The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  A mountain squirrel — a pika — leapt on top of a boulder, chattered angrily at her, then dashed for cover. There was nothing of their little girl left in that place. Not a morsel for anyone to attach emotion to.

  She could hear Joe grunting and puffing. Her lungs were clear — she’d never suffered asthma in these mountains. Her eyes were leaking tears, but that was on account of the sharp wind. Certainly not for their infant, who was a candle blown out, who was everywhere, but nowhere here.

  Joe had halted and was standing against the steep incline, one knee bent for balance, leaning into the slope. She could hear the boy’s boots clinking and scraping on the loose scree below her. Had Joe told him what they were doing, what they were looking for? Had Joe known himself? As she came up he was mopping his face with his handkerchief and wheezing from the climb.

  “There’s nothing here, is there, Iseult?”

  Her faith in him, his faith in the power of himself — all of it had sustained considerable damage over the years. But he had brought them here to pay tribute to something besides the memory of their infant daughter, and she had to admire his courage. This place represented their marriage and its foundation days of boldness and suffering.

  “We’ve made the trip,” she told him. “That’s what counts.” And it was true, somehow.

  “Don’t know what I was thinking of,” he puffed. “Crazy idea.”

  “No. This is a powerful place for us.”

  He peered at her. They were a little wrecked, a little ruined, but they were still the same people after all, and would lay their hands on what they needed in order to go on.

  “I’m glad we’ve come,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Bear,” the boy said sharply. “Across the river. Female and two cubs. Griz.”

  She looked around. On the avalanche slope that rose on the other side of the old right-of-way a grizzly was balanced on hind legs, her head dipping from side to side.

  “Getting our scent,” the boy had said, slipping the rifle off his shoulder.

  “She won’t trouble with us, will she?” She felt fear knotting in her throat. Her voice was weak. “Once she knows we’re here, she’ll stay away, won’t she?”

  “She might,” said the boy, working the rifle bolt.

  “Soon see,” Joe said.

  The bear began descending the avalanche slope, moving easily among grey smashed trees, her cubs gambolling ahead of her.

  “Got a couple of stoppers in here,” the boy said, patting the breech of his rifle.

  She and Joe and the boy stood very close, arms and elbows touching. Fear fluted through her body and she could smell gun oil and the spruce gum the boy was cracking between his teeth.

  The she-bear halted again, rose on hind legs, and waved her nose in the air.

  Don’t cross the river, Iseult pleaded silently. Don’t shoot. No orphans. Let us all walk to the rest of our lives from here.

  The grizzly dipped her snout and headed for the river. She began following the bank, her lithe, swaying walk almost as fluid as if she were swimming. She was heading in the opposite direction from where they had left the station wagon. The cubs splashed in and out of the water, trailing her.

  “That’s it, mama, keep going,” the boy said.

  ~

  The Maine morning was a surprise: clear and warm, a breeze out of the southwest. The plan was not to trouble with their neglected house or overgrown garden, but just go sailing. The old Friendship sloop had been launched and rigged and was waiting for them on her mooring at Cape Porpoise. Iseult rowed them out in the dinghy. Joe wore old grey flannel trousers with a sail tie for a belt, a white shirt with a frayed collar, tennis shoes, and an old soft hat. She wore a skirt and an old college sweater of Mike’s.

  The sloop had been freshly painted. While Joe attached the jib, she unfurled, loosed sheets, and began raising the mainsail. They had owned the Friendship for twelve summers and there was nothing luxurious about her: she was more barebones fishing sloop than yacht.

  The cruises she had taken with Joe over the years, up and down the Maine coast, were as intimate as any time she had ever spent with him. They anchored in quiet coves and swam naked in the mornings. She always brought along binoculars and spotted for cormorants, fish hawks, puffins, porpoises, seals, while Joe logged every sighting. They would take turns at the helm, jig for mackerel, buy haddock and lobsters off the boats. After dinner she always went forward to smoke a cigarette while he washed the dishes. After covering the hatches with mosquito netting, they played blackjack by lantern light in the galley. He slept in the forward V-berth and, because he snored, she usually plugged her ears with wax, then lay in one of the galley berths and read a novel by flashlight, and after a while she slept. She never had trouble sleeping aboard. The lilting ocean was a reservoir, absorbing all her fears.

  Now he let go the mooring pendant and stood in the bow, backing the jib. She held the tiller. As the sloop began falling off the wind, Joe released the jib. She sheeted it, then quickly sheeted the main. They were sailing.

  Once they had rounded Goat Island and cleared the lobster pots crowded at the narrow mouth of the harbour, Joe stretched out on the foredeck, hands clasped under his head, as he often did at the beginning of a sail. She had always felt confident handling the sloop herself. Maybe on a larger boat she wouldn’t be strong enough. Maybe he wouldn’t either — they were both getting older. But now, on a broad reach with a clean wind and nothing in the way, she would not waste these clear blue hours worrying what was going to become of them.

  SICILY, AUGUST 1943

  Displaced Person, Part I

  Sicily

  11ième août 43

  Margo ma chère,

  This letter is to be the wings of a dove and somehow fly between us but it’s no bird, this letter. My pen is almost dry so is my mouth I can’t speak. Haven’t had a decent thought in days.

  I’m trying to shake myself out like the sheets we stripped from the bed that morning in Maine. Shook them, left in a bundle for the charwoman to wash and wring and hang where the sun and the clean breeze would cure them.

  You’ll never get me clean, Margo, I’m afraid.

  The sun here is the same sun as in Maine or Canada. I would not believe it, but know it’s true.

  There is a rifleman in Lt. Trudeau’s platoon, Pvt. Blais, a farmer — no, a farmer’s son. From Arthabaska.

  I’ll tell you about him later.

  Planes overhead. Our planes always. The Germans possess none, apparently.

  They say we own the sky.

  The people from Brigade say that we have beaten the Germans only they do not know they are beaten, and therefore we, the infantry, will have to walk to Germany and remind them again every mile, every farm,

  every village, on each street corner.

  What clothes do you wear? Do your fingers touch this paper? Does the ink speak to you? How are we connected exactly, Margo? I feel more of a connection to certain bullets than to you.

  I’m thinking of your wrists now.

  I once knew my wife, down to her bones.

  Do you have a sweet tan this summer? Comme une huronne?

  Whatever sense I once had, whatever solidity I inherited from my Norman ancestors, has been beaten out of me, I think, in this growling ground. This month of things bursting.

  Let me dispose of my adjectives, please. In your arms, please let me release them.

  bloody,

  silly,

  fecal,

  loud,

  beaten,

  red,

  terror.

  You see I have slipped into nouns, so let me deliver a few more. You don’t have to unwrap these, Margo. Just sign for them, then you can put them away.

  Child,

  children,

  machinegun,

  antitank,

  .303,

  88,

  tree-burst,

  counterattack,

  head wound,

  pr
isoner,

  neck wound,

  aorta,

  femoral artery

  battle

  And men of good cheer are singing now. In this our “rest area” the men of the Régiment 22ième are being fed hamburgers et fèves au lard puis un bouteil le chacun de Black Horse Ale. P’tit Canada dans une olivaie sicilienne.

  Are your thighs still your thighs?

  I’m sorry. I apologize.

  O ma femme.

  Is the little girl . . . no, I shall not think of her. No. I don’t want her appearing in this place.

  Your cunt.

  I’m sorry. I apologize. Je t’en prie.

  Me, I want you on your back.

  I want your belly sweet and warm like sugar pie.

  Anti-tank.

  Howitzer.

  To lose your head out here, c’est tellement facile. The 88s come cracking through olive groves at dawn, high velocity, very flat trajectory, dismembering trees. What kills is often not the shell itself but bits of riflemen, and splinters of rocks, trees. The thing comes at you like a girl you want, like a cunt, so sweet and so indirect. Soldiers in rifle companies are killed by pieces of other soldiers in rifle companies. Arms, boots, knees. I tell my platoon leaders, it’s another reason to keep from bunching up which is what the boys will always do at first, like cattle, no matter their training, our battle drill.

  Think of your pals, I tell them, as shrapnel, dangerous. Watch out for those flying steel helmets. A splinter of leg bone can do astonishing damage.

  My Sergeant Major, on the road approaching Catania.

  There.

  I want you to cover me.

  Three young German boys in a staff car on a road through the mountains. As little Lieutenant Duclos reported, he fully intended to offer them a chance of surrender. Only Corporal Dextraxe offered them a lively talk from his tommy gun instead. And the young lieutenant, the jesuitical prig straight out of Brébeuf, was quite cool delivering his report. He’ll lose no sleep over dead Boches. It was the corporal, one of our best, a rugged forester from Megantic, who was trembling and cursing.

  Their Company Commander, this is who I am. I am not your husband anymore, Margo. I don’t belong to anyone but the tree bursts and right now the greasy air floating from the hamburger tent where survivors gorge.

  Replacements are due up tomorrow: for my company, seventeen fresh men.

  Everyone is tired.

  The riflemen assure me there are beautiful, famished girls alive in the cellars of Messina who will do it with vigor for a piece of cheese. And afterwards offer you a bottle of marsala for one lousy Sweet Caps cigarette.

  That Blais, the rifleman I mentioned. The imbecile got his girl pregnant last year just before going overseas. Her old man put her off to the Grey Nuns in Montreal where she had the child and was forced to give it up and is now a slavey, scrubbing floors for the Sisters, and very miserable. Her letter, which he showed me, is pathetic — do they send girls in the country to school? This one hardly makes herself understood. In any case. Will you go to the convent and see the Mother Superior to determine what can be done, you may use the name of my uncle, the bishop. The girl is Lucie something or other, from Tingwick, fifteen or sixteen of age. Blais is a good chap and insists they will marry if he survives. Perhaps you can find her a maid’s position. With the wages they’re paying at the factories these days I expect in Westmount you are short of slaves.

  Oh my dear. I am shook up and no one but you knows it.

  Forgive. I give you my blood, my heart, my kisses for our girl.

  Jean

  WESTMOUNT, AUGUST 1943

  Prodigal

  The doorbell rang just as Frankie and her parents were sitting down to dinner. She exchanged glances with her mother — they weren’t expecting visitors. Ever since Mike, then Johnny Taschereau, had gone overseas, a doorbell ringing unexpectedly had been enough to spook them at Skye Avenue. Mike had what sounded like a safe desk job in Africa, but everyone knew the Canadians were fighting in Sicily, and Johnny could be one of them. Margo had been having trouble sleeping. She was drinking too much lately, Frankie thought, and was often short-tempered and snappish with Madeleine, her three-year-old.

  Doorbell dread was like a sliver of ice entering the intestinal tract. Her father sat at the head of the table, and even she couldn’t tell what he was feeling: nerves or gloom or wonder.

  Her mother nodded at Helen, the new West Indian maid, who set the salad bowl down on the sideboard with a crash and hurried to answer the door. It seemed to Frankie that her mother had became old the day the war started. She had not bought any new clothes in years. She still ran the free-milk clinic in Sainte-Cunégonde and travelled a lot and gave speeches to raise money for soldiers’ families. But she never took a camera with her anymore and hadn’t spent any time in her darkroom since just after Madeleine was born. When Iseult was at home, she usually stayed in bed all morning, reading stacks of mail and writing letters that Frankie typed up on the machine at her office downtown.

  Without moving from her chair, Frankie glanced out the window, caught a glimpse of a taxi driving away, and felt relieved. Had her brother-in-law or brother been wounded or killed, word would have come by telegram, not by taxi.

  She heard a male voice in the hall, and a moment later a gaunt brown figure in tropical uniform strolled into the dining room.

  “What’s for dessert?” Mike said. “Chocolate cake, I hope. All hail the returning hero.”

  ~

  When Mike went overseas, their father had blamed their mother and Uncle Grattan, which was ridiculous, Frankie thought, because Mike would have gone no matter what anyone said or thought or wrote in a newspaper column. When their father had tried to shut down his firm, a friend of Uncle Grattan’s — a federal cabinet minister — told him he had to keep it going, not just to stay out of jail but also for Mike’s sake. Abandoning important wartime contracts would embarrass and disgrace Mike, who would certainly feel responsible; how could he not? And hadn’t Joe planned on handing the firm over to his son one day?

  So her father kept the firm going, and they’d been building war things for almost three years now. Whether it was making him richer than ever, Frankie couldn’t say. She only knew that during the long winter weeks after they heard Mike was wounded, when it had been so difficult getting any information about his condition, her father and mother had been kind and gentle with each other.

  Even the United States was in the war by then. Maps of England, North Africa, Russia, and Italy had long since replaced the Canadian railway maps on the walls of her father’s study, with red and blue pins marking every place where his son and son-in-law had been stationed.

  And now Mike was home. She hardly recognized him, but he was home. Hugging him, she could feel his bones through the frayed khaki tunic he wore.

  “Awfully chic, being killed,” Lulu Taschereau had remarked at the Normandie Roof one evening, a few weeks before her fiancé was killed at Dieppe. Everyone at the table, including Frankie, had smiled. What life had been like before 1939, she barely remembered.

  Her two serious romances so far had been with soldiers, a lieutenant with the Loyal Edmontons and an anti-tank captain in the RCA. Both might now be in Sicily, and Johnny Taschereau, who had left the Maisies to take over a company in another French-Canadian infantry battalion, the 22ième, might be fighting in Sicily too, though no one knew his whereabouts for certain. Or even if he was still alive.

  Her father had not risen from his chair; he watched silently while Frankie and her mother made a female fuss over Mike. Her brother was telling them about hitching a ride on a B-17 out of Prestwick, Scotland, flying at a hundred feet across the North Atlantic. She could tell from the blue rings on his sleeve that he was now Flight Lieutenant O’Brien, equivalent to the army rank of captain. For the past year she had been booking transatlantic flights on bombers for VIP passengers. It was a glamour job and all her pals envied her, but she’d never heard of an officer belo
w the rank of major general or air commodore rating a seat on such a flight. No soldier, no airman ever arrived home in the middle of a campaign, unannounced, without there being some piece of trouble attached. From her father’s silence, from the set of his mouth, she guessed that he too sensed trouble: all kinds of suffering, sorrow, the crash of dreams.

  Her brother was exotic, strange. His speech had a clipped edge now, very English. Frightfully cold. Bloody awful.

  He’d lost weight and his teeth were blazing white in his mahogany face. He had a glow. He’d been in the desert at least a year: of course it had marked him. He had always loved the sun. What was Tunisia like in summer — dusty olive groves, or did it rain there? The brother she had known would have found the most beautiful, most deserted beach and stripped down to take a long, solitary swim in the Mediterranean.

  His face was built differently somehow. He smiled in a way she didn’t remember. The bones were bold in his face, giving him a ferocious look. Around his blue eyes the skin was stretched, withered. He’d had a haircut recently, shorn at the sides and neck, thicker on top.

  She felt dizzy. It was the shock of seeing him. And she’d had a long day, with hardly anything to eat.

  The West Indian maid was trying to put down three little plates of salad. “Set a fourth place, Helen, please,” Iseult said. Just back from a fundraising trip through the Maritimes, she looked thinner than ever. She had spent a few days in Maine back in June and it had done her good, but now she was very pale for the middle of summer.

  The chandelier twinkled in the mirror over the sideboard. It was like having a male stranger in the house. Her brother might be called handsome, but his youth was gone. He was parched, spare. War had desiccated him. His uniform was sizes too large. His face, wrists, hands were nearly as black as Helen’s.

  If he weren’t her brother she might have fallen for him. He looked extraordinary. Damaged, too. His glow had an animal ferocity. He was no longer who he had been.