The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (29 page)

“That was good for him, I bet,” Simon said. “Bet he was lonely.”

She gave a few quick nods of her head. “It was when I was sitting with him on the stone bench in their garden that I heard Jack’s voice.” Her lip quivered.

“I believe you,” Simon said. He took her hand. “I do.”

She nodded and turned to go. Simon walked her to the steps leading up to the road and said good-by, then walked back along the wharf past the piled-up lobster traps and on down the ramp to the float. He tipped the tender up and rocked it enough to spill out most of the water, then checked the starfish’s progress. He turned around at the sound of footsteps, expecting Philip, and saw Zenus instead, sauntering down the wharf. He stood looking down at Simon, arms folded.

“Never guess who I just saw—Miss Charlotte Victoria Plante. Said she was down here with you.”

“No she didn’t,” Simon said, without glancing up.

Zenus took out a rolled cigarette, lit it and came down the ramp. He passed it to Simon. Simon took a long drag and let the world go off-kilter and come back again.

“She didn’t need to,” Zenus said, leaning against the wet rowboat in his oilskins. “So what were you up to with her, eh? Seeing if the wharf would stand her weight?”

“What are
you
doing here?”

“Fetching Dad from the tavern, what else? Don’t tell Ma.”

“You’re always fetching him. You don’t tell her?”

“Are you kidding? If I told her every time I had to fetch Dad out of the tavern, she’d have killed me by now for letting him go in.”

“I’m serious. You lie to her, every time?”

“Simon, my boy, you’re always serious. Lately, anyway. Thinking of lying to your ma about being with Charlotte?”

“No.”

“Liar,” Zenus said.

“Yeah, I was with her. Give me another puff, there.”

“Take it. I gotta get Dad anyway afore he ties one on with Philip.”

W
HEN
S
IMON
GOT
back to the house, his mother was on her bed, taking a pale spell, just as Young Fred had said. Simon sat down at the foot of the bed. “I saw Charlotte and she had a message.” How easy it was to lie when the lie was in service of the truth. “She only gets one per customer. Swear you’ll never breathe a word. Or she’ll get in trouble.”

Astonished, as he knew she would be, his mother sat up. “What are you talking about? What message?”

“He said, ‘I’m lucky.’ ”

“
Lucky?
”

“That’s what he said. Maybe . . . maybe better off—you know, in heaven, which is where he is and where he sent the message from.” He took her hand in his. “I’m sorry, Ma.”

“Did she say he was
dead
?” his mother asked. “No, she didn’t. I can see right through you, Simon. You didn’t get a message, and she didn’t say he was dead.”

Simon flung himself back across the bed and put his arm over his eyes. His mother lay back beside him.

They stayed like that, listening to Ida banging pots around the kitchen and the steady murmur of voices below until the voices grew faint and the sky began to lose its color. A languid contentment spread over them as they lay side by side, neither of them stirring, neither trying to convince the other of anything, as if they were drifting on a raft, lifting gently over the currents. He wasn’t even sure what he believed. And was there any harm, really, in her thinking Ebbin was alive? There was no body.
And no message either . . .

“Remember that picture your father painted of the phalarope? Just the belly and feet, one foot clinging to Lynch bell buoy?” his mother said in a dreamy voice.

“Sure, I do.” This, too, this unexpected reference to his father, to his painting, seemed a fragile floating-up of something. The painting had the phalarope in close-up atop Lynch bell during a storm. There was something immensely sad about that one foot clinging, or immensely hopeful. When he finished it, his father had swept Simon up on his shoulders, marched out of the shed and up the slope and around the well, grabbing Simon’s small hands in his and stretching his arms out. He and his father filled the yard, the sky above, and the ocean beyond. They were the only ones who liked the phalarope.

“He loved that painting. Whatever happened to it, I wonder . . .”

“I don’t know. Did you like it?”

“I didn’t understand it. What was the point of bird feet on a bell buoy? But now, I think I know.”

“What?”

“Phalaropes—whale-birds, sailors call them—travel in huge flocks out at sea. And here was just this one. Feathers ruffled in a cross wind. One foot up . . . as if deciding if it was safe there on the buoy or better off flying on.”

“Which do you figure?”

“Hard to say, but either way, very much alone.”

F
OURTEEN

April 6
^th
, 1917

Arras Sector, France

K
eegan, spewing dirt, was filling one sandbag after another like the short-armed troll that he was. “You should get a medal for trench repair,” Angus whispered to him. Maybe Keegan had been a gravedigger in another life. Then again, maybe he was one now. The gravedigger of Happy Holly Trench. One more night, Angus kept saying to himself. One more night. So far, not a man wounded. Not one killed. It was all he cared about. That and getting the trench deep enough for men to stand in, which it just about was. His platoon had been digging four nights straight, returning to camp before dawn and heading back at sundown. To the southeast the sharp report of field guns and the boom of artillery shuddered through the night, rolled down, and started up again. The massive preliminary bombardment had been stepped up, a daily allotment of
2
,
500
tons of shells, most of them fired at night. The men dug all the faster—the thundering roar spurring them on.

A few men down from Keegan, Hiller was fumbling with a burlap bag, seemingly unsure of how to fill it. “Just do it,” Angus snapped.

Happy Holly, an abandoned trench now to be used as a jumping-off point, was so filled in and shallow that first night that it had left them all exposed, silhouettes with shovels at the edge of No Man’s Land. “Suicide,” Katz muttered. “Get to work,” Angus had commanded, a cold sweat breaking out on his face.

Their camp was behind the Lorette Spur. Beyond it a valley led up to Gouy-Servins. In the valley lay
80
,
000
bodies, exactly where they’d fallen two years before—still aboveground. Some said the two opposing sides had been through too much to collect them. Some said there was too much hatred on both sides to allow the standard recovery and burial. Some said they were left there to remind them all of their own fate.

The
17
th
had been meant to camp in an abandoned town, but shells had upended the village graveyard, and splintered coffins had sluiced down the hill in the rain where the public well received their rotting contents, contaminating the water. The march to Fouquet Wood took them well within range of the Kraut guns. Eight shells exploded as their pipe and drum corps piped them on. The dead and wounded were hauled away on stretchers. Amid the broken drums and a crumpled trumpet, Roddy Gordon squatted down and turned a set of ruined bagpipes over in his hands. A young private named Brady asked Wertz if it might not have been better to suffer typhoid or haul in water to the last camp than to have his best friend die with his legs blown off in this one. Wertz replied that it would be best to refrain from making friends altogether. Katz noted they might do better without the band.

The date of the attack, “Z-day,” was not yet known, but the orders showed the
17
th would be attached in reserve to the
45
th to make up for losses and to be “in support.” Conlon explained that their brigade would be relegated to “tasks under,” which meant hauling in supplies and ammunition, and clearing out German trenches, supporting the first wave if needed. The
45
th was Ebbin’s battalion. It was this stunning news that Angus carried with him on that last night of digging.

But he also carried something else. Ambrose, a gunnery captain from the
45
th, bragging about their exploits back in camp, mentioned a fellow named Havers who’d joined them sometime around Courcelette. A secret weapon, he called him.

“You
know
him?” Angus half-stood, and quickly sat down. “Why, do
you
?” Ambrose asked, arching an eyebrow. “No, no,” Angus heard himself saying. “Heard of him is all. Just wondering if what they say is true.”

“Yeah,” Publicover broke in. “What’s he done, this secret weapon of yours, that’s so impressive?”

Ambrose replied that Havers had been in it from the beginning
and hadn’t a scratch on him. Bullets didn’t touch him. Single-hand
edly took out nine Bosche, armed only with his bayonet, at Thiepval. Might be up for a DSO.

Rosenbek, a laconic lieutenant attached to the Ottawa Rifles and en route to HQ, stretched out his long legs and said he’d heard of Havers, too—a lance corporal, right? But thought he was with another unit. He heard it was a Mills bomb that took out those Krauts. Havers had made a name for himself long before Thiepval, as early as Ypres, Rosenbek said, but there was no one left who could remember how.

The conversation turned to the big push, and Angus staggered out into the sleeting rain. Roddy followed. “You alright, mate?” he asked. When Angus didn’t reply, he flung an arm around him. “I’m thinking we should maybe capture this Havers from the
45
th and make him one of our own.”

Angus fumbled for a match. Dropped his cigarette. Roddy leaned back, hand still on Angus’s shoulder, and squinted at him.

Angus stared at the disintegrating cigarette. “Stuff of myth, don’t you think?” he finally got out.

“Aye,” Roddy said with a grin. “That’s why we need him.”

I
N THE DAYS
that followed, the strange and fantastic crouched beside Angus in the ditch where their digging continued under the watchful eye of the enemy, who had not fired a shot. It made no sense, yet it was so. Beyond Keegan’s squat form, Hiller stood, his shovel rattling against his pick in the hardened dirt. Keegan shoved him roughly. Told him to get to work. Hiller paid no attention, but the others did. Angus pushed past and grabbed Hiller’s shoulder. Maybe he was nuts, maybe not, but there was nothing for it now except to get the digging done and get out. He wasn’t about to let Hiller jeopardize that. He yanked him close and said in his ear, “See these men? As scared as you. Except they’re doing their job. I’m ordering you. Pick up that shovel and dig. Don’t make me press the point, goddamn it.” He pulled back his greatcoat, hand on his revolver.

Hiller’s nose twitched. He squinted at Angus, then bent double, stood up, and entered into a loose-limbed, jaw-smacking dance, holding his shovel across his chest then stretching it up over his head. Angus lunged for him as the shovel, tossed high in the air, glinted against the flare of a Verey light.

The bullet-riddled shovel sailed over the trench as the sandbags above them exploded with a thousand bullets. Tanner, up on the trench ladder, thudded to the ground, both eyes shot out. Hiller’s jaw was severed from his face. The rest of them flattened in the ditch. Angus refused to look at Hiller’s profusely bleeding corpse. Hating one of his own; it had come to that.