The Longest Year

by Daniel Grenier

  The leather couch Aimé sat on clashed with the rest of the furniture and the walls. Canvases were everywhere, hanging or strewn over the floor alongside battered, paint-stained easels. Crane made some noise in the cupboards, in the kitchen, a puny room at the back of the studio, and when he came back all trace of unease had vanished, his face told only of his eagerness and excitement to finally speak to a man who had seen, up close, what he was preparing to put into words: the thrill of combat, imminent danger, the whistle of flying bullets and the deafening report of cannon, inspiring hope of victory while wreaking havoc with ear drums. He undid the buttons of his navy blue blazer and sat down on the sofa across from Aimé, crossed his legs, took a deep breath, then uncrossed them to lean in toward the bottle. He poured liquor into the glasses and handed one to Aimé, who kept his hands in the air, ready to toast. Crane served himself and clinked Aimé’s glass with his own. Each man smiled and stroked his respective moustache, sculpting it to an upturned tip. Crane reclined comfortably deep in the sofa and crossed his legs. He shot Aimé an ironic look.

  “You’re old for your age.”

  Aimé didn’t say anything to that, but started to open his mouth. Crane continued:

  “Or maybe the opposite. It’s hard to say.”

  “I know. It’s hard to believe. I’ve always been healthy. But I feel old at the same time, it’s weird. Sometimes, in my head, I feel two hundred years old, know what I mean? I feel old, when I think about it, but my body can still do whatever I ask it to: my legs never get tired, my arms move smoothly, there’s no particular pain in my muscles.”

  “They say war makes men age faster. Yet here you are. What do you figure happened?”

  Crane took a sip. When you stopped to think about it, took a closer look at the interest he seemed to attract wherever he went and whatever he did, he also seemed to be, deep down, a stranger to his age. His was the attitude of a much older man, who’d lived a thousand lives before making a brief stopover in this one. He moved and talked with a wisdom that was hard to place, a mental acuity quite distinct from mere vigour.

  “It’s as if nature had overlooked you.”

  “Too kind.”

  Aimé took a sip of bourbon. It was bad. Evidence of economic depression was all around. Only the rich could afford good whiskey now. Aimé had laid aside a stash over the years, bottles of Dickel and Old Bushmills. He held the liquid in his mouth for a long time, rolled it around on his tongue and the roof of his mouth as if it were a venerable Irish. It tasted like backwoods Kansas rotgut.

  “I’m not sure it’s a compliment. I mean, it’s as if you’d been abandoned, forsaken by nature, left to your own devices.”

  “That’s the impression I give you?”

  “As if it were up to you to decide what happens, if you take my meaning.”

  “Yes.”

  “As if it were up to you alone. A heavy weight for any man.”

  He came forward one more time, to open the little metal box on the table. Inside was a small mound of very fine white powder.

  “Or not. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll grow old in the blink of an eye, then drop dead, like a man flattened by an explosion. A bolt of lightning, the blow of a hammer. Who knows? A falling piano. A black cat.”

  “For now, everything seems normal. It’s a matter of appearances, when you get down to it. Consider it a matter of appearances. As everyone knows, they aren’t to be trusted.”

  Crane took a snort off a little iron key he dipped in the powder, and offered the box to Aimé, who picked it up carefully. Crane shot him a look signalling that he was welcome to it, all he had to do was help himself. The tiny key was shedding powder. He inhaled vigorously, then pinched the side of his nose. At his house, somewhere in Oregon or maybe New Mexico, in a sealed, humidity-controlled cellar, that’s where they were, the bottles of whiskey he’d been saving for a long time. As dust gathered, the flavours were growing in complexity. He was saving them for a special occasion.

  A ray of light came through the window, slicing the room in two. Between noon and one, if the weather was fine, the sun shone down on the buildings nestled against each other up and down the street, you had to enjoy it while it lasted. When the ray came into sight, Crane stood up and went over to the large curtain. Then he walked back and sat down, and they started in on serious matters. Aimé had expected him to take notes, scribble on a pad as he talked. But he didn’t. Crane listened, occasionally smiling with pleasure at a detail, reshaping his moustache with his fingertips. When Aimé began to veer off he would nudge him back on track with specific questions about, say, the types of weapons he’d used, or the number of cannon at Morrisville in April ’65, one of the final battles of the long war, one of the very last co-ordinated cavalry movements.

  When Aimé turned to more personal matters the story grew more interesting. Crane’s expression changed. Gone was the ironic smile. He wasn’t quite sitting on his artist friend’s sofa anymore, you couldn’t really call what he was doing “sitting” anymore. He was listening to Aimé, and the people in the paintings strewn around the studio without apparent rhyme or reason seemed to do the same.

  Aimé described how the sun poking through the long grey rainclouds had made him feel like it was all over and everyone would head home, marked forever but still alive, and this had given him a misguided idea that the horror was coming to an end. It had happened many times, more than he could count. But it was inevitable, he couldn’t stop believing it. He explained how he’d thought of his mother, the mother he’d never known but liked to imagine, bidding him goodbye as he cried silently, saying farewell by the fence they would have built to keep the hens safe from foxes and coyotes. He didn’t think about his wife, or the woman he’d been in love with, or the fleeting paramours he’d left behind, but about a mother who might have let him head off for the war, alone with his illusions of heroism and courage, shedding silent tears from stoic eyes.

  He liked to imagine this mother of his, see her again in his mind when the enemy artillery fire fell on his position and the whole area for miles around. That way, he carried his mother with him, her image imprinted on his mind, and thought of her, in the midst of the cannon and gunfire, surrounded by men spitting and coughing in fits and the shouts of an officer whose dismount was cut short by a bullet to the face. It landed on a mouth that, right before being blown off his face, had given an order, arm gesturing toward the heart of the battle, where they must head to truly join the fighting. No matter what they may have thought, despite the unarguable violence of the explosions and the broken pieces of bark and stone flying in every direction, they weren’t there yet. They were far from the battlefield. The officers never stopped barking orders, ordering them to get moving, individually and collectively, like a giant rearing up to crush the enemy.

  One thing Crane had to wrap his head around was that there was no way to describe a battle from a single point of view, unless it was that of an eagle, or a general examining a map, or a historian after the fact. Aimé liked to tell how, once battle was underway, it took on its own living shape, had its own life, its own ecology and geology and breathing pattern, panting followed by shortness of breath and then moments of otherworldly repose. Whichever way a soldier looked there was always an outcropping of violence around the edges, often miles from the supposed epicentre of the battle where the fate of the war and the country were to be decided.

  Aimé talked about how, to feel the power of combat, it was vital to understand its counterweight, the crushing boredom that was the lot of the soldier and his entire regiment, boredom dragging on so long you could almost believe victory or defeat might be achieved without you and your contribution. Out of this boredom grew the potential for heroism, mirages, hallucinations in the cold night, agitated dreams that transformed even the most humble of men into conquering emperors. Nothing would happen for so long that, when something actually began to occur, it w
as unreal, almost inconceivable. The regiment marched, and marched, and marched some more, over whole states, it seemed, across entire mountain ranges, only to arrive, after weeks and weeks, in a nameless clearing where everything was blowing up, where the entire universe was strangely concentrated in the colours and the sounds and the visceral fear that took hold in such cacophony that nothing made sense anymore. A few leagues from the clearing there would be an abandoned farm, its frame a collection of cracks, its roof on the brink of collapse. It was built of salvaged lumber, so they must have been far indeed from Washington or Savannah or Richmond or wherever decisions were being made and troop movements co-ordinated.

  Also, as he snorted more cocaine and agreed to another glass of bourbon, he explained to Crane, trying to make him understand without belabouring the point, that the true meaning of war, of any war, lay in the apparent contradiction between our cowardice and thirst for heroism. He described how he had run off in the opposite direction with no clear idea why. Aimé, who had volunteered, convinced in the ill-advised wisdom of youth that he wasn’t afraid of anything, had run far from the field of battle, guided by the artillery fire that seemed to come from ever further away. He told Crane that was the precise moment he’d lost control of his body in general and his legs in particular. The battle was unfolding up the mountain and he had run down, down toward the clearing, toward a creek they’d crossed days earlier. He’d told himself he was looking for water for the others, that they would need water. He wasn’t deserting, was merely thirsty, and the others must be too, the lieutenant was terribly thirsty, you could hear it in his voice when he yelled, a discernable lack of saliva, his mouth was so dry it made his voice husky and muffled, and spittle was whitening the corners of his mouth.

  As he snorted he made it clear to Crane, looking him in the eyes, without trying to convince him, that it was perhaps this he should try to find the words for, in the book he was preparing to write: this involuntary movement of the legs that had made Aimé run, far from the gunfire and cannonballs, as far as his legs would carry him. Maybe Crane’s words would help him explain, no, not exactly explain, that wasn’t the right word, he had no idea what the right word was, but somehow put words to why he had run away, and what it meant in the life of a soldier and the overall economy of war; somehow explain the meanings assigned to war by various classes of men. Was Aimé the kind of man who ran away? Is that how you would describe him — him in particular — or was he rather a type of something much larger than himself? Crane bit his upper lip and ran his finger through his moustache, visibly holding back from asking a question. Aimé stopped talking and waited.

  Had he been injured?

  Yes, he’d been hit. A rifle butt to the head that nearly killed him, at the hands of a Union soldier. He’d asked where the battle was. When he finally decided to rejoin his regiment, after running around the edge of the fighting for hours, wild-eyed, tripping over dead men, he’d asked a group of soldiers who looked to be halfway through a successful desertion where the battle was, and one of the men had given him a shove, followed by a blow to the head with his rifle. Aimé was knocked unconscious and later, when he joined the others, he was treated by a military doctor convinced he’d been grazed by a bullet. The shape of the wound suggested a bullet scraping his skull as it whistled by. He didn’t say a thing. He couldn’t tell a full-fledged lie, nor could he tell the truth. They called him a hero.

  Aimé leaned over and tilted his head to show his old scar to Crane, who hadn’t asked to see it. In the spot on his hair where strands of grey were mixed in, Aimé made an opening with his hands, where a line of swollen skin formed a zigzag. His gesture partook of understated, dignified pride, as if he were defying Crane to locate the cowardice in this scar, in this wound sustained in the heat of battle, in the heart of personal and collective defeat.

  They’d been drinking a while and the cocaine was taking effect. Aimé constructed labyrinthine sentences in his rich and often antiquated English. He described a sudden fear that would take hold of his torso, his chest, his Eustachian tubes, and was slipping into a quasi-scientific register whose anatomical terms kept him from falling into over-the-top lyricism. Increasingly, what he was saying grew less focused and less clear, it spun in circles around different nodes of his own private story. He talked a lot about the colours of the landscape, the shades of grey, pink, and dark blue stretching out on the horizon, which he admired but which had nothing do with what was going on in Five Forks, Fort Bragg, and Selma, Alabama. Wherever the troops went they were surrounded by the same eternal, ancestral mountains, as if these mountains would up and run when the skirmishes reached a pitch of violence that presaged the imminent apocalypse. You were waiting for the sun to go down, the mountainsides to crumble, and the giant trunks of the great elms and oaks to start cracking all around, breaking into pieces that would rain down on the armies. Aimé wondered where these grim, somehow pellucid impressions came from. Were they born of fear, or courage? It all happened in your guts, between the rising diaphragm and twisting colon. You couldn’t name this sensation that made you run in one direction or the other, point your gun and shoot at the fuzzy grey shapes on the edge of your field of vision or run away into the safety of the forest and the calm, impassive mountain peaks, the Blue Ridge stretching as far as the eye could see and up into the clouds; run off and disappear into the Alleghenies.

  A few hours later, when the empty bottle lay on its side on the table, knocked over by a wayward gesture of Crane’s, Aimé said he had to go. Crane cracked his back and then his fingers, first toward and then away from himself. They got up at the same time and walked a relatively straight line to the door, which Crane opened for Aimé. They shook hands and Crane started thanking him. His temples throbbed visibly and he was concentrating, his attention focused completely on a spot between his guest’s eyebrows. He said it again: You look so young, man.

  Aimé smiled and chortled through his nose; a humourless, rational, empathetic laugh. He winked in agreement and freed his hand from Crane’s grip. As he left the apartment he stumbled over the railing, and on his way down he could hear the young journalist explaining how to get back downtown. His voice faded in the hallway, then on the steps of the spiral staircase, in the building’s distant reaches. The dirty air and absolute blackness enveloping Aimé dispersed once he emerged onto the front steps.

  In this neighbourhood without streetlights, people walked around with oil lamps, their dancing flames hypnotic as pendulums. On his way down the steps separating him from the dirt road, Aimé heard a series of high-pitched yelps and lifted his head to walk toward the sound. At one of the building’s windows, on the seventh floor or maybe the eighth, a man was bent over. He held a little brown dog he was tossing in the air, laughing. Behind him, mixed in with the animal’s wheezing and barking, you could also hear a child’s cries. The man turned around and yelled “Shut up!” into the apartment. In an elegant, true, unhesitating movement he hurled the dog into the void. It started spinning very quickly, suddenly silent. The little dog sailed through the space over Aimé’s head, crashed into the wall of the building next door, and came to rest in the middle of the road, with a muffled thud absorbed by the dust and rocks kicked up into the dry air. The man turned away from the window, still laughing, and closed the blinds. Some of the lanterns were pointed toward the dog, others toward the window through which you could no longer hear crying or any other sound. A woman pulling sheets off the clothesline had a full smile of clothespins in her mouth. She seemed to be in shock, standing still and upright on the balcony. Aimé looked unsuccessfully for Crane in the interstices of the walls, between the blinding rays of the lanterns.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SEPTEMBER 1837

  NEW ECHOTA, GA

  The weapons confiscated from the men and youths of the Cherokee Nation were stockpiled in a house belonging to Major Ridge, who hadn’t been consulted. After a hasty inventory they were left there, lo
ng guns on one side, pistols on the other, ready for the militia that would back the army in the mass relocation ahead. This movement was for the protection of all, Indian and settler, farmer and soldier. No one, not even the shamans, doubted the march would proceed in an orderly manner.

  The guns lay waiting to be handed out in a house a few miles south of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. Someone was standing guard, to protect them in case of an Indian rising, but everyone knew they could count on the co-operation of Major Ridge, whose signature appeared on the recent treaty. Nobody was afraid of the Indians. They’d kill each other off if any one among them jeopardized the safety of the families. The week before, three men had spoken out against the Treaty of New Echota that set this westward march in motion. They were found dead, throats slit in the night by persons unknown.

  Major Ridge had already moved his family onto land allotted to the Cherokee, oblivious of the plans being made in his name. At the end of the day, that wouldn’t change a thing. He still believed in the good faith of all parties involved, was still writing letters urging the holdouts to join their ranks, across the mountains, where they would find a good land and large, a land of milk and honey where the weather was fine, the farming was easy, and the cattle and buffalo roamed free. Over there the Americans would at long last leave the Cherokee to live in peace. The United States would never stretch that far. There was simply no way. The Great Father, as they still called Jackson, had shown time and again that he was a man of his word. He’d promised the Cherokee would be free over there, across the Mississippi, out past the Arkansas River; this land they’d been granted in good faith by the Americans would never be taken from them, never overrun by the White Man. There was plenty of room for everyone, the landscape and the future stretched out in a straight line as far as the eye could see.