The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

  At some point the lights came on and the ship turned back on course. The storm had come; the end had not. Angus made his way to the upper deck in a daze. In the main saloon, a couple of sailors swept up shattered glass. Out on deck, stars winked out from a fast-moving cloud cover. The ship steamed on. A day later they were told they were within sight of Nova Scotia and coming onto Halifax. Angus helped Peers, limp as a rag, out to the rail, where all those who could ambulate had gathered for the landfall. A cheer went up. Then another, louder, and louder still. And then the men fell silent. Home. Her jagged inlets and coves smoothed to a solid line by distance, a washed-clean purity against the broken land they’d left.

  “Chezzetcook!” one of the men up forward shouted. “They say we’re just off Chezzetcook!” Those who knew the land they were passing hung on the rail and conjured up wild sea grasses, bluffs and spongy bogs, stony, boulder-strewn beaches, and the dark green firs and turning maples of the eastern shore. A blinded soldier said he could smell low tide. No one corrected him.

  When they passed Sambro Light, the fog rolled in again. It held as they made the turn into the deep water passage to Halifax Harbor. The low moan of the steam foghorn on Chebucto Head could be heard. As they passed McNabs Island, an apparition in the mist, a private from New Brunswick began singing, soft and slow.

  “Un Canadien errant,

  Banni de ses foyers,

  Parcourait en pleurant

  Des pays étrangers.

  “Parcourait en pleurant

  Des pays étrangers

  Un jour, triste et pensif,

  Assis au bord des flots,

  Au courant fugitif

  Il adressa ces mots . . .”

  “What’s he singing?” Peers wanted to know.

  “An old folk tune. ‘Un Canadien Errant,’ ” Angus replied. “ ‘The Lost Canadian.’ ”

  Peers shook his head.

  “A man is banished from his homeland—from Acadia when the English took it, I’d guess. He travels on, weeping through foreign lands. Then he sits by a rushing river.”

  The song ended with the sad refrain,

  “Si tu vois mon pays,

  Mon pays malheureux.

  Va, dire à mes amis,

  Que je me souviens d’eux.”

  Peers looked to Angus. “He says to the river, if you see my country, my sad, sad country, go say to all my friends that I remember them,” Angus translated, and added, “Our sad country . . .”

  “Lies back there,” the soldier next to him quietly filled in.

  “That’s right,” another said, letting the tears fall. “Good men, every last one of them.”

  “We won’t forget,” another said.

  Angus leaned out over the rail. With each familiar landmark, buoy and channel marker they passed as they were piloted up the harbor, a widening gulf opened—one he could not bridge back to himself. Yet, still his heart was beating.

  WHEN ANGUS STEPPED off the train at the Chester station, Zeb was there in his truck, alone, as Angus had requested. The ship had docked a day ahead of schedule. Papers signed, discharge complete, Angus had been free to go in so short a time that he’d wandered the streets in a daze. At the North Street Station he bought a ticket, then waited in the tearoom of the King Edward, the plush comforts of which nearly suffocated him. He stared at his cup until his tea went cold.

  Zeb scratched his chin and gave him the once-over. “By Christ. Look like you been in a war,” he said. “Did like you said. Didn’t tell the home folk, but we can put in a call at the stationmaster’s, if you’ve a mind to. Call the store and have Alvin run up to your house with the news.”

  Angus shook his head and got into the truck.

  Zeb held the steering wheel in both hands before shifting into gear. They bumped along in silence around the back harbor road and up to the Chester bandstand, where Zeb slowed and idled the engine. Angus stared at Lobster Point and out at the whale-shaped mound of Quaker Island, bereft of trees, cows grazing contentedly, and at Meisner’s, her sparse, pointed firs, black silhouettes against the sky. Then he leaned out the window and twisted back at Little Fish, Gooseberry and the Western Shore. The blues and greens of the bay and the islands in all their bright, clean, alien beauty, and the wharfs and boats and nestled shore houses were somehow still there, patiently waiting—a flat picture postcard suspended in time.

  “Some things don’t change, eh?” Zeb said.

  Angus leaned back and closed his eyes with the warmth of the sun on his face. Zeb turned the engine off. “Look there now.” He pointed to a boat coming in, running before the wind. “One of them pleasure yachts. Feller from the States, Philadelphia, Baltimore maybe, owns her. Built a house up on the hill there just for the summers.” Angus kept his eyes on the boat, her main and jib set wing and wing, like a great bird. Zeb waited a moment more, then turned the key, put the truck in gear.

  They drove in silence with the occasional nod from Zeb at some point of interest—a new cottage or a familiar landmark. As they neared Snag Harbor, Zeb shifted around in his seat and began talking rapidly, as if he was nervous about something. “Plenty of changes since you’ve been gone,” he began. “That boy of yours is growing up fast. Not much taller, but some. Has a sweetheart now name of Charlotte Plante, the Bromleys’ niece, over here from England. And let’s see now. Hettie’s cut her hair off. She tell you? Lord Jesus, she’s Ebbin all over again.”

  “Cut her hair?”

  “Cut it right off. Has the women talking nonstop. Course you know that Duncan’s ’bout turned the business over to her. And han’t she taken to it. Heading off on that horse of hers, buying up land and sawmills and timber and Lord knows what.” He shook his head, smiling. “Folks don’t like it much, but she don’t seem to notice. Not Hettie. Never did.” Angus ran his hand across his mouth to cover his shock, to hide from Zeb how much he didn’t know. He reminded himself of all he’d kept from Hettie.

  “Then there’s that Heist business,” Zeb was saying. “Guess you know about that. Him being a spy.” He jerked a look at Angus. “Duncan didn’t write you about it? Or Hettie?”

  “Heist?”

  “Yep, yes sir,” Zeb said. He flexed his fingers on the wheel. “Got no papers to prove he’s a citizen. Hauled off to the camp up at Amherst. Mounties ransacked his house. A traitor, turns out.”

  “A traitor?”

  “Had to get a new teacher for the upper grades. Miss Engle. Stick legs and a scrawny neck. One hundred and ten, if she’s a day. But Avon Heist is gone for good.”

  Angus was shaking his head. “I don’t believe a word of it. Heist a traitor? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, now, that’d be your choice. That’d be the choice Duncan made, but I’m telling you it’s the wrong choice. Heist had letters from the other side. Vor Moody said so all along. And he was building a signal tower to contact submarines.”

  “C’mon, Zeb.” Angus tried to picture Mr. Heist in his suit and vest up on a tower flashing Morse code to a surfaced sub. He nearly laughed.

  “Yep. All them years telling us he was a citizen.” Zeb shifted into a lower gear. “Dickie Bethune says Heist had family killed over there—might have tipped him over the edge. Good thing you’re home, boy, wounded or no, is all I can say. With those ribbons and medals on your chest, it’ll make a difference.”

  “What kind of a difference? What are you talking about?” By then they were jouncing down the rutted turnoff for Snag Harbor and into Mader’s Cove. As they approached Mader’s boatyard, Angus asked Zeb to stop the truck. Zeb shook his head. He flexed his hand on the wheel. “Don’t you want to get home?” he asked. “Stop the truck,” Angus repeated. That’s an order, he almost added. “I just want a look at her. Let me out.”

  Zeb slowed the truck and narrowed his eyes at the road. “No you don’t,” he said softly. “You don’t want to go down there. Not just yet.” But Angus had the door open. Zeb put on the brake and gripped his arm. “There’s some things as ha
ppened here now that are no good. No good a’tall.” Angus was out of the truck and down the wharf. There, lifting in the shallows of the slipway, were the charred remains of the Lauralee, the imprint of her name still visible in gold scroll along her bow.

  The burnt timbers receded. The cove with them, telescoping away, until all that was left was her name. “There now. Terrible. Terrible shock. Weren’t meant to see this. Not yet.” He heard the voice, but the ringing in his ears grew louder, a high-pitched buzzing that canceled out sound. And then he was on the move, down the ladder, up to his ankles in the water, up to his knees, reaching for the bowsprit until he got his hand around it.

  Men gathered behind him on the stony beach. The buzzing subsided, and in the silence he could hear their every unuttered word. The pity of it, the sorrow, the shame. Come home to this. At his feet through the clear water, the spine of a green sea urchin spiked up at him. A pod of yellow rockweed swayed forward and back in the hush, hush, hush of the waves lapping the keel and blackened hull. God did this, he thought. Sealed his fate. Emotion slowly drained out of him and the numbing cold of the water entered in. He lifted his head, loosened his grip on the bowsprit. He had nothing left. He would ask the necessary questions, receive the proffered answers, and move on.

  Philip gripped his shoulder when Angus finally waded out of the water. He stood there in his dripping kilt, looking at him with dull eyes, and waited. Philip patted his overalls and pulled out his pipe but didn’t light it. “Duncan wanted her in the water of a sudden week or so ago,” he began. “Maybe ’cause you were coming home. I needed that cradle. He knew that. Had me do a few repairs. Not enough to get her back in business, but we launched her, stepped the masts that afternoon. Anchored her here in the cove. I was to check her fittings. There was a storm that night. Not much rain, but lightning bouncing off the water. Must have struck her masts.”

  “She was ablaze and adrift, headed toward the Elsie,” Wallace added. “T’were Frank and his boys got a line onto her and towed her out to the harbor. Rain came up and she burned to what you see there. Towed what was left back here.” He took off his cap.

  Zeb spoke up. “Some say the fire was set, and she was set adrift. By George Mather, maybe, or by some as wanted to give your father a warning for calling the town a bunch of traitors when Heist was arrested. Some say the old man set it himself for insurance money.”

  “Shut your mouth, would you, Zeb?” Philip sighed. “You saw the look on Duncan’s face when she was burning. It was an act of God.”

  “An act of God,” Angus repeated dully.

  “That’d be my summation,” Philip said, then he reached down for a canvas sack, out of which he pulled the Lauralee’s compass. “Took it off her myself. You can repair the glass. The brass was blackened, but all it needed was polish.” He held it in both hands, angling it around so the needle spun. “See? Still works.” Angus ran his fingers across the broken glass, then met Philip’s eyes. Wallace fingered his cap and slapped it back on. The incoming tide inched slowly up over the wreckage.

  Angus climbed into Zeb’s truck without looking back. By the time they crossed the causeway, he was as detached from the boat as from himself. He left Zeb at the bottom of the hill and walked the rest of the way alone. He wanted to enter quietly. To take in the surroundings slowly, as if waking from the fog of dream, preparing himself for the letting go and the taking in of the tangible world. Here the old spruce trees, there the house, and there in the yard under the gnarled old tree a young boy, who was not Simon Peter, as he’d thought with a quickening heart, but Young Fred. Of course, Young Fred, who was lining up pencils—his pencil people, it came to Angus—on the swing. When Angus knelt down next to him, Young Fred gave him a shy smile as if his presence was no more fantastical than his talking pencils. Or perhaps too unreal to be true. It was a moment before he leaned toward Angus and let himself be hugged. “You’re wet,” he said. “You were fighting sea monsters.” Angus said that was just about right. Young Fred turned back to the swing. “The ones who are naughty fall off when I push. The good ones stay on. See?” He gave the swing an almost imperceptible push. All but one of the pencils rolled off, a long red one with teeth marks up and down. Fred picked it up and thrust it toward Angus. “It’s you,” he said, beaming. “This good one is the Dad.” It was then, with Young Fred’s hand gripping the red pencil in one hand and the other resting lightly on his shoulder, that Angus wept and could not stop.

  SIMON KICKED PEG’S flanks when they reached the Mathers’ field, but she wouldn’t budge. Simon hadn’t seen George since the Lauralee had burned. But he’d seen the look in George’s eyes when the Mounties had hauled Mr. Heist away. It was said that he broke his mother’s crockery that night and ripped up her roses and buried them upside down in the yard. Even from the road, Simon could see that they were chopped down to nothing. But he didn’t risk getting close enough to see if they were upside down. He may not have believed that George had burned the Lauralee, but the world had turned dark and dangerous. Though not to Peg. She lowered her head and began to nose the grass. He jumped down, turned her into the field, closed the gate and started walking.

  The Heist cottage was set far enough off the road and behind a bank of evergreens, so if you missed the path leading up to the back of the cottage, you’d miss it altogether. The first time Simon had ventured inside on his own, the front room had been a sea of splayed-open books. He’d shaken each one out as he re-shelved them. There were gaps in the shelves where the confiscated German books might have stood. He’d checked every emptied drawer, but had found only a tin box of matches embossed with a German cross on the lid and a few flimsy envelopes, none of which held Mr. Heist’s citizenship papers.

  The next time, he’d cleaned up the mess the Mounties had made of the kitchen and bedroom. Both times he’d sat for a while on a rocker on the front porch facing the bay and the garden and ended his visit down on the wharf, where he made sure the rowboat was secure and pictured Mr. Heist in his life preserver, rowing out with the long line tied to the wharf. The last time, Simon had sat in the boat itself, reading and rereading Charlotte’s letter—a very long letter in rounded script with stories about the girls and teachers that made him laugh. She had no idea about the Lauralee. He hadn’t been able to find the words to describe the sight of her that night, adrift like a fire ship, flames licking up her rigging, her mast crashing into the water. Huddled on shore with everyone in town watching her burn, Zenus had whispered to Simon that she’d come back, just like the Teazer, to haunt the South Shore. His grandfather, eyes rimmed and red, said the next morning that with her trading days over, she didn’t want to be stripped down, nor left to rot. Simon took immense comfort from this. God had acted, had a plan. But he couldn’t imagine what that plan was for Mr. Heist unless it was that Simon was to help him find a way out.

  When he reached the cottage, he headed around it to the bayside and into the front garden. He intended to take the path to steps down through the woods to the wharf. All he wanted was to sit there and think, to try to pull all the threads together—his father coming home, life without the Lauralee. He needed to be alone.

  But he was not alone. He froze at the sound of glass shattering, followed by a thud and jeering laughter from the back of the house. As he turned in confusion, the air was shattered by the crack of gunshot. He raced back through the garden and crept along the side of the porch and on into the juniper and twisted rhododendron at the corner of the cottage. From there he made out Robbie McLaren, hunched over, and Tim Bethune flat on his stomach in the yard. Next to them a pile of sticks and rags, a can of gasoline and a box of matches. Tim looked around wildly, but there was nowhere to run. Because there was George, up on Peg, slowly coming down the path from the road toward them, shirt open, rifle pointing to the sky. He lowered the gun, shoved the bolt, and took aim again.

  He fired off two more shots. The first made Tim’s hat spin in the air. The second took out the rock at the top of the pile. Simon
flattened against the wall, then sank down, his breath short and shallow. Robbie and Tim were pleading, “Don’t kill us! Please don’t kill us.” George, gun resting easily across Peg’s bare back, steered her over to them on a slow walk. He squinted at the house. Simon could hear the boys sobbing now. “Sharpshooting easy-shot,” George said. “I have forty rounds in silver casings for cowards like you. Come back again, and I’ll make them count.”

  The boys didn’t move. George waited. Finally, Tim struggled to his hands and knees. George cocked his head toward their bicycles. The boys scrabbled over like crabs, choking and sobbing. Robbie couldn’t make his pedals work. He grabbed the handlebars and Tim did the same, and they ran their bikes to the road.

  George walked Peg directly to the rhododendron. Simon squeezed his eyes shut, quivering against the wall. A chickadee let out a two-note call.

  “Simon Peter?” It was the first time George had said his name in all the time since he’d come home. He was leaning over Peg’s neck and holding out his hand. Simon went rigid. “Safe harbor,” George said, sitting back up. He waited, still as a statue, staring out at the bay, his long hair catching the breeze. It was a long time before Simon, still shaking, slid upright against the wall. A longer time still before he sidled out from the bushes. George turned Peg around without a word and they walked around to the yard. Simon kicked the pile of sticks and rags and picked up the matches. “They set the Lauralee on fire,” he said.

  “Nope,” George answered. “Lightning down the mast.”

  “Lightning? You saw it?”

  George nodded. “Couldn’t save her. She’d broke free.”

  Simon stuffed a towel in the broken window, locked the door, and came down the steps, then gripped George’s hand and swung up on Peg. He leaned back against George’s bare chest. George put his strong, tanned arms around him and shook the reins, his shirttails fluttering in the wind. “There’s my girl, Peg,” George said softly.