Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  “I mean he’s from Quebec!”

  “But you said French. Brel is Belgian. Aznavour was Armenian but he was born in France….”

  “I mean he sings in French.”

  “Is that all you can tell me?”

  “He is a fisherman’s son. He sings a song about how this country is not a country, it is wintertime. He’s old, but not as old as Voltaire….”

  “Then he is Gilles Vigneault. But you must not make this his only song you know. I can let you hear others.”

  The clerk speaks of the fisherman’s son as if he’s a king.

  How have descendants of Quebec fishermen, whose livelihoods I smashed in the name of England, come to be paramount in this land today? No matter where I search in Montreal for remnants of British conquest I find little. It makes no logical sense.

  “Vigneault is the soul of Quebec.” The clerk looks even more familiar if I imagine him shorn of his radical hair. He hands me some headphones. Have I seen him before? His tattoo—a word, I see, though I can’t decipher it—is it Arabic? “You’re wrong about him being old.”

  “I heard—”

  “Yes, he is nearly ninety but has never become old. Do you know why he became a socialist and a poet?”

  “I haven’t—”

  “Vigneault was going to university. He was—how old are you? Late twenties? Early thirties? He was a few years younger than you. He went down to Quebec City from Natashquan and saw cod for sale, fifty cents a pound. You know how much his father was getting for those fish back home? One cent a pound. Okay, he said, maybe the package and the label cost seven cents…but who’s getting the rest?”

  “Is this in any of his songs? I wouldn’t mind hearing one if—”

  “It’s in all his songs. Cod made Vigneault a socialist. Listen.” And with that, the clerk presses a button and—headphones are amazing! My ears fill with sound.

  —

  MY FATHER AND I KEPT the distasteful parts of soldiering from my mother.

  I didn’t want to ruin her health by telling her warmongering details. But my father had a professional ear and I told him about slashing in ribbons the nets of those fishermen the summer of 1758, the year before the Heights of Abraham. Every day for five months I convinced myself I was part of a big endeavour, for the greater good of England. As if England served some overarching, abstract lord who might make noble use of the food we confiscated from Vigneault’s forebears along the Saint Lawrence. But no one could eat that fish, salt-stiffened, full of maggots, and so tough we bundled it to make shelters and fascines.

  I look for that greater, abstract man everywhere—that phantom king of England.

  Not the human king, none of the Georges, and not a queen either—I mean where is the king behind the king? How glorious he’d seem if I could find him—not a creature but a concept—more powerful than godhead or angel.

  When I went in my soldiering youth to any seashore and saw clouds piled and sunlit I looked in those clouds for the phantom owner of all glory, the glory for which I have fought. No one could look upon his face without being blinded, and he had no name.

  Did I really believe he lived?

  I invoked him when my men carried off a fishwife who had smashed one of their skulls with her cast-iron pan. The men dragged her into junipers where I could not see what they did to her though I’d forbidden them to rape anyone.

  “Marie-Yvette!”

  It helped that all the Canadian women were named a variation of Mary and all the men were Joseph, so to me they became all one Joseph and all the same Marie. As we dragged the Josephs down to our ships they called for their Maries over the tips of their tenderly pruned damson bushes in great, sobbing, manly carillons.

  We kicked every cabbage out of every kitchen patch until cabbage heads rolled down the stony banks. We tore laundry props supporting wretched woollens knit from our future mutton. We splintered with men’s own tools the sheds and stages where they dried their fish.

  For my soul’s preservation I invoked that phantom glory of England and saw it reflected in cod on the wharfs. Mirrors, the cod-eyes glittered, as reproachful glittered the eyes of Marie-Yvette’s nine little girls and one boy screaming Maman!

  I invoked my king behind the king—honour of England. I imagined him glowing down on me from the silver clouds over those farmsteads. I was not invoking a heavenly father. I believe one of the greatest perils to a man’s soul is the unseemly adoption of dramatic and irrational spiritual beliefs.

  But I did write to my earthly father:

  Dear Sir,

  If you could see this shore and its desolate bogs and stones, you’d ask yourself the questions I ask. You know I never plunder, but we were forced to seize the dried and salted cod that would have seen these families through the winter. We were instructed to let nothing remain that might reach and help sustain the fortress at Quebec.

  I tried to help the fishermen and their families. I offered to let them keep their boats so they might retreat. I gave explicit command that their women were not to be harmed. But who can guarantee the effectiveness of such a command when one’s men are barbarians and their actions easily hidden by these wretched fir and spruce trees with old man’s beard dangling off the twigs and smoke from the burning houses and barns obscuring the whole shore?

  Our clothing was worse than unsuitable—our breeches where mosquitoes burrowed and sucked, our insupportable hats, our shoes whose leather fell sodden even as we approached the man-eating bogs. Our white leggings blotted our own blood from flies’ bellies as we slapped and squashed them too late to prevent itching welts. I said nothing of this to my father—we never whined to one another about personal discomfort.

  Our shorthand for the destruction of the fishing families in 1758 along that part of the river was “great exploit.” My father and I had both done the same on other coasts. We knew that in the British army, “great exploit” is a fine headline for Britons to read in the London Evening Post over their black pudding, though we soldiers perceived no greatness in our campaign.

  And yet: today Vigneault sings to me.

  The fisherman’s son reminds me it’s not quite true that my father and I did not whinge.

  My father complained loud and long. “Britain produces shiploads of money,” he lamented, “but all of it for Sweet William, the king’s son, and for all sorts of dreary German nobles, while here I must badger treasurers like a beggar to see a penny of my salary years after I’m owed it.”

  Maybe there’s a smaller difference between a Quebec fisherman’s family and my own than England’s kings might wish its soldiers to believe.

  What’s Vigneault singing now? Though my French is good I find his poetry almost too elusive to catch:

  When you die of our love,

  I’ll plant in the garden a morning flower

  half metal, half paper,

  that will cut my foot just enough

  to let a stain of blood fall to earth

  and become its own flower…

  As he sings, that phenomenon occurs where I become certain I glimpse a person whom I’ve loved, but who is dead.

  I have seen George Warde and Eliza Lawson many times since they passed, and also my brother, Ned. It has happened, as well, that I’ve seen a person who has not died but who should be elsewhere—I once chased George Warde in Paris, where he could not possibly have been, as I’d just received a letter from him addressed from his mother’s house in Kent.

  People have doppelgängers, or the displacement of travelling makes resemblance seem more startling than it is, or the mind and heart miss a person so greatly that they superimpose the loved one’s features and gait and whole mien over an unsuspecting other person, in another country, and, in my case, another time.

  I have run after Eliza twice in London when even had it been Eliza, she’d have refused to speak to me, having already said she would not love me through my mother’s disdain.

  And Ned, my brother—though his horse and I
rode as one dejected beast after we lost him at Ghent, I saw him alive again the following year at Culloden, and then lighting his pipe outside the tavern in Vauxhall Gardens, though Ned never had a pipe. I saw him a third time—and in this case I believe it really was him—calmly firing his gun among Kennedy’s men on the Plains of Abraham.

  Now, as Vigneault’s stain of blood becomes a flower, I glimpse through Archambault’s window Eliza, breezing through the crowds on Saint Catherine Street.

  I lurch after her with the headphones on—and had the clerk not kept his eye on me, I’d have yanked the sound equipment off its shelf.

  He touches my ear with his lips, his grip strong. “Do you not know me?”

  The beloved Lawson curls float out of sight. I know it can’t be her but I want to run after her double. I crave that finality when the face dissolves from its illusion of being the face I’ve lost.

  The clerk’s grip takes me back to wrestling in the grass with George Warde. He’s muscled for someone so slender and smells like something I remember, something from a moment of abandonment or brotherhood. I feel comforted by his scent and do not fight him. I’ve no wish to attract shop security. They might summon Montreal’s strange police, who saunter around in unconvincing garments that appear to me like mock uniforms but with real guns strapped on.

  The clerk’s release is abrupt: he lifts a ceremonial hand toward Archambault’s exit, giving me back to the street.

  9 Little White Words

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

  NOON.

  Chinatown. Montreal, Quebec

  WHY HAS SAINT CATHERINE STREET no Café Bouleau, a sanctuary where I might find a confidant, a person who can understand? I know from experience that given the right combination of shade and comfort, even a so-called enemy will lend a sympathetic ear.

  Everyone says, Oh, Montreal’s the place for that—full of wonderful cafés!

  Not this strip in front of Archambault’s.

  How I wish now for my spot where the Marquis de Montcalm and I confided in quiet.

  Montcalm named our place Le Café Bouleau after the old birch at its tranquil centre. He would lay his cloak on a patch of ground softer than the tight roots woven all around, where Vaudreuil’s ten-year-old Indian slave had been buried the previous summer. On his cloak he set brandy and demitasses of strong coffee he brewed on a brazier the size of his hand. Our homesickness abated the moment we smelled the dark roast.

  He esteemed me more than did my brigadiers Monckton, Townshend and Murray, being of my rank and with the same to lose. The nature of our mutual loss was a mystery that intrigued us both. That goal in whose pursuit we each engaged—how golden it had shone at first, like the pears, so unattainable, in stories we had both heard told to La Pompadour by her smart little attendant in a fern-green dress. We’d been fed, the Marquis de Montcalm and I, on identical fairy-tales.

  We reminisced on the extravagant details of these stories in our green shade, in lulls between our musket fire and my house-burnings down the shore. Veiled from carnage we stole an hour and a half here, two hours there, and—one Sunday in the deepest heart of my physical infirmity and Montcalm’s grief over the news of his dead daughter—an entire dappled afternoon, in which we settled on our final and most covert pact: inaudible though ants perceived it, invisible yet pulsing in the hot blue of a dragonfly on my sleeve as Montcalm grasped me by the hand.

  We neither whispered nor wept.

  We believed ourselves unobserved.

  But it’s true what they say about little birds, and plenty of little birds surrounded us. I don’t doubt now, when I see my history written in books so plain and definite, that the birds kept our confidence in their breasts. No telegram or seaway bore our secret, nor later did any highway or railroad transmit it.

  Little birds could be trusted, then as now, to keep our downhearted treachery to themselves, to bear our sorrows aloft, to change and uplift a man’s suicidal despair—or that of two men—over the Indian slave’s burial place and into a New World: and to render that world hopeful by birdsong, tiny notes sprinkling free of any foul thing mankind might hatch, blowing like pollen, waiting for men below to catch its light and love.

  Yet anything Montcalm and I agreed upon at our Café Bouleau was personal and did not undermine our capacity for military cunning. Each general remained the other’s most dangerous adversary.

  We felt a wind nudge us and we both knew it was the first touch of September’s equinoctial gales. Our personal secret floated on the eddies with the fragrance of coffee and juniper. Our premonition of the gales to come swirled beneath our conversation. We knew our pact would fruit only when French or English lust claimed this land, as it would claim our bodies.

  Afterwards, I wrote to England warning the Earl of Holderness of the coming gales. Already my anchor scraped across the Saint Lawrence’s bedrock. Only the accident of its grappling a ridge of outcrop prevented my vessel from dragging anchor and floundering toward the river-mouth with each ebb-tide that sucked wild at night.

  There was a bond between the ebbing river and my failing body. Patch me up, I told my surgeon. I know very well there’s no fixing this ruin—just knock me back together in time to gain what England craves, before the gales wreck the hell out of our ships and spew the bits in the gulf.

  The difference between the river’s ebb and mine was that the river flexed violent and alive and would recover.

  I was so run-down I let myself do what I had promised my mother I wouldn’t: complain about a circumstance while it is yet ongoing. She always urged me to make a game of restraint: wait until a trying situation is over. Afterward, it is permissible to recount things I might do to prevent the undesirable circumstance’s recurrence.

  But for Montcalm and myself, the war game occupied all our powers of stratagem so that—I confess—we each complained to the other. I mind very much if people know this.

  He complained about the regime in which he found himself compelled to work: the lewd and gluttonous Vaudreuil, who stole more than he ever gave to his people. Bigot, whose name summed him up precisely: a small-minded thief of no nobility or discretion, constantly on the lookout for ways he could personally profit from the misery of his own citizens. These were parochial ne’er-do-wells whose minds admitted not the thinnest crack of enlightenment, or service to one’s king, or the simplest human kindness; they were the coarsest rogues imaginable. In his off-guard hours with me at our spot in the woods, Montcalm regretted his place among their machinations.

  “When I am gone,” he told me, “after you and I succumb together to this war’s blessed death, Bigot and Vaudreuil will take over here along with the clergy, and willfully cast centuries of ignorance and darkness over this place like a foul rain carrying all the blight and avarice of Old France over this abandoned peasantry.”

  “No,” I argued. We allowed ourselves three brandies apiece and I had downed my second. “When I am gone, after you and I succumb together to our longed-for oblivion with which this war will so graciously oblige us if we play our cards right, my king will send British governors of far greater acuity than Bigot or Vaudreuil, and they will institute a more merciless and pecuniary English rule than the French will ever be able to fathom and from which no Frenchman can find succor, save from piercing his own heart to end the half-life of England’s utilitarianism.”

  “Nonsense,” countered Montcalm. “When I am gone, the second after my body succumbs on the plains, Vaudreuil and Bigot will confiscate all the spoils the British thought to commandeer from our people, and sell it back to them for the price of seven generations’ wages, with the right of priests to seize their daughters and sons under fourteen years of age for their beds for the same number of generations with a slice of eternity thrown in.”

  “When I am gone,” I replied, “with French shot in my loins and my scalp dangling in your savage allies’ hands, England will establish the finest schools it knows how: every hall and lecturer bound by proclamation to e
ntrench the tyranny of Lord, Earl and King—all tremulous or nascent wisdom and philosophy banished to the insane, the penniless, the homeless wanderer sucking his outlawed drop from the last wild brook….”

  And so Montcalm and I continued, our valour cast off, our lamentations studded with forbidden complaints about the bog, the flies, the excruciating loneliness of the white-throated sparrow’s chorus, the scrawny, inhospitable trees.

  And then we got back to work.

  —

  HOW YOU SCALP A CANADIAN is that you jam your hobnails between his scrawny shoulder blades as his nostrils fill with the scent of Labrador tea, which soon mingles, unfortunately, with the stench of his terror-propelled excrement.

  You grasp a tuft of his greasy locks and haul skyward till his brow furrows like benevolent English sands at low tide. How I miss those sands!

  I miss their soft-yet-hard bumps under my bare feet as I dimpled that shiny blue wetness reflecting a Kentish sky. I miss digging for winkles and boiling them in seawater beside a little fire, picking the meat out with one of my mother’s hairpins while I rested my head on her thigh.

  There was always an unspoken rift between the son she wanted and the man I am.

  Barbarities I never confessed to my mother hang to this day in the air over my battlefields: if she got wind of them she used sleight-of-hand to whisk them into that pouch I sent her from Madame Pompadour’s dressing-table….Oh Mother, you loved to hear of the time our ambassador took me to kneel before the French king’s mistress, didn’t you. You devoured my tales of bows and curtseys and of ruffles that ran down your son’s fine shirts in France.

  You weren’t quite so eager to hear how much the ruffles cost, or how, exactly, your son gained the wages to pay for them, or for his fencing lessons, his dance-master, and all that lustre. You treasured La Pompadour’s pouch and the lace hoods I sent you from the shop beneath the studio of my dance teacher…

  The French in their home country are so enamoured of dainty ornament. My fine presents imbued with this sensibility pacified my mother, and god knows she was hard to appease. The lacemaker had stitched little white words across that pouch: Honour, Empire, Victory.