Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

His lips twist. He hefts the grenade in his sweating palm, turns abruptly and walks away.

Bonhomme frowns after him. “What?”

“I’ll need a run-up.”

He fights the urge to rub the grenade against his trouser-leg. He turns back and fixes his eye on the shrub, and then he goes to pull the pin and fumbles it, hands shaking. It’s out. He runs; three long strides, tick, swings his hand up and bowls the grenade out, tick, into the air, tick. He stands, watching, as the grenade spins towards the juniper. As though these were the nets at Portora, or summer cricket fields at Trinity.

He glances round for Bonhomme, but the farmer is just dust and scuffing feet, already gone.

Oh, yes. That.

He has made five big strides when there is an almighty whumpf and a thump of solid air hits his back and propels him on. He collides into Bonhomme and they stumble together, come to a halt. They look back. The air blooms with red dust and a shower of rock and grit falls back to the earth. Sound comes blanketed, and a thin ringing pierces through it.

“I should have said—” Bonhomme yells over their deafness. “If you can manage it, it’s a good idea to cover your ears.”

—

He is taken another way back — along the far side of the bluff and down a dry gully that in winter would be a foaming stream. Their feet clatter over sharp-edged rocks.

“For now, we’ll need you to take care of some shipments and conceal some items for us. At the moment we are preparing ourselves, getting things in place.”

He nods.

“But when combat operations start,” Bonhomme says, “you report immediately to camp. Don’t wait around for someone to come and get you, we will need to get to work.”

“How will I know?”

“Do you know Verlaine?”

“Some.”

“ ‘The Song of Autumn.’ ”

“I know it.”

“There will be a quotation, in the messages on Radio Londres. When you hear that, you come and find us. You use the password Violins. ”

“Verlaine,” he says. “Violins.”

“And La Victoire. ”

He rubs his arms.

They reach a footbridge; it cuts across the gully at head height. The ground falls away and there are roofs below, a fence.

“I’ll turn back here,” Bonhomme says, his voice dropped low. “You go up and on; the path will take you to the road. You should know your way back from there.”

They shake hands. He clambers up the bank. At the top he glances round to fix the route in his mind: the footbridge, that sloping tree. Bonhomme has gone; there’s a flicker of movement higher up, and that is that.

He turns and heads downhill, following a faint path that gets more definite as it descends. He comes to the dwellings, skirts the side of a garden. There’s a gate, and then a lane, and he follows the lane, keeping to the verge, feeling dizzy and conspicuous with it all, like having written, when the writing’s going well, or maybe like falling in love.

Those gnomic messages on Radio Londres, carrying their invisible bundles of meaning: one of them will now be addressed to him. A line from a poem that will mean something entirely other than what it means.

At the end of the lane, he finds himself standing on the edge of the main route to Apt. He’s only a quarter of a mile or so from home. He stuffs his hands into his pockets, finds his sucking stone and slips it into his mouth. He turns along the road and walks on through the twilight.

—

Between the coppiced willows, down on their hunkers in the low-growing foliage, they keep out of sight. From the crossroads, one track heads off Roman-straight along the valley floor; the other is a sinuous white line that weaves its way down from the hills behind them and up into the far mountains ahead. There’s no settlement at the crossroads, no signpost, nothing but a triangle of woodland, and then open pasture, vineyard, and an owl that goes ghosting past, then settles on a branch, and then flutters off again.

They are waiting to make a pick-up. But no one comes.

They have walked for miles — eight or nine by the time taken and the lick they took it at — out through the pastures and the vineyards beyond Roussillon. At first, it seemed that they were heading for Cavaillon. He followed the other fellow’s steady countryman’s stride along footpaths and down field margins and farm tracks; there were sudden turns in the darkness, loops to avoid farmsteads where dogs stirred in their kennels, clinking their chains. They climbed fences and ducked through holes in hedges. And soon he was not certain that it was Cavaillon that they were heading for after all. There were no road signs, no milestones to go by, and no landmarks that he could make stick: he thought he recognized a broken tree, a barn, but then as they passed the angle changed and the shapes seemed different, and he no longer felt sure of anything at all.

So that now, huddled in the darkness, the terrain keeps morphing around him, swelling, shrinking, swooping sideways, making different shapes out of itself as he tries to situate himself within it. It’s dizzying.

The other fellow, though, seems confident they are in the right place. He seems certain-sure.

“We’re early.” A battered tin water-flask is swished in front of his face. “You go faster than I thought you would.”

He takes the bottle and swigs, expects water, gets brandy, coughs; he takes another drink and then returns the flask.

At midnight, by a distant chime, a cart rumbles down the road towards them, coming down from the hills. It’s carrying no light. The other fellow gets to his feet; he follows, his knees cracking. They clamber up the bank out of the woods and on to the road. The dark shape rolls on towards them.

But then something changes. He catches sight of the other fellow’s profile — the angled cheekbones, the narrowed eyes — and wonders how he can see that much all of a sudden, and where the light is coming from. He glances round. And then, Christ, there are headlamps coming in a stream along a road further off down the valley. The low, yellowed, half-blindfolded headlamps of military vehicles in blackout. He counts three sets as they bump and weave and slide round bends. He knocks his knuckles into the other fellow’s arm, jerks his hand in that direction.

“Brothel of shit.”

The cart is there; the cart is loaded with air-dropped supplies, they should not be out at this time, they’re all implicated and it’s all too late. The carter scrambles down from his seat: he’s a little skinny man, just bone and wrinkles. “Quick!”

And then it is all ham-handed fumbling and it is so slow, there is a watery clarity in which images hang suspended: the carter’s deep-lined temple as he squints down at a buckle, fumbling with it; the silvery muzzle of the donkey, its coffee-dark eye; the raised grain of weathered boards in cold pink hands.

Between them, they manage to roll the cart off the edge of the road and then slither it down the bank into the copse. They heave the wheels over roots, grate through narrow places between trunks. It’s become a monster of a thing, lumbering and recalcitrant. The convoy has turned along the valley floor now. Is heading dead towards them.

“Careful!” hisses the carter. He is struggling with the donkey.

They ease the cart-bed down; the crates slide and clunk together.

The donkey brays and pulls against its halter. The carter curses, drags, brings the donkey stumbling after him and into the edge of the woods.

The other fellow’s back up on the road, scuffing out tracks, ruffling up the wayside grass.

That sickening rattle of diesel engines. The carter’s face is a skull in the shadows: he is dragging at the donkey’s halter; she stands splay-legged, head low, unshifting. The other fellow grabs the donkey’s halter, wraps an arm around her neck and heaves her over. She drops, collapsing, and he falls with her. She struggles, and he shifts his weight, and she lies still.