Hat Girl by Wanda Campbell

Author:Wanda Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signature Editions
Published: 2013-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

5

Pillbox

In the week since I had been back from the hospital on the mainland, I was having trouble sleeping, and the clocks falling back didn’t help. I slept in till nearly noon, but when I awoke, I already felt exhausted. There is nothing like sustained weariness to fill the world with woe. I rolled over and turned on the clock radio. Though Remembrance Day was still a week away, they were leading up to it by interviewing people who had lived through the wars, their numbers diminishing year by year. This morning the voices were talking about an abbey somewhere in France. When the inhabitants returned after the war, they noticed that the snowdrops in the courtyard were growing in different places. They thought that maybe the Nazis had hidden something, and they had — the bodies of young Canadian prisoners of war who had been shot in cold blood while standing in a circle, their hands joined.

Hemingway thought that writers who dismissed war as an unimportant or abnormal or diseased subject were just jealous because they had missed out on something irreplaceable. He himself had been just the right age to get a crack at all the major wars of the century. It wasn’t that he thought it was all guts and glamour. In A Farewell to Arms, he wrote: Now for a long time, I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. Nonetheless, he believed war gave a writer a great advantage. Where else could you observe this kind of desperation and wounding on a daily basis? Where else could you see courage and fear and violence stripped clean of domestic complications and rituals? Where else could you learn to look at death without shutting your eyes?

I looked up through the skylight, remembering my first glimpse of Luke’s torso through that gap. Luke was gone, taking his lissom body with him, taking the large tools in his red metal box, and the tiny tools on the timepiece I had given him. He had vanished to the life-sized version of Toronto, away from the miniature version the two of us had built in my backyard. And now I found myself thinking about Hemingway again. Ernest came seeping back, the way seawater will eventually fill up the hole you make in the sand, if you dig it deep enough.

The Sovereign Remedy was one of Hemingway’s many names for death. There would be only the moment of taking the jump and it is very easy for me to take almost any sort of jump, Hemingway had written, explaining that going off an ocean liner at night would be best, next to dying while asleep. But there were only cruise ships now, and people would notice if you jumped off the Gannet Island ferry. They would throw out life preservers, or dive into the cold water after you.

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