PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2017 Kathleen Winter
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Winter, Kathleen, author
Lost in September / Kathleen Winter.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780345810120
eBook ISBN 9780345810144
I. Title.
PS8595.I618L67 2017 C813′.54 C2017-900883-8
Book design by Jennifer Griffiths
Cover and interior illustrations by Jennifer Griffiths
v4.1
a
For my mother,
who has always loved dogs
I know,
I know and you know, we knew,
we did not know, we
were there, after all, and not there
and at times when
only the void stood between us we got
all the way to each other.
PAUL CELAN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PART I: YELLOW MAN
1 Gregorian Chant
2 His Flute
3 Madame Blanchard
4 Lonely Calèche
5 Costco
6 Fire-Ships
7 Gay Village
8 Doppelgänger
9 Little White Words
10 A Soldier’s Exile
PART II: BLUE MAN
11 The Hag
12 Dragonfly Girls
13 Oyster
14 The Moping Owl to the Moon Complains
15 Umbrellas
PART III: RED MAN
16 Madame Blanchard
17 Watermelons
18 Finding Harold
19 Nobody
20 Babies
PART IV: GREEN MAN
21 JW’s Letter
22 The Ravelled Sleave
23 The Foulon
24 Who Am I in the Night
25 Deathstalker
26 Bright Game
27 Stolons
Acknowledgements
About the Author
JANUARY 2, 2018
SAINT ALFEGE CHURCH
GREENWICH, LONDON
UNITED KINGDOM
Dear James Wolfe,
I wanted to write this book in time for your birthday. Silly, I know, but why not place it on your grave here at Saint Alfege on this day that celebrates your life? That is, after all, what I have tried to do in these pages. Forgive me if I have not entirely succeeded. Try to see my intent. I don’t mean to complain, but you gave me no choice except to look for traces of you in unexpected streets, in modern places as well as old haunts. How else was I able to find what you dearly wanted me to know? For I have, dear James, heard you whispering to me at night in the park, or by day in libraries, and in the voices of people I have met while on your trail. And I believe with all my heart that you wanted me to meet a certain representative of yours—that you placed him in my path, so that he might hand me your message directly.
Still, though I listened as carefully as I could, I don’t know how you will feel about my rendition of you.
I have come to know a James Wolfe who does not appear in the historical reports of your military strategy, nor in accounts of your siege of Quebec. In those tales, you always wear the same red costume and sustain one aim, which can be boiled down to a sentence: In September 1759 he took Quebec for the British, and with that victory, achieved in fifteen short minutes of battle, forever changed the course of history, ensuring that Canada would be British and not French.
What I know is different. I have intercepted a deep-hearted sadness. You have become present to me, in the way of those I loved and whose bodies I have held but are now gone: my mother, my grandmothers, my grandfathers, each of whom has known love and loss and war.
Do souls depart?
You think not, I suspect.
I remember you, as I remember the faded presence of departed beloveds. Perhaps memory of a person is one thing, and the real, present person another, like a body separated from its shadow. I am, in your case, flooded by your memory without having touched you. As I walked your death-ground last autumn I mourned a soldier I feel I remember. Not in the flesh—rather, you were a light-body slipping through me.
I miss that light now. These pages are what remain.
Faithfully yours,
Genevieve Waugh
1 Gregorian Chant
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2017.
AFTERNOON.
Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec
“SOPHIE!” I WAIL, BUT THESE barrens swallow my voice.
Behind me recede northern lakes, distant peaks draped with snow. Here come little bridges, fragile fences…I check the ditches, always check the ditches, because if I’ve learned one thing it’s that I’m not, in fact, invincible—one minute you’re fine then in a split second—fuck! Elwyn…
Is nobody around?
“Sophie!”
I’ve got no route-clearing equipment with me here, nothing but my eyes to check the culverts and ravines, that wadi up ahead—but no, it’s a harmless peat gully—am I back in Scotland, then?
Sophie would know. Far ahead of me, she has probably already pitched our tent. Not in Scotland, no…our tent is in…Montreal, that’s right. It was 1745 when I was in Scotland—god, was I only eighteen?
Here come the birches. I have to keep reminding Sophie that it’s easy to wonder where the hell I am, for the birches of Scotland and much of that land are one with this Gaspé outcrop, bitten off the same biscuit of ancient earth.
But Sophie has grown very impatient. Threatens this is the last September she’ll work with me. “It’ll be our eleventh year,” she warned last fall. “One for each day you claim was stolen off you. Jesus, Jimmy, why haven’t you come to your senses long before now?”
There is nothing wrong with my senses, especially my hearing. War’s din roars in my lugs like the sea in a pair of old shells: Elwyn screaming for me to haul him into our Coyote amid mortars and radio static, you don’t know whether the fire’s Russian or American, you don’t know what you’re hearing, all I know is Elwyn’s down that goat trail, he’s crawled behind the rubble, and meanwhile the head of Ned, my little brother, still rolls in Dettingen like a kicked pig-bladder.
Can a man be blamed for having treasured Elwyn, or Ned—or even Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Highlanders, their bluebird-coloured hats pinned with white roses? It broke my heart back in ’45, to see how those Highlanders would gladly draw their swords and beat their drums and skirl their demented pipes to defend that place. We formed our mute English line as those fellows straggled onto the field, starved after their night march and noisy as hell. Easy prey.
But once we slaughtered them, who had won?
A soldier is only a visitor.
Emptied, Culloden heath: crows, distant hills full of birches. Dettingen: mud, rubble, my lifelong horror’s tender shoot. Ghundy Ghar: from our new trenches fell bones from old wars over the very s
ame land.
Land, wind and clouds were present before our carnage, and after it they continue to lie, blow, hover.
“Sophie!”
Every year I become seasick trekking over this terrain: it falls away in great troughs then swells against my face in sudden crests, as if a demon ocean has been turned to swamp and stone—always with treacherous rivulets and pockets where the leg of horse or man might break…
No, not horse, not these days—and now here’s the perilous Spout, heaven help me. Each September as I pass its ledge I feel its fantastic tug—sixty feet down to the rocks. But sparkles plash up its hollow. Now a whoosh of barm, a column of brine rising toward me at the precipice, a silver fountain inviting a man to dive on its breast and plunge as it falls, plummet to fucking oblivion below, with the seals, and the herring, and the blessed sway of silent weeds…
Irresistible.
“Not now,” I tell the Spout again this year, like I’ve told laudanum, heroin, cocaine. “I’ve one more chance with Sophie, in the city…”
Can this really be the eleventh time I’ve made this trek? Eleven autumns walking this stretch of coast from Manched’Épée to L’Anse Pleureuse, trying to escape seagulls, stones and seaweed? Leaving behind a root cellar full of seed potatoes whose stolons have grown long and white and threaten to strangle me? Sophie’s right: I must escape this cycle.
“Come on,” the Spout sings, as all the opiates sing. “Come to me, baby—does your Sophie even need to know?”
Sophie certainly would know, or would at least suspect, if I dived, but then—I think—on to another soldier she’d move, there being no shortage.
“No,” I answer the Spout once more. “Not yet.” I remind myself that these barrens, with their chasms and blood-sucking pitcher plants, mustn’t swallow me now. Their curtain of fog is my foyer to a better world, where Glory waits to rejoin me as it did on the Plains of Abraham…if only I can find my way to those plains again…
Glory, do you hear me?
Look—there’s the boulder marking the border beyond which I’ve walked ten Septembers, and now this eleventh, from bog, from stony ground, from that desolate beach where no one but the summer snack-van attendant remembers my name, though she insists on diminishing it to Jimmy.
“Soph!”
The only reply is geese heading south in a noisy, honking V, abandoning the lonesome Gaspé, the place Sophie has always urged me to leave.
Likely she’s already pitched our tent on Mont Royal and hopped the orange line to the mission. Filled out her seasonal work forms, begun mopping floors, stacking Habitant soup tins, listening to every squeegee kid or drunk widower, every vagabond soldier…and quite unable to hear me.
Pure peat surrounding my boulder is easy to dig barehanded, though peat takes two thousand years to form. Compared with that, what’s any soldier’s puny history?
I retrieve my fanny pack with all my ID cards—expired by now, but vital if I ever try to renew them, according to Sophie. Update yourself, she yelled as we parted last September. Fight for your military pension. Bloody well visit Madame Blanchard and get your ancient papers sorted out! Stop obsessing about the number eleven. Eleven, eleven, that’s all I hear about from you, your endless Gregorian chant. This is how she views my need to recover the time fate cheated from me long ago.
September 3 through 13—that last being the number that marks the very anniversary of my death on Abraham’s plains. These are the lost days I hired Sophie, a decade ago, to help me find. At least, that is how I have understood our bargain. But like the birches dotting this Gaspé coast, our agreement now feels ethereal and broken, ready to scatter into bright, white paper pieces.
—
WHAT SOPHIE DOESN’T KNOW is that last year, near the end of our usual eleven days, I found a great cache of my old letters. I spied an article in the Montreal Gazette saying they’d been bought by the Fisher Library in Toronto for a million and a half dollars. Of course, I got on the bus to Toronto immediately. Imagine: every letter I’d ever written to my mother, and a few to my father, and my one plea to my beloved George Warde, ink and paper beautiful and intact. But by the time I arrived, a Mrs. Waugh had installed herself for days, sopping the nuance out of my letters laid in their sparkling cradles of archival sponge. I had to stifle my alarm.
Don’t salivate!
Stop cracking my spine!
Treat my letters like the creatures they are: papery skin, insubstantial bone….
I could have whispered every living word of those letters into her ear, though I’d inked my last full stop 238 years before, on the banks of the Saint Lawrence.
I found the head librarian, a Mrs. Heather Forest, and without hesitation begged her to give me my papers back, but one look at the incredulity on her face and it dawned on me that I might be prevented from visiting them unless I hovered unobtrusively over Mrs. Waugh’s shoulder with my dollar-store reading glasses perched just so.
“I’m sorry I haven’t combed my hair,” I told Mrs. Forest. “Perhaps I should’ve—”
“It’s not that. Your hair’s quite…striking.” She looked at me with a glimmer of what I took, with faint hope, to be understanding. Dared I lean forward and whisper the truth into her ear?
“It’s hard to remember niceties such as one’s coiffure when one is on leave from the battlefield,” I began.
Then, in a rush, I confessed to her my name.
I find that even stern librarians are among the more soft-hearted denizens of the New World. Perhaps they feel kinship with my type: antique, forgotten, relegated to history.
“I understand,” said Mrs. Forest, her face so grave yet kind that I believed her. Some people recognize truth even when it has been orphaned for a while among this world’s bright falsities. I believe that a tiny part of Mrs. Forest took—not pity on me; never pity…had she taken pity I’d have fled. No, a part of her, the part that welcomes people who ask to stay in her sanctum and study, to steep themselves in history so that time loses its artificial calibrations and begins to swirl as a single entity, that part of Mrs. Forest took me at my word.
“At least,” she said, “I can let you sit here and study some of the non-restricted materials.” She gave me bound photocopies that included letters to my father and entries about myself in old editions of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
I noticed that Mrs. Waugh, the researcher ensconced with my material, had hair messier than mine—how had she the right to my original papers? She nosed through my letters in a cardigan whose elbows she’d patched with bits of other, even more decrepit, attire. I felt both envious and sympathetic.
I overheard her ask Mrs. Forest, “However did Wolfe manage to find that pineapple he gave to the wife of his enemy, Drucour, in Louisbourg?”
Ah! That was a fantastic pineapple, my pineapple of 1758, the summer I ravaged Louisbourg in preparation for my victory in Quebec. It was a delicious, perfectly ripe specimen in a sere and fruitless land.
“I can answer that,” Heather Forest said, “since my other interest, outside these archives, happens to be eighteenth-century horticulture.”
“Really?” said Mrs. Waugh, with childish delight.
“The British were mad about pineapples!”
“Were they?”
“Off their heads. They packed trenches with manure to make hotbeds, and they grew pineapples in the manure’s heat. Pineapples became a symbol of exotic opulence and people presented them to each other with great ceremony. There’s a famous painting of King George being presented with a pineapple by his gardener, a man named Rose….”
Dear Heather and the unkempt Mrs. Waugh moved away from the study area ranting about pineapples and I tuned in from afar with the aid of a hearing augmentation cone I made out of my souvenir map of Culloden battlefield; they seemed not to notice me listening in.
I observed that into her battered briefcase Mrs. Waugh had crammed several books about me, written by military historians. They all boasted that pa
inting by Benjamin West on their covers: my battle scene, with me perishing while attended by my battle-mates. On my second Montreal September I read in a fat new history book at the Grande Bibliothèque that a literary person called Margaret Atwood claimed West made me appear like a dead, white codfish, and I had to agree. Evidently Mrs. Waugh had acquainted herself with the extinguished codfish: she’d dog-eared the books beyond redemption.
“Unreasonable and odd relationship with his mother,” I heard Mrs. Forest say.
“My former companion—an eighth-generation francophone Québécois, a Beauvilliers—told his tante Claudette what I’m up to, studying these letters,” said Mrs. Waugh, “and she had a fit…Le cochon! Le maudit chien anglais! She said Wolfe burned whole villages along the Saint Lawrence. This was at a family dinner with all the Beauvilliers brothers…”
“I can well imagine,” said Mrs. Forest. “The dog, the pig, the Wolfe…”
“But after Claudette’s outburst the brothers were silent. Ghislain, the eldest, brought up Voltaire…”
Voltaire! My scorched villages! My succulent pineapple!
I began to think that perhaps Mrs. Waugh was more perceptive than I’d believed. How sick I’d become of people parading the same tales about me over and over again. You could pretty much make a paper doll in my likeness—a James Wolfe paper doll, I mean—and manoeuvre him on the end of a stick like a child’s puppet: have him cross the ocean and float up the Saint Lawrence River and shimmy across L’Anse au Foulon and mosey on up the cliff and fire off a few musket-balls on the Plains of Abraham and get hit three times and slowly expire while ascertaining victory was certain and exclaiming, “Well then, I can die in peace.” You could do the whole thing in four minutes.
“Ghislain—they call him the family intellectual—told me Voltaire wrote about why the French really lost the battle,” said Mrs. Waugh. “It wasn’t because of Wolfe. It was because the government of France had abandoned the people of New France. They thought it more worthwhile defending colonies where there was warmth, sugar, rum. Why should France trouble itself over, as Voltaire put it, quelques arpents de neige…a few acres of snow? France was indifferent and Montcalm didn’t have what he needed to win the battle.”
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