by P. S. Duffy
The sun was squeaking through the heavy clouds by then and the rain had stopped. Charlotte said she’d better be going. He asked if she’d like to go sailing sometime. He’d find a boat. She was game, she said. Anytime.
Outside, the damp air was laden with a heavy smell of low tide. She took a long, deep breath. “I can tell you about that one time, if you like.”
“Now?”
“Yes.” And without further hesitation she told him about the Yardley-Ransoms, neighbors in London, and how their son Jack was killed at the Somme, and Mrs. Yardley-Ransom was shut up in her room for weeks. And how one day Charlotte heard some words clear as a bell in Jack’s voice. It happened three times in a row. She told Mr. Yardley-Ransom, and he told his wife, and after that she came downstairs for the first time. “She kissed me and hugged me,” Charlotte said in wistful conclusion, “as I had never been hugged before or since.”
Everything about the story struck Simon as true and terribly sad. After a moment he asked, “What’d he say, this Jack?”
“He said, ‘I’m lucky.’ ”
“Lucky,” Simon repeated, incredulous. “That was it? Lucky?”
“Yes,” Charlotte replied, as if lucky was a perfectly reasonable thing for a dead man to say. “Lucky to be out of the war, maybe.”
“But he was dead.”
“I know.” She walked a ways down the wharf and looked down at the float. Philip’s rowboat was glistening with raindrops and half full of water. Simon pointed to a starfish clinging to a piling above it. “Will it survive without water?” Charlotte asked. He assured her it would. The starfish could climb down to the water if need be, but the tide would come in again. Charlotte bent down to look more closely at the starfish, now slowly stretching one foot out and hunching another in to move down the wet piling. “They had another son, Edmund,” she sighed, “with this contraption holding his face together. That’s how he came back in 1915. People looked away. He and I used to sit together in their garden . . . I’d sometimes talk for him when we were together and he’d nod yes or no for his end of the conversation.” She lowered her eyes and could not go on.
“That was good for him, I bet,” Simon said. “Bet he was lonely.”
She gave a few quick nods of her head. “It was when I was sitting with him on the stone bench in their garden that I heard Jack’s voice.” Her lip quivered.
“I believe you,” Simon said. He took her hand. “I do.”
She nodded and turned to go. Simon walked her to the steps leading up to the road and said good-by, then walked back along the wharf past the piled-up lobster traps and on down the ramp to the float. He tipped the tender up and rocked it enough to spill out most of the water, then checked the starfish’s progress. He turned around at the sound of footsteps, expecting Philip, and saw Zenus instead, sauntering down the wharf. He stood looking down at Simon, arms folded.
“Never guess who I just saw—Miss Charlotte Victoria Plante. Said she was down here with you.”
“No she didn’t,” Simon said, without glancing up.
Zenus took out a rolled cigarette, lit it and came down the ramp. He passed it to Simon. Simon took a long drag and let the world go off-kilter and come back again.
“She didn’t need to,” Zenus said, leaning against the wet rowboat in his oilskins. “So what were you up to with her, eh? Seeing if the wharf would stand her weight?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Fetching Dad from the tavern, what else? Don’t tell Ma.”
“You’re always fetching him. You don’t tell her?”
“Are you kidding? If I told her every time I had to fetch Dad out of the tavern, she’d have killed me by now for letting him go in.”
“I’m serious. You lie to her, every time?”
“Simon, my boy, you’re always serious. Lately, anyway. Thinking of lying to your ma about being with Charlotte?”
“No.”
“Liar,” Zenus said.
“Yeah, I was with her. Give me another puff, there.”
“Take it. I gotta get Dad anyway afore he ties one on with Philip.”
WHEN SIMON GOT back to the house, his mother was on her bed, taking a pale spell, just as Young Fred had said. Simon sat down at the foot of the bed. “I saw Charlotte and she had a message.” How easy it was to lie when the lie was in service of the truth. “She only gets one per customer. Swear you’ll never breathe a word. Or she’ll get in trouble.”
Astonished, as he knew she would be, his mother sat up. “What are you talking about? What message?”
“He said, ‘I’m lucky.’ ”
“Lucky?”
“That’s what he said. Maybe . . . maybe better off—you know, in heaven, which is where he is and where he sent the message from.” He took her hand in his. “I’m sorry, Ma.”
“Did she say he was dead?” his mother asked. “No, she didn’t. I can see right through you, Simon. You didn’t get a message, and she didn’t say he was dead.”
Simon flung himself back across the bed and put his arm over his eyes. His mother lay back beside him.
They stayed like that, listening to Ida banging pots around the kitchen and the steady murmur of voices below until the voices grew faint and the sky began to lose its color. A languid contentment spread over them as they lay side by side, neither of them stirring, neither trying to convince the other of anything, as if they were drifting on a raft, lifting gently over the currents. He wasn’t even sure what he believed. And was there any harm, really, in her thinking Ebbin was alive? There was no body. And no message either . . .
“Remember that picture your father painted of the phalarope? Just the belly and feet, one foot clinging to Lynch bell buoy?” his mother said in a dreamy voice.
“Sure, I do.” This, too, this unexpected reference to his father, to his painting, seemed a fragile floating-up of something. The painting had the phalarope in close-up atop Lynch bell during a storm. There was something immensely sad about that one foot clinging, or immensely hopeful. When he finished it, his father had swept Simon up on his shoulders, marched out of the shed and up the slope and around the well, grabbing Simon’s small hands in his and stretching his arms out. He and his father filled the yard, the sky above, and the ocean beyond. They were the only ones who liked the phalarope.
“He loved that painting. Whatever happened to it, I wonder . . .”
“I don’t know. Did you like it?”
“I didn’t understand it. What was the point of bird feet on a bell buoy? But now, I think I know.”
“What?”
“Phalaropes—whale-birds, sailors call them—travel in huge flocks out at sea. And here was just this one. Feathers ruffled in a cross wind. One foot up . . . as if deciding if it was safe there on the buoy or better off flying on.”
“Which do you figure?”
“Hard to say, but either way, very much alone.”
FOURTEEN
April 6th, 1917
Arras Sector, France
Keegan, spewing dirt, was filling one sandbag after another like the short-armed troll that he was. “You should get a medal for trench repair,” Angus whispered to him. Maybe Keegan had been a gravedigger in another life. Then again, maybe he was one now. The gravedigger of Happy Holly Trench. One more night, Angus kept saying to himself. One more night. So far, not a man wounded. Not one killed. It was all he cared about. That and getting the trench deep enough for men to stand in, which it just about was. His platoon had been digging four nights straight, returning to camp before dawn and heading back at sundown. To the southeast the sharp report of field guns and the boom of artillery shuddered through the night, rolled down, and started up again. The massive preliminary bombardment had been stepped up, a daily allotment of 2,500 tons of shells, most of them fired at night. The men dug all the faster—the thundering roar spurring them on.
A few men down from Keegan, Hiller was fumbling with a burlap bag, seemingly unsure of how to fill it. “Just d
o it,” Angus snapped.
Happy Holly, an abandoned trench now to be used as a jumping-off point, was so filled in and shallow that first night that it had left them all exposed, silhouettes with shovels at the edge of No Man’s Land. “Suicide,” Katz muttered. “Get to work,” Angus had commanded, a cold sweat breaking out on his face.
Their camp was behind the Lorette Spur. Beyond it a valley led up to Gouy-Servins. In the valley lay 80,000 bodies, exactly where they’d fallen two years before—still aboveground. Some said the two opposing sides had been through too much to collect them. Some said there was too much hatred on both sides to allow the standard recovery and burial. Some said they were left there to remind them all of their own fate.
The 17th had been meant to camp in an abandoned town, but shells had upended the village graveyard, and splintered coffins had sluiced down the hill in the rain where the public well received their rotting contents, contaminating the water. The march to Fouquet Wood took them well within range of the Kraut guns. Eight shells exploded as their pipe and drum corps piped them on. The dead and wounded were hauled away on stretchers. Amid the broken drums and a crumpled trumpet, Roddy Gordon squatted down and turned a set of ruined bagpipes over in his hands. A young private named Brady asked Wertz if it might not have been better to suffer typhoid or haul in water to the last camp than to have his best friend die with his legs blown off in this one. Wertz replied that it would be best to refrain from making friends altogether. Katz noted they might do better without the band.
The date of the attack, “Z-day,” was not yet known, but the orders showed the 17th would be attached in reserve to the 45th to make up for losses and to be “in support.” Conlon explained that their brigade would be relegated to “tasks under,” which meant hauling in supplies and ammunition, and clearing out German trenches, supporting the first wave if needed. The 45th was Ebbin’s battalion. It was this stunning news that Angus carried with him on that last night of digging.
But he also carried something else. Ambrose, a gunnery captain from the 45th, bragging about their exploits back in camp, mentioned a fellow named Havers who’d joined them sometime around Courcelette. A secret weapon, he called him.
“You know him?” Angus half-stood, and quickly sat down. “Why, do you?” Ambrose asked, arching an eyebrow. “No, no,” Angus heard himself saying. “Heard of him is all. Just wondering if what they say is true.”
“Yeah,” Publicover broke in. “What’s he done, this secret weapon of yours, that’s so impressive?”
Ambrose replied that Havers had been in it from the beginning and hadn’t a scratch on him. Bullets didn’t touch him. Single-handedly took out nine Bosche, armed only with his bayonet, at Thiepval. Might be up for a DSO.
Rosenbek, a laconic lieutenant attached to the Ottawa Rifles and en route to HQ, stretched out his long legs and said he’d heard of Havers, too—a lance corporal, right? But thought he was with another unit. He heard it was a Mills bomb that took out those Krauts. Havers had made a name for himself long before Thiepval, as early as Ypres, Rosenbek said, but there was no one left who could remember how.
The conversation turned to the big push, and Angus staggered out into the sleeting rain. Roddy followed. “You alright, mate?” he asked. When Angus didn’t reply, he flung an arm around him. “I’m thinking we should maybe capture this Havers from the 45th and make him one of our own.”
Angus fumbled for a match. Dropped his cigarette. Roddy leaned back, hand still on Angus’s shoulder, and squinted at him.
Angus stared at the disintegrating cigarette. “Stuff of myth, don’t you think?” he finally got out.
“Aye,” Roddy said with a grin. “That’s why we need him.”
IN THE DAYS that followed, the strange and fantastic crouched beside Angus in the ditch where their digging continued under the watchful eye of the enemy, who had not fired a shot. It made no sense, yet it was so. Beyond Keegan’s squat form, Hiller stood, his shovel rattling against his pick in the hardened dirt. Keegan shoved him roughly. Told him to get to work. Hiller paid no attention, but the others did. Angus pushed past and grabbed Hiller’s shoulder. Maybe he was nuts, maybe not, but there was nothing for it now except to get the digging done and get out. He wasn’t about to let Hiller jeopardize that. He yanked him close and said in his ear, “See these men? As scared as you. Except they’re doing their job. I’m ordering you. Pick up that shovel and dig. Don’t make me press the point, goddamn it.” He pulled back his greatcoat, hand on his revolver.
Hiller’s nose twitched. He squinted at Angus, then bent double, stood up, and entered into a loose-limbed, jaw-smacking dance, holding his shovel across his chest then stretching it up over his head. Angus lunged for him as the shovel, tossed high in the air, glinted against the flare of a Verey light.
The bullet-riddled shovel sailed over the trench as the sandbags above them exploded with a thousand bullets. Tanner, up on the trench ladder, thudded to the ground, both eyes shot out. Hiller’s jaw was severed from his face. The rest of them flattened in the ditch. Angus refused to look at Hiller’s profusely bleeding corpse. Hating one of his own; it had come to that.
Lying next to Hiller, arms over his head as the bullets screamed through the air and pelted the ground above, Angus saw the 80,000 rise up from the valley—their rotting corpses not yet turned to dust. Exposed, unsheltered, they continued their hollow-eyed march—neither of this world nor the next. They pressed against Angus to make things right, to keep the stench of meaningless waste at bay. To make every act a footprint that said, I was here; this was worth it—this ditch I’m digging, this traverse I’m building, this cable I’m laying, this mule team I’m leading, this gun I’m oiling, this water I’m hauling, this ammunition I’m packing, this bayonet I’m sharpening. Worth it, worth it, worth it. If not, they all may as well throw their shovels in the air, run out naked into No Man’s Land, yapping and stammering and declaring the Hillers of the world visionaries. And by so doing relegate those 80,000 souls and Brady’s limbless friend, and Wickam and Dickey, Orland and now Tanner, all of them, to a permanent, unhallowed place, where they’d be forever stuck to the living in unholy communion.
He rose up, grabbed Hiller’s rifle, and risked flying bullets to shove it between the jumping sandbags, and began to fire. He hadn’t a hope in hell of silencing the machine gun, but he wasn’t about to die facedown in the dirt. Three shots later, a velvet silence fell around them like a curtain.
Under the blinking stars above, the men slowly lifted their heads and got to their knees. They looked at each other, and then at Angus, with the wonder reserved for a god.
“Keep digging,” Angus said. “Dig like mad.”
BACK AT CAMP, they were told the date for the battle had been set for two days hence, April 8th, Easter morning. “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Chaplain Mercer intoned at the open-air service that Saturday evening. Angus had prayed for Tanner and Hiller and for himself because his prayer for Hiller was without a shred of sincerity. Whether it was proper to thank God for silencing the gun that last night in the trench, he did not know. Miracles were not something he was accustomed to.
Angus found Conlon later, reading his little green book. “Nothing like the resurrection to bring one comfort, but I have a feeling the men will need more than that,” Conlon said.
When he gathered C Company for the last time before the battle, that evening, Conlon reminded them why they were there. Who they were up against. Reminded them of the 150,000 who had tried to take the ridge before them and failed, and of those who had given their lives in the effort. He reminded them of the bloodshed and carnage each man had witnessed at the hand of the enemy. Of how the war could turn on their efforts. He opened his little green book, but instead of reading from it, looked slowly up at them. “Rage!” he said. “The rage of Achilles, that doomed warrior, smoldered and flamed and roiled across Troy’s wave-swept shores, and flung the souls of mighty fighters, great chiefs, to the dark depths
below, untimely slain, lying unburied, torn and stripped by devouring dogs, moving the will of Jove toward its end.”
Conlon looked at the astonished faces around him. “I ask you now, toward what end? You are here to vindicate every man who has gone down before you and any man who may fall beside you. You are here to restore what is rightful and just. Put on rage as your armor and honor as your shield. Unsheathe your sword of valor. Do your part, whether in support or in the thick of it, and make Canada proud. For my part, I’m proud of you already and honored to serve with you.” He paused. “Now, let’s astound the gods and turn this war around, and bring it to its rightful end.”
WEATHER OR WHIM changed the orders at the last minute, and it was not until six in the evening that they marched out of Fouquet Wood, up Music Hall Line and into position in Happy Holly, under a cloak of utter silence, waiting for the dawn of Easter Monday, for zero hour, set for 5: 30 A.M.
FIFTEEN
April 9th, 1917
Vimy Ridge
Arras Sector, France
Five-twenty came and five twenty-one, -two and -three . . . so quiet that Angus could hear the men’s every breath up and down the line—faces white in the dark, expressions blank. Snowflakes drifted down from a steel-gray sky, then swirled and lifted in the puff of a breeze. The silence was so raw, so unfamiliar, that it stripped him down and left him naked.
Then earth and sky shattered. The mines blew beneath the German trenches. Towering fountains of earth shot skyward. The Allied guns opened up—a thousand shells every twenty seconds. The steady concussion fused into an iron wall of sound. Its thundering vibration likely trembled a cup of tea in the faint dawn of a London kitchen; made old men in suspenders, reaching for collar and tie, pause and look up through curtained windows. In trench and dugout it compressed all thought—of home, of laughter, of sorrows, of chances missed and chances taken—into a whispered prayer.
