The first place they visited was a stable, although to call it that lent it a dignity it didn’t have. It had been a distinctly one-horse shelter, roughly the size of Kate’s boardinghouse room in Boston. Her despised room felt like a palace in comparison. Kate picked her way across the muddy dirt floor, weaving between wooden boards that had been laid on the ground in lieu of beds. A pallet in the corner was occupied by an old woman, snoring gently, her teeth in a cracked teacup beside her. A girl of about ten, with a dirty cap covering snarled hair, was cooking over a makeshift fire, ringed with stones.
A woman wearing a stained dress, a baby on her hip, came to greet them. Oh yes, she’d heard of them. The crazy ladies with the trucks. She didn’t put it quite that way, but the inference was clear. Everyone seemed to have already heard about their driving around in circles three hundred yards from the castle.
“If you had only followed the signposts . . .” said their hostess helpfully, sticking her knuckle into the baby’s mouth to suck to stop it crying. Kate added a note to get some pacifiers in. Also to strangle Julia.
Emmie made a comic tale of their misadventures, and, in no time, the woman was telling them her story. The woman in the bed was her mother, who was ill; make no mistake, in full possession of her wits, just bedridden and cranky, it was the rheumatism, you know, which had been made worse by being evicted from their house, which had had four good bedrooms and silk paper on the wall of the dining room—“We’ll send our doctors to look at her,” Emmie promised. “Don’t worry. They’re good doctors”—her husband was away with the army; her oldest two sons, ages twelve and fourteen, had been taken away by les boches to a work camp in Germany, and no word had come since. Six other children, ranging in age from ten to two months （the baby wailed to confirm that he was, in fact, that young） shared the small room.
“We had a house once,” the woman insisted. “A very nice house.”
“And you will again,” said Emmie with such assurance that Kate nearly believed it. “With silk paper on the walls of the dining room. We’re waiting for our cows to be delivered, but once they come, we’ll be able to start bringing milk. When was the last time you had milk for the children?”
It all seemed a bit haphazard, but as Emmie chatted and Kate scribbled as hard as she could, a very sizable dossier of information emerged: where the family had lived, who was missing, what they needed, information about the other inhabitants of the village.
It was the same everywhere they went. Too many people crammed into spaces with no roof, no proper floor. Emmie would produce a handful of candies for the children; hand out baby clothes and fine-tooth combs; elicit information about ailments and other pressing needs. And the missing. Every family had its tale of the missing, the children away avec les boches.
“She sounds lovely,” Emmie would say as a beloved and tattered photo was shown or a bit of old embroidery displayed or a treasured teacup, that was the last possession of a daughter or sister lost to the boches. “Now, about your grandson, we mean to start holding classes for children. . . . May I put his name on the list?”
“We must bring a bathtub next time,” Emmie said ruefully as they climbed back into the White, having made the rounds of all sixteen families eking out their existence in what had once been their home. “I’ve never seen so many lice. I’m itching. Are you itching?”
“I wasn’t until you mentioned it,” said Kate, not wanting to bring a bathtub, not wanting to come back ever again. I’m just here to drive the truck, she wanted to say, but of course, she wasn’t, she couldn’t; they were meant to all pitch in on everything. But she didn’t know how Emmie did it, how she kept talking and talking when Kate felt frozen in the face of so much misery, so much grief.
I had a daughter once. . . . I had a house once. . . . I had a family once. . . . The catalogue of loss went on and on.
“Shall we go back and take stock?” Kate asked hopefully. “We can help sweep out the Orangerie.”
“It’s hours until sunset yet,” said Emmie, spreading out the map. “Let’s go to Canizy.”
“It’s after three already.” It took a surprisingly long time, recording life histories. Kate had thought they would be in and out, checking boxes. “Canizy is the farthest of the villages.”
“Yes, but I want to visit the Boche baby and make sure she’s being properly cared for—if we leave by six, we should still be able to make it back before dark.”