by P. S. Duffy
Next to her, Ida, needles clacking, was turning out socks just like the ones she’d made for his father. Edith Andrews and Flora Zinck measured and snipped gauze and bandages, which Enid Rafuse and Delsie rolled to exacting Red Cross specifications. Maisie’s mother sat back under the lamp sewing rolled hems on handkerchiefs. Mrs. Bethune was already asleep.
With many-chinned authority, Lady Bromley called the meeting to order, corrected Enid’s minutes and approved his mother’s treasurer’s report. “Accurate, as always, Hettie, thank you.”
His mother shrugged. “Numbers,” she told Simon when he struggled over them, “are comforting. They never lie.” She kept the books for Simon’s grandfather. “You’re a wonder,” he’d say, shaking his head over a four-cent error she’d spotted or her offhand yet invariably accurate projection of net gains for the next quarter. “Been to the oracle, have you?” he’d ask. “Perhaps,” she’d say with an air of secret amusement.
Lady Bromley smoothed out a letter. “This comes to us from a member of the Woman’s Patriotic League of Toronto. She has a job for us. What she wants is sphagnum.”
“Sphagnum?” Flora asked. The women stopped rolling. Ida stopped knitting.
“Yes, Flora, sphagnum moss. We can’t collect it now, but come spring, we can and should.”
“Why ever would they want them mosses?” Ida asked.
“Because,” Lady Bromley read, “sphagnum ‘can absorb twenty-five times its weight in liquid, more quickly than cotton, retains and distributes fluids better, and is more soothing.’ That’s what the letter says.”
“You mean peat moss,” Ida broke in. “We’re to put peat into dressings.”
“Exactly, my dear Ida.” Lady Bromley smiled with unmasked condescension. “Highlanders have used it to treat boils and wounds for centuries. Here, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has a comment on what he calls the ‘widespread persistence of sepsis.’ ” She ran a finger down the letter. “He says that last year they estimated that the minimum number of dressings needed would be thirty per man. And he says with the cost of cotton rising, sphagnum would be an excellent alternative.”
“Thirty dressings per man?” Maisie’s mother whispered.
Simon pictured a man with thirty wounds, patched together with sphagnum dressings.
“Thirty per man . . .” Enid Rafuse echoed.
“It’s an estimate, a mathematical average,” Lady Bromley said, looking to Hettie for confirmation.
“Did you hear about Rutherford Lynch over to Western Shore? Came back last week. Blinded by gas,” Ida put in. “I wonder how poor George Mather’s doing. Haven’t seen him in months.”
“Terrorizes his poor mother, I’ve heard. She’s afraid to bring him to town,” Flora said. “He poked my backside with one of his crutches at the post office last time I saw him.”
“They say he’s lost his mind since he’s come back. He’s a menace,” Enid whispered. “He should be put away for his own sake . . . and his mother’s.”
“Ladies, please!” Lady Bromley broke in. “Let’s not sink into discouraging talk. Our duty is to keep spirits lifted. Our boys depend on it. Now, here’s where you come in, Simon. Organize some of your chums to gather moss from the bogs.” She peered over her glasses. “How does that suit you?”
“Fine,” Simon said. A manly way to do his bit.
“You’re a stouthearted youngster, Simon. Maybe get your grandfather involved.”
Glances were exchanged around the table. Lady Bromley sighed. “No, I suppose not. You’d think with his own son in it now. Well . . . Let’s see, we’re to clean and ship the moss to Halifax or Saint John. Obviously, we’ll ship it to Halifax. Our own provincial Red Cross will be perfectly capable of making sphagnum dressings to spec. This is a great opportunity, a great war effort. Are we agreed?”
The women agreed.
“Except,” Simon’s mother said, retrieving a bandage that had unraveled across the table, “we shouldn’t promise a set amount until we know what it takes to collect and clean it and how many men are around to help in the spring, with the fleet out.”
Lady Bromley exhaled a long, loud breath. “Yes, yes. Thinking ahead. Good for you, Hettie. But you see, we’re just trying to settle on a single effort, and I think we agree this is a good one.”
Simon’s mother brushed his back with a featherweight touch. “Get the tea ready, would you?” In the kitchen he rearranged his mother’s random placement of cups on saucers—the rose cup on the rose saucer, the sweet-pea cup on the sweet-pea saucer—until they matched. The cups and the scalloped silver tray on which they sat had belonged to his grandmother Lauralee MacGrath, who’d come from Halifax, where ladies’ teas had been the order of the day long before they’d been introduced for the war effort in Snag Harbor. Simon set the kettle to boil and put the comfort boxes he’d made on top of the basket of socks and gloves, wristlets, mufflers and sleeping caps knit by women too busy with chores and children to attend a ladies’ tea.
He’d made four comfort boxes that month with money he’d earned at Mader’s boatyard. He lifted the lid off one to admire the contents. Clean handkerchiefs! A chocolate bar to share with my chums! He waved the chocolate bar around, then rooted through the rest of the box. Look here now, pins to patch my uniform and string to tie my gloves to my belt. And a razor and soap to lather up with! A good razor was IMMEASURABLY APPRECIATED IN THE TRENCHES FOR THEIR SUPERIOR KEENNESS, the adverts in the Halifax Chronicle proclaimed. the 85TH HIGHLANDERS OVERSEAS BATTALION, SONS OF ROBERT THE BRUCE, USE GILLETTE! THE LUSTY BEARDS OF SCOTTISH BLOOD GROW EVEN LUSTIER IN THE VIGOROUS LIFE OF ACTIVE SERVICE. The man with thirty wounds might need a nurse to open his box for him, but it would bring comfort and a clean shave. He’d know he wasn’t forgotten.
Simon replaced the lid, pulled on his gloves, and leaped over the back steps. Snow was coming hard, a million flecks of ash against the slate sky. But on the ground, they fell flake on flake, each one glittering on top of the one beneath. He blew out a long breath, watched it hang in the air, then dashed into the path he’d dug to the sheds. He ran, then crouched, aware at every step of snipers nested behind the raspberry bushes, dug in on the slope to the west, watching his every move. Him without so much as a rifle. He had to make it to the shed. Now! Run for it! Fritz was spraying his machine guns at the trench. But wait! A Mills bomb in his jacket! One left. He pulled it out, released the pin, and tossed it into the raspberry bushes. BAM! Fifty Germans flung fifty feet in the air. Mad brutes! He didn’t have time to watch. He was at the shed, bursting through, panting. He was a wonder! He was his father’s son.
He collected the logs, carried them in, and dumped them in the bin by the kitchen stove. The wind moaned around the eaves. He considered the next installment of the story he was telling Young Fred at bedtime—a story loosely based on Treasure Island with himself as Jim Hawkins and Young Fred as a character he named “Finn Venable.” He gave a quick check to the goings-on in the parlor. Satisfied it was safe, he flipped open his copybook and withdrew the enlistment card.
The crouching ape in his German spike-tipped helmet leered up at him, clutching the fainting maiden in his brutish arm, her thin gown soaked and torn and twisted, one breast barely covered by her loosened hair, the other actually exposed. Simon focused on the breast, the faint nipple, the rounded curve. Behind the ape, a sinking navy ship, and beyond it, a town in flames. The ape’s raging mouth exposed pointed fangs. In his free hand he carried a spiked club with the word “Kultur” dripping in blood on it. Culture—just as Mr. Heist had said. Culture and decency dragged into the mud by the Prussians. DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE! arced over the ape’s head in orange block letters. ENLIST! was printed at the bottom.
“Simon! Is that water boiling yet?” a distant voice called out.
The kettle! He threw his book on the table, grabbed a towel and lifted the kettle off the stove. His mother materialized by his side. She finished making the tea and ferried the pot
, wrapped in the towel, into the parlor. He lifted the tray of cups and set it back down. The card. Where was it?
“My, what’s this?” A gagging noise from Enid Rafuse. He rushed to the parlor where Delsie and Flora were slapping her on the back. Lady Bromley snatched up the card from her hand and adjusted her spectacles. Simon felt himself go warm, then cold. Young Fred came out from under the desk and stood by Lady Bromley. “Let me see! Let me see!” he cried, reaching up for the card.
“Good day, ladies!” Simon’s grandfather called from the kitchen. He stamped the snow off his feet and strode in. “Sorry to interrupt. Snow’s coming hard and the wind’s kicked up. Might be a blizzard. I just saw Walter Zinck coming up the road to fetch some of you, and I’ve got Rooster chomping at the bit, ready to take the rest of you home . . .” He stopped short at the face-fanning and throat-clutching. “What’s all this now? Has Enid taken a pale spell?”
“A bit of a shock, is all, from a recruitment card,” Lady Bromley said.
“Recruitment card? Are you passing those out to the ladies here, Hespera? Figuring they’ll join up?” His tone was light, but he was clearly not amused. “Let’s have a look.”
“It was attached to the teapot and towel. A rather graphic display of the Hun’s treachery. Not for the faint of heart.” Lady Bromley held the card to her chest, staring pointedly at Enid, who cleared her throat and declared herself recovered.
Like the unfolding of a bad dream, Simon watched his grandfather take the card, hold it at arm’s length, and slowly lower it. With his back to Simon, he said, “Where did this come from?” He waited until Simon said softly, “It’s mine, sir.”
“No reason to get after the boy, Duncan,” Lady Bromley said, adjusting her shawl. “It may violate decency, but if it promotes enlistment, then we have to say it is perfectly legitimate.” Young Fred was twisting his head upside down to see the card. Hettie pulled him into her lap.
“Perfectly legitimate—this slathering ape?”
“A depiction of the enemy, Duncan.”
“Prussians,” Simon blurted out. “Not all Germans, just Prussians.” His grandfather slowly turned to him. “Mr. Heist. He said it’s not Germans,” Simon stammered. “Not Bavarians, anyway—it’s the Prussians started it. He said so. Not all of Germany. So the ape must be . . . Prussian.”
“You got this from Avon Heist?” Duncan’s eyes went wide.
“No! No sir. From Hennigar’s. Mr. Heist was just saying in class that it was the Prussians. They’re against freedom. They—”
“Mr. Heist!” Lady Bromley threw her shoulders back. “What’s he on about, splitting hairs over who is and is not the enemy? At present we’re at war with all of Germany, I believe, and Herr Heist would do well to remember that!”
Staring right at her, Duncan ripped the card down the middle, and ripped it again.
“Don’t you look at me that way, Duncan. What do we know about him anyway, out there on the Point all alone? What’s he doing tricking our students? Parceling up Germany into Bavarians and Prussians and who knows what. It’s ridiculous. Unpatriotic, and just what one might expect from—”
“From . . . ?” Duncan sprinkled the shreds into the fire where flames licked them to curling ash—the beast, the breast and all. He turned to the women and in an even tone said, “I’ve got Rooster hitched up and can take you ladies home. The snow will be getting worse before it gets better.”
In equally measured words Lady Bromley said, “Thank you, Duncan. A most generous offer. We can meet at my house next Thursday. We have our boys overseas to think of. There’s a war on.” She collected her papers and put her spectacles in their case.
As the women gathered their things, Duncan clamped his hand on Simon’s shoulder without looking at him and said, “I’m ashamed of you and for you.”
When he was gone, Simon marched to the kitchen and threw on his father’s heavy wool shirt. He slammed the door and didn’t care. Ashamed, was he? His father wouldn’t be ashamed of an enlistment card.
In the unyielding cold of the woodshed, everything was still. Next to the wood pile, the door to his father’s art shed stood open a crack. The padlock hung at an angle from the latch. Just like that. Who’d have done it? Who had the key? His mother? His grandfather? Ida? They had no right.
He poked the door with two fingers. It swung open in silent invitation. He ducked under the old beam and went down the two steps into the room and breathed in his father in the turpentine and linseed oil. In the gathering twilight he made out curled tubes of paint, stiff with cold, a jar of brushes, a scatter of sketches. On the broad shelf by the row of south-facing windows, the cans of turpentine, pens, an old inkwell and a pile of rags took shape. To the left of the woodstove, his father’s paint-splattered stool.
Simon glanced at the sketches. A curlew in flight. A single herring gull. Two loons in charcoal. Some boats and seascapes. The kind of pictures his father sold up in Halifax and along the way on cargo runs. He lifted a piece of chalk from its case and put it back. He unscrewed the cap of a tube of oil paint and sniffed it.
He turned to go, but stopped at the sight of a sheet-shrouded canvas, three times the size of all the others, on the easel in the corner. He hesitated only a moment before pulling off the sheet. Rough splotches of color filled the lower half of the canvas. Simon had to step back for it to take shape. A dory? A rowboat? The beginning of an oar here, the man’s hand on it. Another hand, a boy’s hand, hovering above it. The start of torsos, the boy between the man’s legs, yes, silver paint splattered everywhere around them, and then the canvas was blank. It was as if the man and the boy were rowing from the room right into the bottom of the picture, as if standing there, he was on the boat himself. Then he realized he was. Collar up, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, he did not move until darkness fell around him.
FIVE
February 18th, 1917
Arras Sector, France
“ February 18th, 1917,” Angus wrote at the top of the tablet in his lap. He ran a filthy hand through his filthy hair. The sack of censored letters slumped beside him on the frozen ground of the dugout. Some he’d censored himself, as was required of junior officers—a task he found embarrassing, and one which Publicover sailed through on the winds of duty. I get through mine in ten minutes flat, he told Angus. Just scan for anything that reveals location or tactics and for grievances against king and country, the CEF or the top brass. No need to get bogged down with memories of apple blossoms or hopes for Aunt Bertie’s recovery.
In the process Angus had learned a few things about his men—that some, like Boudrey, could barely write; that Katz, McNeil and Wertz could turn a phrase with ease; and that some wrote no letters at all. Many were homesick, some heartsick, but they generally refrained from self-pity. Survival demanded that someone, somewhere, had it worse.
There was about an hour of daylight left, Angus figured, maybe twenty minutes of it to himself. By midnight, he’d be gone. His men, too. Off the Front Line trenches and back to the camps a few miles behind the line to drill and train, and then sent up again in the regular rotation. Two weeks done. Still alive.
He stared at the page and flexed his hand. “Dear Family” he began, then wrote with abandon,
As I write this, I’m still alive, though God knows why because, despite the unrelenting boredom, the possibility of death is in every corner, every timber, every moldering bag of sand, in the very air we breathe and the filth we lie in. It is in the faces of the men and in my every dream. As we wait and wait some more, spirits are kept up with fresh news of the enemy’s treachery which we in turn inflict. It is a grim madness in which grand purpose is lost and men die regardless. As for Ebbin, I am no closer to the truth than I was before I left.
He flipped the page over. Get a grip. At the very least he had to respond to Hettie’s letter telling him that her parents had gotten word—Ebbin had been officially declared missing in action. “At least not ‘known dead.’ Missing suggests hope,
” she’d written. Christ.
He blew on his hands and picked up the pen. The pen had curves in mind. That was the problem. The rounded head and upturned throat of a speckled lark, the V of its beak opened in song. Sketching would settle him. Write! he told himself.
He stared down at the mail sack. Half the letters in it were Field Service Postcards. This was the choice of Boudrey, who dutifully filled one out every day. Angus helped him memorize the boxes you could check: “I am quite well” or “I have been admitted to hospital.” After the word “hospital,” you could pick “sick” or “wounded,” followed by either “and am getting on well” or “hope to be discharged soon.” There were no options for “my arm’s been blown off” or “been blinded by gas” or “the doctors don’t think I’ll recover.” If there had been, they would have been followed by “but otherwise in the pink.” Thus, the ranks could send word home without actually sending words.
Which seemed an excellent idea. Words were too paltry and powerful, both. To write home was to evoke home. And to evoke home was to risk images of home that, like whirring shrapnel, could slice through the simplest of tasks and render him impotent.
Should he write about his first patrol and the mortar attack that left him uncertain which way was up and left the sergeant, Ricketts, not ten feet away, with his throat sliced open? Keegan was elevated to sergeant the next day. Whizbangs, Angus had learned, gave a warning whiz on release, but were so fast to explode it didn’t much matter. Like so much else at the Front, mortar attacks seemed disconnected from human motives, launched by a shadowy menace across the void who every now and then showed a helmet, fired a gun, raised a sausage.
Which again made him think of the bird. And the German.
He’d seen them both that morning. Wertz, Hanson and Boudrey were crouched near a pot of water, waiting for tea. Boudrey, the mouth-breather, was so young and gullible, he’d taken on the status of a mascot. The men figured if he made it through, they would, too. Just as the water began to steam, the heady smell of cooked sausages wafted over the sandbags. It filled the nostrils and made the mouth water.
