Dearest Freidrich, she had written in German, I hope you can find someone who makes you as happy as Felix makes me.
In his rooms, Fred lit his stove and poured himself a glass of rye whiskey before finding the courage to take the letter out of his coat pocket. He turned it over in his hands. It had been opened and badly glued back together.
Dearest Freidrich,
I hardly know where to begin this letter, so full of bad news. My dear Felix was killed in France last November. He had been home in the summer, with an injured leg, but it healed well enough for him to be sent back. They are running out of men to fight. The Kaiser has said he needs every able-bodied man for these last offensives and that it will all be over by summer. The army signs up boys fifteen and sixteen, as well as men in their fifties. The boys go because they are foolish, the men go because they need to feed their families.
We have been living on turnips for so long I can’t remember what anything else tastes like. Everything from the farms goes directly to the front. Mother died of typhus in December. Father has lost heart. I can hardly get him out of bed in the morning. Bertha and I have decided to leave Paula to take care of him while we go to Berlin to work. The glass factory has been shut down due to fuel shortages. Only the war factories are at work right now.
I hope that things are better for you in Canada. I sometimes think of the times we had there together. It is like a beautiful dream now. But we must all look to the future, which can only be brighter than these difficult days.
My warmest regards,
Lena
Fred held the letter to his nose. There was no scent of her. He finished his whiskey and poured himself another, opened the firebox, and prodded at the flames.
Then he read it again. He wondered if she regretted leaving Canada, if she wished she could return. Of course she couldn’t come back now. Not while the war was on, perhaps never. It was hard to believe the turn of fortunes for the Germans here in Canada.
When he arrived as a boy, foreigners were largely unnoticed. Everyone in Montreal came from somewhere else. His father, welcomed in the glass factory in Hamilton, taught the Canadian glass-makers everything he had learned in Lauscha. He’d never missed a day of work. But the tide of mistrust that rose against them with the war, his fellow citizens turning against him, that had weakened his father so. At first it was just whispers in the street. But by the time his father became too sick to work, the foreman had demoted him to assistant, something he hadn’t been since he was fifteen years old. Some of the other Germans just put their heads down and tried to stay out of trouble. Others, like Lena and her parents, fled back to Germany. But the truth was, only half their hearts had ever made it across the Atlantic when they first emigrated from Germany.
Would he want Lena to come back? Fred went to his bedside table and took the wedding photo from the drawer. She looked so happy. Canada had never been her home. And Fred would never return to Germany. He studied Felix. Proud. Confident. He wondered how long that had lasted. The realities of the war were trickling back, not in the papers, never in the papers, but in the bars, on the docks, and in the parks where the men with missing limbs stared from benches. Leaflets appeared more and more often on the streets, describing the terrible conditions in the trenches, saying the war was being fought “at the expense of thousands of young Canadians by imperialist powers for the re-division of the wealth they had plundered from the world’s people. Conscription imposed by the ruling class, trampled on the national rights of Quebec and the democratic rights of all Canadians.”
Fred finished his whiskey in one gulp. The moon splintered behind the crack in the still unmended window. He thought of Clare’s fiancé. She’d stood stock still when her father told her the news. Then she’d turned to Fred. “Please return this to Mary Hamilton for me.” She’d handed him a book with a firm hand, though her voice shook. Then she’d turned and walked away from him, without looking back.
She hadn’t been there when Fred arrived to play piano with Celia yesterday afternoon.
“Gone home,” was all Geraldine had said.
Fred had walked home that night under a rising moon, so pale it seemed transparent. He stopped at the citadel to watch it ripen in the darkness, until he could see the ships clearly in its light, gathering in convoy for the next day’s early departure.
27
THEY WERE BEING MOVED, rumour had it, behind the lines. Red Ears walked the dark trench, kicking them awake in turn. The soldier with the port wine birthmark on his face trailed the corporal, wincing. Once, when Red Ears was meeting with a general, this older soldier, whose uniform had the simple cloth collar of the territorial army of his hometown, had shown Leo a photo of his family. He was seated, with a tiny girl on his knee. An older girl, hair curled into ringlets, stood beside him, her hand on his other knee. Both girls held a single flower that looked plucked from the garden.
Now he handed the prisoners small canvas packs, motioning that they should pack their damp blankets.
Leo glanced around, quickly rolling up a German jacket and pushing it deep into the pack. He’d found it stuffed under some wood in the trench. It was filthy but dry and he’d been wearing it under his own jacket at night to keep warm.
At the cook tent the men ate a half-heated gruel standing up, stuffed crusts of bread, dark with ox blood, in their packs, and lined up to march, silent and shivering. They had learned to talk among themselves only when the guards were playing cards or singing.
Two more German guards, a cook, and soldiers carrying pots and sacks of supplies joined the line of prisoners. The men trudged in their wet boots along a supply railroad behind the lines. A sore on Leo’s heel split and seared with each step. A dull hope filled his chest — they were finally being marched to an official prisoner of war camp. Their flea-ridden clothes would be steamed, their boots dried. They would get letters and packages from home. Leo’s mouth filled sharply with saliva: cigarettes, chocolate. But then, with a thrum of dread, Leo knew that wasn’t what was happening. Red Ears, tormenting Digger at the end of the line, looked too pleased.
THE SUN BROKE THROUGH a bank of mist. It was an early spring morning in Grafton, the smell of snowmelt in the marsh at the bottom of the field, the sun warm on his neck, as he ran down the road. Tears filled his eyes. He hated when memory ambushed him, savage as a bullet, with its painful beauty.
AFTER ABOUT THREE HOURS of walking they came to a copse of beech trees and a barn. The barn still smelled of animals but there was no living thing to be found in it or in the fields, which were fallow, weeds brown and flattened by rain.
The men gathered saws and axes from the barn and marched to the beech copse without a break. They were to clear the forest.
Leo and Wes, one on each end of a crosscut saw, started on a big tree, its great feet splayed in the leafy duff of the forest. The bark, covered in a green down of moss, smelled like the forest at home. Leo and Wes worked without speaking, leaning in, leaning out, with each draw of the saw. Every so often Red Ears would snap them with a thin, braided leather whip, signalling them to work harder.
It took the two of them three hours to fell the tree. By that time it was dusk. Leo looked into the faces of the prisoners as they lined up for the march back to the barn. They were losing weight rapidly, their eyes hollow, bones stabbing their cheeks. Red Ears jabbed his bayonet at Wes as he straggled out of line. Red Ears grinned at Leo. An ugly grin. And Leo understood in that moment that he would die here.
28
ADA MET CLARE AT THE DOOR with a look of doting sadness. She would be counting on Clare staying home this time, where she could nurse her grief. “Oh my dear, what terrible news.” She smoothed Clare’s hair and stroked her cheek. “And Marty Flemming too.”
“Marty?” Clare cried. She sank down into the straight-backed hall chair. “Missing too.” The light falling through wind-tossed chestnut branches darted the curtains back and forth.
“No, they found him,” Ada said. She ran h
er hand up.
Her father clucked his tongue. “Ada …”
Ada turned to him as he started up the stairs with Clare’s bag. “Well, Alf, she’s better to hear it from us.” She turned to Clare. “Your father’s knees are terrible this winter,” she said, as if it was a passing ailment.
Clare jumped up. “I’ll take that,” she said, yanking her bag from her father. She wanted to shut herself in her room, lie under her starburst quilt.
“Well, since you’re going up there …” her father said.
“We’ve had to move our bedroom down to the sitting room!” her mother said.
THE NEXT MORNING Clare was kneading bread on the kitchen table when the door knocker banged. Ada would have been annoyed that they didn’t use her newly installed doorbell. Ada and her father had taken the carriage to town first thing. But not before asking Clare, with sad eyes, if she would be all right alone.
Clare wiped the flour from her hands and opened the door to Charlie Ramsay.
He had become more stooped, whether from aging or from some inner retreat.
They sat down across from each other.
“Missing,” he said. The word fell like a stone onto the table between them. Missing, as if a man had simply been misplaced, or perhaps wandered away.
“He might not be dead.” Clare contemplated the dough caught under her fingernails. “Like Marty.” Her voice caught.
Charlie looked up, as if with great effort. “They say that there’s nothing left of most men. They never find their bodies.” He blew his nose in a blue handkerchief.
“He promised he’d keep his head down,” Clare said.
Charlie wiped his face roughly. “I’m just glad Evelyn isn’t alive to see our son …”
Birchwood cracked in the cook stove.
“What was she like?” Clare said. She’d seen a photograph of Evelyn in Leo’s house. Years before, the doctor who delivered Leo had taken to carrying his new camera on his country visits. He had driven by Evelyn, Leo had told her, bringing lunch to Charlie in the fields, and was taken by the picture they made. In the photograph she stood in a field of half-baled hay, a tall, broad-shouldered woman, looking down at the plump, rosy-cheeked baby in her arms, her hair swept up into two swirls over her ears. At the moment the doctor took the picture, Leo had cried and his face was blurred. The photograph was so tender, Clare always wondered whether the doctor hadn’t loved Evelyn.
“She was clever. That’s where Leo got his brains.” Charlie pushed his thumb into a knot in the table. “Such a shock. She died so suddenly — appendicitis.” He rubbed the bulbous end of his nose again with his handkerchief. “She was always so strong.” He laid one big knuckled hand over another and looked out the window at a cerulean sky. “But she was inconsolable about surprising things, an early lamb dying or a story in the newspaper about an orphan. She could not have endured this.” He looked at Clare, his gold-brown eyes, the exact colour of Leo’s, filling. “Missing,” he said. Tears ran down his cheeks unencumbered.
Later, Larry stopped by. He crossed the kitchen with his crab-like walk, his head tilted sideways and up at her, his small eyes bright. He had just come from his farm and carried a basket of eggs. He placed them on the kitchen table shyly. “Still warm,” he said, picking one up and pressing it to her cheek, below her eye patch.
Clare started, then took the egg from him and put it in a white bowl on the table. “Thank you. I’ll make an angel food cake.”
Larry smiled widely, showing his small fox-like teeth, placing the rest of the eggs, one by one, in the bowl. “My favourite.”
“I know,” Clare said, wrapping her hands in her apron. “I remember.”
Larry stood pleased, then awkward. “I’m sorry.”
Heat rushed from the oven as Clare took out the loaves of bread. She set them on the stovetop and turned to Larry, wiping her brow with the back of her hand.
“About Leo,” Larry said, holding the handle of the empty basket for her in both hands.
CHARLIE EVENTUALLY shuffled off home. The hours thickened and drained listlessly into dusk. Clare had only come home to be close to Charlie, to hold onto that piece of Leo. But as she sat next to the stooped grey man brimming with grief, the lethargy that had overcome her on her last visit returned.
She said good night to her father and Ada even though she wasn’t sleepy. Lying in bed she felt the weight of her body falling away from Leo as if into a dark well. When she woke in the night, Evelyn was there. She looked up from the baby in her arms as she floated and hovered over Clare’s bed. Clare, as if looking through milk glass, became the self she’d been the last time she was home. She reached for the laudanum bottle on her bedside table but none was there. She got up, lit her candle, and took out her sketchbook.
She drew Evelyn as an angel, delivering a child from the land of the living to the land of the dead. When Clare tired and the visions faded, she lay back. Her habit in these dark hours was to think about Leo. But tonight the memories she had sipped on like honey, topping up her daily longing for him, feeding her plans to go to him, tasted bitter. There would be no more letters to write or to look for in the mail. A great emptiness rose into the room, stifling the oxygen, making it hard to breathe. Leo was gone. The war had been something to cross over, a trek to the other side, where their new lives would begin. The war in Europe ground on in the trenches. At home, it was fought with the weapons of waiting: hope, blind faith, superstition. For Clare, the waiting was over. Waiting had become her habit, an instrument that she had had to learn to master, to continue the small tasks of day-to-day living. Now she plucked at vacant air. She cried soundlessly, hot tears running from her empty eye onto her pillow.
THE NEXT MORNING Clare was rolling up her wool stockings, her valise open on her bed, when Ada climbed the stairs.
“What are you doing?” Ada cried. “You just got here!”
“I need to get back to Halifax.”
“You don’t need to go anywhere!” Ada pushed her aside, hauled out her dark red sweater, her chemise, threw them in a clump on the bed. “Why harrow up all those memories again? You’ve had shock upon shock. You need rest. You’ll make yourself sick again!”
A weight pressed hard under her lungs. It made Clare want to sleep.
“Well, Mother, then I want to go back. Remember Dr. Cox said it was important for me to have something to do.” Clare reached for her sketchbook lying open on her bedside table and placed it in the case.
“What’s that?” her mother said.
“Nothing. Just some drawings,” Clare said.
“Oh, but I’m happy to see you’re drawing again. Before she ran off with that artist,” Ada sniffed, “Winona always said you had talent.” Snatching the book from her case, Ada began flipping through it, pausing at each drawing: Evelyn, the infant Leo, the girl flying from the burning house, an old woman trailing dirty blankets. A look of fear crept over Ada’s face. Clare remembered her mother’s tears at finding Clare’s childhood drawings of her little sister Pearl scattered around her on this very bed.
“Who are these people?” Ada said.
“Just people from my memory,” Clare said, forcing still her nervous fingers. “It calms me to draw them, Mother.”
“It’s the visions, isn’t it? I’m going to call Dr. Robson.”
Oh, the comfort of that brown bottle. “No,” Clare said, catching her mother’s hand, “you aren’t. I can’t see Dr. Robson.”
“He helped you, Clare. He helped you the last time you were home.”
Clare took the sketchbook. “This helps.”
The lines around Ada’s mouth deepened. She planted her feet, in her blue felt slippers, firmly apart on the wood floor.
“I’ve started going to drawing classes at the Victoria School of Art,” Clare said.
“What about your job?” Ada said, eyeing Clare warily.
Clare closed her eye. Truth be told, she couldn’t imagine returning to the glassworks. When she walked int
o Mary’s classroom she felt herself walking into her life. The only life she could imagine now. Explain this to Ada? She had no words.
“The glassworks opens next week but, Mom, I want to study art. I guess — I wish I — could. I was wondering, could you and Dad help me?”
Ada looked at Clare narrowly. “Clare, you, an artist? With just one eye? Artists have to see properly!”
“I can see.” Clare slammed her case shut. “More clearly than I ever have before.”
“Clare.” Ada suddenly looked old in her gingham housedress, stained with berries from last summer’s canning. “Are there other women in the classes?”
“We’re all nine of us women. Most of them will be teachers.”
“You’ve never said anything about wanting to be a teacher.”
“No. No teaching for me. There are women who are artists. Only artists. Like Mary.” Clare did up the buckles of her valise.
“Mary?”
“Our instructor. She trained in Germany and France.”
“Germany?” her mother said, balling up her red hands in the pockets of her dress.
“Before the war, Mother,” Clare said.
Her mother stepped closer, looked into Clare’s face. “Clare, what kind of people are these artists? Surely you haven’t forgotten about poor Winona?”
“As far as I remember Winona ended up falling in love with a man who could actually string more than two words together. They moved to Paris.”
Her mother bristled. “Certainly you are not planning a move to Paris.”
Clare sighed. “I just want to be able to continue my training in Halifax. Please.”
Her mother ran a hand over her eyes. “I can’t see what kind of life you would have as an artist. Far better to keep on at the glassworks until …”
Dazzle Patterns Page 17
