When he reaches the Legion Hall he climbs the steep steps and seats himself in front of the blue double doors. From this vantage he can look out over the railway line and into open countryside. At the foot of the steps is Connaught’s memorial to two World Wars, a mortar anchored in a slab of cement. The neck of a Coke bottle protrudes from its muzzle. Kids can’t resist stuffing it with garbage. Daniel estimates the trajectory of the bottle if it were really a shell. He sees it launched over the rails, soaring over a mile of tired, over-grazed, beaten-down pasture and wolf willow, landing like thunder on a dun-coloured knoll outcropped with headstones and crosses. The second bomb to go off there in the last ten days.
Daniel shakes his head at the thought and reaches into his shirt pocket for the cigarette he hooked from his mother’s package earlier that day. Before lighting it he casts a nervous, furtive glance up the street. He always comes to the steps of the Legion Hall for his evening smoke because from here he can see for a block in both directions up the street. He doesn’t want to be taken by surprise by his mother. When it comes to her there is no such thing as being too sure. Daniel wouldn’t put it past her to tail him if she noticed that her cigarettes had gone missing.
He sits, hugging his knees, smoking. When he feels lonely, as he does now, Daniel thinks of himself as Montgomery Clift. When his mother makes him mad he thinks of himself as James Dean. The thing about James Dean is the anger and pride of his apartness. The thing about Montgomery Clift is the sadness and loneliness of his apartness. Tonight Daniel is more Montgomery Clift. He hunches himself up like Montgomery Clift and toys with and broods over his cigarette the way Montgomery Clift does. The evening is a sort of Montgomery Clift evening, too, quiet and still and slow. A kid in a Yankees baseball cap goes by, pedalling his bike so lazily that he has to crank the front wheel from side to side just to keep himself upright, steering with one hand and ringing the bell on his handlebars with the other, simply making noise to keep himself company. If he could see Daniel huddled at the top of the steps he would stop muddling along in a dream. But he doesn’t. He just goes on ringing his bell the length of the street. The fainter it grows the more sweetly it chimes until it ripples so plaintive and frail that Daniel can’t be sure he is hearing it or the memory of it. And then a car drives by with its windows rolled down and teenagers laughing and a radio playing and that is nearly as good as the bell.
Daniel grinds the cigarette out beneath his heel. He has one more stop to make before returning home. He wants to visit the wall.
During his first days in Connaught Daniel had come upon the back of the hardware store (what he thinks of as the wall) by accident, taking a shortcut home down the alley behind Main Street. There were two things unusual about the wall. It was all blank brick except for a single tiny window set high on the second floor and its brick was not the common, reddish variety but a brick the colour of certain kinds of raw clay, a strong yellow. Still, he might never have noticed it if it hadn’t been for the little boy crouched on his haunches before it, intently scraping away at the brick with some sort of tool.
Daniel had halted in the lane and listened to the dry, persistent scratching. What’s he up to? Daniel had asked himself. For several minutes curiosity kept him standing there, absolutely still, observing the child work. Then, as people will, the kid had sensed that someone was watching him. He froze. Then slowly his toes began to edge around in the dust, his face twisted around over the point of his shoulder. Seeing Daniel, a big boy, and, worse, a stranger, he settled lower on his heels, trying to shrink, trying to make himself disappear against the bold, glaring, yellow backdrop of the wall. All Daniel had been able to make out were two eyes peering over the tops of knees, two dirty hands clenching shins.
“What you doing, kid?” Daniel had said, trying to make himself sound friendly. He took a step forward.
Question and step were too much for the boy. He broke for it. There was a wild, high, flickering kick of heels, a whirling and circling of arms as he swerved around the corner of the hardware and vanished.
“Hey!” Daniel had called out regretfully. “Hey!” But it had been no use, he was gone.
When Daniel had approached the wall for a closer examination, the first thing he had noticed was an old awl lying at the foundations where the boy had dropped it before he ran. It seemed he had been doing something forbidden.
Then Daniel raised his eyes up to the wall. It was a blur of scratches. To the height a man could reach and for its entire length it was written all over. Scarcely a brick was untouched. Amazed, Daniel had not been able to resist stretching out his hand and running his forefinger along the deep grooves that had been worked into the brick.
What a strange effect those words and signs, those scrawled fucks and sentimental, arrow-stricken hearts, those names and dates had had on Daniel who had never felt he had belonged anywhere. All those things collected there, year after year, by common consent. Everyone agreed that there was the place to leave your mark and say your say. In the very centre of the wall was the earliest date which Daniel could find, accompanied by three names: Avery Toper, Sam Kyle & J.S. Vance, he had read, Enlisted Oct. 9, 1915. For King and Country. They must have been the beginning of the tradition, the fathers of all the rest, because from that date and those names later dates and other names spiralled outward like the funnel of a tornado spinning out from the calm, unchanging eye of the storm. Daniel had counted forty-three names of men announcing enlistment between 1914 and 1918.
After the war, the custom of putting a mark on the wall had not ended but it had altered. People wrote things other than names and dates, so that the wall, like the peace itself, grew more disorderly. The brick swarmed with autograph-book rhymes (Love many, trust few/Always paddle your own canoe), insults (Walter Herbert is a stock diddler), declarations of love (John R. & Sharon S., Eternally).
Now once again finding himself facing the wall, as he has so many times in recent evenings past, Daniel can’t explain why standing here makes him feel less lonely, less apart. Maybe it’s the feeling that he is on the threshold of a room, crowded and noisy and bustling with life, a party which has been running for years.
Seeing his uncle’s name up there also helps him to feel somehow part of it. It’s the only name on the wall he can put a face to. He’s seen his mother’s snapshot of his uncle, a boy in his baseball uniform. In fact, he recently asked to look at it again to search it for some resemblance to himself. His grandfather keeps slipping and calling him Earl.
His uncle’s name is high on the wall, so high Daniel has to tilt his head way back to find it. Earl Monkman, May 2, 1946, the wall says, Forever and Beyond. He had told his mother about discovering his Uncle Earl’s name on the wall and asked her what Forever and Beyond might mean. She had laughed. “There must have been another name you missed,” she had said. “It was something we used to write as teenagers. Arnold and Mabel, Forever and Beyond. It meant undying love. The next time you’re there find the other name and let me know who it is. I’d be curious to know.”
Daniel had checked. But there was no other name linked to his uncle’s. Only Earl Monkman, May 2, 1946, Forever and Beyond.
8
For Vera, peace proved to be a great confusion. In the months following the end of the war she began to suspect that life in the Army had cruelly unsuited her for what she now had to face. Being a sergeant had taught her that she preferred giving orders to taking them. Already it was becoming clear that women were expected to quickly lose that acquired taste.