Air Force Brat by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

the
front of the room dispensing little dippers full of ink into them.
We would then pop the little pots back into the holes in our desks
for another week of blot-free writing in our cahiers . Making unsightly ink blots
in your notebook was a particular pet peeve of Ma Soeur and was guaranteed to get
you slapped or, at the very least, screamed at with full-frontal
spittle. I often wondered how those poor girls turned out in later
years. Did they become militant feminists? Did they turn away from
Catholicism? Did they grow up to become meek and obedient wives?
Did they start drinking too much at an early age?
    I say my relationship
with Ma Soeur was
complicated because although I felt fairly certain she did not like
me, and resented my presence 2 in her classroom as a
disruption, she could be nice. Once, during a history lesson—and
one that I had comfortably tuned out of—she was strutting about the
classroom and droning on and on about something when suddenly she
stopped by my desk and put her hands on the back of my chair. I
woke up when she raised her voice and practically shouted: “…at
that point the brave Americans came in and SAVED FRANCE!”
Instantly, all my classmates clapped and smiled insanely at Susan
and me as we took credit for D-Day and the saving of the French
Republic. (We were so totally rock stars on the playground later
that day.)
    I also remember another
time with Ma Soeur which always tempers my picture of her as a total sociopath
forced to teach mewling, despicable children. It was early evening
on Christmas Eve in the village. I had never seen Ma Soeur outside of the
classroom, but I ran into her—both of us alone and she strode over
to me, grabbed my hand and shook it, saying “ Joyeux Noel, Suzanne ,” with tears in
her eyes. I suppose if anything could move her to joy or emotion,
it might be the birthday of our Savior. But there was something
else in the way she reached out to share it so sincerely with me. I
actually felt love from her. For this reason alone, I cannot
characterize her as the meanest person I have ever
known.
     

Chapter Seven
    A Boy’s Wildest Adventure, A Mother’s Worst
Nightmare
    The afternoon was wet and gray when we found
the dead body. It had rained for three long, dreary days. Tommy had
been clearing the entrance to the bunker for a week. It was
providential that I was with him that morning as he usually shunned
my company in favor of solitude or the two hulking Scibetta boys—my
friend Susan’s brothers and our far neighbors on the outskirts of
Ars. Tommy, impatient to resume excavation, allowed me to accompany
him to help haul and carry rocks away from the entrance to the
bunker. I’m not sure what kind of child I must have been to have
considered this something I wanted to do, but there I was, slipping
and picking my way on the muddy, steep ground, to where the
mysterious bunker lay hidden.
    Tommy discovered the
bunker two weeks earlier but he’d only recently had the time to
turn his attention to exploring it. Six months into our stay in
France, he had already found two caves totally hidden from the
population, one lengthy part of a badly damaged tunnel he was sure
was part of the tunnel system used by the Nazis in the Allied
invasion sixteen years earlier. A labyrinth of German tunnels
between Ars-sur-Moselle and Metz created by the German troops still
survived.
    Once he tired of his new finds—cave or
tunnel—he would show them to us, his siblings. The entrances to the
caves were absolutely hidden; there were moments we could easily
hear the calm conversations of French farmers or pissing vagrants
without detection. We stashed our stuff in the caves. We plotted in
the caves. We hid in them. We napped in them, read novels in them,
played war in them, camouflaged their entrances, and never spoke of
them to either American adults or French villagers.
    I found many opportunities to steal away to
one of the closer caves to sit and read and think about who I