by Don Gillmor
Two thousand horses were cut down in a few confusing minutes, sprawling, collapsing, skidding and trying to get up, failing. Men were thrown and pinned and lay broken among the animals. Michael raised his revolver and aimed where flashes of machine-gun fire appeared. Ahead, their commanding officer pulled up, his sabre raised. He turned in his saddle and yelled something, then dismounted and took cover. Michael galloped past him, and when his horse was shot he was thrown forward into the ground. He lay in the dust for a few seconds then scrambled to the cover of his dying horse. He assessed his injuries, his shoulder bruised, his knee swelling and cut, hands scraped, wrist jammed. His horse was still breathing. He could feel the damaged bellows of its lungs as he lay against it. Its forelegs were broken and a pink froth of blood and saliva pooled at its mouth. Michael lay against the horse and felt its laboured breathing beneath the warm coat. They breathed in tandem for short periods, a shared misery. He looked back across the battlefield. Could all the horses be down? Those magnificent targets. He couldn’t see Dawkins or Walters. He found his pistol and shot his horse in the head to end its suffering.
After an hour, he heard changes in the gunfire. New guns had entered the battle. Men yelled and moved toward the village. He got up with effort and followed them. He stumbled over Chambers from Calgary, his thin moustache and easy charm, his pink brains drying on the earth.
The Fort Garry Horse had approached from the other side and routed the Germans. The Dragoons came up on foot and helped secure the village. At dusk, the 4th Division relieved them, and they walked, tired, horseless, back to their camp.
“Could that have been the actual last cavalry charge?” Dawkins inquired rhetorically at mess the next night. “After a thousand years, is this the last time men will attack one another with swords on horseback?” One of his arms was in a sling, and there were cuts along his forehead. “What commander could give that order now? How many horses survived? Fifty? Ten? Was that the final slaughter?”
“The tanks didn’t do much better,” Walters said. “We started with more than four hundred. Six are still working, I’m told. Horses don’t work, tanks don’t work. What does this mean?”
“It means we’re living in the present,” Dawkins said. “One of those rare moments in history where you know exactly where you are, right while it’s happening. The horses are part of the past, officially relegated to history. But the tanks, they’re still in the future. They don’t work yet. But they will. It means that this”—he gestured around him—“this collection of death and sentiment and bad food and poor decisions, this is inescapably, undeniably, the present.” Dawkins took a bite from a square of bitter chocolate, then offered some to Michael and Walters. They ate the chocolate and watched the sun glow red in the west.
During the autumn, the Allies advanced: Bourlon, Bourlon Wood, Pilgrim’s Rest, Haynecourt, Canal du Nord, Cambrai. Sweating through bogs, laying corduroy roads under the afternoon sun, walking through abandoned villages of ghostly stone, seeing vague shapes in the fog that settled over skeletal trees the colour of bone. The smell of gas sitting lightly on the breeze, the hundred-year-old faces collapsing around bully beef as they ate in silence. They could sense the end. The Germans were in flight. Walters was vaporized by a shell outside Cambrai, a direct hit that left a pink spray that settled lightly on the earth. Tanks were angled on the horizon, rusting in farmers’ fields. The Germans were inching eastward, going home.
Walking through the shattered streets of Cambrai, the dust rising in a grey mist out of the rubble, buildings cleaved and looming jagged and black against the pleasant French sun. A mad German sniper who was left behind to die fired his Mauser from a window and was then blown to pieces. A hundred men knelt in front of wooden chairs in the half-ruin of a cathedral, the heavy candelabra intact and hanging in a shaft of sunlight that came through the bombed dome. Valenciennes, Marly, the buckled streets, huge splinters lying across the stone, charred beams that the people carefully stepped over as they came forward with flowers and tears, embracing Michael, kissing him, holding his face like a chalice.
6
STANFORD MOUNTAIN HORSE, FRANCE, 1918
In a cave in the chalk hills, beside the oversized chess set, Stanford pressed the cloth lightly against his wound and watched the red stain spread. Sunlight came in the vertical window, bisecting the space, illuminating the muddy rations scavenged from the battlefield that sat on the wooden table beside the tobacco. There was a revolver in a leather holster and a bone-handled knife. Two rifles, an Enfield and a Mauser, stood in the corner. On the floor, a collection of helmets. Stanford was slumped in the wooden chair and he reached for the dented canteen and took a long drink, and then breathed in sharply. Was his spirit getting ready to leave? A soft light that hovered, waiting to drift skyward like a feather on the wind. A warm breath dispersed in the cool of morning.
His mother had told him of Crowfoot, stories she whispered as he lay half asleep in his bed under the Hudson’s Bay blanket. Crowfoot died in a tent east of Calgary. It was 1890, near the close of the century, certainly the end of their time. All twelve of Crowfoot’s children had died of starvation or tuberculosis, and it was his mother, almost a hundred years old, who was at his deathbed. The generations working in reverse; first the children die, then the parent, finally the grandparent. She had seen the century come in and was there to see it end, one hundred years of gathering sorrow.
Stanford drank some whisky from the flask and discarded the bloody cloth. He took a grey rag torn from a German uniform, applied it to his wound, and watched it too slowly flower with blood. He observed the patterns on his body, the crude swirl of ink. He had been conscripted for a firing squad, the most loathsome thing he had done in the war. Eight of them, slipping out before dawn, lining up to shoot a seventeen-year-old boy whose nerves had broken like glass. He was sitting in the forest, unable even to stand, wet from the dew. He reminded Stanford of a crippled deer. The military police had captured him at a train station. One of the eight rifles had a blank round, cheap comfort that they may not have killed the boy. When they took aim at his heart (not his head), when they lined up the button on his chest pocket and squeezed the trigger, while the condemned boy rallied himself briefly, saying quietly, “It ain’t right,” they could convince themselves they weren’t executioners. No one spoke on the walk back to their tents. The light had hardly broken, and no one spoke of it again.
How many had he killed since? There had been so many Germans. And so many of his own. Stanford took another sip of whisky from the small flask, lay back and closed his eyes. The hand that held the cloth to his side was sticky with blood. Who had shot him? A German, perhaps. Though almost as likely to be a Canadian or a Brit. Stanford inhabited the landscape like a wraith, behind one line then the other. He had begun to think he was invisible. Doing good, doing harm, doing God’s work. This last thought triggered an ugly laugh that turned into a coughing seizure. He held the cloth to his mouth and noticed the fresh blood when he took it away.
His thoughts drifted back to the first battle, the beginning of his own war, years ago. (Was it the beginning? Not truly. A war begun before his birth, fought and lost and resurrected, handed down through blood.) He saw the door slightly ajar, the light leaking out, coming from the small window in the room and being swallowed by the dark polished wood of the school hallway. There was Heeney’s naked form, his face both surprised and angry, the whisky priest. Albert Lone Thorn’s eyes were desperate and uncomprehending. He was crying. Heeney closed the door. Stanford was paralyzed, and stood there hollowed, a void that grew inside him and was filled with shame and anger and a betrayal that finally rose like black bile and filled every sense. Albert was gone in a week, vanished from school, from the world, sitting unclaimed in the creek for three days. Stanford spent time on the aspen bough, finding the right size, the right length and heft. He carved a design in the bark, a wolf ’s head. When Heeney’s face received the first blow, there was surprise and something else,
some dark wish for penance, a Catholic gift for pain. The wood hit him above the eye and then again across his nose with the sound of a tree splitting. He fell awkwardly to the floor, losing consciousness, and Stanford focused on an offending hand that lay on the bare wood floor and hammered until it was red shapeless meat staining the freshly washed boards. When the other priests came into the room, Stanford was crying and on his knees, his mouth against Heeney’s unhearing ear, filling his head with ancient fears.
HOMECOMING
1921–1929
When I got home from the war. How many stories began with those words. When I got home I married my sweetheart, made my fortune, wept for a year, joined a dance band.
At first, I didn’t get home from the war. I stayed in France. I met a woman there, that was part of it. I was at an outdoor market in Paris, a place I liked to visit, though the markets in those years were lean. Wooden trays with stunted potatoes and peppers that looked like old faces, apples pitted with black spots that gave a wonderful aroma. But there was something hopeful about the market. After two years of rations, everything out of a can, it was a joy just to see something that had been grown. I would go early in the morning and have a coffee and walk around. One morning there was a woman holding an artichoke. I’d never seen one and I stared at it, and at her too, I suppose, and she smiled and told me what it was. She spoke a little English, enough that I understood her. She handed it to me and I examined its armour. She invited me to her apartment and boiled it and then showed me how to peel the leaves off and dip them in a spicy oil and she fed one into my mouth and slowly withdrew it as I bit down on it. Afterwards we made love. You can’t imagine the effect this had on me. It was overwhelming. Her name was Marie. There wasn’t a woman like her out here, not then.
I spent a lot of time in Paris just walking the streets. I had this fantasy of running into Stanford. Absurd, I know. But there had never been any official confirmation of his death. His body hadn’t surfaced; most likely it was swallowed by the mud like so many others, a prehistoric beast whose bones will be discovered ten thousand years from now. But I would imagine him walking down rue Marcadet, dressed fashionably in a camel hair coat, a girl on his arm, and we would race through Montmartre, running as we hadn’t on that day in Calgary when we fought those men.
We used to shoot gophers together when we were kids. We had one .22 rifle to share, our mother reasoning that there would be less chance of an accident with only one gun. I was maybe nine. There was a bounty on gophers: Each tail brought in a penny. We lay in the grass, Stanford with the gun, sighting down the barrel, waiting for a gopher to show itself. Hours went by like this. Pleasant unprofitable days.
For all we knew, the whole world was like this. There was no radio or TV and we didn’t get a newspaper. Our only connection to the world was what we could see. We were explorers. Maybe if Stanford hadn’t had any contact with the world he would have been fine. Or maybe it was in his blood and it would have come out anyway: four generations of war, starvation, gin, and darkness waiting to escape. And what better playground than France in 1916.
I stayed in France for more than a year, and then I started thinking of home, like Domagaya and Taignoagny, the first Indians in Paris, who had come unwillingly. I was no longer fashionable, or maybe it’s fairer to say no longer exotic.
Domagaya and Taignoagny and their father, the Iroquoian chief Donnacona, were kidnapped by the French explorer Jacques Cartier, along with seven other Indians—four of them children offered to Cartier as gifts. Ten Indians in the Paris of 1536. The children were cooed over, like all children of other races, embraced as perfect, and Donnacona was presented to King François as a visiting monarch. The two kings stood opposite one another, François in his splendid gold tunic that bulged absurdly around the arms, as if his power was matched by his physical strength. Donnacona slept in a perfumed bed and was invited to royal balls, dressed in clothes that were the royal tailor’s idea of what an Indian king should wear—a red cape that dragged on the floor, as heavy as drapery, a purple sleeveless tunic with embroidered trees and animals; here was the noble savage. Perhaps it was Donnacona who first put that idea into the French mind.
It was true that Donnacona looked kingly. He was taller than anyone in the court. But after eight months of posing as himself, Donnacona wanted to go home, wanted the snow and the sound of his people’s voices. In May one of the Indian children died, eaten by European disease. She was covered in sores. In death she was almost weightless, her spirit gone. Donnacona viewed the small corpse with sorrow and realized they had to get back before they all died like the girl. The food didn’t agree with him, though he liked the pastry, and he would miss the women, the ladies of the court who moved through the hallways like a school of fish, the careless removal of all those layers of clothing. But death was stalking them. There was death in Stadacona too, of course, but there it had a familiar face: winter, hunger, an enemy with an axe. Here it arrived unseen. You awoke with your killer already inside you, eating your heart in victory.
Also, the Parisian curiosity was almost sated. Donnacona spent more time alone. There were fewer invitations. His sons, who often woke in the morning smelling of women’s perfume, were less in demand. Donnacona met with a man named André Thevet, who asked him questions about where he came from. Thevet was a mapmaker of sorts, trying to piece together the world. They sat together and ate pastries as Donnacona conjured a world—not the one he had lived in but one he hoped the French would want to return to, bringing him and his sons with them. So he told Thevet that the Saguenay had spices and gold, and the men who lived there were white and didn’t piss.
Donnacona told the king the same story. François had been reluctant to spend money on another trip to the New World. The last two had been costly and hadn’t yielded much. Cartier stood beside Donnacona as he described this imaginary world to his fellow king. Cartier had spent the winter in Stadacona, and he knew there were no spices or gold or white men. The Saguenay that Donnacona described was north of where his men had frozen to death, the ground too hard to bury them. They covered the corpses in snow and buried them in the spring. But Cartier wanted to go back too, and so he joined Donnacona in this lie, the kidnapper and his victim allied.
While they were preparing for the voyage, seven more Indians died, and Donnacona was sitting in a scented bed in a small room coughing blood into a dirty handkerchief. His hair had grown out and he resembled a startled bear. His eyes were red and his head was fevered and filled with dreams of death coming as a raven. He was unreconciled to the idea of being buried in the earth—why go down when your destination was up? Also Thevet had told him of hell, described its horrors, though he would be grateful for the heat. Cartier wasn’t ready to return until May 1541, and by then Donnacona too was gone, and the only surviving Indian was a little girl. Her eyes were large and dark and she stared at people, making them uncomfortable. They called her Temoin—the Witness—and she didn’t go back. She disappeared into Paris as so many do.
Perhaps the little girl survived. She could have grown up, gotten married, had children, and her ancestors live there still, her blood diluted, unrecognizable, carrying the ancient crime inside, long forgiven. Or maybe the blood doesn’t forgive. Maybe it produced someone like Stanford or Riel, someone who emerged three centuries later carrying revenge in his liver. A receptacle for every historic wrong.
Anyway, I was no longer exotic and Paris was grey. I longed for some of the things Donnacona had longed for: the first taste of snow, the sound of my own language. I think I’d been putting off coming back alone, without Stanford, as if it was a failing somehow. What would we be, my mother and I, without him?
After the war, the world was redrawn. Thirty countries met in Paris to sort out the new maps of Europe. Everyone lined up to claim their lost luggage. The Poles and Serbs arrived with maps that went back to the fourteenth century. Not to be outdone, the Bulgarians went back to the tenth century. The Italians wanted the Dalmatian
coast. The rhetoric of maps has rarely been shriller. Everyone shouted that their bloodlines went back further and were purer, that their God was more righteous, that their map was proof. But maps are rarely proof; they’re more like opinions. In 1919, land was given out like toys among children, and in that new map a new war was born, though it didn’t start for twenty years.
Back here, things hadn’t changed much. The big news was that the Prince of Wales had visited Alberta and fallen in love with the scenery. He bought the old Bedingfield place out by Pekisko, and suddenly the future King of England was our neighbour. When I got back I got a job working at his place. He called it the EP Ranch—for Edward Prince.
Edward looked like an illustration of a prince taken out of a children’s book. A bit spoiled, aloof. His family were originally German. A vain man, always beautifully dressed. He usually had a cigarette going. I looked at him and thought about all those pink countries on the map—the colour of the British Empire—that would be under his patronage, more or less. And I looked at his face, a bit vacant, like a toy soldier, and I knew, even then, that the maps would be redrawn again.
In the meantime, we went to the movies. Everyone had had enough of reality: The war and the Spanish flu had seen to that. Cars and movies swept us off our feet. Movement and fantasy. It gave America the chance to sell its relentless promise to the world, and we weren’t the only ones that bought into it. Germany, England, France, everyone sat in the dark and entered that celluloid world like children. Even in black and white, America was seductive.
1
ALBERTA, 1921
He was trim, a compact man with no fat. His posture gave him the illusion of height, his hair immaculately combed, standing in a checked shooting jacket, tan riding pants, and gleaming boots, nimbly taking a cigarette out of a silver case.
