Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  I forgot myself and sent out invitations. I commanded my officers to bathe and to wash their clothes, and invited the women prisoners of New France to a soirée in my tent.

  I had the sutlers break out the marzipan and confits, and our cook dug a pit for a pair of lambs Niall Mackison had risked his neck fetching from a cliff on Île d’Orléans. I ordered my last pineapple sliced and studded with barley sugar and laid on a trestle. I borrowed French glasses from Montcalm himself. I did all this not out of kindness to our prisoners, though I was always pleased to cause any woman happiness, but out of my own longing. I wanted an illusion of Paris and I got it. There were gowns, coiffures. We lit the great tent with candles. I played my flute, and a little songbird—a miller’s daughter from Isle-aux-Coudres—sang “Partons, la mer est belle” and “Vive la rose,” and we all danced.

  Sophie never believed this story. She ridiculed it until the phantasm, illumined and gorgeous, faded from me.

  But it all comes back to me now. And the story is true. I sent the invitations on my best ship’s paper and I thought the women would be glad to get them. It was a stupid mistake. Have you never let your enthusiasm for a venture cloud your judgment? I asked Sophie. Have you never been surprised and hurt when others do not share your love of some particular, lovely enterprise?

  The women of New France came. They’d bathed, and had done the best they could with a few scraps of ribbon and muslin. I tried not to stare at their weird little hats, or to inhale as I danced near their decayed teeth. I did not mind overlooking the incapacity of colony folk to reach the level of European sophistication. Some of the prisoners were dressed in well-made garments their servants had stitched with imported silk. It was not too primitive or outlandish a scene.

  The problem was, I forgot that every last woman among them hated me with her whole heart.

  Their hatred billowed out to my tent walls until those walls strained like the engorged gut of a lord who has filled himself with a lifetime of rancid mutton and ale. I could hardly breathe. Much as I imbued my face and my every gesture with civility that night, I intercepted nothing in return save barely disguised derision.

  Remembering that derision renders me downhearted now, especially among these disdainful caricatures populating the new Foulon.

  Where has my old Foulon gone?

  Under the high sun—is it already past noon? —I see, beyond the billboards and the path and the cut-out effigies of my men, a wild and unchanged part of the cliff!

  Does it know me?

  I move closer and see that the landscapers and the designers of history have their limits: they have not altered the face of the cliff beyond one small area. Above me, dark against the bright sky, looms my real Foulon, and I resolve to climb it once again instead of going back into the city by the manicured path.

  My boots cause little avalanches on the escarpment and I think of Harold. I think: the last time I did this climb, I had company.

  My coat drags in the dust and I become thirsty. I feel more worn-out than I did in the pre-dawn of my death-day: daybreak then felt exhilarating.

  I am weary from all my travels, the weary afternoons with their futile suns.

  As I scramble back into the trees I’m grateful for their cool darkness. I feel respite as I reach the trees and grab their roots—their roots are fingers of dear ones who have missed my presence.

  24 Who Am I in the Night

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12.

  NIGHT.

  The Plains of Abraham. Quebec City, Quebec

  WHEN I WAKE IT IS to see in the forest a lurid stain from sodium lamps in the port below. My trees muffle the industrial rumble, but the woods’ margin still suffers the port’s racket, an extra layer of hollering from workers repairing a massive vessel that bears no cargo save passengers. I peep through foliage to see its name in the lamplight: Empire Summit.

  The Plains of Abraham at night are more sympathetic to my eyes than in the day—I wander to that place where I saw the marmots and the wraith under the apple tree, was it yesterday? Was the lad Elwyn? No—Ronnie? Was it here—yes, here are the fallen apples, but the fallen youth has disappeared.

  I lie down where he lay, fancying the damp grass might retain a drop of his warmth, but night vapours sink into me. I lie on a few sour little apples hard as stones, inedible—I could use their juice, were there a single drop.

  Beyond the field spangle Quebec’s lights—churches and apartments and office buildings, even a sky-high restaurant that revolves, glittering, over the city. Here in the lonely field I feel a cold worm under my fingers, an icy wet slug, a spider crawling over my face, and the moon, luminous but uncommunicative sailing over my head, waning as she did during my siege. I have always thought the waning moon resembles a lozenge being sucked, and its one indefinable, dissolving edge makes me uneasy, unlike the sharp crescent of a new moon, or that perfect edge when the moon is full.

  I hear a shuffling near the apple tree—shadows shift and I make out the outline of the animal I saw yesterday, but instead of gathering apples it watches me. The second marmot hangs back at the entrance to their den. I feel compelled to make no movement or sound. I’m not scared, but I imagine one of them could jump and bite my face. I’ve had many a rodent lick salt off my cheek in my bunk on the Neptune, and one or two have bitten me while I slept.

  Sometimes an unaccountable sadness comes at me from out of nowhere. There are innumerable reasons to feel broken-hearted, but which one is at play during any given bout of broken-heartedness? Sometimes I can’t tell.

  “Why look at me?” I ask. “You’re just an unimportant little animal.” I can’t see its eyes but I feel them. “Did Sophie send you?”

  A scrap of cloud stretches threadbare over us. There is a French word for it, when the cloud-cover stretches and breaks into chaotic little floaters, the way my men lost formation and scattered into ineffectual pieces of scarlet on the day of my battle—am I the only one who requires precision of formation in combat: an alignment of line, plane and colour in a most sacred kaleidoscope? A kaleidoscope that goes beyond symphonic sound, beyond artistic genius, and into the realm of maps and nations and of entire countries sewn together in the ultimate creation that is our human purpose and destiny—the whole globe is a general’s aim, his symphony, his masterpiece. The object at stake in his work is no abstraction, but is the only reality he possesses.

  I have taken comfort in the blessed peace of the choreography of war.

  I see that choreography now, rising on this misty field under the waning moon.

  All around me in the grass arise my lads. But it isn’t lads a general sees during the fight: what he sees is the beauty of tactical structure and geometric precision. The calming harmony of military strategy. The form and metre of soldiers taking their places as the general has ordered them to do.

  I watch it rise out of the mist around me now—the aesthetic harmony of lines, columns, formations of infantry combatting not only the men of New France but also the adversaries of boreal swamp and bog that encroach on every attempt to carve a town or village out of this damned wilderness.

  Around me materialize the sharp, beautiful red coats and guns and hats and bayonets against the rise of hill and hummock: this field breathes like a woman waiting for us to fall.

  But we don’t fall, for we planned, mathematically and artfully, this scheme, the visual field, the planes of line and colour, just as my favourite painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau, planned his Festival of Love—a scene so similar to these undulating plains I feel I’ve entered it.

  Was not my battle a festival of another sort of love?

  Do people think a butcher hacks away at a cow without devotion? No! He follows a map of utmost precision, slicing rib from breastbone, unwinding intestine from curled bud, lifting brain from skull into brine with his slotted spoon, each tool fit for its task.

  Or the war is music.

  For, as Handel has his lines and spaces into which he must slot, finally, a set
of musical notes—half notes, whole notes, quarter notes: an arsenal of fractions whose intervals and lengths can stretch into timeless space or become exquisitely small—so a general must compose his score, his symphony, his musical gift for the king.

  My brigadiers gathering around me in the mist complain I am indecisive!

  Would they dare interrupt Handel at his composition desk? Have they not noticed paper crumpled knee-high around the composer as he charts new variations, not out of vacillation but out of his quest for perfection?

  The field peoples itself before me. I watch from my place under the moonlit crabapple, its strange little animal standing over me—silent and soft, as if he can somehow protect me.

  Am I remembering my old battle, or are these new variations?

  Notes sound at the composer’s command. Do my brigadiers and other detractors suppose me rigid or unreasonable? My orders have been few but necessary. I don’t deny I require obedience even while I change my mind. Do people suppose I am only a man speaking? How many times do I have to explain that a general is not merely a man?

  No. Just as Handel erased, obliterated and changed the line-up of notes in his perfect compositions, so a good general must have cooperation from his brigadiers, and from soldiers down to the lowest ensign…not as a matter of human rank or personal superiority, but as a question of life-giving symmetry. Without the fidelity of the lowest sixteenth-note, the whole symphony is lost in cacophony.

  Harmonious alignment with the highest English principles is everything to me. It is why a man who elevates his personal appetite, one who cannot control his impatience, his loyalties or his morals, is beneath my concern and cannot expect protection under my care, as long as I remain a general.

  Men have a talent for mocking the tilt of my nose and chin, but no inkling of the exquisite dance of choices I entertained. It is not true that I changed my mind. My mind, in a single moment of focused contemplation, contains more possibilities than other men might conceive in a thousand days if they changed their minds every hour.

  I see combat’s game-pieces move in infinite combinations. This is not changing my mind. It is, rather, a consummate warrior’s steadfast meditation.

  The warm-blooded marmot sits on the grass inches from where I lie. I ask, “Where’s the lad I saw lying here yesterday, that wraith in the bright afternoon?”

  The animal regards me.

  I name my Highlanders, starting with Ronnie, though I know this lad wasn’t Ronnie….

  He’s the one you refuse to name.

  Has the marmot said this? He is staring at me so quietly now. He regards me with an attitude I recognize: calm and disconcerting, challenging me.

  “Sophie,” I ask again. “Did Sophie send you?”

  Do I ask this aloud in the night? Or does the animal play with my thoughts the way Sophie did?

  I check myself—Sophie has not sent the animal. The animal lives here all the time. If Sophie has sent anyone, it is myself. Hasn’t she said, over and over again, I need to face the plains?

  On this turf where the unnamed Redcoat lad lay this afternoon—am I lying in his blood?

  The marmot sits humble and apparently insignificant, but self-possessed as if he owns the plains, or at least holds great status here. He commands his place on this hill like a landowner disguised as a servant. He listens as I cast about to anchor myself in time and place.

  I mistrust that moon’s soft edge: to me the moon-blade is the edge of time itself, and when that edge wants sharpening I cannot know where I’m moored.

  “Who was that lad? I half recognized him….”

  The marmot looks at me with what feels like considerable pity.

  “He lay here,” I insist, “yesterday in the afternoon, right where I lie now, then he sank away—he was one of mine, wasn’t he? You told me to come back at night and you’d tell me his name.”

  Not one of yours.

  Is it the animal I hear, or wind in the crabapple?

  Or do the Plains of Abraham themselves possess a voice?

  We hold him in safekeeping, as we safeguard all the lost.

  Have I spent too many nights with Sophie and her walrus and her teachings so irrelevant to a man of my brutality?

  Is the marmot not both silent and insignificant?

  Let us hold safe the spirit remains of the lad, our red-haired Wolfe…

  “You think he is yours!” I exclaim to the creature.

  And of the beautiful Montcalm. And of the undetermined number of Amérindiens anonymes and British and Scots and Acadians whose blood is here with that of Wolfe, whom you wish to be but are not.

  The plains and their animals and their wind and their whispering tree fall silent.

  “If he’s yours,” I say, “if you hold Wolfe in your safekeeping, and he is not within me and I am not him, then who am I in the night, lost in September on his Plains of Abraham?”

  Do the plains call me by that name I’ve feared since I heard the taunt in my Gaspé schoolyard?

  Va-t’en!

  Criss de tapette!

  De fieffés imbéciles!

  Get lost, Jimmy Blanchard.

  25 Deathstalker

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13.

  MORNING.

  The Plains of Abraham. Quebec City, Quebec

  THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS to forgive. Some are heinous, others small.

  The last time I saw Madame Blanchard, she said, “I hope you’ll forgive me about the onions.”

  “What onions?”

  “The onions I used to fry every day as you were coming in from school. I wanted it to smell nice and homey for you, coming in. I never knew what I was going to do with the onions from one supper to the next. I started doing it the day you came home and said supper cooking in other boys’ houses made your mouth water. Fish cakes, caribou cakes—Madame Rivard and Madame Brunet were always cooking delicious things. I just wasn’t that kind of mother,” said Madame Blanchard. “If I had been, you might not be so skinny.”

  But it was not the things Madame Blanchard was or was not that drew me in on recruitment day at school.

  Neither was it the rifles, nor the lieutenant’s enticements, nor the mechanical grasshopper squatting on the schoolyard dirt, glittering in parts but cavernous, a matte-dark foreboding in its manifold niches and inset grooves and important compartments, hundreds of these, folded or punched into the dark metal as if by manipulations of a robot genius. You could hide secret messages in any of a hundred niches or slots or little cubes of space. You could stick money in there, coins folded up in paper money. There were places where you could stuff a couple of bologna sandwiches for later.

  The tank was a geometrically crumpled mountain of latent power.

  I was very interested in it.

  But the tank was not the element of recruitment day that won me. I was essentially unwinnable—I wanted books and solitude and would have been content to spend the summer of 2003 lying under our wild crabapples like this one here on the Plains of Abraham, except they were spring crabapples on that day, gnarled and interlaced and newly wind-robbed of the blossom clusters that dressed their gesticulations like insane gypsy brides.

  But the visiting lieutenant had a young soldier with him—a boy from Luscious Bite—that’s how I heard the name of his village. Imagine a place called that, I thought, and this boy had come from it.

  I searched for the outport with that name on maps of Quebec and the world that Madame Blanchard had Scotch-taped over our woodstove. Days and weeks after the general left town with that boy I looked, and never found it. I never knew until Elwyn wrote it on my hand for me two years later that the name was Lushes Bight, a tiny place, almost never found on any map. But Elwyn had a map that contained it, and I saw it with my own eyes on the northeast coast of the island of Newfoundland, a coast even more desolate and lichened and brine-encrusted than my Gaspé.

  These plains are bucolic in comparison.

  How long have I slept under this September c
rabapple?

  Under my head, my envelope of papers is dew-damp and so is Wolfe’s coat.

  There was a morning when Wolfe was a child of…three? Four? Maybe five or six. He was in a trance brought on by the multitude of petals on the apple tree outside his bedroom. Their scent was faint, yet it invaded him—I smell it now—every pistil and stamen was surrounded by lit pollen. His mother, Henrietta, shouted up the stairs, summoning him for some task to do with his shoes….I forget whether she wanted him to put them in the hall or give them to Betty for cleaning….They were his blue shoes with real brass buckles. He put the shoes away, or he did something with them, and when he returned to his lit-up blossoms, the tree drooped, a sudden storm slashing it—and he saw the petals all stuck like dead moth-wings on the grass.

  —

  THE PLAINS MUSEUM HAS OPENED. I go in and wash my face in the public restroom, then ask the attendant my question: Will there be a reenactment of the battle of the Plains of Abraham here, today? To mark the anniversary?

  I point at my coat. “I have experience participating in such events.”

  But the attendant, a young man, florid of face and having a strangely baby-like, milky expression, replies that there will be no such thing.

  I press him. “Today is the thirteenth of September, is it not?”

  “Oui.”

  “I know it’s not—I mean, Quebec City is hardly, I suppose, going to celebrate…but…”

  He lets me go on like this for some time before pulling a paper from under a stack of loose-leaf and perusing it with apparent reluctance. “There will be, today, at one o’clock, a reenactment just outside the main door….”

  “Oh?

  “On the meridian between the parking lot and the plains.”

  “Really? Is there any chance I might—could they need someone to play the part of…of General Wolfe?”

  He looks down his nose at me and says no, this thing is a foregone arrangement planned for educational purposes and is out of his hands—he knows nothing more about it than what he has already told me. In fact, he is not sure if it will really happen.