Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  One of Blakeney’s 27th officers lifted a silver platter high in the air as if it was extremely important though it was empty.

  He laid it on the table.

  I wondered why it had no sweetmeats or tarts on it. It glittered bare for half an hour while the men made a hubbub that stung my head. I threaded through them to see if the girls and the boy would play with me but the fat woman pinched me and said, Leave them to their work.

  The fairest girl had hair of strawberry blond, lighter than mine with a glow like sunset on buttercups. The boy was one of Colonel Halpern’s slaves, shorter than me, and dark black. The other girl was black-haired and fair and she picked the skin round her thumbnails when she thought no one was watching. But all the men in the room were looking at her, though I don’t think they saw her picked fingers.

  The men peeped out the corners of their eyes, pretending not to see the girls or the boy. After a while they glanced more directly, but still hesitant or unsure, as if the youths had come in the wrong door and were here by accident and needed showing out to the sweet shop on Broad Street for a lick of barley sugar, which was where I badly wished to be.

  Then the girls and the slave started peeling their clothes off. The men stopped talking and set their coffee cups down and gravitated to the end of the room away from the youths, but none took their eyes away. The farther they moved to the end of the room, the more they stared.

  Shadows pooled between the girls’ ribs as in wet sand at low tide. Their hair hung down as in a painting my nurse Betty once showed me of mermaids.

  The slave took his garter and stockings off and stood in pitiful drawers.

  The men made a half-circle.

  One officer took that big platter and raised it over all the empty cups and remnants of food and he held it aloft amid the men.

  The girls bent and moved at their end of the room, not once looking at the men but shifting their rosebud breasts and small hips and swivelling so all the men could get a good look at what they had. The boy let his drawers slide to the floor so that he had no clothes on, and then the men held their members and swelled them—their faces bloomed redder and redder and they pumped themselves until one by one they ejaculated into the big glittering dish. Then that officer of Blakeney’s measured the amount of wet in the dish with a measuring stick and wrote figures down in a green notebook.

  —

  I DON’T DIVULGE MY MILITARY RANK to civilians as a rule. But swimming with Harold—for that was the name of the yellow man—was like swimming with strangers at Bath: men spoke their hearts and no one had his guard up. Naked, water lapping around us, our words slipped free.

  In the azure echoing pool Harold drew my shame out of me.

  I told him things I’ve never told Sophie, or that Sophie, in the name of what she calls tough love, ridicules or chooses not to believe.

  Unlike Sophie, Harold did not cajole me to remain in the present.

  He did not admonish me to get real.

  He realized exactly who I am in the inner man.

  I suppose I stared at his eyes, trying to see how they could have gone from blind to sighted overnight. I was dying to ask but couldn’t bring myself to do it. He saw my hesitation.

  “I didn’t make it up, my story,” he said. “I’m not crazy.”

  “I believe you…you had vision before you were four, but not after that. Not until yesterday. I know you’re not crazy. But…how did such a thing happen?”

  “I’ve been working with a neuropsychologist for years. Yesterday he brought me to a place where I no longer need to block out my surroundings for fear of any horror they hold. He convinced me my surroundings are safe. What I can hardly believe is how beautiful they are. The sky. The clouds. People. Everything is so incredibly beautiful that I don’t think anything can ever bother me again. I was down by the river all morning. Have you seen that river?”

  Had I seen the river!

  How could anyone who had not been with me at Quebec City in the year of my death understand about the Saint Lawrence River’s profound migrations of geese, its estuaries, its fire-ships at night?

  “I’ve seen it,” I told him. “But mostly miles downriver, a long time ago…”

  “The geese,” Harold said, “and herons! Light on the water—all the willows and flowers! After this swim I’m going to walk to the botanical gardens, have you seen those?”

  “I’ve slept in the First Nations part, with the wild raspberries and juniper and birches, on nights when I’m not allowed to sleep at the place where I stay now.”

  “At the botanical gardens,” Harold said, “I want to visit a particular flower that begins with B. I intend to go through the whole alphabet.” He spoke with a kind of awe. I sensed he saw a fragile future before him, but a future nonetheless.

  After exiting the Y, we drank green tea at Magic Idea in Chinatown while Harold knitted. He said he’d learned to knit when he was blind by the feel of the needles and wool.

  I tried not to doubt him.

  Had his blindness plunged him into real darkness? Or did neurological blindness mean his eyes worked but his brain refused to decipher what they saw? If the latter was the case, had he really been blind at all?

  I confessed to him another secret. “I saw the wraith of my beloved, Eliza Lawson, come to me in a vision at night on the open sea.” This was the kind of thing Sophie refuses to believe. Get on with the now, she says. But the yellow man weighed my statement, unwinding yarn he’d caught around his button. “Eliza wore a gown sequined with herring-scales,” I said. “I wasn’t dreaming.”

  “I know you weren’t,” he said, his voice full of confidence, although his eyes appeared to entertain a silent question mark.

  “We’d left land far behind. We were in the oceanic night.” He brightened at the word oceanic.

  “It’s a well-known fact,” he said, “about seaweeds, they don’t need a stiff backbone like land plants. Or like us!” This fancy seemed to amuse him, while it made me think of alternative humans floating like eels or sea-horses, undulating and without stiff backbones. “The water supports them,” he added.

  I told Harold other things. He seemed very interested in the death of my brother, Ned, particularly my recounting of the box of Ned’s things I sent home to our mother, the box containing special amulets, his sash, his gorget, books and maps. Then I told him of my aborted attempt, these past few years, to visit the scene of my own death, to see whether I could possibly make any sense out of what happened in 1759, the thirteenth of September.

  “The thirteenth,” he said. “That’s a lucky number. People are far too scared of it. And it’s in exactly a week from now. That’s seven days. Seven and thirteen are wonderful numbers. They make me excited. If you want, I’ll go with you after my trip to the botanical gardens. I know somebody in Quebec City whose couch I can sleep on.”

  He knit a circle three inches wide out of a tiny ball of wool. He snipped the ends with folding scissors strung to his belt loop. He gave me the circle. I put it in a pocket where it comforts me even now, though it appears to be of no earthly use. Harold’s unhurried appreciation of the world imbues the little patch. It makes me feel less remote from some unknown comfort. It makes me feel somehow recognized.

  I asked him, “You mentioned the alphabet—you mean to visit plants whose names go all the way from A to Z?”

  “Not only plants!”

  “What else?”

  He thought about this, as if watching a parade of possible answers, and said, “Yesterday when I decided to begin with the letter A, I climbed to the top of Mont Royal and inadvertently caused a small avalanche.” He seemed amused by this, as he cast on five pink stitches.

  13 Oyster

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6.

  NOON.

  The Green Spot. Montreal, Quebec

  “THE DEVIL, THE RAM, THE GRIM REAPER in his crypt, the sharp-toothed lunging beast and the hollow-eyed eroded monkey at the door…all these and a thousand other stone
entities crowded and overwhelmed me so that I feel their disturbance still,” says Genevieve Waugh as she bites into her Green Spot smoked-meat sandwich. She has warmed up, this woman, become somewhat excited, as compared with her former reserve when we met last year. She seems to think she knows me well. Apparently she has been all over the place tracing my steps through history, in order to write about me with something she calls “emanations.” She has been, for instance, over the water to Scotland to stay in a half-ruined castle so that she might know how I felt in those bleak winter months of 1753 when I did the same. I am not sure how I feel about her enthusiasm.

  “Emanations?”

  “Yes, in the same way you feel emanations from living people. I mean the way I feel emanations from you right now, or the way you feel mine…it’s like a smell, except without sensory shape or impulse, and simply hangs in the air, giving off a heart-feeling or an ineffable but unmistakable energy, the energy of that unique, particular person, and no other. I mean, Wolfe has begun to have that for me, now.”

  “Wolfe?”

  “I mean the old Wolfe,” she eyes me quickly, “not—I mean, I don’t know him the way you do, I mean he doesn’t inhabit me, but—”

  “There is only one Wolfe. There isn’t an old one and a new one.”

  “Of course, I mean that for me there is, perhaps, having newly travelled over the historic places and now, getting to know you a little…”

  “I don’t think you know me. I hardly think…”

  “I mean that I’m finding out new things about him. Things I’m sure, of course that you already—”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Well, there was a letter to Henrietta all about his being holed up in solitude and dilapidation, and feeling like a clam!”

  “No. Not a clam. I can quote that one to you directly: ‘Let me alone six or seven days in my room, and I lose all sensation, either of pain or pleasure, and am in species little better than an oyster.’ ”

  “An oyster! That’s right.”

  “Of course it’s right.”

  “Look, I’m not questioning—”

  “I wrote it. I would know if it’s right or not.”

  “Like I said, I’m still finding things out, thank you for correcting me. For turning the clam back into an oyster…”

  “It was always an oyster. How can you write a book about me if you can’t get a simple detail like that correct?”

  “It’s for that very reason that I wanted to have lunch, and to see how you feel about a few new things I’ve been researching that weren’t in any of the historical records.”

  “What new things?”

  “Well, like information about babies with January birthdays…”

  “Mine was January the second.”

  “Exactly. I mean winter babies born in the northern hemisphere are known now to be more susceptible to seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a depression that comes from spending your first few months on earth in dreary sunlessness—a baby like that is prone to suffer disheartened bouts of inconsolable unhappiness, especially in prolonged grey weather.”

  “The thing that gives me inconsolable unhappiness now,” I interrupt her, “isn’t the desolate winters of my childhood, nor even the hateful blizzards on the Atlantic, or the windswept rocky wastes of Louisbourg or fog on the coast during my siege. It isn’t the deserts of history but modern-day wastelands that strain me beyond endurance now. Tell me, when you went to Scotland, what was the place like once you left the castle ruins and found yourself in a modern village?”

  “Well…”

  “Because when I went two years ago, looking for Culloden and all my old haunts, I found that the whole of Scotland now has a smell I do not remember it having in the past—manure, slightly rancid butter, hops and malt. It is as if the body of land and heather has become a rather old and decaying person who emits a sickly-sweet odour, from breath, or pores, or sweat, every time they manage to shift position on their bed, to which they have taken themselves some years ago and neither their clothing nor their greasy quilts has been laundered since.”

  “Edinburgh certainly—”

  “To the bus driver I said, ‘Culloden battlefield?’ and he replied, ‘Close enough.’ In front of me sat a woman with her hair rived up in black velvet roses and a glittering plastic butterfly. The bus lurched through hair-raising suburbs of Smithton: uniform housing coated in damaged stucco. Then the town of Culloden itself—a village of letterboxes and hair salons, like the rest of Scotland. Then—up, uphill—I felt great relief when the houses died away and the roadside grew greener and inward toward the roadway leaned birches.”

  “Miserable pebble-stucco housing estates,” commiserates Mrs. Waugh. “Rubbish lining the roads. Cadbury purple foil chocolate wrappers I kept mistaking for crocuses. Hedges on whose twig-ends people have rammed pop bottles. And then the castle, which seemed friendly and did not appear haunted at first, began gathering about it a plethora of eyes and souls in its stone, wood and earth, watching and bearing influence on anyone foolish enough to stay. And so I couldn’t stay.”

  “Where did you go? Did you have a tent, such as I had when I went?”

  “I followed in your footsteps, and went to Culloden. En route at Inverness I found a bed and breakfast—it seemed promising on the outside. But inside, the administrator, a tough little woman, showed me through a sitting room she’d colonized with her bathrobe, her slippers, and newspaper spread over the couches, and not one but two programs broadcasting: football on the radio and a soap opera on television. My room, number ten, was up narrow back stairs. The key was so big and unwieldy I had to kneel on the floor to unlock the door. Fluorescent fire instructions glowed all night on the wall…and I had wet beans and tinned mushrooms for breakfast…and there were old people everywhere with walking-sticks…”

  “And on a plinth behind the Culloden bus stop there’s a unicorn…”

  “I saw that unicorn,” says Genevieve Waugh.

  “…put there in case one had not realized that behind Scotland’s dour stodge there rises something else.”

  “Deer,” says Mrs. Waugh. “Primroses. Old women hunched over trowels. Smoked haddock soufflé.”

  “Gargoyles,” I correct her, “ancestral dryads.”

  “I have a confession,” says Mrs. Waugh. “I didn’t want…at first, before I got to know him….I didn’t want Wolfe to be spindly and light. And I didn’t want him to fall in love with a woman who was like that—Elizabeth Lawson. Where was the fun in that? The hot-bloodedness? The passion?”

  “I’m delicate in health. Anyone who writes about me has to accept that. Delicate not only in health, but in my whole person.”

  “But when I go back to the letters—”

  “My letters.”

  “Well…They are clear and direct. Strong. Thoughtful and not impulsive—and in them is repeated a thing I like: Wolfe kept insisting that in at least part of every important decision one must leave something to risk, to chance.”

  “Of course he did.” An unnerving suspicion niggles me: has Mrs. Waugh come to decide that she knows as much, or perhaps even more, about James Wolfe than the man himself understands?

  “He wanted to leave space for unknown forces to play a part…The more I study the letters, the more I see him as a man not afraid to admit he’s ambivalent, comfortable with self-doubt, and frail of mental as well as physical constitution.”

  “I told you I’m delicate.”

  “Changeability was Wolfe’s friend…and he possessed a strange kind of ambition…he trusted not in titles or in status, but in his own keen discernment of even the most evanescent opportunity….”

  “Look here, I wish I were still that man you describe. But please don’t—are you looking at me with pity?”

  “I feel,” says Mrs. Waugh, “alone with James Wolfe in all the world, as if nobody cares about him right at this moment as I do. I feel, after reading and following and casting runes on his behalf…” />
  “Rune-casting?”

  “And drawing that tarot card—have you still got it? The five of cups…”

  I take the melancholy man out of my pocket and place him between my fork and the sugar dispenser.

  “I feel Wolfe has been waiting for me to find him, and talk to him, and help him understand what the hell happened.”

  I feel uncommonly exposed by Mrs. Waugh’s gaze. The woman almost makes me miss Sophie’s tactics of argument and neglect. I stare at the melancholy man with the cups. “What’s the tarot card supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a card of loss, there’s no doubt. But if I could talk to James Wolfe, I’d tell him—no, I’d ask him—what’s in those two upright cups behind his desolate form as he stands on the riverbank? What remains and has not been wasted? Did I tell you I drew you a second card?” She shows me a young man dancing away from the sea in his too-tall helmet, balancing two pieces of gold in an infinite loop of green ribbon.

  “The two of pentacles. I didn’t give it to you because it seems not like Wolfe at all. Too happy…somebody else’s card maybe? Do you recognize it? I’ve no idea what it means.”

  “Neither do I.” Although the happy card in fact does remind me of someone. “What about the rune-casting?”

  “I cast Tyr, the sky-god. That rune means leadership, warrior, balance, self-sacrifice, logical thought, rationality, victory—these attributes belong to Wolfe all right. He became a consummate warrior. He overcame his physical and mental frailties by exercising mental balance and fleeing from emotional extremes. He made constant effort to practice logic about all military action, as if he were not a man but a principle or agency working on behalf of his country. The logical outcome of this stance was victory for his country, and death for the man….Don’t look so downcast. You’re still alive, aren’t you? Oh—” She rummages in one of the sacks she carries around. “By the way, I emailed Monsieur Choinière, the handwriting expert, last night, and this morning he sent this—I printed it out for you. He’s funny, isn’t he?”