The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

  “One hundred and sixty feet,” Lathen said, clearly pleased.

  “Huge,” Simon said. Something about her lines made him want to cry. Her bow was curved like the back of a spoon, not sharp and angled like a clipper bow. Rounded, ample. Without effort, Simon imagined the masts and crosstrees, the gaff booms, the long deck, the angled stern.

  “Bowsprit?” he whispered.

  “Sixteen and a half feet. Main mast, one hundred and twenty feet tall, twenty–two inches round. Douglas fir. A feller from America is having her built.” Lathen was sliding down the stony grade. Simon followed. They angled around some men in dark green overalls sliding a thick plank of pine from a massive steam box and stood as near as they could to the boat. Simon tipped his head back to take her in.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Repulse Bay.”

  “What? Who names a boat Repulse Bay?”

  “The man who’s paying for her to be built. That New York feller. Wears a white hat and a polka-dot handkerchief. Asked me if I’d ever heard of Repulse Bay in Hong Kong. I said I never had and never would, with names like that. Hong Kong must be somewhere in New York, I figure.”

  “Repulse Bay,” Simon repeated.

  “Yup. Told me it was the fittingest name he could find. Said there was a story behind it not fit for telling. I asked him if he’d been saved. Told him I had.”

  “And?”

  “Said nope, but there were stranger things had happened to him. Said he didn’t know how to sail and didn’t care if he ever learned, but when I was older he might take me aboard. He’s hiring crew. Might go back to Repulse Bay to make things right, he said. Or just might sail her off and sell her.”

  “A man who can’t sail, and doesn’t want to, builds a boat like that.” Simon spat on the ground. “I wouldn’t step foot on her.” But still he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  A couple of men up on the cradle waved at Lathen. Simon shot him a stunned look. “Here every day after chores,” Lathen grinned. “Might get work on the caulking gang or some such if the Merton don’t come get me. But I’m not going out with that New York feller neither, no sir.” He squinted up at the sun, then looked at Simon. “How about I never see the Merton come in, and you and me work every day on the caulking gang, and drink orange fizz after supper?” He flashed a smile, then said he had to be going. Had chores to do for Mrs. Gates. They wished each other luck. Lathen turned to go and never looked back.

  Simon backed up to a nearby boulder and sat down in a trance, watching the Repulse Bay come to life, memorizing her every line, her dimensions, deck to waterline, beam to length, itching to get them down on paper, maybe build a model, show Philip. And thinking how he’d been saved once and for all from clubbing fish to death by a boy he met on a step.

  DARK CLOUDS WERE gathering when they met back on the Elsie. They suited up in oilskins. There was a heavy chop and they sloshed along out of the harbor and turned away from Cross Island on a close reach. Simon was surprised when Frank asked if he’d like to take the tiller again. He and Frank traded places.

  Stevie, up at the rail with a pair of binoculars, told them that the boys on the Runabout had spotted a U-boat on the bay side of Ironbound.

  “In Mahone Bay? And you believed them,” Wallace said.

  “Maybe scouting things out. Wouldn’t call them fellers the type to lie.”

  Frank squinted suspiciously at Wallace. “Sounds like Duncan’s rubbed off on you. Papers say there’s all kind of spies, foreign-born aliens, most of ’em, all along the coast, doing the Kaiser’s dirty work.”

  “Talk going around says Avon Heist is building a lighthouse of his own,” Stevie chimed in. “Now you tell me, why would a man do that? To signal subs for one, and Duncan still making the case for him as schoolteacher. That right, Simon?”

  Simon stared at him. The mainsail luffed heavily and the boat stalled.

  “Mind the wind! Lord Jesus!” Frank barked. And then they were in irons, dead in the water, slipping back, wind on both sides of the sails. “Goddamn it!” Frank shouted. “Hand over the tiller!”

  Simon slammed the tiller hard to port. The Elsie hesitated, then turned ever so slightly and the wind just caught the forward edge of the mainsail. They slacked the sheets until she picked up headway, then hauled the lines back in as Simon slowly eased her up again. “Now, keep her on course, boy!” Frank yelled.

  The Elsie was lumbering. “C’mon, schoon!” Simon whispered to her. The pressure of the water against the rudder came up through the tiller into his arm. She did have a weather helm! Simon eased her up gently. Tension strained through the rigging. The Elsie hovered like a seabird, then found her place between wind and water and surged forward, sails filled, power released. Simon had found the slot.

  “Alright then. A right good skipper we’ve got, eh, boys?” Frank said, cleating the main sheet and ducking spray. “Might be as good as his father one day if he can keep his eye on the sails.”

  The clouds opened up and rain poured down in sheets, then came in sideways as the wind blew hard from the southeast. “Now we’re in it!” Stevie shouted. He and Wallace went below, and it was just Frank and Simon on deck. Frank eased the main when gusts slammed against them. Simon, standing now to counter the heel of the boat, with both hands on the tiller and his right foot against the leeward seat, headed her up and fell off in near-perfect synchrony with the roaring wind and waves. His hood flew back. Green water came over the bow. Salt spray washed down his neck. Rain stung his face. He had to tell Mr. Heist—tell him to get rid of the Fresnel light. Sink it.

  “When you’re wore out, I’ll take her,” Frank yelled, ducking spray.

  “Mr. Heist, he’s a good man,” Simon shouted, holding tight to the tiller.

  Frank didn’t answer.

  TWENTY-TWO

  July 3rd, 1917

  No. 18 Canadian General Hospital

  Saint-Junien, France

  Destiny?

  I thought I had one once, says Canada.

  I made a name at Vimy

  Took the hill then bled to death.

  Your dear one,

  Smiling Jimmy

  Angus stared at the poem, if you could call it that. Written in Jimmy’s hand and waiting now for the censor’s. Poor Jimmy—whether he’d meant that he’d bled to death or that Canada, without a plan for pursuit after Vimy, had done so, didn’t much matter. Jimmy, who had died of infection, had not bled to death. Nor had Canada. But both had bled a great deal. The numbers were mounting—Private James Perry of Winnipeg, just one more. Angus had been censoring his letter when Brimmie came with news of his death.She told him to bring the letter to her when he’d finished censoring it.

  “One more death to add to the Vimy list,” she sighed. Angus knew the numbers by then—4,000 Canadians killed, another 7,000 wounded—all for a four-mile dent in the German line that hadn’t done much but prove the Canadians a force to be reckoned with. The French had all but given up. Not long after Vimy and the Second Battle of the Aisne, some 30,000 of them had walked out of their trenches demanding better food and more leave, demands that were eventually granted. At the end of June, hope arrived in the form of 14,000 American troops on French soil. Two nurses from a hospital in Étaples said they’d never seen men so tall. They were giants, but apparently without guns or knowledge of how to fire them. America was in the war but wouldn’t be fighting it for God knew how long.

  All the while, Angus remained in No. 18 Canadian General Hospital. He focused again on the letter. It was hard to tell if it was a letter because apart from the salutation, “Dear Mum and Dad,” the poem was all there was. Angus put his pen down next to the bottle of black ink on the desk. He could make black lines with his left hand if the paper was anchored, which is how he ended up censoring hospital letters. Truth, the first and great casualty of war, he thought. Who better to blot it out?

  Angus had received letters of his own that day. Katz, the scribbler, had written to say the boys m
issed him and hoped he’d join them soon. They’d been assigned a new lieutenant, who made Keegan growl more than ever. LaPointe had met up with a lone Zouave trying to find his Algerian platoon. LaPointe traded a couple of postcards and one of his harmonicas with him for a wind-up tin monkey that performed rude tricks and gave the boys a laugh. The new lieutenant wasn’t amused and had ordered LaPointe to trash it. Now that’s just wrong, McNeil had said. Katz said they’d come across some women bathing in a river who invited them in. Kearns and Hanson had splashed on in fully clothed. They all nearly had, except Boudrey, who’d run for his life.

  Conlon had written as well. The Kilties had used the map and landmarks Angus had drawn to locate and secure the Krupp howitzer at the stone barn. They’d found Publicover and the others where they’d fallen, the bodies unmolested, and buried them there together. They’d later be located and brought back for burial at Vimy. “Sam will have his stone marker, and for what it’s worth, I’m glad of it,” Conlon wrote. “I must be going soft. Get back here, would you, before I go to mush.”

  I will, Angus said as he folded Jimmy’s letter. He imagined the parents back in Winnipeg, slowly opening the parcel—his mother holding his socks to her face, breathing in a last whiff of her son. Then whispering to her husband, “Look here, Alfred, a letter. One he never got to send! Our poor Jimmy.” He imagined them opening it . . . No, it wouldn’t do to send it. Not to the grieving, uncomprehending parents.

  He turned down the oil lamp, sat back, and let the tears fill his eyes. Help me now, he whispered. God help me keep moving forward. The grieving parents. His father’s reaction to his own wound was something Angus tried not to imagine. The war will break you, he’d said. Or no, he hadn’t said that at all. Angus just kept imagining him saying it. Maybe to keep himself from breaking.

  And Ebbin’s father. How would he face him? There’d be no marker for Ebbin Hant at Vimy. His name would be registered somewhere among the missing. A soldier without a grave. But there he’d be, forever uncelebrated beneath a marker for Lance Corporal Havers. God help me, Angus repeated. He carefully tucked the folded poem in with Jimmy’s other effects. Yes, it would go back to the parents. Maybe in a hundred years, looking back, it would mean something to someone, or maybe not, but his would not be the only tears shed over it.

  A WEEK LATER, Angus and a small group of ambulatory patients were led down the hill by several nurses, got up in their dress blues, to the town of Saint-Junien. The Matron had ordered Angus to go—the outing considered good therapy for convalescing patients. He’d protested, but the Matron had persisted, noting he hadn’t been off the grounds since his arrival; it was therapeutic and not a choice. “Do you good,” she said.

  Walking down the steep hill was not easy. A smattering of red and orange poppies bobbed on the roadside, flanked by purple delphiniums. The delphiniums were lined up in a row, as if they’d escaped from a garden but, once free, had been uncertain how else to position themselves.

  At the intersection of the town’s cobblestone streets, the group prepared to go their separate ways. Brimmie pointed to a hairdresser’s shop and explained that some of the nurses would get their hair washed there. Others would be off to buy trinkets and postcards and maybe take a cup of tea. Orderlies were to accompany the men who wished to go to a hymn sing at the YMCA.

  Angus declined the hymn sing, but was uncertain of where to go. He hung near the entry to the shop as the nurses exchanged greetings with Sabine, the woman who ran the place. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket. It was then he heard her name. “Juliette,” said Sabine, clear as day, “ma soeur.” He slowly lowered the cigarette. “We didn’t know you had a sister!” the nurses exclaimed. And then he saw her—carrying an immense pitcher, nodding at the women. As she set it down, she lifted her eyes to the mirror above the sink, then turned toward the open door, her eyes a mirror for his own.

  In a glance, she took in his sling and said that yes, she was helping her sister, but today she’d be stopping at two o’clock to meet the 2:40 out of Boulogne for some supplies. She did not break communion with Angus as she said this, and the nurses paused to exchange curious looks. The spin of the earth paused as well. Angus heard Brimmie say, “Indeed! Well, we’ll be long gone by then. We’re collecting our patients at two o’clock.”

  THEY DID MEET at the train depot as the 2:40 pulled in. But not then. Not for another month. A month in which General Currie considered whether to commit the Canadian troops to another Allied push in Ypres. Third Ypres, it was called. And it had another name—Passchendaele.

  It was a month in which Cobb, having forgotten his four-week deadline, decided Angus would benefit from leave—lift the spirit and might just promote his return to health.

  Juliette had not visited Angus in the hospital. She must have sensed what a violation that would be. An hour after he’d left her holding the pitcher that day at the shop, he’d gone back and stood in the shadows of the connecting alley. Pink and lavender sweet peas fluttered on a vine—their scent, light as air, filling him with a temporary amnesia for the war. Behind the vines, beyond the sheltering branches of an elm, the women rubbed their hair with thick towels and then sat in a circle in the sun, each one combing the next one’s hair with wide-toothed combs. Their laughter spilled out over the dappled yard. Juliette came out the back door and through the gate and tossed a tub of wash water into the dirt lane. It raced down a gully and eddied into a sudsy pool. He backed into the shadows. She straightened, as if sensing his presence, and peered down the alley. What he saw in her face was a solace so tangible it might leave him utterly undone. He slowly turned on his heel and left her.

  AND SO THEY did not meet until the 2:40 pulled into the depot a half hour late on August 10th. With a military pass in his pocket and an uncharted course, he’d stationed himself on a wooden bench, waiting—for what, he did not know. Two trains had come and gone—one 40 hommes, as the troop trains were called; one with civilians and soldiers both. He hadn’t bought a ticket for a ferry because the thought of being in London, tossed about in a sea of innocent civilians, was intolerable. And no one, not even a crazy one-armed Canadian lieutenant on leave, went to the Front for a visit, which is what he longed to do.

  He stared at a collection of flattened cigarette butts at his feet. The train pulled in. Steam shot out as the great red and black wheels slowed to a hissing stop. Through the steam a pair of worn black boots beneath the hem of a dusky red skirt marched past, turned, and came back. He didn’t lift his eyes. He couldn’t, and so she sat down on the bench beside him. For a long time they didn’t speak. Then he found voice enough to tell her that he was on a six-day pass. She said she and Paul were living in her sister’s cottage on the coast, seven miles away, and could he make it that far? And he said, yes.

  SHE HAD A bicycle. It wobbled and bumped on the cobblestones as he walked along, wheeling it with his good hand and somehow balancing his pack on his good shoulder. He fixed his eyes on her boots. Worn and dusty and cracked, they looked as if they’d been to the Front and back and could go again, a world away from the blue leather shoes he’d slipped onto Hettie Ellen’s arched and innocent feet.

  When they approached the charcuterie, she took over the bicycle without apology and set it against the wall, managing to make him feel neither pitied nor ashamed. She haggled over the price of chops and sausage; he sat at a table outside the pâtisserie next door. He ordered a coffee and looked up at Saint-Junien’s multispired presence, dominating the end of the street. He had stopped there on his way to the station that morning. In the misty darkness of the vestibule, rows of candles on a stand illuminated the feet of an incredibly large and extremely sad Christ, hanging on the cross. The thick smell of wax sucked the oxygen from the air. There were religious paintings in ornate gilt frames along the walls—lurid scenes of violence and supplication.

  Inside, instead of pews, scattered chairs took up lonely stations on a cold stone floor. The interior was immense, a sanctuary of suspended time a
nd sorrow, misting up to a ceiling too high, too dark to see. Multiple arches framed a set of wide steps leading to a distant altar. Backing out, he was again confronted by the weary Christ who had likely grown more weary in the past three years, and maybe in the past three minutes, and who, from his expression, held out little hope for mankind. Among the flickering votives were unlit candles which Angus understood could be lit to illuminate a wish, a prayer, a hope. Praying for his recovery seemed a selfish act, given the injuries he’d witnessed—the ones that led to a tortured prayer for death. Praying for forgiveness was ludicrous. Instead, he prayed to find his way back, whatever road it might take.

  Now, looking down the nearly empty street as he waited for Juliette, the sharply peaked roofs and flat fronts of its row of Flemish houses, their long unblinking windows bound by painted shutters of faded blues and yellows and greens, seemed a street-long façade, a stage set.

  Juliette returned then, a bit flushed, and with her the rush of the here and now. With a trace of triumph, she handed him the sausage and chops, wrapped in brown paper and string, and he put them into the wicker bicycle basket. They walked with the bicycle between them as the cobblestones gave way to a hard-packed dirt road that took them on a southwesterly route toward the sea. Several miles later, they passed a thick woodland, alive with rustling leaves and the flick and twitter of birds on either side of the road. Cheerful poppies fluttered in the grassy ditch, and the sweet smell of wild raspberries filled the air. It was as if they’d walked into an illustrated children’s book. Beyond the wood, the road curved down onto the lonely stretch of land that led to the dunes. The sun bore down as they left the shade behind. He grew weaker and finally stopped to take a swig from his canteen. He had to angle it between his knees to unscrew the lid. She didn’t try to help. She took it when he offered it and passed it back to him to close.