The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (2 page)

A
NGUS WAS RIGHT
about the train. And the march. He fell in with the rest of them and they marched fifteen miles to a railhead, arriving worn and hungry. Another troop train headed to the Front was expected, they were told, in less than an hour. Chunks of bread and fruitcake were passed out. A young soldier named Mueller fell over—with exhaustion, it was thought, or too much fruitcake. But he was burning up with fever.

The promised train arrived. A space was cleared in the aisle so Mueller could lie flat. Angus helped him drink from his canteen and called for a blanket to put under his head, then found a seat next to a young lance corporal who said not a word. The train clacked on. Angus reached for a cigarette and pulled out the picture of Ebbin. He’d shown it to just about everyone he’d met, an automatic gesture that along with the words “Ever seen this man?” led to nothing, until he’d begun to feel as tattered at the edges as the photograph. In London, he’d finally bought a leather sleeve to keep it in. “Your brother?” people would ask, studying it. “Brother-in-law,” Angus would patiently explain. Angus, a head taller, with dark hair and darker eyes, bore no resemblance to the carefree, light-featured Ebbin, but “brother” might indeed have been as accurate. In the picture Angus stood, rope in hand, to the side of Ebbin on the deck of the
Lauralee
. A photographer named Klein from the States, dressed in a suit, tie askew, juggling cameras and tripod, had taken the picture and many more of Snag Harbor and the islands, hoping to turn them into picture postcards. Angus, just back from Yarmouth, was tying the boat up at Mader’s when Ebbin strolled down the wharf. The photographer instantly wanted Ebbin in the picture. Only too willing, Ebbin had hopped aboard and slung Angus’s duffel bag over his shoulder in the pose of a seaman home at last, though he was a bad sailor and prone to seasickness. Hence his grin and the wry smile on Angus’s face. The photographer wanted more pictures and suggested a sail, with Ebbin at the helm. You come along, too, he’d said to Angus as an afterthought. Ebbin had laughed out loud. Suppose we buy you a drink instead, he suggested. It’s the safer course, trust me. The photographer had readily agreed. There was a better photo, a portrait of Ebbin in uniform taken a year later, but it was this picture that Angus had chosen to bring with him.

He slipped it back in his pocket and conjured up Ebbin waving his arm in a wide arc on the gangway of the troop ship with an enthusiasm that had vanished from his letters the minute he’d hit the Front. Ebbin Hant, on the brink of promise.

“Off to save the world from the Hun,” he’d said, chin up, at the crowded Hant family dinner in Chester one Sunday in 1915. “Signed up yesterday.” He’d tousled the hair of the nearest young half-brother, but grew serious when he caught his father’s eye. At the head of the table, Amos Hant adjusted his great bulk. Chatter died out. “Well, boy, you go ahead,” Amos said slowly. Angus shot a look down the table at his own father, Duncan MacGrath, his boyish face grim.

Amos pounded the table with his ham-like fist. Plates jumped. Cider splashed. “Go ahead, by God! Blast them to Kingdom come!” He stood. “To Ebbin! Make us proud!” He raised his glass and looked round the table. “To Empire, God and King!” he bellowed.

Duncan spun a salt shaker in half-circles on the table. Hettie Ellen sat back as if she’d been shot. Everyone else, children included, raised their glasses. Stood up. “King and Country!” they said. “To Ebbin!” Ebbin cocked his head, then rose himself. “To Canada!” he said, and emptied his glass.

Angus reached for Hettie’s hand, limp at her side, but she didn’t return his squeeze and pulled away as war talk took over, as pot roast and vegetables were served up and plates passed hand to hand down the long table.

Elma Hant, at the opposite end of the table from Amos, excused herself to the kitchen. Angus found her leaning on the table, her raw-knuckled hands spread before her, head bowed. “Not to mind me,” she said, pushing away and straightening as he entered. “I’ll get over it.” She was a big woman, broad and tall. She looked out the window, slowly folding a towel. “I may not be Ebbin’s real mother, God rest her soul, but . . .”

“Ebbin can take care of himself,” Angus said.

She heaved her shoulders. “I suppose . . . Done it well enough up in the Yukon, out West.” She shook her head and met his eyes. “How’s Hettie going to manage, is what I want to know—her brother off to war? Did he think of that? And Amos. What’s to become of him if something happens? If you’d ever seen the care he took with them two as babies when he’d come to pick them up at night, scrubbing the dirt off his hands afore he touched them. Tying up their bonnet strings . . .”

Amos Hant’s thick fingers fumbling with bonnet strings made Angus say, “The war will be over soon.”

“They say by next Christmas, don’t they?” She shot him a hopeful look. “Or was that what they said last year?”

“They did, but it’ll be over soon.”

“That’s right. Long before the younger boys are of age.” She recovered herself and said, “Now. What do you need?”

“Only a fork.”

She wiped her nose and opened the cupboard drawer. “Well, that’s one need I can fix up straight away. You never ask for much, Angus.” She placed a fork in his palm and folded his fingers over it.

Late that night, back home in Snag Harbor, Angus watched Ebbin jump out of Zeb Morash’s truck at the bottom of the hill road and saunter up to the house—a dark silhouette against the moonlit water until the black spruce closed in behind him. He tried to imagine Ebbin in uniform, but couldn’t for the life of him see him succumbing to regimentation, yes sir, no sir, at the bottom of the heap.

An hour before, in the upstairs hallway, with Young Fred’s head drooping on her shoulder, Hettie Ellen had begged Angus to change Ebbin’s mind. He’s already signed up, Angus told her. There’s no changing that. She wanted him to try anyway. Thirteen years into their marriage, she remained as much Ebbin’s sister as Angus’s wife, a fact Angus accepted as part of the bargain, a price to be paid.

When Ebbin hopped up on the porch, Angus lifted the jug of rum at his feet, withdrew the cork with a satisfying
thup
, and handed it to him. Their glasses stood empty on the porch railing. “Off to save us from the Hun, eh?” Angus said.

Ebbin took a long swallow, wiped his mouth and grinned. “Someone’s got to do it,” he said. “I take it Hettie’s in bed.”

“You expect
her
to do it?”

Ebbin gave a quick laugh. He leaned back on the railing and said, “She wouldn’t talk to me after dinner. I’ll catch her in the morning. She’ll come around.”

“Doubt it. Not this time. What the hell, anyway? Were you drunk?”

“Yeah, maybe. Me and the boys had a few.” He lit a cigarette.

“Who was with you?”

“Virgil, George Mather. We’d have signed on anyway. No families of our own. Tough to justify
not
going. The Germans can’t just stomp all over Europe and claim it for themselves, for Christ sake. England’s at risk.”

They talked about the course of the war and the boys they knew who were over there. Then Ebbin tipped his head back and waved the cigarette across the night sky. “This is the shape of things to come, the grand sweep. I want to be part of it.” He paused and looked back at Angus. “Don’t tell me your old man’s got you against the war. He’s gone pacifist, hasn’t he?”

“
Gone
pacifist? Always has been. You know that.”

“I always thought that for him ‘pacifist’ was just another word for ‘anti-Empire.’ ”

“No. Maybe. Dangerous in this climate, either way.” Angus lit his own cigarette. “As for me, I’m not against the war, just you in it.”

“Yeah. I’d feel the same. I’ll tell you something, though—when I signed up, I felt different. I felt . . .” He shook his head.

Proud, Angus thought. He felt proud. Ebbin had studied law, worked for his father at the forge, and rejected both. He’d considered stage acting, but saw no future in it. He’d disappear for months at a time—working horses out West, tramping around in the wilds of northern Quebec, the Yukon. Once spending a winter in Wyoming at the base of the Beartooth Mountains with a survey team. Trailing hints of a roughshod world, he’d return with money in his pocket and stories to tell, ones that made you laugh, and ones that made you wonder—fending off a maniacal Mountie who rode into their camp bareback and backwards; sipping water from a stream so pure it tasted of earth and sky and sugar. He had Hettie’s fine features and restless nature, but unlike her had an endless store of self-confidence and an unforced, infectious optimism. Ebbin just needed to find the right opening and he’d do fine, everyone said. But Angus had seen the trace of lines around his eyes, the shadowed doubt. Now this sudden singularity of purpose. How often did that come around? Only in war perhaps. Or in love.

“Come with me, why don’t you? We’ll fight them like we did the pirates on Mountain Island,” Ebbin said. “Seriously, how long are you going to drag up and down the coast on the
Lauralee
for the old man? When are you going to escape?”

“The
Lauralee
is
my escape.”

“Not for long, eh? A fella risks his life just stepping aboard.”

“She’s not that old.” She was, of course.

“Yeah, she is. Rotting away, and you along with her. Railroads, motorized transport—that’s the ticket to trade these days.” Ebbin jabbed his cigarette at Angus. “Or so Hettie whispered to me like a sweet song yesterday.” He raised his brows in theatric exaggeration.

“Railroads? She
said
that?”

“Something like that,” Ebbin shrugged. “Thinking of the future, unlike you. Point is, coastal trade was supposed to be temporary. Remember? Yet there you are, still going, resenting every minute of it.”

“Except when I’m out there,” Angus countered.

“True enough,” Ebbin agreed.

It was true. As much as Angus resented working for his father, sailing the
Lauralee
fed something deep, made him feel part of “the grand sweep”—not of history, but of the sun’s first rays breaking over the curve of the earth, the currents below, the wind above, propelling him forward, and letting him know just how small a part of the grand sweep he was, but still—a
part
of it. Suspended, sustained in the territory beyond the points of the compass. And it was that he wanted to capture on canvas—more than capture, he wanted to let it flow through him and out and back again. God had given him talent, or maybe just the longing, but either way, not enough courage to trust it. He took another drag on his cigarette.

As if party to these thoughts, Ebbin said, “Maybe you should chuck it all, rent a garret and—”

Angus held up his hand. “Let old dreams die a good death, would you? For once?”

“Dreams never die a good death. Seabirds, seascapes. They’re so easy for you.”

“Too easy. Failures of imagination.” He’d never studied art, had never been to a museum or gallery. What he did came naturally, easily, but he wanted more than sentiment. Wanted to get down what he felt, not just copy what he saw. Wanted to capture things beyond his knowing—a unification, closely rendered, expanding out. Yet only rarely did he risk it, and all too often it left him feeling a fool.

“Weir loves your pictures,” Ebbin reminded him.

“Weir loves them because they sell. ‘Illustrations,’ he calls them, and rightly so. Sailors buy them for their mothers.”

“And that’s not enough for you—pictures that sell?”

“Sell for a song. And no.”

“What about those ones you’re afraid to show around? Why not take them to Weir?”

Angus flicked his cigarette into the yard.

Ebbin shook his head and sighed. “Always shortening sail when you could go with the full set. You make life hard. You know that, don’t you?”

“Fair enough. And you make it all seem so easy.”

“By choice! There’s always a choice. Until you decide there isn’t.”

Angus folded his arms and cocked his head. “That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Or the most profound,” Ebbin countered with a grin.

Angus returned his smile. “Hand over that jug. I’m not near drunk enough for your platitudes.”

They were next to each other now, facing the yard. After a moment Ebbin said, “I don’t know what you’re after exactly, but I know it’s more. I wouldn’t be talking this way, but with me heading off . . .”

A bat fluttered past. Angus said, “I wish you weren’t. But I know what you’re after, too.”

“Yeah? Do you?”

“Sure I do.”

Ebbin threw his arm up around Angus’s shoulder. “Remember that day we met a hundred years ago? When you were afraid to go sledding?”

“I wasn’t
afraid
. Jesus.”

“Yeah, you were. Afraid of what your old man would say, anyway. Still are, as far as I can see.”

Angus lifted the jug and took a long swallow. Golden was the memory of that overcast day on the snow-packed hillside so long ago. Angus’s mother dead a year; his father holed up on dry land, the two of them at opposite ends of the long mahogany table, night after night in silence. And then the burst of the Hant family onto the scene. Hettie Ellen, a toothpick in thick woolens and scarves, on a sled behind Tom Pugsley that day. Her shrieks echoing down the steep run ricocheted against Angus’s hesitation and longing. And Ebbin, whom he’d just met, waving his hand over his sled with a bow, saying, “She’s yours. Just steer around them two boulders. Be the ride of your life.” The dazzling smile, the gallant gesture—a perfect counterpoint to his father’s newfound adherence to an angry, puritanical Old Testament God, sucking the life out of pleasure and the pleasure out of life, which in Ebbin’s presence seemed so attainable, so utterly possible. Angus had put a cautious knee on the sled, had shot down the hill, and had the ride of his life.