Dazzle Patterns Page 8

  He sat down on a stool in front of the stove. Allies Must Get MEN and Munitions … Cause of Humanity Against the Hun Must Not be Lost. He crumpled the page into a loose ball, held a match to the paper, and watched the flame burn yellow, then orange. It flared a brief blue from some impurity on the wood, perhaps copper. Fred had spent most of his life looking into fires, first at home, in front of the huge wood stove in Lauscha, winters, when the cold would sweep down the high peaks of the Rennsteig, fastening icicles to the eaves.

  He’d stood in front of the kilns of the glassworks, where he made his first marbles, and finally fine decorative and scientific glassware. As he got older he spent so much time in front of hot fires that his own body heat seemed to drop. Thin and never warmly enough dressed, he suffered terribly in the cold. When his parents died in Ontario within a month of each other, and then Lena left, he’d decided that Halifax would be kinder. He hadn’t understood how the sea wind and fog would steal into your bones.

  He stood a moment and looked down into the yard, fading into dusk. The children had tromped back in, leaving dirty boot prints and one red mitten. Fred was grateful that his parents hadn’t lived to see these hard days. He built up the fire with larger pieces of birch, watching the white papery bark peel back and ignite before he shut the firebox door.

  He was almost asleep by the time he crossed the room to his bed. In the seconds before he slipped off he thought of Lena, hardly visible through the spring snowstorm, waving from the deck of the S.S. Teutonic as it pulled away from the dock in Montreal, taking her back to Germany, his vanished world.

  THE COLD WOKE FRED. His fire had burned down and he could feel the deepening chill sliding through the clapboard and the cracked window glass. The sky held the grey halftones of dawn. The empty ache of hunger drove him early into the street.

  SLUSHY SNOW HAD FROZEN SOLID, and tree branches, glazed with ice, clicked in the wind. He stopped at the Lutheran Church, where a woman was struggling out the door with a child on either hand and one on her hip. He held the door for her. One of the children, his arm in a sling, was crying silently, wiping his eyes on his elbow. The simple pews, lined up along three long dark tables, were crowded with more women, children, and a few old men. The room smelled of burnt porridge and wet wool. Boots left puddles of melting snow under the tables.

  A flushed woman, with sandy-grey hair pulled tightly back from a precise part down the centre of her head, set a bowl in front of Fred. “Freidrich, it’s goot to see you, even if it’s only for ze food.”

  “Hello, Gerda.” A skin had formed around the spoon, jammed in the porridge. She pushed a pitcher of milk towards him.

  “Maybe, you’ll come more often, yah? Sank Got for your goot fortune?”

  It was months since he had been to church. Gerda was one of three or four women who seemed to have taken on the role of making sure the single men stayed on the straight and narrow.

  The last time he was there, he had found himself daydreaming during the sermon, staring at the coloured light cast on the congregation by the small stained glass window. He remembered setting out the vials of copper, iron, and sulphur for a stained glass window with his father, in Lauscha long ago. It was to be set in a church in France, just over the border. The stained glass windows of the great European cathedrals gave the church great power, his father had said, they awed the peasants.

  Sitting on the hard pew Fred had imagined the people of that church in France, crouching to pick up pieces of shattered glass and lifting them to the light of a bombed nave. He looked out over the people in the church, the women’s Sunday hats, the men’s shining Brylcreemed hair, and wondered if they too felt the world unravelling.

  NO SMOKE SPIRALLED from the glassworks chimneys. A couple of men were boarding up shattered windows, including the window which had injured the woman from the packing room. What was her name? Cora? Clare. He wondered how she’d fared. He’d hoped his humiliation didn’t show when she checked his glass. It would betray his training, his father, to allow himself to be belittled by Jack Bell, or worse, Ernie Ryan. But she handled the glass respectfully, looking for the important flaws, minute bubbles, star cracks, scratches, imperfect joints. He remembered she had unusual eyes, dark grey-green, with golden centres. She’d probably lost that eye, he thought with a small wash of sorrow. But so many were worse off. He thought of the bodies in the morgue.

  He longed to get back to the quiet absorption of work. Even handling the dead was too social for him.

  JACK BELL WAS IN THE glass-blowing shop, sweeping glass. He looked up briefly. “You decided to come back.”

  “Yes, of course.” Fred extended a hand to the broom. “I can do that if there’s other things you need to get to,” he said.

  “So now you want to help?” Jack said, planting his feet wide on either side of the broom. His cheek was rough with red-grey stubble.

  Fred scanned the shop, checking his bench to make sure it was in order, his hands hanging loose.

  “Where did you bugger off to the morning of the explosion?” Jack said. “We needed every man to pitch in here.”

  “I helped with the injured … took them to the hospital.”

  “Just how did you do that?” Jack pulled on his long chin.

  “I found a cart.”

  “Found?” Jack snapped.

  “The girl, Clare, needed help.”

  Jack leaned on his broom. “Huh.” He rubbed his jaw with the heel of a hand. “How is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or you don’t care.”

  “I was helping at the morgue. There was a lot to do.”

  Jack grunted and returned to his sweeping with renewed savageness. “Lost one of our gaffers. Bad burns. Not a lot to do here. Until we fix some boilers and get our hands on some fuel. We’ve given all our coal to the relief centres. Check back after Christmas.”

  12

  THE TROLLEY LURCHED along the waterfront. Clare pressed her forehead to the cold glass. The tide was high, dissolving hems of hoar frost on the shoreline. Frigid air, smelling of creosote and coal smoke, rushed in at the stops. The Grampian was loading, its black hull streaked with rust. Escort ships waited in the harbour for the next transatlantic trip. Deckhands and dock boys drove horses up a ramp onto the deck. The animals flared their nostrils at the black smoke pouring from the tall red stack. The men held reins tightly, coaxing the animals up the narrow passageway. The hooves of their hind legs stalled and slipped back as they snorted at the greasy, swirling water below.

  She would have gladly boarded the ship. Even if it meant a dark room in the hold. A short trip after all. She felt tears of frustration rising. She could be in England in ten days, in time for Leo’s leave. The tears tasted of longing, the ache she felt in her belly. She would do whatever was needed for the Red Cross. She could still work hard.

  The tram turned up away from the waterfront and passed city hall. Its clock still read 9:04.

  It is 9:03. She is walking to the windows, the winter sun lifting through silver fog. 9:04. She is looking down at a thread of black smoke rising from the harbour where the restless scrum of ships sits at anchor, each poised to carve a thin wake to the war. She is thinking about Leo and the letter she has just received, the muddy battlefields and the boys lying with dog tags in their mouths. 9:04. The second hands tick. War rips through the city, blowing glass, lancing her.

  Climbing the hill, Richmond to the north was laid out, a waste of blackened piles of debris and the charred skeletons of trees, exactly like the pictures in the papers of villages in France.

  She stepped off the trolley at the corner of Walnut Street and walked past peeling fences, rubbish bins tipped by hungry dogs. A woman bustling past her, pulling a wagon with a child bundled in tartan scarves, tried to hide a repugnant look when she glimpsed Clare’s eye patch.

  AT HOME, Geraldine was scrubbing the teapot. “Herself sent the tea back. The pot was stained. As if I’m the downstairs maid …” She regarded
Clare with outraged pale green eyes. The skin over the bridge of her thin nose blanched as she grimaced, “I’ve arranged for the repairs to the windows. What does she expect?” She dried the teapot vigorously. “I’m glad you’re back. She has Celia and me running up and down the stairs all day long. Get this. Do that. While she sits on that fat arse. Soon she’ll be so enormous she won’t be able to fit it through her door.” The kettle sang and Geraldine stamped across the kitchen, splashed hot water into the pot, and placed it on a tray. Geraldine had the slightness of a fourteen year old, but she moved with a heavy foot. Clare was woken every morning by the sound of her crashing around her room down the hall.

  “Pass me the teacup, will you?” Geraldine said.

  Clare fetched a rose pattern teacup and saucer from the sideboard.

  “No, not that one, her favourite one,” Geraldine said. “You know, the Queen Victoria one.”

  Clare reached for a white cup with an elderly Queen Victoria encircled by 1897 diamond jubilee banners and sporty men and women playing cricket, sailing boats, riding bicycles, playing field hockey.

  “Ta.” Geraldine placed the cup and saucer with the sugar bowl and creamer on the tray. The sound of piano scales, played as if by a child, started in the next room. “Oh, Celia’s back at it! It’s a miracle the piano survived. It was covered in snow. The relief committee sent over some men to drag it into the parlour. The music room can’t be fixed until a work party is available.” Geraldine picked up the tray with both hands. “That beam very nearly crushed Celia’s hand. She can barely move her fingers. Meanwhile, Queen Rose stays in her room, with her door closed.” She shoved the tray at Clare. “Would you mind bringing this to her? She told me to send Celia up, but the poor girl spends her day running up there. And invariably, she comes down in tears. Why not let her play her blues away.”

  Rose had always been an astute landlady. This house is all my Frank left us, she would sigh over dinner, before the explosion. Her husband, a druggist, had died under the hooves of a runaway milkcart horse one morning, when Celia was a child. Rose would add, in an offhand way, that she had had an enquiry from a nice secretary, or a librarian, looking for a good clean room. “High quality lodgings,” she would say, busying herself with the soup ladle. “You know how hard that is to come by.” That fall, after a spate of “enquiries,” she had raised her room fee by a dollar a week.

  Clare found Rose sitting on her velour couch stabbing at her embroidery, a Union Jack in a garland, stretched on a circular frame. The room smelled of lavender water. And under that, a slightly marshy smell, the folds of her flesh. Clare couldn’t understand how she managed to continue growing fat, while everyone else was thinning on wartime rations.

  “Clare! Oh, why did you return to this tragic place? I can’t imagine.” Rose dropped her embroidery and it instantly disappeared in her lap. She reached doughy arms. Clare set the tea tray down and allowed herself to be enfolded in Rose’s pungent embrace.

  “I suppose you’ve seen Celia?”

  Clare pried herself away and sat on a sagging wicker chair. “Well, I hear her. She seems to be in good spirits all things considered.”

  Celia was a diligent girl. Rose had encouraged her piano. “It is important for plain girls to have special talents,” she’d once said to Clare.

  One day last fall, Celia showed Clare a note her piano teacher, Mr. Devon, had sent home, saying he would like to talk to Rose.

  “I am sure he’s going to recommend me as the featured player for this year’s Christmas concert,” Celia said, waving the note in long fingers.

  Clare had answered the door to Mr. Devon the next afternoon. He had disappeared upstairs for tea with Rose, who, a flush fanning up her bosom, told Clare after he left, that he had said Celia was gifted. He felt she had an excellent chance of getting a scholarship to the Royal Conservatory in Toronto. After that, Rose began thinking of Celia as a prodigy.

  Rose fished around in her lap for her needlework. “She’s pretending. She’s devastated, of course. She’ll never get a scholarship to the conservatory now. Pour me a cup of tea, will you?” Rose turned her embroidery frame round and round. “I thought Celia was coming to join me. I asked Geraldine to tell her I wanted to talk to her. No, three teaspoons of sugar, please.”

  Rose stirred in her sugar. “We had to sieve the sugar … it was full of glass.” Queen Victoria trembled as her spoon clinked against the cup. “You may as well pour the other cup for yourself. You don’t take sugar, do you?”

  Celia’s desultory notes rose from below. Rose sighed. “I can’t bear listening to her play.” Rose looked disapprovingly out the window as if waiting for the notes to fly up past it like wounded birds. Then she sipped her tea and took Clare in, as if for the first time. Celia stopped playing. An awkward silence fell. Clare took in the room with a swift appraisal, its water-stained peony wallpaper and yellowed lace curtains.

  “And your … how is your …” she flapped her hand, “eye?”

  Clare gave the answer that she always gave these days. It was easier. “The doctors say I was lucky.”

  BEFORE BED, when she looked in her mirror, the patch was the black mark they made in the packing room before they threw flawed glass in the barrel for melting down again. She took a couple of drops of medicine and the feeling passed.

  THAT NIGHT, horses pushed their way through her bedroom door. At first there were only two, a dun and a chestnut dray horse, like her father’s horses at home. The animals just barely fit in the small room, one on either side of the bed. They clopped about then shrank and other horses followed, even once Clare got up and closed the door. A long train, like the model trains at Uphams at Christmas time, appeared against the wall. At the train windows, tiny faces watched the herd of horses tearing around the room as if it were the wide prairie.

  She lay back on the bed, closing her eyes. Horses poured through the room. Her heart thundered with beating hoofs. She pulled a pillow over her face. If it got worse, there’d be only one way to escape. She placed her hands over the pillow and pressed hard.

  She and Leo would dare each other, early in the summer when the water was cold and high. Who could hold their breath longest underwater? Leo as a boy, sleek and wet, skinny legs kicking into air as the rope swung out. His body slid into the river and darted underwater, smooth and brown as a trout, until he came up many seconds later downstream. Longing for him rushed up like a warm spring from her belly.

  She pushed the pillow away gasping for air. She was nearing the end of her supply of drops. She’d cut down these last few days. She tossed and turned, drifted off, awoke with a racing heart, as if she’d lost her footing, palms sweaty, shivering, sugar ants crawling under her flannel sleeves.

  13

  FROST HARDENED the broken ground. The air carried cooking fires and the sharp sweet smell of cordite. It had taken the group of six men fifteen minutes to walk from their dugout to the tunnel. Marty led the way, carrying his pack and a canary swinging in a small cage.

  The entrance to the tunnel was almost hidden under a bank matted with dead leaves, in the sparse forest behind the line.

  “Have a good trip, Dougie.” Marty lowered the cage down the shaft. The canary’s peeps faded as it dropped into darkness.

  The other Canadian sappers laughed, their cigarette smoke hanging above their heads like morning fog.

  “You’re going to be court-martialled one of these days,” Leo said, loading his auger in his pack.

  “I think General Douglas Haig would be pleased by the honour,” Marty said. “After all, our brave feathered friend has been up and down these tunnels a half a dozen times. Six more times than our esteemed general has.”

  After a few minutes Marty began winding the rope back again. The canary emerged, chipping angrily. Marty held the cage close to his face. “Calm down, it wasn’t that bad. You can go back to the chateau, order seeds and champagne for breakfast, with the other generals.”

  One of the young clay kickers
ran the cage back to the dugouts. The others threw their cigarettes on the ground and shouldered their packs. Leo probed with his shovel at the pile of sand by the shaft, looking for more shells. His jacket felt hot and tight. Marty headed down ahead of him, whistling, as always.

  Leo could only recall one time in their youth that Marty’s good spirits failed him. When they were boys in Grafton, Leo and Marty had decided to make a lion pit, near the McDiarmid farm. The McDiarmid brothers, Joe and Melvin, were twins. They had long noses and hooded eyes, like basset hounds, and spent most of their time conferring with each other on how to torment the other kids in their class. Leo and Marty worked on their lion pit most of one spring morning. They’d pissed in the hole, then covered it with woven birch branches, and finally threw leaves over the whole thing. Masterful. Leo stood back imagining Joe McDiarmid crashing through and rolling in the piss-soaked dirt. But Marty had gone silent.

  “I shot Wrigley last Tuesday,” he said.

  Leo had stared at him. Marty was crazy about his dog. “Was he sick?”

  “No,” Marty collapsed onto the wet leaves. “He ran out in front of me. I was shooting rabbits up Cobbs Hill.”

  It had taken Marty a week to tell Leo about the accident.

  “The thing was,” he’d started crying, “he didn’t die right away. When I got to him he just lay there looking up at me, as if he knew I’d done it but hoped maybe I’d help him. But the bullet was in his belly and he was bleeding all over the place.” Marty swiped at his tears with his hands, leaving dirty streaks on his face. Then he’d picked up a big boulder and threw it dead centre at the lion pit, which collapsed.