Fatherless Sons” by Dyson Carter.

Part one, chapter one

 

***

“Well, mother,” said young James, in 1914, a day after his nineteenth birthday. He stood proudly in the doorway wearing the Kin’s uniform.

James was the handsome one. A huge boy, yet graceful as a buck. Three of his sweethearts wept unashamedly at the station when he left.

His sister-in-law Anna, Jules’ wife, pleaded and prayed with him to the last moment. She openly begged him to desert.

“It’s right for me to go,” Jim said. “Let Jules stay in the mine. He has a family. But if the Boche* wins, we’ll all be German slaves!”

Merrily the bands played for young Jimmy.

Three years later, in 1917, there was a band to send off Jules. But by that time, the players were old men and young boys. Ypres, St. Julien, Festhubert, Arras, Vimy Ridge*… a whole Canadian generation had perished there. The weeping at Deep Rock station sounded louder than the marching songs.

Anna and her two sons, George and David, went home in a stupor of fear. Soon Grandma Madeleine moved in to live with them. It was gossiped at her church that the elder Mrs. Nelson had repeated visions of Jules’ death.

“Now the Americans have declared war, they’ll end it!” Anna assured her. “Jules won’t be sent to the front at all!”

In the little movie theater of Deep Rock, the Nelsons saw American soldiers parading. How Canada sighed with admiration for those beautiful uniforms, the guns by the millions, the alluring Hollywood actresses selling Victory Bonds!

Still, it was the British and French, the Russians and Canadians, the Anzacs* and the Sikhs*, who went on dying…

Jules Nelson was only one of the 16,000 Canadians who fell in the bloody slime of Cambrai*, breaking the back of the Kaiser’s army there. While the graves were cooling, President Wilson made speeches promising to “bring our boys home before Christmas.”

Jules had not risen from the ranks. He had only his father’s skill with pick and shovel. When his rifle jammed at Cambrai he had picked up a shovel. And that was how the gravediggers had found him. There was no medal.

So the young orphan Dave used to say to visitors, “My father was killed one month and two days before Armistice!” Somehow that was a comforting boast.

George was seven, and Dave was just five, when they first sat quietly holding hands in the big kitchen of their mother’s boarding-house, to hear the answers to their question: “What was he like, mother?”

They never dared put the question to Uncle Jim, their father’s brother. He did not return till a year after the war ended. At the station, only his mother recognized him, and she fainted.

Not that his handsome features were much changed, or that he had lost a limb. But it seemed as though he had broken trail through a blizzard of supernatural force. His face was frozen, utterly immobile. And seeing the way others shrank from his strange visage, he would look away to the horizon, neither smiling nor frowning.
”He’s stark, staring mad,” a miner told his mates.

“No, not him,” the wives said. “Jim won’t look at a person long for some sin he has in his soul. He killed prisoners, they say.”

The young women secretly whispered to each other that Jim Nelson had suffered an unmentionable wound. That was why he went off to live in the bush*, and never looked at a girl.

Before she died, his mother made one last effort to probe Jim’s secret. Both he and his dead brother had abandoned the church in their youth. Madeleine played on what fears this might have left in Jim’s memory.

“Go back just once!” she said, despairingly. “Oh my James… only once! Go to confession! Promise me, I’ll rest easier.”

In the face of death Jim Nelson seemed only to freeze more rigidly than ever. But he was efficient at his mother’s funeral, and made a good impression on the big crowd of miners and their wives at the cemetery. Afterwards, a barely perceptible change developed in him. Uncle Jim became a more frequent caller at Anna’s boarding-house. He took the youngsters< George and Dave, out to his camp. He taught them to fish, shoot and trap, to sing the old ballads of the bush-rangers and lumber workers.

No one had ever heard an angry word from him, or any sign of passion, until 1941. He came to his married nephew’s house one August night carrying a loaded rifle, and quite drunk. Standing with his big legs wide spread in the stony back yard, hefting the heavy rifle with one hand like a pistol, he roared like a bull moose. He vowed that he would kill George then and there, unless he deserted the army and fled to the north country.

“I’ll kill you myself before I let them get you!” he bellowed, cursing the government. Half a dozen men finally packed him into a car and drove him out of town.

 

NOTES:

Boche – сленг, презр. бош, немец

Ypres, St. Julien, Festhubert, Arras, Vimy Ridge – бельгийские и французские города, в районе которых происходили крупные бои во время первой мировой войны.

Victory Bonds – облигации военного займа.

Cambrai – Камбре, город на севере Франции, где в сентябре-октябре 1918 г. союзные войска нанесли немецкой армии серьезной поражение.

Anzac – австралийский илиновозеландский солдат.

Sikh – житель Пенджаба.

bush – большие пространства некультивированной земли. В Канаде это слово в переносном значении применяется, как по отношению к тайге, так и сельской местности в противоположность городу