Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  “Marguerites,” Harold marvels. “Isn’t it amazing how the brain fastens on certain details, and not always the right ones! But how did you know I was here?”

  “This is the third hospital I’ve been in today, looking for you.”

  —

  THIS MORNING I BOARDED the Metro at Berri-UQAM and rode uptown to the fancy prison on Boulevard Rivière-des-Prairies to ask if a blind man named Harold, who was no longer blind, had been sent here.

  “What is his nom de famille?” The receptionist chawed green gum. Did all Montreal officials sit behind partitions and expect one to talk to them through half-moon holes so low one had to bend one’s knees and become like a six-year-old?

  “I do not know it.”

  “Tabarnouche, if you don’t know his name…”

  A sign on the partition said Respect Uniformed Personnel. I thought for a split second that it said Uninformed. Then I remembered I was in my uniform. Were we all as uninformed as each other?

  He scratched cherries and bananas off a couple of lottery tickets.

  A lank-haired woman in the waiting area said, “Maybe they threw him in the lockup.” Her bulging purse was covered in studs. “If he’s harmless.”

  “His name’s Harold. Maybe you saw him on the news?”

  “I only have Netflix.”

  “Harold isn’t a criminal.”

  “Neither is Jean-Maurice!” said the woman. “Jean-Maurice is completely innocent.”

  “Harold may have committed a small error in judgment…”

  “Jean-Maurice wouldn’t squish an ant.”

  “Harold’s was a simple mistake such as might be made by any one of the street people around the Y or the Mission…”

  “I’d say they’ve put him in the lockup or the Douglas. But they won’t tell you unless you’re next of kin.”

  I managed to convince the receptionist to hand me the washroom key, which was chained to a shoehorn in the shape of Santa Claus, also in his red coat far from home. I wiped down my collar and dampened a wad of paper towel. With this I refreshed my face and cleaned my shoes. Then I took bus 67 to the police station on the corner of Rue Angers. I left my uncertainty tied to a fire hydrant out front. I stood tall and told the attendant that as a British army general stationed here for the month of September to take part in tactical exercises I needed to contact a suspect individual whom police here had also deemed of interest. The attendant did not want to tell me anything but he ended up rummaging online for the file in question and muttering that Harold had been taken by ambulance to one of the hospitals.

  “Which hospital?” I asked. But by then the man had regained himself, and said he was not at liberty to tell me.

  —

  ABOVE HAROLD’S GURNEY HANGS a sign warning, in French, that wait-times cannot be predicted and anyone becoming belligerent will be prosecuted. The bloody bandage around Harold’s head seems to have dissuaded staff from kicking him off the gurney but does not press them to slow down or check on him as they hurtle down the corridor. The chaos reminds me of Culloden.

  “I don’t mind waiting,” he says. “I quite like being still for hours.”

  Harold knits and knits, forming tight circles like webs made by an industrious little arachnid. I discover he loves talking about himself. It turns out that on his one night in jail he staged a peaceful protest—they had not allowed him to knit—and he was beaten up by a Buddhist monk.

  “He harmed me by accident.”

  “But you said he came down hard on your head with a tray….”

  “It was an accident of the heart. My philosophy on knitting made him snap.”

  “Why was he in there in the first place?”

  “He’d ignored several injunctions.” Harold touches his sore head. “He was banned from going into pet stores.”

  “How many stitches did you say you had?”

  “Stitches.” He laughs in his ruminating way that suggests he is reminded of things too odd for me to understand—I can see how he might have infuriated the Buddhist.

  “You mentioned some astronomical number…what’s funny about…”

  “You said the word stitches just as I was counting stitches.”

  He knits and I sit with him, and in the seven and a half hours it takes for someone to finally attach an electronic monitor to track his brain signals he manages to run out of things to tell me about himself.

  “So, you, Jimmy,” he turns to me. “You’re a career soldier. A bona fide lifelong military man. An inter-generational warrior.” Unlike Sophie, Harold appears to have no trouble at all with my having been born in 1727. He does not disagree that I might have been adjutant at Dettingen and aide-de-camp for Hangman Hawley at Culloden in 1745, whereas Sophie snorts at the very mention.

  If a person knits as you speak of the past, you can become mesmerized. As the yarn unwinds from its skein your memories naturally unfold to their full length. I tell him about my fierce adoration of George Warde, and about the strange love between my mother, Henrietta, and myself. Harold listens without judgment, his soothing line of wool unspooling and purling round his needles. I tell him how Hangman Hawley made me hammer up gallows at his tent-flaps to hang the lad Jonas who romanced the laundress Hawley fancied, then he hung a fourteen-year-old who forked the glob of suet Hawley had his own eye on.

  I start to say something about loving and losing Eliza—I’ve been talking for over an hour—and Harold says, very politely, “You mentioned her, I remember…but…tell me again about losing your brother.” He says this with a frown as if he hasn’t quite understood. I recall telling him last Tuesday in Chinatown, at Magic Idea, about losing Ned after Dettingen, about having to write home and tell my mother how I’d distributed his effects….A letter it cost me tears to write.

  “Tell me again about the box of your brother’s things,” Harold says. “The one you sent home to your mother.”

  The bravest moment in a big brother’s life is not the instant before his own death in battle. He foresees that the moment he enlists. The brave part is when he sees limbs blasted off a boy down the line and doesn’t know if they belong to Ned, or Elwyn, or whoever his beloved might be.

  “I saw the blood of the loveliest boy soak in the stones,” I tell Harold. “I ran to see, but the head was torn off—the head was a bag of blood, a burst football rolling till it smacked into a rock. His blood congealed in a tide-mark on that rock. And the rock belonged to land I knew would never be home to any of my people now or down through history yet to come.”

  “But this was your brother? It was Ned?”

  “Nobody could tell me who it was.”

  “But your brother died, and you told me you sent his things back home….”

  “Yes. Ned died.”

  A dead soldier’s little world fits in a tin box. What a shrunken world it is: a tin around its cube of air that in a few years no one will disturb. My brother’s amulet! I thought it was made of wishbones and delicate bones from inside fish-heads, but when I looked close they were the cochleae of a child he’d shot through the eyes. We killed anything that spoke no English. Woman, child, dog, no matter. The woman who stole at night to the river to lather herself in starlit soapwort…we shot her as well. Anything that fluoresces in the night and is not English, you must doubly kill.

  “And you sent that sad little box to his mother?”

  “I did what you’d do for any mother. You get rid of the macabre amulet. You replace it with his dog tag, his phone, his memory stick. You write the tender note proclaiming her younger son, the younger of all fairy-tales, an honest and good lad who lived very well and always discharged his duties with cheerfulness: He lived and died as a son of yours should—all his friends miss him, and our Colonel made me promise that I’d assure you of his particular concern. Elwyn was an excellent soldier, and if I ever appear to laugh again, or to have a good time in my life, it is because time—a traitor—always lessens the degree to which a bereaved heart swells in sorrow….”r />
  “I see…” Harold pauses and clicks his needles as if in some curious deliberation. “I thought you said your brother’s name was Ned.”

  “It was.”

  “And some of these things in the box of Elwyn…they were Elwyn’s things, not Ned’s, am I right?” Harold puts his knitting down and touches my tattoo. His hand is warm and I wonder if his continual knitting has permanently heated it. “Elwyn’s things aren’t from your old battlefield, are they? They aren’t from Scotland and they aren’t from Quebec…they’re things a soldier might leave behind in modern warfare.”

  Harold resumes knitting. He knows as well as I do that past, present and future are contained in a single length of yarn.

  My tattoo is coloured like his wool, but duller, since ink fades and Harold’s wool is new, or is perhaps not wool at all, but something from a dollar store, made in China out of petroleum.

  “Modern warfare” is such a contradiction in terms. All warriors descend from a single, ancient Council of War forged at the dawn of manhood, when standing stones mimicked the thrust of our sex and we coated ourselves in vestments so insubstantial they became symbols. Our true garb has always been the tattoo, and mine’s a beauty, bearing my warrior-name and pierced by a sabre that will forever stand straight even if my body should crumple.

  19 Nobody

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10.

  NIGHT.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  WHEN I RETURN FROM THE HÔPITAL DE VERDUN, rather late, Sophie asks, “Where’ve you been all day? Who were you with?”

  Sophie disliked it last year when I befriended the young woman nosing around the park to document facts about marginal and homeless citizens for the census. Sophie couldn’t believe that the woman, Sarah, had dutifully noted down my name as James Wolfe, son of Edward Wolfe and Henrietta Thompson, born in Westerham, England. I got confused about my birthdate and Sarah replied with understanding that for many homeless people such was the case. Sophie rolled her eyes as Sarah recorded that I was a soldier currently out of work, unmarried to woman or man, and childless.

  “I stopped in at the Mission. My copy of Gray’s poem came.” I don’t feel like telling Sophie anything about my day with Harold, and it is true that I did pick up my book, though it was a disappointment.

  “And?”

  “I had a hard time getting it open. The box was cemented! I injured my thumb ripping the end. Here—look.”

  “What?”

  “It appears to have been woven out of laundromat dryer lint by robot spiders or silkworms, and the first page I opened tore under hardly an ounce of pressure. A drop of tea spilt on this book would cause the entire thing to dissolve.”

  “Watch your disappointment,” she says. “You let it have too much power. Poetry lives spoken in air, not written on paper. But I’ll admit…” She fingers the sad volume. “This flimsiness is disgraceful. You’re almost better off getting the ebook.”

  “I’ve memorized the poem,” I remind her.

  Where does a poem exist when unspoken and unwritten yet committed to memory? I imagine its words afloat: letters invisible, vowels inaudible—a vapour unseen and unheard that yet infiltrates the soul, like love, like my memory of Eliza or George, less substantial than fragrance but outlasting death.

  Rain patters on the tent.

  “Why am I seeing twin cactuses over your head?” Sophie demands.

  I don’t feel up to questioning her visions just now. “I’ve no idea.”

  “One has eyes all over it—eyes covering the whole cactus: big open eyeballs staring as hard as they can. The other one’s covered in spikes. Long, lethal spikes—it’s afraid….What the hell are the cactus twins trying to say?”

  “They’re your vision. How should I know?”

  “But they’re over your head. The one with eyes, it’s starting to overflow with tears. Every eye on it is a river of grief. You’re a river of grief tonight. Why?”

  “You know there are a lot of reasons why a man like me might feel sad.”

  I have not told Sophie about Madame Blanchard and do not want to admit that she died before I had a chance to say goodbye. Much less can I confess I’ve lost her remains through negligence, through inattention or preoccupation….Sophie is always accusing me of these things.

  “This rain reminds me of the night I saw Eliza Lawson’s wraith come to me in a vision on the seas!”

  “Stop it. You need to come back into the present.”

  “But I plainly saw Eliza! I’ve told you, she sailed through the constellations and her hem snagged on Orion’s dagger over my ship the night she died—I got no sleep on that board under my smudged porthole…”

  “Please.”

  “No! I watched Orion straddle the North Atlantic and wished I had his nonchalant tilt….English manners had unfastened from me like pea-tendrils from a trellis! I’d forgotten how to relate to men in any civilized way. Whenever I set sail my belly spewed sustenance and instead of food I absorbed rain, wind and weed-stink. You know this! You know I remembered how to command men, but not how to command myself—how sick I was of retching into my old friend, the too-small tin pail….”

  “I bet that made a nice splash and a pretty tinkling sound, like a bell, and I suppose right after the bell you saw your dear Eliza, dagger-snagged…”

  “Hanging against the star-hunter as if she were his little sister—how small she looked! Her dress was like the rosy inside of a shell sequined with herring-scales. She stared through my porthole. I knew Miss Lawson was dead and I needed no telegram. I already wore a black armband after my father’s death—it was easy to pry my porthole open and drag the mourning-silk through the starlight as Eliza scattered her Valentine sequins down on me.”

  “Valentine?”

  “We had departed Portsmouth for Quebec on the Neptune on February the fourteenth.”

  Sophie chaws her stick of beef jerky from the Dumpster.

  “Eliza was my mind’s guide. She was my inspiration and my self-knowledge. She was and is my every true vision, my every signal. There was nothing sublunary about her.”

  “Sub-what? What the hell?”

  “Have you not read Donne?”

  “Er, no?”

  “Dull, sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense…‘Sublunary’ means under the moon, accompanying other things that also exist under the moon…”

  “Seal-flipper pie?”

  “Things that can be felt, tasted, touched and smelled…”

  “Narwhal? Army boots? Hard-boiled eggs?”

  “Things whose soul is sense…”

  “You mean you and Elizabeth Lawson didn’t feel each other. You didn’t touch each other. You didn’t smell each other. Did you even talk? Or were you locked together in some sort of extraterrestrial sacred silence?”

  Sophie chooses this moment to let off a noisy fart that reeks of today’s vat of chicken korma the Bombay Restaurant donated to the Mission. I have to untie the tent flap and stick my head outside. “Are you saying,” she persists, “that if Miss Lawson had grown old and you saw her next week as an old woman on a park bench, you’d still fling yourself at her feet?”

  “Old?”

  “If her shell-pale gown’s in tatters and she has varicose veins and has grown extra-large ears and a humongous nose…you do know people’s ears and noses never stop growing?”

  “Could you please not…”

  “You’d love Miss Lawson the same even then?”

  “I’d—yes.”

  “There’s one just like that who walks her Pomeranian every morning down Parc Avenue and plonks herself under the lion statue and takes her dentures out to suck a banana. She used to be an ethereal beauty like your woman. Her daughter’s with her sometimes, a younger version of her with identical bone structure. I’ll show you next time I see them. You can let me know which one is sublunary, who sends you over the moon and who leaves you lying under it cold and dead as an avenue of unlit chimneys.”

 
; Sometimes I wonder if Sophie envies or resents women who are delicate and who do not work as janitors in homeless shelters and who have heart-shaped faces and do not swagger around in steel-toed work boots. Instead of arguing with her I lie listening to the night sounds of the park: leaves rustling with that first papery dryness beginning to take over their summer-green softness. The rummaging squirrels, and the soft, heavy raccoons thumping toward their night-market: the rubbish bins lining Rue Olmsted.

  Sophie is right. I sometimes use my thoughts of Eliza, and the sadness they bring, to veil other, more recent kinds of sadness. The ones Harold understands about me now. My wretched losses, recent losses that have no gauze of time to soften their edges. Losses caused by my own mistakes. How can I have lost everything?

  —

  AS SOPHIE SNORES, I RECALL how behind Madame Blanchard’s house whispered a grove of spruce, and in that grove grew timothy hay and in that hay spangled Louis, Lolly and Madarin. I used to go and talk with them—Madame Blanchard made me carry bread in my pocket so as not to get carried away by the fairies as her real-born son had been when she and her Canadian soldier were first married. She did not like it when I came home and told her about my fairies, did not like it at all, but Madame Blanchard was never the kind of foster mother to burn my arm with the stove damper or clip me around the ears with her wooden spoon. This was in summer, and I was alone a lot.

  Our stove sat under the beam painted with shiny CN-train paint and hung with a copy of The Angelus. All the kitchen chairs had the same paint because Monsieur Blanchard brought it home free from the station when he was done his shifts. He stole it, all the conductors did. They all stole paint and they all died on the railway one way or another—after Monsieur Blanchard was gone, Madame Blanchard and I had the house to ourselves. I played with Louis, Lolly and Madarin while Madame Blanchard went to council meetings—our town council had no men in it, all women, because what man wanted to manage a pot with no money?

  At my first school dance the other boys picked girlfriends—Gérard Cormier and René Vaillancourt pursued Emilie Callaghan. I was not very interested in girls then either, at least not in getting them behind the Coke machine and kissing them, though I did sit with them on Wednesdays when Madame Blanchard gave me money for hot chicken pie. I liked talking to girls a lot better than boys.