I stay awake the whole night before we are to go back up the line. In the middle of the night I’m forced to face something I have been fighting. Elijah is mad. The acts he does will bring bad luck onto all of us. Something is coming, but I cannot quite see what it is.
Our battalion is moved back to the caves and tunnels of Vimy late in the winter. Talk is that this is where the Boche will focus their spring offensive. The Boche like the high ground, and the Canadians have the ridge now.
One night word goes out of a trench raid, the first in a while. The plan is simple. Go in under cover of a box barrage, and once we are in, inflict as much damage to the trenches as we can. This will be one of many small raids. The call goes out for five volunteers. Elijah and me, Thompson, a new soldier, and McCaan. I’m surprised that McCaan is going with us. He’s better at staying back and helping with the barrage.
We are over the top and crawling across no man’s land late in the night. Artillery laid down an unnecessarily large barrage earlier in the evening that went on too long in the hopes of picking apart the section of Hun line that we head for. We make it through the wire with little problem and I am spooked to find that when we slip into the enemy trench, no enemy is there to engage. It seems as if they’ve abandoned this line. Then the realization hits me.
They have abandoned this section for a reason. I’m beginning to think that the barrage has given us away, and whisper this to Elijah as the first shell screams in and the young soldier ten yards away disappears in a flash of white and red. The rest of us are thrown to our backs. It was a German shell. It came from that direction, not the Canadians’. Fritz has been waiting.
Another shell screams in, then another. They are landing so close that the air is sucked out of my lungs and I cannot breathe. I roll onto my stomach and begin crawling. I have no idea what has happened to the others. Shards of frozen earth rain down on me as I find a dugout and roll in. Impossible to see anything in the smoke and darkness. The earth smells burnt.
The shelling stops as quickly as it started and I know that Hun will swarm into this section any moment to finish us off, but I’m too stunned by the explosion to move. My ears hear only silence.
Where are the others?
I force myself to crawl from the caved-in dugout. In the darkness I grab onto a leg. I pull myself along it but find it is not attached to a body. The leg belongs to one of us, and a sick wave washes over me. Nothing for me to do but crawl back over the side and make my way back to our line. Up on the parapet I look down once more. Some of the smoke has cleared and I can see McCaan on the ground.
“Sergeant,” I call to him. He’s looking up at me but his eyes don’t seem to take me in. I see that his arm is gone. Blood spurts out of him in pulses. He struggles to sit up. I’m frozen up on the parapet, my legs and arms not responding to what I ask them to do. “Sergeant McCaan!” I shout, and my voice is muffled in my head. His eyes focus on me then. A smile comes to his face and his red moustache curls with his lips. He stretches his remaining arm to me.
I see the movement to my left. A couple of soldiers run up with rifles pointed and stare down at McCaan. One of the soldiers shouts at him and the other lifts his rifle and aims at McCaan’s head. I see the spit of fire come out of the barrel and then McCaan lies still. I squeeze myself flat, trying to disappear into the earth, frightened like I have never felt before. If I make a sound they will kill me too. I watch them move on a short way, and when their backs are turned, I force myself to roll away from the parapet’s edge. Now I can move to save myself, but I could do nothing for him. I am a coward, and the thought of living through this moment takes over my limbs. Tears and smoke burn my eyes as I turn away and crawl back across no man’s land alone.
Morning is close and I am the only one who has made it back. I report to Breech the confirmation of McCaan’s death. Word travels out to the company quickly. We begin to fire our artillery all afternoon, a great barrage in anger and sadness and revenge. Nothing has changed by early evening. The three most popular men in the battalion, all lost in one night.
Late that night I am awakened by Elijah’s ghost. He is so thin that I think I can almost see through him. Elijah laughs and talks but I can’t make out what he’s saying. I turn away from him to go back to sleep and Elijah pushes at me. I turn back and see that it really is him.
“I had to hide out in a shell crater not ten yards away from their line all day!” he says, excited.
“What of the others?” I ask. “Speak louder!”
“I dragged Thompson out just before Fritz arrived,” Elijah says.
I think of my inability to do the same for McCaan. The thought crushes something inside me.
“That new private was killed instantly,” Elijah continues. “I couldn’t find you or McCaan and I had to get out of the trench when I heard Fritz coming.”
“McCaan is dead,” I say. “I watched it happen.”
“I’m glad you’re alive,” Elijah says. “Thompson was hit bad. I’m lucky I was carrying morphine or his cries would have given us away. I helped him to sleep out there through the day. He was gut shot so bad I can’t imagine he’ll make it. But I got him back to our side in the dark.”
I look at Elijah, follow his lips moving. He’s found a way to remove himself from the pain of all this. None of this seems to affect him.
Everyone is stunned by the death of McCaan, but Elijah’s and Thompson’s miraculous survival takes a bit of the sting away. The men have something positive to focus on. I too feel some relief that Thompson has made it. McCaan is gone forever, though, and this continues to eat away the small part left in me that keeps me walking forward. Thompson won’t make it. I know this as surely as I knew McCaan’s fate before he did. I grieve in my own way for my two friends, burn sprigs of dried grass that I find along the roads that lead in and out of this place. The prayers sent up on the smoke seem so small. McCaan and Thompson were the ones who anchored the company, made Lieutenant Breech bearable. I realize I’d come to think of them as my relations.
Not long after this, my name is shouted at mail call. I’m as surprised as anybody. Elijah and I used to joke that we were the only ones in the Canadian army to never receive mail. “If only your heathen aunt could write English,” Elijah took to saying. When it’s passed to me, all I can do is stare at the letter in my hand. I open it carefully and look at the piece of paper for a long time. I will need to find someone who will read it to me. Elijah can read, but I do not want him to be the one. He might lie about what it says or play a joke. I go to Fat, take a long time to build up the nerve to ask him.
Fat humphs and then begins to read it in his nasally voice. “It says here that you must return home.” He stops reading, looks up at me. “This is very difficult to read, X. There is no punctuation and the handwriting is childlike. From the best that I can tell, it says you are the last in the family. You must raise a child so you can teach him what you were taught.”
The wind is knocked out of me as surely as if a shell has exploded at my feet. Does this mean Auntie is dead?
Fat continues. “It says that God understands if you must kill Elijah.” Fat stops and glances up at me. “This is nonsensical, X. Kill Elijah! My word!”
“What else does it say?” I ask him, barely breathing.
“Not a lot. It says to pray and do what you must to make it home.”
He hands me back the letter and I sit on my haunches. “Is there a name upon it?” I ask, desperate.
Fat takes the letter and looks again. “It’s child’s scrawl, but it appears to say ‘Joseph Netmaker.’ What kind of name is that? My word!”
I think hard, remember Joseph. He wasn’t a homeguard Indian, but one of the good ones who still lived the old way. He wouldn’t lie or play a joke like this. I approach Fat again, take him aside and ask him to read the letter once more, slowly and loudly. “There is no mention of my aunt?” I ask.
“No, it clearly says that you are the last of your family.”
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My heart falls to my stomach.
“And it is followed by the sentence that God understands if you must kill Elijah. I have a mind to turn this in to Lieutenant Breech, X.”
He gives me the letter once again. I fold it carefully and put it in my pocket, get up and walk far away so that I might figure this out.
I sit alone and let the words echo in my head. Auntie does not know how to write their language, never mind speak it. This letter says she is dead. It even talks of the madness that has taken Elijah. Why would old Joseph send this? The world is suddenly less real than it was yesterday.
We are in the caves of Vimy, waiting to be moved up to the front once more, when Elijah comes to me, carrying a sack. Elijah’s eyes look wild and shiny again. He has been taking too much of the medicine, has explained to me that he has built up such a tolerance that one of his doses would kill a normal man instantly. I want to tell him of the news of Auntie, but can no longer rely on him.
“Come with me, X,” he says. “I need a big favour of you.”
He leads me through the winding tunnels back to the surface at the bottom of the ridge. We are outside in the evening of an early spring. The sky is still light in the west. A fresh breeze blows from the south. A nightingale calls out. We walk to the edge of a small copse of trees that survived last year’s shelling. Elijah looks excited.
“Let’s build a fire,” he says.
We do this together, choosing nice dry hardwood that has been lying here since last year. We sit by the fire and gaze into the flames.
Elijah continues to put wood on the fire even though there is no need for it. The night is balmy still. “Go easy with the wood,” I say. “You’ll have Fritz spotting it and shelling us.”
“I need to get it very hot,” he says. “I want you to do something for me.”
I wonder what craziness he wants me to do with fire. He reaches for the sack and pulls out a whitened bone. It is slightly concave and smooth and looks like a bone I recognize. Elijah hands it to me. I turn it over, rub my fingers along it and realize what I have. “Where did you find the shoulder blade of a bear?” I ask him.
Elijah smiles. “It is not from a bear. It is German.”
I drop it immediately, look at him to see if he jokes once again. He doesn’t.
“I need you to read the bone,” Elijah says, staring at me. “I want you to divine for me.”
I am confused. “Why? What do you think I can decipher from it?”
“It is just the same as conjuring a moose, is it not?” he says. “You have read moose bones in the past. I have watched you. And often it has worked. You have led us straight to them before.”
“But this is different,” I say.
“What is the difference?” Elijah asks. “To hunt is to hunt.”
“I hunt for sustenance,” I say.
“And so do I,” Elijah answers.
I’m not sure I understand what Elijah’s saying. “Are you telling me that you eat Germans now?”
“Don’t be so literal, X,” he says. “I have found the one thing I am truly talented at, and that is killing men. I do not need food when I have this.”
We stop talking for a while and stare into the fire.
“Although,” Elijah continues, “there are those who will eat the eyes of their enemy to see what he sees. Thompson told me of them before. Those Frenchmen verified it. And besides, the Iroquois eat their enemy’s heart to take his power. We grew up with those stories.” He stops as if to consider this.
I shake my head. “You are not yourself, Elijah.”
Elijah goes quiet. Small tremors begin to shake him. His fists are clenched and his face contorts in a sneer. My fear of him returns stronger than before. I do not want any part of this. As if he realizes this, he unclenches his fists and a mask of calm falls over his face. He smiles, but it isn’t genuine. I must get away.
“If you want me to divine for you where you can find Hun,” I say, standing to walk away, “I will. They are over there.” I point over Vimy Ridge and to the Hindenburg Line.
When we are again sent back to rest, an idea comes to me. I search for good rocks and borrow old canvas from the quartermaster. I search the sparse woods behind where we stay and find an appropriate place, then construct a matatosowin and build a hot fire nearby, heating the rocks all day. I do all the work myself, and when the rocks are ready, I carry them in one by one with my trench shovel, followed by a pail of water. I strip down so that all I wear is my medicine bundle around my neck.
I crawl into the lodge and circle it in a clockwise direction, then take my place. A cupful of water poured on the stones makes them hiss red and release a billow of steam. I breathe the steam in so that my lungs burn. I want the steam to release the prayers from inside my head so that I may send them up into the sky.
Nothing.
I pour more water on the stones and the wet heat sears my skin. My body feels on fire.
Once again I pour water on the rocks and this time the steam is so painful that I bend down at the waist and suck in the cooler air from the ground. I stare at the stones glowing red in the blackness. Light white fissures of heat pulse from under the red. I gaze into them and they begin to dull. Another cupful of water onto the stones makes them hiss back to life. I begin to panic. The air is too hot to breathe. To exit the matatosowin now would be failure. I calm myself best I can and bend down so that my face is buried in the ground. The pain of the heat on my back makes me moan.
It is too hot to concentrate, so I wait and try to master the pain. No prayers will come. I think of the four directions, I think of you, Niska. I think of home. I try to see if you truly are dead. Nothing. I ask out loud what I should do, what I can do. Nothing. That you are gone and the letter is true, Niska, seems all too clear now.
Finally, it comes to me. I begin to think a simple prayer over and over. I want to hear. I want to see. I want to hear. I want to see. I want to hear again. I want to see what I should do. I want to hear again. I want to see what I should do. I pour more water and the billow of pain that washes over me turns ecstatic. I pray until I have left my body and float out over this place, rising so high that I’m looking down at the lines of the trenches scratched into the earth. I try to read their pattern, to understand it. Lines cut into the earth’s skin. Scars. I can’t read their language, but I know I must go.
I am light-headed leaving the matatosowin, stumble when I bend to pick up my clothes. Still no answers. The heat has sucked everything out of me. My skin is red and tender. The air outside is deliciously cool. My will does not guide me at this point. Something carries me. I’ve been in the lodge for hours. The world now is a colour I’ve never seen, a blue-black so sharp that the sky feels close enough for me to touch it. A half-moon floats above me. I let whatever this is pull me along, take me where it will.
As I slip into one of the tents, in the darkness I hear the slow regular breathing of Elijah. I walk to it. Elijah sleeps the sleep of the medicine. I crouch by him, look at his peaceful face outlined in the little light. His kit is beside him. My hand goes to it, feels inside for a syringe of his medicine. I take it out, stare at it.
I sit with my back against Elijah’s bed and lightly touch the sharp end of the needle. I roll up my sleeve. I want to feel what Elijah feels. Maybe I will understand better then. With the sharp needle to my skin, I begin to push, but as the first layers of skin break, something stops me. Another idea. I know what to do.
I turn and kneel, face Elijah again. I feel for his arm and take it gently in my hands. I feel with one finger for the bump of vein, the one that runs inside of Elijah’s elbow. I take the needle’s point and place it gently along the bump, like I’ve watched Elijah do. Elijah never takes more than a little bit this way. The syringe now is full of the golden liquid.
I push the needle tip into Elijah’s vein. It slips in, first with resistance, then smoothly. I place my thumb on the plunger and, before I flush the medicine into my friend’s vein, se
arch his face one more time.
His eyes are open. He has a slight smile on his lips.
“What are you doing?” he asks in Cree.
“I am giving you medicine,” I say.
“I do not need more right now,” he says.
We stare at one another for a long time. We are caught in this moment.
Slowly, I pull the needle from Elijah’s arm, place it back in his kit. I stand up, weak-kneed, and leave the tent.
PIMINAAWIN
Flying
TODAY IS OUR THIRD FULL DAY on the river. I will soon begin to recognize the country where I grew up. The weather continues to hold, but ahead of us, to the north, grey clouds rise up from the Great Salt Bay. I don’t care if rain falls. I became so used to living in cold rain, to life spent shivering in wet wool, that living felt incomplete when the sun shone.
I hold the last needle of morphine in my fingers, and twirl it so that the sunlight captures the golden liquid and makes it glow. My stomach is cramped badly and my arm screams where a Mauser bullet entered.
“Auntie,” I say, twisting around to her. She looks down at me as she paddles. “This is the last one. After this there is no more.” I turn back and pick a small scab from a vein on my arm, then slip the needle point in. I push down the plunger and feel the slight burn as the liquid enters me. Nice not to have to hide my habit any more, but I laugh to think that just as I come to this point, the medicine is all gone.
My breath catches and the sun shines bright behind my eyelids and the canoe rocks gently and the water drips from Auntie’s paddle and I float up from the wreck of my body. The warm wind tickles my skin. For the last time I feel the full embrace of it. In a few hours I will fall and shatter on the rocks of this hard place, but for now I will float free of myself and won’t feel any pain.
From up above I see Elijah and me standing at attention in an open field with the others, rifles smartly resting in our right hands. We’ve been issued fresh uniforms and the new company sergeant has ordered haircuts for all of us. Elijah says his scalp burns from the rip of dull shears on his skull. Despite what I tried to do to him with his needle, despite my claiming I don’t want him to talk to me any more, he still does. Incessantly, like a child. Maybe he thinks if he stops talking to me, he will pop like a sturgeon bladder puffed with too much air. He talks to me as if his life depends on it, his eyes wet with the morphine. To make up for long stretches out alone hunting in no man’s land he spends the nights whispering his thoughts to me while I try to sleep.