The thirty-foot rolls of barbed wire glinted darkly just ahead. To the left some of his comrades had found breaks in the wire and their bayonets flashed silver and then red. Eddie sighted and fired, a green coat stiffened in the act of straightening, and folded. Dead ahead Sandy was running alone towards the bristling parapet, zigzagging like a soccer player, dancing wildly amidst the bullets, his rifle floating in his hand as if he were carrying a flag on the end of it. Then, aiming his body like a missile, he dropped the rifle, flew over the remaining terrain with the grace of a five-minute miler, and while the astonished enemy gaped in disbelief, sailed into the barbed wire as if he had not seen it or else disdained its petty intercession. As a result he lifted, flattened and hung there, stunned. Slowly, with some regret, a machine-gun barrel swivelled around, locked into place and chattered. Eddie saw the steel-jacket bullets rip out of Sandy’s back, the helmet snap off and clatter to the ground, the head loll giddily from side to side saying no, no, no. But the body remained on the wire.
What was left of Eddie’s platoon came up behind him. Their sergeant and company captain were dead. The soldiers raised their rifles and fired at the nameless targets. Bolts jammed. Barrels blushed and seized. Cartridge chambers exploded, blinding. Eddie took the rife from the corpse beside him, a scarlet welt where the face should have been. He inched forward. The dirt sizzled in front, this side, that side. Bullets hummed in there like maddened worms. When they didn’t, you were dead. Eddie continued to crawl forward, alone now, close enough to throw his grenade. It landed short. The barbed wire unsprung, jangling. But nothing they could do over the next two hours, nothing could stop the Germans – standing in the ruins of Fabeck Graben on balustrades of their own dead – from blasting to shreds, one bullet at a time, the pinioned flesh-and-bones of Sandy Lecker, the farmboy from Waterloo County.
The Princess Pats, says one semi-official account, fought with magnificent valour, but their right suffered most severely. Scattered groups forced their way into Fabeck Graben here and there to the western side of Courcelette, where the 25th Battalion was pressing stubbornly forward. The men of the 49th reached the trench in time to relieve the situation and assist in the consolidation there, it being impossible in the face of enemy fire – both artillery and machine-gun – to advance farther. Down the line, one of the attacking companies ran into a terrific barrage, almost half its members being wiped out. The attack continued, however, and in spite of all obstacles the Germans in Fabeck Graben were routed. Throughout the entire line, despite some reverses here and there, the success was magnificent and quite deserving of the congratulations of the commander-in-chief.
...Eddie was alone. In the din and pall he recognized no one. There were no units, no officers, no direction. Twice out of the mist of smoke and steam of opened flesh, greenish limbs had blundered into the rage of light around him, and he had fired or stabbed, stepped over the crumpled baggage and tried to find a place to run towards. Once, he had stood up stock-still and tried to squeeze his eyes shut against his own death, but the cordite tears in them flushed them wide and searing with absolute sight. Everywhere he put his foot down, it skidded on blood, rubbed against bone, slithered on living intestine.
Through a fissure in the maelstrom, his glance caught the blank bulls-eye of a machine-gun. He felt himself launched towards it. It stuttered, and jammed. His rifle jumped and the youth behind the gun gasped as the bullet sliced through his throat and cut off his cry. Eddie turned in time to see the wayward shell – it could have been from either side – complete its mile-long random arc no more than a handspan from his next step.
Eddie was flung sunward with the slow-motion ease of a levitation dream, blood stretched to the fingertips, toes, the whites of the eyes. The joints unhinged. The bones disengaged – legs, arms, scapula, skull spun out of the disintegrated skin towards the compass-points of some unimagined gravity. The centrifuge of the heart at last gives way and releases with it from time’s cradle these fragments: snatches of a Celtic lullaby; a telltale bubble of healing laughter; the perfect stanza of an unfinished poem; phrases of affection shaped but not uttered; three flawless lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’; cherished moments of child-bravery, fright, longing, devotion, steadfastness, the courage-to-be; memories as green as the hours that nurtured them one by one in all the afternoons and evenings and mornings it takes to bring the man out of the boy; dreams of generation wherein the future is scanned with the past’s prophecy; and dreams that run deeper than memory, that feed in the shrubbery of our chromosomes and sip the cryptic ink of that gene where the myths of the species itself are made memorial.
The Battle of the Somme began on July 1, 1916 and ended on November 28 of that year. The Germans lost 582,919 men. The Allied Forces counted 623,907 casualties. Of these, Canadian losses were 24,029 killed, wounded, and maimed.
Every one of them was Eddie.
2
Granny came out of the house into the austere light of the September morning. She might have been on her way to tend the chrysanthemums or the cucumber beds or the tomatoes that had survived the first frost. She carried her trowel but no hamper. Her left hand was tightened into a fist, and her walk a little less spontaneous than usual. She moved slowly but without hesitation towards the big tree at the end of the property. The wind which had risen with the sun filled the yellowing leaves with sibilant motion. She stood under its shade, the breeze from the Lake on her face, and tried to imagine what this place – the knoll east of the marshes below and the great hickory above – was like when Southener’s forefathers had first come upon it, seeing it surely – as Lily had so long ago – from the water’s edge staring eastward into the rising sun. Were they drawn to its sibylline whispers? Its promise of shade and renewal? Its bounteous strength bridging four seasons? The sweet nub of its fruit under Carcajou’s tongue in the long hallucinatory nights? Even now with the magic of the talisman gone, she recalled the words Southener had spoken to her, in trust, more than sixty-five years before: “I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by generation upon generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods and waters and passed on, as we all do. The days of its guardianship are almost over; there is little magic left in the forests and the streams, older now than our legends. So when you have no more use for the stone’s powers, I ask that you return it to the sacred grove whence it came, to the gods of that place who lent their spirit to it.”
She opened her left hand. The jasper amulet lay in the palm as cold as when she had removed it a minute ago from the leather sachet she had carried out of the bush in another century. Only two of the treasures now remained there: the Testament with Papa’s inscription inside the cover and the cameo pendant bearing the face of the woman who may have been her grandmother. Transferring the stone to her right hand, she dug a small hole in the ground between the two largest roots of the tree. She placed the jasper in the hole and for several minutes watched it carefully; then she brushed the soil over it. Under that seal of earth lay the dead amulet, Lil Corcoran, Lady Fairchild, Lily Ramsbottom, Lily Marshall, Cora Burgher, Granny Coote and what remained of whoever she was now.
Mrs. Carpenter, who had just heard the terrible news, came through the hedge and spotted Granny coming towards her from the garden.
“Oh Cora, we just heard. It’s all over town. You poor, dear thing.” She was wringing her apron and putting on the bravest face she could muster. “What can we do to help?”
Granny opened her mouth to reply but nothing came out – not a vowel, not a spent breath. From that day forward not a single intelligible word passed her lips.
PART FOUR
The Return
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1
The work of the monument proceeded apace. Sam Stadler brought his sons along only on those days when there was lifting or manoeuvring to be done. Otherwise he laboured alone under the vigilant supervision of the old man now rumoured to be his uncle. When the grand-nephews were about, the old fellow gambolle
d and chided and gabbled and offered copious instruction. When they were not, he sat on one of the unprepared stone slabs and rarely took his eyes off the movements of the artisan’s hands. Neither did Granny from her own watchtower across the street.
The monument was to consist of a double-pedastalled base of polished alabaster sandstone guarded by eight newel-posts linked with black iron chain. Surmounting this elegant base was a cube of rough-cut limestone with projecting cornice. On each facet of this cube was set a smooth tablet in which Sam Stadler had patiently inscribed the scroll of the dead. Normally these tablets would have been prepared in a workshop and transported to the site for installation, but Sam Stadler was no ordinary builder of memorials-in-stone. Every cut and gesture of his craft was executed on the grounds in the open air. When it rained, as it did often that April and May of 1922, he drew a tarpaulin over the unfinished pieces and sat in his truck smoking and smiling at respectable intervals as the old fellow chattered beside him. Sometimes if the rain were warm and misty, they sat silently in its midst, the droplets beading on the brims of their crumpled fedoras, cigarettes cupped lovingly in hand. Often several hours would pass before they moved – to return to the task or climb contentedly into the battered truck to go home, wherever that was.
On sunny days Sam Stadler sat on a stool and chipped into stone the strangers’ names written on the sheet of paper spread out before him on the ground. Though hammer and chisel and file were his instruments, the play of his fingers across the grooved tablet reminded Granny of a pianist’s fingers, Arthur’s fingers – with their supple strength, their gentle probing, their easy precision, their effortless acceptance of art’s tyranny. Letter by letter she watched him chisel into continuance the names of the children of the village, and something in the tenderness of his gestures and in the deep resignation behind the quick smile he gave to the curious attending silently from the sidewalk, told her that to him these were more than yet another set of sad anonyms. He was, she thought, a calligrapher spelling out the letters of his first born in the reverence and awe and regret we feel for all things cherished and mortal.
On top of the pedestal and memorial facets was to be erected a twenty-foot obelisk of cut limestone interspersed with inscribed tablets to record the names of the battles wherein the sons and fathers had fallen or whatever cause had driven them hence: Ypres, St. Eloi, Vimy, Passchendaele, Hill Seventy – names that would enter the village vernacular like the names of those diseases which had struck and departed without cause or care: diphtheria, typhus, small pox, Spanish influenza. They would be forever the whispered words of quarantine, of taboos only partially exorcized, of cold subcutaneous fear. The obelisk was constructed in five-foot sections to be fitted in place at the end of the work. On top of the last section a stone bust of the unknown soldier was to be erected. It was uncrated from a box delivered from the freight-sheds. Somewhere, Granny thought, there was a factory that turned these out from a single mold and shipped them to the hinterland. Against the wishes of Sam Stadler and of Reeve Denfield, the council had insisted on this necessary fillip, perhaps to offset the uncompromising idiosyncrasy of the rest of the piece, perhaps to ensure, for some, the military character of the memorial which the words alone, in their ambiguous solitude, could not do. “It’s ugly and says nothing,” was all Sunny said to her about the figure, and she nodded in agreement.
What was especially charming during the construction was the way in which people came to observe, almost always alone (even the children), posted in silence on the nearby walk, watching for long moments when you were certain they had not breathed and waiting as a faithful terrier does for recognition – usually just a tip of the mason’s hat or a wink (for the kids) or a cornerwise smile for the regulars. Granny observed many of these brief exchanges, no two of them quite the same though generated from similar sources and needs, and she marvelled once again how much could be conveyed without the sweet contamination of language. One day just after the base was completed, Granny walked across the street with a thermos of tea. She stood and watched the three men sweating in the smooth sun, aware of the old fellow’s stare. When the men had finished the task they were engrossed in, Sam Stadler acknowledged her presence with a grin.
“You been keepin’ a good eye on us for some time now,” he said pleasantly. “Denfield tells me it was your house they took down to make room for this.”
Granny nodded and pointed to her lips.
“It’s okay,” Sam Stadler said. “I know.” He turned to his sons. “I’m Sam and this here’s Harry and Pat, my boys. The old wood-grouse there in the corner is my Uncle Jack but everybody calls him Old Jack for short.”
Old Jack murmured an indistinct but not unfriendly greeting and kept his owl’s eye fixed upon her in happy puzzlement. “He don’t talk neither,” Sam said and laughed good-naturedly as his sons and uncle joined in. “But that’s never stopped him from gettin’ his point across.”
“If that’s hot tea you got in there,” Old Jack said with a superfluous wink in the direction of the boys, “we’d sure like some.”
Sam Stadler spread the tea-towel in which he had wrapped their lunch over one of the slabs of stone.”If you’d like to sit for a while, please do,” he said. Granny sat down in the sun.
A little while later the boys drove off in the truck, and Old Jack, after some strenuous bantering over lunch, ambled to the back of the lot and fell asleep under the hickory tree. Sam Stadler picked up several chisels and awls, sat on his stool before one of the partly finished memorial tablets, and began chipping out the letters of a name. The sun warmed his fingers and mellowed the stone that gave way smoothly under their insistence. The shadow of his face fell over the name. When he sat back to roll himself a smoke, Granny read the letters he had just etched there: EDWARD ARTHUR BURGHER. Sam Stadler lit his cigarette, turned towards her, caught his smile in time, and said quietly, “You knew him.”
After a deep draught of smoke he went on. “I didn’t know him, of course, or any of these others. But four of my sons were there, and only two come home.” She reached out and placed a hand over his. He didn’t move. Not an eyelash.
Old Jack was holding forth over the lunch hour, ostensibly for the benefit of his grand-nephews slouched in the grass but more likely for the edification of his favourite nephew and anyone else near enough to be moved by his sad tale. Granny picked at one of the muffins she had brought over an listened politely.
“The younger generation’s got no idea, not an inkling, of what life was like fifty or sixty years back. No sense of tradition, no respect for their elders. It’s the cities and the wars and the ruination of Mother Earth herself. When I was a boy we lived in huts and we moved from place to place in the woods, following the deer and small game even we children were taught to trap and shoot. In them days we treasured every word that dropped from the lips of our elders. My father was a giant, a king, a great hunter, he was permitted to talk with the gods.” He glanced towards Harry and discovered him in the midst of a yawn, which he chose to ignore. “Our history was passed down to us through the lips of our grandfathers. The lore of our people was passed along from hand to hand, and Mother Nature was the consort of our gods. We would’ve been ashamed to wear clothes not made from the skin of our brothers in the forest.” Pat was dusting off his overalls in a badly timed gesture. Old Jack ventured a quick glower and then resumed his monologue.
Afterwards Sam Stadler told her: “We’ve got some Indian blood in us from way back, and the old fellow likes to have his dreams.” Then perhaps as if he had gone further than he intended, he added, “Some of the things he talks about were true.”
Towards the end of April with only the base completed and part of the memorial section, the town council proudly announced that the Governor-General, Lord Byng, and his wife, Baroness Byng, would take time out of their busy schedule to visit the Point and consecrate a cornerstone of the cenotaph. Sam Stadler was hastily contracted to make a suitably engraved tablet, which bec
ame the first stone to be set in place upon the pedestal. The whole town went into a flutter of anticipation. And even though their Excellencies would spend less than an hour in the village – the rest of their hectic day to be apportioned among the various functions devised by the Sarnia-city elite – the visit was generally held to be a matter of civic pride, and not-a-little boasting here and there. The veterans were to escort Lord Byng of Vimy from Bayview Park to the site of the cenotaph where patriotic speeches would be delivered, a bouquet of flowers presented to the Baroness by Harry Hitchcock’s little girl, Susie, and a blessing uttered over the sacred cornerstone.
Granny heard the blare of bugles bent by the wind, and the tramp of military boots on pavement. The shadows of the restless throng around the site (some of them crowded back onto her lawn) flickered on the far wall. She heard the sparrow-chatter of children and the ooh’s and aah’s of their elders as the royal train approached. Although the words of the speeches – by Deputy Reeve Hitchcock and the Commanding Officer himself – were inaudible, Granny knew what platitudes they would employ, what pauses would be made so that the visiting press could capture each cliché intact and uncorrupted by novelty. Somewhere in the middle of an invocation or doxology by one of the innumerable local reverends, Granny drifted far enough into unconsciousness to enter the world of her own thought. She was thinking of Eddie and the time just after Arthur died when they went for a Sunday drive in Ralph’s father’s automobile, down into Moore Township.
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