The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

  WHEN HE MADE it home alone on Peg, Simon sensed something going on even before he walked down from the barn to the house. Zeb’s truck in the yard. The Fredas’ door wide open. Voices in the kitchen. And there at the kitchen table was someone who looked just like his father, staring at a slice of Ida’s bread on a plate as she buttered it, staring at it as if he’d never seen such a thing.

  This man looked up slowly and knocked the bread and the plate to the floor as he stood, as he lurched around the table to pull Simon against him.

  ALONE AT LAST— the Fredas and Zeb long gone, his father still up at his house, Simon Peter helping Ida—Angus sat on the bed. He looked down at the rim of salt on his kilt a few inches above the knee, then went to the bureau and pulled out a pair of old trousers. He laid them on the bed and pictured himself pulling them on one-handed, the potential defeat of the buttons on the fly. Five. He counted them.

  The Lauralee’s compass, like a severed head in a sack, was on the bed next to the trousers. He pulled it out and traced the crack in the glass. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.” Those were the words his father said on welcoming Angus home—or had he said, “home from the kill?” It didn’t matter. “Requiem,” by Stevenson. Angus knew the verse, and knew the opening line. “Under the wide and starry sky, dig the grave and let me lie . . .”

  He’d taken the compass with him, intending to give it to his father when he finally walked up to his house. How frail the old man had looked there in the study, just where he’d left him. Still in his white shirt and dark wool vest. Except this time in the wing chair, head back, mouth open, sound asleep. Angus paced quietly about and sat down behind the desk. It was strewn with news clippings and letters and old ledger books. There was a check made out to the Union of Democratic Control—the UDC. Angus had heard of it—a stop-the-war organization in Britain filled with intellectuals who had never been on the field, as far as he knew, and social agitators and labor unions. The check was for $500, about what it might cost to build a new boat or maybe a house.

  Angus stood abruptly. The desk chair slammed back. His father jerked awake and blinked uncomprehendingly, then his mouth fell open again. “I’ll be damned,” he whispered. “Am I dreaming?” He got to his feet, hand tentatively holding the chair. “Home is the sailor . . .” he said and the rest. They stared at each other until finally Angus came around the desk and they exchanged a rough embrace.

  There was no small talk. His father went directly to the cupboard and pulled out a bottle of whisky. “Single malt. From Scotland. Been keeping it for this day,” he said, searching for the crystal tumblers and pouring it out. But once poured, he simply stared at Angus and sat back down. When they finally spoke, it was about the Lauralee. They agreed to believe it was lightning, the hand of God. Agreed it was fitting. Angus tried to give him the compass, but he wouldn’t accept it. She was as much yours as mine. She wouldn’t have made it under another skipper, he said, glancing at Angus’s wounded arm. Wouldn’t have made it anyway, Angus said, stating outright what he’d been afraid to admit for so long.

  His father’s eyes remained on the sling. Angus instinctively crossed his left arm over it. “The monstrous atrocities you’ve seen. Participated in. I can’t imagine,” his father said flatly.

  Participated in. Angus let that sink in. Waited for more. But his father was not about to turn the conversation to Angus, not directly. To the war, yes—the insanity, the unending horror of it. His own efforts and the UDC. The necessity of a negotiated peace this instant. He grew agitated, walked over and jabbed at papers on his desk. “This man Sassoon, a Military Cross to his credit, a lieutenant like you, has refused to continue. Did you know that?”

  Angus indicated he did, hoping to cut the conversation short, but his father kept right on. “His letter to his commanding officer was read aloud in the British House of Commons.” He whipped a sheet of newsprint from the stack. Fumbling with his spectacles, he leaned over and ran his finger down the page. “Said, and I quote, that England is now engaged in a war not of ‘defense and liberation’ but of ‘aggression and conquest.’ Said he was acting on behalf of all soldiers.” He looked up at Angus. “There’s courage for you. Begged Parliament for a negotiated peace. And what was the response? Sent him off to the looney bin to shut him up.” Spittle had collected in the corner of his mouth.

  “They’re called war hospitals,” Angus said evenly. “Craiglockhart. It’s a British war hospital. And Sassoon does not speak for me. I speak for myself.”

  His father ripped off his glasses. “What do you mean? Of course he does. I’m on your side. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “And what side is that? The one where men died for nothing? Now we just stop the war and hand them France and whatever else they want?”

  “Exactly! End this bloody war. Prevent this—look at you. You want more men to come back like . . .” He pressed his thumb and fingers against his eyes.

  Angus had no feeling for a moment. Then it came to him just how afraid his father was. Better to stand behind the shield of righteous anger, to think of death and sacrifice as abstractions, as without purpose, than to imagine those deaths, one by one, or see the crippled son in front of him. “I have come back,” Angus said firmly. He took a step backward, and, eyes on his father, leaned down, picked up the compass, and left.

  IT WAS NOT long afterwards that Simon came home. “Don’t speak,” Angus had said. “Don’t say a word. Let me just hold you.” He felt the surprising muscularity of the boy’s arms, felt him sink against his paralyzed arm, and held him far too long. When he did let him go, there was Publicover in the freckles and blond hair, the cheery grin. He pressed his eyes and sat back heavily in his chair. Simon stared at Angus’s medal. Avoided his arm. Told him about Mr. Heist and how he was innocent. Said he’d told Mr. Heist that his father would get him out of prison. Rattled on. Thankfully, did not ask about the war. They talked about the Lauralee, and Angus said it must have been a horror to watch her burn. Simon grew quiet, and Angus assured him they’d get on without her and that all they’d do was think of the good times and what a brave old girl she was. Ida set out tea and more bread and some chowder. Simon shoveled it in, talked some more, filled in every empty space. Told Angus he’d worked at Mader’s all summer. Told him all about a boat once called Repulse Bay, now unnamed, at Smith and Rhuland’s. Spoke with surprising technical detail about her lines. Grinned some more. Flicked a look at his arm again. Grew serious. Mentioned Vimy. Said, You showed ’em, Dad.

  Ida pulled out some meat tarts and said it may as well be supper because Hettie would be late getting home. She was over to Gold River to check on the new foreman at the sawmill. Ridiculous her riding all over the place. Duncan had agreed to get a truck, and Zeb was going to teach Hettie to drive. Drive a truck, mind, she said. Right on up to Dawson lumber camp, next thing you know. She checked Angus for his reaction. Seeing none, she said, “She’s your father’s eyes and ears and more. But maybe she always has been, because the men she deals with don’t seem to mind her being a woman, far as I can tell, as long as her money’s good. Of course, it’s all Duncan’s.”

  “As long as there’s money left,” Angus said.

  Ida nodded. She knew what he meant. “Puts his money where his mouth is, I’ll give you that.”

  IT WAS NEARLY SUNSET, a blush of pink overhead deepening to red, by the time Hettie came up the hill on Rooster, Ebbin’s old hat hanging down her back by its leather ties. Immobilized on the porch, Angus watched as if witness to a passing dream. Rooster nodding with each slow step, Hettie’s heavy boots in the stirrups, the drape of her rough brown skirt, the tousled short hair, her face sunburnt and purposeful. She didn’t see him as she rode up.

  In the barn he said her name. She was closing the stall door. She went rigid and slowly turned to him. “Hettie. I’m sorry,” he said. He walked over to her. She touched his lips with trembling fingers. They sank down on the straw with
Rooster breathing over them and held each other until she pulled back and wiped her downcast eyes. He picked bits of straw from her short locks. She touched his arm, a touch he did not feel. He shook his head. They sat back against the stall door, side by side, and the enormity of all they had not written to each other hung between them.

  “I found him,” he said. Said it compulsively, without thinking, but glad of it. He wanted to tell her, wanted his guilt to overwhelm him, be purged from him. Wanted to make sense of it with the only person who could understand, the only other person who knew Ebbin the way he did. The great weight of knowing pressed down on him.

  “Found his body?” she whispered. “The army said . . . I thought, I thought—”

  “No,” he said, before she could finish. “You don’t understand, I found him.” But she refused to hear it. Said she could not bear to hear his name. That she had buried him. And had found life without him—

  He stared at her dumbly as the words “found life without him” registered. The tremble of her upturned chin, the anxious confusion in her eyes—all this he took in and weighed against his selfish need, his reckless words.

  “No. I meant . . . I found out about him. That he was . . . heroic in the end. At the end.”

  “Oh,” she said, and sank back against the stall.

  He waited to see if she wanted more—if there was even a shred of a possibility that she’d open the door. But she kept it firmly closed. “What does it matter? The war took him, hero or not,” she sighed. She stared straight ahead. “For a long time, a very long time, I couldn’t accept it. But finally . . . the day my father brought this to me, I knew he was gone.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pressed Ebbin’s tag into Angus’s hand. “You need to bury him, too,” she said. Then she picked up Ebbin’s hat and stood, holding the leather brim with both hands. “Remember this hat? Remember that story of his? How he won it off a ‘mad Australian’? How he made us laugh? That’s how I want to think of him. Not as a corpse, not as a soldier blown to bits, his body mangled—I don’t care what he did over there, nor how he died. Please. Just let me keep him as he was so I can keep going.”

  Angus closed his fingers over the tag and slipped it in his pocket. He stood as well. “Hettie,” he said, stretching out his hand. But she stepped back and turned her head away and closed her eyes. Angus let his hand drop.

  She took a deep breath and, without looking at him, said, “There’s something else. Something you need to know. Something awful. I don’t know how to tell you—” She faced him. These were tears in her eyes.

  “You don’t have to. I saw her. The Lauralee. I couldn’t have sailed her, not like this.” He nodded at his arm. “And she was in no condition anyway. We all knew that. She’s gone. Like Ebbin.”

  Gone but not. Vanished but present. Dead but not buried. Not really.

  Rooster shook his mane and stamped. Peg sidled up to the edge of her stall and hung her head over into his. Hettie stroked Peg’s nose, removed Rooster’s bridle, rubbed him down quickly, and fed them both oats. Refused Angus’s help. Only take a minute, she said. I’m used to it. And of course she was. Angus had barely ever ridden Rooster, let alone rubbed him down or fed him. His father and Hettie had always been in charge of the horses—just one more element of their partnership, he thought now, watching her. How deft and sure her movements were. How efficient and robust she seemed. He remembered his father telling him to give her some certainty. She had it now. She was no longer the wraith wandering the hills. The air and the smell of horses grew thick around him. He stepped outside.

  She finished her tasks and joined him. He lit a cigarette and nearly offered her one. “You’ve had a lot on your shoulders,” he said, somewhat stiffly. “I’ve heard you’ve taken over the reins of Dad’s affairs. I’m proud of you. Grateful to you.”

  She shrugged it off. “Keeps me going,” she said. He could imagine how her offhand manner might work in a negotiation, how it would disarm those who took it too literally.

  “Keeps us going, from what I’ve heard.”

  She cocked her head. “I was thinking,” she said softly. “With the Lauralee gone, and you—I’m not sure what you’d want to do, but we’ve bought up more timber. Paper mills, maybe. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

  “Paper mills?” He almost laughed. And then he felt it. The cool detachment of the question.

  “But what will you do?”

  “I just got home,” he snapped.

  “I know, I know,” she whispered in a soothing voice. “I’m sorry. I should have asked about what you’ve been through. But . . .” She bit her lip and looked away. “Duncan said, this pamphlet said that soldiers coming home don’t want to talk about it. If you want to—I mean, your men, they sounded a fine bunch . . . from what you wrote.”

  He stopped her. “It’s alright. My father was right. The pamphlet was right.” He looked up at the purple sky, the first stars. A fine bunch. Conlon had warned him that stirred-up memories could overtake the physical world and pull you back. But so too could uncomprehending souls threaten that hallowed ground. “It’s getting dark,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

  She hesitated, maybe waiting for him. When he didn’t move, she started down the hill. “Did you think of me?” he thought he heard her ask as she brushed past. “Yes,” he said. She was at the well by then and down the yard and into the house. And he knew he had imagined those words. “Did you think of me?” he whispered.

  LATE THAT NIGHT with Ebbin’s tag in his hand and Havers’s cross around his neck, Angus went down to the beach below the house and sat on a boulder where he used to sit as a boy, waiting for his father to come in from the Banks. He stared out at the islands and thought about how his father would swing him up on his shoulders and parade him around the town wharf. He thought of his phalarope out there under the waves. The frigate bird he had seen gliding low over the trench in a hallucinatory moment came back to him—a bird he’d drawn from pictures, but never seen. And Paul’s pigeons circling, and moonlight glinting off a bayonet, the glaze of ice on grass, the pounding of his heart as they crawled through it, the neatly tied laces on Wickham’s upside-down boots, and Publicover’s freckles, his smile, his laugh, and Conlon’s voice breaking, his own as well, on the slow-paced drumbeat of “Brave Wolfe” one night in an estaminet, weeks before Vimy. The cannon on each side did roar like thunder . . . And youths in all their pride were torn asunder . . . Angus repeated the lines in a whisper. The charred timbers of the Lauralee merged with the blackened tree stumps at the riverbank so long ago. He searched the black water beyond the Lauralee’s empty mooring. But there was no hint of a green running light.

  STILL LATER, in the bedroom, he stood over his wife, watching her breathe. Had he thought of her over there? Not often and not enough. And when he had, it was as a schoolgirl when the world had just begun. Angled across the bed, only too used to him not being in it, she lay on her back, mouth slightly open, arm flung back. He feathered a lock of her chopped hair through his fingers. Who was he to disturb such reinvention? To soil such brave efforts? Maybe she had buried Ebbin after all, and maybe half her heart with him.

  Still dressed, he sat in the rocker and undid his boots. Undid his sling. The one place he had not gone in the years and years since he’d stepped off the train and into Zeb’s truck was the art shed. He pulled the faded blue and gray quilt around him and leaned back.

  There’d be a stone marker on the hillside at Vimy for Lance Corporal Havers. Of that, he had no doubt. But for the rest of time, only he and two other living souls would know who was buried beneath it. And they, like Angus himself, were very far away. His arm was heavy in his lap. His shoulder ached.

  TWENTY-SIX

  November 28th, 1917

  Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia

  Simon Peter pushed the shed door open. Two and a half months had come and gone since his father’s return, and he hadn’t bothered to lock it. Yet Simon had seen him go inside, swinging
the lantern up the yard at night. He’d seen the rumpled quilt on the cot near the stove. The studio was dry and still—an empty husk, just like his father. Simon stepped in boldly. But once inside, he softened his steps. It remained sacred ground whether his father cared or not.

  His father did not care about many things. Life went on around him, and he stared out at it through sad and vacant eyes. He dressed and shaved each morning, then sat with his knees pressed close together on the porch when the weather was fine, or by the fire when it was not. He used his good arm to move his bad one up and down in what he called “passive exercise.” He kept a book in his lap and a pair of binoculars by his side. He kept the Lauralee’s compass hidden away in a cupboard. He did not care to have visitors, nor go into town. He would not go out on the water, and didn’t want Simon in the dory. It wasn’t safe, he said. He would not talk about the war. He barely talked at all.

  When Reverend Dimmock came that first week, saying he’d like to have a ceremony after the Sunday service to welcome the war hero home as they’d done for George Mather, his father had refused. Reverend Dimmock pleaded that it would go a long way to heal the town after the Heist affair, and that it might even bring Duncan back to the fold. Simon’s father had stood up, towering over the reverend, who cringed and held his tea biscuit up like a shield. He said that he was no hero and that Reverend Dimmock understood very little if he thought Duncan MacGrath would be placated by glorifying war in a house of God. Reverend Dimmock, red in the face, clamped on his hat and said that Angus might want to consider his own soul. His father shut the door and leaned his head against it for a long time.

  Simon debated whether to tell his father what George had said about seeing Ebbin after Courcelette. When he finally did tell him, his father took a long time before responding and said something like “sometimes we see what we want to believe,” which was saying nothing and sounded eerily like George.