We make our way up the ten feet of mud that is the side of this pit and carefully peer down. It seems deserted. Some water fills the bottom, but plenty of places look very good for hiding. We crawl down into it, rifles ready in the event that we surprise any Hun. Scouting around the perimeter, we can see it is abandoned for now. Lengths of tin roofing and chicken wire lie scattered about. Thompson says it must have served as a listening post for Fritz at one point. Apparently, Canadian artillery found its mark.
He points to a trench that runs east from the crater. “That one there goes straight to Germany,” he says. “We’ll have to post a man fifty or sixty feet in to keep an eye out for any visiting Fritz.”
We group around a stretch of old canvas and count out our arms and ammunition. Ten Mills bombs, two rifles and plenty of rounds, Thompson’s revolver, and Graves’s machine gun with only a couple of drums of bullets. I wish now that I’d turned back last night and retrieved what I’d left behind. “Two rest, two keep watch,” Thompson says. “Fritz doesn’t know we’re here, but the bad news is that neither does our side, so try to find a place that gives a little cover from shellfire.”
We decide that Graves and I will rest first while Thompson goes down the trench as a sentry and Elijah keeps watch in the crater. I pull some chicken wire over a cut in the crater that will make for a comfortable nest. I cover the chicken wire with a few boards and a layer of mud. Slipping into it with my rifle, the exhaustion washes over me. I know I’m invisible here and the tension slowly recedes from my jaw. Sleep comes fast and deep.
My eyes open to sunlight cut by diamonds of shadow. For a moment I’m not sure where or who I am. I just am.
The brightness of late morning shines through the chicken wire and across my face. I wiggle myself a little so that my head is free of my nest and I stare up at the blue sky. Not a cloud, only the blue of morning. Small birds dart across the crater chasing one another. One swoops in and lands close to my head. It doesn’t know I’m there and begins to primp itself, just a few feet away from me, its feathers shining in the sunlight. It is a type I’ve not seen before. The eyes are black as night. I blow on it and, startled, it hops, then flits away. For a while nothing moves. Pure silence. It’s not something I’m accustomed to any more.
I inch out of my nest in such a way that my movement won’t be noticed. I peer about, rifle at my side and ready. Graves is curled up close by, sleeping lightly. Elijah sits at the other end of the crater, rifle across his lap. Every few seconds he scans the parapet above him. I wave to him. He smiles and waves back. I make my way to him.
I feel good but a little groggy. Sitting side by side, we pass a canteen of water. “Get some sleep,” I say. “You look tired. Crawl into the place where I slept. It’s comfortable.” Elijah doesn’t put up a struggle, just gets up and walks to the nest and goes in.
I find a cut in the crater that gives some cover and sit there with my rifle on my lap, listening. Big guns have started up in the distance but they are miles away. It’s as if the war has moved to another place. It has sucked the life from Saint-Eloi and left it like this, has moved on in search of more bodies to try and fill its impossible hunger.
I figure it’s safe enough to light a cigarette. No one will notice it in the sunlight. I started smoking to fit in. Now I like it. Sometimes I send up prayers on the smoke.
I take a cigarette out of my kit. The flare of the match makes me want something more, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m reminded of the danger of the night, see the shellfire in the match’s light. I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve got a little time alone. I pull the smoke down into me. It tastes like bitter spring greens on my tongue. Reaching into the inner pocket of my tunic, I undo the moosehide bag in which I keep the tobacco that protects me. It is the bag Auntie gave me before I left. I put the bag back in. It feels warm against my skin, like it is filled with blood.
I hear the scuffle of feet and train my rifle on the trench that runs out of the crater. Thompson appears, looking tired. He sits beside me and lights up a smoke too.
“It’s as if Fritz has headed back to the Rhine,” he says. “I went down that trench a good hundred feet but no sign of anything. I came back half that way and sat all morning long. You wouldn’t think there’s a war going on.”
I must listen carefully to understand him.
An aeroplane drones above us, silhouetted by the sun and hard for me to identify. “Looks to be one of ours,” Thompson says. “You can see by the outline of the wings. Observation plane. Stay still. If
it spots us it might take us for one of them and call a bombardment in on us.”
I listen, basking in the warmth.
“Did you send Elijah off for some rest?” Thompson asks. I nod. “You’re a quiet one,” Thompson says. “I’d have said that’s an Indian trait, till I met Elijah.”
We laugh.
“Why’s his English so good?” he asks after a time.
“Him, he stayed in residential school a long time,” I say. “Him, he had no parents, so the nuns kept him.”
Thompson leans back and stares up at the sky. “Your English is getting better,” he says. I smile. “I watch the way you two walk about,” Thompson says. “I figure I know true hunters when I meet them.”
Another plane drones somewhere we can’t see.
“A cup of coffee and something to eat sure would be nice right now,”Thompson says. “I’m going to rest awhile and dream about it. You take the trench, but don’t let your curiosity get you and go down too far. Fifty or sixty feet is plenty. If Fritz does decide to come along, you can get back here and warn us.”
We both get up and Thompson rouses Graves. I head down the trench. Nothing’s in it but the mud walls. I find a place to sit where I can get a view down the laneway but can’t be seen. I don’t mind sitting here, waiting for the darkness that is still many hours away. My head floats up above this cut in the earth and into the blue swatch of sky above me. I listen to the rhythm of bombing in the distance.
The afternoon is waning when I make my way back to the crater. The sun has begun its slide down behind the Canadian lines. Graves sits by the side of the crater, his machine gun pointed at the trench I emerge from. Graves nods to me as I walk out. We wake Elijah and Thompson.
When it is dark enough, Thompson gathers us and we make our way out of the crater. As I crawl out, I see an old German helmet. It
is the rarer kind, made of leather and cloth with a spike on top. Elijah grabs it. He straps the helmet to his pack.
Instead of leading us back to our own trenches, Thompson has us wait by the lip of the crater. He hands each of us two Mills bombs. “I’ve got a feeling they’ll be coming this way soon enough to look around,” he says. “If you hear them scrounging about below, pull the pins and throw these in. Then we’ll make our way back quick.”
When twenty or thirty minutes pass and I begin to think that Thompson is mad, I make out the sound of men sneaking about below. I can hear them whispering, can hear the step of boots all around where I’d slept this morning. Thompson gives the nod and we set and throw the bombs in at the same time. They explode in a series of concussions. Men scream. Thompson takes Graves’s machine gun and crouches at the lip, sprays into the crater until all of the rounds are spent. I’m amazed at the little man’s actions. He kills with such ease.
“Let’s go, boys,”Thompson says.
We move from crater to crater, the ground a little more familiar now, and finally drop into the safety of our own lines.
I replay it over and over in my head so that I don’t sleep all night, pulling the pin on my Mills bomb, throwing it and watching it arc until it disappears into the crater, the concussion and screams. I have killed someone now.
The next morning after stand-to, Thompson approaches Elijah and me. He talks to both of us, but his words are for Elijah. “What do you think of the last days, Whiskeyjack?” he asks, lighting a cigarette, exhaling and looking at the sky.
I can see that Elijah knows exactly what Thompson’s asking. Thompson is asking if Elijah likes killing. Elijah considers it for a moment. “It’s in my blood,” he finally says.
Thompson smiles, then walks off. He didn’t ask me the same question. Does he sense something? How am I different? A strange sensation, one I do not recognize, surges up my spine.
KISKINOHANAASOWIN
Learning
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.