The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (46 page)

“That wall of water came crashing in, and she took the boats, took the wharf, and the houses with. She was a-roaring up the hill, sure to swallow them up. Etta Tilley stops dead in her tracks and turns. Stood her ground on a granite rock and faced down that wall of water with her wizened face fierce and her black dress a-billowing out, and the cross held straight in her outstretched arm. And by God, as I live and breathe, the sea stopped right there and drew itself back.”

“Holy smokes!” Simon said. He glanced at Charlotte, who was staring at Putnam with wide eyes.

Putnam tipped his hat.

Davy, leaning back, crossed his legs and said laconically, “You didn’t say a word about the dogs and goats and such, Putnam.”

“What dogs and goats? Oh yes, I see how you mean. Turns out the goats and cats and dogs all about scrambled up the ridge
before
Heb Noseworthy even saw what he saw. Seems they knew aforehand what they needed to do.”

“That’s better,” Davy said. “That’s more of a story—made her more lively, see?”

“She was lively enough in the first telling. Look at them young ones here. Looks like they
seen a ghost, so I’d say she was fine enough in first telling, without your dogs and cats. And goats.”

“Nope, t’weren’t,” Davy said. “It’s them small things make a story worth the time it takes to listen.”

“Who’s the collector here? You or me?”

Simon broke in. “So, when—when was this?”

“Years afore you were born. Afore I was born, and I must be near a hundred now.” Putnam smiled.

“But what was it? What made that happen?” Charlotte asked.

“Don’t know. See, Davy? Miss Charlotte here was right taken with my telling.”

Davy scratched his jaw. “Could be something come out of the sky, made a hole in the sea and sucked the ocean down into it.”

“Doubt that,” Philip said, foregoing the coffee and drinking straight from his flask.

“Or one of them earthquakes.”

“Well,” said Philip, “how could it be an earthquake if it happened out at sea?”

“Alright, a seaquake, then,” Davy answered.

“Now that’s just stupid,” Putnam said.

T
HAT EVENING, HIS
grandfather’s response was yes, he’d heard of an undersea quake before the turn of the century that had struck the southern part of Newfoundland with what he called a tidal wave, and, of course, earthquakes could and did occur on the ocean floor because what was the ocean floor if not the earth covered by water? These answers led Simon to the conclusion that the world as he knew it, the world without end, could erupt at any moment and sweep away all that is and was.

T
HAT CONCLUSION WAS
verified the following week as the Mounties hauled away Mr. Heist’s telescope and Fresnel lens, pulled down his wharf lamps and packed them off as well, and raked through all of Mr. Heist’s books, tossing them on the floor, and seizing all the ones written in German and all of his papers, and even his butterfly notebooks, as “potential evidence.” It was Simon’s grandfather, not Mr. Heist, who had to be physically moved from the door of Mr. Heist’s cottage; his grandfather who followed the Mounties from house to garden protesting their search, imploring them to stop; his grandfather who got roughly knocked to the ground when he tried to wrest the telescope from their hands. Throughout it all, Mr. Heist, who had been informed his services at the school would no longer be required, sat slumped in shock at the red kitchen table.

It was Simon’s grandfather who stood up in church the following Sunday after the Apostle’s Creed and accused the congregation of turning on one of their own, claiming that God would rain down retribution upon Nova Scotia, that there would be hell to pay, before he stalked out the door. And it was Simon Peter who walked out with him.

T
WENTY
-F
OUR

August 15
^th
, 1917

No. 18 Canadian General Hospital

Saint-Junien, France

I
n the filtered sunlight of the woods on the way back to Saint-Junien, Angus stopped. He’d been walking fast, with his head down to keep from turning back to the cottage and with the thought circling round his head that the only way he’d been able to stay with Juliette and Paul was knowing he would leave them, and the only way he could leave them was to think he might see them again. In the shifting shadows, birds flicked from branch to branch, and small feet scurried through leaves on the forest floor. Nothing else broke the silence. For a moment he considered idling there and obliterating all thought, but a tingling down his arm and pinpricks in his hand brought him back to the road he was on.

Boes had said it would take three months for nerves to regenerate. It had been more than that, but all the same—his arm seemed to be tingling. His hand as well. Surely it was evidence that the paralysis was physical, not in his mind. He resolved to ask for therapy three times a day. He picked up his pace. He nearly ran. He would recover. He would recover.

Full of his own purpose, he reached the top of the hill overlooking the Saint-Junien station, but there came to a full stop. Below him convoys of wounded soldiers were being offloaded from the trains. Transport vehicles, lorries and motor ambulances were rumbling to and from the station. Angus ran down the hill into the confusion of stretcher-bearers and the walking wounded, the bleeding out, the gassed, the lame and the nearly dead. Cradling his arm, he managed to hop onto the running board of a truck headed to the hospital.

As the truck entered the courtyard, Angus jumped off and found Brimmie directing the flow of wounded men. She told him Cobb and Brown had been killed with five nurses while touring field hospitals at the Front. Boes had been spared, and had been in surgery with Spinner and Sadler nonstop for twenty hours. If he wanted to help, go to supply. There he helped a Corporal Lee load boxes onto a wheeled trolley headed for Ward D. Lee told him that Lovell and three other nursing sisters had been shipped off to London with iodoform poisoning days before. Angus looked at the boxes of the crystalline antiseptic on the trolley and imagined the nurses’ hands yellow and swollen from overapplication of it. He wheeled the boxes to Ward D himself. There amid the shrieks of pain piercing the air, he was soon carrying bedpans, handing out packages of cotton wool, holding basins for dirty dressings and vomit.

From what he could gather, divisions of the CEF had been part of a force that had taken Hill
70
above the town of Lens, long held by the Germans. Taken it in twenty minutes and then, supplies dwindling, hungry and mired down, had nonetheless repulsed some twenty counterattacks that included mustard gas and flamethrowers. All while he’d been at the cottage. He had no idea who among his band had survived. More than once he was sure he saw Conlon, but was wrong every time.

Every bed was occupied and extra cots set up again in the great hall where he’d woken up so long ago to Nurse Lovell’s face. In one of the cots he found Wertz struggling for breath from a chest wound. Angus clasped his hand and leaned in close. Wertz told him Conlon was alive, and Boudrey. And LaPointe. Maybe Katz and Hanson. He didn’t know who else. But who would take care of Boudrey, he asked. Angus tightened his grip. “I’ll see to it, if I can,” he said. When he returned late that night, Wertz was gone, his bed occupied.

At four in the morning, Angus made his way back to the ward he’d shared with the other rehab cases Boes had been working on. They’d been shipped back to England two days before, he was told. In his own bed lay a private with mustard-gas blisters bubbling across his face.

In the hallway Angus slumped down and, with his back against the wall, shut his eyes. Wertz. All his men. He wanted to suffer with them, to savor small victories, be with them at the razor’s edge of life and death—not as some kind of penance, but to feel whole. As he felt now in the chaos of the hospital. His arm was alive with pins and needles. His hand was coming back. He couldn’t flex it, couldn’t move it; but in his exhaustion, he was sure he felt blood pulsing through it.

“MacGrath?”

It was Boes, standing across the dimly lit hallway, removing a bloody surgeon’s gown. He motioned Angus into his office and collapsed into a chair behind his desk. The lamplight was low. Boes looked up with sunken eyes. Behind him, the tangled wires of the condenser apparatus dangled over the edge of a table. He told Angus to take a chair. For a moment neither of them spoke.

“Cobb’s dead. Did you know that?” Boes said.

“I heard.”

“And some of our best nurses.” Boes reached for his pen. “I’m a major now, for what it’s worth. I’m having you invalided home.”

Angus jerked upright.
Home?
“But . . . May I speak?”

“Of course. Speak at will, but it won’t change my mind.” He unscrewed his pen and began filling in a form on his desk.

“But I’m getting better. I swear to you. I’ve felt pins and needles in my arm just like you said I would. Those are my men out there. I need to be with them, see this through.”

“Your men are headed toward Flanders to join the British
2
nd Army. Currie’s finally committed them to Passchendaele. They’ll be in it in days. How is it you’re going to be with them?” Boes stopped writing and gave him a weary look. “You’re an officer who can’t hold a pistol and a cartographer who can’t hold a pencil. I’m sending you home.”

“What about a hospital in England? I can recover. I know I can.”

“You’ve had months of therapy and it hasn’t helped. More than I should have given you. Maybe I wanted to prove something.” He glanced up. “I’m sorry, but they’ll have nothing more to offer you.”

“Well, maybe this is all in my mind. You thought that once. What about one of those, those war hospitals for whatever you call it—hystericals?”

“MacGrath,” Boes countered slowly, “have you any idea? There are six civilian hospitals in Britain that can manage what they’re calling ‘shell shock,’ and the military has set up another six for officers and some thirteen more for ranks. They’re filling up with gibbering, incoherent men who can’t speak or walk, who have lost all balance. That’s not you.”

Angus sat back and looked Boes in the eye. “You don’t think I’ll recover.”

“I didn’t say that. I said you’ll manage, just not as a soldier. You’ll find your way. Trust me.”

Angus jumped to his feet. “Why should I? You said I’d get better. You said to trust the condenser apparatus. You can’t just change your mind like that. You’re a
doctor
. Why should I trust—”

Boes dropped the pen and held his head in his hands. “Because,” he said softly, “I am a
good
doctor.” Without another word, he filled out the rest of the form.