by P. S. Duffy
What of the man who’d sung to this boy of all the fishes in the sea, who’d rescued him from troubled sleep, stabbed the monsters and mastodons lurking in the corners of his room? A man who by his own hand had shot a wounded soldier in the chest and stabbed another, and kept on stabbing him long after he was dead?
The weight of his lifeless arm pressed against him, and he went rigid with the thought that he might never recover and might not deserve it if he did, that all that he and Boes had tried had failed for a reason. His mind raced back to Publicover rounding the barn one minute, bleeding to death the next. And to Voles and Burwell. Had Angus stopped Ebbin from going on the mission, had he not let Ebbin leave the hospital, had he told the truth . . . He jumped up, left the bed and was down the steps and out the front door. Under scudding clouds, he rushed on, but he could not outrun the pain of Ebbin Hant. Nor Wickham, Dickey, nor the German with his postcard of the Royal Vic. “Franz,” it said in the salutation. Franz, whose eyes when Angus shot him registered the surprise of life, the surprise of death, and all the moments in between. They were his dead, he their unworthy living repository. Manifold sins, miserable offenders. He thought of the other German he’d killed, the one who’d kicked Ebbin’s lifeless body and killed Publicover. Saw himself with Publicover’s Bowie in his raised hand, stabbing the German over and over until he was stabbing a bloody corpse. And knew if he had the chance, he’d do it again. There was no health in him.
He blundered on across the bluff. The bending sweep of the grasses led him to the edge of the point. He staggered against the gusts. The empty beach below angled around and stretched away to the southwest, where the white surf curled in off a black sea. The tide was up. Wave after wave raced over the sandbars to lick the beach and suck out again. “Over there” was no longer the Front in France. It was the shores of home. And he belonged to neither. He was alone in an eternal limbo with the pull of the sea below and the forgotten stars above.
His knees began to buckle but as he dropped, he caught the faint green flash of a starboard running light. Someone was out there, out on the rolling, dispassionate sea, keeping watch. He could not take his eyes off the running light. But it wasn’t out at sea; it was bobbing on the beach curving beyond the bluff, carried by the inky and dissolving shape of a figure standing now at the edge of the breakers. A woman.
He had to keep on the path, he knew that. Had to resist the urge to cut through the brush or he’d lose his way. He had to angle around ’til he got to where the path broke off and led to the steps. He had to take them slowly, keep his balance, hold his arm. He had to pray she was still there. And then he was at the bottom, running as best he could to where she stood in the whipping wind with the green lantern by her side.
He slowed as he approached, gathering himself in. But when she turned and faced him, when she lifted her shawl, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her in and she pulled him down so they were both on their knees, his face buried against her neck, his right arm limp at his side. All the pain and guilt, all the horror and all the longing he’d bottled up leapt and bolted through him and shattered the air around them. He was devastated and alive with release. His mouth found hers, so soft against his hunger that he drew back. She kissed his eyes and cheeks and his mouth again. And his desire to pour all he had, all that was left of him into her, overwhelmed him.
She pulled him in with a pliant strength against which he was powerless and felt more powerful than he’d ever imagined. He knew it wouldn’t last, but knew, too, that nothing lasts. Nothing on earth.
SABINE LEFT THE next morning under a clear sky soon after her ami, in his polished black auto, pulled into the drive. An immaculate man with charcoal-gray hair and perfectly trimmed mustache, he was in far too much of a hurry for conversation. He bowed briefly, kissed Juliette’s hand, and held the door. Sabine took Juliette’s hands in hers. She nodded and smiled at Angus, then secured her hat, buttoned her gloves, and blew kisses to them all.
For the next five days, Angus stayed with Juliette and Paul at the cottage on the bluff. Paul let his pigeons fly and circle home. In the late afternoons, sitting on a blanket spread out on the soft sand above the pebbled tide line, the three of them ate raspberries and crusty bread spread with goat cheese. Paul threw bits to the swooping gull scavengers and chased after flocks of sandpipers, who raced ahead on toothpick legs and lifted in unison to skim the water’s edge. With the wind against his face, Angus could hear the run of the sheets through the Lauralee’s blocks, feel the broad swing of her bow as he took her up into the wind and she leaned into the next tack. It was all of home he allowed himself. Juliette sat under an umbrella and sometimes rolled off her stockings and waded into the wash of the sea, letting her bunched-up skirts get wet and her hair fly. Angus held her boots in his hand. He ate. He slept. He went barefoot over the hard-ridged sand flats, walking for hours. She sometimes went with him. The beach was nearly a mile wide at low tide, a vast stretch of white, with white shells tumbling in on the waves. Not a rock nor clump of seaweed to be seen. He let the surf foam around his legs and, for moments at a time, felt almost clean. In the early mornings, the sea was always the same hazy green close to shore and the same deep blue where the sandbars fell off. The surf was gentle. It did not pull him in nor under. Paul said the very best thing was that when they were not there, the sea went in and went out just the same.
Watching Paul, dripping wet in his sagging undershorts, running zigzag up the beach, cradling a sand crab in his hands, Angus saw the child Paul might have been, the child that Simon Peter was, innocent of buzzing planes, of the knowledge that birds could be enlisted in combat, that aunts could be taken for spies, that cows could have their throats slit, innocent of the shifty mutability of all that mattered. Unscathed, secure in Snag Harbor, Angus kept him there, standing on pink and gray boulder-strewn shores, watching the tides rise and fall.
One afternoon as Paul ran back to the water, Juliette stroked the puffy curled fingers of Angus’s right hand. Perhaps because he could see but not feel her touch, he told her of his anguished and misbegotten attempts at capturing intersections, the binding together of the seen and the unseen, on canvas. And how cartography was the thing he was probably best at—a map of the physical world that, in its black- and-white precision, denied reality.
THEY DID NOT speak of his family, nor of her husband, whose picture stood on the bed stand at night and the kitchen sill by day. One night, lying flat on their backs on a blanket on the beach, a floating moon above them, he told her about his men and what Conlon meant to him as a leader and a friend. Then he sat up and, looking beyond the beach at the waves collapsing over themselves, told her everything that had happened at the stone barn. She sat up as well, and after a time told him it was she who had taken Paul to the uncle for safety, the very day the Germans had slit the uncle’s throat in the barn and slaughtered his cows and left their corpses in the field to rot. She who had abandoned him while she ran back to attend to the demands of the German soldiers tramping into her house.
Angus lowered his head at this and the demands he imagined the Germans had made. He reached out his open palm and she slipped her hand into it, and they lay back again and watched the moon drift between the clouds. They held on to what they had just then, which was all they had and enough.
Outside on the afternoon of the fifth day, Angus stood by the door. Next to Juliette, Paul hung his head. Angus reached into his pack and drew out the smoothed oval board with the ink drawing of the lark. “Remember her when things get tough. She finds the good, like you.” Paul bobbed his head up and down, unable to speak. Angus gripped the back of his neck and told him he was the best soldier and best friend anyone could have. Paul sank against him. “You will go back to the Front?” he said into Angus’s shirt. Angus told him he would try. Paul stepped back and gave him a salute. Then he turned and ran to Édouard, Papete and Angelica. Angus stared after him and, without looking at her, drew Juliette in and held her with all the strength in him.
TWENTY-THREE
August 15th, 1917
Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia
Mr. Heist was on his knees, plucking at weeds, as Simon approached. He was relieved to see the Fresnel light back under its tarp on the porch and no sign of a lookout tower—though there was a stack of lumber by the shed that hadn’t been there the week before. He had warned Mr. Heist against the tower again and again.
“Simon!” Mr. Heist said, shielding his eyes from the sun. “You’re early by a day for your lessons! Did you bring The Iliad?” He arched his back. “Ach, this weeding is a trial.”
“I’m not here for lessons.” It seemed a long time ago that Mr. Heist had given him the book—had given him the choice, actually, between The Iliad and The Odyssey—the battle for Troy or the homecoming? Simon had chosen the battle, even though Mr. Heist had claimed the journey home was equally if not more entertaining. The truth was, Simon had lost interest in Troy after his father was wounded. Men could do a lot of things without their right arm, but not sail a boat, tie a rope, paint a picture. Hoping against hope that his father would recover, he didn’t actually want to think about battles because now what Simon wanted more than anything was for his father to be safe, to stay alive, to come home. His grandfather was right. The war was unending. Yet, when he pictured his father, it was on top of Vimy Ridge, “noble in sacrifice,” quiet in victory. A crippled arm would not undo him. The worse the situation, the stronger and steadier his father became. Simon remembered a time when lightning was striking the ocean all around the boat a mile or two off Peggy’s Cove. Terrified, he began to hope that if the mast was struck and the boat sank, they could swim to shore. He knew the water was too cold, but he shouted out anyway, “If the boat sinks, we could swim to Peggy’s, right? It’s not that far! Just a mile or two. We could make it!” Dodging spray, his father kept his eyes on the sail. “Wish that were true,” he said.
Mr. Heist had said that to truly appreciate either story, The Iliad or The Odyssey, Simon should read it in the original Greek. Even the best translation could not hope to capture the epic’s cadence and rhythm nor the layers of meaning that made up what he called the “poet’s armament—a quiver of arrows that could pierce the thickest hide and reveal shared pain and ineffable joy.”
When Simon had asked what “ineffable” meant, Mr. Heist had said that if he knew the classic languages, he would not have to ask. And so it was that Simon began a study of ancient Greek twice a week with Mr. Heist, who had claimed after a month that a boy right here in Snag Harbor with such facility for languages and thirst for knowledge was itself a source of ineffable joy.
“I’m not here for lessons,” Simon repeated. “I’ve come to warn you.”
“Another warning,” Mr. Heist said, ticking his tongue. “Alright then.” He mopped his face, but before Simon could begin, Mr. Heist said he had something very exciting to show him and hurried toward the cottage. Once inside, he unveiled a high-powered telescope and tripod. “Excellent for the night sky and think how far it takes me during the day!”
“A telescope? Are you—?” Nuts, Simon wanted to say. “I told you, everyone thinks you’re building a signal tower. What’re they going to say about a telescope?”
Mr. Heist carefully scrubbed the dirt from his hands with a stiff brush at the kitchen sink. He replaced the brush and the bar of yellow soap in a dish, wiped his hands, and sat down with an almost amused expression. “And I’ve told you,” he said, “how could it be that a wooden platform on stilts—an act so bold and a structure so obvious—would ever be construed as a means of secretly signaling anyone? And what secrets might a mere schoolteacher have access to? That blueberries are in season? That monarch butterflies passed through last May? That with my telescope I saw a whale spouting off Big Tancook?” He glanced at the instrument fondly and said, “Here, let’s get it out onto the porch so you can see—”
“Don’t you see, Mr. Heist? You could sight a submarine periscope from up here with that thing,” Simon pleaded. “I told you, Frank Mason and other fellers say subs have been sighted here in Mahone Bay.”
“To my knowledge, Simon, there has not been a single confirmed report of submarine activity in Mahone Bay,” Mr. Heist sighed. “And although it is powerful, my telescope cannot see beyond the bay, over the curve of the earth.”
“Please, Mr. Heist, you have to think how it looks.”
“Ah yes. But one can’t narrow one’s existence down to how things look. One has to respect oneself above all. Besides, come September, the townfolk will see me back at my desk, teaching their children, just as I taught them in their day. They’ll see me as the loyal, upstanding member of the community I’ve been these past twenty years—fifteen years a citizen.”
“But that’s just it! That’s what I came to tell you. Grandpa says there was a meeting, a secret meeting, about whether they’ll hire you back next year. There’s talk they’re not going to.”
“What meeting?”
“I don’t know! I think Lady Bromley and Vor Moody, the Bethunes, some others. Grandpa was worried.”
“Well, I am not. I have already signed a contract. That is a legal and binding document.”
This was a relief, but a minor one. “If you’re so sure people aren’t against you, why have you stayed out here all summer?”
“There is a war on. And you’re right—I am sensitive to the perceptions of others. As a teacher, I wear a badge, the honor of the profession, and am a respected member of the community. In the summer, I am just a man with a German accent. So, I have kept to myself. But in the end, I trust the majority of the community to behave rationally.”
He rubbed his glasses with his handkerchief. “My tower and my telescope are my connection, my way of breaching the boundaries of a narrow world.”
After a few moments of awkward silence, Mr. Heist asked if Simon wanted to take his lesson now. But Simon said no, he had taken the morning off from his job with Philip and had to get back. Mr. Heist patted his arm and said he was glad Simon so enjoyed his work and to stick with it. He had a feeling it would pay off someday, far more than Greek translation. Simon had told Philip all about the Repulse Bay, shown him his drawings, but hadn’t found the words to explain it to Mr. Heist, who didn’t know a hatch from a halyard. Yet, he somehow seemed to understand.
PHILIP WASN’T AT the boatyard, but Charlotte was. She’d brought him lunch. They dangled their feet off the end of the wharf as she unwrapped the sandwiches and brought out a bottle of tea. He told her about going to see Mr. Heist. “I don’t know how a man so smart can be so dumb.”
“Do you think something bad might happen?” Charlotte asked.
“If he builds that tower . . .”
“Why’s he building it anyway? It doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“It does for him. He wants to see beyond Owl’s Head Point. You’d have to know him to understand.” Simon picked up his sandwich, but didn’t eat it. Instead, he surprised himself by telling Charlotte about his recurring dream.
No wonder he felt bad, she said, when he’d finished describing how the sea was sucked out, and all the fish lay flopping in wilted ribbons of kelp, and how the boats lay on their sides. It was a horrible dream. After a moment she said, “Don’t you think that dreams, good or bad, shape things to come?”
“You mean foretell the future?”
“No, like they color the whole next day. Cheery dreams make things a bright sunny yellow. But scary ones—everything seems smoky green afterwards.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Simon said. The Glory B rounded up into the cove, and Philip thumped down the steps to the wharf. “Charlotte, Simon, how’s by you? How’s by me? Not too bagatally. The Glory B’s coming in for her new gaff boom. Look smart and grab their line, Simon.”
Simon caught the line from Davy. “Miss Charlotte!” Putnam said in his high, foggy voice, ducking under the boom. “Kindly catch our stern line, m’dear.” Sure enough, she caught it, and Simon showed her how to m
ake a couple of half-hitches over the piling. “Got your oilskins yet?” Davy asked her.
While he and Simon furled the mainsail, Philip conferred with Putnam about a few more repairs the Glory B needed. Then Putnam held out his hand for Charlotte, and they all stepped aboard. “I’d say you look poorly, Simon,” Putnam said. “Hain’t this girl got sweetness enough to cheer you?” Putnam opened a jug of coffee and passed out mugs all around. “Have some coffee, boy,” he said to Simon. As Philip poured a little something from his flask into Putnam and Davy’s mugs, Davy said he’d heard the Repulse Bay was being refitted. “Feller name of—what was it, Putnam, feller who owned her?”
“Baxter B. Weatherly,” Putnam said. “From somewhere in the States. Seems he lost his every dime in an export scheme gone bad.”
“That’s right. She’s been bought by a consortium in Halifax. Going to fit her out as a fishing schooner, so far without a name.”
“I know what I’d name her,” Simon said.
“What’s that?” Philip asked.
“True North.”
“Well, there you have a name,” Philip said, rolling a toothpick around his tongue.
“Fix on true north and you’ll get where you want to go,” Putnam said, taking a long draught from his mug.
Simon asked if they’d seen a boy named Lathen Pike when they were in Lunenburg and told the story of how Lathen had come to be there from Reeks Cove, Newfoundland.
“Believe I did. He might be working down to Smith and Rhuland’s yard. Saw a boy there of about that age. Burly feller,” Davy said.
“Reeks Cove!” said Putnam. “That boy must be a Tilley. Those are my people.”
“He’s a Pike,” Simon corrected him.
“Course he is. I heard you. Pikes and Tilleys are all mixed in. Noseworthys, too.” Not to be outdone by Simon’s story of Lathen, Putnam said he had one from his father about old Etta Tilley, eighty-one at the time, born and bred in Reeks Cove and clearly an ancestor of the boy, Lathen. He cleared his throat. “Now as it happens, my father was visiting one of the Tilleys in Reeks Cove, don’t rightly know which. After supper, everyone from all around crowded into Bascom Tilley’s house to hear him tell stories when Hebron Noseworthy bust in, white as a sheet. Struck dumb, he was. T’were all he could do to point out the door. So they all ran out, and their jaws hung open, for what they saw was a harbor empty of water. Tide had sucked so far out that boats were lying on their sides. But t’weren’t no ordinary tide. Happened all at once, see? And then Heb cries out that what the sea took out she’d be a-flinging back and they better run for their lives. That’s when they saw a wall of water a-roarin’ back in. They ran up the hill ’til they could run no more—old folk, young ones—Etta, too, but not afore she grabbed the wooden cross off the partin’.