The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  “I went to look in on Nan and then everyone came in the door, back from church. And you left before I got to say a word to you.”

  “Before you went to look in on your grandmother,” he said. “You pulled away from me.”

  “I never.” A look of disbelief on her face.

  He smiled at his feet. “You pulled away and you said, ‘Don’t make a whore of me.’”

  She shook her head, but he could tell from her expression that it was coming back to her. Her hesitation and the way those words set him on his ass in the chair. She said, “I never.”

  “Hiram had money on it all, did he ever tell you that?”

  “On what?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Mercedes.”

  “On what?”

  Wish leaned his weight against the bed frame. “Every little place we went into with the movies, he’d give me odds on bedding some missus. Usually someone with a husband off on the Labrador for the season.”

  “You bet with him?”

  “I was a youngster, Mercedes. I was pissed at your mother, is most of it. The bet was just an excuse.”

  She adjusted the straps of the shoulder bag, as if it was falling away from her.

  “I was just a youngster,” he said again. “I would have screwed a knothole in a fence post for fifty cents.”

  She smiled and didn’t smile and smiled again. She drew her head back to take in a breath of air. “A knothole,” she said. Every breath seemed to be striking her like a slap in the face.

  “Mercedes.”

  She went out the door with both hands clutching the straps of the shoulder bag.

  He went as far as the rail, calling after her, but she ignored him and he let her go. He walked into the bedroom and stood at the window, swearing under his breath. The window was so old that the glass had settled and pooled near the bottom, the striated panes distorting everything he could see out across the Cove, sheep appearing and disappearing like pennies in a water glass. The two women came around the side of the house below him and started down the path, their figures wavering like a mirage through the ancient glass.

  He hadn’t felt anything for Mercedes in so long he assumed it had leached from him somewhere in his travels, in the years of itinerant work and drinking, in the long string of temporary relationships. But he was wrong about that. He felt as if he was exhuming a creature preserved in a peat bog for centuries: the body intact, the face leathery and tanned black by the bog but still identifiable. The material of the clothes retaining its original colour under a camouflage of wet turf.

  He left the camp after the tidal wave of wind and heat ripped through, the single spectral pulse of it and the violent recoil, as if it was cast out on a line and jerked back to the place it was thrown from. Windows shattered. Anything movable tumbled first in one direction and then the opposite. Utterly, utterly silent afterwards as he picked himself up from the ground and walked out the gates. Some kind of cloud rising over the hills in the distance, a grey bloom exfoliating steadily, a long central column towering like the stalk of a plant. The cloud was eerily symmetrical, as if it was the product of intelligent design, and it chilled him to watch it expanding moment by moment as he walked up out of the valley, the sky darkening over him.

  When he crested the hill above the camp he could see what was left of the shipyard in the distance. Buildings and warehouses, destroyers and carriers reduced to piles of scrap metal. Beyond that, more devastation than it was possible to catalogue. He turned away from the city, walking for more than an hour in the opposite direction without a plan, until he passed the French Temple. The building was still intact and empty when he stepped inside and he walked toward the altar, brushed a pew clear of shattered glass.

  Others began arriving shortly afterwards. He didn’t acknowledge them and no one spoke. It was as if they were gathering for some prearranged service. By late afternoon the sanctuary was crowded and people had already begun dislodging pews to shift them out of the way. Some of the survivors had made their way from neighbourhoods near the city centre and most of those were badly burnt. One boy lay against the wall near Nishino, shaking with some kind of fever. His upper body was naked and the skin appeared to have been torn away in one long strip from his torso, raw muscle over the rib cage, the wound outlined in vermilion and black. His mother sat near his head and the boy was asking her for ice cream, repeating the question relentlessly without pausing for an answer. Nishino could feel the mother watching him, realized finally it was his uniform that drew her gaze, that she was expecting some sort of direction or assistance from him. It seemed then that the eyes of everyone in the church were on him and he began to shake under that weight, a tremor running through his shoulders, his teeth chattering.

  He gathered up his kit bag and went through a doorway beside the altar. Took the set of stairs to the basement and wandered through the dark corridors until he found an unoccupied room. It had no windows and there was only enough light from the hall to confirm it was empty. He pushed the door shut and lay against it in the pitch, trying to quiet his breathing, to stop his teeth knocking. The muffled sound of the people on the floor above him filtering into the darkness.

  He would have to get rid of the uniform. He began emptying the pockets, making a small pile of items to one side. He fished out the medallion last and sat holding it, tracing the outline of the king’s head with a fingertip, his hands still shaking.

  It was his sister who had brought it to him. She was only ten at the time but had inherited all of their mother’s responsibilities short of managing the family’s money. She cooked for the men, worked the farm and kept the house, cleaning, washing and mending clothes. On Saturdays, when his father drove produce to the market and spent the night with his mistress in New Westminster, she stripped sheets, washed the bedroom floors, straightened closets.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked her.

  “I was putting away his clothes,” she said. She looked down at her feet, embarrassed by the obvious snooping she’d done. “There’s something written on the back.”

  He reached for the medal. “You should be ashamed to be looking through his things.”

  “The first part of it is Father’s name. I don’t understand the rest.”

  “You should be ashamed to know so little of your own language.”

  “What does it say, Noburo?”

  “Mind your own business,” he said, putting the medal away in his pocket.

  His father’s mistress was a white woman, a childless widow who ran a market stall established by her husband before the First World War. He had been killed in action in France and in the years since she had taken to wearing the dead man’s clothes and knee-high rubber boots. Nishino met her when he was still a boy, when he and his father drove the vegetables to New Westminster, and he was fascinated by the woman at first. She smoked cigarettes and swore a blue streak and drank whisky. She seemed not to care what anyone said or thought about her. After the truck was unloaded they drove a few miles outside of town to a river, where his father spent the late afternoon fishing for trout while Nishino swam a little ways upstream. Some afternoons the woman came out to meet them there and she and his father would wander off into the trees for half an hour.

  The affair wasn’t a closely guarded secret but it was carefully shaded and bordered, operating so far beneath the surface of the family’s days it was possible to ignore it completely. It was only after his mother’s death that it started to seep into their lives in a public way. His father began spending nights with her in New Westminster and the woman occasionally came to the house in Kitsilano for meals, although there was never a suggestion of anything as brazen as having her sleep in the dead wife’s bed.

  The increasingly open nature of the relationship meant that plenty was said about it in the community. On two occasions small gangs of white men drove out as far as their farm to break out the windows and warn his father away from the woman. They were all drunk. They threatened to bu
rn the farm to the ground if Nishino’s father refused to screw his own kind.

  The engraved symbols on the back of the medal his sister found read Hisatsune Nishino. Private First Class. The Somme. Ypres. 1917–18. His father would have met the woman through his acquaintance with her husband in the New Westminster Regiment. When she came to visit the farm in Kitsilano she carted an armful of newspapers and magazines with her, The Vancouver Sun and The New York Times and The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, Anvil, New Masses, and she spent the evening poring through them angrily, editorializing as she went. There was no world event beneath her opinion. Chancellor Hitler recognizing Manchukuo and publicly supporting a Japanese victory in China. The expropriation of American oil companies by President Cardenas in Mexico. Nishino’s father sat smoking and nodding slowly, never contradicting or arguing with the woman. Austria and Hungary recognizing Franco in Spain. The League of Nations adopting a resolution to investigate the use of poison gas by Japanese troops in China. “Poison gas,” she said. “And the goddamn League of Nations adopting resolutions. Is that what you and George fought the war for?”

  Nishino left the farm in Kitsilano at three in the morning after one of these visits, walking all the way into Vancouver. He left a note addressed to Hisatsune Nishino, Private First Class, to say where he was headed. Boarded a ship bound for Tokyo, his father’s medal still weighting his pocket.

  The traffic in and out of the church continued steady for days. Nishino rarely left his room in the basement for fear of losing it to other squatters, waved his pistol around when necessary to keep it to himself. He ate almost nothing. He slept most of the day and night and dreamt often of his mother, the woman always at work in the farmhouse or out in the fields, smiling up at him as she finished each task. Or lying on her deathbed and breathing strangely, each inhalation abrupt and mechanical and so widely spaced one from another he felt panicked, holding his own breath, waiting for the next.

  He jolted awake in the darkness, sucking in a lungful of air. Shimmied his way toward the wall and leaned his weight against it. It was late, he guessed, not a sound from the church overhead. He searched around with his hands until he located the bottle he’d been drinking from. He was almost through the last of the alcohol. He tried to count the days since he’d arrived but couldn’t even say whether it was day or night outside the room. He felt like a prisoner in the crypt, berated himself for leaving the camp, slinking off like a coward to hide in the bowels of a Catholic church. Even Chozo Ogawa had been granted a soldier’s death and he found himself envying the boy.

  It was the thing he despised most in the POWs, how they clung to life even when there wasn’t a shred of respect to be gained in it. And it was clear to him now that he was no different, that the country where he’d become a man had infected him with the same weakness. He lacked the courage to turn the gun on himself, whatever the weight of shame he carried by living.

  He drifted into sleep again, was woken by the sound of footsteps on the stairs at the end of the corridor and he listened to them approaching. Voices too muffled to make out. The sss ssss sss of English.

  He tried to find his glasses where he’d laid them on the floor, sweeping his hands in wide arcs. The footsteps slowed in the corridor and came to a stop outside his door. He scrambled for his kit bag and took the handgun from the holster, moving back to the farthest corner of the room. He heard the word flashlight.

  The door slammed open and a single beam flicked over the room before coming to rest on him. He couldn’t see anything beyond the blurred circle of light. He placed the gun against his head and squeezed the trigger repeatedly, long after it was clear the weapon was empty of ammunition. Only a cold clicking sound jarring his temple.

  “I am very pleased,” a voice behind the light said, “to meet you.”

  MERCEDES

  1.

  BEFORE THEY WENT LOOKING for Wish’s house in Calvert that morning, they’d driven all the way down to Renews. They stopped in front of the church and walked across to the grotto. The statue of Mary in the same alcove but everything else was barely recognizable from the first time Mercedes had seen it. She took off her sunglasses.

  “This was all bare,” she said. “There wasn’t a green thing for miles.”

  A thick coat of vines covered the stone walls, the knoll behind it overgrown with a cultivated copse of trees. The Stations of the Cross laid out along a path shaded by spruce and fir, cypress and hawthorn and mountain ash. The state of the place surprised her in a completely predictable, prosaic way. To see she’d been away long enough for those trees to be planted and mature, that a lifetime had passed in her absence. It made the time left her seem meagre, insufficient to what she wanted of it.

  Wish clearly wasn’t going to offer anything easily. There was a practised deceit in his manner, a vulnerability that seemed false, that was meant to disguise real damage. He confessed just enough to hide the truth, went only as far as she could push him. The calculation of it all infuriated her, the guile.

  Bella said, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just.” She took a deep breath. “What do you smell here, Bella?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Try, for God’s sake. Take a whiff.”

  Isabella rolled her eyes and started sniffing at the air. “Nothing,” she said again.

  Agnes said, “Spruce. Salt water.”

  “I haven’t been able to smell anything since I woke up in hospital.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this to the doctor?”

  “They wouldn’t have let me out if I told them, would they?”

  “Well you’re going back,” Bella said, “first thing.”

  “Not till we get back from the Cove.”

  “Don’t argue with me, Mom.”

  “I’m not arguing. I’m telling.”

  “Don’t be so goddamn stubborn.”

  “Wait till you get old,” Mercedes said. “Then talk to me.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Bella said.

  Mercedes watched Isabella stalk off past the old convent and down toward Aggie Dinn’s Cove. Agnes gave her a look and Mercedes nodded in Bella’s direction to say go after her. When they were out of sight she looked up at the statue of Mary, at the woman’s blank gaze. She brought a hand up to her cheek, felt the hard metal plate under the dead skin. How stone would feel to the touch under a layer of cloth. She took another breath through her nostrils. Nothing. It was as if she was in the process of leaving the world one sense at a time.

  She crossed herself and said, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women.”

  She hadn’t said the rosary or the Ave since she’d converted to marry Johnny Boustani in 1946. He insisted they raise Marion in the church and took a hand in what he called her spiritual instruction. She’d always ridiculed Johnny for his little ritual observances, saying the rosary in the living room while she cleared the supper dishes, lighting candles at the feet of the saints, saying novenas to St. Theresa. When they put their first house in Lowell up for sale in 1959, he buried a figurine of St. Joseph upside down in the garden for luck. “A goddamn grown man,” she’d said, “praying to dolls.”

  He gave up the church after Marion died. They had Isabella baptized but never darkened a church door afterwards. Mercedes hadn’t so much as overheard the rosary for decades. She didn’t know which mysteries were meant to be recited on which day and had forgotten the order they were laid out in, but she pressed on below the statue of Mary, throwing them out in a jumble as they came to her. Crossed herself when she was done. If she’d known what saint to bury for luck, she’d have done that as well.

  When they left the wharf in Tilting, Mercedes made her way out past the cuddy of Gerry Foley’s longliner to sit in the bow. Her eyes tearing up in the breeze. She fished her sunglasses out of the shoulder bag, put them on against the wind. Little Fogo Island looming on the horizon, growing steadily. It felt almost as if she
was the one sitting motionless, that the place was coming to meet her finally, after all these years of waiting.

  Rounding the headland and a first view of the Cove. Most of the buildings fallen in on themselves, the lumber stripped of paint and ochre, gone grey with the weather of thirty years. The church still standing, though she could see that every last window was gone, the large double doors off the hinges. And up the south side the house she’d grown up in tilting awkwardly, like a child’s drawing of a house.

  “That’s our place,” she said, calling back to Wish and pointing.

  “Which one?”

  “There,” she said. “The last one on the south side.” He shaded his eyes. “You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head apologetically and she called past him to Isabella.

  “Our house,” she shouted.

  Isabella nodded miserably, without bothering to look.

  All the way up the path to the house she was thinking of Clive Reid, his name whittled into the beam under a pile of rubble on the land-wash. She knew from Agnes that he’d drowned years before, trying to take up his trap in rough weather. But seeing his name carved into the beam brought him back whole. “The Tennessee Waltz.” That first unexpected kiss. The rush of it clinging to her for weeks, even after she decided she had no interest in Clive himself. And the guilt, like the pale underside of a leaf flying up in a wind. A married man and she’d done nothing to protest or stop him.

  Her grandmother was just beginning her slide into illness at the time and the delicacy of her constitution made her more observant somehow, more wary. She was the only one who noted any change in her. Mercedes insisted her grandmother was imagining things, but the old woman’s certainty wore her down.

  “I kissed a man,” she admitted finally.

  They were separating cream from the milk in the cold room and the old woman set down the pan she was holding. “What man?” she said.