The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (42 page)

Conlon had written as well. The Kilties had used the map and landmarks Angus had drawn to locate and secure the Krupp howitzer at the stone barn. They’d found Publicover and the others where they’d fallen, the bodies unmolested, and buried them there together. They’d later be located and brought back for burial at Vimy. “Sam will have his stone marker, and for what it’s worth, I’m glad of it,” Conlon wrote. “I must be going soft. Get back here, would you, before I go to mush.”

I will, Angus said as he folded Jimmy’s letter. He imagined the parents back in Winnipeg, slowly opening the parcel—his mother holding his socks to her face, breathing in a last whiff of her son. Then whispering to her husband, “Look here, Alfred, a letter. One he never got to send! Our poor Jimmy.” He imagined them opening it . . . No, it wouldn’t do to send it. Not to the grieving, uncomprehending parents.

He turned down the oil lamp, sat back, and let the tears fill his eyes. Help me now, he whispered. God help me keep moving forward. The grieving parents. His father’s reaction to his own wound was something Angus tried not to imagine. The war will break you, he’d said. Or no, he hadn’t said that at all. Angus just kept imagining him saying it. Maybe to keep himself from breaking.

And Ebbin’s father. How would he face him? There’d be no marker for Ebbin Hant at Vimy. His name would be registered somewhere among the missing. A soldier without a grave. But there he’d be, forever uncelebrated beneath a marker for Lance Corporal Havers. God help me, Angus repeated. He carefully tucked the folded poem in with Jimmy’s other effects. Yes, it would go back to the parents. Maybe in a hundred years, looking back, it would mean something to someone, or maybe not, but his would not be the only tears shed over it.

A
WEEK LATER,
Angus and a small group of ambulatory patients were led down the hill by several nurses, got up in their dress blues, to the town of Saint-Junien. The Matron had ordered Angus to go—the outing considered good therapy for convalescing patients. He’d protested, but the Matron had persisted, noting he hadn’t been off the grounds since his arrival; it was therapeutic and not a choice. “Do you good,” she said.

Walking down the steep hill was not easy. A smattering of red and orange poppies bobbed on the roadside, flanked by purple delphiniums. The delphiniums were lined up in a row, as if they’d escaped from a garden but, once free, had been uncertain how else to position themselves.

At the intersection of the town’s cobblestone streets, the group prepared to go their separate ways. Brimmie pointed to a hairdresser’s shop and explained that some of the nurses would get their hair washed there. Others would be off to buy trinkets and postcards and maybe take a cup of tea. Orderlies were to accompany the men who wished to go to a hymn sing at the YMCA.

Angus declined the hymn sing, but was uncertain of where to go. He hung near the entry to the shop as the nurses exchanged greetings with Sabine, the woman who ran the place. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket. It was then he heard her name. “
Juliette
,” said Sabine, clear as day, “
ma soeur
.” He slowly lowered the cigarette. “We didn’t know you had a sister!” the nurses exclaimed. And then he saw her—carrying an immense pitcher, nodding at the women. As she set it down, she lifted her eyes to the mirror above the sink, then turned toward the open door, her eyes a mirror for his own.

In a glance, she took in his sling and said that yes, she was helping her sister, but today she’d be stopping at two o’clock to meet the
2
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40
out of Boulogne for some supplies. She did not break communion with Angus as she said this, and the nurses paused to exchange curious looks. The spin of the earth paused as well. Angus heard Brimmie say, “Indeed! Well, we’ll be long gone by then. We’re collecting our patients at two o’clock.”

T
HEY DID MEET
at the train depot as the
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40
pulled in. But not then. Not for another month. A month in which General Currie considered whether to commit the Canadian troops to another Allied push in Ypres. Third Ypres, it was called. And it had another name—Passchendaele.

It was a month in which Cobb, having forgotten his four-week deadline, decided Angus would benefit from leave—lift the spirit and might just promote his return to health.

Juliette had not visited Angus in the hospital. She must have sensed what a violation that would be. An hour after he’d left her holding the pitcher that day at the shop, he’d gone back and stood in the shadows of the connecting alley. Pink and lavender sweet peas fluttered on a vine—their scent, light as air, filling him with a temporary amnesia for the war. Behind the vines, beyond the sheltering branches of an elm, the women rubbed their hair with thick towels and then sat in a circle in the sun, each one combing the next one’s hair with wide-toothed combs. Their laughter spilled out over the dappled yard. Juliette came out the back door and through the gate and tossed a tub of wash water into the dirt lane. It raced down a gully and eddied into a sudsy pool. He backed into the shadows. She straightened, as if sensing his presence, and peered down the alley. What he saw in her face was a solace so tangible it might leave him utterly undone. He slowly turned on his heel and left her.

A
ND SO THEY
did not meet until the
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:
40
pulled into the depot a half hour late on August
10
th. With a military pass in his pocket and an uncharted course, he’d stationed himself on a wooden bench, waiting—for what, he did not know. Two trains had come and gone—one
40
hommes
, as the troop trains were called; one with civilians and soldiers both. He hadn’t bought a ticket for a ferry because the thought of being in London, tossed about in a sea of innocent civilians, was intolerable. And no one, not even a crazy one-armed Canadian lieutenant on leave, went to the Front for a visit, which is what he longed to do.

He stared at a collection of flattened cigarette butts at his feet. The train pulled in. Steam shot out as the great red and black wheels slowed to a hissing stop. Through the steam a pair of worn black boots beneath the hem of a dusky red skirt marched past, turned, and came back. He didn’t lift his eyes. He couldn’t, and so she sat down on the bench beside him. For a long time they didn’t speak. Then he found voice enough to tell her that he was on a six-day pass. She said she and Paul were living in her sister’s cottage on the coast, seven miles away, and could he make it that far? And he said, yes.

S
HE HAD A
bicycle. It wobbled and bumped on the cobblestones as he walked along, wheeling it with his good hand and somehow balancing his pack on his good shoulder. He fixed his eyes on her boots. Worn and dusty and cracked, they looked as if they’d been to the Front and back and could go again, a world away from the blue leather shoes he’d slipped onto Hettie Ellen’s arched and innocent feet.

When they approached the
charcuterie
, she took over the bicycle without apology and set it against the wall, managing to make him feel neither pitied nor ashamed. She haggled over the price of chops and sausage; he sat at a table outside the
pâtisserie
next door. He ordered a coffee and looked up at Saint-Junien’s multispired presence, dominating the end of the street. He had stopped there on his way to the station that morning. In the misty darkness of the vestibule, rows of candles on a stand illuminated the feet of an incredibly large and extremely sad Christ, hanging on the cross. The thick smell of wax sucked the oxygen from the air. There were religious paintings in ornate gilt frames along the walls—lurid scenes of violence and supplication.

Inside, instead of pews, scattered chairs took up lonely stations on a cold stone floor. The interior was immense, a sanctuary of suspended time and sorrow, misting up to a ceiling too high, too dark to see. Multiple arches framed a set of wide steps leading to a distant altar. Backing out, he was again confronted by the weary Christ who had likely grown more weary in the past three years, and maybe in the past three minutes, and who, from his expression, held out little hope for mankind. Among the flickering votives were unlit candles which Angus understood could be lit to illuminate a wish, a prayer, a hope. Praying for his recovery seemed a selfish act, given the injuries he’d witnessed—the ones that led to a tortured prayer for death. Praying for forgiveness was ludicrous. Instead, he prayed to find his way back, whatever road it might take.

Now, looking down the nearly empty street as he waited for Juliette, the sharply peaked roofs and flat fronts of its row of Flemish houses, their long unblinking windows bound by painted shutters of faded blues and yellows and greens, seemed a street-long façade, a stage set.

Juliette returned then, a bit flushed, and with her the rush of the here and now. With a trace of triumph, she handed him the sausage and chops, wrapped in brown paper and string, and he put them into the wicker bicycle basket. They walked with the bicycle between them as the cobblestones gave way to a hard-packed dirt road that took them on a southwesterly route toward the sea. Several miles later, they passed a thick woodland, alive with rustling leaves and the flick and twitter of birds on either side of the road. Cheerful poppies fluttered in the grassy ditch, and the sweet smell of wild raspberries filled the air. It was as if they’d walked into an illustrated children’s book. Beyond the wood, the road curved down onto the lonely stretch of land that led to the dunes. The sun bore down as they left the shade behind. He grew weaker and finally stopped to take a swig from his canteen. He had to angle it between his knees to unscrew the lid. She didn’t try to help. She took it when he offered it and passed it back to him to close.

The road dipped past an eclectic collection of stone and stucco cottages at the end of which she turned up a hard-packed sand path. Bound on either side by thin lengths of wire stretched between fence posts, the path ran up behind the dunes toward a bluff. Sharp sea grasses brushed his legs, but it was the barbs on the wire fencing that brought him to a stop. Fresh salt air swept down the dunes. He lifted his head. There was no sound of the sea, just the wind rushing the grasses along the tops of the great rolling dunes. No voices, no gunfire, no shells. Just wind. Salt wind. He felt himself pinwheel through space.