Good Hope Road: A Novel (47 page)

‘You let her go now,’ Ellie had counselled Jim. ‘Madeleine needs to get out of these hills every now and again. She’s a city girl after all.’

‘Flatlander, you mean.’

‘How would you feel if you had to stay all cooped up in one of those townhouses there in Boston?’ she demanded, hands on her hips. She nodded with satisfaction at the look of horror that crossed Jim’s face at the prospect. ‘I thought so. Well, it might be the same with her, just the other way around.’

He still hated it when she left, but slowly adopted a grudging acceptance.

As for the Major, little Jimmy Henry was a miracle, wholly unexpected and entirely undeserved, but one that he marvelled over every single day. ‘He’s the spitting image of Jim at that age,’ Ellie kept saying. Try as he might though, the Major could not remember Jim as an infant. Those memories were all tangled up in the war years that had come so soon after. Only hints remained of the time that had elapsed before.

When the Major would limp into the nursery in the morning only to find little Jimmy already up, standing impatiently in his crib, it sometimes brought back a faint imprint of memory. It was the same crib of burled walnut, worn smooth over the decades and passed down from generation to generation, that Jim had slept in. As he stood over the crib, chuckling at Jimmy tugging at the bars, the Major would be gripped by a sense of déjà vu. A shadowy imprint in his mind of his younger self, standing exactly here, with Jim, not Jimmy, gurgling in pleasure as his father reached for him.

The specifics, however, this sweet-scented mix of milk and talc, the innocent trust of a child curled asleep on his lap – these the Major did not recall at all. The early years of Jim’s childhood tacked instead on to the edges of other memories: that winter of 1917–18, for instance, when the temperatures in Raydon dropped to thirty below and did not rise above zero for forty consecutive days.

He remembered with crystal clarity the bite of those mornings that he was home on furlough, frost piling in the corners of the window panes like sawdust. Stepping outside on those sleepless nights, with icicles glittering all along the eaves, the cold a balm against the rawness of his leg. A whoosh of wings against the moon – a migrant great horned owl, one of so many that winter, fleeing the great white north. The gleaming gimlet eyes, the tiger stripes, the hoot of its six-tone songs.

Surely he was imagining the child by his side?

1918. The sharp memory of coming home for good and the sight of the thinned-out orchard. Apple orchards up and down New England had been decimated by the cold that year but these old, hardy breeds, the McIntoshes and Malindas had held stubbornly on. Even the graft that had been planted when Jim was born, even that tenderling doggedly stood. In these battered survivors, the faint mirroring of his story.

The Major had poured himself into the orchard in the months that followed. He could rattle off, even now, the names of the grafts he’d initiated then, could recall the precise shape and texture of each of their leaves. And like a hint of colour just beyond the edges of a daguerreotype, a blurred sense of his young son, toiling faithfully alongside.

It filled the Major with sadness, these shell holes in his memory. The stretches of darkness, the unaccounted days mired in loss. The faces from the past that he sometimes saw, phantom images in the black mirror, in the crowd beside a boxing ring.

It was only when he was with his grandson that he felt somewhat restored, those guileless, blame-free eyes easing his inner turmoil. Bit by bit as little Jimmy grew, the Major began to take an interest in the world about him once more. The Bonus Bill was submitted to Congress for the sixth time in January 1935, and he began to pore over the newspapers as before, tracking reports of its passage. That spring, when Major General Smedley Butler published a book on veterans and their plight, the Major promptly put in an order.

He was sitting lost in the book when little Jimmy toddled over. The Major hoisted him on to his lap. The child pointed at the cover. ‘War is a Racket’ the Major read aloud. Jimmy jiggled his bottom up and down, bouncing on his grandfather’s lap in encouragement. The Major obligingly began to read aloud:

‘. . . Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of thirty dollars a month.’

The Major sighed and tried to put the book aside, but Jimmy bounced up and down again until he continued.

‘Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a labourer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependants, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance – something the employer pays for in an enlightened state – and that cost him six dollars a month. He had less than nine dollars a month left.

‘Then, the most crowning insolence of all – he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.

‘Enough,’ the Major said abruptly. ‘No, Jimmy,’ he said firmly, when the child pouted, ‘that is quite enough reading for now. Look!’ He pointed at a barn swallow dipping and wheeling outside. Jimmy stared in wide-eyed fascination, mouth agape, clutching on to his grandfather’s thumb. The Major hugged his little body closer and, shutting the book, began pointing out yet again all the varieties of apple trees in the orchard, teaching his grandson each of their names.

There was something so endearing about the two of them sitting companionably there that when Jim came in from the barn, he paused in the doorway to watch. Madeleine came sleepily downstairs, pushing the hair back from her face. He glanced coolly at her, still angered by their recent argument.

She’d returned from yet another trip to Boston last evening and he’d been at the station a good half an hour early to get her, just from missing her so. When she’d stepped from the train car, it had given him a start, the new shortness of her hair. She’d laughed, linking her arms about his neck. ‘Do you like it?’

He did, actually, once he got over the surprise of it. What got him irritated was the faint tang on her breath. ‘Have you been drinking?’

She’d risen up on her toes and kissed his cheek. ‘You might say that. An impromptu get-together last evening, and,’ she gestured at her purse, ‘a small going-away gift inside, to while away the hours on the train.’

He knew without asking that the odious Freddie had been involved. ‘Let’s go,’ he said curtly.

‘Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, Jim Stonebridge, it was only a glass or two.’ She kissed him again. ‘I missed you, you know.’

He’d picked up her bag without comment, striding towards the truck.

‘I missed you too,’ she muttered for him, under her breath.

They’d slept on the far sides of the bed. He’d been the first to wake this morning. He looked at her, watching the light fall on her skin, the shorter hair highlighting her cheekbones, the etched jut of her jaw. He put a finger to one creamy arm, tracing the pattern of light and shadow; when she stirred, however, he’d taken his hand away and walked into the bathroom without a word.

Madeleine smiled now as she watched the Major and Jimmy, taken again by how much they were alike. She leaned gently against Jim. ‘I did miss you.’ He glanced at her, looked away.

‘Well, that makes one of us,’ he said. She paid no mind, resting her head against his arm and after a moment’s hesitation he raised it stiffly about her waist. She leaned closer, and he drew her in, holding her close. She smiled, again, contentedly.

As they stood there watching little Jimmy chortle in his grandfather’s lap, it gradually dawned on Madeleine that for the first time that she could remember, the Major had moved his armchair from its customary position before the fireplace. It was angled in such a way now that sitting in it, one still had a clear view of the black mirror, but one could also, as the Major was now, look directly out on to a large section of the apple orchard. The verdant, buzzing vista of flower and fruit, the brilliant yellows and reds of finches calling from the trees, the colours vivid, vibrantly alive.

hat summer, they had a surprise visitor. On a sun-soaked July afternoon filled with the chirp of song-sparrows, Connor walked up the drive.

‘I’m headed to Washington,’ he explained, grinning as the Major slapped him on the back and shook his hand. ‘Thought I’d take a bit of a detour and look you folks up.’

‘You staying a while, I hope?’ Jim asked.

‘Just the night, if you’ll have me.’ He jerked a thumb at the barn. ‘In this heat, a pile of hay to sleep on will do me just fine. Well, that and maybe a beer.’

‘I think we can do better than that,’ the Major said wryly. ‘Come on inside and let’s get you that beer for starters.’

Madeleine came to see what the hullabaloo was about. ‘I’ll be . . .!’ Connor exclaimed, as he removed his knapsack from his shoulders. ‘Look who we have here. Mrs Stonebridge then, I take it?’

‘That’s right,’ she said, laughing. She kissed his cheek. ‘And there’s someone in the nursery who you ought to meet as well.’

He’d been in the CCC veteran camp up in Vermont for a while, he told them, building dams over the Winooski.

‘I went up there,’ Jim interjected, and the Major looked at him, surprised. ‘I drove up to see if you or any of the others had signed up.’

‘Got your message,’ Connor admitted. ‘Took me a while, I know, to get here, but I’ve been moving around some.’ He hesitated. ‘After Anacostia . . .’ A hummingbird flapped in the honeysuckle vine along the porch. He followed the blue flurry of its wings. ‘Not been in touch with anyone in a while,’ he said by way of explanation. He squared his shoulders, mustering up the cheerful, stump-toothed grin that Jim remembered so well. ‘Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, and let’s drink to that,’ the Major said.

The three men sat late into the night, long after Madeleine retired upstairs. Connor did most of the talking, spinning yarns and repeating old, half-forgotten jokes as he worked his way through hard cider and whisky, his laughter ringing through the pall of cigarette smoke.

He’d gone back to see his wife, he said, to see if they couldn’t pick up where they’d left off. It had worked for a few months, but all the old stuff started up again and one day, he’d just upped and left. ‘Ain’t been back since, and she ain’t been looking for me either, I don’t think,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘The dynamite,’ he confided at one point, talking about the CCC camp in Vermont. ‘The explosions did me in.’ He lit a fresh cigarette. ‘We cut granite up and down the Winooski, in all sorts of weather. Blisters on our hands every day, the size of marbles. Still, I was fine with it, even in the . . . bitch of a winter you folks have around these parts. All winter long we worked, the ground like iron and the freeze rising from the water until our balls just about fallen off. They’d drive us to the river in open trucks with the wind coming in from everywhere. Kids would throw snowballs at us as we passed through the towns, through Waterbury and East Barre.’