Content warning for occasional use of period-appropriate terms for indigenous, First Nations persons follows.
Part of The Stone Gryphon story cycle.
To the Chinese Merchant Seamen who served this country well during both world wars.
For those who gave their lives for this country - Thank You.
To the many Chinese Merchant Seamen who after both world wars were required to leave.
For their wives and partners who were left in ignorance of what happened to their men.
For the children who never knew their fathers. This is a small reminder of what took place. We hope nothing like it will ever happen again.
FOR YOUR MEMORY
Liverpool Chinese Seaman Memorial, installed 26 January 2006
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV)
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence."
Leonardo da Vinci
From: Miss Polly Plummer
Dunstable
Stains Square
Beds.
England
To: Miss Rita LeBlanc
LeBlanc Camp Supply
Church Street
Amherst
NS
Canada
15 February 1946
Dear Rita:
Thank you for the kind condolences on Richard's passing. As I mentioned in my last letter, this was the worst sort of lingering illness, robbing a brilliant, infuriating man of his strength, health, wit, and mind over a painfully long period of years. It has taken a very long time for his body to finish its work.
I, unfortunately, cannot make the journey to see you this time. Whipsnade is fantastically busy trying to return the animals from the London Zoo that took refuge here. Having a functioning zoo is so important to morale and as difficult as the War was, we are in for long years of recovery and rebuilding. Gerry, that enterprising junior keeper I wrote you about, has had the brilliant idea of using the craters on the property made by the dropping bombs. We are going to line the holes and turn them into ponds for our water fowl – assuming we can find the building materials to do the job. This will be a recurring problem, I think.
So, in my stead, you will finally be able to meet Asim and Mary. Mary was grateful for your letters and very much appreciated the retelling of Richard's harassment of the beavers and the she-beaver's revenge upon him. With this finally over, and Richard delivered into Her hands – his term – I think Mary is ashamed to feel relief. She is fleeing England and no one blames her for this desire for freedom beyond the sick room she has been tending for the last four years.
Asim at one time would go where Mary leads. In this case, he comes to see you for his own purposes. I still do not fully comprehend them for all that we have known each other for many years. Perhaps you will see in him what Lucy does.
I do hope that Lucy joins them. In this way, you may finally meet the young woman who (according to Asim's report) shines like the sun, just as you had told me, 20 years ago!
Rita, it took me a long time to see all this clearly and to find what I had lost. Or, perhaps better, to understand what I wanted and to pursue it with courage as you have. I made important decisions after we first met, and they were better ones than I might have otherwise made.
Once some semblance of normalcy returns to Whipsnade, we shall likely resume what had once been regular correspondence and visits with the zoological societies in Toronto, Montreal, and New York. The War put off many things and deeper knowledge in animal care is one of them. For the first time in a long time, I can confidently say that I shall surely see you before the end of the year. In the meantime, enjoy your visit with my dear friends and all my love to Clara.
With warmest regards,
Polly
PS – just as I was sending this, I understand that Lucy and her brother, Peter, are both coming. This is all to the good.
3 June 1946
"It's never just a train ride!" Mary uttered the pronouncement with profound, and ominously prophetic, satisfaction.
Peter hefted Mary's case next to his own on the overhead rack and then stumbled into the seat across from hers just as the train lurched forward. "Only my trust that Asim's encyclopedic knowledge of railway timetables extends even to Nova Scotia lines and your impatience to get to Joggins assures me that you've not somehow bribed the engineer to take us to the Northwest Territories instead of Amherst."
"I'd never find fossils in the permafrost, Peter." She hauled their pack from the floor to her lap and began rooting through it.
"Don't you want to save those rations if we do end up diverted to Labrador?"
Mary drew Richard's 25-year old battered Joggins field book out of the pack and peered over her glasses at him. "You're impugning my competence, again. I'm perfectly capable of stretching rations and supplies all the way to North Pole and back if necessary to sustain the four of us." She sniffed disapprovingly. "Pity I wasn't there when you were haled back to Narnia the second time. Only a torch, a sandwich and a pocketknife amongst you?! Really."
This was always a sore point for her – that she had not been summoned as so many around her had. In this case, though, Mary's enthusiasm for the fossil site in the Bay of Fundy probably preempted even a trip Down the Rabbit Hole. And Peter had learned something of how to soothe her pique over the years.
"You are quite right, of course. I've trusted your provisioning since you saw me off to traverse the immense distance from Oxford to Cambridge with sufficient supply to sustain four people for a week at Harold and Alberta's and another week kipping out in the Professor's garden."
"More Mary management," she muttered.
He didn't argue the point. Peter stretched his legs to prop his boots up on the edge of her seat then regretted it as the train swayed. Wincing from the strain, he pulled his left leg back down. He'd be carrying this remnant of the shrapnel he took behind a hedgerow outside Escoville for the rest of his life. The injuries he sustained in Narnia had never troubled him here. He didn't have that luxury anymore.
"The fossils have been there 300 million years. They could have waited another day or two for your leg to limber up," Mary said.
As much as he wanted to deny the discomfort, he didn't lie to Mary and couldn't hide it from her, regardless. "It will be fine once we're moving around more. I'm just glad to be off the ship."
"Boats," Mary said, grinning. "Do tell me your opinion of them."
"I bloody hate them," Peter replied, matching her tone.
"Wasn't it that obnoxious swordmaster who told you swear like a soldier, or not at all?"
"Yes, but I wasn't really fluent in invective until the Ox & Bucks. Learned from the best."
"It is good of you to soldier on, Peter, despite the obvious pain."
He waved away the solicitude, which was kind but unnecessary. "Getting out of Halifax was sufficient incentive."
Halifax may have been one of the most important ports of the War for England, but it was a rough place that thousands of soldiers had looted on V-E Day less than a year ago. When all of Nova Scotia beckoned, there was no reason to tarry.
It was truly a relief as the train lurched again and they began to pick up speed. The grubby grey of Halifax would be behind them, soon.
Peter started to crane his neck around but Mary interrupted. "They're fine. Praying now, it looks like."
Lucy and Asim were sitting as he and Mary were, facing one another, behind him, at the other end of the train car.
"How was she? I didn't see her at breakfast."
"Only the prospect of missing the train and a telegram from Lee catching up with us in Amherst got Lucy out of bed. Lucy continues to labor under the assumption that there will be something for Lee to tell us that warrants sending a telegram. Probably a mistaken assumption," Mary concluded bitterly.
"I think Lucy is the only one expecting anything after so many weeks."
Mary nodded and angrily brushed away the tears that suddenly splashed down her cheek. She determinedly turned another page in the field book.
Hearing it repeated and saying it himself couldn't seem to make it any more possible or credible to him. As horrible as it was, he simply couldn't credit it, except that it had plainly happened
The Chinese men of Liverpool, all veterans of the British Merchant Navy, were disappearing. It had been going on for months. As best they could tell, hundreds of men had disappeared, suddenly, leaving their families and jobs, and without a word.
Among the vanished, Kwong Lee and Lin Kun's son, Yi. Yi had gone to work one morning in March to the Merseyside docks and never came home. The Blue Funnel shipping line had denied knowing anything, then said that surely Yi had stolen aboard a ship and fled England to escape his responsibilities. And then said that he was probably a drunk, been murdered, and his body thrown into the sea. Then they said he was a communist agitator who had obviously gotten in trouble with the Kuomintang nationalist government and that was why he had disappeared. Lucy and Lee thought there was some truth to that one and suspected that Blue Funnel, in league with the Liverpool police, had targeted unionists and men with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and forcefully deported them.
The Home Office said it wasn't responsible for what happened to non-citizens, which made no sense. Yi had carried a seaman's card, which should have been as good as any passport.
Most fundamentally, the men of the Merchant Navy had served, and died, just like the rest of them, in the War. And, the Chinese men had done it for less pay – a cause Lucy had been agitating about since 1942. And now England was thanking them for their service and sacrifice by turning a blind eye to what could most charitably be called repatriation and looked more like mass kidnapping.
Lee and Kun were furious, they all were. Yi's wife, Maureen, was distraught, pregnant with their second child, and Yi's son, Clancy, still asked for Papa every day. Mary and Lucy had argued to the Home Office that it should exert itself because Yi was married to a British subject, which a doughy bureaucrat had dismissed with a sneer because Maureen was Irish and the marriage in common law.
Lucy had thrown herself into the cause, writing letters, demanding meetings, and being such a gadfly, she'd been arrested for trespass and banned from the Merseyside docks. The helplessness, lack of information, and futility had badly affected her.
"I was able to get her out of bed but not in time to eat anything," Mary said, rightly reading where his thoughts had turned. She patted the pack. "Asim has some rations and he'll try later."
"Thank you." He had been saying this to Mary and Asim a lot, since they'd left Liverpool, and weeks before that. "I just can't seem to help her. I had really thought being at sea would help."
"Was Lucy prone to melancholy?"
"Not Lucy, no. She could be very excitable, and as there were many times she was deliriously happy, there were occasional times when she would be subdued or disappointed. But it never happened often, certainly never for so long. Or so profoundly."
He glanced back to see Lucy, scrunched in her seat, smaller, grayer, deeply diminished.
Mary shifted the pack off her lap and leaned forward. "Peter? I've been wondering…"
He turned back and regarded her warily, having to lean in to hear her soft words over the clack of the train. "What?"
"Forgive me, I know this can be fraught but…"
Mary glanced over his shoulder, evidently assuring herself that Lucy was not paying them any attention, but dropped her voice lower still. "Do you think there might be something from Narnia that explains why Lucy feels this all so very personally?"
He puzzled through her peculiar choice of words. "What do you mean?"
"You've told me before about Edmund leaving his wife behind and that you think Morgan was pregnant?"
He nodded slowly.
"But what about Lucy?"
"No," he said, even as it came out, the denial sounded automatic and even rehearsed. "She and Aidan were together; he had children but Lucy wasn't… didn't..."
He was unfairly interpreting Mary's steady, sympathetic look as condescending.
"I've just been thinking about how profound her grief is and wondering if maybe something had happened before, that she'd forgotten and is now remembering."
He shook his head. "I don't remember anything like that."
Mary reached out and clasped his hand. "You all do not remember the same things, or in the same way. Some of that is surely just the way people see and experience things, but, I don't know if that really explains all of it. And you've said that you didn't remember there anything of your life here until you returned. So…" Even Mary stumbled with the mere suggestion of it.
"And the same effect could apply here," Peter replied, viscerally rejecting the idea and hating her sympathetic logic.
"I don't know, of course. But Lucy has been taking this all so dreadfully, worse even than Maureen and Clancy. And I know it's made me regret…" Her voice broke and he returned a gentle squeeze of her hands then released her as Mary fumbled for a handkerchief in the pocket of her khakis.
"Mary…"
She shook her head and blew her nose. "It was despicable of me to not understand how much Richard would have wanted to be with Wangari and their children. I should have never kept them apart."
"They chose their lives, Mary. They chose to live thousands of miles apart. Blame the War, if you must. It's what kept Wangari from getting to England."
"Don't minimize it!" she snapped. "I could have done more, when he first got sick."
"I don't think…" Peter stopped. He wouldn't lie to Mary, as brutal as the truth may be. "It was a very bad situation and your selfishness didn't help lessen the misery for everyone. But if you insist on berating yourself, also recognize you've since made amends and Wangari is very grateful for your support to her family. Don't repeat the mistake by letting how you feel detract from what's best for Yi's family."
Her pale face flushed red with anger and then faded. "I won't." She blew her nose forcefully, shoved the handkerchief away, and began rummaging again through the pack, removing her treasured copy of The Hobbit.
"Thanks," Peter said, taking the book from her. He'd started it on the boat and was hoping Smaug would appear soon.
"Freud called it projection, you know," Mary said, staring out at the green of Nova Scotia now rolling by. "You take impulses and feelings you cannot accept in yourself and attribute them to someone else. I'm sorry. I might have been doing that with my theory on Lucy."
"Perhaps." Peter removed his bookmark. Bilbo had just rescued the dwarves from the Elven King's dungeons and sent them all down the river in barrels. "But I can't explain how I forgot England, my parents, or what a lamppost was except that it must have been Aslan's doing. If you are projecting your grief and anger, maybe Lucy is as well. Certainly her bears are beyond anything I've ever seen that she's suffered before."
Mary glanced over his shoulder and smiled. "Well, she's eating something from Asim's pack, so that's better. Perhaps the bears are beginning to dissipate."
"Bears" was a very grim term that had described melancholy in Narnia, dating from Jadis' first year when Bears and other hibernating Beasts had kept on sleeping when Spring never came and eventually died of starvation in their dens and nests. Narnians took "the bears" very seriously.
"From what Polly said, Rita keeps a very good table so perhaps that will tempt her appetite where a ship's mess didn't."
Peter glanced behind him and saw Lucy chewing on a biscuit and pointing out something outside their window to Asim. Asim intercepted his look and nodded slightly.
He turned back and fingered the book's pages. "Mary? Does Asim understand Rita's…" He paused to let her fill in the blank.
"Arrangement with Clara?"
He nodded. For the rest of them, their relationship wasn't a concern, or their business, at all. But Peter had wondered if Asim was so sanguine about such things.
She shook her head. "Asim has his eyes and mind upon his God, spying, and War. I don't think there's room for anything else. Over the years, we've endured all manner of behaviors from fellow travelers and hosts – some of it very loud, mind you – and Asim just doesn't notice such things at all."
Peter wasn't surprised, really. He'd never seen Asim look at or comment upon any man or woman, except to provide the assessments of a spy or the revelations of a man of God. He remembered once that Susan had remarked upon how beautiful Jill Pole's mother was and Asim's only comment was to recite her height, weight, eye and hair colour.
Mary leaned forward and tapped the book. "Smaug is coming. Get reading. Eustace and I both want to know what you think of him."
As the sun finally disappeared for the day beneath the horizon, Asim excused himself from the chocolate conclusion to Rita LeBlanc's excellent meal to wash, collect himself, and recite the West prayer, ṣalāt al-maġrib, under an endless, wide sky in a new place.
And at its end, he called upon Allah, Who is most forgiving and merciful, with thankfulness and praise, and added, as he had done for months, a special du'aa for Lin Yi and his family.
You Alone do we worship and You Alone do we ask for help.
After, he considered going into the kitchen to help with clean up, but from the sounds behind the heavy, swinging door, Mary and Peter were already there with Clara. A cup of tea and cake – chocolate encasing layers of sponge, raspberry, and buttercream – waited for him on the cleared dining table.
The cake was superlative, nearly French in execution, as best he remembered the patisserie of Paris. The tea was properly brewed if a little weaker than he preferred it. It was simply very pleasant to be able enjoy both and he whispered a sincere thanks to God for the many gifts of safe voyage, good companions, and very good food.
He went out to the front porch to savor the tea with Lucy and Rita. Netting kept the worst of the biting insects away, which were prodigious in Nova Scotia. Rita was leaning against the railing and Lucy was swinging in the porch swing and actually eating a very large cake slice. English peacetime food was little better than that in wartime and, while sufficiently sustaining, neither was it especially stimulating to a dulled appetite.
"So you will endure our collective bonfire, rather than help with the dishes?" Rita asked.
"I have never been very good with dishwashing unless it involves scrubbing with sand and boiling water at a campsite. But if I must turn my back upon you to avoid a headache, please do not be offended."
Rita laughed.
"Do not be surprised if he fetches sunglasses to wear even though it's dark," Lucy said, and set her dessert plate down on the rail with a look of almost surprise. She even picked at the crumbs and licked them off her fingers. "Asim has become so thoroughly accustomed to miracles he no longer remarks upon them at all."
"You misunderstand, Lucy. Say, rather, I no longer try to anticipate God's miraculous gifts. I humbly learned that lesson the day you flew out of a tree, caught me completely unawares, and knocked me unconscious." It was still embarrassing to recall.
"Dreams are fickle guides," Rita agreed.
Both Lin Kun and Professor Kirke had considered his and Lucy's calamitous first meeting as another example demonstrating their theorem that God had a sense of humor which, of course, was not the case at all. God who is great granted him fewer miracles these days. When he did see a dream now, it was usually of ominous portent – often of a dead Crow or Mole, or a rusted, broken sword. No such dreams intruded on the voyage from England to Amherst.
He inhaled deeply, catchy the scent of the Bay. Their journey from England had been unremarkable – an adequate ship, two meals a day, no leaks, fair weather, and a cramped cabin he and Peter had shared with four other men. The Bay of Fundy was something else entirely, a new experience, wild, cold, large, dangerous and there were purportedly rare whales at its entrance and a type of black and white bird resembling a penguin. "I am looking forward to seeing the tidal bore come up the Bay. The only one I've ever seen before was in Bristol up the River Severn. Rita, is it possible to get a good viewing of it?"
"You mean without being swept away by the largest tidal range in the world?"
"That would be preferable, yes." Earlier that day he had noticed that, as she waited on customers at her camping and outfitters store, Rita could be impatient with tourists who did not respect the place around them. She was harsh with those determined to stupidly endanger themselves. Mary had taught him much about dealing with such personalities. "Hence why I asked you, a local expert, to avoid such a fate."
She visibly relaxed. "Then yes, of course. There are several places, only a few miles from here, with very good overlooks of the Maccan River. You can even get muddy when the water sloshes up over the banks. But if you really want the proper experience of the Bore, I can take you out in a boat and we can ride it."
He dropped his cup onto the saucer, astonished. It sounded terribly foolhardy, not something he expected from Rita at all. "Surely, it's very dangerous?"
"If you do what I tell you, not at all. The longest ride would be from Chignecto Bay up the Petitcodiac River. We could ride the Bore almost 20 miles. But the Maccan River is closer, and runs faster. We'd get good running around the Shubenacadie, too."
Rita spoke with authority he wouldn't question, though local pride might also be a factor – he thought the Petitcodiac River was in New Brunswick. "I would like that very much and leave to your judgment which to do, when, and how many times we may make the trip."
"So you would rather ride the Bore than go to Joggins…"
Asim nodded vigorously. Things fossilized in rocks were even less interesting than things that hid under rocks or basked on top of them.
"Then we can go as many times as you like while you are here."
Lucy dropped her boot to the deck, stopping her swaying in the porch swing. "What is the Bore? Besides Lawrence Holt?"
Lawrence Holt was the manager of the Blue Funnel Line and had received all of Lucy's passionate advocacy on behalf of the missing Chinese and an increasing amount of her scorn. At Holt's request, the Liverpool police arrested Lucy whenever she tried to enter the Blue Funnel offices and yards.
"The Bay of Fundy has the greatest distance between low and high tides in the world and the Bay gets narrower and shallower the further in you go," Rita said. "And the water naturally rocks back and forth. It all works to create the Bore that pushes water up the Bay at high tide, twice a day."
Rita gestured to his tea cup. "May I? We can refill your cup."
As he nodded, she picked up his cup and tilted it until tea sloshed over the rim. "It's like that, but, bigger, of course. Going from one end to the other, the water at the mouth of the Bay takes about 13 hours to rock up to the headwaters, and back down."
She set the now half empty cup back in the saucer and handed it back to him. "And by the way…"
As Rita again turned severe, Asim pretended to take a sip and then set the cup on railing, tipping it so the rest spilled out.
"I reviewed the tide tables with Mary and she has an accurate watch and understood them and the dangers of not being caught on the Joggins beach when the tide comes in. Peter seemed uninterested in it all. Do I need to threaten him and order him off the beaches?"
"Peter is accustomed to someone else being his logistics man. He'll trust Mary to keep them from drowning. But never mind him. So, you are saying the Bore is a tide?" Lucy prompted.
"Yes, of a sort. With the huge difference between high and low tide, and the rocking, as the water comes in from the ocean, it creates a huge, long wave and rapids that surge into the Bay and all the local rivers that feed it. It's strong enough that it changes the course of the rivers and forces them upstream."
"How big is the wave?" The one he saw in Bristol had been a long, steady wave moving up the Severn that sloshed over the banks, but it hadn't been very high.
"I've seen it as high as four meters. We should get very high waves later this month with the lunar eclipse and the moon being so close. When the moon gets big, so does the Bore."
The lunar eclipse was on the fourteenth of the month and being able to ride the Bore during such time would make up for not being able to see it where it would be visible over the Indian Ocean.
"Rita, that sound marvelous and infinitely superior to Mary's rocks," Lucy exclaimed, sounding genuinely excited. "We can leave her and Peter to Joggins and ride the Bore ourselves!"
"So they wouldn't want to come out?"
"Mary will likely want to try it once, and maybe more if she finds the fossils less engrossing than expected," Asim said. As he understood it, the reptiles that Mary was most interested in were not at Joggins. She and Peter both were coming here mostly to escape England and as a pilgrimage to honour Richard.
"As for Peter, he vastly prefers dry land and having only just arrived in Nova Scotia, he won't want to get back in a boat. And if he did, he would surely fall out of it," Lucy said. She pushed off the porch's planked deck and the swing swayed and creaked. "If you want to see him turn positively green, just mention the part about the water rocking backing and forth."
Rita clapped her hands and rubbed them with satisfaction. "Wonderful! I would love to take you around the Bay. Clara and I can work out who will cover the store. There's no reason either of you needs to go to Joggins. You're welcome to stay here at the house and not camp at the cliffs at all."
"Oh! Goodness, Rita, that's so kind to offer to put up with us!"
Asim knew his answer already, though Clara and Rita's cooking was an incentive to stay and avoid camp rations. "Thank you, and as much as I would enjoy your hospitality, it's been too long since I've camped and I'm looking forward to exploring the area." And solitude. "Of course, I would welcome your guiding of the area."
The squeaking swing paused and Lucy tapped her boot on the deck. "If I stayed here, I might get any telegram from Kwong Lee sooner."
"Not by much," Rita replied. "I would drive out to your camp if something did come."
Asim weighed his words and spoke the truth he felt. "Lucy, you should do as you wish, of course, but stopping everything for news that will most likely not come after so long would not be helpful for you or anyone else."
Lucy's mood immediately swerved back to the grim place she'd been in for weeks and she visibly sagged on the porch swing. Rita moved across the creaking porch to sit beside her and Lucy began searching her trousers for the ever-present and often used handkerchief.
For a time, there were only the sounds of gulls, the nightly buzz of insects, the creak of the swing, and Lucy sniffling.
"It's just horrid, kidnapping loyal Chinese men and destroying their families. I still can't believe the government did this, or let Blue Funnel do it, which is much the same thing. "
Rita held Lucy's hand in her own. "It is awful. But is it really so shocking?"
"Yes!" Lucy pulled away. "We're not Nazis! We fought the War and beat them to stop this sort of brutality."
"Yes," Rita agreed slowly. "The Allies defeated Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, but I don't think it changed people that much."
"What do you mean, Rita?"
"The War didn't change Canada or Nova Scotia at all. They still treat the Mi'kmaq as horribly as before."
Lucy's fretting stilled and Asim sensed that she mustered herself to attend. "In what way?"
"Like what is happening in Liverpool, from what you've said, with the government breaking up families and sending people away because of their race. Canadian authorities have been stealing Mi'kmaq children away for decades. They still are. I have cousins I've not seen for years that are locked up in a residential school Shubenacadie. We aren't permitted to see them."
Lucy stiffened with outrage and Asim wondered if this fresh brutality would divert and divide her grief, or magnify it.
"This is outrageous! Why?"
"Well, the reasons given are that we're unfit parents. But the reality is that if Mi'kmaq parents lose their children, eventually, we disappear." Rita shrugged. "And then we're just like everyone else, except not, of course."
"Separating children from families is an effective way to destroy a people," Asim added.
Rita sighed. "I know it seems shocking to you, Lucy, and I'm not minimizing what's happening in England. But I would be more surprised if they'd done anything except break up mixed race families and deport the men. And in a few months, they'll declare the mothers unfit because they can't support their children without the husbands they deported and pass the children into orphanages or adoption to white families."
"Oh, Rita, I didn't know. I'm so sorry." Lucy tried to take Rita's hands in her own, but Rita pulled away and rose from their seat.
The plates clinked loudly as Rita roughly stacked them. "It's not as if it's new. The British, Americans, and Europeans have done it for centuries."
"Australia, too," Asim added. "A man from the 9th Division told me about it during the North Africa campaigns. The government removes Aboriginal children from their families." The soldier had told him of orphans from church homes having to flee Japanese bombings along the north coast.
"Of course they do," Rita said with a snort of disgust. "And surely for the same reasons America and Canada take Indian children." Rita moved silverware around on the plates. "There's no reason to think the War stopped it anywhere. It's still happening here, it's happening in Liverpool. Ireland is a horror."
"What about Ireland?" he injected quickly, curious and concerned. "Yi's wife is Irish. Should she not go back?"
Rita shook her head so vigorously, her black braid bounced about her broad shoulders. "Not if she's unmarried and pregnant. Clara and I are helping two Irish girls in Halifax who managed to run away. They both got pregnant during the War and were sent to a laundry in Dublin, worked like slaves, and nuns took their babies away. They say there is a graveyard in the back of the laundry where they buried the women and babies who died there."
"I don't know if Maureen was thinking of going back to her family. I'll telegram Lee in the morning and warn her."
Lucy nodded and looked at him, eyes dry and a little sharper. "You aren't any more surprised than Rita is, are you?
Lucy was a young woman and so had some of this bitter experience and she felt injustice more keenly than anyone he had ever known. But she couldn't understand the full brunt of prejudice, not completely, because she would never live race and class as he had, or even more deeply as Rita did, who was both a woman and an Indian.
"It is one reason I have been, skeptical, I suppose. Whites have been separating families for our own good for centuries. In a sense the Nazis were unique only in that they were so very effective at it and made no pretense of trying to civilize Jewish children. They just gassed them along with everyone else."
Rita gathered up the dishes and silverware and stalked inside, the doors banging behind her eloquently expressing her anger. Lucy drifted back and forth in the porch swing; she was muttering softly under her breath, which meant a conversation with Aslan, or one of her loved ones from beyond the Wall. The similarities between her own losses and those they had discussed were surely difficult.
And, as if on cue, Lucy broke into his thoughts. "How do you reconcile such evil in the world with God?"
He settled across from her in a slatted wooden chair that was more comfortable than it looked. "Isn't this an inquiry better made to Professor Kirke?"
"Yes. However, he is not here and he doesn't actually believe in God, or at least not presently. The Professor's spiritual relationship with the Divine Creator is very much a lifetime's work in progress. You have seen terrible things yet continue to believe, devoutly, in an all-knowing, all-merciful, all-powerful God. How?"
How do you reconcile Aslan's benevolence with the pain of your own separation from your loved ones at the Wall of Water and Lilies?
"I have long thought you would not be a good Muslim, Lucy."
"I have though the same thing, my friend." She shoved off the porch floor again with her foot, setting the swing to rocking again. "I am curious why you think so."
It was so difficult to articulate but he would try. Lucy waited. It never came out as clearly as it should and always left him feeling inadequate and clumsy. Praise to you.
"God – Allah – is Creator of everything, all that is good and perfect and so all that is evil is also His Work, in furtherance of His Purposes. His wisdom is unbounded, complete, and limitless. My wisdom, on the other hand, is imperfect and..."
He had to pause again moment to try to articulate such unfathomable greatness and goodness as compared to his own inadequacy. The poor words eventually came. "My understanding and knowledge are limited and imperfect. Understanding of why there is evil and suffering in the world is something only the Compassionate One has, not to me. Only through humility and patience might I ever begin to understand it."
"And I am not patient at all, nor particularly humble."
"No."
"It's really just a variation on 'Not a Tame Lion.'" Lucy grumbled. "God moves in a mysterious way."
"I would say, in ways that I cannot comprehend though God who is all-knowing does."
"But if understanding is impossible, then what? What is the point? Why not just crawl into a cave like a hibernating bear and never come out?"
"Or stay in bed and never rise from it?"
Lucy scowled, acknowledging the challenge she had been unable to meet of late.
"Can't say I worry much about understanding the nature of evil." Rita stood in the doorway with a warm teapot and a glass of a strong smelling liquor. "Peter wanted to try Canadian whiskey and I surely need one if we're going to carry on this conversation. Lucy, you can share mine, or I can get you your own glass."
She warmed his own tea cup and gave it back to him. "Thank you, Rita."
"Come, sit, we'll share the drink." Lucy patted her swing. "I want to hear why you don't fret about reconciling evil and a benevolent, all powerful God."
Rita shrugged. "Clara would say that I'm just not the sort who thinks about these big, profound things." She set the teapot down and flopped into the swing, sending it rocking back hard enough that both women giggled. "To me, it's irrelevant. I don't have to understand it. I just have to fight it."
"But don't you ever get tired?"
"Yes, of course. That's what whiskey, friends and food are for." She sipped her whiskey and offered the glass to Lucy who took a very deep drink and handed it back.
He sipped the tea and it was weaker than before. Perhaps Canadian coffee was better or maybe Rita and Clara just didn't brew tea very often.
"When I get really discouraged and angry, I don't like that person very much and I have to let others carry on without me for a little while." Rita raised her glass in salute to those unseen helpmates. "But I'm not giving up. I was able to stay with my father and mother because others were already fighting this fight for decades. If we stop now, it will never change and we lose our children and the Mi'kmaq forever."
"I admire that courage so much, Rita. It's just that … we failed. I failed." Lucy made it sound a profound self-indictment. "I couldn't stop it. I can't see how to stop it and it's still happening."
Rita laughed with a harsh scoff, sounding a little rude and probably thinking that Lucy sounded naïve. "It's still happening here, too. That doesn't mean you stop trying."
It occurred to him that Lucy might be struggling under something that he had seen with Peter and, at one time, with Susan during her SOE training – the burden of only having ever succeeded. "Lucy, it may be that, perhaps, in your extraordinary double life, you did not know anything but victory. As someone who has lost more battles than I have won, I can say with confidence that you can do everything you can, everything you should, and you still may not carry the day."
Rita cast him a narrow look and he had the sense of being a disapproved-of tourist who had not followed her instructions precisely enough and was now wading into dangerous waters.
"My point being," he added, "that you are courageous, valiant, in everyday life, but it requires a very special steel to go back and fight again, even knowing you might very well lose."
"Isn't that definition of madness?" Lucy asked, with a bitter smile.
"To that I can say only that, Lucy, you know full well it can't be helped going among mad people."
Lucy's smile was brighter, recognizing the well-loved quote that was well-used amongst them. "We're all mad here, aren't we?"
"No, it's not madness," Rita injected before he could say something else she disapproved of. "It's hope."
It took a solid three wet, muddy, insect-ridden weeks of hard work before Lucy felt like she was shaking off the miasma of grief that had engulfed her since Liverpool and before. She hated these bears but had not been able to beat them back on her own.
She was able to, eventually, stop fretting over telegrams that she came to accept would not come. There was only one message from Lee. Maureen had heeded their warning and decided to not return to Ireland. It seemed a very small victory until she spent time with Mary and Bridget, the two Irish runaways and heard of the horrors they endured in the Magdalen laundries.
She spent a few nights at the Joggins campsite but it just wasn't that interesting and she ended up going back to stay with Clara and Rita. In their home, though, it was impossible to stay abed when every morning Clara baked something that perfumed the house with scents of butter, maple syrup and chocolate. And their lives were so busy, she couldn't have gone back to bed. Rita would drag her off to help open the outfitters store until Clara appeared to drag her off for lunch and then Rita would drag her off to visit her extended Mi'kmaq family in nearby towns. She joined Rita and other Mi'kmaq and they went and banged on the doors of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, which was a horrible, dour place.
She wondered at Asim who, she had thought, had come for solitude, camping, and prayer. He did borrow a car to spend a few days alone, further north and west, and came back absolutely gobsmacked at the size of a bull moose he had encountered on the road. He earned Rita's respect by confiding in properly awed tones, "It reminded me of a rhinoceros."
He prayed as he always did, perhaps a bit longer, but, after his trip, surprised her by frequently staying at Rita and Clara's, and it wasn't just for the amazing food. Though she assumed he would have eschewed it as women's work, he went with her and Clara to Halifax to help Bridget and Mary. He repaired the lock on the door to the tiny apartment they shared with two other women, caulked a window, and repaired broken floorboards. Asim was so attentive to Bridget and Mary's search for jobs that did not involve laundry, he investigated the hiring hotels and restaurants to report on those that did not seem to abuse their cooks and maids. He also came when they visited the ailing Mi'kmaq elders Rita and Clara shopped and cooked for.
The visits with the elders were especially hard and she scolded herself for wishing, again, for her cordial. If you want to help sick people, you're going to have to do it like everyone else does. The difference was that, while the she was still very irritated at the barrier, it was beginning to look like something that maybe she needed to try to hurdle. Or smash. That meant going back to beastly school but Lucy was coming to see that not being qualified to heal except by magic was even more beastly.
Mary had managed to keep Peter from drowning in the Joggins tides. Rita did take the four of them out for an overnight to the beaver lodge they had all heard so much about. Peter didn't get sick but did capsize the canoe that, with Asim handling the logistics and Mary's planning, did not contain all their overnight supplies. For Peter and Mary, there were drunken, maudlin, tearful toasts to Richard. Rita gave them a splendid re-telling of the Tale of the Irate She-Beaver And The Foolish Man Who Antagonised Her. She taught Mary and Rita the Moose Song.
The Bore was unlike any sea voyage she had ever had, more like trying to navigate a swift running river – but without the rocks. It was wonderful. She would cling to the gunwales of the boat's bow, relishing in how the water would crash over and around her and swamp the boat as Rita piloted them expertly through the rollicking waves.
And today promised to be the best. It was brilliantly clear, windy, and the water was choppy enough to make the boat bounce even before the Bore came in. Rita said the waves would be the highest they had yet seen.
From her perch on the bow, Lucy shrugged about in the mac and boots, pleased that they did not hang on her as they had three weeks ago. It wouldn't matter if she'd been wrapped in oilskin; by the time they finished riding this Bore, she'd be soaked to the skin.
"Peter does look very uncomfortable," Rita commented from the stern. "He'll probably feel better once the waves start coming in. Or at least distracted."
Lucy shaded her eyes and looked at the other boat, a few meters away. Mary had taken the position at the bow – of course she would – with Clara at the stern managing the engine as Rita was on their boat. Peter was in the middle, clutching the sides and looking very tense. Beyond the boat were the mudflats and shallows, stretching a kilometer or more all the way to the distant, rocky coast. In a few minutes, the Bore would pour in and fill it all up.
"What happens if he goes in?"
"He's wearing the life jacket. He floats. We pull him in." Rita cut the engine to a rumbling idle. That way, they wouldn't have to shout and would be able to hear the roaring Bore before they actually saw it.
"It would probably be best if we effectuated the rescue," Asim said. Like Peter, Asim was in the middle of the boat, but very at ease. "I'm not sure Mary would be able to pull him in on her own as Clara must manage the engine."
Rita nodded. "Clara and I already agreed we'd do that."
Lucy looked about, watching the plovers and sandpipers step delicately through the mud for food. The water would push them back shortly, only to recede again, leaving the birds to even greater feasts. They had seen ospreys before, too.
"Rita, Polly mentioned the story of the Star Husband. Would you tell it?"
"Now?"
"We have a little time."
Rita rolled her eyes. "It's a story for little girls who think it is very romantic."
"Perhaps," Lucy replied. "Yet it was very important to Polly when she heard it." She hadn't been ready to hear it before. She wasn't sure if she was ready to hear it now.
"We could sing the moose song instead," Rita offered.
"Please, no," Asim begged.
Physician, heal thyself.
"I would like to hear the story if you're willing."
Rita glanced at her wristwatch. "Oh, very well. But no romantic sighs."
Not romantic ones, no.
"Once, a young woman fell in love with a young man. Sadly, the man died and became a star in the heavens. But the woman's love for her husband was so strong, it remained even onto his death. Every night she would longingly gaze up at the sky so that she could look upon her husband, even though they were apart."
"Now it also happened that there was a Mikmuesu, that is, a wicked wizard, and he also fell in love with the widow. He blew up a storm cloud to block her view of her star husband and she was sad and longed to again see her husband."
The Putuwatkw Melkiknaq Wjusunn, that is, the One Who Blows Strong Winds, saw the wicked doings of the Mi'kmuesu and tried to clear the sky with his breath. But, the Mi'kmuesu was too powerful and the young woman could still not see her star husband. So, the Kaqtukwowiskw, that is the Thunder Goddess, formed a thunderstorm to open the heavens. Again, the Mi'kmuesu magic was stronger and the woman could not see her star husband.
So moved by the woman's love, the Putuwatkw Melkiknaq Wjusunn and the Kaqtukwowiskw created The Great Blue Heron to carry the young woman to her husband in the sky. The couple now shines brightly for all to see their love."
Lucy felt her throat tighten; her tears might have been from the wind. "Thank you, Rita."
She clutched the side of the boat a little harder and watched an osprey dive into the Bay and flap away with a silver fish in its talons. Like many other birds of prey, ospreys mated for life. Would seeing your loved ones be better than hearing them, as she heard those beyond the Wall, still? Was it a blessing to know? Or curse?
Lucy turned her face into the wind and let it whip the tears from her face. She thought she knew the answer. Yi would never see or hear his wife. Yi, Bridget and Mary would never hear or see their children. The War had left so many widows, widowers, and orphans. She was not alone in her losses.
Inexplicably, governments were worsening that tragedy. And that, she could try to do something about.
"The Mi'kmaq have many stories of Star Husbands and their wives," Rita said. Stating what was obvious to Lucy, she added, "I never loved a man like that and I'm very glad of it, especially given what happens to our children. "
"That seems very wise," Lucy replied, turning back to face the stern. The possibility of a child ending up in the Residential School was unthinkably horrible. There was, of course, a great deal more to it than not wanting children. Rita and Clara were deeply in love and had been together for nearly ten years. "What did you think of the story, Asim?"
"I do not see how a magician could overpower the gods."
"Though if a magician was responsible for evil, than that would solve the problem of an all-loving God, wouldn't it?" Rita asked.
"But not an all-powerful God," Lucy responded. She had not resolved it. She could not resolve Aslan's love for His Children and Creation with the loss and evil. She probably never would. But she had come to see, as Rita did, that it didn't much matter. "And so we are back to where we started."
"Not entirely," Asim said, surprising her.
She couldn't read his expression. Asim's beard was longer than it had been during the War and he was wearing sunglasses and gazing intently toward the mouth of the Bay, probably still hoping for a glimpse of a rare whale.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
His words were measured and slow. "With the War over, I have been thinking and praying on what I should do in peacetime."
"So riding tidal waves isn't enough!?" Rita exclaimed.
"Write a memoir!" Lucy added. Truly Asim's biography would be remarkable.
He was still watching the waves. Perhaps she and Rita were exceptionally bright that day. "These contemplations have brought me back to our first night's discussion of the nature of evil and our response to it. I thank you for the example you set and helping me see what I should not need a dream to reveal."
Asim was usually so clear and fluent in his speech. However, his faith was so profound and deeply felt, he found the words slowly and often spoke them haltingly.
The boat began to rock a little harder and a rumbling roar began rising in the distance. The Bore was coming.
"Though I can never comprehend the fullness of God's purposes, I can know them better. The Prophet said, 'Feed the hungry, visit the sick, and free the captives.' Surely it is time for me to devote greater efforts to a fuller accomplishment of that hadith."
This hadith then was why he had been joining them. It was a duty and he would fulfill it. If it had been another person, Lucy would have reached out and touched Asim's hand or shoulder. But she never did that with him. He never touched a woman.
"God is Great," she whispered to him. He wouldn't hear her over the growing roar of the Bore and the sputtering engine but would not need to to know what she felt.
"Thank you," Rita said. "You have been helpful and kind." She murmured something in her own language and Asim gravely inclined his head. A blessing perhaps.
"Now are we ready?" Rita gripped the tiller, and turned the boat around to race toward the incoming wave.
"Yes!" she shouted.
Rita opened up the throttle. Lucy spared at a glance at her brother in the next boat; Clara had pulled alongside them and the boats were bouncing together across the water towards the incoming wave. They would all feel this banging of water meeting boat meeting flesh in their joints and bones. Peter was hunkered as far into the boat as he could get and was being a terrific sport. Maybe he would enjoy the speed and the surfing and not vomit. Or fall out.
Lucy took a deep breath, tightly gripped the lines anchored to the boat, and leaned into the waves already arcing up over the bow. Water splashed her face and stung her eyes. Oh! It was so cold! Glorious!
Thank you, Aslan for this gift.
The wave was coming. The birds were hurriedly flapping away off the flats to escape the flooding tide. She braced herself as Rita shouted, "To the starboard!"
Rita spun the boat about, so now the wave would catch them at the stern and push them forward. Lucy glanced behind her and the wave was larger than any they had ridden – could it be even higher than 4 meters?
The wave caught them and pushed, picking the boat up like a bit of flotsam and driving it forward. They flew across the Bay, like a dolphin in the water riding a wake.
Until Peter fell out.
A long time coming. Thanks for those who've been so kind during this long hiatus. Notes and links are included on AO3 posting and my Dreamwidth account regarding this this complex chapter in which everyone learns a lot and talks a lot, but not a lot happens.
I have worked very hard to be true to both Islam and the Mi'kmaq. I don't have a sensitivity reader so if something isn't right, please let me know, politely.
As the saying goes, this has all happened before and it will all happen again. It was only in the last few months that the impetus to tell this story became more urgent and I've struggled over the summer to pull this chapter together and its disparate philosophical, historical, religious and ethical threads.
The deportation of the Chinese sailors from Liverpool after the War and Lucy's reaction to it have been part of this story for many years. You can read more about this disgraceful episode from links on my AO3 posting and DW. Lucy's fury and despair in losing, really for the first time, is an old element of the story. Her profound sense of personal loss, however, is new. Also new, but very relevant to today's experience, is the fatigue that comes as part of resistance.
The impact and inhumanity of U.S. policies separating immigrant and refugee families are all over the news and don't need to be summarized. Not surprisingly, US policies have resulted in dredging up other similar, historical church and government-sponsored actions. Obviously, African American families were broken apart with impunity during the era of lawful slavery. The history of the US government removing indigenous children from their families is summarized in numerous sources. Another example are the Magdalen Laundries. Their enduring and shameful presence in Ireland was discussed as recently as Pope Francis' visit to Ireland in August 2018. There are many excellent resources about the Residential System in Canada and the US that were essentially institutionalized abuse and pedophilia of aboriginal children and erasure of aboriginal culture. In Australia, the practice of removing indigenous children from their families and institutionalizing them is referred to as the Stolen Generations.
Links to all this research in my DW and AO3 posting.
