Three Day Road (38 page)

Elijah waits. Nothing happens. He can see an entranceway into a pile of brick that he guesses is where they are sheltered. It seems to lead into a basement. Much of the other area is crushed stone and broken timber. He can’t see a lot of places big enough to hide more than one soldier. They must have retreated from that basement when the going was good. When I arrive with the others, Elijah knows, we will throw some eggs in just to make sure.

Elijah sits back and relaxes. A whine echoes in his head, and his arms and arse ache. A sure sign that he needs a little more medicine. He reaches into his kit and removes a readied syringe. The supply is running low. He’ll have to get more soon, maybe question Grey Eyes. Not even bothering to pull his pants down, he jabs the needle through the wool and into his thigh. The prick of it feeds his anticipation. He pushes the plunger down and feels the heat and fullness of the morphine going into his leg. No injecting directly into a vein when he needs his wits about him. The world shrinks back a little and
the harsh light diffuses to a pleasant glow. Even the ache of his bowels that have not been emptied for years, it seems, goes away. His hearing sharpens, and as he lets his eyes close he makes out the scuffle of boots coming down the trench. His section, coming this way. Further away he picks out the voices of whispering Boche. Where are they? Not close enough for Elijah to worry about them right now. His listening for them makes Elijah in turn think of me. Poor Xavier, Elijah thinks, he is going deaf but does not want to admit it to anyone.

McCaan’s shout forces Elijah to raise his eyelids. “Corporal Whiskeyjack, have you spotted the enemy?” Elijah crawls to his knees and peers over the ledge toward us. We’ve clattered to a halt and sneak looks over the trench toward his perch in the steeple, rifles aimed at the stretch of crushed village ahead of us.

“Indeed, Sergeant, I have. But I believe that they have retreated. There is a hole leading into a basement to the south and to the east that looks dangerous, but nothing that a few bombers can’t take care of. ” He hears Breech bark out some orders. Breech isn’t used to all this front-line activity. Graves and a new private who doesn’t even shave yet are handed Mills bombs and sent over the top to take care of it. I see Elijah climb slowly onto his knees to get a good view of the proceedings. The fighting clatters on, hundreds of yards away. Graves takes the lead position and walks toward the entrance. The young private walks six or seven yards behind.

“Don’t forget to pull the pins,” Elijah shouts. The others in the trench laugh.

“Hop to it, Private!” McCaan barks out to the young one. “The faster you do this, the quicker we can get to the action!” Everyone laughs again. This is the private’s first mission. Graves has done this sort of thing dozens of times.

Looking back to the basement, I make out the figure of a man who has emerged from it while we were all laughing. A rag is tied across
his nose and mouth. He carries what looks like a rifle in his hands but it is attached to a tube that runs under his arm and to a large tank on his back. Blue flame falls from the barrel of the strange gun and splashes onto the brick. Everyone else must see this very soon after I do. The laughing stops and Thompson shouts out, “Move!” Graves stops in his tracks. He seems about to turn, stops himself and then continues forward, raising the bomb in his hand like a club.

“Lie down, Graves!” Elijah shouts, reaching for his rifle, and I realize just as he must that the words are in Cree.

Graves looks up to Elijah, confusion on his face. A stream of bright yellow fire spits from the tip of the strange gun with a great
whoosh
and engulfs Graves’s body. He raises his arm to Elijah as if waving, his hair and moustache burning. Within seconds he is a ball of flame writhing silently on the ground. The young private turns and begins to run back to safety but trips on the brick, landing with arms stretched toward the others, the Mills bomb he carried flying toward us. Men rush and tumble over each other around me, trying to get out of its path. Another flame spits from the gun and engulfs the private, who screams shrilly and stands, then runs blazing in a greasy yellow fire until he crumples to the ground. Only then do I realize I must pick up my rifle and end this.

Then the bomb explodes in the trench, sending men flying.

Before I can get off the ground and aim at the fire shooter, a couple of men in the trench do it. One of them hits the tank on the Hun’s back. A fiery explosion shoots up into an orange-and-black ball of flame. What was a man is now burning pieces of carrion on the ground. Elijah rushes down from the steeple. Graves is a smoking heap. The young private is still alive, the flames out now, but they’ve burned the clothes from his body and he reminds me of the charred moose that Elijah and I found on the riverbank so long ago. He is unrecognizable lying there, gasping, the pink inside his mouth the only colour that stands out against the oozing and charred black of his body.

A soldier screams in the trench. Another lies dead. Their two bodies muffled the explosion and it is pure luck that the whole section wasn’t killed by the blast. I am all right, but shaken. Fat walks in circles, muttering. Graves was the only one who treated him kindly. A couple of the others stare down at the screaming soldier in the trench. Others stare confused at the burnt kid. Nobody knows what to do. We are stunned by this new weapon used against us. McCaan begins shouting for a medic. It breaks the spell.

Elijah and I take covering positions and keep an eye out for any other Boche. That is when we hear another sound coming from the direction of Graves’s body. I turn around and watch as Fat sits beside the burnt corpse, slapping his own face hard as he can, crying.

By day’s end we’ve cleaned out the coal-mining village and word trickles down that the First and Second Divisions have taken Hill 70. The Canadians are poised now to go into the big city of Lens. Word also comes of more of the fire attacks against us, and more and more Canadian troops are being stretchered down from the front lines, bodies melted and black. The smell is sweet enough to make the stomach feel bad. Rumours travel that the Germans have introduced another new weapon, a type of gas that is fired long distance by shells and burns the skin. We’ve entered into a fire war, Elijah says to me.

Elijah tells me he dreams of Graves on fire, waving to him. Elijah sees and smells his blackened body. And this makes Elijah dream of Sean Patrick, a neat hole in his throat, his life blown out the base of his skull. He dreams of Gilberto, of me describing how one moment he was there smiling, the next his big body was lying across me, lifeless. Elijah looks up. They stand around him in his dugout. Smoke wafts up from Graves’s head. Sean Patrick is grey. Gilberto’s brain leaks out from his mouth. “Do what you can,” they all tell him. “There is nothing sacred any more in a place such as this. Don’t fight it. Do what you can.” Elijah wakes with a start.

Through the rest of August, we hold the hill and the small surrounding villages that we’ve taken. From this vantage we continue to pound Lens, but just as before, our forward movement has crunched to a stop. Elijah’s crazy with the boredom of routine. Little action in the way of trench raids, just night patrols in no man’s land. He asks Lieutenant Breech permission to resume sniping with me, tries to win his argument by explaining that we have great advantage in being on a rise, looking down at the Hun for once. It is not long before he and I are searching out good spots again, and this helps relieve the growing ache inside of Elijah that he cannot stem. We lie still for days, searching out targets. We’re after officers and must be very patient. Thompson had once told us that spotting officers is easy. They are the ones who aren’t doing anything when everyone else is working.

In the long hours of hunting Elijah tries to understand what is growing in him. He talks to me about this through the nights we spend out in the damp and mud. Mist rises from craters and swirls in the stink. In the end, the answer that comes is simple. Elijah has learned to take pleasure in killing.

Elijah says that something in me has hardened in the last months. I talk even less than before, do not smile at all any more. He knows that I want to be home, that I am sick of all of this, but he tells me I must realize that the freedom of this place will not present itself again. But this freedom he talks about, this freedom to kill, is a choice I no longer want.

We’ve found a place that is three hundred yards from the Boche line. Elijah and I have a good view of it, but very little cover is offered here and we will be easily spotted as soon as we fire. One shot, two at best, then we must get back to our line. We wait and watch.

There is an officer who appears in the Hun line, but only for a moment each morning at stand-to. He was clearly visible this morning, and Elijah had a shot, but was still groggy from a long, restless night. He
tells me he will not let that chance go by again tomorrow morning. We spend this day looking up at the sky, waiting for the aeroplanes to swoop across the trenches, strafing and bombing. But none come. “I want to fly in one of those once before I die,” Elijah says again.

The night is even longer than the day, but Elijah’s kept awake by the image of the officer coming into the sight and Elijah pulling the trigger. I pretend to sleep lightly beside him as he reaches into his kit and extracts a syringe. He needs some to steady his nerves, to take away the aches that are now a part of his every waking moment. He nudges me when dawn is approaching and he peers through his glass at their trench. Enough light now to make out forms in the darkness.

When the grey breaks from the black over the horizon, Elijah places his finger on his trigger. Just as yesterday, the same soldiers’ heads appear for stand-to, and just behind them a lieutenant appears, hands behind his back, inspecting the line.

“You have your shot,” I say, and Elijah doesn’t hesitate.

His crosshairs are on the officer’s forehead. The officer stands there frowning. Elijah squeezes the trigger, but the kick of the rifle prevents him from getting a clear view of the outcome.

“He is dead,” I report, and Elijah begins to laugh. He is better off where Elijah’s sent him. I turn to gather our little gear and make a quick exit from our cover.

Already Elijah can see through his scope the startled looks of the soldiers, the veterans training their guns on our position. He reloads and finds another target, and although he knows better, he fires again, this time at a soldier whose head is higher than the others’. The soldier drops from the impact, but the muzzle flash of the rifle has given us away. The crack of rifle fire travels up the rise, bullets zinging close by us.

“Ashtum!”
I call out, already five yards closer to the safety of our line. Elijah collects his gear and crawls out of his hole, stretches lazily up to the sky and smiles to the sun. Bullets rip the air all around him.
“Put yourself in danger if you like, but not me!” I shout in anger as I turn to run.

Elijah turns too, and begins walking casually. “I’d only meant to add a little excitement to your morning, shake you out of this funk you’ve sunk into,” he shouts back.

I have rarely raised my voice at him. I can tell he is hurt.

The nights are getting cold again. Goose-hunting season back in Mushkegowuk. Word has trickled down that we are to be moved north, to a place called Passchendaele. The name is a pretty one. It makes me think of women. But then I am told it is near the place where Lisette lives and so my heart hurts all over again. When we are pulled off the line we are sent to a town far behind it. A pub that the company has adopted as its own sits in the middle of the village. I don’t like to go to it, but Elijah makes me anyway. “There are other Lisettes,” Elijah tells me. That makes me mad.

We will drink till we fall down tonight. I am not a good drinker and it won’t take me much, I think.

The pub is crowded and noisy and full of smoke. Men bang glasses and bottles on the long, scarred wooden tables. A feeling here Elijah says he doesn’t like. We buy drinks from the old woman behind the bar. Her nose is thin and crooked. She has long white hair that unravels from her braid. She reminds me of an old grandmother, a
kokum
. I look across the bar then and I see him. I’m shocked by his face here in this place. A face like mine. I’ve seen other brown men, a troop of brown men on horses, white cloth twisted high on their heads and long beards tied neatly so that they looked frightening and beautiful with their swords rattling at their sides. McCaan told me they were another type of Indian. “Indians from India,” he said. “Some of the King’s best.” But the one here in this pub is an Indian like Elijah and I are Indians. He’s Anishnabe. He looks Ojibwe.

I nudge Elijah and whisper to him to look to our left. At one of the tables the short brown man with black hair sits laughing with
some others. It takes Elijah a moment, I see. He first thinks it might be an Indian from Moose Factory that he’s not quite remembering. But then he sees the stripes of a corporal.

“Is he the one they call Peggy?” Elijah asks me.

I shrug, take a long swig from my glass as if I don’t care.

He does not look at Elijah and me but we know that he knows we are here. Elijah buys a second bottle of wine from
Kokum
and goes to sit by him.

“Wachay, wachay,”
Elijah says, handing him the bottle.

He smiles at Elijah. The smile is wary.

“Three Anishnabe in the same place,” the corporal says, nodding. He speaks in his tongue, but it is close enough to ours that we understand it. “Some things are beyond chance.”

“And how is your hunting?” Elijah asks. “I hope it’s as good as mine.”

I snort a laugh. It is good to laugh again. The white men around their table look at us oddly. They do not like that the Indians talk in words that they can’t understand.

“You must mistake me for someone else,” the corporal says. “There are more Anishnabe than you might guess who wander these battlefields. We all want to be warriors again.”

Elijah looks at me. I smile and then laugh again. It strikes me that I’m drunk.