Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 in a three-part series of stories about the aftermath of the First World War. Culture Summerside engaged 15 writers in the Summerside area for its project titled “1919 – P.E.I. Soldiers Return from the Great War.” The following work of fiction, along with the newspaper image that inspired it, is one of the submissions that will appear in a booklet to be distributed at a commemorative event on May 26.
The Other Soldier
By Carolyn Rowe-Turner
“Maman?”
Géraldine’s eyes burrow into the knots of the kitchen table. The young mother doesn’t hear her daughter. She is lost, lost in the spirals of the darkened pine. It has been one year, two weeks and three long days since Father Albert appeared on her doorstep, on that dark and cloudy day. If it wasn’t for holding bébé Félix, she would have collapsed. The furrow in his brow, the sorrow in his eyes said it all. Father Albert embraced mother and child, absorbing her cries. He is mistaken. I will hear word. I will. She refused to accept this intimate casualty of war.
The sun has yet to break through the clouds, for as much as Géraldine could care or see. Joseph promised me he would return. Une promesse, c’est une promesse.
“Maman,” Camille tugs at her mother’s sleeve.
These days, the Wellington Station is a gathering place. Soldiers trickle in, returning from the war. It is a time of quiet jubilation—salt on her open wound. For Géraldine, hope fades like the fog over the glen. Joseph’s shadow will be all that she welcomes home.
Bébé Félix babbles in the corner, eating his porridge, oblivious to the worries that laden his mother. “Maman!” Camille stomps her little feet, shakes her mother, pleading, “MAMAN!” Géraldine, pulled from her melancholy, cups her child’s face in her hands and stares into her little one’s innocence, thinking to herself, no child should grow up without their papa.
“Oui, ma p’tite. What is it?”
“J’ai fini mon déjeuner. Je peux jouer?”
“Of course, go play, the chores will wait.”
Her mind’s eye turns to bébé Félix wailing in the corner. When will she have the courage to tell her children that Papa will not be returning home, ever again?
Not today.
She puts on her mask.
She soldiers on.
