Dazzle Patterns Page 7

  Her mother was waiting for them in the garden. She took the roses from Clare and held them in her lap, while Aunt Emily poured tea.

  All fall Clare waited for Ada to come home. But left mostly alone, she disappeared into drawing. She held her pencil, poised, on the blank paper. A page was an empty room. She filled it with her friend Laura’s little sister Ruth, who fell through the ice in the spring. Ruth swam through underwater grottos. Clare drew her hair, long streams of seaweed, wound with shells. She drew Pearl, her pale face and small red mouth, seated on top of her white coffin, a carriage, drawn by horse clouds.

  Ada came home just before Christmas and Aunt Emily left, gathering Clare to her perfumed breast, before she descended the front stairs on her short legs.

  On her first mornings, Ada dressed in her usual dark blue wool housedress. In the kitchen, she tied on her flour sack apron, edged with a frill. She started the fire in the cookstove and boiled water for tea, as always.

  Her sadness lifted and she returned to life, cooking Sunday pot roasts, canning applesauce. She even started going to the Women’s Institute meetings on Saturdays, pinning her hat on her hair and rubbing violet water into her hands.

  One day, Clare, just home from school, found her sitting on her bed, tears streaming down her face. Frightened that the sadness had returned Clare rushed to her. Clare’s drawings lay scattered over the quilt.

  Her mother arranged for Winona Thomas, from the church, to come over every other Sunday afternoon to paint with Clare. Ada had admired the florals and landscapes Winona presented from time to time to the minister or the mayor on behalf of the Women’s Institute. Winona was an Englishwoman. The rumour in Grafton was that her family had lost their fortune in risky business ventures in the Far East. She had immigrated to Canada years ago with her husband.

  Winona taught Clare as she had been taught as a girl, though she made it clear that she was not working for Clare’s family. She had taken Clare, twelve now, on as a student because she thought she needed a mentor. And though Winona never said, even at that young age, Clare knew that she meant to be an example not only as an artist, but also as a woman of superior breeding and gentility.

  Clare was to copy Winona’s technique exactly. The surface had to be built up from light to dark.

  “Think of the washes as layers of transparent silk.” Winona would waft her hands back and forth, the cuticles of her fingers split from housework. “This was the way the great landscape painters worked — Turner, Ruskin …”

  Clare used too much paint, or threw one colour into another to see how they ran together in watery blooms. Winona would smile isn’t that daring! She would slip Clare’s painting off to one side, or set it on the windowsill. “Let’s leave that kind of thing to the French.” Then she would present a new piece of paper, deliberately and gently, from above, as if it were a white bird settling on the kitchen table.

  After a few classes, Winona began visiting with her cousin in Halifax for weeks at a time. Eventually she stayed. It was said that she had run off to Paris with a painter from the art school. The next year her husband, a mason who Clare had never heard utter more than two words, died under a collapsed wall.

  Left on her own, Clare mixed every colour, splashing it with abandon on her paper. Within days she had used up all her paint and forgot her lessons with Winona.

  NOW CLARE TOOK those old sketchbooks up to her bedroom. The drawings she’d made after Pearl’s death were gone. And the others were mostly copies of Winona’s, exercises she had given Clare. But there was one of Pearl her mother must have missed, a drawing of the small girl, leaning back against an apple tree, reading. Clare remembered the day, a few months before Pearl died. She was weak and their father had carried her to the orchard to sit under the tree on that warm summer afternoon. Clare was to watch her. She’d convinced Pearl to keep her hands in her lap under her book, so that Clare didn’t have to draw them. She never could get hands right. The drawing showed the many ghost lines she had rubbed away in frustration, and the foreshortening of the legs looming towards her was clumsy, but she had got something of Pearl’s expression, her sickly petulance. Clare saw now also her own irritation with Pearl’s needs, her mother’s constant petting and spoiling. And the fierce happiness she kept hidden when Pearl died.

  That night when Clare woke, her room was dark as a root cellar. Falling back on her pillow, she noticed a movement. From under her night table a line of children emerged. They marched right up the leg of the table and paraded across it, boys in the uniforms of the Royal Canadians, Khaki jackets buttoned and belted, polished boots and green gators, black helmets. She reached for her drops. Dr. Robson had stopped by the other day and given her another bottle.

  9

  LEO DRAGGED THE WOOD he’d stolen from the tunnel supplies into the trench. He laid the largest piece on the ground and propped up a couple of sidepieces with sandbags. He’d be dry tonight. It would take a couple of days for the wood to sink in the mud. He wrapped his coat tightly around himself and lay down in his narrow bed.

  Leo could hear Marty playing poker for cigarettes in the next dugout. “Flush!” His laugh, loud and rough with the chronic cough all the men seemed to have.

  Leo was bone-tired from coring all day. But sleep wouldn’t come. He was dreading going back into the tunnels in the morning. He wished he had Marty’s nerves. The guys from Cape Breton joked that Marty was a miner’s kid who must have got switched at the hospital. The miners were the happiest guys in the regiment, doing what they always did, used to the danger, cave-ins, floods, carbon monoxide poisoning. The tunnels made everyone else claustrophobic.

  “It’s out here I feel like a sitting duck,” Marty would say when he climbed out of the tunnel back into the fresh air.

  Leo thought of the trenches running through the countryside, the earth open for miles in zigzags lines. What twisted fate set this war on top of a layer of porous sand lying over a pan of impermeable clay? Rain poured through the sand and lay in standing pools, flooding trenches. Wounded men drowned in shell holes.

  It would all be buried eventually. The trench scars would remain for a time, not as long as the glacial striations on the rock at home, but a long time. It calmed him to think of time this way. The seemingly interminable span of this war was but an instant. One day it would be wiped clean from the earth’s memory.

  He shoved a hand in one of his pockets. His fingers grazed the fossil shell. Three weeks he’d worked at the tunnel entrance. Then, one morning, voila. There it was. How had he missed it? It had winked at him from a pile of sand, which had been excavated to drop the steel shaft. Probably been brought up from deep in the excavation, from those treacherous waterlogged sands the Germans called Schwimmersand. One half of a Cardium shell. A perfect cast, like the cockles on the beaches at home. Half a heart.

  Leo’s lungs compressed as if a heavy weight were lying on his chest. He took an anxious gulp of damp air and imagined himself somewhere else. He thought of Clare, her warm body, the salty smell of her, mixing with the scent of lilies as she lay back in the grass. He wrenched his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a photograph. It was taken in a studio. Clare seated on a velour chair, her hair pulled up in a bun. She was wearing a shirt buttoned to her chin and a high-waisted skirt. Her chin was tilted slightly so that she looked down at the photographer. It might have looked haughty if you didn’t know her. To Leo, it was a familiar gesture, the way she moved through the world, with her head up, her eyes watchful. He preferred to remember Clare on the beach, hair free, eyes brimming sea.

  Sometime deep in the night Marty returned to their dugout. He rolled into his bunk, stinking of rum. Extra rum rations? The stakes must have been high. When they were on tunnel duty he turned in his bunk all night. Tonight Marty dropped off immediately. “Ha!” He laughed in his sleep. “The king of spades …” He turned, grunted, and started snoring.

  The wind carried the scent of far tidal flats. What was Marty dreaming
? What did any of the men dream about? Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding? Hot baths? The French prostitutes in the billet villages with their thin necks and unwashed dresses? The men who screamed and woke in cold sweats were moved back from the line, for rest. Some never returned.

  Leo watched the soldiers sleeping around him, their arms flung over their heads, just as they’d be in death.

  10

  THEY STARTED VISITING Clare during the day. As she stood at the front window watching the ravens wing over the field, suddenly there she was, the girl in her nightgown, flying from the roof of the barn. While Clare rolled out pastry, the kitchen filled with patients, rising from ghostly stretchers in a hospital hallway. At such times she would pull the bottle of laudanum from her apron — she carried it with her now. She found herself untroubled by her insistent visions, as if they had a right to be there.

  “I need to see the doctor,” she said to her mother one day in early February.

  Ada, kneading bread on the kitchen table, paused. “Are you ill?” she said.

  “My whole body aches. I think I have the flu.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of that going around.” Ada turned the bread over and dug her fists into it. “Old Mrs. Smithson almost died of it last week.”

  Clare’s eye scrutinized the vivid liver spots and rough, wrinkled skin on the back of her mother’s hands.

  “But she wasn’t well to start with. You’re young and healthy.” Ada began shaping the dough into loaves. “There’s no need to call Dr. Robson.”

  “I need to see him,” Clare said. Would she say, “Tiny, terrifying armies march through my room?” She was sure that Dr. Robson couldn’t make them go away. What if he sent her to the “home” where her mother had gone after Pearl’s death? How would she sort out her passage to England, if Dr. Robson decided she needed a “rest”? Clare thought of the woman shaking the bald doll at her from the locked ward. Her heart squeezed tight. She wouldn’t tell Dr. Robson about her visions. She would tell him it was the shock of the explosion. He would give her more laudanum. The thought of getting through a night or even a day without it filled her with panic.

  “I need more medicine,” she said.

  Her mother wiped her palms on her apron and shot Clare a scrutinizing look. “You need to get out. There’s a charity market at the church tomorrow. The women’s group is putting together packages for overseas. It would do you good to come.”

  “I wouldn’t want to give them my flu,” Clare said.

  “Your father is going to drive us to town first thing.”

  CLARE WATCHED from her bedroom window for her father. A warm wind had melted the snow and he was hitching up the wagon today. She put Leo’s photo in her valise. At the last minute she took the shell, turning it over in her hand.

  That day at Arisaig, cobbles tumbled in the break, fell and rolled backwards, clattering against each other like stone castanets. Leo had walked fast, holding her hand in his. When they got to the cliffs he stopped, scanned them, then pulled her forward towards a shallow headland.

  “The best spot is over here,” he called over his shoulder, the wind whipping his straight brown hair.

  When they got to the cliff he threw off his pack and dug around it, pulled out a hammer and chisel. While she stood, her sweater wrapped tight around her, he began to chip away at the wall, loosening thin slabs of rock, murmuring to himself and flipping them over, reading each one before tossing it to shatter on the beach. He turned to her as if he had just remembered she was there. “Millions of years ago this was a sea full of corals, snails, clams, and worms …”

  He held a stone as if it were bone china. “Here,” he said. “Not a whole one, but you can see the shape of the shell.” He traced it with his finger. It was a ghost image, conical, delicately chambered, burned into the stone. “This is only part of it,” he said. “If you follow the taper it was probably …” his hand extended past the rock, “twelve inches long.”

  She ran her fingers over the imprint.

  “A nautiloid, or horn shell,” Leo said. “The first people who found these thought they were unicorn horns.” He slid his free arm around her and turned his back to the wind. She leaned into him. They stood like that for a moment, until he lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck. Then he crouched, wrapped the stone in a cloth, and put it in his pack. “It’s all here, somewhere, the past, fixed and waiting for someone to find it, to make sense of it.”

  HER FATHER’S WAGON clattered to the gate. Clare’s mother was straightening her hat in the hall mirror when Clare came down dressed in her own coat and hat. Ada looked up with surprised pleasure until she noticed Clare’s bag. “What on earth is that for?”

  “I’m going to get the train back to Halifax.”

  “You certainly are not,” Ada said, shoving one hand into a black knit glove.

  “Yes. I am,” Clare said, running her thumb over the shell’s ribs, deep in her coat pocket.

  “Why on earth would you want to go back there, after … everything.” Ada shoved her other hand into its glove.

  “There are things I need to do,” Clare said.

  “What you don’t need to do is go back.” There was a trace of grit in her mother’s tone, which Clare knew from long experience could turn into fierce resolve.

  “Geraldine says the glassworks may open again soon. And maybe I can be of help in the meantime,” Clare said. She had decided not to tell her mother about her decision to go to England. She would wait until things were settled.

  “What help could you be to anyone?” Ada picked up a carpetbag, stuffed with wool and knitting needles. “It would be better for you to be here with us in case …”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case you …” she pushed the bristling needles down into the bag, “you don’t feel better soon. Besides,” Ada opened the front door, “what can you do that someone else can’t do? It’s not as if you’re a nurse or a teacher or a … nun.”

  So her family had only indulged her in her job in the city because of the war. They expected her to return when it was all over and to do what her older cousins had done, what the women of her family had always done. Become a farm wife.

  Clare drew herself up, gathered her mother’s hands in hers. “I’ll come back to visit, I promise.”

  CLARE SAT RIGIDLY in the wagon, swaying and bouncing along the ruts. Her mother sat beside her, looking straight ahead, as if trying to solve a sum in her head. The snow had melted. The roads were muddy, Clare was agitated, and her bones ached. As soon as she got back to the city she’d find a doctor who would help her.

  11

  IN THE END, Fred Baker stayed two full days and nights after the explosion, helping with the bodies at the Chebucto School morgue, sleeping for short stretches wrapped in a tarp in the same room where dead bodies lined the floor. This morning Arthur Barnstead, his own face blurred with fatigue, had sent him home to get a good sleep.

  Walking back to his rooming house Fred saw houses fallen in upon themselves, charred like abandoned bonfires, or burnt completely away, only the chimneys flooded with black puddles of ash and snow. Standing houses stared blank-eyed, all their windows gone. Telephone poles tilted. On the street, a breadbox, a school bag, a woman’s evening shoe, black patent with a pointed toe and a velvet bow. At the corner of Agricola and West Street, Fred brushed the snow off and righted an empty baby carriage.

  He turned south on Brunswick Street, passing the Little Dutch Church. The weathercock had been knocked about and the east arrow now pointed towards the northern end of the city, as if gesturing to the vanished stack of the sugar refinery. The church bell was hanging in its steeple. It must have peeled thunderously with the explosion.

  Black Court, Fred’s rooming house, was still standing, its plain clapboard walls grimy with soot, most of the windows boarded over.

  The Dempsey kids were building a grey snowman in the courtyard with a couple of other children Fred didn’t recognize. One of them
, a girl of about four, had thrown her wet mittens on the ground and was crying disconsolately.

  As he climbed the dark central staircase, Mrs. Dempsey opened her door. She was still in her housecoat even though it was almost noon, her face splotched and puffy.

  “Where you been then?” she said suspiciously. And then, without waiting for his answer, “Lost me brother at the foundry. That’s his two down there with mine. Sharon won’t get out of bed.” She cocked her head towards the bedroom. Fred glimpsed an inanimate lump under the wool blanket.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Fred said, swaying from fatigue.

  “You’re lucky. You’ve no one to lose,” Mrs. Dempsey said and then, as he headed up to the next floor, “George boarded up your window.”

  His room was dim. In fact her husband had only boarded up half the window — the lower half was intact though badly cracked. Fred found a piece of stale bread in the bread box and took it along with the pitcher of water sitting on the counter to the small table.

  Below in the courtyard, eight-year-old Ena Dempsey was kneeling down in front of the small crying girl, rubbing her red hands.

  Fred dipped his bread into the water and wolfed it down in two bites. Tomorrow before he went to the glassworks, he’d need to find food. Ernie Ryan had left the morgue when he heard that food stations were being set up. “They’ll be needing help,” he said to Arthur, with a sideways glance at Fred, as he was leaving. “You know, men to do the lifting.”

  He opened the door of his cast iron stove and began tearing up a copy of the Herald. The headline, page two, read, Women of Halifax Are for the Men Who Are Risking Their Lives. Last week’s paper. Before the women of Halifax imagined it could get worse. He thought of the line from King Lear, the worst is not, so long as we can say: “This is the worst.” When his English teacher in Hamilton had read that out loud, he had looked around the class to see if any of the other students were startled by it. Most were looking out the window at the first warm day of spring. By that time, Fred had been in Canada only a couple of years but already he knew the truth of it, and the line sank like a small weight into the shallows of his adolescent attention.