Hour of the Crab

by Patricia Robertson

  His name was Thomas Evans. He and his older brother Eddie — one of the assistant gardeners — were enlisting with the Twenty-First Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Forces. Two boys of eighteen and nineteen from a farm family of nine, exchanging their hoes and pruning shears for rifles and puttees and the honour of serving the King in the Empire’s quarrel with the Hun.

  Perhaps the soldiering explained the hunted eyes, though not the pickaxe.

  But why had he chosen her?

  Crofton — the dog, not the British officer — arrived a week after Bethany did. Charlotte and Bethany picked him out together. He was some sort of terrier mix, with magnificent eyebrows and an air of being unfazed by anything.

  –Very undignified, said Bethany, looking at the name on the cage, which was Popcorn. –I think he’ll be happy to be Crofton.

  He took immediately to his new home, digging holes beneath the carefully transplanted azalea bush and commandeering the overstuffed armchair by the window. Joined Charlotte’s runs on rural roads and wooded trails, tearing through the undergrowth and attacking defenceless branches. Bethany, in the overgrown garden, taught him to fetch and sit, to come when called. They played chase games through the leggy daisies. Afterwards Bethany sprawled full-length in the grass as Crofton — Croftie, now — crept under the raspberry canes to eat berries, looking round guiltily as if he couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be stopped.

  The original Crofton — Lieutenant-Colonel James Baskermayne Crofton — would not have been amused. He came from a landed family in Cheshire and had joined the Forty-Ninth Regiment of Foot in 1797 by way of purchase of a commission. Sent to Upper Canada, he was appointed aide-de-camp to General Brock himself, receiving a mention in dispatches after the Battle of Queenston Heights. The handsome limestone house had been built for him on land he’d been granted in what was then a village of a thousand people. But within the year he’d been recalled to England, where in 1860 he died in his bed on his Cheshire estate, aged eighty-three.

  –We have to buy flowers, Anneke said. –Here, it’s where I always get them.

  They were standing, Anneke and Charlotte, next to a stall beside a canal, the overcast skies greying the water. Anneke spoke in Dutch to the owner, wrapped in a heavy coat against the damp, and the three of them chose frilled pink-and-white tulips, yellow irises, chrysanthemums in rust-edged porcelain blue.

  –Every time I come home I fill the flat with them. Anneke bent her face to the blossoms. –To get rid of the smell of chlorine.

  –And does it work?

  –It’s in your nose, isn’t it. Anneke’s smile dimmed for a moment. –It never goes away. But I pretend.

  Charlotte, who found the smell of chlorine and bleach comforting, studied the tulips. Anneke was right; the flowers were a solace, however temporary. –You need to visit, she’d told Charlotte by email, exercising her clinician’s prerogative. And Charlotte, obedient not to a trauma psychologist but to friendship, flew to Amsterdam on her way home from the DRC.

  On the way back to the flat they bought ingredients for dinner: fresh chard, an aged gouda cheese, spicy Surinamese piccalilli. Anneke’s daughter, studying fashion and design at AMFI, was joining them after classes.

  –My other ritual is visiting the Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum. They make me sane again. At least — Anneke’s wonderful giggle filled the corner shop — I think so, but maybe you’d better ask Liesbeth.

  Liesbeth, chopping tomatoes in the impeccable kitchen, turned out to have a variant of her mother’s face, with its wide forehead and flared nostrils, and — so Anneke said — her father’s blond curls, cropped short. Of course she’d chosen a field unlike her mother’s; she had no desire to be a martyr. She glanced slyly at Anneke; they’d had this conversation before. Anneke called her boefje, little rascal. Liesbeth was beginning an internship in a New York fashion house in January. She shared Charlotte’s cigarettes and told her about a Toronto Charlotte didn’t know.

  –There’s an exciting new clothing line, Matière Fraîche? They use things like hide and sweetgrass.

  –Sweetgrass is for smudging, Charlotte said. –It must be bamboo. Or organic cotton.

  –You see, she does know something beyond nursing! Anneke, mock-severe, lifted her eyebrows. Liesbeth patted her arm, indulging a mother’s rights.

  –Come for a visit while you’re in New York, Charlotte found herself saying. –You can see my new house. You can meet Crofton.

  –All my mother talks about is work. Are you like that?

  –I’m an insomniac and I smoke too much. Among other battlefield injuries.

  –You mean love affairs? said Liesbeth, and they all laughed.

  She hadn’t meant to tell them about the man with the pickaxe. Liesbeth gave her mother a meaningful glance. –Ma’s had it too, those — hallucinations. Remember, Ma? How Pap had to take you — ?

  –Old houses get imprinted like that, Anneke said, shrugging. She didn’t meet her daughter’s glance. –It happens all the time here. He might even be watching over you, who knows?

  Thomas and his brother were fighting in France, near the Belgian border. So she understood when he began visiting her at night. He had a name now, that was why he came, this eighteen-year-old with his boy’s face. His battalion had been ordered to hold the line against a determined German advance south of Lille. She had a confused impression of trenches and mud, a dead horse still harnessed to a gun carriage. She woke and lay smoking with her light on, shaken, trying to catch her breath.

  The next night he’d been wounded, struck by shell fragments that shredded the soft tissue in his arms. She bent over his hospital bed in her nurse’s uniform. He stared at and through her, or wept uncontrollably, or told her again and again how he couldn’t pull his bayonet from his enemy’s body. He seemed to be recuperating at some hospital on the English coast. The voices in the dreams, at least, were English. Along with the physical injuries he had persistent diarrhoea, complete retrograde amnesia, and mutism, with a hysterical paralysis of the right arm.

  On sunny days she wheeled him outside and left him sitting in the sunshine in the fresh sea air, unable to speak. She read him letters from his mother. Dear Tom, It’s been hard this year getting hands for the haying, all our lads are off serving like you, so Granddad’s pitching in, imagine, and your cousins come up from over Lanark way. I’ve been sitting up late making over my old wedding dress for Frances, good thing she’s my size! And Daisy had her litter last week, we’re keeping you the runt like we promised.

  Nothing, no reaction, not a flicker.

  When they could do nothing else for him they would have sent him home. His family, meeting him at the train station, would have taken him gingerly from those who’d travelled with him. A nurse, perhaps, in her blue uniform and starched white veil, a young orderly from the Medical Corps.

  Did the nurse ever forget the expression on the face of Tom’s mother?

  When he was a little better they must have put him to work on the farm, collecting the eggs or helping lift potatoes. He sat with the hens and the young chicks for hours, holding them, talking to them softly. Regained his speech a little.

  Each day he asked the same question. When’s Eddie coming home?

  What they hadn’t told him in those letters, that a telegram had arrived some months earlier. Pte. Evans had been made corporal just before his death, his CO said, had distinguished himself in battle, they could be very proud of him. The battalion would be putting in for a Distinguished Conduct medal.

  Soon, Tom. Very soon. Next week. Next month.

  Tom was good with horses, always had been. A local dairy owner, taking pity, gave him a job in town delivering milk. Never looked you in the eye, people said, but quiet and reliable and conscientious. A good worker, even if he only talked to the animals.

  At home Charlotte finished unpacking, finally, cleaned in a frenzy of intent because Anneke’s daughter was coming. Crofton danced round her, bringing her his stuffed squirrel or making grow
ling assaults on the vacuum cleaner. Amid dust and boxes and sorting she didn’t notice at first that Tom had disappeared. She was perversely disappointed, then irritated, as though his visits were a duty he owed her. Perhaps he resented her alterations to the house — the remodelled bathroom, the repainted rooms.

  It was January, a freezing cold January, with a dampness that bit to the bone. Bethany had gone off on a week’s holiday to St. Kitts with her family, taking her course assignments with her. Under a sky pregnant with snow, Charlotte spent too much time on the internet and waited for a summons. At night, when even a handful of melatonin tablets didn’t bring sleep, she re-read the old-fashioned novels of her childhood: I Capture the Castle, The Little White Horse, A Traveller in Time. She might be almost thirty-eight, but adulthood had eluded her. What she wanted were thick blankets and her old teddy and mugs of hot cocoa. She woke sweating out of vague nightmares in which she was running from gunfire, carrying a baby that had been entrusted to her. Ahead was a brick wall she’d have to climb, only with the child in her arms she didn’t see how, and the gunfire was getting closer…

  They all had it, she and Tom and Campbell, even Anneke, whatever you wanted to call it. Soldier’s heart, it had been once. Did it make any difference now it had a more clinical name? One evening, out drinking with Campbell, she’d met a Canadian lieutenant-colonel who’d been a military observer in Sarajevo during the war. –Did you know, he said, what an Egyptian combat veteran wrote three thousand years ago? Shuddering seizes you, the hair on your head stands on end, your soul lies in your hand.

  Walking back to his billet one evening, carrying a loaf of bread, he’d met a brother and sister, aged nine and eleven, out foraging for wood. He’d given them the bread, and a bar of chocolate. The next morning, in the morgue, he found their bodies, unmarked except for the sniper’s bullet through each head.

  Liesbeth arrived unexpectedly in the middle of a snowstorm. Her flight out of New York had been delayed, then her train out of Toronto. Charlotte, hearing the doorbell ring in the middle of the night, ran downstairs thinking of Campbell, shot in some war zone.

  –So stupid of me, I erased your number! Liesbeth was laughing on the doorstep in spite of the cold — it had dropped into the minus twenties overnight. Only her momentarily less-than-fluent English gave away her nervousness. –I am so sorry, waking you like this, I frighten you a lot, no?

  Crofton, self-appointed master of ceremonies, escorted Liesbeth upstairs to the guest room, rootling through her suitcase with interested precision. In the morning she marvelled over everything: the frozen lake, the vast house, the ancient cannons across the street. She took Crofton for a walk — or he took her — and said Amsterdam, too, had once been cold enough to freeze the canals. Her grandmother remembered skating on them in winter. She even taught Crofton, in Dutch, the sit command, and told him solemnly how cosmopolitan he was becoming.

  Charlotte took a photo of them standing in front of one of the Martello stone towers overlooking the lake. Liesbeth wore the white wool jacket with turnover collar that had won her some design competition at AMFI. Later, with Bethany, they went for drinks at the Iron Duke, where Charlotte had to explain to a bewildered Liesbeth why a Canadian pub might be named after a famous British general who had defeated Napoleon in a European battle.

  Three days into Liesbeth’s visit, the NGO called. A staff member had been taken ill very suddenly in Mali, could Charlotte replace him? –Stay as long as you like, she told Liesbeth, and left her preparing dinner with Bethany, who knew nothing about cooking but was learning how to make stamppot and bitterballen under Liesbeth’s tutelage.

  How was it you could never imagine it, flying out of a city turned the black-and-white of a Canadian winter only to land among the desert colours and withered acacia trees of a land in near-permanent drought halfway across the world? Only at night did the world she’d left behind come back to her. What filled the present was the sweat trickling beneath her uniform, the rows of cots filled with patients, the staggering exhaustion. In some other life she might be that Charlotte who led an ordinary existence. For now she was certain that any day some narrow passageway back would close and she’d be trapped here forever.

  At some point he must have realized his brother wasn’t coming home. Would have known, wouldn’t he, without being told? And then had some argument with a stranger, a man who’d walked toward him one bright morning carrying a shovel over his shoulder. Tom, bearing his crate of milk bottles, looked up and saw — what? A German soldier coming at him with a bayonet, or so he said at his trial. It was the same soldier who’d killed his brother. That was why he’d engaged with the enemy. He spoke calmly, confidently, serene in the knowledge that he’d done his duty.

  He was sentenced to life at hard labour, to be served in the federal penitentiary, less than a mile down the road from his life as a garden boy.

  –We’re in love, Bethany announced the day Charlotte got back from Mali.

  Half-stumbling over Crofton, Charlotte set down her backpack with a thump. Straightening, she couldn’t quite remember where she was.

  –Liesbeth and me. An interior radiance lit Bethany up. –I didn’t tell you I was — well. You’re probably not surprised, are you? We’ve been phoning and texting since she left. I’m going to Amsterdam next month!

  Bethany and Liesbeth? She was still in the air somewhere; a part of her hadn’t caught up. Your soul lies in your hand. If only she could shake herself, the way Crofton did, into where she actually was.

  –How marvel — I’m so happy for you, Bethany. Very happy.

  To have someone who took you in their arms, who lay in bed beside you at night. What would that be like? Instead Charlotte kept intermittent company with a ghost.

  –I don’t know why I’m crying, I’m sorry. Bethany stood there, face wet with tears. –I’m always too emotional.

  Crofton, who disapproved of emotion, especially the wet kind, was barking. Charlotte bent down and picked him up. –He’s going to miss you when you’re away.

  –But I’m coming back! I’ll bring him a gift, I’ll bring him a nice new toy of his very own. Oh, Charlotte, I’m so happy!

  Charlotte had driven Campbell past the penitentiary on a tour of the town’s grimmer sights when he’d come to see the house. It had closed down years before, but still it made her shiver. As if the sunlight you’d been driving through a few minutes before dissolved into a dank acidic mist that didn’t lift until you were on the other side. At his insistence they’d gone into the prison museum across the street, where in the gift shop he’d threatened to buy a T-shirt with Wish you were here printed across a barred window.

  In the next room was a display of prisoners’ crafts — landscape paintings, model ships, intricate knotwork. And a lifelike wooden horse, twelve inches high, carved by one Thomas Evans. Created from memory of a real horse, so the placard said, a chestnut named Diadem that had belonged to Thomas’s employer. The face was remarkably expressive, alert. Dr. Streatfeild had ridden Diadem to his offices in nearby James Street for years.

  He must have been a model prisoner if they’d allowed him a knife for carving. When would he have had time? On Sundays, she supposed. On the other days he would have been marched each morning through the prison gates, carrying his pickaxe on his way to work in the limestone quarry. Two lines of men in grey uniforms, those flat grey caps, forbidden to speak or gesture or even look at each other. Jeered at by small boys, pelted with stones, spoken of in dark whispers — Look what’ll happen to you if you don’t do as your pa says!

  Or perhaps at night, by feel, in his tiny cell, with its cot, its Bible, its piggin of drinking water. At least until the guard came by to slam open the slot in the barred door on his hourly check.

  Did his family visit on the one day they were allowed every three months? His married sister smoothing her dress, not looking at him, his mother holding herself rigid against collapse?

  He came back the day after Bethany left for Amst
erdam. This time he stood beneath the crabapple on her neighbour’s lawn, once part of Streatfeild House’s grand gardens. He still held the pickaxe, but the other hand explored the crabapple’s trunk, his fingers touching its crevices. She stood watching from an upstairs window. He didn’t turn to look.

  He might even be watching over you, who knows. He was a virgin, she was sure of that. He had found love — in the gardens, his family, perhaps even the carving of horses — but not a lover. She would have to do. He would have to do, for now at least. They were stumbling through together, keeping faith with each other. What you’d gone through couldn’t be ungone through. You held it at bay however you could. And sometimes you couldn’t.

  In bed that night, awake and smoking, she shut her eyes and summoned her first trip to Africa. The green of maize fields in the sun, the dusty dry-grass smell of the African bush, burning garbage. A small shy girl with her pet goat. The taste of grilled African pear and suya bought from street stalls, vendors snapping their fingers, singing out rhymes.

  And the hymn they’d been singing in that little evangelical church, the women in their bright head wrappers swaying to the music, their eyes closed.

  Bring down your angels, O my Lord,

  All of your angels, my good Lord,

  Bring them with your power and majesty,

  Bring down your angels and set me free.