Dazzle Patterns

by Dazzle Patterns (v5)

  “Hey, what did you do that for?” Leo’s vision of Joe McDiarmid, lying on his back, his big feet splayed, dissolved.

  “I had to shoot him in the head,” Marty sobbed. Then he’d turned and started running home, down the road to Grafton, his dirty shirt-tail flapping.

  THE TUNNEL ENTRANCE they were heading down was a steel shaft, dropped through the dry sands, then through the deeper wet sands, to the clay below.

  Leo wiped the sweat from his brow. He could feel the blood draining from his face.

  “Why don’t you ask Seward to be re-mustered to combat infantry?” Marty said, just before he started down ahead of him.

  “I’m fine,” Leo answered. Since his illness, Leo found his heart bolting in his chest each time he descended the tunnel shaft. He’d be letting Seward down if he requested a transfer, especially since he’d put in for Leo’s promotion last summer, to geological assistant. But more, he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up the sampling work.

  LEO STEPPED FROM THE LADDER into a shallow pool of cold water. Forty feet down the clay glistened slickly in the weak light of the single bulb hanging from the tunnel roof. Bloody pumps never could keep up. The men took off their boots.

  Leo’s feet were blue. He poked at them to be sure they weren’t numb. The soldier beside him, Wes, a weedy postal worker from Hamilton with a bushy red moustache, was examining the sole of one foot, grimacing. The skin of his heel was bleeding. His toes were bright red. Even the new trench boots weren’t any good in the tunnels. It was better to walk in bare feet. The men tied their bootlaces together, slung them over their shoulders, and began walking up the slight grade into the tunnel system.

  “So, Jimmy, from Cape Breton, turns up for his first day on the line,” Marty began.

  The miners from Cape Breton snorted.

  Marty carried on, “After the first few days in the trenches, his lieutenant calls his men together. He says, Today is the day we take the fight to the Germans. Ready yourselves, we’re going to send every German we can to hell! Jimmy looks at him embarrassed and says, Sir … I’ve lost my rifle.”

  The line of men snaked close to one damp wall to avoid water dripping from the tunnel roof.

  Marty continued, “The lieutenant looks at him and says, Don’t worry, you can charge without a rifle. Jimmy is terrified, knowing he is going to die there on the field. You want to survive? his lieutenant asks. Of course I do, Jimmy shouts back. Well, all you have to do is … the lieutenant raises his hands and makes the shape of two handguns, one behind the other, put your hands like this and if you see Fritz, point at them and say Bangity Bang!” Marty held his hands up like guns.

  The miners laughed.

  Marty splashed through an ankle-deep puddle. “You’ve got to be joking, Jimmy says. I swear, the lieutenant answers, then sounds the charge. The soldiers all go over the wall screaming and shooting. As they run across the field, Jimmy sees a German shooting. He points at him and yells Bangity Bang!” Marty was shouting now.

  “Keep it down,” one of the men said. Most of them still whispered, from long habit of mining tunnels. From the terror that when you were in German territory setting explosives, they’d get to you first. Recently mining had stopped; the battles moved too fast for tunnelling. Their unit was working on underground chambers to shelter troops from barrage.

  “Then?” Wes said. The line of sappers had stopped now and were watching Marty.

  “To his amazement Fritz falls over dead. Jimmy aims at another German, Bangity Bang!” Marty said in a stage whisper. “And again the soldier dies instantly. Jimmy’s grinning and running and keeps shooting and he’s almost at the enemy trench, when a lone German soldier walks towards him. Jimmy lines up and shouts Bangity Bang! But the German keeps walking forward. He tries again, Bangity Bang! Nothing! He runs forward until he is just twenty feet in front of the guy and screams at the top of his lungs, Bangity Bang! Nothing.” Marty paused and made a show of adjusting his pack, then looked up and down the line of waiting men. “To Jimmy’s surprise, he’s suddenly knocked on his back and squished into the mud as if a giant tree fell on him. And the last thing he hears before he dies is the German whispering Tankity tank …”

  The men groaned.

  “I think that was my cousin Jimmy,” one of the guys from Cape Breton said.

  THE GROUP MOVED behind the cone of their miner’s lights, in single file, hunched over even when the tunnels opened up to six feet. Occasionally they stepped into niches to let men pass, their trams loaded with soil to be dumped, their faces grey with dried clay.

  Leo could hear his own shallow breathing.

  In five minutes they reached the tunnel face and the men dropped their packs. Leo and Marty lifted timbers from a tram, while the other men relieved the clay kickers, who were working on their backs reclined on boards, their arms still, digging at the clay face with spades attached to their feet. Beside them two baggers caught the clay, piling it up on the empty tram. It was the way they built the tunnels at Vimy, when silence was essential. Nine inches an hour, day and night. Fifteen miles of tunnels in one three-mile section of the line. And that didn’t count the German tunnels. The clay kickers worked the same way, with their feet, for these troop and supply shelters, in six-hour shifts. It was what they were used to and it was easiest on the body, so they could work longer.

  The geologist to the corps, John Seward, said the clay could sustain more, as long as the pumps could be kept running. Seward had studied at Cambridge. Last spring, Leo had tried to spend as much time as he could shadowing him as Seward worked in the tunnels. Seward had taught him how to take core samples, bring them back from the tunnels to his makeshift laboratory: a tent with a wooden floor, a table, bookshelves, and a microscope. There he had shown Leo how to analyze the cores, emptied on glass plates, for content and percentage of sand and clay.

  “You’re careful,” Seward had said when he told Leo of his promotion. He’d smoothed his moustache outwards from the central part over his lip. “Most men don’t understand how crucial it is to be meticulous in this work.”

  Yesterday Leo had gone to the officer’s quarters behind the line to show him the shell he’d found.

  Seward had been sitting at a small wood table in shirtsleeves and suspenders, examining a topographic map.

  “This is where the first chalk appears.” He stabbed at a point to the south. “Thank bloody Christ we’re not there. The tunnels fill with water almost as soon as you dig them.”

  Leo looked down at the map, eager to study it.

  “So what can I do for you, Corporal?”

  Leo had pulled the cockleshell from his pocket. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but I wondered if you could help me identify something?”

  Seward had looked at it with interest. “Paleogene like everything in these sands.” He stood up and reached for a book on a shelf above him. He handed it to Leo. “Go ahead.”

  Leo opened a thin bound volume: On the Tertiary Strata of Belgium and French Flanders. From the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, for August, 1852. The pages released that dry, airless smell, paper suddenly decompressed, the smell of ease, of lassitude, of libraries, the smell of another time.

  “Lyell,” Seward said. “Charles Lyell.”

  Leo knew of Lyell as the first modern geologist and an important influence on the young Darwin. But here, in this book, was his painstaking work, digging and sifting fossils from these very soils.

  “I think our excavations would bloody amaze him,” Seward said, glancing at Leo.

  Leo didn’t say what he was thinking: Lyell would more likely be wondering how the hell we got ourselves into this mess.

  And there it was, buried on page thirty-three, Cardium elegans, Eocene. Forty million years.

  AFTER UNLOADING THE WOOD at the tunnel face, Leo helped Marty load up bags of soil. He picked up his pack again and together with Marty, began pushing the cart back along the tram. Just before they got to Leo’s turnoff, Marty
jumped on the cart, on top of the clay bags. He took his helmet off and grinning, rested his hands behind his head, his big ears sticking out, his sandy hair plastered back from his forehead, where his helmet had left a red line.

  LEO TOOK A SHORT BRANCH of tunnel, which opened into a large room lined with low wooden planks. Even with room to move, the walls pressed in on him. He felt forty feet of soil, millennia, pressing down on him. Sweat trickled down his forehead. His claustrophobia got worse with each descent.

  He shook off his pack and pulled out his augers and soil pouches. He set them on the bench along with a candle. The match almost went out in his unsteady hand but the flame of the candle flared, flickering over the walls of the room. Was the air thin down here or was he just not pulling enough of it into his lungs? The gallery was braced with freshly milled wood. He inhaled deeply. The smell of resin released memory: the snow was melting and the winter air filled with the smell of wet earth and rising sap. He was splitting rounds from a couple of pines that he had taken down in the field to build up his father’s wood supply. He straightened and looked around the farm. Once he reported for duty he wouldn’t be around to help. But by the time he got back, Dad would be ready to sell. And Leo would be able to go to Halifax to start his studies.

  Clare. Coming towards him, up the road that connected their farms. Clare, backlit by late afternoon sun. In its halo she looked like a stranger. He noticed for the first time her strong light step and how she held her chin slightly up. Her dark hair seemed glossier, thicker, and she looked taller. She was trailing a long whip of pussy willow, much as she did when she was a little girl, to lash at Wilson’s bull on her way to school. But in the dazzling light, unable to focus properly, he saw her clearly. In that gesture, surprising as the end of winter, his feelings towards her changed.

  14

  120 Walnut Street

  Halifax

  February 15, 1918

  Dear Leo

  I have returned to Halifax. Mother didn’t want me to leave of course. It was hard for her to understand why I would return when the city is a wreck. I know I didn’t write much about the explosion to you in my last letter. It was difficult to describe the ruin and the suffering. By now you will have read the papers and heard all about it. The glassworks is still closed. We heard it was because of damage, and then that they were waiting for fuel for the boilers. Now they say it’s hard to get enough men to come to work, as so many are grieving lost family. And others still busy digging through their ruined houses and helping volunteers clean up and start rebuilding. As I write, the temperature has dropped and another snowstorm is on its way.

  Clare wrapped her blanket around her shoulders. It was too cold for her to sit at her desk. She was hunched in bed, writing by candlelight. Rose insisted on turning out the electric lights at nine. Clare pulled her wool vest tighter. Ten o’clock. Soon the laudanum would deliver her to sleep.

  She’d gone with Rose’s daughter, Celia, to the clinic this afternoon, even though the girl had insisted she could manage on her own.

  “Mother thinks I’m helpless,” Celia had said, pulling her cloche hat down over her ears. She sat on the hall bench and began to tie up her boots, using her good hand to catch the hooks and pressing with her left wrist on the laces while she tightened them. “She won’t believe that my hand is getting better, says I’ll never play again.”

  Celia stood up, her round, bland face regarding Clare petulantly. Celia’s hand seemed permanently damaged to Clare.

  “I am perfectly capable of going to the doctor on my own.” Celia wrapped her scarf around her neck.

  “The walk will be good for me,” Clare had said.

  “Are you sure?” Celia said. “You don’t look well.”

  She was right. Clare felt pale and clammy. But she’d be able to talk to a doctor at the clinic.

  Hammers rang like bells in the clear air as Clare and Celia set off. Smoke from burning debris piles drifted over the streets.

  The clinic was in the YMCA, one of the temporary stations still too busy to shut down. While Celia saw the doctor behind a cloth divider, Clare fidgeted on one of a dozen wooden chairs, occupied by patients, set in two rows, facing each other. A woman holding hands with an old man stared at Clare’s eye patch. The man had what looked like a dark smear under a scar on his face where the black soot of the explosion had entered the wound and left a permanent stain, like a tattoo.

  Clare stood up and walked to the window. Dusk was falling, dissolving the buildings, the passing cart, and the hunched figure walking down the street. She felt panic. The solid world slipping away. As it did each night, when she was idle, or when lethargy swept over her. She felt the phantoms stirring. In the last couple of days they seemed more restless than ever.

  Celia emerged and motioned for Clare to go in. The woman sat down in the chair opposite her. “I’m Dr. Perkins.”

  Oh! Clare had never met a woman doctor.

  “You haven’t been here before. You’ve seen … other physicians in Halifax?” Dr. Perkin’s grey-blue eyes flicked back and forth from a chart to Clare.

  This would not be as easy as Clare had hoped it might be. “Just the doctor who removed my eye. But I haven’t seen him since,” she said.

  “And why are you here today?” Dr. Perkins looked up keenly from under sleek dark brows and a smooth high forehead.

  “I thought maybe I should get checked.” A bead of sweat ran between Clare’s breasts.

  “I see. Well, if you could please take off the eye patch.” The doctor leaned close. Clare’s good eye flicked to the window, still backed with black paper. Her own reflection, pale, one-eyed and false, stared back at her.

  The doctor held Clare’s head steady with one hand. With her other hand, she pulled gently on, first the lower and then upper lids of her missing eye. “Mmmm,” she said each time, tilting her own head a little from side to side. Then she sat back. “It seems fine. You can have a prosthesis fitted anytime.”

  “Yes,” Clare said, hesitantly.

  “It’s not painful?” Dr. Perkins said.

  “Oh. No. I wouldn’t guess it would be.” Clare pulled at a loose button thread. “It’s just …” The thread broke and the button fell and rolled away. She dropped onto her knees and reached for it under her chair. When she sat down again the doctor was looking at her narrowly, her fingers tented in her lap.

  “I can’t sleep. And I have bad … thoughts,” Clare said.

  “What kind of thoughts?”

  “About that day … about the things I saw.”

  “The explosion.” Dr. Perkins collapsed the tent of her fingers and clasped her hands. “People saw terrible things that day. It will take some time for life to get back to normal,” she said.

  Clare took a long breath, lifted her chin. “My doctor at home in Grafton gave me, well,” she coughed, “he gave me laudanum. But I’ve run out. I think I would be better if I could just have … some more.”

  Dr. Perkins straightened, her eyes darting over Clare’s face. Clare had the feeling that this young woman had a ruthless eye.

  “When did you run out?” she said.

  “Two days ago.”

  “And have you been feeling unwell?”

  “My back aches and I have terrible sweats,” Clare said.

  Dr. Perkins smiled mirthlessly. “You are going through withdrawal from the laudanum.”

  Clare turned the button over and over in her hand.

  “Sometimes the anxiety which the drug relieved gets worse for a time after you stop taking it. It will pass.” Dr. Perkins flattened her hands in her lap.

  A traitor tear was gathering in Clare’s missing eye. “The worst thing is, some nights, I lie awake. I lie awake thinking. All I can think about is … I have to get better. I have to go … to go to England. It was all set. To help. But then, this. And now all I can think of is … before I can get better … before I can see Leo, I need more drops.” Even as she said it, Clare heard the deception in her ow
n voice.

  “Leo?”

  “My fiancé.”

  Dr. Perkins’s grey eyes glinted. “He’s in England?”

  “No. He’s in France.”

  Dr. Perkins’s gaze held Clare soberly. “How long have you been taking laudanum?”

  Clare looked down the foggy tunnel of memory. “About … two months.”

  Dr. Perkins ran one neat hand over her forehead, smoothing down her hair, which was pulled back in ebony combs. She picked up her chart and tapped it with her pen. “One vial only. I will prescribe one vial.” She glanced up and said primly, “You have stopped too quickly. We’ll need to taper you off. Come and see me in a week.” She closed the chart and turned to place it on top of a stack on her desk.

  CLARE DREW THE CANDLE CLOSER on the bedside table. She started a fresh page.

  The other reason I came back to Halifax was to see the doctor. Maybe by now you have heard from your father. One of my eyes was injured during the explosion. I needed it to heal before I leave for England. Yes, England! I have visited the Red Cross office. I will work in one of their rest homes, do whatever I have to do. I leave as soon as I can sort myself out. When I think that I may see you soon I feel I will burst.

  The laudanum was filling her limbs with light and warmth.

  Meanwhile, please don’t worry. I am fine. The eye will never be quite right but I can still see perfectly well. In fact I can see you perfectly, your gold-brown eyes, your handsome smile. One doesn’t need both eyes to see do they? To feel someone’s hands or lips?

  15

  FRED HAD GONE BACK to Chebucto School a few days after the explosion. He couldn’t bear sitting in his cold room at Black Court, listening to Mrs. Dempsey shouting at her kids, cooped up by the foul weather.

  Fred found himself thinking of Arthur Barnstead. The day after the explosion, his wife, Louise, had stopped by the door of the school with food for Arthur. She was a big-boned woman with pale skin and red-gold hair. Fred had overhead her trying to get him to come home. “You need sleep,” she’d pleaded.