Three Day Road (3 page)

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

R
AIN 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 sound 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.

I am hungry but we are forced to stand here. The time to eat our day meal passes. It is only after that that Breech gives McCaan the
order. We are to begin marching. A great cheer comes up from the men, and it all suddenly makes sense to me. The ones who order us are as crafty as wolves. To have men cheer as they march off to the front is not an easy accomplishment. This army orders itself very carefully, I see. I think about this as we march along a crooked road filled by mud and puddles, the sounds of the guns getting closer with each step.

As the others break into a song, the sun settles down behind us so that we walk upon our own shadows. They sing a song I don’t know and even McCaan sings out in his thick and raspy voice. From what I can tell it’s about a girl and her smell and not a lot of it makes sense. Me, I won’t sing their songs. I have my own songs.

I try to remember one of my own but the English words all around stop it from coming, so I hum instead and soon I notice that someone else is humming, too, but it is out of tune and grows louder and louder until the hum is a scream and, with no other warning, thunder and a wave of heat coughs me up from the earth, the river and the exploding trees flashing through my head. And then I’m landing hard on the ground shoulder first and it’s raining rock and softer globs of red dirt that it takes me a moment to realize are the flesh and guts of men. In the muffled sound that can get through to my ears that feel full of cotton I hear horses screaming and men shouting and another shell lands, this time in front of me, and men are crawling and scratching at the mud trying to get to the side of the road and past it, anywhere that might offer shelter from the splinters of flying metal. I want to crawl too but can’t move, and I feel the tug of hands at my shoulders and I’m being dragged through the mud and pushed under an overturned wagon, and Elijah’s face looks down at me, asking in Cree, “Are you all right?” I nod and Elijah’s eyes are full of sunlight like he’s smiling. He crawls back out and returns a little while later with Grey Eyes and Sean Patrick and we all huddle under the wagon and listen as the shells creep a little farther away with each
boom and shudder, like they are live beasts sniffing and pounding the dirt in search of men’s flesh to rip apart.