The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (36 page)

Simon laughed. Charlotte climbed up on the rail next to him. “I’ll get her some oilskins,” he said, “and some fishing boots!”

“That’s right. Never know when the weather’s going to turn foul,” Davy said.

“Davy, you don’t know a good day from a bad one. Never have,” Putnam said.

For Simon, it was fair weather all the way home, with Charlotte’s thigh pressing against his, strands of her hair licking his face in the wind.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT,
he let those strands of hair brush his face again, felt the smooth skin and padded tips of her fingers, the springy feel of her hands in his, her thigh pressed against his own, imagined dimpled knees. These were not the kind of thoughts to lull him to sleep. He got up and went down to the kitchen. There he found his mother in his father’s thick socks with his old plaid wool shirt over her nightgown. She had her arms stretched out along the length of the sink and was staring out the window. She didn’t move when he entered. Her chin was lifted. A portrait of solitude in the moonlight.

He coughed so as not to startle her. “You okay, Ma?” he asked.

She pushed away from the sink and slowly turned to him. “I think so. I have something to tell you. It’s taken me a long time . . . but I know now that Ebbin is dead. I can feel it.”

Simon slowly sat down.

“Dad came up to the house this morning, my dad. Gave me this.” She reached into the shirt pocket and pulled out a leather cord at the end of which dangled a round disc. “Ebbin’s tag,” she whispered. “They keep the other one for burial. Even if there is no body.” Her hands shook as she lit the candle. Simon stared at the tag nearly glowing in the candlelight. “Go on,” she said. “You can touch it.” He picked it up and ran his thumb across it. Here was the visible proof he, too, had been missing. He felt his mouth go dry and thought of crows flying.

She pulled his father’s shirt around her. The kettle was going. She took down two mugs and very deliberately sliced pats of butter and put them and some sugar and some kind of spice in each mug, and then added some rum and a good deal of hot water and a little cream on top. “Why not?” she said.

Simon took a sip. Apple rum pie without the apples, and a whole lot better. The tips of his fingers tingled. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Why not?”

His mother stared into her mug. “Ebbin and I always felt we came from somewhere else.” When she didn’t go further, he said, “Well you did. Alberta is someplace else.” He took another sip and wiped the cream off his mouth with his sleeve.

“And . . . we were both named for our mother, Ellen Langston. I look like her, which always made my father sad, and that made me sad, growing up. He was sorry for it, but he said to look at me sometimes was to see her on her little horse, her hair flying. Maybe that’s why I like riding Rooster all over. But anyway, it meant he never saw me, not really.” With her elbows on the table, she slowly stroked her temples. “When he gave me the tag, you know what my father said?” She looked up abruptly. “He said, ‘You’re alive, Hettie Ellen. We both need to bury the dead.’ ”

Simon nodded, his heart on tiptoe.

“He was right. It’s not right to give up life. Ebbin made his choice. I’m making mine. There are things I need to do.” She glanced away. “This hideous war thinks it can take everything. I’m not going to let it.”

“You’re going to become a pacifist?” Simon whispered.

“What? No. I’m going to take care of things right here. Grandpa’s letting things slide.”

“His business, you mean.”

“That’s right.”

“Are we going broke? Ida said . . . should I quit school? I can work. I can go . . .”

She dismissed this with a vague wave. “Settle down. Of course we’re not going broke. But I’ll tell you something.” She picked up the jar of strawberry jam beside the sugar bowl. “Do you know why Ida calls this ‘live jam’? Because it’s not preserved. Because even in that simple task, I fail. I only just figured out why. Because I don’t like putting up jam. Nor carrots, nor peas. I don’t like serving tea, nor gossiping over it. I don’t like blacking the stove—”

“Okay, okay. But you can’t just . . . run things.”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I? I’ve kept the books.” She swept her hair up behind her ears and let it fall. “I’ve been Ellen Langston’s daughter, Ebbin Hant’s sister, Angus MacGrath’s wife,” she said. “Now I’m going to be me, Hettie Ellen MacGrath. H. E. MacGrath. That’s how I’ve been signing the correspondence I write for your grandfather. I get good responses to my letters. And to my bills.”

“You’re going to work? Like a man?”

“Your grandfather loans us Ida. Lets us live in this house. Your father never seemed to care—out there on the
Lauralee.
But I did. And besides, maybe
I’d
have liked to have been out sailing on her.”

“But you get
seasick
.”

“That’s true,” she said, amused at herself. “The point is that I see what’s going out and coming in, and mostly it’s been going out with poor return, and I’m going to fix it.”

“But how?”

“I’m not sure yet. We need a plan. That’s what I’ve been thinking tonight. Things are changing. Branching out—investing. That sort of thing. There’s more than boats and cod—”

“You mean war buccaneering,” Simon said, folding his arms across his chest.

“Buccaneering?” She tilted her head. “Oh. Profiteering.
No, no. I can’t explain it all. I just see it.”

Simon leaned toward her. “I can help. Let me go out on the Banks this summer. I’ll give all the money to you. It’s what I want more than anything. Let me go,
please
.”

She took his hand. “Simon, Simon. I know you want to be out on the water, and maybe one day you will. I would myself if I were you. If I didn’t get seasick. But right now, I need you here.”

He looked at his hand in hers. “Do you?”

“I do,” she said. But she wasn’t really speaking to him. She was staring at Ebbin’s tag. She lifted it gently and put it in her pocket, then got up and set her mug in the sink. Standing, Simon took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Then he closed his eyes and gulped down the rest of his buttered rum.

E
IGHTEEN

April 17
^th
, 1917

No. 18 Canadian General Hospital

Saint-Junien, France

A
bove him the ceiling, dim and white, high and arched, seemed an overcast sky, but globes of light spread out into separate suns, attached, he saw, to an iron chandelier. Was it swaying? He closed his eyes and immediately snapped them open. He concentrated on colors—blue and white next to him. A white curtain? No, an apron—stiff, starched, and bibbed over a blue dress. And a white muslin headdress above, crisply folded below the ears, framing the face. The face was speaking.

“Welcome back, Lieutenant,” it said. A clean face, startling and disturbing in its beauty. “You’ve come round. Good.” Blue and white. Bluebirds, they called them, the Canadian military nurses. The voice and the face vanished, replaced by a row of cots to his left. Above, a gallery and banister. More cots up there, and mattresses lined up on the floor. He heard whimpering and crying out, orders given, and hushed responses. Sunlight streamed through arched windows behind the gallery down to the lower level. It dappled his blanket. What country was he in? Where were his men?

The nurse, whose name was Lydia Lovell, told him he was in a Canadian military hospital in Saint-Junien, between Calais and Étaples, just across the Channel from England. His chest wound was septic and nothing could be done about his shoulder until the infection cleared. “I’ll just see to that wound now,” she said.

“Where’s Conlon?” he demanded.

She stuck a thermometer in his mouth and pulled back the sheet and wool blanket and unbuttoned his pajama top. His right arm was not in the sleeve. It was propped on a pillow, in padded bandages except for the fingers. His shoulder was taped up with gauze dressings. As she worked at the bandage, the nurse said: “I don’t know where this Conlon of yours is. You called out his name any number of times over the last day and a half. His and others. I’ll see if he’s among the wounded if you give me his full name and rank.”

She was an idiot. That much was clear. Beautiful, but an idiot. Conlon hadn’t been wounded. He’d squatted next to the stretcher at the camp and given Angus water. Angus remembered how thick his tongue had felt, remembered asking about Publicover and Ebbin. Ebbin! Had he said Ebbin’s name?

He ripped the thermometer out of his mouth. “I’ve got to find Conlon.”

“Be still!” She thrust the thermometer in again and told him to close his mouth. He clamped his lips over it. She checked his pulse and finally withdrew the thermometer.

“How soon can I get back to the Front?” Angus asked.

“Back to the Front? I hardly think so. Let me finish this dressing now.”

“No. Yes! Go ahead. But then I’ll need my clothes—I’m an officer. I need to get back to my unit.”

“Lieutenant, you do not outrank me, you’ll notice. And as to going back to the Front, I’m afraid you wouldn’t make it to the end of your bed.” She dropped a putrid dressing into a metal bowl.

Pain flamed through him. He started to shake. The nurse dropped her scissors on the cart and pressed one hand on his forehead and the other under his neck. Her hands were cool and firm. She didn’t move her eyes from his. “You will find him and your men when you’re ready.” Minutes seemed to pass. His trembling subsided and he sank into a leaden fatigue.

“There,” she murmured. “You need to get well before you can do anything else. All right? I’ll get another blanket.”

As soon as she left, he forced himself to sit up. It was then that he realized his arm, his right arm, wasn’t moving. The bayonet had gone in just below his shoulder. He couldn’t feel his arm. He followed its length down to the hand, lying palm-up on the pillow by his side. He willed his fingers to curl, to straighten, but they did not. He willed his wrist to lift the hand, but it remained still. He willed his shoulder to raise the arm, but nothing happened. Worse, it seemed to belong to someone else. He ripped back the blanket—his legs. Still there, thank God. He swung them over the cot and planted both feet on the stone floor. His right arm rolled off the pillow like an anchor. He gripped the bed frame, too dizzy to stand, then bent over and heaved. Nothing came up. He fell back. He wanted to weep.

He barely heard the nurse scolding him, a different one this time, tall, her eyes hidden by the glare on her frameless spectacles. She got him under the covers and placed the arm properly on its pillow. To his right a great commotion started up. A soldier was in convulsions that would not stop, until they did, and he was dead.

Angus turned away. “Shrap in the head,” the man in the next cot said. “Been doing that for over a day. Jerking like that. A goner now, poor chap. Or lucky bastard, depending. How about you? You’ve been yelling up a storm. Who’s this Ebbin? And ‘Sam, Sam,’ you kept saying. Peter. Simon. Hattie. A raft of names.”

Angus did not trust himself to speak, but the man persisted. “Shot through the arm, were you? Can’t move it, eh?”

“No,” Angus whispered. He felt he should ask the man about his wounds, but he was too busy clawing at fragments. Debris shooting out from the loft. The tree flaring up like a matchstick. Publicover rounding the barn. The bloodied Bowie next to him. Publicover. Conlon’s tortured disbelief when he saw Publicover was dead.

And Ebbin. And now he remembered Conlon’s words.
You were right about Havers. Must have had a death wish.
A shudder raced through him.

“Got the willies, eh? You’ll get through them,” the man said in a kindly tone. “This is my third time in hospital. Sent back every time. I’ll have to lose my leg or my mind to get sent home. Wait. I think I did that already. Know how I can tell? I don’t bloody care if they send me home or not.” He tried a laugh.

Angus shut his eyes. He prayed he’d never open them. Everything was shutting down. He reached over the side of the dory and gathered up a handful of water and held ripples of sunlight in his palm. But the water slipped through his fingers, stiff and bloody, and sloshed beneath the floor boards. And he looked up empty-handed at his young son.