s, and when it came to her she didn’t see any reason to change it.” Lucien had put his hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “Madame Lefevre was born over it. Eighty-four years ago. She had never slept a night out of the village in her life until Tuesday.”

The old woman did not look up from her stick.

“And him?” I said. “The father.”

Auguste had been waiting for that. He told it himself, to Peter, in Norman and then in something slower, with Lucien putting in the words that would not go across, and Peter frowning.

“He’s not a shopkeeper. He’s very firm about that. He’s a négociant. That’s the word. A provisions merchant. Before the war he went round the farms in a van and bought what they had, butter and eggs and cheese and cream and calves, and sold it on in the towns, and brought back what the farms needed. The shop was hers and the van was his, and both of them made a living.”

“Was?”

Peter asked. Auguste spread his hands and answered.

“The French took the van in 1942. He’s done it with a horse since.”

“And the horse?”

Auguste said something short, and for once did not go on. Lucien answered for him.

“A shell,” Peter said. “On Tuesday. In the road outside the shop. That was when they left.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Auguste slapped his knee and said something to the pot, and Lucien laughed, and the pot went round again.

---

Peter asked Lucien what he did, and Lucien told him, fast, with his hands going, laughing in the middle of it.

“He’s twenty,” Peter said. “Twenty-one in August. Born in the summer of ‘twenty-three.”

“Same year as me.”

Peter told him. Lucien pointed at me and then at himself and said something that made Auguste nod.

“He wanted to go to the training college at Saint-Lô,” Peter said. “To be a schoolmaster. Teach in a village like his own. He had the place, nearly.”

“What happened?”

Peter asked. Lucien laughed and told him.

“The war. Then in ‘forty-two the French took the young men of the village to work in their factories, and he went into hiding on a farm instead. Two years. He worked on the farm in the daytime and came home at night to do the shop’s accounts.” Peter listened a little longer. “He never went to the college. He doesn’t know if he ever will.”

“Why’s he laughing?”

“I don’t know. He’s telling it as if it happened to some fool in a story.” Peter asked him something. Lucien pointed at his own chest and said, “Moi! L’idiot, c’est moi!” and laughed harder, and so did Auguste. Madame Morel looked at her son and did not laugh, and did not look away.

He talked more than anybody I have ever known. He talked more than Peter and Baca together, to us and to the children and to the old men on the straw and to the committee woman when she came round with her book. And then he would stop in the middle of a sentence and look at you and wait.

“He wants to know what you do,” Peter said.

“Tell him I’m on the gun.”

“He knows that. He means at home.”

“A farm,” I said. “Cows. Hay. An orchard.”

Lucien waited. He did not say anything at all, which I had not seen him do, and I found that I was telling a man I had known for two hours about the farm on the Bedford side of Lexington, and the nineteen milkers, and my father, who did not talk, and that the first cut of hay would be about now and I would not be there for it. He listened to all of it through Peter as though it was news.

It was the word eggs that did it. I said we sold eggs in town, and Auguste sat up.

“Les oeufs?” He asked Peter something.

“He wants to know what an egg costs in America.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t bought one in two and a half years.”

“He says roughly.”

So I told him what we had got for them at home in 1941, by the dozen, at the store in town, and what the store sold them for, and what it cost us to keep a hen a year, and Peter turned it into French, and Auguste took an envelope out of his waistcoat and a pencil and wrote it down.

“Et le beurre?”

“Butter,” Peter said. “Now he wants butter.”

I told him butter. Then milk, at the farm gate and in Boston, and the price of hay, and he asked and asked and wrote it all down on the back of the envelope, delighted, as if I was telling him the secrets of the universe. Lucien leaned over and took the envelope and the pencil out of his father’s hands and did the sums there on his knee: the difference between the farm and the town, the cost of the carting, what was left. He did them quicker than his father could read them out. Then he turned the envelope round and held it out to me.

I did them in my head. “He’s right.”

“He knows he’s right,” Peter said. “Look at him.”

Lucien was looking at me.

“Tell him I do my father’s accounts,” I said.

Peter told him. Lucien tapped his own chest and said something.

“He says he does his mother’s.”

We looked at each other over the envelope, and he laughed, and I laughed, and Peter took his glasses off and began to polish them and said, “Oh, God, there are two of them.”

---

It got dark. I said, “I told Ridley I’d be back by dark.”

“You’re not going to be,” Peter said.

“No.”

I stood up, and the family stood up, all but the old woman, and Auguste shook my hand again and gave me, out of a basket, six eggs wrapped in a page of an old newspaper. I held out the cigarettes. He put his hands behind his back.

“Tell him they’re for the eggs.”

Peter told him. Auguste shook his head and answered.

“He says the eggs are for the wheel. He says if he takes the cigarettes, he’ll owe you a wheel.”

I tried again anyway. Peter tried once. Auguste kept his hands behind his back and laughed at both of us.

Madame Morel had been standing a little apart. When I had the eggs she came over, and looked at me again with that closed face, and said something to Peter, short.

“She says thank you for the wheel.” Peter hesitated. “She says you did it properly. She says, where did you learn.”

“My father,” I said. “And his father.” I turned the eggs over in their newspaper. “There was one in my family who did it for a living. A long time ago.”

Peter told her. She nodded once, the way she had nodded at the wheel.

Then the old woman on the cart spoke. It was the first thing she had said all evening, in a high, cracked, very old voice, in Norman, without looking up from her stick. Lucien laughed. Auguste laughed. Even Madame Morel nearly smiled, at one corner of her mouth.

Peter said, “Qu’est-ce qu’elle a dit?” and Lucien told him, and Peter laughed too.

“What?” I said.

“Later.”

“Peter.”

“Halfway up the lane,” he said. “Not before.”

He kept to it. We said goodnight and went out through the arch and up the lane in the dark with the eggs, and when we were halfway he said, “She said that the Americans have come a very long way to mend her cart, and it’s a great pity they couldn’t have come four years ago and mended the rest.”

---

Ridley was standing by the gun. He looked at us, and at the eggs.

“Dark was an hour ago.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

That was once. We cooked the eggs on a shovel over a fire in a hole, six eggs between eight men. Baca ate his share in two bites and shut his eyes.

“Best thing I’ve eaten since Arizona.”

“Since Wisconsin,” Brandauer said.

Gaines ate his in silence. When it was gone he wiped the shovel with a piece of bread and said, “Since Shawmut Avenue,” and Baca looked at him and burst out laughing.

---

I went back the next evening, and the evening after, and most evenings for the next two weeks, when the battery could spare me and sometimes when it could not. Peter came when he could, which was most of the time. When he could not, Lucien and I got on without him, with our hands and our numbers and the words we were trading.

“Oeuf,” Lucien would say, holding one up.

“Egg.”

“Egg.” He said it like a hiccup, and then said it to the goat.

By the end of the first week I had about twenty words of French and he had about ten of English.

I took them things: tins from the cookhouse that the cook did not count, and a blanket for the old woman, and soap. Once I took a pair of boots for Auguste that had belonged to a man in the second section who no longer needed them. Auguste turned them over in his hands and looked at the soles, which were nearly new, and asked Peter something.

“He wants to know whose they were.”

“Tell him they were spare.”

Peter looked at me, and then told him they were spare. Auguste put them on and walked up and down the yard in them, with the children behind him.

They gave me eggs, and cider, and once a piece of their own butter that Auguste had got from somewhere, the first butter I had had since Devon. And I mended things. I mended the old woman’s chair. I mended the handle of their pot. I put a new strap on Auguste’s bag and sewed a button back on his waistcoat. One evening I was sitting on the cobbles with the chair upside down between my knees, and Lucien said something to Peter, and they both laughed.

“What?”

“He says you can’t come into the yard without mending something. He says his grandmother is afraid to sit still in case you mend her.”

When it was done I turned the chair the right way up, and the old woman sat down in it.