Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  “Don’t think,” says Harold to the dog, “you’re going to get brioche with real butter in it every day. That’s not good for working dogs. You have to have your avocado oil.” He fishes in his pack for a handful of the Working Friend dog food he never fails to provide: he showed me, with some care and pride, that on the label it promises twenty-nine vitamins, no additives, 18 percent protein and a patented oil made from avocados and glucosamine, for dogs over the age of nine. For two weeks after the bag has been opened, Working Friend promises to stay tender.

  But the brioche is dry and I wish I’d fished a bit of water from my death well and stored it in one of the Perrier bottles lying everywhere. Late roses and Jacob’s ladder have begun to glow bright as the plains develop a cold mist, silver sun-dogs retreating over Point-Levis across the river.

  I sense drumbeats through the fog.

  A young woman carrying the fleur-de-lys strides past us, purposeful, her pigtail swinging behind her hat.

  “Excuse me,” I say to Harold as he fiddles around in his pack searching for a wet wipe, “but did she not look to you to be dressed exactly like le Marquis de Montcalm?”

  But the woman has disappeared into the fog, headed for the museum grounds.

  “His blue coat, his red vest and golden stripes…”

  “I really don’t know, I didn’t see…”

  I rise and Harold follows, past Joan of Arc on her beautiful horse, past willows and a little boy pulling his wooden toy truck behind him on the mown grass. We walk down to where the French and British armies have begun to assemble. As the museum attendant warned me, there are no folding chairs. The armies gather on a traffic meridian as he predicted. We have to stand behind a line of parked cars to watch as the woman who is Montcalm readies her troops:

  “Assemblez, ligne un! Assemblez, ligne deux! Assemblez, ligne trois!”

  A second young woman joins her. Is she—can she be—today’s Wolfe? She has a blonde pigtail and a beautiful replica of my Redcoat uniform, much grander than the original one I wore for the battle, and far cleaner than the version I have on my back. I wonder where she got hers. How is it that you can buy a replica of my coat made to fit a small young woman? I suppose that if she is affiliated with the museum there must be a tailor somewhere who has sewn the garment to her specifications.

  The armies line up in a completely unbelievable way. Four tour buses pass through the road in the plains above. Construction racket clamours in the city at my back. Cyclists ride past the armies, uninterested.

  The female General Wolfe and all her soldiers yell everything in French, before suddenly breaking into God save the Queen! God save the King!

  Joggers prance past the proceedings. Japanese tourists walk past without stopping to lift their cameras. Harold and I are the only spectators and I fear someone might ask us to move along as there is no place for us and we are in the way. But we might as well be invisible.

  After twenty minutes of preparatory theatrics, Montcalmette and her soldiers commence their fatal march toward my men, who—and this is somewhat true to the way it happened—do not move a muscle until the French are within shooting range, and then, with a volley of shot, the French collapse on the field.

  There is a minute of indecisive quiet, in which a huddle of other persons begins to budge from the meridian’s edge. Can it be…yes…they indulge in a simulacrum of Mohawk war whoops as if from some cartoon…they tend to the injured French soldiers then encircle and kill the remaining Redcoats.

  Montcalm and Wolfe are the correct age—Wolfette is about twenty-five.

  But the soldiers…the soldiers are all between eight and eleven years old.

  After the enactment, Wolfe and Montcalm peel their surcoats off and spread them on the grass, and take Tetra Paks and granola bars out of a cooler for their students, who sprawl over the battlefield and await their school bus.

  One of the children lies on the grass reading a book separate from the others, and I would like to see which book she has chosen—it’s a thing I do on the train, on the bus, on a bench in the park, whenever I see someone reading. Though reading is a solitary act requiring privacy and quiet, I feel bound to other readers by an invisible thread of words, a kinship without speech. I suppose this is one of the things that made my schoolmates laugh at me and I wonder if this young child’s schoolmates taunt her in the same way.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I tell Harold, “getting a bit closer to see what that child is reading…just out of curiosity.”

  I wonder if her book will protect her. For some reason, despite all that has happened to me, I still hope reading might help somebody. But her school bus arrives, and I hear in the melee that she and her classmates are bound for Rimouski, four hours northeast of here across the Saint Lawrence—halfway up the coast to where I have lived all these years in the old wooden house of Madame Blanchard. Perhaps once the children come of age their well-meaning teachers will invite a young soldier to their classroom with an invitation to die in the wars now being born.

  As the school bus leaves, taking the children’s voices with it and leaving lonely the sounds of jackhammers and distant sirens, Harold, Veronica and I walk to a small memorial stone in the distance, next to which someone has planted a sapling. The plaque honours Montcalm: this is the place where he received his mortal wound on this very date, yet there is no one to notice but the three of us. Like us, the Marquis de Montcalm has become nobody.

  “It’s because he did not win,” says Harold. “There lies a sadness around Montcalm that will never go away. But,” he reaches for his knitting bag, “sadness isn’t the right word, now, is it? Maybe the public emotion around Montcalm isn’t sadness at all, but ignominy. People avert their faces from him, and from you, both of you turned to stone and clothed not in glory but in a disease infecting body and psyche of the New World. No one can deny it but neither will anyone admit it. Instead we go on teaching the children our bright, empty game.”

  Harold retrieves wool out of his bag, sits under Montcalm’s memorial stone, and knits.

  “You like knitting this much?” I ask. In the time I have known Harold, he’s left a trail of holy circles with almost everyone we’ve encountered: ticket takers at the Metro stations, a policewoman manually operating the traffic lights at the corner of Rue Jacques Parizeau and Rue de la Chevrotière, the cashier at Dollarama.

  “Even people who’ve known me a very long time,” he stretches the phrase so it hangs like a soft reproach in the air, “think I find it relaxing.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No! It’s not at all relaxing. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You’ve been on many a battlefield, so you know.”

  “What has knitting got to do with battlefields?”

  “I’m firmly of the opinion that every meeting of the United Nations, and every war fought on every battlefield, should have a person present who is devoted to knitting.”

  “In the midst?”

  “Exactly. But not concentrating on the knitting—instead very much engaged in the talks or in the conflict.” He fishes from his pocket the chain on which hang his keys and his folding scissors, and snips his wool.

  “Are your scissors a part of your equipment like my musket or my dirk?”

  “They most certainly are, as is my yellow attire.”

  “I was wondering how many of those yellow shirts…”

  “I have quite a lot. I was in Orillia working as a caregiver and I had a little bit of money and saw them on sale in a shop, and I bought eighteen of them. They were ten dollars each.”

  “Eighteen?”

  “It’s important for a knitter to wear high-visibility gear.”

  “Instead of camouflage gear?”

  “Absolutely. Knitting is an important part of the world’s healing process, so it needs to be seen. We use the idea of knitting all the time to talk about this. We talk about bones being knit or mended after they’ve been broken. We talk about knitting relationships back together a
fter they’ve been torn apart. And my knitting is another way of bringing that healing about. And it takes time. I’m talking about sitting at an important meeting or in the battlefield for three or four good long hours of deep knitting. It’s hard work.”

  He glistens with sweat thinking about it. I see he is talking about real exertion.

  “I’m engaged,” he says. “I’m part of the proceedings. I’m not concentrating on the knitting. In reality, I’m not knitting at all.”

  —

  I LEAVE HAROLD BEHIND ON the plains.

  I turn back once, to see him knitting at the foot of Montcalm’s stone. Harold said he will stay on the plains throughout this anniversary day of Wolfe’s death. For me he will loop the yarn around his needles while the ghost of my battle unfolds. In his golden shirt, looping the green yarn, he is the living image of Mrs. Waugh’s mysterious second tarot card: the two of pentacles, the one neither she nor I understood.

  All this day and night of the thirteenth of September, Harold promises, he will remain on the site in my stead, brightness beaming off him in the midst of the battlefield. Smoke and fire, drums and death-screams will not obscure him. I leave him, high-visibility Harold in his yellow sweatshirt, seated on the grass knitting to the heartbeat of Ronnie, my not-yet-fallen drummer.

  I climb down from the plains, their incline now so gentle, their embankment lazy and easy as the herring gull gliding in air currents over the Saint Lawrence River. I hear her needle-thin cry flung aloft and raining down on me this admonishment: Climb on, General Wolfe. Don’t involve me in your memories and your regrets—I’m above all that.

  I follow the path of the school bus driving the students of Rimouski home: the bridge, the highway, walking and hitching ride after ride.

  Vachon cake truck—

  Nun’s red Yaris—

  Drifter’s nicotine-stinking wagon—

  Beer truck to the junction—

  Back to this unmarked stretch on my Gaspé, between L’Anse Pleureuse and Manched’Épée without an ice hockey arena or even a road-sign warning motorists to watch for moose. No human is here to watch me reach the place where I leave James Wolfe behind.

  Too soon, I approach signs of my return to life as Jimmy Blanchard: vetch leaves turning brown in the ditch, goldenrod high and going to seed, fireweed with its hot purple feathers waving overland to the estuaries.

  27 Stolons

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13.

  EVENING.

  The Gaspé, Quebec

  A MAN CAN BE IMPORTANT yet completely misunderstood.

  He can be remembered in bronze or in stone or only in the wind, yet all memory is a failed mirror.

  Here come the barrens…hills stretch into the distance, snow on their round tops: rivulets fill the land’s crevices and cleavages.

  So many things are the same between my two lives as I walk this road linking villages whose fishing nets Wolfe ripped and burned, toward my own forgotten village.

  I have surveyed moor…desert…does the terrain’s name matter? Land outspans army and king. It outlives us, and will out-breathe us. Does the year of any given campaign—Dettingen, Culloden, Quebec, Ghundy Ghar—do its dates mean a thing? I dig up human bones everywhere—no matter where we fight a war, that land holds bones in it from previous warriors. I dig them up, shovel sand to pile on rock to pile on more sand, bones falling on me, pile ’em higher to make cover.

  Shovels are the same throughout time.

  Alone, I dig femur, sand and clavicle; I dig stones and myriad little bones of someone’s feet, delicate and connected and graceful as the armature of birds. A man might spread his fingers and toes and rise up out of the land having become avian, become weightless, become mobile and all-seeing.

  But nowhere have I been more alone than I was in that peeling saltbox after Madame Blanchard had to leave me eleven summers ago. As summer ended I burrowed under quilts she had made in her healthier days: her pink one with the green rose leaves, or the orange zigzag number with the crocheted edge like symmetrical seaweed or a scallop shell’s crenellated hem. I kept La Grignotine Louise in business buying their Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs as well as mini ravioli because of the pop-top tins that do not need a can-opener and can be stacked on the bedroom floor, there being no heart in me for getting up and descending into the root cellar to face potatoes with their malevolent and overwhelmingly populous stolons, active in the otherwise comforting dark. The stolons, white and probing, turn into ghost-fingers that would like me to join them underground.

  The stolons await me now again—I sense them already in this foyer to my solitude. Here the land lies, grasses sing under the wind’s voice, earth makes love to wind’s touch, the ground is pierced and made lonelier by cries of geese and crows—nothing is more fearsome than this land’s power to annihilate a man all by itself.

  And a king believes he has subdued it?

  At last I have stood on Quebec’s famous battlefield and know it ludicrous—as with all the other battlefields I have seen, or Wolfe has seen, or Elwyn DeMaldaire or George Warde or any other soldier has seen—ludicrous to call the land owned, conquered, taken by one small group of men who do not even plan to stay on it.

  Heaven help me, here comes the chasm, the boiling fissure of the Spout!

  Its geyser rises, a pillar with its exploding silver head just waiting for me to succumb. Who hasn’t wanted to fling himself on it and descend—what a rush it’d be, what a way to go dark, down with the herring and the seals. Weeds and brine and water-music then nothingness, no pain…why have I made it wait?

  What waits for me at Madame Blanchard’s empty house?

  Alone last February I kicked my way under the frozen tarp covering the cut spruce in the yard. Alone I sharpened the axe to make splits and start a fire.

  Alone I slept late and retired at five o’clock and felt a pounding in my ears like the sea. Alone I climbed the stairs to the landing and tried to look out toward Elwyn’s homeland, tried to imagine that he had returned there, though he has not; tried to picture him eating breaded chops with his sister and mother, a dessert of homemade bread slathered in clotted cream and jam.

  Alone, I cried in the creaking bed under whose iron frame sits Madame Blanchard’s willow-ware pisspot that has quite a nice English scene on it. Alone, I read, or tried to read, old newspapers and National Geographics, and, always, my beloved history books.

  In corners of Madame Blanchard’s house has grown a black mould—not an onslaught; mere lines, lacy and delicate. I find it pretty, like frost ferns, only dark. Mould enjoys the chill, it likes aloneness.

  Alone in that house I gathered my stories about the English hero Wolfe under my covers and gleaned more about him than I’d ever known as a boy. Wolfe, who for so many, like Tippet and Galbraith—those thugs of my childhood now working in the oil sands—remains a forgotten antique. Anything not in the books, any gap in his letters, occupied my solitude until James Wolfe’s days transpired again with golden clarity in what has otherwise been Trooper James Blanchard of Squadron B’s fog of…is it envy? Is it, as Sophie claims, depression? Or is it that yearning all soldiers like me feel to act, to matter, to make even a tiny difference in this world?

  I guess Sophie thought that once I walked the Plains of Abraham I would return to normalcy, to being Jimmy Blanchard, perhaps even be able to have an ordinary life with her, working together at the snack van in summers, going to Montreal for the autumn and winter seasons, with her working at the Mission and me, well, she always had the notion that I could, if I pulled myself together, qualify for a subsidized bedsit and find a half-decent job like hers.

  But my plan has always been different. My plan was that I might, like Wolfe, finally sleep. I believed he and I were destined to become one man on this same road. And I planned to fling my breast here upon the Spout and fall, in triumph, to join him.

  I’ve managed, over eleven Septembers, to coax myself right to the edge of this Spout, balance on its ledge and
hover over the column of spume so that it soaks my face. Years ago I couldn’t get this close. People say there are some who, upon reaching a ledge like this, would involuntarily hurl themselves over it with a compulsion that has nothing to do with suicide—but I am not that kind of man. My reluctance to balance here has been precisely because I know that I’ve always planned to fall.

  How many soldiers get to choose this dynamic a grave, one that never stops rising and falling, heaving, breathing—calling out in the voice of loud waters to a coastline where all the birds, all the hares and partridges, the caribou and snowy owls and voles and seals and whales, hear the cataract’s lament? Men in the desert don’t get this grave. Elwyn will never have it. Montcalm and Wolfe have not found it. This is the one consolation being an ordinary soldier wins me. My own rushing waters, constant as the brook flowing from the Westerham hills behind Wolfe’s boyhood home, loud as the falls at Montmorency that Wolfe heard each day of his siege…I get my own, personal, ever-gushing geyser of sorrow.

  Do not think I haven’t longed for this. It was to be my reward upon visiting Wolfe’s Quebec battleground. Alone, gloriously alone, I could have done it. Do not think I don’t have it in me.

  Across the chasm, patient and golden, sits my companion.

  Harold told me to keep her for as long as it takes.

  He has given me instructions on how to live with Veronica as a workmate, how not to spoil her industry or her training.

  Have you ever sat across the chasm of death and looked into a working dog’s eyes?