Graves In The Sand

Chapter 1 – Normandy Coast-1

Chapter 1 – Normandy CoastIT WAS COOL AND DARK in the room, save for the scattered bits of light that wandered in between the wall and heavy curtain drawn across a solitary open window. The curtain muted an unending chorus of birds outside. There were more birds here than Cole had ever heard in his life. Opening his eyes and blinking a few times, he looked towards the wall as the curtain danced just a bit with the soft morning breeze that snuck through the narrow streets of Carentan. A minor detail lost to others, Cole couldn’t help but appreciate the cool and clean air of a morning in coastal France when compared to the stagnant and loud congestion he’d known back in Panama. Careful with his movements, he rolled gently to his left and saw Marie nestled against Isabella’s side, sleeping on her back with one of her arms draped over her head. At six months old, Marie had a full head of the same curly dark hair as her mother. Cole reckoned that she had his ears, but just about every other feature of his darling little girl was handed down from Isabella.

The room was a light shade of blue with white accents around the window and door frames. The coat of paint was heavy and masked what had undoubtedly been several other colors over the decades. The walls bore dozens of small imperfections that were well concealed under the latest shade of blue. Barely big enough for the larger bed that Isabella’s parents had graciously bought when Cole showed up, and with an antique crib tucked against the corner, Cole rolled onto his back once more and slowly lowered his feet to the wooden floor of the crowded yet modest room. With deliberate steps to avoid the creakiest of the uneven and foot-worn floorboards, Cole pulled on a pair of jeans, the same t-shirt from the day before, and stepped around the empty crib towards the door.

Marie was up each night at some time between midnight and two in the morning. She was easy enough to put down at night in her crib, but she was a child determined to wake up in her mother’s arms each morning. And so, each night Isabella would scoop her up, whisper something French into Marie’s ear, and lay her down in the middle of their bed. With a few short whimpers, Marie was quickly back asleep for the remainder of the night. Cole stopped at the doorway for a moment to admire them both in the pale morning light, then with delicate precision, pulled upwards on the heavy wooden door to keep it from creaking, and closed it slowly before letting the brass handle latch.

Down two flights of stairs, he found his shoes by the door leading into the bakery. Boulanger Patissier was run by Isabella’s family and had been since well before the war. Her mother was the muscle behind the operation while her father ran the administrative side of their small business. Since his arrival, Cole had worked tirelessly to win them over, but it was a daunting task given the particulars of his situation. They had sent Isabella, their youngest daughter, off to Martinique to intern at a hotel and she had returned early back to France, pregnant. To make matters worse, Cole showed up six months later with little money to his name and a newly healed scar on his chest from a drug dealer’s bullet. Several weeks passed after his arrival before he could even move around without pain and labored breathing.

Isabella had explained as best she could, but her parents had, from the start, raised obvious and very fair concerns. Her father, a resident of Carentan his entire life, had asked Cole early on about his military background. When Cole tried to explain the Coast Guard, Isabella’s father had inquisitively asked in broken English, “Like the Airborne?”

When Cole replied no, her father looked away dismissively and blew a short puff of breath from between his lips before finding something else more interesting to focus on. It was clear that Cole would not easily win this man over.

“Airborne?” was a question Cole was asked nearly each time he or Isabella brought up his past. Isabella tried to avoid going into much detail about the drug-running double-agent chapter of Cole’s life, preferring to paint his character in a more positive light, but when it came to the quaint little coastal town of Carentan, if an American wasn’t part of the Airborne, he mattered little, if at all.

Her father’s response was repeated time and again throughout Carentan—it was, Cole thought, quintessentially French. The town had a long-standing love affair with the 101st Airborne, ever since they had daringly jumped into Northern France in the middle of the night on June 6, 1944 to rid France of the Nazi plague. Indeed, nearly every shop, Boulanger Patissier included, proudly hung American and 101st Airborne flags over their doors and windows to recognize the sacrifice of the allied nations. And while their love for the Airborne was real, the people of Carentan knew little of the Coast Guard and cared even less about Cole’s years in the service. Moreover, they were, as a whole, smart enough to know that Cole’s story had some mystery surrounding it. An American who’d somehow been in the military yet also spent the better part of a year off the grid and undoubtedly consumed with some activity not entirely above-the-board. Cole could see that some in this town were fascinated by him and others wary of his presence. Only he knew that the truth floated somewhere in the middle.

Isabella was Carentan’s most favorite daughter and Cole found himself perpetually held in some form of judgmental purgatory. No one really knew what to think of him. On one hand, he’d been tacitly accepted, but on the other he knew he was viewed with some level of skepticism. None of this bothered him much, but he was committed to winning over Isabella’s parents. The rest of the town would come around with time, of that he was certain.

On this morning in mid-June, Carentan was still decorated from the previous week’s commemoration of the invasion. Stepping out of the bakery and onto the sidewalk, he took a few deep breaths of the crisp morning air and paused for a moment to take it in. Every shop proudly displayed some artifact from the invasion. From old canteens to well-preserved bayonets and first aid kits, each little shop strived to show that Carentan was indeed grateful. Perhaps that’s why the birds never stop chirping, Cole thought. Looking around at the rooftops, Cole never could figure out where they all came from or why they chose Carentan, but if there was going to be a constant sound of anything, it could be far worse than songbirds. Panama was still fresh in his mind and if he closed his eyes, he could hear the faint pulsing bass and see the strobe lights from the dance floor of Habana’s. On the mornings when he found himself thinking back to the Caribbean, he was quick to shake those haunting thoughts from his mind. If his mind lingered too long, he was inevitably drawn back to that night when he shot David and David shot him. The image of dark red blood, both his and David’s, swirling like a flooded river and pooling on the dirty dance floor, gave him the chills. On this morning, he pushed those thoughts aside and focused squarely on his day ahead.

To his left, he saw that the cooler of ice cream bars needed restocking. With that, he went to work. It was just after five in the morning. Back inside, Isabella’s mother had already brewed a pot of coffee and Cole filled a mug, dropped in two cubes of sugar and took a short sip before putting the mug down and working his way back to the deep freezer. As he passed the kitchen, he called out, “Bonjour.”

Isabella’s mother, from somewhere unseen, replied back, “Bonjour, Cole.”

He was confident she was beginning to like him. Cole worked tirelessly at the bakery, doing any and all chores he could find to help out. After restocking the cooler out front, he checked on the morning’s deliveries. Isabella’s mother had laid out a carefully assembled row of bags, each with various assortments of croissants, baguettes, beignets, crispy rolls, and plain loaves of bread. Stepping away from the kitchen for a moment, she started at one end and worked her way down the row calling out names or addresses for Cole to remember. At first it had been a litany of gibberish to Cole, Rue this, Rue that, Rue de la blah blah blah…, but over the course of several months, he had begun to catch on.

From most men, the French language sounded arrogant to him. But from a woman’s lips, it was something delicate and beautiful. Isabella’s mother was no exception. When she finished, she looked at Cole to see if he understood. “Oui,” he replied with certainty. With that, she smiled at him for just a second, something she had begun to do over the past few weeks. He was confident she was coming around to his presence, and it lifted his spirits to see progress each week.

Finishing his coffee and washing the mug in the sink, Cole wiped his hands and set out with the first of the bags. To say Carentan was scenic in the morning light did it no justice. Downtown had been rebuilt after the war, but its walls still carried many battle scars. There were pockmarked sections of stone that told the story of the fierce house-to-house fighting that took place to take back the town from the Germans. Several of the buildings had undergone refurbishment over the years and had completely hidden the damage, but many more still had original roofs, stone walls, terraces, and columns that showed clearly enough to the careful eye the magnitude of the Second World War.

Rounding a corner onto one of the main streets, Cole heard and saw a construction truck backing up and its crew busy setting up for a day’s work. Scowling for a second, Cole shook his head dismissively and continued on his way. It was inevitable that over time the town would eventually conceal its past. As Carentan had expanded after the war, the new construction was mostly of a different type, preferring stucco walls instead of the hand-laid stone that defined old France. The heart of the town was still painted in broad earthy strokes with the same shades of dirty cream stones and grey concrete walls as had defined it during the war. The outskirts were increasingly decorated in pastel colors, but the heart of Carentan remained largely untouched.

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BY ELEVEN, he was done with deliveries and back at the bakery. Isabella’s mother handed him a small pizza wrapped neatly in paper and taped shut. “With no egg,” she said with a smile as she handed it to him. “Merci,” Cole replied as he kicked off his shoes and made his way back upstairs. Why anyone would ever put an egg on a pizza, he did not know. Isabella had Marie in her lap playing with a doll. One of Isabella’s sisters sat across from her and the two talked casually at the kitchen table, laughing like girls do just as Cole came up the steps. “Bonjour,” Cole said as he walked over, kissing both Isabella and Marie on the forehead. Her sister smiled at Cole, then back at Isabella with an expression that only sisters understand.

Unlike her parents, Isabella’s two sisters were more accepting of Cole. Older than Isabella by a few years, each were still not old enough to forget the winding path of young love that had joined Isabella and Cole together.

“Huit,” Isabella said with a slight smile as she looked up at Cole, indicating that Marie had slept until eight in the morning. There were days when Cole’s movement in the morning woke her up and others, like today, where his little girl would sleep well into the morning. This in turn put both Isabella and Marie in the best of moods.

Switching to English, Isabella spoke, “We may go out for the afternoon. Is that all right?”

“Sure,” Cole replied. They looked at each other for a moment. She was in many ways the same girl he’d met in Martinique. The labors of childbirth had not extinguished her youthful charm, but she had grown quickly into the role of a mother. Less carefree than before, something about Isabella had changed. For Cole, it was comforting to see how much she embraced motherhood, but he struggled to pinpoint just what it was about her that was different. It was nothing bad, he told himself. As they looked at each other for a moment more, he thought it a new chapter in life and nothing more. Martinique, and their nights with a bottle of wine under a sky full of stars, seemed like years ago.