The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (20 page)

“Drop him, Private,” he commanded. “You! Stand back,” he said to the other soldier.

The short soldier cold-cocked the Canadian as the burly one rushed Angus and brought him to the ground. The Canadian fell to the cobblestones like a sack. The revolver fell from Angus’s hand, but the soldier didn’t notice. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, his breath a humid fog of alcohol on Angus’s face. “And what the fuck do you want with Havers?” His hand went around Angus’s neck.

“
Arrêtez!
Let him go!” came a small voice.

The soldier stared uncomprehendingly over Angus’s shoulder. He loosened his grip and a sloppy grin spread across his face. “What we got here, now? A little officer?” Angus pushed him off and rolled to his feet. Paul leveled the gun with two hands. Before he could cock it, the other soldier grabbed him up from behind. Paul kicked and struggled, his striped socks dangling around his ankles. The revolver fell to the ground. The fat soldier grabbed it, held it, and looked over at Angus, his dull eyes registering something.

“That’s right. I’d be the officer,” Angus said. “Drop the kid, and hand over my revolver.”

The soldier’s mouth fell open. “ I . . . thought you were in for Havers here. Sir, I thought . . .”

Angus grabbed the gun and glanced at the slumped form of the Canadian who could not possibly be Ebbin and most certainly was. “I don’t give a
damn
what you thought. Get out of here or so help me God, I’ll kill you both.”

Turning once to look back at Angus, they stumbled down the alley, melting into the darkness at the far end. Angus holstered the revolver and quickly felt along the boy’s limbs, lifted his chin. “You okay?”

Paul bobbed his head up and down. “Am all okay, Lieutenant,” he said.

The side door burst open. Angus pulled Paul behind it. They flattened themselves against the wall as two corporals staggered out, sniggering and laughing. The corporals swung around and faced the wall, fumbling with their trousers, then urinated loudly. Angus looked over at the Canadian, curled on his side, still as stone. If Havers was Ebbin, the only way to protect him now was to leave him lying there unnoticed.

“Hurrah, hurrah, the general’s going to be shot!” sang one soldier.

“Hurrah, hurrah, the dirty drunken sot!” sang the other.

Then in unison, “For he was very mean to me when . . .” There they stopped. One scratched his head, then buttoned up his fly. “Got it!” he said, and in a deep baritone sang, “For he was very mean to me when I was with his lot!” And they finished with a high-pitched flourish, “Hurrah boys, they’re going to shoot the gennnn-eral!”

They stumbled back inside. Angus dashed to the Canadian. Violin music zigzagged through the racket. A general brawl had broken out. There was the sound of gravel flying and an auto engine idling. A revolver went off. Military police were breaking it up. Angus rolled the Canadian over, and he and Paul dragged him behind the barrels. Eyes on the door, Angus put a hand under the soldier’s neck and raised his head. The soldier moaned. Angus clamped a hand over his mouth and looked down. There, looking up at him, was Ebbin. The light brown eyes rolled back. The lids shut. He was out cold.

Paul said, “
Allons-y!
”

“Where?” Angus panted.

“
Là!”
Paul pointed down the high stone wall across the alley.

“Through the wall? A gate?”

“
Oui
.” Paul was already lifting Ebbin’s legs.

“Let me drag him,” Angus whispered. “It’ll be faster.”

Paul crouched through a thicket of brambles and shoved hard against a hidden plank gate. Angus hauled Ebbin through. Across a short black stretch of yard stood a shed or barn. Paul pointed. Angus nodded. They shut the gate just as long shafts of light from electric torches swept through the alley. Crouching next to Ebbin on their side of the wall, Angus heard footsteps and an “All clear,” followed by “Round those men up.” A whistle sounded again, and they were alone. Angus blew on his hands against the cold; Paul did the same.

Angus dragged Ebbin to the barn, mentally shuffling through all that he should be doing—filing reports on the two soldiers whose names he’d failed to get, taking Paul home, getting Ebbin to his unit or the field hospital . . . Ebbin! Jesus Christ. He had him. His mouth went dry. He wasn’t about to let him go.

Angus checked again to be sure they were alone. Chickens clucked briefly, pigeons cooed in the rafters, and just beyond the open door—a garden, bedded down for the winter. An isolated patch of home and hearth standing its ground.

Paul folded the scarf under Ebbin’s head and found a lantern. Angus lit it, and they held their hands out as if it were a campfire. Angus lit a cigarette and his eye caught the hint of a cord on Ebbin’s neck beneath the unbuttoned tunic. He slowly lifted it out and held up the lantern.
E. Lawrence
Havers, Lance Corporal,
45
th BN,
c.e.F
. He dropped the tags and sat back. Paul swallowed and cast a hungry look toward the cigarette. Angus passed it over.

“It is him,” Paul whispered through a stream of smoke that ended in three perfect smoke rings, suspended over Ebbin’s head. Angus spit on a rag and wiped blood from Ebbin’s slackened mouth. He daubed at the swelling and the ragged cut on his cheek, and knew he had no compass for the territory he was about to enter.

N
INE

February 24
^th
, 1917

Deep Cove

Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia

T
he air was crisp and dry enough to sharpen all the senses. Fresh snow had fallen, a powdered topping over the crust beneath. All the way over to Deep Cove, with the warmth of the sun on their faces, rug over their knees, and Rooster plodding on, Simon and his grandfather had hardly spoken. It suited them both.

For everything had changed. The Hants had received a telegram of their own from the War Department the day after his father’s had arrived. After that, his mother shivered with her own truth. There was no body. He has
not
been found. Which left Simon torn between protecting her from the truth and wanting to make her see it. But how? He even entertained the idea that she might be right. He was only too relieved to see her two young half-brothers come up the road and fetch her back to Chester, where her family would take care of her, but still felt ashamed of his own inadequacy.

A memorial was being planned, the brothers said. She’s temporarily unmoored, Simon’s grandfather whispered to the brothers, a fact they accepted. High-strung, one of them said, his face drawn, throwing a blanket over the dray. She’ll come round, said the other. It’s the shock of it, Duncan agreed.

“Sight for sore eyes, eh?” his grandfather said as they reached the top of the ridge. Below them, the blue-black water of the long, glacier-cut cove offered up its mystery. It was so silent at the top of the ridge that they could hear the ripples under the beard of ice along the shore.

“You own this cove, right, Grandpa?” Simon asked.

“No, no, just this piece of the ridge we’re standing on,” his grandfather said. “Can’t buy the sea, lad.”

“Right,” Simon agreed, and after a moment, added, “I might buy some islands, myself. Rafuse, because it has the best beach. I’d always let people picnic on it like they do now. And Oak Island, one day.”

“After treasure, are you?”

“Maybe. Me and Zenus might take our dory over to Oak this summer. See how the digging’s going.”

“That old dory? Can’t point worth a damn. Her sail is stiff as a board. Take you a week to get there.” His grandfather chuckled at the thought of it.

“She can’t point,” Simon conceded, “but she moves along on a reach.” He and Zenus had found her, an abandoned Lunenburg dory, or what had looked like one. It was longer than a dory, but outfitted the same and still had a bobber and line in it. It had washed up on the rocky beach by Oxner’s boathouse. No one claimed it, a mystery that added to its appeal. In exchange for some work, quite a bit of work, Philip Mader had helped them replace her rotting planks, outfitted her with a centerboard, tiller, rudder and a new mast that they could slip into a hole in the forward seat. Wider than a Shelburne dory, she could be rowboat or sailboat, depending. Not very fast, not very responsive, but she was theirs.

“Got a name for her?”

“Not yet. We’ve been discussing it.” They’d been arguing about it for two years. In the beginning, when they weren’t arguing over her name, they used to force the mop to walk the plank, then turn the dory around to rescue it, a drowning maiden, her thick rope hair all sodden. And they’d talk about ways to defy the sand-slipping underground caverns of Oak Island, where it was a known fact that Captain Kidd had buried his treasure. Periscopes is what they’d be searching for this year when they were out on the bay. “If I owned Oak, people could come and picnic or dig for the treasure, if they’ve a mind to. Pay me for the right to dig. Picnic for free. Might get them interested that way.”

“Simon Peter, fisher of men, I think you have the makings of an entrepreneur!”

“A what?”

“A businessman. Speaking of your future, Philip says you’ve got a feel for boatbuilding. Something I wouldn’t mind getting into one day. MacGrath and MacGrath. Eh? How’s that? You liked working with Philip on your unnamed dory.”

“Yes sir.”

“Knew it. How about I send you over to Tancook for a time this summer? See if one of the Stevens boys would take you on or old Gaundy Langille—well, he’s too old. Retired now. Or Reuben Heisler. Fine craftsman. He’s got that forty-two-tonner going over there.
Silver Oak,
she’s called.”

“What about Philip?”

“Philip’s small-time. Repairs, mostly. Built the
Lauralee
, but her design is way out of date. He hasn’t built a new boat in years and wouldn’t be much good at it anyhow. My plan is, you learn it from the ground up.”

His grandfather always had a plan. Simon wasn’t about to be shipped off to Tancook Island for a summer, living on fish and sauerkraut with the four or five families who lived there, and no friends. He knew exactly what he was going to do. As soon as he could get to Lunenburg, he’d ask Captain Knickle about a place on his salt banker. “What if I don’t want to learn?”

“Eh? No. You need to know a business from stem to stern. You know, when we built the
Lauralee,
I took your father over to Martin’s River and we searched out the straightest, strongest spruce we could find for her masts.”

Simon remembered his father saying that when he put his hand on the
Lauralee’
s
main mast, it was the tree come to second life. He squinted at the black water below and switched the subject. “Deep Cove is so deep it could have held the
Titanic,
right? That’s what Dad said.”

His grandfather frowned, but allowed that Deep Cove, a glacier gut, could manage the
Titanic
.

“Deep enough for subs then. There’s talk they’re out there,” Simon said.

“Subs in Mahone Bay, eh? In Deep Cove, no less. Where do you get such ideas?”

“Around town. And the
Herald
.”

“You quote that warmongering rag to me?”

“You quote it to me!”

“Course I do. But not because I trust every word in it. I’ve told you that. If we were to believe the
Herald
, every man in Lunenburg should be rounded up as a spy for their German names alone. As for the
Titanic
, that product of man’s hubris rests in another ocean crevasse, never to be found. And now the
Britannic
, her sister ship—torpedoed and sunk. Both of them monuments to man’s self-glorification . . . God has his ways.”

The rows of caskets, some of them tiny, stacked behind the protective cover of a tent on the Halifax docks came to Simon, and all those left captive in the
Titanic’
s hull, bumping against staterooms and stairways, drifting silently past portholes in the currents. “The
Britannic
was a hospital ship,” he said. “She’s not a monument to—whatever you said. Self-gratification.”

“Exactly,” his grandfather answered. “
Dragged
into the war. What you might want to think about while folks over here spread false rumors about submarines is all the boys on the other side of this war that are missing uncles and fathers. Eh?”

Simon now regretted the trip altogether.

“Your own father . . . gone on a fool’s errand and now—”

“
A fool’s errand?”
Simon burst out. “Who cares if he found Uncle Ebbin or not! He’s out there defending us, and you—you don’t even write to him!”

His grandfather didn’t flinch. Didn’t look at him. Just said, “Watch yourself,” with that low-voiced menace that sent a shiver down the spine. Point made, he switched to a brighter note. “Well, sir,” he said, “fresh snow or not, I haven’t seen a thing here that indicates a campfire or trespasser. We’ll circle round through those firs and get back to Rooster. These old bones of mine are feeling the cold. His, too, no doubt.” He patted a gloved hand on Simon’s wool hat and started back down the hill. “See if we can get a mug up at Toby’s,” he called out without looking back.