Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  For which I…what?

  The S–W shelves loom behind me. Beyond them, past the tiny XYZ cubbyhole, towers the History section to which I dare not gravitate.

  What has history decided about me?

  If I succumb, as I have in other Septembers, I can hardly expect comfort from the pages of those books that mention me, nor from Sophie who scoffs at my addiction to “reading my press,” as she terms it. If I open any page in the collection concerning my life and times with the aim of checking up on my reputation, I’ll reap what Sophie says any eavesdropper deserves. It’s no different, she claims, from pressing your ear to a door, behind which you know the servants or your friends and family might mention your name.

  “I know you’re gonna do it, though,” she taunts every year. “You can’t resist the lure.”

  I feel ashamed of losing control with that young beggar. I head for Beckles Willson, the one book that never fails to salve my heart. Here’s the very bookmark I placed last year, made of foil from a square of orange-flavoured chocolate.

  Oh, my dear, lovely page 411 where I behold the image of George Warde. The picture lacks his robust force, but what painting can possibly contain it?

  This fragile old book was written before a soul questioned my efforts to win North America for England. If my fingers sneak toward paragraphs that praise me, surely the librarian nearby on her stepladder, changing a bulb over Robert Louis Stevenson, will pay no heed.

  Dearest George, you never married until you were past fifty. What soldier can keep house or family on what we earned then? Who would wait decades for us to return home? No woman would endure it—this we understood.

  How strange I find it now that the things we kept secret nibble at the edges of historical record. But other things I want emblazoned across the pages have been completely suppressed.

  I wait for the librarian to descend her ladder. I try not to appear impatient. She ducks behind her desk to retrieve a sandwich and is about to leave a sign on the desk when I venture, “Might you please be so kind as to remind me how to find the London Gazette for the summer of 1759?”

  I’ve looked at the Gazette before and know what I’ll find. But I feel compelled to check again. I need to see if anyone has reinstated what my prime minister excised from my reports for fear of disturbing Britons with my cruelty.

  The light the librarian changed continues to malfunction, flickering.

  The Gazette of August 1759 has not miraculously altered to contain the censored details of my Quebec campaign.

  Things of which I was proud continue to cause national shame.

  Meanwhile, a wrecked denizen by the window intensifies his snoring. His feet smell like blue cheese. This brings on my old melancholia, and I glance for salvation out the window.

  All save one pedestrian appear to have agreed on sporting navy blue or black. One man emerges from the drab parade.

  I recognize his bright yellow sweater, chartreuse trousers, his every garment yellow or golden. He is the blind man I’ve seen in the showers at the Guy-Favreau YMCA pool. This man gleams like a sun drawn by a child with a yellow crayon.

  There’s something odd about the way he hurries east on Saint Catherine—something that won’t align with logic. Is he missing something, or has some new power been added to him? Some magnificent strength that I can’t pinpoint. Has his brightness seduced me? Or do I need only to escape history’s dusty shelves?

  I rise off my sorry butt and follow the Yellow Man.

  11 The Hag

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

  NIGHT.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  PARC DU MONT-ROYAL’S MAPLES HAVE PALED and a nearly full moon renders the heavens a heartbreaking indigo. George-Étienne Cartier’s angel raises silver arms over me as I tread the lawn, fumble in the gazebo, and find what has been deposited: paper wrapped around…is this a playing card? My eyesight’s not what it should be anymore. Neither my eyes nor my teeth are of the calibre one might reasonably hope to find in the head of a relatively young man.

  Sophie, in the tent: “What have you been doing? Who did you see today? What’s that you’re shoving in your pocket?”

  I quickly conceal the letter. I fear Sophie would not take kindly to my correspondence with Mrs. Waugh. For one thing, she’d be furious that I’ve exposed our existence here in the park to a journalist. Under the radar at all times, is where Sophie wants to live.

  “What is it you’re hiding?”

  “I’ve been…I was rereading my mother’s appeal…” I decide to refer to another letter, the one I keep on my person at all times, the sole correspondence from my mother that I still possess. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, that I need to get serious about my rightful pension, and I was…”

  “The letter Madame Bee wrote to the department of Veterans Affairs? Hallelujah! Finally, a lucid document. Something that might yield monetary results!”

  “Actually, it’s…”

  “Pass it to me, will you? For God’s sake, how’s anyone to help you if you hoard documents until they fall to bits?”

  Carefully, I extract my mother’s written plea from underneath Mrs. Waugh’s letter in my trousers. The two separate papers feel utterly different to the touch: one new and crisp with the mysterious card wrapped in it, the other soft and worn. It was tricky, but not impossible, to retrieve my mother’s plaintive words from the small maritime museum I visited near Westerham during my watermelon nightmare. Despite Mrs. Waugh’s horror when I showed her this same letter on the steps the day we met, I believe misplaced objects yearn to be returned to the hands of their rightful owners, that repossession is not theft.

  “Be careful,” I tell Sophie as she unfolds the paper, whose every word I know even before she reads it aloud:

  BATH, 22 FEBRUARY, 1761

  Sir,

  On reading your letter I could hardly believe my senses at the shamefull betrayal hinted at in the Conduct of the Ministry. Is it credible that my dear Son’s glorious death has raised up Enemies who in this fashion seek to strike at a defenceless Woman, his Mother, by with-holding his proper reward which is granted to every Officer of his Rank in his Majesty’s Service.

  Does any one least of all his Majesty doubt that my Son was appointed by his late Majesty Commander in Chiefe?

  I pass over the question of the Commission in scorn and contempt. Am I to sue on my bended knees for what shou’d be given of right and would have been had he survived the Campaign which covered England with Glory. But my pen fails me to describe such unlook’d for Baseness as to rob me of what he so hardly earned—if indeed this is the Fact and not an obstacle merely rumoured to enhance the value of the Services rendered.

  I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

  Henrietta Wolfe

  “Jesus,” Sophie throws down the letter so forcefully I am obliged to swoop down and rescue it from the messy tent floor. “You really are a hopeless case. This is the letter I’m supposed to use to apply for your pension? Another useless dream from the distant past? It’s not the right one! What about here and now? What about Madame Blanchard’s papers? Hers are the documents we need to include if we’re ever going to see a penny.” At the sound of Madame Blanchard’s name I see silvered boards, a clothesline whose garments dance in summer wind.

  “Have you forgotten her?” prods Sophie.

  Forgotten Madame Blanchard! Her empty house—the scabbed turnips, the useless hoe, the pinhole in the pail—

  Is that house one of the hundreds I ordered torched in the summer of 1759?

  “Where’ve you really been today? You were ages longer than usual. You’re in a worse state of hauntology than ever tonight, aren’t you?”

  Sophie insists my problem with civilization, or war aftershock, or even melancholy, is really a problem with time. She says all these problems would fall away and thus end my torment if I could only come to terms with her version of time and abandon mine.

  Hauntology! Those scorched fish
ermen’s homesteads merge into one in my memory. Do I over-fondly imagine such a house not burnt, not destroyed at my command but somehow restored into one single saltbox: parlour shaded by a lilac at the window, corner where a returned soldier can sit in a chair and read his book of poems, dog at his feet? I see this house plainly, a simple fisherman’s house on the Gaspé, yet not his—it’s all mine—where has the fisherman gone? I’ve burned his traps and filled the place with my books! I’ve stolen his chair for my reverie. My house, hidden in goldenrod and asters ringed by junipers fragrant with sticky cones pink as a newborn’s toes…

  Was I ever newborn?

  Sophie cuts in. “Did you go to Gerard’s pawn shop today to gawk at your lost flute? Is that what’s the matter with you?”

  “I put my nose in for a second.” I say this, although it is not true. I should have known Sophie would ridicule my mother’s letter. Perhaps I did know it—it’s why I’ve put off showing it to her though she has demanded to see it ever since I foolishly mentioned finding it—she assumed I had found an appeal written by Madame Blanchard and I was afraid to correct her. Sophie’s outright scorn saddens me now. In all our time together I’d hoped she understood me, the real James, deeply, as an intimate companion would. Instead she insists on dragging me with her toward a frightening emptiness….

  “And?”

  “Gerard has a bowl with a cobalt glaze like the one Betty Hooper gave me my posset in when I was little.”

  “You mean Madame Blanchard, not Betty, who fed the Wolfe-child.”

  “No, Betty—the nurse my mother hired. Betty had all the time in the world. I’ve told you, she worked my entire childhood on a waistcoat she was sewing for her husband, Roger, who I never saw. She sang Ned and me a song about sheep and marigolds and a white horse. I loved her more than I loved my mother.”

  “You didn’t go to Gerard’s pawn shop today at all, did you? For God’s sake, Jimmy, I’m only trying to get you to face up to things as they are now, today. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do. Instead you go on about all the useless past history you claim to have seen. Gallows! Lightning rods! England’s first potatoes! I suppose you wasted yet another day today at the library, reading up on The Triumphant Life and Times of General Wolfe. God forbid you should forget any important details.”

  Sophie alarms me not just with her insistence that I learn how to manage modern civilian life, but with how well she predicts my every move. I decide I’d better say nothing about this morning’s dust-up with the busker. I definitely must not tell her about following the man I’d recognized, the blind man in yellow from the changingrooms at the Y, after spying him through the window of my beloved Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy.

  “Well, then, what else has Gerard got in there besides your old posset-bowl?”

  “He has a horse-head cane. A nugget of pure ruby. A set of wine glasses from the 1988 Calgary Olympics, and several violins.”

  I announce this with bravado, remembering Gerard had a violin last year and shared with me the outrageous stories he makes up to charm customers: it was handmade by a Portuguese traveller, or it came from a short-lived artisanal German workshop and is made of rare black walnut, or its origin is unknown but possibly from the time of that great Cremonese who died when I was ten, though of course Gerard won’t go as far as to say Stradivari made the instrument. He likes, rather, to imply that it came from a secondary talent somewhere in the greater man’s orbit.

  I also recall how much, last year, I liked hearing Gerard mention that secondary talent. I feel an affinity with an anonymous man who is not a hero, not a famed miracle worker, just a competent tradesman working behind the scenes. No famous museum or stratospheric prodigy covets his work. Instead, it lies unheralded in Gerard’s dark little shop around the corner from the street that has been named with such reluctance after myself.

  I wish nothing at all had been named after me.

  —

  MY BRAVADO ABANDONS ME in the small hours. “Have you fallen asleep?…Sophie?”

  “Mpph…”

  “Soph…”

  “Huh. Now you’re the lonely one? I was here by myself all evening pining for a story while you were off someplace. Now shut up and lemme sleep.”

  If Sophie truly wanted to hear a story, a real story and not just a sensational piece of news about the dragonfly girls, or Hangman Hawley, my brutal mentor whom I’d like to forget, I’d tell her about the river. Isn’t it amazing that the same river passing below us now—south of the park and Boulevard de Maisonneuve and Saint Catherine and all the old, cobbled streets of the old Iroquois way—is the very same river it was when I knew it so long ago? In spite of what the river has experienced: every crisis, every freeze and thaw, every passing canoe and every sunken suicide, it remains recognizable. The river’s form might have widened a little here, narrowed somewhat there, but anyone who knew it in 1759 would know it instantly now, as I know it, upon sight.

  Back then, I battled with the river more than I did with men—I was convinced the river found me unpalatable. It spat me out on its demented ebb-tide—it guzzled rain and swelled its current evermore until my slightest manoeuvre took ten times longer than it should’ve.

  Drizzle infected the banks with unease.

  I tried to learn the river’s vocabulary but it was scummed with vegetal dust that blew off the alders and bulrushes, and its wide beaches whispered to their small sister-shores commanding them to grow more incoherent the harder I cocked my ear. My incomprehension went on for days. On early autumn mornings the gold straw bore tinkling ice-beads, which I took to be the river warning me: “Watch out, Wolfe—my prettiest ice begins like sequins but soon forms lace that grows, thickens and chokes.”

  The curse of history is its implication, when viewed in hindsight, that any given day in a soldier’s life contains certainty. Whereas, in the moment, the only thing certain about the Saint Lawrence River was that it resisted anyone foolhardy enough to try and conquer Quebec.

  The river let me hear what it wanted me to hear. It flung prickles of alienation mixed with brackish mist from its estuaries—the honking of its geese threaded itself among a reek of eel-spawn and bladder-wrack while my men grew mute, impatient.

  My men agitated to alight on the Heights of Abraham and tear into French ground as if it were bread: they were lustful, battering the French as salt wind punished the few birches along the river, ripping their white dresses. My men wished me to be what I am not: decisive, more cunning than the river, master of tides. Certainty is what they craved, and I excelled in its opposite and still do. Rather than pounce blind, I wait and see. Men loathe this.

  When did I first notice the little beach at L’Anse au Foulon?

  That was the happy part. The early part. The part where I still had a confidant on whom I could rely. I spied the sweet landing-spot earlier than anyone thinks. I took Sam Holland upriver with me out of frustration at not being told the condition of that shoreline. The navy did not exert itself toward providing the army with intelligence. It almost seemed to glory in my inability to find a way to attack Quebec from upriver. Too much wind and tide, they said. Stony cliffs. Spruce roots to trip your men into dislodging rockslides that will send them flying down the banks….

  Meanwhile, my men wanted me to feel hatred for the French. My men’s derision and the iron in the land were corrosive. The land and the men stood against me, but one soldier, Sam Holland, was a loyal friend. I sensed early that he was a person who understood there is exhilaration in shifting plans and in treacherous tides. Sam Holland knew the power of a secret scheme of last resort.

  Certainly the Foulon beach was all hazard. But a general whom ladies chide as bookish does not discount faint possibilities. He does not think anything is simple or certain. I did not think it would be easy to reach Abraham’s Heights, even though we had Abraham’s own grandson tied up on our fleet, having tricked him into believing we were French merely by raising that country’s flag. How little deception is needed
when men believe so fervently in bits of bright cloth. This is what I mean about men’s ideas of certainty and how they fail us.

  But what I do find certain is that beauty hides in risk.

  I have no time for safe military games, tame as a round of piquet with my mother. I pant for a chance to amass elusive scraps of military strategy into a satisfying whole. The longer solutions escape me the harder I thrill. If answers outrun me, if I flounder on a dark shore in an uncertain night, I am home.

  I might not be certain in word or in command, but I do not lack confidence when it comes to navigating the loneliest, most dismal stretches of shore known to any servant of the king. Certainty is sustenance for coxcombs who have no affinity for a north wind.

  “What are you looking at?” Sam Holland asked me. I knew I could trust him by the genuine engagement on his face. He was interested in the reality at hand, not in his future status or promotion. I find it amazing how thoroughly self-interest prevents a man from seeing. It makes him blind. I never minded having my parents’ hopes melted when it came to my military career. Nor did I ever fear finding myself lost in woods or in fog around Point-Levis or the Etchemin River or the Foulon. The soldier in me is used to sensations of loss, of being the stranger. It is only when I’m out of uniform that I mind being unrecognized in a Canada that disdains to know me.

  I handed Sam back his spyglass so he too could see the embankment opposite the Foulon, where the pretty river Etchemin glittered. I’d caught scent of smoke from a camp of French and Indians and begged Sam to lend me his glass. I’d trained it on the wisp, coiled and slender, where a few of Montcalm’s old men and boys and a couple of Indians smoked a heap of silver éperlans, and I have to admit I went into reverie.

  I would have flown to that camp for solace had we not been at war, had I not been a general, had I no responsibility on earth save healing my personal weariness.

  “Do you see the women laundering their garments in the river?” I asked Sam.

  Their linen blazed. Slender boys paddled two canoes. I nicked my hand clenching the filigree on the locket bearing my fiancée’s portrait—not Eliza but Katherine, the one my mother had reluctantly approved. Katherine: sensible—not the French sensible—Katherine Lowther was not sensitive or thin-skinned at all, but sensible in the English way. Katherine and I both wanted a home life. We did not need the kind of estate my mother envisioned. Here, through Sam’s spyglass, I saw the life that pleases me: sons, my home-smoked fish, dogs, guns, shelter. I needed a roof no grander than the huts over this raw edge of a new and different Europe. Although too rough, in truth, even for sensible Katherine.