—You just come up from St. John’s, did you?
—Went through Port Union, he said, on the way along.
—Everything all right down there?
—How about that tea? Eli said.
Tryphie left an hour later without learning the first thing about what was troubling Eli. He packed the firebox with wood, thinking Eli didn’t have it in him to keep a bit of heat in the house.—You know where to find me, he said, you needs anything.
Eli didn’t get out of the chair to see Tryphie off. He sat and watched the portrait beside the chimney, half a mug of tea gone cold in his lap. He’d been held up in St. John’s a week after Coaker left for Port Union and wired to say he would stop in on his way to Paradise Deep. Spent half an hour on the wharf when he disembarked to make the rounds, poking his head in at the office to shake hands and ask after this or that project. He walked up past the rows of union houses to the residence Coaker had built for himself. It was the only touch of ostentation in the town, a turret and gabled windows, a sun porch screened in at the back. Coaker had packed the rooms with lavish furnishings and every time Eli came through he found some new addition—a woollen rug from one of the union’s European fish buyers, chairs from Harrods in London, a South American dining table, Italian statues. Not a soul begrudged it to him, seeing he’d built the union and the town from nothing.
The Bungalow was the only house in Port Union where people knocked before entering and a youngster answered the door. Eli had seen him once or twice on the waterfront, Bailey he thought the name was. His hair combed back from a high forehead, wool coat and tie and a high starched collar. He couldn’t be more than eighteen, Eli guessed. A mouth to make the angels jealous.—Uncle Will said to expect you, the boy told him.
There was an orphan’s look about him, Eli thought, a hint of want so sullen it was almost predatory. He could hear Coaker’s gramophone in the parlour, the music seeping past the boy into the open air.
—He’s having a little lie-down, the boy said.—You can come in and wait if you like.
Eli considered that a moment before he said, Tell Mr. Coaker I stopped by.
He heard the door close as he walked down the long concrete walkway to the road and he stopped there, still trying to take in what he’d seen in the youngster’s face. One more exotic trinket added to the Bungalow’s comforts. Two men wandered along the path and they nodded to him there, courteous and a little wary. He could see them shake their heads when they’d gone past, as if the new arrangements at the Bungalow mystified them, though they couldn’t begrudge Mr. Coaker even that.
Tryphie came by a second time two days later, standing just inside the door to tell Eli that Allied lines across the Western Front were overrun by a German offensive. Fifty killed in the Newfoundland Regiment, another sixteen unaccounted for, though the names of the dead and missing weren’t known. Eli stood from his chair and picked up his coat lying on the green leather chesterfield.—I’ll walk you back, he said.
They didn’t speak until Eli dropped Tryphie at John Blade’s house.—You’re all right, are you? Tryphie asked.
—I’ll be fine.
He went on to the F.P.U. office where he tendered his resignation from the union executive. He walked to the telegraph office in the hospital basement, cabling St. John’s and Port Union to resign from the House of Assembly and the national coalition government. Back in the Gut he took his seat across from the president’s portrait and waited for night to fall.
Late that evening Eli lit a lamp and stoked up the fire to boil the kettle. There was a basin on the table shaving by his reflection in the glass. When he was done he took the frame off its nail and turned Coaker’s face to the wall. He dressed in his best shirt and coat and set out for the Tolt under a cold flood of stars. He walked into Paradise Deep, past Selina’s House and up Sellers’ Drung to the merchant’s house. Adelina met him as he let himself into the porch and he apologized for calling so late.—I wonder, he said, if I could talk to Levi.
On May eleventh the coalition government in the Newfoundland House of Assembly passed the Military Service Act with the full support of its F.P.U. members. The sudden reversal of the union’s opposition to conscription was undertaken without warning, and local councils across the island passed resolutions condemning the act and Coaker’s high-handedness in imposing the change without consultation. Responding in The Fisherman’s Advocate, Coaker spoke of the torture he suffered making the decision to support conscription, how he neither slept nor ate in the days before the vote. But he never managed to explain his reasoning to anyone’s satisfaction. In thousands of union homes the president’s portrait was turned to the wall or smashed on the floor or taken down and put away for good. It was as if half the country had woken from a collective dream to find the world much the same as when they’d drifted off.
Abel’s name wasn’t among the list of the regiment’s dead and missing published in the St. John’s Evening Telegram. His letters to Esther began arriving belatedly, from England and then France. Esther never opened them in company and never reported their contents and Hannah was forced to read them on the sly, sneaking into Esther’s room when she was gallivanting drunk through town.
Abel was marched around a parade square with a wooden rifle and a bayonet. He was granted two days’ leave before being posted across the Channel and wandered over half of London to see the theatres where Esther made her name. The roads in France were frozen mud and his toenails had blackened and fallen off from the rough walking. There was a half-breed from Labrador name of Devine in the regiment, he carried a tooth he claimed belonged to Judah. Abel was assigned work as a regimental stretcher-bearer where he was least likely to get others killed. They were moved off the front lines while they waited for reinforcements and were living the easy life, assigned as guards to the commander-in-chief. All through that summer he complained he was bored to tears but he’d requested a transfer to the regular infantry and expected to be more than a stretcher-bearer when they moved back to the front. Each letter closed with a line in a hand unlike the writing in the body, a style so old-fashioned and baroque it was almost comical. Behold thou art fair, my love, thou art fair, thine eyes are as doves. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride.
As the summer wore on Hannah began to catch glimpses of a change in Esther’s figure, a rise in her profile under the layers she wore, a slight change in her posture that suggested a particular discomfort. Esther seemed determined to keep her condition a secret from the world, wearing even more clothes than was her habit, never leaving the house without a shawl or overcoat even when the sun was splitting the rocks. For weeks Hannah dismissed the evidence as her own imagination at work but by the end of August Esther’s overcoat was barely equal to the task. Hannah finally mentioned her suspicion to Tryphie, talking in a roundabout fashion that allowed the word itself to go unspoken.
—I knew goddamn well, he said.—I knew it. Have you told Eli?
—I wanted to be sure, she said.
—Perhaps we should have Dr. Newman take a look at the girl, he suggested.—Before I bothers Minnie with it.
—Come by on Sunday afternoon, she told Tryphie.—We’ll ask him then.
The doctor spent an hour at Selina’s House every week, drinking cups of barky tea he fortified with rum when he thought Hannah wasn’t watching. He was telling her the regiment was back at the front and fighting in Ypres when Tryphie stuck his head round the door. Tryphie looked from one to the other, tentative, trying to guess if there’d been any mention as yet of Esther. He sat to the table and fell into talk of the union to avoid the subject most on his mind.
—This conscription bill is the end of it, Dr. Newman predicted.—The F.P.U. is dead.
—Coaker won’t let it go so easy as that.
—He’ll keep it afloat a good while, Newman said.—But there’s no one going to take him at his word again. He’s just another politician now.
—The movement’s finished, you’re s
aying.
—No one will remember there even was a movement after Coaker goes.
—You sound more like Bride all the time, Hannah told him.
Newman nodded.—I have to keep her with me somehow, he said. He cast around the room, struck by the loss afresh and fighting for purchase.—I appreciate you looking out to Esther all this time, he said finally.
Hannah glanced at Tryphie.—We’ve been meaning to ask you, Dr. Newman. Have you noticed any change in her lately?
—She’s drinking a bit less, I thought.
—I mean in how she looks. Her shape.
Newman squinted across at her.—I haven’t really paid. He glanced down at the table as if trying to picture his granddaughter.
—I think before Abel left for overseas, Doctor, Hannah said.—Tryphie and me, we’re fairly certain.
Newman was still staring at the table and she thought he’d never looked more like an old man. He glanced up at Tryphie and then Hannah.—You’re sure?
—There’s no mistaking it, she said, suddenly doubting herself again.
Newman shook his head and looked directly at his stepson.—She asked me not to tell you, Tryphie. She had a procedure in Europe.
—What kind of procedure?
—I tried cleaning up the scar tissue when she came home. A butcher’s job they made of it.
Hannah turned away from the table, setting the teapot on the counter. She felt strangely disappointed to think she’d been wrong all this time.
—Perhaps I’ll go up and talk to her, Newman said.
The stairs were almost too much for him and he stood on the landing a minute to get his wind. Ambushed by an image of Bride as the cancer dismantled her one organ at a time, the veins showing through her papery skin. The false teeth in her wasted face made her look a corpse in the bed and he’d wished he was dead, watching her leave in so much torment.—I can make it stop, he told her, knowing she would never consent to such a thing.—When you’re ready.
Bride offering the slightest nod.—Now the once, she said.
It was the oddest expression he’d learned on the shore. Now the once. The present twined with the past to mean soon, a bit later, some unspecified point in the future. As if it was all the same finally, as if time was a single moment endlessly circling on itself. Bride forever absent and always with him.
Newman straightened his tie and knocked lightly at Esther’s door, letting himself in when he got no answer. She was asleep on the bed dressed only in her nightshirt and even from across the room he could see the remarkable distension of the belly. The tumour at least the size of a cabbage, he guessed.
His presence in the room woke her and Esther glanced around until she found him there.
—Hello my love, he said.
She placed both hands on her stomach.—You told me I’d never be able to get pregnant again, Dr. Newman.
He shrugged.—Medicine is an inexact science.
—I didn’t realize, she said, how much I wanted this.
Newman cleared his throat.—Sometimes that’s all it takes, wanting something enough.
—You think I’m crazy to be happy about it.
—Are you having any pain?
—Nothing I can’t manage.
Newman turned toward the door, put a hand to the frame to steady himself.—That’s grand, he said.
—I used to think you were crazy, Esther said.—Staying here all these years when you could have lived anywhere you wanted.
—I thought the same myself some days.
She smiled across at him, unselfconscious, and looking for all the world like a child herself.—Any regrets, Doctor?
He shook his head.—Not a one, he said.
The regiment was held up by heavy fire from a farmhouse and six soldiers were sent into a stretch of bush to outflank the building. They were spotted as they skulked through the thin foliage and the relentless pendulum of machine-gun fire ripped through the underbrush. The others dropped around him one by one as he scrambled forward, running for his life. He was within shouting distance of the farmhouse when he heard the whistle of artillery incoming, covered his ears against an explosion he never heard.
Still light when he came to himself but the sun was almost below the trees, which meant he’d been out for hours. There was rifle-fire still though it was sporadic and stopped altogether as soldiers dug in or pulled back to support trenches for the night. Quiet, quiet but for the buzz in his head. He could make out the farmhouse through the bushes, watched a German soldier come through the back door to piss behind the building. He tried to crawl deeper into the undergrowth then but his legs would not move. Dead to the touch when he reached down, the flesh no more his than the tree roots or the ground itself. He heard a voice behind him, another soldier coming to and grunting helplessly against some grave injury. He dragged himself away from the sound till his arms could drag no further. Lay face down, trying to will the toes in his boots to wiggle or curl.
When the Germans came through the bush they were walking three or four abreast, whispering to one another. He lay with his face in the dirt as they moved past him toward the steady suck and moan of the injured soldier and the sickening sound of it went still suddenly. A voice called the group to another body a few yards further on. He could pick just enough from the talk to know they were stripping the corpses of their boots, turning out the pockets for coins and tobacco and ammunition, stealing rings and necklaces and keepsakes. He’d crawled away from his weapon in the panic to hide himself and he was too terrified now to move, the tramp of the trophy hunters circling closer in the woods. They would use the knife on him as well, he knew, and he’d likely never be found there in the bush. A mortal darkness gathering at his heart’s heart as that anonymous death sidled toward him—dread and resignation and a searing, wistful longing that felt like homesickness, all of it rising in him like the stench of the fallen world.
A hand gripped his shoulder to turn him on his back and the German soldier pulled away in disgust, cursing under his breath.—Dead a long time this one, he told the others. He covered his nose and mouth with a square of cloth and kept his head turned away, rooting blindly at the pockets, gagging through the muffle of his handkerchief. No one else in the group would come near.
He stared blankly at the green canopy of trees as the German pushed a hand through the collar of his jacket. The dog tags yanked away and examined briefly before being tossed into the shadows.—Leave him, another voice said.—We should get back.
He spent the full of the night alone there, paralyzed and bored and terrified. He tried to choke back a suspicion the German soldier was right, that he was dead where he lay in the bushes. That death wasn’t sudden and complete but took a man out of the world piecemeal, a little at a time. It was a relief to hear the artillery start up just before dawn, to feel it shake through him and ring his head like a bell. By first light hundreds of soldiers were crossing the field toward the abandoned farmhouse and he dragged himself into the open, waving at the legs as they passed. Hours still before stretcher-bearers carted him the half-mile behind the lines to the aid post.
—This one’s lost a hell of a lot of blood, the medic said.
—He doesn’t appear to be bleeding, Sergeant.
—Well what’s wrong with him?
—Couldn’t get a word out of him. Some stink coming off the man though.
The smell suggested an infected wound and they stripped him out of his clothes but there was nothing there to be found. The medic looked down at him again.—Even his eyelashes are white, he said.—He wasn’t wearing his tags?
—No sign of them. He’s a Newfoundlander, that’s all we know.
—What’s your name, Private?
He opened his mouth to answer and then shook his head helplessly.
—Psych case probably, the medic said.—We’ll have to transport him back to Casualty. He leaned over the man on the stretcher.—Don’t worry, he said, We’ll fix you up.
Two days lat
er he was moved to a base hospital in Rouen. He was in a ward with twenty-three other soldiers until their complaints about the stench forced the orderlies to set up a tent where he could be kept on his own. He was bathed twice a day in a concoction of carbolic and lye but it did nothing to lessen the smell.
A girl from Belleoram in Fortune Bay was nursing with the Voluntary Aid Detachment and she made a special project of him when she learned he was a Newfoundlander. Morning and evening she came to the tent in a surgical mask to massage his dead legs and talk about home. Guild socials and hooking mats and berry picking on the barrens and painting her bedroom floor a shade of green she’d seen on Johnny Lee’s boat. He followed her with his eyes and she could see he didn’t know what she was talking about.—You don’t remember home, do you.
He shook his head.
—But you miss it.
And after he’d considered this a moment he nodded.
The weather was already bitter before the German surrender in November but he never complained or showed any discomfort in his unheated tent. At the end of the month the nurse brought him a sheet of paper and a lead pencil.—Tell me something you’d like for Christmas, I’ll see if I can’t find it in Rouen.
He stared at the implements as if he’d never laid eyes on such things in his life.
—Do you not have your letters? she asked. She was embarrassed for him and made a move to retrieve the materials but he shook his head. He held the pencil over the page a moment before starting in. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, he wrote, and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.
She took the paper when he was done and held it toward the light through the tent flap, trying to make it out.—Whoever taught you to write like this? she said, scanning back and forth the page.—I can’t pick out the half of it. You wants some fruit, is that what you’re saying?
He stared at her blankly.
—Fruit? she said again and he nodded, though there was no conviction in his face.
After Christmas he was shipped across the Channel to a convalescent hospital in England where doctors stuck pins into his legs and feet, examined his throat and ears, performed a series of tests to assess his mental faculties. They held conferences at his bedside, speaking about him as if he were deaf. His muteness and the paralysis were clearly the result of shell shock and they prescribed fresh air and quiet along with electrical massage to slow the muscle atrophy while he recovered his senses. But as time passed with no improvement they began to suspect the debilitation might be permanent. And the smell of the man was a riddle they had no answers for.
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