“Jim, it’s not that I don’t appreciate this time we have.” Her expressions softened somewhat, aided by her voice, modulated in tactfully chosen words tendered with emotion, “and it’s not that I don’t support you on this venture—it’s just that I don’t appreciate all the time we don’t have anymore. I’ve seen you a total of twenty days this last year. My visit to you in Halifax two months ago was the last time I saw you. The last time before that was when we met your family in Sudbury two months before that. And now … ” Her voice trailed off into silence, absent words defining absence.
“And now ... ” he refrained. “And now, let’s make this last weekend count, darling.” The choice of the word darling jarred like a bad note or a snapped string during a violin solo. It seemed so gratuitous after this gradual parting over the two years, since he’d joined the service and been moved all over the bloody country on various postings with his unit. Darling—did that word even apply anymore?
She was right about the lack of time spent together, and the implications for their marriage. She had every right to feel the way she did, her true feelings breaking through time and time again like stress fractures in a poorly built bridge, demonstrating in actuality what he tried to forget, tried to convince himself was not really the case, that he was just taking a leave of absence and all would be the same again, he would be home with new stories to tell, new scars to show. She was right, she was right; boy, was she right about a great many things, some that he refused to believe.
“Let’s eat before our dinner gets cold.” She looked back down to her plate, stirred the beans around into the gravy, and dragged the tines of her fork screechingly across her plate as she did so before nibbling halfheartedly. He cut into a sinewy chop with his steak knife and chewed, every chew ringing out loudly into the silence.
“Mrs. Wright dropped off some flowers today for us—more African violets. I put them on the windowsill. Sweet old lady, don’t you think?”
“Uh huh.” He looked up at the kitchen windowsill. Indeed, a pot of primly arranged African violets called for attention from the kitchen windowsill. He sipped his root beer, licking the excess froth from his lips.
“She comes by often, you know, for tea and whatnot.”
“That’s very nice of her.”
“I think it’s because her own kids all left the nest.” A mouthful of mashed potatoes.
“That would make sense.” Another mouthful of pork.
“And I think because I’m alone so often.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, well, you know, it could all be ...” He thought better about finishing his sentence.
She picked up on this thread he had left her. “Could be what, Jim? Could be what? Over before you know it, all over and it’s back to normal and you’re back teaching at Ashton and I’m typing in the office and maybe we can take over the furniture store later? Have a couple kids, grow old and all those boring things a married couple do together?”
“Sorry,” he said with a sigh, and ran his hand through his hair. He felt awful and stupid about leading the conversation in this direction, as if it wouldn’t have gone this way later anyway as it had so often in the past. “I’m sorry. Let’s … just eat, then.”
“You know, it wouldn’t have been so bad if you didn’t take your damn friend John’s advice.”
“John who? Barrett?”
“Yeah, him, John Barrett. It’s one thing to sign up. You could have stayed with the Camerons, for crying out loud, then you’d be training nearby and you could see me more often. You could’ve switched to the 2nd Battalion and had a job training other officers who volunteered for overseas service. You would still be involved, and would have an important job. Instead, you have to go carouse with your old buddy and jump ship to another regiment all the way in goddamned Toronto!” Her voice began steady, wavered in the middle, and broke into crying by the end. “You went away before they even stationed you anywhere else! You left me then because you wanted to, not because you had to, Jim!”
“Damn it Marianne, goddamn it, I get my embarkation leave and it may be my last weekend here and you drag out this fucking argument yet again!” He was up and pacing throughout the kitchen, gesturing with his hands. “Look—it really doesn’t matter what happened and why anymore. What matters is that I’m here. And please, for God’s sake, please don’t make me feel I wasted this leave pass on you when I could maybe have seen my parents instead, if you’re going to be this way.”
“Maybe you should have.” She too was standing now, arms folded in a protective, combative stance.
“You know, I do what I can to wrangle these extra leaves. I’ve tutored Colonel Brophy’s son, I’ve traded all my liquor rations with others for leaves, used what connections I have.”
“That doesn’t sound too difficult, you know.” She circled about the table, pausing to continue. “You hardly drink much as it is.”
“Well, you know Marianne, there isn’t much to do after hours on some of these postings, a stiff drink now and again is just what the doctor ordered, do you hear me?”
“It’s a pretty small sacrifice.”
“Yeah, well, whatever works to bring me to you.” For dramatic emphasis, he made his way into the cramped front hall and grabbed his wedge cap and his duffel bag. “I could leave, if that’s what you’d prefer. And go where I’m welcome. I’ll take the first train to Montreal, have myself a gay old time, spend my leave enjoying myself, for Christ’s sake!”
“This isn’t …” she began, then stopped herself, averting her eyes.
“Isn’t what?” he snapped back as he made it to the hat rack, looking behind his shoulder for emphasis.
“This isn’t all because you’ve had doubts about marrying me?”
“Come again?” A look of bafflement. “Pardon?”
“This isn’t … I mean, all of your wanting to quit your job and walk out on me and prove yourself at some epic venture, all this isn’t because you’ve had your doubts about me, is it? Or doubts about tying yourself down and settling and raising a family when you felt you had accomplished nothing of your own merit yet? Because you felt that you’d wasted a lot of time up till now? That you had yet to grow up yourself? That you felt upstaged by your younger brother when he joined the air force? That me and us and our plans together just weren’t good enough for you?”
“Why in hell would you think that? What on earth would any of that have to do with this? And why do you think that I think these things?” He fumbled a moment for extra words. “This—this decision of mine—this call of duty as it were, is just that—a call of duty. I feel it incumbent upon me to do something for my country. We are at war, Marianne. Wars don’t just fight themselves, you know. And they don’t go away until you fight them, and until you win them.”
“I think that you’re just fighting yourself, Jim. And I am the one being left out in the cold.”
“Whatever you say,” he mumbled into his hand.
“Well, I think that all of that certainly does play a role, anyway.”
“I already told you why I joined.”
She looked at him from the entrance to the kitchen, leaning against the doorway in moody resignation. She turned her head slightly and the hall light caught a flash of tear streaks running down her cheeks. He stood in the doorway, poised to leave, cap under arm and bag clasped in hand, riding out this charged moment. Then he looked down and was greeted by black socked feet, and he felt ridiculous, his polished patent leather shoes parked several feet away on a mat beside her two-toned Mary Janes. He smiled foolishly. She looked at him and he surrendered to her watery gaze, her sad, longing watery gaze.
“I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly, and he felt the water welling in his own eyes, all defences down, tenseness subsiding, and he put the bag down and the hat upon the rack, and he stepped toward her, and she lifted her head, and her head flashed tearshine
in the light again in an angle of sadness, a glinting of bodies in space drifting slowly apart.
“I’m sorry,” he uttered again, pulling her close, and she surrendered to his arms, a sad surrender, and she placed her arms around his waist and rested her head upon his shoulder, and they held this position for a while, rocking gently, uncertain of who was the prime mover, a pendular equilibrium marking time and riding out the waves of uncertainty.
“Should we finish our meal?” he asked softly into her ear.
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
“Neither am I. Shall we go upstairs?”
“I’m not feeling that either.”
“Well goddamn it Marianne, make up your bloody mind what you want to do.”
A stinging slap across the face, and an expression of outrage on her face. He rubbed his hand over his enflamed, burning cheek. “Ouch! For the love of God, what was that for?”
“You watch your mouth around me. You’re swearing at me like you would with your soldier buddies. Don’t ‘goddamn’ this and ‘bloody’ that and ‘fucking this’ with me.”
“Sorry.”
“You know, I’m not some prude, and I’m not a shrew, but I feel that you could talk to me a little better than you would your comrades in the officers’ mess.”
“Sorry.” He stood longer in front of the door, and she stood looking at him, eyes burning, and they both glared and glowered until the embers of their eyes cooled in the thoughtful silence, blood pressure subsiding, reason reasserting itself heartbeat by slowing heartbeat. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“So sorry,” he blubbered as he dissolved into tears, against the wall by the door, sliding down to the floor, sobbing into his hands, his knees curled up, and Marianne went to him and enveloped him in a hug, whispering into his ears, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay, cry if you have to, go ahead and cry,” all the while crying herself, rocking him, and he rocking her, the two of them rocking and swaying like a pendulum ticking away the last of their time together.
22
Drunk on a hill at the outskirts of the village, among the vineyards and the copses of trees and the hills; standing beside an ancient church, overlooking the town and its spires and the brownstone medieval walls encapsulating the old town centre, wandering walls jutting into a promontory here, indenting there, baring their crenellated teeth at ancient enemies; and looking at the clusters of pup tents in surrounding fields, the parked lines of vehicles, the massed and concentrated assembly of force. His flask and canteen are now empty. He has no idea how long he has been out here, he has been in a blur, neither here nor there, really, avoiding company, especially his own. A gaggle of British truck drivers brew up tea in a bucket in a vineyard with a gasoline fire and offer him some, and they make cursory conversation with him,” “‘Ello Canada! Want a spot of tea, sir? We don’t ‘ave scones, you’ll ‘ave to make do with only tea, it’s teatime here at the front you see, sure, thank you, not a bad brew at all considering.”
Soldiers come and go in their small bands. Flashes in the nearby woods; guns crump from their positions, hurling shells here and there toward the German lines. He takes his tea in a tin cup they’ve offered him and sits on an edge of the vineyard wall, made of loosely fit stone laid down and replaced over the ages, mottled with lichens, the aged liver spots of stones. Mosquitoes buzz about him, and one buzzes him in the ear with its high-pitched whine, and he swats absently at it before it flies off and tries its luck with one of the truckers. Over yonder the drivers sit cross-legged on the ground by a high wall entangled with withering sunbeaten ivy, and they smoke cigarettes and chatter and drink their tea, filmy as it is with a touch of oil, and the wind changes direction and the smoke blows into Jim’s eyes and they burn and sting.
“Goddamnit!” he grunts, choking, and he slides a little further down the wall. A mosquito follows him to smokeless sanctuary and he is pestered about the ears again.
“Sorry, sir! Bloody wind is Jerry’s Fifth Column!” shouts one of the four drivers with good cheer and in a Cockney accent, a rough-cut man with a sunburned face and a deep scar in his cheek. The others laugh.
“You enjoyin’ your-r-r tea, sir?” another asks, a smaller, gaunt and wiry man with a brown moustache, who with his thick brogue and upward-turned inflections proves to be Scottish, likely from Glasgow.
“Yes, thank you,” he answers loudly with a forced smile. “Very much so.”
“You wan’ in a round o’ craps, sir? We’re playin’ for fags.”
“No thank you, I’ll just drink my tea here, okay?”
“R-r-right, sir!” And with that they deal out cards and dice, rolling the dice in a frying pan procured from their truck parked nearby. He sits in a silence broken by the clattery dice rolls and the shouts and laughter of the drivers. After a while, he stands up and surveys the scene about him, tin cup in hand. He looks into the sky. Clouds conspire against the last of the late summer sun in the sky above, and they fill up with the autumn rain that will start and build to a torrential crescendo, turning the fields into muck, swelling the dry, trickling riverbeds to varicose versions of their summer selves, creating further obstacles to an already grinding advance, as what happened the previous autumn to the long-suffering 1st Division and 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade, as happened for a few days while he held the church, a preliminary taste of the autumn rains. The rains will come and churn the fields and gulleys into cold porridge. Cold porridge, he thinks, like a bowl of soggy-sweet Red River for breakfast on a prairie farm. Red river, he continues, pensively turning the words in the hand of his mind, examining them, musing on them. A horrible metaphor comes to him. Yes, red river indeed. The rivers will run red when we cross them. Like at the Melfa. And the Foglia. The near-parched riverbeds fed and made torrential with the lifeblood of youth.
The air cools a little, just a little, as a cold front moves in and tangles with the warm, nature locked in its eternal struggle with no thought toward the man-made one that litters the ground below and poisons the air around and above. A casual breeze, a slight change in pressure, a twitch of planetary muscle more powerful than all of man’s engines of war put together. Still, he takes in this scene, this pastoral painting of rural northern Italy, this postcard intruded upon by military men and vehicles. However, even the men and the vehicles add something, are part of it: as little is happening, the soldiers are just part of the scene around him. Surface details, ephemeral details in a world of great and subtle changes millions of years in the making—the seasons, the erosion of sea against shore, the formation and destruction of mountains, the quick-change costume pageant of human history atop all that and aware of little of it, like microbes on the skin of a great animal, living out their lives and purposes with little perception of the nature of their environment. Here and there, the stone walls separating the fields and orchards, the stone and stucco and cinderblock walls of houses, and the wooden slats of barns and toolsheds are pitted with bullet holes or broken by shells; but there is a strange, still beauty in that, too. Below the hill, in the valley, the village of San Giovanni, the centuries mixed together in mortar and stone and wood, still standing after centuries, changing hands like the moving of seasons—Romans, Byzantines, Malatestas, Venetians, Austrians, French, Germans, Anglos. Pitted in the walls of many such towns are chiselled experience, architectural memories, the seismic buckling and volcanic change of the human landscape.
My, Jim thinks after his wordless survey of the world about him. A moment. No one is trying to kill you right now. Your wife just left you but you are still standing. Tottering, but standing. And your head is beginning to hurt, because you are drunk now. The sun is still shining—take it in. If I were commissioned as a war artist, I’d paint one of those houses with holes in it. I’d call it The Endurance of Everyday Life. That sounds like an artist’s title for something, like something Arthur Lismer would paint, I imagine. He recalls
a detail from last night’s overview of the battle plan, that the Germans may use the castle on the outskirts of Coriano during the upcoming attack as a firing position or an observation post, a castle still malattestant to human conflict. Fulfilling its martial purposes centuries again after it was used for such purposes. He takes a deep breath: invigoration.
He stares ahead and around him and lets the scene envelop him within its frame of escape, letting his eyes paint his mind with what he sees before him. Supply trucks rumble behind him. A shell sizzles overhead forward through the sky, but he does not really care. It’s not aimed at me. It’s aimed beyond this scene, beyond the scope of his eyes. In the distance, a plumed row of smoky puffs, followed moments later by the succession of reports like the rolling of distant thunder. The sun cuts through parts in the gathering clouds with shafts of light that suggest to him, optimism. So what if it’s going to rain. The sun will still shine. So what if there’s a war on. There’s no war without peace to compare it to. And peace will return. And the sooner you wake up, the sooner you clear your bloody head and take your charge and lead, the sooner that peace will return. There is a time for everything, war and peace. In the meantime, take in beauty where and when you can find it. Like the smashed bits of stained glass in the church, beautiful in a broken way, teasing the eyes, the mind sketching what it sees. The smell of olive oil, suggesting comfort, home-cooked meals, a grateful family serving up what little they have to someone they feel is a liberator, who acknowledges the hardship. Or the sun-gilded surface of the Adriatic, the miles of beaches of fine sand, broken down over millions of years. Sea at dawn, lapping molten at the beach. But don’t swim lest you lose your legs and your balls to an unfound mine! Achtung! Minen! Attenzione! Minatos! Danger! Mines! proclaim the signs, or yell frantic seaside dwellers when they see someone absently milling about in such a situation. But you can still look at the beach and at the sun rising from the sea, and that is good enough.
Beckoning War Page 18