Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

“But if it does, then you think I’m too late to be hired? Perhaps, if someone fails to materialize…I could step in as a last-minute remplacement?”

  “Non—if it happens at all they will hire nobody. It is not a paid event. It is educational.”

  “Might there remain any work to be had in…in setting up for the event? I have resorted, at Wolfe’s birthplace in Westerham and in other reenactment sites at other times, to this kind of…auxiliary role—anything to be part of the proceedings….I see there are no chairs outside—perhaps you have folding chairs you’ll need carried out? For the audience?”

  “Monsieur.” The man appears disgusted—perhaps my attire is not as smart as I have imagined. “There will be no chairs. There will be no audience.”

  With that, he stuffs the paper in his pocket and disappears to a back office through whose doorway I spy a whining photocopy machine and a tantalizing pot of coffee. Disheartened and repressing a wish to protest, I exit the museum and the plains themselves and head down Avenue George-VI and zigzag the descending alleys to Dépanneur Bonenfant to see Harold.

  —

  HAROLD ATTACKS A HOT DOG, all-dressed with the condiments peculiar to New France, his needles and wool parked tenderly beside his plate. I order an eau-de-vaisselle coffee and ask how he slept.

  “Like a baby! And you?”

  “I was troubled…there was fog. I slept under a tree that reminded me of my childhood. I kept veering between…here…and…”

  I place my dew-damp papers from Madame Blanchard’s nursing home on the Formica. The cheque made out in my name for the little bit of money she had in the bank—$754.57. Her list of medications and so on. Receipts from the nursing home outlining what they did with the rest of her bank account. Her letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs, so similar to the one Henrietta Wolfe wrote to the prime minister of England, asking for justice regarding her son’s military pension—then the papers pertaining to Madame Blanchard’s guardianship of me.

  I show Harold a document dated 1987. “Here’s the one with my birth mother’s name on it after they found her stoned at a tavern on the beach in a town whose name they’ve obliterated with a black marker.” I first saw this document just before Christmas at the age of eleven, searching Madame Blanchard’s bedroom to find out if she was hiding a Sears guitar.

  “Your birth mother?”

  “They found her turning her purse inside out for the lotto machine while I screamed alone in the bedsit with my foot caught in the crib slats. The social worker omitted all the names of people or places, leaving only the name of the bar: La Taverne…”

  “That narrows the field!” Harold resumes his knitting.

  “And the first name of my birth mother: Noémie.”

  Harold focuses on twirling together strands of yarn where his wool has split.

  “I know I told you my mother’s name is Henrietta Wolfe….”

  “And so it is.” Harold calmly peruses his stitches and runs the yarn through his fingers. “Henrietta. Yes….It’s a lovely name.”

  He still sports his yellow shirt, very clean, much cleaner than my red coat. I wonder if he has a habit of visiting laundromats, and how he manages to live rough as I do yet remain fresh as a chrysanthemum, such a light yellow.

  “You believe my mother’s name is Henrietta?”

  “It most certainly is.”

  “Though this paper plainly states that I’m Jimmy Blanchard?”

  Harold doesn’t even glance at the paper. Instead he reads into his wool as if it is helping him understand me. “Of course.”

  “You understand that I’m actually…in truth, I mean in very essence, I’m James Wolfe?”

  “I do. I understand it very well.”

  “And not just…a nobody.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Every schoolboy in Quebec learned all about Wolfe when we were small. But none of the other schoolboys responded the way I did…”

  “They were very likely firing chewed paper pellets at each other.”

  “For me it was, Get lost, you fuckin’ fag! Ai, moron! Enlève-toi d’icitte!”

  “A lot of us well know that scene.”

  “I was nobody and nothing. Un bébé lala!”

  Harold lays his knitting in his lap and gazes toward the shelved tins of Habitant pea soup and ragoût de boulettes and the Vienna sausages that have not come from Vienna.

  The cook in the corner kitchen in his paper hat tosses a fryer-basket full of frites so crisp they rustle throughout the dim shop. From nails hammered down the side of a shelf dangle packaged rubber gloves, bathing caps and fly swatters. One high shelf holds a concentration of things I find incredibly useful and can never seem to get my hands on when the need strikes: WD-40, duct tape, steel wool, glue. I’m tempted to get up and have a closer look, but Harold says, “You became Wolfe as a way of honouring the parts of yourself no one else saw…and…it’s not as if the real Wolfe minded…he was waiting to be found.”

  “For a very long time!”

  “Found, known, loved. Understood…and from what you’ve told me—from everything I’ve heard you say when you speak from his position—Wolfe longs to stop being such a high-profile figure. He wants to see how it feels to be…well…to be you. Someone unknown. Unheralded. It’s in—what’s the poem you said he carried everywhere?

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

  “He longed to be a nobody just as you longed to be a somebody. It’s a hilarious piece of justice, really, because in the end…” Harold counts his stitches and lays his incomplete circle on the counter and smooths its bumps.

  I finish his thought. “I used to be so envious of him…I used to imagine James Wolfe had more control over war than I did….”

  “But your ranks differ no more than markings on that deck of cards over there on the counter: who is the joker and who the king?”

  “As Jimmy Blanchard I certainly didn’t have the power to reward men under me with extra pay or a word of praise, because there were no men under me. Hell, I wasn’t even Jimmy Blanchard—I had no way of knowing who I was, and still don’t.”

  I thrust the wretched foster care papers across the counter. They fall on the floor and I don’t bother to pick them up.

  “For all I know I could be related to you, or to Sophie, or to one of the boys Wolfe saw fishing in the river Etchemin. I could descend from a Gaspé fisherman whose nets Wolfe shredded in 1758. I could be a complete nobody. I’ve never found out. Madame Blanchard was no help. She cared only about beauty….”

  “Beauty?”

  “Well, I never saw anyone else’s mother trek down to the beach and take her shoes off on laundry day—a fine Monday of warm wind and sun—and walk the sea-frill where the hard stripe of wet sand shines, and pick up a pocketful of quartz and green glass and bits of bone-white pottery she called willow-ware decorated with pictures of the very ocean waves that had smoothed and broken its pieces. She laid these on the white windowsill and she filled the milk jug with flowers other mothers yanked from their cabbage gardens with rusty trowels. She did not play cards at night, nor take the bingo bus, nor watch Days of Our Lives on the television in the afternoons, and she despised it when I signed up.”

  “Do you feel you let her down?”

  “I don’t know how she felt—all I cared about was the boy, Elwyn, who the lieutenant brought to our class. The lieutenant pointed out Elwyn’s insignia: a chevron—and boasted that Elwyn had completed a course in weapons management and threat response in Longueuil and was about to leave for service in Afghanistan. In June. The very time we would all be enjoying the fruits of peace and good government in our lovely meadows.”

  “Elwyn wore a chevron?”

  “I liked the chevron’s grace but I’d never been seduced by flags or fancy uniforms before, and I did not think I’d be any good at polishing my shoes. Elwyn had a glittering starburst that kept flashing on his boot-toe as the sun glanced off our classro
om’s window frames.”

  “Elwyn’s boots dazzled you!”

  “It was none of those things that drew me. It wasn’t the dazzle. It wasn’t the boots.”

  Harold knits thoughtfully. “So what was it?”

  …It was the fourteenth of May, and robins had come back to our cove, and we were all watching for the moment when we could pick fiddleheads and devour them twice-boiled to get rid of the bitterness. At our house Madame Blanchard melted pats of real butter on the greens instead of margarine. I had seen two dragonflies and harvested most of our rhubarb. Now here was a boy, Elwyn, all dragonfly, all robin, all burgeoning newness of strong, sour, wild rhubarb, having a face whose beauty pierced through me clear and sharp as an arrow of geese flung home from the blue….

  “Where have you gone?” asks Harold.

  Where have I gone?

  When Wolfe saw his first battle at Dettingen at the age of sixteen he looked in the mud and found headless men, bodiless arms flung from horses, the ancient death-grimace on face after face. He grabbed the dead faces and looked in their eyes—were any of them his brother? He found his brother Ned-not-Ned again and again…

  “At our shithole Ghundy Ghar,” I tell Harold, “that hill rising out of the poppies like a filthy boil, I hunted for Elwyn exactly as Wolfe once looked for his brother Ned. But afterwards, Wolfe repaired to his tent, alone, for two whole days. I didn’t have that luxury, not one day, not even an hour or a minute—not a second, even now—after watching Elwyn crawl in the dust trying to find his arm….”

  “Elwyn, whom you loved?”

  “With his arm blown off he looked like the scorpions we hunted at night. Our gunner, Mavis, used to slice their legs off and sprinkle them on his meal pack. He had the maimed victims race each other, the side with legs thumping and dragging the amputated side. We called it the Mangled Assassin Olympics. Elwyn looked like one of them, dragging himself toward us: one side raising itself unnaturally high with each lurch, and the armless side, the left, and he was left-handed—dragging with a horrible judder. I was freaking out because he and I had made a deal: one sees the other permanently maimed and we finish him off.”

  “But then you couldn’t.”

  “You quickly redo the math when it happens: an arm missing might not be all that bad. He can do things with the other one. Choose knife or fork. Ruffle the dog. Hold me in his remaining arm while we sleep. Elwyn and I had three arms between us and yes, I loved him.”

  “Why could he not run?”

  “The Afghans were a few hundred yards away—Elwyn should’ve had no problem running to us—but his every move was pinned to the mud and stones because he was searching, he was asking where the fuck did my arm go.

  “I’m gonna fetch him, I told Mavis, who was busy unjamming his C7 in his boxers and a pair of flip-flops he’d made of duct tape and packing foam from a shipment of Tim Hortons vanilla dip with sprinkles. We had eighteen doughnuts each that day.

  “The Afghans started flinging grenades and mortars and we had a new problem appearing at the east side of our position: I saw we were in for a Taliban swarm we’d failed to expect.

  “She’s overheated—Mavis slammed his gun and racked the slide—she’s gummed up….Dust was always jamming our guns and the jury was out on whether we needed more lube or less. Nobody could agree. Mavis was about to load a new round when Tippet and Galbraith tore out from their cover and hammered the ground between us and the Taliban for what seemed half an hour but was only, I’m told, nine minutes.

  “But in that nine minutes I lost sight of Elwyn and that was because, as I saw when I finally walked over to where he’d been crawling in search of his arm, he’d rolled over into one of the dried-out gullies left all over the place by a combination of long-gone rains and ever-present wind. He fitted right in there like he’d been top-loaded into that all-dressed steamie you just ate.

  “If Elwyn hadn’t been unarmed and destroyed and half buried in that natural-looking, gravelike hole, he might have been a little bit interested in my telling him that for those few minutes of crawling, he lumbered just like one of Mavis’s handicapped scorpions.

  “Like I said though, I did not have two minutes to grieve Elwyn.

  “You become a body and then you become remains and when you’re finished your five seconds of being remains you’re shucked into that unreal realm of glory in which we’re all supposed to have believed from the start of our deployment. The never-never land of departed souls, more significant dead than when we farted or slept or gulped pineapple ham rations and masturbated together. Departed, we attain an importance reverential and unreal and in the past tense which is always somehow fictional.

  “I didn’t have two minutes for grief, but I did ask Mavis this: What’s the name, the species, of the scorpions in your night races? He told me the word but I handed him my arm and said, Shut up and tattoo it. When he was done I said, Great. Glorious. A big, long crazy wild Latin name, Elwyn would’ve loved it.”

  Harold reads my arm: “Leiurus quinquestriatus…Is there an English translation?”

  “That’s the first thing I asked Mavis. What’s the common name? He said, I’ll tattoo that for you as well, but I said just tell that one to me. And he said it’s Deathstalker, lemme add it on for you, and I said no, don’t tattoo that on me, I want to keep that name to myself. I wanted to whisper that one at night to Elwyn. I wouldn’t have it written. I wouldn’t in any way expose it to scrutiny beyond that of my own private remembrance.

  “I might not know my own real name, or the name of my original hometown where the woman called Noémie gave me up to social services, but I knew when I came home from Ghundy Ghar I wanted to look out from Madame Blanchard’s landing, past Cap-d’Espoir to Anticosti and the North Atlantic then Newfoundland where Elwyn spent nineteen years of his life without my having an inkling he existed. If I looked long enough I saw him in the fog.

  “I’d stay and I’d watch and I’d drive Madame Blanchard nuts, not doing anything, not cutting firewood or helping around the house, hardly recognizing her except to sit and eat cod and potatoes she’d leave for me with a plate turned over it on the stove. She wanted me to go to the city, to Montreal, to get help. Finally, in the middle of summer 2007 when her own health gave out and she had to go to La Résidence Dernière Rose, what was I to do? I paced the floorboards, stayed up all night, didn’t eat properly. I started remembering more and more about James Wolfe, how no one understood him the way I did, not even in school when I was a boy, long before I knew anything about a real battlefield.”

  “You felt you were the one who really knew him,” replied Harold.

  “Yes. I spent the whole latter part of that summer alone in the house thinking of him, comparing myself with him and falling far short, at first.”

  “You felt yourself a lesser soldier than he was?”

  “Of course. Next to James Wolfe, James Blanchard of B Squadron really was a nobody—a twenty-one-year-old redhead nobody from Bougainville.”

  “So being James Wolfe made you a somebody.”

  “I lay on the daybed with my eyes shut, willing Wolfe to help me, to impart something of himself to me, make me more like him. I spent July and August begging him for that. Then September came and I was forced to venture outside as the nights were getting cold and I’d no more fuel for the stove. I climbed down to the beach to find driftwood and that’s when I met Sophie, working in Germain Medosset’s van.”

  “And by that time, Wolfe had become part of you.”

  “Without having come to know the heroic Wolfe as I did through that lonely time, James Blanchard would continue to be just another ruined soldier trying to find his way back home. Sophie calls it my dead-end delusion.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You don’t call it that, too?”

  “I don’t call it anything like a delusion,” Harold says. “I call it the heaviest possible dose of reality.”

  26 Bright Game

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
3.

  NOON.

  The Plains of Abraham. Quebec City, Quebec

  “I FOUND OUT A LOT of things about you yesterday when I was walking around town,” Harold says, swiping a half-eaten brioche off an abandoned plate as we pass a café terrasse. He folds it in his cloth handkerchief and pockets it despite Veronica’s nose-quiver.

  “About Wolfe?”

  “Yes! About James Wolfe in his days as the general.”

  He leads me around. It is strange, having him show me the obelisk bearing my name opposite that of Montcalm’s, the marquis facing downriver and Wolfe eyeing the Foulon. Just as Jenny Waugh wrote to me, the monument has a Latin inscription:

  Mortem virtus communem

  faman historia

  monumentum posteritas dedit

  “I believe I understand it,” Harold says. “After all, Latin and English have a lot of the same roots…Their virtue gave them a common death, and fame gave them a common history, and this monument, well, they’ll both have to share it.”

  He leads me to a beautiful library where, up some cordoned-off stairs behind a balcony rail, stands a foreshortened statue of myself pointing past the stacks of books toward some undetermined goal.

  “The librarian told me,” says Harold, “that a couple of butchers made the original shortly after you died, and mounted it over their shop, where people pelted it with rotten fruit and knocked it down onto the street so many times they had to make this new one. Even this one got stolen and carried around the world in a boat and stuck in front of an English pub until someone mailed it back here. To get it in the crate they had to hack off that pointing arm—you can see the mend….”

  “He’s very short,” I complain.

  “He is, isn’t he. I guess when you’re a butcher you’re not much of a sculptor and maybe you don’t really have enough wood. So the librarian told me that after the Falklands War an Argentinian student burst in here and flung a Molotov cocktail at you and set five hundred books ablaze and the staff had to throw you out the window into a snowbank to save you. So someone cares….”

  We meander along the Grande Allée and I very much like the tasteful monument to myself in the spot where I died, in front of what is now a beautiful art museum, even if the monument has been blown up and replaced several times and bears traces of a great big red X through my name where rebels have obliterated it and city officials have gone at it with some sort of remedial acid wash. Not far from that monument is the very wellspring from which I received a drop of water as I lay wounded. On the plains behind my monument lies the exquisite sunken garden dedicated to Joan of Arc where I sat for a while yesterday, and we go there, Harold and I, to share his brioche with Veronica.