Thirteen Tolls

By four o’clock on Thursday every poppy in the field had turned its face away from Ypres.

Jon Marston noticed because the dead had taught him to notice small things.

Ten years earlier, a man learned quickly that the direction of smoke mattered, that birds rising all at once meant something had disturbed them, and that a silence in the wrong place could be louder than artillery. The war was over now. The field before him had been combed and seeded and returned, as far as any field could be returned, to the business of being Belgian earth. Yet the poppies had come up again in the October stubble, the late, wrong-season flush the farmers said this ground produced every autumn, and they leaned east in a single red congregation, their thin stems trembling beneath a wind that had not reached Jon’s coat.

He lowered the camera and looked west.

The sky beyond the broken country had changed while he was beneath the focusing cloth. What had been a gray shelf over the horizon had climbed into a wall. It rose from the direction of the Channel, blue at its base, almost green above it, and capped with a whiteness too hard and bright to be mistaken for ordinary cloud. Sunlight still lay over the field where Jon stood. The approaching darkness had already swallowed everything beyond it.