As they drew closer to Grafton, Clare saw the familiar shoulder of North Mountain rise above the valley, the dark branches of the maple forests on its flanks etched against blue shadows. As children, she and Leo liked to follow ravines up to their summit, to look down on their neighbouring farms, the houses and barns tiny, toys scattered at their feet. It made them feel more potent than they were. On the way down they’d pretend they were Indian scouts, tracking soundlessly through the forest. Sometimes they’d surprise a grouse, who would sit still unblinking in a tree, then explode from its low branch in a wild beating of tawny wings.
THE DRIVE TO THE FARMHOUSE had been planted with chestnuts long ago but balsam firs had sprung up between them over the years. Her father used to cut one each year, but now they had grown too big to use as Christmas trees. The two-storey house stood solid and square and simple though it needed a new coat of paint, having taken on the colour of dirty snow. A couple of railings had fallen from the wide front porch that wrapped around the side of the house facing the orchards. A yearling deer, pawing through the snow to find fallen apples, turned to watch them as Larry took Clare’s hand to help her down from the sleigh, planting himself on his big feet. Her mother’s face appeared from behind the heavy drawing room curtain for a moment. A moment later she opened the door. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders, and she was wrapped in a shawl, her boots unlaced.
“Oh my girl. What a terrible …” Ada fell forward sobbing, and gathered Clare in her arms. She smelled of home: potato peelings and Resinol soap.
Larry pushed past them with Clare’s bag. Her father followed, patting his wife on the back, “Ada, Ada,” and pulling her into the house.
CLARE CLIMBED BETWEEN flannel sheets. The coal furnace heated the lower floors but barely warmed her small room in the upper floor dormer of the house. Frost flowers bloomed on the window.
She pulled her blue-and-white starburst quilt up under her chin, ran her hand over her empty eye socket, her stomach roiling. The socket felt scratchy.
“Don’t rub or press on the eye socket,” the surgeon had said when they took the dressing off. “It looks fine.” He’d had a chance to change his clothes but his breath still smelled rank.
Fine? she’d wondered angrily. What did fine mean to her, disfigured for the rest of her life? She had pressed her lips together hard.
Dr. Cox straightened and regarded her critically. “The sooner you get used to your condition, the better.” He snapped his black leather case closed. “The nurse will show you how to clean it and will give you a patch. The medical team from Boston brought us a fresh supply. We’d run out.”
Lucky her.
When he left, the nurse jostled between the beds crowded into the tiny room. She had a mirror, some cotton swabs, and a bowl of warm water.
“You can sit up,” she’d said. She was a plump woman in her early thirties, with light brown hair wound in a tight bun under her nurse’s cap.
Clare was still wearing the dress and stockings she’d arrived at the hospital in and she was aware of a stale odour rising from them.
“Swing your legs over the side.” The nurse put the bowl down on the window ledge and turned to Clare with her blue eyes, the irises pale with dark rims around their outer edges. She held a mirror up. Clare turned away.
“Now, now. You have to learn how to take care of the wound,” the nurse said. “So first you have to learn to look at yourself, young lady.”
Clare looked at her boots, which someone had shoved under her bed. The patent leather toes were muddy and one was missing a lace.
“All right. I’ll explain it and you’ll have to do it yourself.” The nurse dipped the cotton ball into the warm water and pulled down her own lower lid. “Just use warm water to swab the lids. You shouldn’t try to clean the inside of the socket yet. The swelling will go down in the next week or so.” She stood for a couple of seconds waiting for Clare to change her mind, then she plopped the mirror down on the bed beside her and left the room.
IN THE EARLY HOURS of the morning, the house boards, cracking with cold, woke Clare. She pulled up the two heavy wool blankets from the foot of the bed. Lying back, she imagined the house a rocking boat. She was strong and well and she was on her way to England.
CLARE SPENT HER FIRST DAY home wandering the farmhouse restlessly. Her mother followed her with a tragic expression, dusting the polished mahogany table in the dining room, straightening the fringed antimacassars on the wingback chairs in the parlour.
When Clare went up to bed, her mother arrived a few minutes later, entering as she knocked. This time Clare was naked, her nightgown half-pulled over her head. Her mother rushed over to pull it down.
“I’m fine, Mother, really,” Clare slapped away her mother’s hands from the flannel.
“You’re thin.” Ada sucked in her cheeks. “You hardly ate anything for dinner.”
Clare buttoned up her nightgown.
“Was it terrible?” her mother said, sinking onto the bed.
“No, I just wasn’t hungry,” Clare said irritably.
“For heaven’s sake, I mean the explosion,” Ada said.
“Yes,” Clare said. Her mother wanted a longer answer. Wanted to hear the details so that she could then talk with her friends about how they made her faint with pity and horror.
“They say people lay all over the streets,” Ada half whispered. She gripped Clare’s hand. “I was so worried, I couldn’t breathe. I believe I didn’t eat for two days. It was such a relief to get the wire from Geraldine. Even though you …” She pulled Clare down on the bed beside her and peered into her face. “Does it hurt?”
“No, Mother!” That wasn’t quite true. It hurt the wound if she looked back and forth too quickly with her good eye. And her heart hurt all the time, as if her ribs were pressing too hard around it.
Her mother leaned closer.
“There’s nothing to see,” Clare lied. She had still not looked closely at her wound herself.
Ada left reluctantly and Clare sat in front of her old dressing table, shivering, staring at her reflection. Her thick, dark hair was loose over her shoulders, framing her pale face. She pursed her lips and slipped the eye patch up, easing it off and letting it drop on the floor. The purple bruise on the cheek below was fading to pale green. Her left eye was still swollen, the lids closed, as if wilfully, on the world. Her good eye stared as if interrogating an imposter. A single tear tracked from the missing eye down her cheek. Her other eye, pitiless, was dry.
SHE TOOK OUT HER LAST LETTER from Leo, which had arrived just before she left Halifax, with the first mail since the explosion.
There’s a rumour General Currie’s coming tomorrow and we’re to be marched I never wrote about Vimy in my letters last spring. I couldn’t bring myself to describe it. No one talks about what we’ve been through here. No good dwelling on it. But now some time has passed it’s more not less vivid. It’s hard not to think about it with the whiff of another big brawl ahead.
Just before dawn on Easter Monday the gunners began moving the guns forward towards Fritz with fifteen thousand more Canadian soldiers advancing behind. It was a miserable morning, with a wind full of sleet and snow. Before it all started we’d been firing on them for a week non-stop, enough to set my ears ringing. It was deafening even underground.
Our sound rangers had figured the exact location of the German guns. While we continued firing, the infantry crossed into no man’s land in our tunnels. Once they crawled out they marched through craters and trenches filled with mud, right into the thick of German shelling. By the next day we Canadians had the whole of the Ridge. We had a tunnel collapse and we found ourselves in the open, firing on the enemy, only a hundred yards off.
I picked up one wounded fellow. As I helped him back, with his good arm around my neck he told me all about his family in PEI. He knew he’d be sent home now and he was going to move into his father’s law firm as soon as he was well. When he passed out I put him on my back.
By the time we got to the medics he was gone. God
These days we’re working with new equipment, which I’m not allowed to write about. It should help us keep tabs on what Fritz is up to underground. It’s hard work what with the heavy rains, turning the ground into a sea of mud.
I guess the only good thing about Vimy is that I know how to keep my head down and plan to do just that so that I can come back to you with only a few small pieces missing. I could get by without an earlobe, or a pinky finger. What do you say, would that be all right with you? The war is bound to be over soon now that the Yanks are here.
Your parcel certainly cheered me up. So many thoughtful things, and all tied up with tissue of our old school colours. I’m smoking the Lucky Strikes now, using the paper as you can see, and intend to put the socks on soon, as the pair I have on doesn’t match and my big toe is sticking out of one. The good thing is that we got our trench boots the other day, so at least my feet are dry.
My home at present is a dugout. It’s only big enough for three bunks with a space about three feet by five but at least the roof doesn’t leak. I share the space with Marty (he says hello), and a minister’s kid from Digby (I’m not convinced he’s eighteen). He assures Marty and me that God over-rules even where shells fall thickest.
We were here two days before they sent us any rations but we have lots now. Last night for supper we cooked beef steak. French fried potatoes. Fried onions. Bread, butter and pineapple jam. And we cooked it all on the lid of a biscuit tin.
If I can hold out for two more months I’ll be getting leave. I’d like to see Paris while I’m over here, but just now I feel I want to get as far as possible from France. I think I’ll go dig around the chalk cliffs at Dover.
I’m homesick tonight and just pining to eat a real family meal. But I realize that there wouldn’t be any cozy family gatherings if there weren’t boys in Khaki away from home.
It will be getting cold there now. All the apples will be in. I don’t know whether a letter will get to you by Christmas.
Raise a glass to me will you?
Your Leo
CLARE FOLDED THE LETTER, running her fingers along the creases. She would find Mrs. Beddow as soon as she got back to Halifax. What difference would it make if she arrived in England missing an eye? The men in the homes would be in worse shape.
A little piece missing, Leo said it himself. She ran her hand over her breasts and down her belly. The rest of her was still whole.
The bone-white moon was setting behind a scrim of cloud, lighting the fields, filling her room with pale glow so that she could see the items on her dressing table, the hand mirror, face down, her hair brush, the fossil shell Leo gave her, and, beside it, a picture of him, seated, in his uniform, his dark eyes, his mouth, a half smile.
She stared past the picture at the reflection of the dormer roof-line in the dressing table mirror, then she was staring at a child in a nightgown, standing, arms spread wide, like an angel just about to take flight.
Clare jumped out of bed to run to the window, dizzy. She knew that child. Who? Yes! She’d seen her as they made their way through the city after the explosion, standing on the tilting floor of a burning house. Here she was — Clare’s feet rooted to the cold floor — arms spread, hair flying, her terrified expression, in the half darkness. The child stepped forward and fell into space. Clare rushed to the window, searched the empty yard below, the smooth blanket of snow.
When Clare finally got back into bed, she pulled the covers over her head, her blood rushing in her ears, waiting for the vision to wash away. Waiting for blessed sleep.
CLARE WAS BEING BURIED by the weight of snow falling on the fields, heavier and heavier. She jerked awake and threw off her quilt and blankets.
Her mother was at her door. “It’s ten o’clock, sleepy head. I’ve never known you to sleep this late.”
Clare scrubbed at her good eye. She’d been in some strange margin of sleep last night — her dream, the girl in the nightgown — they’d spilled into her waking.
“I don’t want to get up.”
“There are fresh scones.”
“I’m tired. I didn’t sleep well.”
Ada’s eyes narrowed. This was usually her role: lying in bed, while someone tried to convince her to get up and get dressed.
UNTIL LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, Clare watched the snow rise like a white sea, a slow motion inundation around the fence posts.
At five o’clock, a flock of ravens arrived, wheeling over the fields, searching for winter’s scraps. They called to each other hungrily across the valley. One flew over the yard, banking steeply. And there, running through the snowstorm was a woman wrapped in flowered cloth. Clare closed her eye, but the woman remained, on a road now, the curtain flying out behind her, as clear as when Clare first saw her, running down the street in oversized boots, frantically calling her children’s names. The lane to the farm filled with women and children, black with soot. Clare’s horror turned to fascination. What perfect detail, this parade, the coats, plaid and herringbone, their buttons and toggles, the children, freckled and fair, dark-haired and blonde, carrying spotted dogs and ginger cats.
The ravens fled to some hidden roost, the vision faded, and Clare fell back under the weight of her blankets into dreamless sleep.
The next day Clare pushed back her quilt and got out of bed. With the first steps on her floorboards, she heard Ada on the stairs.
Clare was sitting at her dressing table reaching for her eye patch when the door opened and for a moment she caught the quick aversion in her mother’s face, in the mirror’s reflection.
She slipped on the eye patch.
“I washed your dress.” Ada held out the dark blue one Clare had worn the day of the explosion. “It froze solid on the line.”
Clare imagined it, pinned there, the skirt and arms stiff, as if inhabited by an invisible body.
“But I hung it by the stove yesterday,” Ada continued. “Then I mended the tear on the bodice.”
Clare hadn’t noticed that tear. She looked at her mother in the mirror and saw the window billowing inward, the air full of shards of glass, catching the morning sun.
“Old Charlie Ramsay was asking about you the other day.” Ada hung the dress in the armoire. “I think he’s lonely, all by himself at the farm. I don’t think he ever thought Leo would be away so long.”
“None of us did,” Clare said.
What had anyone expected of this war? Why had no one ever talked about what seemed to have been inevitable? As if a collective amnesia would solve things.
Leo’s last night in Halifax, she had opened her eyes to a figure at her bedroom door.
“Clare.”
Dark pants, jacket, and a flat-brimmed cap, drawn by a penumbra of grey light.
Chilled pre-dawn air, smelling of burnt sugar from the refinery, slid over the windowsill.
“Leo? What are you doing here?”
The floorboards creaked. He stepped into the room, then turned back and drew the door closed.
“What’s wrong?” Clare pushed herself up onto her elbows. “Has something happened?”
He’d hunched in the dark and at first she thought he had doubled over in pain. He unlaced his boots, then walked to her, took his cap off, and dropped again, this time to his knees, resting his forehead on the bed’s edge.
She sat up and held his head with her hands.
He buried his face in her neck. His skin was hot and dry. “Please. So I can remember.”
The room, dissolving in the half-light, the material world, the boarding house, mined with treacherous sleepers, fell away. He was the only solid thing. She could feel his heat.
“Leo,” she pulled him up from his knees, “you can’t stay.”
He fell onto the narrow bed, rolled his whole length into her, ran his hand down her back, smoothing the thin cloth of her nightgown, as one might comfort a child. But he stopped at the small of her back, pulled her to him tightly. He smelled
of the bars.
“I won’t stay long. And I’ll be quiet.”
“Not here, not like this …” She’d pushed against his chest and he rolled onto his back, stared at the dim ceiling, then ran a hand over his face. “I’m sorry.”
She lay awake for a long time after he left, restless with the memory of the hard ache of his body pressed against her.
The next morning she met him at the garden to walk with him before going to the dock where his troopship was waiting. His eyes were bloodshot but he was freshly shaven, his hair combed back wet, off his high forehead.
For a time they sat by the fountain. Then Clare rose and took him by the hand. She led him into the farthest corner of the garden, wandering, unspeaking, past the irises and peonies, the clipped privets, under the beeches, past the lake, to a thicket of lilacs. Leo took off his uniform jacket and laid it on the uncut grass.
His palms were rough against her collarbone, under her blouse, on her breasts. She lifted her hips and he pushed up her skirt. She shivered and he rolled on top of her. They lay like that for a few moments until their bodies began to move against each other. He fumbled with her light cotton bloomers, until she pushed them down herself. His breath in her neck was hot and stale with beer. He took her hand and placed it over his fly where he was hard. She unbuckled his belt and began undoing the buttons. He was breathing hard now and he pushed his hand down, rushing to finish unbuttoning, both of them stifling giggles. She took him in her hand, startled by the heat and silkiness of that skin. He searched her face avidly. He prodded, blindly trying to find his way in, finally opening her with his fingers. He entered gently at first and then, with one swift push. She arched back and caught her breath with the high fine pain of it. They moved together, the pain mingled with pleasure, red light under her eyelids.
Dazzle Patterns Page 5
