Above the post office, a low granite wall separated the delivery way from the manicured lawn of the Anglican Church, and sitting on it, soaking up the sunshine, were Leveret Hershey and Ginger Coile. There were people Maclean would sooner have drunk with, but Leveret and Ginger would do if they had the money to pay their way.
Leveret Hershey, whom some of boys behind his back called “The Major” after Major Hoople in the comic strip, was a large man with a full paunch, a full head of gray hair, and a slow considered way of talking even when sober. He dressed himself in a succession of suits which he got from the Salvation Army, and he always wore a felt hat. For a while, he and Maclean had been together in the old Third Brigade that had been gloriously gassed and machine-gunned at Ypres, Festubert, and Givenchy, where Leveret lost the first three fingers off his left hand. He never knew how. One second they were there, he said, and the next second they were gone. And since you can’t very well shoot a rifle, or even dig a ditch, with three fingers shot off, he was sent home. A small price to pay for getting out of there alive. By way of further compensation, he was given a small pension. Then a few years after he got home, he came into some money when his father died, and he hadn’t worked a day since.
Ginger was young enough to have missed the Great War and just old enough not to have been called up for this one, not yet anyway, not until they got desperate for anybody who could stop a bullet or two, the way they had in 1917. He was a big man too, but, unlike Leveret, he didn’t look like any major. He had tousled, red hair, none of his clothes seem to hang on him right, and he walked with a loose-limbed shamble, like an old dog. He was one of the strongest men in town. Maclean had once seen him on a bet lift a stove and carry it across the street. But whoever had put him together had run out of material before he got to the head and had left him a little simple. This was maybe why he was so attached to Leveret, whose brainless pomposities seemed to Ginger, even when he couldn’t understand them, wisdom such as few ordinary mortals are privileged to hear. And for this privilege he was always ready to help Leveret out with a little of the cash he earned working at the jobs people thought him fit for, like wheeling cement or heaving barrels of potatoes onto a truck or carrying stoves across the street.
“Well, boys,” Maclean said, as he ambled up to them, “this ain’t a bad crack at a nice day.”
“No,” Leveret said. “I don’t look for no snow, not before tomorrow anyways.”
“So,” Maclean asked, “what are you boys doing to put in the afternoon?”
“Nothin’ special,” Leveret said. “Nothin’ special.”
He shifted uneasily on the wall, lifting one buttock and setting it down again carefully a different way. Maclean sensed that something was up that Leveret was worried he might be an impediment to, no doubt through a lack of wherewithal. But before he was too quick to let them know he wasn’t on the bum, he decided he’d better wait and find out what was up and who might finish bumming from whom. Leveret, he knew from long experience, could be shifty.
On the sidewalk, Magistrate Thurcott went past carrying a little brown paper bag with his bottle of sherry, mincing along the way he did. His eyes flickered towards them and turned quickly away again. Theirs did the same, and he went on, up past the Anglican Church, where tomorrow he would sit and kneel and stand and sit down again and nod his head at the mention of the Lord’s name. We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.
“Pinky,” he said, looking down, wearily, from the bench. “John. Mr. Maclean. You are a man of some education. What are you doing here?”
They watched him pass on up the street, and the silence spun itself out. Then Maclean became aware that Leveret wasn’t looking at him any more but at something behind him and was nervously shifting his ass around again on the granite wall. Maclean turned and saw Jimmy McIninch and Bill Kayton coming around the corner of the post office.
Jimmy McIninch was a little Irish Catholic, but the practice of his Catholicism had long since lapsed although it was still touchy to say anything against Catholics or the church unless he said it himself first. He was five feet tall and weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds. When he walked, he always looked as if he were sidling through a half-opened door, and the more worried or nervous he was the more he sidled. He was sidling now, and shrugging his shoulders, studying Maclean warily from under the peak of his cloth cap.
Bill Kayton was young enough to have been conscripted if it weren’t for the drink. He was a wonderful carpenter when he was sober, and he could always get work since carpenters of any kind were scarce because of the war. People who hired him just took it for granted that every now and then he wouldn’t be there in the morning, the way they took it for granted that every now and then they were going to lose a day or two because of the weather.
So Bill Kayton almost always had money, and as soon as Maclean saw him with Jimmy and saw Leveret dancing his ass around on the granite wall, he knew what was up. Leveret and the others had coupons but no money, and Bill Kayton would have money but no coupons, and Leveret was worried that he had arrived to join the party with neither one.
Jimmy and Bill came up, Jimmy sidling and shrugging like a monkey with fleas.
“A nice day,” Maclean said.
“ The very best,” Bill said. “How you been?”
He acted as if he might already have had a drink or two, but drunk or sober, Bill was someone Maclean had always liked.
“Good,” Maclean said. “Good. You ain’t working today?”
“Never work on a Saturday,” Bill said. “Five days shalt thou labour and on two shalt thou enjoy the fruits of thy labour.”
The talk faltered, and they all stood around looking at each other.
“Well,” Leveret said finally, when he saw that Maclean wasn’t going to go away, “we were sort of wonderin’ the four of us here, if we might not get together and get a little somethin’ to drink.”
“You got coupons,” Bill said. “And I got a few dollars.”
“Yes,” Leveret said uneasily, eyeing Maclean. “Well, yes.”
“Three coupons for wine, Jimmy told me,” Bill said.
Maclean liked watching Leveret squirm, but he decided he had let it go on long enough.
“That’s all right then,” he said. “I’m fixed not too bad. I got a coupon and a little money, and I wouldn’t mind coming in if that’s all right.”
“Well,” Leveret said, brightening up. “We thought three bottles of port. Three bottles would make two dollars eighty-five.”
He looked at Bill Kayton.
“Jimmy said you needed another dollar and a quarter.”
“If that seems fair to you,” Leveret said. “As a sort of trade for the coupons.”
“Fair enough,” Bill said.
“Well,” Maclean said. “I got my coupon, so why don’t we get four bottles. How would that be? And I could put in another sixty cents and just leave myself a little for some tobacco.”
He looked at Bill Kayton.
“You couldn’t manage another thirty-five cents?”
“Sure,” Bill said.
“Well, then, boys,” Leveret said, raising one arm expansively, to the alarm of a little old woman hustling past on the sidewalk. “There ain’t gonna be many more days like this, so what do you say to the Black Rock?”
5
HALF A MILE up the tracks from the railroad bridge Maclean had crossed that morning, the Black Rock jutted out from the steep bank of the river. Twenty feet high, thirty feet long, shaped like the prow of a great ship, it was said to be part of the seam of an ancient volcano that the glaciers, the river, and the weather had disinterred and sculpted. At the end of a dry summer, the water at its base was hardly a foot deep, but in the spring freshet, the river, filled with floating ice cakes, rose half way up its sides, and then it did indeed seem li
ke a great ship adrift in a hard-running winter sea.
From the railroad tracks, a steep path angled down to the rock through a jungle of chokecherry bushes. Below the bushes, the soil that had washed down the bank over the years had become a soft, gently sloping, green verge of grass and moss wide enough for a man to lie on with only his feet stretched out on the bare rock. They lounged there now in a row—Maclean, Leveret, Ginger, Jimmy, and Bill—looking lazily out at the river flowing below them, at the hills on the far side of the river with their farms and orchards, at the highway bridge downriver with its slow-moving freight of Saturday traffic.
The first bottle of ruby red port had gone twice around quickly and now stood, carefully capped against spillage, between Leveret’s knees. The other three bottles in brown paper bags lay in a little hollow among the bushes behind them. The afternoon sunlight, falling through the leaves, lay warm along them, and Maclean, with the warmth also of the port inside him, felt weightless, content, without a care in the world. This beat all to hell sitting in the Legion with the noise and the smoke, so that you could hardly breathe, listening to the same, tired stories, most of them lies, that went round and round until most of the boys there no longer knew the difference between what had really happened in the war and all the bullshit they had made up or seen in the movies.
“Now this is good, boys, ain’t it?” Leveret proclaimed. “If this ain’t good, boys, then there ain’t nothin’ good in the world.”
Maclean looked across the river at a great, plain, wooden building, like a barn with some extra windows let into it. His first school. How many years ago? The school yard was bordered at the back by a line of sugar maples, and he saw that the whole side of one had already turned a flaming, autumnal red. Funny how some of them always go early like that. Beginning to die and feeling already the coming of winter.
At his age and with his health, whenever the first snow came and the fierce, bone-chilling cold, he always had to wonder whether he would see another spring. (“Will she last the winter?” the daughters whispered to Drusilla, standing outside the door of Mrs. Fraser’s room. “No,” Drusilla whispered back, “when they get this low, they don’t last long.” And Mrs. Fraser, her mouth open, a dark hole like the mouths of the three-day dead, lay in her bed, listening and looking up at the ceiling, pretending not to hear.)
He looked across the river, now blue under this blue sky, and imagined it as it would be in four months, a wilderness of ice, the wind howling across it, the way it had the day the old Queen died, and he had stood over there listening to the bells.
“Well, now,” Jimmy said, “why don’t we send that bottle around another trip?”
Leveret unscrewed the cap and passed the bottle to Maclean, and the bottle went along, each one of them taking his swig, each swig by long practice as near alike as made any difference among pals.
“You just finish that off,” Leveret said when the bottle reached Bill, “seein’ as you put in a little more than the rest of us.”
Bill tipped it up and drained it, then turned the neck down, and they watched as three red drops fell one by one into the moss at his feet. Jimmy took the bottle and went out into the middle of the rock. He made a couple of awkward little sideways jumps and sent the bottle arching end over end out into the river. It went in neck first, bobbed up and over, took enough water to make it float straight up, and began its way slowly downriver towards the bridge and the island.
“We should put a message in one,” Ginger said. “We should write our name and address on a piece of paper and put it in and put the cap on. I heard about somebody did that, and somebody found it somewhere way down in the States and wrote back a letter.”
“Did he git any money?” Jimmy asked.
“No,” Ginger said. “I never heard about no money. But it was in the newspapers and all.”
“You should say you’re a starvin’ orphan,” Jimmy said, “and then maybe they’d send ya some money.”
Maclean sat with his elbows on his knees watching the bottle as it drifted slowly away from the shore out towards the main channel. He imagined it clearing the rocky shore of the island and sailing on downriver past other islands, past Fredericton, through the Reversing Falls and Saint John Harbour, out into the Bay of Fundy, on and on southwards towards islands of perpetual warmth and sunshine.
Past the lighthouse, past the nunbuoy,
Past the crimson, rising sun,
There are dreams go down the harbour
With the tall ships of Saint John.
“Well, no,” Ginger was saying. “I wouldn’t want to tell no lies. But I could say that I wouldn’t mind comin’ to visit them, and maybe if it wasn’t too far off, they might send me the money.”
“Yes. Well,” Leveret said. “I wouldn’t be packin’ my suitcases just yet for a while.”
“It was just an idea,” Ginger said. “I ain’t never been further than Fredericton once when I went down with the river gang.”
Maclean lost sight of the bottle and couldn’t find it again among the reflections dancing on the surface of the water, and he sat looking instead at the highway bridge—twelve spans of steel girders looping across the river, high up on tall granite piers beyond the reach of the floodwaters that had carried away an older bridge ten years before he was born. The traffic made two almost solid lines—wagons, cars, trucks—crawling past each other on the narrow roadway conceived before the advent of the motor car and the truck.
Leveret took a second bottle out of its paper bag and unscrewed the cap in his slow, deliberate way, as if it were an operation that required expert deliberation and skill. Ginger took the empty bag and blew it full of air and hit it with the flat of his hand making a sound like a shot, and a flock of waxwings that had been feasting on chokecherries in the bushes behind them exploded upwards and flew off upriver, their tail flashes brilliant in the sunlight.
The bottle went along the line again, the first time quickly, then twice more, more slowly, reflectively. When it was empty, Ginger put it in the sun at the tip of the rock to dry out. Bill had a little notebook, and he tore out a page and wrote Ginger’s name on it.
“Ginger Coile, General Delivery, Wakefield, NB, Canada.” Ginger rolled the paper up and put it inside the bottle and screwed the cap on tight and threw it out into the river, twice as far as Jimmy had thrown the first one.
With the cap on, it didn’t drink any water and floated on its side, tipped down only a little at the bottom, turning its neck slowly around in the current as if looking for the best way to go. Ginger sat down on the edge of the rock and watched it floating away.
“Where do ya think it’ll git to, Ginger?” Jimmy asked him.
“I dunno,” Ginger said. “But it would be fun if somebody did write me, now wouldn’t it.”
“And sent ya a ticket to New York City,” Jimmy said.
“Or maybe someplace down south,” Ginger said, “where nobody don’t need to do no work because everythin’ they need they can just pick off a tree. That would be great, wouldn’t it?”
“Did you hear about the McIntyre boy?” Leveret asked Maclean.
“Yes,” Maclean said. “Sam Kelly told me.”
“You used to know Timmy McIntyre,” Leveret said to Ginger.
“Yes,” Ginger said. “We worked on the railroad once for a while.”
“He got killed,” Leveret said. “In Sicily.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Ginger said. “That’s too bad. What they gonna do with him? They gonna bring him back?”
“No,” Leveret explained. “They don’t do that. They’ll just bury him over there someplace.”
“If there’s anything to bury,” Maclean said.
“Do you remember Sergeant Akers?” Leveret asked.
“Yes,” Maclean said. “I haven’t thought about him in a long time.”
“We used to call him Sergeant Death, remember?”
“Yes,” Maclean said. “And a lot of other things too.”
Hubert, I am, when I’m ‘ome among real human beings, but Sergeant Akers to you bastards. All of a sudden, the glass of memory wiped clean by alcohol, Maclean could see Akers’ face as clearly as if it only been an hour ago that he had watched him arrive with his miserable lackeys, boys who had been hauled up for something or other and given to Akers for a week or two as their punishment. A square, lantern jaw, a thin-lipped straight mouth, high cheekbones, a high forehead, and a thin swatch of wispy hair combed straight from one side to the other and held down by some kind of grease. A small man with narrow shoulders, short arms, and white, pudgy, little hands with fingers that looked like disinterred grubs.
He was English—from London, someone said—but he had emigrated to Toronto and joined the Canadian Army there. Maybe because he was no use for anything else, more likely because he went after what no one else wanted, not even as a way to escape getting killed, he was put in charge of burial details for the battalion. He collected whatever bodies or bits of bodies could be collected without too much danger, identified them if he could, and either buried them on the spot or carted them back to the rear.
“Who the hell,” Jimmy asked, “was Sergeant Death?”
“Sergeant Death was the guy used to bury our dead men,” Leveret told him. “And he loved it, didn’t he, Pinky?”
“Yes,” Maclean said.
“There was sumpin’ very peculiar about him,” Leveret said. “Very peculiar. Do you think maybe he was a fruit?”
“Maybe,” Maclean said.
“Remember the day the trench got hit with that there mortar bomb,” Leveret said, and a whole bunch of the boys got killed?”
“I remember,” Maclean said.
“And when Akers got there,” Leveret said, squinting out at the river as if trying to get it all in focus, “he said sumpin’ queer, and one of the boys was going to knock his head in with a rifle butt. Got himself put on a charge. Remember?”
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