The Dutch Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

young soldier’s body. Click! He took his hand away, and everyone could see that the magnet was clinging to the flesh of the soldier. He did the same with the rest of the magnets, half a dozen of them. The young soldier winced each time the magnets clicked.
    Rachel Vanderlinden, watching, winced along with him. The metal protruding from his body reminded her of a painting of some old martyr.
    “See?” the Sergeant said through the megaphone. “This brave young man still has shrapnel inside him. The doctors took a lot of it out, but there’s still bits of it floating around inside him like eggshells.” He then began roughly pulling the magnets off, ignoring the obvious pain of the young Private. He handed him his tunic. “Dismissed!” he said.
    The young soldier buttoned up and stumbled back down the stairs.
    The Sergeant spoke urgently into the megaphone: “Now, if a young lad like this wants to get back and serve his country, surely all you able-bodied men should be ashamed to stay home. Come on now, sign up right away!”
    WHEN THEY SAT DOWN at breakfast the next morning, he told Rachel he had something on his mind. He said he wanted to enlist.
    She wasn’t surprised, knowing him now as she did. Yet she was afraid even to think about living without him. For since that moment he’d knocked on her door in Queensville, they’d barely been parted, and their relationship was intense and absorbing.
    “Go if you must,” she forced herself to say. The words were like some awful, self-inflicted curse.
    “Thank you, Rachel,” he said. Then, in a coaxing voice: “And maybe now we should be honest. Let me tell you everything, what do you say?”
    She wasn’t angry with him as she once was. “No,” she said wearily. “Not now. When you come back. Tell me everything when you come back.”
    “But, what if . . .?” he said.
    “Hush,” she said. “When you come back. Tell me everything when you come back.”
    ON A MORNING THREE MONTHS AFTER THAT, baby Thomas still sleeping, she stood at the window, looking into the front yard. She hadn’t been able to sleep and had watched the coming of dawn almost as if she alone were re-creating the world. Now the first birds halted the silence. She saw the bright-red slash of a cardinal and the small lightning of finches at the feeders he’d hung in the big spruce tree. He’d said, watching the variety of birds at them, that it was like the Garden of Eden. She imagined him, now, in the trenches somewhere at the Front, missing her as she missed him. His absence was a kind of death to her, alleviated only a little by hope.
    She saw an early cyclist turning into the driveway. It was the telegram boy.
    Refusing to allow herself to think, she made herself go downstairs to the front door. The boy handed her the brown envelope. She tore it open with extreme care and saw the chilling words:
    “REGRET TO INFORM . . .”
    “Any reply?” she heard the boy ask.
    She shook her head. No reply from the Garden of Eden. She fumbled her way back into the house. She felt as if one-half of her being had been excised. All before her was the abyss.
    At that moment, and for a long time thereafter, she was certain that it would be preferable not to live any more.
    – 2 –
    SPRING, AGAIN, three years later.
    A parade was taking place along King Street and Rachel Vanderlinden, free of baby Thomas for the day, sat in the bleachers, along with those other Camberloo women who’d lost family members in the War. They applauded as each of the bands paused before them, playing martial music. After the bands came the veterans themselves, soldiers and sailors. They marched proudly, their hobnailed boots ringing on the pavement. Then came the maimed, who had to be pushed along in wheelchairs. After them came those who could barely walk, wheezing from the mustard gas; others, blinded, their faces still bandaged, leaned on the arms of their comrades; the last group tottered slowly by, some with canes and