The best shooting I’ve done, Elijah says, looking at me.
I stare at his lips and nod. My hearing has left me once again with Elijah’s gun so close to my head.
Are you having trouble hearing? Elijah asks.
I understand from the way his lips form the words. “Too much loud noise,” I say in English.
Before dusk, the town is overrun by the Canadians. Elijah and I make it back to the trenches of the night before. Exhausted, we find Lieutenant Breech and report to him. Sergeant McCaan is somewhere in the field. Breech listens to the report, Elijah talking, me standing wordless behind him. Breech sounds incredulous when Elijah reports taking down the machine-gunners in Courcelette.
“Was an officer present to verify?” Breech asks, standing and stretching.
“No, sir,” Elijah says.
“Your claim seems a little exaggerated to me.” Breech laughs, as if other officers are in the room to laugh along with his humour.
“I’m a good judge of distance, sir,” Elijah says.
“Yes, I’m sure you are,” Breech answers. “How many canoe lengths did you say they were from you?” he says, smiling, sitting down and picking up his pen. “I’ll make sure to note it in my report.” He stares at Elijah, his smile daring him to respond.
Elijah smiles back. “Very good, sir. Very good joke!” He’s good at hiding his anger.
“Get some hot food and an hour’s rest, then re-equip yourselves. Report is that Courcelette is putting up stiff resistance still.”
Elijah and I salute and leave. The medicine is almost gone now, I can see, and Elijah feels the headaches coming. Although he cannot remember the last time he ate, he’s not hungry.
“I need to sleep for a while,” he says to me, finding our dugout and crawling in.
“I’ll be here,” I say, crouching by the entrance and leaning on my rifle.
Elijah lies down and feels the lice crawling, closes his eyes to the artillery exploding and rifles cracking not so far away.
For the next two weeks Elijah and I move about, searching out the enemy from a distance. Breech orders us to report back often, noting any enemy movements we see, even the sighting of smoke from cook fires. The Canadians have cleared out Courcelette and now focus on taking the Hun trenches to the north, trenches with names like Hessian and Kenora and Regina. Elijah and I concentrate on harassment fire, finding weaknesses in their trenches and shooting at parties as they try to work.
Eleven days after Courcelette, another big push begins, and we watch for the first time a tank rumble across the field. I’d heard the rumour of them during the attack on Candy Trench, didn’t know whether to believe that these great iron monsters were real. But there one is, rolling past our nest on the very edge of Courcelette. To the left of us, troops march behind it, and Elijah and I ready ourselves, searching out machine-gun nests in the smoke and rubble hundreds of yards away. Fritz is not so ready to give up these trenches today, and Elijah and I fire our rifles and watch as hundreds of Canadians fall ahead of us. For a moment I feel like I’m watching something private that I shouldn’t be, Canadians on the ground screaming out in pain or lying still as the earth, but then the black anger washes over me and I fire the Ross I’m forced to use until the barrel is too hot to touch and the poorly made rounds begin to jam.
No more ground can be won in this area, and after the Canadians’ gains, both sides dig in once more. Our company is sent back to Albert for respite. The men drink hard. We join in even though I’d rather retreat to somewhere private. I’m not enjoying this war like Elijah is.
Elijah, he tells me a story of a night in Albert. He has no choice but to tell me. I am his listener.
One evening he climbs the steps of the basilica, rifle in hand. He’s drunk on wine and the morphine courses through his veins in such a way that he floats more than walks. He makes his way up the crumbling bell tower, scaring pigeons out of their roost. Their wings beat into the night and he watches as feathers fall about him, reminding him of fat snowflakes, then of home. It is the wrong time for melancholy, it will ruin his mood, and so he straps his rifle onto his back and makes his way out the window of the tower and onto the ledge. Above him the giant virgin leans straight out, glowing gold in the night, her baby Jesus in her hands as if in offering to the war below. He climbs up to the roof and scrambles onto the foot of the statue. He scuttles up further so that he straddles her. Shimmying, he makes his way out along her back, daring himself to see how far he will go. She seems to be anchored to nothing, and Elijah’s weight as he rides her back like she is a great horse threatens to knock her down, smash her into a thousand pieces on the ground below.
He’s made his way to mid back and makes the decision that he will reach her golden crown. She shakes with the effort of holding him as he slides out further onto her. Elijah is surprised to find he’s become hard with the excitement of this. He has his first erection in months, it seems. He lies flatter on his stomach and continues sliding himself up her back, the ground below beckoning them to it, Elijah shaking now as much as she is, her crown almost in reach. He stretches his arms up to the rim and grimaces, pulls himself the last foot to her head and begins to convulse in waves, the virgin below him vibrating along with him.
He lies there a long time, staring down at the world below. Reaching into his pocket he pulls out a cigarette, lights it and inhales. He unstraps the rifle from his back and peers through the scope into the night. There isn’t much light, just the rage of battle on the horizon. He focuses in on that, the dancing colours just like the Wawahtew back home. He cannot escape thinking of the place he comes from on this night. He slips off the safety and aims at the dancing colours, squeezes his trigger, firing a single bullet into the light.
In the freezing rain of late November, we march back into the forward trenches, and Elijah tells me his world would be a perfect place if only he were able to rid himself of what he eats. It seems the medicine won’t allow him to.
Constant back-and-forth shelling around here and the trenches have been pummelled so often that some of them are more like shallow ditches than trenches. A constant threat of being attacked looms over us. More days of cold, relentless, pelting rain than days of dryness, and even with duckboards, the trenches fill with water. Many men fall to pneumonia, and many others suffer skin irritations from being constantly wet that turn into nasty festers. We’ve been issued tall rubber boots that reach up to the thighs, but in many places these are not even tall enough and fill with water. A new expression to describe the condition of feet rotting in watery boots has appeared. When the soldiers see that their feet are black and swelling, they call it trenchfoot.
Elijah and I immediately think of home here. In the spring and autumn when we goose hunt along the rivers and the sodden, soft shores of the Great Bay, we live in cold rain for days on end and must learn to navigate the mud. It is a part of Cree existence. Elijah and I don’t complain like the others but focus our energy on staying alive and finding the little comforts, wait out the autumn, and avoid the shells that scream in randomly from the grey sky. We wear the tall moccasins I made for us a long time ago back in Canada. They dry quickly and allow our feet to breathe, and in this way we avoid foot trouble. The moccasins are the one break in dress code that McCaan will allow. “Just don’t let Breech see them,” he mutters.
Trench raids against Fritz are impossible right now as they are too well dug in, and even night patrols are rare in this weather. The mud and water hold the Canadians captive. We dig deeper into it and await what winter will bring.
I am sick of the corpses around us, but in his boredom Elijah volunteers for burial detail, taking the dead out of the line and down the dangerous alleys of support trenches that are constantly bombarded, stacking the corpses in rows like cordwood and helping with the digging of graves. “It isn’t all that difficult in this soft muck!” he says. They try to bury the dead out of range of Fritz’s guns so that they won’t be disturbed again. Elijah goes t
hrough the dead men’s pockets and takes out coins and combs, pictures of wives and girlfriends and children, Christian medallions to help ward off death, letters from home and letters not yet sent, billfolds, knots of hair, baby teeth, bullets, cigarette cases and lambskins, morphine pills and wedding rings and baptismal certificates and prayer cards and maps and wills and poems. Elijah places these things in envelopes and marks the names of the owners of them and brings them in piles to the officer.
Before he leaves a corpse, Elijah tells me he has taken to opening each man’s eyes and staring into them, then closing them with his calloused right hand, letting a strange spark of warmth accumulate deep in his gut each time that he does it, noting the colour of the iris, knowing that he, Elijah, is the last thing that each will see before being placed into the cold mud and water here. Before they go to their place.
Elijah, he says the spark fills his belly when it gnaws for food.
PAHKONIKEWIN
Skinning
ON CHRISTMAS, what seems like an uneasy peace settles over the trenches for a few hours. For the first time since I’ve been here, the pounding sound of the big guns does not serve as background to everything that we do. The quiet is unsettling. Our section is one of the lucky ones sent back in a nice bit of timing to behind the lines where festivities for the troops are planned. In a nearby village a great rowdy affair begins and the rum runs freely and we run from house to house drinking and visiting with soldiers from many different places. Gilberto is as happy as I’ve ever seen him and has become close with Graves and Fat. The three walk ahead of Elijah and me, arms around each other’s shoulders, singing an Italian song that Gilberto knows, a bottle between them.
Grey Eyes catches up to us with his glassy eyes dulled a little by the drink. He has been scouting around and brings with him half a goose stolen from the table of some British officers a few houses back. We all tear off a chunk and I eat mine as I walk, the taste reminding me of that place where I was born that feels so impossibly far away right now. I look to Elijah, his lips smeared with the fat of the goose’s skin, and in his eyes I see the sadness of what he too feels.
The sound of an accordion and a fiddle comes from a darkened house along the street and we are all drawn to it at the same time. Inside, Frenchmen with blue uniforms and dark hair and unshaven faces sit around a room lit by candles and sing in accompaniment. The words are soft and pretty and the music swirls around my rum-filled head so that I feel a peace I’ve not felt in a long time. I look over to Elijah. He feels the same thing, I see. He goes to a corner of the room and lets himself slide down the wall so that he’s sitting on his haunches, eyes closed and head swaying with the sound. The music stops but I know it continues to echo in his head as it does in mine. Eventually, he sits and stretches his legs and opens his eyes, seeing that only I remain in this room with the Frenchmen, keeping an eye out for him.
The men act as if Elijah and I are not even here, talking and gesturing and drinking from the many bottles on the table. A few of them hold long knives with thin, wicked blades and brass knuckles for handles and play games with one another, placing their hands out on the table and spreading their fingers, allowing the other to tap the point of his knife as fast as he can between the digits, a blur of glinting metal between fingers. Elijah is mesmerized by the game. He stares with his head tilted and his mouth held loose. One man, tall and thin and wiry strong, stands and gestures wildly with his knife, then acts out a scene of struggle with an imaginary enemy, sneaking up behind him, making the motion of slitting his throat, then grabbing the head of his crumpled enemy on the floor by his hair and slicing the scalp from the skull. He is good with his movements, fluid so that I can tell he has done that very thing many times before. The men all raise glasses and repeat words that I don’t know, then drink again. I’m as fascinated as Elijah.
Just when I’m beginning to wonder whether they even remember that we are among them, the tall, wiry one turns to us. He neither smiles nor sneers, but just stares for a while. Elijah is looking away, but I know he sees everything anyway. I meet the man’s gaze and hold it till the Frenchman motions for us to join them at the table. We are given a bottle of thick red wine. Elijah takes a deep drink.
“You do not look like the Canadians that I have seen,” the wiry one says. His voice has a heavy accent, but his English seems good.
The other men continue to talk with one another, but I can tell that they are listening.
“I’m an Indian,” Elijah says. “From the North. This one too, but he doesn’t speak much English. ”
“Does he speak French?” the man asks.
Elijah shakes his head. “He is a heathen, speaks his own tongue fluently, nothing else. ”
I look to Elijah and I think only then does he realize how much my English has improved these last months that I understand his joke.
“I’ve heard of one of you Indians, a Canadian too. They say he has killed many, many men, that he is the best hunter of us all. ” Elijah smiles and is ready to nod his thanks for the kind words when the Frenchman continues, “His name is Peggy, and he works alone. ”
Elijah has heard of this Peggy just as I have. Neither of us has spoken about him lately since he hasn’t been active.
“I hear rumour that he is dead,” Elijah says.
“No, he is not dead,” the thin one answers. All in the room are listening now. “He just works alone. His C. O. refuses to acknowledge all the kills he makes since he doesn’t like to work with a spotter. But he is the best. He has killed many Hun. ”
“I would like to meet this Peggy,” Elijah says.
We all drink and Elijah and I listen to them talk their French, and I can see he grows angry thinking about this Peggy. What kind of name is that, anyway? I can hear him say to himself. Getting up, I watch as he makes his way outside and to the back of this house, the voices and music wafting out the open window. He notices the cold as he rolls up his sleeve and searches for skin that is not too bruised. Even in the darkness he can see the black discoloration running up and down his arm. He takes the short needle from the moosehide bag in his chest pocket and slips it in quickly, efficiently, wincing as he hits a tender area. His whole arm is tender. Elijah practises self-control, knowing as he floods his vein that he is using the medicine right now out of anger. Just enough goes into him that he no longer feels the pain of his arm or of the cold. The golden halo settles down around his head, and he’s protected once more.
When he turns to go back inside, he’s startled by me standing there, watching him.
“I don’t like these ones,” I say. I talk in Cree. “Let’s find the others. ”
“I would like us to stay for just a while longer. ” Elijah wants to find out more about this Peggy.
“I will wait outside, then,” I tell him.
I wait, listening and watching.
Inside, the men continue to drink and some of them are very drunk, fighting with their knives in a type of practised dance that Elijah hasn’t seen before. They come very close to cutting one another but always manage to pull back at the last moment, even in their condition. Elijah sits back down with the thin one. He tells Elijah his name is Francis G.
“I know who you are,” Francis says. “There is talk about you and the silent one. ” Elijah nods to him. Everything really is better with morphine. “You two killed the Boche sniper by Saint-Eloi. ”
“We did,” Elijah says. They sit without speaking for a time.
“Avoid what happens to Peggy,” he says. He smiles at Elijah now. “Do what we do. Collect evidence of your kills. Do what my people taught your people a long time ago. Take the scalp of your enemy as proof. Take a bit of him to feed you. ”
Elijah doesn’t know how to answer this. He smiles. “And what will collecting these trophies really do for me?” he asks.
“They will buy you honour among us,” Francis says. “And we are honourable men. ”
WE ARE MOVED NORTH before the new year. This place
that we have been sent is called Vimy Ridge, rolling countryside near a smashed town named Arras. I can see that it was once beautiful country, but is now mashed earth. I look around at the ruins and wonder if this place will ever heal. I try to imagine the countryside here in ten years, in fifty years, in a hundred years, but all I can see in my mind are men crawling in and out of the tunnels in these hills like angry and tired ants, thinking of new ways to kill the other.
Elijah and I are back in the front line. Breech acts as though he wants to keep a close eye on us. “This war would be a fine thing if not for that man,” Elijah says to me.
It seems that every private who is sent in to replace Sean Patrick dies soon after arriving. The men have taken to calling it The Curse. Right now we wait for a replacement to bring our section to strength. Elijah tells me he feels sorry for the one who arrives. Word comes that Thompson is recovering nicely and will be sent back to us sometime soon. Elijah wears the power that he’s been given as acting corporal comfortably. But we are kept from going on raids in this new place.
This Vimy Ridge is quiet compared to what we endured at the Somme in the autumn. And I’m glad for it. Fritz’s line runs along the high ground to the east. The Canadians sit hunkered below him, our every movement visible. Troops must move at night or be pounded by Fritz with great accuracy. This is the place where the French army was nearly wiped out two years ago, and the British last year. Although the Canadians are not supposed to hear of it, word is that the French lost 150,000 men in the fighting here, and the British 60,000. Those numbers are impossible to keep secret. They are impossible for me to understand. I ask Elijah, “How many does that mean?”