The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

  Angus no more understood why he’d resisted than why Conlon had succumbed. Nor why he continued to resist. There was no answer, and all that Keegan might tell him later about the circumstances, the bits and pieces of Conlon’s last days, would never be explanation enough. We cannot know the whole poem from a single word, he finally found the strength to say, nor a life from a single act.

  Forced up against the limits of human knowing, on bended knee to the mystery, not just the fact of Conlon’s death, Angus glimpsed the greater mystery. There was more, but known only by a knowing beyond all knowing. His tethered life stretched away from him and he was in that moment unbound.

  “MACGRATH!” HE HEARD someone call minutes, maybe hours, later. He spun around, nearly slipped off the rocks. There was George, crazed and undone, balancing on a boulder, his crutch in the sand. “Thiepval,” he shouted. “He was there! Saved my life.”

  “I know,” Angus said. “I believe you. I saw him, too. At Vimy, and after that.” The released truth of those words carried him at a rapid pace across the slick rocks to George.

  George’s hair whipped across his face. He slowly pulled it back. “With the 45th?”

  “That’s right. Called himself Havers. But it was Ebbin. I watched him die. Watched him die a hundred times since.”

  They met each other’s eyes. “End without ending,” George said.

  Angus lost his footing, grabbed George, and they fell together onto the sand and struggled up and hobbled over the stony beach to the shelter of the trees, then sank down on the steps leading up to the Heist cottage. Angus huddled over and lit a cigarette and handed it to George.

  George held it between his thumb and forefinger. “Boy cried out for his mother. Passed him one of these,” he said.

  Angus glanced up at George, then lit one for himself. A misty rain began to fall.

  George blew out a long stream of smoke and dropped his head. “Die or go on. Either way won’t bring them back. Or us. Heart-broke, head-broke.”

  Angus leaned back against the railing. George’s hands went slack between his knees. Angus closed his eyes and remembered the scrape of a muddied kilt on bare knees. After a time, the wind began to die, and the air took on a softness. A blue jay sounded a series of hollow notes above them.

  Angus said, “There was a lark nesting in a Kraut jacket on the wire in the middle of No Man’s Land. Singing her heart out.”

  George lifted his head and listened, then reached for a twig of mountain laurel that had blown onto the steps. He broke a leaf in half, held it to his nose and inhaled deeply. He passed the other half to Angus, who did the same. The fresh scent of the wet woods—blueberry bushes and laurel, drenched pine needles, damp earth—flooded in, overtook memory, canceled time. They slowly took the steps up to the Heist cottage. There George stopped. They clasped hands and Angus left him there rocking on the porch.

  AS HE WALKED BACK, alone on the hilly road, the evening sky took on a tremulous violet-blue that filled in and grew deeper until, suddenly luminescent and silvered, it faded to black. “In life,” he had said to Orland, futilely staunching his dead brother’s wound, “we are in death.” Nothing lasts. Every moment is a moment passing and gone. Yet, as he walked, and dusk faded to night, that violet-blue stayed with him in its essence, calling up his longing in the bottom of a trench for the whole sky. It was above him now, vast and star-filled. Every star the brighter for the depth of unending darkness.

  The war was in him, part of him, but not all of him. Memory would always haunt him, as it haunted George. He knew that. But he knew, too, that the sacrifice could not be honored by memory alone, but in the purest part of self where it was understood it could not be fully known. Now we see through a glass darkly . . . now I know only in part.

  When he reached Mader’s wharf, he stopped. He took the steps down to it, and walked to the end. The shed door creaked open and a figure stepped out.

  “Angus? That you?” Philip called, peering into the darkness, one hand on his pot belly, the other scratching his neck.

  “It is.”

  “Knew it. That one-armed way you got of walking. Come down here in the middle of the night to see how I’m doing? Well, I’ll tell you. Seventy-two years old and still got me powers.” He winked, amused at himself, and said, “C’mere now since you’re out and about. Got something I want to show you here. C’mon, c’mon,” he wheezed, motioning Angus inside.

  In the shed he pointed with his pipe to the beautiful little hull of a boat, a sloop, about twenty-four feet long, up on a cradle. “Honduras mahogany,” he said. “Got it cheap if you can believe it, but don’t believe it.” He squeezed out a high-pitched chuckle.

  “She’s a beauty,” Angus said.

  “Yep. She is.” Philip strutted around her through the sawdust, and got up on a stepladder and rested his gnarled hands on the gunwale. The deck was not yet finished. Just the carvel-planked hull, a soft reddish-brown, unvarnished and sanded smooth. “Your boy and me designed her. Didn’t think I could build a boat again. I liked her so much, couldn’t help but build her. He pushed me along. Mostly his design. Wanted that long counterstern, that spoon bow. Been helping every step of the way.”

  “Simon Peter?”

  “None other. How many boys you got?”

  Angus circled the boat, eyeing her graceful lines, the deep keel, the oval at the end of her transom. She was the most perfectly balanced, beautiful little boat he had ever seen. “He helped design her? How do you mean?”

  “I mean he and I talked dimensions. He even made some drawings, to scale, he told me, if that don’t beat all, afore we lofted her up. He don’t want to paint her. Just varnish so that color stays true. I never seen anyone sand so fine. Wants me to name her True North, but I told him that’ll be up to whoever buys her.”

  Dumbfounded, Angus ran his hand along her planks and then pressed his hand against the curve of her smoothed spoon bow.

  “He and I figured the mast about twenty-eight foot tall,” Philip said, climbing back down. “He’s already picked out the tree. She’ll carry a lot of sail, but she’s good for it. That keel will keep her from going over in a fifty-knot gale with a couple of skinny boys on her windward rail.”

  Philip pulled out his flask and offered it to Angus. Angus took a long swallow and leaned back against the door frame, staring at her transom. “Philip,” he said, “I’m thinking that True North would look pretty good on her stern.”

  “Well, sir, that it would. It’s a right good name,” Philip agreed. “Right good.” He shoved his pipe back between his teeth and smiled broadly. Then he switched off the light and bade Angus good night.

  Angus walked down to the end of the wharf and felt a release that filled the sky. Beauty had not abandoned him. He’d abandoned it. On the battlefield he’d risked life in the midst of death. And he had not risked it since. He closed his eyes and let the stars fall around him.

  BACK IN HIS shed, he found himself warming tubes of paint in his hand and mixing the most perfect blues he could imagine—the near navy blue of Mahone Bay on a crisp October day, the deep violet-blue of twilight, the French blue of the shutters in Saint-Junien, the dusky iridescence of the Morpho didius, the sea-glass green-blue of the sea water beneath the bluffs at the cottage in France, the ice blue of Publicover’s eyes, the gray-blue of his son’s. He lifted a brush with his left hand and swirled it thick with paint. It felt awkward at first, but the strangeness of it was freeing. He righted the easel and placed a clean canvas on it and in great thick jabs began to create not a perfectly rendered reproduction, but the very truth of that blue.

  What shape it took was of no interest to him, but once on the canvas, in shuttered shadows, in rounded curves of gravestones and drumlins and bird wing, it became all of those things. He worked for hours with different mixtures of color, and the more he worked, the more he felt the blood rushing, pulsing through him. Then he added a hint of green. And then he was done.

  Completely spent, he slum
ped onto the cot in the corner and saw that the rumpled old blue and gray quilt was neatly folded at the foot, the sheet and blanket turned back, and the pillow plumped. Hettie. He ran the back of his hand gently across the pillow, and it came to him that the cot had been made up just like that, night after night.

  AT SUNRISE THE next morning, he woke to Ida shaking him roughly. “You better wake up and see to your boy. Hettie’s off to Bridgewater. You’d better get up.”

  Angus sat up and rubbed his face.

  “Look here at this letter from Mr. Heist. Hettie forgot to give it to Simon yesterday, I guess. He’s read it now.” She thrust it at him. “That man never thanked him for that butterfly. Did you know that? Now he sends this letter. Says he’s not one of us.”

  Angus unfolded the letter and read. In the letter Heist said he’d found new reason for hope. His new friends, Dymetro and Johann, sturdy fellows who shared potato-peeling duty with him, had rescued his spectacles when a fight broke out and mercifully taken him under their wing—a godsend, given the louts and bullies that populated the camp. They’d become followers of a Russian named Trotsky, who himself had been hauled off a ship in Halifax en route to Russia from New York and sent up to Amherst for fear that his call to overturn corrupt governments would spread. “And so it should,” he wrote. Imprisoned for a month, Trotsky had held mass meetings and garnered many followers among the prisoners. Things were going to change, and that, Mr. Heist said, had given him the courage to survive. Heist said Simon Peter probably didn’t realize how critical this moment in history was. “Few of your countrymen do,” he said.

  Angus glanced up at Ida, and read on, picturing Heist on all fours, dodging blows, trying to reach his glasses. Heist noted he’d had to smuggle the letter out of the prison. He had friends now. And there the letter ended.

  “Does my father know about this?” Angus asked hoarsely.

  “No. I brought it straight to you.”

  “Poor Heist.”

  “Poor Heist?”

  “Yes, poor Heist. He’s trying to survive, is all,” Angus said, standing up. “It’s what people do.” Look around you, he wanted to say. He pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and asked where Simon was.

  “He took off. Who knows where. Down to Mader’s be my guess. His heart is about broke.”

  “Christ,” Angus said. At the mercy of his own demons for so long, he stood there immobilized by all the ways he’d failed his son, all the ways he didn’t know him, by all his imagined efforts at protecting him from the war when the truth was he’d given him nothing to hold on to.

  OUT OF SIGHT of the house, Simon began to run, pounding Heist into the ground with every step. All these months of defending him. Trusting him. He’d throw his stupid books into the bay—his butterflies and Greeks. The key to his stupid cottage. As the road came into town, Simon slowed down, feeling stupid himself. Small and stupid and pitiful—as alone as he had ever felt. He would never trust anyone or anything again. He had learned his lesson. You could count only on yourself. For months and months it had been staring him in the face, but he’d been blind to it. Well, the blinders were off now. Lesson learned. He hoped his father would leave again. Go back to Halifax, to France. Wished him back in the war, the father he’d thought he’d known but who didn’t know he was alive. At the fork in the road, he headed toward Mader’s Cove, intent on taking off in the dory on his own—anything to get away and be alone as he was meant to be. Every step of the way he recast his knowledge of his father—a man he knew he’d never really known. Thought he had, but never had. Just like Mr. Heist.

  AT MADER’S, SIMON found Zenus already in the dory untangling some line and Daryl Nauss on the float. His little brother Purdy was climbing in the boat. Simon took a deep breath and stared down at them from the wharf.

  Zenus looked up and cocked his head. “You comin’ out with us, or would that be breaking the MacGrath law?” He shielded his eyes. “Jesus. What’s wrong with you?”

  Simon barely rocked the boat as he stepped aboard. Daryl, heavyset, leapt in after him and the boat dipped. He punched Purdy’s leg without looking up. “Start bailing,” he said, and handed him the wooden spudgle.

  Zenus grinned at Simon and set the oarlocks. “Thought your old man said the boat wasn’t seaworthy enough for you.”

  “Who gives a damn what he said.” Simon took up an oar. Zenus took up the other.

  They rowed away from the wharf. “Whoa. Slow down, will ya?” Zenus said to him. “You got us going in circles. Are we in a race here?” Simon didn’t answer, just slowed to match Zenus’s pace. Once they got into the rhythm of it, the boat shot forward with each long pull. To hell with Heist. To hell with his father.

  They were halfway up the cove in short order, looking for hints of fresh wind in the harbor. Purdy was leaning over the bow, his leg resting on an old trawl barrel, his arm dangling to the lapping waves. Daryl, in the stern, was hooking bait from a wooden tub onto the jig lines. “There’s wind over there,” he said, nodding to the northwest, “and pollock by the lee shore of Mountain Island.”

  “Are you nuts?” Zenus shook his head. “If there’s fish to be caught, they’d better be in the harbor. We haven’t got us a decent sail for this rig yet. And the wind’s barely come up.” He stopped rowing. “Uh-oh. Look there, Simon.” He pointed back to the wharf.

  “Simon!” came the shout across the water. His father was waving his arm, had run to the end of the wharf.

  “Keep rowing,” Simon said to Zenus. “Pretend you don’t hear him.”

  Out in the harbor, they stepped the mast for the little sprit sail into a round hole in the forward seat. It caught the dust of a breeze that grew by the minute off the starboard quarter and they headed off on a close reach. Zenus managed the sheet. The others cleared the lines. Simon steered. After a time, the sail began to luff. Zenus flashed a look back at him. “You forget how to steer a boat?” he said. He pointed to leeward. “There’s where we’re headed. Remember?”

  Simon nodded. He flexed his hand on the tiller, gripping it so his knuckles were white.

  “Yeah. Keep us on course, would ya? Thought you were supposed to be as good as your old man,” Daryl said.

  Eyeing the sail, Simon said, “Yeah, well, people aren’t what you think. Maybe he never was that good.”

  Zenus coiled the anchor line and shook his head. “No idea what that means, but I’ll tell you what, boys . . .” He wiped his hands on his trousers and pulled out a leather pouch from which he withdrew a crumple of tobacco and some cigarette papers. He rolled a cigarette against his knee, licked the paper and struck it with a match. A curl of smoke rose up and dispersed to the wind. He handed it around to the others, each taking a draught in turn. “This,” Zenus said, “is about as good as it gets. We should sail her across the bay this summer.”

  Purdy piped up. “Well, we would, but come summer, me and Daryl are going to be catchies on a salt banker.”

  Zenus rolled his eyes. “Doubt that to be true. Bit young, aren’t you, Purdy?”

  “I’m nine!” Purdy said.

  Ducking beneath the boom and eyeing the water to leeward, Daryl said, “Well, I’m goin’ to the Banks, but Purdy here can’t go. He’ll have to wait ’cause he’s too little no matter what age he is.”

  “Am not!” Purdy stood up. “Lookit here what I can do.” He passed the cigarette back to Zenus and in two seconds was teetering on the gunwale, holding on to the mast with one hand, none of which made any sense. The boat dipped to windward.

  “Quit it, ya little bastard,” Daryl said on the inhale. “All you’re doing is rocking the boat.”

  Simon shifted his weight to leeward to compensate. “Yeah, get down, Purdy,” he said. As if to show greater prowess, Purdy let go of the mast. Daryl tossed his cigarette and stood up to grab him. The dory lurched. Purdy smiled in triumph at his balancing act just before he bent at the knees, arms flailing like a windmill, and splashed into the dark blue chop.

  “P
urdy!” Daryl screamed. Simon lunged to windward and stretched an arm to the sinking Purdy as they passed. The boat rocked again. Simon pushed the tiller hard to starboard. “Coming round!” he shouted. “Mark the spot and keep it marked!”

  Zenus hauled in the sail. The boat turned to the wind. The sail luffed, then whacked across the boat. Daryl ducked under the boom. Zenus eased the sheet, and the boat lumbered back toward the slapping, gasping Purdy, who rose for a second and slipped below again as Daryl shouted, “Over there! There he is!” Purdy’s hand was the last thing they saw.

  Simon already had his boots off. His cap tumbled onto the seat. “When we get there, drop the sail and use the oars,” he said from under his sweater. He flung it over his head, and as the boat came close, they could see Purdy still flailing in slow motion below the clear waves. Simon, the only one who could swim, jumped in.

  The shock of cold, a vise grip around his chest, took Simon’s breath away. He kicked hard again, and got his wind. Two strokes and he ducked under to grab the now-sinking Purdy. Down and just out of reach. He kicked hard and, clutching the back of Purdy’s sweater with two hands, hauled him up, took a breath, then dipped below and rolled him over his head, praying Purdy was alive enough to reach for the oar he knew would be there. His hand still pushing Purdy, he gave a violent kick and downward sweep of his free arm and surfaced himself. A great gasp for air. He let go of the sweater and shifted his arm up Purdy’s chest until he had the little chin in his hand. Purdy’s legs drifted along Simon’s. With his free hand Simon pulled in a sidestroke against the dark water, looking for the boat. He stroked and kicked against Purdy’s dropping body, the chin firmly in his right hand, waves washing over both of them. An oar stretched out to him—too far away. And the dory slipped by. The oar dipped in. Daryl was rowing her back. Sunshine above. Cold below, slowing him down. The dull yellow dory loomed near again. Oar in the water. Just a little farther. The knot of a line hit his head and dropped below. One hard kick and he caught it, wrapped it around his hand in a twist, then, still holding Purdy, felt himself dragged against the cold and the numbness until he was beside the hull. Daryl speared the boat hook at Purdy and caught his sweater under the armpit. Simon let go his chin clutch. Purdy rolled over. Simon found he could not reach up. Rays of sun fanned out behind the shadowed face of Zenus, who caught his wrist and put his hand on the gunwale. “We got him, we got him. Hold on, Simon,” he said.