by Patrick Lane
Joel was getting lost. What did a bell have to do with anything?
“It must first learn the sounds of the wind before it is played,” Wang Po added.
“I don’t understand,” Joel said, the whisky and smoke clouding his head.
“It was a war. But listen now,” he said as Art began to speak again.
“Alvin saw it first. The little pig was grubbing in the mud at the edge of the berm behind the barn. It had survived the Germans on their pullback to Walcheren island. They were living off the land, the Germans, foraging just like the pigs were. But the Germans had missed the shoat. It was Alvin caught it. Cran and Elsted drove it into deep water and Alvin waded out almost up to his chest and hauled it by the hind legs back to land. Alvin said the shoat was swimming for England. We killed ourselves laughing at that. It was Tommy did it. Alvin was on his ass holding the pig in his arms and laughing while it kicked. Pigs scream like children, like women do when they’re held wrong and can’t be let go. As Alvin laughed Tommy reached down and pushed the pig’s snout up under Alvin’s chin and cut its throat. The blood sprayed out across Alvin’s arms. For a moment I thought it was Alvin’s throat Tommy cut, but then Alvin let the pig go. The shoat grabbed hold of the ground with its feet, but it just stood there on legs that wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do. Not anymore.
“Alvin stood up and him and Tommy watched it die into its own blood. Men die like that. Germans mostly, but our own too. The Calgary Highlanders. The shoat. Tommy wiped off his face with his shirt. He was half naked when he gutted it. The offal piled around his feet. The blood in the water looked like sheet copper forgotten in the rain. And then the guns began again off to the west. The ships were shelling Walcheren. I knew we’d be leaving the farm at daybreak, water or no water, roads or no roads.”
Art stopped as Wang Po held the pipe stem to his mouth. He closed his eyes again and Wang Po sang.
Coming home in the dark through the broken fields
My cane tangles in the weeds and scattered stones.
Walls in the temple, black from forgotten fires.
I ask an old man to tell me where my mother lives now.
He points to a faint star adrift among the clouds.
“You sing different than us,” Joel said.
Wang Po’s laugh was the sound of grass scraping on rocks.
“Listen. Listen to Art’s war.”
“Johnny speared the carcass on an iron bar he found in the barn. He tied the pig around it with brass wire from a roll he had in the tank. The coils bit into the skin. Cran made a handle with a pair of long-handled locking pliers from the tank and Elsted started turning the shoat over the fire. The hairs in the pig’s ears turned to flame, the ears beginning to burn. No one cared. Somebody, Cran, I think, pushed potatoes into the hot coals at the edge. We drank the brandy and watched. The woman? I don’t know where she was when we were drinking. She wasn’t mine to worry about. We were leaving in the morning. It didn’t take long before we were tearing off bits of crackling. We couldn’t wait anymore. We hadn’t had fresh meat in a week. Forage was scant in the Scheldt. Fat kept dripping onto the coals. Little bright fires splurting. Tommy was hunched over the blackened pig. He cut off chunks of meat and tossed us gobs of half-cooked pork. Tommy was nineteen. Only that and the worse for it. Another East End kid from Vancouver. He kept that knife of his razor sharp. Some nights it got so I thought I’d go nuts listening to his steel slide across the Washita stone in the firelight, Tommy spitting, and then, slick-slick, slick-slick. The steel sounded like skin slipping on a wet mirror.”
“Here’s another song for you, Art Kenning.”
In the desert the soldiers wake among bones.
They break camp as vultures circle the heavens.
“What does it mean?” Joel asked after a silence.
Wang Po breathed smoke, wisps in his black hair. “From the old time,” he said. “A bad-dream song about war.”
“Alvin kept raking potatoes out of the coals. The husks were charred, the insides steaming. Tommy sheathed his knife in its scabbard. It hung from a braided leather belt he took off a German officer we found in a ditch. It was after Caen. Tommy was squatted down by the fire and chewing on a shard of crackling. There was grease all down his chin. It dripped on the Iron Cross swinging from his throat. The medal he stole was on a string around his sparrow neck. All the time he was chewing Tommy never took his eyes off the woman, a knot of pig gristle stuck in the corner of his mouth. He had no right to steal what wasn’t his.”
Joel sat and listened. His head was strange inside. His eyes closed.
“The woman. The candle was cupped in her hands. Her ring was almost worn away. It was like the moon just before it isn’t anymore. That last slice thin as a fuse burning ten miles away. I look at paintings in my head. Everything bleeds in the dark. The shadows were so hungry they ate themselves. The candle flame was impossible. It flicked at her skin, at her hair. Blonde clots lay on her shoulders. Up inside her frayed collar were her wing bones white beneath her throat. I can see the flowers on her dress. Blotched poppies. They were the colour of the shoat’s blood in the gobbets the men had ate. Watery blood and brandy to thin it. I looked at her slack breasts and looked away. I was so ashamed. Tommy wasn’t. Tommy Bilkowski. He stared at her across the fire. He was whispering to the Calgaries. Cran had that stupid grin on his face. Elsted kept giggling. The ring on her finger told me she had a man. Of course, there had to be one. We were on a farm, for Christ’s sake. There was a barn. There were animals or at least there used to be animals. That pig had to have been hers. She was all alone. But I didn’t want to know what she was feeling.”
“Long time ago, Art Kenning.”
“He never told it like this before,” said Joel.
“Art’s war.”
“The story is different than the times before.”
“Each day we get older the story gets older. It changes with our lives. That is the way of stories.”
Joel hunched down as he waited for Art to begin again.
“She was alone in the candlelight. I wanted to say something, thank her for the potatoes, maybe, thank her for the brandy, the pig. I knew what the men were thinking. When I stood by her, the light from the candle crept into her hair. Can you imagine light hiding? I said I was sorry. I was hopeless as that. I looked at the men and knew the only sure thing was not to feel anything. She lifted her hands from the candle. She stood up and took my sleeve and walked me into the house. It was after we ate at the shoat. There was still some left hanging from the wire. I turned once and saw Elsted twist a leg off the pig. He was rotten drunk. There were bones and bits of meat and scorched potato husks scattered on the dirt. I followed her down a narrow hall into a room at the back of the house. When I got there she took a picture out of a drawer and held it to her chest. Her bed was in that room. I cringed to see it so neat. I remember thinking how she must have believed pulling up the covers over two pillows and smoothing a quilt out somehow made the war not there. As if a careful bed could be a safe place. The window was blown in. The quilt was a sunflower. Crumbs of brick and dust and splinters were sprayed across it. I wish I never saw that bed.
“I took the photograph from her hand. Godelieve, she said. At first I’d thought it was her name, but it wasn’t. No one asked her what her name even was. Not once. Not me. I didn’t. Even when I tried to help her she never had her name. The photograph had her in it. She was younger when it was taken. I knew the look on her face in the picture was one she’d never have again. A man was with her, the farmer, the husband, the father, and between them was a young girl. The girl was the girl named Godelieve.”
It was the name Joel had heard on the stairs. Half in dreaming, the smoke soft in his head, Joel said, “What?”
“She had on a dress, something that was trying to be special, tiny buttons sewed in a circle just above what were her first breasts. The girl wasn’t looking at the camera. She was holding her father’s hand and sh
e was lost in his blunt fingers. I don’t know. She had on her face what you’d call a fleeting smile. It was a smile that got caught by the camera just as it tried to run away, a smile there only for a moment and going just as the shutter closed. The kitchen wall that was gone was in the picture behind them. There were flowers in a pot by the door. I’d seen bits and pieces of that pot in the rubble outside. The spilled flowers were ruined geraniums, the blossoms like clenched blood. The girl in the picture looked maybe nine or ten. Eighteen years and I still see it, her smile flying away like a bat into the dark. The woman reached out and took the picture away from me. She braced the wood frame against the worn poppies on her belly and looked up at me with the kind of helplessness women get when they think they’ve lost everything and suddenly know it’s not over, not yet. There’s never an end to losing, there’s always something more.”
“You are a river gull lost in the canyons,” Wang Po said into the quiet.
Joel listened, a thin silk of smoke shivering above his head.
“The woman was younger in the picture. It’s who she was back in ’33 or ’34. When we were at the farm she was older. There were ghosts in her eyes made of rain. The man in the picture was holding the daughter’s hand, the husband, the farmer, the father. Who else? The woman sat on the edge of the bed saying, Boche, Boche, Boche. She whispered the words like some strange prayer. I led her back to the ruined kitchen with her still saying it. The picture was pressed into her belly. When she got there Tommy untangled her fingers from the frame like he was undoing a knot. I didn’t stop him. I don’t know why. He took the woman by the wrist after he looked at the photograph. I knew even then, I knew. That bubble of pig gristle was still stuck in his grin. I said no, but he walked away with her. The woman didn’t struggle. Not even at all. She walked like she was already dead. He looked back at me only once. Tommy, I called. He grinned at me and I knew saying Tommy’s name wouldn’t be enough. When he came out of the dark he had the girl. The woman, the mother, was behind them. She kept putting her hand on Tommy’s back as if by touching him she could make him let the girl go. The woman must have hidden her daughter as soon as she heard us coming along the dike road. The girl was what the woman had left. Her Godelieve.”
Wang Po was curled up on his bed, his eyes closed, singing.
The night guards have returned, their eyes closed.
Only the owl remembers the stars.
Its long sorrow is the song of a war without end.
The guns are silent, the far fires turned to ash.
The morning has broken with the screams of gulls.
Another night passed in the dreams of horses and men.
“Tommy knew when first he saw the woman she wasn’t alone. He’d seen the two places set at the table: two plates, two knives, two forks. And she was the one brought the picture out to where Tommy was. I don’t know why she did that. I don’t even know why she showed it to me. There was the smell of the burned meat, the stink of the men, the mist, and the rot lifting from where the tank treads had torn the ground. There were a hundred wars in that dirt. You could dig anywhere and come up with a sword or spear or a Lee–Enfield or Browning. There was grease and oil, shit, sweat, jism, and blood in that dirt. It was worn into our uniforms, our hands. There was water all around us. We were on an island in drowned fields that stretched all the way to the sea. Out in the west were the guns of Walcheren. Ours and theirs. Oh hell, Johnny was the first to follow Tommy when he took the girl into the barn. Cran and Elsted were close behind. Alvin stayed outside with me. He was the corporal, but he didn’t say anything to them or to me. He just started breaking more fence palings and throwing the pieces into the fire. What was left of the shoat was burning by then. I looked around for the mother, but she was gone. When I finally saw her she was out in the sea too far to find. Her dress was floating around her like a broken flower. There are nights I can’t close my eyes. I remember Tommy’s blade cutting the meat, his knife a slow scythe.”
I fish for minnows in the lake.
Just born, they have no fear of man.
And those who have learned,
Never come back to warn them.
“Su Tung Po’s death song,” said Wang Po. “At the end of his life he sang this song.”
* * *
—
THE SMOKE IN THE AIR had left Joel in a world where a pig burned on a fire and a woman and a girl danced in a picture frame filled with water. He lifted his head and looked at Wang Po. The cook’s hands were moving above Art’s head and he was singing in his strange tongue. His voice was soft and slow. Joel’s mother would have called his song a keening, but Joel didn’t think men keened. Only women made sounds like that.
And old Chinamen, Wang Po might say.
Joel tried but couldn’t get up off the floor. He tried to lift his empty glass but fumbled it and the glass rolled away. It was the best he could do. He felt like throwing up.
It didn’t seem like the first-aid man had moved since he first sat down. Joel watched as Wang Po took the pipe from Art’s hand and tapped it on the lip of the porcelain cup, a grey nugget and dust.
“All gone,” the cook said, “all over,” and he patted Art’s head as if talking to a child.
He nudged Joel’s leg with his red slipper. “Get up, boy,” he said.
“What?”
“Take Art Kenning home.”
“Did he finish his story?”
“All ashes, that story,” said Wang Po. “He won’t let the dead sleep.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He keeps them in a room in his head,” he said. “It is where they live now.” Wang Po kicked lightly at Joel’s foot with his worn slipper. “You take Art Kenning home.”
Art’s head lolled to one side, his mouth open, a grey pearl in the corner of his eye.
“Why’s he like that?” asked Joel as he pulled his hat down on his head. It seemed too tight for him and he wondered if his head had grown while he was breathing that smoke.
“Art Kenning is a good man,” said Wang Po. “Bad things happen in war to men like him.”
“You were in Nanjing,” Joel said. “That was a war too.”
“I am not so good a man,” said Wang Po. “I crossed the river when others couldn’t. I didn’t turn back. The last thing I saw was a mouse swimming in the river. I saved it from drowning.” He placed the pipe on the low table. “Never mind Nanjing. That place is lost among the willows across the river.”
Wang Po leaned into Art and whispered. All Joel could hear was the faint rasp of Wang Po’s breathing, the words faint and far away. As the cook spoke, Art lifted slowly, his body leaning to the side. Joel got up off the floor and stepped behind Art before he fell over. The chair tumbled to the side and Art began to shuffle, taking Joel with him. It felt to Joel like they were dancing to a song he couldn’t hear, Art sliding inside Joel’s hands, his feet flopping like he had broken ankles, uneasy knees. Joel put his arms all the way around Art’s chest.
Art stopped and mumbled, “Okay. I’m okay.” He tried to shrug him off, Joel lifting him and him almost falling back.
Joel let him slowly go.
Art swayed but held his ground. His eyes were slit as if the lids had been cut with a razor.
Wang Po said, “Go home. The gulls will start screaming soon.”
And they were outside the cookhouse, a high wind crying across the trees.
Art pushed Joel away. “Leave me alone.”
Joel watched him stumble across the gravel reach by the cookhouse where the road headed into the village.
Maybe Art would go home.
The village was quiet, the night shift over. The dim light in the drying yard glowed, the stacks of lumber sprawled around it like heavy animals dead on their knees. Joel glanced at the cookhouse and caught the dark of Wang Po’s room, the light in the narrow window at the foot of the wall going suddenly out. He wondered for a moment what Wang Po did when he was down there alone in his cave, if he e
ver missed his home in China. Nanjing, where the war had been.
Joel had only ever felt lonely in the village since Alice came. His sudden wanting never to be alone again was the beginning of loneliness. It was a new kind of fear. It had entered him like a cage enters an animal.
It seemed like the only person Wang Po ever talked to was Art and even then he never said much. When he did, Joel had trouble understanding him. Joel thought Wang Po talked the way a river talks, in swirls and eddies.
Wang Po never went into the village and never went across the tracks to the mill. Joel had seen him on his night walks down by the river where the big eddy turned and turned in its circle. The only other times Joel saw him leave the cookhouse were to take the kitchen garbage out to the oil barrel drums and that time in the spring when he’d caught the train south to Vancouver. He left in the middle of breakup during the high snows last melting, the bush roads impassable. He was gone a week.
The creeks had overflowed their banks and the roads in the bush had become ruts of mud and gravel, some of them washed away by slides. The few trucks that tried for a load remained in the backcountry sunk to their axles in mudholes and gravel slides. Claude had shut the mill down, the workers living on what they’d saved. It could be three weeks or three months before the mill started up again, everyone said. Art told Joel breakup or no breakup, Claude would’ve shut the mill down anyway. Lumber prices were at rock bottom in the States. And in late spring when the prices rose the sawmill started up again, Claude scrambling to find a crew. When he found Jim McAllister he was happy. A good sawyer was hard to find. Camp cooks too.
Wang Po had only the cot he slept on, two wooden chairs, and a table with a few books on it, the curling pages held down by what Art called his chrysanthemum stones, quartz splayed across the rock like fractured flowers. The books had soft white paper for covers with string stitching and Chinese writing down the side. The writing looked like grouse tracks in snow and Joel always wondered how anyone could make sense of them. Joel had opened a book once when Wang Po and Art were smoking and the book had the same strange writing on the pages inside. They were stick pictures, complicated drawings of things. Wang Po had tried to explain them to him and it made a kind of sense.