I went alone.
I watch the beast pull up and give one last great sigh, as if it is very tired from the long journey, smoke pouring from its sides. People wave from the windows and people on the ground wave back, just as I have watched them do for days. Then men and women and children who have arrived start stepping down into the arms of others. I see a few soldiers and search among them for Elijah’s face with his sly grin. The crowd begins to thin, and once again I do not see an Indian soldier with one leg.
I am turning to leave when I see through one of the windows the silhouette of a man inside. He walks slowly along the aisle, on crutches, in a uniform, a small bag slung over his shoulder. I step away from the shadow of the wall.
He wears a hat, just like the wemistikoshiw do, but this one is of their army and I cannot see his face for his looking down as he slowly makes his way down the steps on his crutches. He is an old man, I think. So skinny. This cannot be the Elijah I know. One leg of his pants is pinned up and hangs down a little way, empty.
When he is off the steps I begin to back away, thinking it is not him. He looks up and I see his face, thin and pale, high cheekbones, and ears sticking out from beneath his hat. I stumble a little, the blood rushing away from my head. The ghost of my nephew Xavier looks at me.
He sees me at the same moment, and I watch as his eyes take a long time to register what they see, but when they do he begins to rock back and forth on his crutches. He falls to the ground. I rush up to him, kneel beside him, grab his warm hands. He is no ghost. I hold him to me. His heart beats weakly. I am struck suddenly that he is very ill.
“Nephew,” I whisper. “You are home. You are home.”
I hug him, and when he opens his eyes, I look into them. They are glassy. Even in the shadows of the station his pupils are pinpricks.
“I was told you were dead, Auntie,” he whispers.
“And I was told you were, too,” I say.
We sit on the ground for a while, both of us too weak for the moment to get up. We are crying, looking at one another. A small group of wemistikoshiw gathers and stares at us. I help Nephew up so that we can get away, get to the river where he can drink water and I can better protect him.
We do not stay in the town long. It makes me too nervous. Automobiles, they are everywhere. We must cross the dusty road that they travel upon before we can get to the river where I keep my canoe. Nephew walks slowly on his crutches, his eyes cast down. People stare at us, at him. There was a time before he left that he would have stared back, he and Elijah both, not intimidated by them.
What of Elijah? If they made a mistake about Nephew’s death, maybe they made one about Elijah. I want to ask, but will wait until he is ready to speak.
We try to cross the road but an automobile honks like a goose and swerves around. I watch carefully and must wait a long time until I can judge that we can cross safely.
I lead Nephew down to the riverbank. I have left the canoe a good walk down the rocky shore. I tell him that it is best for him to wait while I go ahead and get it. He doesn’t respond, just sits heavily on the bank. Quickly as I can, I make my way. I am silly to worry about leaving him alone for a few minutes. In the last years he has experienced more danger than anyone should experience in a hundred lives. But I worry anyway.
As I approach him in my canoe, I can see that he has his jacket off and is holding his thin arm in one hand. I get closer and see that he has stuck something into his arm, something he pulls out just as he looks up and sees me. His body has gone relaxed and his eyes look guilty for a moment, but as I get to where he is they are like the dark river in the sun.
I feel better once he is in the canoe and we are paddling away from the town. It smells the same as Moose Factory, the scent of burning wood not quite masking another decaying smell below it. He paddles for a while, but he is listless.
I tell Xavier to lie back on his pack and rest, that we are heading north and I have the current with me for once and it is easy going. He does not seem to hear me. I touch my paddle tip to his shoulder. He turns. I say it again and he watches my mouth intently. He lies back without speaking, and I paddle us back into the bush, looking every once in a while at his thin face in the sunlight, this face that has grown old too quickly. He sleeps, but his sleep is not restful. He twitches and his hands shake. He calls out and this wakes him up. He sits and dips his hand in the river, runs it across his face. His shirt is soaked through with sweat. He is very sick. Some fever is burning him up from the inside. I push down the river in silence.
I take my time, find it pleasant not to have to work constantly, not to fight the current. Only a couple of days ago I battled with every stroke until my arms were dead things and my lower back felt broken. Now paddling home I have the luxury of the current that runs north with me to the Great Salt Bay, to the place the ones who took my nephew call Hudson Bay. It cost me a week of hard work to make my way up the river, but with the wind and weather in my favour, the river is a three-day paddle home. I have many questions for Xavier, and I am like a child inside, waiting to ask them. But I am patient. I am good at waiting.
We do not get far before the sun lets me know that it is time to prepare a camp. I want to go easy with him anyway. No rush. It is summer.
The insects are heaviest just before and during dusk, and so I look for an island in the river that will afford us some relief from them. Ahead, a good one appears with a sandy beach and dead wood scattered about for a fire.
We beach the canoe and I busy myself collecting wood. Nephew tries to help but his crutches sink into the soft sand and he grows frustrated. I want to cry, watching him from the corner of my eye as he bends and tries to pick up wood and then finally sits and pulls rocks to him slowly, making a fire circle.
I cut long saplings with my axe and drag them to him, tie them together at one end and construct the frame for a small teepee. I pull a length of canvas from the canoe and tie it to the frame. The sky right now looks like it will give a starry night, but the wind tells me something different. We are not so far away from the bay that a storm can’t rush up on us. Once I have dragged our few belongings into the teepee, I pull food from a pack and lay it out. Nephew has gotten a nice fire started.
On one rock I place salted fish, on another some moosemeat and on a third, blueberries picked fresh from the bush. I take a stick and sharpen its end. Nephew stares at the river. I lace a length of meat onto the stick and heat it by the flame. He turns his head in recognition when it begins to warm and its scent comes up.
“I have not smelled that in a long time,” he says, smiling shyly. These are the first words he has said since the town.
I give him some food, but he doesn’t eat. His skin is the colour of cedar ash in the setting sun.
That night I crawl into the teepee, tell him to sleep when he is ready. He stares at the fire.
Hours later, I awake to a light rain tapping on the canvas. I open my eyes and listen to it. The fire smoke in the rain is a pleasant scent. I realize I lie here alone. Even with the weather, Nephew has not come in. I peer outside. The fire sizzles and pops, and my fear returns when I see he doesn’t sit beside it.
There is no sleep the remainder of the night. I toss in my blanket. My body hums with Nephew’s pain and with the realization that he has come home only to die.
TAKOSHININAANIWAN
Arrival
RAIN PATTERS ON THE SAND all around me tonight, slowly soaks through the wool of this uniform I still wear, the animal scent of it pulling me back to the battlefields. I do not ever want to go there again. Auntie rests in her little teepee, but me, I can’t. When I do, the dead friends I don’t want to see come to visit. They accuse me of acts I did not perform. Of some that I did. We all acted over there in ways it is best not to speak of. Especially Elijah. He is the truly skilled one. But at one time I was the better marksman. No one remembers that. Elijah, he is the blessed one.
Where is he? We spent the whole war together only to lose
each other in the last days. A shell landed too close to me. It threw me into the air so that suddenly I was a bird. When I came down I no longer had my left leg. I’ve always known men aren’t meant to fly.
They gave me medicine for the pain, and I learned how to fly in a new way. The cost this time is that I can no longer live without the medicine, and in a few days there will be none left. Their morphine eats men. It has fed on me for the last months, and when it is all gone I will be the one to starve to death. I will not be able to live without it.
This is all too much to figure out. Elijah is missing. Auntie is not dead after all. I received a letter in France one year ago saying that she was gone. Nothing in the world makes any sense any more. I lie back on the sand and let the rain tickle my face. The campfire hisses. I should sit closer by it, but the light hurts my eyes.
I watch my body shiver in the cold rain. The morphine is very good, though, a warm blanket that wraps about me like a moose robe. I will lie here and listen to the hollow breathing in my chest, wait for dawn to come, and I will fight the sleep that pulls at me. I do not want to sleep and be taken back.
I stare up at the rain that falls down, flickers of lightning cutting through it every few minutes. My body floats above itself. Oh, this medicine is good. I hear my breathing, how the air floods in slowly then recedes from me like waves on a beach. I listen to myself breathe, and I close my eyes. After a time I can hear others breathing heavy all around me. I want to tell them to go quiet. Lightning, another flare, pops up out of the darkness and throws a white light on us and on the ditch we lie in, our uniforms soaking up the cold water. Elijah is not near. So long has Elijah been around that he is like a part of my own body.
Where is he?
The big guns echo. They shake me.
I crawl with the others up to broken buildings on the edge of the town. Me, I’m so tired I’d rather sleep here on my belly away from the buildings that attract all their shells. The darkness makes me feel safe.
Tomorrow we will go into the trenches. But tonight we’re told to go to that town. We have no choice. The crack crack crack of rifles keeps us in the ditch and the flares go up and nobody knows who’s firing into the night. The rifle fire sounds maybe fifty yards away, to the left and front.
“Are those our fucking signal flares?” Sergeant McCaan hisses. “Can somebody tell me? Are they?”
The one called Fat whimpers like a dog. The others around me breathe too loud. A good hunter will hear us. Another crack of rifle fire. Puffs of dirt spray on my head.
“Ross rifles,” I whisper over to McCaan, and he looks at me, swearing more, the words louder and angrier. It’s our own rifles firing at us.
Suddenly McCaan crouches and begins screaming at the top of his lungs, “Quit firing on your own, you bastards!” and I reach up and pull him down as rounds buzz by his head.
We hear a voice in the distance shouting back, and the rifles stop their noise and the voice becomes clear, shouting out to stop all firing.
We make our way up, ready to jump back down, holding our arms in the air and climbing out of the ditch. McCaan’s face glows red in the Very lights falling near us. I’m glad I’m not the one who will face his anger. Elijah walks beside me. He’s laughing at all this. I don’t find it funny.
It is another Canadian company holding the edge of this town, just over from England, too, and as they hand out cigarettes they explain that at this place there seems to be no clear front and that Fritz is all around. McCaan has marched up to their officer and I can tell that he wants to beat the man, but he’s a lieutenant and so McCaan must hold all his frustration in. We’re given directions to a place we can sleep, and as I march away with the others into the night I wonder what kind of sign this is that the first time I am under fire it comes from my own side.
We are sent to an old farmhouse billet, and upstairs through the glass-less window is a good view of the horizon where the drumbeat of artillery keeps constant and the horizon glows like a wood stove with the door open. The beds in here are long gone and most of the walls are torn down. We lie on straw, so many of us squeezed in shoulder-to-shoulder that I worry the floor can’t hold our weight and we’ll be sent crashing down to the ground below. The lice crawl over me so that I can’t fall asleep for the itching. Sitting up, I search for them in the seams of my uniform, picking them out and cracking them with nails that have grown long for the purpose.
I’d much rather be outside on the cool grass, me, but the officers won’t allow it. We’ve been over here in this place that some call Flanders and others call Belgium for three weeks now. I felt stupid and small when Elijah had to explain that Belgium is a country, like Canada, and Flanders is just one small part of it, like Mushkegowuk. I’m still uncomfortable with the language of the wemistikoshiw. It is spoken through the nose and hurts my mouth to try and mimic the silly sound of it. I opt to stay quiet most of the time, listening carefully to decipher the words, always listening for the joke or insult made against me. These others think that I’m something less than them, but just give me the chance to show them what I’m made of when it is time to kill.
This is the closest we’ve come to the front. It’s close enough that I can smell the burn of the cordite, and the guns are louder than I thought anything could be, even thunder or waterfalls. The urge to admit that I want to be home and not in this ugly place hovers close, but I must push the thought away.
For a time this was almost what I pictured it to be from all the stories the others told. Green fields and pretty girls waving to us from windows and doors in the towns we marched through. Then we were shipped further north on old trains and walked through towns smashed to pieces as if by giant children. I saw my first dead body in one of these places, not the body of a soldier but of a small boy, naked and bloated in the sun, a great chunk of his head gone. The child confused me. What did he have to do with any of this? Where was his mother?
I’m confused by many things, by all of this movement, by the loss of my sense of direction here. The rain began soon after I saw the boy, is continuous now so that it has become a part of my world.
Every day we practise drills in it. Bayonet drill, grenade drill, shooting drill, marching drill. My skin is always wet so that I feel like a frog or a fish. All this rain makes keeping my rifle clean and working difficult.
Rain. We lie in the farmhouse, scratching, and I listen to rain and to Sean Patrick and Grey Eyes talking quietly to one another.
“My girl back home wanted to marry me,” Sean Patrick says. He is the youngest of our section and is from a place in Ontario not so far away from where I live. I wonder how they let him into this army. He looks like a gangly moose yearling not yet weaned from his mother. All knees, bigger ears than mine.
Sean Patrick keeps talking. He loves to talk. “That’s the only way I was going to get to see her naked. But I told her that I didn’t want my wife being a war bride. ‘You’re too good for that,’ I says. ‘I’d just as soon wait till I get back to marry you.’” He scratches at the collar of his unbuttoned tunic. “‘We all know this war isn’t going to last long anyway.’” I see Sean Patrick turn to Grey Eyes when he says this. Sean Patrick needs others to tell him he’s right. “Truth is, I didn’t agree to it because I was mad at her that she wouldn’t do it with me. I’m only just turned seventeen, and that’s too young to marry.”
Grey Eyes laughs quietly in the dark.
“You really an American?” Sean Patrick asks.
“From Detroit,” Grey Eyes answers. “I got me a girl back home, too. Her name’s Maggie, and she’s a real looker.”
“Oh yeah?” Sean Patrick says.
“Red hair, a figure like Aphrodite. I promised her I’d marry her, too, once I get home.”
I was there when Grey Eyes told Elijah his girl’s name was Janice and that she had hair as golden as a wheat field. I’m not sure about this one, the one who’s befriended Elijah.
I fall asleep to their voices and to the soun
d of the guns pounding back and forth in the distance, thinking about Sean Patrick, who’s not seventeen winters but fifteen. And that one, Grey Eyes. Him, he’s a liar.
The next day, we stand in front of the farmhouse at attention all morning. I don’t know why they make us do this. Late April clouds gather in the distance. Elijah stands next to me, moving his feet about so that Sergeant McCaan shouts at him to be still. I can see that McCaan doesn’t want to shout at him, doesn’t want us standing here at all. The one who tells McCaan what to do is named Lieutenant Breech. The enlisted men call him Bastard Breech. He stands in the shade and watches us all morning. He carries an ash stick with a bullet tip and whips it against his leg when he wants McCaan’s attention.
The clouds continue to gather and still we are told to stand there as the rain comes from the sky and soaks all of us until we shiver. The men begin to talk when the downpour is thick enough that Breech heads inside.
“We are to go into the front lines today,” one near me says.
“’Bout time,” Sean Patrick answers.
McCaan tells him to hush.
Elijah leans toward me. “Now we get to hunt,” he says.
I don’t respond, am too worried that Breech might be watching.
The rain falls harder and soon I can’t tell the guns from the thunder. The men shift and moan. Our packs weigh more than half our weight. The men around me are like the horses I’ve seen here, skittish. I hear someone behind me talk about officers taking our own soldiers behind the lines and shooting them for the slightest disobedience. Another says that the Canadians just took a beating at a place called Saint-Eloi and now our battalion’s to go in as reinforcement. The rumours continue until they become the truth. We will go into the front lines today.
And then the rain stops. The sun comes out, and so does Breech. We sag under our packs. The one called Fat whines. They call him Fat because he really is. Fat as a beluga. I stand and suffer and watch the steam rise up from us as if we are all on fire, smouldering slowly under the weight of Breech’s stare.