I’m writing quickly before the candle burns down. We have to keep pretty low here. We’re working on a tunnel under a road from one house to another. Tonight we’re staying in a cellar — ritzy! When we finish here we’ll be able to fix the guns in new positions and it will be back to the dugouts. I got your parcel last night and it cheered me up. It’s been five weeks since your last letter. I don’t know what happened to the ones in-between. The mail here often seems to go missing. You’d think they’d know how important a soldier’s mail is. Anyway, thanks for the socks. It’s been raining for days and they’re the only dry ones I have. Our new C.O. (from Blighty) is a corker — yesterday he had us hike ten miles only to find out we’d gone to the wrong post. The Englishmen they ship us are awful. I think the good ones must all be dead. It sounds like you’re making yourself at home at the boarding house. I try to do that too, but perhaps it’s easier for me, having no furniture, just a few blankets, ha ha. Of course I have some privileges that you don’t have, like sticking candles any place they’ll stay. They’re far superior to electric lights. They’re also useful as pipe lighters, fire starters, chewing gum etc. I do envy you a heating coil though. I think it was a good idea to stay at the job at the glassworks. There’s nothing for you in Grafton. You will have become such a woman of the world! Did I tell you that my uncle worked in that glassworks for a time? He took me around when I was twelve or thirteen. I’d never seen anything so exciting as those blazing furnaces. I imagined I was standing on the edge of a real volcano looking into its molten heart. I’ve written Dad today. I appreciate your visiting him when you’re home. Please remind him that the mail service in France is terrible. I think he’s getting forgetful.
There are no shortcuts through these fields like the ones between our farms. The only way I can get home to you is by going straight through this war. Hopefully in one piece.
Often, in the middle of the day, I imagine you asleep in your own bed in Halifax. My darling girl, more than anything, I need to believe that home remains unchanged through all this. The memory of that day in the hidden corner of the gardens, the thought of holding you close again, helps me bother to brush my teeth, keep my boots dry, fall asleep despite bombs falling in the dark.
From the boy who loves you, Leo.
Clare let the letter drop on her chest. Leo’s last day in Halifax. Almost two years ago. They had sat by the fountain in the public gardens. He’d taken her hands in his. Somehow, in those last months, they had become essential to each other. He needed her to wait for him. She looked at the brown skin of his neck, at the pulse above his uniform collar. Underneath the scent of beer and tobacco and sweat was something else — a smell like clean beach sand. She wanted to inhale him. The fountain guttered in the wind. Leo leaned into her and kissed her on the mouth, then on the neck. And she let her head fall back. The figure at the top of the fountain, the young soldier from the Boer War, his rifle loose in his hands, gazed down at her.
The skin of her chest prickled with the heat of the memory of that morning. They’d gotten up from the fountain and wandered into the farthest corner of the garden. The effervescence rushing from the soles of her feet up through the inside of her thighs like a tide, through her belly and up into her throat, the cry she muffled against Leo’s starched uniform shirt.
But the past had become untethered from the present. It was a different world now. She was a different person. A casualty. Clare lifted her hand again to the dressing on her eye. She imagined the empty socket, the ugly deflated eyelid.
She stuffed the letter back under her pillow and let the darkness pull her back into sleep.
The seamen were letting loose the great hawsers and the ship was beginning to inch off the dock. One ramp was still in place. If she ran, she would be able to make it, but the streets were filling with snow and she had lost a boot. The faster she tried to run, the more slowly she moved towards the ship. Mrs. Beddow waved from its deck.
Clare woke, her heartbeat the ship’s engine as it pulled away from the dock, the world outside hushed with heavy snowfall, the hospital silent as a mausoleum.
5
CLIMBING INTO THE NIGHT from the tunnel’s deep darkness thirty feet down was like climbing into daylight. Leo was dog-tired, but he paused for a few moments to look back over his shoulder where a half moon was rising above billows of smoke, as if it was the only thing that had survived the day’s barrage. When he was a child he’d thought the moon rose only over Grafton, rolling through the sky above the farms and orchards. He was amazed when his father told him that everyone on earth, in Canada, in India, in China, watched the same moon. It troubled him, that collective gesture. But the shift in the scale of his world also made him light-headed, his first inkling of the vastness of things.
The December moon would be rising over Halifax in a few hours. He wondered if Clare would see it and think of him sleeping under its pale light. A star shell exploded, exposing briefly the craters of no man’s land.
6
IN THE EARLY HOURS of the morning, when the only light in was the reflection of fire on the low cold sky, a medic from the hospital, a young man with tired eyes and close-cropped dark hair, had run to the van, where Fred and the others were just about to set off back into the ruins. “We need you to go to the morgue at Chebucto School.”
They took bodies to the school. It stood dark and impassive, its two solid storeys facing the snowstorm. Fred Baker, the cadet, and the soldier carried the heaviness of death down the stairs of the dark school, into the basement, which had become a morgue.
Snow blew in on cold gusts from the windows. Steam rose from the breath of soldiers and buckets of hot water. In the halo of kerosene lamps soldiers crouched to clean the bodies, to reveal faces black with soot. Around them, the ghostly outlines of row upon row of corpses, covered with white sheets, which had been brought in folded stacks from military stores.
In the early hours of the morning, a man in his mid-forties, wearing a suit vest and rolled up shirtsleeves, threaded his way through the corpses towards Fred. “Arthur Barnstead.” He held out his hand briskly. “Some of the men are needing to get home.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw grey with stubble. “If you don’t have anywhere else to go, I’d be grateful if you could stay and give us a hand here,” he said, as if he knew that Fred had no one waiting for him. “There’s going to be more coming in and we have to handle the bodies correctly. It’s crucial not to lose anything that might help us identify them, not get mixed up …” His gaze swept the room, and lingered, unfocused in a far, dim corner. He said, “It’s not like before. These are our own.”
“Before?” Fred said.
“The last time.” He stared into the dark, talking now more to himself. “They brought the bodies from the Titanic to Halifax.”
“THIS ONE’S READY.” One of the soldiers picked up his pail to move to the next body and waved Fred over. “From Africville.”
The dead man’s jacket had been torn off by the blast. He had been covered with a grey paste of plaster dust and soot, which when washed off revealed he was a coloured man. His open shirt revealed a long wound and a twist of black metal. Fred was dizzy from lack of sleep. His field of vision contracted, so that he could only see if he concentrated his focus. Trying not to breathe the terrible smell of burnt flesh, Fred pushed his hands deep into one of the pockets of the dead man’s wool trousers. Two keys on a silver chain. He dropped them in the numbered linen bag he had been given.
Next to him a young woman was being laid out.
Across the room, a small man with round glasses fumbled with a snuff box. Fred recognized him as Ernie Ryan from the glass-blowing shop.
“See to this woman please,” Barnstead called to Ernie.
Ernie took in Fred and nodded coldly. He glanced at the man Fred was attending to. “Don’t they have their own morgue?”
Fred looked away while Ernie approached the young woman and crouched down beside her. Her brown eyes were open. A dark purple
bruise ran up her neck from under her blouse. She had no stockings or shoes on and her bare feet seemed oddly touching. A look of repulsion as Ernie turned his face away and rummaged her pockets.
Fred slipped his hand under the man’s buttocks to check his back pockets. Beside him, Ernie dropped a thimble and a mother of pearl button into a linen bag. Then he began twisting a ring, what looked like a blue sapphire flanked by two small diamonds, off the woman’s finger. Fred moved around to the other side of the man, his back to Ernie, to reach the shirt pockets. A receipt fluttered to the floor. As he swung around to pick it up he saw Ernie drop the ring into his own pocket. Ernie looked up and caught his eye, straightened. “I know this woman.” He wiped his hands on his jacket and nodded, “I’ll get this to her family.”
“I believe the committee will make sure the families get the possessions when they identify the bodies,” Fred said.
“Well, I don’t see why it has to be so complicated,” Ernie spit tobacco juice onto the earthen floor and shot a look at Arthur Barnstead, who was talking to a woman in a Red Cross uniform.
Fred examined the receipt, $1.08 from Uphams for a pair of boy’s hockey boots, probably a Christmas present. He felt the exhaustion of the endless hours crash down on him.
“Not going to do much good here anyways,” Ernie said. “Her mother will want it back as soon as possible.”
Fred straightened. “And you’re going to take it to Mrs….?”
“Minnie. I only know her first name,” Ernie said. “We go to the same church. St. Paul’s.” He tucked a new plug snuff in his cheek. “Wouldn’t be your church. Guess you’d go to the Lutheran Church. With the rest of the Krauts.”
Fred closed his fists.
“My buddy Leslie? Says he knew you back in Montreal, when you were fresh off the boat.”
Leslie McCorran. One of a litter of nasty brothers who lived down the street.
“I’m Canadian,” Fred said.
“Once a Kraut, always a Kraut.” Ernie snorted and sent a long arc of tobacco spit to land at Fred’s feet. Fred turned to the next body, too tired to care.
By the morning, almost all the fires had burned themselves out. The blizzard had pulled its own white sheet over the city.
7
GERALDINE BROUGHT CLARE one of her best hats, an absurd golden velvet wide-brimmed hat with a fur pompon. “It’s a special day,” Geraldine said.
The nurse dressed Clare’s eye with a clean bandage for the trip home in the cold.
“You might run into the furniture at first,” the nurse said without humour, adjusting the dressing under her hat, “but you’ll get used to it.”
“Used to bumping into the furniture?” Clare said with a sideways grimace at Geraldine, who was waiting at the foot of the bed.
“Nooo,” the nurse waggled her finger at Clare. “Used to a new way of seeing the world.”
GERALDINE MANOEUVRED HER, arm linked tightly in Clare’s, who was still weak and unsteady on her feet as she felt her way down the icy streets. She misjudged the distance of curbs and snowbanks, gritting her teeth in shame and anger as Geraldine’s iron grip pulled her up more than once and steadied her against her friend’s small frame.
FOR TWO DAYS, back in the rooming house, Clare watched the light brighten and fall around the rim of tarpaper covering the window, her headache flooding and ebbing. Every morning and afternoon Geraldine would appear at her bedroom door with tea or a tray of food, soda crackers and sardines, canned peaches, from the Relief Committee and Clare would reach for her eye patch. Mostly she was left to herself. Geraldine disappeared during the day to help with orphaned children. Rose, who ran the boarding house, was frantic about her daughter Celia’s injured hand and dragged the girl to the medical stations every day.
Late in the morning of the third day, Clare awoke to find a man’s figure at her door. “Leo?” she said. She sat up so quickly that she was light-headed.
“Clare, I’m here to take you home.” Her father.
He sat down on her bed and appraised her with his clear eyes. His thick dark hair was greying at the temples. He was wearing the wool jacket he wore on the farm. She pushed her face into his chest. He smelled of horse sweat and woodsmoke and the hand-rolled cigarettes he smoked behind the barn. They stayed like that, his arms stiffly around her, until she pulled awkwardly away.
He went back down the stairs to wait for her in the drawing room, where the piano was still collapsed off its legs in the middle of the floor.
Her father had hired a coach to take them to the station. The city was dazed, waiting. Other than men carrying lumber or covering windows, all was still. A line of women and children stood at the door of the Green Lantern Restaurant. Long boxes were stacked in front of the School of Art. From a distance they looked like more of the mysterious freight, debris, planking, boxes, which were piled up on the streets, banked on sidewalks. As they drew closer, Clare realized they were fresh coffins; their weight, even empty, was somehow unbearable, as if they were a visible measure of collective loss. She closed her good eye against them and turned away.
In the train station, her father guided her along the snowy platform, her left elbow in one hand, holding her valise with the other.
“I’m fine.” Clare shook off his grip. She looked straight ahead, ignoring the stares. Grimly lifted her hand to adjust the black eye patch that had slipped down her cheek. She looked up to a flock of small dark birds flickering against the white sky. The explosion had torn the train shed roof clear off the station.
The train cars were cold from sitting in the open all night. Clare pulled her gloves up over her wrists. Her father had brought them for her. The gloves smelled of a warm rabbit just pulled from its burrow under the snow.
How was it that after years of helping to skin rabbits, only now she thought of the terror of the animal caught in her father’s trap? She pulled off the gloves and stuffed them in her pocket.
On the seat opposite her, a soldier dozed, one leg stretched out into the middle of the aisle, a cane propped beside him, leaning on a poster fixed to the coach wall. Clare had to focus hard. A Cry From the Trenches. Send Us Smokes. 35 cent package includes 50 cigarettes. SEND IT NOW to the Tobacco Fund. Her eye ached. Again she looked away.
At the other end of the seat, a big man wearing the short rough wool jacket and cap of a farmer leaned over a leather case, tightening the straps and muttering. Beside him, his young wife, a toddler on her lap, closed her locked hands to hide her fingers: “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, close the doors, where’s the people?” The child, nose clotted with green snot, coughed and batted at her mother’s hands until she opened them, then squealed with delight, and broke into chesty coughs. Breathing hoarsely she settled back against her mother, quietly surveying the car. “What’s the matter with that lady’s eye?” she asked, pointing her stubby finger.
Clare’s face flushed hot. The child’s mother looked apologetically at Clare. “I’m sorry.”
The young mother was trying to stuff the little girl’s hands into mittens threaded through her coat sleeves, while she flapped her hands then closed them into fists. Her father began forcibly uncurling each finger and shoving her mittens over them and she arched her back, screaming, face red. Her mother tightened her grip then whispered something in her ear, pointing at Clare. The girl looked at Clare, swallowing her screams until they became ragged breaths.
Clare had to turn her neck at an awkward angle to see out the window beside her. It would have been better if she had the soldier’s seat across from her — her good eye close to the window. But he stared through the glass, as if no one else was in the car.
As they left the city, she watched the pale sun rolling along the broken rooftops, frost glittering in bent grasses emerging from under snow, smoke rising from the chimneys on unpainted houses, standing in fields without gardens or fences. Somewhere behind her the public gardens were empty, the fountain dry.
At the end of the last stree
t, they passed into forest, ranks of naked maples and pale birches, and beyond them, curtains of dark conifers.
The car, warmer now, slowed as it passed through Windsor Junction. The small girl’s head dropped onto her mother’s lap, her eyes closed, then flew open, as a rifle shot rang up from a field beside the tracks. The soldier across from Clare lunged forward, then dropped his head to his lap. His cap fell off and his hands clasped the back of his head so tightly his knuckles whitened.
Only after long seconds did the young man look up. The blood had drained from his cheeks and lips.
“Okay then?” her father said.
The soldier looked past him, and pulled a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lit it with shaking hands. “I just need some air,” he said, pushing himself up from his seat leaning on his cane. He limped to the coupling.
“Seen that in one of the boys down Auburn, came home last month.” The farmer crossed his arms over his chest. “Nerves shot. Can’t even stand the sound of a slamming door. Just sits in the kitchen whittling little animals all day long. Got a whole circus there.”
Clare looked back to the window to the face wearing a black eye patch.
LARRY, THE YOUNG MAN who helped his father with the farm work, was waiting for them on the platform of Berwick Station, stamping from foot to foot, his cap pulled low over his ears. The son of their neighbour, a farrier, he had fits as a child. When he didn’t finish grade seven, Clare’s father took him on at the farm. He was tall now, with a wide forehead and a long sharp nose.
“Hello … Clare,” Larry said haltingly, looking up at her with his small bright eyes. He reached to take her valise, pretending not to notice her eye patch. He had a crab-like walk, favouring his right side, and he held his head tilted down, so that he had to look up.
Heavy snows lay in the Annapolis Valley. Larry had harnessed Aggie to the sleigh. Clare sat, wrapped in a blanket, between Larry, smiling happily to himself, and her father, wrapped in his muffler. She closed her eye, listening to the sound of the sleigh runners. The cold air was almost scentless. Did she smell apple piles rotting behind packing houses?
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