The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

  Ida said to give his father time. A wise woman, our Ida, his grandfather agreed. But time was running out for Mr. Heist, as the letter in Simon’s pocket proved. His father just sat in his rocker, in the shadows of the porch, refusing to help. The fact that he was a veteran and an officer wouldn’t matter to those in charge of the camp at Amherst, he said. Your grandfather has done all that could be done. And maybe Mr. Heist was better off in prison, protected there until the war was over, he said. He didn’t seem to understand what was happening to Mr. Heist. Worse, he didn’t seem angry over the injustice of it—just defeated.

  Meanwhile, in prison, Mr. Heist grew more miserable and heartbroken by the day, which is why Simon was determined to send him the blue Morpho didius that he’d copied in meticulous detail from the picture in Lepidoptera of Eastern North America. In earlier letters, Mr. Heist had told him to keep working on his Greek translation. Strangely, his father had taken a fleeting interest in his translation—said a friend of his, a Captain Conlon, carried The Iliad with him at the Front, The Odyssey, too, and quoted from them. The poets remember, he said. Simon had waited for more, but no more came. Standing right next to him, his father had already drifted away.

  In his last letter from Mr. Heist, the one in Simon’s pocket, there was no reference to the suffering of Agamemnon or Troy, only to the suffering of Mr. Heist in the wretched conditions in which he found himself. He said the search for a single thing of beauty was fading and that even as he witnessed the sun’s rising and setting, he felt his eyes growing dim.

  So Simon needed blue paint. The watercolors were as dried-out as the brushes, but all they needed was water to come back to life. He couldn’t send the book for fear of what might happen to it in prison. He didn’t want to rip the page out. So a drawing would have to do. He sat on the stool by the ledge and mixed the color he wanted, then filled in the black ink outline he’d made. When the paint dried, he filled the veins and tips of the wings with more black ink, leaving little spots of white, just like the pictured Morpho. It was a tedious process, but it gave him pleasure.

  As he leaned down to replace the watercolors, a sheaf of black papers caught his eye. He picked one up and saw that the paper wasn’t black, but was nearly covered in thick rough strokes of charcoal. Had Young Fred been in the shed? Used his father’s charcoals? Simon turned it over. On the back, in a primitive hand, it said, “Deliverance, 1917,” and then “A. A. MacGrath.” Simon rifled through the lot of them, each one signed, each one the same with the strokes leading to a point of white, perfectly round, randomly placed—about the size of a thimble in some, a jelly jar in others, a mere dot in one.

  The door creaked open and in strode his grandfather, demanding to know what Simon was doing there with his father’s paints. Ignoring the question, Simon handed him the charcoal papers. His grandfather shuffled through them impatiently. “What the devil are these?”

  Simon turned them over, and his grandfather pressed his fingers against his eyes, leaving two black marks. “Deliverance? My God,” he said hoarsely.

  “What’s it mean?” Simon asked.

  “I have no idea. But it isn’t good.” He tossed the papers on the ledge and turned to face the huge canvas still covered on the easel in the corner. He ripped off the sheet and stood before the half-finished image of the man and the boy in the rowboat. “Here’s what he could have done, if he hadn’t—”

  Simon’s mouth fell open. “You’ve seen it?”

  “Of course. Don’t tell me you haven’t. I know you’ve been in here. Looked at this many a time yourself would be my guess.” He didn’t look for confirmation, and of course he was right. “All these years,” his grandfather said, “I thought his painting was a waste of time. Those blasted birds and seascapes . . . But this—this has imagination. Splotches of paint jabbed on the canvas is what I thought at first. Lunacy. But when I stood back, it jumped out at me. Rowboat coming out of the bottom of the canvas there as if you were on it. Sunlight in the water. To see this picture is to be in it.”

  Exactly, Simon thought.

  “Ah. He had greatness in him and I missed it. All the same, he never did anything like this before. I know. I searched every picture in here. I imagine you have, too. And there it sits. Never to be finished. That’s the utter tragedy of it. The terrible price we’re all paying.”

  To stop his grandfather from launching into the terrible price all of Nova Scotia was paying, and to cut off the rising sympathy Simon was feeling for his father—the man who barely knew he was alive—Simon picked up the sheet to cover the picture. But his grandfather stayed his arm. “Remember that old lapstrake rowboat we had? I used to sing to him, ‘Of all the Fishes in the sea—’ ”

  “ ‘I like the best the bass. He climbs upon the seaweed trees and slides down on his hands and knees . . .’ I know. Dad used to sing it to me when we were out in that old rowboat.”

  “Did he?” His voice fell to a hushed whisper, and Simon saw that his mouth was trembling.

  “Wait,” Simon said. “You thought the picture was—you think it’s you and Dad? You’re the man and Dad’s the boy?” He looked again at the picture and back at his grandfather as the pain of that possibility registered.

  His grandfather put his arm around him. “Well now, who it is isn’t important, eh? It’s every father and son, suspended there. What do you think?”

  Simon jerked away and shoved the charcoal drawings back under the shelf. “He’s nuts, that’s what I think. Nuts.”

  “Hold on, boy. He’s lost his compass is all. He’ll find it.”

  “What’s he need a compass for? He’s not going anywhere.” Simon pointed at the map of France with its colored pins. “That’s the only place he cares about,” he said.

  THAT NIGHT, ANGUS lit the lamp in the shed as he did every night. It was cold enough for the stove, but he sat shivering. Unlike some, Angus did not shake with every sudden noise; but he shook often and his head was filled with shrieking noise, his mouth with ashes, and when it was over, he found it best to remain very still. Very still and very far away so as not to corrupt the world around him. So as not to tell the story he had to tell of a friend, brother-in-law, brother and son whose memory would be tarnished by those with ears that could not hear nor ever understand. Marooned on his island, alone with his war, he watched his family head off to their appointed rounds. He opened books and reread the same sentences over and over. Hours would pass unnoticed. He had to force himself to eat. He willed himself invisible. He sent for an enlarged map of France and Belgium, pinned it up in the art shed, and followed every scrap of war news, keeping watch with the fervor of a religious convert and the longing of a lost pilgrim. Some days, in the dark well of grief and memory, he’d get a flash of how bright, how brilliantly white, death’s deliverance could shine. The white hole that hovered above the pit.

  It was at night that the claustrophobia of his landlocked existence fell away—when he could look out to black water and see nothing and feel and know the nothingness of himself.

  He sat down and opened Conlon’s most recent letter, which carried, as had all his letters, a thread of connection—news of the men, those alive and those dead, news of the battles. Passchendaele was over. The Third Battle of Ypres had spread a sea of blood over the mud of Flanders like a flood tide, Conlon wrote with journalistic flair. That sea included the blood of the 16,000 Canadian casualties Currie had predicted months before.

  Boudrey was the latest, his death leaving those still alive in a state of shock. Fell off a duckboard and drowned in the mud, Conlon had written. Hanson, Katz and Kearns had died of wounds. LaPointe, Oxner and McNeil—having stood waist-deep in water for five days straight as German shells rained down—had been taken off the field with fever. Now, Boudrey. “Survival is the surprise,” Conlon wrote, “death expected.”

  As he tried to fathom Boudrey’s death, it was Agamemnon who came to Angus. Where in all that suffering was the wisdom Zeus had promised? The grief of memory “dri
pping in sleep against the heart” was without end. And how he longed for an end. Things he’d barely noticed at the time loomed larger than life—a button on his shirt could bring back buttons hanging by a thread from Publicover’s torn and blood-soaked jacket . . . He stood abruptly, let the letter fall from his hand, lifted the lid off the stove, struck a match and threw it in. When the flames were going, he grabbed his “Deliverance” pictures and held them to the flames, one by one. One for each man who had died. And then the rest of them, one by one, watching the curling paper turn to ash.

  Something moved. He felt it more than saw it. There—behind the stove, the sheet had slipped from his easel and revealed the father and son in the boat. Why now? To taunt him in all their unfulfilled promise. He flung the canvas across the room and the easel after it, then raced his hands blindly along the high shelf, found the knife and knelt over the painting. As he raised his arm to slash it, a paper landed like a breath on the floor at his knees. A butterfly. “Morpho didius,” the carefully hand-printed letters at the bottom said, and beneath them, the words “Remember, this is your way of being alive.”

  Angus slowly got to his feet and took the butterfly to the lamp by the row of windows and studied it. When he looked up, the reflection of his crazed, ravaged face stared back at him.

  The note was in Simon Peter’s hand. “Your way of being alive.” Angus sat back amazed. Simon, so secretive, so angry at him for failing to rescue Heist. He’d tried to tell him how useless it would be—yet another failed mission, he’d thought, but hadn’t said. He’d tried to explain how much safer Heist was in prison—safe from those eager to fight the war at home and for whom Heist had already proven an easy target. Staring at him with confusion that transformed to dull-eyed detachment, Simon had dropped his spoon in his empty mug. The clatter of it reverberated through the distance between them. Angus sat there, a ruminating, broken man with nothing to offer. And now, his son had sent him a message.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, before he left for school, Simon Peter found his father leaning on the shelf, asleep—brushes and paints splayed out next to him. He noted the canvas flung up against the flattened easel. He refused to care. Under his father’s elbow lay the butterfly, still intact. That he did care about. His father stirred and sat up, blinking.

  “The butterfly,” Simon said. “It’s mine.”

  “You made it? Copied it from that butterfly book?” His father rubbed his face. “The note at the bottom. This is your way of being alive. What did you mean by it?”

  “Nothing. Just something between me and Mr. Heist.”

  “So it’s a message . . . for him?”

  “That’s right,” Simon said. “I made it for him. He needs it. A thing of beauty. Because that’s what keeps him going. He said so once.”

  He picked up the butterfly and left.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  April 9th, 1918

  Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia

  Five months later, a year to the day after Vimy, the Morpho didius with its iridescent blue wings and white-spotted wing tips—all its unattainable beauty—fluttered through Angus with nothing to offer but regret. It came to him on the train back from Halifax, where he had been since late December, helping to orchestrate relief work—not for war’s victims overseas, but for her dead at home. Half of Halifax and half of Dartmouth had been leveled in an explosion that shook the ground in Snag Harbor, over sixty miles away.

  In a navigational blunder of epic proportion and cruelest irony, the S.S. Imo, a Norwegian tramp steamer loaded with relief supplies for Belgium, collided with the freighter Mont-Blanc, loaded with the makings of weapons for the war—picric acid and TNT in her hold and thirty-five tons of benzine strapped to her decks in casks. The final and deadly irony was that the sight of the Mont-Blanc in the harbor brought people out to watch, as a ship on fire always did. Unaware of her lethal cargo, they stood mesmerized on the streets, at office windows and at the water’s edge. Then she blew.

  More than 2,000 were killed, 20,000 left homeless, hundreds orphaned, and many more blinded by flying glass. The explosion sent boats careening through the air. It forced the harbor waters apart, then set off a tidal wave that raced in over the city—news that left a white-faced Simon unable to speak.

  And then came the blizzard, one of the worst on record, coating the ruins in ice, burying them beneath snow, bringing to a halt trains with supplies and aid from all over Canada and New England. And, despite clear evidence from the inquiry that the explosion had been neither an act of war nor the work of spies, but rather the result of human error, those of German descent, some of whom had relatives in Snag Harbor, were attacked on the streets, and many placed under temporary arrest. Duncan had stood up at a town meeting organized by Lady Bromley to step up relief efforts. Stood up without being invited and spoke about the desperation the tragedy had wrought, not just in physical suffering, but in spirit. And he spoke of hearts blackened by revenge. “Let not the death toll include the souls of men still living,” he said. There was no doubt whose souls he was talking about, and this time his words were met with silent approval.

  Ida told Angus it was his finest moment. She held her apron to her face, her knuckles red and raw. “When the explosion happened, he wondered if it was God’s retribution for us being in the war. He always said Nova Scotia would pay. He didn’t say it to other folks, mind. Just to me. But when it come out how bad it was, he left that notion behind.”

  “You love him, don’t you, Ida?” Angus said, sitting at the kitchen table with her.

  “I do, warts and all,” she said, and met his eyes.

  With Hettie’s blessing and stated relief that he wanted to be of use, Angus had packed his things for Halifax, and there discovered that despite his arm, he was of great use in helping the relief effort. His military service was not without benefit. He was lifted from the ranks of helpers to a temporary position of some authority. He knew how to navigate human suffering.

  When his work was done, he returned to spring leaves unfurling and ice in retreat in Snag Harbor. He had written to Simon, but had received only the most cursory letters back. Hettie wrote more regularly—her usual five-line notes that let him know all was well, and he assumed better, without him there. How could it not be? While in Halifax, he’d felt a welcome sense of military demeanor and welcome stabs of pain in his shoulder and hand. He operated with calm detachment, organizing the distribution of supplies, checking their deployment to shelters, whispering reassurances, listening to stories of loss. He could move his arm at the shoulder, but the pain and movement disappeared upon his return. It was as if the nerves had tried but failed. Darkness again settled over him. He became convinced that his own life was meant to be played out only in the most savage of circumstances. Beauty was neither his to behold nor create. God had hamstrung his arm for the hubris of once thinking it possible. But he thought, too, of hands passing out food and blankets and of the toddler he’d found wandering the snow-filled street who fell asleep on his shoulder, whose tiny breaths warmed his neck as he carried her to shelter.

  IN THE MIDDLE of June, one year and two months after Ebbin’s death, Angus learned in a letter from Keegan that Conlon, always on the edge of grace, steady, steadfast, recently elevated to major with a Distinguished Service Order medal pinned to his uniform, had died.

  Conlon, Angus’s confessor in absentia, to whom he whispered his transgressions without giving them voice, from whom he’d never asked for absolution, had written to Angus in May, saying that had it not been for Havers, they would not have discovered the howitzer at the stone barn. And had it not been for Angus, barely alive, the three of them, he and Angus and Keegan, would never have found their way back to tell Rushford where it was.

  In that strange letter, recounting their times together, he’d asked Angus to go back and put a wreath on the graves of their comrades at Vimy and Passchendaele when the war was over. He predicted it wouldn’t go on forever, but it might very well end in defeat. “Prom
ise you’ll honor our graves, in victory or defeat,” Conlon had written in an uncharacteristic plea.

  In his response, painstakingly composed with his left hand as all his letters were, Angus reminded Conlon of the abbey cemetery—how Conlon had scoffed that stones crumble and names fade away and no one remembers, “except the poets who help the rest of us remember what we dare not say.” But Angus gave his word—he’d place a wreath on every grave when the war was over—victory or defeat. But he wanted Conlon with him when he did. Wanted him to recite what the poets knew.

  Now, Conlon of the soft voice and softer smile, who, as Keegan said in his letter, had led his shredded forces at Passchendaele to feats more heroic than they had a right to, who had unfailingly kept spirits up, had found his way out. Enclosed with Keegan’s letter was Conlon’s copy of The Odyssey, which he’d asked Keegan to send to Angus should anything happen to him. The note to Angus from Conlon, tucked inside the book’s worn pages, said that unlike Odysseus, and unlike Angus, he did not think he could find his way home, but he hoped that Angus could find it in his heart to cherish his memory as much as he had cherished Angus’s friendship. Days later, he’d taken his own life in a hotel in London.

  Angus turned The Odyssey over in his hand and placed it on the ledge. He opened the cover and laid Conlon’s note inside. Before he closed the cover, he pressed his palm flat against the words. Then he left the shed door swinging open behind him. He walked on, spoke to no one, and headed up into the deep woods and hills, until finally, stumbling through a bog, he turned southwest toward the coast. Hours later he staggered across the boulders on the beach at Owl’s Head. There he let all the tortured whys fly out on the wind. Gusts rushed through the tops of the trees. At his feet a growing surf drenched the rocks in cascades of foam, unceasing, unending, uncaring. He’d been prepared for Conlon’s death, but not by his own hand.