by P. S. Duffy
“That wall of water came crashing in, and she took the boats, took the wharf, and the houses with. She was a-roaring up the hill, sure to swallow them up. Etta Tilley stops dead in her tracks and turns. Stood her ground on a granite rock and faced down that wall of water with her wizened face fierce and her black dress a-billowing out, and the cross held straight in her outstretched arm. And by God, as I live and breathe, the sea stopped right there and drew itself back.”
“Holy smokes!” Simon said. He glanced at Charlotte, who was staring at Putnam with wide eyes.
Putnam tipped his hat.
Davy, leaning back, crossed his legs and said laconically, “You didn’t say a word about the dogs and goats and such, Putnam.”
“What dogs and goats? Oh yes, I see how you mean. Turns out the goats and cats and dogs all about scrambled up the ridge before Heb Noseworthy even saw what he saw. Seems they knew aforehand what they needed to do.”
“That’s better,” Davy said. “That’s more of a story—made her more lively, see?”
“She was lively enough in the first telling. Look at them young ones here. Looks like they seen a ghost, so I’d say she was fine enough in first telling, without your dogs and cats. And goats.”
“Nope, t’weren’t,” Davy said. “It’s them small things make a story worth the time it takes to listen.”
“Who’s the collector here? You or me?”
Simon broke in. “So, when—when was this?”
“Years afore you were born. Afore I was born, and I must be near a hundred now.” Putnam smiled.
“But what was it? What made that happen?” Charlotte asked.
“Don’t know. See, Davy? Miss Charlotte here was right taken with my telling.”
Davy scratched his jaw. “Could be something come out of the sky, made a hole in the sea and sucked the ocean down into it.”
“Doubt that,” Philip said, foregoing the coffee and drinking straight from his flask.
“Or one of them earthquakes.”
“Well,” said Philip, “how could it be an earthquake if it happened out at sea?”
“Alright, a seaquake, then,” Davy answered.
“Now that’s just stupid,” Putnam said.
THAT EVENING, HIS grandfather’s response was yes, he’d heard of an undersea quake before the turn of the century that had struck the southern part of Newfoundland with what he called a tidal wave, and, of course, earthquakes could and did occur on the ocean floor because what was the ocean floor if not the earth covered by water? These answers led Simon to the conclusion that the world as he knew it, the world without end, could erupt at any moment and sweep away all that is and was.
THAT CONCLUSION WAS verified the following week as the Mounties hauled away Mr. Heist’s telescope and Fresnel lens, pulled down his wharf lamps and packed them off as well, and raked through all of Mr. Heist’s books, tossing them on the floor, and seizing all the ones written in German and all of his papers, and even his butterfly notebooks, as “potential evidence.” It was Simon’s grandfather, not Mr. Heist, who had to be physically moved from the door of Mr. Heist’s cottage; his grandfather who followed the Mounties from house to garden protesting their search, imploring them to stop; his grandfather who got roughly knocked to the ground when he tried to wrest the telescope from their hands. Throughout it all, Mr. Heist, who had been informed his services at the school would no longer be required, sat slumped in shock at the red kitchen table.
It was Simon’s grandfather who stood up in church the following Sunday after the Apostle’s Creed and accused the congregation of turning on one of their own, claiming that God would rain down retribution upon Nova Scotia, that there would be hell to pay, before he stalked out the door. And it was Simon Peter who walked out with him.
TWENTY-FOUR
August 15th, 1917
No. 18 Canadian General Hospital
Saint-Junien, France
In the filtered sunlight of the woods on the way back to Saint-Junien, Angus stopped. He’d been walking fast, with his head down to keep from turning back to the cottage and with the thought circling round his head that the only way he’d been able to stay with Juliette and Paul was knowing he would leave them, and the only way he could leave them was to think he might see them again. In the shifting shadows, birds flicked from branch to branch, and small feet scurried through leaves on the forest floor. Nothing else broke the silence. For a moment he considered idling there and obliterating all thought, but a tingling down his arm and pinpricks in his hand brought him back to the road he was on.
Boes had said it would take three months for nerves to regenerate. It had been more than that, but all the same—his arm seemed to be tingling. His hand as well. Surely it was evidence that the paralysis was physical, not in his mind. He resolved to ask for therapy three times a day. He picked up his pace. He nearly ran. He would recover. He would recover.
Full of his own purpose, he reached the top of the hill overlooking the Saint-Junien station, but there came to a full stop. Below him convoys of wounded soldiers were being offloaded from the trains. Transport vehicles, lorries and motor ambulances were rumbling to and from the station. Angus ran down the hill into the confusion of stretcher-bearers and the walking wounded, the bleeding out, the gassed, the lame and the nearly dead. Cradling his arm, he managed to hop onto the running board of a truck headed to the hospital.
As the truck entered the courtyard, Angus jumped off and found Brimmie directing the flow of wounded men. She told him Cobb and Brown had been killed with five nurses while touring field hospitals at the Front. Boes had been spared, and had been in surgery with Spinner and Sadler nonstop for twenty hours. If he wanted to help, go to supply. There he helped a Corporal Lee load boxes onto a wheeled trolley headed for Ward D. Lee told him that Lovell and three other nursing sisters had been shipped off to London with iodoform poisoning days before. Angus looked at the boxes of the crystalline antiseptic on the trolley and imagined the nurses’ hands yellow and swollen from overapplication of it. He wheeled the boxes to Ward D himself. There amid the shrieks of pain piercing the air, he was soon carrying bedpans, handing out packages of cotton wool, holding basins for dirty dressings and vomit.
From what he could gather, divisions of the CEF had been part of a force that had taken Hill 70 above the town of Lens, long held by the Germans. Taken it in twenty minutes and then, supplies dwindling, hungry and mired down, had nonetheless repulsed some twenty counterattacks that included mustard gas and flamethrowers. All while he’d been at the cottage. He had no idea who among his band had survived. More than once he was sure he saw Conlon, but was wrong every time.
Every bed was occupied and extra cots set up again in the great hall where he’d woken up so long ago to Nurse Lovell’s face. In one of the cots he found Wertz struggling for breath from a chest wound. Angus clasped his hand and leaned in close. Wertz told him Conlon was alive, and Boudrey. And LaPointe. Maybe Katz and Hanson. He didn’t know who else. But who would take care of Boudrey, he asked. Angus tightened his grip. “I’ll see to it, if I can,” he said. When he returned late that night, Wertz was gone, his bed occupied.
At four in the morning, Angus made his way back to the ward he’d shared with the other rehab cases Boes had been working on. They’d been shipped back to England two days before, he was told. In his own bed lay a private with mustard-gas blisters bubbling across his face.
In the hallway Angus slumped down and, with his back against the wall, shut his eyes. Wertz. All his men. He wanted to suffer with them, to savor small victories, be with them at the razor’s edge of life and death—not as some kind of penance, but to feel whole. As he felt now in the chaos of the hospital. His arm was alive with pins and needles. His hand was coming back. He couldn’t flex it, couldn’t move it; but in his exhaustion, he was sure he felt blood pulsing through it.
“MacGrath?”
It was Boes, standing across the dimly lit hallway, removing a bloody surgeon’s gow
n. He motioned Angus into his office and collapsed into a chair behind his desk. The lamplight was low. Boes looked up with sunken eyes. Behind him, the tangled wires of the condenser apparatus dangled over the edge of a table. He told Angus to take a chair. For a moment neither of them spoke.
“Cobb’s dead. Did you know that?” Boes said.
“I heard.”
“And some of our best nurses.” Boes reached for his pen. “I’m a major now, for what it’s worth. I’m having you invalided home.”
Angus jerked upright. Home? “But . . . May I speak?”
“Of course. Speak at will, but it won’t change my mind.” He unscrewed his pen and began filling in a form on his desk.
“But I’m getting better. I swear to you. I’ve felt pins and needles in my arm just like you said I would. Those are my men out there. I need to be with them, see this through.”
“Your men are headed toward Flanders to join the British 2nd Army. Currie’s finally committed them to Passchendaele. They’ll be in it in days. How is it you’re going to be with them?” Boes stopped writing and gave him a weary look. “You’re an officer who can’t hold a pistol and a cartographer who can’t hold a pencil. I’m sending you home.”
“What about a hospital in England? I can recover. I know I can.”
“You’ve had months of therapy and it hasn’t helped. More than I should have given you. Maybe I wanted to prove something.” He glanced up. “I’m sorry, but they’ll have nothing more to offer you.”
“Well, maybe this is all in my mind. You thought that once. What about one of those, those war hospitals for whatever you call it—hystericals?”
“MacGrath,” Boes countered slowly, “have you any idea? There are six civilian hospitals in Britain that can manage what they’re calling ‘shell shock,’ and the military has set up another six for officers and some thirteen more for ranks. They’re filling up with gibbering, incoherent men who can’t speak or walk, who have lost all balance. That’s not you.”
Angus sat back and looked Boes in the eye. “You don’t think I’ll recover.”
“I didn’t say that. I said you’ll manage, just not as a soldier. You’ll find your way. Trust me.”
Angus jumped to his feet. “Why should I? You said I’d get better. You said to trust the condenser apparatus. You can’t just change your mind like that. You’re a doctor. Why should I trust—”
Boes dropped the pen and held his head in his hands. “Because,” he said softly, “I am a good doctor.” Without another word, he filled out the rest of the form.
FIVE DAYS LATER, Angus was gripping the rail of a hospital transport steaming through misty rain and choppy seas to the other side of the Channel. His hand was numb again. He could hardly find his balance, yet refused to find a seat inside. Insisted on staying on deck. Prayed he would not lose his footing. From England he’d be sent home, while Conlon and the rest of them marched to Flanders. As the French coastline disappeared from view, he felt a despair such as he had never known.
TWENTY-FIVE
September 15th, 1917
Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia
Simon Peter stared for a long time at the scale drawing he’d made of the Lauralee. The thought of giving it to his father was now unbearable. He put it away in the bottom drawer and pulled out his Great War scrapbook. He adjusted the book on his lap and opened its wide cover. Staring up at him in white ink on the black page was THE GREAT WAR 1914– in his own hand. Beneath the title were the gay little Union Jack and Red Ensign that he’d cut and pasted in when he got the book and which, as he looked at them now, seemed altogether too small next to the printed letters.
A stack of newspaper articles, weighted down by a pair of scissors, lay untouched on the floor beside his desk—stories on Vimy and Hill 70, on Third Ypres, on U-boat sightings—uncut, unpasted, and some of them unread. Next to the news clippings was the Lepidoptera of Eastern North America, which he’d rescued the day Mr. Heist had been hauled away, along with Pope’s translation of The Iliad and Mr. Heist’s Greek-English dictionary. Tucked away in the back of the desk drawer was a lacquered box. In it was the key to Mr. Heist’s cottage. Mr. Heist had asked him to take what books he wanted and to care for the plants and garden, if he was able, while he was detained in the camp. “Detained” turned out to be a nice way of saying “held prisoner”; “camp,” a nice way of saying “prison.”
The camp, in Amherst, up on the New Brunswick–Nova Scotia border, was a former ironworks factory, requisitioned for prisoners of war and suspicious enemy aliens. Mr. Heist was not an alien, though he hadn’t been able to produce his papers. He was not an enemy combatant, obviously, nor an enemy sympathizer, which is what he was called. But there he was with the rest of them—hundreds of sailors from the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, sunk in 1915, sailors from other ships, various untrustworthy, roughshod Canadians, and a large group of “suspicious” aliens—many of German origin and few, if any, men of letters, according to Mr. Heist. They were stacked up in bunks two deep and three high with hardly space to breathe. German officers, some of them quite gallant and gentlemanly, had their own quarters, he’d written to Simon.
Simon had hoped to have the scrapbook ready to show his father, but he had no energy for it, not anymore. And he doubted his father would either. All that mattered was that he was coming home. Like Ida said, it was a miracle. A long nightmare over. We’ll get that arm of his better, she said. The hats-aloft wave on the troop ship, his father and Ebbin running down the gangway, people cheering, flags waving and a band playing—the fixed image Simon used to snap into place when needed—was long gone. Tucked away like his lead soldiers in a box. The scrapbook slipped. He lowered it to the floor and reached for the lacquered box. Next to the Heist key was a tiny framed oval of Charlotte, much younger, but with the same gray eyes and open expression. He wanted his father to meet her. They’d taken a long walk the day before the Bromleys had shipped her off to Edgehill School. They’d vowed to write. They’d agreed that his father would set things right by Mr. Heist. His father was an officer, after all. A wounded officer. A decorated officer. Comfort was in her hand in his as they parted, and there in the upturn of her generous mouth, and in the very softness of her lips when, unexpectedly, he’d pressed his mouth against hers. In the trance of it, a memory as close as the moment itself, he set the box down and touched his fingers to his lips.
H.M.S. Regina
September 15th, 1917
In the damp claustrophobia of the cabin he shared with an amputee named Peers, Angus watched a pencil roll from one side of the foot locker to the other, letting it drop in his hand each time it fell off the edge. Peers finished vomiting into the bucket and sank back in his bunk. Angus pressed a damp cloth against his face, lost his balance and nearly smothered the man. Peers moaned. The cabin reeked. Lurching and slamming against the walls of the airless corridor, Angus found his way to the head and emptied the bucket. There wasn’t much but bile—Peers had been retching for an hour. Angus rinsed it as best he could and nearly vomited himself. When he got back, Peers was asleep, his breathing steady. He slept on and, finally, Angus went up on deck so he could breathe.
The ship sat high above the ocean, detached from wind or current. The deck shuddered as the engines clanged below. Twin screws churned up the water at the stern. The furious white-green chaos of the wake rose up and fell away to sudsy bubbles in the swells—a long, long trail winding back to all that was left behind and left undone.
To starboard, a darkened patch of rippled sea swept toward them. Just a gust. But the pressure was dropping. A storm was coming. The sky was gun-metal gray, and up ahead, angry cumulus clouds gathered. Green lightning zipped through them. They’d be in it in less than an hour, he told a crewman, who nodded in somber agreement. Black smoke belched from the stacks above and Angus considered the effects of the coming storm on the rattletrap of a converted troop ship. The captain would have to alter course to keep the seas from hitting them broadside. And
if those engines failed, what then? They’d be flotsam, tossed about until the sea rolled them over and moved on. There was nothing heroic about death by drowning. But perhaps it was a fitting end.
They were south of Newfoundland when the storm hit. Winds howled. Seas raged. It was as bad as Angus predicted. But the gale’s fury engendered a familiar fortitude until a wave caught them from behind, lifting the stern so that the props churned helplessly in the air and the rudder failed to catch. Then they were rushing forward and down, but not, as it turned out, to the bottom.
How many times he fell on the gangways and hallways below decks to get to Peers, he did not know, but finally, hunching along on his knees, his entire left side in pain, he found the cabin. There was Peers, jammed against the bunk board, near-catatonic. Angus had intended somehow to drag him to the upper decks near the lifeboats, but the lights went out, and drained of all caring, Angus heaved himself up on the bunk. There he lay beside Peers, his good arm across him, gripping the board to keep from slamming back in the nosedives and from crushing Peers when the ship pitched up against the next towering wave. He said nothing, for he had no voice.