Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  On the Quebec side, opposite that sweet river camp, sat the lonely beach at L’Anse au Foulon, the dark north shore rising above it to Abraham’s Heights.

  —

  THE TWO SIDES OF THE Saint Lawrence are different countries. The north side on which Quebec stands is not benevolent like settlements I marauded along the south. It has none of Kamouraska’s golden and pleasant incline, no grasses or dreaming horses. The north is the salt side, the tide-harsh cliffs whose rockface and spruce loom so tight there’s no place a husbandman can lie down and read his poem or drink a draught.

  When Sam Holland and I turned our backs on the pastoral Etchemin River encampment, I grew cold and felt knowledge drain out of me. If Sam had been of a melancholic nature as I am, I might never have thought a Foulon landing possible. But he was one of those souls whose natural warmth emanates toward the man near him.

  I knew Sam had a girl at home who was unlike Katherine—one who craved to fling her thighs round him. Katherine and I had a different sort of ease. If I made it home she could count on me for kind attention and my soldier’s wages. Ha! In those days I actually believed that there would be a wage coming to me to reward me for my service. Well, those were the days of innocence, and Katherine was part of that innocence—or should I call it gentle peace? She knew I’d sit reading half the night rather than come to bed. It was she who slipped me my favourite poem as I left England—and for a long time I hid the volume in my bunk so as not to arouse scorn.

  Sam and I faced the north side’s rock. Hostility suffused the embankment beyond Quebec all down Montcalm’s guarded shore. Canadian loathing migrated toward my men camped at Montmorency Falls. It spilled over Île d’Orléans and Isle-aux-Coudres. Terror welled up in the ground, engulfed the soles of my feet and infected me.

  Yet the Foulon was perfect.

  I trained Sam’s glass on it for longer than was prudent, given the necessity of concealing the plan forming itself in my thoughts. When Sam questioned me I told him not to mention to any of my men how long I had considered the seemingly insignificant spot.

  So I had a good long look, that first time, at that beach at L’Anse au Foulon. I did not even write to my mother about it. I was alone with the river, and something in that dark little cove called out to me—it was a strange, comforting call of victory and shadow.

  When Sam and I got back to our camp at Montmorency the men could sense my departure from their ways of thinking. The more they mistrusted me, the more I wanted to scout around the unguarded and unremarked Foulon again, by myself, to tread its bleak stones with exquisite uncertainty and make a plan.

  My men complained about the secrecy of my plans. They thought it was vacillation. Sam Holland told me they likened my indecision to the tide that twice daily helped the Saint Lawrence render our fortunes unknowable. The more I secretly considered the Foulon the less my men believed in me. The harder Brigadier Murray ached for me to send him upriver, the less I agreed, given that the naval support we had up there seemed to be falling apart. I wasn’t sure what was going on up there. I did not mind being honest about this. But my men would have preferred bombastic lies.

  “What do you reckon are our chances if we attack?” Murray demanded.

  “I can’t presume to know a sum. Given the wind, the unprofessional tactics of our enemy and their resulting unpredictability…”

  “Can you not give us a single definitive word?” Brigadier Jim Gibson poised his pen to pin down my answer.

  “Infallibly…” I paused.

  Murray rolled his eyes and Gibson brightened.

  I faltered. “Probably…”

  Brigadier Townshend hauled out his sketchbook and moved around to my side so he could nip in the bud any illusions posterity might spread about the strength of my chin.

  I did not muster the strength—or was it the weakness? I can’t always tell—to utter these words I hold privately within my heart:

  Uncertainty is my mistress.

  Risk is her middle name.

  And in truth, once I fastened my mind on the Foulon, the Saint Lawrence River altered.

  She allowed me to plan and dream, and no longer drowned my thoughts in her flow. She gave me assent. The wind and the river’s assent separated me even more from my men. I held no council of war. The river knew I’d go to the Foulon once more, alone.

  When I love anything, be it man, woman, or river, I want to make it mine. I want to separate it from the world of all that belongs to others, and hold it to myself. I look on it as crystalline, a vision of the heart that only I can see. I have to do this or my love won’t ignite.

  Is this a failing? I think some call it insanity. But from childhood I did this: I moved away from the crowd so I could hold my love before me and examine it in precision and solitude, like a cut gem with my vision of the loved one suspended inside.

  I did this with my secret beach. After I went with Sam Holland, I returned alone. When everyone thought me too ill to act, I acted. While they lamented ordinary discomforts, shrews in the bread and saltwater rotting their shoes, I took a catamaran and one dripping oar and went back to my Foulon.

  —

  “ELWYN?”

  Usually Elwyn doesn’t come to me unless I’ve been asleep.

  Normally I judder in and out of slumber and sometimes I think I’ve woken up to find Elwyn armless on the ground, outside the tent, trying to open the flap with his teeth. The last bit of the knot eludes him every time, slippery and tight, impossible for teeth to unfasten, and of course there’s nothing I, a sleeping man, can do to help him. I’m paralyzed in the bed.

  Sophie calls this recurring nightmare “the Hag.”

  She has rolled over and missed my story about the river. I wish Mrs. Waugh could hear me, wherever she is, out there in the night. I carefully bring out her letter once again, and, for comfort, try to decipher it by the light of the park lamp shining through the tent. But Sophie stirs—paper is so loud! I shove it back into hiding and await dawn.

  12 Dragonfly Girls

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6.

  MORNING.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  AS SOON AS THE SUN RISES I examine the letter of Mrs. Waugh—it is slow-going to decipher her spidery handwriting, and I dread waking Sophie.

  Dear James,

  Thank you for your letter, which arrived this afternoon. Can you believe I spent nearly all day today at the McCord Museum in the company of a piece of Wolfe’s—of your—red hair? Here in Montreal, on Sherbrooke Street! They have it encased in a glass circlet bound by green ribbon. I wish they’d let me touch it. Red hair’s often coarse isn’t it. My mother had it, and I fancy if I’d had a son or daughter—but what I wanted to ask is this: it’s about the letter you sent me…would you mind, terribly, if I had your handwriting analyzed? You see, I’ve been in contact with a graphologist, a Monsieur Choinière…

  I remember spying, on her desk among my letters last autumn at the Fisher Library, Mrs. Waugh’s own letter asking this man to analyze the handwriting of “someone who is no longer alive.” Her note goes on:

  “…whose life’s work is the psychological assessment of a person through analysis of his or her handwriting and—forgive me if this sounds in any way disrespectful to your own story, which I believe, I do—I believe you have, in some way I might not yet fully understand, brought General Wolfe, who died on Abraham’s plains in 1759, here, to Montreal today. I have shown Monsieur Choinière some of Wolfe’s older letters, and I wondered if I might also show him the letter you have sent me. Don’t worry, Monsieur Choinière is quite sensitive—he says handwriting is a picture of a certain moment in time: people change, they evolve, they go through crises…and he looks for the larger picture. You know, yourself—you told me that day on the steps—history books have hardly told your whole story. Military histories, especially…with their concentration on strategy, on the geometry of battle…whereas Monsieur Choinière’s approach is more a sounding out of the inner man…but
I would never show him your private letter to me without your permission.

  Would it be possible, I wonder, for us to meet tomorrow at noon at the Green Spot on Rue Notre Dame? We could discuss matters further, and I would be honoured to treat you to a smoked-meat sandwich with one of their legendary sour pickles.

  Tomorrow? That’s today! I glance at Sophie, now stirring as I quickly examine the card Mrs. Waugh has wrapped inside her note. I see that it’s not a playing card at all, but has some sort of pictorial significance: it depicts a man of my age, about to become not-so-young, standing in a cloak at a river, his head bent in sorrow. Across the river stands a ruined fortress, beyond a bridge that appears inaccessible. The man has spilt three goblets on the ground—has he spilt blood? Two goblets remain upright behind him. The man does not appear to know where to go or how to move beyond loss.

  Yes, I should go for that sandwich. The melancholy card, my sudden hunger at the thought of delicious smoked meat—how is it that Genevieve Waugh knows, so exactly, how I feel in both body and spirit?

  Sophie twitches, commences grumbling; “You’re not planning on hanging around here all day, I hope? It’s already Wednesday.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I say as I conceal the letter and card.

  “Better get your act together is all I’m saying. You have a few more nights here with me then I’ve got my next combat-shattered marauder to deal with.”

  “Do I know who he is?”

  “Why assume it’s a he? You’re such a BMW.” BMW is what she calls big white males. “You should be halfway to the Plains of Abraham by now. But no, Jimmy Bee is scared of the real plains. He prefers to revisit them in his imagination, all blood-stained and heroic. Is that why you’re scared of getting your paperwork sorted out as well? That it might fail to reflect your true glory? Have you any intention of getting your ass over to see Madame Bee while she even remembers you?”

  “Madame Blanchard is not senile.”

  “I’m just saying time’s a fox, not a centipede.”

  Right! Mrs. Waugh’s strange card in my pocket lends me confidence. Touching it reminds me that it would be folly to tell Sophie about my new developments. Or the Green Spot. Or Mrs. Waugh. Or my pursuit, yesterday afternoon, of the blind man in yellow.

  I ran after him through the lower shadows of those impressive buildings that form Montreal’s skyline as you approach by the Champlain Bridge: the McGill College peak and the Roccabella tower and the Marriott Hotel and all the others—so friendly-looking from a distance, huddled and inviting—but if one walks near them, they impose on you. They shut you out like a phalanx of giant judges. The man in yellow blazed through this modern urban architecture and I was drawn right behind him.

  He hastened, and I realized as I followed him past the skyscrapers and down past melons and lumpy gourds spilling out of boxes in Chinatown, that the odd thing, the thing that had defied logic but which I’d been, at the window of La Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy, too self-preoccupied to pinpoint, was that he was without his seeing-eye dog.

  I saw as he ducked in Rue de la Gauchetière that we were about to return to our old common ground, the shower room at the Y.

  I missed that dog of his.

  The fact that he took his dog to the Y had been a warm spot in my wanderings. I liked watching him operate with the dog’s help. I loved how the dog waited for him, alone, when he went in the hot tub or the pool. The dog was a beacon of mute loyalty and now, with it gone, the yellow man threatened to become like all other men, walled-off and separate. If, as it now appeared, he could see, then I would not be able to spy on him anymore. I realized I’d liked doing this, much as I liked looking at bodies naked in the change-room and nearly naked in the pool. I liked to think my gaze was benevolent. When a man is blind can he tell you’re looking at him? Does he know you’re watching and feeling, in that one-sided glance, a connection with humanity otherwise estranged?

  Yesterday, on catching up with him in the dressing room, I made an awkward attempt not to look him in the eye but botched it. This happens to me on the subway and on buses, too. Sophie says I have not learned how to live in a modern city.

  So, I caught his eye and he caught mine: he was certainly not blind now.

  “Hello again,” he said.

  “Have you seen me before?”

  “You’ve certainly been here before, haven’t you?”

  “Usually you have been here with a dog that I assumed was a…a working dog….”

  “Veronica—yes. She’s a lovely dog. She’s been very good to me, Veronica has.”

  As he peeled off his yellow clothes he spoke slowly, with a quizzical aspect, as if testing statements out on himself to see if he believed them.

  In the shower he felt for his soap with searching hand-pats. He held his face as if gazing across a height into a distance. He felt the taps for degrees of hot and cold and did not look at their red and blue labels.

  He bore the appearance of a man on whom heaven had bestowed bliss—I’d noticed this about him before. He stood with his hands raised to the shower in divine rapture like Saint Francis on a stained glass window I saw in the chapel of that Flemish town where I mourned my brother, Ned. Normally I no longer fully felt the pang of losing Ned, but it overwhelmed me now. Something in the blind man—innocence?—recalled Ned, barely fifteen when he left me, though this man had to be thirty.

  I was drawn to his sphere of childish delight and when he held his soap an inch from his face and laughed at it, I blurted, “You seem to be having a good time.”

  He looked at me as if I were a dear friend whose name he couldn’t quite remember.

  “Yes,” he drew the word out while he deliberated on the time he was having. “The bubbles.”

  There were indeed bubbles, little ones, coursing down his arms like sea-froth.

  “I haven’t seen bubbles,” he said, “in twenty-six years. I’d completely forgotten how lovely they are.”

  “You see them now?”

  His eyes crinkled in wonder. “Yes I do.”

  “And the dog…Veronica…you don’t need her anymore?”

  “Veronica was absolutely dedicated…” He trailed off, remembering her goodness. Then he said, “Do you know, I was blind from the age of four until yesterday? And now I can’t believe how beautiful everything is. Look at the bubbles!” His voice squeaked. “Purple, gold, green, blue…all so exquisitely round, more perfectly round than any of my knitting.”

  I secured my YMCA towel around me and sat on the hot-tub edge dangling my legs. It’s not often I get to sit high enough for that. The chlorine smell scratched my nostrils. I know people dislike its sting but it makes me feel blanketed and undiscoverable. I liked the broken clock above the doorway claiming the time was six thirty when in fact it had to be no more than around two in the afternoon. When time is measured incorrectly I feel doom lift: if time can’t reach me then neither can the loss of George, or Eliza, or Ned, or Elwyn.

  “What happened to you?” I asked the man. His yellow sweatshirt and pants were in their customary heap on the floor.

  Bathers straggled in from the Chinatown apartment complex next door, bellowing to each other in Cantonese and smacking themselves all over in a kind of skin-stimulating exercise with wads of paper towel they’d pulled out of the dispensers. They ignored us. On the walls hung signs forbidding anyone to spit, which they disregarded. Members of an aqua-fit class filed out of the pool dripping wet and stood under communal hair-dryers or spindried their swimsuits in a centrifugal force apparatus that sounded like I imagine the industrial revolution must have done. So we had to shout.

  He roared, “I was raped when I was four!”

  I was glad the Cantonese chatter continued so the men had possibly not heard. I felt such revulsion that had he not screamed in my face I might’ve sidled out to the locker room pretending I’d not understood. Or I might have responded in some noncommittal way: Right then—sorry for your troubles…and floated off. Being Britis
h has its conventions.

  But his volume matched the force of his words.

  His shout solidified in the tiled room.

  It hit me in the head and sent me into my old shock—flung me back to that first time my father ever took me from my cocoon with my mother at Westerham to the town of Portsmouth. I was thirteen, and had not until that journey apprehended anything firsthand about man’s depravities.

  —

  HAD NAUSEA NOT, EVEN IN THOSE DAYS, overtaken me at the sight of the ocean, I might not have seen what I saw in Portsmouth.

  My father ached for me to volunteer with him against Spain at Cartagena. He’d been waiting for me to pass age twelve so I could become a soldier like him. But I turned into a pale, limp mess even as our ship waited to sail. He had to leave me there with a man he barely knew, entrusting him to see me safely home.

  But the man was anxious to drag me to a coffeehouse called the Dragonfly.

  We stepped over a woman slumped over her bottle, her infant on the ground rooting for its mother’s nipple. We navigated an alley that stank of piss and beer. In it I spied someone—two someones, under a cloak; one straining to get away but the other pressing down…they writhed, guttural.

  The Dragonfly was lit inside for a party, all men but for a fat woman lifting a tray of pies. I was the youngest and soon the men started calling me Old Soldier. Then I saw other youths at the front, two girls and a boy. My guardian went off to fetch brandy and I became squashed between officers boasting Admiral Vernon’s triumph in Portobello and Sir Chaloner Ogle’s fleet assembling at Spithead. I felt queasy—I always had a bad stomach even then, and was ashamed to be getting sent home, and the shame made me sicker. I vomited in the pot where an aloe towered behind the buffet that bore slices of boiled tongue and a tureen of coffee.