Armistice Day

Abstract

Armistice Day Alice Hatcher (bio) I found the first boot prints in the garden five weeks after Charles's letters stopped coming from the front and six hours before the first haunting. Even now, M would slap me if I used that word—haunting—though it's undeniable our cottage is still haunted. But then I rarely speak to M because she barely speaks to me. She withdrew into herself once the war became entrenched in our house, settled between us and coated everything like ash we could never fully sweep from the flagstones, and made the hearth seem cold even when we lit a fire. I saw the prints one August evening, as the sun was brushing the mountaintops. A light rain had drawn the dust from the air and given everything the quiet clarity of a graveyard. In the twilight, a hush descended upon the birds, and shadows like brackish water soaked the ground. I had just gathered chard for the soup M was making and was puzzling over a string of pale fingers dangling from a vine strained only the day before by dark green beans when a breeze crossed my neck without stirring anything, making me wonder if it was not a breeze but rather some thought escaping my head and worrying my hair. I watched the movements of dusky clouds until I remembered M waiting for me, twisted the pale beans off their stems and dropped them into the folds of my apron, and followed a path between heads of lettuce, only to find a plant unburdened of a swollen tomato that had vanished in the night. If I described my thoughts at that moment, M would say I'm foolish, a child in the body of a young woman, or mad, but I had a sense of time spooling backward and the garden unripening. I imagined tomatoes growing pale and yellow blossoms swallowing them and slipping back into their stems, beans shrinking and vines and fiddleheads threading their way back into the dirt, carrot greens disappearing, and lettuce heads folding in on themselves and returning to the time our brother Charles was still writing letters asking M to tell me he would soon be home to help me pick apples from our trees and buy me ribbons at the village fair, teasing me even from the trenches and knowing I will never bind my hair. I imagined spring melt rising from the earth and becoming snow upon the ground and then drifting upward in tiny flakes from frosted autumn leaves fallen back when Paul was alive and writing to M about places like Villers and Amiens and asking whether she still loved him and whether I was still bothersome (letters I glimpsed when M was sleeping and leaving them out thinking I have trouble reading), and saying he hoped for a quick end to the war so they might get married. Then time slipped forward and I smelled something fecund verging on rot, felt my feet sinking into earth damp with drizzle, and returned to the gloaming of that August evening. It was then I saw the print of a man's boot beside my own foot. Not for the first time, my mind became crowded with artillery wagons and horses drowning in mud and the tangled limbs of men trampled and dead in trenches. I couldn't help it. I think such things because people talk about such things. I believe them because only monstrous imaginations would conjure such things, and I can not believe the land is [End Page 145] stalked by so many monsters, and so I could not help thinking of war looking at the mark of a heel and several prints between the chard and the onions. M says I have an overactive imagination, and maybe my mind was impressionable from living alone with my thoughts, the village then empty except for old men and young boys, women who avoided our company thinking misery a contagion, the priest who still crosses himself every time he passes me, the mayor flush with wine and the flurry of delivering death notices, and with father and mother sleeping in the cemetery, our...