The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (17 page)

He dropped a coin on the table, and half an hour later the strains of “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven” pulled him like the tightening loop of a bow line knot into the YMCA hut where a hymn sing was in progress. Inside, soldiers and nurses, their voices a robust chorus, nearly drowned out the piano. “Alleluia! Alleluia! Praise the everlasting King!” The echo of home in their every note.

The chaplain he’d met on the hill faced the crowd and sang out the lyrics by heart. An old sergeant sidled over to share his hymnal with Angus. Angus shook his head, but could not turn away from the purity of that gesture. He took up his half of the hymnbook as the third verse began:

“
Father-like he tends and spares us,

Well our feeble frame he knows.
”

How he had failed Ebbin, failed Hettie. Failed himself.

“
In his hand he gently bears us,

Rescues us from all our foes.

Alleluia! Alleluia!

Widely yet his mercy flows.
”

Where was God’s rescue, God’s mercy? Or was death the rescue—and the mercy? He’d never know, and not knowing was as unbearable as knowing. Angus folded his side of the hymnal into the old soldier’s hand as gently as he could. Then he was out in the cold air again where he could walk and not stop.

On the furthest reaches of Astile, on a road he did not recognize, he stopped. There, a shallow stream, filmed by ice, met a frozen pond. Sparrows flitted through the leafless thicket. He turned up his collar. Above him the sky was bled white, as drained of color as his mother’s lips and the white of her startled eyes before Dr. Woodruff gently closed them forever. He could see his father leaning his head against the wall as Ida cradled the dead baby with a blanket over its face, as if to protect it from the pain its birth had unleashed. Still and pale, white and lifeless, his mother was lowered into the soft spring earth, and with her, his father’s joy and ease of being. He remembered his father coming back from the Banks months later with a stunned look in his eye, a rigid determination to reverse his fortunes, and the arrogance to believe he could.

What hubris, what lunacy had led Angus to think he could find Ebbin, to rescue him? He tried to imagine Ebbin’s last moments, but could not. What came to him was the image of Hettie getting the news. He had to get word to her before the War Department did. On his knees, rocking back and forth, he composed and recomposed the telegram until it, too, meant nothing

L
ATE THAT NIGHT,
long after he’d sent the telegram and checked on his men, long after he’d taught his classes with the fervor and precision of someone desperate to keep from thinking, he staggered back to the house, where he was met by Juliette. She caught her breath at the sight of him. “
Ton frère?
”

“Frère-in-law.
Le frère de ma femme
,” he corrected her, as if it mattered.

“
Il est mort?
”

Angus told her the body had not been found. Only the tags. Ebbin was now officially declared dead. She leaned over slightly, arms around her waist. He took her elbows, then her hands, dry as paper, and lifted her upright and into his arms, rocking her in his embrace, staring over her head down the dark hallway. “
Mort?
I don’t know,” he whispered.

She pulled away and searched his eyes.

“Wishful thinking. Idiotic.” He let her go and rubbed his face and paced about in agitation, hands on his hips. “It’s just with no body, I keep thinking, which is the problem, I know, but I keep thinking he just walked away somehow. Left his tags. Maybe he’s a deserter, though it doesn’t figure. And how the hell would he have slipped away in the middle of a battle? Or maybe that’s the perfect time. But where would he go? And why didn’t he write for all those months before Courcelette?” He stopped when he caught her expression. “You must think I’m crazy,” he said. “You’re probably right.”

She shook her head no, but in her eyes there was something—pity maybe, or no—compassion.

T
HAT NIGHT, ON
top of the too soft, too clean bed, fully clothed except for his boots, with Publicover curled like a baby against him and moonlight spilling a filigree of light and shadow through the lace, Angus thought back to Mitchell Finch, whose wife fell off a boat in Shelburne. Her body was never recovered, and for years afterwards, Mitch would say, “Jenny’s down to her folks in Shelburne. Back any day now.”

Angus swung off the bed, walked soundlessly to the window and dug in the pocket of his jacket for the cross.
ELH
. Ebbin Langston Hant. After all those years of indifference, Ebbin had gone out and bought a cross. Had it inscribed. An expression of faith, or a hope that faith would follow? He put the chain around his neck and let the cross slip down his chest. The Ebbin he’d known nearly all his life had gone down a rabbit hole and vanished. Dead, yes, he was dead by all accounts. But his fate remained unknown.

S
EVEN

February 21
^st
, 1917

Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia

S
imon heard the creak of the wheels before he saw George. George was pushing his wheelchair hard, back and forth, appearing and disappearing in the doorway to the kitchen. Simon felt a wave of nausea—maybe from the smell of cabbage boiling on the stove—but even from the hall, he could sense the menace in George’s wheeled pacing. George was raw-boned and broad-shouldered. People said he’d turned mean since he came back from the Front. Simon wished George’s mother would hurry up with the mufflers he was there to collect. Suddenly, George whipped around and faced him.

“That Peg o’ My Heart you came on?” he rasped. Simon nodded nervously. As if in answer, Peg whinnied softly outside.

“Heart-broke. Horses worked to shivering death.”

“What?” Simon asked reflexively. He looked anxiously down the hall.

“Flog them, lash them. Orders! Eyes bulging—pull our guns and shells through the mud ’til they’re too done-in to eat the oats we give them. Broke their hearts, is what.” George wheeled past Simon to gaze at Peg tied to the fence post. “Peg o’ My Heart,” he whispered, then stiffened and sat bolt upright. “Shoot them when they get like that. Wet flanks crying in the rain. None buried. No time for that. Flog more into action.” He clenched his fist and kept his eyes on Peg.

“That you, Simon? I’m coming!” George’s mother came in with a stack of mufflers. “Or, George, was that you?” To Simon she said, “Goodness. He don’t talk for a week or two and then just starts in straight out of the blue. And then we have a right good conversation, don’t we, George?” She put the mufflers down and shook out an afghan. George shoved her away when she tried to put it over his knees. Simon caught her hand to steady her. “Don’t talk much, but he’s strong. Eats like a horse,” she said, flushed and flustered. “George? This is Simon Peter MacGrath. Remember him?”

George gave her a murderous glance and grabbed his crutches. He pulled himself to a stand and thumped back to the kitchen. At the door, he twisted around. “I’ve got fourteen coins in fourteen boxes for boys just like you,” he said.

Mrs. Mather stood still as a statue, then shoved the mufflers at Simon. “Twenty-five years old and not a friend to his name,” she said. “You ask Lady Bromley what good are neck warmers when a decent boy comes back like that?” Simon backed out the door. “Ask her!” The words rang in his ears as he leapt over the steps and set Peg to a fast clip back along Owl’s Head Road.

D
UNCAN SNAPPED HIS
napkin and then folded it with the care he’d apply to furling a foresail. “What news of Angus?” he asked, as he always did, as if inquiring about the fate of colonists in a foreign land.

Hettie stared out the kitchen window. “Letters take two weeks,” she sighed.

Simon stared at his plate and imagined horses too worn out to eat. He quietly scraped his cabbage into the napkin on his lap where it collected into a wet lump and drained onto his trousers. Duncan tapped his mouth with his fingers. Then he slapped his thigh and opened his arms. Young Fred slipped from his seat and hopped into Duncan’s lap. Simon dumped his sodden cabbage in the compost pail.

“That’s my boy, Young Fred. Now, what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Simon made me a sword to stab sea monsters. Plus, I don’t like slush.”

“Lately hasn’t wanted to get his boots dirty,” Hettie said with a wink at Young Fred.

“Ah. Well now, we’ll have to get you some good fishing boots to deal with that slush, eh?” Duncan pulled out his pocket watch and looked at Hettie. “And what do we hear of Turley?” Young Fred clicked the latch. The watch sprung open.

“Hmmm?” Hettie said, straightening up. “What?”

“Turley! Damn it, I’m asking you about Turley. Your cousin. Fred’s father. Have you
heard
from him?”

Hettie swept up her plate and scraped the remains into a bowl at the sink. “No. Don’t expect to. He’s up in Labrador.”

“Labrador? What’s he doing up there? Still no interest in what happens to the boy?”

“For heaven sake, Duncan!”

“What, you think the boy hasn’t wondered? My God, Hettie. His father’s a failure. You want him to grow up to be one, too? You need to be honest. Let him know what it takes to get along in the world. Backbone. Straight living, eh, now, Fred?”

“He’s four, Duncan.”

“Nearly five!” Young Fred piped up.

“You just turned four last month,” Simon said.

“See?” Hettie frowned at Duncan.

Duncan sighed. “Doesn’t matter how old he is. At least he’s thinking along the right lines. Right, Fred?”

“My pencil people need a new Dad,” Young Fred said, hopping down.

Hettie patted his head and lifted him into her lap. “You have a father,” she said. “He’s just away right now.”

Young Fred buried his face against her. “Not me. My pencil people.” He sat up and glanced longingly at the three pencils lined up next to his plate, then wriggled down and took them under the table.

“Well, now,” Duncan said, leaning down at him. “Suppose you enlist your stick people to help with the dishes, eh? Hard work, that’s what stick people need. Gets their mind off things.” He grunted as he rose from the table. “I’ll take my pipe in the parlor and a mug of this coffee, if we can call it that.” He winked at Hettie. “C’mon, Simon Peter.”