“Until what? I get married?” Clare cried. “Have you forgotten?” She sank onto the bed. Leo was gone.
LARRY INSISTED ON GIVING Clare a ride to the station. With the snow melted, he could hitch the horse to the dray wagon. He was silent until they arrived and he’d carried her case to the platform. The clouds had blown away and he stood awkwardly, squinting into the sun. A train whistle sounded around the bend. Larry turned to her, flustered. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Larry, you already take care of us. Dad couldn’t keep farming without you.”
“I mean,” he kneaded his hands, “you could marry me.” Clare choked back a small utter of surprise. The smell of warming earth blew across the platform. “You need someone to take care of you now.” His eyes were tearing in the wind. “Now that your eye is gone.” He swiped away the tears with his hand. Whispered, “And Leo.”
Clare looked up into his small, kind eyes. “Larry, I can take perfectly good care of myself.” She stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled of milk cows. “But thank you for the offer.”
From the window, Clare watched him, standing forlornly on the platform, until he grew too small to make out, and the train rounded the bend.
THE DAY THE GLASSWORKS OPENED Clare got up, dressed, and rode the tram with Geraldine, jamming into the seat at the back of the aisle, as always.
“I’m right relieved to be going back,” Geraldine knocked a bony knee against Clare. “And not a day too soon. I’m not needed greatly at the orphanage. I’m down to my last pennies. I was short on my rent last month.”
“You should have told me!” Clare said.
“Never mind. I reminded her nibs that if she turfed me out, there’d be no one to wash her skivvies and she agreed to credit me ‘til I’m back at the glassworks.”
“I could have tided you over.” Clare tightened her gloves, finger by finger.
“Wouldn’t dream of it. You need every penny too, for those mad classes,” Geraldine said, looking out the window at a group of children running along the street, school satchels banging against their bare legs. “Imagine having no cares!”
The tram turned down to the waterfront and stopped for the working men, heading for the piers.
The Olympic was in; its zigzags of blue, white, and green dazzle patterns winked cheerfully in the morning light. A group of men in fresh uniforms jostled and laughed among themselves as they waited to board. A few soldiers were being brought down the ramp on stretchers, while others limped off on crutches. The new troops fell silent as the injured passed. Some reached out to shake the returning men’s hands enthusiastically. The returnees mostly looked down or past them to the dock, hoping someone was waiting for them. A young woman ran towards a man wheeled onto the street, her arms extended.
“I envy her,” Clare said flatly.
“Tsk. Tsk.” Geraldine patted her hand and Clare turned her face away as the tears gathered again.
On the tracks by the waterfront, a train idled. It would be leaving for Truro in an hour. Clare felt the urge to take it. To ride away from these ruined streets. Leave the weekly ships gorging on men and weapons. She would get on the train and not get off until there was no more track.
While she was at home, Ada had insisted Clare dry her eyes and come to her Women’s Institute meeting, “Do something to take your mind off your sorrows.” One of the women there, June, had a daughter who had moved west with her husband. June explained while she rolled bandages that the train took almost two weeks to cross the prairies. At night the porters unfolded beds from the ceilings. In the day you could sit in a car with a glass roof and watch the scenery go by, miles and miles of forest, then prairie, then mountains, until you reached the Pacific. Even the ocean seemed named to make one forget war.
June’s daughter and her new husband had got off the train to visit the Rockies for a few days. June gave Clare a grave look, drew in her breath, and exhaled, “I was terrified that they’d be eaten by wild animals.” She twisted the end of the bandage. “But the hotel was civilized. Silver and crystal and clean linens in the middle of the wilderness.” She jabbed a safety pin into the roll to fasten the end. “Imagine!”
THE TRAM DREW UP to the glassworks. Smoke was spiralling from the chimneys.
Molly, Jenny, and a gaggle of girls waited at the glassworks gate. Molly took Clare’s arm tightly. “We’re so glad you’re back, Jenny and I.” Molly looked over her shoulder at the fair-haired woman, who smiled self-consciously. “We were wondering if you’d be … well enough.”
“I am very well,” Clare said, unhooking her arm from Molly’s and walking faster, leaving them behind.
Jack Bell was waiting for the women in the office. With his narrow face, his thatch of hair, and clothes hanging from his thin bones, he resembled a forlorn scarecrow.
As usual, he started in on one of his talks. “Welcome back. As you know, we have not exported glass from Europe for four years …”
The group straggled down the corridor behind him, Clare at the back of the line.
“… shortages of milk bottles, lenses, street light globes …” Jack paused to allow the group to gather. He rubbed his jaw. “And now we’re making window glass.” He rubbed his hands. “We have a lot of work to do. I think you know the way.” He waved towards the shops. The girls set off in a tight cluster, down the hallway, waving as they passed each shop.
Clare lingered. “I’ll be right there,” she told Geraldine, who arched her eyebrows. Clare turned back to Jack who was looking at his watch. “Jack. A moment?” she said.
Jack shifted restlessly from foot to foot. He had aged so since she’d last seen him, the skin of his face losing its grip.
“I only came to tell you personally,” she twisted her gloves in her hands, “that I’m not coming back to work.”
“Ah, I thought you might find it a bit much, once you thought about it.”
“It’s not too much. Instead I’m studying at the School of Art.” She put her gloves in her purse.
“Art?” Jack crooked his thumbs in his belt loops.
“My parents have agreed to pay for one term.”
“And then?” Jack said.
“I don’t know.” Clare tightly grasped the handle of her purse.
Jack hitched up his pants. His narrow head sank into his shoulders and he looked away briefly. “You know I can’t hold your job for you. There are so many in need.”
“Yes, I know. Well, I guess I’ll go say goodbye to the girls,” Clare said.
“I’m going that way,” Jack said.
The din of machines prevented much talk. “I convinced the board that we needed to move into window glass,” Jack said over the noise.
They’d stopped at the first workshop, where men cut cylinders of glass, which opened flat like hot toffee.
In the hand-blowing shop, Fred Baker rolled a gather of molten glass on a polished steel marver. He looked over his shoulder at her and nodded.
Clare carried on.
“I was wrong,” Jack said.
Clare turned. Jack gestured to the factory beyond the room. “This isn’t to blame for the war.”
“Blame?” Clare said.
“Technology, I mean. Progress.” He clenched his scarred hands. “It was the generals. They sent our boys to be slaughtered. The British fought all summer without getting anywhere. In the fall they sent the Anzacs. By the time we got there, three hundred thousand men had already been lost.” He stared into the white-hot glory hole. “At Passchendaele they marched them through knee-deep mud right into German fire. Sixteen thousand Canadians, some bodies were never found — simply swallowed up.”
“But we won the battle, didn’t we?” Clare said. A slow suffocation began to fill her chest. Why had she come to the glassworks this morning?
“Oh yes, we won the day.” Jack laughed bitterly. “We reached the ridge and the German trenches. A few weeks later the British abandoned the area. It was no longer important to their
strategies.” He said the last word thickly.
“Leo …” she said.
Jack struggled to drain the anger from his face. “Your young man. I heard.”
A man pumped a large bellows and the fire rose up with a whoosh. “I’m sorry.”
Fred thrust his rod into the kiln and began turning it, rolling clear molten glass onto the end.
“They never found his body. Maybe he’s still …” Clare said, tears rising.
“Clare.” Jack touched her arm. “There’s no point …”
Fred stepped away from the kiln, the glass on the end of his rod glowing and moving as if alive. He rested the rod on a beam, and still turning it, sat on a nearby stool and began to gently blow. A flask emerged. He pulled it towards himself and his face stilled. Moving without hesitation, he stalked back to the kiln, plunged the whole thing back into the fire, and pulled out a new ball of red-hot glass.
Jack inhaled. “You’re young. This war isn’t going to last forever. There’ll still be some fine men left when it’s over.” Jack looked down at his work boots. When he looked up his eyes were moist. “You’ll be missed here, Clare. You were the best flaw-checker we had. Good luck to you.” One of the other glass-makers, a short dark man, was making his way towards them. He shot Fred a belligerent look.
“Now, I need a word with Ernie Ryan,” Jack said.
29
BACK AT THE BARN, Leo and the other prisoners carried their helmets to a lean-to where a cook was stirring two pots. The smell of the meat and potatoes bubbling in one of the pots made Leo dizzy with hunger. But the prisoners were served from another pot.
“Bloody acorn stew,” Digger said under his breath.
It was so bitter it brought tears to Leo’s eyes.
The men slept in the barn. One part of the roof had collapsed but there was enough room at the other end of the loft for the men to stay dry. They dropped into the hay, exhausted. A series of low whistles broke the silence, stopped, started again. An owl, calling from the disappearing beech forest.
Leo fell asleep before he could begin to make his plan. Away from the damp cold of the trenches, the rats and the sound of sniper fire, stretched in hay, which carried the scent of summer, he slept hard for the first time since his capture.
EACH MORNING they returned to the beech forest. Some of the men chopped and sawed vigorously, taking their fury out on the wood. Leo worked methodically, rarely pausing but never breaking into a sweat, even though it meant lashes from Red Ear’s whip. He had to guard his strength.
Each morning he put on the German coat, inside out, under his own. On the fifth day Leo carried cut wood to the growing pile in trip after trip until dusk. Fortune favoured him. Red Ears was behind the lines and a new group of men, mostly Anzacs, had arrived, swelling the prisoners’ ranks.
When the guard blew the whistle to form their line for the march, Leo hung back, slipped behind the woodpile, crouched, and burrowed quickly into the fresh cut wood.
He lay there unmoving, his heart crashing around his chest, the smell of sap filling his lungs. He stayed until all sounds of the line had moved on and darkness was complete. Then, piece by piece, he began to move the wood aside.
He stripped off his own jacket and dropped it, then turned his German jacket right side out. He stood, trying to get his bearings, looking to the half moon rising in the east.
He didn’t need a map. He knew the lay of the land by heart from reviewing Seward’s geological charts. To the north was the extension of the cretaceous chalk ridge that ran from a fault scarp to the south, territory that was completely held by the Germans. If he travelled around it to the east he would be further behind the lines. To the west he would come perilously close to the front, but if he could get past it, he could head west on the coastal alluvial plains. He figured if he moved quickly during the night, it would take him three days to reach French territory.
He ate some of the bread he’d saved in the bottom of his pack and started walking, the moon over his left shoulder. When would the guards notice he was missing? Leo hoped that the influx of new men might distract them. The Canadians would know he was gone but they wouldn’t say a word. He’d been careful to discuss his plans with no one. He’d thought of taking Wes but they would have less chance of making it together.
Off in the distance, the flickering light of star shells. Fortunately the moon was waning. The cover of darkness would improve each night. His mouth was dry. His head pounded.
He looked for the huddled shapes of alder copses, hugging the lower edge of the ridge, where he couldn’t be seen from the top. Most trees had been cut down for trench and tunnel construction. There was no sound except for a light wind. The sounds of his breath, his heart, were as loud as sirens. Something erupted at his feet. He jumped back, the air sucked out of his lungs. A hedgehog, waddling from the underbrush. He dropped, gasping for air, shaking violently as the animal meandered blindly past him.
Just before dawn etched the sky in grey light, Leo buried himself in dead leaves and fell immediately asleep. He was woken by the cold a few hours later. The sun was up but it didn’t touch the chilly hollow where he lay. He drifted in and out of sleep for the rest of the morning, waking to the sound of footfall. He began to shiver again, only partly from cold. He couldn’t control these bouts. He held his breath and watched through the tangle of branches. Four German officers passed him on horseback. The horses’ nostrils flared briefly. The men talked quietly among themselves. Cigarette smoke trailed them. Leo inhaled it like food.
He finished his bread on the morning of his second day. His hunger receded but he was always thirsty. An overwhelming nausea prevented him from drinking water in muddy puddles. Instead he looked for water lying in curled leaves or cracks in rocks. Once he found a tin cup, half-full, hanging from a branch. He carried it with him, leaving it out if it was raining, dangerously near the hedges and leaf litter where he buried himself. Once he had to remain concealed as troops passed on a road a hundred yards to the west. All night the wind blew the sound of their boots to him.
By the third night, the sole of his left boot had peeled back from the toe. He tied it on with one of the laces but it soon frayed and snapped. He ripped the sole off and stuffed it inside his boot, which quickly gave him blisters on his toes. Blood from the wound on his heel pooled in his boot.
On the fourth night he turned west. Before dawn he came to the outskirts of a French village, where a small stone farmhouse and barn stood in the dark. It was risky, approaching farmhouses. Dogs might sound the alarm or Germans might be around, even though he was technically finally in French territory.
His feet were so raw he could hardly walk and he was tired to the deepest core. So tired he didn’t care if they caught him and sent him back to the camp. As he stood on the edge of that French farm, his life before the war as well as his notions of the future blurred, as if they belonged to some other man. His future was no longer essential. He could let it go so easily. For this moment all that was important was finding a place to lie down. He preferred a short sleep to a long life.
He pushed open the barn door and smelled the vegetable breath of the animal. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he took in the one thin dairy cow in its stall. He walked to it and draped himself over it, warming his face and drawing in its sweet smell. He dozed for a few moments, like that, on his feet, then woke with a start and climbed the ladder. He wedged himself between the only two hay bales in the loft and fell immediately asleep.
HE WAS WOKEN after what seemed like only moments, by the scrape of the barn door. The sun was high. Dust motes floated in a column of light falling from the loft window.
“Qui est là?” A woman’s voice.
Leo didn’t move.
“Je sais que quelqu’un est ici.”
He had taken a little French in school and spoken it from time to time in the villages where they were billeted. How did she know he was here?
“J’ai votre sac.” She sounded frightened.
Damn, he’d left his pack on the floor by the cow. He crawled out from between the hay bales and looked down into the barn.
A dark-haired woman wearing rubber boots, a shabby dress, and what looked like a man’s sweater took a few steps back and looked up at him.
“Ce que vous faites ici?” She continued, “Vous êtes un déserteur!”
“Non. J’étais un prisonnier.”
He crawled towards the ladder to come down and she lifted the hunting rifle she had concealed behind her back. “N’avancez pas!” she said. “ll n’y a pas de camps de prisonniers Britanniques près d’ici.” The rifle shook in her hands.
“Ah, je comprend,” he said. “Je ne suis pas Allemagne.” He took off his German jacket. “Je suis Canadien.”
She held her gun on him. He searched his mind. “From Nova Scotia.” She looked at him uncomprehending. He began singing, “Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines! Ding, daing, dong.” He began easing himself down the ladder, rung by rung, facing forward. “Ding, daing, dong.”
A look of frightened confusion passed over her face. Leo jumped onto the floor of the barn.
“Arrête!” she shouted and stepped back.
The retort of the gunshot tore into him, drowning out her scream.
He fell onto the dirt and cow shit.
“Jesus Christ, you’ve shot me!” Leo shouted. Blood oozed from between his fingers where he gripped his calf.
Only then did she drop the gun and run to him. “Mon Dieu!”
30
SOME MORNINGS SHE WOKE FORGETFUL, opening her eyes to the light playing on new leaves outside her window. As she roused, sensation returned, not so much pain as absence. She could not say where it lodged: in her mind, her breastbone, her limbs, only that there was a part of her that was shut in a room whose door she could not open. She was equally angry at this loss and at the stealthy thinning of grief that made her feel as if she was being moved through an inner season by something beyond her control. The ache of her grief became dry as if shedding more tears was like throwing salt in the ocean.
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