“Ah,” he said when he saw the valley.
He nodded off with the medicine, and when the kid was sure that his father was deep into sleep he left him to ease stealthily into the trees to hunt. He grabbed a trio of stones that were rounded like small balls and tucked them in his pocket. Then he found a log fallen against a large rock and he lay behind it and peered out through the triangular opening at a stretch of forest littered with bracken, fallen branches, and small pines. He waited. Around him he could hear the sounds of the bush, the snap and crack of it, the swish of ferns where small things scuttled and the rustle of leaves and limb where birds and squirrels made their evening preparations. He closed his eyes and worked at pushing the edges of his hearing out. He could hear things in the distance. A moose bawled in the valley. A bear grunted somewhere down the slant of the ridge and there was a slicing sound where the wind cut through the gap. Then he heard the birds. There was a covey of grouse hunting and pecking around the trees. They moved with their heads down and he looked through the space under the log and whistled once, sharply. The grouse leaped into the branches of the nearest trees and sat there immobile and dull-witted, waiting for the threat to reveal itself. He stood. The first stone felt smooth as a bullet and he hefted it in his palm a few times and leaned toward the biggest grouse perched on a thin limb. He threw and missed by an inch. The bird sat there and blinked. But it fell to the ground when the second stone found its mark. The
third stone dropped another bird and he walked around the log to retrieve them. He plucked them clean before walking back toward the camp.
He laid the birds on a rock. Then he gathered stones and made a fire ring and scooped dirt and moss out and made sure there were no roots that might catch. Then he gathered wood, stacking it until he had a good pile. He started a fire with the knife and a rock and some of the moss and small twigs. When it was going well he cleaned the birds and threw the guts in the fire. He skewered them on sticks, drove one end of each into the ground, and tilted them to the heat. As the fire burned down to embers he sat and sipped at the canteen and tended it while the birds cooked.
He stood and stretched, turned the birds on their sticks, and walked to the edge of the ridge. The valley had shifted to a low purple light and the mountains at the far side fell into grey. The river was pink with the light of the setting sun. He stood and watched it ease itself down to slumber. When he turned and walked back to check on his father he found him bathed in sweat, hot to the touch, and clammy. His breath came in ragged gasps. He shivered the length of his body. The kid covered him with blankets. He stirred some and groaned and when he tried to turn on his side the kid could see pain rack him as he clutched at his side and the sweat popped out in globules on his brow. The kid retrieved the canteen and poured some water into his palm and wiped his father’s brow. He held it to his lips and his father sipped at it and his eyes flickered. Then he sank back into the hold of the medicine.
The kid watched him sleep, feeling afraid of what was to come and of what it would mean to him when it did. When the fire had died down to a faint orange glow he built it up
again slowly and when the flames cast his shadow against the wall of trees he took the first bird off the stick and let it cool before tearing into it ravenously. When he was finished he cut the flesh of the second into strips and then diced them into small bits his father could chew if he was able to eat. He tended to the horse and by then it was full dark. The moon nudged the tips of the trees. He could hear coyotes yap and howl in the valley. The fire threw sparks and he watched them scurry and twist upward and then tumble back down before they flared out inches from the ground. When his father moaned he walked to where he lay and knelt beside him. He was awake.
“Feel like a warmed-over turd,” his father said.
“You wanna sit by the fire?”
“Yeah.”
The kid helped him to his feet. He could feel the ribs along his back and his hand wrapped easily around his father’s forearm. He got him to the fire and set the pack behind him and stoked the fire so it blazed. His father drank from the canteen and he could hear the dry clack of his throat as he swallowed.
“Got me some grouse. Can ya stand to eat?” the kid asked.
“I could try.”
He chewed the first dice of grouse with effort. He had to fight the urge to retch but he got it down and the second piece was easier. He couldn’t take a third. He sat and stared into the fire and the kid could see the sweat bathe him in a dull orange sheen. He coughed and almost toppled from the effort of it. Then he leaned back on the pack and closed his eyes and the kid tapped him on the knee and held out the medicine. “Ya best take more,” he said.
His father took it and sipped at it. He relaxed and for a while he lay in a doze. The kid poked at the fire and got the flame to rise higher. He fished his makings out of his pocket and rolled one and lit it with the glowing end of the stick. When his father spoke again, the words rolled out in a monotone.
“Jimmy used to say we’re a Great Mystery. Everything. Said the things they done, those old-time Indians, was all about learnin’ to live with that mystery. Not solving it, not comin’ to grips with it, not even tryin’ to guess it out. Just bein’ with it. I guess I wish I’da learned the secret to doing that.”
He motioned for the cigarette and the kid handed it to him. He smoked it down to a butt that he had to pinch it with two fingers to hold it and after the last deep haul flipped it into the fire. “I never belonged nowhere, Frank. Never belonged nowhere or to nobody,” he said. He gazed into the fire as though it was where his words and the strength to say them were coming from.
“Come a time when I was older when I thought that that was just my draw. Come a time when I believed it was all I deserved on accounta all I done, and I guess all I never done.”
A cough racked him and when the kid stood quickly he raised a hand to stop him from approaching. He hacked in small, hard coughs until the spell was over and he took several deep breaths to calm himself. “When the doc told me I was dying I remembered this place. I come here when I was fifteen. We were logger scouts and I come here and found this ridge. Stayed here two days just sitting on the edge of that cliff looking at it all. That’s all. Just looking. I don’t recall even thinking anything except how good it felt to be there.”
The fire burned low and for a while neither of them spoke or moved. The night edged close around them and in the
silvered phosphorescence of the moon the top of rocks shone dimly and looking upward into the sky they could see millions of stars and the milky clouds of nebulae and the shimmer of meteors piercing the fabric of it.
“I come to know some peace here, Frank,” his father said. “This here’s the only place I felt like I belonged, like I fit, where I never fucked up. Couldn’t think of no better place to leave from.”
He fell silent and the kid raised his eyes and studied the sky again. He leaned his head back as far as it would go and the air was so clear he felt as though he were floating above the earth. The stars almost within reach. He imagined he could hear the crackle of their fire. He kept that pose until his neck ached and he sat straight again and drank in small sips from the canteen.
“I killed a man once,” his father said. His voice came out of the dark and shadow.
“On purpose?” the kid asked.
“I don’t know.”
He reached a hand up and waved for the smoke the kid had just lit. He knelt beside him and handed it to him. He took a long draw. His eyes were closed and he shook when he spoke, and the kid put a hand to his brow and his father turned his head away. The kid sat back on his haunches and when his father turned to look at him again his eyes were hard and set and there was a feverish gleam to them.
“Ain’t spoke of it since it happened. But it’s what you need to know of me,” he said.
His father shifted about to find a comfortable position. When he was settled he set both hands down along his thighs
and spread his fingers wide to brace himself. He exhaled and let his head slump forward, held it there a moment, and then inhaled and raised it again and began to speak.
WAR
.
1951
. Neither of them had ever heard of Korea. When the name first rumbled through the talk in the bunkhouses and mess halls they let it disappear. But it persisted. A lot of the younger men were eager to fight. The last World War had been over for six years. Some of them relished the idea of the glory they’d missed out on and others just allowed the notion of conflict percolate within them and the garrulous talk of their fellows to stoke and drive them. They lived for stories in the papers that landed intermittently in their midst. They mouthed the name
Karyong
like a litany when word came of the first fighting and the first casualties. Then the night fight at Hill 677. The 2nd battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry completely surrounded by North Korean and Chinese troops in two days of blistering combat where ten men died and twenty-three were wounded. It read like a glorious campaign. The fact of the dead fuelled their outrage. The anonymity of the name
Hill 677
gave the image of the battleground the lustre of dreamscape, and he and Jimmy talked of nothing else for days. Soon, there was a steady flow of those leaving to report to the volunteer stations to sign up for the conflict. Men drifted off from the mines, the lumber camps, the oil rigs, road
crews, and earthworks. It made work easier to find but harder. There were fewer men for the projects and while the pay remained the same the rigour and the demands on their bodies deepened. Jimmy was the first to raise it.
“We should go,” he said. “To that Korea place.”
“A guy can get trained for stuff. They even send ya to school if you wanted to learn stuff. Maybe we could be engineers or learn how to drive Cats’n things.”
He eyed Jimmy for a long moment. Then he nodded grimly. “Might be a good go. Come back an’ earn big. No more bustin’ a nut for peanuts no more.”
They were eighteen when they went. They were assigned to the Royal Canadian Regiment. They took the train across the country to Camp Petawawa with a group of sixty, the lot of them filled with the keen edge of adventure. They were young and oblivious to danger; instead they were driven by the spark of it, and its presence hung in the air of the coach like sulphur off a struck match, hard in the throat but bracing. The train car was riotous with card playing, wrestling, name calling, and the occasional fist fight, which was broken up quickly and the semblance of order restored until it flared up again. They were mostly dropouts and itinerant workers. The idea of war was beyond them and they only existed for the thrill they felt building in their bodies as the land whipped by and the sheer force of collective bravado became the land itself, the open breech of the sky, what they drank into them, the distance between them and the blood rush of combat shrinking rapidly. At night, as the coaches swayed and the dim coach lights cocooned them in shadow, he could hear the fear in the men around him; the whimpers, the curses, the thump of a fist on a wall, and muttering as they flailed against dreams the colour
of ash. They became kids again. He sat and listened and watched Jimmy beside him sleeping. He thought of his father and how he might have felt in similar moments during his war. He thought of his mother. He wondered if she ever thought of him at all in those four years. It was a sad thought and he tried to let it go. He was frightened. The old feeling of confusion rose in him once again, followed by a longing he could feel in his bones. When the black idea of dying coursed through him, he shivered and pulled his blanket tight around him and fought for sleep, the jostle of the train against his spine like small concussions, and he dreamed of explosions and screams and a sky filled with dark birds hungry for dead men’s eyes and rotting, smoking flesh strewn everywhere.
They hit Petawawa and were swallowed up in the crush of bodies and the canvas of green the camp was painted in and there was no time for skin. There was only order. There was only detail and the pressure to fit into it and make it part of their consciousness, their way of thinking, their way of being. It was the hardest work he’d ever done. But they fell into the rampage of energy that was basic training. They were muscular and fit and they both loved the running and the exertion. As they had done with the work, they challenged each other for more, and when they ran the obstacle courses and the roadways around the camp, they left the others behind and ran like they had through the bush when they were kids. The years of work had made them tough and the stress of being commanded and driven was as natural as breathing. The feel of the air under barbed wire with the zing of bullets flying over their heads and the concussion of grenades throwing dirt that stung like pellets of shot only made them crawl forward all the faster. They could shoot. They discovered that
fast. But while Jimmy was a natural with a weapon, as skilful with his hands as a magician, the arc of a blade in his hands spellbinding in its fluid grace, he felt ashamed that he had to struggle to breakdown a carbine, thrust a knife, or drive a bayonet powerfully through a practice dummy. He could shoot but he did it deliberately, measuredly. Jimmy rattled off rounds and shredded targets. He was the best shot anyone had ever seen. But together they were like ghosts in the trees. They could disappear and not be found, not be tracked, and when they broke training after three months they were assigned to the 3rd battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment.
“You ever figure we’d be humpin’ it in Japan,” Jimmy asked.
“Least I hearda it,” he said.
They were sent to Nippon Bara for advanced weapons training. They would train on mountainsides under live artillery. Jimmy was jumpy with the feel for fighting whereas he couldn’t set his mind to it. He found himself with deep questions. He didn’t understand war. Still, he felt loyal to Jimmy and willed himself to concentrate. He focused on what he was being trained in. He became proficient, methodical, dependable, and sure-handed.