Hero (2 page)

I jump in my chair as his eyes suddenly open, staring upwards, unseeing, I think. The colour of his irises—virgin, crystal blue—evokes visions wildly at odds with the man before me: dolphins cavorting in a glistening Mediterranean summer, windmills rotating against an infinite, cloudless sky. Pin-prick pupils seem to search the ceiling, for a moment retrieving some slender threads of consciousness. I shrink with each hammer-blow from my chest, terrified that his head will turn towards me; that his unmoving limbs will slide into motion under the sheets, hands burrowing into the open; that the torso will curl at the waist and he will rise and take the shape he had cast off forever—the indomitable Kean, he who met enquiry with defiance, curses with indignation, he who turned mothers' tears to effrontery.

I watch closely, ready to spring for the door. The eyes do not—cannot, perhaps—move from the ceiling. There's a gurgling in his throat. A new fear comes upon me. If he chokes and dies, I may be tried as a murderer; I will be a murderer. The small number of days stolen don't mitigate the crime, nor does the dismal, foolish nature of the act. Part of me wants to lurch forward, plunge my fingers between his gums, and rescue the ice, but I'm held by reluctance to touch him again. The fact he is, after a fashion, awake, holds me back.

A door, the nurses' staff room again, comes open, and Bing comes wafting upon the sterilized air. There's the brief patter of footsteps, then silence save for the music. The women's chorus has taken over for the moment.
Jonah in the whale, Noah
in the ark
, they sing in close harmony.

The footsteps come again, and with no other warning the door opens.

“Still here, Mrs. Evans?” asks Peggy. The tone is exactly the same as usual. She comes between me and her patient. She lifts his wrist and looks at her watch.

Kean's eyes are still open. There's the dribble of melted ice on his chin, and still the odd gurgling sound, but Peggy doesn't seem to notice. It occurs to me that her playing the same record over and over, her observance of the same dull routine, the same conversations, must all be part of her same extraordinarily over-ritualizing nature. Before I have much of a chance to fear discovery, she has turned, scribbled something on the chart at the foot of his bed, and left.

Alone with the old man again, I scoop up another ice block. This time it slips from my fingers and drops onto the hard floor. Suddenly drained and sagging, I pick up my purse, rise from my seat, and shuffle out into the corridor.

CHAPTER 2

A
clump of American soldiers emerges from a Duckworth Street restaurant, laughing, lighting up. One of them glances at me—a forlorn figure round-shouldered and solemn in front of the war memorial—then looks away again quickly, guilty perhaps that he has survived, that he awaits only the bureaucracy of demobilization to get him home.

I stare at the monument's iron figures—young men with square jaws and fixed, determined attitudes brandishing, in turn, pick, rifle, and baton. Time, I realize, has reduced me even more surely than it has reduced Abram Kean. Many years ago I threw myself in front of a train to rescue a child's rag doll. This was once the measure of a reckless act. I was ashamed enough of the episode at the time, but now I am in awe. What would that brave young woman think to see her forty-seven-year-old self trying to torture an eighty-nine-year-old man with a block of ice?

Age changes everything. Would the monument stir the blood if the faces before me were lined, their backs arched, and their joints swollen? It's curious, this magic of youth that's supposed to make anything—even wasteful, criminal death— glorious and exciting.

This place always draws me. But it's not for my first husband, Jack, or my brothers, Michael and Jimmy, that I'm here. There are better ways to mourn the Newfoundlanders lost at Beaumont-Hamel than staring at metal men with flint-like brows—creatures cast in the very image of the weaponry they have been made to wield. It must be the mystery of it all that draws me, how this all came to be, how soft flesh is over and over again persuaded to charge into the chaos of flying steel, how even the monuments we construct in honour of the dead conspire to reverse the very significance of mourning, to make war seem part of a natural course. The iron men in front of me were designed for war. Jack, Michael, and Jimmy were not. They all seem little more than boys now, cavorting on the far horizon of time. Even the parade, the ceremonial drills, and the cheering on the banks of Quidi Vidi Lake seem like the innocent adventures of childhood.

Each time I come here I feel like I'm facing an unendurable truth that part of me insists I confront. Was it merely coincidence or some malevolent angel on my shoulder that brought me back on the last day of June in 1924, the very day before this memorial's inauguration? With little else to do, I attended the event, though something, no more than a slight tingle in my bones, was already warning me off.

Field Marshal Haig, the architect of the Somme's infantry disaster, was in town to lay the first wreath. My reaction to this news was amazement. How could he show his face here? How could he show his face anywhere for that matter? But I soon found it wasn't Haig's presence that worried me. It was the acceptance of the unacceptable. It was like watching my countrymen walking gleefully into a raging wall of flame. The newspapers greeted his visit as an honour. I felt no itch of dissent in those around me. Something honeyed and mellow dwelt in the voice of Patricia, my cousin—and, I hoped, temporarily, landlady—when she mentioned him. It was more than forgiveness, distinct from acceptance or reconciliation. The outward rush of air that accompanied the name Haig was laced with the fragrance of lipstick and another quality I hesitated to name. But it was yielding and soft, without grudge or briar of any kind. Only as I was en route to the event and it was too late to back out did I identify the emotion in Patricia's half-whisper: gratitude. He had noticed us. We were on the map of the British High Command. The dead and grieving of Newfoundland were worth a few days' sea journey for an important man.

The old me—the one capable of arguing—was afraid of what I might do as we shuffled into place among the waiting crowds. Hundreds, some in ranks and in uniform, stood in the series of horseshoe rings of paving laid into the green below the monument. Those who had served stood at attention. We civilians were almost as solemn, and my eyes surveyed the dignitaries in attendance for a broad, rather proud face that matched the photographs I had seen of Haig. I settled upon one of several in uniform to whom the others—even our mayor and prime minister—seemed to defer in whispers and slight nods.

When the intelligence buzzed through the multitudes that the moment was upon us, the crowd seemed to hold its collective breath. You could hear the whoosh of fabric against skin as Haig moved towards the monument and bent to lay the first wreath. The bright sun played upon the ribbons and gold on his chest. He stood slowly, saluted, and back-stepped into position. Still, no one spoke or coughed, and I felt not even the mosquito stir of movement at either elbow, just the sense of focus upon the proud iron figures of the monument, the dark wreath, and Haig.

There was the faint tickle of leaves behind us, and the hope fluttered inside me that the apathy and despair from which I had been running for so long might be on the verge of breaking. Not everyone was like Patricia, after all. The lengthy silence might not spell respect for Haig. The hush might be a dim but growing awareness of some violent effrontery, the steady, noiseless withdrawal of a wave before the crash. But something extra was needed to unleash this force.
He is the one!
I felt like shouting.
It was he who sent them all—your sons, your husbands,
your brothers—to their certain deaths!

But silence hung like a canopy. Save for the faintest ripple of loose skin as his jaw clenched, Haig stood as still as the statues. A bugle played, its notes dipping and rising. A breeze played upon a lady's feather hat and two men watched from high on a roof overlooking Duckworth Street. I itched for one of them to reach inside his jacket. But they remained erect and respectful, despite their unorthodox vantage point. As the ceremony moved towards its conclusion, I realized that anger, grief, desolation, and pain had been transformed as if by magic into a permanent hushed respect for the very act of war that had brought it all about. Who was I to complain? In the end I had acted like all the others, silent and acquiescent, and to all appearances, admiring of the man who had taken centre stage.

I left the place in a sea of self-disgust. Despite, or perhaps because of, an aching loneliness that had descended upon my shoulders, I walked arm-in-arm with Patricia. Patricia was at least human. She wasn't some representation of humanity moulded in iron and set, pick, baton, or rifle in hand, upon a concrete pedestal. I caught the warmth of her arm through the fabric of her blouse, and knew she had also lost a brother at Beaumont-Hamel. How could I criticize when I had no alternative to offer? She had been offered a sweet pill of consolation, an escape from the despairing thoughts of futile, pointless slaughter, and she had taken it.

I listened to the double-beat of our footsteps, mine echoing Patricia's, and for a while failed to notice that my cousin had been talking to someone on her left. Patricia half-turned and nudged me with her elbow.

“Elsa,” she said, and her brown eyes seemed suddenly large, conveying an obligation to be polite. “You remember Fred Evans, Noah's brother.”

Noah Evans was a thread that ran through to my earliest years, one temporarily unhooked by the war, my widowhood, and my time away. While the name chimed like a once-loved bell, I could recall only the shape of things but not the details. “Noah,” I said decisively, following the thread through to its abrupt and terrible end. I looked across Patricia at a tall, thin man. Adding hair to his shining temples, flesh and colour to his cheek, I recreated the older brother of the childhood friend with whom I had spent happy months in Bonavista.

He caught my eye.

“I'm glad to see you again, Miss Walsh,” he said with a touch of nervousness around his mouth. “Another sad day for sure.”

There was something about the air around the near stranger I recognized, tightness in the face, a vague sense of burden around the shoulders. Our meeting glances seemed to acknowledge this too.

Another sad day
, he had said.

The words flapped in my ears like the wings of a mournful crow. Sad, not warm or comforting. There was no room for pride or valour in a leaden word like sad. With the single-minded treachery of the lost, my attention changed focus from Patricia to Fred Evans.

Another
, he had said.
Another sad day
. So this was not an aberration, but part of a pattern.

In three short words Fred Evans had come closer to giving form to the very essence of my grief and isolation than any person within the last year. Noah had died not in the war but on the ice. But his death was a prelude to the great catastrophe, the thunderclap before a storm. The two events—the disaster of sealers lost on the
Newfoundland
and the Great War itself— were part of the same desolate pointlessness: men with picks, men with rifles, men with clubs, men cutting through wire making their way into no man's land, men tramping through snow, jumping from ice pan to ice pan. Men eschewing safety and dry land, turning their backs on their families and communities, turning from real life to reach for imagined glory. In neither case was it a single event, a ship without wireless, a battle plan that didn't work. It was something more, either a kink in the divine plan or a mistake in evolution. It was something that Fred Evans and I understood. Or so it seemed then.

Another sad day
.

What a dreadful disservice to a man to lay so much expectation on three words.

CHAPTER 3

B
lue smoke rises from Fred's pipe and his heavily veined forearms, exposed by his rolled-up sleeves, ripple in concentration. He doesn't look up as I enter, but the newspaper crackles, warding off interruption. Heaviness moves in my chest as I go to the sink, fill the kettle at the tap, and place it on the hot plate. A peek over his shoulder reveals that my husband of twenty years is reading the obituaries, and I feel a swift tug of envy for those whose lives have been levelled at last into painless paper and ink.

Shaking his head, he sighs but still doesn't look up. “A great man.”

He continues reading.

Fred has remained a man of few words, but he has a knack for making them count. His brief statements always stir a hundred questions; they are profound by default.

The kettle starts to whistle behind me.

“Who's died?” I ask at last.

“The greatest sealer who ever lived.”

He flaps the paper, folding the page over which the article continues.

I turn again and attend to the kettle, sloshing hot water into the teapot, swirling it around and pouring it into the sink, and then stretch up to the high shelf for the tea caddy.

“Kean?” My voice is soft, unnatural, as I start spooning tea into the pot.

“Who else?”

It is not a question but a statement of defiance. I think of the times: I left the hospital at three. The newspaper is printed…when? I used to know these things. Patricia's nephew was a reporter for a time. My hand wavers as the water streams in a hesitant ribbon from the kettle into the pot. Rising steam stings the hairs on the back of my hand, and I replace the pot's lid with a double clug.

“When did he die?” I wipe my hands on the tea towel, then turn and lean back against the oven rail.

“Yesterday.”

“I imagine you'll pay your respects.”

“All decent people will.”

I know he must have finished Kean's obituary by now. But his frown remains on the page.

“Some people didn't like him.”