The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (53 page)

Angus walked down to the end of the wharf and felt a release that filled the sky. Beauty had not abandoned him. He’d abandoned it. On the battlefield he’d risked life in the midst of death. And he had not risked it since. He closed his eyes and let the stars fall around him.

B
ACK IN HIS
shed, he found himself warming tubes of paint in his hand and mixing the most perfect blues he could imagine—the near navy blue of Mahone Bay on a crisp October day, the deep violet-blue of twilight, the French blue of the shutters in Saint-Junien, the dusky iridescence of the
Morpho didius
, the sea-glass green-blue of the sea water beneath the bluffs at the cottage in France, the ice blue of Publicover’s eyes, the gray-blue of his son’s. He lifted a brush with his left hand and swirled it thick with paint. It felt awkward at first, but the strangeness of it was freeing. He righted the easel and placed a clean canvas on it and in great thick jabs began to create not a perfectly rendered reproduction, but the very truth of that blue.

What shape it took was of no interest to him, but once on the canvas, in shuttered shadows, in rounded curves of gravestones and drumlins and bird wing, it became all of those things. He worked for hours with different mixtures of color, and the more he worked, the more he felt the blood rushing, pulsing through him. Then he added a hint of green. And then he was done.

Completely spent, he slumped onto the cot in the corner and saw that the rumpled old blue and gray quilt was neatly folded at the foot, the sheet and blanket turned back, and the pillow plumped. Hettie. He ran the back of his hand gently across the pillow, and it came to him that the cot had been made up just like that, night after night.

A
T SUNRISE THE
next morning, he woke to Ida shaking him roughly. “You better wake up and see to your boy. Hettie’s off to Bridgewater. You’d better get up.”

Angus sat up and rubbed his face.

“Look here at this letter from Mr. Heist. Hettie forgot to give it to Simon yesterday, I guess. He’s read it now.” She thrust it at him. “That man never thanked him for that butterfly. Did you know that? Now he sends this letter. Says he’s not one of us.”

Angus unfolded the letter and read. In the letter Heist said he’d found new reason for hope. His new friends, Dymetro and Johann, sturdy fellows who shared potato-peeling duty with him, had rescued his spectacles when a fight broke out and mercifully taken him under their wing—a godsend, given the louts and bullies that populated the camp. They’d become followers of a Russian named Trotsky, who himself had been hauled off a ship in Halifax en route to Russia from New York and sent up to Amherst for fear that his call to overturn corrupt governments would spread. “And so it should,” he wrote. Imprisoned for a month, Trotsky had held mass meetings and garnered many followers among the prisoners. Things were going to change, and that, Mr. Heist said, had given him the courage to survive. Heist said Simon Peter probably didn’t realize how critical this moment in history was.
“
Few of your countrymen do,” he said.

Angus glanced up at Ida, and read on, picturing Heist on all fours, dodging blows, trying to reach his glasses. Heist noted he’d had to smuggle the letter out of the prison. He had friends now. And there the letter ended.

“Does my father know about this?” Angus asked hoarsely.

“No. I brought it straight to you.”

“Poor Heist.”

“Poor
Heist
?”

“Yes, poor Heist. He’s trying to survive, is all,” Angus said, standing up. “It’s what people do.” Look around you, he wanted to say. He pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and asked where Simon was.

“He took off. Who knows where. Down to Mader’s be my guess. His heart is about broke.”

“Christ,” Angus said. At the mercy of his own demons for so long, he stood there immobilized by all the ways he’d failed his son, all the ways he didn’t know him, by all his imagined efforts at protecting him from the war when the truth was he’d given him nothing to hold on to.

O
UT OF SIGHT
of the house, Simon began to run, pounding Heist into the ground with every step. All these months of defending him.
Trusting
him. He’d throw his stupid books into the bay—his butterflies and Greeks. The key to his stupid cottage. As the road came into town, Simon slowed down, feeling stupid himself. Small and stupid and pitiful—as alone as he had ever felt. He would never trust anyone or anything again. He had learned his lesson. You could count only on yourself. For months and months it had been staring him in the face, but he’d been blind to it. Well, the blinders were off now. Lesson learned. He hoped his father would leave again. Go back to Halifax, to France. Wished him back in the war, the father he’d thought he’d known but who didn’t know he was alive. At the fork in the road, he headed toward Mader’s Cove, intent on taking off in the dory on his own—anything to get away and be alone as he was meant to be. Every step of the way he recast his knowledge of his father—a man he knew he’d never really known. Thought he had, but never had. Just like Mr. Heist.

A
T
M
ADER’S
, S
IMON
found Zenus already in the dory untangling some line and Daryl Nauss on the float. His little brother Purdy was climbing in the boat. Simon took a deep breath and stared down at them from the wharf.

Zenus looked up and cocked his head. “You comin’ out with us, or would that be breaking the MacGrath law?” He shielded his eyes. “Jesus. What’s
wrong
with you?”

Simon barely rocked the boat as he stepped aboard. Daryl, heavyset, leapt in after him and the boat dipped. He punched Purdy’s leg without looking up. “Start bailing,” he said, and handed him the wooden spudgle.

Zenus grinned at Simon and set the oarlocks. “Thought your old man said the boat wasn’t seaworthy enough for you.”

“Who gives a damn what he said.” Simon took up an oar. Zenus took up the other.

They rowed away from the wharf. “Whoa. Slow down, will ya?” Zenus said to him. “You got us going in circles. Are we in a race here?” Simon didn’t answer, just slowed to match Zenus’s pace. Once they got into the rhythm of it, the boat shot forward with each long pull. To hell with Heist. To hell with his father.

They were halfway up the cove in short order, looking for hints of fresh wind in the harbor. Purdy was leaning over the bow, his leg resting on an old trawl barrel, his arm dangling to the lapping waves. Daryl, in the stern, was hooking bait from a wooden tub onto the jig lines. “There’s wind over there,” he said, nodding to the northwest, “and pollock by the lee shore of Mountain Island.”

“Are you nuts?” Zenus shook his head. “If there’s fish to be caught, they’d better be in the harbor. We haven’t got us a decent sail for this rig yet. And the wind’s barely come up.” He stopped rowing. “Uh-oh. Look there, Simon.” He pointed back to the wharf.

“Simon!” came the shout across the water. His father was waving his arm, had run to the end of the wharf.

“Keep rowing,” Simon said to Zenus. “Pretend you don’t hear him.”

Out in the harbor, they stepped the mast for the little sprit sail into a round hole in the forward seat. It caught the dust of a breeze that grew by the minute off the starboard quarter and they headed off on a close reach. Zenus managed the sheet. The others cleared the lines. Simon steered. After a time, the sail began to luff. Zenus flashed a look back at him. “You forget how to steer a boat?” he said. He pointed to leeward. “There’s where we’re headed. Remember?”

Simon nodded. He flexed his hand on the tiller, gripping it so his knuckles were white.

“Yeah. Keep us on course, would ya? Thought you were supposed to be as good as your old man,” Daryl said.

Eyeing the sail, Simon said, “Yeah, well, people aren’t what you think. Maybe he never was that good.”

Zenus coiled the anchor line and shook his head. “No idea what that means, but I’ll tell you what, boys . . .” He wiped his hands on his trousers and pulled out a leather pouch from which he withdrew a crumple of tobacco and some cigarette papers. He rolled a cigarette against his knee, licked the paper and struck it with a match. A curl of smoke rose up and dispersed to the wind. He handed it around to the others, each taking a draught in turn. “This,” Zenus said, “is about as good as it gets. We should sail her across the bay this summer.”

Purdy piped up. “Well, we would, but come summer, me and Daryl are going to be catchies on a salt banker.”

Zenus rolled his eyes. “Doubt that to be true. Bit young, aren’t you, Purdy?”

“I’m nine!” Purdy said.

Ducking beneath the boom and eyeing the water to leeward, Daryl said, “Well,
I’m
goin’ to the Banks, but Purdy here can’t go. He’ll have to wait ’cause he’s too little no matter what age he is.”

“Am not!” Purdy stood up. “Lookit here what I can do.” He passed the cigarette back to Zenus and in two seconds was teetering on the gunwale, holding on to the mast with one hand, none of which made any sense. The boat dipped to windward.

“Quit it, ya little bastard,” Daryl said on the inhale. “All you’re doing is rocking the boat.”

Simon shifted his weight to leeward to compensate. “Yeah, get down, Purdy,” he said. As if to show greater prowess, Purdy let go of the mast. Daryl tossed his cigarette and stood up to grab him. The dory lurched. Purdy smiled in triumph at his balancing act just before he bent at the knees, arms flailing like a windmill, and splashed into the dark blue chop.

“Purdy!” Daryl screamed. Simon lunged to windward and stretched an arm to the sinking Purdy as they passed. The boat rocked again. Simon pushed the tiller hard to starboard. “Coming round!” he shouted. “Mark the spot and keep it marked!”

Zenus hauled in the sail. The boat turned to the wind. The sail luffed, then whacked across the boat. Daryl ducked under the boom. Zenus eased the sheet, and the boat lumbered back toward the slapping, gasping Purdy, who rose for a second and slipped below again as Daryl shouted, “Over there! There he is!” Purdy’s hand was the last thing they saw.

Simon already had his boots off. His cap tumbled onto the seat. “When we get there, drop the sail and use the oars,” he said from under his sweater. He flung it over his head, and as the boat came close, they could see Purdy still flailing in slow motion below the clear waves. Simon, the only one who could swim, jumped in.