Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  I did not run to the front of the class the day soldiers brought the tank and guns, though I was glad the soldiers had come: our blackboard had a terrible new math problem on it that I did not think I’d ever decipher—I remember cadet recruitment came as a blessed diversion.

  They brought fifteen rifles—and they let us take turns aiming them.

  I aimed mine at my sunflower in our biology corner. When the other boys aimed theirs at Miss Cranton I felt sick even if she was not my favourite teacher. I wished I could swivel the guns away from her but you don’t do that to Gérard or René or Alphonse and Elzéar Huet or you end up with a face-full of gravel like the peanut bits in an Eat-More bar.

  No.

  What attracted me were not the gun barrels, nor the tank the soldiers rolled up to our classroom windows…it frightened me: a faceless, mechanical grasshopper. Nor was I enthralled or intrigued by the soldier who did all the talking, though he wore red and gold gorgets and had his photo on page one of the Gaspé SPEC. He promised college, with our fees paid by military scholarship. All we had to do was sign and get our mothers to sign. There was no need to fear we might not measure up—there was state-of-the-art training in Bagotville and Valcartier. We all knew about these camps. Brothers and cousins had packed their bags after secondaire cinq and boarded the Valcartier bus and kissed their moms goodbye.

  Mothers have it hard in a situation like that.

  Mothers have the wrong status to go interfering in a soldier’s life when that soldier gets infected with romance. Mothers know they have no say: they are women, they are roses on the wane, they are the past generation. They’ve begun looking upriver to the source instead of downstream to that thrilling unknown. They are not beloved, and if they were—if some mother was strangely beloved by her son or daughter with a rare and heartbreaking intimacy—the child would still clamour to be one with the vivid stream snaking out of the village.

  Madame Blanchard picked up the phone when she read the note saying the recruiters were coming. I heard her tell the principal he might as well invite the Pied Piper of Hamelin to our village. He must have asked her to repeat this, which she did a couple of times before hanging up gently and looking sadly out the window at our rhubarb and our blackcurrant bush.

  I did not protest when she made phone calls like this, or when she visited the school to complain. When you are a foster boy from away, when you are spindly and pale, and you like talking about books with girls, you are already far from any hope of gaining approval in our village. Already boys shouted at me in the schoolyard, “Va-t’en, criss de tapette!”

  The recruiting lieutenant outlined what would be in store for us glorious sons and daughters of Bougainville and Percé and Port-Daniel–Gascons. We’d amount to all a youth could hope to be or become or give. There would, he said, be a lot of giving: an extravaganza of elevated sacrifice. We’d learn the meaning of living, not the mundane meaning for which rural youths so tragically settled. And so on.

  His heroic rhetoric was not the element that won me.

  We were close to the start of summer holidays, about to be unloosed to reclaim softball bats in a blaze of hawkweed. We were to go trout fishing in La Rivière Malbaie, and climb that precipice shadowing the over-fall where every boy in Bougainville worth his life would jackknife down to the cold green pool below. It was not a wide pool and not always deep enough: once in a generation someone sliced his skull and released brains full of fresh algebra into Minnow Gulch.

  The mothers said no. They spent wretched time beside the toaster, picking a shrivelled leaf from the coleus plant, scratching dried maple syrup off the kitchen table with a thumbnail. Don’t go, don’t dive in Minnow Gulch like Stéphane Durocher. Don’t come home from Afghanistan in a body bag like Guillaume Macdonald.

  Mothers invoked the dead names, but no one listened. It remained each mother’s lot to flap her gums in the wind.

  Madame Blanchard was a very good foster mother, almost the same, in every respect, as my real mother.

  “Those jumelles!” Sophie shouts, suddenly awake just as I am about to fall asleep. “Your cactuses! I know their names. Their names are Discernment and Fear—when the eyeballs on the first one, Discernment, have properly grieved, the tears will flow down and water the second. Then all its spikes—I see them unfold—they’re bound to flower brave and unafraid.”

  Trust Sophie to bring up the notion of fear and bravery now, in the small of the night, just as I begin to feel lulled by the sound of raindrops tapping the taut orb of our tent. I snuggle down into our rumpled old sleeping bag. I do not feel one little bit like leaving by morning’s first light. But the time has come.

  20 Babies

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11.

  EARLY MORNING.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  I WAKE WHILE IT IS STILL DARK, to hard rain and one of my lonely fits. I have to meet Harold at dawn—yesterday they finally cleaned him up at the hospital and pronounced him fit to go home with a new bandage on his head. Between my flute-bruised cheek and his bandage we’re going to look a fine pair on the road to Quebec. Damn this damp cold. If my shoulder sticks out of the sleeping bag, I can’t tell the difference between the air and the chill of my own dread. My twisting wakes Sophie. I lie still, trying not to annoy her, concentrating on our tent with its seams and folds, transparent as all the fragile shelters we raise to enfold ourselves: our cocoons, our membrane-wheels….

  “Go back to sleep!”

  Our tents, our veils and parasols…What exactly did I write to Henrietta Wolfe upon discovering umbrellas in Paris? I have seen that letter somewhere recently—yes—the words are coming back…

  Dear Madam,

  The people in Paris use umbrellas to defend themselves from the hot sun, and something of the same kind to secure them from the snow and rain—I wonder a practice so useful is not introduced into England, where there are such frequent showers, and especially in the country, where they can be expanded without any inconvenience….

  How my mother scoffed at this!

  I have never understood her resistance. Why would she—a sensible Englishwoman—scorn something so useful, given how much rain fell in London and Blackheath?

  Granted, she had no sun and the Parisian way of shading one’s face from the light simply did not apply to the English. But rain! Why did my mother not even consider enjoying such elegant respite from our nearly constant rain?

  I hear her now: “Anyone foolish enough to raise half a silk balloon over his head every step he takes would certainly be the laughing stock of the whole country for being so unfit and cowardly as to be scared of a raindrop.”

  Am I really scared of a raindrop?

  Despite my best efforts, Sophie remains awake and annoyed: “Have you not got some sort of bedtime prayer to calm yourself?”

  “You know I never pray. I don’t believe in incantations. They remind me of the elaborate grace intoned by the bishop in the big priests’ house where Montcalm persuaded me to dine during one of our Sundays of truce. The bishop had twin Indian slaves who’d tried to run away and he’d taken an iron and seared each one’s shoulder with a fleur-de-lys, from which pus oozed at the scab edges. The bishop devoured three roasted snipes. Now there’s a bird with a song worth hearing.”

  “Is it in the morning you’re leaving?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Usually there are a few of your socks lying around, but there are none to be seen now.”

  Our tent might be damp and even mouldy but suddenly I wish I did not have to leave it.

  “And your toothbrush is no longer on the flat rock. I’m inside out with fatigue here, can we just…”

  “Are you saying you’re going to miss me?”

  “Also, a letter came today for you at the Mission. I have it here.”

  “Where’s the flashlight?”

  “Look. We both have an early rise…”

  “Can’t I read it? Who’s it from?” I hold it up to
the filtered lamplight:

  JW

  Hôtel Le Priori

  Rue du Sault-au-Matelot

  Québec City

  “I dunno. Maybe James Wolfe finally got sick of you impersonating him and has written from his death-scene to tell you to stop.”

  “I need the flashlight!”

  “Read it in the morning! I’m perishing with fatigue.”

  I lie sleepless until the appointed hour.

  Around five in the morning I hear someone outside the tent. I draw out my dirk and hold still. I poise the blade and it occurs to me that before I depart for Quebec City I should slice the canvas and cut around Sophie’s painted walrus and fold him up and take him with me in my pocket. She painted him there for guidance, hasn’t she said as much? She’s always implied the walrus might have a teaching for me, but I have heard nothing from it yet that did not in fact come out of Sophie’s own mouth.

  As I raise the knife Sophie barks—can the woman see in her sleep? —“Lay it down!”

  “I was only…”

  “Asshole. Haven’t you stolen enough, with your knives and your guns and your bayonets?”

  “I thought you said the walrus was meant…”

  “The walrus is not yours for the taking.”

  Again I hear a noise outside the tent. An interloper gropes through the tent flap, and as I’m about to slash at him I glimpse his face—he’s the clerk who served me and helped me listen to the chansonnier Gilles Vigneault, and then held me in a vice-like grip at Archambault’s music shop. This fellow slithers into the tent on his belly, mud streaked all over him.

  “Do you recognize me now, Jimmy?” he says.

  I know he is talking about a time before Archambault’s. And I remember now that he is always the soldier who comes after me here, that he is another young man whom Sophie helps. I look at his tattoo and remember how to decipher its arabesque calligraphy, but this does not mean I can tell you his name.

  “Jimmy always imagines he’s the only one,” Sophie says.

  When I slip behind the tent to recover my medicines I take a last look at Sophie’s walrus, whose form, lit by the park lamps, is opaque when viewed outside the canvas, as opposed to transparent inside. I have not looked closely at the walrus from out here before. I incline my ear to his head and listen somewhat pathetically to see whether he does not have some wise message of farewell. His face moves and I realized it’s Sophie’s face I see pressed against the fabric from the inside.

  She aligns her eyes with the walrus’s and mouths, Listen to your own goddamn animals.

  —

  THE RAIN DOESN’T LET UP as I make my way down to Saint Catherine Street, checking the spines, fabric and handles of last night’s umbrellas discarded in the trash bins.

  There’s always a good reason an umbrella has been abandoned, but a few still look promising. It’s a mercy nobody knows me as I try out the trashed frames: I triumphantly glide a ring up its pole only to have the silk wheel float off and sail into a lamppost.

  At Casse-Croûte Diane, where we have agreed to meet, Harold listens to me with a curious, crackling reception—as if knitting needles were a kind of radio antennae.

  Outside, tied to a pole, is his golden dog.

  “I’m still not sure I want to hitchhike,” I begin. “And you’ve brought Veronica?”

  I have my pack containing water, apples, a couple of tins of beans, last night’s letter from JW in Quebec, my envelope of papers from Madame Blanchard, and my extra underwear. After our Breakfast Special Number 4 we walk past Gare Centrale—we’ll soon reach Victoria Bridge and after that the clover-leafs and the non-pedestrian nightmare of overpasses and turnpikes where Harold seems cheerfully prepared to lift his thumb.

  “Veronica will be an asset, not a liability, you’ll see.”

  “I don’t know if I can stand the noise and the air whistling off transport trucks….”

  “You’ll be all right, especially in that jacket. It counterbalances my dubious bandage. You can hang back off the pavement altogether if you want, and leave me and Veronica to do what we do naturally.”

  Harold says hitchhiking is something that fits particularly well with what he calls his skill set. He can’t remember what happened yesterday, or even five minutes ago, unless he crayons a symbol of it in his notepad, but he seems capable of feats that give me anxiety.

  “Remind me about your hitchhiking skills?”

  He loves this question. “The first plus is that I’m very good at appearing non-threatening.”

  “I guess knitting helps?”

  “I can’t knit and hitchhike at the same time!”

  Harold has rules about the way he does every single thing. I imagined that a person might easily knit and occasionally stick out a thumb on the roadside, but now I realize that for Harold, this would be impossible. Both things cannot be done at once, since neither hitchhiking nor knitting is as simple as I might have imagined.

  “In Jamaica you put your thumb like this…” He makes an aggressive lunge, jabbing his thumb groundward, body craned forward. “You’re telling the driver, essentially, hey—you have the wherewithal to own wheels and I do not, therefore you’re obliged to give me a ride. You wouldn’t do that here.”

  “No, indeed. Someone might run you over. Or bash your head in.”

  He regards me as one might a charming three-year-old. “Perhaps it’s not that rough. But you’re absolutely right, it wouldn’t be culturally appropriate to hitchhike like that here. Here you have to be much more inquiring. You hold yourself like this…”

  “I guess I can see how you can’t simultaneously knit.”

  “Exactly.” His entire body has become a most polite question.

  “You have your thumb and body held high away from the traffic, yet are hesitantly asking if, perhaps, there might be some chance of assistance?”

  “That’s it!”

  In his eyes, I am an astute three-year-old. “I still don’t feel I can do it.”

  “Do you not? Really?”

  “If your first required skill is that you appear non-threatening, I am at a disadvantage. I like to present myself at my full height. I like to travel armed. The thought of appearing weak…”

  “Remember the driver is in control. They are driving the car and this helps them.”

  “But the other side of that is—you give away your power. How do you keep out of danger?”

  “Right.” He looks into space. “A lot of people think there is more danger and violence, more lack of safety in the world than there really is. I know that I had a terrible experience when I was a child, but, since then, I’ve found people, on the whole, to be extremely kind and willing to help. I’ve hitchhiked in five countries over fifteen years and never once felt unsafe—well, maybe once, but it was nothing serious, and I had a talk with the person and we reached a place of safety quite easily.”

  I think of all the missing hitchhikers on the news, decapitations and rapes, victims buried alive along roads to and from nowhere. I feel tempted to point out that maybe he has no fear because he is quite a large man…but Harold is such a not-man—so open and soft I fear if I point out his size or his maleness he might weep. “What would you do,” I say, “if you got in a car and found it unsafe? If you felt you were vulnerable?”

  “You mean if the driver turned out to be dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “…I’d do the same thing I do in any situation, whether the person I’m with seems bad or good. I don’t look at who the person has become. I look at everybody as if they are the same, because they are, in a way, to me at least. Bad or good. Rich or poor. Male or female. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Everyone? Millionaires? Bullying tycoons? Thieving corporate bosses? Torturers?” I want to add things. Many things I have seen or done. There is no end to the butchery and cruelty I’ve been a part of. I suspect Harold is aware of this.

  “All of them,” he says. “Even the man who raped me when I was li
ttle.”

  “You look at them how, exactly?”

  “They were all babies once. I look at them as babies.”

  “No matter what they’ve become?”

  “No matter what. I babify them.”

  21 JW’s Letter

  JW

  Hôtel Le Priori

  Rue du Sault-au-Matelot

  Québec City

  SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2017

  Dear James, or perhaps, dear Jimmy…

  May I call you that?

  Yesterday I took the train from Montreal to Quebec City. As you can see from the letterhead here, I’ve booked a room at Hôtel Le Priori, a chic little place near the funicular in Quebec’s lower town, with exposed brick and a brushed metal sink shaped like an ice cream cone. There is an air freshener in the hallway that I had to surreptitiously quarantine.

  I have been studying James Wolfe’s letter to his father in which he explained how his shortened leave affected him. I made a copy of it at the Fisher Library and have it here with me now. I have read and reread it…so now I do see how James Wolfe might come back to visit in 2017. And I see, Jimmy, believe me, how you feel Wolfe has chosen you. To his father he wrote that everybody knows how hard it is to get a bit of time away from the army, yet no one allowed him to seize what little freedom he could. You’ve given him, haven’t you, that opportunity he feared might never occur again?

  It has also occurred to me—and forgive me for not having understood this sooner—that James Wolfe was always a young man. He was never not young—thirty-two when he died. In the work I am writing now, he remains young in physical appearance but he is old, really—as you know. Forgive me for appearing to separate Wolfe and your own self, but know that I understand—coming to Quebec City has helped me understand—that, in you, Jimmy, Wolfe has come back to a Canada in which both he and Quebec have grown older.