1
Granny Coote sat at the window of her new house and kept a faithful watch on the workmen across the street. Mr. Stadler had brought along two helpers to assist him in unloading the rough slabs of limestone he would smooth and shape into a memorial pillar over the weeks to come. Sunny Denfield had shown her the drawings – deft pencil sketches on brown paper – and so she was able to speculate not unpleasantly about how these raw-cut stones might be teased into the elegant promise she’d seen on paper. The stones were very heavy. They had to be eased down ramps from the back of the truck – as dented and dusty as the old man’s face – and then skidded over to a spot near the site itself. The young men appeared to be sons or nephews of the builder; they were as lithe and wiry as he, and moved with animal ease. Their skin was tanned and roughened, the mark of men who spend much of their life outdoors. The old man, who came almost every day, was a delight to watch: he hopped about like a rabbit on a griddle, firing off instructions (in a strange, jabbering tongue) that were respectfully ignored, lending a hand when it was least required, then unexpectedly lapsing into a state of deep repose from which he observed and blessed the intricate actions of his son (surely he must be Stadler’s father) as if from a dream. When they sat down on one of the stone for a brief rest, the old fellow seemed to dominate the conversation, speaking in a low voice and gesturing as if he were telling long, thoroughly-weathered stories. There is something very familiar about the Stadler family, Granny thought, but then I’ve lived so long and seen so much around these parts, everything looks familiar to me.
2
Eddie began writing to her as soon as the troops reached Valcartier camp for the second phase of their training. Eddie had joined up in the new year when recruiting for the Second Canadian Division began in earnest. Five of his college friends joined with him as part of one of the university companies who would form replacements for Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry already overseas and in combat. Such students were given permission to carry on with their studies during the local training period, which ended in March, after which they entrained for Valcartier. Granny knew Ralph Sifton well and though she had not met them, she felt she knew the other four because they had been part of Eddie’s conversation for two or three summers. As she read over each name of ‘the Vic platoon’ in Eddie’s letter, a picture of past exploits – college-boy derring do and hijinks and irresistible good humour – instantly formed in her mind. Besides young Ralph from Sarnia (studying law as his father had), the platoon included Cliff Strangways from British Columbia (graduate history); Sandy Lecker from Waterloo County (biological science), the first of his family ever to attend university; Bart Ramsay (graduate philosophy) whose Toronto family had enough money to protect him from the temptations of academia, but couldn’t; and Henry Potter, raw-boned prairie lad who was studying French in hopes of joining the foreign service and seeing parts of the world that weren’t flat. Although they didn’t all get into the same platoon, they were part of a single company, an inseparable fraternity.
In April Eddie started writing once a week, his letter arriving on Tuesday morning where she was waiting in the Post Office on Michigan Ave. to pick it up. She never opened one before she got back home, nodding obscurely to friendly or anxious faces on the street and once there making herself a cup of tea to sip on as she read the words aloud at first, then silently – many times.
“Valcartier is a pleasant surprise considering the rumours we were foolish enough to believe in advance. It’s a hug complex of barracks, drilling grounds, rifle ranges and mock battlefields – all cut right out of primeval bush. I get the strangest sensation firing my Ross .303 at a painted target two hundred yards across a scraped pasture and looking up at the evergreens behind them which roll unbroken and impassive for a thousand miles north of us, north of anywhere. Do you know what I mean?
Yes, Eddie, I do, though I haven’t got the words you have to describe it.
“Bart, our city-boy, went for a stroll in the woods last night, as if he were off to High Park in pursuit of pretty girls – of which there are none, pretty or girlish, within twenty miles – and promptly got himself lost. The Vic-platoon volunteered for the search party, and it was Cliff, who grew up in the Kootenays, who found him on the second tallest branch of a spruce tree, where he claimed a black bear had driven him out of spite. Cliff is of the opinion that it was a sasquatch, abetted by the shadows and on overheated imagination.”
Granny found it a daunting task to respond to these weekly outpourings – four or five pages of elegant script capturing a side of Eddie she knew she would not see if he were at home – closer, safer. But there was nothing else to do but sit at the kitchen table in the afternoon sun or the evening lamplight and try to make the pen say the thousand things racing through her. By the time the Second Division was ready to embark for England in May of 1915, she was able to write several pages of stilted prose, sweating laboriously over it for two days. In part Eddie made it a bit easier by asking questions about his chums in the village or about local events she herself had long ago excluded from her sphere of concern: “Who’s joined up lately? Did they finally get Hitch? Or Sandy Redmond? Who’s to replace MacPherson on the council? Will you be sure to clip the theatre items from The Observer?” And so on. Though replying to these and making an occasional comment herself helped to fill up some of the weekly quota of two pages, she was not pleased with the results. Her first letters were choppy, disconnected pieces; she felt she was not conveying anything of herself in them, and every instinct she possessed told her that Eddie was waiting out there, and listening with his heart for some force behind her words more tender and more compelling than the voices he was hearing daily inside him and all around. I can’t do it, Eddie, she thought sadly. I never learned. I’m too old, too stubborn, too stupid.
In desperation, as he prepared to sail for England and foreign battlefields thousands of miles away, she began to tell about a few of the simple follies that peppered the everyday life of the village and upon which she had begun to cast an ironic eye. To her surprise she found the effort much easier than she thought it would be – closing her eyes and recapitulating a scene or a conversation overheard and pressing Eddie’s face as close to her own as she dare. “You remember old Ollie Jensen who used to be reeve, and was always suspected of treating his horses worse than his wife? Well, he enters his prize pacer in the May Day races down at the track, and when his driver shows up drunk, he decides to hop on the sulky himself. But Bomber, his gelding, sees his chance to get even for past whippings and indignities, and just as the horses come up to the starting line, Bomber breaks, rears up and stops as still as a stone right in front of the steward’s stand. Well, you can imagine the cries of encouragement and helpful advice that started raining down from the bleachers. Ollie himself goes puffy and red in the face, like someone was pumping air into a tomato, and lashes the gelding’s well-padded rump with his whip, which makes the creature jump an inch straight up in the air but not a fingernail forward towards the other pacers now disappearing around the first turn. ‘Try sweet-talking, Ollie,’ somebody shouts from the cheap seats, and Ollie pops out of his seat like a plucked radish and stomps towards Bomber’s front end to whack him with the butt of his whip. But the victim, with better timing than he ever showed in a race, steps smartly into his hobbles and sprints off towards his companions. Ollie then breaks the whip over his knee and has to be helped off the track by his wife to avoid being run down by the approaching stampede. You never saw a happier horse in your life, running as free as a bluebird alongside of the others without the burdensome drone of a driver. He finished in a dead-heat with his old rival.”
“The fellows want to hear more of your stories about the village. I assure them you’re not making them up, but they’re not inclined to believe me. Bart wants to know if Bomber had to share the purse with his master?”
Granny found herself in turn asking more and more about the fellows. “How did Bart make out with the nurses at the camp dance? Was Henry too shy to ask anyone?” “Bart naturally appropriated the prettiest girl among the two dozen allotted to our battalion and danced with her the whole evening. Unfortunately for the course of true romance, she was the worst dancer, stomping on his feet so often he had to be carried to the barracks and soaked up to his ankles in ice for three days. He claims he purloined a kiss behind the packing cases. As you surmised, Henry was too shy to ask for a dance, so Cliff did it for him. I don’t think Henry had ever seen anything but a square dance (you remember them, I reckon), but he adapted remarkably well. I danced with a girl from London and one from Fredericton. How odd to be holding, as closely and intimately as sweethearts, two complete strangers from different parts of the continent coming together in a Quebec bush-camp for the sole purpose, we hear, of shooting to death a million Germans.”
“You asked about young Redmond, the third generation of his family to embrace the grocery trade. Well, he did join up last week, and the talk around town is that circumstances forced him to do so. It seems that Grandma Quilty caught young Red with his thumb on the meat-scales, and thinking she had her umbrella in her hand, she started to whip him with it and call for the constable. It turns out she was carrying a large bunch of beets just plucked out of the vegetable hamper. She whapped him with seven or eight death-blows so hard that the beet-juice bled all over his face and ran down his white shirt, and he was laughing and yelling at the same time when his mother comes scuttling out of the storeroom and sees him tipped backwards on the butcher’s block covered in gore, and she thinks he’s dead and faints into her husband’s arms. You can imagine the variations of that tale going around for the third time! The army will be a relief for young Red. By-the-by, did Sandy’s father manage to get his corn in alone?”
“We are to complete our basic training here in Shorncliffe in the picturesque county of Kent. What a relief after the stories being told about First Division’s autumn and winter in the rains and muck of Salisbury Plain. Here it is dry and warm, we are surrounded by tropical green and curious, anachronistic villages with quaint names like Dibgate, Otterpool and New Inn Green (very old). Our own bell-tents are pitched on St. Martin’s Plain. Among the trees and shrubbery on every side we can see church steeples shining in the sun, and hear medieval bells tolling the hours. Ralph sprained his ankle during a bayonet drill. He didn’t take kindly to suggestions that he engage the services of his prominent daddy in a lawsuit against the inventor of the Ross Rifle. By the way, Cliff has just learned of the death of his grandfather, and is feeling very remorseful about not going to see him before embarkation: it seems Cliff is interested in the history of the region and had promised that he would record the old tales his grandfather often told about the pioneer days in New Westminster. I told Cliff about Arthur, and it turns out that his grandfather knew Arthur quite well. This was confirmed recently by Cliff’s mother. Cliff would like to hear from you about any of those great yarns Arthur used to tell us. He won’t believe my versions, and I don’t blame him. Henry is terribly homesick. Any advice?”
So it was that Granny came to add or interpolate into her letters whole paragraphs addressed directly to individual members of the Vic-platoon. “This is for Henry only” she would print in caps, teasingly, for she knew they sat around and read her letter together and likewise began to pen postscripts of increasing length to Eddie’s own accounts. She found herself spending entire days in composing responses, part of the time spent in reflection on past events in reference to the questions and requests raised for her. Cliff could not get enough detail about Arthur’s days in the theatre of the 1860’s, and she found herself rummaging through Arthur’s trunk, sometimes parting with a cherished playbill – the names receding but still legible – for the boy’s sake, though she was quite certain nothing would ever fully assuage the sense of regret he was suffering so far away. Minor detail elicited from Cliff’s mother would be duly relayed back to Granny and in some cases half-told stories from each side were dove-tailed to make a complete one, so that Arthur himself, through the eyes of the deceased Mr. Strangways, was enabled to speak to her with fresh and vicarious verve. When Sandy Lecker casually asked about farming techniques in the pioneer days, she found herself talking about events and impression she had not even dreamt about in more than twenty years. Sandy was a farm-boy and he was willing to brave the gentle derision of the others.
“Ralph and I took our furlough and went by train over to Salisbury and thence by car towards Stonehenge. The cathedral is as magnificent as the pictures we’ve seen of it, but no picture can replicate the awe we felt standing in the nave and looking heavenward, and feeling the incredible stillness created by the thousands of vaulting line so cunningly crafted they appear as natural as rivulets in the stone walls of a vast cavern. Next day we stood together on the English grass more than two thousand years old and stared without comprehension of any kind at the primitive, Druidic tablets aimed with imperfect magnificence at the stars. It was only when we passed by the old barracks and drilling ground on the road north that we came to realize we were preparing for war. The charred mud and filth of the rotting barracks looked to us very much like the trenches in Belgium we’ve been hearing about since the day of our arrival. Nevertheless, the peacefulness out here in the English countryside is real, and is as deep as the stones of Tintern Abbey, where we hope to go if we’re not sent across the Channel.”
But they were on their way to France on the seventeenth of September and thereafter not a single reference was ever made to that pastoral quietude. In his last letter before leaving Shorncliffe, Ralph typically made light of the impending event: “We went on manoeuvres yesterday for the sole purpose of proving that Sir Sam Hughes’ secretary was right after all, that the ‘MacAdam shovel’ which bears her name (and a number of unofficial ones provided free of charge) will not only defy German bullets but dig a six-foot trench with the aid of the human hand. Sir Sam steadfastly refuses to believe reports, spread by the envious Brits, that the shield won’t stop a B-B at thirty yards and, lacking a handle, the spade is useless as a delving device. Bart suggests the whole thing is a Canadian plot to have the Kaiser’s army laugh itself to death.”
Several of the boys now wrote to her separately as well as collectively in the packet-sized letters that left the postmistress puzzled and not-a-little suspicious. Granny in turn continued to compose equally impressive omnibus editions in addition to the smaller, private confidences to ‘her boys’.
“There are no words to describe the battleground,” Eddie wrote. “Nothing could have been done to prepare us for it. Our training over here was cut short when we were sent directly to the front as part of the newly organized Canadian Corps (chalk up one for the colonies!). They tell us we’re in Flanders near the Belgian village of Vierstraat, south of Ypes. Some of the ground we occupy has changed hands several times already and the devastation here is complete. I expected to see battered houses and charred barns and rotting orchards, but there are no such human signposts anywhere. Between our trenches and the German’s a few hundred yards away, and behind us for over a mile, there is not one distinguishing landmark; the outbuildings have been flattened, pulverized by repeated shelling and then tramped upon by marching feet so thoroughly into the mud there is not the slightest hint of a farm ever having been. Occasionally you step on something firm underfoot, and if it isn’t a corpse, it’s likely to be the submerged stump of a tree, blasted and then buried, with its roots still gripping something grim that lurks below us everywhere. As we approach our front-line position or as we’re returning to billets for our stint in reserve, we can see the shattered orchards or half-burned rooves of hay barns, enough to remind us of what we must have ruined. As I peer ahead of me over the sandbag parapet, searching for prey with my sniper’s eye, I cannot see any sign of where the ground itself was – the ruts, craters, stinkponds, the gouged and shredded turf are an alien landscape, bearing no resemblance to any of those earthly contours we have inherited and cherished for centuries. It is moon-ground, the erg-desert of my nightmares. Sorry to be so depressing, but I do need someone to unburden this on; among the fellows I have to be careful about each word, each gesture, each well-intended jibe: the feelings we have for one another are as fragile as they are deep; that is one thing I am learning about the war, even before we’ve gone into battle.”
“Tell me your feelings, Eddie, all of them. Let me know how the boys are really doing, I can’t trust the stories they invent to make me feel less anxious. Let me know what they need to hear.”
“Some of the Canadians were involved a few days ago in the fighting around Loos, part of a larger offensive at Artois and Champagne – a fiasco, we suspect, from the endless lines of walking wounded filing past us with their faces gray as paste, the whites of their eyes the brightest colour visible against the backdrop of mud, the wan uniforms, the darkening bandages, the dirt-streaked faces – they remind me of blackface minstrels minus the smiles, music and hypocrisy. While rumours fly of our imminent involvement, Ralph and I go off on ‘borrowed’ bicycles all the way up to Ypes. It’s a six-hundred-year-old country town, walled and sedate, its ornate churches and stately guild-hall a distillation of human civility. Ralph and I stood a few feet apart and stared at the partial ruins of the latter building, thinking of the handiwork and masonry and dogged imagination it took to create it hundreds of years ago in spite of the clerical armies of Europe who rolled back and forth across this very territory in their petty attempts at ravaging it. ‘I wish we had gone AWOL and up to London to see the Abbey’, I said to Ralph. He didn’t say anything to me because by that time we were both weeping silently. When we got back, though, we were delighted to find that Henry’s wound was only superficial, and he was returned to us in swaddling clothes. Please tell Sandy and Henry as much as you can about the old days on the farm: it’s the only subject left which they can still argue about. Write soon.”
“They always used axes to cut down the big trees because usually only one man started the process, or the bush was too thick to wield a two-man saw, or you couldn’t control the drop-spot as easily. Then the hundreds of small branches had to be trimmed quickly with an expert axe-hand so that only the trunk remained. You must remember that in Lambton County we are talking about pines and plane trees and walnut that soared a hundred and fifty feet in the air and often ran six or eight feet across at the bole. It took a trained ox-team to move these trunks and get them into a pile where they could be burned. Only the best-looking limbs were sawn up for cordwood. Everything else was burned into powdery ash.”
“When we were returning from our six-day stint in billets we marched by a mud-pasture where the Brits were practising manoeuvres with the latest ‘engine of Armageddon’ as our padre so quaintly calls the ‘land-cruiser’ or ‘tank’. Our entire company stopped on the off-beat to watch, and laugh. Your boys decided to have a contest to see who could find the best comparison to describe these monstrosities, and you have been selected to be the judge. So here they are, starting with my own: ‘armadilloes with indigestion’, ‘wood-burning locomotives run off the rails and floundering in the gumbo-beds below the elevator’ (your grandson), ‘mammoths coming out of the glacial muck and frightened by the sun’ (our historian, Cliff), ‘Henry Ford’s rejects’ (Bart, who likes autos), ‘dinosaurs on a toot’ (Henry, who’s seen ’em), ‘maggots with armour’ (Sandy, who’s been too long on the farm) – love, Ralph.”
“In those days every field was outlined by bush, not as it is now with stump or snake fences and friendly little patches of forest for shade. We had homely and domestic names for each one as we cleared them: Pine Field, Orchard Field, Back Willow, or simply North Field, South Field. When we looked up, we never had any doubt where we were.”
“Gran: we’ve discovered a virtue in the rain and mud that permeates our daily routine: only humans can live in it. Really. The rats, without barns or granaries, have retreated to the billet areas behind us. The field mice can find neither fields nor fodder, and their burrows are washed out faster than they can tunnel them. No birds fly overhead, except the tidy cormorants, because there is no tree to light on, no grass for a nest, no water that is not stinking. Even the earthworms have drowned. We are the only living things for miles. But enough of my dark philosophizing – Bart tells me to inform you that we also have mechanized ravens here, called aeroplanes, but they don’t talk dirty like Mrs. Finch’s crow and aren’t half as much fun. The German version is called a Fokker, and Bart says it occasionally gets garbled in the translation.”
“Mrs. Finch’s crow has learned a new trick. He hops along the clothes-line behind the missus and picks off the pegs as she pins them, then slips into the apple tree before she can figure out what ill-wind keeps blowing her sheets away. I’m tempted to tell her, but the crow is known to have a vengeful streak in him.”
“We’ve begun a series of what are called ‘night-raids’, our first real action in the two months we’ve been here. We blacken our faces and hands with burnt cork, and then when the moon goes under, our platoon slips silently over the parapet and pads through the muck of no-man’s-land with only the point of a dark ridge to our north to act as a guide. The idea is to drop into the German’s foremost trench, yell and stab and create havoc for ten mad minutes, then retreat in the darkness before they can warm up their field guns or counter-attack. This manoeuvre is designed to keep the enemy perpetually scared – as if that were a difficult objective to obtain. Our group went ‘over the top’ last week, and we got all the way to the Bosch trenches without incident; I heard Cliff Strangways give the attack cry and we leaped blindly into the gap at our feet. It was eerie beyond description, like jumping off the edge of the world, we didn’t know whether we’d land on a soldier’s stomach or a keg of Bavarian beer or a parked bayonet. We sang out our banshee howls and jumped, swivelling our spear-guns like the Turkish infidel and waiting for the wince of human flesh at the end of the blow. Nothing happened. We landed askew in the dark, shouting and stabbing, but no one shouted back. Our sergeant barked a ‘cease attack’ that brought us all to a quivering halt. No sound of the dying or the terrified. Cautiously a torch was turned on and we gazed in horror at the sight around us. An hour before, during one of the periodic artillery duels staged by mutual consent, one of our batteries must have misfired several ‘short’ rounds meant for the front-line ridge beyond. Those shells had made a perfect, if unintentional, strike on this isolated part of the trench. Thirty or forty corpses, still warm and oozing, stared out at us with death’s eyes. We had been told in the silly propaganda paper circulating here that the Germans were troll-like creatures who devoured their own babies when angered, who drank blood for breakfast, and so on. But I can tell you, Gran, all of us have looked on the faces of our enemy: they are just men, who die as men everywhere in the futility of battle.”
“Some of the logs, of course, would be used to make the settler’s first home, there are still many standing to this day. Often that first winter only enough bush was cleared for the cabin and an acre or two of fall wheat sown between the stumps. The ash from the burning was used as fertilizer, and for soap. We made our tables and chairs out of split logs. Our beds were cedar or spruce boughs on a frame of poles and cross-hatch of saplings. We burned wood for fuel- heat and cooking fire. We made flutes out of softwood sticks to make the music to carry us through the long winter. We walked over the snow – five-feet deep – on wooden snowshoes. Our world was made of wood. We loved and we hated it.”
“Bart was killed in one of the raids two nights ago. We were almost back from a mélée in the enemy trench when their artillery opened fire. We’d stayed a minute too long. I landed among some piles of equipment and slashed my way through it without encountering a soldier until the cry went up to retreat. Just as I dropped safely into our own trench, the first shell exploded, and Cliff and I heard Bart scream as if a cat had raked his flesh. Despite the noise and panic all around us, we heard it as clear as if he’d spoken to us across a quiet room. He’d fallen about ten yards away, and Cliff and I went out after him, shells breaking up everywhere. I was as scared as I’ll ever get – that much I know. I had thought under these circumstances that I would think of my past life or my life to come or of you and Arthur shielding me against the wind along the river flats, but I thought of nothing, nothing – there was nothing in my brain but a gray numbness, the way death itself may be. We got Bart’s body back into the trench, but he was already dead. We drew lots to see who should write home to his parents. Ralph lost.”
“Please do not give me any of the details of the boys’ deaths or injuries, Eddie. My heart recoils at the thought of what you must bear, alone. Tell Sandy he can prevent Trench Feet by taking grease from the cook’s skillet and rubbing it all over the inside of his boots. The Indians, they tell me, used to have much success with the method.”
The Vic-platoon saw little action as the winter dragged on in Flanders where record rainfalls turned the mud into a quagmire. “Henry says he may be the only one here who isn’t affected by the muck and slime. He claims the gumbo south of Winnipeg is twice as sloppy and has four times the sticking power. Some of the fellows are suffering terribly from the grippe and dysentery and Trench Feet which can easily become gangrenous. They wish they could get into battle, which they think would be a form of relief. We try to assure them it is not so, though the wet and the waiting are hellish in themselves – with the din of distant siege-guns reminding us that some people out there are fighting and dying and maybe winning the war. Morale is high, I hasten to add, more likely because we feel a powerful camaraderie here that is more important than the so-called reasons we’re given for our sacrifices – the defense of the Empire and the freedoms it stands for, as if the two notions were connected or even compatible. But we’re here; most of us volunteered in one form or another, and here we’re going to stay, together, to see this thing through. A strange rationale for fighting, isn’t it? But what can you say in defense of General Haig who refers to our combat casualties as ‘tolerable levels of wastage’. We had a good laugh about that one, the five of us.”
Granny was now writing as many as four letters a week, occasionally more. No longer did her left hand balk at the glare of a page; it skittered across with a nervous energy of its own, sensitive now to every eddy of the mind and emotion that propelled it. The words flowed – now guarded, now brazen, delicate, all-thumbs, scrolled, jagged – they carried their share of the burden and in them she was able at last to see those reflections of herself she had not thought possible in seventy-six years of living. She began to compose with inordinate speed, with a soft fury of phrasing – the words tumbling out like crumpled butterfly wings, jelling in the cold squeeze of ink against the page, and glowing there as bright as icons at the fulcrum of a dream. She felt and she wrote. She thought and she wrote. She read and she wrote. Her room was full of voices and urgencies. The letters accumulated in huge piles in the corner beside the table. She re-read them at intervals. She put a rubber band around Bart Ramsay’s, and one day she sat down and began writing a letter to Mrs. Ramsay in Toronto, the first of many. By March she was so weary she often woke up in the dark with her head on the table and a sentence half-finished on a page she couldn’t recall writing.
At the end of April the Canadian Corps, now three divisions strong, went into full-scale battle, and though Eddie’s description of the combat and of trench-life itself became more circumspect – he had sensed the alarm perhaps in her letters – she was able to reconstruct the horrific events surrounding the St. Eloi craters and the subsequent battles of Mount Sorrel with enough clarity to comprehend their impact on him. On April the twenty-ninth he reported that they had slogged through slime up to their waists while under constant fire. “But we achieved our objectives, according to the C.O. That is no news at all to Henry. He left us yesterday at five o’clock. I am to write soon to his father. He was the only child of a widower. What do I say?”
For ten full days there was no letter from Eddie or any of the remaining boys. The papers boasted of the recent successful offensives, and mentioned the spearhead towards Mount Sorrel. A few days later three letters arrived, one of them from Eddie. They were all lengthy. Sandy Lecker went on and on about tracing his family tree back through the Lowlands to the broken clans of 1845. Cliff Strangways had written out several comic songs his mother had found in grandpa’s theatre-trunk – did she happen to know the music that might go with them? Eddie described the feelings he used to have when he first went skating on the pond-ice of Little Lake, and quoted from a poem by Wordsworth, the English fellow he was writing part of his thesis on. Eddie’s words were more beautiful than the poet’s. At the end of a long letter he said, “We’ve just come back from Sorrel. Ralph did not come back with us. I’ve written to his mother.”
Granny could not write for a week. For a while she thought that her arthritis had decided to stall her efforts permanently. A second letter arrived from Eddie. Was she all right? Perhaps it would be better if he only wrote once a month or so, perhaps she should not hear, right off, about the fellows leaving them. He was sorry, terribly sorry for placing such a burden on her, he had no right to do so. She wrote him back that afternoon, taking the letter down to the post office herself.
Eddie, Cliff and Sandy all wrote cheering notes to her that week, each describing in his own way the arrival of the Dumbells’ troupe for a weekend of performance before their fellow soldiers. “The spirit of 1860 and the old Colonial Theatre,” Cliff enthused. “You should have been there to see it. Arthur should have been there to take a bow.” Near the end of his letter Sandy let it be known that rumours were flying about a “big push to end the war” coming up soon, so that if they stopped writing suddenly, she was not, repeat not, to worry. Eddie’s letter was forcibly cheerful and obsessively newsy. “Don’t worry, Gran,” it concluded, “we’re certain it will be over soon.”
She dropped the letter on the table and went immediately to Arthur’s trunk. Under some posters and playbills she found what she was looking for: a vellum envelope. From it she drew a sheet of ordinary writing paper on which, in Bradley’s crabbed hand, were written several stanzas of poetry. The title over them read: “Colloquy, for Sarah.” When she had finished writing to Eddie, she copied the poem out in her own hand, then tucked the original in with the letter. This is all your father brought home to me from the wreckage of his life, she said to herself. It’s time you knew the truth about that, and about the gifts you have to carry you into the future he refused to face. You have an obligation to live. Please, Eddie.
On the evening of July 1, 1916 Granny was wakened from a restless sleep by a thunderclap that brought her upright into the silence of her living room. She felt a stabbing at her heart as if an icicle had been plunged there by the Bogeyman. My heart, she thought right away, and braced herself for the next blow. Several peremptory ‘pops’ from the direction of Bayview Park broke the momentary quiet, and she peered in puzzlement at the night-sky visible from her window. Three skyrockets, celebrating the forty-ninth birthday of the Dominion, burst against the velvet backdrop, obliterating the stars and fanning out like irradiated metallic flowers.