Hero by Paul Butler Page B

than to fade into the upholstery of her chair. And this is probably what she did want. She was so still, and so quietly spoken, she might have fit in perfectly as one of the teachers I worked with in St. John’s.
    For each of Mrs. Jenson’s sidesteps regarding Mr. Smith I had a ready answer. He’s too young to be institutionalized. He can work sitting down. No need to mention the war. I was armed and marching, tambourine in hand. There was no turning back now.
    Catching up with Lucy, I pull her gently away by the wrist. She follows easily enough, though her eyes remain on the giant gingerbread man with the cherry buttons down his front. Even as we walk away she spins her head one way and another so as not to lose sight.
    â€œCome along, Lucy. You want to see the park. It’s a beautiful day.”
    How many times has this platitude escaped my lips, and how many times have I cringed inside? There are no beautiful days. Jack is dead. What remains of his young face and his auburn, wavy hair is under the soil of Belvedere Cemetery in St. John’s. My brothers are gone the same way, and their bodies—either invaded by steel or torn asunder by explosives —lay an ocean from their country in Beaumont-Hamel. Flu and tuberculosis swept away my parents, but a breath of wind might have taken them just as easily. “Flu” and “tuberculosis” are merely the medical terms for heartbreak.
    The sun may be shining upon the cobbles. The cotton wool clouds may be breaking into blue, and sylph-like young women in their frocks and pale stockings may be wafting through the streets as though this were Paris and not some provincial British town. But the scene is a cruel mirage. There have been no beautiful days since the madness began nine years ago, since sensible men and boys gathered in herds and hurrahed on the banks of Quidi Vidi Lake—a stone’s throw from the cemetery fence that would in a few short seasons encompass their mortal remains—since they all threw their hats into the air in unison, a rippling sea of human excitement at the foreign adventure due to overtake them.
    It all seemed harmless enough at the time. Ashamed as I am to remember it now, I even felt a tingle of anticipation at the stories Jimmy, Michael, and Jack might tell around the stove in the months to come. I can’t deny that even then it occurred to me something was wrong, that the tinge of excitement might harvest a terrible response. A frozen spring and the martyrdom of a young and soulful Noah were fresh enough in memory and apt enough in detail too, as men kitted up for war, rather than the hunt, and got ready to be shipped. But what had seals to do with Germany? Except, of course, that it felt the same.
    A veritable army of marching insects, they seem to me now, cheered on by their insect wives and sisters, an accumulation of limbs with no self-directing brain, no queen, no one to whom a question can be asked when the disaster of mass annihilation is complete.
    I couldn’t stay in Newfoundland after the war. When all my people were buried, parents too, I knew I could not live in a place that could be gutted of its young through the twitch of a government pen so far from our shore. A fire burned inside me, and I was startled by its heat—it was anger, determination, self-destruction if need be, but not despair. What happened, I knew, was wrong, fundamentally so. I knew the wrong spread far beyond my island home. But for Jack, Michael, and Jimmy, and the many others like them, it was different. How could I live in a place that would so happily divulge itself of any real choice in such life-or-death matters? Newfoundland no longer existed for me. It was merely a distant dream, a failed idea. I could no longer see the point of it. I had to go to where an ocean did not lie between decisions and their consequences. Not that I myself had any chance of affecting such things materially. I had no such