The O'Briens (34 page)

Black silences, bouts of drinking, and hiding in Manhattan hotels: she had always been able see everything that was coarse in him, and something else too, that gleam he had always had.

And what did he see, looking at her? She was dark from the California sun, and much too thin. Unkempt — had she even brushed her hair? At that moment she probably looked a little crazy.

She shut her eyes and remembered Krishnamurti's voice, his fine hands, his coolness and dispassion.

Joe turned and started back to the road.

She waited a minute or two, then followed. She came upon him filling canteens at the little stream. Kneeling on the soft moss, she splashed her face with cool, clear water. Neither of them said anything.

Had he known his plan was working? Had it been a plan?

She helped him pick up the canteens and they went back out to the road where the boy was waiting by the station wagon. They climbed in and followed the logging road for another hour until they came to the North Thompson again, and the CNR right-of-way. They left the station wagon and started hiking in along the railway tracks.

The steel rails were shiny and glinting, more substantial than she remembered. The timber sleepers were ballasted in gravel that had been tamped solid and perfectly graded. The sun was hot and the scent of tar oozing from the sleepers hung in the still air. The boy was carrying an old military rifle slung on his shoulder and Joe was telling him that miles of track had been torn up during the war and shipped to France.

A whistle echoed down the valley, and a bald eagle burst off the top of a spruce tree and went winging up the river between the tall spruces and Douglas firs crowding both banks. After walking a couple of miles they reached the point where the new line split off from the old right-of-way and crossed the river on a modern steel bridge.

It was easy enough to follow the old right-of-way, though rails and sleepers had been torn up and the grade was overgrown. It had always been a harsh country, but things grew at brutal speed during the short summers, ferns and saplings sprouting with manic energy, the forest concealing all its scars after a month or two.

As the old right-of-way sloped on its long, gradual ascent towards Tête Jaune and the Continental Divide, the trees became smaller; larches and aspen replaced fir and spruce. The right-of-way followed a rock face that Joe's blasters had dynamited out of the mountainside. The sky was clouding. The air smelled of rock and ice.

As they came around a bend, she saw a scree slope rising from one side of the grade: a massive pile of boulders, rock chips, and gravel worn away from the shoulder of the mountain. The slope looked barren, and a cold wind swept down on them as Joe left the grade and began climbing, heading straight up. Was this really where they had left their daughter in the autumn of
1912
? If Joe's map told him it was so, it undoubtedly was; he never made a mistake reading a map or a chart. But there was nothing she could see that looked manmade. The bone-house had been swept away, probably by an avalanche.

Joe was going straight up the fall line, and it was difficult work catching up with him. There was no trail, no switchbacking. The incline was steep and the loose rock treacherous. Iseult and the boy started climbing, but Joe had outdistanced them. There was a glacier lacquered on the upper reaches of the mountain but she lost sight of it behind the ridge above them. The only plants were black and orange lichens. No human trace could have lasted long on such a scoured terrain.

A mountain squirrel — a pika — leapt on top of a boulder, chattered angrily at her, then dashed for cover. There was nothing of their little girl left in that place. Not a morsel for anyone to attach emotion to.

She could hear Joe grunting and puffing. Her lungs were clear — she'd never suffered asthma in these mountains. Her eyes were leaking tears, but that was on account of the sharp wind. Certainly not for their infant, who was a candle blown out, who was everywhere, but nowhere here.

Joe had halted and was standing against the steep incline, one knee bent for balance, leaning into the slope. She could hear the boy's boots clinking and scraping on the loose scree below her. Had Joe told him what they were doing, what they were looking for? Had Joe known himself? As she came up he was mopping his face with his handkerchief and wheezing from the climb.

“There's nothing here, is there, Iseult?”

Her faith in him, his faith in the power of himself — all of it had sustained considerable damage over the years. But he had brought them here to pay tribute to something besides the memory of their infant daughter, and she had to admire his courage. This place represented their marriage and its foundation days of boldness and suffering.

“We've made the trip,” she told him. “That's what counts.” And it was true, somehow.

“Don't know what I was thinking of,” he puffed. “Crazy idea.”

“No. This is a powerful place for us.”

He peered at her. They were a little wrecked, a little ruined, but they were still the same people after all, and would lay their hands on what they needed in order to go on.

“I'm glad we've come,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Bear,” the boy said sharply. “Across the river. Female and two cubs. Griz.”

She looked around. On the avalanche slope that rose on the other side of the old right-of-way a grizzly was balanced on hind legs, her head dipping from side to side.

“Getting our scent,” the boy had said, slipping the rifle off his shoulder.

“She won't trouble with us, will she?” She felt fear knotting in her throat. Her voice was weak. “Once she knows we're here, she'll stay away, won't she?”

“She might,” said the boy, working the rifle bolt.

“Soon see,” Joe said.

The bear began descending the avalanche slope, moving easily among grey smashed trees, her cubs gambolling ahead of her.

“Got a couple of stoppers in here,” the boy said, patting the breech of his rifle.

She and Joe and the boy stood very close, arms and elbows touching. Fear fluted through her body and she could smell gun oil and the spruce gum the boy was cracking between his teeth.

The she-bear halted again, rose on hind legs, and waved her nose in the air.

Don't cross the river
, Iseult pleaded silently.
Don't shoot. No orphans. Let us all walk to the rest of our lives from here
.

The grizzly dipped her snout and headed for the river. She began following the bank, her lithe, swaying walk almost as fluid as if she were swimming. She was heading in the opposite direction from where they had left the station wagon. The cubs splashed in and out of the water, trailing her.

“That's it, mama, keep going,” the boy said.

~

The Maine morning was a surprise: clear and warm, a breeze out of the southwest. The plan was not to trouble with their neglected house or overgrown garden, but just go sailing. The old Friendship sloop had been launched and rigged and was waiting for them on her mooring at Cape Porpoise. Iseult rowed them out in the dinghy. Joe wore old grey flannel trousers with a sail tie for a belt, a white shirt with a frayed collar, tennis shoes, and an old soft hat. She wore a skirt and an old college sweater of Mike's.

The sloop had been freshly painted. While Joe attached the jib, she unfurled, loosed sheets, and began raising the mainsail. They had owned the Friendship for twelve summers and there was nothing luxurious about her: she was more barebones fishing sloop than yacht.

The cruises she had taken with Joe over the years, up and down the Maine coast, were as intimate as any time she had ever spent with him. They anchored in quiet coves and swam naked in the mornings. She always brought along binoculars and spotted for cormorants, fish hawks, puffins, porpoises, seals, while Joe logged every sighting. They would take turns at the helm, jig for mackerel, buy haddock and lobsters off the boats. After dinner she always went forward to smoke a cigarette while he washed the dishes. After covering the hatches with mosquito netting, they played blackjack by lantern light in the galley. He slept in the forward V-berth and, because he snored, she usually plugged her ears with wax, then lay in one of the galley berths and read a novel by flashlight, and after a while she slept. She never had trouble sleeping aboard. The lilting ocean was a reservoir, absorbing all her fears.

Now he let go the mooring pendant and stood in the bow, backing the jib. She held the tiller. As the sloop began falling off the wind, Joe released the jib. She sheeted it, then quickly sheeted the main. They were sailing.

Once they had rounded Goat Island and cleared the lobster pots crowded at the narrow mouth of the harbour, Joe stretched out on the foredeck, hands clasped under his head, as he often did at the beginning of a sail. She had always felt confident handling the sloop herself. Maybe on a larger boat she wouldn't be strong enough. Maybe he wouldn't either — they were both getting older. But now, on a broad reach with a clean wind and nothing in the way, she would not waste these clear blue hours worrying what was going to become of them.

Displaced Person, Part I

Sicily

11ième août 43

Margo ma chère,

This letter is to be the wings of a dove and somehow fly between us but it's no bird, this letter. My pen is almost dry so is my mouth I can't speak. Haven't had a decent thought in days.

I'm trying to shake myself out like the sheets we stripped from the bed that morning in Maine. Shook them, left in a bundle for the charwoman to wash and wring and hang where the sun and the clean breeze would cure them.

You'll never get me clean, Margo, I'm afraid.

The sun here is the same sun as in Maine or Canada. I would not believe it, but know it's true.

There is a rifleman in Lt. Trudeau's platoon, Pvt. Blais, a farmer — no, a farmer's son. From Arthabaska.

I'll tell you about him later.

Planes overhead. Our planes always. The Germans possess none, apparently.

They say we own the sky.

The people from Brigade say that we have beaten the Germans only they do not know they are beaten, and therefore we, the infantry, will have to walk to Germany and remind them again every mile, every farm,

every village, on each street corner.

What clothes do you wear? Do your fingers touch this paper? Does the ink speak to you? How are we connected exactly, Margo? I feel more of a connection to certain bullets than to you.

I'm thinking of your wrists now.

I once knew my wife, down to her bones.

Do you have a sweet tan this summer? Comme une huronne?

Whatever sense I once had, whatever solidity I inherited from my Norman ancestors, has been beaten out of me, I think, in this growling ground. This month of things bursting.

Let me dispose of my adjectives, please. In your arms, please let me release them.

bloody,

silly,

fecal,

loud,

beaten,

red,

terror.

You see I have slipped into nouns, so let me deliver a few more. You don't have to unwrap these, Margo. Just sign for them, then you can put them away.

Child,

children,

machinegun,

antitank,

.303,

88,

tree-burst,

counterattack,

head wound,

prisoner,

neck wound,

aorta,

femoral artery

battle

And men of good cheer are singing now. In this our “rest area” the men of the Régiment 22ième are being fed hamburgers et fèves au lard puis un bouteil le chacun de Black Horse Ale. P'tit Canada dans une olivaie sicilienne.

Are your thighs still your thighs?

I'm sorry. I apologize.

O ma femme.

Is the little girl . . . no, I shall not think of her. No. I don't want her appearing in this place.

Your cunt.

I'm sorry. I apologize. Je t'en prie.

Me, I want you on your back.

I want your belly sweet and warm like sugar pie.

Anti-tank.

Howitzer.

To lose your head out here, c'est tellement facile. The 88s come cracking through olive groves at dawn, high velocity, very flat trajectory, dismembering trees. What kills is often not the shell itself but bits of riflemen, and splinters of rocks, trees. The thing comes at you like a girl you want, like a cunt, so sweet and so indirect. Soldiers in rifle companies are killed by pieces of other soldiers in rifle companies. Arms, boots, knees. I tell my platoon leaders, it's another reason to keep from bunching up which is what the boys will always do at first, like cattle, no matter their training, our battle drill.

Think of your pals, I tell them, as shrapnel, dangerous. Watch out for those flying steel helmets. A splinter of leg bone can do astonishing damage.

My Sergeant Major, on the road approaching Catania.

There.

I want you to cover me.

Three young German boys in a staff car on a road through the mountains. As little Lieutenant Duclos reported, he fully intended to offer them a chance of surrender. Only Corporal Dextraxe offered them a lively talk from his tommy gun instead. And the young lieutenant, the jesuitical prig straight out of Brébeuf, was quite cool delivering his report. He'll lose no sleep over dead Boches. It was the corporal, one of our best, a rugged forester from Megantic, who was trembling and cursing.

Their Company Commander, this is who I am. I am not your husband anymore, Margo. I don't belong to anyone but the tree bursts and right now the greasy air floating from the hamburger tent where survivors gorge.

Replacements are due up tomorrow: for my company, seventeen fresh men.

Everyone is tired.

The riflemen assure me there are beautiful, famished girls alive in the cellars of Messina who will do it with vigor for a piece of cheese. And afterwards offer you a bottle of marsala for one lousy Sweet Caps cigarette.

That Blais, the rifleman I mentioned. The imbecile got his girl pregnant last year just before going overseas. Her old man put her off to the Grey Nuns in Montreal where she had the child and was forced to give it up and is now a slavey, scrubbing floors for the Sisters, and very miserable. Her letter, which he showed me, is pathetic — do they send girls in the country to school? This one hardly makes herself understood. In any case. Will you go to the convent and see the Mother Superior to determine what can be done, you may use the name of my uncle, the bishop. The girl is Lucie something or other, from Tingwick, fifteen or sixteen of age. Blais is a good chap and insists they will marry if he survives. Perhaps you can find her a maid's position. With the wages they're paying at the factories these days I expect in Westmount you are short of slaves.

Oh my dear. I am shook up and no one but you knows it.

Forgive. I give you my blood, my heart, my kisses for our girl.

Jean