Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

Miss Beamish’s dogs, locked up in the scullery, are barking fit to wake the dead. But it wasn’t the dogs that alerted him to the soldiers’ presence. It was the gunshots.

The first shots jolted him out of sleep; the second burst made him register what had smashed his sleep apart. They seemed close, but the way that the sound would bounce around the valleys, bluffs and outcrops here made it hard to tell what direction they had come from. Sten gun, he’d have laid money on it, set on automatic: somebody was making very free with their ammunition. He reached out for Suzanne, but Suzanne wasn’t there; of course, she was staying with Josette and Henri, so he just lay sweating, alert, listening to the birds cawing to the sky and the empty echoes down the valley, waiting for whatever happened next.

Nothing happened next.

So he got up, crossed to the window and opened the shutters. In the pre-dawn blue, there was just the pale road and the dark trees and the burnt-paper scraps of birds settling back into their roosts, so he closed the shutters and pulled on his shirt and trousers.

He was downstairs when the milk cart rattled past the front of the house, going at an unusually brisk trot. He trod into his boots, drew the bolts and headed out into the lane. He glanced in both directions, but there was nothing going on, so he went a little way into town at a tired amble, keeping to the shadowy edge of the lane beside the sprawling wild roses, under pollarded limes. The dash of a rat made him jump, but that was that.

The town itself was peaceful: just the early-morning unshuttering of shops, the bakery glowing, the scent of bread making his stomach clutch. So he turned back and headed the other way, out of town, passing the front of the little house and on towards Anna Beamish’s, and still there was nothing to be seen in the raising light but the dusty road and the trees and the dry grass and the snails trailing their way across the verges and weighing down the stems. Back to bed, then, if nothing’s doing. But then a farm cart came trundling round the corner, down past the side of Anna’s place, and the horse jibbed and sidestepped, and it was all the driver could do to keep the old cob steady, and they clattered on past him, and the driver had his gaze fixed dead ahead and didn’t even nod.

And that was when he peered along the lane and saw the soldiers.

They were a grey heap up against Anna’s fence, but he brought himself to move towards it. Then there was the smell of blood. He stared down at stockinged feet, a hand curled in the dust, the dark inside of a fallen-open mouth. Skin was pale blue; blood was black; a button, though, caught the morning light and glittered.

He stands now, and he looks, and his tongue presses against the back of his teeth, and a tooth gives, and it hurts, and he stands, and he looks, and he stands, and he looks, and the dogs are barking.

And then someone comes out of Anna’s house. He hears the door go. The dogs come tumbling with her, beside themselves. The door falls shut.

“Is it yourself?” she calls.

He nods. His gorge rises. They are in trouble now.

She comes striding down the path towards him, the dogs barking and twining around her ankles; she’s knotting the cord of a tartan dressing gown.

“For God’s sake, whisht, ” she says, and scoops up one of the creatures and holds it to her.

“We heard,” she says. “But we thought it best to stay inside. One thinks one should telephone to someone. But who does one telephone these days?”

“There are two—” The words stick in his throat; they have hooks. He turns back to look at the heap. “Bodies.”

“Definitely dead?” She peers over the gate; her question’s answered. She puts the dog down again and slips out to join him, leaving the creatures there to yap and whine. “Damn damn damn damn damn.”

She frowns, scans up and down the road. Death itself has become contagious; they could catch it here themselves. “We’ll have to do something.”

“Call the priest?” he suggests.

“If they get taken into town, the whole place would be implicated.”

They stand in silence.

“We came through a town,” he says, “where there’d been reprisals.” The woman with the frozen eyes. The man with a hole in his cheek, his jaw on show.

“We can’t just leave them lying here,” Miss Beamish says.

“No.”

She becomes brisk. She’s off back through her gate, yelling at the dogs, striding up the path, while he stands there with the dead. Up at the house, the other Suzanne is trying to get the dogs indoors. Voices are raised over their barking: What is it? Oh Good God, what are we going to do? He looks at a foot, the hole where a toenail has scythed right through the wool. The soldier’s gaiters are lying loose on the dust nearby. The killers took the boots.

It’s early yet. The road is quiet. Few people pass this way. They might get away with it.

Anna rejoins him. She has thrown on slacks and a polo-shirt and brings two garden spades, sloped together over a shoulder. She has also brought a bottle.

“My pal suggested this.” The bottle is lifted for inspection. Brandy.

“She is very wise.”

“She is. She really is.”

They consider the men. Slavic, high-boned faces, one softer than the other, younger, with a scattering of freckles like a pancake. The eyes are open and they’re grey, and the corneas are creasing as they dry, and the flies gather to sip away the wet. The Armée de l’Est, serving here, were recruited from conquered countries; they were prisoners of war.

“State of them, poor lads.”

She hands him the bottle. He uncorks it, swigs brandy, hands the bottle back.

“Where’ll we…”

They glance around.

“Over there,” she says with a nod. There, the verge is wider. Wide enough for a grave.

They go past the bodies.

“Russians, do you suppose they are?” he asks.

“Could be. Could be Poles. Took their chances, didn’t they? Either this or a labour camp. You can see why.”

The other is darker and seems a little older than his companion, a little harder-looking. Sunburned.

Anna turns her face away. He follows her on to the wider scruffy margin before the trees. He wants to say something consoling, something useful. There is nothing consoling or useful to say.

Her voice is dry; he hears her swallow. “Here?”

“Here’s as good as anywhere,” he says.

They shunt their spades into the ground. They begin to dig.

—

It takes a long time to dig a grave. As the diggers sink lower into the earth, the inner surface grows blood-red, damp, veinous. Paler rusty topsoil trickles down inside. He turns his sucking stone over in his mouth, tucks it down alongside his back teeth; the nerves sing like wires.

After an hour or so, Anna clambers out, careless of her clothes, and goes back to the house. No one passes; no one comes to investigate the gunshots in the night. He is grateful for the isolation of their little houses, for the self-preservation that is keeping their few neighbours at a distance.

When Anna returns, the other Suzanne comes with her, frowning, worried, carrying two bottles of beer and a biscuit tin. They drink the beer and eat in silence, squatting in the dust. The other Suzanne offers to help with the digging, but there is no room really for another in the grave, so they wave her away; also, the fewer people tainted by association, the better. They swig more brandy, swipe at flies, and get back to their work.

They dig as the sun climbs into the sky and the heat grows, and the flies buzz loud and the smell gets worse. He runs with sweat.

“That’ll do,” she says, breathless. “Won’t it?”