The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (52 page)

“I do, warts and all,” she said, and met his eyes.

With Hettie’s blessing and stated relief that he wanted to be of use, Angus had packed his things for Halifax, and there discovered that despite his arm, he was of great use in helping the relief effort. His military service was not without benefit. He was lifted from the ranks of helpers to a temporary position of some authority. He knew how to navigate human suffering.

When his work was done, he returned to spring leaves unfurling and ice in retreat in Snag Harbor. He had written to Simon, but had received only the most cursory letters back. Hettie wrote more regularly—her usual five-line notes that let him know all was well, and he assumed better, without him there. How could it not be? While in Halifax, he’d felt a welcome sense of military demeanor and welcome stabs of pain in his shoulder and hand. He operated with calm detachment, organizing the distribution of supplies, checking their deployment to shelters, whispering reassurances, listening to stories of loss. He could move his arm at the shoulder, but the pain and movement disappeared upon his return. It was as if the nerves had tried but failed. Darkness again settled over him. He became convinced that his own life was meant to be played out only in the most savage of circumstances. Beauty was neither his to behold nor create. God had hamstrung his arm for the hubris of once thinking it possible. But he thought, too, of hands passing out food and blankets and of the toddler he’d found wandering the snow-filled street who fell asleep on his shoulder, whose tiny breaths warmed his neck as he carried her to shelter.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of June, one year and two months after Ebbin’s death, Angus learned in a letter from Keegan that Conlon, always on the edge of grace, steady, steadfast, recently elevated to major with a Distinguished Service Order medal pinned to his uniform, had died.

Conlon, Angus’s confessor in absentia, to whom he whispered his transgressions without giving them voice, from whom he’d never asked for absolution, had written to Angus in May, saying that had it not been for Havers, they would not have discovered the howitzer at the stone barn. And had it not been for Angus, barely alive, the three of them, he and Angus and Keegan, would never have found their way back to tell Rushford where it was.

In that strange letter, recounting their times together, he’d asked Angus to go back and put a wreath on the graves of their comrades at Vimy and Passchendaele when the war was over. He predicted it wouldn’t go on forever, but it might very well end in defeat. “Promise you’ll honor our graves, in victory or defeat,” Conlon had written in an uncharacteristic plea.

In his response, painstakingly composed with his left hand as all his letters were, Angus reminded Conlon of the abbey cemetery—how Conlon had scoffed that stones crumble and names fade away and no one remembers, “except the poets who help the rest of us remember what we dare not say.” But Angus gave his word—he’d place a wreath on every grave when the war was over—victory or defeat. But he wanted Conlon with him when he did. Wanted him to recite what the poets knew.

Now, Conlon of the soft voice and softer smile, who, as Keegan said in his letter, had led his shredded forces at Passchendaele to feats more heroic than they had a right to, who had unfailingly kept spirits up, had found his way out. Enclosed with Keegan’s letter was Conlon’s copy of
The Odyssey
, which he’d asked Keegan to send to Angus should anything happen to him. The note to Angus from Conlon, tucked inside the book’s worn pages, said that unlike Odysseus, and unlike Angus, he did not think he could find his way home, but he hoped that Angus could find it in his heart to cherish his memory as much as he had cherished Angus’s friendship. Days later, he’d taken his own life in a hotel in London.

Angus turned
The
Odyssey
over in his hand and placed it on the ledge. He opened the cover and laid Conlon’s note inside. Before he closed the cover, he pressed his palm flat against the words. Then he left the shed door swinging open behind him. He walked on, spoke to no one, and headed up into the deep woods and hills, until finally, stumbling through a bog, he turned southwest toward the coast. Hours later he staggered across the boulders on the beach at Owl’s Head. There he let all the tortured whys fly out on the wind. Gusts rushed through the tops of the trees. At his feet a growing surf drenched the rocks in cascades of foam, unceasing, unending, uncaring. He’d been prepared for Conlon’s death, but not by his own hand.

Angus no more understood why he’d resisted than why Conlon had succumbed. Nor why he continued to resist. There was no answer, and all that Keegan might tell him later about the circumstances, the bits and pieces of Conlon’s last days, would never be explanation enough. We cannot know the whole poem from a single word, he finally found the strength to say, nor a life from a single act.

Forced up against the limits of human knowing, on bended knee to the mystery, not just the fact of Conlon’s death, Angus glimpsed the greater mystery. There was more, but known only by a knowing beyond all knowing. His tethered life stretched away from him and he was in that moment unbound.

“M
ACGRATH!” HE HEARD
someone call minutes, maybe hours, later. He spun around, nearly slipped off the rocks. There was George, crazed and undone, balancing on a boulder, his crutch in the sand. “Thiepval,” he shouted. “He was there! Saved my life.”

“I know,” Angus said. “I believe you. I saw him, too. At Vimy, and after that.” The released truth of those words carried him at a rapid pace across the slick rocks to George.

George’s hair whipped across his face. He slowly pulled it back. “With the
45
th?”

“That’s right. Called himself Havers. But it was Ebbin. I watched him die. Watched him die a hundred times since.”

They met each other’s eyes. “End without ending,” George said.

Angus lost his footing, grabbed George, and they fell together onto the sand and struggled up and hobbled over the stony beach to the shelter of the trees, then sank down on the steps leading up to the Heist cottage. Angus huddled over and lit a cigarette and handed it to George.

George held it between his thumb and forefinger. “Boy cried out for his mother. Passed him one of these,” he said.

Angus glanced up at George, then lit one for himself. A misty rain began to fall.

George blew out a long stream of smoke and dropped his head. “Die or go on. Either way won’t bring them back. Or us. Heart-broke, head-broke.”

Angus leaned back against the railing. George’s hands went slack between his knees. Angus closed his eyes and remembered the scrape of a muddied kilt on bare knees. After a time, the wind began to die, and the air took on a softness. A blue jay sounded a series of hollow notes above them.

Angus said, “There was a lark nesting in a Kraut jacket on the wire in the middle of No Man’s Land. Singing her heart out.”

George lifted his head and listened, then reached for a twig of mountain laurel that had blown onto the steps. He broke a leaf in half, held it to his nose and inhaled deeply. He passed the other half to Angus, who did the same. The fresh scent of the wet woods—blueberry bushes and laurel, drenched pine needles, damp earth—flooded in, overtook memory, canceled time. They slowly took the steps up to the Heist cottage. There George stopped. They clasped hands and Angus left him there rocking on the porch.

A
S HE WALKED BACK
, alone on the hilly road, the evening sky took on a tremulous violet-blue that filled in and grew deeper until, suddenly luminescent and silvered, it faded to black. “In life,” he had said to Orland, futilely staunching his dead brother’s wound, “we are in death.” Nothing lasts. Every moment is a moment passing and gone. Yet, as he walked, and dusk faded to night, that violet-blue stayed with him in its essence, calling up his longing in the bottom of a trench for the whole sky. It was above him now, vast and star-filled. Every star the brighter for the depth of unending darkness.

The war was in him, part of him, but not all of him. Memory would always haunt him, as it haunted George. He knew that. But he knew, too, that the sacrifice could not be honored by memory alone, but in the purest part of self where it was understood it could not be fully known.
Now we see through a glass darkly
. . .
now I know only in part
.

When he reached Mader’s wharf, he stopped. He took the steps down to it, and walked to the end. The shed door creaked open and a figure stepped out.

“Angus? That you?” Philip called, peering into the darkness, one hand on his pot belly, the other scratching his neck.

“It is.”

“Knew it. That one-armed way you got of walking. Come down here in the middle of the night to see how I’m doing? Well, I’ll tell you. Seventy-two years old and still got me powers.” He winked, amused at himself, and said, “C’mere now since you’re out and about. Got something I want to show you here. C’mon, c’mon,” he wheezed, motioning Angus inside.

In the shed he pointed with his pipe to the beautiful little hull of a boat, a sloop, about twenty-four feet long, up on a cradle. “Honduras mahogany,” he said. “Got it cheap if you can believe it, but don’t believe it.” He squeezed out a high-pitched chuckle.

“She’s a beauty,” Angus said.

“Yep. She is.” Philip strutted around her through the sawdust, and got up on a stepladder and rested his gnarled hands on the gunwale. The deck was not yet finished. Just the carvel-planked hull, a soft reddish-brown, unvarnished and sanded smooth. “Your boy and me designed her. Didn’t think I could build a boat again. I liked her so much, couldn’t help but build her. He pushed me along. Mostly his design. Wanted that long counterstern, that spoon bow. Been helping every step of the way.”

“Simon Peter?”

“None other. How many boys you got?”

Angus circled the boat, eyeing her graceful lines, the deep keel, the oval at the end of her transom. She was the most perfectly balanced, beautiful little boat he had ever seen. “He helped design her? How do you mean?”

“I mean he and I talked dimensions. He even made some
drawings
, to scale, he told me, if that don’t beat all, afore we lofted her up. He don’t want to paint her. Just varnish so that color stays true. I never seen anyone sand so fine. Wants me to name her
True North
, but I told him that’ll be up to whoever buys her.”

Dumbfounded, Angus ran his hand along her planks and then pressed his hand against the curve of her smoothed spoon bow.

“He and I figured the mast about twenty-eight foot tall,” Philip said, climbing back down. “He’s already picked out the tree. She’ll carry a lot of sail, but she’s good for it. That keel will keep her from going over in a fifty-knot gale with a couple of skinny boys on her windward rail.”

Philip pulled out his flask and offered it to Angus. Angus took a long swallow and leaned back against the door frame, staring at her transom. “Philip,” he said, “I’m thinking that
True North
would look pretty good on her stern.”

“Well, sir, that it would. It’s a right good name,” Philip agreed. “Right good.” He shoved his pipe back between his teeth and smiled broadly. Then he switched off the light and bade Angus good night.