The Heart's War

by Lucy Lambert

  At some point later in the night, I remember staring up at the patchwork stars overhead as my eyelids grew heavy and finally dropped down in front of my vision. I don't know how I managed any sleep, cramped as I was.

  But it was dreamless, and destined to be brief.

  Sometime in the dead of night, the train pulled up to the station in Montreal. My body had become so used to the motion of the car on the tracks that its absence woke me. It was just as well, as Lawrence grabbed onto the overhead rack, pulled himself to his feet, and bellowed for all the men to get ready to switch trains.

  "No, please..." I said, still groggy, "I can get those, there's no need..."

  "Nonsense! What kind of gentleman soldier would I be if I didn't take a lady's bags for her? Oh! Quite the heft to these. Packing for a long trip?" Lawrence said, my two suitcases both clutched in one of his hands, his other occupied grasping the straps of his duffel bag.

  I had hoped to change trains and give him the slip, but I could think of no excuse for getting my bags back that would earn me more than a snort and another "Nonsense!" from my new admirer.

  A young soldier wrestled his bag out onto the station deck and turned to help me down the two steps to the platform. My legs shook beneath me, my body still thinking that I hurtled down the tracks.

  "Thank you," I said, smiling at him. He couldn't have been more than eighteen. He blushed in return.

  "Yes, private, thank you. Now be off!" Lawrence said.

  The bite in his voice sent the young soldier to stiff attention for a moment before throwing a salute and beating a hasty retreat with his duffel bag thrown over one shoulder.

  Steam hissed from the train as though it breathed a great sigh of relief for a few moments rest. The moon projected a ghostly halo through the new cloud as it glared down at the proceedings.

  The new train waited across the platform for us. Soldiers' conversations hummed indiscernibly. I suspect that many of them had received a rude awakening, and had dredged themselves only as far out of sleep as was required to walk across the platform, board their new car, and fall into another slumber.

  I had felt tired myself when I first stepped off, but the coolness of the air left me wide awake and miserably cold.

  "Wait a moment!" Lawrence said from behind me.

  I turned to see him put the bags down on the platform. He removed his jacket and hung it over my shoulders. A protest stalled on my lips when I felt the warmth his body had left in the fabric.

  "Thank you," I said, fully intending on returning it as soon as we took our seats in the new car.

  A few of the taller buildings in Montreal were visible and lit by moonlight. How many in that city slept while these soldiers trekked towards the sea? How many French Canadian soldiers had we picked up at this place? I tried to focus my attention on the conversations of various groups of soldiers as we walked across the platform, and I thought I caught a few snatches of French.

  French might as well have been Greek to me, for all my ability to speak or understand it at all. I resolved to make Jeff take me to Paris for our honeymoon, and I would do my best to learn enough of it to order myself something nice to eat there.

  A few of the soldiers called to me or whistled. I was the only woman on the platform, it seemed. When I heard what a few of them said, I blushed.

  Lawrence bellowed at them, using his superior rank to quell their catcalls. He hurried me onto the train, which was a shame. Montreal looked lovely, from the little bit of it I saw.

  When I started to sit at the first empty seat, Lawrence leaned down to whisper in my ear.

  "No, keep going farther; I have a surprise waiting for us."

  I thought about sitting anyway, but I lacked the patience to deal with Lawrence's reproach at that moment. So I continued forward, sliding my way around soldiers throwing their duffels onto the overhead rack or bending over to shove their packs under their seats.

  We reached the door at the end of the car. Taking all three bags in one hand, Lawrence leaned past me and opened it.

  The next car was much quieter. The narrow hall had several sets of doors down either side, leading to private cabins. A few were occupied; I could hear bits of conversation from one, snoring from another.

  "Ah, here we are. Please, be my guest," Lawrence said, flashing me those blinding white teeth of his as he again leaned past me to open the door. For a moment, his chest touched against my shoulders and I felt the thump-thump of his heart. He seemed so calm and collected.

  Inside, I shrugged off his jacket and hung it on a peg by the door. There were two benches, facing each other, and a small bed that was little more than a cot that unfolded from the wall.

  "Cozy," Lawrence said, storing our bags on another overhead rack.

  He waited for me to sit before hanging his hat over his jacket and taking his own seat across from me. He ran one hand through his hair, straightening out any bits thrown into disarray from the breeze outside.

  "An awful business, this war. All this travel by night, stuffed into train cars with dozens of other men. Distasteful."

  "Do you think it will end soon?" I asked.

  Lawrence licked his lips, leaving them glistening under his mustache. He ran his hand through his hair, and I thought I saw his fingers shake. It was the first time since I'd met him that I'd seen his nerves frayed.

  Could all this bravado and rakish behavior just be a mask? I wondered. This man had already been to the front. Was this his way of dealing with the stress of battle, of dealing with seeing people die? As a captain, I imagined that he must have ordered a fair number of men to their deaths himself.

  I felt the urge to reach across the table and hold his hands. When he saw that I'd seen his momentary lapse, he smiled at me again.

  He reached into his jacket on its peg and pulled out a curved metal flask. His fingers shook as he unscrewed the top. They stopped their trembling when he took a long draw of whatever was inside.

  He didn't speak until he screwed the cap back into place and thrust the flask back into its pocket.

  When he looked me in the eye, for just those few moments I saw the real man there. I saw the fear and uncertainty behind those eyes. That question of whether he would come back to Canada after this latest tour. Then that mask of his came back over his features, and I looked at a face plastered with roguish charm.

  "It can go another decade if it wants, my dear. At this rate, I'll be a leftenant general by Christmas!"

  I smiled and gave him a little laugh. That seemed to satisfy him, and he leaned back, sighing. Whisky soured his breath. All of my previous distaste for him dried up, with pity flowering where my revulsion had withered.

  The train whistle blew, and I jumped at the noise. In this private room everything was quiet. The sleeping city offered no noise as the train trundled away. Beneath us, the wheels clacked once more on the tracks and the dark landscape visible through our window turned into a grey and black blur. If I tried to focus, to catch a singular object with my eye, I saw houses, a few cars with their headlamps blazing, and not much else.

  Bells rang at crossings as we moved away from Montreal, the train curving east towards the Maritimes.

  The little snatches of vision I got mesmerized me, and my earlier exhaustion didn't return. Lawrence, however, ran out of steam. He leaned against the wall, using one of his hands as a pillow.

  I hadn't a watch, and I didn't want to wake him to ask him to check the time. It felt as though I'd been sitting on the train both for just a few moments, and for hours and hours.

  But the lights of the city had long since faded behind us. With a momentary start, I realized that this was the absolute farthest I'd ever been from home. Every second moved that marker however many feet the train managed to travel.

  Were these the same tracks that Jeff had taken? Did they still hold the heat from the friction of his train travelling over them? Or had they lost all that warmth?

  I took some time to really look at Lawrenc
e, then. He looked sharp in his uniform, even though pressing his hair against his hand pushed some of the slick strands up to stand at funny angles.

  He breathed evenly in and out through his nose, and his lips held closed over those brilliant teeth looked pink and soft. A few worry lines had been carved into his forehead, but were so shallow so as to be easy to miss in the daylight. A fine network of crow's feet crinkled the corners of his eyes.

  A handsome man, but much too boisterous and boastful for my tastes.

  I marked the hours by the sound of the watchman's footsteps going up and down the little hall outside the door.

  Sometime early in the morning, but still hours before sunrise, I stood and stretched. My back ached from sitting for so long, and my left thigh prickled as blood flowed back down my leg.

  Lawrence stirred, shivering.

  "Shh," I said, not wanting to wake him.

  Grabbing his jacket from its peg, I draped it over his chest and he calmed down.

  For the first time since supper, a pang of hunger whined up through my empty stomach. I thought I might find the dining car and see if there was anything to be had.

  As I grabbed the latch for the door, I felt his arms slip around my waist. I gasped. I hadn't even heard him rise!

  "I'm so glad you joined me tonight..." he said, his breath hot against my ear and cheek.

  He moved to kiss me, tickling my neck with his whiskers even as his hands began travelling up my body.

  Grabbing his hands, I tried to pry his fingers off me even as I ducked beneath his attempted kisses.

  "Lawrence! Stop!" I hissed, trying to be as quiet as possible.

  He batted my hands away and pulled me harder against his body. His squeezing arms forced the air from my lungs, and I had to breathe in short, quick gasps. He succeeded in rubbing his lips against me, and I reached up to scratch at his face.

  He grabbed me by the wrist and kissed it.

  "Lawrence! Stop, please!"

  "Come, dear, you don't know what it's like over there. I don't want to go back there without with rejection on my mind. I may die out there, you know. You're so warm and soft. I promise you'll enjoy it. Maybe I'll jump my good man Jeff up to sergeant... think of all the good you'll do him..."

  "Stop talking about him!" I hissed even as I brought my heel down on his foot.

  "Ah!" Lawrence said, hopping back away from me, bumping against the walls tying to hold his boot in his hands.

  Someone stirred in the cabin next to ours, and I heard a muffled, "What's going on?" It would be so easy to go out and fetch a guard and tell him that Captain Marsh had tried to force himself on me. I didn't know what the military system of punishment was, but I assumed it to be worse than the normal one.

  Lawrence sat down heavily on the bench and pulled his jacket out from under him. He fished in it for a moment, then pulled that flashing silver flask out. I snatched it out of his shaking hands before he could get the cap unscrewed.

  "Come dear, give that back. Or take a sip yourself; maybe you'll be more amenable..."

  "Stop! Just stop!" I said, holding the warm metal vessel out of his reach.

  "Give that back, now!" he said, the frown lines deepening on his forehead as he stood.

  He was taller than I, and his arms longer than mine. So I hid the flask behind my back.

  "All I have to do is call out..." I said.

  The sounds of people stirring around us continued. All his bumping around and his cry of pain woke them, it seemed. His lips pressed into a thin line, and he didn't spread his weight evenly between his feet, leaving one leg bent.

  I wondered for a moment whether I'd hurt him badly, then I reminded myself of what he'd just tried to do to me.

  "Do it! Go ahead! They'll put me in the stocks, and I won't go back overseas. Really, you'll be doing me a favor. Now, give that back," he said.

  In the time it had taken for our confrontation, the sky brightened noticeably. Was this the false dawn? Even if it were, that meant the true one wasn't long in coming. Yet. I still didn't feel tired.

  "If that were true," I said, "You would have done something before now to get yourself into trouble. You're scared, I can see that. But I think you enjoy it, too. Now, stand back, Captain Marsh."

  I unscrewed the cap on his flask and brought it out from behind my back. He watched me warily, his eyes widening when I started tipping the vessel to the side.

  "Yes, fine! You don't know how hard it is to find anything worth drinking..." he said, moving so that he pressed his back to the wall.

  Grabbing my bags down from the rack, I put his flask down on the table and left his cabin. An older man, his white hair sticking out from one side of his head, looked a question at me. I smiled at him, all the while thinking how I just wanted to find an empty seat a few cars away.

  I opened the door to the next car and found it full of sleeping men. A few jerked and muttered in their slumber, with arms and legs thrown haphazardly into the aisle. These I stepped over or around.

  The sun really was rising. We seemed to be moving through dense forest. If I squinted hard enough, I could make out the outline of hills somewhere in the distance.

  By some miracle, I managed to find an empty seat near the end of the car. It took some doing to lever my bags up onto the rack. Doing so drained all the energy from my body, and I slumped down onto the bench.

  Were we even out of Quebec, yet? I tried to focus on these questions, as they helped me to forget the tickling of Lawrence's mustache against my neck, and the feel of his hands moving up my body. Jeff had never touched me that way. Though, there were times when I imagined him doing so. Right then, I could not. His face kept getting replaced by Lawrence's rakish smile.

  Oh, Jeff, please be there, I found myself wishing as my eyes descended and blocked from my sight the coming dawn.

  Chapter 10

  Another day slipped by and when the sun rose again, we were approaching Halifax. At one point during the day, I heard Lawrence yelling at some soldiers and he came into my car. Our eyes met for a moment, and he began to smile before the expression faltered and his gaze fell to the floor.

  I felt restless after that. The other men in the car sensed my prickly disposition and they did little more than smile and nod and excuse themselves if they came near.

  The port city announced itself not by sight or sound, but by smell. Having never been near the ocean, the salt in the air caught me off guard. I had of course read about it in various novels, and had always imagined it as mild.

  The scent conjured images of white waves breaking themselves over rocks and against cliffs, and I could almost hear the rhythmic slosh of water.

  An usher came in through the door and moved down the aisle. "Please make sure to collect your bags, gentlemen. We'll be arriving in Halifax shortly."

  Eagerly, I looked out the window. What would the ocean look like? Would I be able to see the docks from here? But all I saw were more trees.

  Then the city broke into view as the trees receded. We'd come out of the woods on a hill, and the train curved slowly towards its destination.

  My heart beat quickly at the sight, and I pressed my hands against the window like a child.

  Halifax jutted out into the ocean. All along the coast, there were factories of all sorts. Their tall smokestacks rose into the air like uneven fingers, belching out great clouds of smoke. Across the water, on the other side of the inlet, was the city of Dartmouth, its features indistinct in the haze and shimmer off the water.

  The water teemed with shipping traffic. Large ships and small plied the waters. I knew from memory the outline of the Olympic, but I didn't see it. I thought that perhaps the harbor itself where the great liners docked was hidden from view.

  Ships from France and Britain came here, I knew, to pick up supplies from the war effort. Food, munitions, clothes. I wondered if the uniforms I helped make were in a cargo hold somewhere out on that water. Then I realized that was silly; they'd have been taken
out to Quebec or other training centres and given to our boys there.

  "Quite the sight, eh?" said a man sitting in the seat across from mine. He spoke with a western accent, so I figured he was from Alberta or perhaps Saskatchewan.

  "I've never seen anything like it!" I said.

  A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth, and I felt so excited that I almost forgot my reason for being there. A city like this was a gateway to the rest of the world. Had the war not been going on, I could book passage to almost anywhere I could think of.

  The train station was located away from the harbor, though. While nowhere near the size of Toronto, Halifax was a true city. Tall buildings dotted its skyline, and people bustled about in the streets going about their daily lives. Police blew their whistles at intersections to direct traffic, and all manner of car horns filled the air with their cries. The train's wheels blended their hum in with the general background noise of city life.

  When the train began to slow noticeably, I knew the station was near. My body began trembling, then, and a nervous tickling started in my stomach and went all the way up the back of my throat.

  I had arrived. I found myself wishing that the train still trundled along out in the country, hours or days from its destination. While I was out there, I had the comfort of not knowing the truth. I could comfort myself with my ignorance.

  There wasn't anything wrong with telling myself that I'd arrive to find Jeff waiting to board the Olympic, and that we'd have time to explore the city for an evening before finally bidding one another a fond farewell.

  I busied myself hauling down one of my bags. Out the corner of my eye, I saw the long platform of the station shoot by. My palms began sweating, so I pulled out the pair of long, white gloves Marie gave me and tugged them on. Mechanically, I pulled out a bonnet and seated it on my head.

  Here in Halifax the truth waited for me. My mind retreated back to an earlier point in the journey, when I could tell myself that Jeff was here and I could rest assured with my uncertainty of whether or not I lied to myself.