The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel Read online

  When Ebbin hopped up on the porch, Angus lifted the jug of rum at his feet, withdrew the cork with a satisfying thup, and handed it to him. Their glasses stood empty on the porch railing. “Off to save us from the Hun, eh?” Angus said.

  Ebbin took a long swallow, wiped his mouth and grinned. “Someone’s got to do it,” he said. “I take it Hettie’s in bed.”

  “You expect her to do it?”

  Ebbin gave a quick laugh. He leaned back on the railing and said, “She wouldn’t talk to me after dinner. I’ll catch her in the morning. She’ll come around.”

  “Doubt it. Not this time. What the hell, anyway? Were you drunk?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Me and the boys had a few.” He lit a cigarette.

  “Who was with you?”

  “Virgil, George Mather. We’d have signed on anyway. No families of our own. Tough to justify not going. The Germans can’t just stomp all over Europe and claim it for themselves, for Christ sake. England’s at risk.”

  They talked about the course of the war and the boys they knew who were over there. Then Ebbin tipped his head back and waved the cigarette across the night sky. “This is the shape of things to come, the grand sweep. I want to be part of it.” He paused and looked back at Angus. “Don’t tell me your old man’s got you against the war. He’s gone pacifist, hasn’t he?”

  “Gone pacifist? Always has been. You know that.”

  “I always thought that for him ‘pacifist’ was just another word for ‘anti-Empire.’ ”

  “No. Maybe. Dangerous in this climate, either way.” Angus lit his own cigarette. “As for me, I’m not against the war, just you in it.”

  “Yeah. I’d feel the same. I’ll tell you something, though—when I signed up, I felt different. I felt . . .” He shook his head.

  Proud, Angus thought. He felt proud. Ebbin had studied law, worked for his father at the forge, and rejected both. He’d considered stage acting, but saw no future in it. He’d disappear for months at a time—working horses out West, tramping around in the wilds of northern Quebec, the Yukon. Once spending a winter in Wyoming at the base of the Beartooth Mountains with a survey team. Trailing hints of a roughshod world, he’d return with money in his pocket and stories to tell, ones that made you laugh, and ones that made you wonder—fending off a maniacal Mountie who rode into their camp bareback and backwards; sipping water from a stream so pure it tasted of earth and sky and sugar. He had Hettie’s fine features and restless nature, but unlike her had an endless store of self-confidence and an unforced, infectious optimism. Ebbin just needed to find the right opening and he’d do fine, everyone said. But Angus had seen the trace of lines around his eyes, the shadowed doubt. Now this sudden singularity of purpose. How often did that come around? Only in war perhaps. Or in love.

  “Come with me, why don’t you? We’ll fight them like we did the pirates on Mountain Island,” Ebbin said. “Seriously, how long are you going to drag up and down the coast on the Lauralee for the old man? When are you going to escape?”

  “The Lauralee is my escape.”

  “Not for long, eh? A fella risks his life just stepping aboard.”

  “She’s not that old.” She was, of course.

  “Yeah, she is. Rotting away, and you along with her. Railroads, motorized transport—that’s the ticket to trade these days.” Ebbin jabbed his cigarette at Angus. “Or so Hettie whispered to me like a sweet song yesterday.” He raised his brows in theatric exaggeration.

  “Railroads? She said that?”

  “Something like that,” Ebbin shrugged. “Thinking of the future, unlike you. Point is, coastal trade was supposed to be temporary. Remember? Yet there you are, still going, resenting every minute of it.”

  “Except when I’m out there,” Angus countered.

  “True enough,” Ebbin agreed.

  It was true. As much as Angus resented working for his father, sailing the Lauralee fed something deep, made him feel part of “the grand sweep”—not of history, but of the sun’s first rays breaking over the curve of the earth, the currents below, the wind above, propelling him forward, and letting him know just how small a part of the grand sweep he was, but still—a part of it. Suspended, sustained in the territory beyond the points of the compass. And it was that he wanted to capture on canvas—more than capture, he wanted to let it flow through him and out and back again. God had given him talent, or maybe just the longing, but either way, not enough courage to trust it. He took another drag on his cigarette.

  As if party to these thoughts, Ebbin said, “Maybe you should chuck it all, rent a garret and—”

  Angus held up his hand. “Let old dreams die a good death, would you? For once?”

  “Dreams never die a good death. Seabirds, seascapes. They’re so easy for you.”

  “Too easy. Failures of imagination.” He’d never studied art, had never been to a museum or gallery. What he did came naturally, easily, but he wanted more than sentiment. Wanted to get down what he felt, not just copy what he saw. Wanted to capture things beyond his knowing—a unification, closely rendered, expanding out. Yet only rarely did he risk it, and all too often it left him feeling a fool.

  “Weir loves your pictures,” Ebbin reminded him.

  “Weir loves them because they sell. ‘Illustrations,’ he calls them, and rightly so. Sailors buy them for their mothers.”

  “And that’s not enough for you—pictures that sell?”

  “Sell for a song. And no.”

  “What about those ones you’re afraid to show around? Why not take them to Weir?”

  Angus flicked his cigarette into the yard.

  Ebbin shook his head and sighed. “Always shortening sail when you could go with the full set. You make life hard. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Fair enough. And you make it all seem so easy.”

  “By choice! There’s always a choice. Until you decide there isn’t.”

  Angus folded his arms and cocked his head. “That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “Or the most profound,” Ebbin countered with a grin.

  Angus returned his smile. “Hand over that jug. I’m not near drunk enough for your platitudes.”

  They were next to each other now, facing the yard. After a moment Ebbin said, “I don’t know what you’re after exactly, but I know it’s more. I wouldn’t be talking this way, but with me heading off . . .”

  A bat fluttered past. Angus said, “I wish you weren’t. But I know what you’re after, too.”

  “Yeah? Do you?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Ebbin threw his arm up around Angus’s shoulder. “Remember that day we met a hundred years ago? When you were afraid to go sledding?”

  “I wasn’t afraid. Jesus.”

  “Yeah, you were. Afraid of what your old man would say, anyway. Still are, as far as I can see.”

  Angus lifted the jug and took a long swallow. Golden was the memory of that overcast day on the snow-packed hillside so long ago. Angus’s mother dead a year; his father holed up on dry land, the two of them at opposite ends of the long mahogany table, night after night in silence. And then the burst of the Hant family onto the scene. Hettie Ellen, a toothpick in thick woolens and scarves, on a sled behind Tom Pugsley that day. Her shrieks echoing down the steep run ricocheted against Angus’s hesitation and longing. And Ebbin, whom he’d just met, waving his hand over his sled with a bow, saying, “She’s yours. Just steer around them two boulders. Be the ride of your life.” The dazzling smile, the gallant gesture—a perfect counterpoint to his father’s newfound adherence to an angry, puritanical Old Testament God, sucking the life out of pleasure and the pleasure out of life, which in Ebbin’s presence seemed so attainable, so utterly possible. Angus had put a cautious knee on the sled, had shot down the hill, and had the ride of his life.

  Ebbin swung over the porch railing and dropped like a cat onto the yard. “Take the pictures to Weir and see what happens. For me. It’s a long
way to Tipperary, you know.” He whipped out his harmonica and played the first notes.

  “Longer still to France . . .” Angus said. “Oh, alright. I’ll do it. Give Weir a good laugh.”

  “There’s the spirit.” The silver harmonica flashed, and the sweet notes of “Annie Laurie” drifted down the hill to where the maples, hiding among the spruce and silvered by the moon, stirred, their new leaves clinging. Ebbin gripped the porch railing and swung back up. “Home before you know it.”

  Angus, a little unsteady on his feet, handed him a glass. “Home before you know it,” he agreed, and they clinked their empty glasses.

  TEN MONTHS LATER, in March of 1916, shortly before the Battle of Saint Eloi Craters, where the Canadians had over 1,300 casualties, Ebbin’s regular letters stopped. He was seen afterwards, that much the home folks heard from George Mather, back from the Front in a wheelchair—no one returned without wounds; signing up meant “duration.” George claimed to have seen Ebbin in September after Courcelette, near Thiepval. Embedded as this information was in repeated number sets and words like “silver,” “angel” and “whirlwind,” it was hard to know what he saw. And after those first few days of incoherent ranting, George had gone nearly mute.

  In the months between Ebbin’s departure and his disappearance, Hettie Ellen drifted like a leaf in a current, as she had several times over the years. When he went missing, she seemed to spiral away from herself.

  For Angus, Ebbin became a phantom limb, painfully there and not there. His unknown fate offered hope at first. But hope grew dimmer by the day. Letters to Ebbin’s commanding officer went unanswered. Letters to higher-ups had been met with uncertainty. Ebbin was not yet officially declared missing in action. There was nothing to fill the space where Ebbin had been—no sign, no word, no body and no grave.

  Was he in hospital without identification? Blown to bits? Maybe he’d wandered off with a concussion, unable to tell some poor peasant his name. Maybe in a prison camp, forbidden from writing. Maybe . . . Maybe . . . Angus lay awake at night next to Hettie, the two of them silently conjuring scenarios, his hand a cradle for hers under the quilts.

  With Ebbin missing, thousands of casualties mounting and the war escalating, the tenuousness of Angus’s own purpose grew pronounced. He had feverish dreams about his painting that startled him awake and filled him with regret. It was there in the milky white stone clattering in on the surf, in the streaked semicircles etched in a black mussel shell. There, too, in the sweep of clouds racing away from a chalice of blue sky. It was in fog seen through a lace curtain, in bloomers pinned to the line, sailing on the wind. It was in paint chipping off a lone bell buoy and in the dull clang of the bell itself on the slowly rising, slowly falling sea.

  A fine hobby for your mother, his father said of his painting, but a man works by brawn or brains, and you have plenty of both. Use them, would you? You’ve a life to live. Make it count.

  And so it was, with a family to support, Angus agreed to ply goods up and down the coast for his father—the once and great schooner fishing hero, a wealthy man by Snag Harbor standards, owner of fishing vessels and the timber to build them. A man who had given up a life at sea to raise his son and never let him forget it. A man for whom words about the sanctity of life and honor and obligation and money in the bank were sufficient expressions of love. And a man who had supported him, no questions asked, when Angus had needed him most, seeing to it a house was built for Hettie and the baby when, at nineteen, Angus stood before him in paint-splattered boots, pockets empty.

  In charge of the Lauralee, Angus could grasp some essential part of himself. Now she was heavy in the water and her rigging groaned with fatigue. Refitting her was an exercise in futility. The days of hauling cabbages, potatoes, timber, salt and barrel staves in a sailing vessel were drawing to an end. Still, every now and then, as he brought her up to the edge of the wind, she’d take hold, and he’d feel the synchronized perfection of water pouring off her foredeck, running along the lee rail and back again to the sea. “Drive her, boy! She’s singing now,” Wallace would shout.

  On a brilliant July morning, with Ebbin still missing and the Battle of the Somme raging, Angus and his father spread out the Lauralee’s mainsail in the yard behind the house. On his knees checking for weak seams, of which there were plenty, Angus said, “Stevens says it’s new or nothing. He’ll cut us a new set of sails on Hutt’s Pond as soon as it freezes over.” Duncan grunted to a stand. “Well,” he said, “Randolph Stevens might be the best sailmaker around, but she’s well beyond them. And she won’t do with an auxiliary motor. The vibration would knock her timbers loose.”

  And knock the soul out of her, Angus thought. He placed the flat of his palm on the soft cotton canvas, bleached white by the sun, and remembered the deep cream color the sails had been to start, and how he and Wallace had taken pains to let the light winds of sunrise and sunset work the perfect curve into the main. He thought of how in a wild sea, the jib in tatters and the main halyard jammed, they couldn’t get the mainsail down, and how a crack raced halfway up the mast before the wind blew out two seams. Thought about Stevens’s perfect repair, and ran his hand along the length of it.

  It was at this moment that his father chose to tell him that he’d been thinking of talking to Balfour.

  “Balfour?” Angus looked up sharply. “Why? You’re not trading on Hettie’s friendship with Kitty, are you?”

  Unfazed, his father replied: “Of course not. I’m trading on that summer she helped him out when his clerk dropped dead. Balfour’s coming down from Halifax to check out property in Chester, and I aim to go over there and show him around. Talk a little business. I want you with me.”

  Angus sat back on his heels. It was the last thing he wanted to do. And the mere mention of Kitty and her father, the silver-haired Balfour, a Halifax financier, brought Angus back to the summer Hettie had spent in their big stone house on the Northwest Arm. Back to the lawns and gardens and Kitty’s invitation to go out for a sail with her cousin Blanchard—“BB,” he was called—on the sleek little thirty-two-foot Herreshoff sloop that Balfour had bought him. Reclining in the cockpit in pleated white trousers, passing a silver flask around, BB and his friends had let Angus rig the boat and sail it for them like a hired hand. All these years later, Angus still remembered how responsive the sloop was, how she’d cut through the chop like a knife, how she’d tempered his humiliation, and how it had returned full throttle when, rowing back to the Yacht Squadron after the sail, BB and his friends tossed Hettie’s name around as if she belonged to them.

  “Connections. That’s how things are done,” his father was saying. “Even Hettie understands that.”

  “Maybe you should take her on as a partner.”

  “You can joke all you want, but I’m serious here now. Balfour’s heard about the pretty penny I’m turning up at Dawson’s. He might want me to invest in a brickworks he’s looking at in Bridgewater. Wants to merge it with one in the Valley. There’s money to be made by the high rollers that make that happen. Mergers and whatnot. And Hugh Balfour is honest enough to avoid war-profiteering. A good man. The problem is, I don’t pretend to understand this high-finance business, and I’m too old to learn. What I understand are things I can grab hold of—timber turned to boats, land you can plant your feet on. But I wouldn’t mind some of the action. High time you came in off the water and helped me out. Expand your horizons.”

  “You’re going to scrap the Lauralee.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  Angus had hit a nerve, as he knew he would. It was a line of defense that had worked before to protect him from a life onshore under his father’s thumb, working as a glorified clerk, a manager, checking up on properties and holdings and other men’s work. And now even worse—high finance, high rollers, the money game—all that animated men like Balfour. His father, unlike them, lived almost as simply as he always had. The fortune he was building and the one he dreamed of was just another way of c
oming in off the Banks with a hold full of fish. A race to the finish. Angus may not have known a paper stock from a rolling stock, but he knew just how high the stakes were and what denying that legacy would do to the man he hated and admired and loved. And what capitulating might do to himself.

  His father unrolled his tobacco pouch and slowly filled his pipe and lit it. Squinting off toward the bay, he said, “We’ll haul her up, see the kind of repairs she needs, but we best face it. She’s not worth a new set of sails. Coastal trade in a sailing vessel is over. No money in it. And I didn’t raise you to be a common sailor.”

  Angus got to his feet. The world was closing in. “Maybe that’s just what I am and what I want to be,” he said. “Just because you gave up a life on the water doesn’t mean—” He stopped. Too late. His father seized upon the opening with “And who’d I do that for? You. A motherless boy.”

  It had taken years for Angus to recognize the fiction of that response. After his mother’s death, his father had in fact headed straight to the Banks, driven by his own demons, whatever they may have been, and driven back to shore by them as well, where like a drowning man he clung to his Bible and went from singing sea shanties to ruminations on fate and the hand of God. As time went on, every deal he made seemed to come out in his favor, which he began to see as part of God’s plan as well, reward for a moral, upright life, the outcome of which, his legacy, might not outsmart death, but would give it a good run for the money.

  His father jerked the sail and started pleating it into folds. “It took years for me to move up from catchie to captain. Years. I wasn’t just handed a boat like you. You want to toss your life away, roving around at sea? My God. Look at Ebbin. Never settled down. Never got serious. And where’d he end up? At the bottom of a trench. No more senseless way to die.”

  “We don’t know he’s dead yet,” Angus snapped. It was all he could do not to rip the sail from his father’s hands and shove him against the wall of the barn.