Free Sparrow Falling by Gaie Sebold Page B

be on one of those.” She sighed. “One day he told us he was going on campaign. He was very excited.
    “Then we didn’t see him for months. When he came back for a visit, I was so looking forward to seeing him. Mama had already threatened me with being sent to Bedlam, you see. I thought perhaps he would help me. But... oh, Evvie.
    “When he came to the door I didn’t know who he was until he said ‘Hello, Elizabeth.’ He was so thin. His hands seemed to have got bigger, but they hadn’t – it was just his wrists had no meat on them, none of him did. And his face. His face was grey. His moustache had started to go grey, too, just a little, otherwise it was the same – but it was wrong, it was on the wrong face. Even Mama looked shocked. She asked him if he’d been wounded and he said, ‘Oh, no. A little. Nothing.’ He said he was glad to see us and Mama fussed about making tea and Evvie, it was all wrong. He was like his own ghost, all grey and drifting. I asked him if he was ill and he said yes, in a way, and that seeing me made him better, but it didn’t. I knew it didn’t, not really. He didn’t call me Little General any more. And when Mama chattered at him about my going away to school, he just nodded, I think he barely heard her. He just stared through things until even Mama stopped talking. He put his arms around me, oh, so thin , and said, ‘Thank God they’ll never send you, Elizabeth,’ and then he was gone.
    “And he never came back. Mama wrote to his regiment, in the end. They told his parents, when he was killed, but his people didn’t bother telling Mama, they...” She shook her head, and blew her nose again, smearing the other side. “They’d cut her off, when I was born, so I suppose they didn’t think she deserved to know. I don’t know if they even knew he’d been coming to see us. I stopped reading military history, because they talked about ‘soldiers’ and ‘the men’ but every one of them could be Uncle Berry, and maybe they all had people at home who wanted them to come home and they came home wrong or never came at all. So it matters, you see. It matters if there’s a war, because there’s people in it and they get broken.”
    Eveline tried to think of something comforting to say, but she couldn’t. So she refilled the teacups and sat silently with Beth in the sunny kitchen, her eyes constantly drawn to the thick black headlines that marched, military and stern, across the pages. Her mind put people inside those headlines now. Old Jeff who pulled himself along Northey Street in a little cart, his uniform trousers wrapped over where his legs ended above the knee. Jenny Blake, whose five boys had all gone for soldiers, and not one of them had come home. Jenny who had gone quietly mad, wandering the streets asking strangers if they had seen her Davey, her Bobby, her William or Frank or little Joe with his red hair like his Da’s. More, plenty more – men missing eyes and arms and smiles, women missing husbands and brothers and sons. And Beth’s big, laughing Uncle Berry, who turned into a ghost before he was even dead.
     
     
    A FTER SLEEP AND sausages, Eveline felt better, more like herself. Liu would come around. And Mama would be happy.
    Ma Pether... well, Ma Pether could either go on training the girls, or she’d have to find something else to do. Evvie felt a little chill around her heart at the thought of telling Ma to go, but in the end, if it came to it, she’d have to. And the war? The war was none of her business, even if it happened. The newspaper said it wasn’t going to and that would have to be enough for her.
    She went to visit Mama, and found her flushed and smiling over a letter. “You look wonderful, Mama, what is it?”
    “It’s Mr Thring, darling. He’s coming over tomorrow. Isn’t it wonderful?”
    “I suppose...”
    “Don’t sulk, my pet.”
    “I’m not sulking, Mama. I’m just... worried. You won’t let him...”
    “Eveline, my