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

  “Only an idiot would believe otherwise. Accept it. And get your wife to do the same. Look at her. Barely eats, barely talks, wanders around like a boat adrift. Good thing I can spare Ida so she can see to you folks down here.”

  With utmost control, Angus replied, “We can do well enough on our own,” though Ida’s sturdy presence in their midst was a relief. He turned and started down the hill. “It’s the uncertainty that’s killing her,” he said.

  “Then give her some certainty,” his father shouted after him. “Convince her. And get on with life.”

  A WEEK LATER, Angus took three of his oils to Weir’s shop in Halifax—the one of the phalarope on the storm-tossed Lynch bell buoy, which loomed out from the lower left corner of the canvas, and the two others, nearly devoid of color—a line of huddled gulls facing the wind on the bleached bones of a gray whale, and a white-gray canvas, masts and hull emerging from fog in the faintest of lines. All three were rendered in oils of thick application, none of them quite capturing the suspended mystery, the tender, flawed visions he was after. Weir set them up and stood before them, brows furrowed. Gone was his heavy-lidded disdain, his feigned disinterest. He took the odd step forward and back. He smoothed his well-oiled hair. But in the end, he pronounced two of them colorless and strange, experimental without conviction, and all three, particularly the bird on the buoy, as impossible to sell. “Stick to real birds,” he said. Angus picked up the paintings and left.

  On the sail home, with Chebucto Head off the starboard quarter and Wallace pumping away at the bilge water, Angus tossed the pictures one by one over the side. The last of the three, the phalarope, one foot up, one on the bell buoy—almost in flight, still clinging to uncertain refuge—hovered in the following wind. Angus lunged for it just as it dropped into the wake and stared back at it long after it had disappeared from view, then swung the wheel, checked the compass, and set the boat on course.

  He considered telling Hettie when he got home. In her starched white blouse and blue skirt she was suddenly talkative, fully there. But it wasn’t the sort of thing he had the words for, and she was on about Balfour. How Duncan had brought him round for a visit while Angus was away. How he’d been pleased to sit around the kitchen table as if he were used to it, how he’d invited her to sit right down and filled her in on Kitty’s life in New York, and included her when talk came round to brickyards and paper mills, “papering our way out of the 1913 depression,” she added with a shy smile, quoting Balfour. Stocks and securities, a play on words, she had to explain to Angus. Through it all and on that note, Angus thought of the phalarope, floating on the waves, slipping under.

  In August with yet another unsatisfactory response from the army in his pocket, Angus went over to Chester and entered the gloom of the forge where the furnace raged against the silhouette of Ebbin’s father, Amos Hant, gripping the clamps and pounding away at the hot lead on the block. Amos stopped pounding when Angus spoke and went back to it when he finished, without looking up. Angus put his hand on Amos’s massive shoulder and glanced away from the tears cutting tracks down his broad, soot-stained face.

  Back in Snag Harbor he headed straight for the tavern, where talk was of a U-boat sighted by a Newfoundland schooner off Sambro Light, and where from an enlistment poster on the far wall, Lord Kitchener pointed his finger straight at Angus.

  It was Andrew Rennick, dean of the Hill Theological School, pitching the plight of the boys over there from the pulpit at St. Andrew’s—the honor of sacrifice, which was God’s greater purpose, which defined Faith—who after the service suggested cartography and said he could put Angus in touch with a Major Gault, who would smooth the way. Rennick reminded him of the amendments Angus had made to official provincial charts over the years, correcting misplaced shoals, uncharted rocks, inaccurate depths. Angus could search the hospitals for Ebbin himself while making maps in London, the dean stressed—behind the lines—risking neither life nor limb.

  Standing there in the church vestibule, Angus thought about Hettie and about Amos; about certainty and uncertainty, and about the mechanical precision and reproduction that was mapmaking. He knew about charting depths, not elevations. Knew nothing about surveying, but that would hardly be required. And surely he could learn how to turn a photograph into a flat-line map.

  “Men risk their lives flying over enemy lines to get those photographs,” Rennick said. “You could help save lives by transforming them into maps.”

  Perhaps, Angus thought, he’d been led to this point all along. After all, he was good at drawing “real” birds. Accept who you are, Rennick had told him years before, agreeing with Angus’s decision to leave the seminary. Here was the opportunity to use his skill and do something that mattered.

  Art with a purpose, his father called his chart work, something Angus reminded him of when, white hair wild, eyes wide, shaking with controlled rage, his father warned him about the immorality of serving as a cog in the engine of war, no matter how remote from the field, about putting his talent to evil purpose.

  It was the first time Angus had heard him use the word “talent.”

  ON THE FLOOR beside him Mueller moaned, and Angus jerked back to the troop train, which was slowing to a stop at a Casualty Clearing Station. Flags snapped brightly above the Matron’s tent as Angus and some others helped Mueller off the train, where he was collected by two oddly cheerful young women. Ambulance drivers. From Toronto, they told him. Behind them a group of privates, recovered from wounds and illness and cleared for duty, climbed aboard. One man was left on the platform. His shoulders were raised up awkwardly on his crutches, and he swung forward and back, his good leg barely sweeping the ground. His only leg, Angus saw on second glance. The soldier stretched his lips into a grin. “I get to go home now. Grand, ain’t it?” Angus forced his own smile and nodded. “I’m a logger,” the soldier said. Still grinning, he bobbed his head up and down.

  The logger’s cockeyed grin stayed with Angus as the train rocked on, as did the words “casualty clearing station.” Casualties . . . 57,000 casualties on the opening day at the Somme, 24,000 Canadian casualties in two months of fighting in and around Courcelette. And “clearing”—sorting men out, fixing them up for another go at becoming a casualty. In his search for Ebbin, Angus had seen enough in the London hospitals to understand that burns, blindness, amputation, loss of speech, and mechanical contraptions to fill in missing parts of the face were but the order of the day. Ebbin’s name would have been registered if he had been in hospital, Angus was told. Soldiers without tags rarely made it back to England, and if they did, their identities were almost always sorted out. But Angus had been taken to the nameless, and, upon seeing the drooling, slack-jawed faces, the vacant eyes and those for whom death would be a prayer answered, had thanked God Ebbin was not among them.

  As guns, like thunder, boomed in the distance, the Brits on the train broke out in a rendition of “Marching to Pretoria.” The Canadians took up the song and added a few bawdy verses. The Brits added a few of their own. Everyone got a good laugh out of it, even Angus.

  What was truly laughable, he thought as the song ended and another began, was the idea that he could have found Ebbin from a safe distance behind the lines like some kind of armchair hero. Now he was on his way to inflict wounds and likely become a casualty himself. Yet to lose Ebbin was to lose a link to himself—and to Hettie. Ebbin was her other half. She used to hang on his every word. Angus thought of her as Ebbin’s kid sister, for years, in fact, until she went away to school. And then came that summer she spent with Kitty—happy to wear Kitty’s handoffs to dances, to sit on a terrace wall and sip champagne from a fluted glass beneath the hanging lanterns, seemingly oblivious to the effect she had on BB and his crowd.

  On his increasingly frequent visits, Hettie and Angus had broken faith with Ebbin and discovered each other, tentatively at first and then with growing confidence that had culminated in a moment of passion behind the gazebo at the bottom of the Balfour law
ns. An endless moment, out of time, that had ended nonetheless, and was followed by a fumbling, fruitless search for two pearl buttons in the shadowed grass and tears over the torn lace and streaks of green up the back of Kitty’s best white linen. More confusion and regret followed. Ebbin, stunned and speechless at first, had found it in himself to forgive Angus, and not long afterwards, pronounced the marriage and baby to come a gift forever linking the three of them.

  That Simon Peter was a gift was never questioned in the thirteen years since. Easy, imaginative, unspoiled, he was their golden boy—their only child. The flame of passion that brought him into the world had failed to rekindle. Angus remained tenderly protective of Hettie, wanted her happy, hoped for but expected little in return, and tried not to think how he’d cut her chances short. She said she had no regrets, claimed he’d rescued her from Kitty Balfour’s silly crowd. But after the wedding, sitting beside her, her delicate gray-gloved hands lightly resting in her lap as the wagon jounced over the rutted road past the sheds and fishnets, the stacked lobster traps and sturdy wharfs of Snag Harbor, he doubted that.

  Removed, remote, almost ethereal, Hettie was a mystery, drawing him in, keeping him at bay. Yet she could on occasion, like a tourist innocent to local custom, ask a question that cut through long-held assumptions to the heart of the matter, weaving disparate strands into a whole with stunning originality and pragmatism. It was she who suggested that Angus sell his bird and shore pictures on cargo runs, and that he make them consistent enough to be associated with the name A. A. MacGrath; she who had encouraged Duncan to help set up an insurance fund in Lunenburg, beneficial in the long run to widows and fishing consortiums alike, she pointed out. No wonder she’d been taken into Balfour’s confidence. She’d shrugged it off as she did her looks.

  She once told Angus that her favorite word was “and” because it meant something always came before and something always followed, which, like the infinity of numbers, was reassuring. Her practical visions of the future, countered as they were by her dreamy detachment from the physical world, and her fairly constant detachment from him, were perhaps her way of ensuring a future was possible.

  But the past and future were nothing now. Only the grinding present. Next to him the lance corporal leaned over his knees, hands folded in prayer. The train was pulling to a stop. Finding Ebbin was a fast-fading hope and the only hope Angus had. What lay ahead was not the training for war, nor war’s ginned-up national pride. What lay ahead was the certainty of battle and his own uncertain place in it. Even as this thought shuddered through him, he held out hope that there was a larger purpose at work, that he was meant to be here, could do some good, and that Ebbin was just around the corner, in some trench, lying on a field, or hiding in a farmhouse, eating an apple and waiting for Angus to find him.

  As the train came to a full stop and Angus angled around the lance corporal into the aisle, what came to him was his last glimpse of Simon Peter at the railway station in Chester—shoulders back, legs apart, hands stiff at his sides. But what stayed with him as he stepped off onto the platform and wove through the crowd of soldiers pushing ever onward was that last little wave—a child’s wave. Stay alive, Angus told himself. Stay alive.

  TWO

  February 3rd, 1917

  Snag Harbor, Nova Scotia

  Simon Peter MacGrath, quilts piled over him, lay wide awake, unable to move, thinking he might be dead. He blinked into the darkness, willing objects back to their familiar shapes.

  The bureau persisted as a wharf; its drawers, ladder steps nailed to pilings. The floor, the mudscape of the harbor bottom. His boots, exposed rocks. In his dream, Snag Harbor and all of Mahone Bay had been sucked dry of water, every rock and belt of seaweed exposed. Boats lay forlorn on their sides, their crosstrees tipped into the muck; their keels, the fins of so many dead fish. The Lauralee hung at an angle from Mader’s wharf, her bow line a hangman’s noose. From the opposite shore, through the spruce marched a thin line of tunk-tunks, those miniature, menacing, empty-eyed deer that so often populated his dreams. Over the slick rocks they came, over the flattened seaweed, over the fish, pathetically flipping their tails, gills slowly opening and closing, until they stood, silently rocking in formation, as if waiting for a signal. At the mouth of the bay, the sea had sucked back to a towering wall, blocking the sun, and poised to roar back in.

  Simon slowly turned out of the bed and allowed his feet to flatten against the broad, painted floorboards until the cold penetrated the fog of his dream. There across the room was his cousin, Young Fred, a huddled shape, thick with sleep. On the desk under the window between their beds were Simon’s schoolbooks, just as he’d left them, the lamp, a red-and-white speckled rock from Fundy, and the heavy magnifying glass with its silver handle and intricate scroll work—a loan from Mr. Heist. There, too, the jaunty, puffed-up puffin in his striped scarf, painted by his father on a small square of canvas just for him.

  Simon draped the soft old top quilt around his shoulders and crept over to the desk. He hunched onto the chair, feet on the seat, knees pulled up to his chest and stared out the window. Through frosted panes, he made out the northeast field leading down to the finger of water and the little bridge over the causeway that separated the peninsula where they lived from the mainland. The white of the snow looked lit from within, so dark was the night. He could make out the spruce at the bottom of the hill and a hint of the harbor in the reach of blackness beyond. He had to take it on faith that the water was still in it. On the windowsill stood a lead soldier, a solitary sentry. Simon had taken it from the box weeks ago and had given the rest to Young Fred, who rarely played with them, preferring his “people,” pilfered pencils of various lengths, some chewed, some not. At thirteen, toy soldiers were beneath Simon. Still, he was glad to have saved this one. Its colonial costume was masked by the darkness, but the musket stood straight up. His father, this very minute, would be holding the line, rifle in hand—the Krauts, cowering in their trenches, across from his watchful eye. There were thousands of soldiers at the Front, but at this moment, Simon could only imagine one.

  An icy stillness held everything in suspension. When he was little and suffered night terrors, his mother would shush his screams with murmured incoherencies, her hair falling around him like a silk cocoon. Then she’d lie next to him, then fall asleep, oblivious to empty-eyed tunk-tunks and mastodons prowling and pawing in the dark corners of the room.

  But when his father was home, he’d stride in, swing Simon up, and pace the floorboards, holding him tight until the world came back to itself, no matter how long it took. Then, together, waving stiff arms a few inches above the covers, they’d clear the area of whirligigs, his father’s name for night terrors, and Simon would fall back to an easy sleep, his father’s hand resting on his back. Sometimes his father was in need of comfort, but rarely, and only in the art shed, which no one could enter without permission.

  Standing at the threshold once when he was small, Simon had been shocked to find his father, paintbrush clamped in his teeth, hunched over on the stool, head in his hands. Simon had summoned all his courage and whispered, “Whirligigs?” The silence in the room was so deep, his father’s acknowledgment so profound, that Simon had been unable to breathe until, without looking up, his father had thrust his arm out, and together they thrashed away at the whirligigs on the canvas, their mighty efforts securing the notion that terrors, even of monstrous proportion, could be gotten through—though perhaps only in shared company.

  But Simon had outgrown whirligigs, and now he was alone.

  On the day his father left for England, Simon had sat on the bed, watching him pack. Ida Corkum, his grandfather’s housekeeper since before Simon was born, had knit far too many socks, every pair in cream wool with a red and brown stripe at the top. His father plucked at them, rolling them into pairs and setting them back down. They were useless.

  “Too short, aren’t they,” Simon said.

  “Yep, but you can wear them
in your boots and tuck the long hose over when it’s freezing.”

  “But how do you keep your legs warm under a skirt?”

  “Kilt, Simon. You know better. Ah, I see—making light of the uniform, eh?”

  Simon smiled. “Yeah. But still, how do you?”

  “A kilt is twice as thick as trousers and your legs harden from exposure, so you don’t feel the cold any more than on your hands and face. Just ask old Athol McLaren—ever see him in trousers? Besides, I’ll be indoors most of the time.”

  “So . . . you’ll be in the army, but you won’t be fighting the Germans?” Simon had asked this many times, the answer never quite resolving his simultaneous disappointment and relief.

  His father rolled his eyes.

  “I know. Cartography.”

  “Exactly. I’ll be detached from my unit and assigned to cartography in London. But the maps I make will be used at the Front. So I’ll be supporting the war.”

  Simon then asked the question he hadn’t yet dared to ask. “Will Grandpa still be against the war with you in it?”

  His father was quick to respond. “Of that I have no doubt. He has a right to his views. Just remember, moral certainty is a luxury of the very young and the very old.”

  “Define moral certainty.” Simon had been trying this out instead of “What’s that mean?” But it struck a tone he hadn’t intended.

  “Alright,” his father said slowly. “Seeing the world in black and white. How’s that?” He raked his hand through his hair and tossed three pairs of socks into the duffel bag. “Look, I know this won’t be easy on you,” he said.

  He was right. There was no escaping his grandfather nor his anger over the war. He lived right up the hill, owned the land they lived on, the house they lived in—was in it as often as not, and knew everything that went on even when he wasn’t. Lately, when his grandfather chastised Simon for some minor infraction, he was Captain Bligh to Simon’s Fletcher Christian, secretly plotting a mutiny. The story of the H.M.S. Bounty was one he’d been told many times by his grandfather, who had no use for an officer defying his captain and setting him adrift, and by his father, who had a more sympathetic take on Mr. Christian. Simon sided with his father, but his grandfather made more of an event of the telling, filling it in with a good deal more drama and colorful detail.