Hero

by Paul Butler

  Against my will, the memory returns for the sixth or seventh time since the letter. I ease Charles upon the ground, arms, neck, and head like a carcass from a butcher’s shop—bones within a sack of skin. He lies there contorted at the neck and shoulder, eyes gazing off into blue. Something crashes through me at the memory, a wave of emotion I can’t recognize. It tugs and circles, loosening moisture, bringing a hint of salt water to my nose. I remain upon the battlefield, listening as the cackle of gunfire merges with the motion of the train. I spin around as I did then, towards the enemy lines, the rising smoke, and the wire-pinioned bodies. I see a finger raised, not, after all, in accusation. I see a smirk, but the target is not me, but war itself, the beast against which I have just declared myself enemy.

  Sarah’s eyes are upon me, scrutinizing, worried. I realize I have sighed, quite loudly. She turns back to our daughter and points something out through the window.

  I miss Charles. This was the meaning of the salt water in my nose, the reason for the sigh. It’s wounds of grief, and not guilt, which now flow with fresh blood. Grief for the man I never dared to mourn. This, not the action of a moment, is my failure. It is this omission that has spanned the years, punishing Charles’s sister and niece.

  I listen to Sarah, to her soft words pointing out the ash, the oak, the elm, the willow. I try to catch the rhythm of her speech, try to feel my way into some future conversation. It is madness indeed I could have been so blind to my redemption, but here they are beside me. Weightless I remain, at least for the while, but the warmth of them, their aliveness, gives promise of focus returning and of fresh pain aplenty. The cave of perpetual guilt has been my refuge. It’s time to come into the light.

  St. John’s

  1945

  CHAPTER 35

  The window frame groans from a sudden gust. Do I see, or merely imagine, the moving of a curtain? I arise from suffocating dreams, the mattress squeaking beneath me as invisible knots loosen and fall from my elbows and wrists. Fred gasps, holds his breath, then slowly exhales. I recognize the sound of his lean, agonized dreams.

  There is almost no light. I let my soles touch the floor not because I have any destination in mind, but because I need to remind myself that movement is possible. I need to feel I’m not fixed like a piece of guttering to this central portion of St. John’s.

  One pace in the darkness and I catch the protesting moan of my husband’s dreams. I wonder with whom he imagines himself to be sharing a bed in this hushed, post-midnight zone. Whose absence provokes his longing breath? Not mine.

  A kiss of ice seems to land upon my eyelashes though the room is warm, and I imagine snow falling from the ceiling. I gain the window in four short steps and, clear through the glass, I think I can taste the falling dew of night. It has to be a dream, the thought comes, this last thirty years or more. I can’t be here. It’s not so much that my life is more terrible than I deserve but that the reality of the here and now seems so arbitrary, as though I have been transported through a series of lightning flashes to the various plateaus of existence. Wife of Fred Evans, governess to Lucy Jenson, widow of Jack Hamilton, wife of Jack Hamilton, double expatriate, once here, once there.

  Re-emerging from my dreams is an earlier self still. Though little more than a child, this girl seems wiser than she has been at any time since. Through the crisp precision of instinct she is able to divide thought, belief, and action into night and day, right and wrong. Only later did she stumble through the trials and errors of experience into the dense fog of uncertainty.

  My dream brought me back to Bonavista, to the soft lamp–light by the Evans’s stove, to a scene fresher in my mind, more enlivened by senses, than yesterday’s clumsy argument about Kean. There were just two of us, Noah Evans and I. The stove’s hiss and crackle accompanied our words and the wind created a harmony of low moans outside.

  “Fred is going to the ice again this spring,” he said, stretching his hands uncertainly towards his foot, cradling his lower calf in his palms. Noah was a year younger than I, but we both sat like children, folded in upon ourselves, a cluster of confidentiality and innocence. “He has a berth on Abram Kean’s ship.” He hasn’t met my eyes. This and his bald statement convey everything.

  “How about you?”

  He smiled, relieved perhaps, at the ease with which I have caught his meaning.

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Perhaps next year your mother will let you.”

  He shakes his head, a touch of irritation about him now.

  “I don’t want to spill blood.”

  The idea stopped me for a moment as I watched Noah’s forefinger probe a freshly stitched wound in his thick woollen sock.

  “It’s not human blood, Noah.”

  As Noah’s older brother entered, filling the room with the unmistakable yet hard-to-describe scent of a young man—the rough smell of physical work, leather, and thick outer clothing—I spoke lower. Fred cast a look in our direction that was half-curious, half-scornful. He sat at the round table a few feet away and, with the hint of a flourish, opened the newspaper.

  “Have you ever been up close to an animal?” Noah whispered. Fred rustled his newspaper. “Close enough to strike it dead?” His brown eyes, alive with constant, frightened motion, locked upon mine.

  I leaned as close as I could to Noah without gaining Fred’s attention.

  “You don’t have to.” My face burned, perhaps with the heat of the nearby stove. “You don’t ever have to if you don’t want to.”

  He winced as though struck on the side of the head, and gave a bitter smile. “You don’t understand. I do have to. Everyone does.”

  I was about to argue, but sensing a change in the atmo–sphere, we edged away from each other and looked up to the table. The wind had died down and even the stove had ceased to sizzle. Fred was listening.

  “I wonder you girls aren’t taking the time to do some sewing.”

  I threw the older brother a scornful glare. He looked away suddenly and I saw his jaw tensing.

  “See what I mean?” breathed Noah so quietly I barely caught the words.

  Fred’s face had turned pink and his knuckles were white as he gripped the corners of the newspaper he scanned too intently.

  “Right the first time,” he said suddenly. Through the supersensitive hearing that sometimes alerts one sibling to the most private whispers of another, Fred had managed to hear all of Noah’s words. “You do have to. The families on this coast can’t afford men who fear the sight of blood.” I turned from Noah and faced him. His eyelids flickered beneath his businesslike frown as he pretended to read.

  “Fred, your family doesn’t rely on the seal hunt anymore, as you well know. Leave Noah alone.”

  “Just as well it doesn’t.” Fred snapped the newspaper shut. “I’ve been out with your brothers taking a look at the ice. The three of us might go out tomorrow and shoot a few in advance of the hunt.”

  “Noah will join you,” I said, aware of my recklessness, of the hum of blood in my ears. I sensed Noah squirming beside me and felt the heat of his blush.

  “Ha! Just two weeks ago we put him on an ice pan no more than twenty yards from shore, club in his hand, knife in his belt, a family of seals no more than fifteen paces away.”

  “Here he goes again,” said Noah, rolling his eyes.

  I tried to catch his eye but his face had turned, seeking refuge from the stove.

  “Just like Father at fourteen, just like me, except the task was far simpler. We leave him to it with instructions to bring home flippers and hide.”

  “Stop it,” I said. Fred locked eyes with me for a moment, but the interruption had merely served to infuriate him more.

  “He snuck back in two hours later with nothing.”

  Fred rose from the table, taking his newspaper, his face twisted in an odd kind of triumph, aimed—I thought at the time—in my direction. “That’s the kind of man he is, the kind that can never support a family.�
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  “What do you know?” hissed Noah, shoulders hunched like those of a dog caught between flight and defence. “I did kill a seal.”

  “Where is it then?” Fred stood over us, his newspaper rolled up in his hand.

  “It slipped off into the water before I could fetch it back.” Fred was motionless for a second, his rolled newspaper wavering. He watched his younger brother for signs of deception. The aggression had gone from Noah, and he sunk upon his crossed legs, deeply ashamed. For a moment there was a glimmer of something new on Fred’s face, a suggestion of approval.

  “I’m going out to meet Michael and Jimmy again,” he said, turning to the door. “Maybe we’ll even get one before supper!” The door opened and slammed. “Man’s work, Noah!” The exclamation died off into the dusk.

  The battle between the brothers had arisen during my stay. As tonight was my last before returning to St. John’s, this was the final shot I was to witness. It didn’t trouble me so much because I would soon be home and within the orbit of Jack, the auburn-haired young man who had begun turning up with the unexplained regularity that promised a long and reliable courtship. I assumed that for Fred and Noah the tensions between them would die away once I left.

  Now I wonder whether I had been flattering myself all along. Family relationships are like spiders’ webs, vastly more complex than they at first appear. A twitch upon a thread will cause a movement in an unexpected place. Were Noah and Fred fighting over me? Or were Fred and I locked in battle over Noah’s soul? Now, in the dark, rendered lonelier than solitude by a husband’s tortured breathing, this second explanation seems more likely.

  “Did you really kill a seal?” I asked in a tone more excited and more breathless than I really meant. I wanted to purge him of Fred’s disparagement, to add a woman’s encouragement to the goading of a man.

  He raised his head. The eyes that met mine were moist with some passion I couldn’t name.

  “Would that impress you?” he asked. Each syllable was stealthy, like footfalls upon pine needles. It passed through my mind even then that he seemed almost afraid of the answer.

  “Of course it would!” I said, touching his arm warmly.

  Of course it would, I repeat to the rhythm of the curtain, rising and falling with the breeze. Fred groans again from the bed behind me. What I would not give to return to the Evanses’ hearth and draw those words back into myself.

  It seems all my life I’ve been searching for a villain. Kean was the latest. Haig was one of the first. But Fred has been in my sights too, at least since our marriage. Fred humiliated his young brother into the hunt. After the ceremony at the memorial twenty-two years ago, he made me believe he was feeling the same as I. It was not so. But I didn’t imagine the aura of sadness when I met him after the laying of the wreath, and melancholy has a way of demanding forgiveness. Fred’s unhappiness ensured he would always escape my final condemnation. So my search for a villain continued, and now at last it seems I have found her. Noah might be alive today had I not spoken as I did.

  And who else? whispers the hem of the curtain against the window ledge. Night and silence are merciless and they have sensed there are many hours until dawn and nothing to interrupt their work.

  Mysteriously, from Fred’s wheezing the sound of a cheering crowd unfolds. I stand hunched, reliving the hurrahs of the young men on the banks of Quidi Vidi Lake. Through what subtle means might I have communicated that tingle of pride I felt? How might the light in my eyes, the admiration and excitement I felt, have forbidden second thoughts in my husband and brothers?

  I see a flash of orange hair on a bright summer day, a shining track, and the dark bumper of a steam engine, feel again the urgent tug of air in my lungs as I drop to the shingle and leap for Lucy’s rag doll. Was it Lucy, the unhappy child, Noah, Jack, or my brothers I was saving? Or someone else? Which creature of my acquaintance could have been brought to mind by a lifeless doll overwhelmed by the vastness around her? Who is that one human being whose likeness might compel me to risk my own life? Every question leads to the same answer, a pinprick of vanity, a single star of self-interest. The tiny, fearful light continues to burn regardless of a black–ened cosmos that surrounds it; it has to burn because without it there is nothing.

  So I continue both dead and alive, just as Fred, my lean, aging wolfhound of a husband continues, just as Simon and Sarah Jenson and their unhappy Lucy must have continued when I left their service. But I am wrong to foist my defeat upon them. They, at least, were still young, and they did have one child with another on the way. Something had happened that day in Ipswich too, when Mr. Jenson threw poor Mr. Smith down the stairs and when I almost made off with Lucy. They did not become happy, but grief ceased to rage with such intemperate, uncontrollable flames. I wonder what became of them all.

  “Elsa.”

  My heart stops at the sound of my name in the darkness. Two beats skip into one and, stiffly, my head begins to turn.

  “What are you doing?”

  I hear the sigh of sheets on skin and I know my husband is sitting.

  “Thinking about Noah,” I say. Did I mean that as a deterrent? If so, it was not planned.

  “Me too,” he says, and the unexpectedness of it prickles the hairs on the back of my neck. I turn around fully and see an outline of Fred’s neck and jaw in the moonlight, the blueness and his sinews reminding me for a moment of the war memorial. “I dreamed about Noah on the ice.” His voice is soft and uneven and the thought slips into me that this is what happens: Men must turn themselves into stone under the all-seeing eye of the sun and then in the darkness of dreams must sink into jelly. I remember a scream in the night more than twenty years ago.

  “A nightmare,” I say. I meant it as a question but it comes out differently, as though I can read his thoughts.

  “Yes.”

  I am across the room already and clambering in bed although I scarcely know how to comfort him.

  “You can tell me about it,” I say, as the mattress stops creaking.

  “I was just out there with him, in the darkness, in the cold. We fell on our knees together and the ice worked its way through our skin to our bones.”

  He pauses and I listen for more, letting my hand rest upon the thick down of his forearm. Then I realize he has finished, and realize also that it is enough.

  I was right the first time about Fred. Another sad day, he said to me once, and I fell for him. It was real and honest, that rich seam of melancholy that ran through his spirit. I shouldn’t require him to feel and think as I do. I could vent my fury and self-accusation regarding Noah, Jack, and my brothers and then wait out the chilled and wordless night that would in time give way to a day of silences and accusing stares. But what would be the point? By accident, it seems, I have snagged a thread of similarity between myself and Fred. Why not cultivate it a little? If he doesn’t hate war and bloodshed as I do, he certainly hates the consequences, and perhaps in the end that amounts to the same thing, even if something crucial has been lost along the way.

  “What about you?” he asks, his voice distant, indistinct. His speech has had this quality ever since my revelation this morning about being by Kean’s deathbed. Fear and pleading are in there somewhere, like the voice of someone who, lost in the wilderness, spies a figure on the horizon but is afraid it may be a mirage.

  “It’s just sad,” I say, choosing the only statement I could think of that is both truthful and neutral.

  “Yes,” he says, and I sense a touch of relief as he draws me a little closer. “It’s just sad.”

  Epilogue

  Noah

  Ice spirals around my uncovered wrists. I have to glance down to confirm it is merely air and not bracelets of iron that squeeze so hard against my flesh. I move the club from one hand to the other, not in the stealthy way that Fred and the others describe but with an exaggerated, jagged motion like a coward hoping the man he challenges takes off in fright before blows and injuries are necessary. But t
he lone seal upon which I have been making ground, his companions having long since slipped off the pan, merely turns his head and stares though black and uncomprehending eyes.

  I don’t need to turn around to know that Fred and Father are gone. I heard their voices—yelled exhortations to bring home flippers and hide—die away upon the crisp, still air. I take a last pace towards the animal, the ice dipping only slightly under my boots, and am now close enough to strike. I can feel the coiling of muscle and sinew that would accompany the rising and bringing down of the club. The ghost of the movement passes through me and, for the moment, I am a man of steel. I can feel things and see the world as Fred and Father see it. I can smell the animal’s blood and feel the special warmth of an achievement that expands the world of a man, feeding and clothing others and myself. Who would I draw into this expanding circle of mine? The question yields a pale, sparsely freckled face and a scent I carry to bed, to school, to work, through suppers when my mind is absent and I am brought abruptly into the stark Evans world by a thrown crust and the yelp of teasing voices. Elsa. Elsa and the life she and I might create between us. She is a year my senior and surely wants a man and not a boy. She will be here with her parents in two short weeks, breathing the same air, sleeping under the same roof, and we will slip into each other’s thoughts as before. This is my chance. The word chance, the slippery sound, merges with the beast’s watery black eyes, now blinking as it bobs its head for a moment then raises it up again. It is asking for deliverance. I can hardly believe this part of the task should seem so easy.

  But something is wrong. The impulse to strike has left me. The coiling motion that passed through me and that I took to be a prelude now seems both the beginning and the end. The seal shakes its head. Rolls of fat undulate and ice pellets fly from its whiskers. Its nostrils expand into black tunnels then go back to slits. Its exhalation momentarily warms my left wrist.