Hello, friends.

This short story takes place in the middle of Chapter 35 of Dispatches ("One Hour to Madness and Joy").

It is rated M for sexual content. If that's not your cup of tea, please don't feel any pressure to read it, even if you were a regular Dispatches reader. If you are a new reader (hello!) you can find the backstory for this relationship beginning in Glen Notes (well, beginning in Spitched Eels, I guess) and continuing in Dispatches.

Special thanks to MrsVonTrapp for being a champion beta reader and for nudging me over yet another cliff.

Love,

elizasky

One Hour to Madness and Joy

O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860

Per Ardua Ad Astra

Paris

November 1917

(Shirley)

When the door closes behind him, I lock it three times: lock and deadbolt and a chair thrust firmly under the knob just for good measure. He draws ancient, musty drapes against the afternoon sun and then it is just the two of us, staring at one another across a dim and shabby room, frozen in the simple truth that it has been two years and more than time besides.

We talked in the street and at the Eiffel Tower, where I saw him first and watched him for long minutes while he looked past me without recognition. In the end, I had to approach him and call him by name. My voice was a live wire, startling the blue eyes wide, and he watched me warily as we walked. We talked of mundane things — was your train on time and did you find your way through the city alright and many other nothings as our silent feet carried us here.

Now we have our triple lock and could say anything, if only we would.

He does not remember me. Foolish, to think a few sparse letters, a handful of sly jokes, would be enough to remind him. He has forgotten me; he looks me up and down as if I were a stranger. Did I really expect anything else?

I would turn away. But he has removed his cap and a lawless beam of unblocked sun sparks gold off his hair and I cannot turn away. Does he look different? Perhaps. There are lines that were not always there, and his face seems baked, not sun-kissed or freckled as it always was in our fishing summers. But I would know him anywhere, just by his gait and the chickadee tilt of his head.

He could not say the same. He didn't know me on sight. Now, he peers at me with eyes like a deep channel in the gulf, chilly and sharp. I would turn away.

But he steps toward me and, reaching, takes my own cap, tosses it aside. He presses a pale hand to the wings sewn over my heart. It must be audible to him as it is to me.

My RFC tunic is stylishly smooth, not like the plain, pockety, infantry khaki. He catches his lower lip between his teeth as he works the buckle and I would help him, if only I could move. He finds the concealed buttons and traces their path from shoulder to hip, working them one at a time until he can push the tunic off my shoulders.

It falls away like the creases in his forehead. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. It spreads, unfurling across his features until he has no need of external sunlight.

"There you are."

He kisses me atiptoe, a kiss anchored in heavy boots, vibrating up through khaki puttees and waist and collar, flowing through pliant lips and fingertips skimming over my cheeks.

I melt; I surge. Something gigantic is blossoming in my chest like a genie unentombed. Very well: First, that he would be safe. Second and third, that I might know him again and be known in return.

I move to pull him toward me, but he is right about the uniform. Five buttons on a service dress jacket and it too falls away, a dull husk consigned to the oblivion of the floor. Better. Dropping to one knee, I unwrap and unlace until his feet slip free, unmoored. I rise and he effervesces into my arms, bubbling delight.

One kiss and another. Glowing lips parted under mine, retreating from me as irrepressible smiles.

I am not content with kisses, and go roaming.

Under his jaw, a tiny line, dark and straight, shows where he nicked himself shaving. I wonder where he slept last night, where he woke this morning. Somewhere, he bathed, the mud of Flanders sloughing off, carrying all its filth down a drain.

How, after all this, can he still smell like himself? The superficial scents are changed — harsh army soap and worn serge and the acrid sting of delousing powder. But underneath, something I had always assumed was the smell of ponds and reeds and red Island roads. Perhaps it was only him all along.

Impulsive, I rasp the cut with my tongue and it bleeds afresh. I lick it clean. I never did tell anyone about his close shave. His fingers twine in my hair and an inaudible moan resonates through the lips I press to his throat.

I would draw him out. Gray flannel and placket and sleeves, all the government-issue impedimenta fall away, flimsy, and I wish there were a drain for those, too. I would stay, raising patches of pink along his collarbone, but the undershirt must, must come off, off now, and the only way is to pull back and peel it away over his waking skin.

I am lost at once. Whatever idea I had of tasting the hollow of his throat, of burying my face under his arms and breathing there until the very air in my lungs was only what had passed over him first, all immediately forgotten at the sight of blue eyes gone dark, lips fallen open over a soft and darker mouth.

Perhaps I kiss him too forcefully, or perhaps the taste of blood is my own, surging from every extremity, drawing me together with a lurch like a missed stair. He wraps bare arms around my neck, elbow-deep, and will not let me go.

I hesitate a moment over more buttons, but he only smiles against my lips and the encumbrance dissolves under my fingers. If my hands are busy, his are as well, and soon there is nothing between us, not even silence, as we fall laughing onto the bed, intertwined.

Is it funny? Of course it is, this knotty puzzle of enmeshed limbs and the absurd freedom behind our thrice-locked door. We are waves, rolling over and through one another, mingling and lost where we meet, indistinguishable.

He sinks into the pillows and I move to resume my expedition, surveyor of the only body I know better than my own. He delays me only a moment with one last ripe-mouthed kiss, not farewell, but safe journey.

What should I say of my excursion? That I recalled the way? That the terrain of heaving chest and tender belly rose up to meet me? That soft and softer skin remembered my husbandry?

There are medical words in Leidy's Anatomy. There are coarse words in the mouths of soldiers, and bleak words in the law. There are even lovely words among the poet's leaves. I would not fill my mouth with words.

Trembling (both). Leaping (both). Gasping (both). It's only friction, isn't it? (It isn't.)

If there is still a world, I have forgotten it. Even the blue eyes, closed now, and the panting, parted lips are distant. All creation is a mere hand's-breadth wide, and that hand mine. Writing is useless and speaking is vain; I've never been able to put things into words. This is better. Slick and salted, with pen-less fingers and wordless tongue, I fill every silence.

The word I do not say is syncope: a change in rhythm, a lapse, a brief loss of consciousness. How to describe that moment, when it is not yet begun, and yet inevitable? I would not try. I would only delight in it, that sublime, sapid syncope that I have both given and taken for myself. It is mine and his and both of ours together.

Faintly, I hear his valediction: "I'm going."

I will follow in my own time. For now, I would bid him adieu, sending him off with a wave, and a wave, and a cresting wave.

That night, or perhaps the next day or the next night, we lie amid rumpled bedclothes, measuring our hands one against the other. He slides his palm across mine and grins when I catch him by the wrist and kiss the ball of his thumb.

Earlier, his callouses rough against my singing flesh, I wondered how he came by them, but let the worldly thought drift away. Now, it has been a day and a night or perhaps two days and two nights, and I would know him other ways.

"Your hands are rougher than mine."

Apple-cheeked and toothy, he plants a kiss on my temple. "They always have been."

I brush this aside, derisive, but he persists: "Your hands have always been wonderfully soft."

"Have not!"

"Have too! The very first time we went fishing, I went up to Ingleside to collect you, and you were in the kitchen, helping Susan make porridge. Your hands were dusted with oatmeal and when I took one, I remember thinking that you had hands like butterfly wings."

A plosive breath escapes, but I cannot contradict him.

"Alright. Maybe my hands were soft when I was nine . . ."

He is chuckling, shaking his head.

"Just as soft the summer before Queens."

Fingers dance along the sides of my face and he returns to me the very same kiss I gave him that sultry day when we tested the depths of the stream. Unmistakable.

I ask because I never have before: "What made you kiss me that first day?"

Leaning back against the headboard, he laces fingers behind the tousled nimbus of his hair and beams.

"Madness. What made you kiss me back?"

There is only one answer to that, and I give it.

"Joy."

He grins and dives at me, bearing me down into the depths of the mattress, bedclothes splashing away from us as we grapple. We are a long time reenacting that scene, embellishing it with fanciful alternate endings.

We surface, suspiring, and I open my eyes to see something merry spark in the blue depths.

"I have something for you," he breathes.

With a peck, he wriggles away and off the bed. I follow to the edge, perching watchful as I savor the sight of moon-bright skin. I have read of act-poems; he is an anthology. He stretches, the flex of shoulders and crux of elbows enjambed, flowing one into another as he searches through forgotten clothing strewn across the floor. What could I possibly want that would fit in a pocket?

Whatever it is, he has found it.

He comes to stand between my knees, nudging them apart as he closes what little distance separated us. There is a determined set to his jaw. Unashamed, he twists the top off a little circular tin and my last coherent thought is he has thought this through.

Were his hands rough? They are slick now. Slipping, grasping, encircling, and I do not remember when I last took a breath. I try to summon enough air to ask, are you sure, but can't form the thought, let alone the words.

There is no need. His hands may be occupied, but it's his gaze that holds me fast: clear, bright, dark blue eyes fearless and direct.* A puckish sparkle kindles there in response to the feeble, gargling sound that I meant as speech.

He answers me wordlessly with tongue-tied kisses. Our happiness is in each other's keeping, and we are unafraid.**

Toppling, we are a tangle of knees and creases and knobbly spines. He guides me through perplexities, slow and then slower. I match his breathing, slow slow slower, his hand strong in mine.

Yielding (both). Aching (both). Cleaving (both). Is that Whitman or the Bible? (It's both.)

Words are such contrary things. How can cleave mean to split when it also means to adhere? If that seemed a mystery once, it isn't any longer.

I will think on that in afterdays. Nothing so rational now. What began as uncertain ripples in a lagoon and swelled to rhythmic waves on welcoming sands now erupts into storm-roiled cliff-breakers. Crashing, plunging, dashing reckless and dangerous where sensible people dare not sail. I would be lost if it must be so.

Some would have me spend my life in quiet conformity. Some would have me spend my life for Canada, but what is Canada to me? I would spend it here instead.

Spent, I am an edgeless puddle, bleeding into the world around me. He gathers me back together, pulls me to his own heaving shoulder, cradles me there. Ear pressed to his chest, I can hear the sea rushing in his pulse or mine or both.

We lay just like this the day before he left, in our rose-papered room at Mrs. MacDougal's. He had arrived that evening in his crisp new khaki, and I swelled with pride and longing and envy to see him so. Pleasantries to Mrs. MacDougal, then we had escaped upstairs to stow his negligible baggage. A step over the threshold and I pushed him up against the door, scrabbling with unfamiliar garments and their fastenings. He laughed, called me something unrepeatable that brought me up short, not because of my tender sensibilities, but because I had never heard the like from him before.

"I'm a soldier now," he winked. "We get to say all manner of filthy things."

How we ever made it back downstairs for supper is a mystery.

Later, in the dark of the new moon, he held me just like this, running his fingers through my hair as we lay together under Mrs. Rachel Lynde's tobacco stripe quilt. He's to have that, of course, when I die. It is tucked up with camphor in the cedar chest by my bed at home. I considered leaving a note with it, but Susan might air it out and that would never do. I've left a sealed letter for Una instead, among the papers in my foot locker. She'll see it through.

"Penny for your thoughts," he whispers.

"I was thinking about Mrs. MacDougal."

He laughs like a burbling brook. "I'm not sure which of us should be more flattered."

Feeling that my bones might be solid enough to support me again, I prop myself up beside him on the pillows. "Are you alright?"

"Quite alright."

"You're sure?"

He smirks and I search his face for hesitation or dissembling.

"You're a lot stronger than I remember," he says.

Heat prickles into my cheeks and I grope for an apology, but only manage a faint, "Sorry."

"I'm hardly complaining."

I swallow around the stone growing in my throat, but he sees my difficulty and punches me playfully in the shoulder. "You should see your face."

"I didn't mean to . . ."

Pale fingertips press my lips, silencing me.

"I am perfectly alright. Better than."

"You're sure?"

"Very."

With that, he kisses the tip of my nose and burrows into my neck, nuzzling under my ear, pressing himself to me all along the length of our bodies. He winds an arm across my breast and I pull him close in turn, the old familiar embrace.

My pulse is diminishing; his as well. Soon, the breaths rippling across my throat are shallow and even. I risk a tiny shift in position, the better to see his face; he is smiling.

As I slip toward sleep, a line rises to the surface of my muzzy brain: There is perfection in you also.

In the morning, he is gone.

Beyond the drapes, there is a little balcony. I sit with my knees tucked up against my chest and smoke a third cigarette, not seeing the city.

He could be anywhere. Should I go searching? One khaki needle in a teeming khaki haystack. He may even have left Paris, run back to the war early to get away from me. Shit.

The last time I cried, I was eleven. It was August and we were fishing the Glen Pond, as we did every summer. As we sweltered together on the landing, sharing a haversack of early apples, the mood turned confessional in a way it hadn't before, and we poured out the sort of secrets that you can't tell just anyone. He admitted that he missed his mother, that he could barely remember her, that Rosemary was lovely and kind and good, but that didn't stop him longing for the woman who had eyes like his. I confessed that I worried about having two mothers, that perhaps there was something wrong with me, deep down, because Susan meant as much to me as Mother ever had.

Neither of us noticed the viper in the form of Andy Reese hiding in the rushes, not until it was too late. I can still see that pug nose, popping out to burst our lovely bubble, and hear the mocking tone, though I don't recall the words.

What I do recall is the clear, cutting voice beside me that sent the sneak slinking away to lick wounds deeper than any I could have delivered with my fists. And when we were alone again, he took another apple and winked at me.

I didn't have words for that emotion: part gratitude, part adoration, part what I didn't yet recognize as desire. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that it was enormous.

I ran away home and curled up in the window seat behind Susan's rocking chair until she came in from the garden and soothed me without knowing what was wrong. How could I tell her when I didn't know myself? She promised me undying love and showered me with jam tarts that did not fill the new hole in my heart.

The turning of a key in the lock cracks like a rifle. I swivel to see him step through the door softly, as if he would not wake me. A paper sack crackles, cradled in one arm, bulging, baguettes tilting crazily out the top. He glances toward the bed, the secret, lip-bitten smile of the prankster curving his lips.

I am on my feet, blinking hard.

"Oh! You're awake."

I only stare, heart hammering, mouth gone slack.

He holds up the groceries, smiling an apology. "I thought you must be starving."

I suppose that's one word for it.

I croak, smoke-parched. "I thought you left."

"Sorry. I only meant to let you sleep."

Perhaps something of the past hour's vigil remains etched in my face, because the soft smile is gone and he is looking at me with mounting concern. I cannot last long under this tender scrutiny. He sees that, too, and takes a towel from the washstand.

"Why don't you go take a shower?" he says, handing it to me. "Then come back and have something to eat."

I nod, unable to trust my voice.

Down the hall, there is a little washroom, blessedly unoccupied at the moment. I stand under the showerhead in the curtained tub, but it its too short, so I have to sit in the basin to cry.

I feel eleven years old again, having no name for whatever emotion is washing down the drain. Some part of it is relief, some part elation, some part an ineffable sorrow I can't pin down. Whatever it is, it is much too big, and I am grateful to let the excess overflow and swirl away with the water.

Calmer, I stand before the mirror. Judging by my stubble, this must be the third day. I scrape my cheeks and chin, drawing the razor carefully up my throat. It is something of a surprise to see a tiny flash of red carving a bright path through the shaving soap. Less of a surprise to see that the cut is just where his was that first evening. I didn't do it on purpose, but some things have their own purpose.

If this is the third day, we will both need to leave early tomorrow morning. Trains are unreliable and the war is calling. We'll still have letters, of course, but you can hardly say anything in those, not with the censors and other people always wanting to hear the news. Luckily, Rilla generally sends me some chatter that I can use to divert any letter-curious comrades. Not that there are many, and none of them last very long.

My squadron has only been in France a few weeks, but my bunkmates have been dying ever since we started training. One crashed the very first week we flew solo; two more before we left Canada. The aerodromes in England have their own cemeteries.

Now we're finally here, and the question isn't how many aerial victories you can win; it's how many you can win in a row, beginning with your very first. There isn't much room for trial and error. If your unbeaten streak stretches to five, they call you an ace. If you last six months, they call you Gramps. Every day is the last one out there.

I pull on trousers and undershirt, check the cut under my chin, clotting now. The face in the mirror seems composed.

Well, if this is the last day here, I would make it count.

Back down the hall, I knock softly, am admitted softly. He has taken a blanket from the bed and spread it on the floor, set it with split loaves spread with cheese, a clutch of pears, a bottle of wine.

"I've never had wine before," he shrugs, inspecting the bottle. "I had beer in England, and we have rum rations in the trenches, but that's practically medicinal. But when in Paris . . ."

I fold myself to the floor, our knees brushing with a subtle electric fire. He struggles with the cork, chipping off pieces until I take it from his hand and pop it with a corkscrew knife I won at poker from one of my dead bunkmates. I offer back the open bottle, can't help laughing at the red crescent he licks from his upper lip.

The food is miraculous. It is reassuring to realize that some of that was just ordinary hunger after all.

When we have stuffed ourselves, I lean back against the bed, memorizing him. I hardly know where to begin.

"You didn't recognize me," I say. "At the Eiffel Tower."

He brushes crumbs from the gray flannel of his shirt, wrinkles his nose. "Of course I didn't. I was looking for the kid I left back home. I wasn't expecting . . . you know . . . the shoulders and all."

My mouth is dry despite the wine, my voice quiet. "I thought that you had forgotten me."

He looks up, brows quirked, lips twitching with what might be mirth. "You thought I forgot you?"

I shift my weight, squirming under his incredulity. Does he have to keep staring at me like that?

He has risen to his knees, pushing the remnants of our feast aside. Face intent, he takes both of my hands in his. Is the posture familiar? There was a spring last time, murmuring under the maples.

He waits until I meet his eyes of my own accord, then speaks reverently:

"I, Thomas Carlyle Meredith, do solemnly swear that I will never, ever forget you, Shirley John Blythe, not ever, not for one single minute, until the day I die."

The words fall from his lips and run skittering up my arms, raising every hair in a shiver that is perilously close to ecstasy.

I should repeat the oath, should swap the names, complete the ritual. But there is no set form for us, no rite but the one we write for ourselves. I could quote someone else's words, give him a line of Whitman or his own words back. But I want to give him my own, poor as they always are.

"I love you, Carl."

It is sufficient. He obviates any further covenanting with a joyful kiss, and another, and enough that counting is a fool's errand. We, who have been rivers and streams and waves together so often, are become wine, dark and rich and sweet on one another's tongues.

He is tugging at my undershirt, and I would happily oblige him, but not just yet. I put his hands away from me, just for the moment.

"I have something for you."

"I'll bet."

"No," I laugh. "An actual present."

"Oh?" he brightens. "Let's see it then."

I find my tunic crumpled in a corner and dig around in one of the hip pockets for the little pin clasped to the lining. Tiny wings rendered in gold, emblazoned RFC, with the corps motto on a blue enamel ribbon: Per Ardua Ad Astra. Through Adversity to the Stars.

I sit down across from him, my palm gone damp, clutching the token too tightly. It's not a gift usually given from one soldier to another, this sweetheart brooch. Women display them with pride when they have a beau or a husband or a son in the flying corps. What would he ever do with it? Suddenly, it seems an absurd gift and I wish I had never spoken.

He cocks his head like a bright-eyed bird, waiting, but my mouth has gone to cotton.

"It's . . . it's stupid," I say.

"I doubt that very much."

"It's only . . . well . . . I don't mean to . . . to insult you . . . to imply . . ."

He is waving his hands vigorously, chuckling. "Hold on. Back up. From the beginning, if you please."

"The beginning?"

"Maybe start with, What is it?"

I unclose my fist, holding up the beetle-bright pin with its gilded wings. He blinks, goes very still.

"It's . . . well . . . it's a pin. But the trouble is that . . . well . . . most pilots give them to girls and I don't mean to imply . . . that is . . . I don't mean . . ."

There is hilarity brewing in his expression, but he takes pity on me."Let me help you," he says, taking the pin from my hand and caressing it with his thumb. "This is your very special RFC pin that shows that you are very brave and very talented and very stupid. Lots of other brave, talented, stupid men give these to their wives or to their best girls . . ."

"Sometimes to their mothers."

"Alright, well, that's not really helping, but sure. All the same, this is your pin. And you want to give it to me. But you're worried that I will be insulted by the offer because it is normally a gift given to a woman."

"That's about the size of it," I mutter.

"Why do you want me to have it?"

Whitman whispers in my ear . . . carry me when you go forth over land or sea, for thus merely touching you is enough, is best, and thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally . . . but again, a quotation will not do.

I'm no poet. If I were, perhaps I would know a name for every hue of my heart, and paint him poems worth quoting. Instead, I can only offer up my few unadorned syllables and hope that he can hear what I would say if I knew how.

"Because I'm yours. Truly."

Beaming, he fastens my wings on the breast of his shirt, where women wear their brooches and heroes display their medals.

The sight jolts me with the sandpaper intrusion of the real world. "You can't . . ."

"I know," he says, and his smile falters a bit. "Just for now, though."

Just for now. Just for here. Just for us.

Is that sad? That we should have only this moment? That we must carry one another in secret and write in riddles and hold ourselves aloof when others shout over the roofs of the world? Perhaps. But I would save my pity for all the luckless wretches who have never seen this Paris and never will. I would not trade my place for any pale imitation whose only virtue is longevity.

Rising, I offer him my hand and pull him to his feet. My pin gleams over his heart and I can die happy now, knowing that I have said what I needed to say, words or no. With steady fingers, I hold him firmly by the chin and he returns my gaze.

Fearless (both). Equal (both). Bound (both). How can it mean confined when it also means to leap? (I think I know.)

If we have only this hour, then let it be an hour of fullness and freedom, one brief hour of madness and joy.

Notes:

*LMM's description of Carl Meredith in Rainbow Valley, chapter 4, "The Manse Children"

**Anne's House of Dreams, chapter 4, "The First Bride of Green Gables"

A note on poetry:

Shirley has absorbed Leaves of Grass (especially the Calamus and Children of Adam sections) so thoroughly at this point that it would be impossible to footnote every time he alludes to a line of Whitman (I have used italics when he quotes directly). Some of the poems he invokes are:

"One Hour to Madness and Joy"
"I Sing the Body Electric"
"From Pent-Up Aching Rivers"
"Oh You Whom I Often and Silently Come"
"Whoever You Are Now Holding Me in Hand"
"Among the Multitude"