Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  Where is the splendour I envisioned?

  Mother, remember when I said I believed there would grow a people here, out of our own little spot in England, to fill this space and become a vast Empire, the seat of power and learning?

  The man named Arnold rejoins his vocal woman. Together they wheel an enormous cart. It holds dog food, chocolate, marshmallows, bottles of Pepsi and crates of electronic equipment, a fifty-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes and eighteen loaves of sliced bread in cellophane. It holds fatty meat ground up and crammed behind film bulging over foam trays. The meat glitters under the lights in this echo chamber of disparate and towering imports.

  It is as if England has had a nightmare in which the Empire’s crowning achievement has been to inflate the size of material goods: every chicken leg, every shirt, all the grapes and loaves and boxes of tea, even the people, their bodies sluggish and distended. Madam, if you thought me thin in England, then I am emaciated here.

  “Remember the Kirkland made him throw up all over Amber’s beanbag chair?”

  Dear Madam, if I am not careful, someone—a guard, for this place employs beefy guards—might have to send for a doctor and have me removed to hospital….I am beset by an overwhelming panic.

  Sophie warns me I need to stop hunting for the fruits of General Wolfe’s labours. She says they cannot be arrayed like corpses on a battlefield: four hundred French vanquished here, ninety Savages laid waste there, and over here twenty Canadian prisoners…whose wives, I promise you, Mother, we have not harmed—in fact we have offered the wives, as well as all the old men and babies, decent boats and shelter….

  No such calculation of wartime accomplishments occurs in peacetime, Sophie likes to remind me.

  I’ve told her I’m well-used to the shock of peacetime, its boredom and lack of passion—I’ve experienced it many times and know it takes months to acclimatize to the loss of adrenaline. My fear is not the fear of stasis: waiting and inertia are a soldier’s everlasting companions. My fear is that I see no evidence that our lives in peacetime have any direction at all.

  New French Britain is extremely frightening. I don’t see how any soldier returning here could want to do anything except slit his own throat.

  Sophie claims this is not the fault of the place. The fault is mine.

  I need to be rehumanized.

  And she says I have to do it myself. She hasn’t time to help, the way I have time. She’s got too much other work to do, too many other soldiers to shelter. All she can do is direct my vision.

  “Get your ass out of Montreal to Quebec City,” she says. “Search its bloody Plains of Abraham. Look under every bush and examine every blade of grass—until you see that what you lost in the past isn’t there.”

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

  EVENING.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  EVEN SOPHIE HAS TO ADMIT I’m pretty good at building our clandestine campfire on the mountain. While I prepare the draught for my ailment—it involves boiling snails, from an old recipe of my mother’s—I try to describe my day, including Dogfood Woman and Arnold.

  “This new letter to your mother is maudlin and useless,” Sophie declares.

  “But I must tell her of the overpasses, the cement pillars, the lots twinkling with cars. How there is nobody walking, or if anyone does walk he’s in mortal danger of getting stuck at a curb until the end of time waiting for the light to change. I often predicted to my mother that our colonies might become tinged with the vices of England, but if ever I had envisioned Costco…”

  “You’re coughing again.”

  “My lungs are worn purses Dick Turnip might have slashed to ribbons, finding them entirely useless!”

  I smash my snails with a rock to steep overnight among bits of willow in my medicine pan.

  “Turpin.”

  “What?”

  “The eighteenth-century highwayman who robbed your neighbours was Dick Turpin, not Turnip. Nobody’s called Turnip. Did you get the bread?”

  Sophie has surprising nuggets of knowledge. But I have forgotten the bread! “Sorry.”

  “Baking soda?”

  “Colgate.”

  “For God’s sake. What about the Dumpsters?”

  “Covered in disgusting tomato pulp.” In fact, I did not get around to the Dumpsters.

  “And Madame Bee? Did you at least make arrangements to see her?”

  “I did nothing about Madame Blanchard.”

  “I’m asking about her for your sake, not mine.”

  “I got distracted.”

  “Don’t blame me if you wait too long. She is not getting younger.”

  Sophie hauls up our sleeping bag. It’s not really a bag any more, more a tattered blanket. I found it in front of a pizzeria sign whose salami the sun had bleached green.

  “I need you not to be on your phone just now.”

  “Yeah-yeah.”

  “I’m paying you to listen…”

  “You haven’t paid me anything yet.”

  “I gave you nearly all the money I earned in Westerham.”

  “That was two years ago, and you didn’t earn it—that money was the measly bit left over from the government cheque I helped you—”

  “Sophie, I need to talk about today….I was thinking on the bus….”

  “Hang on!” She’s lit Facebook-blue. This is far from the kind of listening my mother provided, but it’s all I have.

  I can’t always recall what happened in combat at Dettingen or in Culloden or at Quebec or anywhere else. Events have become entangled: all my wars now transpire in a single battlefield during one timeless period—darkness cut with spears of flame in whose light any instant of my soldiering might have played out. Sophie is supposed to help me disentangle the years. That has been our arrangement, from our first September to this one.

  “Please?”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “On the bus today I remembered flames, fire, all the times I made things burn, or made people burn, or when other people burnt things….”

  “Forget about what other people burnt.”

  “I never burnt anyone on purpose.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did I? Not directly…”

  “You burnt people indirectly?”

  “I see them scream and burn—but—I was not barbaric.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “The enemy were the barbaric fiends.”

  “Which enemy?”

  The answer to this is always hard to remember.

  Sophie wants me to separate out every point of combat. She wants me to draw them on a timeline. But I cannot always remember who the enemy was, or where or when.

  “There have been a lot of enemies in a few well-chosen hellholes.”

  “Which one are you talking about tonight?”

  “…Montcalm?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The French lit the fire-ships…”

  “We’ve been through the fire-ships.”

  “We have?”

  “We did the fire-ships last year and the year before. The fire-ships get you nowhere.”

  She claims the French fire-ships are a story I repeat to distance myself from remorse. She says I project them over blasts I have myself inflicted, not only on soldiers but on civilians, even on children. I can hardly credit this.

  “French fire-ships never frighten you for a second. You have total control over them. You know that as soon as you tell me the part about sending a man on a raft to nudge them with a rod, they’ll float ashore and burn like chandeliers on a Shakespearean stage. You’ll whoop at your post, best seat in the house.”

  “I already told you about the raft?”

  “You’re the one who raises or lowers the curtain. You decide everything as far as fire-ships go. I don’t want to hear about them again.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To look at my grandbabies on Facebook, then nibble your belly and stuff my snout in your gingerfuzz
armpits to keep warm.”

  “You’re supposed to keep me warm, that’s our deal. And I meant what story do you want? I need you to listen to at least one tonight.”

  “You never finished telling me that interesting one about the dragonfly girls.”

  “Why do you only want to listen to things that make me burn with shame?”

  “You want to sulk? Go right ahead. Get mired in fire-ships for all I care. C’mon, nuzzle in.”

  She clamps me in her thighs and rams her face in my side, licks and bites my nipple so it stands up straight in the canvas-and-maple air. My cough retreats into its lair. After all my mother’s disapproval of Eliza Lawson, after all my efforts to please Mama, I’ve taken up with a janitor who has four grandchildren and is twice my age. If ever I’d imagined sleeping with a fifty-seven-year-old woman in my early days, I’d have forecast dry skin and uninviting horrors. Not in a million years could I have foreseen the heat and salty-sweet of a grandma named Sophie Cotterill.

  Dear Madam, fifty-seven’s young! Fifty-seven grabs my buttocks, reaches for my cock and grasps it with the expertise that I’d have thought belonged only to a man who has out of necessity pulled his own cock alone at night on a succession of warships. She has a way of snaking her arm around me so it feels I’m doing the thing myself, or that it is being performed by Elwyn, or George. Her arm is muscled as an eel. If ever she chooses to rescind her rule that I’m never to penetrate her body, I might almost feel like a husbandly consort.

  I cannot imagine Sophie in a dove-grey gown like Eliza’s, nor does Sophie carry rouge or a handkerchief. She shoves her bison-hide wallet in her jeans and reams her nails with the pocket-knife hung on the key ring in her belt loop. With this knife she also lifts Portuguese sardines to her gob out of tins, slices hard skin off her heels, and digs out splinters. I’ve whiffed the sardines on her at three in the morning.

  “Well, General Wolfe?” Sophie prods me with her sharp elbow.

  “Well what?”

  “On with your fire-ships!”

  6 Fire-Ships

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

  NIGHT.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  “BRAVERY, SOPHIE, IS A CAST of the dice. And I gamble, but only if I’m wearing the red coat. Without that coat you’ll find me cautious as the next man, soft and passive as a slug—don’t judge! When I put on the coat it is a costume and I’m a player, a man who’ll jump to court the dice. If a soldier chances nothing he might as well go to war in his bedshirt, clinging to a biscuit dipped in milk. You think me a mama’s boy? I won’t argue with that or even resent it. Brigadier Townshend, that fine artist and soldier, cartooned me as a spineless coward, but he did it because he couldn’t tell the difference between soldier and man.

  “Superstition engulfed the French in June of 1759, as did grey ghost-ribbons of rain hung in shreds and shrouds in the nearing squall. The French fell on their knees and kissed crucifixes and their priest gave out stale cake and pickled wine to thank their god for the wind rattling our ships hard enough to block the Saint Lawrence with splinters. But the luck of the dice has its own power and I find that it cooperates with a general who won’t take his own life too seriously. I mean, I was gaunt, seasick and plagued with the gravels, with dysentery and bad vapours. I’d no reason to fear for my health—it was ruined already. The storm that welcomed us to Île d’Orléans worried my men but I told them to consider it background music to what we would, ourselves, unleash.

  “That little snot Vaudreuil must’ve driven Montcalm crazy—as soon as we reached the island their defectors ran to us, sick of Vaudreuil stuffing himself with goose legs and capers and hoarded sweetmeats while his militia subsisted on the black-hearted turnips they were obliged to count as wages. They told us that Vaudreuil, with his coxcomb’s sense of theatre, had prescribed fire-ships be sent toward us on our first night, to finish off what the storm could not. Fire-ships! No modern army took them seriously any more. That man must have been sleepwalking in history, imagining himself fighting Spanish and Turks in ages when fire-ships were a force in which one might still believe. Now they were no more than stage lighting or fanfare for a royal wedding.

  “ ‘He’s counting on no moon,’ said one toothless defector as he wrapped his joyful gums around a crackled pig’s ear, releasing a runnel of slaver down his chin. It was difficult for me to make him out, between his atrocious accent and the gnawing and smacking. ‘He’s made a dozen fire-ships with Delouche in command.’

  “ ‘Is Delouche the one with the ludicrous moustache?’ I asked Pig-Ears. I thought I’d seen Delouche in Paris, dancing a gavotte with an overconfident frothiness.

  “ ‘Oui.’

  “Flies swarmed straight from hell and we had to slather ourselves with lard to fend off the numbers bulging with our blood, which they sucked through stingers fine as pins in my mother’s sewing box. The process would have been fascinating had it not covered us in itchy welts. My men ripped their coats, slashing the red skirts and tearing off epaulets and fastenings and anything that might snag on the stumps and pricks of the twigs and bush all stunted and broken aslant. I did not modify a thing on my own coat, but would eagerly have done so had I not been bound to set a good example.

  “As dusk fell we smelt sap and dog-roses in the marsh and heard plaintive notes of white-throated sparrows and eerie snipe. Quebec towered before us and all I could do was glare at Montcalm’s encampment that straggled all the way up from our deafening water-cascade at Montmorency through Beauport to the Charles River at the city’s back gate. Beyond Montcalm’s redoubts and entrenchments loomed the natural cliffs, and on these I kept my gaze.

  “The storm-rinsed sky glowered then cleared, as Pig-Ears had promised, without a moon. Vaudreuil was an idiot for thinking this meant we’d have no light to discern his fire-ships’ approach: we had a sky crammed with stars dusting the river surface with their influence. Their quiet light gathered in the water and magnified, and the rain-bulged waves sifted luminosity back into the air where it hovered over the whole river before us.

  “But Delouche was sailing into an undifferentiated darkness on our isle of Orleans, a blackness that obscured from him my sentries and our artillery—I knew he saw nothing but a silhouette of spiky night trees rising against the Milky Way.

  “An hour before midnight my sentries spied looming shapes drifting toward us blue and violet against sky and river. Lumbering and stacked high with relic cannon and loaded muskets, Catherine-wheels and mortar-bits and cast-iron hollow-shot, they lurched and floated toward us like phantasmagoric monsters.

  “Delouche sailed like he danced—confident at first, but when the real intricacy of the music began he faltered, though he would not admit it: instead he blazed ahead, mis-stepping, to his partners’ chagrin, rather than retreating to study the matter further so that he might proceed with any kind of knowledge.

  “Now, as before, true courage did not come to him; a false bravado made him give the order to ignite his fuses too early by half an hour, and with that, his men in their nearby fire-ships also lit the works far too soon for their purpose. Fire spilt up their masts and lit their sails in a lurid glow that illumined the banks and painted Montcalm’s tents orange.

  “Explosions blew molten holes agape in the fire-ships, and great booms and cracks obliterated the waterfall noise that had at first been so insistent. Grapeshot clattered amongst the birches, staccato like monstrous hailstones, and there was a lightning-bolt followed by thunder that we thought must be the storm returning, but it was a cluster of bombs and grenades catapulting sound and light into the departing clouds. Ribbons of fire lit up the stonework of the fortress and cathedral spires of Quebec so high on its rock I teetered looking at it.

  “I tell myself again and again that the main job of a general is to persuade his men to hold fire until we are close enough to finish the enemy. I’m surprised by other men’s inability to remember this, and Delouche had forgotten it now.

  �
�He managed to burn alive his own best men and incinerate his boots: my men saw him leap on a raft to rescue for himself a pair that had fused on the melted leg of one of his sailors.

  “By the time his fire-ships came close they’d nearly burnt themselves out. My men easily heaved grappling hooks over them and swung them into the reeds where their flames dwindled to embers. By dawn the ships were frail charcoal sticks tinkling as they leaned and collapsed on themselves, reeking that sad stink of burnt houses. For a ship is, like a house, a sort of dwelling, even if it is a temporary one and even if it floats like a houseboat or like the frail, bright dream of a burning dragon.”

  —

  “ARE YOU ASLEEP?” IT WOULDN’T be the first time Sophie has let me tell stories while she conks out. I often wonder if she’s heard a word I say.

  “I’m listening. Delouche and the burning dragons.”

  “Hold me? I’m chilled. I feel my old cough deep down.”

  “General Wolfe,” she declaims, turning to address the walrus painted on our tent wall, “has no idea what true cold is.”

  “I’m uncommonly susceptible!”

  “Nor does he understand heat. He swans in here every September and has no clue about our stifling July, and he especially knows sweet fuck all about our brutal winters.”

  “I get the shivers. I’ve told you it’s why I need to get up so early and walk. All my life I’ve broken camp at daybreak to get moving—the cold seizes my nose and fingers. It distresses me considerably….What are you doing? Can’t you stop that? Always getting that thing out and staring at it.”

  “Hang on, hang on…listen.” From her phone sings a man in the Québécois cadence that bears no resemblance to any French I learned in Paris.

  “Who’s that?”

  “This man knows more about Quebec than a British general can ever fathom. Everyone in Quebec knows this song!”

  In the white ceremony where the snow

  marries the wind—

  “Is he singing about winter?”

  “It’s Vigneault. No one knows his exact intent.”

  “Voltaire!”