Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

One evening, Kathleen has instructed Mercedes and Frances to play on their own while she finishes a letter to Daddy — “… school is great … lots of fun….” By now she finds their chatter less distracting than their eager silence.

Frances is at the reins of the covered wagon they’ve made from Kathleen’s bedspread. “When I grow up I’m going to have so much hair and be the boss of everything and I’ll be singing and eating candy.”

Mercedes is the pioneer mother with the babies. “Me too, and when I grow up I’m going to the Old Country and visit Sitdy and Jitdy.”

“Me too.”

Kathleen looks up from her letter. “They’re not in ‘the Old Country’. What are you talking about?”

Frances clicks her tongue at the horses, Mercedes comforts the monkey baby and answers, “Yes, because they prospered —”

“But then they missed the fruits and diamonds —”

“They darn well live in Sydney,” says Kathleen.

Frances blinks and the horses disappear. The babies cool to porcelain and rubber in Mercedes’ arms. “… Mumma said —”

“I don’t care what she said, they live in Sydney and they hate us, they’re stupid rotten idiots and we’re better off without them.” Kathleen tosses her pencil onto the desk and stands up. “What shall we read?”

Frances looks to Mercedes. Mercedes says, “The magazine.”

“No,” Kathleen decrees.

“The Red Shoes.”

Frances enthuses, “Oh yes, and she gets her feet chopped off.”

Mercedes bursts into tears. Then so does Frances.

“She does not get her feet chopped off,” says Kathleen.

Frances sobs, “She does, she does.”

Mercedes wails, “She does.”

“Not if I say she doesn’t.”

But they are inconsolable, clinging to each other and crying for Mumma.

“What a couple of sissies, come on, we’ll read something else.”

She wipes their noses, hands Frances her hairbrush and settles Mercedes in her lap.

“Can we sleep with you tonight?”

“Oh all right, get in —”

“Yay!”

And when they’ve snuggled down, “Now clam up and listen. The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore —”

It’s wonderful when Kathleen reads because she does all different voices and accents. “‘Suah’s yo’ lib, we do keep a-movin’!’ cried Dinah, as she climbed into the big depot wagon. Dinah, the colored maid, had been with the family so long the children called her Dinah Bobbsey, although her real name was Mrs Sam Johnston.’”

Downstairs, Materia wrings her hands before a big bout of cleaning and baking. She received a telegram today. James is coming home.

On a cold April afternoon in 1917, James got the inspiration for his boot business from a French soldier near Vimy.

The Frenchman wandered skeletal from the fog, his bare feet sucking the yellow muck where James was looking for wounded. The Frenchman drove his thumbs into either side of James’s windpipe, slamming him into the slime, holding his head under. Then he went to work on James’s boots, slicing the laces. James wrenched up and stuck the man. Luckily no one saw for the fog — the French were our allies.

From that moment, boots are all James can think about. It’s the only thing that will drown the sound of his bayonet scraping between Frenchie’s peekaboo ribs, and the sight of him scarecrowing off the end when James managed to shoot free — under and up, ladies, under and up. Boots are what count. More than weapons, food or strategy. We will win because we have more and better boots, boots determine history. Warm dry feet will allow us to go on being killed longer than the enemy. When the enemy’s boots wear out, they will no longer be able to run in waves into our machine-gun fire, and they will surrender. I’m going to be ready for the next war by making boots. I’ll be rich enough to send my daughter to the conservatory in Halifax for a year, then to anywhere in the world. But not Milan or Salzburg or even London. The Old World is a graveyard. “‘Is’t not fine to dance and sing, When the bells of death do ring?’” No, it isn’t. The great music will immigrate to the New World. New York. James can smell it. He has a distant cousin there — an old maid with an odd first name … Giles — that’s it — she works with the nuns. Everything is turning out beautifully. Everything’s going to be fine. Spit and polish, rise and shine.

James starts polishing his boots every day, sometimes all day, because often all day is all there is. Between the rips and rotten bits, around his exposed toes, the remains of James’s boots positively glow through the perpetual fog. The other men call him “Rudolph”.

It is this habit of the boots that prevents James from yet another tour of duty, although he’s volunteered. His superiors determine that he is no longer fit for combat conditions. Sticking someone is perfectly normal in the mud culture. Obsessively polishing a pair of disintegrating boots is not. It’s shell-shock. James’s superiors do not refer to him as “Rudolph;” they call him “Lady Macbeth”.

Along with an invisible part of himself, James loses a toe. It falls off, painlessly. And is seized and carried away by a rat right before his eyes. If the shell-shock hadn’t got him, this thing with the toe would have. So, out of consideration for a man’s pride, “shell-shock” is not what James’s superiors write on his discharge; not even “battle fatigue”. Officially he is invalided out because of the injury to his foot.

James is taken out of the drowning pools of Passchendaele and across the Channel to Buckingham Palace, where he is awarded the Distinguished Service Order “for extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy”. During the ceremony he looks from people’s footwear to their faces and decides whether or not they match.

He is shipped home to be honourably discharged. No one can know how tired he is. He will be tired for the rest of his life.

When James sees Halifax Harbour from the deck of the troopship in December 1917, he revises his plans for Kathleen. He’ll have to send her straight to New York City. Halifax has been blown up. He doesn’t wonder how or why. The war has grazed the edge of Canada, is all.

A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don’t take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you’ve gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can’t remember who you were before the war. There’s a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.

The Great War was the greatest changer of them all.

James has one thing in common with the man who marched off to the wars three years before: their daughter, Kathleen. On December 10, 1917, he steps off the train in Sydney, an unexploded shell.

He has had a few years’ practice being present and absent at the same time so he is able to find his way from Sydney to New Waterford. He walks the nine miles of frosted dirt road in his civvies, his duffel bag over his shoulder, and with each step his mind says, “Sydney, New Waterford. Sydney, New Waterford.” To his left is Europe.