Hero (23 page)
Lucy lifts her head from my shoulder and turns towards the window, scanning the bright platform and the drifting steam. She gives a small sigh, neither happy nor sad. Elsa sits meditatively, her hands upon her lap. Her neck moves easily like a newly oiled spring as the train jerks into motion.
The change in my husband's mood is a mystery, requiring, for once, no coaxing, no strategy from me. It seemed to fall like the first drop of rain after seven years' drought, and in phrases entirely new to our marriage.
Everything's all right
, he said for the first time in seven years or more.
Let's all go home
. The promise it holds seems impossibly delicate, like a palace of ice-crystal in the blistering heat of the desert. I imagine the whole of today and tomorrow lived in this mood of quietness.
The train chuffs harder, gaining momentum, and the rails, like living vertebrae, send dull rumbles and sharp clatters through the seats. The sun smears the window with great yellow dollops, turning our heads, battering our eyelids. Everything that was dead is suddenly alive. Within me some deep, withered thing, a cluster of grey leaves, unrecognizable in their dry and curled-up state, begins to sense the faint pulse of moisture. I wonder whether it could be possible for us, after all, whether I dare steel myself for the faint hope of a normal life.
D
espite the jogging motion of the train and the rattle and clang of the rails, the image in my mind remains constant: a letter reduced to a nest of a hundred scraps, each with a loop, curl, or line of faint blue ink.
Too drained to take stock of today, the fresh volley of wild horrors wilfully committed, I focus instead on the letter fragments, some puckered and twisted, others merely lying at rest like a score of miniature white flags. The missive was read onceâvery quicklyâthen destroyed in a frenzy. While my shaking hands tore and twisted under the ridge of the bar, the knowledge seeped slowly through my alcohol-dulled brain that the words conspired to give a message very different, opposite even, from the one I had been expecting.
Now the scraps are stuffed deep into the garbage pail outside the Station Hotel, but the words, most of them, burn upon my thoughts like fresh tattoos. Once understood, the sentiments hauled me into sobriety. I still feel cool reality trickling down my face.
Smith's blade found its target yet again. Tiptoeing upon a carpet of felt, the fox eased himself into the barn, and his sharp teeth glided through my unprotected flesh, separating me from the comfortable certainty of guilt and despair, leaving new and unexpected wounds, wounds just as painful in their way, but not enclosed and festering like those to which I had become accustomed. The emotion overcoming me in the Station Hotel was alarmingly fresh. Once more I stood on the battlefield, taking the weight of a man who had emerged through the drifting smoke. Again I twisted my bayonet and pulled back sharply. I heard Charles's gasp, felt a hand grope my shoulder, and squeeze the joint till it pained. But this time something was different. The quality of my murmured apology, the intonation in Charles's final words, “I thought you were hurt,” was vivid even to the very touch of his breath upon my face. The experience in its essentials, the facts and the words, had never been forgotten. But they had become hazy and grey like the outline of a shipwreck viewed from above. Suddenly the bizarre and accidental nature of the event was upon me in all its hues and textures. In the contorted face of my brother-in-law, something was mingled with his desperate pain. Dare I call it understanding? Dare I call it forgiveness?
Smith would dare, of course. But he is merely a pacifist, the least honourable in the eyes of those who might condemn me. They are legion. He is one. And I have always counted myself as one of their number. So who is Smith to absolve me? The question has been throbbing in my brain since the letter's contents were absorbed. It peaks with each sharp rattle of the tracks, and eases off as the seat beneath me becomes calm. Normally Smith's opinion wouldn't matter too much, of course. But, in this case, he and I are the only witnesses, and my own judgment is clearly shot. I've heard that philosophers believe a thing becomes real only when looked upon and observed. I have felt this way often. By this reckoning at least, Smith, the only reliable witness, is the only one to count. His exclusivity transforms him from the negligible to the infinite.
It is sane to recoil from gunfire, he said, human to rebel. Tenderness and horror are the only sane reactions, conformity the only madness. The words rendered me weightless, especially as they matched so precisely a pattern that hovered in my own mind when I was in the trenches, an unmoving cloud formation, never analyzed or acknowledged, never committed to paper, and buried deep after July 1, 1916, never to be unearthed until now.
The shackles of guilt are gone, but the sensation is in no way painless. I feel the rumble of oncoming change. The uncertainty of it all is terrifying. For seven years, guilt has been the gravity that ties me to the earth. It's been my excuse and my comfort too. What now?
Lucy, half-nestling, half-restless upon her mother's knee, points to something in the passing trees, and claims Sarah's attention. My wife softly coos encouragementâsays something about a deer perhapsâbut I don't catch the words, and in truth I'm not listening, as usual. This habitual indifference may have to change, I realize, in the near future. Lucy is the key. She is the child of my murky tragedy. Smith's letter has inflated my soul, and I'm now straining at the seams, ten times my normal size. Air circulates in chambers long sagging. Some of this forgotten space relates to Sarah, some to Charles, and some to Lucy. They have all been sharing the same dank cells, the same collapsed and wheezing ventricle of my plodding, sickening heart.
Against my will, the memory returns for the sixth or seventh time since the letter. I ease Charles upon the ground, arms, neck, and head like a carcass from a butcher's shopâbones within a sack of skin. He lies there contorted at the neck and shoulder, eyes gazing off into blue. Something crashes through me at the memory, a wave of emotion I can't recognize. It tugs and circles, loosening moisture, bringing a hint of salt water to my nose. I remain upon the battlefield, listening as the cackle of gunfire merges with the motion of the train. I spin around as I did then, towards the enemy lines, the rising smoke, and the wire-pinioned bodies. I see a finger raised, not, after all, in accusation. I see a smirk, but the target is not me, but war itself, the beast against which I have just declared myself enemy.
Sarah's eyes are upon me, scrutinizing, worried. I realize I have sighed, quite loudly. She turns back to our daughter and points something out through the window.
I miss Charles. This was the meaning of the salt water in my nose, the reason for the sigh. It's wounds of grief, and not guilt, which now flow with fresh blood. Grief for the man I never dared to mourn. This, not the action of a moment, is my failure. It is this omission that has spanned the years, punishing Charles's sister and niece.
I listen to Sarah, to her soft words pointing out the ash, the oak, the elm, the willow. I try to catch the rhythm of her speech, try to feel my way into some future conversation. It is madness indeed I could have been so blind to my redemption, but here they are beside me. Weightless I remain, at least for the while, but the warmth of them, their aliveness, gives promise of focus returning and of fresh pain aplenty. The cave of perpetual guilt has been my refuge. It's time to come into the light.
T
he window frame groans from a sudden gust. Do I see, or merely imagine, the moving of a curtain? I arise from suffocating dreams, the mattress squeaking beneath me as invisible knots loosen and fall from my elbows and wrists. Fred gasps, holds his breath, then slowly exhales. I recognize the sound of his lean, agonized dreams.
There is almost no light. I let my soles touch the floor not because I have any destination in mind, but because I need to remind myself that movement is possible. I need to feel I'm not fixed like a piece of guttering to this central portion of St. John's.
One pace in the darkness and I catch the protesting moan of my husband's dreams. I wonder with whom he imagines himself to be sharing a bed in this hushed, post-midnight zone. Whose absence provokes his longing breath? Not mine.
A kiss of ice seems to land upon my eyelashes though the room is warm, and I imagine snow falling from the ceiling. I gain the window in four short steps and, clear through the glass, I think I can taste the falling dew of night. It has to be a dream, the thought comes, this last thirty years or more. I can't be here. It's not so much that my life is more terrible than I deserve but that the reality of the here and now seems so arbitrary, as though I have been transported through a series of lightning flashes to the various plateaus of existence. Wife of Fred Evans, governess to Lucy Jenson, widow of Jack Hamilton, wife of Jack Hamilton, double expatriate, once here, once there.
Re-emerging from my dreams is an earlier self still. Though little more than a child, this girl seems wiser than she has been at any time since. Through the crisp precision of instinct she is able to divide thought, belief, and action into night and day, right and wrong. Only later did she stumble through the trials and errors of experience into the dense fog of uncertainty.
My dream brought me back to Bonavista, to the soft lampâlight by the Evans's stove, to a scene fresher in my mind, more enlivened by senses, than yesterday's clumsy argument about Kean. There were just two of us, Noah Evans and I. The stove's hiss and crackle accompanied our words and the wind created a harmony of low moans outside.
“Fred is going to the ice again this spring,” he said, stretching his hands uncertainly towards his foot, cradling his lower calf in his palms. Noah was a year younger than I, but we both sat like children, folded in upon ourselves, a cluster of confidentiality and innocence. “He has a berth on Abram Kean's ship.” He hasn't met my eyes. This and his bald statement convey everything.
“How about you?”
He smiled, relieved perhaps, at the ease with which I have caught his meaning.
“I don't think I can.”
“Perhaps next year your mother will let you.”
He shakes his head, a touch of irritation about him now.
“I don't want to spill blood.”
The idea stopped me for a moment as I watched Noah's forefinger probe a freshly stitched wound in his thick woollen sock.
“It's not human blood, Noah.”
As Noah's older brother entered, filling the room with the unmistakable yet hard-to-describe scent of a young manâthe rough smell of physical work, leather, and thick outer clothingâI spoke lower. Fred cast a look in our direction that was half-curious, half-scornful. He sat at the round table a few feet away and, with the hint of a flourish, opened the newspaper.
“Have you ever been up close to an animal?” Noah whispered. Fred rustled his newspaper. “Close enough to strike it dead?” His brown eyes, alive with constant, frightened motion, locked upon mine.
I leaned as close as I could to Noah without gaining Fred's attention.
“You don't have to.” My face burned, perhaps with the heat of the nearby stove. “You don't ever have to if you don't want to.”
He winced as though struck on the side of the head, and gave a bitter smile. “You don't understand. I do have to. Everyone does.”
I was about to argue, but sensing a change in the atmoâsphere, we edged away from each other and looked up to the table. The wind had died down and even the stove had ceased to sizzle. Fred was listening.
“I wonder you girls aren't taking the time to do some sewing.”
I threw the older brother a scornful glare. He looked away suddenly and I saw his jaw tensing.
“See what I mean?” breathed Noah so quietly I barely caught the words.
Fred's face had turned pink and his knuckles were white as he gripped the corners of the newspaper he scanned too intently.
“Right the first time,” he said suddenly. Through the supersensitive hearing that sometimes alerts one sibling to the most private whispers of another, Fred had managed to hear all of Noah's words. “You do have to. The families on this coast can't afford men who fear the sight of blood.” I turned from Noah and faced him. His eyelids flickered beneath his businesslike frown as he pretended to read.
“Fred, your family doesn't rely on the seal hunt anymore, as you well know. Leave Noah alone.”
“Just as well it doesn't.” Fred snapped the newspaper shut. “I've been out with your brothers taking a look at the ice. The three of us might go out tomorrow and shoot a few in advance of the hunt.”
“Noah will join you,” I said, aware of my recklessness, of the hum of blood in my ears. I sensed Noah squirming beside me and felt the heat of his blush.