Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  When I came to Canada my mother held on to that sachet, but she never sniffed what she’d hidden in it; she just waved the pretty bag around for show. But in it she had mixed quite the potpourri, poison she knew I must swallow but whose existence she refused to acknowledge: essence of human meat and bone, seasoned with a generous helping of herbes salées du Bas-du-Fleuve—salted weeds from the lower Saint Lawrence River.

  Once you’ve sunk your cleats in the savage’s back, you knife the crescent that stretches from temple to temple and you slice his bleeding meat off its bone. It’s fascinating how layers of meat separate off a skull—I fancy, had I been brute enough to tell my mother the details aloud, she’d have forgotten her feigned ignorance of my affairs and exclaimed, “Bravo—that is exactly how François prepares a hare for our soup!”

  “Understand, Madam,” I once wrote to her—I occasionally slipped up and lost sight of epistolary decorum after too long away from civilizing influences—“I’d perform this act only on an Indian or on a Canadian dressed like one….”

  But I remembered, no matter how long I’d been away from England, never to confess that my Redcoats scalped any Canadian they pleased: Indian, habitant, woman or babe.

  Honour. Empire. Victory.

  The word “victory” has gone out of use. Even my mother preferred to look at it only after the fact, in triumphal Gazette headlines, on monuments for the town square, or in a telegram from the king. Now victory has become unfashionable, shameful—never bandied about by the au courant.

  Here is a letter I did not send:

  Dear Mother,

  Surely you admit, despite looking away so discreetly from the details of my infamy, that I was not sent to Canada to participate in some sort of benevolent exercise…

  Only English civility could save the New World from Spanish barbarity or French foppery or Indians burning us alive piece by piece. England sired the only people by whom real kindness might rule overseas: I don’t mean to question that…but before that happened, we had to win. I was not sent over the sea to assuage or cooperate.

  How long scalped Canadians caterwaul depends on how much blood they lose before you peel ’em. I’ve seen a yowl fit to wake the Duke of Cumberland’s dead father rise out of a completely skinned head. Sound travels slower than death.

  For all this, I’m grateful I never had youngsters. After scalping Canadians my men woke camp at night with their own howls, dreaming of their bairns thus slaughtered. It’s funny how the mind misplaces circumstances at night. My father was never more right in his head than when he used claret to put himself to sleep. The problem is deciding how much to drink without impairing your judgment the next morning. That difficult balance was one of the reasons I begged my superiors to make me second, not first, in command.

  There’s a gap at the head of things, always wanting to be filled, and I never asked to fill it.

  Clarity has always been an attribute of mine, against my wishes. Because of it I have been entrusted with too much. Clarity sounds like claret, but hasn’t nearly the same power of tonic for the mind.

  —

  HOW YOU SET FIRE to a farmstead after a fortnight of August rain is that you ignite hay in the barn, then light pathetic sideboards nailed from packing crates and balsam till the tar drips. You fling this abroad in drafty rooms till flankers engulf the curtains and bedding already windburnt from hanging on clotheslines over the turnip rows.

  There’s clarity, there’s claret, and there’s bed. I don’t talk about the times I had to take to my bed. Some beds, beds in every camp I’ve known, aren’t worth the name—rats’ nests made by turning round and round in a patch of stones.

  Twice in my soldiering life I’ve had to take to my bed not for the gravels, not for dysentery, not for bladder-stones that’ve doubled me over so often—these ailments I can work through: they’re only discomforts, though twice they accompanied my greater ailment, the one a successful soldier conceals, the one I have concealed to this day.

  One of the most satisfying things I ever ate in my life was a blueberry pie set to cool on a sill in Kamouraska. The woman who made it had fled a mile in the woods before the juice pooled in the collarbone of my grenadier and stained his teeth purple.

  How you supply a scurvy-infested regiment with nourishment is that you confiscate the sheep, goats, eggs and cabbages of the enemy. It drives me wild that no matter which century I peruse, men look at my success with either praise or blame. They marvel at my genius or my brutality, asking where I got my knowledge. Whether they think me a depraved genius or a profitable servant of empire, their bafflement is constant and it disturbs me.

  Not then, not now, and nowhere in the future, does anyone appear to read anything.

  They haven’t read Xenophon’s advice on guerrilla warfare, so they think it novel when I train my infantry to retreat the instant after an attack, hiding behind any available thicket or dune instead of keeping to the silly English way of parading in formation, as easy to target as a street full of houses.

  Nor does anyone seem to have heard of Sun Tsu.

  It wasn’t yesterday he counselled warriors to plunder an enemy’s food. For centuries his advice has been in plain sight for anyone with eyes: one barrow of the enemy’s wheat and goat meat is worth twenty of your own because of the palaver, and the spoilage, and the cost of transport. Yet England marvels that I manage to find my soldiers cod, pork and eggs, as if the banks of the Saint Lawrence were populated only by owls. I’ve eaten an owl egg and I vouch instead for jam in a peasant’s larder.

  How you get peasants to relinquish their precious winter supply of provender is that you nail a note to their wretched chapel door warning them that if they so much as whisper against our invasion their every lamb chop will sizzle on a Redcoat’s spit. There won’t be a shrew’s head or a barley grain left to nourish them through January. You point out that by March they have a choice of flesh remaining on their bones or cormorants spitting out those bones to turn pocked and green in the estuary. When they hesitate you don’t flinch. You send reeking Redcoats to torch every hovel on the riverbank until families stream like vermin from all hope of sustenance.

  England did well to choose red for our uniforms: fish-gutting and sheep-butchering peasants are well acquainted with red. Unlike flashier generals, I wear the least fancy, plainest version of the red coat. I find that the hue on its own causes more fright than any buckle or adornment. Where is my uniform now? Oh yes, I remember—waiting for me—why have I not already put it on?

  —

  I SENT MEN TO CATCH that woman who made the blueberry pie. They dragged her back with her three small sons and her old father who’d been the cause of their capture, for he’d insisted on carrying his lame old bird dog.

  “Pitou!” the old man wailed as we shot the animal. He did not glance at his house, or at the barn in flames, nor did he appear to care about my men going off to our fleet with wagonloads of his cabbage and swedes. His eyes never left the dog.

  This nearly made me sentimental. But we already had one dead Frenchman’s dog for a ship’s pet, and it had made such sentimental fools out of the toughest of my Highlanders that I hardly wished to add another softening influence.

  The old man’s dog made me remember my dogs at home. For a perilous moment I was almost plunged out of my soldier’s mind and into that man’s. When this happens I force myself to look down at my uniform, and to remember that when it covers my body it also covers my sonship, my loverhood, and any private nature known by my mother, or by Eliza, or by George Warde or Elwyn or…I try not to think beyond this.

  Those who love me know what a whimsical sort of person I am.

  They know how variable I am, and how unsteady—how, like the habitants we scorch and kidnap, all I desire after retirement from this soldiering life is a house, a very little one, remote on the forest edge or in a meadow like Kamouraska farmhouses. But this is my younger self, the one who knew no motive other than beauty.

  The
loveliness of dogs! I couldn’t help but think, as we shot that poor half-setter, of my own dog Ball in our yard at Blackheath—me coaxing his belly with a cherry branch to make him stop chasing the Newfoundland puppy of a friend who’d come for tea. How I miss dogs—how good they are at quenching the bitter end of loneliness.

  I miss dogs now and I missed them in 1759, and had it not been for that old habitant’s dog, or his daughter and her pie with the juice running and the pastry piped to a pretty frill by her hand, I would not have remembered my personal self at all in Kamouraska.

  I grew afraid when I looked at that woman and dog: afraid I was becoming warped into a peculiar fierceness of temper brought on by war.

  I unfastened my buttons and let the equinoctial wind blow on my chest and reminded that wind to bring me warriors into whose hands I might fall early, rather than be converted by degrees into a barbaric, unholy man; a man who has forgotten his humanity.

  10 A Soldier’s Exile

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

  AFTERNOON.

  Chinatown. Montreal, Quebec

  Don’t you know me?

  Had Archambault’s clerk really asked me that? Where would I have seen him before, or a boy like him? He looked nothing like George Warde. Nor my brother, Ned. A soldier from somewhere…who am I remembering? Elwyn? No. Elwyn has faded from me and will not resurface. Elwyn is gone. Was it Ronnie, my Highland drummer, that I saw in the clerk’s face? Was it Sam? Maybe Sam Holland?

  In the tattooed clerk throbbed Danger and Bliss—my twin lovers from camp, where men flung limbs over one another in a snoring web. If the enemy came, no matter his stealth, we’d waken as one.

  This is the regiment’s interlocked body: sweeter than paired love.

  How I miss it now, alone on Saint Catherine. The exile of a soldier ejected from war is unbearable. I’ve suffered it before, and will continue to do so as long as I wander in my unease in this city of peace.

  Is there no one I can summon to walk with me? Sophie has made it clear that traipsing the streets with me is not part of our deal. And Mrs. Waugh, though I hold hopes of our meeting again, is hardly the confidante of my dreams. Isn’t there anyone?

  Before I left England in February 1759, I beseeched George Warde by letter to come with me to Quebec, invoking all our old methods of mock dissuasion. I promised dire hazard, extreme disadvantage, destruction of his health and constitution—all the exertions he and I craved beyond sex, claret, tobacco or the harder vices.

  I promised him peril and even risked committing to paper my extreme delight over the pleasures of his company.

  My only regret is that I could not for national security’s sake reveal the location in which our exquisite danger was to manifest. All I could say was that I did not mean the Indies but could promise him a far distant land.

  He agreed to come and my heart leapt.

  If I’d specified Quebec I believe he’d have extracted himself from his obligations. Had he done so we’d not have lost one another. I wish I had identified my campaign by some oblique code.

  I longed for George’s company as soldier and man. He was the confluence of my personal and national excitement.

  This was long after I mistook that other man for George in France, outside Café Procope. My French lessons had taken place around that corner. This man stood out. He was not like the buffoons of Paris.

  I grant that now and then I saw a Frenchman I’d call prettily turned, one who moved with grace. Some had generally good faces or fine hair, but most had bad limbs and were atrociously shaped, especially nobles and men born in Paris. Men from the provinces presented a better figure—the one I mistook for George had no foppishness of the city-bred nitwit in him. His gaze was serious and his posture defiant, nothing plump except the lips. George looked on you as suspect until you earned his respect. This was not caginess or unmerited suspicion but an aspect of his constant exercise of precise judgment.

  I’ve forgiven my mother other things, even her cold treatment of Eliza which I regard as involuntary jealousy. But I do not forgive what she did to George. I specified in my will that he be bequeathed a thousand pounds, and she would not give it. She held on to my inheritance: George would have to wait for his portion until after she was dead. I cannot fathom her pettiness and I try to overlook it.

  The man in Paris I mistook for George had his own reason for maintaining his figure—he was a prostitute—whereas George kept his shape out of that carefulness I found so lacking in city men, then and now.

  —

  I TRY TO AVOID WATCHING Montreal locals lounge in the undisciplined fashion that dispirits me so. Will a swim at the Y revive me? Should I attempt a half hour on the number four rowing machine, the only one I can fathom how to operate?

  Sloth, everywhere! I saw the same in Blackheath and London, and remind myself it has less to do with the utter failure of the New World than with the difference between a soldier’s life and a civilian’s.

  A young man, not seventeen, thrusts his cap out at the approach of an old woman walking with a cane. He possesses many times her agility yet demands her spare change.

  She suffers a spinal curvature and hoists a dollar-store bag bulging with biscuits and oranges. She rummages as he waits, no shame in him at all, and he accepts her coins. She gives him a smile whose startling warmth glows, I think, from the false teeth you can get these days. I keep meaning to ask Sophie about the teeth. My mother would’ve loved them, and my own are in such hard shape.

  “You remind me of my aunt Trudy,” says the beggar to the old woman.

  “Do I?”

  “You do! I don’t know why. She was a very kind person, too.”

  He condescends as if he’s done the old woman some service instead of the other way around.

  I wait till she’s gone round the corner. He stashes her cash and gulps his coffee. I’m buzzing from the grip of that tattooed clerk, and the adrenaline, along with the sight of the youth’s indolence, wakens the soldier in me.

  No trouble to grip that neck. “What sort of a disgrace are you? Pilfering from an old woman. Eh?”

  “I need money for my train home!”

  “You’ve got a home? Where? Some shithouse? A whorehouse? Or did you crawl from under a rock?”

  “Antigonish!”

  Where the hell’s my bayonet? I’d love to stick his bowels and fling him in the road. I become aware of voices swirling around me.

  “Laisse-le tranquille!”

  “My God, he’s a kid—you’re twice the size of him, look at you!”

  Are they hissing at me? I wish the fellow would stop snivelling. And that cat—I hadn’t noticed the matted cat tied to his belt. A woman in gardenia scent cradles the kid, glaring as if I’m the shameful one. He’s conned her all right. Far abler than he looks…I’d love to sign him up right here, have him outfitted and trained and put him to use in my regiment. He has everything I require: youth, a decent form unadulterated by an excess of bad food, even an uncouth charm that makes the gathering crowd treat him like a brother.

  “If I could harness these qualities of his and direct them properly,” I whisper to the gardenia-scented woman, “he might amount to something.”

  How lovely is her chemise covered in roses. She spits. I check my person to gauge what might have drawn her disapproval and am aghast to see I am not wearing an ironed shirt, nor have my trousers been recently laundered.

  If only she could see the shirts I bought in France—the good ones with the ruffles. I found them fussy but others treated me like a gentleman as long as I had one on.

  A pair of police: “Eh? Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”

  “Ça va maintenant,” says Gardenia-rose. “Mais, this homeless man was trying to beat up the boy and steal his train fare.”

  Incensed, I scan the crowd for a face that will verify I’m no vagabond. The policewomen’s suspicion softens to weary forbearance and the older one knocks me on the shoulder with her baton: Effacer. Se perdre! Tenez-vous.


  —

  RUE SAINT-ANDRÉ…Rue Saint-Timothée…What building is this? The humble little library where I first found the lovely old copy of Beckles Willson’s Life and Letters of James Wolfe. Thank god for libraries—I can sink in that fat green armchair near the S–W section.

  I pick up a magazine about skiing and pretend to read it, only to notice that the other armchairs are occupied by bona fide homeless men whose tatters, bags of filthy miscellany, and outright snores the librarian seems willing to tolerate.

  It’s bad enough that Gardenia-rose decided I was homeless, but it is something else when you realize that you look, in the eyes of others, more dilapidated than you imagined. And then you find a place to recover—and that place turns out to be full of real lost causes.

  It’s not as if I haven’t been dishevelled in the past, at the height of my serviceability. Washerwomen are hard to find on a soldier’s travels and when he finds one he pays her well if he cares at all how others perceive him. Can it be possible I look as wasted and disreputable as the men here at La Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy?

  Dear Mother…My pad is stained with the beggar’s coffee….As you know, the entire world has always been my home….

  But is this true? I do not feel, at this moment, that it’s true at all. Can I even picture my mother? I hardly remember her address. How Sophie laughs at me every time she catches me looking for a postbox. Ridicule presents itself all around me.

  I have, by reason of my endless wandering, always loved to hear of your perennials, and of my father’s onion garden. I imagine returning to your chives and alyssum, your roses and gooseberries, all the while I march through these strange lanes….

  That young lout’s cat bothered me. How dare he tie it to his belt, depriving it of hearth or scullery where it might doze in a patch of sun? If a man has to roam, he should limit the discomfort of his family and of domestic animals as well.

  But tell me, mother, to what has this all led? I walk the streets of Montreal and cannot say it has become a seat of learning, nor an example of the English values for which I…