Sometimes the wind was good, and sometimes it wasn’t. Windward, leeward, when there was no wind, it was difficult to trawl, despite Jimmy’s valiant efforts to set the sail. With just the two of them on the boat, Alexander loosened the staysail and while the sloop floated in the Atlantic, they sat and had a smoke.
Jimmy said, “Good God, man, why do you always wear that shirt down to your wrists? You must be dying of heat. Roll it up. Take it off.”
And Alexander said, “Jimmy, man, forget about my shirt, why don’t you get yourself a new boat? You’d make a heap more money. I know this was your old man’s, but do yourself a favor, invest in a f*cking boat.”
“I got no money for a new boat.”
“Borrow it from a bank. They’re bending over backwards to help men get on their feet after the war. Get a fifteen-year boat mortgage. With the money you’ll make, you’ll pay it back in two years.”
Jimmy got excited. Suddenly he said, “Go halves with me.”
“What?”
“It’ll be our boat. And we’ll split the profits.”
“Jimmy, I—”
Jimmy jumped up, spilling his beer. “We’ll get another deckhand, another 12-trap trawl; we’ll get a 1300-gallon live tank. You’re right, we’ll make a heap.”
“Jimmy, wait—you have the wrong idea. We’re not staying here.” Alexander sat with the cigarette dangling from his fingers.
Jimmy became visibly upset. “Why would you be leaving? She likes it here, you keep saying so. You’re working, the boy’s doing all right. Why would you go?”
Alexander put the cigarette back in his mouth.
“You’ll have the winters off to do what you want.”
Alexander shook his head.
Jimmy raised his voice. “So why’d you get a job if you were just going to raise anchor in a month?”
“I got a job because I need work. What are we going to live on, your good graces?”
“I haven’t worked full time like this since before the war.” Jimmy spat. “What am I going to do after you leave?”
“Plenty of men are coming back now,” Alexander said. “You’ll get someone else. I’m sorry, Jim.”
Jimmy turned away and started untying the rope from the staysail. “Just great.” He didn’t look at Alexander. “But tell me, who else is going to work like you?”
That evening, as Alexander was sitting in his chair, showing Anthony how to tie a hitch knot through the marlinspike in his hands while they were waiting for Tatiana to go for their evening walk, there was shouting, and what was unusual this time was that a male voice was participating.
Tatiana came out.
“Mama, do you hear? He’s fighting back!”
“I hear, son.” She exchanged a glance with Alexander. “You two ready?”
They walked out the gate and started slowly down the road—all of them trying to hear the words instead of just the raised voices.
“Odd, no?” Alexander said. “The colonel arguing.”
“Yes,” Tatiana said in the tone of someone who was saying, isn’t it fantastic.
He glanced puzzled at her.
They strained to listen. A minute later, the mother came barreling out of the backyard, pushing the wheelchair with Nick in it through the tall grass. She nearly knocked herself and her husband over.
Thrusting the chair into the front yard, she said, “Here, sit! Happy now? You want to sit here all by yourself in the front so that passersby can gawk at you like you’re an animal in a zoo, go ahead. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about anything.”
“That much is obvious!” the colonel yelled as she stormed away. He was panting.
Tatiana and Alexander lowered their heads. Anthony said, “Hi, Nick.”
“Anthony! Shh.”
Anthony opened the gate and went in. “Want a cigarette? Mama, come here.”
She looked at Alexander. “Can I have a cigarette for him?” she whispered.
But it was Alexander who went to the colonel—his body and face slightly twisted—took out a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and held it to the colonel’s mouth.
The man inhaled, exhaled, but without his previous fervor with Tatiana. He didn’t speak.
Tatiana put her hand on Nick’s shoulder. Anthony brought him a stag beetle, a dead wasp, a raw old potato. “Look,” he said, “look at the wasp.”
Nick looked, but said nothing. The cigarette calmed him down. He had another one.
“Want a drink, Colonel?” Alexander asked suddenly. “There is a bar down on Main Street.”
Nick nodded in the direction of the house. “They won’t let me go.”
“We won’t ask them,” Alexander said. “Imagine their surprise when they come out and find you gone. They’ll think you wheeled yourself down the hill.”
This made Colonel Nicholas Moore smile. “The image of that is worth all the screeching later. OK, let’s go.”
Swezey’s was the only bar in Stonington. Children weren’t allowed in bars.
“I’m going to take Anthony on the swings,” Tatiana said. “You two have fun.”
Inside Alexander ordered two whiskeys. Holding both glasses, he clinked them, and put the drink to Nick’s mouth. The liquor went in one gulp. “Should we order another one?”
“You know,” said Nick, “why don’t you order me a whole bottle? I haven’t had a drink since I got hit eighteen months ago. I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t worry,” Alexander said, and bought Nick and himself a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They sat in the corner, smoking and drinking.
“So what’s the matter with your wife, Colonel?” Alexander asked. “Why is she always so ticked off?”
They were leaning toward each other, the colonel in a wheelchair, the captain by his side.
Nick shook his head. “Look at me. Can you blame her? But not to worry—the army is going to get me a round-the-clock nurse soon. She’ll take care of me.”
They sat.
“Tell me about your wife,” Nick said. “She’s not afraid of me. Not like others around here. She’s seen this before?”
Alexander nodded. “She’s seen this before.”
Nick’s face brightened. “Does she want a job? The army will pay her ten dollars a day for my care. What do you say? A little more money for your family.”
“No,” Alexander said. “She was a nurse long enough. No more nursing for her.” He added, “We don’t need the money, we’re fine.”
“Come on, everyone needs money. You can get yourself your own house instead of living with crazy Janet.”
“And what’s she going to do with the boy?”
“Bring him, too.”
“No.”
Nick fell quiet, but not before making a desperate noise. “We’re on a waiting list for a nurse, but we can’t get one,” he said. “There aren’t enough of them. They’ve all quit. Their men are coming back, they want to have babies, they don’t want their wives to work.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “I don’t want my wife to work. Especially not as a nurse.”
“If I don’t get a nurse, Bessie says she’s going to send me to the Army Hospital in Bangor. Says I’d be better off there.”
Alexander poured more needed drink down the man’s throat.
“They’ll certainly be happier if I’m there,” Nick said.
“They don’t seem like a happy pair.”
“No, no. Before the war, they were great.”
“Where d’you get hit?”
“In Belgium. Battle of the Bulge. And there I was thinking colonels didn’t get hit. Rank Has Its Privileges and all that. But a shell exploded, my captain and lieutenant both died, and I was burned. I would’ve been fine, but I was on the ground for fourteen hours before I got picked up by another platoon. The limbs got infected, couldn’t be saved.”
More drink, more smoke.
Nick said, “They should’ve just left me in the woods. It would’ve been over for me five hundred and fifty days ago, five hundred and fifty nights ago.”
He calmed down by degrees, helped by whiskey and the smokes. Finally he muttered, “She is so good, your wife.”
“Yes,” said Alexander.
“So fresh and young. So lovely to look at.”
“Yes,” said Alexander, closing his eyes.
“And she doesn’t yell at you.”
“No. Though I reckon she sometimes wants to.”
“Oh, to have such restraint in my Bessie. She used to be a fine woman. And the girl was such a loving girl.”
More drink, more smoke.
“But have you noticed since coming back,” said Nick, “that there are things that women just don’t know? Won’t know. They don’t understand what it was like. They see me like this, they think this is the worst. They don’t know. That’s the chasm. You go through something that changes you. You see things you can’t unsee. Then you are sleepwalking through your actual life, shell-shocked. Do you know, when I think of myself, I have legs? In my dreams I’m always marching. And when I wake up, I’m on the floor, I’ve fallen out of bed. I now sleep on the floor because I kept rolling over and falling while dreaming. When I dream of myself, I’m carrying my weapons, and I’m in the back of a battalion. I’m in a tank, I’m yelling, I’m always screaming in my dreams. This way! That way! Fire! Cease! Forward! March! Fire, fire, fire!”
Alexander lowered his head, his arms drooping on the table.
“I wake up and I don’t know where I am. And Bessie is saying, what’s the matter? You’re not paying attention to me. You haven’t said anything about my new dress. You end up living with someone who cooks your food for you and who used to open her legs for you, but you don’t know them at all. You don’t understand them, nor they you. You’re two strangers thrown together. In my dreams, with legs, after marching, I’m always leaving, wandering off, long gone. I don’t know where I am but I’m never here, never with them. Is it like that with you, too?”
Alexander quietly smoked, downing another glass of whiskey, and another. “No,” he finally said. “My wife and I have the opposite problem. She carried weapons and shot at men who came to kill her. She was in hospitals, on battlefields, on frontlines. She was in DP camps and concentration camps. She starved through a frozen, blockaded city. She lost everyone she ever loved.” Alexander took half a glass of sour mash into his throat and still couldn’t keep himself from groaning. “She knows, sees, and understands everything. Perhaps less now, but that’s my fault. I haven’t been much of a—” he broke off. “Much of anything. Our problem isn’t that we don’t understand each other. Our problem is that we do. We can’t look at each other, can’t speak one innocent word, can’t touch each other without touching the cross on our backs. There is simply never any peace.” Another stiff drink went into Alexander’s throat.
Suddenly Tatiana appeared in the dark corner. “Alexander,” she whispered, “it’s eleven o’clock. You have to be up at four.”
He looked up at her bleakly.
She glanced at Nick, who was staring at her with a knowing, full expression. “What have you been telling him?”
“We’ve just been reminiscing,” said the colonel. “About the good old days that brought us here.”
Slightly slurred, Alexander said he would be right back and stood up, knocking over his chair and swaying away. Tatiana was left alone with Nick.
“He tells me you’re a nurse,” Nick said.
“I was.”
He fell silent.
“What do you need?” She placed her hand on him. “What is it?”
His moist eyes were pleading. “Do you have morphine?”
Tatiana straightened up. “What’s hurting?”
“Every single f*cking thing that’s left of me,” he said. “Got enough morphine for that?”
“Nick…”
“Please. Please. Enough morphine so that I never feel again.”
“Nick, dear God…”
“When it gets unbearable for your husband, he’s got the weapons he cleans, he can just blow his brains out. But what about me?”
Nick couldn’t grab her, but he threw his body forward to her. “Who is going to blow my brains out, Tania?” he whispered.
“Nick, please!” Her hands were propping him up, but he’d had too much to drink and was listing.
Alexander came back, unsteady on his feet. Nick stopped speaking.
Tatiana had to wheel Nick up the steep hill herself because Alexander kept releasing the handlebars and Nick kept rolling back down. It took her a long time to get him to his house. Nick’s wife and daughter were purple with ire. The shrieking would have been sweeter for Tatiana had the colonel not spoken to her, but since he had, and since Alexander himself was too drunk to react to the histrionics of the two women, and since Nick Moore was also in a stupor, the punchline of the joke—a quadruple amputee in a wheelchair vanishing from the front lawn—went unappreciated by all parties, except for Anthony the following day.
The next morning Alexander had three cups of black coffee, staggered to work hung over, could put down only three traps at a time instead of the usual twelve, and came back with barely seventy lobsters, all of them chickens or one-pounders. He refused his pay, fell asleep right after dinner and never woke up until Anthony screamed in the middle of the night.
In the evening after supper, Tatiana went outside with a cup of tea, and Alexander wasn’t there. He and Anthony were with Nick in the next yard. Alexander had even taken his chair. Anthony was looking for bugs, and the two men were talking. Tatiana watched them for a few minutes and then went back inside. She sat down at the empty kitchen table and, surprising herself, burst into tears.
And the next night, and the next. Alexander didn’t even say anything to her. He just went, and he and Nick sat together, while Anthony played nearby. He started leaving his chair on Nick’s front lawn.