The Brass Button

In a box, under a bed, in a little house by the coast, sits a button. Its brass is faded, its once delicate engravings smoothed by the fiddling thumbs of time. The pillow it sits on, velvet worn and webbed in dust, would likely fetch more at a flea market than the treasure it holds. But to me it is priceless.

Long ago, outside a smoky shop in a small village in the northeast of France, stood a little girl.With rapt attention, she gazed at a coat through the glass. It had soft wool blue as the sky outside the paper mills and a row of shiny brass buttons down its front. At age seven, with her hands shoved in thread bear pockets and her cheeks pink from the winter chill, It was the most beautiful thing Josée Allaire had ever seen.

Every day on her way home from the market, she would pass by the corner store and marvel at the little blue coat in the window until the milk from the milkman froze through her mittens and the bread cooled in her basket. She would have to run home after that, small boots crunching on the ice as she tried to beat the sun rising over the eastern hills.

Sometimes when the nights were stormy and the wind whistled through the stones of their little cottage, everyone would huddle around the kitchen fire and, in a small voice, Josée would tell them about her coat.

Mama said that they couldn’t afford it of course, that it didn't matter anyway because they would never buy from a Boche like him. Josée had asked what she meant, clutching her bowl of meager porridge, but no one ever seemed to give a straight answer.

That didn't stop her from dreaming, and it didn’t stop her from pausing every day to look at the little blue coat in the shop window.

On Sundays after Mass, the kids would gather around the old man with the rotted smile, and receive a Franc to buy candy from his son in the village. While the others chewed on soft nougat and crunched on handfuls of dragées, she would slip her prize into her pocket and run home to the little can buried under the farmhouse. She would hold the tin close to her ear as she dropped
the coin through the slit in the top, heart quickening with excitement every time she heard a new coin rattle with the others.

Every day was the same; the coins, the shop, and the frozen December inside the cold stone walls of the paper mill. Until it wasn’t.

The soldiers came one frosty morning, marching down the road with their buckled leather and scuffed boots. Many thought they were just passing through, with their talk about distant battle lines and an enemy that couldn’t possibly be anything but far away. But they stayed, and the war soon followed at their heels, until the fear of it had spread over the whole village like a plague.

Josée often passed them on her way home, the retort loud as they practiced aiming their soot- blackened rifles in the quarry beside the main road and their stories quiet as they drank liquor in the village square. The men talked of many things, of the rotting bodies piled as high as your chest, the trenches muddy with blood, and rats scurrying along the limbs of the dead.

It wasn't long before Josée, stirring vats of pulp in the mill, heard word of men who had stumbled into the village tavern, covered in mud and dried blood. Then came others, eyes hollow, rags tied around fingers and limbs that sickness and frostbite had stolen. People started to vanish, houses dark and footsteps carved deep into the early morning snow.

Papa wanted to leave too, fear written on his face as he told Mama the story’s brought back by the hunted limbless men. She wouldn’t let him of course. “Fighting doesn't reach the countryside,” she insisted, “it stays on the battlefield.”

“In a war like this,” Papa said, the lines on his face deeper than usual, “everywhere is a battlefield.”

Josée kept her little tin close after that.

The corner store closed and Josée was forced to stand on her tiptoes and press her eyes to the crack in the shutters just to get a glimpse of her blue coat. Mama said the owners were gone for good, but Josée didn't believe her. Why would anyone leave something so beautiful behind?

The village became very quiet.

It wasn’t long before the smoke came. It rose from the west until the air was thick and frostless snow fluttered from a churning sky. The wind seemed to be filled with a haze that made breathing a dry, ash-tasting thing.

It was early morning, huddled with the remains of the village in a quiet Mass when they heard the boots, a thum thum thum like the beating of a heart.

People started to panic.

Josée was grabbed, tossed, pushed aside, the stone floor ripping the knees of her best stockings. Flames started to crackle somewhere close by, screams and laughter echoing off the church's wooden rafters. Glass shattered, people called for help, others cried in pain. Terrified and confused, Josée found a small shattered window and clambered through.

Then she ran. Past the square and the candy shop, the bakery where she ate sweet buns and the little cemetery where grandma was buried. She passed the cobblers shop and the market, and-

She skidded to a stop.

It was burning, smoke rising from the building like dark shadows in the gray sky.

The beams of the corner store creaked in the heat of the fire, flames hissing as they climbed onto the snow-covered roof. Glass crunched underfoot as she walked forward carefully and reached out a small hand. She could hear Papa's voice calling for her somewhere. Gunshots cracked from the west, echoing down the town's narrow cobblestone streets.

Everything else in the shop was ruined, nothing but goo and bubbling metal, but the blue coat, peppered with cinder marks and covered in ash, was protected in its display.

Papa found her just in time, standing in the street, face soot-stained and cheeks pink in the heat of the flames, her arms filled with her little blue coat, their once shiny buttons tarnished by smoke.

Crying with relief, papa scooped Josée in his arms and walked down the road, leaving nothing but ashes behind them.

Their family had a lot with them on that journey.

They all had their hunger and fear, the cold on the train, and the rats scuttering claws at night. Baby sister had her grating cries and papa his quiet ones. Mama had her blank eyes as they threw her body in the sea. Brother had his aching cough in their damp little apartment in Brooklyn.

And Josée had her dented can, now empty of Francs, and her once shining blue coat, now gray as the New York sky outside the steel mill.

She wore it until she couldn’t anymore. When the time came, Josée passed it down to her daughters, who passed it to hers. Time wore the fabric to dust, buttons falling through the cracks of generations. A handful remained. Then a trio. Then a pair.

When it came to me one remained, the only physical piece of Josée’s story left in the world. So I polished its faded brass and laid it on a velvet pillow. I placed it in a box and tucked it reverently under my bed in my house by the sea. My great grandmother's button.