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  Praise for Paul Butler

  “Paul Butler is a fine example of strong Newfoundland story-telling.”

  —Farley Mowat in Atlantic Books Today

  “1892 combines both lyrical writing and telling detail. It is a novel written by a sure and confident writer in his prime.”

  —Halifax Chronicle-Herald

  “The mythology [in NaGeira] is rich and the subject epic in scope…Butler’s prose is smooth and clean; the story moves forward vigorously, with patches of poetry.”

  —Globe and Mail

  “Butler is a very good writer, creating both colour and suspense with assurance…[He] is a fine stylist, one who knows how to provide apt images that vivify thought and action.”

  —Canadian Book Review Annual [on Easton’s Gold]

  HERO

  HERO

  Paul Butler

  Copyright © Paul Butler 2009

  E-book © 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

  Vagrant Press in an imprint of

  Nimbus Publishing Limited

  PO Box 9166

  Halifax, NS B3K 5M8

  (902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Design: Heather Bryan

  Author photo: Paul Daly

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Butler, Paul 1964–

  Hero / Paul Butler.

  ISBN 978-1-55109-730-5

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-55109-826-5

  I. Title.

  PS8553.U735H47 2009 C813’.6 C2009-902859-X

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.

  This book was printed on

  Ancient-Forest Friendly paper

  Contents

  St. John’s 1945

  CHAPTER 1 Elsa

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  France 1916

  CHAPTER 4 Simon

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  Suffolk, England 1916

  CHAPTER 7 Sarah

  CHAPTER 8 Simon

  CHAPTER 9 Sarah

  CHAPTER 10 Simon

  Suffolk, England 1923

  CHAPTER 11 Simon

  CHAPTER 12 Sarah

  CHAPTER 13 Elsa

  CHAPTER 14 Simon

  CHAPTER 15 Sarah

  CHAPTER 16 Elsa

  CHAPTER 17 Simon

  CHAPTER 18 Sarah

  CHAPTER 19 Elsa

  CHAPTER 20 Simon

  CHAPTER 21 Elsa

  CHAPTER 22 Sarah

  CHAPTER 23 Simon

  CHAPTER 24 Sarah

  CHAPTER 25 Elsa

  CHAPTER 26 Simon

  CHAPTER 27 Sarah

  CHAPTER 28 Elsa

  CHAPTER 29 Simon

  CHAPTER 30 Sarah

  CHAPTER 31 Elsa

  CHAPTER 32 Mr. Smith

  CHAPTER 33 Sarah

  CHAPTER 34 Simon

  St. John’s 1945

  CHAPTER 35

  Epilogue Noah

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  St. John’s

  1945

  CHAPTER 1

  Elsa

  The crack comes a second time. It’s similar to the sound of ice sheaths falling from bare branches, hitting the frosted ground, and breaking open. I imagine hands turning from prayer to supplication. But there is no snow beyond the closed white window blinds, only unseen grass and daisies trembling on the cool spring breeze, and perhaps the cautious twitter of a few small birds. Milder weather has come early for once. Only this inner space is cold and still, a room of white sheets and whiter walls—a place of waiting.

  The chair creaks beneath me as I lean in a little closer to the old man. Short white hairs poke out through his nose. His eyes are closed, and the ravine between his lid-veiled eyeball and forehead is deep, like a treacherous fissure in glacier ice. He exhales again, a slow rising moan. His chest is an ancient machine, all rusting wires and chafed connections. The crevice of his cheek, like that of a mummy under parchment wrapping, deepens as he sucks in another breath. Will he mourn his own passing, or will he merely slide into obsolescence like an anchor chain in the sand?

  Crack crack crack. There it is again and now I’m certain: It’s coming from inside him. Every noise within some undefined periphery of this place has migrated into him. The buzz, rattle, and scrape of the wards beyond the room, every chirp and scurry of wildlife, have become mute in the visible world. These movements reverberate instead within the echoing chamber of his skin. He is descending into death, and just as a sinking ocean liner is said to exert suction upon its surroundings, he too will carry some elements of earth, fire, and water into the depths.

  I listen intently all the same for footsteps or the sudden rush of music that accompanies the opening of the door to the nurses’ staff room. I have come to know the fright of movement during the last few days’ vigil. A crooner’s voice—someone plays Bing Crosby over and over—will ring out melodiously on an unexpected breeze of trumpets and saxo–phones. Bing will remind me to eliminate the negative and not to mess with Mister In-Between, and then I will hear the staccato beat of heel upon tile. The door behind me will swing open and a nurse, usually Peggy, will clatter between me and the patient delivering, perhaps, a cup of ice cubes and a straw like the one on his night table now.

  “Still here, Mrs. Evans?” she will say, looking at her watch and holding his wrist.

  At first I took this to mean it was time for me to leave. But I soon realized the watch was to check the pulse, not to remind me of the time. Peggy always poses the same redundant question because she doesn’t seem able to think of anything else. It’s always a disappointment, this blankness. Her pale, freckled face and red hair carry an echo of my former life and of the wild moment when I came closest to motherhood. Lucy Jenson—her doppelganger, my almost-child—must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight, about Peggy’s age. Peggy always makes me wonder where Lucy might be now.

  My hands tremble as they float towards the cup. I was always a terrible liar, and I know that if I am caught I may as well forget about mouthing the words of an alibi, however plausible. And what could be more natural than to give a dying man a drink, and to falter, spilling ice onto his lips? The fabrication slides so easily into the situation that words would hardly be necessary. The nurse would merely give a sympathetic “tut-tut” and help me pick up the ice and dry off any water that had seeped into the thin bedclothes. It’s a measure of my cowardice that even when every detail conspires to shield my intentions I still fear giving myself away.

  My fingers poke about the ice and scoop out a block. It slips into my palm and I raise myself from the chair.

  Is this your great revenge? a voice teases me. Visions of youthful snow-fights return, the trickle of ice water down my collar, the childish squeal of protest. Suddenly the whole idea seems too absurd. Couldn’t the sword of justice have chosen an avenger fiercer than I, one whose blade would not have been blunted to a child’s game, a mini-torture of ceremonial value only?

  And whose revenge is it? I think flee
tingly of Noah and the seventy-seven Newfoundland men left to die on the ice in 1914 and I know my cause is more convoluted and more personal than a levelling of scores—so convoluted and so personal as to be almost meaningless. The thought almost frees me. My elbows pine for me to drop the ice cube; my legs itch to take me outside into the dubious spring. But this may be my last chance. For the moment Kean is trapped inside himself. In a week, a day, an hour, he will be beyond reach, standing upon the prow of the ferry boat, gentle waves lapping at its sides, Hadean moon spilling its serenity all around the new and mysterious world he is entering. He and his kind will have won.

  Held in trembling fingers, my miniature iceberg closes towards his thin blue lips, and then it touches. There is the hint of a twitch, evidence of some discomfort perhaps. Skin and ice meet in a curious, tentative kiss. A droplet runs around his chin, and his dying mouth opens, quite unexpectedly, as though preparing to receive the punishment. My fingertips push the ice block between his gums, and I catch a glimpse of his pink, moist tongue.

  I jump in my chair as his eyes suddenly open, staring upwards, unseeing, I think. The colour of his irises—virgin, crystal blue—evokes visions wildly at odds with the man before me: dolphins cavorting in a glistening Mediterranean summer, windmills rotating against an infinite, cloudless sky. Pin-prick pupils seem to search the ceiling, for a moment retrieving some slender threads of consciousness. I shrink with each hammer-blow from my chest, terrified that his head will turn towards me; that his unmoving limbs will slide into motion under the sheets, hands burrowing into the open; that the torso will curl at the waist and he will rise and take the shape he had cast off forever—the indomitable Kean, he who met enquiry with defiance, curses with indignation, he who turned mothers’ tears to effrontery.

  I watch closely, ready to spring for the door. The eyes do not—cannot, perhaps—move from the ceiling. There’s a gurgling in his throat. A new fear comes upon me. If he chokes and dies, I may be tried as a murderer; I will be a murderer. The small number of days stolen don’t mitigate the crime, nor does the dismal, foolish nature of the act. Part of me wants to lurch forward, plunge my fingers between his gums, and rescue the ice, but I’m held by reluctance to touch him again. The fact he is, after a fashion, awake, holds me back.

  A door, the nurses’ staff room again, comes open, and Bing comes wafting upon the sterilized air. There’s the brief patter of footsteps, then silence save for the music. The women’s chorus has taken over for the moment. Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark, they sing in close harmony.

  The footsteps come again, and with no other warning the door opens.

  “Still here, Mrs. Evans?” asks Peggy. The tone is exactly the same as usual. She comes between me and her patient. She lifts his wrist and looks at her watch.

  Kean’s eyes are still open. There’s the dribble of melted ice on his chin, and still the odd gurgling sound, but Peggy doesn’t seem to notice. It occurs to me that her playing the same record over and over, her observance of the same dull routine, the same conversations, must all be part of her same extraordinarily over-ritualizing nature. Before I have much of a chance to fear discovery, she has turned, scribbled something on the chart at the foot of his bed, and left.

  Alone with the old man again, I scoop up another ice block. This time it slips from my fingers and drops onto the hard floor. Suddenly drained and sagging, I pick up my purse, rise from my seat, and shuffle out into the corridor.

  CHAPTER 2

  A clump of American soldiers emerges from a Duckworth Street restaurant, laughing, lighting up. One of them glances at me—a forlorn figure round-shouldered and solemn in front of the war memorial—then looks away again quickly, guilty perhaps that he has survived, that he awaits only the bureaucracy of demobilization to get him home.

  I stare at the monument’s iron figures—young men with square jaws and fixed, determined attitudes brandishing, in turn, pick, rifle, and baton. Time, I realize, has reduced me even more surely than it has reduced Abram Kean. Many years ago I threw myself in front of a train to rescue a child’s rag doll. This was once the measure of a reckless act. I was ashamed enough of the episode at the time, but now I am in awe. What would that brave young woman think to see her forty-seven-year-old self trying to torture an eighty-nine-year-old man with a block of ice?

  Age changes everything. Would the monument stir the blood if the faces before me were lined, their backs arched, and their joints swollen? It’s curious, this magic of youth that’s supposed to make anything—even wasteful, criminal death— glorious and exciting.

  This place always draws me. But it’s not for my first husband, Jack, or my brothers, Michael and Jimmy, that I’m here. There are better ways to mourn the Newfoundlanders lost at Beaumont-Hamel than staring at metal men with flint-like brows—creatures cast in the very image of the weaponry they have been made to wield. It must be the mystery of it all that draws me, how this all came to be, how soft flesh is over and over again persuaded to charge into the chaos of flying steel, how even the monuments we construct in honour of the dead conspire to reverse the very significance of mourning, to make war seem part of a natural course. The iron men in front of me were designed for war. Jack, Michael, and Jimmy were not. They all seem little more than boys now, cavorting on the far horizon of time. Even the parade, the ceremonial drills, and the cheering on the banks of Quidi Vidi Lake seem like the innocent adventures of childhood.

  Each time I come here I feel like I’m facing an unendurable truth that part of me insists I confront. Was it merely coincidence or some malevolent angel on my shoulder that brought me back on the last day of June in 1924, the very day before this memorial’s inauguration? With little else to do, I attended the event, though something, no more than a slight tingle in my bones, was already warning me off.

  Field Marshal Haig, the architect of the Somme’s infantry disaster, was in town to lay the first wreath. My reaction to this news was amazement. How could he show his face here? How could he show his face anywhere for that matter? But I soon found it wasn’t Haig’s presence that worried me. It was the acceptance of the unacceptable. It was like watching my countrymen walking gleefully into a raging wall of flame. The newspapers greeted his visit as an honour. I felt no itch of dissent in those around me. Something honeyed and mellow dwelt in the voice of Patricia, my cousin—and, I hoped, temporarily, landlady—when she mentioned him. It was more than forgiveness, distinct from acceptance or reconciliation. The outward rush of air that accompanied the name Haig was laced with the fragrance of lipstick and another quality I hesitated to name. But it was yielding and soft, without grudge or briar of any kind. Only as I was en route to the event and it was too late to back out did I identify the emotion in Patricia’s half-whisper: gratitude. He had noticed us. We were on the map of the British High Command. The dead and grieving of Newfoundland were worth a few days’ sea journey for an important man.

  The old me—the one capable of arguing—was afraid of what I might do as we shuffled into place among the waiting crowds. Hundreds, some in ranks and in uniform, stood in the series of horseshoe rings of paving laid into the green below the monument. Those who had served stood at attention. We civilians were almost as solemn, and my eyes surveyed the dignitaries in attendance for a broad, rather proud face that matched the photographs I had seen of Haig. I settled upon one of several in uniform to whom the others—even our mayor and prime minister—seemed to defer in whispers and slight nods.

  When the intelligence buzzed through the multitudes that the moment was upon us, the crowd seemed to hold its collective breath. You could hear the whoosh of fabric against skin as Haig moved towards the monument and bent to lay the first wreath. The bright sun played upon the ribbons and gold on his chest. He stood slowly, saluted, and back-stepped into position. Still, no one spoke or coughed, and I felt not even the mosquito stir of movement at either elbow, just the sense of focus upon the proud iron figures of the monument, the dark wreath, and Haig.
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  There was the faint tickle of leaves behind us, and the hope fluttered inside me that the apathy and despair from which I had been running for so long might be on the verge of breaking. Not everyone was like Patricia, after all. The lengthy silence might not spell respect for Haig. The hush might be a dim but growing awareness of some violent effrontery, the steady, noiseless withdrawal of a wave before the crash. But something extra was needed to unleash this force. He is the one! I felt like shouting. It was he who sent them all—your sons, your husbands, your brothers—to their certain deaths!

  But silence hung like a canopy. Save for the faintest ripple of loose skin as his jaw clenched, Haig stood as still as the statues. A bugle played, its notes dipping and rising. A breeze played upon a lady’s feather hat and two men watched from high on a roof overlooking Duckworth Street. I itched for one of them to reach inside his jacket. But they remained erect and respectful, despite their unorthodox vantage point. As the ceremony moved towards its conclusion, I realized that anger, grief, desolation, and pain had been transformed as if by magic into a permanent hushed respect for the very act of war that had brought it all about. Who was I to complain? In the end I had acted like all the others, silent and acquiescent, and to all appearances, admiring of the man who had taken centre stage.

  I left the place in a sea of self-disgust. Despite, or perhaps because of, an aching loneliness that had descended upon my shoulders, I walked arm-in-arm with Patricia. Patricia was at least human. She wasn’t some representation of humanity moulded in iron and set, pick, baton, or rifle in hand, upon a concrete pedestal. I caught the warmth of her arm through the fabric of her blouse, and knew she had also lost a brother at Beaumont-Hamel. How could I criticize when I had no alternative to offer? She had been offered a sweet pill of consolation, an escape from the despairing thoughts of futile, pointless slaughter, and she had taken it.

  I listened to the double-beat of our footsteps, mine echoing Patricia’s, and for a while failed to notice that my cousin had been talking to someone on her left. Patricia half-turned and nudged me with her elbow.