by P. S. Duffy
“Hurrah, hurrah, the general’s going to be shot!” sang one soldier.
“Hurrah, hurrah, the dirty drunken sot!” sang the other.
Then in unison, “For he was very mean to me when . . .” There they stopped. One scratched his head, then buttoned up his fly. “Got it!” he said, and in a deep baritone sang, “For he was very mean to me when I was with his lot!” And they finished with a high-pitched flourish, “Hurrah boys, they’re going to shoot the gennnn-eral!”
They stumbled back inside. Angus dashed to the Canadian. Violin music zigzagged through the racket. A general brawl had broken out. There was the sound of gravel flying and an auto engine idling. A revolver went off. Military police were breaking it up. Angus rolled the Canadian over, and he and Paul dragged him behind the barrels. Eyes on the door, Angus put a hand under the soldier’s neck and raised his head. The soldier moaned. Angus clamped a hand over his mouth and looked down. There, looking up at him, was Ebbin. The light brown eyes rolled back. The lids shut. He was out cold.
Paul said, “Allons-y!”
“Where?” Angus panted.
“Là!” Paul pointed down the high stone wall across the alley.
“Through the wall? A gate?”
“Oui.” Paul was already lifting Ebbin’s legs.
“Let me drag him,” Angus whispered. “It’ll be faster.”
Paul crouched through a thicket of brambles and shoved hard against a hidden plank gate. Angus hauled Ebbin through. Across a short black stretch of yard stood a shed or barn. Paul pointed. Angus nodded. They shut the gate just as long shafts of light from electric torches swept through the alley. Crouching next to Ebbin on their side of the wall, Angus heard footsteps and an “All clear,” followed by “Round those men up.” A whistle sounded again, and they were alone. Angus blew on his hands against the cold; Paul did the same.
Angus dragged Ebbin to the barn, mentally shuffling through all that he should be doing—filing reports on the two soldiers whose names he’d failed to get, taking Paul home, getting Ebbin to his unit or the field hospital . . . Ebbin! Jesus Christ. He had him. His mouth went dry. He wasn’t about to let him go.
Angus checked again to be sure they were alone. Chickens clucked briefly, pigeons cooed in the rafters, and just beyond the open door—a garden, bedded down for the winter. An isolated patch of home and hearth standing its ground.
Paul folded the scarf under Ebbin’s head and found a lantern. Angus lit it, and they held their hands out as if it were a campfire. Angus lit a cigarette and his eye caught the hint of a cord on Ebbin’s neck beneath the unbuttoned tunic. He slowly lifted it out and held up the lantern. E. Lawrence Havers, Lance Corporal, 45th BN, c.e.F. He dropped the tags and sat back. Paul swallowed and cast a hungry look toward the cigarette. Angus passed it over.
“It is him,” Paul whispered through a stream of smoke that ended in three perfect smoke rings, suspended over Ebbin’s head. Angus spit on a rag and wiped blood from Ebbin’s slackened mouth. He daubed at the swelling and the ragged cut on his cheek, and knew he had no compass for the territory he was about to enter.
NINE
February 24th, 1917
Deep Cove
Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia
The air was crisp and dry enough to sharpen all the senses. Fresh snow had fallen, a powdered topping over the crust beneath. All the way over to Deep Cove, with the warmth of the sun on their faces, rug over their knees, and Rooster plodding on, Simon and his grandfather had hardly spoken. It suited them both.
For everything had changed. The Hants had received a telegram of their own from the War Department the day after his father’s had arrived. After that, his mother shivered with her own truth. There was no body. He has not been found. Which left Simon torn between protecting her from the truth and wanting to make her see it. But how? He even entertained the idea that she might be right. He was only too relieved to see her two young half-brothers come up the road and fetch her back to Chester, where her family would take care of her, but still felt ashamed of his own inadequacy.
A memorial was being planned, the brothers said. She’s temporarily unmoored, Simon’s grandfather whispered to the brothers, a fact they accepted. High-strung, one of them said, his face drawn, throwing a blanket over the dray. She’ll come round, said the other. It’s the shock of it, Duncan agreed.
“Sight for sore eyes, eh?” his grandfather said as they reached the top of the ridge. Below them, the blue-black water of the long, glacier-cut cove offered up its mystery. It was so silent at the top of the ridge that they could hear the ripples under the beard of ice along the shore.
“You own this cove, right, Grandpa?” Simon asked.
“No, no, just this piece of the ridge we’re standing on,” his grandfather said. “Can’t buy the sea, lad.”
“Right,” Simon agreed, and after a moment, added, “I might buy some islands, myself. Rafuse, because it has the best beach. I’d always let people picnic on it like they do now. And Oak Island, one day.”
“After treasure, are you?”
“Maybe. Me and Zenus might take our dory over to Oak this summer. See how the digging’s going.”
“That old dory? Can’t point worth a damn. Her sail is stiff as a board. Take you a week to get there.” His grandfather chuckled at the thought of it.
“She can’t point,” Simon conceded, “but she moves along on a reach.” He and Zenus had found her, an abandoned Lunenburg dory, or what had looked like one. It was longer than a dory, but outfitted the same and still had a bobber and line in it. It had washed up on the rocky beach by Oxner’s boathouse. No one claimed it, a mystery that added to its appeal. In exchange for some work, quite a bit of work, Philip Mader had helped them replace her rotting planks, outfitted her with a centerboard, tiller, rudder and a new mast that they could slip into a hole in the forward seat. Wider than a Shelburne dory, she could be rowboat or sailboat, depending. Not very fast, not very responsive, but she was theirs.
“Got a name for her?”
“Not yet. We’ve been discussing it.” They’d been arguing about it for two years. In the beginning, when they weren’t arguing over her name, they used to force the mop to walk the plank, then turn the dory around to rescue it, a drowning maiden, her thick rope hair all sodden. And they’d talk about ways to defy the sand-slipping underground caverns of Oak Island, where it was a known fact that Captain Kidd had buried his treasure. Periscopes is what they’d be searching for this year when they were out on the bay. “If I owned Oak, people could come and picnic or dig for the treasure, if they’ve a mind to. Pay me for the right to dig. Picnic for free. Might get them interested that way.”
“Simon Peter, fisher of men, I think you have the makings of an entrepreneur!”
“A what?”
“A businessman. Speaking of your future, Philip says you’ve got a feel for boatbuilding. Something I wouldn’t mind getting into one day. MacGrath and MacGrath. Eh? How’s that? You liked working with Philip on your unnamed dory.”
“Yes sir.”
“Knew it. How about I send you over to Tancook for a time this summer? See if one of the Stevens boys would take you on or old Gaundy Langille—well, he’s too old. Retired now. Or Reuben Heisler. Fine craftsman. He’s got that forty-two-tonner going over there. Silver Oak, she’s called.”
“What about Philip?”
“Philip’s small-time. Repairs, mostly. Built the Lauralee, but her design is way out of date. He hasn’t built a new boat in years and wouldn’t be much good at it anyhow. My plan is, you learn it from the ground up.”
His grandfather always had a plan. Simon wasn’t about to be shipped off to Tancook Island for a summer, living on fish and sauerkraut with the four or five families who lived there, and no friends. He knew exactly what he was going to do. As soon as he could get to Lunenburg, he’d ask Captain Knickle about a place on his salt banker. “What if I don’t want to learn?”
“Eh? No. You need to know
a business from stem to stern. You know, when we built the Lauralee, I took your father over to Martin’s River and we searched out the straightest, strongest spruce we could find for her masts.”
Simon remembered his father saying that when he put his hand on the Lauralee’s main mast, it was the tree come to second life. He squinted at the black water below and switched the subject. “Deep Cove is so deep it could have held the Titanic, right? That’s what Dad said.”
His grandfather frowned, but allowed that Deep Cove, a glacier gut, could manage the Titanic.
“Deep enough for subs then. There’s talk they’re out there,” Simon said.
“Subs in Mahone Bay, eh? In Deep Cove, no less. Where do you get such ideas?”
“Around town. And the Herald.”
“You quote that warmongering rag to me?”
“You quote it to me!”
“Course I do. But not because I trust every word in it. I’ve told you that. If we were to believe the Herald, every man in Lunenburg should be rounded up as a spy for their German names alone. As for the Titanic, that product of man’s hubris rests in another ocean crevasse, never to be found. And now the Britannic, her sister ship—torpedoed and sunk. Both of them monuments to man’s self-glorification . . . God has his ways.”
The rows of caskets, some of them tiny, stacked behind the protective cover of a tent on the Halifax docks came to Simon, and all those left captive in the Titanic’s hull, bumping against staterooms and stairways, drifting silently past portholes in the currents. “The Britannic was a hospital ship,” he said. “She’s not a monument to—whatever you said. Self-gratification.”
“Exactly,” his grandfather answered. “Dragged into the war. What you might want to think about while folks over here spread false rumors about submarines is all the boys on the other side of this war that are missing uncles and fathers. Eh?”
Simon now regretted the trip altogether.
“Your own father . . . gone on a fool’s errand and now—”
“A fool’s errand?” Simon burst out. “Who cares if he found Uncle Ebbin or not! He’s out there defending us, and you—you don’t even write to him!”
His grandfather didn’t flinch. Didn’t look at him. Just said, “Watch yourself,” with that low-voiced menace that sent a shiver down the spine. Point made, he switched to a brighter note. “Well, sir,” he said, “fresh snow or not, I haven’t seen a thing here that indicates a campfire or trespasser. We’ll circle round through those firs and get back to Rooster. These old bones of mine are feeling the cold. His, too, no doubt.” He patted a gloved hand on Simon’s wool hat and started back down the hill. “See if we can get a mug up at Toby’s,” he called out without looking back.
Simon seethed as his grandfather marched off with utter confidence that Simon would follow. He glanced at the smoke curling up from Toby’s chimney. Toby’d be by the wood stove, mending his nets, the old pin in his gnarled hands weaving in and out. No sir. Simon would not be working for Langille or Reuben Heisler or any of them this summer. He’d be off to the Banks himself. He’d come back with money in his pocket. His mother could lean on him then. He’d tell her of his adventures and make her laugh just like Uncle Ebbin used to.
He shuffed through the snow after his grandfather, who wove handily through the spruce and stumpy pine and skinny poplars, dodging boulders and underbrush, and then at the foot of the ridge dropped heavily to the ground. And then Simon was running in great awkward leaps through snow, his scarf trailing, his limbs flailing. His grandfather slumped forward. Simon slid the last few steps and thumped against him in a blur and saw the fox at his grandfather’s knees—stiff and matted, black eyes open wide, gums pulled back in death’s grimace.
“Trapping!” his grandfather spat out.
Simon thrashed back on his elbows. His grandfather looked at him with round eyes as if Simon could explain it to him, with eyes near tears. Dumbly, he shifted his gaze from Simon to the fox. “The utter cruelty of it. Gone and gnawed his foot off to get free,” he said. Blood spattered the snow. He held the little paw against his knee and rocked back and forth. Then he tore the trap from the ground and flung it off over his head. It clanged off a boulder and buried itself in the snow. He tramped after it and yanked it up and threw it again.
Simon crawled to the fox and put a tentative mitten on the fur. His own tears were falling. “We can bury it. Can’t we?”
Trap in hand, his grandfather searched for others. “Please,” Simon pleaded. His grandfather looked up at the sky for a long time. “Please,” Simon whispered.
“We’ll leave it for the crows,” his grandfather said. “They need to live as well. We won’t sentimentalize nature so as to call ourselves civilized.”
Simon set the little paw by the fox’s leg. The solitary hunter lay stiff and exposed. Simon mounded snow over the body. He took off his mittens and cut the cord that held his knife to his belt and used the string to fashion two twigs into a cross and set them into the snow. Overhead, three crows flew fast, wings flapping.
SIMON THOUGHT ABOUT the crows a week later as he left the memorial service. Their raucous rasps, their ragged wings. Gulls lifted high above his head, high over St. Stephen’s square belfry, with wings that held the currents in their gliding. Crows knew nothing of the wind—how to find it, how to ride it, where it had been, where it was going.
Like so many black crows collected in a tree, the mourners had gathered now at the Hants—silence broken by little bursts of talk that grew louder as they piled slices of Finnan haddie, biscuits and boiled potatoes onto their plates and forked up slices of cold lamb. Standing by the window, light falling on her cream cutwork blouse, his mother smiled softly as friends offered their condolences—smiled in an indulgent way as she had during the service, as if sorry for their confusion in thinking Ebbin dead, but willing to accept sympathy for their sake. Balancing a slippery boiled egg on a plate, Simon found a place behind a stuffed chair next to his grandfather Hant’s bulky accordion. The accordion would not be played that day. Nor the silver harmonica on top of the piano, nor the piano.
For Simon, the service had been a blur of black crepe and Union Jacks and Red Ensigns and regimental colors and ancient old Athol McLaren squeezing out “The Flowers of the Forest” and “Amazing Grace” on the pipes and speeches before the service and clutched handkerchiefs and clutched hands during. It was his mother’s slow turn as she held out a gloved hand for Young Fred and Simon to join her in the pew. It was a funeral without a casket and people crowding the church from nearby villages. It was Grandma Hant, heavy and lumbering, supported by two sons, followed by the massive form of Amos Hant, like a slow-paced engine going down a track.
All the Hants were massive, except for Simon’s mother and Uncle Ebbin, who were blond and fine-featured, as if they’d arrived together in a basket left on the doorstep. Which they had, in fact—a story Ida told again to Simon the day after they heard Ebbin was dead—how Amos Hant had parked the babies, just thirteen months apart, on Elma Mitchell’s doorstep when he came back home to Mahone Bay from the failed farm after burying his wife in her family’s plot on the Alberta plains. Each night after a day’s work at the forge that he’d wanted to escape and would later come to own, he’d pick the babies up. A few months into it, he decided it might be easier to skip the dropping off and picking up by marrying Elma Mitchell, who went on to give him four sturdy, dark-haired sons.
And there standing guard over her as she sat, twisting a handkerchief around her thick fingers, was Lady Bromley with talk of God’s great purpose—“fallen hero,” “noble sacrifice,” “angels of victory”—each word increasing Simon’s dread that every man in France would end up unfound and unburied. His tears during the service had been a pouring out of that fear.
Out back, men had gathered around a fire pit. Putnam Pugsley, Vor Moody, Wallace, Zeb, Herman Weagle, Wilson Bethune, Frank Stevens and one of his boys and some others Simon didn’t know. Probably talking about the wa
r from the grim look on their faces. Simon wanted to hear what they were saying, but it was cigars and hard cider and no shadows to hide in.
A hand thrust a hot cherry square on a napkin at him. He took it and ducked through the crowd to the kitchen, where his mother was head-to-head, whispering with Margaret McInnis. Maggie or Mags, his mother called her, an old school friend who’d come down from Halifax and had hardly left her side all weekend, draped in black as she had been since her brothers were blown to smithereens at Sanctuary Wood two years before. Sorry as he felt for her, Simon decided he didn’t like her much, nor her whispered secrets to his mother. He went out the back door, and decided to find himself a spot on the porch with its view of Front Harbor.
“Hant heart, faint heart, bold heart.”
Simon jumped. George stood on his crutches next to a rain barrel where the path curved around the house. His pale eyes reflected nothing. His knuckles were raw and bleeding. His hair was slicked straight back, his forehead wide and pale. He’d been at the service and had several times stood up as if in protest. His mother had had to settle him. People steered clear of him afterwards.
“A medal for his heart box is what he should have. Thiepval. Weepval. Regina trench. Nearly passed me by with the badge of the 45th, but turned back.”
Simon felt compelled to set George straight because Simon knew all the names of all the battles. “My uncle?” he said. “He wasn’t with the 45th. And he wasn’t at Thiepval. He died before that at Courcelette.” He let that sink in. Said the word “died,” and meant it suddenly.
“Hant heart, bold heart,” George repeated, shaking his head. “Came back running. Pal of my heart, bone out my calf, heart in his chest box, beating to the drum.” He began to shiver. Spittle formed at his mouth.