by Mary Lawson
“They’re very quiet,” she said suddenly. Arthur looked up from the buckle he was sewing on a harness. It was true, there wasn’t a sound from the parlor. He and his mother looked at each other, he with the pliers poised to pull the needle through, she with her hands in the sink.
“Do you think…” his mother said, but at that moment Dieter/ Bernhard appeared in the doorway. His face was strained.
“Dieter’s brudder,” he said. “Is tod. Dead. He is killed.”
“Oh!” Arthur’s mother said. “Oh, the poor child…” She was already halfway across the room, drying her hands on a tea towel as she went. The boy—Bernhard, this must be, the one who drove Otto’s tractor (finally Arthur knew which was which)—stood aside and she went into the parlor. She’d have her arms around Dieter in a second, Arthur knew. It was so easy for women—their arms opened out instinctively and they gathered in whatever hurt there was and that was that; they didn’t even have to think about it. Arthur and Bernhard looked at each other helplessly, then looked away.
A few lucky men came home on leave for Christmas. You’d have thought that if the war was nearly over, as they kept saying it was, they could call it quits now and let everyone go home for good, but no, the best they could do was give some of them thirty days’ leave before sending them back to the slaughter. Then, the week before Christmas, Ted Hatchett did come home for good. Of the truckload of boys who had gone down to North Bay to enlist, he was the only one, apart from Arthur himself, who was still alive.
“You must go to see him, Arthur,” his mother said, though he knew that all too well himself. “Apparently he nearly died, he was in the hospital in England for a whole year, but he’s well enough to see people now. He’ll feel strange, being back. You must visit him.”
Arthur went, full of guilt and foreboding. What could he say? What could he say to a friend who had nearly died in battle while he himself had stayed safe and snug at home? Ted had been overseas for nearly five years. Five years of being shot at and bombed, of being soaking wet and freezing cold and having your friends blown to pieces around you. Five years during which Arthur had done what, exactly? Milked the cows. Slept in his own bed every night. Eaten three good meals a day. He trudged through the snow filled with dread.
Ted’s mother looked terrible, and he should have been warned by that. Should have realized something was badly wrong when she wasn’t dancing with relief and joy that her son had come home from war. She managed to smile at Arthur when she opened the door but didn’t say anything. She ushered him into the living room, where a bed had been made up in the corner, and then left him and Ted alone. It was dark in the living room and Arthur couldn’t make out Ted’s face. He said, “Hiya, Ted. How are ya?” before his eyes adjusted to the light.
There was a scar running down the right side of Ted’s face, with a stretch of shiny pink skin covering the eye socket. And as Arthur’s eyes adjusted to the dim room, he saw more: saw that the blankets were stretched smooth and flat across the bed, smooth and flat as a tabletop, where Ted’s legs should have been. And that where his left arm should have been there was an empty sleeve, folded and pinned across his chest. He was looking at Arthur out of one eye so savagely bright it made Arthur think of an animal caught in a trap, an animal you’d kill as quickly as you could to put an end to its pain. Arthur turned around and left the room.
In the kitchen he stopped, head down, breathing hard. Ted’s mother was peeling potatoes and crying into the sink. She looked at Arthur, her face all blotchy with grief, and said, “Talk to him, Arthur. Please talk to him.”
Arthur went back to the living room and tried again. He managed to say, “I’m real sorry,” but that was it. He stood for a minute with his face averted and then he turned and went home.
He was sick with himself. Sick with the world. He wanted to smash something, anything, cleave something in two. He started clearing land, a couple of acres he and his father had just begun working on when his father died. More land to farm was the last thing he needed right now but hacking down trees was the only job he could think of that was violent enough to ease his feelings. Part way through the first afternoon he looked up from the pit of a root he was digging out and saw Dieter and Bernhard looking down at him. They were carrying axes too—they must have raided the shed—and such was his state of mind that for a moment Arthur thought they had come to kill him. It seemed entirely right; he wouldn’t even have resisted. Then they pointed their axes at the nearby trees and raised their eyebrows and he saw they felt the need for a bit of violence too, so he nodded and waved a hand at the surrounding bush—go ahead, hack ’em all down, rip the small ones out by the roots, the more the better. For three days, while snow drifted softly down around them, they attacked the forest like a raging storm, chopped and sawed, then harnessed up all four horses and dragged roots out of the ground like rotting teeth, till the place looked like their very own battlefield, cratered and ruined and smashed to bloody pulp.
At dusk on the third day Jake appeared, limping through the trees like a pale ghost. Arthur saw him coming out of the corner of his eye. He was in mid-swing, about to take another blow at the smooth rounded skin of a beech tree, and suddenly he saw blood on the snow. A big splash of blood, red as Laura’s scarf. He closed his eyes for a moment, the axe still raised, and when he opened them again it wasn’t blood, it was just a big clod of churned-up earth, black as night, not red at all. He lowered the axe and looked at Jake. The shock of seeing Ted Hatchett had actually succeeded in driving the business of Jake and Laura out of his mind for several days, but now it was back. Jake met his eyes and there was a pause, during which Arthur wondered if maybe Jake had seen blood on the snow as well.
“What?” Arthur said, and Jake said, quietly, that their mother wanted them to stop now and put everything away because tomorrow was not only Sunday, it was Christmas Eve.
There were two services, one in the morning and one in the evening. The church was crammed for both of them; even those who were not normally among the faithful turned out on Christmas Eve. It didn’t feel very festive, though. Five years of war had drained the capacity for festive feeling out of people. The war might be coming to an end in theory, but in practice the telegrams were still arriving and peace was just an unreal dream. At the morning service Reverend March did his best, preaching a sermon about the Christmas gift of hope and about giving your pain to God. Arthur would have liked to be uplifted by it but wasn’t. He didn’t feel hopeful about anything and the bit about giving your pain to God made him think of Ted Hatchett. He imagined Ted holding out his pain to God with the one hand he had left—Here you go, God, it’s all yours. What happened next, exactly? Arthur couldn’t see for the life of him how it was supposed to help. He knew that Reverend March was smarter than he was so he should take it on trust, but he couldn’t, so he gave up and watched Laura instead.
She was in her usual pew at the front of the church, and Arthur had positioned himself, as he always did, so that he had a clear view of her back. Her back was very straight and slim and upright. Looking at it calmed him, and after a while the thought came to Arthur that the bit in her father’s sermon about hope might have something in it after all. Maybe he could hope, where Laura was concerned. Maybe he had been wrong to be so fearful about her and Jake. Just look at her sitting there, listening so intently to what her father was saying. She wasn’t Jake’s kind of girl. In fact, if you tried to imagine the absolute opposite of Jake’s kind of girl, Laura would be it. Jake would have had no interest in her whatsoever if he hadn’t seen that Arthur was in love with her. He liked girls with what he called “a little bit of fun” in them, by which he meant girls who would accompany him to the barn. Laura would never accompany Jake to a barn in a million years.
And he must know that. Jake, sitting on the other side of their mother now, thinking about God knew what, must know that. He was probably tired of her already. He was just doing what Jake had always done; he was saying, “Bet you.” Bet
you I can take her away from you. Bet you I’m better than you at this, like I’m better than you at everything. When he had tortured Arthur a little more he would drop her and move on. And maybe Laura would be sad for a couple of days but then she’d see Jake for what he really was and be relieved that he was gone.
All day that thought comforted him. He went over to Otto’s farm after lunch to see to the pigs—Sunday or not, Christmas Eve or not, the animals had to be fed—and Laura waved cheerily to him from the kitchen window. Pleasure washed over Arthur like sunshine. It was going to be all right.
It was after the evening service, when Reverend March was standing at the back of the church shaking hands with his congregation and wishing them a Merry Christmas, that Arthur saw Jake come up to Laura and whisper something to her. Arthur was standing with his mother, waiting his turn to shake the Reverend’s hand, so he had a good view. He saw Jake come up behind her and bend his head and whisper in her ear. Laura’s eyes widened a little and she flushed, and then she turned and looked up at him, and smiled.
Was it the smile that did it, that caused the cold snake of fear to coil around Arthur’s heart? Or the angle of her chin as she turned her face upward to look at Jake? Or was it simply the light that came into her eyes when she heard his whisper—the brightness, the happiness, the pure and unmistakable yearning in those clear, gray eyes.
He couldn’t look at Jake. Couldn’t be in the same room with him. He spent as much time as possible out in the barns, but the weather didn’t cooperate; in the middle of January the temperature hit forty below. If you stayed outside for more than a couple of minutes you could feel the marrow freezing in your bones. In desperation Arthur took to visiting Ted Hatchett. He’d go and sit with him for an hour or so in the afternoons. It was impossible to say if Ted welcomed the visits but his mother certainly did. She was so grateful it made Arthur ashamed. He was there to get away from Jake and to ease his own guilt, and also because in Ted’s presence everything, including life itself, seemed trivial, and there was a certain bleak comfort in that.
He could never think of anything to say, of course; he sat there racking his brains for some event he could tell Ted about. Not a whole lot was going on.
“Pigs chewed through the barn door last night.”
Ted turned his head slowly and looked at him. It was hard to tell if he was interested. The Hatchetts weren’t farmers—Ted’s father had worked in the sawmill and Ted himself in the silver mine—so he might not care all that much about pigs. But it was the only thing that had happened all week.
“They ain’t hungry,” Arthur explained. “Just bored. They hate bein’ inside. They like rootin’ about in the soil, lookin’ for bugs and such. Got to give them lots of straw to root about in in the winter or they go nuts an’ start eatin’ the barn. Boys didn’t put down enough straw yesterday.”
Ted said nothing. As far as anyone knew there was nothing physical preventing Ted from talking but apparently he hadn’t said a word since he was wounded. He’d been a tank gunner—Arthur knew a few more details now, from his mother—and had been somewhere in Italy. The tank hit a mine and blew up and everyone else in it had died.
“Floor of the barn’s concrete, see. Can’t root about in concrete.”
Ted blinked his one eye. Arthur took it as encouragement.
“Cows don’t mind so much. Seem pretty happy just standin’ there doin’ nothin’.” He stopped—it struck him that maybe that was tactless. Even the cows, even the pigs, had more freedom than Ted had now. The problem was, everything was tactless. There was nothing happening anywhere in the world that wasn’t irrelevant to Ted.
Arthur thought of telling him what was going on in his mind. Imagined saying, “I’m scared I’m going to kill my brother. He’s made this girl I love fall in love with him. He didn’t want her, he just took her because he saw I loved her. But now I think he’s going to make her, you know, go out to the barn with him, like he does with other girls. I know she’d never do anything like that, but he’s awful good at wearin’ people down, and she’s so much in love with him…. And if he did it, if he wore her down…I think I’d kill him. I’m really scared I would.”
He wondered if Ted’s one eye would show any interest if he said that.
He still saw her practically every day. It was a torment, because she looked so happy. She seemed younger than when she’d first come to Struan, more carefree, more like a schoolgirl. She laughed and tossed her head if you said something funny, not that Arthur ever did; it was Jake who could make her laugh. The happier she was, the more fearful Arthur became. He wanted to warn her: don’t trust my brother. He imagined himself saying it, saw the disbelief and reproach in her eyes.
Spring came early. By March the snow had gone from the fields, though there were still pockets of it left in the woods. Arthur kept going out to the fields, picking up a little pinch of soil and rubbing it between finger and thumb, looking at the sky, sniffing the air. Should he start the seeding? All the farmers in the area were wondering the same thing. A couple of them had begun already. Arthur was anxious to get started if only to distract himself, but he was cautious. Would his father have started so soon? He picked up another little nugget of soil and rubbed it, seeing his father as he did so, or rather feeling him, feeling the moisture content (a little bit wet) and the soil temperature (a little bit cold) with his father’s forefinger and thumb. He saw that his hands were his father’s hands, broad and square and powerful. It gave him confidence.
Whenever the boys saw him going out to the fields they came with him; they wanted to get started too. They were very subdued nowadays. Arthur guessed they’d heard on the POW grapevine how the war was going: German armies in retreat, towns and cities bombed to rubble. They must need distracting as much as he did. “Is goot?” they’d say hopefully, copying his gesture, rubbing small crumbs of soil. “Is goot time now?” But Arthur shook his head. He decided to wait till the ground warmed up a little more. A couple of days of strong sunshine should do it.
Then on the first of April there was a heavy snowfall and overnight the temperature plummeted to ten below. The boys grinned at him and bowed, and said, “Goot farmer!”
He was going to miss them when they went home. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do without them. What would he do about Otto’s land? The thought took him back to Laura, as all thoughts did.
Jake and Laura took to doing their homework together after school. They took their books upstairs to Jake’s room. Mrs. Dunn was so delighted that they were “friends” that she didn’t even protest.
“She’s so good for him, Arthur,” she confided in a hushed voice. “She’s quieting him down, don’t you think?”
Arthur was appalled by her innocence. How could she know her own son so little? He wouldn’t have left any girl alone in Jake’s presence for ten seconds. He studied Laura surreptitiously for signs that she was being pressured to do things she didn’t want to do. He wasn’t sure what those signs would be, but he was sure he’d know them if he saw them.
He saw them on a Saturday morning at the end of April. He was in the cow barn—the cold snap had broken and he and the boys were taking the cows out to pasture for the first time—and Laura appeared in the doorway. The minute he saw her, he knew.
“Mornin’,” he said, his heart tightening in his chest. And she smiled at him vaguely, and said good morning, and he knew.
She told him that their generator had stopped working and her father wondered if Arthur could have a look at it. She apologized for bothering him, and he said it was no bother, he’d come right now. They walked back to the Luntz farm together and she hardly spoke, and he knew without a doubt.
He had to take the generator to bits to find out what the problem was and he kept dropping things, nuts and screws rolling off into the grass. His head was buzzing like a nest of hornets, thoughts flying about every which way. He kept seeing her and Jake together, Jake whispering to her, touching her. It caused such rage within him t
hat he could hardly breathe. He struggled to calm himself down. He told himself he didn’t know anything for sure, but that wasn’t true; he knew something for sure, he just didn’t know what. He told himself that probably nothing serious had actually happened yet. If anything serious had happened, Laura would be in a terrible state and she wasn’t, she simply looked confused and unhappy. He decided, with huge relief, that this must mean Jake was working on her but hadn’t got anywhere yet. He would be pushing her in small steps, each one hardly seeming like anything, but keeping up a constant, unrelenting pressure; Arthur had been on the receiving end of Jake’s campaigns often enough to know how he worked. She’d be afraid of losing him, afraid he’d think she was a prude. Prude was one of Jake’s words—Arthur had heard him say it of other girls he knew. “She’s such a prude.”
He dropped another screw and had to go searching through the grass on his hands and knees. There was the sound of footsteps and he looked up and saw Reverend March coming around the corner of the house.
“I’ve come to see how you’re getting on,” the Reverend said jovially. He stood squarely in the light, looking down in bafflement at the dismembered generator spread out on an old tarpaulin on the ground. “Heavens above,” he said. “Heavens above. What would we do without you, Arthur?” It was a good question. Reverend March couldn’t have hammered a nail into a plank of wood to save his life.