The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (54 page)

The shock of cold, a vise grip around his chest, took Simon’s breath away. He kicked hard again, and got his wind. Two strokes and he ducked under to grab the now-sinking Purdy. Down and just out of reach. He kicked hard and, clutching the back of Purdy’s sweater with two hands, hauled him up, took a breath, then dipped below and rolled him over his head, praying Purdy was alive enough to reach for the oar he knew would be there. His hand still pushing Purdy, he gave a violent kick and downward sweep of his free arm and surfaced himself. A great gasp for air. He let go of the sweater and shifted his arm up Purdy’s chest until he had the little chin in his hand. Purdy’s legs drifted along Simon’s. With his free hand Simon pulled in a sidestroke against the dark water, looking for the boat. He stroked and kicked against Purdy’s dropping body, the chin firmly in his right hand, waves washing over both of them. An oar stretched out to him—too far away. And the dory slipped by. The oar dipped in. Daryl was rowing her back. Sunshine above. Cold below, slowing him down. The dull yellow dory loomed near again. Oar in the water. Just a little farther. The knot of a line hit his head and dropped below. One hard kick and he caught it, wrapped it around his hand in a twist, then, still holding Purdy, felt himself dragged against the cold and the numbness until he was beside the hull. Daryl speared the boat hook at Purdy and caught his sweater under the armpit. Simon let go his chin clutch. Purdy rolled over. Simon found he could not reach up. Rays of sun fanned out behind the shadowed face of Zenus, who caught his wrist and put his hand on the gunwale. “We got him, we got him. Hold on, Simon,” he said.

Daryl grabbed Purdy by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants and heaved him over the rail.

“C’mon, Simon,” Zenus shouted. “We’re going to haul you in. Ready? Kick!”

No blood left in his legs. He tried to kick. He couldn’t get his breath for the cold. His hand slipped off and the boat nudged by. And then the boat was gone. And he felt himself sinking into a netherworld where action ceased. He felt bubbles as his breath escaped. A stream of bubbles encasing him in a world without sound. An emptiness. A peace. But there was something . . . a line slowly swaying in the water, brilliant white against the depths, a loop at its end, a white hole through which he saw his hand slip. Then the jerk as the line went taut and he was dragged forward, Zenus hauling the rope hand over hand, then the bump of the hull against his shoulder and Zenus grabbing him under the arms until Simon, who had no kicks left in him, somehow ended up in the boat. The downed sail and outstretched boom dipped in the water as the dory righted herself. Daryl was thwacking Purdy’s back. Water dribbled out and then a gush. Purdy coughed and sputtered and opened his eyes.

Simon hunched on the floorboards, coiled tight and shaking. Sucking air. “He’s alive!” he heard Daryl shout. “Purdy’s alive!” Slowly, Simon became aware of the motion of the boat, the sun on his back, the sound of Zenus hauling in the sail and hoisting it up the mast. Daryl was rubbing the shoulders of the blue-lipped, snuffling Purdy. “Sweet Jesus,” Daryl was saying, “thought you were done for.” He gave Purdy a rough shake. Purdy sniffed and nodded. Zenus gripped Simon’s shoulder tight as he stepped around him to shove the tiller over and turn the boat around. “We’re headed home, boys,” he said.

Simon tugged the loop of the bowline knot loose and slipped it off his wrist. Kneeling now, he watched the water drip from his hair onto the center thwart, each drop splashing and separating out into rounded beads that wobbled tremulously with the yellow of the boat, the blue of the sky—each bead catching another, inching into one.

When they were near the mouth of the cove, they saw a tender coming toward them in an awkward zigzag pattern. “Who rows like that?” Daryl snorted.

Simon squinted at the rowboat. Stood up. The eastern sun had the man, his back to them, in shadow. A man with one arm could not row. But a man with one strong arm and one weak one would row just like that. A man, he could see, as they drew closer, who had tied his right hand to the handle of the oar.

When they were at right angles to the rowboat, Zenus turned the dory sharply into the wind, so the boats were stem to stern. The sun shimmered the strip of water between them. The gap widened as they began to drift apart. Angus fumbled with the rope to free his wrist, but could not take his eyes off his son. His oar angled down in the water. At the very last moment, Simon reached out and caught it.

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have been sustained by the generosity of many people. I am grateful to all early readers of the manuscript for their valued comments and insights. It is my great good fortune to have the vision and commitment of an exceptional agent, Julie Barer, and two outstanding, experienced editors, Katie Henderson Adams at W. W. Norton and Adrienne Kerr at Penguin Canada, whose thoughtful and intelligent edits inspired me throughout. I also want to thank Dean Cooke of the Cooke Agency in Toronto for all he has done on behalf of this book in Canada. Special thanks to Ralph Getson and Cliff Zwicker at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, for their unfailing interest and assistance; to Mark Sadler and Susan Rahey of the World War I Interest Group in Halifax for their early support and to Laurel and Kathleen Walsh, whose comments on the manuscript and enthusiasm at a pivotal moment made all the difference. I thank also Rich Katz for advice on “story” and for the long-ago train trip to Ypres and all that came from it. I am indebted to the incomparable Barbara Toman, whose advice never failed and whose dedication to this book has been nothing short of extraordinary. To Jim Duffy, for whom time past is as real as time present and for whom the characters in these pages are as real as they are to me, my heartfelt thanks for taking this journey with me. I am blessed beyond measure by family and friends who have been there in countless ways, and above all by my husband, Joe Duffy—whose love is unceasing, whose faith never wavered—my constant reader, my first reader, always.

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction set during the First World War. With the exception of public figures, boatbuilders Alfred “Gaundy” Langille and Reuben Heisler, and sailmaker Randolph Stevens, all of the characters are fictional, and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is unintentional.

The time line of events on the Western Front, the physical details, casualty statistics, weaponry and tactics, the lead-up to and outcome of the raid on March
1
,
1917
, and the battle for Vimy Ridge and all references to schooner fishing are based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. Additional information was obtained during visits to the Halifax Citadel National Historic Site and the Cambridge Military Library in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia; the Vimy Ridge National Historic Site of Canada in Vimy, France; and other memorial sites on the Western Front, as well as correspondence with historians Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Robinson (retired) and Reverend Nigel Cave, who have worked closely for many years with Veterans Affairs Canada at the Vimy Memorial site.

A novel set during a major historical event must rely on current histories but also on the perceptions of those living at the time. I am especially grateful to John and Pat Noseworthy for the loan of the six-volume, limited edition
Canada in the Great War
(Various Authorities, Vols. I–VI,
Patricia Edition
, Number
942
of a set of
1
,
000
, Toronto, United Publishers of Canada,
1919
). Published a year after the war, each chapter written by an invited military or civilian official, it is an account unfiltered by time, reflecting not only the facts as they were understood then but also the language, views and sentiments of the immediate postwar period. This is true as well of official battalion histories written by eyewitnesses. Entirely different types of sources include those that help identify the intersecting dimensions of memory and myth or, as Paul Fussell writes in
The Great War and Modern Memory
(New York, Oxford University Press,
1975
), the means by which the Western Front has been “remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized.” While formal histories and stark battalion diaries present a view of the war or a given battle as an organized set piece, personal war memoirs such as William R. Bird’s
Ghosts Have Warm Hands
(Ottawa, CEF Books,
1968
), originally published in
1930
, make it clear that almost anything that could happen did; and that while no single account can capture the whole, some are better able to capture the mutability of circumstances in, as Bird puts it, “that land of topsy-turvy.”

The specific actions witnessed and committed by the book’s characters in the war and on the home front are necessarily imagined to serve the story. The towns of Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia; Reeks Cove, Newfoundland; and Astile and Saint-Junien in France are fictional, as are the No.
18
Canadian General Hospital and Happy Holly Trench and the battalion names Royal Nova Scotia Highlanders, Ottawa Rifles and McBride’s Kilties.

Of note, only certain regiments wore kilts; most wore standard uniforms. Kilted regiments, however, typically wore their kilts into battle as do the fictional Royal Nova Scotia Highlanders. With the exception of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (the “Princess Pats”), the “Van Doos” (the
22
nd) and the Kootenay (
54
th), mentioned in passing, the numbered infantry battalions referred to in this work are not among those that served in France. This was a deliberate
choice made out of respect for those who did serve with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France and their descendants. A list of the battalions that were with the Canadian Corps during the First World War can be found in
Canadian Expeditionary Force,
1914
–
1919
:
Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War
(Colonel G. W. L. Nicholson D.D., Army Historical Section, Authority of the Minister of National Defense, Ottawa, Queen’s Printer,
1962
).

My research took me to battlefield cemeteries in Belgium and France, many of which are tucked away in the undulating farm fields where battles were fought, barely visible from the sunken roads. In most there is no fanfare, no presence of any kind except the whispering wind. But the rows of white headstones, sometimes in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands, are fronted by beds of lilies, roses, iris, and poppies with not a weed or brown leaf to be seen—kept immaculate by Commonwealth War Graves Commission gardeners these nearly one hundred years later.

Standing on that ground, the trajectory of the story emerged, but I was afraid to set it at Vimy Ridge—as iconic to Canadians as Gettysburg is to Americans. Then on one of my visits to Nova Scotia, I happened to sail with an “old salt,” probably in his 80s. He asked me outright if I was going to write about Vimy. Oh no, I protested. He squinted out at the horizon and back at me. “You do it,” he said. “These young fellers forget. People forget.”

Copyright

Copyright ©
2013
by P. S. Duffy

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500
Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830

Book design by Chris Welch

Production manager: Devon Zahn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duffy, P. S.

The cartographer of no man’s land / P. S. Duffy. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978–0–87140–376–6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-87140-760-3 (e-book)

1. War and families—Fiction. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. 1. Title.

PS3604.U3786C37 2013

813’ .6—dc23

2013011166

Liveright Publishing Corporation

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT