Three Day Road

A COUGHING FIT makes me open my eyes. This stretch of river is still new growth. I’m amazed that Elijah and I survived the fire only to end up in the trenches. All along the bank the bush struggles back to what it once was. I wish I were so resilient. The cough doesn’t leave me, and each one feels like another rib breaking. I lean over the gunwale for a handful of water and the pain of my rotting guts causes me to gasp out.

  “Are you all right, Nephew?” Auntie asks. “Should we stop and let you rest?”

  Her words make me angry. I don’t know why. “Mona,” I spit into the water. “Leave me alone.” Immediately I feel remorse. I look at my empty pant leg, the material of it pinned up, and think once again, for a moment, that I can feel the foot and calf that aren’t there any more. The medicine is loosening its hold on me. I want more, but so little is left.

  “Do you want to know something, Auntie,” I say, cupping my hand and taking a small sip from the river. “So many dead men lay buried over there that if the bush grows back the trees will hold skulls in their branches.” I laugh, and it makes me feel worse. “I saw it already. We once left a place covered in our dead. When we came back a few months later flowers redder than blood grew everywhere. They covered the ground. They even grew out of rotting corpses.” Knives of pain stab me low in the gut. My arm screams out high in the place where a bullet entered it. My head throbs with the cut of sunlight. She doesn’t respond, but I know she listens. “Those flowers grew back, but that was all.” I hurt so bad. “Useless things.”

  “Sleep, Xavier,” she says. I want to tell her I’m sorry for this anger, but I close my eyes instead.

  Thompson and Graves and Elijah and I have returned from the big crater. I can’t sleep for wondering if I’ve killed someone now. We all threw Mills bombs into that pit and heard the screams. We are all equally guilty.

  The rain begins the night of our return. It falls for five days and makes me wonder if manitous are unhappy with me. The Germans shell this section of line more heavily than normal and the Canadians, we are miserable, cold and wet and muddy and scared we are going to die soon. Some say Fritz is doing it to avenge the crater raid.

  Soon we will be sent back for a few days, and this is the only thing that keeps me going.

  Elijah is happy, though. He marches around the trench, up and down in the rain, wearing that helmet he took from the crater. The rotted thing looks silly sitting on his head, and this must be partly why he does it.

  To make it all worse, Elijah’s taken to talking in an English accent in the last days. This makes the other soldiers laugh, but I wonder why he really does it. It’s like he wants to become something that he’s not. He tells jokes and makes the others laugh and brags that he has now killed men, all of them close enough that he could hear them die. But is it the truth? I do not think so. I was there and know Elijah was scared too, and know that when we all threw the bombs into the crater there was no telling how many men died down there. But what is the truth in a place such as this? It might as well be Elijah’s version. After all, he makes the others happy, he keeps their spirits up, and that is worth nearly as much as good food and a warm, dry bed.

  He is already a hero to them. I can see that. Me, I can feel the eyes of the section on me. They try to figure out what makes me different from them, different from Elijah. I know I am a better shot than Elijah, that it was me who taught him the ways of the bush. But they are drawn to Elijah and his easy smile. Me, I won’t give in to this army’s ways so easy. I learn their English but pretend I don’t. When an officer speaks to me I look at him and answer in Cree.

  Lieutenant Breech—Bastard Breech—he doesn’t like me speaking my language at all. He has disliked me from the moment he saw me. Elijah is partly to blame. I remember the morning not long after we’d joined up. Elijah and I had travelled for days together on a train from the north. We had been sent to a huge place of stone and glass called Toronto, were kept in an area called the Exhibition Grounds by the big lake. Every day, I was up before the others, before the bugle call, taking care of the horses. I couldn’t get used to sleeping in a cot surrounded by all these strange men in the great echoing stall. I wanted to sleep outside and asked Elijah to ask Lieutenant Breech. My English was no good. But Elijah taught me the words instead, told me I had to begin fending for myself in their tongue. We had finished lunch and men were sitting around smoking. Breech sat laughing with some others. He seemed in a good mood.

  Breech broke into a big grin when he finally understood what I was asking. His smile made me feel good. “So the Indian wants to sleep under the stars,” Breech said, loud enough that everyone around stopped what they were doing to listen. “If you don’t mind,” Breech said to me, “would you please repeat the question so that the others may hear?” His smile wasn’t so nice any more.

  “May I be so bold as to request different sleeping quarters?” I stuttered. “Perhaps outside away from the atrocious snoring of my fellow soldiers?” It had taken me all day the day before to learn it. Even though I had practised, it did not come out like I’d wanted it to.

  “Is there any other way we might accommodate you?” Breech asked. “A separate and private mess hall? A maid perhaps?” I wasn’t sure what Breech was saying at the time, and had to ask Elijah later.

  Breech’s smile disappeared and his face turned red. “This is not a day camp!” he screamed. “There will be no special treatment! Where I prepare you to go there is only misery, fear and death.” I looked over to Elijah then. He was covering up a laugh with his hand. “I have a mind to put you up on charges, Private,” he yelled into my face. “I can’t even think of what those charges might be other than buffoonery. Get out of my sight.” Breech then sent me to clean the horse stalls, not knowing I enjoyed it, did it every day already. My relationship with Breech never really improved after that.

  Corporal Thompson says that the Hun are reinforcing their lines somewhere else and that their manpower is low around here right now. He tells McCaan that he wants to go over with Elijah and me again. He admires our calm in the face of battle. “Nothing against Graves, Sergeant,” he says. “He acted as a soldier should. But your two Indians are blessed. They’ve got the charm about them. And I’d like a little of that charm myself right now.”

  I like Thompson but don’t know if I deserve all this that he wants to give me.

  At nighttime when I am not on sentry duty I lie in my little hole in the side of the earth and fondle the medicine bundle around my neck. It still has the faint scent of the fire’s smoke when I put it to my nose. Sometimes I’m tempted to open it, but have decided not to any more, for fear of losing something important, something of you, Niska.

  I dream of home. The sleeping’s no good here, but I’ve taught myself to dream with my eyes open. Where I live the river is as wide as a lake and now at this time of year, spring, is when the fishing is best. It is also the time when we all come together from our winter camps to socialize and to live easy a short while. We build goose blinds on the bay and set our decoys. We pluck and smoke birds over a fire late into the night and fill our stomachs as often as we please. It would be interesting to take Gilberto and Grey Eyes and Sean Patrick and Graves there. I wonder what they would think of such a place. All the bush and water and not very many people like all of these other places I’ve been now. The children would be amazed by Gilberto’s hairy body and strange accent. The girls would surely think Sean Patrick was handsome. Graves would impress the elders with his stories of fighting wars for most of his life. Grey Eyes would probably steal things.

  Grey Eyes tried to talk Elijah into going to the medicine world with him last night. They’d come from up top where they were in charge of repairing a stretch of wire and there were still many hours until dawn and stand-to. They squeezed into my hole and Grey Eyes asked me to keep an eye out for officers, then he went through his ritual with the needle. He turned to Elijah while he slipped the point into his arm and asked Elijah to try it as well. He smiled at Elijah like a lover.
Elijah turned away from him with disgust, but I could see something in the flash of light as Grey Eyes lit a cigarette and lay back. Elijah’s eyes told me all I needed to know.

  When Grey Eyes takes a lot of it, he lies still like he is dead until I worry he has joined them. Then he groans a little and breathes deeply like he is sleeping, and I guess that is actually what he is doing, sleeping with the dead for a short while. I wonder what Grey Eyes would do if the trench was overrun.

  He doesn’t always take enough that he goes unconscious. I have seen him glassy-eyed and calm, breathing deep and staring like he is concentrating. He speaks carefully then, worried, I think, that his words will be slurred. Me, I don’t think he can hide this forever, though. If McCaan and the others know what Grey Eyes is doing, no one says anything. But I don’t think anyone but Elijah and me know. We’re the keeper of the secret for now.

  Not many days pass before the pattern of the trenches is a part of me. Dawn and dusk all soldiers must stand-to, up on the duckboards, rifles loaded and cocked, prepared for a Hun offensive. After stand-to, we gather in our small groups, open our tins of bully beef, smoke cigarettes and clean our equipment. We try to stay dry in the rain by erecting pieces of canvas over us like little tents, but it’s near impossible. We repair trenches blown apart in bombardments the night before and collect the dead for the stretcher-bearers to pick up when they can. Those who aren’t collected we bury the best we’re able in the trench sides when they begin to swell and stink. I make sure to thank them for helping to strengthen the trench line, tell them that even in death they are still helping.

  In the afternoon, our section is allowed a sort of rifle practice. The snipers stand aside for us while we wait by the steel plate. Each of us takes his turn lining his rifle up and listens to what the spotter beside him says as he peers through the periscope. When a possible target is sighted we are told approximately where it is, and as soon as the shooter gives the call, the steel plate drops and he is given a very short, panicked second to fire his rifle before the plate swings up again. More often than not, there is not much of a target to try and hit in such a short time, but twice now for both Elijah and me the spotter has called out, “Good shot, you hit their plate.” More often than not, too, a German hits the Canadian plate the moment it closes, and the loud whomp of the bullet crushing itself on the metal barrier rings in our ears. We constantly move our firing position so that the Hun don’t get too used to where the firing comes from. We also try to keep many sniper spots operating randomly at the same time. Too much of a pattern and someone is dead.

  Sean Patrick is proving himself a very good and natural shot. Sometimes the Hun like to play a game where they place an old helmet or a tin can on a stick and see if the Canadians can hit it. Right now, Sean Patrick has hit these targets more than anyone else. The fact makes Elijah irritable. Sean Patrick keeps both eyes open when he shoots and this allows him to find and aim at his target quickly. I was shown the same way of shooting as a boy. I talk to Sean Patrick about where he grew up, a place called Ahmic Harbour, and I tell him that ahmic means beaver in both Cree and Ojibwe. Even though he is a wemistikoshiw, he grew up with many Ojibwe who taught him how to hunt and shoot.

  Gilberto doesn’t like to do anything that takes chances. Every day he says how he wants to get sent back where he can become a cook where it is safer and there is always enough to eat. He writes one letter every day, no matter how busy we are or how much it rains. He makes sure to give them to soldiers heading back for rest or to stretcher-bearers who will make sure they get posted. Elijah asks him who he writes to and Gilberto replies it is to his wife and young family left behind on his few acres in Southern Ontario. He writes in Italian and he has let me look at his letters and has even read a couple of them to me. His handwriting is large and childlike, like mine, although he knows how to put down far more words than I ever will. Gilberto keeps his hair very short but his moustache long and bushy.

  After ten days on the line we are finally relieved. I feel good packing up my few possessions and stuffing them into my sack. We head out down the communication trench as shelling goes on nearby.

  “They’re sending us off in good fashion, eh?” McCaan says to no one in particular.

  “You couldn’t wish for a better stretch to lose your virginity, fellas,” Thompson says to our section as we squat and allow a fresh company to pass us on their way up, shells whistling by overhead. I’m not sure what he means. “I’ve never seen a stretch with so few casualties,” he continues. I think of all the shells that have missed us so far and of all the sleepless nights and try to imagine how it can be worse than that. “Oh, it will get far worse than we’ve seen, boys,”Thompson says as if to answer me. “This is the calm before the storm.” A shell explodes fifty yards away and wet clumps of dirt rain down.

  We make our way out of the last communication trench and for the first time in a very long time I can walk erect up on top of the earth again. It is a strange, good feeling. The moon threatens to come out from behind the cloud cover and we fall into step, dreaming of sleeping through a whole night on beds of straw and of eating hot food and of lying on our backs in the sunshine for a few days with nothing else to do but watch the aeroplanes twist and dive and fight. We head down the road pitted with shell-holes and weave around the craters like a line of ants, rifles slung over our shoulders, packs heavy with muddy clothing and mess kits, our skulls and uniforms crawling with lice that have become a part of us now.

  We stop for a ten-minute rest along the side of the road. Up ahead a column of soldiers comes toward our own, uniforms clean and boots shining in the moonlight, their stride long and timed right, their faces open, eyes wide. They stare at our platoon from the corners of their eyes as they pass. We pretend not to notice them, our column leaning against rifles or sitting in the mud, cigarettes dangling from mouths and eyes squinted. We pretend that these new ones are not even there. But we know. They were our platoon weeks ago, years ago, lifetimes ago. I look at a few of the faces as they pass and wonder which ones won’t come back this way again. Elijah sits beside me, whistling a song that he’s heard the others whistling a lot lately too.

  I look over to him and say in Cree, “It will be good for a few days.”

  He smiles. “I’ll miss the excitement. But yes, it will be good to relax.”

  We stand and begin to walk again with feet dragging, back to somewhere behind Sanctuary Wood.

  We’re billeted in a barn once again, the roof full of holes from some earlier fighting, but the rain has stopped for now, so nobody really cares.

  Outside, their backs shining in the sun, a line of soldiers stands naked. They hold their clothes in their arms, and when they reach the front of the line they hand them to a man who throws them into a long steaming machine that is supposed to kill all the lice. The men stand around and chat and smoke cigarettes and scratch themselves, naked as the day they came into the world. Elijah and I laugh at the sight, something worth taking home with us and telling a story about when the elders ask us what we saw. I can see myself telling the story of being surrounded by naked wemistikoshiw with hairy bums standing around in the sunshine talking, their clothing in a machine that cleans it for them.

  I will tell the elders the many strange things I’ve seen, the aeroplanes that fly high up in the sky and fire machine guns at one another, the bodies of the dead everywhere so that one gets used to the sight of them swelling in the rain, the spoken threat of little bombs that release poisonous gas that burns a man’s throat and lungs so that he chokes to a painful death, the sneaking about like a fox at night, repairing wire and raiding the enemy craters, the shells that whistle from out of nowhere on a quiet morning and blow the arms and head and legs from the man you talked to the day before. But especially I will tell the elders how after a shell attack life returns to normal so fast, how one’s mind does not allow him to dwell on the horror of violent death, for it will drive him mad if he lets it. That is why they can stand arou
nd naked talking to one another without a care as the Belgian farm girls giggle at them from a distance, how they can light up a cigarette with fingers still bloody from the soldier they have just finished burying, how they can cheer as a man in his aeroplane hurtles to his death after being riddled by machine-gun bullets. How they can accept without blinking the execution of one of their own for sleeping on watch. I keep my head attached to my body by doing the simple things that it knows to do.

  The day is sunny and warm and the only reminder that we are in a war is the rumble of shells on the horizon like thunder threatening to bring rain. I watch the others play a game of soccer, and when they ask me to join I do, running after the ball, not understanding the rules but running like a child anyway, until my lungs burn and the sweat stings my eyes. We line up at the food wagon and fill our plates with runny stew. We soak the stale bread in it so that it can be swallowed. I want to taste goose right now. I know the people who have this farm keep some. I saw them.

  Our days of rest pass too quickly. Elijah and I discuss capturing and plucking a goose for dinner but decide against it. It would be obvious that the Indians were the guilty ones.

  It rains again the day we are ordered back in line to march the ten miles to the front.

  Spring warms into early summer, and we put our time in on the front line by Saint-Eloi. We spend this time digging in and avoiding German shells as best we can, waiting to be relieved again so that we can get back to a safe place. Most nighttime activity has dropped off, and through May there is none. But something is in the air, and I cannot forget Thompson’s words that far worse days are just over the horizon.

  THOMPSON GETS PERMISSION to begin taking Elijah and me to learn the art of the sniper. A long natural slope rises up a hundred yards behind our own line that offers a view of the German-held craters. That is where we set up our position. Thompson calls this place the Ypres Salient. Here we stumble upon old dugouts in the waist-high grass. Good places in which to hide, I think, but they seem too far away now for a good shot until Thompson mounts a looking-glass on Elijah’s rifle that you squint through with one eye. It brings the target up close. What was once just a bump on a field seven hundred yards away suddenly appears as a tree stump. Even better, they have somehow put a cross of thin hair on the glass so that you can put the point where the two lines meet right in the centre of your target. These wemistikoshiw amaze me sometimes.