The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

“Many are descendants of Protestants who came here in the 1750s to farm and fish at the behest of the British. And why?” Mr. Heist paused. “Nora?”

  Nora Church, usually quick with answers, hesitated. “Why are we descended?”

  Mr. Heist closed his eyes in pain. “No, not why are we descendants. Why did the British invite people, largely from German states, to colonize these shores?”

  “To make settlements against the Catholics, I mean, the French?”

  “Precisely! On both counts. A settlement, a living fortress, if you will, of Protestants in Lunenburg against the French Catholic settlements and French forts. You see how life changes? We were against France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now, at the dawn of the twentieth, we are lined up with her against Germany. Now, where were these German-speaking settlers from, one hundred and sixty years ago?”

  Before they could answer, he loosened the strings holding the map of Europe in suspension. It crashed to the floor. Laughter rippled through the room. Simon winced. This was just the sort of thing that happened to Mr. Heist. A scholar among Philistines was how his grandfather described him. With his back to the class, Mr. Heist remained still until the laughter evaporated. “Simon,” he said.

  Simon, in charge of maps and chalkboard that day, stepped handily over the outthrust leg of Tim Bethune, collected the map and helped Mr. Heist reassemble it. When it was hung up again, Mr. Heist took up the pointer, whirled around and struck it against Germany. “Teacher’s pet,” Tim hissed as Simon resumed his seat. “Philistine,” Simon retorted, pleased at the flummoxed look the word evoked.

  “Another syllable, and we’ll be here until darkness falls.” Mr. Heist raised his brows. “Now, again, where did the German settlers come from?” When no one answered, he struck the map again. “Here. Bavaria, one of the southern states of Germany. From parts of Switzerland and eastern France as well, but it is the German states I’m focused on. Bavaria. Can we say that together?”

  “Bah-vaaar-ee-ahh,” the class repeated halfheartedly. It was 3:02. Across the hall, the primary grades were charging out of their classroom.

  Daryl Nauss drew a question mark on a scrap of paper.

  “And, up here, what do we have? Class?”

  Maisie Morin raised her hand. “Prussia,” she said with a flip of her curls.

  “Precisely, Maisie. Thank you. Prussia, another German state. Now,” again he clasped his hands behind his back, “make no mistake, the German people have a rich heritage of letters, music, science and philosophy. But the Prussians have all along stood for something else.”

  He was pacing now. His words came faster. His accent grew thicker. “Prrrussians are part of the old Junker aristocracy—arrogant, unlettered, with aspirations conceived of by the sword!” The pointer slapped the Prussian state on the map. “No less than Visigoths and Vandals before them, the Prussians are against freedom!” Another slap. “Against culture!” Another slap. “Against parl-i-a-mentary government!” A final slap. “And out of this primitive set of mind rose who? Who?” The pointer shot straight up above his balding head and nearly tipped King George sideways. Not missing a beat, Mr. Heist poked the other edge to straighten him. “Well?” he said. The whisper of laughter rippling through the class died a quick death.

  “Bismarck?” little Otto Brink, in the second row, responded.

  “Otto von Bismarck! Precisely! Thank you, Otto. Not to worry over your Christian name.”

  Little Otto sat up straighter. Mr. Heist carried on, his voice rising. “Bismarck, whose political genius led him to the highest levels of power. Under him, Germany was not united, as we see in our history book.” He held the offending book aloft. The class was mesmerized. The book was wrong?

  “Not united”—he slapped the book down, placed his fists on the desk and leaned toward the students, his voice falling to a stage whisper—“but subdued.” He straightened up. “Subdued to his iron will! And after? And then? Then he set his sights on the rest of Europe, beginning with . . . ?”

  “Alsace and Lorraine!” Simon Peter shouted. They had just covered the Franco-Prussian War.

  “Yes! Very good! Took on the weak and corrupt French government in 1870 and won. How could he not? But the Junker Prussians weren’t satisfied, were they? No! Of course not!” His voice rose again. “Intoxicated with success, they took their militaristic aspirations to the high seas, building up their navy to take over the world. Who and what stood in the way?”

  “The British navy!” Danny Boer called out.

  “The whole British Empire!” came another voice.

  “George the Fifth!”

  “The Canadian Expeditionary Force!” Zenus yelled. Then there was a rumbling of feet and the beat of hands on desks.

  “Yes! Yes!” Avon Heist shouted back at them. He tore off his spectacles and, eyes shut, pinched the bridge of his nose, as if in gratitude for students so smart. Then he narrowed his eyes at them. “And the peace-loving peoples of Bavaria? The rest of Germany?” he said, waving his spectacles about. “What of them? Held hostage to these monstrous aims! Just as the Allies are protecting your freedoms, so too will they bring freedom to the peoples of Germany! The Kaiser will fall and the Prussians will be crushed! Not the German people, the Prussians!”

  Snow was falling hard now. He slowed to the finish. “Krrraut and Hun, Bosch and Frrritz! I will not tolerate this intolerance. No, I will not. Fathers and brothers and uncles, some of them Zincks and Zwickers, Kaisers and Heislers, Nausses and Bremners, men of peaceable German heritage from all up and down this province, are this very minute fighting in the Canadian army. And a man named Fritze”—here he shook his head sadly—“was prevented from going with them.” He let that sink in. “Ostracized!” he said, looking up. “A man as Canadian as you. As Canadian as me, now fifteen years a citizen!” He stretched up a little taller than he was and yanked his vest with two hands. “Class dismissed!”

  The students, all twenty-three of them, remained seated for a fleeting second, then pounded out to the cloakroom, winding mufflers around their necks, strapping their books, pulling on hats and coats and bolting out the door. Simon Peter grabbed his jacket and looked back. Mr. Heist was again at the window.

  A hard shove and Simon was knocked to the ground. “What’re you going to do about it?” Tim whispered, jerking Simon close. “Eh? Cry to the Kraut?” He let loose a gob of spit into Simon’s ear, laughed and pushed through the door past Zenus, who leaned his head in and told Simon to hurry up for God’s sake, it was freezing out.

  Simon scuffed through the snow down Queen Street next to Zenus and behind Maisie’s group of chattering friends. “I’d like to beat that Tim Bethune to a pulp,” he said, rubbing his ear.

  “He’s got four inches and forty pounds on you. He’ll be in grade six for the rest of his life. Forget him,” Zenus answered. “Wasn’t that something, though, old Heistmeister ranting on about the Krauts and sounding just like them?”

  “Yeah. He’s not, though. He’s Canadian, like us,” Simon said. “That’s the point.” But Simon was still trying to sort it all out. Prussians, Bavarians. Parts of Germany holding other parts hostage. None of this had been said before. “You ever hear about that Mr. Fritze?”

  “Nope. Making it up, I bet.”

  They had reached Hennigar’s Dry Goods and Grocery. Maisie turned back to Simon and said she had to buy some thread for her mother to take to the Red Cross tea at Simon’s house. “You can take it to her,” she said, and led her group into the store.

  Simon rolled his eyes. “How’d I get so lucky?”

  “Forget her, too,” Zenus said. “There’s our girl.” He pointed at the store window. The two of them fell silent as they always did at the face of Little Belgium, staring out at them from a war poster behind sacks of Beaver Flour and a pyramid of canned pears. Little Belgium—a soft-featured peasant girl with dark curls loosely framing her face and a gray cloak set back on her head. The cloak fell in folds around her shoulders,
revealing a deep red dress topped with a hint of lace. In her shadowed eyes, something sad and weary; in the tilt of her head, something vulnerable and imploring. She was framed by a pale circle of gold. Above her the words have YOU any women folk worth defending? You bet they did. Below her, nearly hidden by the tinned pears, pale blue script slanted up with the words, “Remember the women of Belgium.”

  How could they forget? How could anyone forget? Poor little Belgium, raped and pillaged, houses burned, women dragged through the streets by their hair, children murdered by the swords of the advancing German hordes, exacting revenge on common citizens. And for what? Because the teeny-tiny Belgian army had chosen to defend their teeny-tiny country. “Outrageous propaganda” his grandfather called it, but to Simon and Zenus, the girl in the window was Little Belgium, and she needed rescue.

  “Just a couple more years . . .” Simon leaned forward, hands in his pockets, resting his forehead on the glass.

  “Three, if the war’s still on,” Zenus said.

  Simon jerked upright. “It will be. My grandfather’s sure of it. Besides, in a year or two, we can fake our age.”

  “Right,” Zenus agreed. “Say, how about that enlistment card? You’ve had it for a week.”

  The card was tucked away in Simon’s copybook. “A week is seven days. I get one more day with it.”

  “Let’s see it anyway. Whata ya figure, the gorilla is a Hun or a Prussian?” Zenus laughed and thrust his hand out.

  Simon squatted down and unstrapped his books. “It’s Prussian or Bavarian.”

  “Yeah . . . so, our boys over there are supposed to go up and say, ‘Howdy do. Could you tell me if you’re Bavarian or Prussian so me and my chums know whether to blow your brains out?’ A Kraut’s a Kraut. Period.”

  It did seem strange how hot and bothered Mr. Heist was over it. Simon dug through his books for the enlistment card, carefully hiding the poems, composed by Mr. Heist himself and bound into a book with covers of dark green linen. He’d told Simon he could keep it as long as he wanted because maybe Simon had some poet in him.

  “Damn it! Hurry up!” Zenus hissed. “Too late. Here they come.”

  The girls, leaning into one another, giggled their way out of the store. Maisie grabbed Simon’s hand and dropped the thread in it in a grand gesture. Simon rolled his eyes again.

  As he left the group, Zenus shouted, “Don’t forget, my turn tomorrow! Have fun with the Red Cross ladies, ya stinking Prussian!”

  Simon whipped a snowball at him. “Who ya calling a Prussian, ya blasted Kraut?”

  ALONE ON THE short bridge over the causeway to the peninsula, he lingered, watching snow fall silently onto the islands—Snake, Saddle, and beyond them, out of sight, Mountain, Mark, Woody, Lynch, Quaker, Rafuse, Clay, Gooseberry, Oak, and so many more. And to the southwest, Big Tancook and Little Tancook. Barrels of sauerkraut put up by the islanders, lined up on the Tancook wharf and lowered into the hold of the Lauralee for transport to Halifax. Kraut. Of course! He’d never made the connection before.

  He thought about poor Mr. Fritze left behind and about Mr. Heist, out on Owl’s Head Point, two inlets over, all alone with no one to cook for him. Why didn’t he live in town, people asked. But Simon knew. Mr. Heist liked to be out there in his cottage where he could play his violin and tend his garden and write his poems in peace and quiet—so quiet, he’d written in one verse, that you could hear the beating of bird wing and the soundless rise and fall of the tides.

  The sky was growing dark and obscuring the islands. Drumlins, his father called them. Drumlins is what they were—oval hills rising up from the bay, not those dark outcroppings along the Maine coast, his father said, with their straggling trees clinging desperately to jagged rocks, but rounded mounds of islands, sloping down from the high windward side to a lee beach tail. Made by the glacier’s retreat, perhaps. Who knew? It wasn’t known. It wasn’t important. The shape was what mattered. Rounded ovals, “the rounding of a woman’s hip, the oval of a whaleback, the curve of the earth itself. Feast your eyes on them,” his father told him. “No shape more pleasing to man.” Nowhere else in all the world were drumlins so perfectly protected, thanks to the cliffs of Ironbound and Pearl Islands at the mouth of the bay. Beyond those last two, stretching out to the edge of wonder, was the rounded curve of the earth’s blue orb.

  Snow swirled and vanished in the black water. Nothing, his father said, is black and white. Simon turned in the late afternoon gloom up the hill toward the house, and the snow turned gray before his eyes.

  THE WOMEN WERE crowding into the front hall, rubbing their hands and shaking snow off their boots. Gracious, when would the snow stop and wasn’t it bitter out and didn’t the fire smell good? Cold air clung to their wraps. Simon let it engulf him as he hung them on the wooden pegs. He helped his mother move the table closer to the hearth and pulled up a chair for old Mrs. Bethune, who said, as she always did, “I’ll need a good stiff-backed chair that I don’t sink into, Simon Peter, or I might never get up.” He looked down at the top of her little gray head. If only she knew what a rotter her grandson was.

  Young Fred wandered in, a couple of pencils in each fist, and found himself a spot under the parlor desk where, not surprisingly, his pencil people entered into a heated argument. Young Fred’s pencil people talked a great deal more than he did. Their differences were rarely settled.

  Simon pulled out a chair for Lady Bromley, who waved him off, saying she had things to dig out of her bag first. There was a good deal of talk about how Simon had grown, which he hadn’t. The man of the house now, they said. He smiled and nodded, which was all the response they wanted, except for Delsie Walker, who took his hand and asked how his father was.

  There was a sigh of relief when Ida bustled through the back door with apple squares to round out the crumbling shortbread his mother had made. “Your mother is many things, but a good cook isn’t one of them,” his Uncle Ebbin used to say as she set out failed bread, thin chowder or roast that stuck in your throat. She’d just shrug as if there were more important things in life than good cooking.

  To Ida, there was nothing more important than good cooking, except maybe a clean floor. Nearly as old as his grandfather, the muscles in her short arms still jumped when she rolled out dough or kneaded bread. And lord help the bread if it didn’t rise fast enough. She reminded Simon of a stout little kettle, bubbling over.

  “Simon,” Delsie was saying. “I have a new book for you. Came to me by way of Dr. McInnis in Halifax.”

  “Is it a novel?” asked Mrs. Bethune, suddenly animated. “I do like those. They can be stirring!”

  “I’m so glad to hear you say that,” Delsie said, patting her hand. “You must tell me what authors you like, and I’ll try to get them in.” The library was in her house.

  Lady Bromley muttered darkly about current-day rubbish, but Delsie rifled through her yarn bag. “First Voyage, it’s called. A boy who runs off on a ship to South America. Just your sort of adventure. Well, oh dear . . . looks like I forgot it. Stamped and everything.”

  Lady Bromley cleared her throat in disapproval—at the book or the delay in the proceedings or both—and asked for her shawl. Simon draped it around her shoulders. She slid her spectacles from the leather case on a black cord round her neck and gathered her papers.

  “Lady B.” was what Simon’s father called her. She’d once been plain Hespera Church—something to remember when she was on her high horse, his grandfather liked to say. She’d fancied him in her youth, but her affections were not returned. Late in life, visiting relatives in England, she’d met and married Lord Edward Andrew Thurston Bromley—a man of title, a man of many promises, older than she, and thin as a rail. Back in Snag Harbor, he sat on the porch in summer, by the fire in winter, starting each day with a pint of beer and ending it the same way with nothing much going on in between. Undaunted by his lack of dash and property, Lady B. had assumed title enough for them both. And a bit of his British accent to boot.<
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  The accent was in force as she suggested to Simon he might want to hear the first order of business. When he’d seen her the day before at the post office, she’d mentioned starting a local chapter of the Blue Cross, “Our Dumb Friends League,” to support the horses in wartime. They’d had a nice talk about the help horses might need—stables to sleep in, blankets (“dreadful winter over there”), hay and oats, of course, and rubdowns after charging forth. She’d set her mail down and looked Simon square in the eye and said that he was as patriotic as the next boy and not to forget it. He liked hearing the word “patriotic” attached to himself.

  It was not a word heard in the MacGrath house unless spat out in one of his grandfather’s rants. Never mentioned by his mother, certainly. Even with his father in the Front Lines, she took neither inspiration nor comfort in words about love of country, duty or sacrifice. Once, when Simon pressed her for her opinion on the war, she shrugged and said, “What I think isn’t important. I’m not the one in it. If I was, I’d be for it, as every man over there must be to survive. But since men I love are in it, I’m against it.”

  Across the table from Lady Bromley, his mother leaned for the bandage basket. Loose strands of her hair drifted down. She tucked them back with hazy indifference. Her slim ankles were crossed beneath her green wool skirt, her feet shod in shoes of a bright blue with short black heels and an openwork pattern of blue leather laces. No one had laces like that, nor blue shoes. Not that color blue. His father had bought them for her in Yarmouth. Sky-blue shoes for a blue-sky summer day, he’d said with a rare carefree smile. She was so beautiful, it didn’t matter, really, what her hair looked like or whether her shoes were right for winter. Her features were as fine as cut glass, but then, too, there was something slightly unraveled about her, some loose thread that Simon would very much have liked to have knotted up, but for which he was ready to defend her. In her world, clothes did not matter and time did not pass until she happened to glance at a clock. She could spend hours making fancy labels for jams, oblivious to the jam itself burning down to nothing on the stove.