Howard Norman - What Is Left the Daughter

In my chair in the front row, I closed my eyes and pictured my aunt's black 2 × 2 × 3 Hartmann cushion-top wardrobe trunk, which had small brass studs along the seams, two wide black hinges in back, brass cornices and a brass lock. She'd purchased the trunk in Truro, and when it arrived by bus, Donald brought it home and set it on the dining room table. Donald, Tilda and I stood there when she first opened it, and she said, " Wallah! " like a magician, and she showed off its three inside drawers, its wooden dowels and five wooden hangers. "I looked at any number of wardrobe trunks," she said, "but this one all but said, 'Take me to Newfoundland!'"

"But as for radio static?" Magistrate Junkins said. "As to the relevance of radio static. By the way, Miss Teachout, are you keeping pace?"

I forgot to mention that Lenore Teachout was the stenographer and sat to the front and right of Magistrate Junkins.

"Yes. I had all of January and February at court in Halifax, you might remember," she said. "I'm well trained."

"Continue, then, Mr. Hillyer."

"We had the Grundig-Majestic on the kitchen table," my uncle said. "Bad weather, and I was trying to get a clear human voice. We'd get snippets. We'd get parts of updates and bulletins: 'the sinking of the ferry Caribou'— static static static — and then 'Axis U-boats plying their grim trade, no common humanity'—then more static. It can be like that with a radio, but that day it seemed outright cruelty. You see, whenever I'd put 'Angels of the Highest Order' pieces by Mr. Beethoven on the gramophone — Mr. Beethoven's a German. I'm not without appreciation for that particular German mind. Anyone who knows me can attest to that fact."

"Mr. Hillyer—"

"No, no, no, listen. I say all of that because my gramophone is old, and the recordings I had were scratchy. That's not an entirely unpleasant sound, not to my ear at least. The scratchiness, I mean. It makes you feel like the music has wended its way forward from another century. But radio static, now that's a different thing. Radio static's democratic, that I admit. It intervenes on good and bad news alike, eh? Terrifying war news or trivial information on what to purchase and in which shops. I understand all of that."

"And the point of this disquisition—?"

"The point, sir, is that when you're trying to get vital news about a loved one—"

"Sir—"

"— static intervenes. And that afternoon, before Secretary Macdonald telephoned, there was just too much goddamned static, sir."

Yet during the couple of days after the Caribou had been sunk, plenty of information had gotten through loud and clear. Personal testimonies of survivors were even quoted on the radio. To this day, I recall what one survivor, a Mr. Leonard Salter, said: " — right over the trough of a heavy swell, I was near a lifeboat and for an instant the light from floating parts of the burning ferry was such — and I've always had grand eyesight anyway — but I could see on the deck of the Laughing Cow its sailors bustling fast into the hatch. The submarine dropped out of sight then and I got pulled up into a lifeboat. Cries, wails, pleadings from the water all around. Prayers—"

The captain of the Laughing Cow — the U-boat that torpedoed the Caribou— was Ulrich Graf. His cowardice was reported in yet another broadcast. Once the Caribou had gone under, Graf took his sub down and directly beneath the survivors, who were in lifeboats, scattered on rafts, holding on to planks, holding on to anything at all for dear life. Graf had figured that the escort ship Grandmere wouldn't drop depth charges there. And in that, Graf was correct.

"Are you capable of continuing, Mr. Hillyer?" the magistrate asked.

Just before he clasped his head in his hands and rocked forward and back, forward and back, nearly falling off the witness chair, my uncle said, "Everything I love most used to happen every day: wake up, see my wife's face, maybe an improvement on a sled or toboggan already in mind. Eat break fast. Look at the sea. Go on out to the shed. Come in for lunch. But not that day. The day Hans Mohring came to make amends, that day was hell on earth. Two, three, four months earlier? I couldn't've found a day like that on the map. And now that hellish day's my permanent address."

Tilda returned to the library around eleven A.M. and sat in a back corner. Magistrate Junkins shifted his attention from his notes to my uncle, removed his reading glasses and said, "Now, Mr. Hillyer, if I understand correctly, you're something of an expert in Navy battles and have more than a general interest in the fates of seagoing vessels off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland."

"Naturally, expertise in the subject has caused torment."

"So you'd say that your mind was steeped in, or at least preoccupied with, said subject. I quote a neighbor of yours—"

"Which neighbor is that?"

"— who remains anonymous," Magistrate Junkins said in a reprimanding tone. "I quote" — he put on his spectacles again and read from a notebook—"'Donald Hillyer became a walking history lesson, often of the browbeating sort. And this lesson was unfolding on a day-by-day basis. He was fairly steaming about the U-boat sinkings. Steaming like a—'"

"My wife Constance's lungs are filled with seawater."

Magistrate Junkins closed his eyes, sighed deeply and followed that with shorter sighs. He continued reading: "'Steaming like a—'"

"Feelings of gloom and spitefulness, that's what took over," my uncle said. "How difficult is that to understand, sir?"

"'Steaming like a teapot on the boil.' Mr. Hillyer, is it true that the walls of your work shed are covered with newspaper articles about recent tragedies at sea?"

"They are German-caused murders of great proportions, whatever else you might call them." My uncle sipped some water.

There in the library I pictured the walls of the shed, all but completely covered with newspaper headlines and articles and photographs. You read the incidents left to right like a book, in the chronological order in which they happened. All the U-boat attacks off Atlantic Canada were represented — the ferries lost, the number of casualties, the number of dead and missing and presumed lost, photographs of people waiting at docks and wharfs, of church gatherings and wakes.

For instance, on the wall on the immediate left as you walked in, headlines about the Battle of the St. Lawrence, as it was popularly known, which occurred on the night of May 11, 1942, when U-553 torpedoed and sunk the British freighter Nicoya off the Gaspe and the Dutch ship Leto in the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence River. Both ships were bound for England. That attack roiled my uncle in the extreme.

Now, Marlais, I won't inventory the seventeen merchant ships sunk by U-boats, plus an American merchant ship and two Canadian warships that were sunk near the St. Lawrence over sixteen months, starting around May of 1942—and the Caribou right in the center of all of it. But before the Caribou went down at sea, each time any sort of vessel was attacked, up went an article on the shed wall. And since I was working in that shed long hours every day, I couldn't help but practically memorize them. Against my will, almost, I was becoming a student of these incidents. The shed walls became my harrowing reading life, you might say. "The walls ran the gamut," as my aunt put it, "from you-wouldn't-think-it-could-get-sadder to sadder-yet. 'Lost at sea' has its own strange quality. Out to the cemetery, you put on the stone 'Sacred to the Memory,' of course. But since the body's not in the ground, it's somehow a more hollow feeling. Read the newspapers. Listen to the radio. Talk to your neighbors. Even sermons in church. These past few years it's as if the whole of Atlantic Canada feels hollow."