Resistance by Anita Shreve

parking the truck behind the barn, bringing with him the sharp chill of the frigid night. Claire looked up at her husband from the stone floor on which she was kneeling Henri's face was drawn, gray, exhausted. There was grime in the creases of his skin. He'd been stunned when, just minutes earlier, he'd bicycled into the gravel drive and found his wife in the truck bed with an injured airman. She knew that he was afraid of this work, that he was afraid of the presence of the foreign airman in his home. And yet he had never turned a soldier or a Jew away. He had never refused a request from the Maquis.
    “I’m going for Madame Dinant,” he said from the doorway.
    Claire nodded. She wanted to tell him to go upstairs to bed, but she knew that was impossible. The airman couldn't be left alone, and Henri would be able to bicycle to Dinant's much more quickly than she could.
    “Tell her to bring plaster and morphine,” she said. “And tell her …” Claire looked toward the ceiling of the kitchen. “Tell her that the old woman is dying.”
    When Henri left, the room was still. She could hear the clock tick and looked up at it; it read one-fifteen. She removed the pilot's leather helmet and put a pillow under his head. His hair was the color of sand, and matted flat. She examined the rest of the flight suit. One trouser leg, the right one, was soaked in blood near the foot.
    Claire stood and removed a pair of long shears from her sewing drawer. She bent over the American flyer. Her hair, unrolled, fell like sheets at the sides of her face, hampering her vision. She made an impatient gesture, swinging her long hair to one side, and, tilting her head just slightly to keep it there, she began to cut the man's trousers, starting at the ankle.
    The shears were dull against the leather. Bits of sheepskin, dirty with blood, came away in tufts, and began to make a pile surrounding the man's leg. When she reached the wound, she felt a sudden nausea and had to swallow hard. The skin of his calf down to the back of the ankle had burst open like an angry blossom. As delicately as she could, she picked off dried pieces of fleece from the open wound. She heard a sharp intake of air, looked quickly at the airman's face. The skin had gone gray. He was awake now and was watching her.
    “I am sorry if I am hurting you,” she said in English.
    He shut his eyes briefly, and exhaled slowly, trying to control the pain. The wound was exposed now to the air.
    “You are safe now. You are in Belgium,” she said softly. She whispered the word again, and then again.
Belgium. Belgium.
    She studied him. The color was not returning to his face. Claire noticed a day's growth of beard. He shook his head slowly. She didn't know if he meant to say they were not safe, or if he did not believe he was in Belgium. His eyes closed again, and he lay back against the pillow^
    Thérèse Dinant had not slept since the previous night, but, unlike Henri, she showed no signs of fatigue. She walked noisily into the house, as if all rooms in Belgium were open to her.
    “We treat the aviator first,” Dinant announced, as though there had never been any question. Claire knew the aviator would be a priority: Save the airmen at all costs. But it was also triage. Tend to those who had the best chance of life.
    “What is the man's name?” Dinant asked.
    “Lieutenant Theodore Aidan Brice,” Claire answered.
    “The pilot, then,” Dinant said absently.
    In the warmth of the farmhouse kitchen, Dinant stripped off her coat, but she kept on her kerchief. Her face was reddened and dry, with fine hairs on her cheeks. She wore a long, black cardigan and gray knit stockingsthat accentuated her sturdy legs. On her feet she wore a man's clogs. Dinant worked without preliminaries and with dispatch. She had been with the Croix-Rouge and subsequently with the Maquis since its inception in 1940, and lived alone in a small terraced house in the village. She was as large and as strong