The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (50 page)

Angus closed his fingers over the tag and slipped it in his pocket. He stood as well. “Hettie,” he said, stretching out his hand. But she stepped back and turned her head away and closed her eyes. Angus let his hand drop.

She took a deep breath and, without looking at him, said, “There’s something else. Something you need to know. Something awful. I don’t know how to tell you—” She faced him. These were tears in her eyes.

“You don’t have to. I saw her. The
Lauralee
. I couldn’t have sailed her, not like this.” He nodded at his arm. “And she was in no condition anyway. We all knew that. She’s gone. Like Ebbin.”

Gone but not. Vanished but present. Dead but not buried. Not really.

Rooster shook his mane and stamped. Peg sidled up to the edge of her stall and hung her head over into his. Hettie stroked Peg’s nose, removed Rooster’s bridle, rubbed him down quickly, and fed them both oats. Refused Angus’s help. Only take a minute, she said. I’m used to it. And of course she was. Angus had barely ever ridden Rooster, let alone rubbed him down or fed him. His father and Hettie had always been in charge of the horses—just one more element of their partnership, he thought now, watching her. How deft and sure her movements were. How efficient and robust she seemed. He remembered his father telling him to give her some certainty. She had it now. She was no longer the wraith wandering the hills. The air and the smell of horses grew thick around him. He stepped outside.

She finished her tasks and joined him. He lit a cigarette and nearly offered her one. “You’ve had a lot on your shoulders,” he said, somewhat stiffly. “I’ve heard you’ve taken over the reins of Dad’s affairs. I’m proud of you. Grateful to you.”

She shrugged it off. “Keeps me going,” she said. He could imagine how her offhand manner might work in a negotiation, how it would disarm those who took it too literally.

“Keeps
us
going, from what I’ve heard.”

She cocked her head. “I was thinking,” she said softly. “With the
Lauralee
gone, and you—I’m not sure what you’d want to do, but we’ve bought up more timber. Paper mills, maybe. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

“Paper mills?” He almost laughed. And then he felt it. The cool detachment of the question.

“But what
will
you do?”

“I just got home,” he snapped.

“I know, I know,” she whispered in a soothing voice. “I’m sorry. I should have asked about what you’ve been through. But . . .” She bit her lip and looked away. “Duncan said, this pamphlet said that soldiers coming home don’t want to talk about it. If you want to—I mean, your men, they sounded a fine bunch . . . from what you wrote.”

He stopped her. “It’s alright. My father was right. The pamphlet was right.” He looked up at the purple sky, the first stars.
A fine bunch
. Conlon had warned him that stirred-up memories could overtake the physical world and pull you back. But so too could uncomprehending souls threaten that hallowed ground. “It’s getting dark,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

She hesitated, maybe waiting for him. When he didn’t move, she started down the hill. “Did you think of me?” he thought he heard her ask as she brushed past. “Yes,” he said. She was at the well by then and down the yard and into the house. And he knew he had imagined those words. “Did you think of me?” he whispered.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
with Ebbin’s tag in his hand and Havers’s cross around his neck, Angus went down to the beach below the house and sat on a boulder where he used to sit as a boy, waiting for his father to come in from the Banks. He stared out at the islands and thought about how his father would swing him up on his shoulders and parade him around the town wharf. He thought of his phalarope out there under the waves. The frigate bird he had seen gliding low over the trench in a hallucinatory moment came back to him—a bird he’d drawn from pictures, but never seen. And Paul’s pigeons circling, and moonlight glinting off a bayonet, the glaze of ice on grass, the pounding of his heart as they crawled through it, the neatly tied laces on Wickham’s upside-down boots, and Publicover’s freckles, his smile, his laugh, and Conlon’s voice breaking, his own as well, on the slow-paced drumbeat of “Brave Wolfe” one night in an
estaminet
, weeks before Vimy.
The cannon on each side did roar like thunder . . . And youths in all their pride were torn asunder . . .
Angus repeated the lines in a whisper. The charred timbers of the
Lauralee
merged with the blackened tree stumps at the riverbank so long ago. He searched the black water beyond the
Lauralee’
s empty mooring. But there was no hint of a green running light.

S
TILL LATER,
in
the bedroom, he stood over his wife, watching her breathe. Had he thought of her over there? Not often and not enough. And when he had, it was as a schoolgirl when the world had just begun. Angled across the bed, only too used to him not being in it, she lay on her back, mouth slightly open, arm flung back. He feathered a lock of her chopped hair through his fingers. Who was he to disturb such reinvention? To soil such brave efforts? Maybe she had buried Ebbin after all, and maybe half her heart with him.

Still dressed, he sat in the rocker and undid his boots. Undid his sling. The one place he had not gone in the years and years since he’d stepped off the train and into Zeb’s truck was the art shed. He pulled the faded blue and gray quilt around him and leaned back.

There’d be a stone marker on the hillside at Vimy for Lance Corporal Havers. Of that, he had no doubt. But for the rest of time, only he and two other living souls would know who was buried beneath it. And they, like Angus himself, were very far away. His arm was heavy in his lap. His shoulder ached.

T
WENTY
-S
IX

November 28
^th
, 1917

Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia

S
imon Peter pushed the shed door open. Two and a half months had come and gone since his father’s return, and he hadn’t bothered to lock it. Yet Simon had seen him go inside, swinging the lantern up the yard at night. He’d seen the rumpled quilt on the cot near the stove. The studio was dry and still—an empty husk, just like his father. Simon stepped in boldly. But once inside, he softened his steps. It remained sacred ground whether his father cared or not.

His father did not care about many things. Life went on around him, and he stared out at it through sad and vacant eyes. He dressed and shaved each morning, then sat with his knees pressed close together on the porch when the weather was fine, or by the fire when it was not. He used his good arm to move his bad one up and down in what he called “passive exercise.” He kept a book in his lap and a pair of binoculars by his side. He kept the
Lauralee’
s compass hidden away in a cupboard. He did not care to have visitors, nor go into town. He would not go out on the water, and didn’t want Simon in the dory. It wasn’t safe, he said. He would not talk about the war. He barely talked at all.

When Reverend Dimmock came that first week, saying he’d like to have a ceremony after the Sunday service to welcome the war hero home as they’d done for George Mather, his father had refused. Reverend Dimmock pleaded that it would go a long way to heal the town after the Heist affair, and that it might even bring Duncan back to the fold. Simon’s father had stood up, towering over the reverend, who cringed and held his tea biscuit up like a shield. He said that he was no hero and that Reverend Dimmock understood very little if he thought Duncan MacGrath would be placated by glorifying war in a house of God. Reverend Dimmock, red in the face, clamped on his hat and said that Angus might want to consider his own soul. His father shut the door and leaned his head against it for a long time.

Simon debated whether to tell his father what George had said about seeing Ebbin after Courcelette. When he finally did tell him, his father took a long time before responding and said something like “sometimes we see what we want to believe,” which was saying nothing and sounded eerily like George.

Ida said to give his father time. A wise woman, our Ida, his grandfather agreed. But time was running out for Mr. Heist, as the letter in Simon’s pocket proved. His father just sat in his rocker, in the shadows of the porch, refusing to help. The fact that he was a veteran and an officer wouldn’t matter to those in charge of the camp at Amherst, he said. Your grandfather has done all that could be done. And maybe Mr. Heist was better off in prison, protected there until the war was over, he said. He didn’t seem to understand what was happening to Mr. Heist. Worse, he didn’t seem angry over the injustice of it—just defeated.

Meanwhile, in prison, Mr. Heist grew more miserable and heartbroken by the day, which is why Simon was determined to send him the blue
Morpho didius
that he’d copied in meticulous detail from the picture in
Lepidoptera of Eastern North America
. In earlier letters, Mr. Heist had told him to keep working on his Greek translation. Strangely, his father had taken a fleeting interest in his translation—said a friend of his, a Captain Conlon, carried
The
Iliad
with him at the Front,
The Odyssey
, too, and quoted from them. The poets remember, he said. Simon had waited for more, but no more came. Standing right next to him, his father had already drifted away.

In his last letter from Mr. Heist, the one in Simon’s pocket, there was no reference to the suffering of Agamemnon or Troy, only to the suffering of Mr. Heist in the wretched conditions in which he found himself. He said the search for a single thing of beauty was fading and that even as he witnessed the sun’s rising and setting, he felt his eyes growing dim.

So Simon needed blue paint. The watercolors were as dried-out as the brushes, but all they needed was water to come back to life. He couldn’t send the book for fear of what might happen to it in prison. He didn’t want to rip the page out. So a drawing would have to do. He sat on the stool by the ledge and mixed the color he wanted, then filled in the black ink outline he’d made. When the paint dried, he filled the veins and tips of the wings with more black ink, leaving little spots of white, just like the pictured
Morpho
. It was a tedious process, but it gave him pleasure.

As he leaned down to replace the watercolors, a sheaf of black papers caught his eye. He picked one up and saw that the paper wasn’t black, but was nearly covered in thick rough strokes of charcoal. Had Young Fred been in the shed? Used his father’s charcoals? Simon turned it over. On the back, in a primitive hand, it said, “Deliverance,
1917
,” and then “A. A. MacGrath.” Simon rifled through the lot of them, each one signed, each one the same with the strokes leading to a point of white, perfectly round, randomly placed—about the size of a thimble in some, a jelly jar in others, a mere dot in one.

The door creaked open and in strode his grandfather, demanding to know what Simon was doing there with his father’s paints. Ignoring the question, Simon handed him the charcoal papers. His grandfather shuffled through them impatiently. “What the devil are these?”