Three Day Road (51 page)

After a time, I get up and dress. I help Nephew into his clothes and start a fire. We sit by it and gaze up at the stars that dot the sky. The
Wawahtew
pulse a little more brightly tonight than last. The eastern sky is lightening. It’s been a long night.

Tonight I do not worry about making camp. I just pull our blankets from the canoe and we curl up in them and watch the fire. In a little while I will have to add more wood to keep the chill away. Nephew breathes calmly. I listen to the sounds of the night animals not so far away. I hear the fox and the marten chasing mice. I hear the whoosh of great wings as an Arctic owl sweeps close by, and after that the almost silent step of a bigger animal, a lynx perhaps, keeping watch with her yellow eyes. I lie here and look at the sky, then at the river, the black line of it heading north. By tomorrow we’ll be home.

Acknowledgments

I
WISH TO HONOUR
the Native soldiers who fought in the Great War, and in all wars in which they so overwhelmingly volunteered. Your bravery and skill do not go unnoticed. I especially want to honour Francis Pegahmagabow, sniper, scout, and later chief of Wasauksing First Nation (Parry Island). He is one of Canada’s most important heroes.

A
LTHOUGH HE’S FAR TOO HUMBLE
to admit it, R. James Steel ranks among our country’s best World War I historians and authors. His patience, wisdom, and especially his astounding knowledge of the war made this a journey I will never forget. Any inaccuracies that might exist in this book can only be blamed on me. Thank you for reading so many drafts of this novel, Jim.

Thanks must also go to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support; it is a vital Canadian institution.

I also wish to thank Greg Spence of Moose Factory, Ontario, for his guidance in translation to the Cree language.
Mikwec ntontem
.

A debt of gratitude to my dear friends for reading early drafts: Jarret Lofstead, Joe Longo, James Grainger, Michael Winter, Carmen and Chris Tozer, Matt Suazo, and David Gifford.

I especially want to thank my brother, Bruce Boyden, for his wisdom and close military eye to detail. I also wish to thank Marc Cote for his willingness to share his editor’s knowledge. Janie Yoon,
your attention to the page is something I will not forget.

I experienced the rare and wonderful opportunity to work with a number of great editors in shaping this novel: Barbara Berson at Penguin Canada, your skill, faith, and confidence is deeply appreciated. David Davidar, what can I say? You’re the man. Tracy Bordian, you are the finest managing editor a writer could wish to have.

Many thanks also to Paul Slovak at Penguin U.S.A., and Helen Garnons-Williams at Weidenfeld and Nicolson U.K. for your guidance and belief in me.

Francis Geffard at Albin-Michel: You were the first one to take a chance and the first to let me know when it worked and when it didn’t.
Meegwetch, mon ami
.

Nicole Winstanley: You are more than just a brilliant agent. You are a dear friend.

On my northern travels I’ve never experienced anything other than warmth, laughs, and incredible stories. William and Pam Tozer of Moose Cree First Nation,
mikwec
for always making your home my home.
Mikwec
as well to the Metatawabins of Fort Albany First Nation. To Bertha Sandy and her family of Beausoleil First Nation: You’ve been good to my relatives and me.

Finally, I want to thank my own very large family: David, Raymond, Francis, Suzanne, Julia, Veronica, Mary, Bruce, Claire, Theresa, Angela, and, of course, you, Mom. You are everything. Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Wilfrid Boyden, D.S.O., C.D., M.D., our deceased father and World War II hero, you continue to live in all of us.

As always, Amanda, you’ve been the best reader a person could ask for. Your support and encouragement made a writer out of me.

A Penguin Readers Guide

Three Day Road

About the Book

About Joseph Boyden

An Interview with Joseph Boyden

Discussion Questions

ABOUT THE BOOK

Set in the wilderness of northern Ontario and the battlefields of Europe,
Three Day Road
takes readers deep into the horrors—physical, emotional, and spiritual—of the Great War.

The story is told through the voices of two Native Canadians: Xavier, who has returned from the war badly wounded and ravaged by his addiction to morphine, and his aunt Niska, who cares for him and tries to restore him.

Xavier had joined up at the urging of his friend Elijah; like many who fought in the Great War, they were certain it would be over quickly. But the war they experienced was far from the thrilling adventure they had imagined. Once they arrived at the Western Front, their Native hunting skills impressed their superiors and both men became snipers. They killed many men, but while Xavier from the beginning felt a kind of spiritual revulsion, Elijah revelled in it and tried to notch more kills than any other sniper in the war. His bloodlust completely mastered him, and he soon learned to kill with both detached coolness and frenzied violence. Disobeying orders at every turn, he committed atrocities against the enemy, against civilians, and even against his fellow soldiers. His addiction to morphine only hastened his moral dissipation.

As Xavier remembers the nightmare of war, he struggles with his own addiction, the loss of his leg, and the certainty that he will die after his supply of morphine runs out. But Niska watches over him and “feeds” him healing stories of her past, his own past, and of the larger past of their people, the Cree of northern Ontario. Whether she will be able to save him—to bring him back from the brink of death—creates the suspense that drives the narrative to its surprising conclusion.

Inspired in part by real-life World War I Ojibwe hero Francis Pegahmagabow,
Three Day Road
is a compelling and viscerally powerful exploration of what poet Wilfred Owen described as “the pity of war.”

ABOUT JOSEPH BOYDEN

In the summer of 1945, my father was invited to Buckingham Palace by the king. The war in Europe had ground to an end in the streets of Berlin. As George VI pinned the Distinguished Service Order upon my father’s uniform, he proclaimed him the most highly decorated medical officer in the British Empire.

In the summer of 1945, Erl, my dad’s older brother, was living a traditional lifestyle in a teepee near Algonquin Park, selling crafts to tourists. Uncle Erl had experienced World War I and was too old for this second great war, but I doubt he would have wanted to participate anyway. He enjoyed life in the woods of northern Ontario in summer and the life of a world wanderer in winter.

I’m forty years old, the third youngest of eleven children born into a strict Irish Catholic family. My age betrays the fact that my father sired a number of my siblings, including me, when he was quite a bit older than most fathers. I grew up with history and myth swirling around me, stories of my father’s war exploits and my uncle Erl’s Ojibwe ways inseparable. I was born into a family from a very different era and listened to stories of how my father and Erl and their younger brother Robert had to form their own gang when they were young because they were Mick Catholic bastards in a world of Orangemen. My father was older than most of my friends’ grandfathers, and had actually delivered a number of my schoolmates’ fathers into the world.

My father was blond and blue-eyed. Erl was brown and high-cheekboned and had a hooked nose. Robert looked something in the middle. My father chose one route. He became a doctor and a war hero and brought his family to the city. Erl took the other route. He lived in the bush and made his own clothing out of hide and travelled the world with only a few coins in his pocket, somewhere along the way picking up what now sounds like the horribly racist moniker “Injun Joe.” There are still postcards of him in full Indian regalia floating around Algonquin Park trading posts. Robert chose a quiet life somewhere between the two.

My dad died when I was eight. Erl took the three day road years earlier. Robert died not long after my father. My raven-haired mother, strong and still beautiful, was left to raise my sisters and brothers and me. She was no stranger to war veteran relatives, either. Her father, Guy, had been a motorcycle dispatch rider in World War I, had had the dubious distinction of being wounded on November 11, 1918, the last day of the war. He spent the rest of his life blinded in one eye from shrapnel.

With so many children to keep track of and a full-time job as a teacher at the local elementary school, my mother was forced to grant a certain amount of lenience to my wandering ways. Just like my Indian uncle, I had a taste for the road and for adventure. The punk rock scene of the early 1980s was a nice fit for my rebellious sensibilities. In deference to my uncle I wore my hair in a mohawk, and lived on the streets of Toronto in the summers, returning home to pursue my schooling in the autumn. At the time, I didn’t recognize the parallels between my uncle and me.

At sixteen I began travelling to the United States on my own. More and more I felt the inexplicable pull of the Deep South, making close friendships with a group of misfits in South Carolina and Louisiana. I became a roadie for their band and criss-crossed the U.S. and Canada with them. Responsibility, the ghostly apparition of my father, always pulled me back to continue with my schooling. I kept all kinds of jobs in order to feed my growing passion for the road: gravedigger and groundskeeper at a cemetery, tutor, dishwasher, waiter, and bartender. But always, as soon as my last exam was finished, I’d climb on a Greyhound or stick my thumb out or jump on my motorcycle and hit the road once more.

I fancied myself a writer, eventually enrolling in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. Here I finally learned to focus my energy and work ethic in a city that seemed too good a fit at times. I met my wife, Amanda, here, a trapeze artist, contortionist, and writer.

But the pull of my home and my family is strong. I returned with my wife to Ontario and took a job as professor of Aboriginal programs on James Bay in the far north. Here I was
introduced to the Mushkegowuk Cree, northern cousins of the Ojibwe. Stationed in Moosonee, I worked for two years up and down the reserves of the west coast of the bay—Moose Factory, Fort Albany, Kashechewan, and Attawapiskat—teaching communications, my wanderlust satisfied by moose and caribou hunts and snowmobile treks into the frozen wilderness of Hudson Bay. Over the last ten years this gateway to the last great wilderness has become my muse and obsession, refusing to loosen its grip on me even now that I am back in New Orleans teaching in the same MFA program that birthed me. I visit what have become old friends on James Bay a number of times a year.

It seems I’m a bit of a split personality, a combination of my father and my uncle Erl. I have my father’s responsibility and my uncle’s belief that the world is to be travelled. I split my life between the Gulf of Mexico and the gulf of the Arctic. I write and I teach writing. My heart is part Irish, part Ojibwe. I’m a Canadian in America. I’m grounded by history, and I am inspired by legend. I’m part my father, part my uncle. I am a father to my son, Jacob, and I am a writer.