The Land God Gave to Cain (2 page)

I turned left at the top of the stairs and there was the door with STATION G2STO stencilled on it. It was so familiar that, as I pushed it open, I couldn't believe that I wouldn't find him seated there in front of the radio. But the wheelchair was empty, swivelled back against the wall, and the desk where he always sat was unnaturally tidy, the usual litter of notebooks, magazines and newspapers all cleared away and stacked neatly on top of the transmitter. I searched quickly through them, but there was no message, nothing.

I had been so certain I should find a message, or at least some indication of what had happened, that I stood at a loss for a moment, looking round the small den that had been his world for so long. It was all very familiar, and yet it had a strangeness because he was no longer there to give it point. Only that had changed. All the rest remained—the school pictures, the caps, the wartime photographs, and the bits and pieces of planes with the scribbled signatures of the air crews who had been his companions. And over by the door hung the same faded picture of my grandmother, Alexandra Ferguson, her strong face unsmiling and yellowed above the tight-buttoned bodice.

I stared at it, wondering whether she would have known the answer. I had often seen him glance at the picture—or was it at the things that hung below it, the rusted pistol, the sextant, the broken paddle and the torn canvas case with the moth-eaten fur cap hanging over it? Alexandra Ferguson was his mother. She had brought him up, and somehow I'd always known those relics beneath the photograph belonged to the north of Canada, though I couldn't remember anybody ever telling me so.

I dug back in my memory to the vague impression of a grey, bleak house somewhere in the north of Scotland, and a terrifying old woman who had come to me in the night. The photograph didn't recall her to my mind, for all I remembered was a disembodied face hanging over me in the flickering flame of the night light, a cold, bitter, desiccated face, and then my mother had come in and they had shouted at each other until I had screamed with fear. We had left next morning and as though by common consent neither my mother nor my father had ever mentioned her to me again.

I turned back to the room, the memory of that scene still vivid. And then I was looking at the radio receiver and the morse key with the pencil lying beside it, and the memory faded. These were the things that now dominated all the bits and pieces of his life. Together they represented all that had been left to him, and somehow I felt that, as his son, I should have enough understanding of him to wring from them the thing that had driven him to such a superhuman effort.

I think it was the pencil that made me realise something was missing. There should have been a log book. He always kept a radio log. Not a proper one, of course; just a cheap exercise book in which he jotted things down—station frequencies and their times of broadcasting, scraps of weather forecasts or ships' talk or anything from Canada, all mixed up with little drawings and anything else that came to his mind.

I found several of these exercise books in the drawer of the table, but they didn't include the current one. The latest entry in these books was for September 15, a page of doodling in which it was almost impossible to decipher anything coherent at all. Drawings of lions seemed to predominate, and in one place he had written:
C2—C2—C2
…
where the hell is that?
The scrawled line of a song caught my eye—
LOST AND GONE FOREVER
—and he had ringed it round with a series of names—Winokapau—Tishinakamau—Attikonak—Winokapau—Tishinakamau—Attikonak—repeated over and over again as a sort of decoration.

Turning back through the pages of these old log books I found they were all like that—a queer mixture of thoughts and fancies that made me realise how lonely he had been up there in that room and how desperately turned in upon himself. But here and there I picked out dates and times, and gradually a pattern emerged. Every day there was an entry for 2200 hours, undoubtedly the same station transmitting, for the entry was nearly always followed by the call sign VO6AZ, and on one page he had written
VO6AZ came through as usual
. Later I found the name Ledder occurring—
Ledder reports
or
Ledder again
, in place of the call sign. The word
expedition
occurred several times.

It is difficult to convey the impression these muddled pages made. They were such an extraordinary mixture of fact and nonsense, of what he had heard over the air and the things that came into his mind, all patterned and half-obliterated with childish lines and squiggles and odd names and little drawings with the shape of a lion repeated and repeated in page after page. A psychiatrist would probably say that it was all symptomatic of cerebral damage, and yet most people doodle when they are much alone with their thoughts, and through it all ran the thread of these reports from
VO6AZ
.

I turned to the bookcase behind me, which housed his technical library, and took down the
Radio Amateur Call Book
. This I knew listed all the world's ham operators under their different countries, together with their call signs and addresses. He had explained the call sign system to me once. The prefix gave the location. G, for instance, was the prefix for all British hams. I started to look up Canada, but the book fell open almost automatically at Labrador and I saw that VO6 was the prefix for this area. Against the call sign VO6AZ appeared the names Simon & Ethel Ledder, c/o D.O.T. Communications, Goose Bay.

The knowledge that he had been in regular contact with Labrador drew me again to the map hanging above the transmitter, the names he had written on that last page running through my head—Winokapau—Tishinakamau—Attikonak. It was like the opening of Turner's poem and, leaning forward across the desk, I saw that he had made some pencil markings on the map. I was certain they hadn't been there when I'd last been in the room with him. A line had been drawn from the Indian settlement of Seven Islands on the St. Lawrence, running north into the middle of Labrador, and against it was pencilled the initials—Q.N.S. & L.R. To the right of it, about halfway up, an almost blank area of the map had been ringed, and here he had written
Lake of the Lion
with a large question mark after it.

I had just noticed
Attikonak L
. inked in against the outline of a large, sprawling lake, when the door behind me opened and there was a little gasp. I turned to find my mother standing there with a frightened look on her face. “What's the matter?” I asked.

She seemed to relax at the sound of my voice. “You did give me a turn—I thought for a moment—” She checked herself and I realised suddenly that this was how my father had stood, leaning on the table and reaching over towards the map of Labrador.

“It was the map, wasn't it?” I was excited by the sudden certainty that it was the map that had drawn him to his feet.

A shadow seemed to cross her face. Her gaze fastened on the log books strewn on the table. “What are you doing up here, Ian?”

But I was remembering something a Canadian pilot had told me at the airfield—something about a party lost in Labrador and Canadian Air Force planes searching for them. The references to an expedition in the log books, the map and my father's obsession with Labrador, and that sudden frightened look on my mother's face—it was all coming together in my mind. “Mother,” I said. “There was a message, wasn't there?”

She looked at me then and her face went blank. “I don't know what you mean, dear, Why don't you come down and finish your tea. Try to forget about it.”

But I shook my head. “You do know what I mean,” I said, and I went over to her and took hold of her hands. They were cold as ice. “What did you do with his log book?”

“His log book?” She stared at me and I could feel her trembling. “Aren't they all there?”

“You know they aren't. The current one—it's missing. What have you done with it?”

“Nothing, dear. You don't understand—I was too busy. It's been a terrible day … terrible.” She began to cry gently.

“Please,” I said. “All the log books are there, except the current one. It should have been on the table beside the morse key. He always kept it there, and now it's gone.”

“He may have thrown it away. Or perhaps he'd forgotten to keep it for a time. You know how your father was. He was like a child.” But she wouldn't look at me and I knew she was hiding something.

“What have you done with it, Mother?” I shook her gently. “He received some sort of a message. Something to do with Labrador.”

“Labrador!” The word seemed to explode out of her mouth. Her eyes widened and she was staring at me. “Not you, too, Ian. Please God. Not you. All my life …” Her voice trailed away. “Now come down and have your tea, there's a good boy. I can't take any more—not to-day.”

I can remember the weariness in her voice, the note of pleading—and how cruel I was. “You never understood him, did you, Mother?” I said that to her, and I believed it. “If you'd understood him, you'd know there was only one thing would drive him to call out, struggling to his feet and reaching out for the map. It was the map he was reaching out to, wasn't it?” And I shook her gently whilst she just stared at me with a sort of fascination. I told her then about the planes searching for a geological party lost in Labrador. “Whatever Dad may have been during these last few years, he was still a first-class radio operator. If he picked up some sort of a message from them …” I had to make her see it my way—how important it could be. “Those men's lives might depend on it,” I said.

She shook her head slowly. “You don't know,” she murbured. “You can't know.” And she added, “It was all in his imagination.”

“Then he did pick up a message?”

“He imagined things. You've been away so much … you don't know what went on in his mind.”

“He didn't imagine this,” I said. “It made him suddenly find his voice. It forced him to his feet and the effort killed him.” I was being intentionally brutal. If my father had killed himself in an effort to save other men's lives, then I wasn't going to have his effort go for nothing, whatever my mother's reason for concealing it. “Look—I'm sorry,” I said, “but I must have that log book.” And when she only stared at me with a sort of dumb misery in her eyes, I said, “He wrote the message down in it, didn't he? Didn't he, Mother?” I was exasperated by her attitude. “For God's sake! Where is it! Please, Mother—you must let me see it!”

A defeated look showed in her face and she gave a tired little sigh. “Very well, Ian. If you must have it …” She turned then and went slowly out of the room. “I'll get it for you.”

I went with her because I had an instinctive feeling that if I didn't she might destroy it. I couldn't understand her attitude at all. I could literally feel her reluctance as I followed her down the stairs.

She had hidden it under the table linen in one of the drawers of the sideboard, and as she handed it to me, she said, “You won't do anything foolish now, will you?”

But I didn't answer her. I had seized hold of the exercise book and was already seated at the table, leafing through the pages. It was much the same as the others, except that the entries were more factual with fewer doodles and the word
search
caught my eye several times.

And then I was staring at the last entry on a page clear of all other jottings:
CQ—CQ—CQ—Any 75-metre phone station—Any 75-metre phone station—Come in someone please—Come in someone please—K
.

There it was in my father's laboured hand, and the desperation of that cry called to me through the shaky pencilled words in that tattered child's exercise book. And underneath he had written
BRIFFE—It must be
. And the date and the time—
September 29, 1355—voice very faint
. Voice very faint! And below that, with the time given as 1405—
Calling again. CQ—CQ—CQ, etc. Still no reply
. Then the final entry:
Calling VO6AZ now. Position not known but within 30 miles radius C2—situation desperate—injured and no fire—Baird very bad—Laroche gone—CQ—CQ—CQ—Can hardly hear him—Search for narrow lake (obliterated)—Repeating … narrow lake with rock shaped like
… The message ended there in a straggling pencil line as though the point of it had slipped as he made the effort to stand.

Injured and no fire!
I sat there, staring at the pencilled words, a vivid picture in my mind of a narrow desolate lake and an injured man crouched over a radio set.
Situation desperate
. I could imagine it. The nights would be bitter and in the daytime they'd be plagued with a million flies. I'd read about it in those books of my father's. And the vital part was missing—the bit that had brought my father to his feet.

“What are you going to do?” My mother's voice sounded nervous, almost frightened.

“Do?” I hadn't thought about it. I was still wondering what it was that had so galvanised my father. “Mum. Do you know why Dad was so interested in Labrador?”

“No.”

The denial was so quick, so determined, that I looked up at her. Her face was very pale, a little haggard in the gathering dusk. “When did it start?” I asked.

“Oh, a long time ago. Before the war.”

“So it wasn't anything to do with his being shot up?” I got up from the chair I had been sitting in. “Surely you must know the reason for it? In all these years he must have told you why—”

But she had turned away. “I'm going to get supper,” she said, and I watched her go out through the door, puzzled by her attitude.

Alone, I began thinking again about those men lost in Labrador. Briffe—that was the name Farrow had talked about in the Airport Bar. Briffe was the leader of some sort of geological expedition, and I wondered what one did in a case like this. Suppose nobody but my father had picked up that message? But then they were bound to have heard it in Canada. If Dad had picked it up at a distance of over two thousand miles.… But, according to Dad, Goose Bay hadn't replied. And if by some queer chance he had been the only radio operator in the world to pick that message up, then I was the thread on which those men's lives hung.