The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (5 page)

An icy stillness held everything in suspension. When he was little and suffered night terrors, his mother would shush his screams with murmured incoherencies, her hair falling around him like a silk cocoon. Then she’d lie next to him, then fall asleep, oblivious to empty-eyed tunk-tunks and mastodons prowling and pawing in the dark corners of the room.

But when his father was home, he’d stride in, swing Simon up, and pace the floorboards, holding him tight until the world came back to itself, no matter how long it took. Then, together, waving stiff arms a few inches above the covers, they’d clear the area of whirligigs, his father’s name for night terrors, and Simon would fall back to an easy sleep, his father’s hand resting on his back. Sometimes his father was in need of comfort, but rarely, and only in the art shed, which no one could enter without permission.

Standing at the threshold once when he was small, Simon had been shocked to find his father, paintbrush clamped in his teeth, hunched over on the stool, head in his hands. Simon had summoned all his courage and whispered, “Whirligigs?” The silence in the room was so deep, his father’s acknowledgment so profound, that Simon had been unable to breathe until, without looking up, his father had thrust his arm out, and together they thrashed away at the whirligigs on the canvas, their mighty efforts securing the notion that terrors, even of monstrous proportion, could be gotten through—though perhaps only in shared company.

But Simon had outgrown whirligigs, and now he was alone.

On the day his father left for England, Simon had sat on the bed, watching him pack. Ida Corkum, his grandfather’s housekeeper since before Simon was born, had knit far too many socks, every pair in cream wool with a red and brown stripe at the top. His father plucked at them, rolling them into pairs and setting them back down. They were useless.

“Too short, aren’t they,” Simon said.

“Yep, but you can wear them in your boots and tuck the long hose over when it’s freezing.”

“But how do you keep your legs warm under a skirt?”

“Kilt, Simon. You know better. Ah, I see—making light of the uniform, eh?”

Simon smiled. “Yeah. But still, how do you?”

“A kilt is twice as thick as trousers and your legs harden from exposure, so you don’t feel the cold any more than on your hands and face. Just ask old Athol McLaren—ever see him in trousers? Besides, I’ll be indoors most of the time.”

“So . . . you’ll be in the army, but you won’t be fighting the Germans?” Simon had asked this many times, the answer never quite resolving his simultaneous disappointment and relief.

His father rolled his eyes.

“I know. Cartography.”

“Exactly. I’ll be detached from my unit and assigned to cartography in London. But the maps I make will be used at the Front. So I’ll be supporting the war.”

Simon then asked the question he hadn’t yet dared to ask. “Will Grandpa still be against the war with you in it?”

His father was quick to respond. “Of that I have no doubt. He has a right to his views. Just remember, moral certainty is a luxury of the very young and the very old.”

“Define moral certainty.” Simon had been trying this out instead of “What’s that mean?” But it struck a tone he hadn’t intended.

“Alright,” his father said slowly. “Seeing the world in black and white. How’s that?” He raked his hand through his hair and tossed three pairs of socks into the duffel bag. “Look, I know this won’t be easy on you,” he said.

He was right. There was no escaping his grandfather nor his anger over the war. He lived right up the hill, owned the land they lived on, the house they lived in—was in it as often as not, and knew everything that went on even when he wasn’t. Lately, when his grandfather chastised Simon for some minor infraction, he was Captain Bligh to Simon’s Fletcher Christian, secretly plotting a mutiny. The story of the H.M.S.
Bounty
was one he’d been told many times by his grandfather, who had no use for an officer defying his captain and setting him adrift, and by his father, who had a more sympathetic take on Mr. Christian. Simon sided with his father, but his grandfather made more of an event of the telling, filling it in with a good deal more drama and colorful detail.

His father was speaking again. “It’s fine to be against war—admirable,” he said. “But we’ve got to play the hand we’re dealt. We’re not pacifists, and neither is your grandfather, not in a formal sense anyway. I was raised to respect life, not take it, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and . . .” He whipped the bag off the bed and jerked the drawstring tight. “I have to do what
I
feel is right.” He stood staring at the bag with his hands on his hips. “I may not be cut out to be a soldier, but . . .”

Simon glanced up and took in his father’s tall, lean frame, his strong profile and broad shoulders. “What d’you mean? You’re captain of the
Lauralee
.”

“That’s right.” His father smiled at him. “But she isn’t a ship of the line, is she? I haven’t exactly been sailing under Nelson.” He sat down on the bed and put his hand on Simon’s knee as if he was going to say more. There was a long white scar that sucked the flesh down between his thumb and forefinger. He’d sliced it open freeing a line in a storm, bound it up in a rag, and never batted an eye. Even now, his father never spoke about it. Wallace was the one who filled Simon in, as he always did. “A right fine skipper,” Wallace and others who sailed with his father agreed. “
Right
fine. Knows these waters like the back of his hand. Can find his way through the thick of fog and black of night like his father before him,” Putnam Pugsley always added.

Sitting on the bed next to his father, breathing in the same air, resting comfortably in the same easy silence they shared when out on the water, Simon began to think about how much more empty the house would be with his father overseas than it was when he was up the coast. He asked what would happen to the
Lauralee
with his father gone, and would Wallace take her out.

“Wallace is looking for other work. The
Lauralee
belongs to your grandfather, and he wants out of the coastal trade.” His father ran his hand through his hair again as he always did. A thick wave of it tumbled forward.

“He’d never sell her . . . would he?” Simon whispered.

His father’s gaze shifted to the window, where the predawn sky was filling in, slate gray. “Course not,” he said after a moment. “Who’d buy her?” But his smile was strained.

“I won’t let him. I’ll see she’s hauled up proper at Mader’s ’til you get home.”

“There’s my boy. My boy of big heart, sound mind and strong body . . .”

Caught off guard by the familiar words spoken in so sad a tone, Simon felt tears well up. “Do you think Uncle Ebbin’s alive?” he whispered. “Will you come home if you find him?”

His father stood abruptly. “Christ, Simon. Why do you think I enlisted? I’m going over there to do my part.” He rifled through some papers and stuffed them in his bag. “I can’t just walk away when I feel like it, and wouldn’t want to if I could.” He stopped himself. “Sorry, son,” he said. “Sorry. Forgot who I was talking to.” Then he patted Simon’s head, which made Simon feel small and useless, so he chose that moment to say, “Since the
Lauralee
isn’t going out, how about I go out on the Banks this summer? Carl Keddy, Martin Rafuse, Daryl Nauss and a bunch of others will be out there.”
The Banks is where boys become men.
Daryl repeated this line from his old man at every opportunity.

His father’s dark eyes grew darker. “Fishing the Banks is a rough life for a boy. Backbreaking. Dangerous. Those boys have no choice. Their families need the money. Don’t romanticize it.”

“I’m not. I just want to go.”

His father nodded in appreciation. “Sure you do. Or think you do. But Banks fishing is not for you. You have other talents. You just haven’t found them yet. Besides, summer’s a long way off and right now, you’re needed here at home.” When Simon didn’t reply, his father said, “C’mon now. Chin up. I’ll write. You’ll write me back, right? Keep me posted on what you’re up to, and fill me in on Young Fred.”

“Guess we’re stuck with him forever,” Simon said with exaggerated resignation.

“Maybe. I doubt Cousin Turley is coming back anytime soon. You don’t mind, do you—sharing your room with him?”

“Nah. Every night he tells me he’s ready to sleep in the spare room
all by himself.
At least he’s not sleeping in my bed anymore.” Simon managed a grin.

“That’s right. It’s hard not having a mother. We’re all that boy has right now.”

Turley, Young Fred’s father, was a sometimes logger and a steady drinker. No one was sure when his wife died, but sometime afterwards, Turley brought the two-and-a-half-year-old Fred for an extended stay without mention of when he’d be back. Fred was now almost four. Why did everyone have to be lost? Simon wondered. His father cinched up his duffel bag. Both of them stared down at it. “Dad?” Simon said without looking up. “What if Uncle Ebbin is dead? What if—”

“No
what-ifs
. We’ll find out. Not knowing is worse than knowing, even if it’s the thing you fear most. And now,” his father pulled out his watch, “time’s running short. You’d better go get your grandfather. And, Simon? You mind what Ida says, your grandfather, too, when I’m gone. And your mother,” he added.

Simon might have liked to mind his mother, but she hardly noticed if rules were broken. The rules weren’t hers anyway.

H
IS GRANDFATHER DID
not come to say good-by at the train station in Chester. “Too hard on this old man. Too long a journey,” he said when Simon went up to fetch him—though the train station at Chester was only sixteen miles away. When Simon pleaded with him, his grandfather just stared out at the harbor. It was a beautiful morning, sharp and crisp and perfect. “I’ve said my good-by. You’d better get on. Go on, boy. Go to the station.”

“Dad’s going to find Uncle Ebbin,” Simon said, arms crossed.

His grandfather’s pitying look ushered Simon out the door.

C
AUGHT NOW IN
the threads of dream and memory, Simon huddled deeper into the quilt and rested his head on his knees and thought about France and wondered how the constellations lined up over there.

There was a globe worthy of a university library on a stand in his grandfather’s study. He and his grandfather used to navigate it together and, more often, the charts his grandfather would spread on the massive chart table. “Here,” his grandfather would say, his calloused hand over Simon’s, moving it along, “is the route Champlain took to the South Shore before it was called the South Shore and before it was Nova Scotia, before it was New Scotland. And here, settled on an island at the mouth of the St. Croix. A disaster. And here, John Cabot’s route a hundred years before. Lowered baskets like a pail down a well and scooped up cod without so much as a hook. Bottom feeders, mind—so plentiful they must have been stacked one on top of the other to find their way into buckets dropped from a deck.” The grand finale was always, “And here is Mahone Bay, most beautiful bay in the world, where God has granted us the privilege to live.”

Now they shared something else—a passion for war reports. It was serious business. He and his grandfather devoured and analyzed every scrap of news from the Front, often at cross purposes, but always enjoying their time together. Simon relished being treated with respect—enough to ignore the occasional antiwar rant. And he secretly suspected that war news was his grandfather’s way of keeping up with his father.

The previous afternoon, the paper brought news that the Canadians were massing forces in the Arras Sector at a ridge called Vimy, which no one had been able to wrest from the Germans. “The French failed to take that ridge twice in
1915
and racked up over a hundred fifty thousand casualties,” his grandfather said, lowering the paper. “My sources tell me the western slope of it is an unending graveyard. Now the French insist the Brits should try it. So the Brits have enlisted the help of our boys. Arras—that’s where your father is this very minute.” He’d rattled the paper into its folds and slapped it against the desk. “War to end all wars, eh? My God, the simple-minded lunacy of it.”