What Is Left the Daughter (12 page)

Hans changed records and sat back on the sofa with Tilda. Again they held hands. I looked over to the front window and saw three men, all in RCN uniforms, peering inside. I recognized one as the customer who'd been in Ballade & Fugue when Hans and Randall had greeted each other in German. Each Navy man had his eyes cupped and shaded by his hands, adjusting to the interior light of the store, probably wondering why the
CLOSED
sign was up. I'm certain they could hear
La Boheme.
One face disappeared, and I noticed the front door handle being tried. Randall, Hans and Tilda were lost to the opera. And right then and there I got a sick feeling, a bad feeling, but I made no logical connections, not like in a game of Criss Cross. I thought it had to do with the uniforms, the realization that I was officially in the RCN, that I might soon be out among German U-boats and every other horror. It could have been a thousand things. Then the three Navy men disappeared.

"Randall," I said, "that
CLOSED
sign turned away a few customers, I'm afraid."

"Look at it this way," Randall said. "What if they wanted to buy
La Boheme
right when we were listening to it? I only have the one set."

When the arias ended, Randall finished filling whatever of the list he had in stock. The money Hans had in his wallet fell a little short. I was going to offer some, but Randall said, "The rest we can work out in German lessons." He gift-wrapped the records individually and wrote out a receipt.

"We should be getting back home," I said.

"What on earth for?" Tilda said, and I had no good answer.

"Want to listen to more opera?" Randall said. "Once I put the sign up, I don't take it down till morning. My hours are my own." (I saw Hans jot down that phrase in a notebook.)

But we left Halifax shortly. The recordings were on the back seat. Once in Middle Economy, we went directly to the bakery, famished. It was already closed, so Tilda used the key Cornelia had given her. When we stepped inside, we found a note:
A bit under the weather—there's half a cake on the counter.
That cake with vanilla frosting was our dinner. I left the bakery at about nine
P.M.

The next morning I was violently shaken awake. I squinted up at Uncle Donald, his unshaven face gaunt and derelict, breath like he'd been chewing sawdust. He was holding up the
Halifax Mail.
"See this, Wyatt!" he said loudly. "Right here on page two. Some Navy boys took direct action in Halifax last night." He tossed the newspaper onto my face and I heard him leave the room.

I went into the kitchen, ran cold water from the spigot and splashed some on my face, then sat with the
Mail
at the kitchen table. A headline on page two read:
POLICE INVESTIGATE BREAK-IN; THREE RCN QUESTIONED.
Underneath that: "Owner of Record Store in Serious Condition in Hospital."

Really, Marlais, I could scarcely believe my eyes. The article, which ran to two columns, informed readers that late the previous night thugs had broken into Ballade & Fugue, torn the place apart and "systematically splintered 1,789 gramophone recordings of classical music, according to owner Randall Webb's inventory." I knew it had to be those men who'd peered in through the window, the ringleader maybe the man who'd heard Hans and Randall speak German to each other. The rest of the article described how they'd attacked Randall in the storeroom, "rained blasphemies and indecencies on him, and had, in the course of a beating, broken his nose, cheekbone, and four ribs, punctured his spleen and left him with a severe concussion." It wasn't until four
A.M.
that Randall had managed to telephone the police, who immediately dispatched an ambulance. To my amazement, it was Officer Dhomnaill—I recognized his face in the photograph; he was standing in Randall's store—the newspaper quoted: "We jimmied open the door and found Mr. Webb unconscious and bleeding on the debris here in his shop."

I drove to the bakery to deliver this news to Hans and Tilda. It was already nine
A.M.
but they'd just sat down for breakfast. I'd heard rumors that newlyweds sometimes slept in like that.

I
N THE END,
the Dewis family decided not to put out the money, and Tilda lost that mourner's fee. "No good deed goes unpunished" was Cornelia's response, after she'd informed Tilda that Reverend Plumly had called to cancel her services, with apologies. "And here you'd gone and changed the date of your wedding on their behalf." Yet the same day Tilda got another offer to mourn, in the village of Lorneville.

"It's arranged through Reverend Greene at Lorneville Methodist," she said.

"Didn't he refuse to perform your wedding service?" Cornelia asked.

"One of many who did," Tilda said. "I don't have to be his best friend, I just have to work with him half an hour."

"Practical of you," Cornelia said.

Over the next few days —October 11, 12 and 13—I lived like a hermit. I pretty much kept to the house, scarcely laying eyes on my uncle, though I'd hear his truck come and go. And what I'm going to tell you about now, Marlais, which occurred on the night of October 13–14, I didn't see as a premonition at first. Yet it must've been a premonition that led me to wander into Donald and Constance's bedroom and sit on my aunt's side of the bed. I use the word "premonition" because, a few days later, an article in the
Mail
substantiated that the ferry
Caribou
had been torpedoed and sunk at about the same time of night.

I hadn't been able to sleep. My uncle was out in his shed. Sitting on the bed, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the room, then toured the ancestral portraits in frames on the walls. I looked at my aunt's hairbrush on the bureau, her hand-held mirror, the vase of dried flowers, her blue cotton bathrobe on its hook on the door. I looked out the window. The moonlit view was down the scrub pine slope, a number of ponds, a stream that eventually widened out into the Minas Basin.

There were several lights on in Betty and Abel Wickersham's house; possibly they were already up and about. I recalled how a week earlier at the post office Abel spoke to me about the change in Donald's character. "This war—all of us are coming apart at the seams," he said. "That young man from Advocate Harbor and that other from Diligent River shipped home in coffins. Fellow from Portapique, what family was he from, the Cogmanaguns, wasn't it? Reverend Witt says people need to use all the old prayers more often, but come up with some new ones, too, to fit this war in Europe. So much sadness and not always knowing what to do about it."

"I sure don't know what to do with mine," I said.

"It's nothing new to our part of Nova Scotia," Abel said. "Being from Halifax you may not know, but during the Great War not one man of conscription age from Great Village ever came back. Not a goddamn single one survived. That whole generation of men, absent like if you woke up and discovered your middle finger had disappeared. After that, if you were a young woman from Great Village wanted to marry, you looked elsewhere."

"The world's gone haywire again, Abel, hasn't it."

"Who doesn't feel that? So tell me, what gives Donald the right to poke his finger into our chests, hectoring about U-boats as he's been doing?"

"You got me there."

"Look, I've known Donald Hillyer my entire life, and I'd be the last to contend he's mild-mannered by nature. But he never used to hector like that. Understand, I'm less filing a complaint than mystified."

Moonlight flooded the wide field behind Patrick and Marcelline Bastow's house, down the road to the west of the Wickershams'. The Bastows had only their porch light on. Their son, William, served with the ambulance corps in France. Tracing their road farther west, I came to Reverend Witt's house. Witt lived alone and raised about a hundred sheep, which brought the behind-his-back comment that a Christian flock wasn't enough for him. Not more than ten days before, Reverend Witt had dropped by the house and told my aunt that Donald had asked to deliver a sermon in church.

"Donald getting up in front of all those people?" Constance said. "He couldn't have been serious."

"Here's the list he gave me of his ideas," Witt said. "See for yourself."

My aunt and I both read it. My uncle's every topic was U-boats, no surprise there. My aunt could only shake her head, incredulous, and say, "My Donald's got smoke blowing out of his ears. Tea, Reverend Witt?"

The three of us sat down for tea. Witt said, "Just so you know, I told Donald that I had sermons composed for the next long while. I could see this didn't sit well with him. He said, 'If that's the best answer you've got, I might approach churches elsewhere.'"

Now, I realize, Marlais, that human memory is an unreliable stenographer of such conversations, but you get the gist of them. The one with Abel Wickersham, the one with Reverend Witt. In fact, many of the people who'd had run-ins with Donald had come to a similar conclusion: my uncle in effect had (to paraphrase Scripture) become what he beheld—U-boat atrocities, radio war reports. He'd become those and was almost a broken man for it.

The night of October 13–14, I tried to sleep on top of the quilt on my aunt and uncle's bed, but couldn't. At first light I went to the shed to attempt to make amends, but my uncle was nowhere to be found. I killed some time — doing what, I can't remember. Around noon I drove to the bakery, and Cornelia said that early that morning Donald had dropped by for coffee. "He was on his way to get toboggan runners from the blacksmith in Truro," she said. The blacksmith's name was Steven Parish. He'd fashioned runners for my uncle for two decades, had only once raised his price, in 1934, but not before or since.

"Tilda around?" I asked.

"She and Hans went to visit Randall Webb in hospital," Cornelia said.

I got in my car and drove to Truro. My uncle's truck was at the blacksmith's shop. The shop was across the road from a restaurant that featured a view of the Tidal Bore, the berserk tide that filled the long cove in just minutes. The cove was not fifty meters from the restaurant, though locals regarded the Tidal Bore as a world-class phenomenon of nature. In fact, the restaurant, McKay's Diner, bragged-up the Tidal Bore at the top of its menu—a drawing of a couple, daredevil in a rowboat riding a tall wave, eating a big stack of pancakes. The printed motto was "Our blueberry pancakes fill you up fast." For my aunt's sixty-first birthday, January 5, 1942, we'd gone to this restaurant for breakfast, Donald and Constance, Tilda and me, and the pancakes were excellent. When Donald had started in on a story from his childhood about his competing in an ice-skating race despite a sprained ankle, my aunt said, "Husband, don't be a tidal bore." I laughed loudly, so did Tilda, and so did our waitress, who'd been refilling our coffee cups. But then the waitress asked my uncle, "Well, did you win or not?"

The sign on the door of Steven Parish's shop read
BLACKSMITH AT WORK,
and when you stepped inside, that's exactly what you found. Parish was born and raised in Truro. He was about fifty years old, handsome, with curly black hair usually tied back from his forehead with a bandanna, taut of build. He wielded the tools of his trade with precision and grace, especially considering his "youthful arthritis," as Constance called it. Anyway, when I opened the door into the heat-blast of the forge, Parish, wearing a smudged leather apron, goggles and thick asbestos gloves, saw me and walked over. He pressed the working end of a hammer against my chest and said, "Wyatt, whatever's on your mind, I wouldn't speak a single word of it to your uncle. He's in my office listening to a nightmare bulletin on the radio. So I'd get right back in your car and drive home, is my suggestion."

"How do you mean 'nightmare'?"

"German U-boat sank the
Caribou,
and Constance might've been on it, on her way home from St. John's."

Parish stepped over to a dozen or so runners leaning against the wall, tapped one with his hammer and called out, "Take these with you." He went into his office. Before he shut the door behind him, I caught a glimpse of my uncle pounding his fist on the table. His face was contorted in a way that twisted up my own stomach. I loaded the runners into the back seat of my car, then drove straight to Middle Economy.

I carried the runners into the shed and went inside the house. As it happened, Tilda had also learned from Cornelia that Donald had gone to Truro, and what with his being absent like that, she took the opportunity to gather up a few personal items from her old room. I found her there paging through
The Highland Book of Platitudes.
When she looked over and saw me in her doorway, she said, "Randall's in bad shape, every breath painful, but he says he's going to build his record shop back up from scratch, and Hans and I said we'd help."

I didn't respond.

"What's the matter, Wyatt? Don't tell me nothing, because your face is all mayday! mayday!"

I sat on the bed next to her and took her hands in mine. "Tilda," I said, "one of the ferries Aunt Constance was taking. It's called the
Caribou.
"

"Jesus wept!" She pushed me away, stood and walked to the window and stared out. "Is it sunk for certain?"

"All I know is, I went to the blacksmith's shop to try and find Donald, and when I got there, Steven Parish said a radio bulletin had come in. And he said—"

Without turning from the window, Tilda said, "What? Steven Parish said what?"

"He said the
Caribou
was lost."

"But is it for
certain
Mother was on that particular run? Those ferries, every week or twice a week or whatnot, go Newfoundland-Nova Scotia and vice versa, correct? Plus, she said she was going to be a tourist along the way, remember? Gone a month like that. Ferry after ferry."

"I didn't know her exact schedule, Tilda. I only know Aunt Constance was ticketed twice on the
Caribou.
"

Tilda took five deep breaths, counting each one out loud. "Now, here's what I'm going to do," she said. "First off, I'm going to walk to the bakery. You won't drive me, because it's a good specific distance, to allow crying. Crying about what's not yet known for certain. Because, sad as any ferry sinking is, I realize my mother might not have been on that particular
Caribou
run, right? And as we speak, she may be fully alive, laughing and smiling at the christening—but I can't for the life of me remember the date of the christening. I know she was making a stop or two along the way. Or was that on the way back?"