They lay a long time afterwards, oblivious to the changing light, the hours of afternoon reeling him back, down to the waterfront, where the ship whistled.
In the end they ran the last blocks, hand in hand, Leo’s one canvas duffel bumping against her shoulder.
At the top of the dock, Leo opened a pocket of his pack and pulled something out.
“This is for you. I’m sorry I couldn’t afford a ring.” He pressed the fossil shell into her hand, the nautilus, trapped in stone, he had found with her at Arisaig.
She put the shell in her pocket and ran her hands under his wool jacket to his shoulder blades. She pushed her breasts against his chest, felt him go hard against her again. She could still feel the heat, the moisture between her legs. He kissed her, pulled back, and looked at her. Then, hesitation gone, he turned and was swept into the stream of soldiers flowing up the gangplank of the Olympic, its hull gleaming white, blue, and black dazzle patterns.
The pier was festive. The cadet band played blithely, keeping ragged time, one flute slipping higher and higher. Gulls flashed like ticker tape against the blue sky.
Mothers cried through smiles, waving, as if they were sending their boys off on an exotic vacation. Her last glimpse of Leo was from the stern of the ship as it turned to starboard and gathered steam. Then he became one of five hundred, identical from afar, perfectly turned out in their brand new uniforms, leaning from the rail, arms raised, moving backwards into the light.
8
IN THE MORNINGS she helped her mother with the Christmas baking. She was clumsy, her perception distorted without her left eye. She bumped into a chair as she reached for the sugar bin and her mother rushed to help.
“I can get it myself,” Clare snapped.
She mixed shortbread dough and rolled it out on the wooden table.
By late afternoon the light drained until the stark calligraphy of the orchard, the sturdy out buildings and stone garden walls, dissolved altogether.
When she caught her reflection in the dark windows, she started at the black patch then yanked the curtains closed. She would wander the house looking for something to read, finding only the few books she remembered from childhood, Ivanhoe, Kim, Songs of a Sourdough. After a few minutes she’d be staring at the wallpaper border: an interlocking pattern of deer and hares emerging from garlands of leaves and flowers. Her eye aching, she would soon close it.
Aunt Alice and Uncle Floyd stopped by on Christmas Day, and on Boxing Day, her father’s sister Letty and her daughter Sally, with six children in tow, drew up to the farmhouse in their sleigh.
Clare hated their pitying glances, the whispered conversations among the women in the kitchen. She preferred the unselfconscious stares of the children at whom she would stare back unwaveringly, until they either looked away or said something like “What happened to you?”
“I had sex in the garden and I’m leaving soon for England,” she felt like saying but a parent would hush the children, or distract them with a shortbread biscuit, and the moment would pass.
Stanley, one of her cousin’s children, a seven-year-old boy with jug ears and a runny nose, followed her around the house until he caught her alone. “I want to see what it looks like underneath!”
“I’ve been told never, never show it to children.” Clare smiled wickedly.
“Jordie says it would scare me to death.”
“And where’s Jordie now?”
The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve. His eyes flicked across the room, to where the toe of his brother’s boot could be seen just outside the open door frame.
“Oh, he’s chicken,” Clare said. “Turn around.” She turned her back to Jordie, took Stanley by the shoulders, and swung him around in front of her. The boy twitched but stayed rooted. Then she bent down and slipped the patch off her eye.
The boy looked terrified at first and then he leaned in and squinted at the eye, trying to make out how the pieces fit together.
“Did it hurt?” he said.
Turning back to the open door she said loudly, for Jordie’s benefit, “Did it hurt? Did it hurt? Imagine a long sharp knife piercing your eye as if it was a piece of jelly. Imagine the blood shooting out. And imagine the excruciating pain.”
Jordie poked his head around the door, his mouth gaping.
Clare lunged towards Jordie, who tore off screaming in fear and delight. She pursued the boy, waving her patch until he crashed into the parlour, where her parents were lifting a glass of her mother’s black currant cordial with the guests.
Ada stared at Clare. Clare’s father looked anxiously at Ada, her glass frozen in mid-air. Letty and Sally looked away. Jordie buried his head in his mother’s lap.
Clare set her patch back in place, strode to the sideboard, and poured herself a generous glass of cordial. “To Leo,” she said.
EVENINGS, Clare made herself stay up as long as possible. One night she woke to a battalion of tiny soldiers marching across the bedroom floor at the foot of her bed. She climbed out of bed and began swinging her arms, trying to sweep them away.
“Get out,” she hissed.
They sat on her bed.
“I said leave, go away!”
“Clare! Who are you talking to? What are you doing?”
Clare twirled around. She’d been shouting. Her mother stood at her bedroom door, her bare feet among the forget-me-nots of the hooked rug, the top buttons of her nightgown undone to the crease of her cleavage.
The soldiers faded from the room.
“Going crazy,” Clare said coldly.
The next day Larry brought Dr. Robson from Kentville. He was in his early seventies and had delivered Clare. His eyes darted like pale minnows behind the fishbowls of his thick, wire-rimmed glasses. “Well, young lady, the eye seems to be healing.” He handed her back her patch. “And the other eye is perfect.”
He put his stethoscope in his black leather case. “I went down to Halifax, to see if I could help. It was much worse than I imagined. You’re lucky you didn’t lose limbs.” He handed her a small brown glass vial, marked Laudanum. “You’re suffering from a nervous disorder. Dissolve a couple of drops of this in a glass of water before bed each night. It should help you sleep.”
He snapped his case shut. “I hear there will be some funds available soon.”
Clare, inspecting the glass vial, looked up, perplexed.
“For glass eyes, prostheses,” he said, packing his bag. “They can be remarkably lifelike.”
The drops were bitter. The next day she found herself waiting for the moment of her limbs filling with warm heaviness, for the open, cool feeling in her eye. Of her mind dropping into laudanum’s soft darkness.
IN THE NEW YEAR, an envelope arrived from Rose’s, a letter from Geraldine, saying that Rose’s house was now repaired but Rose was very low. Her daughter Celia’s hand was healing, but she would never play piano professionally. Tucked next to Geraldine’s letter was an envelope forwarded to Clare, a letter from Leo. The handwriting was a little shaky.
December 1, 1917
Somewhere in Flanders
My Dearest Girl
I’m sorry I haven’t written. I’ve been ill for several weeks. Nothing serious but it landed me in the infirmary. I will only write a little here, as there is not much time for writing these days. Our company is still working night and day. I am not supposed to say exactly what we’re up to but I can assure you there’s not much time for daydreaming. It looks like I’ll be working alongside one of the geologists until I have more energy for the heavy lifting.
You may have heard that we gained the area of Passchendaele. The state of the ground was even worse than Vimy after all the shelling and the heavy rains.
The Canadians won the day but bloody corpses heavy losses for little gain. We checked as many men as we could to find the living and put dog tags in the mouths of the dead ones. Even the horses drowned. It was terrible to see those poor beasts fighting to get through mud up to their ears.
/> I’m not sure can recover. Personally I don’t mind that we have to to drive the Huns back and bring it to an end. I’m sick and tired of it and so is everyone else. best souvenir of this war is a whole skin.
The censors had left the last words untouched: If you make it home soon, don’t forget to ask Dad if the cheques are coming in. He should be able to keep things up with that, so we can get a good price for the farm at the end of the war and I can start at Dalhousie.
We’re all living in the future in our dreams now. When I come back we can be two kids and grow young again.
With love, your own Leo.
THE NEXT MORNING Clare put on her heaviest wool vest, drawers, and dress.
Her father was in from milking, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands over the oil stove. Her mother was breaking the porridge skin with a serving spoon. She looked relieved to see Clare dressed, with her face washed and her hair up, for the first time in weeks. She filled a bowl with porridge and placed it in front of Clare on the whitewashed table.
“I’d like to take the small sleigh over to Leo’s this morning,” Clare said.
“Charlie would be happy to see you.” Ada looked relieved. “Larry can take you over.”
“I want to go by myself.”
“There’s no need for that. He can’t get to the fences with this heavy snowfall.” Ada set the milk bottle down firmly in front of Clare.
“I want to go by myself,” Clare said.
Her father looked up at her with interest and cleared his throat. He was a man of few words. After Clare’s little sister Pearl’s death, ten years earlier, he had grown even quieter and began any talk with a small cough as if allergic to words. “Larry should see to that plow. Better to have it ready when we need it than lose good days while he’s getting around to fixing it,” he said.
THE SNOW WAS WIND-CUT and dry as glass. It squeaked as she walked across the yard, kicking at frozen horse droppings. The barn was dim after the white light of the yard and smelled of mold and animal breath. She harnessed Aggie, standing on tiptoe to bury her nose behind her ear, the spot where her rich warm scent was strongest.
Clare drove the small sleigh out of the yard, the runner bolts creaking. She looked back once as she opened the gate. Her mother was standing at the front window watching her.
The metallic air stung the fine hairs of Clare’s nose. Her eye socket throbbed in the cold. She wrapped her scarf over her face and set down the road that crossed the valley.
Everything was hidden — rotting piles of potatoes, broken wheels, and collapsed outhouses — under the new snow. She was grateful for this stripped simplicity. If she stared at the snow long enough perhaps its whiteness would burn away the images that still visited her. Lately she had started taking a few more drops when she woke in the night.
She turned the sled down the Ramsays’ road. There were no tracks other than the Braille of hare veering off into the birches. A threadbare flag of smoke flew from the farmhouse chimney.
She pulled into the yard, climbed down from the sled, and led the horse into the barn, where she brushed her briefly, threw over her an old blanket hanging from a stall, and tossed a couple of handfuls of oats from the nearby bucket into a feed bag.
Charlie Ramsay creaked open his door, looking as if he had no idea who she was or what she was there for. He stared at her eye patch, then scanned her face.
“Oh. Clare,” he finally said. “Come in, come in …” He swept her in the door with one arm, closing it behind her with the other. “I’m sorry …”
“It’s okay. People don’t recognize me,” she said.
WHILE HE MADE TEA and set some stale biscuits on a plate, Clare sat at the kitchen table, glancing down the narrow hall where the door of Leo’s old room was open enough for her to see the foot of his bed and the shelf lined with his shells and stones.
“Cold out there today, isn’t it?” Charlie started with the usual small talk about the weather, which began every conversation in the valley. He placed the teapot, a chipped Brown Betty, on the table. “I got a letter from Leo the other day. Said he’d been sick.” He looked at Clare anxiously.
“I think he’s better now. Perhaps, still a little weak,” Clare said, thinking of his shaky writing.
He gestured for her to pour her tea. “How are the animals faring in the cold?”
“Oh, you know Larry, nothing he likes better than fussing over the milk cows.”
Clare’s gaze kept travelling back to Leo’s room. She wanted to get up from the table, walk down the hall, and crawl into his bed. She wanted to bury her face in the pillow and breathe in the sandy scent of his hair. She thought of his body lying on hers, the sharp intake of breath and his low groan, in her ear, at the end. She blushed, then, lighting on Charlie’s dusty fiddle case lying on the sideboard, asked quickly, “Have you played lately?”
Charlie looked over at the instrument and shrugged. “Not much going on around town these days.” Leo’s mother had died of appendicitis when he was four. Charlie never married again but he was a regular at local dances, playing jigs and reels, his face solemn, lips as soft as a girl’s.
They talked of other families with boys overseas. “Clarence Sutherland got home last week. Lost his right arm.” Charlie pushed the cookies across the table. “At least Marty and Leo are together.”
“They’ll look out for each other, like they always have,” Clare laughed. “Heaven help the Hun who tries to take them both on.”
The Westminster clock on the mantle chimed the quarter hour. Shades of dusk were drawing over the day. Charlie shuffled his leather slippers under the table. He wore the years of Leo’s absence in his tired eyes, in the sloping shoulders under his grey cardigan.
“Your mother told me about the explosion,” Charlie said, “but I didn’t know …”
She thought of her eye with anguished tenderness. Where was it? Had someone thrown it in a bowl? Had it lain there, staring up blindly while the surgeon closed the hole it left, before he tossed it in the garbage?
This war had made everyone blind. And it had made them miserly, each carefully nursing their own rations of grief.
“And you?” Clare said. “Are you well? Getting the help you need?”
Charlie fidgeted with his buttons. “Help?”
“Around the farm …” Clare tucked her napkin under her plate.
“Oh, not much to do this time of year.” His eyes slid to the clock.
“Be sure to talk to my dad. He can always spare Larry for jobs once the snow’s gone.”
AS SHE PULLED INTO THE YARD, she realized she had forgotten to ask Charlie whether the cheques were coming. She walked Aggie to the barn, through violet bars of shadow cast on the snow by the trees lining the drive. A bright planet shivered on the horizon. Leo would know what it was. Would he notice it over there? Could they still see the sky? She had read an account in the Halifax Herald of the battlefields. The star shells, which lit the night, breaking over no man’s land, sounded almost beautiful.
Her mother, mending a pair of her father’s work pants, looked up with relief when Clare walked into the drawing room.
“How’s Charlie?” Ada said.
“Well enough, quiet as ever.” Clare sank onto the horsehair couch, between protruding springs.
“Nora White says he hardly leaves the house. She’s started bringing him groceries from town as well as cooking for him twice a week,” her mother said.
“He’s aged since I last saw him,” Clare said.
“Haven’t we all,” Ada sighed. She jabbed her needle though the cloth. “This wretched war.”
She was right. Her mother was growing old. Grey strands threaded her dark hair, her cheeks were netted with fine broken veins, and her eyelids were like pudding skin. Maybe it was just time’s work, but it felt as if Clare was seeing differently, as if her orphaned eye had become ruthless in its solitary gaze.
“I was in the attic today.” Ada bit her thread and shook out the trouser
s.
Clare watched her. There was a time, after her little sister Pearl died, when Ada would spend hours in the attic, looking at her things.
“I was looking for an old coat to cut up for rugs,” she said, as if reading Clare’s mind. “And I found some things of yours.” She gestured at a pile of books on the side table.
Clare picked up the volume on the top of the stack, a dog-eared sketchbook from her childhood. From those years when her mother was busy with Pearl.
Clare was five when Ada had Pearl. Clare loved it when Ada let her help bathe Pearl, unwrapping her, and dipping her in the water basin bowl. Tiny and perfect, Pearl was a doll come to life. But she grew into a sickly toddler, who suffered from constant coughs and chest infections. Runted and cranky, she needed constant nursing.
In the months after Pearl’s funeral, her mother sank under her bedclothes. On Sundays, Clare would creep to her parents’ bedroom door after church. Sometimes her mother was still asleep, a still form under the blankets; sometimes she rocked and quietly cried. Other times Ada sat up in bed, her dark hair fallen loose around her shoulders, staring.
Her father’s maiden sister, Aunt Emily, arrived. She was short and round with a generous bosom, which smelled of her lily of the valley eau de toilette. She made Clare’s porridge in the morning and stood on the porch waving Clare down the road when she left for school. Her father was out long days on the farm, mending fences and picking the early apples.
One day Clare came home from school and her mother was gone.
“She’s having a rest,” Aunt Emily had said.
Once, Clare, her father, and Aunt Emily went to the “home,” in Truro, to visit Ada. Clare stood, in her best dress with its sky blue satin sash and new school shoes, wearing her white summer gloves and holding a bouquet of late yellow roses.
Her father ran the bell and after a few moments they heard footsteps and bars sliding on the inside of the door. Rose petals dropped on the porch.
The matron, a thin woman with sinewy calves and feet that turned out neatly as she walked, led them to the women’s ward at the back. On the way, a door off the hall swung open and a nurse bustled out. Beyond her, a woman in bare feet and a cotton smock to her knees held a doll with a bald head out to Clare. The door swung shut.
Dazzle Patterns Page 6
