Remembrance Read Free

whether his wife was literate. They had been so consumed with each other physically that there had not seemed much time for anything else. In retrospect, he realized he had never seenher reading the
Family Herald
(which was the only newspaper to which his father subscribed) before the lamp was blown out. The letters that he did receive contained little information, mostly descriptions of the weather in far-off Nova Scotia.
    When his troop ship finally landed in Halifax, it was snowing. He and most of the others were still in full uniform. On the dock a fellow soldier offered to sell him an army rifle that he had smuggled across the ocean in his duffle bag. He had sawed off part of the barrel so it would fit into the bag and then reattached the front sights to the shortened barrel. He also had a few shells, which he threw in as part of the bargain. The price of the transaction was a dollar.
    Later, on the overcrowded train to northeastern Nova Scotia, there was a great deal of raucous celebration. Men drank openly from their brown-bagged bottles and sang off-colour songs. Mothers tried to cover their young children’s ears. A soldier stood in the aisle with a baseball bat he had borrowed from one of the children while a friend pitched oranges to him. When the bat made contact, the oranges exploded, spraying the passengers with juice and seeds and mushy pulp. Through all this some people slept and dreamed, and froth bubbled from their lips.
    When he finally arrived, he went first to his in-laws’ house, where he assumed his wife was staying. The house was hot and overcrowded and filled with women. His father-in-law had died during the previous winter, but no one had informed him. He hugged both of his daughters,one of whom had not been born when he had enlisted. From an adjoining room his wife brought forth an energetic little boy. “This is another David MacDonald,” she said. “Say hello to Daddy.”
    The child, clearly under two years old, ran forward and hugged his brown-serged pantleg as if he had been rehearsing.
    The room lapsed into silence. He sat down, and the child sat on his lap and played with the buttons on his tunic.
    From the start, the child showed a fierce affection for him. He was later to think that perhaps he was a sort of novelty as a masculine presence in a house of so many women, but he could not be sure. For a brief time he thought that his in-laws were encouraging the child to win over his affections, but he soon realized that could not be true. The child was too young, and his in-laws were not given to that sort of planned deception.
    He went to visit his own father, whom he found as austere as ever. “Well, what do you think?” asked his father.
    “Not much,” he said, trying to sound as noncommittal as he could. He felt somehow that he should defend his wife against his father’s stern morality, but he was not sure of that either.
    When he first lay with his wife, he was hesitant and uncertain. He remembered that, in the barracks, soldiers had said that certain Arab or African men would not sleep with their wives if they knew their wives had experienced sexual relations with men other than themselves. He was not sure if this were true, or if it mattered. He realized that a lot of the talk in the barracks bordered on the fantasticaland was little more than nonsense. Still, he wondered if such talk was having an effect upon him or if it was just his own personal situation. He wondered if he would be the same had he never heard such talk and never encountered what he had.
    Too late for that.
    “I couldn’t do without it,” his wife said. “I bet you sowed a lot of your seed in Holland and Europe and all those other places.” He was surprised at her use of the phrase
sowed a lot of your seed
and realized how very little he really knew her. They had been in a married relationship for just over a year and he was not sure if he had changed or she had changed, or if it were the circumstances