But nothing happened. No enemy raid broke through the lines of defence, and only the grey snow that fell at the end of every year coloured the hastily constructed barricades. Around a week later the townspeople finally unclenched their teeth, calm of a sort returned, the militia disbanded, and the students went back to military college. By Christmas no one talked about it anymore. The army recruiters came back to convince people of the importance of enlisting. They had reached the north shore of the Potomac, up at the Shenandoah Valley; it was now every man’s duty to halt the Confederate advance.
The day after the town council’s quiet celebrations, a recruiting station was set up near the post office and the population summoned. The soldiers described the latest fighting, answered families’ questions. All wore hats and dark blue frock coats with gold braid. Their boots were polished to a shine, that martial shine that calls out to every farmer’s son, and the sight of these men, ramrod straight and in full feather, inspired respect and fear.
One man read out the names of soldiers who had fallen bravely in combat, killed by the band of traitors under Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davies, and their ilk, men who lay dead in muddy battlefields in far-flung locales like Tupelo, Peachtree Creek, Chickamauga, Spotsylvania, Chattanooga, and Smithfield Crossing. In these farmers’ minds it may as well have been California or Mexico. The man held a long unrolled parchment in front of his face as he listed them off: Osborne. Macpherson. Woods. Thorngood. O’Reilly. Keller. Langston. Murray. Aimé hung back.
They were all Johns, or so it seemed: every one of these dead men shared a single Christian name. Another man stepped forward and said that today, until the end of the afternoon, the families concerned by this announcement were called to come forward and claim the relevant documents. They would be in town one week, he said, till New Year’s Eve, and intended to set off with at least thirty volunteers. The time for shilly-shallying and excuses was behind them. The good American women would look after the children and the harvest. They were prepared to do their part. They fully expected to leave with no fewer than thirty brave volunteers, and not only farm boys: this War was the concern of one and all, from hired drudge to rich man’s son. The time for pretexts and excuses was past; the time for Bravery was upon them. There would be new uniforms. If men failed to step forward of their own free will they would have no choice but to enforce the Enrollment Act passed by Congress last March. There was nothing to be gained from hiding.
As he spoke these words an immaculate Union Flag fluttered, planted in the ground by the strong hands of the federal war machine, its fabric interwoven with golden threads.
Perhaps because they looked alike, which in the eyes of many created a strange and unavoidable doubling effect, and though they shared few interests or acquaintances, Aimé and William developed a natural understanding and quickly grew close. The moment they crossed paths in the hotel lobby was one of mutual recognition. William was embarking on a legal career. He was a creature of logic and reason, a young man who knew Latin and loved physics and whose protracted education had taught him to formulate simple solutions to complex problems. Aimé, on the other hand, had long felt he had nothing to lose. He’d landed here after fleeing Saint-Henri, but Newport was no destination, just a place where a man such as himself (there weren’t many) might find a new path. They ran into each other in the morning, when William came to say hello to his father and inquire about an urgent matter, a formality to do with army recruiters. He spoke nervously and jumped when he heard another man approach. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, with Aimé stopped on the landing, staring straight at William’s bushy sideburns and full lips and sallow skin that bore traces of a childhood fever, Frederick introduced them. They looked alike in a way that wasn’t quite alarming but still turned heads most of the time, if you saw them huddled in close for a chat on Main Street, or through a carriage door, or in the shadow of an alley. They were up to something, those two, in front of the Van Ness Hotel or out by the lake, walking along the docks, the biting December winds ruffling their long coats. William held his hat in his left hand. Aimé spoke with a light French-Canadian accent, it was barely perceptible when he spoke quickly, you might mistake it for a stutter. His mastery of English was beyond reproach. It was as if he enjoyed pretending not to speak perfect English. He knew a lot about birds and spoke affectionately about Audubon and his drawings, as if he were a personal acquaintance.
Within weeks they had become what you could call friends, why not, though neither knew the first thing about the other. Aimé told William he’d left Montreal strictly for adventure, despite or maybe because of the war down south, adventure being clearly something that started here, he said, pointing an index finger at the ground, walking assuredly, tracing a line toward the mountains and the South with his hand. William didn’t ask questions, he was looking for a way out, putting out feelers. Aimé was looking for adventure? Had he considered a military career? He seemed to have no responsibilities, no family, no mouths to feed. Was he in need of money? Was he aware of the great opportunities offered by the army? He may not be a U.S. citizen, it may not be his war, his cause, but they had slaves in Canada as well, didn’t they? Were there slaves in Canada? Of course, it wasn’t his war, but didn’t war itself have an irresistible grandeur, when you stopped to think about it? A noble tradition? He wasn’t the first to say so.
William sketched out his idea, frequently repeating that he was a man of means, generous with his friends, a man who knew how to show appreciation. He was working up to a proposition that was already fully formed in his mind, arrangements that might be struck between two men whose interests diverged but who could clearly find common ground, men who had, after all, found each other in a town full of strangers. William looked over his shoulder frequently and held his hat when strong winds rose up off Lake Memphremagog, from over the border, and his friend who had arrived in town less than a month ago turned his back to the squall rising on the horizon which would mark the arrival of the new year, 1865. When they looked off into the distance it was clear. The clouds were moving quickly, the clouds didn’t lie. Old dry snow cracked under their footsteps.
At twenty-five William was recently engaged to Margaret Tarrant. Her father was Cornelius Tarrant, the tycoon from Montpelier, Vermont who had built the Vermont–New Hampshire railway and linked it to the rest of New England. William was only twenty-five, had his whole life ahead of him, if only this vile war would finally end, and this vile conscription law be repealed. He tried to look more outraged than scared at the prospect of dying in combat, or coming back a cripple. He’d seen men, mere youths, return from battle missing legs, missing arms, with no pension or means of support for themselves or their families and no hope for the future. He’d seen kids come back so wrecked no one would talk to them out of the fear of catching what they had.
When Aimé offered to take his place he looked genuinely surprised but accepted immediately. One evening in the hotel, in the private parlour where the lights were low and warm and the leather armchairs smelled like fire and ash, Aimé floated the idea as if it were his own, as if he’d been thinking it over a long while, weighing the pros and cons. They looked so alike, it seemed almost meant to be. It wasn’t a favour, exactly, nor was it explicitly illegal. All that remained was to set a price. Aimé wasn’t asking much, just enough to be sure he would never want for sustenance, new boots when he needed them, a pair of not-too-threadbare breeches. He didn’t want to be reduced to stripping corpses to survive. It was fairly simple, when you got right down to it. William merely had to hole up for a few weeks, long enough for the dust kicked up by the horseshoes to settle and the snow to melt, and then it would be back to business as usual. There were rumours of cases like theirs, in other counties. William’s father and future father-in-law were of a like mind, they approved in principle. Neither was a Republican in his soul, though both had come out in support of the war effort, time and again. Van Ness had never hidden his
misgivings about the outcome of Lincoln’s campaign. He thought it too great a wager for any man, let alone one with a dangerous penchant for populist propaganda; it was Lincoln’s fault this war would never end, neither side would ever win, the country would lose a whole generation of young men, and why, he said in private, for whom? For these fundamentally inferior beings who may not deserve to live in chains, but certainly didn’t warrant the sacrifice of a son? Tarrant, for his part, had always voted Democrat, and had supported the pacifist faction in the election, though the bitter internecine squabbling ultimately cost them victory. He was an ardent pacifist who always said that if only Lincoln had sat down with Davis over a bottle of whiskey and a couple good cigars, this whole mess could have been avoided. So when Aimé suggested he take William’s place, when he said he would report to the recruiting station the very next morning, the two honourable men concluded the arrangement without hesitation. They got the question of money out of the way quickly, struck a bargain that was profitable for all concerned. Aimé was told he would never be forgotten. Margaret, who was sleeping on the top floor, was informed.
Aimé had nothing to lose. His life had drawn on so long he no longer remembered the meaning of childhood, ignorance, or fear, not even fear of dying on a battlefield far from home, though he’d once known feelings of this kind. He was in the process of forgetting and had, probably for that very reason, stopped fighting the possibility of placing himself in harm’s way and facing the death that seemed perfectly indifferent to his existence. In every previous brush with death he’d managed to slip by unseen. He didn’t know what to think anymore. Sometimes he understood his immortality almost literally; he’d look at himself in the mirror and the word would rise to his lips but get stuck in his throat. He might entertain the thought but refused to countenance it, figured it was an impossible, absurd exaggeration. Surely he would die one day, like everyone else. It made him laugh that, after so much time had gone by, and now that time seemed to have almost stopped, with no apparent hold over him, he should want something so commonplace.
So it is under the name William Van Ness — infantry sergeant, standard-bearer, drummer, cavalry soldier, or humble private – that Aimé makes occasional appearances in the scattered, unreliable registers of the American Civil War, where he fought first in Virginia and then in Georgia, and where a few months later he took part in certain illicit actions led by little-known militias in Alabama and Tennessee, long after the surrender of the Confederate States and the dismantling of General Lee’s army. No death registry bears his name.
CHAPTER SIX
FEBRUARY 1760
QUEBEC, QC
Under conditions difficult for us to describe or imagine, here in the comfort of our armchairs, it was undoubtedly in fear and in suffering that Aimé came into the world, on a bed of hay or in a pool of dung water, under the protection and yoke of an occupying army, behind a door that creaked and didn’t close properly, a Union Jack snapping in every gust of wind atop the highest tower of the fort.
The world he came into was one where soldiers marched right into people’s homes to ferret out militiamen hidden under beds and in wardrobes, insurgents already being called traitors as if the order they were rebelling against were immutable. They burst into houses and warned the occupants in both tongues, addressed those in hiding first in French and then in English. They wore heavy uniforms of red and white felt that weighed down their shoulders, and carried beautifully crafted rifles of English manufacture, straight from George II’s private magazines, where the British arsenal lay alongside gold and jewels. These weapons never caught fire or blew up in the soldiers’ faces, unlike the volatile old gunpowder used by the habitants. On Chemin Sainte-Foy, the King’s Road that ran north from the city, far from the fortifications, just before the cliff overlooking the countryside and farms, sounds of the latest skirmishes could be heard coming from the remaining pockets of resistance. The city was abustle with vice and British soldiery, the streets overtaken by puddles of melted snow on warm days, petrified by piercing cold on others. The locals hid from the redcoats with their ruddy faces and perfect elocution and frostbitten lips.
People had gotten so thin you could scarcely tell the men from the women. That was nothing next to what they’d look like a few months later. Spring came; the promised staples didn’t. Fall would bring no bounty that year. There were no arms for the harvest anyway.
The woman who gave birth to Aimé, late on the night of February 29, was as thin as the others. No one had noticed she was pregnant, and neither had she. Her nausea was slight, but then she hadn’t known a day without nausea since her tenth birthday. Acid from daily vomiting had stained her teeth. She wore brown, beige, and off-white rags like a dirty, sickly second skin, torn in the most sensitive areas. Her gaze was furtive as a hummingbird’s wings.
The cramps began on her way to army camp, to visit an officer who’d insisted on seeing her one last time before being posted back to Montreal. As she walked down the street, alone in the dark, she suddenly found herself doubled over, you could hear her cries echoing in the seeping stone hallways of the Hôtel-Dieu, where hundreds of cripples from both camps lay, months after the battle, bodies riddled with metal shards, legs sawed off to halt infection.
Mother Juchereau de Saint-Ambroise, who had set out with a fur coat on her shoulders and an oil lamp that she held away from her body, found her lying in the snow where she had fainted, moaning and panting through her spells of consciousness. She was young, as was the nun who turned around and called for help. Other lights appeared. Between the woman’s legs, covered with coagulating blood, you could see a baby’s head. They laid a wool blanket on the ground and tried to produce as much heat as they could. Some of the sisters weren’t yet fourteen.
Seeing that the woman was already stiff, but the baby was breathing and crying heartily, they carried mother and son into the hospital through different doors. The nuns took her to join the bodies of those who had frozen to death that day or that week. The cold was glacial and it would be months before anyone managed to dig a hole. Her body was placed next to a young man who, even with a missing eye, seemed to watch her with interest. He lay on his side, one arm hanging into the void, as if intent on cuddling up and enjoying what little warmth remained in her flesh. Mother Juchereau gave her a cursory wash, then discarded the rags. Meanwhile they took the tiny, blood-covered Aimé to another room one floor above to be baptized immediately. There was no guarantee he would live through the night.
She was never identified. No one asked after the corpse, or came forward to claim the child. They never knew who she was or who had impregnated her, but there were signs of violence on her face, swollen patches that weren’t caused by cold or fever. The sides of her nose and eyebrows were scarred with burn marks and she’d been bitten repeatedly, on the left forearm, by a dog or wolf.
The sisters of the congregation had Aimé baptized, someone with authority chose a name to their liking, and at dawn, safe in a Moses basket, he was taken to a room deep in the west wing of the seminary where Father Clovis ran an orphanage of sorts.
On the road, in the indefatigable arms of a young Augustinian sister, he passed uniformed soldiers with barrel and snare drums, drilling for one more parade in front of an officer and the King’s Colours planted in the frozen ground. They were preparing to attack on the position at Saint-Augustin with the few hundred healthy men remaining. Discussions drew on as they awaited the British Navy vessels whose arrival would confirm their victory and rightful dominion over this land. There was always a good crowd on the ramparts, eyes trained on the horizon, waiting to relay the joyous news.
Fewer habitants were dying of scurvy, and the officers reminded the troops to treat the locals well. Without the people’s support they were as good as dead. Stop kicking in doors. Stop insulting the women. Hands off private stores. Fingers were too frozen to point, but the impulse to warm them over a flame was in fact the w
orst possible idea; instead you had to act against your better instincts, rub hands in the cold snow and patiently wait for the heat to return to the knuckles. Regiments had been sent out four miles west with makeshift carts in search of wood.
In the room at the end of the hall, nursemaids were busy with the newborns. No one wanted to see them die before they’d had a chance to live. In exchange for a few hunks of bread and fresh water to take home, the women lined up to help Father Clovis with his good works. The authorities didn’t have to know. A seamless understanding obtained between women and priest. They came to help out and kept it quiet, even the babies, good children all, the fallen sons and daughters of habitants or the poorly armed French forced to retreat to Montreal. Since September’s end they had gathered thirty babies and mourned the thirty mothers who’d frozen to death or succumbed to malnutrition or died for no better reason than failure to recognize the symptoms of pregnancy. Some had been abandoned, by people who may not have meant badly.
Of all these babies only Aimé survived the winter. When the warmth returned, as if brought back by the British ships, to the garrison’s shouts of joy, he had gained a lot of weight. He was sure on his feet and chattered away in three or four unknown languages. He had the look of a child who would age prematurely, grow up fast, and die young out of sheer impatience to get out into the world.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AUGUST 1863
MONTREAL, QC
The first time Aimé saw Jeanne Beaudry she was getting off a two-horse streetcar on Saint-Laurent. He was leaning, with an apple in his hand, against a rotten wooden post outside a shop. The heat was choking the city. Buildings trembled in the mirages of freshly paved streets, and the blue sky stretched out like an opaque dome over the thoroughfare. Everyone was yelling, yet their surprisingly heavy voices petered out after a few yards.
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