His father was daydreaming again.
Marcel had been sitting at the edge of the low brick wall, watching the river rush past his dangling bare feet, when he slowly became aware that his father was no longer hacking at the bare earth of the winter garden. He twisted around and saw him leaning against the hoe, staring at the ground. His wild hair caught the sun in a strange way, casting his weathered face into shadow that contrasted sharply with his shaggy white mane. Marcel watched his father's unmoving hands, stained brown with sun and dirt, clenched about the slender wooden handle of the hoe. The knees of his gray trousers were the same shade of brown. From his darkened face, Marcel saw the gleam of his father's melancholy eyes, focused, as always, on the unobtainable past. He seemed to sense his son's gaze and blinked once, the glistening points flickering out for the briefest of moments and then fixated again in the same place.
"Your mother didn't live long enough to name you," he said softly. Marcel loved the quiet tone of his father's low voice. He knew that the man had once been a soldier, but he could not imagine that dear old face contorted into a battle cry. The loudest sound he had ever heard from that crinkled throat was a sob. The father continued. "She left it up to me. All of it. I couldn't think of a thing. She named your brother. She just held him in her arms once, a red little squalling thing, and immediately she knew what to call him. And I stood there holding you, crying just as your brother had done, hoping that she would wake up and tell me what to call you. And then Nanette was pulling me out of the room and that was the end of it. I never saw your mother again. And her father came for your brother only a few weeks later."
Marcel did not want to hear the story of his missing brother again. He dropped down off the low wall and ducked behind it, crouching in the mud only a few feet from the mighty river.
A moment later his father's tragic face appeared above him, throwing Marcel's own eyes into shadow and blocking the dull winter sun. The father reached down and lifted the boy back into the little garden, holding him firmly with his strong arms. That these same arms once supported fellow soldiers on the battlefield, Marcel could not comprehend. He laid his head on his father's broad shoulder.
"I do the best I can, son," he sighed. Marcel closed his eyes and felt himself rising and falling with his father's chest. If he moved his head just so, he could hear the faint throb of the man's heart. He put a small hand against the leathery face and found the familiar ridge of the old battle scar, a prodigious sabre cut, absently tracing it from the large forehead to the hollow cheek. "But sometimes I worry that I think so much on your poor mother and on Marius that I forget you."
Marcel was certain that this was true.