Good Hope Road: A Novel (60 page)

Raydon • December 1941

he fire in the grate cast an ochre light over the floorboards, its warmth coaxing a deeper perfume from the Christmas tree that had already been set up in the corner. The fire wasn’t really needed, the afternoon being unseasonably warm. Not that anyone was complaining, Jim thought wryly, not about near seventy-degree highs a week into December. Half of Raydon was lingering about on Main Street today, Ellie had said, after attending Sunday Mass. Even old Asaph and Jeremiah, taking advantage of the balmy temperatures to sun themselves – on opposite ends – of the bench beside the church.

He nudged a stray pine needle with his foot, paying only partial attention to the game. The Dodgers had just scored in the second quarter, but with eight wins this season, the Giants already had the championship under their belt. He stretched out his legs, listening with half an ear as Ellie and Obadaiah bantered in the kitchen over the elaborate meal he’d fixed for them this afternoon.

He’d offered to cook Thanksgiving dinner, but Ellie was having none of that. ‘Sunday supper, then?’ Obadaiah had suggested, undaunted.

‘A feast,’ he’d promised, as Ellie looked dubiously at him from over the top of her glasses. ‘A grand banquet, with the best French cooking you folks ever had.’

It was a feast alright. Deeply flavoured chicken, cooked in onions, mustard and hard cider. A generous heaping of the mushrooms that Ellie had canned in the fall, sautéed golden-brown in butter; a burnished potato gratin rich with fresh cream and studded with roasted garlic and tiny cubes of ham.

‘Delicious!’ Madeleine exclaimed, spearing another bite.

‘Sure is,’ Jim agreed, glancing indulgently at her. Unlike her previous time, when she was carrying Jimmy, Madeleine’s appetite was particularly robust with this pregnancy. She took another spoonful of the stew, chewing with obvious pleasure.

‘
Le Cordon Bleu
good,’ she praised.

Obadaiah grinned. ‘You gotta try it with them French chickens,’ he said. ‘
Poulet de Bresse
– they just melt in your mouth.’ He turned to Jimmy. ‘Them birds, they got blue feet, you know.’

‘Blue?’ Jimmy echoed in surprise.

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear,’ Madeleine mildly admonished.

‘That’s right, blue. Red combs, and feathers white as snow.’

Jimmy digested this information, eyes wide as he pictured these wonderful, tricoloured birds. ‘Fourth of July chickens!’ he exclaimed.

‘Victory chickens,’ Obadaiah agreed, chuckling. ‘James—’ he paused, a shadow crossing his face. He looked down at his plate. ‘Your grandpa tell me ’bout them,’ he said simply.

‘Well, it’s very good,’ Ellie said. ‘And you better be teaching me how to make it too,’ she threatened, waving her fork at him.

‘So these chickens,’ Jim asked interested. ‘Do they sell well? We’ve got space here on the orchard. Maybe one day—’

In many ways, Jim thought, it felt as if Obadaiah had been here for ever. Jim would remember for the rest of his life, in sharp, angular detail, the morning when he’d first walked into their lives. After the initial shock of his arrival, his presence had quickly come to feel entirely natural, his staying on an organic progression of events that felt just right.

Ellie and he were like a pair of old wives, bickering back and forth, but there was no denying the deep and genuine fondness that had developed between the two. Like the Major had before him, Obadaiah took special joy in Jimmy, spending hours with the boy as he told him stories about his grandpa from a seemingly inexhaustible supply, talking to him about boxing and Jack Johnson, teaching him to play the harmonica and sing the old marching songs of the Legion.

Jim in turn took comfort in the presence of the older man. They worked companionably in the orchard, a natural rhythm to their labour all through the picking season, pausing to watch a glowing sunset as they brought in the rowen hay. There was still a bleakness he sensed at times in Obadaiah, a deep and unfathomable sadness in his eyes. Sometimes he wouldn’t sleep, sitting out all night on the porch and playing his harmonica; it would wake Jim sometimes and he’d lie in bed listening to the soft, haunting notes. In the morning, Obadaiah would be quieter than usual, but they never alluded to it, and gradually the mood would begin to lift from him, and he’d start to hum again as they worked.

Laughter drifted in from the kitchen. No doubt Obadaiah was staying close to the woodstove, Jim thought, amused. He always seemed to be cold, him and Madeleine both. The fire this sunny afternoon had been lit at her behest, with Obadaiah enthusiastically championing the notion.

As if on cue, a log shifted in the fireplace in a shower of sparks. Still plenty of wood on there . . . He glanced at the clock on top of the mantelpiece. There were still a few minutes to go before halftime. Continuing, idly, to follow the game, he swivelled the armchair slightly, the better to take in his wife. Madeleine had pulled her chair as close as possible to the fireplace, absorbed in cutting out paper angels for Jimmy’s Christmas play at school.

He was struck again by how luminous she was, as if lit from within.

‘It’s going to be another boy,’ Ellie had pronounced, taking in her expectant glow.

A deep contentment stole over Jim. Registering every detail, the burnished sweep of hair, the delicacy of her wrists. She looked up, sensing his gaze on her, and smiled.

‘We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press.’

The reporter’s voice crackled over the radio, halting the commentary of the game mid-sentence.

‘The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.’

im rowed in the middle of the river, a ripple at the prow as it sliced through the steel-grey waters of the dawn. He went at an even pace, neither fast nor slow, an assured rhythm to the oars so that they made barely a sound. The unseasonable warmth that had heralded December had rapidly given way as winter staked her claim, the river still free-flowing, but with ghost tracings of frost that gleamed along the banks. A mist hung over the water, damp and chill, but Jim rowed steadily all the same, from memory, familiar with every bend and riffle and deep, bottomless pool. Nothing else seemed to move, the trout that still remained holding to the bottom of the seams as the boat slid smoothly overhead. The whole world seemed to be silent and waiting, an almost ethereal calm over the woods after the rollercoaster of the past weeks.

They’d sat in shock around the radio, as most of the country had, turning the knob from station to station as news continued to filter through the airwaves.

‘It’s a hoax,’ Ellie said appalled. Her voice trembled. ‘Surely it’s just a hoax?’

Jim remembered looking up at the black mirror, as the newsreaders continued urgently to report. The pale cast of their reflections, as if in a tableau, the leached colours of the warm afternoon, of bare bough and pallid sky, as if it were all already slipping from him, turning into a dream. The grim surety: this was no hoax. Pearl Harbour had happened, and the world as they’d known it had just changed for ever.

The newspapers came that evening, an emergency print run confirming what he’d known in his bones. Details began to emerge of the carnage. Thousands dead and wounded, multiple ships destroyed in a deadly, premeditated blitz. Everywhere, across the length and breadth of the nation, the same sense of shock, and a mounting anger. America had been attacked.

The Great Debate ended, as if a switch had been pulled, isolationist and interventionist banding together in the face of their country’s need.

‘Where
is
Pearl Harbour?’ old Asaph asked bewildered, as news first broke.

‘Someplace off Boston,’ Jeremiah hazarded a guess. He paused, unsure. ‘America,’ he qualified, with angry certainty.

Old Asaph looked sombrely at his friend. ‘This means war.’

Jeremiah beat his cane on the ground. ‘We’ll knock them senseless,’ he vowed.

‘We have been stepping closer to war for many months,’ Charles Lindbergh, the most visible face of the isolationist movement said in a statement. ‘Now we must meet it as united Americans, regardless of our attitude in the past.’

Ellie’s boy, Chris, had practically raced out the door, he and so many like him, called up immediately for active service. ‘They need me, Ma,’ he said, and she nodded, kissing him on the forehead and failing miserably in her attempt not to cry.

Madeleine saw the fixedness in Jim’s expression. ‘You have a deferral from the draft,’ she reminded him tremulously. Her hands went instinctively to her stomach, cradling their unborn child. ‘You’re exempt,’ she said again.

Jim looked at her, blue eyes clouded, but said nothing in reply.

As staunchly as he’d opposed meddling in a war they did not belong in, now that it had been brought home to them, Jim knew there was only one thing to do. To stand up and fight, for his family, for this country, for freedom, for all that he believed in. He’d known with perfect clarity, as soon as the news had broken, just what his father would have done, and what he now needed to do.

Obadaiah had tried to talk him out of it. ‘Ain’t no shame in stayin’ outta it,’ he said. ‘Maybe the bravest thing a man can do is turn his back on the madness.’

‘Would you?’ Jim asked simply. ‘After this?’

Obadaiah sighed, slowly fishing about in his pocket to draw out a small box. He handed it to Jim; in it, the rabbit foot gris-gris.

Jim had silently accepted the gift, trying not to show how touched he was. He’d kept it on him ever since; it was tucked into the pocket of his flannel shirt now as he rowed. A band of light appeared to the east. A faint flush, of rose and orange, an opalescence to the mist as it faltered and started to fray. He pulled further along the river as the sunrise grew stronger, crowning granite and sugarbush alike, painting colour into the water that dripped from the ends of the oars. Young Jimmy yawned, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

‘Remember this,’ Jim wanted to say to his son. ‘Hold on to this morning, you hear? You and me together, on this free-flowing water, this river that will run for ever. No matter what happens, no matter what the future holds, know how deeply I love you. No matter how things may change, no matter how different they might become, know that I will always love you, and we will always be bound by blood.’ He caught Jimmy’s eye, and smiled.

He stopped rowing at last and pulled in the oars, the current in this part of the river was too feeble to do much more than lap gently at the boat. ‘I saw your mother for the first time here, you know,’ he said. ‘I was fishing, and she,’ he pointed upwards, ‘she was flying in an aeroplane. She had a bunch of balloons in her hand, dark-red balloons, streaming from both sides of the plane.’

The boy stared at the sky, imagining the sight. ‘Like apples!’

Jim chuckled. ‘Apples,’ he agreed. He looked at his son, a great tenderness in his eyes. He wanted to hold on to every last detail – the way his hair flopped over his forehead, the rounded innocence of his face, the scabbed and banged-up knees – imprinting in his mind every last inch and ounce of his boy.