How Huge the Night

chapter 13





Weapons





It happened exactly like Julien had expected.

He heard the news Monday in math class from Gaston, who was telling Dominique behind him. Apparently he, Julien, was a snitch of the lowest kind who had gone straight to Pierre’s mother with a pack of lies about the fight. He heard Dominique respond to this information with a soft, shocked, “He did?”

Benjamin turned, but Julien elbowed him. Eyes front. You can only make it worse.

Pierre’s eyes were cold and hard as the crusted snow, as cold and hard as Henri’s. That moment they had looked each other in the eye and shaken hands was gone now. Never happened. Julien sat beside Benjamin, staring out the window. He was going to sit this one out.

Two weeks till Christmas break.

The road to school was gray frozen slush; the bridge over the Tanne coated with ice. He walked down it in the early morning dark, the stars overhead, and he walked back up in the dim blue evening, thinking of home and warmth and firelight. Mama would have the fire roaring, the light dancing golden-warm on the walls; he would hang his wet socks up to dry and stretch his feet out near the blaze, and the chill would melt off till he was warm all through.

Benjamin asked if he’d like to do homework together. They sat at the table, mugs of mint tea by their books, the firelight from the living room turning their notebook pages a pale honey-gold, and Benjamin showed him how to work those equations Monsieur Vanier had them on just now. They worked together every night, and Benjamin shook his head and grinned at Julien’s complaints about how the teachers piled it on.

“What else is there to do?” he asked wonderingly.

“Soccer,” said Julien, rolling his eyes, then looked out the window at the blowing snow and sighed.

Benjamin left a week early, before Christmas break, to see his family in Paris. There was a light in his eyes as Julien shook his hand goodbye at the station, in the howling burle. Julien walked to school alone, his head down against the wind.

Back in the science room, he looked over at the circle of the class and wondered if he should try them now, with Benjamin gone, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. To have the troisième class tolerate him, was that what he wanted? He took a seat on a desk among them, closer to the fire, and no one stopped him. But he saw no friendship in their faces.

Suddenly he hated doing his homework alone.





The air was bright and bitter cold as Julien walked out the school gate, and his boots kicked the powdery snow into glittering clouds in the sun. He was free.

At home, there was the roaring fire, and hot chocolate, and preparations for Christmas. It was going to be a simple one this year. Prices were up, Papa said, and there was a freeze on raises for all government employees—and he was teaching at the public school next year instead of the new one. Except for two unpaid courses he’d volunteered for, for love of Pastor Alex. More work, less money. Thanks to Julien.

There was nothing Julien could do except pitch in and not complain and try to think of a good Christmas present with no money. Which was what he intended to do. For Papa and for Mama.

One night, he came down to the kitchen for a cup of milk to help him sleep, and she was there. Candlelight wavering on the walls, and Mama with her little Bible in front of her, eyes closed, moving her lips in a faltering whisper, in Italian. He froze in the doorway, staring. Tears were streaming down her face. He turned and fled in silence.

He lay awake a long time, gazing into the dark.

He wanted to learn to carve.

Grandpa was carving Magali a deer. It was beautiful. It was beautiful just watching the skill in his hands, taking off a shaving here and there, bringing a shape out of formless wood. There’d been a porcelain statue Mama had wanted in a Paris shop—cupped hands cradling a baby that barely filled their palms. God’s hands or something. Papa’d wanted to buy it for her, but it was too much. Julien would make it out of wood. For them both.

“That’s a pretty advanced project, mon grand,” Grandpa told him. But he gave him wood and his second-best knife, and they sat by the fire together peeling golden shavings of wood onto the floor. For a couple of days. But Grandpa was right.

Grandpa taught him wood-burning, and brought him and Magali in on his project: two wooden Bible covers for Papa’s big black Bible and Mama’s little Italian one. Magali did the sewing in strong canvas, Grandpa cut and planed the thin oak boards for the front and back, and Julien sanded and finished and polished them until they glowed.

There was firelight and wood and snow; they went out to cut pine boughs and holly for the house and came home to hot mugs of tea and Grandpa’s stories after supper by the fire. A letter came from Vincent. He missed Julien; their soccer games just weren’t the same; he had Madame Larron for social studies, wasn’t it awful? He’d wanted to send him a present, but he couldn’t, so he’d lit a penny candle in the church and prayed Julien would get a soccer ball. How was he, anyway?

He was all right.





On Christmas day, they cut a pine tree in the woods; they brought it in and tied candles to its branches. They helped Mama stuff the chicken with chestnuts Grandpa had gathered and told her it was better than turkey. They sat round the fire and read the Christmas story, with all the candles lit, and Julien got a new coat, and from Grandpa a carving of a wolf, its head thrown back howling: beautiful. And Magali liked her wood-burned tree picture, and the Bible covers glowed in the candlelight with the high shine he had put on them, and Mama and Papa glowed too. And Mama cried.





“So, Julien,” said Grandpa. “You still want to learn to carve?”

“Yes.” Next year he’d make them the hands.

So Grandpa started him on his first project: a simple, stylized, round-crowned tree.

Soon it was the only good thing left in his life.

Benjamin came home and looked at his plate during meals and hid in his room. He gave Julien an illustrated history of soccer and offered a pale smile and a thank-you for the wood-burned Bible verse Julien had made him: The Lord is my rock and my fortress, my deliverer, in whom I take refuge. The Jews wrote the Psalms, Grandpa had insisted; but that didn’t make them Benjamin’s thing. He’d been right. He backed out of the room, away from Benjamin’s pale, unseeing face.

They were frozen in time, all of them; frozen at the worst possible time. At school, nothing had changed, just hardened into a permanent shape like the footprints in the schoolyard that had been there since fall, frozen solid in the mud. Puddles lay in them, gray, flat, lifeless ice reflecting nothing of the sky. The circle of the class was as it had been: Henri Quatre hard and proud at its center; Pierre throwing dirty looks; the rest not seeing Julien, even Roland. Roland, who had almost been his friend. He had no friends now. He sat at his desk beside a pale, silent Benjamin, studying motionless images of soccer, and did not look up.

But he carved.

Every morning on the way to school, a picture of the day was in Julien’s mind, a picture of the week, like the one on his classschedule sheet, but in color. The school hours were a flat, gray collage: the dirty snow and the hard, gray puddles, the bare concrete walls and the cold faces. Everything frozen, everything numb. The evenings and Thursdays and Sundays burst into light, golden and brown, the firelight and faces around the table, Grandpa’s eyes and all the wood tones of his workshop, the golden shavings peeling off under his knife. This was not frozen; this blocky, solid piece of wood—this he could change. After the tree, he carved a fish with carefully etched scales and a lifelike bend in its tail. Grandpa said he had the touch and started him on a dolphin.

Halfway through the third week of January, the schedule-picture in his mind was blown into a blinding whiteout, all the lines erased: blizzard. He looked out the window at the sheer aching white and praised the Lord.

Down in the workshop, it didn’t hurt.

Grandpa worked with him on the dolphin, trying to shape the flippers without cutting them off. It was a lot harder than a fish; fish were flat on the sides.

On Saturday, a clear blue sky; Julien and Benjamin waded to school through knee-deep snow to find a third of the school absent. Out on the farm track, it was thigh deep or more; those farm kids knew impassable when they saw it.

Then Jean-Pierre Reynaud, the doctor’s son, fainted in Papa’s history class, and Papa sent Julien for the doctor. It was while he was skirting close to the buildings along the place du centre, trying to stay out of the burle, that he saw disaster looking him in the face.

Pierre. In the Santoros’s cafe.

Julien stood riveted by the scene: Pierre lifting his cup, head tilted, a loose grin on his lips, his older friends laughing. But he was clowning, not drunk. Because before Julien could move, Pierre was giving him the death stare.

I didn’t do it, Pierre. I’m not going to do it. Right in the Café du Centre during school hours, you moron! I’m not gonna say a word.

And much good it’ll do me.





“Love your enemies,” boomed Pastor Alex.

Julien shifted on the hard, wooden pew. “‘Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.’ Why does Jesus instruct us to love our enemies? So that we may be sons of our Father in heaven.”

Julien found himself listening. More often than he expected, when that voice rang through the stone church, he found himself listening. Our Father in heaven, Pastor Alex said, as if he were talking about his own father, as if there was nothing better in the world. The Father who made the hills and the rivers and the sea, who sent rain on the crops of the just and the unjust, whose mercy fell on all—and where would we be without that mercy? How, the pastor asked, could we turn down a chance to be sons of that Father? And Julien, listening, could hear it in his voice—the note of terror, sorrow, loss at the very thought.

Then Pastor Alex shifted. He spoke of the training of soldiers, how it cut against the grain of human nature to look another human being in the face and shoot him dead. The heart balks, said Pastor Alex; the hand hesitates. He gave stories, statistics. Those who train soldiers, he said, know that somehow they must take away the enemy’s face for their men, train them to think sale boche and not human being. So if even ordinary regard for a fellow man is an obstacle to war, what of love? Can you love a man and look into his face and shoot him?

“Friends,” said Pastor Alex, “you cannot.”

Julien looked up to where the stone vault of the church curved into shadow, and remembered the night this strange war started, and his prayer: I just want to do something. He didn’t know. He bent his head.

Then Pastor Alex spoke of evil.

He spoke of the Nazis and the things they did. He spoke of Kristallnacht, and Julien clenched his teeth. He asked if we must sit passively by while evil overcomes good. Julien lifted his head.

Pastor Alex leaned forward. Jesus didn’t say, “Don’t kill your enemies.” Would Jesus simply command us not to act in the face of evil, he who won the greatest victory, who conquered sin and death? No, friends, no. What did Jesus tell us to do to our enemies?

Love them.

“Jesus,” said Pastor Alex, and his voice almost shook. “Jesus, the only begotten Son of the Father, offers us this chance to be his brothers and his sisters and to fight as he fought; he gives us his weapons, the Father’s weapons, the weapons of the Spirit.” He sounded reverent, almost in awe. “The weapons of love,” he said. “Fearless love.”

Julien sat straighter. Fearless love. Even if he was never a soldier. Was that what Pastor Alex was saying? He could still fight.





“Why, Julien? I didn’t think you were that dumb!” Roland looked disappointed in him.

“I didn’t do a thing. If you’re gonna believe everything Pierre—”

“Look, I didn’t believe it about his mom—”

“Roland, if you’d been in the Café du Centre in the middle of the morning when everyone’s walking by, who would you figure told on you? Huh?”

Roland looked at him and sighed. “Yeah. Okay. But watch your step a little, okay? He’s got it in for you.”

Julien walked into the classroom after lunch, and on his desk lay a note in block letters that disguised their origin not at all: Go back to Paris tattletale. And take your boche friend with you. Your kind isn’t welcome here.

If only Pierre knew how much he wanted to. And his boche friend too.

Boche again. He could take this note to the principal right now and bust Pierre—he’d given it to him in writing, the moron. To think he’d shaken hands with him—almost liked him. Now they were enemies again

He froze, the note still in his hand. Enemies.

No. The grandeur of that sermon, the rush of rightness he had felt, and for this? This stupidity? He had sat in Grandpa’s workshop thinking and thinking, digging his knife into the side of his dolphin, trying to carve flippers. Weapons of love. What weapons? How did this even work? For all his fine words, Pastor Alex had in the end left Julien with nothing but don’t fight him. Fine. He wouldn’t fight him. He wouldn’t lower himself to fight a moron like that. Why should he?





You’re Going to find out what not welcome means.

As Julien walked out the school gate with the new note crushed in his hand, a blow from behind sent him sprawling into a dirty snowbank. He leapt up and whirled, ready to grab Pierre by the collar. No Pierre. Nobody. Guys walking past like nothing had happened.

His cheek stung where the crusted ice had scraped it. He stood with his fists clenched uselessly, looking at the stream of faces. They had all seen. And Pierre wasn’t there. How many friends did the guy have? Was it the whole school now?

That evening, he knelt beside his bed, rubbing his face with his hands. He couldn’t fight Pierre. Last time had been horrible, and this time would be worse. That was Pierre’s plan, probably: make Julien start it, make Julien take the blame.

All right. He’d do it then.

Pastor Alex had said to look to Jesus to learn the weapons of love. He meant, Julien supposed, read the whole story and see how Jesus acted; but he didn’t have time. He looked up what Pastor Alex had read to them from Matthew 5; “love your enemies” wasn’t much use, but the next bit—“pray for those who persecute you”—he could start on that right now.

Lord, please bless Pierre and make him willing to be my friend again. Please make Pierre understand that I never even told on him once.

It was embarrassing, praying those things; it felt weak. Did it sound to God like he was afraid to fight Pierre again, afraid of getting in trouble? Afraid of Pierre and Henri, how everyone was on their side, how they could make those gray school hours even darker? God knows the heart, Papa had always told him; but that was no comfort at all. God might know better than him; all of those things might be true, and he only a coward. Fearless love, Pastor Alex had said.

I’m not scared of him. I think.





Sunday, Julien was forced to sit beside Pierre, sandwiched in the pew between their families, as Pastor Alex preached on the Good Samaritan. They looked straight ahead as Pastor Alex told them we all have people we’d prefer not to be in the same room with. After the service, they sat awkwardly as their fathers shook hands over them; finally they stood, and Julien put out his hand, and Pierre shook it, looking away.

On the walk home, Magali went on about some new teacher at the girls’ school as Julien thought about the sermon, tried to picture Pierre lying beat up in one of the alleys of Tanieux. Great, now I know what to do if he gets mugged by a gang of mad farmers. That’s a real help.

“Her name’s Miss Fitzgerald, she’s from England, and everyone’s calling her la Meess. And she knows Greek, and there’s this new girl Lucy who’s her niece—her father’s a reporter and she’s lived everywhere. He’s in the United States reporting on why the Yanks won’t fight the Nazis. But she can’t go. I’m glad. And she’s in my class!”

“I really don’t think she’s from England, Lili,” Papa put in.

“Oh, yeah—I don’t get it, Papa. They speak English, and la Meess says the part they’re from is part of England, but when I called Lucy English, her eyes got all big, and she yelled, ‘Ireland! We’re from Ireland!’”

“Ah,” said Papa. “History.” He smiled at Lili. “What did you think of the sermon?”

Magali gave him a sideways look. “Ever wonder why there’s no women in these stories?”

Papa’s eyebrows went up. “Should the Samaritan be a woman? Or the wounded man?”

“The robbers,” muttered Julien, and Magali made a face at him. “Not the wounded man,” he said. “It’d change everything. Anyone would help a wounded woman. If you don’t—that’s just wrong.”

“But with a guy it’s okay?”

Not … okay. But for him to help Pierre, it would take … something. He’d do it though. “It’s just different.”

“Oh, yeah. Girls are different.”

Julien ignored her and walked on, picturing Pierre by the roadside, bleeding.





Julien kept praying.

He spent his school hours watching the clock; he came home to the golden-brown workshop and carved. He carved out one good flipper on the side of his dolphin and began to smooth the wood below it into a tail.

Nothing happened Friday, or Saturday. Sunday, in Grandpa’s workshop, he took a long stroke of the knife along the dolphin’s side and gouged the flipper half off. He sat staring at it for a moment, then threw it hard against the wall. The flipper broke off with an audible crack.

“I’m sorry,” said Grandpa. “The dolphin was my mistake. I didn’t realize how difficult those flippers would be.”

Julien threw the dolphin away.





Roland stood by the school door, beckoning, eyes wide and urgent. Julien followed.

“I don’t know who did it, Julien, I swear. But no one was gonna tell you. It’s not right.”

His books and papers were strewn across the floor. On his desk, the inkwell was overturned—onto today’s homework for Ricot.

“I wasn’t there, Julien, I swear.” Julien wanted to hit him. “I’ll get us rags from the broom closet. Quick.”

Julien stood staring at the deep black stain as Roland raced out the door. He was back in a moment with a wad of rags; Julien mopped at the ink, thick black stuff that soaked in and would never come out; he was powerfully reminded of a Sunday school lesson long ago about sin. Exactly. But not my sin.

They rinsed the rags in the bathroom, and the ink turned the soapsuds gray and the water blue; they stuffed them under the sink for the janitor to find. They put the papers in the desk; the ink black homework in the trash. The bell rang.

“I’m sorry, monsieur,” said Julien when Ricot collected the homework. “I did it, but I’m not sure what happened to it.” He thought he heard a snicker from the back of the class.

“Well, that takes the prize for lamest excuse of the year,” said Monsieur Ricot caustically. “Have it for me on Friday copied five times over.” Another snicker.

Julien didn’t hear a word of the lesson over the blood pounding in his ears. He spent the whole hour composing his note to Pierre on a half sheet of paper with Pierre’s muddy footprint on it. This was the guy he had prayed for this morning. It was ridiculous. And it was over.

You are so stupid, the note read, you don’t need anyone to tell on you. I never did, not even the first time, and if you want me to prove it by smashing your stupid face in, I will. Friday after class. You choose the place.

When the bell rang, he walked back to where Pierre was sitting and slammed the note on the desk in front of him.

“Let me know,” he said and walked back to his seat.





It was Roland who let him know. After the last bell, at the gate, he handed Julien a slip of paper: Take the road out of town till you get round the bend. I’ll be there.

“Thanks.”

Roland grunted.

There was a spring in Benjamin’s step as they walked home through the deepening blue evening. Julien looked at the lit windows of houses and thought of blood on the snow. Benjamin turned to him with an eager look, and Julien scowled.

“Are you okay, Julien?”

“Yes,” he snarled. Benjamin recoiled.

“Fine,” said Benjamin. “Don’t tell me. It’s not like I couldn’t see your note. I’m behind you a hundred percent. If you were wondering.”

Julien looked away. “Don’t tell my father, okay?”

“Don’t worry. I won’t. Anyway, he deserves it.”

“Yeah.” Julien looked at the warm-lighted windows and the darkening sky. “He does.”