by P. S. Duffy
Reluctantly, Simon walked up the rise and along the path and slowly opened the front door. The fire in the parlor was still going, just as he’d thought. No screen. And there, sitting in his wingback chair, still wearing the apron, was his grandfather, a bottle of brandy between his feet.
“Gold and diamonds,” his grandfather’s voice boomed out. “King and country. Plunder in the name of valor. That’s what he died for!”
“Whoa, Grandpa. Dad’s just wounded.” Simon came over and stood in front of him, shocked at the opened vest, loose collar, disheveled hair.
“My brother, Geordie, I’m talking about,” Duncan growled. “Seventeen years ago today.” He took a swig of the brandy from the bottle. It was then Simon saw the gun in his lap. A jolt of panic went through him.
“Went back to the old country, the so-called homestead in the Lowlands. Couldn’t make a go of it. Tossed about for something to do. I said, why not the army? Just about pushed him into it. Thought it would keep him off the drink.” He swirled the contents of the bottle in his hand and took another swallow. “It didn’t. Joined the cavalry.” He set the bottle on the floor. “Met his death in Africa.”
Simon had hardly ever heard his grandfather mention his long-dead brother. He lowered himself into the opposite chair, calculating how to get the gun.
His grandfather slumped his hand on it. “Came to me in a crate, packed with straw, this did. Bequeathed, you might say. A note, unsigned, said, ‘Your brother, George Gordon MacGrath, wanted you to have his pistol.’ ” He picked it up. “Colt .45. Ever seen one?”
“Uh, no sir. Is it . . . loaded?” Simon reached a cautious hand out for it.
“Course it’s loaded!” His grandfather gripped the gun harder. “One bullet missing. Maybe Geordie put that one through his head.” Turning it over in his hands, he said, “Not his medals, nor a pair of cuff links, nor a well-loved book. Just this pistol—a message as sure as there ever was one.” He paused and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Make a man partake of the brutality of combat day after day, and he either thrives or is broken by it. Either way, it strips him down to base instincts until finally, his humanity fails him, and he’s defined by this alone.” He sat back, defeated. Simon kept his eye on the gun.
“Suffering comes to all of us,” Duncan began again, staring into the fire. “Lost my wife and baby, and a few years later, a boy on the Banks. A boy younger than you. Watched him slip through my fingers.” He looked up sharply. “A boy I didn’t know, was known to me then.”
Simon nodded, unblinking.
“Ever seen a boat sink? No? It’s like watching someone die. She hovers for a moment on the edge of life, then is sucked down all at once and the seas cross over as if she’d never been. I’d have given my life for that boy . . .”
The clock ticked loudly, every swing of the pendulum measuring out the silence. Simon jumped when his grandfather started up again. “Saw my own boy slipping through my hand, all I had left in the world. Came back to him. Stayed on shore. Tried to be a good father, a good man. Paid attention to the state of my soul. Then comes Geordie. Dead on the veld. For what?” He pounded the arm of the chair and leaned forward as if about to spring at Simon. “If we can’t find meaning in death, how can we find it in life? Tell me that! Was Geordie’s purpose to die for the greed of other men? Is my son to do the same?”
Simon swallowed hard. Amazed at how steady his own voice was, he said, “Dad’s not dead. He’ll get better.”
“He will, will he? And then get another chance at being killed? My God.” His grandfather weighed the gun in his hands. “Thought I’d learned something about humility. About vulnerability, damn it! How vast the ocean, how small the boat. But I’ll be damned if I know what more I’m supposed to learn through the suffering of my only son.” He cast a withering look at Simon. “Eh? I begged him not to go.” His eyes were fierce. “But it wasn’t enough! He had to go. And for what? My every effort come to nothing.” He stood suddenly, waving the pistol about. Simon lunged for it, and in the struggle his grandfather crumpled to his knees, then half-crawled past Simon to the stone hearth and gripped it with his hands. He leaned there, shoulders shaking.
Simon picked up the pistol, heavy and black, and backed away. The last of the embers blinked red through the ash.
“Hall chest,” his grandfather said in a ragged voice. “That’s where I keep it.”
Simon slid the key off the top of the chest. His grandfather fumbled with the fire screen, cursing it and righting it twice before it stayed in place. Simon opened and closed the chest and turned the long shaft of the key in the lock until he heard it click. By then his grandfather was in the hall. Head down, he thumped his hand on the newel post and ascended the stairs with labored steps, swinging the bottle of brandy by the neck. “Go on home,” he said, voice blurry. “Midnight ramblings of an old man.”
SIMON STOPPED WHEN he reached the bridge. The boulders were slick with yellow-brown rockweed. The pungent smell of low tide hung like fog, and the shallow water lapped the stone walls of the causeway below. A light wind ruffled his hair. He reached in his pocket for the cigarette Zenus had given him and cursed the fact that he had no matches. Then he leaned out over the railing and uncurled his fist and let the key fall from his hand. A brilliant swath of green bubbles foamed around it and trailed up as it plunged to the bottom. Phosphorous. Of all nights. He picked up a stone and threw it over, and another and another, desperate to churn the water into green bubbling light and to feel himself plunging down through it until he disappeared into its unending iridescence.
But there was more to do. He left the bridge and headed for Mader’s Cove and walked down Philip’s wharf, grabbing a set of oars as he went. He took the ramp down to the float and pushed Philip’s little tender off into the water. He set the oarlocks and slipped the oars in as quietly as he could, grateful for the bit of wind that damped the sound. With every stroke, phosphorous danced around the oars and in the wake. He rowed, green light trailing, past the black bow of the Elsie, past the Glory B, and out to the open water. He could have rowed forever. Finally, far beyond the boats and the cove and well into the bay, he shipped the oars and set the pistol on the forward seat and knelt down before it. A dull black menacing shape, it slid sideways as he shifted his weight. He wondered how the bullets got in and how you got them out and if there really were bullets in the chamber. But he didn’t want to know. He lifted it up by the handle, feeling the weight of it in his hand, then leaned over the gunwale and held it suspended above the black water. And let it go. Soundlessly, the pistol, encased in pale green froth, plunged down. Its phosphorous trail bubbled up, then thinned to a narrow beaded column and disappeared. Simon stared until spots formed before his eyes, then crouched back to the center thwart. Looking up, he found the Big Dipper, but it brought him no comfort, and he began to shake. I am alone, I am alone, I am alone. I want my father back. Hunched over, rocking with hands in his armpits, for a long while all he could hear was his own ragged breath and his own heart pounding.
How long he stayed like that, he didn’t know, but when he looked up, nothing was familiar. Then he realized the wind and current and ebbing tide had him drifting fast past Owl’s Head. He was too far out. He could feel a cold wind against his face, wet with tears, and he began to shudder. He’d never make it back. The black ocean grew blacker and the wind stronger. A vision of his father rowing the boat in long even strokes helped him shove the oars out. Helped him grip the oars and pull. He tipped his head up and sighted up the handle of the Little Dipper until he found Polaris. True North. Not the brightest star, his father once told him, but the one around which the others collected and moved and found their bearings. He kept his eyes fixed on it, and arms aching, but no longer shaking, rowed the boat back to the harbor, where the wind shifted and, like the breath of God, pushed him along into the cove and back to Mader’s wharf.
TWENTY
May 17th, 1917
No. 18 Canadian General Hospita
l
Saint-Junien, France
The garden walls were easily seven feet high and partially covered with ivy—as old as the walls themselves, with twisted trunks as thick as Angus’s arm and leaves as broad as his hand. His good hand. The dirt at his feet was loamy, soft with the smell of spring rain, and clean in its very blackness—nothing like the chalk mud that had defined his world. Miniature shoots of something were poking up three rows over. A brown hare streaked out from a thicket and reconnoitered with his companions at the new shoots, their noses pulsing. In a long-ago life, he might have tried to capture their interlude in the garden, and his own, in pastels. But the sanctuary of the garden only accentuated his dislocation.
At the sound of his name, he spun around, lurched forward and sank onto his knee. The nurse—“Brimmie,” she was called by the others, with her reddish-blond bangs peeking out of her headdress, the spray of freckles across her nose, her determined little mouth, brimming with orders and admonitions—gave the rabbits no heed as she approached in brisk little steps. “Lieutenant! Here you are! Time for your treatment.”
She offered her hand. He waved her off and rose awkwardly on his own and followed her across the lawn to the hospital. In the weeks since Vimy, he’d come to know how important the swing of the arms was to the swing of the legs, and had made the required adjustments to his gait. Balancing on a rolling deck would be impossible.
Under the shadows of the arched west entryway, a cool dampness, captive of centuries, penetrated his cotton shirt. Brimmie waited while he removed the rubber boots. Easy to slip on and off, those boots. He neither knew nor cared whose they were. Once ambulatory, he’d been issued a fresh uniform. He could dress himself, unlike some who had to endure the ministrations of the nurses, holding a sleeve or buttoning up a fly. He’d perfected a system for the kilt that involved holding the band between his waist and the weight of his arm, then swinging it around his hips. Leaning against a wall, he could button the waist and buckle the skirt with his left hand.
By rights, he should have been invalided back to England. But Dr. Boes, hoping to prove the condenser apparatus useful for treatment, had confessed he was loath to let him go. Electrotherapy, Boes called it, stimulating the muscles and nerves with electrical impulses, keeping them alive. Angus had heard men scream with it, including two mute soldiers who had found their voices when electrodes were placed down their throats by a consulting physician who’d come from England and gone back. Stimulating the nerves was a nice term for delivering shocks that made the muscles twitch. Angus did not feel the shocks often, but his muscles did twitch. Afterwards, he was drained.
He understood it was his arm that drew Boes—their separate patient, to be treated, observed, and discussed. It was fine with Angus. The closer he was to the Front, the more likely he’d get back to it. Make it right. It was all that kept him going. And Boes insisted that he’d seen miraculous things—men who regained function suddenly and quickly.
Boes was late. Angus stared with dull eyes at the familiar cotton pads and saline solution, at the fruitwood case of the metronome that timed the delivery of shocks, the tangle of wires and electrodes dangling over the table, and the machine to which they were connected. There were voices in the hallway.
“What’s his status, this MacGrath?” It was Colonel Cobb, the tall, stoop-shouldered physician-in-chief.
It was Boes who answered. “I believe he’s getting better overall.”
“On what do you place your belief? This is a medical practice, Boes, not a community of faith. He’s had a vigorous regimen of passive movement and massage, and electrotherapy. What’s your machine say?”
There was a pause. “It’s the muscles innervated by the ulnar that concern me. They respond to low levels of stimulation—less than 0.5 microfarads—yet he has no voluntary movement of his wrist.”
Angus looked down at his wrist and willed it to elevate his hand. Nothing. The padding would have prevented it anyway. But he felt nothing.
There was a rustling of papers. Cobb spoke. “Let’s see here. Bayonet lodged just below the brachial plexus. Below it. Lucky man. Blade removed on the field. Hemorrhage . . . infection . . . cleared. Surgery . . . bone splinters and fibrous mass compressing the nerves. Compressed, but not dissected—right?”
“No, the radial—”
“Yes, I see. Radial nerve sutured.”
“I’m convinced he’ll recover. As the physical wounds heal—”
“You’re convinced of many things, eh, Boes? Well, you listen to me—what does this add up to? Loss of sensation in the face of minimal atrophy? The lack of deformity? The failure of voluntary movement along the tracks of undamaged nerves? I suspect this is largely in his mind. Would you agree?”
“I’m saying that, if anything, it’s mixed—psychical and organic. The nerves were badly concussed.”
“It’s been six weeks. There should be more progress. What happened to the man?”
“It’s in the notes.”
“What happened, Boes,” Cobb sighed. “Not his injuries, their circumstances. A man’s mates are killed, he survives, and reacts to the slightest injury as if it were paretic. Often enough, if these boys are told a furlough is in the offing if and only if they can demonstrate voluntary movement, you’ll find they’re ready to take up their duty again.”
“He wants to recover,” Boes protested. “He’s an artist. Surely he wants to be able to use his hand again.”
“An artist? Ah, a sensitive sort . . .”
“He’s as anxious as the next man to get back to his unit, I swear to you.”
“Anxious? No one is anxious to get back to the Front. Have you ever been to the Front?”
“No sir. But I think I’ve seen enough of the results to inform me of its nature.”
“Do you, indeed? You make me laugh, Boes.”
“But if I may?”
“Yes?”
“I believe you said that after a brief sojourn, men return ‘ready to take up their duty again.’ ”
“Ready to take up their duty, not anxious to return. I wonder about you, Boes. I do. As confident and well trained as you are. In a month or so, I’m up to the Front to inspect our field hospital situation, and I’m taking you with me so you have a better feel for how men develop these hysterical symptoms.”
“He’s quite sane, sir,” Boes insisted. “No twitching or hallucination. He’s quiet, very serious. But when he does speak, there’s a sincerity, an intensity. He’s been very engaged in his recovery. As the organic symptoms subside, I’m sure the rest will follow suit.”
“Alright. Continue your blasted nerve therapy. But my advice is pound it into his head that he does have capacity in the nerves and muscles that are healthy. And for God’s sake find out what happened to him. Only a coward of the lowest order would refuse to get better once he faces things. If he’s not better in four weeks, he’s to be invalided back to England.”
Angus stumbled back as Boes strode in.
“Four weeks, huh?” Angus said. “You up to it? Or shall we just assume I’m crazy or a coward or both and call it a day?”
“Steady now. That was meant to be private. I doubt you understood—it’s a very mixed situation. Here, sit down.”
“I understood.”
Boes cleared his throat, pulled a chair over and sat facing Angus. “Look, no one is saying you’re a coward. You had a lot of very real, physical damage.”
Angus cradled his arm and leaned away. “Not enough, apparently. If I’m supposed to be better than I am, I want to know.”
“It isn’t as simple as that. Suppose you let me be the doctor.”
“Suppose I let you be the honest doctor. How about you share the truth with me?”
“How about you do the same. What happened out there? If you heard what Cobb was saying, you know that’s the truth you need.”
Angus felt himself go cold. “You think I’m hiding something? Here’s the truth. I need to get back to my unit. I owe them.
Owe myself. Do you understand honor? How do you think it feels to have escaped and left my men back there, slogging through it. I belong with them.”
Boes sat back. “Let’s get a hold of ourselves here.” Then in a softer tone said, “Tell me again the names of the men who were killed when you were injured. Let’s start there.”
Angus tipped his chair back against the wall. He hadn’t noticed the ceiling before—narrow-planked, dark wood with a soft patina. He closed his eyes. “First Lieutenant Sam Publicover, Corporal Richard Burwell, Private Anton Voles, and Lance Corporal Lawrence . . . Havers.”
“This fellow Havers—your voice broke.”
The chair came down with a thud.
Boes leaned forward. “Was Havers a good chum?”
“I didn’t know Havers. He wasn’t one of us.”
“Alright . . . you’ve mentioned this Publicover a lot. You once said he looked like your son. Is that part of it? Outside of their names, you never mention your family. Perhaps a leave could be arranged if—”
“Family leave across the Atlantic?” Angus said. “You’re grasping at straws. Junior officers in the CEF don’t get family leave. You know that.”
Boes gazed longingly at the condenser apparatus.
“Look, there’s a good chance I’m nuts, right? I must be because if I could move my wrist or my arm, I would. And I can’t. Get on with the machine,” Angus sighed. “And just so we understand each other, my family is not part of this story. To bring them into it would be to render them . . .”
“Render them what?”
“Unclean,” Angus said.
TWENTY-ONE
June 30th, 1917
Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia
Fog wrapped the gray dawn in a shroud. Simon set his mug in the sink. It would be a long sail over to Lunenburg if the fog didn’t burn off. Still, the muffled world suited him. The last time he’d been to Lunenburg was with his father. They’d gone to pick up new blocks for the Lauralee from Dauphinee’s, where rows of blocks, dripping with caramel-colored lacquer, filled every window and dangled overhead like taffy lollipops.
