The O'Briens (33 page)

Reprieve

C
oming through
the White Mountains Joe told her he was going to order a new sailboat, a thirty-nine-foot knockabout yawl, L. Francis Herreshoff design, to be built at Hodgdon's boatyard in East Boothbay as soon as the war was over. “It's the type of boat Mike and I can sail to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, or the Bahamas, for that matter.”

The Hodgdon yard was accepting civilian orders though nothing could be built until after the war. She and Joe had only begun using that phrase —
after the war
— since Mike's wounding. Why? Had the war changed when their son was hit? No. There was the German defeat at Stalingrad, Germans were on the run in North Africa, but it was still the same struggle all over the world, millions suffering, fighting, dying, being herded and slaughtered.

Had Joe changed? No. Joe had hated the war right from the start. Before they got the news about Mike she'd overheard him say to Elise, “Did it ever occur to you that war is a sickness and everyone in war is a patient?”

Through the winter they had received bright, terse letters from the nursing sister at the New Zealand Army Hospital in Egypt, documenting their son's recovery. And in March a letter in Mike's own hand, assuring them that he was one hundred percent fit. Was this possible? The war had gone after her son, damaged his beautiful body, punctured him. His body had healed in Egypt and he had been returned to active duty, in Tunisia, though not as a pilot.

I'm a staff wallah now, Tac Ops (Air). Flying a desk at 8th Army HQ Tunis. I carry a briefcase to work. I really do.

Everyone, including Mike himself, could — must — try to pretend he was the same. But of course he wasn't, could not possibly be.

Iseult had always felt the war had to be fought. But this war had grown too large for that one little word,
war
. It could not be contained; that seemed to be its essence. And ever since those scraps of steel and Plexiglas had ruptured her son's body, broken his skin, clawed him out of the sky, the war had found its way inside her like some poison gas accidentally inhaled, or a dose of the wrong medicine, a shot of the wrong serum. All winter, the swollen war had been making her ill and weak.

~

Joe had asked their Maine caretaker, Hiram Pinkham, to switch on the electricity, and there was enough hot water brewed for a bath. There was no point in opening up the whole house since it was unlikely to be used again over the summer — they were all too busy in Montreal. Margo ran a canteen for soldiers at Windsor Station and Frankie was at RAF Ferry Command in the Mount Royal Hotel, flirting with pilots and booking seats for politicians and generals flying back and forth across the Atlantic on bombers. Joe's firm was building airfields in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, an enormous dry dock at Halifax, and a navy fuelling station at St. John's. Iseult spent at least two days a week at the clinics in Sainte-Cunégonde and Maisonneuve and had agreed to spend most of July motoring around Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes advising local committees raising money to aid soldiers' families.

The Kennebunk house smelled musty when they arrived. Most of the storm shutters were still closed, mattresses were folded on bedsprings, and the living-room furniture was covered with bed sheets. While Joe lit fires, Iseult opened windows in a few rooms. Fog lay on the beach and the breakwater and she could not see the ocean.

The war wasn't over but the world had been at least partially restored. Mike was safe. So was Johnny Taschereau, at least for now, though three years' separation from her husband was gnawing at Margo. Johnny had been relatively safe in England while Mike was flying in the desert. Now Mike was safe in a staff job, but there'd be an invasion of Europe sooner or later, the Canadian army would have to play its part, and Johnny was an infantry officer.

Would Mike really care to go sailing with his father after the war? Would he stay in Montreal and take over the firm, as Joe expected? The war had changed her daughters' lives, her own, even Joe's, and it must have changed Mike even more. Impossible to predict how he would feel about things when he came home. She hoped he wouldn't be as confused and unhappy as Grattan had been after the Armistice.

Joe baked haddock and potatoes for dinner. They listened to the war news on the radio and went to bed leaving the window pushed open a few inches, enough to smell fog blowing in off the Atlantic and hear waves roaring on the beach. He reached for her and Iseult responded eagerly; the lovemaking seemed to her a celebration. It was the first time they had made love since receiving word their son had been wounded in Africa. Joe might die any day, and so might she; people in their fifties died on sidewalks, died in their sleep, had heart attacks, suffered strokes and seizures, smashed their cars, got cancer. It was odd to be thinking about death with her husband on top of her, his weight and his warmth, but since Mike's wounding she had come back to her old preoccupation with mortality. Joe's body was ageing but thick and strong. She was much too thin, her daughters insisted. Margo had been bringing home ice cream and forcing her to eat spoonful after spoonful in the kitchen, which she did dutifully, though it didn't seem to make any difference. She could not put on weight, just as certain children at the clinics never seemed to thrive no matter how much milk or how many fresh vegetables they or their mothers were given.

Joe fell asleep quickly but she lay awake for a long time. The deep rumble of the surf reminded her of Mike's seawall, and she wondered if it was still standing. She hoped neither of them would die before their son came home.

~

On that trip to British Columbia in
1931
the train had made a special stop at the hamlet of Blue River, where the stationmaster's son was waiting with an old Ford. He drove them north on gravel roads. His skinniness and shyness had reminded her of Mike's. It had been a dry summer, and dust rising from the road clogged every surface inside the car. She fell asleep in the back seat and woke only as they were arriving at the fishing camp on the North Thompson, where a woman in overalls was waiting up for them though it was almost two o'clock in the morning.

Once the road dust had settled, the night air smelled of glaciers and jack pine. Iseult could hear the black noise of the North Thompson River, just as she remembered it, a constant at all the Head-of-Steel camps.

The woman showed her into a log cabin where a lantern glowed on a plank table alongside a bouquet of tiny mountain flowers in a cut-glass vase. A blaze crackled in the fieldstone fireplace. The bed was made up with white flannel sheets, plump pillows, and a red and black Hudson's Bay blanket spread out and smoothed, with another folded across the foot of the bed. Joe and the boy carried in the luggage.

She'd felt far away from her three children then, from California and Krishnaji, and a bit closer to the young woman she had been. There was an enamel sink and a tin jug of creek water that could be heated on the nickel-plated stove for washing. Their privy was at the edge of the woods.

Joe asked the stationmaster's son to come for them at ten o'clock the next morning. The boy was going to drive them in on logging roads as far as the car could go. The woman pointed out the electric flashlight on the floor beside the bed, and warned about bears roaming the camp. Then Iseult and Joe were left alone with their bed, their fire, and the hissing of the river.

He was adding another log to the fire when he looked around at her. “I feel like I'm walking in a dream, Iseult, coming back up here.”

“Oh, let's go to bed,” she said. “I'm too tired to talk about all that now.” How typical, she thought, that it had never occurred to him she might be in love with someone else, even after she'd introduced him to Krishnamurti.

He had taken out his pyjamas and was brushing his teeth at the little sink. She quickly unbuttoned her clothes and, while his back was to her, slipped her nightgown over her head. He was still the only man she'd ever slept with. It was all their marriage really came down to, she thought. All they were was familiar. A pair of bodies that had for some years been physically proximate.

Stepping outside, she walked a few yards from the cabin. She had no intention of stumbling all the way to the privy in the dark — she knew all about bears, and she hated privies. She squatted in the cold bunchgrass to pee.

Smoke from the chimney hung low on the ground. The sky was thick with stars, and frost gleamed on the meadow as it bent towards the road, where she could just see the last speck of the Ford's taillight disappearing. This was the country where she and Joe O'Brien had forged their bond in hard work, success, and suffering. She wondered what was to become of them.

They were the only people at breakfast the next morning. All the other guests staying at the lodge were out on the river with their fishing guides. She didn't want the flapjacks with maple syrup and elk sausage. Taking a piece of warm bannock and a cup of black coffee, she said she was going to have a look at the river.

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“No, finish your breakfast.”

“Well, keep an eye out for bear. Where there's good fishing there's going to be bear.”

She remembered navvies coming back from the river with salmon and stories of being treed by grizzlies. Joe had always carried a loaded rifle on their Sunday picnics along the grade, and more than once they had watched silvertips humping through the alpine meadows, rising and diving amid high grass and flowers, like salmon dashing upstream. But that morning in the sunshine on the meadow there was no aspect of danger, and the sun was already opening pungent little alpine flowers whose names she had learned long ago: bearberry, willow herb, arctic daisy.

She came to the sandy banks of the North Thompson, a milky green snake of a river thickened with melt from glaciers. The strong current and the glacial silt, sand, and gravel suspended in it were what gave the river its frictioned, slithering charge. The flow had power, even then, in late summer. Joe had tried using scows to get materials to the station men beyond Head-of-Steel, and half a dozen boats spilled and smashed before he dropped that idea.

He had occupied her life like an foreign army. But was that really true? Wasn't it just as true that they had created a life together? He had promised there would be no more sprees. He had a powerful will, and when he set out to accomplish something, he usually did.

The corner of her eye caught a shadow moving in the meadow and her blood jumped. A grizzly, come to stoke its endless appetite on fish. But it wasn't a bear — it was Joe, wearing his old soft fedora, flannel shirt, and braces. He'd always had a particular grace of movement in the woods, she remembered from picnics and little sorties from the Head-of-Steel camps in the earliest days, when he would come with her, gathering wildflowers. Softness, silence. Branches and thorns never seemed to catch him. As quiet as a mule deer. When he was a boy, he'd hunted to feed his family and learned to be quiet and patient in the woods.

“Iseult, the boy is here. We'd best get started.”

Started for where? Her feelings were like the river — cold, fast, brutal — and she couldn't quite get hold of them. The river didn't know where it was heading and neither did she. What were they doing, going back seventeen years to search for a daughter who had barely existed? Were they looking for a beginning or an ending?

The boy drove and Joe sat in the front seat with his arm on the seatback, chatting about hunting and hockey — she had never heard him talk so easily with their own son. The washboard gravel road had been cut straight as possible through the bush so logging trucks could travel at high speed. The lodge woman had packed a lunch, which Joe had in a knapsack.

The boy told them he had built a small boat that he sailed on Mud Lake, and a radio set (
Just like Mike
, she thought), and was studying the principles of navigation. He intended to become an officer in the navy: every year the Royal Naval College in England took a few cadets from Canada, and he hoped to get one of the slots. He had never seen the ocean.

Riding in the back seat, her tongue tasted of dust. She started to feel nauseated by the stink of oil that had been sprinkled on the road in an attempt to keep the dust down.

It wasn't as though locating the spot where they'd left their infant daughter was going to make a difference to anything. The lives of her three children weighed more than the death of her first.

Krishnaji was like a lump in her throat. Disoriented, carsick, she leaned forward, lay her forehead on Joe's arm.

“Are you all right, Iseult? Do you want to stop?”

She heard him tell the boy to pull over. As soon as the car stopped she opened the door and climbed out. Spruce and Douglas fir had a clean, warm smell. She jumped across a ditch and started walking into the woods.

Krishamurti's calm. His elegant hands, his sense, his coldness.

She kept heading away from the road, going deeper into the woods, stumbling through fragrant light and shadows of sweet-smelling spruce and fir. She could hear Joe following her but he wasn't trying to catch up. She jumped a little stream with mossy edges furrowing among the trees, a hint of dampness and sweetness rising from its trickle. He was keeping back, allowing her room. Could their marriage endure? Could it move forward and carry them along with it?

She knew, no matter how deep in she went, he would stay with her. He would never lose his sense of direction and always would be able find his way back to the road. There wasn't much she knew for certain anymore, but she was sure of that.

She stopped, turned around. He stopped too.

“I thought I was in love with someone else,” she said. “I believe I still am. Have you any idea what that means?”

He peered at her through dappled light and shadows. Life had hardened and ruined him a little, and there he stood: a businessman wearing old clothes and an old hat. Thickened around the middle, but dark and solid, tough.