by Paul Butler
“Elsa,” she said, and her brown eyes seemed suddenly large, conveying an obligation to be polite. “You remember Fred Evans, Noah’s brother.”
Noah Evans was a thread that ran through to my earliest years, one temporarily unhooked by the war, my widowhood, and my time away. While the name chimed like a once-loved bell, I could recall only the shape of things but not the details. “Noah,” I said decisively, following the thread through to its abrupt and terrible end. I looked across Patricia at a tall, thin man. Adding hair to his shining temples, flesh and colour to his cheek, I recreated the older brother of the childhood friend with whom I had spent happy months in Bonavista.
He caught my eye.
“I’m glad to see you again, Miss Walsh,” he said with a touch of nervousness around his mouth. “Another sad day for sure.”
There was something about the air around the near stranger I recognized, tightness in the face, a vague sense of burden around the shoulders. Our meeting glances seemed to acknowledge this too.
Another sad day, he had said.
The words flapped in my ears like the wings of a mournful crow. Sad, not warm or comforting. There was no room for pride or valour in a leaden word like sad. With the single-minded treachery of the lost, my attention changed focus from Patricia to Fred Evans.
Another, he had said. Another sad day. So this was not an aberration, but part of a pattern.
In three short words Fred Evans had come closer to giving form to the very essence of my grief and isolation than any person within the last year. Noah had died not in the war but on the ice. But his death was a prelude to the great catastrophe, the thunderclap before a storm. The two events—the disaster of sealers lost on the Newfoundland and the Great War itself— were part of the same desolate pointlessness: men with picks, men with rifles, men with clubs, men cutting through wire making their way into no man’s land, men tramping through snow, jumping from ice pan to ice pan. Men eschewing safety and dry land, turning their backs on their families and communities, turning from real life to reach for imagined glory. In neither case was it a single event, a ship without wireless, a battle plan that didn’t work. It was something more, either a kink in the divine plan or a mistake in evolution. It was something that Fred Evans and I understood. Or so it seemed then.
Another sad day.
What a dreadful disservice to a man to lay so much expectation on three words.
CHAPTER 3
Blue smoke rises from Fred’s pipe and his heavily veined forearms, exposed by his rolled-up sleeves, ripple in concentration. He doesn’t look up as I enter, but the newspaper crackles, warding off interruption. Heaviness moves in my chest as I go to the sink, fill the kettle at the tap, and place it on the hot plate. A peek over his shoulder reveals that my husband of twenty years is reading the obituaries, and I feel a swift tug of envy for those whose lives have been levelled at last into painless paper and ink.
Shaking his head, he sighs but still doesn’t look up. “A great man.”
He continues reading.
Fred has remained a man of few words, but he has a knack for making them count. His brief statements always stir a hundred questions; they are profound by default.
The kettle starts to whistle behind me.
“Who’s died?” I ask at last.
“The greatest sealer who ever lived.”
He flaps the paper, folding the page over which the article continues.
I turn again and attend to the kettle, sloshing hot water into the teapot, swirling it around and pouring it into the sink, and then stretch up to the high shelf for the tea caddy.
“Kean?” My voice is soft, unnatural, as I start spooning tea into the pot.
“Who else?”
It is not a question but a statement of defiance. I think of the times: I left the hospital at three. The newspaper is printed…when? I used to know these things. Patricia’s nephew was a reporter for a time. My hand wavers as the water streams in a hesitant ribbon from the kettle into the pot. Rising steam stings the hairs on the back of my hand, and I replace the pot’s lid with a double clug.
“When did he die?” I wipe my hands on the tea towel, then turn and lean back against the oven rail.
“Yesterday.”
“I imagine you’ll pay your respects.”
“All decent people will.”
I know he must have finished Kean’s obituary by now. But his frown remains on the page.
“Some people didn’t like him.”
“Ignorant people.”
I eye the cups hanging from the dresser behind his chair but, for the moment, remain where I am.
“There was that matter of the Newfoundland.”
“Don’t I know it?”
Now he looks up, chestnut eyes catching mine, holding, a buck rabbit in a snare, defying its hunter. The guilt of the survivor is a terrible thing, and I’m loath to prod him further but know I can’t prevent myself. A cargo load of urgency creaks and groans inside me, threatening to crack my ribs. The words escape before I can catch them: “What about Noah?”
“Noah took his chances.”
The wounded look rises in his face, subsides, then he lets his eyes descend again upon the paper.
I circle the table to the cups, unhook them, and return to the teapot. Was it true? By the spring of 1914 I hadn’t seen Noah Evans for a full year. He might have changed during the passage from fifteen years old to sixteen. Wisdom can peel away like layers of skin as a boy grows to the full idiocy of manhood. I lay the cups on the kitchen table like muskets in preparation for a duel, and then collect the teapot and pour the tea first into his cup, then into mine.
“It must have been hard, being on the Stephano under Kean and then finding out.”
“Hard on everyone. Hard on Kean.”
He raises the cup and a bitter look comes over him as he takes his first sip. Does he suspect poison? I raise my own cup. The curling steam, held close, emboldens my lips.
“But Kean knew about the Newfoundland. He had received word but still stayed out on the ice.”
“Everyone likes a villain. What was he supposed to do?”
Again the hunted look; he takes a quick gulp of tea. “It was too late to save anyone.”
“Would you have carried on sealing if you’d known about Noah?”
He rises, cup in hand, scraping back his chair. “Never been on the ice, have you?”
“Neither had Noah, until then.”
He makes an awkward throwing gesture with his free hand—a stock one these days to mean I’m talking nonsense but I’m not worth an argument—as he turns to head out of the kitchen. But unsettled, needing the last word, he hovers at the doorway, putting the tea on the floor and pulling at his shoelaces.
“What’s it to you anyway?” he growls. “He was my brother, not yours. You hardly knew him.”
The thought passes through me that women are robbed of our lives—of our husbands, children, brothers, and friends—and when it comes to the details, some version of “What-is-it-to-do-with-you?” is always the response. This insight cannot be expressed to Fred, and he doesn’t want to hear it anyway, so I hunch over the steaming tea and watch his shoulders tremble in rage as he breaks one lace, curses, then wrenches at the loops to get them even.
“What would you know of Kean, or Noah, or me for that matter? I wanted to get him a berth on the Stephano. He was the one who wanted to go on the Newfoundland.”
I hear an edge of desperation in his voice. A fleeting wish passes through me that I could be as adept at conciliatory phrases as I am at the triggers of anger, but it’s no use; this constant battle is part of us, simply the way we come together. It’s nobody’s fault but I married my enemy when I meant to marry my friend.
“Why do you want to punish people who are only doing their best?” he continues, still fussing at the laces. “You’re so superior to everyone,” he adds, pulling the knot with an exaggerated grunt and picking up his cup from the floor. �
�Just because you stayed in some fancy house in England.”
“As a governess,” I add quietly. “And it wasn’t fancy.”
“Too good to stay here.” He nods his head now, happy to find his target.
“I just needed time, Fred, after the war.”
“Time,” he repeats, almost spitting, rising to stand again.
“That’s a luxury.”
“I wasn’t in a rest home, Fred. I was working.”
“Working!” He waves his tea cup as though weaving patterns in the air with a blade. “Whose child were you caring for?”
His face turns pink. We’ve been here before many times, a cliff edge over which neither of us wishes to tumble. Whose child? Not mine. Not ours. In the panic of anger he’s lit a fuse as dangerous to him as to me. The pinched look about his cheeks tells me he knows this, but he hasn’t the skill to withdraw the question.
“I’ve told you a hundred times,” I say, calmly, reassuringly, “Sarah and Simon Jenson’s child, Lucy.”
“Did they know about sealing?” There’s momentary relief in his tone. He’s grateful I didn’t pick up on the incendiary potential of his previous question. But still his frame is trembling with indignation and a dollop of tea spills onto the floor. He looks absurd, knows it, and I feel sorry for him, again wishing that I knew how to bring it all to a close.
“No, Fred,” I say as mildly as I can. “They didn’t know anything about sealing. And you’re right, neither do I.”
He’s surprised by this and stands for the moment, afraid to move, suspecting a trick. “What happened to the Newfoundland was bad enough without blame. Captain Kean is loved by everyone.”
“No, he isn’t,” I say, not with malice for Kean, but regret for my husband. “He died alone.”
“How would you know?”
His face twitches slightly, but he’s still triumphant, just frustrated at the glitch before final confirmation of his victory.
“Because I sat with him in the hospital.”
“What?”
His expression alters in waves—disbelief, scorn at such a silly lie, then a deep inquiry, gaining urgency with every passing second.
“It’s true, Fred. I sat with Kean.”
The sun intensifies quite unexpectedly through the window, striping the kitchen with bars of gold. Laughter from the neighbours’ children trespasses through the pane.
“Have you gone mad?”
The question thins into a whisper and I can sense the nature of his anxiety: He’s afraid that this time it may be no mere turn of phrase.
“Yes,” I stammer, feeling the kiss of tears on my lower lids for the first time, I think, in many years. “I think that maybe I have.”
France
1916
CHAPTER 4
Simon
I count the wormholes in a cluster—twelve in all. The beam supporting the dugout roof is riddled with them, stoic little buggers. Dank air wheezes in and out of my chest, and my heart pounds against my ribs, wanting to disown me, to batter its way to freedom.
The machine gun fire is relentless. My brain detects an odd kind of music in the noise, the sort of cacophony that might result were the war god Mars to reinterpret Wagner: cymbals, drums, discordant strings, the boom and drone of inhuman voices. Somewhere in the molten depths of the earth are creatures who might find beauty in the strange disharmony. It’s only soft flesh and warm blood that recoils, and it’s we poor creatures who are at fault. The noise merely tells of the universe as it is; mankind is an aberration of unnatural sensitivity. The war has been sent upon us as a purge, to burn us to a cinder so that creation might forget nature’s latest folly, so that it might return to the sanity of rock, fire, and thunder.
The beam shakes and dust rises from one of the sandbags. The boom comes on the heels of the vibrations, the sound delay revealing a distance of three or four hundred yards. A little grey cloud of dust spreads itself—a grimy, desperate last hope such as Wordsworth might have envisioned in a deathbed nightmare. The poet would have found no white puffy cumulus here, no celestial rays flooding the daffodils.
Charles stirs on his bunk beside me. Without turning I can sense that he is coiled. He inhales sharply.
“It must be close to the time.”
It’s a statement of fact. I know this, yet a wave of hot anger sweeps through me, prickling the hairs on my neck, burning the skin beneath. Some time ago the lizard of cowardice crawled into my brain and attached itself there. I still can’t shake it free.
I turn on my bunk to find Charles perched on the end of his own bed like a robin redbreast sitting on a fence. I shoot him a look.
“Sorry old man. Didn’t know you were still sleeping.”
His face—cheeks like fresh peaches, blue eyes clear and trusting—takes me into a whole other world.
“How long have you been out here now, Charles?”
“A week and two days.”
“You’re excited by this, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” He looks down, fingering his bayonet.
Charles thinks I’m accusing him, but my anger is already gone. Nothing lasts here and, in any case, Charles’s features have merged with those of his sister. Or is it the other way around? Has memory remoulded Sarah’s face into that of her younger brother? Minutes are so lugubriously drawn-out here that it’s impossible to trust either the future or the past. Both are as remote as dinosaurs.
There’s a crash; everything shakes, dust rising again.
“Seems so close,” Charles says eagerly, “like we were under bombardment ourselves. How could Jerry survive all that?”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t,” I answer, urbane and world-weary, but a knot of fear tightens in my stomach. This is an old sensation, last felt in the first weeks in the trenches when my nerves hung like the wire demarcating our territory, when the whistle and boom seemed to comprise a heart-jolting overture to some great explosion. But the cataclysm did not come. Only dribs and drabs, hunger, dirt, and diarrhea, stretchers for a few, darkness and waiting for the rest. And I have grown used to these things. This dugout has been home for so long, I can’t imagine life without its protection.
“What do you think will happen, Simon?”
“I don’t know.”
Surprised at the calmness in my voice, I let my back rest upon the wire mesh bunk and my imagination inhale the cigarette smoke I crave. Tobacco hasn’t arrived at our trench even though we were promised it would before this morning. Is this a good omen? A denied last request surely means reprieve. My bunk trembles and the distant bombardment intensifies—a monster’s belch repeating four times, five times, six times, seven…I glance at the disabled alarm clock on the floor. Its spread-eagled black arms say five past seven.
Turning, I swing my legs, boots meeting the loose planks. I beat down my uniform. Charles shadows my movements, dropping from his bunk, standing, and checking his rifle one last time.
“So this is it, old man,” he says, facing me, an odd expression on his face. His cheeks are pinker than usual, and his pale eyes are alive with some emotion I suppose must be fear. Please don’t ask me for comfort.
“Listen,” he stutters, moving forward half a step. I find myself backing off, eyes blinking as though confronted by the sun’s glare. This boy is at odds with everything in the world I now inhabit—the smell of the earth, the damp, and the constant booming. Charles is a flower growing from a grenade.
“I don’t want to talk out of turn, Simon, but I just know this is it. You’re going to get out of this. This is victory.” His lips break into a timorous smile and his eyes flash, just as Sarah’s used to do. “I can sense it.”
My hand gropes for the beam and I grip the dry wood. It isn’t fear the boy is feeling. It’s concern, pity even—for me. He supposes it is I who most needs to “get out of this,” not he. What has he seen? How have I betrayed myself?
I know he has seen my shame because his expression alters. He gives me an encouraging smile.
“It must have been hell,” he says more softly, “all this time here. I can’t even imagine.”
“Not at all,” I blurt, eyes stinging. “Let’s get ready, Baxter.”
Charles holds my gaze for a second before breaking off and stooping towards his bunk. The look he has just given me is one of Sarah’s, an exchange of sympathy that, despite its businesslike swiftness, is as deep and reliable as a fjord. The Baxters—all of them, it seems—are practical, efficient, wise, and well-meaning. Charles, true to form, has taken even my rebuff with understanding.
He attaches his officer’s kit to his uniform. The tug, rattle, and clip of this procedure bring me back to the preparations before a cricket match. Charles excelled as a batsman at school. I did not, but being two years older and his sister’s suitor, it didn’t diminish me in his eyes. I was always the adult world into which he desired entry. It seems I am still drawing on that account.
An improbable fragrance—rich and wholesome like leaves in early autumn—wafts into the dugout. So little remains alive above us, just acres of sun-caked mud, but some genius spirit in the breeze has conjured the magical scent as a subtle torture. It brings me back to September before the war when, after years of clinging to the drying twig of my pride, I fell like a seed, spinning into Sarah’s world with my hasty proposal and her acceptance.
Sarah Baxter and her family inhabit some golden part of nature most of us only glimpse. They are always at play, always teasing, but never unkind. They conjure visions of languorous days and endless green meadows. When I was young I did my best to ignore the ruddy-faced boy and his spindly, vaguely bored older sister with the frizzy red hair as they tramped and hollered their way through the scrub connecting our two homes, yet even then I knew they were the centre of something. Their world was full of games, such as charades or sardines, that seemed both childish and faintly magical. They revelled on the banks of the dank pond that lay within their grounds and were often joined by a cluster of equally innocent cousins. I used to look down at them from the study where I had cloistered myself, wondering at the complexity of the disparagement I felt, the way it tugged at me angrily at the corners, and exerted a dull pressure in the region of my tear ducts. Mrs. Baxter was long a widow and yet she was surrounded by life, while my father, her counterpart in mourning, wanted nothing more than to be left alone. The first few times they asked me to join one of their games I refused, feeling no regret at all at my decision. I can’t remember how many times they asked me, or what it was that made me succumb. Perhaps it was the time when coming home from exams I smirked at their games deliberately, wanting them to see me, and found them smiling back openly in response. I remember the unexpected wave of shame that came over me, the burning on my cheek. Eventually I did join them, and we formed a friendship that remained tentative on my part. For a long time I still didn’t quite believe in them, in this boy and girl to whom sharing was second nature, to whom sarcasm was so alien they didn’t even recognize it. It’s a perpetual surprise to find through Sarah’s letters, and through Charles, that even now they haven’t changed.