Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  Dear Mrs. Waugh,

  I have had a busy spring and summer and I am now preparing to give a lecture at a congress at the University of Wroclaw in Poland with a stopover of 4 days in Paris. Poor me! This was decided almost at the last minute but I am looking forward to it as it is my first time in Poland and Wroclaw looks like an interesting city to visit. It was designated the European cultural city last year.

  I’ll be back to Montreal next week and I should have more time to discuss the handwriting of Wolfe and that of this other person you have mentioned. His time-travel from the eighteenth century sounds intriguing to say the least.

  Hoping that you will have the leisure to spend time on your manuscript in the near future.

  Have a nice week-end,

  Hippolyte Choinière

  “I’ll be out of town for a few days,” says Mrs. Waugh as she takes up our bill and puts on her rather old-fashioned green wool hat, “as I’m taking the train to Quebec City, to see for myself the battlefield at the Plains of Abraham. If I’m going to do justice to any story of Wolfe, I’m sure you of all people understand that’s the place one finally has to see.”

  I let her exit the Green Spot ahead of me. Through the window I watch her grow smaller and smaller as she walks in the direction of Rue Atwater, along Boulevard Notre-Dame. As she vanishes behind the Middle Eastern grocery on the corner, I wonder if Mrs. Waugh has any idea that her own impending visit to Quebec City makes me feel more ashamed than any admonition of Sophie’s. It is high time I had the courage to put on the red coat and go there myself.

  14 The Moping Owl to the Moon Complains

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7.

  AFTERNOON.

  Near Bonaventure Station. Montreal, Quebec

  THE RED COAT IS THE hardest part of the uniform to get right. My leggings and shoes and garter and hat are all easy to find, but the coat needs to have the right weight and weave or else I can’t abide wearing it. I never did wear the more ostentatious versions of this coat and am not about to start doing so. I want my sleeves rolled and do not want extra buckles or buttons or straps. I’ve seen soldiers sporting these baubles slaughtered when they became caught in rough terrain. What good are fancy bits of uniform plastered to rock and scrub?

  You have to be careful that the red coat isn’t made of some modern fabric that melts when ironed. I never iron mine to inspection-worthiness as there’s nothing sillier than enacting a battle as if one pranced yesterday from the tailor. But between Septembers I do clean and press my uniform so it won’t rot or split in the creases or otherwise suffer disrespect.

  I met a rugby coach on the train during my failed attempt to reach Quebec City last autumn, and he said, “I have a riddle for you: What’s worse than losing the championship game?”

  “Winning the game,” I said, “is far more injurious to the soul.”

  He looked at me anew, taking in my facsimile coat and hat. “Aye,” he said, “I guess a soldier would know.” He proceeded to recount to me the mountains of dolour and grief from which he had to dig his rugby players each season they were victorious. “They get depressed,” he said. “They get to asking what it’s all for. Some of the best hang their cleats up for good and I can’t stop ’em. It’s all I can do not to pack it all in myself and go on the beer.”

  “My favourite poem is about that very thing,” I said.

  “Favourite what?” He looked the way some people’s faces turn at the mention of coriander, or asafoetida, or even excrement.

  I hauled from my pocket the page of my beloved poem, torn from a library copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. He found it incomprehensible. He was a lout, really. He completely failed to understand. I found the man so dispiriting I bailed out at the Trois-Rivières station and caught a Greyhound back to Montreal where Sophie sent me to the Mission, having rented my spot to a Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist who’d injured a meniscus.

  I no longer possess any copy of Gray’s poem—the Palgrave page soon disintegrated. But I know where to find my red coat.

  A hardworking toothless woman charges seventeen dollars and fifteen cents to store it for me between Septembers. Alongside unclaimed uniforms of security guards, satin gowns of bridesmaids and dancing lovers, and costumes of retired acrobats, my jacket and its accoutrements hang in a polyethylene sleeve behind the steam presses at Nettoyeur Serge Daoust.

  “I might retrieve my uniform at the dry cleaner’s,” I told Sophie this morning.

  “That’s a start.”

  “And I might go into a bookshop and see if I can get my own copy of the poem.”

  “You and that poem!”

  “The poem has haunted me all my adult life.”

  “What’s it called? ‘Whingeing in the Graveyard’?” She started clicking around for it on her phone.

  “Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard.’ ”

  “From when?”

  “From when I was twenty-four.”

  “Which twenty-four? Yours or the general’s?”

  “Gray wrote the poem in 1751.”

  “Nobody’ll stock that in a bookstore anymore.”

  “But it’s immortal.”

  “I don’t care if it’s got wings and a crown, you won’t even find it in a discard bin. I’ll order it from Amazon and you can pick it up at the Mission…there. AbeBooks, Oshawa. You owe me ninety-nine cents.”

  “But mine cost only sixpence!”

  “Well now, you don’t have that one anymore, do you?”

  “I have discovered that a library in Toronto has confiscated the edition Miss Lowther bequeathed me before I sailed for Quebec,” I say stiffly. I do not want to reveal that I have visited it.

  “Poor baby.”

  “At least today I can go and retrieve my red coat…”

  “What about going to see Madame Blanchard, too? War brides never get over their love for a man in uniform. You’ll be welcomed.”

  “Maybe, if there’s time…”

  —

  AS I NEAR BONAVENTURE STATION my chest tightens at the thought of seeing Madame Blanchard. I no longer take her on outings to Dollarama for no-name laundry bleach or cat food or her dishwashing scrubbers of multicoloured stripes made in Poland. Nor do I accompany her to her annual podiatrist appointment—I was able to help her with these things only as long as she was well. For quite some time I didn’t catch on that her growing imperiousness masked poor health, and even now I find it hard to accept.

  Bonaventure Station is cavernous. Automatic ticket-dispensing machines have encroached upon the ticket-seller’s relic of a kiosk. He devours a bun stuffed with turkey and lettuce.

  “Might you be able to provide me,” I ask, “with a flexible ticket to the suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux?”

  “Non.” He lodges his bun on his packet of cigarettes. “It is not possible.”

  Nothing flexible is possible, he insists, unless I fork out a sum that could practically charter a helicopter to land me on Madame Blanchard’s nursing home roof.

  Does he regard me with disdain? He wouldn’t if I had my uniform on! It is more imposing than his…if only I could console myself with Thomas Gray’s poem. When it’s drizzling and I am lonely and uniformed people confront me who’ve no idea of my history, I become…I was going to say I become like a kitten, but even kittens have claws to protect them….

  Have I begun quivering? Does a drop hang off my nose?

  “Is something the matter with you?” the ticket-seller asks with a lumpy eye.

  “I suppose this station,” I say, “being open at all hours, gets its share of riff-raff. But you needn’t worry about me. I’m simply allergic to the noise here and I seem to have forgotten my medication….”

  Sounds roar: trains arriving underground, defective fluorescent lights, the murmur of passengers snaking to escalators at the Toronto and Halifax platforms, a surround of crashing coffee-shop cutlery.

  “I’ll improve once we get this ticket arranged so I might visit my…f
riend.”

  It is untrue that seeing Madame Blanchard might make me less unhappy, but I tell him this anyway. He needs to know that I, like himself or like any normal person in this station, have a human connection with somebody.

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Do you imagine I have no fire in the hearth? No wife? No child waiting to climb on my knee and kiss his papa as soon as I return home?” These blessings come straight from Gray’s poem and belong to the self I abandoned the day I signed up to become a soldier. But this petty official needn’t know that.

  “Sir, you are raising your voice.” His hat bears plastic buttons made to mimic metal. He fumbles for his phone and I back off, run outside to Saint Catherine Street and lean on a brick wall in tears, eavesdropping on those who pass: how is everyone so cheerful, with their umbrellas and steaming paper cups and chomped sandwich-ends?

  —

  AN AGONY OF CIVILIAN LIFE is the constant need to make small, inconsequential decisions—decisions whose stakes are far from high: goals whose attainment matters not in the least. Non-soldiers stand around nattering as if they care about what, for instance, they might eat tonight for supper. Will it be haddock and should the cook add mustard grains to the sauce, or will we instead simmer the bit of kidney left over from Wednesday in broth? One of the things I like about lunching at the Mission is that these decisions have been made for me. A supermarket has donated tins of Heinz beans and cases of Vienna sausage, so praise god, beans-and-sausage it’ll be.

  I could never stand it when I’d visit Blackheath and, my mother having gone to Bath for her sciatica, her servant Nelly cheerfully assailed me with complex menu choices when all I wanted to think about was what had gone wrong at Rochefort—why had I not convinced my superiors that my military strategy would bear fruit? And as I thought about these important events, events with historic implications, Nelly wanted to go on at length about haddock.

  I suppose I knew I could not expect people like Nelly, or the rugby coach on the train, or the Bonaventure ticket seller—or even Sophie, who claims to understand me—to sympathize with Gray’s “Elegy.” Gray’s rugged elms, the yew-tree’s shade where the moping owl to the moon complains…these are not what modern people of any age want to talk about. Gray loves a nodding beech tree that wreathes its old, fantastic roots high beside a holy brook where an ordinary man—the man I once was, the man a general can never be—stops at noon from his labour in the fields, and slumbers in the grass.

  The drizzle worsens. Montrealers rush past me to shops and offices. Brick buildings hulk like sodden fruit cake. People scurrying under umbrellas can’t stop to smell Gray’s incense-breathing morn. No beetle wheels his droning flight, no swallow titters from a straw-built shed. Outside Bonaventure Station, still without my ticket to see Madame Blanchard, I watch everyone in the New World rush away from Gray’s natural joys as if they, like me, can’t face the day.

  “There’s another man behind the soldier!” I shout at the street. “And I am trying to restore him…”

  Mix rain with tears and no one can tell. So what if I’ve no ticket. Even if I had it, I couldn’t sit with Madame Blanchard the way I used to at her plain table with a box of cream crackers, luxuriating my toes in Missy’s fur, rhubarb out the window bulging and snaking under its mealy seed. Madame Blanchard keeps my letters in an old biscuit tin. She watches Coronation Street and hangs my socks to dry on the banister: she can no longer operate the rusty little wheel on her clothesline and asks me to…But no, that was when she still lived in the house…

  How much time Gray’s “Elegy” holds suspended in it! Time hangs like a banner of gold dust arcing between Gray’s every word over fields of space.

  Buskers stay out in the rain. A flautist has claimed the alley to the old Hotel de Ville. He attempts Handel’s fourth sonata in G. Is that the first or the second movement? I never liked Handel’s pomposity next to the modesty of Jacques Hotteterre. Handel was all for glory and glory is what he got, making a present of his music to the Duke of Cumberland after we took Culloden—I thought that work fawning, nothing like what music should be or do….

  But who am I?

  Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed…Did Thomas Gray mean my hands? “Tool of the Empire,” Sophie calls me. Gray says there are humble men whose destiny is obscure, then there are men who read their history in a nation’s eyes.

  The busker moves under an awning, his hands stiff in gloves with the finger-ends cut off. How graceful a fluteplayer’s elbows are, raised parallel to the ground at tender attention. This one falters over the first bars of—is it Mozart, the boy who was three the year I fell on the plains? Everyone talks of Mozart with a love they can’t feel for Handel, who elicits pageantry not tenderness.

  I duck behind Pub DeVille. Nobody sits in the courtyard with its ceiling of fibreglass parasols down whose poles the rain cascades. In an alcove covered by ivy I sit on a waterproof cushion I untie from a chair. A grate blasts heat, making this a homeless man’s version of Gray’s sequestered vale. I could use a blanket, but I run Gray’s poem through my head instead. That poem did not save me when I recited it the night before my fatal battle, but by god, how it has come to my rescue since.

  I know that outside Montreal the last country flowers have cooled to blue: vetch, chicory, aster. My ivy curtain moves and I remember the twinkle-shiver of a leaf in a glade when rain hits it. I listen to the flautist and try not to think about that house where I saw plain beauty any time I chose: Madame Blanchard’s sill with the glass paperweight, the lilac that tapped and kept me awake half the night; such a nuisance, yet when it bloomed who could resist opening the window and letting lilac perfume all the corners? This was poverty: the lilac’s glory, the wallpaper’s pagodas on their gold background and rose wallpaper beneath that and, if I rightly remember, a pattern of pale green trains under the roses.

  Every book about my Quebec victory makes such a big deal about my reciting Gray’s “Elegy” to my soldiers before the dawn of September thirteenth.

  “He stole up the mighty Saint Lawrence,” these histories say, “toward the little beach at L’Anse au Foulon…He instructed his men to such stealth that it would have been a vigilant Savage indeed who perceived the curlew disturbed from its roost, the lone vole peeping, curious, from its tiny hole in the hill below Quebec’s fortress…”

  They crow about Montcalm’s redoubts, our numbers of cannon and the weight of their shot. Then, Gray’s poem…

  “Wolfe extracted from his breast the precious volume given to him in parting by his fiancée, Miss Katherine Lowther. He raised its pages to the scant moonlight…”

  I’ll say the moon was scant! Would any decent general have ventured to take Quebec on a night when a fat moon poured limelight on his men? No, I chose waning gibbous, cloudy sky, perfect tide.

  From my fronds I peep out to get a better look at the busker’s flute. I discern from the fellow’s age and from his hesitant fingers that he must have played as a child and retained his ability with a bodily memory that can perhaps be trusted more than he believes. I crawl out and get a bit nearer. My fingers ache to dance on the holes of his instrument. How I miss my own dancing fingers, my breath shared between openings in silver. What a sweet voice a flute lends a man whose throat has grown hoarse and useless shouting commands of war.

  He’s finished the Mozart, and, hesitant, I ask, “Might I—hold your flute?”

  I can’t help reaching.

  My fingers remind me of the starlings that beg for crumbs under café tables. Around every Montreal terrasse these creatures congregate, a golden lining peeping from their feathers of dun. I always like to dust crumbs off myself as I rise. The crumbs, tiny as stardust, sustain starling flight over the city for days. Crumbs feed birdsong—that wild parent of anything written by Handel or Hotteterre or Mozart or any of the new composers whose work I have not learned.

  The busker gapes. He hasn’t shaved and a stink of urine shrouds him. The velvet of his
open flute case is smashed, stained with old rosin, the shine long out of it. But the flute is immaculate. It has been cleaned with fastidious regularity.

  But the flautist bares teeth stuck on yellow posts in his gums. He says something in an incoherent joual, and with savage might swipes his flute across my outstretched fingers, then raises it and beats my face so hard I nearly lose consciousness. My cut cheek bleeds and my hands shake—my finger bones turn cold then hot, and for many seconds I fear he’s broken my fingers: I can’t feel them.

  He raises the flute and aims for my collarbone but I back across the road and flee toward the storage place of my red coat. My head and hands throb but my breast has been struck the worst blow. My loneliness for his flute, for a comrade, for a moment of conviviality with another man of the street—all combine to strike grief through my chest, and as I stumble toward Nettoyeur Serge Daoust I catch my reflection in the Bank of Montreal window. I’m a crumpled sticklegged insect, a daddy longlegs swatted against a porcelain tub.

  Sophie calls this kind of talk pure self-pity.

  Why haven’t I put my red coat on before today?

  It amazes me how much more respect people award me whenever I wear it, though Sophie calls it unsurprising.

  “They don’t even know what it is,” I remind her.

  “They don’t need to know. They take one look at its military spiffiness and there you go, you’re a man they love to obey.”

  “But even police and guards in the subway, and officials at the government office when I try to update my carte d’assurance maladie….”

  “Especially those people! Surely you know by now that faced with a military garment bureaucrats are the most compliant of all souls.”

  —

  IN THE ALLEY BETWEEN SERGE DAOUST and a garment shop for teenage girls I crouch behind a recycling bin and change into my uniform. Every time I put it on I congratulate myself on having chosen the plain version. No ostentation, or, as Sophie puts it, no bells and whistles.