Beyond the chokecherry bent by last winter’s frost stand slabs of rock that serve as the kitchen furniture of a man I often see wearing a fedora. He’s not here today, though he has left his tablecloth folded in the grass alongside his transistor radio. It strikes me as tender that no one has stolen the radio.
Is my uniform, too, just another costume—like the swimmer’s dreadlocks, the itinerant’s moth-eaten blazer, the dog-walkers’ neoprene tights? Are we all one solitary traveller?
I break through a straggle of goldenrod and sumac and penetrate to the wild river-edge.
Beneath a maple scored with graffiti, I stare toward my old Quebec.
Looking downriver is for young people, who unconsciously follow the water as it flows toward their unknown future. Daydreaming while looking downriver fills a youth’s heart with mysterious anticipation. But when you’ve lived through long experience—my mother told me this and now I know it to be true—you automatically gaze up a river, toward the water’s source, its past. In sympathy with where the water has been you remember all you have been and done.
I turn my face upriver, away from Quebec City. Can Wolfe, can I, really bear to return there? Sophie mocks me, but she isn’t the one who must do it.
What if there is a museum on my battleground selling little red-haired dolls made in China with plastic mould-seams running down their sides?
What if Quebec City has no record of me at all? It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been thus disappointed.
Perhaps officials at the Plains of Abraham have hired someone who looks like me, someone who might do a passable job of portraying General Wolfe for my death-anniversary in a few days. Some student offsetting his tuition costs while he prosecutes a degree in history or political science or even some branch of the arts.
In recent years I have had little trouble finding freelance positions enacting military roles at historic sites for cash. These kept me going while I waited on my mother’s never-ending letter-writing campaign for the release of my military pension. God bless mothers. But I’ve made more money as a fairground beer-tent busboy than any military mother has ever won for her son’s war service.
Since 1760, my birthplace of Westerham has held an annual dinner with battleground theatrics in my honour. Sophie finds this hard to believe, but I eventually convinced her. In 2015 I travelled back to England and attended undetected even while dressed as myself so I might apply for the position of dramatizing what the brochure called my “pious and immortal memory.” I didn’t get the job.
“How could they not hire you?” Sophie marvelled. “You are the image of James Wolfe, and you actually believe you are him.”
I bought this uniform from the classified section of a British recruitment magazine called The Locker. It was the best I could manage and I spent nearly a hundred pounds on it that I’d won from Boum-Boum Larose in a game of poker at the Bucket of Blood. It’s far from the real uniform any Redcoat wore in my Quebec campaign, but it is better than the costumes of some men who get jobs on battlefields during important reenactments. Some of those fellows…I have to look away.
I found Westerham overwhelming that year I attended as myself. I shied away from the Wolfe statue with its well-meant inscription. I’d barely entered our old house—it had become a museum preserved with our bee skeps and even my canteen with my old spoon still in it—before I realized the building had grown a new soul. Its alien smell forced me outside. I retreated quickly to my camp near the festival fields and darkened my hair with walnut oil. Then I signed up not as Wolfe but as Ruadh Mackay, a lad I slaughtered at Culloden.
There were tents and a hog roast. There were choirs and dignitaries. There was even a ballet.
I endured the spectacle of a lout named Tim playing myself, too short by six inches yet at least two stone stouter. Instead I earned less than seven pounds an hour standing in for a Jacobite soldier in a skit put on by the Royal Society of Medicine, the College of Surgeons and the Society of Apothecaries, who wanted to compare medical care on battlefields now and in 1759. Then some woman named Mountjoy commandeered a team to set watermelons one after another across the lawn outside my beloved George Warde’s house.
I have nothing against watermelons.
There were hundreds perched on their ends and prevented from toppling by the use of string and dowels from the U-Do-It hardware shop on the main road. My job was to fire a musket and demonstrate for the surgeons, and for a straggling audience of grandmothers and aunts and children and their schoolteachers, how musket balls split the watermelons, which stood in for human flesh, so that red pulp exploded, spurted, oozed and dripped, melting in little piles and globules on George Warde’s meadow in the ruthless sun.
At Dettingen and on other battlefields I had seen the human remains those watermelons were meant to resemble. I could have told the watermelon clean-up crew that their job, not the musketeers’, was the most realistic part of the exercise. You scrape up the remains of a shelled soldier in much the same way: you collect the pulp off the ground with a spatula fashioned out of whatever stick or spoon or stone comes to hand, or you harvest your buddy’s innards with your palm. You don’t want to leave him there. You could stuff what’s left of his pulp into your canteen, and I’ve done it. That old spoon in my canteen has gathered the sacred remains, reeking in the sun.
Seeds. We spilled watermelon seeds all over that Westerham field. Slippery and living, they sickened me more than did seeing the sweet mottled rind and blood sugar-pulp explode. I’ve seen my comrades hit the ground the way those seeds sank in the dust. Men dying in war are seeds: they cast themselves into bog and dirt. Sand yawns and men grind into it, every dying fighter animated, planting himself, frenzied, digging to stay alive. Seen from a height the men are tiny, wriggling, animate seeds, shoving themselves in the living ground. At the stupid Westerham thing I wanted to scream the difference: that the watermelon seeds are alive! The dead fruit yet bore surviving seeds: some would sprout new life that year but soldiers’ seed stunk dead in our blown-off balls.
If I were not a disciplined man I could have murdered all the spectators. I could have taken the ladies in their straw hats and strangled them with their scarves.
After I witnessed the Westerham watermelons I became more afraid of how men might remember me than of how I might have been forgotten. If my British countrymen grieved my soul with such displays, what might I find in Quebec where, let’s be honest, no one cares for me at all?
Henrietta Wolfe once wrote a letter in which she outlined how much she loved me. She addressed it not to me but to the man who was my superior during my Paris leave. It must have amused the man, perhaps even irritated him, but he put it down to motherly sentiment and passed it on to me without comment or censure. I have seen it in the digital catalogue of one of the museums that preserve my memory: someone must have ripped it out of my pocket on the battlefield while they were taking the scissors to my hair:
My dear Lord Bury,
When my son departed England I saw you and explained how I love him. I was in mid-explanation when you dismissed me and I realized you had wearied of this woman’s complaints: you assured me all parents love their sons alike. I grant that many do love their sons very much.
But not as I love mine. I am nothing like his father in temperament and neither is he. I am in my son and my son is in me. I bleed by any blade stropped in a room where he dwells. Cold wind near him blows my skin like the membrane enclosing peeled onion or egg: the cloudy layer silken under the carapace.
If he perishes I will with joy abandon my own so-called life: I’ll clench and break beyond this wooden agony into freedom. So summon my son to death, if is your plan for him, but know that in doing so you condemn his mother to the same bliss.
My mother was wrong about the bliss of dying. A lot of people are. People think death is an end, a comforting oblivion, and I wish with all my being that it were.
—
ALONG THE RIVER COMES A WOMAN practicing a
single line from a Chinese opera over and over. Her ruffle-eared spaniel snuffs up to me, its paper-thin tongue quivery and sunlit. I bend to pat it and its joyful drool soaks my pant leg. As they walk off I spy a different woman approach with a yellow retriever.
The yellow dog fixes her brown eyes on me, and I recognize her. She is not wearing her service dog vest but instead has on a blue collar with pink owls on it.
“Excuse me,” I say. “But is that not Harold’s dog? Is this not Veronica?”
The woman stops to let me and the dog reacquaint ourselves. Veronica is now a civilian, whereas I have put on my soldier’s coat.
“I told Harold he’d have to find someone else to walk her after next week,” says the woman. “If she was shorthaired I wouldn’t mind. If she was a Weimaraner or a coonhound…I sweep up enough goddamn hair at my salon—yours is nice though, if you’d brush it—ever think of selling it?” She hands me her business card: Sylvie Lauzier, stylist. “I’d give you forty or forty-five for it.”
“Why can’t Harold walk Veronica?”
“Psh—Harold!”
“Is Harold…has there…”
“Haven’t you seen him on the news?”
“Where is he?”
“Bavette de boeuf’s on sale at IGA,” she says. “I gotta run.” And as she hurries off, she flings a few indecipherable words about Harold, words that sail past me and fall into the ever-listening river.
—
I SIT BY THE WATER on a cushion of flattened reeds. The river chants its choppy flopping sounds as a tanker drifts past and sends ripples.
This part of the Saint Lawrence is a plashing-spot for gulls and the odd goose or heron making its way to Parc des Rapides. When I ask it things I once asked its selfsame body farther down, between Point-Levis and Quebec’s fortress, I find today’s river is a mute sibling of that talkative one of old.
Why, river, are you silent?
I studied you, and you taught me. Why will you not teach me again? I studied you and your banks. I found things out. I did not take your silence for an answer!
I read your current every night as my soldiers slept.
I sat among rhubarb and cabbage stalks of that old habitant whose house I’d seized, and requested that you inform me.
Has time diluted your power?
Your body in those days taught me to be quieter than a vole, more mercurial than eel or smelt. I smelled your weeds and hid my red coat under a rock and stole by dusk in underclothes dim as submerged stones.
That river told me of Montcalm. It reported Montcalm in deep mourning for a dead daughter…but which daughter? Beloved Mirète? The letter did not say if he’d lost the one he loved most. And Montcalm was himself unwell, having succumbed to a sense of doom even greater, perhaps, than my own habitual melancholy. Bad vapours are one thing: seasickness and dysentery and all that. But to lose Mirète…?
I listened, and in listening became the river’s own. I became a droplet in the river. That river carried me swift and fluid and noiseless past sad, dreaming Montcalm, to the secret beach at Foulon.
Anyone could see the beauty of Montcalm’s house from the shore—he had rooms galore, and in them, every comfort: cruets made of crystal, full of vinaigrette with chives chopped into it, even snippets of the mauve flower. He had a basket of slippers, whereas I walked the floorboards of my one-room farmhouse in the socks I had worn on the ship—not that I complained or am complaining now. I just want to point out that he had the comforts of home, or at least of hospitality: he was a guest in the home of a wealthy local man, with all the blessings and perks.
The biggest thing of all, and it affects me yet, is that I was cold.
I was cold to the bone and I couldn’t get warm no matter how many fires I lit in the kitchen, or how close I sat to the embers. I was and remain solitary, and that makes a coldness in the heart that can turn into disease if one is not careful, and in myself I believe it has.
Some people might think I’m deluded in imagining I can pay Sophie to hold me close and feel the relief I’d feel were an unpaid lover to radiate heat. I pay Sophie and people think—my mother would certainly think—that nothing can alleviate the icy touch of cash changing hands. But Sophie does a good job.
Montcalm had slippers and he had fine sheets and despite his sadness and his love-letters to his wife he had a woman who fetched him wild strawberries folded into whipped cream from the cow she kept in the back yard. He had a window-seat on the landing and used to sit on its fine brocade with a blanket on his knee and his book of poetry, different from mine—he told me during one of our brandies that his was an anthology. He liked dipping into a variety of the finest minds between games of Goose with Marie-Louise, the little slave Vaudreuil loaned him.
Montcalm had a daily life—all the French did. We were in their homeland as invaders, encamped and temporary, while they had all home’s comforts. No wonder he did not want to come out and fight—it would prove a great inconvenience.
The way it feels to be near a fire but unable to warm yourself is this: you feel inside your body a bruise like the rot inside a bad potato. All you want is the housemaid to come with her sharp little knife and cut out the black rot—the potato would have a chance then. But the dark spot, like the rest of the fruit, is alive, and has its own growth and emanations. It causes an ache, a dank pain heat can’t reach. The spot is made of dense dark matter far from the sun, and has its own bitter energy. We think cold is an absence of warmth but we’re wrong. It is a present and energetic fire, and I knew this as I kept watch outside Montcalm’s lovely house, so much more a home than my commandeered farmhouse at L’Ange Gardien with its poisonous foxgloves and the tiny radishes that burned hot while I crunched them cold.
—
TODAY THE RIVER TELLS ME NOTHING. It gives me no hint as to what has become of my blind yet not-blind companion, Harold in yellow, who I suspect understands me better than any slave, or prostitute, or strawberry-bearing lover, or even any mother. Perhaps it is because Harold, like myself, has been unable to see properly for so many years.
It is September 9, and I must face the fact that I have not yet done what I came to do: see for myself the Plains of Abraham on the days leading to my own death-day. I have to face the truth that Sophie is no help to me anymore. She goads and threatens to abandon me if I spend my eleventh September in Montreal without making that journey to Quebec City. What will you do, she says. Go and moulder again in the place where I found you, where fog and juniper claw across the bogs?
No, the one I need now, the one who understands, is Harold.
Did Harold say he’d go with me to the Plains of Abraham? I think he said that.
But where’s Harold now?
The woman minding Veronica knows….And the river and I both heard what she said, but only the river caught it. Why can I no longer trust it to tell me anything? I lean in again to listen.
18 Finding Harold
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10.
AFTERNOON.
Hôpital de Verdun. Montreal, Quebec
“I LIKE NOTHING MORE,” Harold says, “than placing myself at the sweet mercy of people who seem quite normal.”
In the main corridor at Hôpital de Verdun he reclines, knitting, on the gurney I contrived to nab so he won’t have to sit on the only chair—one with a broken, jagged seat—in the waiting room. An orderly left an old man on the gurney after nurses summoned her to the elevator, and the old man leapt off it and raced to freedom.
“How did you find me?”
“Yesterday I met the woman who walks your dog.”
“I have several dedicated caretakers for Veronica—was it Sylvie?”
“I lost her card—she had a pointy face and a lot of hair. She offered to buy mine.”
“That’s Sylvie! She makes wigs.”
“She told me you’d been on the news.”
“Have I really?”
“I wish she’d mentioned you were at the end of the broadcast.”
This morning I jeopardized my sanity watching the news program in the library: soldiers with their heads blown off, families pacing the tarmac, sons and daughters lowered in flag-draped coffins. I became dizzy, a peril for tall thin people: that thing happened in my ears where the inner bones go awash in a pounding rush—whoosh! Stallions trample my head. Sophie calls it hypervigilance but it’s only my common-sense approach to the eternal unexpected. I ducked under my carrel. I cowered, whimpering, reaching for the knife I keep in the sheath I stitched inside my red jacket’s arm. The librarian eased me back into my chair and gave me a glass of water. I sat dutiful with headphones on as the anchorman went on and on.
“Was I the funny bit they keep for the end?”
“You were after an advertisement in which a retired sportsman claims to keep his legs strong by resting them on a vibrating disc.”
“Guy Lafleur! What an honour to be on the television after him—greatest scorer in the history of the Montreal Canadiens. What did they say about me?”
“They said a man lay down among the raspberry bushes in the First Nations section of the botanical gardens.”
“It’s true.”
“They said he took a nap in the shade.”
“I did! I fell fast asleep.”
“But not before removing all his clothing and stacking it at his feet…”
“I’m afraid that’s true as well.”
“To the consternation of the Heirloom Marguerite Preservation Society, who came upon him without warning after having travelled by coach from Bowmanville, Ontario, for their annual afternoon tea and garden inspection.”
“Was that who it was!” Harold laid his knitting down. “Now, I’d wondered that. I was under the impression they were specifically there to look at orchids. I’m sure one of them mentioned a cream coloured orchid with red spots. But you’re saying it was marguerites?”
“I think so…” The anchorman’s mirth bothered me. The ladies did not press charges, he smirked, but they did alert garden staff who had the nude man apprehended. He is known to police and has been placed in custody pending investigation….I felt like penetrating the screen and wiping that dimple off his face.
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