The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (44 page)

“
Non!
The CEF!
Maintenant, je suis Canadien, moi!
Two times a week.” Even his milky eye seemed to shine. “They give me a helmet. They pay me.”

“I salute you, Signal Corps Private Raffarin!” Angus stood erect and saluted with his left hand. “I’m surprised you’re not with requisitions, but that will surely come.”

Paul laughed and said, “I do not know this requisitions. One day you will salute with your right hand,
non
? But now you have one hand and I have one eye.”

“That’s right,” Angus said, holding his sling. “Together we are one—”

“Soldiers! We are soldiers!”

Angus nodded and smiled. Paul introduced him to Sabine’s hens clucking in the small barn next to the shed, and to some pole beans, and to the rooster, standing on the wheelbarrow, to the goats, one gnawing on a tattered fishing net, and to a row of onions growing in a box. The cottage and barn were once Sabine’s husband’s, a man who tried to be a fisherman, Paul explained. This husband beat her and then was killed in the war. Paul said Sabine was happy because she could feel good about the fat Alsatian, and she hoped he had killed the bastard husband. “Rudolph was the one she loved, the only one she will ever love, even if he is a German,” Paul whispered. “She says she does not need to love again.”

Angus looked across the wild field at the point where the bluff met the horizon and dropped to the sea, to the edge of nowhere.

He lit a cigarette and handed it to Paul for a drag. Paul followed his gaze across the headland. “You wish to go there?”

“Think we have time before it gets dark?”

“I am not afraid of the dark!” Paul ran toward the house. “
Maman! Maman!
” he shouted.

She joined them. Buoyed by Paul’s enthusiasm, Angus matched his pace, and the three of them followed the rutted trail through the grasses and scrub brush. Various paths forked off to the right and left. Not far from the point, the one they were on widened. A narrow branch angled off toward a railing and a long flight of steps leading down to the beach. They kept on toward the point. Rabbits streaked ahead, crisscrossing the path. Paul flicked on Angus’s torch and tried to follow them with the beam as they jumped the brush. Juliette told him to keep the light on the trail. Twilight gave way to night as they reached the point. Angus could just make out a thin line of white surf breaking some fifty feet below. There was no moon, and it was almost too windy to hear the sea rolling in, but he could sense the swells beyond as if he were in them.

For a time they were quiet, then Paul looked up at Angus. “Lance Corporal Havers?” he said.

Angus took a deep breath. The word “dead” didn’t come easily. But he didn’t need to say it. Paul asked how it happened.

“He was shot. Killed at the same time I was wounded.”

“He was . . . Havers when he—?” Paul asked.

“Said so with his last breath.” Angus kept staring ahead, then dropped his gaze. “I never should have let him—”

Juliette put her hand firmly on his arm. “Havers. It was
his
choosing,
non
?” she said. “
C
’
ést ce qu’il a voulu
.”

“What he wanted,” Paul repeated.

What he wanted, what he needed. But at what cost? Angus thought of those last breaths and his last words. “He called me by name at the end,” he said.

The wind billowed up from below the bluff, whipping his kilt around his legs and the hair across Juliette’s face. She turned away and faced the wind, but he caught her words, “You were with him. He was not alone.”

The three of them, Paul in the middle, leaned into one another and let the stiff wind push against them.

S
LEEP ELUDED ANGUS
that night. When they got back to the cot
tage, everything seemed heightened and simultaneously diffused. The blue of the kitchen chairs, a dusky gray-green in the lamplight, seemed richer, more saturated in color. The lingering scent of fried sausages and onions, pleasing before, enveloped him now in a soft embrace cut through with a painful awareness of Juliette’s every movement, the low music of her voice, the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, her silver rings, her every breath in and out. He claimed exhaustion. Paul arranged a bed of blankets for himself on the floor. They opened the window and the breeze blew in. After some chatter, Paul settled into a gently snoring sleep, his arm around a rag of a stuffed bunny, the helmet on the floor next to him, the stiff patch of white hair sticking out from the quilt.

Angus sat on the bed in the dark and removed his sling. The soft salt air touched his face with day’s end, and a memory of the swing up to the mooring, the drop in the wind, the drop of the sails, a wave from Davy and Putnam coming in on the
Glory B,
the silhouette of tall masts against the dying sun, its last rays catching the crust of salt crystals on the compass, and the long afterglow filling the sky, casting the harbor in pearl-pink luster.
There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams . . .
dreams of a place he might as well have made up and that was moving on without him. When Simon had been about six years old, leaping about the boat, playing some pirate game, he’d stopped suddenly and lifted his head as if listening to something. Something far off that only he could hear. His eyes had grown distant, his expression utterly calm. And in it, Angus had seen something of the man he would become.

What of the man who’d sung to this boy of all the fishes in the sea, who’d rescued him from troubled sleep, stabbed the monsters and mastodons lurking in the corners of his room? A man who by his own hand had shot a wounded soldier in the chest and stabbed another, and kept on stabbing him long after he was dead?

The weight of his lifeless arm pressed against him, and he went rigid with the thought that he might never recover and might not deserve it if he did, that all that he and Boes had tried had failed for a reason. His mind raced back to Publicover rounding the barn one minute, bleeding to death the next. And to Voles and Burwell. Had Angus stopped Ebbin from going on the mission, had he not let Ebbin leave the hospital, had he told the truth . . . He jumped up, left the bed and was down the steps and out the front door. Under scudding clouds, he rushed on, but he could not outrun the pain of Ebbin Hant. Nor Wickham, Dickey, nor the German with his postcard of the Royal Vic. “Franz,” it said in the salutation. Franz, whose eyes when Angus shot him registered the surprise of life, the surprise of death, and all the moments in between. They were his dead, he their unworthy living repository.
Manifold sins, miserable offenders
. He thought of the other German he’d killed, the one who’d kicked Ebbin’s lifeless body and killed Publicover. Saw himself with Publicover’s Bowie in his raised hand, stabbing the German over and over until he was stabbing a bloody corpse. And knew if he had the chance, he’d do it again. There was no health in him.

He blundered on across the bluff. The bending sweep of the grasses led him to the edge of the point. He staggered against the gusts. The empty beach below angled around and stretched away to the southwest, where the white surf curled in off a black sea. The tide was up. Wave after wave raced over the sandbars to lick the beach and suck out again. “Over there” was no longer the Front in France. It was the shores of home. And he belonged to neither. He was alone in an eternal limbo with the pull of the sea below and the forgotten stars above.

His knees began to buckle but as he dropped, he caught the faint green flash of a starboard running light. Someone was out there, out on the rolling, dispassionate sea, keeping watch. He could not take his eyes off the running light. But it wasn’t out at sea; it was bobbing on the beach curving beyond the bluff, carried by the inky and dissolving shape of a figure standing now at the edge of the breakers. A woman.

He had to keep on the path, he knew that. Had to resist the urge to cut through the brush or he’d lose his way. He had to angle around ’til he got to where the path broke off and led to the steps. He had to take them slowly, keep his balance, hold his arm. He had to pray she was still there. And then he was at the bottom, running as best he could to where she stood in the whipping wind with the green lantern by her side.

He slowed as he approached, gathering himself in. But when she turned and faced him, when she lifted her shawl, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her in and she pulled him down so they were both on their knees, his face buried against her neck, his right arm limp at his side. All the pain and guilt, all the horror and all the longing he’d bottled up leapt and bolted through him and shattered the air around them. He was devastated and alive with release. His mouth found hers, so soft against his hunger that he drew back. She kissed his eyes and cheeks and his mouth again. And his desire to pour all he had, all that was left of him into her, overwhelmed him.

She pulled him in with a pliant strength against which he was powerless and felt more powerful than he’d ever imagined. He knew it wouldn’t last, but knew, too, that nothing lasts. Nothing on earth.

S
ABINE LEFT THE
next morning under a clear sky soon after her
ami,
in his polished black auto, pulled into the drive. An immaculate man with charcoal-gray hair and perfectly trimmed mustache, he was in far too much of a hurry for conversation. He bowed briefly, kissed Juliette’s hand, and held the door. Sabine took Juliette’s hands in hers. She nodded and smiled at Angus, then secured her hat, buttoned her gloves, and blew kisses to them all.

For the next five days, Angus stayed with Juliette and Paul at the cottage on the bluff. Paul let his pigeons fly and circle home. In the late afternoons, sitting on a blanket spread out on the soft sand above the pebbled tide line, the three of them ate raspberries and crusty bread spread with goat cheese. Paul threw bits to the swooping gull scavengers and chased after flocks of sandpipers, who raced ahead on toothpick legs and lifted in unison to skim the water’s edge. With the wind against his face, Angus could hear the run of the sheets through the
Lauralee’
s blocks, feel the broad swing of her bow as he took her up into the wind and she leaned into the next tack. It was all of home he allowed himself. Juliette sat under an umbrella and sometimes rolled off her stockings and waded into the wash of the sea, letting her bunched-up skirts get wet and her hair fly. Angus held her boots in his hand. He ate. He slept. He went barefoot over the hard-ridged sand flats, walking for hours. She sometimes went with him. The beach was nearly a mile wide at low tide, a vast stretch of white, with white shells tumbling in on the waves. Not a rock nor clump of seaweed to be seen. He let the surf foam around his legs and, for moments at a time, felt almost clean. In the early mornings, the sea was always the same hazy green close to shore and the same deep blue where the sandbars fell off. The surf was gentle. It did not pull him in nor under. Paul said the very best thing was that when they were not there, the sea went in and went out just the same.

Watching Paul, dripping wet in his sagging undershorts, running zigzag up the beach, cradling a sand crab in his hands, Angus saw the child Paul might have been, the child that Simon Peter was, innocent of buzzing planes, of the knowledge that birds could be enlisted in combat, that aunts could be taken for spies, that cows could have their throats slit, innocent of the shifty mutability of all that mattered. Unscathed, secure in Snag Harbor, Angus kept him there, standing on pink and gray boulder-strewn shores, watching the tides rise and fall.

One afternoon as Paul ran back to the water, Juliette stroked the puffy curled fingers of Angus’s right hand. Perhaps because he could see but not feel her touch, he told her of his anguished and misbegotten attempts at capturing intersections, the binding together of the seen and the unseen, on canvas. And how cartography was the thing he was probably best at—a map of the physical world that, in its black- and-white precision, denied reality.