The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (47 page)

F
IVE DAYS LATER,
Angus was gripping the rail of a hospital transport steaming through misty rain and choppy seas to the other side of the Channel. His hand was numb again. He could hardly find his balance, yet refused to find a seat inside. Insisted on staying on deck. Prayed he would not lose his footing. From England he’d be sent home, while Conlon and the rest of them marched to Flanders. As the French coastline disappeared from view, he felt a despair such as he had never known.

T
WENTY
-F
IVE

September 15
^th
, 1917

Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia

S
imon Peter stared for a long time at the scale drawing he’d made of the
Lauralee
. The thought of giving it to his father was now unbearable. He put it away in the bottom drawer and pulled out his Great War scrapbook. He adjusted the book on his lap and opened its wide cover. Staring up at him in white ink on the black page was
THE GREAT WAR
1914
– in his own hand. Beneath the title were the gay little Union Jack and Red Ensign that he’d cut and pasted in when he got the book and which, as he looked at them now, seemed altogether too small next to the printed letters.

A stack of newspaper articles, weighted down by a pair of scissors, lay untouched on the floor beside his desk—stories on Vimy and Hill
70
, on Third Ypres, on U-boat sightings—uncut, unpasted, and some of them unread. Next to the news clippings was the
Lepidoptera of Eastern North America,
which he’d rescued the day Mr. Heist had been hauled away, along with Pope’s translation of
The
Iliad
and Mr. Heist’s Greek-English dictionary. Tucked away in the back of the desk drawer was a lacquered box. In it was the key to Mr. Heist’s cottage. Mr. Heist had asked him to take what books he wanted and to care for the plants and garden, if he was able, while he was detained in the camp. “Detained” turned out to be a nice way of saying “held prisoner”; “camp,” a nice way of saying “prison.”

The camp, in Amherst, up on the New Brunswick–Nova Scotia border, was a former ironworks factory, requisitioned for prisoners of war and suspicious enemy aliens. Mr. Heist was not an alien, though he hadn’t been able to produce his papers. He was not an enemy combatant, obviously, nor an enemy sympathizer, which is what he was called. But there he was with the rest of them—hundreds of sailors from the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
, sunk in
1915
, sailors from other ships, various untrustworthy, roughshod Canadians, and a large group of “suspicious” aliens—many of German origin and few, if any, men of letters, according to Mr. Heist. They were stacked up in bunks two deep and three high with hardly space to breathe. German officers, some of them quite gallant and gentlemanly, had their own quarters, he’d written to Simon.

Simon had hoped to have the scrapbook ready to show his father, but he had no energy for it, not anymore. And he doubted his father would either. All that mattered was that he was coming home. Like Ida said, it was a miracle. A long nightmare over. We’ll get that arm of his better, she said. The hats-aloft wave on the troop ship, his father and Ebbin running down the gangway, people cheering, flags waving and a band playing—the fixed image Simon used to snap into place when needed—was long gone. Tucked away like his lead soldiers in a box. The scrapbook slipped. He lowered it to the floor and reached for the lacquered box. Next to the Heist key was a tiny framed oval of Charlotte, much younger, but with the same gray eyes and open expression. He wanted his father to meet her. They’d taken a long walk the day before the Bromleys had shipped her off to Edgehill School. They’d vowed to write. They’d agreed that his father would set things right by Mr. Heist. His father was an officer, after all. A wounded officer. A decorated officer. Comfort was in her hand in his as they parted, and there in the upturn of her generous mouth, and in the very softness of her lips when, unexpectedly, he’d pressed his mouth against hers. In the trance of it, a memory as close as the moment itself, he set the box down and touched his fingers to his lips.

H.M.S.
Regina

September 15
^th
, 1917

In the damp claustrophobia of the cabin he shared with an amputee named Peers, Angus watched a pencil roll from one side of the foot locker to the other, letting it drop in his hand each time it fell off the edge. Peers finished vomiting into the bucket and sank back in his bunk. Angus pressed a damp cloth against his face, lost his balance and nearly smothered the man. Peers moaned. The cabin reeked. Lurching and slamming against the walls of the airless corridor, Angus found his way to the head and emptied the bucket. There wasn’t much but bile—Peers had been retching for an hour. Angus rinsed it as best he could and nearly vomited himself. When he got back, Peers was asleep, his breathing steady. He slept on and, finally, Angus went up on deck so he could breathe.

The ship sat high above the ocean, detached from wind or current. The deck shuddered as the engines clanged below. Twin screws churned up the water at the stern. The furious white-green chaos of the wake rose up and fell away to sudsy bubbles in the swells—a long, long trail winding back to all that was left behind and left undone.

To starboard, a darkened patch of rippled sea swept toward them. Just a gust. But the pressure was dropping. A storm was coming. The sky was gun-metal gray, and up ahead, angry cumulus clouds gathered. Green lightning zipped through them. They’d be in it in less than an hour, he told a crewman, who nodded in somber agreement. Black smoke belched from the stacks above and Angus considered the effects of the coming storm on the rattletrap of a converted troop ship. The captain would have to alter course to keep the seas from hitting them broadside. And if those engines failed, what then? They’d be flotsam, tossed about until the sea rolled them over and moved on. There was nothing heroic about death by drowning. But perhaps it was a fitting end.

They were south of Newfoundland when the storm hit. Winds howled. Seas raged. It was as bad as Angus predicted. But the gale’s fury engendered a familiar fortitude until a wave caught them from behind, lifting the stern so that the props churned helplessly in the air and the rudder failed to catch. Then they were rushing forward and down, but not, as it turned out, to the bottom.

How many times he fell on the gangways and hallways below decks to get to Peers, he did not know, but finally, hunching along on his knees, his entire left side in pain, he found the cabin. There was Peers, jammed against the bunk board, near-catatonic. Angus had intended somehow to drag him to the upper decks near the lifeboats, but the lights went out, and drained of all caring, Angus heaved himself up on the bunk. There he lay beside Peers, his good arm across him, gripping the board to keep from slamming back in the nosedives and from crushing Peers when the ship pitched up against the next towering wave. He said nothing, for he had no voice.

At some point the lights came on and the ship turned back on course. The storm had come; the end had not. Angus made his way to the upper deck in a daze. In the main saloon, a couple of sailors swept up shattered glass. Out on deck, stars winked out from a fast-moving cloud cover. The ship steamed on. A day later they were told they were within sight of Nova Scotia and coming onto Halifax. Angus helped Peers, limp as a rag, out to the rail, where all those who could ambulate had gathered for the landfall. A cheer went up. Then another, louder, and louder still. And then the men fell silent. Home. Her jagged inlets and coves smoothed to a solid line by distance, a washed-clean purity against the broken land they’d left.

“Chezzetcook!” one of the men up forward shouted. “They say we’re just off Chezzetcook!” Those who knew the land they were passing hung on the rail and conjured up wild sea grasses, bluffs and spongy bogs, stony, boulder-strewn beaches, and the dark green firs and turning maples of the eastern shore. A blinded soldier said he could smell low tide. No one corrected him.

When they passed Sambro Light, the fog rolled in again. It held as they made the turn into the deep water passage to Halifax Harbor. The low moan of the steam foghorn on Chebucto Head could be heard. As they passed McNabs Island, an apparition in the mist, a private from New Brunswick began singing, soft and slow.

“Un Canadien errant,

Banni de ses foyers,

Parcourait en pleurant

Des pays étrangers.

“Parcourait en pleurant

Des pays étrangers

Un jour, triste et pensif,

Assis au bord des flots,

Au courant fugitif

Il adressa ces mots . . .”

“What’s he singing?” Peers wanted to know.

“An old folk tune.
‘Un Canadien Errant,
’ ” Angus replied. “ ‘The Lost Canadian.’ ”

Peers shook his head.

“A man is banished from his homeland—from Acadia when the English took it, I’d guess. He travels on, weeping through foreign lands. Then he sits by a rushing river.”

The song ended with the sad refrain,

“
Si tu vois mon pays,

Mon pays malheureux.

Va, dire à mes amis,

Que je me souviens d’eux
.”

Peers looked to Angus. “He says to the river, if you see my country, my sad, sad country, go say to all my friends that I remember them,” Angus translated, and added, “Our sad country . . .”

“Lies back there,” the soldier next to him quietly filled in.

“That’s right,” another said, letting the tears fall. “Good men, every last one of them.”

“We won’t forget,” another said.

Angus leaned out over the rail. With each familiar landmark, buoy and channel marker they passed as they were piloted up the harbor, a widening gulf opened—one he could not bridge back to himself. Yet, still his heart was beating.

W
HEN ANGUS STEPPED
off the train at the Chester station, Zeb was there in his truck, alone, as Angus had requested. The ship had docked a day ahead of schedule. Papers signed, discharge complete, Angus had been free to go in so short a time that he’d wandered the streets in a daze. At the North Street Station he bought a ticket, then waited in the tearoom of the King Edward, the plush comforts of which nearly suffocated him. He stared at his cup until his tea went cold.

Zeb scratched his chin and gave him the once-over. “By Christ. Look like you been in a war,” he said. “Did like you said. Didn’t tell the home folk, but we can put in a call at the stationmaster’s, if you’ve a mind to. Call the store and have Alvin run up to your house with the news.”

Angus shook his head and got into the truck.

Zeb held the steering wheel in both hands before shifting into gear. They bumped along in silence around the back harbor road and up to the Chester bandstand, where Zeb slowed and idled the engine. Angus stared at Lobster Point and out at the whale-shaped mound of Quaker Island, bereft of trees, cows grazing contentedly, and at Meisner’s, her sparse, pointed firs, black silhouettes against the sky. Then he leaned out the window and twisted back at Little Fish, Gooseberry and the Western Shore. The blues and greens of the bay and the islands in all their bright, clean, alien beauty, and the wharfs and boats and nestled shore houses were somehow still there, patiently waiting—a flat picture postcard suspended in time.

“Some things don’t change, eh?” Zeb said.

Angus leaned back and closed his eyes with the warmth of the sun on his face. Zeb turned the engine off. “Look there now.” He pointed to a boat coming in, running before the wind. “One of them pleasure yachts. Feller from the States, Philadelphia, Baltimore maybe, owns her. Built a house up on the hill there just for the summers.” Angus kept his eyes on the boat, her main and jib set wing and wing, like a great bird. Zeb waited a moment more, then turned the key, put the truck in gear.