The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

  His father was speaking again. “It’s fine to be against war—admirable,” he said. “But we’ve got to play the hand we’re dealt. We’re not pacifists, and neither is your grandfather, not in a formal sense anyway. I was raised to respect life, not take it, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and . . .” He whipped the bag off the bed and jerked the drawstring tight. “I have to do what I feel is right.” He stood staring at the bag with his hands on his hips. “I may not be cut out to be a soldier, but . . .”

  Simon glanced up and took in his father’s tall, lean frame, his strong profile and broad shoulders. “What d’you mean? You’re captain of the Lauralee.”

  “That’s right.” His father smiled at him. “But she isn’t a ship of the line, is she? I haven’t exactly been sailing under Nelson.” He sat down on the bed and put his hand on Simon’s knee as if he was going to say more. There was a long white scar that sucked the flesh down between his thumb and forefinger. He’d sliced it open freeing a line in a storm, bound it up in a rag, and never batted an eye. Even now, his father never spoke about it. Wallace was the one who filled Simon in, as he always did. “A right fine skipper,” Wallace and others who sailed with his father agreed. “Right fine. Knows these waters like the back of his hand. Can find his way through the thick of fog and black of night like his father before him,” Putnam Pugsley always added.

  Sitting on the bed next to his father, breathing in the same air, resting comfortably in the same easy silence they shared when out on the water, Simon began to think about how much more empty the house would be with his father overseas than it was when he was up the coast. He asked what would happen to the Lauralee with his father gone, and would Wallace take her out.

  “Wallace is looking for other work. The Lauralee belongs to your grandfather, and he wants out of the coastal trade.” His father ran his hand through his hair again as he always did. A thick wave of it tumbled forward.

  “He’d never sell her . . . would he?” Simon whispered.

  His father’s gaze shifted to the window, where the predawn sky was filling in, slate gray. “Course not,” he said after a moment. “Who’d buy her?” But his smile was strained.

  “I won’t let him. I’ll see she’s hauled up proper at Mader’s ’til you get home.”

  “There’s my boy. My boy of big heart, sound mind and strong body . . .”

  Caught off guard by the familiar words spoken in so sad a tone, Simon felt tears well up. “Do you think Uncle Ebbin’s alive?” he whispered. “Will you come home if you find him?”

  His father stood abruptly. “Christ, Simon. Why do you think I enlisted? I’m going over there to do my part.” He rifled through some papers and stuffed them in his bag. “I can’t just walk away when I feel like it, and wouldn’t want to if I could.” He stopped himself. “Sorry, son,” he said. “Sorry. Forgot who I was talking to.” Then he patted Simon’s head, which made Simon feel small and useless, so he chose that moment to say, “Since the Lauralee isn’t going out, how about I go out on the Banks this summer? Carl Keddy, Martin Rafuse, Daryl Nauss and a bunch of others will be out there.” The Banks is where boys become men. Daryl repeated this line from his old man at every opportunity.

  His father’s dark eyes grew darker. “Fishing the Banks is a rough life for a boy. Backbreaking. Dangerous. Those boys have no choice. Their families need the money. Don’t romanticize it.”

  “I’m not. I just want to go.”

  His father nodded in appreciation. “Sure you do. Or think you do. But Banks fishing is not for you. You have other talents. You just haven’t found them yet. Besides, summer’s a long way off and right now, you’re needed here at home.” When Simon didn’t reply, his father said, “C’mon now. Chin up. I’ll write. You’ll write me back, right? Keep me posted on what you’re up to, and fill me in on Young Fred.”

  “Guess we’re stuck with him forever,” Simon said with exaggerated resignation.

  “Maybe. I doubt Cousin Turley is coming back anytime soon. You don’t mind, do you—sharing your room with him?”

  “Nah. Every night he tells me he’s ready to sleep in the spare room all by himself. At least he’s not sleeping in my bed anymore.” Simon managed a grin.

  “That’s right. It’s hard not having a mother. We’re all that boy has right now.”

  Turley, Young Fred’s father, was a sometimes logger and a steady drinker. No one was sure when his wife died, but sometime afterwards, Turley brought the two-and-a-half-year-old Fred for an extended stay without mention of when he’d be back. Fred was now almost four. Why did everyone have to be lost? Simon wondered. His father cinched up his duffel bag. Both of them stared down at it. “Dad?” Simon said without looking up. “What if Uncle Ebbin is dead? What if—”

  “No what-ifs. We’ll find out. Not knowing is worse than knowing, even if it’s the thing you fear most. And now,” his father pulled out his watch, “time’s running short. You’d better go get your grandfather. And, Simon? You mind what Ida says, your grandfather, too, when I’m gone. And your mother,” he added.

  Simon might have liked to mind his mother, but she hardly noticed if rules were broken. The rules weren’t hers anyway.

  HIS GRANDFATHER DID not come to say good-by at the train station in Chester. “Too hard on this old man. Too long a journey,” he said when Simon went up to fetch him—though the train station at Chester was only sixteen miles away. When Simon pleaded with him, his grandfather just stared out at the harbor. It was a beautiful morning, sharp and crisp and perfect. “I’ve said my good-by. You’d better get on. Go on, boy. Go to the station.”

  “Dad’s going to find Uncle Ebbin,” Simon said, arms crossed.

  His grandfather’s pitying look ushered Simon out the door.

  CAUGHT NOW IN the threads of dream and memory, Simon huddled deeper into the quilt and rested his head on his knees and thought about France and wondered how the constellations lined up over there.

  There was a globe worthy of a university library on a stand in his grandfather’s study. He and his grandfather used to navigate it together and, more often, the charts his grandfather would spread on the massive chart table. “Here,” his grandfather would say, his calloused hand over Simon’s, moving it along, “is the route Champlain took to the South Shore before it was called the South Shore and before it was Nova Scotia, before it was New Scotland. And here, settled on an island at the mouth of the St. Croix. A disaster. And here, John Cabot’s route a hundred years before. Lowered baskets like a pail down a well and scooped up cod without so much as a hook. Bottom feeders, mind—so plentiful they must have been stacked one on top of the other to find their way into buckets dropped from a deck.” The grand finale was always, “And here is Mahone Bay, most beautiful bay in the world, where God has granted us the privilege to live.”

  Now they shared something else—a passion for war reports. It was serious business. He and his grandfather devoured and analyzed every scrap of news from the Front, often at cross purposes, but always enjoying their time together. Simon relished being treated with respect—enough to ignore the occasional antiwar rant. And he secretly suspected that war news was his grandfather’s way of keeping up with his father.

  The previous afternoon, the paper brought news that the Canadians were massing forces in the Arras Sector at a ridge called Vimy, which no one had been able to wrest from the Germans. “The French failed to take that ridge twice in 1915 and racked up over a hundred fifty thousand casualties,” his grandfather said, lowering the paper. “My sources tell me the western slope of it is an unending graveyard. Now the French insist the Brits should try it. So the Brits have enlisted the help of our boys. Arras—that’s where your father is this very minute.” He’d rattled the paper into its folds and slapped it against the desk. “War to end all wars, eh? My God, the simple-minded lunacy of it.”

  “Maybe,” Simon said, “that’s where the war will end.”

  THINKING BACK ON the news and o
n his dream, Simon reached for the lone soldier on the sill, encircled the cold lead in his fingers, and held it there until it warmed in his palm.

  THREE

  February 3rd, 1917

  Arras Sector, France

  Angus slipped. He’d been having a hard time keeping his footing. An odorous fog, lying low to the ground in wisps and patches, made it difficult to see the sergeant crouching just a few feet ahead, constantly leading him on as if sure of where he was going, then gesturing with a straight arm to stay down, stay down. The shallow communication trench had fallen in or been blown away, and they were on open ground. No sign of the 17th.

  His breath grew short. He kept trying to remember the sergeant’s name. Shell holes to the right and left—pools of stinking water, sulphurous yellow, phosphorous green, leaching up unexploded shells, empty gas canisters, rusted shrapnel, and bits of bodies. Under the chalky mud lay stick bones, blackened flesh no doubt clinging.

  The moon slid out of the clouds for a moment, revealing an undulating, featureless landscape, cut through by massive belts of barbed wire. The two of them, he and the sergeant, were eerily alone. Where was all the nighttime activity—supplies coming up, working parties, troop replacements, trench repairs? Not a star in the sky, but they were angling north instead of east toward the Front Line, Angus was sure of it.

  They were lost.

  Angus was much taller than the sergeant, so it was no easy task crouching along behind him. Angus slipped again and his leg was sucked into what felt quicker than quicksand.

  The sergeant sensed he’d stopped moving. “Lieutenant?” he whispered as he turned around.

  The sergeant, on all fours, crawled back to Angus and set the pack down. Angus leaned back, and the sergeant heaved his leg straight up like a log. Mercifully, the boot was still attached. Slimed with muck, but still on tight.

  Mercifully, too, the sergeant didn’t whisper, “Don’t worry, sir, you’re not the first to fall off a trench mat.” He’d simply pulled, then smiled. Kind eyes in an angular face. He looked much older than Angus. What was his name? What was his name? They knelt face-to-face for a moment, as if in prayer. Angus whispered his thanks. “Not at all, no worries,” the sergeant whispered back, and then, slapping his thighs as if to say there then, that’s done and off we go again, he unaccountably stood up and turned around, and on the crack of gunshot, fell back, knocking Angus flat and the wind right out of him.

  Angus lay there sucking air, then cautiously lifted his head. Do not fall off this duckboard, he told himself. He slowly eased back. The sergeant lay between his legs, staring upward.

  “Sergeant!” Angus hissed. The sergeant’s head was angled back. How strange his face looked upside down—the cheekbones and chin sharper than before, the lips thinner, the eyes, oddly asymmetric, open to the sky. Angus brushed his fingers over a dark smudge on the forehead. But the smudge was a hole and the sergeant wasn’t blinking. A warm trickle filled Angus’s other hand from the back of the sergeant’s head. Filled it to overflowing.

  Angus ducked back down. A star shell lit the sky with a cascading trail of sparks, and everything took on its silver-white illumination. Heart in his throat, he dared to lift his head. The duckboard ended a few feet beyond, then a break, and some twenty yards out, great belts of barbed wire, and then . . . but the flare died out. He needed to get to that break.

  Trembling, he stretched out over the sergeant, whose body answered with movement of its own. Angus imagined the two of them rolling off the side, sinking in, never heard from again. The duckboard listed to the left just as Angus reached an arm beyond the sergeant’s boots. He elbowed his way to the end, rolled over the edge and into a ditch on top of a pile of sandbags. The forward trench! No sentries. No sign of life. Abandoned—long ago, from the look of it.

  Keeping his head low, he lunged for the sergeant’s boots as the torso slipped into a water-filled hole. There the sergeant lay, half in and half out. And there lay Angus, stretched out of the trench holding the man’s boots with both hands. The boots rattled against the boards. He gripped them tighter, but they kept at it. It was his own hands shaking. All he could think of was helping the sergeant, the two of them somehow finding the 17th.

  A sudden crack and a winging zip, and Angus was at the bottom of the trench, bent double—chest, neck, stomach, limbs clenched. The sandbags at the parapet were missing. Blown in. Blown away. No wonder the sniper had such a clear shot. Angus started crawling down the ditch, catching his knees on his greatcoat, crawling over—what—bodies? No, sandbags. Ripped open some of them, his hands sinking into their oozing contents.

  Some ten yards along, the filled-in trench angled down. Protected by an intact parapet and timbered trench wall, he sat back and hung his head and stared at his hands. Blood on the battlefields of France and Flanders shares kinship with the precious blood of our Lord whose sacrifice was made for us. Dean Rennick’s high-flung words circled back from the pulpit to the bottom of the trench, where Angus was beginning to understand something of blood sacrifice. Sacrifice lifts us to our true humanity, our true calling; through it comes salvation, Rennick had said. Died in the bottom of a trench, no more senseless way to die, came his father’s words.

  Angus stared at the timbers in front of him, one atop another. In the hazy moonlight, the grain of the wood stood out in sharp relief. Oak, Angus thought. Against the noxious air he conjured up creosote on the town wharf and fragrant wood shavings curling under a boat in Mader’s shed, and the tangle of oars, trap buoys, nets, linnet. And there was Simon Peter, clear as day, smiling at the shed door, sun framing his blond head, sunlight sparking the harbor beyond. Angus opened his eyes, and the grain of the timbers became narrow slots through which he might slip unnoticed and never look back.

  When the trembling stopped, he risked his silhouette against the next German flare. Two boots on the rim of the shell hole were slowly sinking in, and with them, the sergeant disappeared.

  “Wickham,” Angus whispered into the night. “John Wickham.”

  “BAD NEWS ABOUT Wickham,” the captain said when, in the wee hours, Angus finally made it to the 17th. “A good man. Fought as a private in the Boer War. Made it to sergeant.” Tunic unbuttoned, legs wide apart beneath his kilt, dark eyes gloomy, he’d offered only a shrug to Angus’s salute. He lined up two tin cups, then poured. Not a ration of rum, but Scotch. From a bottle. “A drink to Wickham,” he said, and handed Angus a cup.

  Angus took it with a shaking, mud-crusted hand and downed the contents.

  “Another?” The captain’s broad face had a yellow tinge in the glow of the lantern. “Thought so. Won this in a bet with an unlucky quartermaster. Step above the standard-issue rum, eh?” Angus threw the Scotch back. Its burn reassured him he was alive. He took the rag the captain offered and water from a spouted can to rinse his hands and face. Mud sloughed off, blood with it, onto the dirt floor.

  “You were sent up from . . . the 183rd?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, you’re with the 17th now. The Royal Nova Scotia Highlanders, assuming you survive the next two weeks up here. Glad to see you’re in the right tartan anyway. Got your papers?”

  Angus reached into his greatcoat.

  “And close that, would you?”

  Angus looked dumbly at his coat. “The door,” the captain sighed, taking the papers. “Bastard weather. We’re either up to our knees in slime or freezing our balls off in snow. Out here where the world actually is flat and the drainage system was shelled to death two years ago, you’re wet most of the time. Take a seat.”

  Angus shoved the corrugated door shut and sat down heavily beside the plank table that served as the captain’s desk. A lantern radiated warmth. The smell of kerosene cut through the dirt and damp, and things were suddenly cozy, if a bit foggy under the low roof of the earth-and-timbered dugout.

  The captain pushed aside a rusted tin of sardines, a pair of wire cutters and a little green book, open to a page with words underline
d. The sardines and wire cutters held down a stack of disordered papers that got more disordered as Angus stared at them. His eyes slid to the book, facing him now. Homer. The Odyssey?

  “You with me, MacGrath?”

  Angus jumped. “Sir!”

  “Try to stay awake,” the captain said patiently. “And you can drop the ‘sir’ for now. It’s Jim. James McCusker Conlon. There are times when I can only tolerate so much formality. This is one of them.” He studied the papers in the light of the lantern. He was thick, broad-shouldered, as tall as Angus, and strong-looking, but soft-spoken in a way that made you pay attention. “So, how’d you come to be with us?” he was saying.

  “Major Tucker’s orders.” Tucker had sent something more detailed to Major Rushford, but Angus hadn’t met Rushford, only his adjunct, who had paired him with Wickham and sent him on up.

  “So where’s the rest of your boys?”

  “Bled into the 61st, the ones I came up with. The rest are still on the other side of the channel.”

  “You might end up wishing you were with them. Did the major say why? Outside of our need for officers? Okay. Here it is. Says here you might be of use in intelligence-gathering. Now that,” Conlon said, staring at Angus with weary eyes, “assumes intelligence on the part of the gatherer. Haven’t seen action yet. Obviously.”

  “Not yet.” Hadn’t seen action. Had just had it drop in his lap.