Galore (42 page)

When the Germans came through the bush they were walking three or four abreast, whispering to one another. He lay with his face in the dirt as they moved past him toward the steady suck and moan of the injured soldier and the sickening sound of it went still suddenly. A voice called the group to another body a few yards further on. He could pick just enough from the talk to know they were stripping the corpses of their boots, turning out the pockets for coins and tobacco and ammunition, stealing rings and necklaces and keepsakes. He’d crawled away from his weapon in the panic to hide himself and he was too terrified now to move, the tramp of the trophy hunters circling closer in the woods. They would use the knife on him as well, he knew, and he’d likely never be found there in the bush. A mortal darkness gathering at his heart’s heart as that anonymous death sidled toward him—dread and resignation and a searing, wistful longing that felt like homesickness, all of it rising in him like the stench of the fallen world.

A hand gripped his shoulder to turn him on his back and the German soldier pulled away in disgust, cursing under his breath. —Dead a long time this one, he told the others. He covered his nose and mouth with a square of cloth and kept his head turned away, rooting blindly at the pockets, gagging through the muffle of his handkerchief. No one else in the group would come near.

He stared blankly at the green canopy of trees as the German pushed a hand through the collar of his jacket. The dog tags yanked away and examined briefly before being tossed into the shadows. —Leave him, another voice said. —We should get back.

He spent the full of the night alone there, paralyzed and bored and terrified. He tried to choke back a suspicion the German soldier was right, that he was dead where he lay in the bushes. That death wasn’t sudden and complete but took a man out of the world piecemeal, a little at a time. It was a relief to hear the artillery start up just before dawn, to feel it shake through him and ring his head like a bell. By first light hundreds of soldiers were crossing the field toward the abandoned farmhouse and he dragged himself into the open, waving at the legs as they passed. Hours still before stretcher-bearers carted him the half-mile behind the lines to the aid post.

—This one’s lost a hell of a lot of blood, the medic said.

—He doesn’t appear to be bleeding, Sergeant.

—Well what’s wrong with him?

—Couldn’t get a word out of him. Some stink coming off the man though.

The smell suggested an infected wound and they stripped him out of his clothes but there was nothing there to be found. The medic looked down at him again. —Even his eyelashes are white, he said. —He wasn’t wearing his tags?

—No sign of them. He’s a Newfoundlander, that’s all we know.

—What’s your name, Private?

He opened his mouth to answer and then shook his head helplessly.

—Psych case probably, the medic said. —We’ll have to transport him back to Casualty. He leaned over the man on the stretcher. —Don’t worry, he said, we’ll fix you up.

——

Two days later he was moved to a base hospital in Rouen. He was in a ward with twenty-three other soldiers until their complaints about the stench forced the orderlies to set up a tent where he could be kept on his own. He was bathed twice a day in a concoction of carbolic and lye but it did nothing to lessen the smell.

A girl from Belleoram in Fortune Bay was nursing with the Voluntary Aid Detachment and she made a special project of him when she learned he was a Newfoundlander. Morning and evening she came to the tent in a surgical mask to massage his dead legs and talk about home. Guild socials and hooking mats and berry picking on the barrens and painting her bedroom floor a shade of green she’d seen on Johnny Lee’s boat. He followed her with his eyes and she could see he didn’t know what she was talking about. —You don’t remember home, do you.

He shook his head.

—But you miss it.

And after he’d considered this a moment he nodded.

The weather was already bitter before the German surrender in November but he never complained or showed any discomfort in his unheated tent. At the end of the month the nurse brought him a sheet of paper and a lead pencil. —Tell me something you’d like for Christmas, I’ll see if I can’t find it in Rouen.

He stared at the implements as if he’d never laid eyes on such things in his life.

—Do you not have your letters? she asked. She was embarrassed for him and made a move to retrieve the materials but he shook his head. He held the pencil over the page a moment before starting in.
Death and life are in the power of the tongue
, he wrote,
and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof
.

She took the paper when he was done and held it toward the light through the tent flap, trying to make it out. —Whoever taught you to write like this? she said, scanning back and forth the page. —I can’t pick out the half of it. You wants some fruit, is that what you’re saying?

He stared at her blankly.

—Fruit? she said again and he nodded, though there was no conviction in his face.

After Christmas he was shipped across the Channel to a convalescent hospital in England where doctors stuck pins into his legs and feet, examined his throat and ears, performed a series of tests to assess his mental faculties. They held conferences at his bedside, speaking about him as if he were deaf. His muteness and the paralysis were clearly the result of shell shock and they prescribed fresh air and quiet along with electrical massage to slow the muscle atrophy while he recovered his senses. But as time passed with no improvement they began to suspect the debilitation might be permanent. And the smell of the man was a riddle they had no answers for.

In the middle of March a woman stood at the foot of his bed in a surgical mask. —Do you remember me? she asked. She was waiting in London while her repatriation arrangements were made, she said, and was looking up boys from home still recuperating. —Just to keep myself occupied, she said. She sat in a chair by the window. She was booked to leave on a boat sailing for Newfoundland on the thirtieth, she told him. Three years she’d worked in France and she couldn’t wait for a home meal.

A doctor flashed by the door and backed up the hall to look in. —You know this man?

The young nurse stood up. —I was at the field hospital in Rouen. Does he still not remember who he is?

—Hopeless case, I’m afraid. Have you seen any of that crazy writing he does?

—A little, she said uncertainly, turning to look at the patient.

—We’re trying to figure out how to send him home.

The girl from Belleoram imagined it must be a ring of Dante’s Hell to remember not the barest scrap of the place you came from. As if all you loved, the world itself, had forgotten you existed. She turned back to the doctor. —You know I’m a nurse, she said.

He was booked on the steamer departing at the end of the month. The days were frigid and inclement but the girl wheeled him around the deck morning and afternoon. —Lots of fresh air for you, she said. —Doctor’s orders. He seemed impervious to the cold and wet, preferring to sit outside in the foulest weather, and he spent most of April month near the stern wearing a hospital johnny under an overcoat. She sat with him as long as she could stand the chill, talking about her family and her trip to New York on the way overseas and a man at home with such a sore throat the wine ran out his nose when he took Holy Communion. Something in it might stick, she thought, some meaningless detail could tip him into his life. She threw random questions at him, as if she might trick him into remembering himself. Do you have brothers or sisters? Do you know the words to “Whispering Hope”? Have you ever been to Port Union? Are you Catholic or Protestant?

The day before they were scheduled to reach St. John’s she said, Is there a girl waiting for you at home? He turned to her with a tortured look that she misread completely. —You remember her? she said. —You know her name?

But he only stared, as if pleading with her to stop.

He had no idea if there was a girl waiting at home and she could almost feel that absence yawing beneath him, the shadows flickering across blank space, nameless and unidentifiable. —I’ll tell you what I think, she said. —Something will come to you. You’ll see a face or a boat or hear someone’s voice and that one thing will bring it all back to you.

He stared blankly out at the water and she patted his hand. —I’m freezing, she said. She stood up and wrapped her arms tight about herself. —Are you all right here awhile?

He nodded.

—Tomorrow’s the Feast of St. Mark, she said. —Mean anything to you?

He smiled at her useless little ploy, shaking his white head. His life like something important he’d meant to tell someone and he couldn’t recall now what he intended to say or to whom. He watched her skitter along the deck toward steerage and disappear inside, relieved to be left to himself. The nurse’s endless questions served only to add depth and definition to what it was he lacked. Alone he could turn his back on the absence, look at the world as if there was nothing to it but surface, the endless present moment. A trick of shadow and light.

There wasn’t another soul out in the drizzle and bitter wind when he spotted the whale steaming clear of the ship’s wake, so close he could see the markings under its flukes, the white of them glowing a pale apple-green through seawater. The massive fan of the tail tipped high and disappeared as the whale sounded and he leaned forward in his wheelchair, expectant, as if he’d been told the humpback would breach, rising nose first and almost clear of the water, kicking up a wreath of foam as it fell back into the sea. The whale came full into the open air a second time and a third, it almost seemed to be calling his attention. And something in that detail turned like a key in a lock, a story spiraling out of the ocean’s endless green and black to claim him.

The face of a girl waiting at home flashed below the surface and he pushed himself onto the deck, dragging his dead legs to the rail. He shed his clothes as he went, returning to himself naked as a fish. Even as he fell he pictured her watching from across the room the next time he opened his eyes to the light.

THANKS

Holly Ann.

Martha Kanya-Forstner.

Anne et al. at the McDermid Agency.

Nit-pickers: Holly Hogan, Stan Dragland, Martha Magor, Janice McAlpine, Larry Matthews, Lynn Moore, Alison Pick, Degan Davis, Mary Lewis, Shawn Oakey, God love the works of you.

There were dozens of community histories, journals and memoirs, academic studies, websites, archival documents, collections of songs, tales and folklore behind the geography, incidents and characters in
Galore
. MKF won’t let me list them all, but here are some of the books I leaned on while writing the novel:
Family Names of the Island of Newfoundland
, E.R. Searey;
A History of Corpus Christi Parish, Northern Bay
, Edward Chafe;
Vignettes of a Small Town
, Robert C. Parsons;
A Heritage Guide to Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s
, Robin McGrath;
Prime Berth: An Account of Bonavista’s Early Years
, Bruce Whiffen;
The Irish in Newfoundland, 1600–1900
, Mike McCarthy;
Fables, Fairies and Folklore of Newfoundland
, Alice Lannon and Mike McCarthy;
Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells
, Barbara Rieti;
Hope and Deception in Conception Bay: Merchant–Settler Relations in Newfoundland, 1785–1855
, Sean T. Caddigan;
A History of Health Care in Newfoundland and Labrador
, Stephen M. Nolan;
The Labrador Memoir of Dr. Harry Paddon
, Ronald Rompkey (ed.);
Doctor Olds of Twillingate: Portrait of an American Surgeon in Newfoundland
, Gary L. Saunders;
To Be My Father’s Daughter
, Carmelita McGrath, Sharon Halfyard, Marion Cheeks;
Theatre of Fish: Travels through Newfoundland and Labrador
, John Gimlette;
Your Daughter Fanny: The War Letters of Frances Cluett, VAD
, Bill Rompkey and Bert Riggs (eds.).

Parts of
Galore
were written during a stint as Writer in Residence at Memorial University in St. John’s. Thanks to everyone in the English Department—in particular Danine Farquharson and Jennifer Lokash—for looking after me. Thanks as well to the staff of the Provincial Archives and Mark Ferguson of the Provincial Museum at the Rooms, and to Larry Dohey at the Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in St. John’s.