by Alan Cumyn
I’ve had many weeks already to absorb the news of Thomas and Will, yet it still doesn’t seem real. Now the mention of their names freezes the air in my throat. And then — He’s alive! He’s alive! — I can picture Uncle Manfred in his suspenders, his jowls flapping, eyes bright with excitement.
We cried and laughed and Mother spilled the potted plant she was holding.
But what about you, dear Margaret?
Please know what joy the news has brought us.
What about you?
I fear I cannot believe the news until something has arrived in your hand.
“Witherspoon!” I call down. “Do you have any extra paper?”
Witherspoon lies buried in pages. “My mother-in-law is complaining of the gout. Beatrice is thinking of joining me here. Crome, would you give up your bunk for her?”
“Trade me some paper and the bunk is hers!”
Witherspoon hands up a measly single sheet, and then I borrow the stub of a pencil from Bildersley, who smells as if he is coming apart and will soon be simply a pile of ooze on the floor. Against my knee I write Dearest Margaret, and look in astonishment at the raggedness of the letters.
You mustn’t worry about me. I am safe where I am and cannot complain — at least not too bitterly — about the treatment I have received.
Far too much has happened to be able to write. But please write to me — write anything that comes into your head. Write whatever would make me feel as if I were sitting next to you in conversation on a pleasant day in the park.
But I must know — how is Boulton? I got a letter from Emily before capture — it seems like a hundred years ago — and she mentioned you are now engaged. Is it true?
My thoughts are yours, war or no war. I feel . . .
I am at the bottom of the reverse side of the tiny paper, the words getting squished further together.
. . . as if there is everything to talk about and no way to do it. Love, Ramsay.
An envelope costs me my last four cigarettes.
I read her letter again and again, marvel at certain phrases, at the look of the words, the feel of the paper in my cold hands. Of course I think of Boulton, the lucky blighter with his banged-up knee — injured at a meeting of conscientious objectors, of all damned things — going off to his government office every day. What could Margaret possibly see in him?
He’s there with her, that’s all. He’s there and I’m not.
Just before lights out I gaze up at the crowded, smoky, suffocating barracks, at all of us huddled in our blankets, our
ragged clothes, the one little wood stove at the opposite end of the room barely sending out heat. The quiet in this room could fill a church, I think, could trick death for a moment into passing us over as already claimed.
Six
“There’s Papa!” Lillian said. For a moment I looked out the train window at the old blue hills rounded like shoulders hunching to the south, at the quiet little station with its fading paint the colour of rotting leaves, and at the dirt road leading up the rise away from the lot where no one waited but a thick man in a straw hat and dusty clothes, sitting high on his tractor. “Papa!” Lillian yelled through the opened window, and waved and laughed when he waved back, arcing his hat high over his head.
I waved and laughed along with them, relieved to be there at last.
As soon as the train stopped Lillian bolted from it like an unbroken horse while I collected the bags. I called after her to be careful, but she might as well have been that horse. “She’s going to drop that baby if she keeps running like that!” a matronly woman clucked behind me. She was encased in a woollen suit stiff as armour, and her legs looked as if they could support a piano.
“It’s going to be our first,” I found myself saying.
In the lot Mr. McGillis gripped my hand. “It won’t be long now,” he said grimly. “What do you think, Lillian?” His face was pale and faded as an old cedar post, not sunburnt earth-brown the way it normally looked.
“The doctor says three weeks yet,” Lillian called back. She was already in the hay wagon behind the tractor, and hauled up the luggage I handed her. All the tension of the train ride seemed to have evaporated.
I pulled myself up beside her. My father-in-law started us off, the tractor spewing black smoke and moaning like a sick beast.
“What’s wrong with it?” Lillian shouted over the noise.
“The bank wants her, that’s what’s wrong!” Mr. McGillis called back.
We topped the rise, then churned down into town, the old Mill Road winding as always past the tavern, the leaning frame of the general store, past houses huddled together like old men playing checkers, past the river, so brown and slow at the first curve, then so suddenly narrow and swift by the old stone mill, past the bridge and up the hill on the other side, away from the town centre.
“Everything all right in the city?” Mr. McGillis called back without turning around.
“It’s fine, Papa!”
“Still got that job, Ramsay?”
“Still employed!” I called back.
Lillian touched my face, then. We were lying back in the hay. We might have been on our honeymoon again, heading to that wretched cabin — but before we knew that Rufus hadn’t even seen it for himself, that he’d taken someone else’s word for it. Before we figured any of this was going to be difficult, disappointing or bitter for either of us. Her clear blue eyes were nowhere but on my face, scanning it for something. “I’m sorry,” she said so quietly I had to strain to hear. “I’m sorry I get so angry.”
“You’ve got an excuse,” I said, patting her belly. “And I should be looking after you better. Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”
“But this is exactly where I need to be!”
We followed the road out of town, past fields and wood-lots till we came to McGillis’s farm. It all looked much the same as it had the first day I’d blundered onto the place, a little more than a year before. Sam, a greying German shepherd, sniffed his way out to greet us as the tractor and wagon stopped before the swaying front porch, with its worn, cracked boards. Lillian nearly hurled herself off the wagon to embrace him. “Careful!” both Mr. McGillis and I called, but she just laughed and rubbed her face in the dog’s old mug.
The screen door still sat ajar, with even fewer traces of ancient green paint than it used to have. The mottled rocker still looked as if it would turn to dust if anybody tried to sit in it.
“Ramsay, walk me down to the stream! Before we do anything else.”
“Before lunch?” In the rush to make it out of the office I hadn’t eaten.
“Before anything! Pa, will you come with us?”
I unloaded the luggage and basket and moved it all the few feet to the porch, then dropped it by the steps.
“You lovebirds go ahead,” Mr. McGillis said.
She was Lillian again at a stroke, like some wilting cut flower magically replanted and brought back to life. We almost ran down the trail to the stream. The hot August sun
reached through the tall branches of the pines and poplars and dappled the soft mosses. It was past mosquito season then, past blackflies, a respite. When we broke through the forest shadows to the stream edge the sunlight hit us as if bounding off a new tin roof.
“That’s the rock where you were sitting!” Lillian said, and she went over to it and sat down, half-facing the cool waters where the stream pooled. “You had a trout when I came up.”
“Yes,” I said, and approached her as if she were me and I were her.
“Then you heard me coming.” She stood suddenly on the rock. I reached out my hand immediately. “It’s all right! You stood just like this. You didn’t know whether to concentrate on the fish or on me.”
“Be careful.”
“Then the fish went over there —” She pointed to the spot farther on, where the current picks up.
“Lillian —”
“Then you twirled like this —”
Sh
e spun herself and I grabbed for her but felt my shoes suddenly slipping on the wet rocks. It was her grip that held me up — again.
“And I caught you! Just like this!” she screamed. “And that’s when you asked me. You just blurted it out.”
The sunlight on the water was so bright it nearly sang, just as it had been the year before. A day almost exactly like today.
“You don’t regret it, do you?” she asked suddenly.
“Of course not, darling.”
She looked away, and the greyness of the city seemed to settle again between us — the knowledge of it at least. I took her hand. “The sun is out. There’s enough to eat at home. We’re having a child. How could I be happier?”
“I don’t know, Ramsay,” she said quietly.
I threw a rock in the water and waited a decent time before suggesting we head back.
At supper that evening Mr. McGillis scraped his bowl like a fannigan and sopped up the last dribs with Lillian’s biscuit, murmured and slurped and smacked his lips. Then he spooned out more for himself before either Lillian or I were even halfway through our first helpings. “You found your mother’s recipe,” he said.
“It’s just tomato soup,” Lillian said. “And it’s my recipe.”
“Well, it makes Maisie’s taste like bilge water.”
“I’m sure hers is perfectly fine. And you’d starve if she didn’t feed you. Any meal I’ve ever had with her was absolutely fine.”
“The woman has her notions,” Mr. McGillis said darkly. He paused for a moment and let his eyes lift from his bowl. “She considers herself the only one doing the Lord’s work. She’d elect herself chief apostle if she could and send all the rest of us down to hell.”
“Well, she hasn’t charged you a cent for all the meals she’s cooked since I left,” Lillian said.
“Yes, that’s right. She hasn’t charged a cent. It’s all going into her heavenly bank account.” Mr. McGillis turned to me. “I try to keep the Lord in my thoughts as much as the next, but some take it straight up the flagpole and try to live there.
This Maisie Campbell doesn’t want me to have any other book but the Bible in my house. She spoons out the stew, then tells me how soon I’m heading down into purgatory if I don’t start cleaning up my —”
“Papa,” Lillian blurted, “Ramsay and me want to move in with you!”
I dropped my spoon.
“I’m sorry, I just have to say it, it’s so obvious. We could save a lot of money even if Ramsay takes the train, and I’m already cooking for Ramsay, and I will be for the baby, so I might as well cook for you. And there’s lots of room. I could work the garden and help with the —”
“Lillian!” I said. “Who decided all this?”
“I’m just saying it!”
“Children,” Mr. McGillis said.
“I don’t want my baby growing up in those sickly rooms!” Lillian said to me. “I can grow vegetables a lot cheaper and a lot better than what I can buy in sorry old Montreal. And it’s easy to keep a few chickens and a pig, and there’s so much room here. You said so yourself! Maybe Frame would let you do some of your work from here.” Lillian’s face looked pinched and red, as if she were determined to head-butt her way through every obstacle.
“Children,” her father said again.
“It all makes sense and I know I’m right. It’s what you want, I know,” she said to him. “This farm is too much for one person.”
“This farm is not mine anymore,” he said. We sat stupefied, as if a sudden wind had blown off the roof and opened us up to the evening sky. “I’m sorry. I knew you’d be upset, so I wasn’t going to tell you right away.” He broke off some more biscuit, lathered it in butter, then wiped his bowl clean again. “It’s the bank, of course. The money for that blasted tractor, but also some more that I borrowed to build the new barn — which, you’re right, I never did build. Instead I gave it to Peter Grimsby to invest for me in a surefire thing. Which sure did fire, it surely did.”
Lillian hit the table with her palm. “What are you talking about?”
McGillis’s eyes looked like swamps in the cold light of morning. “The farm is gone,” he said. “I’m out at the end of the month. Don’t worry, I’m not coming to Montreal to crowd up your little place. Maisie Campbell has offered to room and board me. All I have to do is listen to her. It’s a sentence I deserve.”
“Who’s Peter Grimsby?” Lillian asked.
McGillis drank down his water and tore off some more biscuit and the evening unravelled like a ball of barbed wire as we disentangled each cutting truth. He’d laid it all out in the beginning, but we had to go over it again and again — the explanation of Grimsby, of the loans for the tractor and the barn, of the mishaps and miscalculations, the risks, the sudden collapse of the house of cards. For all our questions and his explanations, for all the tears and trouble, it always worked out the same.
“So you see, I’d love to have you come and live here with me,” he said sadly. “But that’s not God’s plan, now is it?”
That night we lay awake in the small bed in Lillian’s old room.
The mattress was just large enough for us to spoon together on our sides, Lillian holding herself rigidly, her back to me, staring holes in the wall.
“We’ll be all right,” I whispered. “I have work, we’re not in debt. We won’t live for long in that crummy flat. We can buy a place out here — maybe even this property. The bank will own it, but I don’t know that a lot of people have extra money these days. It’ll just go to weed for a time, that’s all. And if we can’t buy this place, then another nearby.”
She was shivering now, her body somehow cold in the heat. “I know this is hard news. But there are ways through it. With a few breaks, if we keep working . . . ”
“I wish the baby wouldn’t come,” she said suddenly, in a wounded voice small as a bone in the throat.
“You don’t mean that.”
She willed herself still, still in the grey shadows.
“Of course the baby’s going to come. Now we have something to work for. I didn’t see it before. But you were terribly right. We’ll make it back here. It’s a perfect spot to love and grow. Now we both know it. And that’s a step right there. Do you understand?”
She didn’t even seem to be breathing. I placed my hand on her belly and felt, with relief, the soft kicks and turns within. I kept talking gently, holding her until the shadows were too long to contain and I could not fight anymore the pressing silence of sleep.
Letters, food, work. Hunger, love, sweat. Fatigue and hatred. This bloody cold bunk rife with fleas and mould and rot. And the ragged edge of want cutting at the throat like a rusty razor sewn into your collar.
Just little cuts. But every tiny movement worn with blood.
Dear Margaret,
I am enclosing a charcoal sketch of our barracks. If for some reason it is deemed a military secret, here’s what you’ll have to imagine. The wooden bunks ranging in rows are so crowded together there is barely floor space for a man to stand. The sleeping pallets are filthy, ragged and losing their straw. One thin blanket is folded in precisely the same way on the foot of each bed. The window has cracked or broken panes. There is a single, dull bulb hanging from the wooden planking of the ceiling. In the far corner is a small wood stove that throws no heat and in the foreground a bucket too small for the night sewage. What I could not show: the stench of an open toilet, unwashed men, rotting linen; the despair of endless days; the sanctuary of night and sleep; the unspeakable joy of receiving mail.
Unspeakable joy? For a few moments, perhaps, while the envelope is being held, while all is possibility still and not actual words on tangible paper. Father writes with his curt list of practical advice — the importance of staying clean, of maintaining one’s sense of perspective, of remaining realistic about the future course of the war. For it will not last forever, and there will be rational life again, perhaps in just a few months. But I know how fast a c
ollection of hard men lumped together in rough circumstances can turn rancid. So you must keep your head above, no matter how dismal the surroundings.
And Mother writes her few words at the end: Loving and hope from all of us dear, dear Ramsay on pages wrinkled from tears. And young Rufus says, You must know from the news that we are whipping their hides daily, and I’m sure you’ll be home soon! In the meantime I am using your bicycle to deliver groceries to which I’m sure you won’t object.
And this from Margaret’s sister Emily:
We think of you constantly, especially Margaret, though she would never say it. She seems so set on martyring herself in marriage to Henry, as if that act alone could bring the world closer to peace, though of course it is breaking her spirit, and if you were here . . . Well I don’t want to say too much, although as you know discretion was never my forte. But if the war did end soon — not that it will, but if it did — and you came right away, then I’m sure the sight of you would shake her back to her senses. For something did happen between the two of you when you were here, didn’t it? Margaret will not say a word to me, even in strictest confidence, and yet after you left she moped about so, and when the news came that you’d been killed — well, you’ve never seen such a fit of carrying on. When Lord Kitchener died at sea we got the barest comment from Margaret over breakfast. But when your black news arrived — if the house had been bombed by Zeppelins she would not have been more upset. She loves you, Ramsay — I’m telling you plainly because she never would.
Witherspoon, who makes it his business to keep up with my love life, reads over the letter, his hairy legs swinging from the edge of my bunk, his big eyes squinting in the poor light to make out Emily’s cramped words.
“Sisters,” he says. “Very tricky waters. But let me see if I’ve got this straight. Emily is the older, ugly one, right?”
“No — she’s younger, maybe even prettier. In a conventional way. She has reddish, curly hair and thinks herself a bit of a painter too. I’m afraid I criticized her work before I realized it was hers. It was hanging on the wall, one of those fussy landscapes the eye passes over.”
