Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  She invited me to come with her to Montreal and share her tent while she helped me salvage whatever I’d forfeited in my lost days, though she was clear that I’d have to pay for her services and the space. “Have you got any money?”

  I told her about my faint hope of a war pension, which I longed to recover, but so far had not.

  “I can help you with that, if you do your homework. Have you no cash at all?”

  “I have a little in the shortbread canister on top of Madame Blanchard’s spice tin…”

  “For heaven’s sake, give me a bit up front and the rest when we get that war pension sorted out. You’re the most pathetic soldier I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m not looking for pity,” I warned. “I need someone to listen and guide me in a no-nonsense way through the logistics of the modern world.”

  “There’ll be no nonsense about me,” she said. “On that you can depend.”

  “But can you build me up? Rescue me from my doubts?”

  “Do I look like a cheerleader to you?”

  “You look more like a…you’re not a succubus?” Succubi had been a problem when I encamped near my battlefields. Between the dryads of Scotland and camp-followers of the British army there had been more nights than I could count when I’d awoken to a woman’s exhalations on my neck, her limbs now cold, now hot, now wet, now dry and scaly as cedar bark, chafing or sliming or entwining, leechlike, around mine, smothering and unwanted.

  “I can write succubus on my card if you want,” she said. “Look, if you want to stay in my tent, be my guest. I’ve told you what my fee is. But I don’t give crazy soldiers any guarantees. Sometimes they perk up and more often they mosey on back to their demented little worlds without having a grain more sense than they had when we met. That’s your call, Mr. Wolfe.”

  —

  LISTEN NOW TO HER SNORE! Sophie’s one of those people who’re jabbering away one minute and fast asleep the next. I tore an article out of the paper for her on the dangers of sleep apnea but she said silken-arsed wimps like me don’t understand how tired a hardworking woman can get. In mid-sentence every night she joins the dead like this, yet she fails to credit me when I explain how a man can linger amongst the living even if he has died—can linger for centuries, trying to make peace with what he has lost.

  Mrs. Waugh, might you believe me? I reread the note I’ll post to her at Box 444 tomorrow.

  Dear Mrs. Waugh,

  Further to our little chat last year on the steps of the Fisher Library.

  Have you thought any more about my lost days? You would be one of very few. All England had protests in the streets, but who in power ever cared about workers losing eleven days’ pay, or about young soldiers called back early from their leave?

  A lord or a duke will summon a soldier back to battle on a whim.

  What did my superiors care that I’d begun learning Hotteterre’s prelude in D on my flute—three minutes of pure and unassuming beauty? Even my failed attempts brought small birds to the door if I left it open. Starlings paid no mind to mistakes in my tune and I only wish now that I had learned from them how to bless and forgive.

  Can it be that my wailing has tormented the angels, causing them to relent? Have they noticed that my eleven lost days included September the thirteenth, the day I would eventually die on Quebec’s plains? Has Michael, the Archangel of War, taken pity on me? —how else has it come about, this feeling that, with your assistance, I might stumble out of my fog and become the man I might have been were it not for all that vanished with my stolen days of 1752?

  All I want, Mrs. Waugh, is for you to understand my plight, and perhaps, if you can, relay it to others. I am staying in my friend’s little tent at Parc du Mont-Royal, just up the hill from the gazebo in whose railing you may, if you wish to arrange a meeting, slip me a note, or from whose platform, if you desired, you might witness me try find the ordinary joy of life that has so far eluded this soldier who remains,

  Sincerely yours,

  General James Wolfe

  How Sophie would ridicule this letter. After years of working on my case, she has started advising me to “suck it up” whenever I mention my lost leave. Reminds me I don’t believe in religion so can claim no help from angels. Part of me wishes I’d met Mrs. Waugh, not Sophie, on the beach a decade ago, frying corn dogs in a van, although I can’t imagine cuddling with her in a tent.

  Hotteterre’s prelude! When I’m tired like this and lying down, I can hear every note of its tender fallibility, its spaces, its unassuming shape. It meanders like a small country stream of no importance to anyone but young walkers, long-legged spiders, dragonflies and slender ducks. Its emotion is an innocent happiness, though not a witless flight of childish primary colour—it remembers all the cleareyed queries I made, as a serious child, of the river and fields. It suggests botanical exactitude, painterly adherence to precise ochres, chlorophylls and butterfly dyes. The prelude travels—I ride it now—takes modest flight, alights on an ear of wild grass, stays in one place and listens. It paces itself then runs ahead, serious and merry yet never frivolous, weightless yet not sweet. Its rhythms are contained as time contains a line that has no end.

  Its line wanders with the unpredictable harmony of a conversation between open minds. Oh Sophie, if only you and I could talk in that way….Its beauty is original and a little bit strange. It lasts only three minutes, yet is not easy to follow, and has taken me forever to memorize, if in fact I have ever truly known it at all.

  3 Madame Blanchard

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

  MORNING.

  Montreal, Quebec

  EVERY SEPTEMBER IT TAKES ME a while to reacquaint myself with Montreal’s city smells, its colours, the subway lines, its mélange of English and French. Eggs tournés or miroir or brouillés? On Saint Catherine Street this Monday morning, as I slip my letter to Mrs. Waugh in the mailbox outside Ogilvy’s, I hear a man hail a taxi shouting old French slang for a chariot—Montrealers mangle quaint, backwoods French with chopped American, yet wield baguettes and bottles of Bordeaux like Parisians. At Casse-Croûte Diane, where we eat breakfast, Sophie critiques my list:

  Bread

  Figs

  Available veg

  Pop-up tins tuna or etc. (Not Flaked)

  Arm-and-Hammer toothpaste (Not Gel)

  The Gazette

  Maudite Lager

  Madame Blanchard

  “Why,” she asks, “did you write the Gazette instead of L’Itinéraire?”

  “Isn’t L’Itinéraire the one homeless people sell on corners?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Won’t the Gazette have more pertinent news?”

  “Are you serious? And how come you crossed out Madame Bee?”

  “I don’t know, I—she—”

  “You know you fucking well need to go see her.”

  “You’re more profane than my brigadiers! You do all you can to make me feel even worse than they did. And this bacon’s horrible.”

  “You’ve demolished five pieces.”

  “It’s acrid. Tasteless. If only it were a bit of Wiltshire peameal….”

  “Quit comparing everything with good old England and stop exaggerating that stupid accent.”

  “I’m not!”

  “You sound like someone drunk at a party translating the Queen’s Christmas message. Quit complaining about everything. The bacon, the money.”

  “But the money feels strange, fuses together…what’s it made of?”

  “Vinyl. Everyone said it smelled like maple syrup when it first came out. City noses. Can’t tell petroleum from spruce.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a grilled tomato.”

  “I’ve told you, take consolation in all the things that have not changed.”

  “Is marmalade too much to ask? Is a toast rack out of the question?”

  “Poor Bigbad.” She hauls her phone out. Her shift starts in nine minutes.

  “The sausages contain no sage. At any
comparable dining establishment in England or Scotland, even a modest rural inn…”

  “Soon you’ll start ranting about the tea.”

  “This sachet of dust floating upon its lukewarm pool is not tea!”

  “Anglos crack me up. You wear this immaculate layer of don’t-touch-me around you no matter how lonely you are or how you ache for someone to love. Get a load of that one.” She points at a gentleman working on the Gazette’s daily crossword.

  I have to admit he looks as if he’s planning the annual budget of the Pitcairns. He has brought his special pencil sharpener and sweeps the dust into his cupped hand then drops it in a cactus.

  “A colonial Englishman never does his crossword with a pen,” she says. “He wouldn’t be able to erase his mistakes and therefore pretend he never makes any. He’s the only person here besides you, by the way, drinking a cup of tea first thing on a Monday morning.”

  “They wouldn’t have it on the menu if nobody drank it.”

  “He has a jar in his satchel for putting old tea bags in so he can reuse them. See how he treats his cup like a brother? English people hate getting close to other people so much that their teapots and cups become their companions. Try to talk to them and they glance apologetically at their tea as if to say, Hold it, old chap, excuse me, but I’m afraid we’ve been rudely interrupted.”

  She rams her beanie on. “Meet me at the Brewery at noon? It’s Habitant Pea Soup Day, followed by out-of-date Sweet Marie bars, and you should claim your bunk before tonight. The forecast says twenty percent chance of freezing rain. Why are you sighing?”

  I prefer Sophie’s tent to the smelly, overcrowded bunks at the Old Brewery Mission. The moon and park lamps glow through its canvas. I love the old walrus Sophie had started painting on it when I met her and has been augmenting ever since, intensifying the creature’s eyes, sharpening its tusks, adding blue to its greyness so it casts blue light on our skin as we lie together. The only reason I ever try to secure a Mission bunk is in case we get bad weather, or Sophie and I fight, or the police harass me, or I desire to receive anything by mail.

  Involuntarily I touch my pocket and Sophie winks. “Okay, see you after you write to Mama.”

  Sophie Cotterill does not remind me that my mother, Henrietta Wolfe, née Thompson, passed away in 1764. Sophie understands about talking to a person you’ve lost: how the person listens if you speak to them as they did while they lived. But she likes to tease me. She likes to grab my writing pad and scribble postscripts to my mother: Your son continues to regret the cutting short of his leave in Paris, 1752. That is a mighty long time ago, Henrietta. Could you not teach him any better how to let things go?

  I used to try and explain to Sophie how worn out I had felt, how that lost leave meant everything to me. Ten years of hard soldiering from the age of thirteen. Then, in Paris, a reprieve, ever so fleeting—Sophie still thinks I mean it was a holiday. I never convinced her it wasn’t leisure but much-needed leave, crucial to any military man for his cultural development. An enlightened general treats culture as part of his work! He can’t get ahead at all unless he knows how to carry himself with sophistication. I wanted to learn the minuet. I made surprising progress despite the curtailment of my leave. I mean, I never learned the steps to great perfection, but at least no one mocked me…I even met La Pompadour! But even then, in the glory of being young and up-and-coming, I glanced in La Pompadour’s mirror and found myself staring at an ancient, broken man. Two of my visible teeth had broken like biscuits…

  “Why not just talk to your mother, instead of writing?” Sophie says. “Do you imagine she can’t hear you?”

  “I’d like to think she can—but…”

  “You and your mother are odd, Bigbad. Weird. Close but not warm-close, more like frozen together. Can’t be pried apart. Totally fucking English.”

  Out she swaggers—before noon she’ll scour a hundred filthy sinks. I wish I still possessed the capacity to love I owned in my early days. I might be a better companion to her and to myself. As soon as she’s gone I grasp my pen and pad like someone addicted to the written word, which I suppose I might be. How else is anything to be pinned down or even half understood?

  Dear Madam, I begin.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

  AROUND NOON.

  Casse-Croûte Diane. Montreal, Quebec

  WRITING TO MY MOTHER HAS always been part duty, but I do feel unburdened by it.

  I’ve always saved special little things for her letters, things that have no place in my letters to my father, or to my military superiors, who wanted to hear tactics, strength, evidence of stern competence and a will to succeed. Never mind that the profession of war demands finesse: it demands time—every day precious—studying our own tactics and those of the French with their precision and grace. Being mentored by my elders, learning the language of my future enemy—did my superiors have no idea what happens to an English soldier in the dark, on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, who cannot deceive the shadows with his tongue? And my fencing lessons! As with my prowess in riding a horse in Paris I found I somehow, naturally, knew how to fence: with my long arms and longer legs, I had the most extensive lunge of any student my teachers had known. A bayonet became a different instrument once the French taught me how to regard a blade. Yet still I needed more time than I had. One doesn’t capitalize on natural talents without practice.

  My Parisian studies prepared me for battle but they also nourished my soul—without them, dear mother, I wither. I withered when they were snatched in my youth and because of their absence I rot to this day in that blind, sere land I inhabit between Septembers.

  Dear Madam,

  So help me if I don’t claim the fruits of my stolen fortnight this year I’ll hurl myself in the Spout, the chasm of sluicing

  No. A mother can stand to hear a little of her son’s anguish, but not too much. I have to continue reminding her of noble things, such as how I spared women and children in battle, or how, despite falling ill and succumbing to despair, I have come back to myself and will, as ever, remain her loyal, obedient son. Then there are the funny little bits, the cryptic parts. I add things no one but my mother would understand, to make the story only we two share.

  Our letters electrified one another with that feather whose touch astounds: each jolt intimate, particular, and ours alone, even the fragmentary installments of our never-ending quarrel.

  And so, each September I still write letters to my mother and I mail them, as I did in her lifetime, but of course not to Blackheath and not by ship. Sophie torments me about dropping them in the red Canada Post mailbox.

  “Nobody does that anymore,” she says. “Even my grandma on Grand-Entrée Island uses email.”

  SEPTEMBER 4TH, 2017, MONTRÉAL

  Dear Madam,

  In Montreal I have found a place a little like the sanctuary we so much used to enjoy at the Bath…

  What I’ve found is, in fact, the Chinatown YMCA.

  I’ve found steam, swirling hot waters of the whirlpool, and penetrating heat of a sauna. And I’ve found society. I do not think I mislead my mother too far when I describe the society at the pool on Rue de la Gauchetière. It does bear a certain resemblance to taking the waters at Bath.

  The bodies.

  Something soothes me about those bodies, all shapes: indolent, quick, wiry, lard-fat, slow or electric, everyone’s guard down. There is one man, blind and dressed in yellow, whose seeing-eye dog waits, ever so patient, beside his glowing pile of clothes while he showers. None of us has to pretend uprightness or strength. I delight in freckles, pot-bellies, undulating buttocks. I loved that about Bath as well. Both places give me uncustomary pride in my own weird shape.

  Why is it that, naked, I lose my strangeness among men?

  When I wore the red coat, those who loved me found ways to assure me it mattered not that I possessed gangling calves or was chinless. My brother, Ned, and my beloved friend George Warde insisted I appeared not at all
like an orange mop on stilts. My mother comforted me all the time about my chin.

  At the Chinatown Y, as in Bath, the steam releases our tension. We emerge bright-skinned and lithe, even the blind man slowly pulling his yellow garments back on: sweatshirt, trousers, even his socks are yellow—and the twenty-five-stone man who keeps muttering to himself and lets loose a final howl as if he’s experienced a resounding orgasm. I refrain from writing to my mother about these people.

  If she were alive I would want her to believe I’m comfortable, even while I suffer my post-battle fears and indignities. Knowledge is healing, Sophie says, but I do not think all knowledge helps mothers.

  My accommodations this September are no worse than they have been previously. At The Old Brewery I have a pretty good bed if I need it. But I prefer my tent after dark, on the mountain, which isn’t really a mountain, but a large hill in quite a nice park in the centre of Montreal.

  Do not worry about my spirits! A friend has given me a little trick to make me feel more at home here….Not the way I felt at your house, of course, Mother. No place in Canada has the comforts of the room where you lay, or the little parlour where my father and I used to dress.

  Nearly everything here is different and I am in an alien world, but this friend tells me I should dwell not on the differences between here and home, but on familiar things that have never changed…such as pigeons.

  It never fails to lift my heart, seeing a flock of the purple and mother-of-pearl fat-bellied city birds lift, shaking stars, off a cornice in Place d’Armes. They are nowhere near as graceful as linnets, or even starlings, whose nets of choreographed skydance I also love. Pigeons roost in the gutters of every common shop, but I find them uncommon. Pigeons are doves, and have not changed in any place or time, but are the same as ever in London, Edinburgh or Montreal, and—I remember—in the cornices around Quebec City’s plains. Pigeons make me come back briefly to my old self. I know my mother understands this, though she always complained about the mess they made in St. John’s Park.

  Madam, I’ll head down to Montreal’s Ruelle des Fortifications again this afternoon. My friend, the one who reminded me to appreciate pigeons—I might have mentioned her name is Sophie and I am far from romantically involved with her: you know I’d tell you if I was. Sophie is a friend to me in the way George Warde was, and you know how I cared for him. You’ll be amused to know she challenges me even more than you ever have. She calls it folly to lament my lost days or to examine the fruits of my past actions, but that is why I am here. How else can I see if winning New France was worth losing all I ever loved, including you?