I see a hunger in Elijah that he can’t satisfy. He goes out on his own to snipe now that I don’t want to go into the field any more. He tells me a story about crawling in the mud and finding the place where he will not be seen. He burrows into the mud like a mole so that just the tip of the barrel of his rifle pokes out, burlap over his scope to deflect glare. He wishes that I would let him use my fine German Mauser. He lies still for hours, for days sometimes, only moving for his medicine, waiting for the shot that will count. He lets many targets pass, waits for just the right one. Men are beasts of habit, and he lets this be the thing that keeps him patient. He looks for corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, all of them spotted by the way they move. More confident. More sure. Officers always seem to have the skinny legs. Elijah runs his tally higher in the ripe fields around Vimy, comes back with just his word that he has killed, but his word is enough now.
One day he’s reached the point with his sniping that the Boche have begun to shell our sector heavily and our own soldiers nod to him and say, “Push off now, do your business elsewhere,” when he passes. He decides to move on to a part of the line that the troops assume is dead. He has a feeling about it.
He crawls through no man’s land at night, listening, stopping often, looking for a good place come morning. Finally he finds one. The lip of a crater offers a fine vantage point. He makes a nest, spends all night doing it so that in the morning it feels right. All that day he peers through his scope, resting his eyes every little while, then peering again. By all accounts this does look like a dead stretch of line, but then, at the end of the second day, he glimpses movement.
A cat, fat and happy, sits on a wrecked parapet and licks its paws. Elijah stares at it for a long time. What is a cat doing here? The cat is well fed and groomed, not wild. By all accounts the trench rats would have eaten it. Somebody is keeping it, and the only ones with such luxuries are officers.
He lies and watches all day, and deep in the night leaves his nest and crawls silent to where he’d seen the cat. Whispers come up from the trench. He listens to the words. There are three or four of them. What are they doing in a deserted section of trench? A quickly called meeting, maybe? No mind. They will soon be dead.
With revolver in one hand and war club in the other, he slips into the trench, looks about so as not to be surprised himself. He watches them in the darkness. They sit in two groups of two. He walks up behind the first group, swings his club at the one closest to him before they even know he’s there. The officer screams out and falls, holding his head. Elijah must work fast now. He swings and hits the one beside the fallen man across the temple, and this one also stumbles and collapses. Now the other two are up. One runs in the opposite direction, the other runs at Elijah, a pistol in his hand, aimed. He fires frantically, misses. Elijah raises his revolver and fires, striking the Hun square in the forehead. The man is dead before he hits the ground. Elijah pursues the other who has run away. This one is not hard to catch. Only fifteen yards down the trench he lies on his side, grasping his chest. He is having a heart attack. Elijah helps end it by
bringing the war club down on his skull. He holsters his revolver, takes out his knife and begins cutting.
Elijah turns back to the others. The first two are still alive, moaning. One has crawled a considerable distance. Elijah walks up behind him, sits on his back, pulls his head by the hair so that his neck is exposed, and cuts across it deeply. He turns back to the other whose eyes are open but not seeing. Elijah closes them gently with his hand, then places the revolver to the officer’s forehead. The gun cracks and the officer’s body bucks, then goes still.
Elijah exits the trench after taking their hair and searching their pockets. All of them officers. As he makes his way back to his nest, he changes his mind and turns back. Crawling into the trench once again, he removes the insignia from their uniforms, goes into their dugout and finds a satchel full of papers and maps. He wants no one to question this evening’s claim.
Back in his nest he medicates himself and lies on his back, his body shivering. As he drifts into the sky, a familiar woman’s voice comes to him, asking if he does not feel anything after such killing. Something walks across his leg and he jolts awake. He does not want a rat bite. He reaches down to throttle it and his hand grasps the warm fur. The animal purrs. The cat has followed him back. He lies back and closes his eyes again. The cat walks up him and snuggles in the crook of his arm. They fall asleep together.
In mid-summer we are sent back for rest to a quiet place alongside a river. I find it hard to grasp that a couple of days ago we were in trenches surrounded by strands of rusted barbed wire and rats eating bodies and today we are camped in tents in a farmer’s field staring out at the wind running its hand over fields of wheat. As if in passing, Lieutenant Breech puts out word that Corporal Thompson has died from his wounds.
“He was a good man,” Elijah says to me as we gaze out at the field. “I hope that he died peacefully.”
“I imagine they filled him with the medicine,” I answer. I’d believed from the moment I saw him that Thompson, more than anyone, would be the one to survive this war. With him gone now, I have only Elijah and myself to rely on.
Nearby sits an airfield, and every morning Elijah’s up before dawn, watching the pilots and the mechanics preparing their planes for flight. The mechanics rush around, tinkering with engines and running hands over wings and loading ammunition into machine-gun belts. He watches as the pilots dress for flight, pretty white silk pants and shirts first, then wool trousers and tunics, and then warm coats, silk scarves, hats and gloves. When they are done, they look ready for winter in the heat of July, and they climb awkwardly into the cockpits of their planes.
But then they become a part of the machine. He watches from the edge of the airfield as the engines cough to life, smoke puffing out from the exhaust pipes, the planes bumping over the rough ground to the airfield and then whining louder and louder, picking up speed, racing across the ground until the moment the wheels leave the ground and the planes swing steep into the air, jostling on the currents of wind, climbing higher and farther away until they are droning specks on the horizon. Later in the day he listens for their return, wonders which ones will make it back and which ones won’t.
On our last day of rest Elijah is asked if he wants to go up in an aeroplane. The pilots have heard that Whiskeyjack the Indian sniper is billeted nearby.
“I would be delighted,” he says, and it’s as simple as that, the dream that he has carried is to be realized.
Elijah tells me everything, even though I say I do not want to hear. But his tone is different with this story. He doesn’t sound like a madman whispering of killing. He sounds a little like himself again.
First the pilots give him soft silk leggings, and then woollen trousers to pull over those. He’s given the flyer’s coat with its sheepskin
collar. A silk scarf is wrapped about his neck and a leather helmet and goggles are placed on his head. He climbs up onto the wing and into the forward cockpit, his head buzzing with the excitement. The pilot sits behind him. The man is thin and handsome, his sharp profile like the profiles of the men on recruiting posters, staring bravely toward the horizon.
“We’ll keep you well behind the lines, but keep your eyes peeled still,” he shouts over the noise of the engine as it coughs, then roars to life. “Fritz likes to sneak up on us from above with the sun behind him.”
The pilot steers toward the runway and then they are bumping along it, the plane accelerating to speeds Elijah’s never known before, the trees flashing by. And then, the moment. The wheels leave the ground and Elijah knows this because the plane quits shaking along the ground and vibrates smoothly instead, the ground below him suddenly further away. The pilot steers sharply into the sky and Elijah’s insides drop near out of him. The engine and wind in his ears combine to a roar and he looks down at the earth below, petrified. He can’t move.
The pilot veers to the left and Elijah’s given a view of the battlefield in the distance, the trenches cut into the earth, just like he’s seen in his dreams. The pilot flies the plane sideways so that the left wing points directly to the earth. Elijah has the sudden panic that he might fall out of the plane at this sharp angle and begins grasping in the cockpit for something to hold onto. The ground looms far below. His body tightens so that his stomach aches. He can see the puffs of shellfire on the German side. The sky is blue when he turns his head away, gives him a sickening feeling like he struggles on an ocean with no land in sight.
The wind is a sharp knife, even through the layers of his clothing. The pilot climbs higher. The earth shrinks away. Elijah feels weightless strapped in his seat, a part of the sky, but not in the way he’d ever imagined.
Nothing holds him from plummeting. He pictures himself falling, arms in a frantic wave, the world coming upon him fast until he is smashed upon it. He’s held locked into the seat of this vibrating thing that coughs and sputters. He has no control.
The pilot veers to the right and signals for him to look down. A river snakes along the earth, glittering in the sunshine. Elijah’s head is so light it feels like an empty bubble. He wants to be back on the ground. The exhaust from the plane’s engine nauseates him.
The pilot must sense this and begins to descend to earth, and that is when a great pressure builds in Elijah’s ears and a pain shoots through his head. He does what he was instructed to do and begins swallowing, but the pain does not go away. Elijah grabs his head with both hands and squeezes. The pain is so intense that he begins to think it is going to kill him, so bad that he begins to throw up, his stomach straining and heaving as he keeps his head between his knees. When he’s about to scream, there is a pop in his head and the pain drains away immediately. The earth is right below them and suddenly they are jostling on the ground once more, the plane shuddering as it strains to slow down. He’s back on the ground now, and the weight of the earth is back upon him as he climbs out shakily and walks to the mess to have a drink with the others.
Is he meant to walk on the ground and not fly? he asks me. He’s not thought about his own death before this, except in the abstract, even during the most intense bombings. He was always different from the others. As the pilots toast with their shot glasses and light cigarettes and trade their stories, Elijah realizes that now, something has changed.
NIPAHIWEWIN
Murder
W
HEN ELIJAH WAS A CHILD
, his mother died of a coughing sickness. He was young and would not accept that she was dead. He continued to talk to her, picturing her in front of him. The nuns who watched over him at the residential school grew angry at his behaviour, and began to punish him whenever he and his mother talked. So he did it more and more until often his body ached badly from their paddlings and whippings.
Not long after this he met me, and I in turn introduced him to you, Niska. The moment Elijah first spoke to you was the moment that he stopped talking to his dead mother.
The days out in the bush with you and me are memories that glow inside him still. Elijah’s sad to see me this way, he says, this unhappiness that burns inside my stomach. I am not meant for war like Elijah is. I am meant to be alone in the bush, hunting moose and snaring rabbits with you, not crawling through mud in search of men.
Elijah’s not one to waste his time reflecting on the past, but in these warm days of summer he grows a little sad. He, like me, misses home. But Elijah’s able to banish this sadness by talking about his triumphant return there. “I will go back and become chief,” he says to me. “I will become a great chief of the people and I will grow into old age pining for these days.”
I look at him and see that he isn’t joking. This is what he’s decided he wants.
By August, the rumour of another great Allied offensive comes true. Fritz tried with everything he had to end this war in the spring, but he is weakening. Elijah and I see when the Canadians take over a section of the Boche trench that the Boche are not eating much or well, that the battle for food is as constant as the battle against the enemy. Elijah says he’s concerned that they will stop fighting sooner than he wants them to, and he’s anxious to see more action.
Early in the month we are sent under cover of darkness to a place east of the city called Amiens. On the way we pass by a battalion of Australians and exchange cigarettes and gossip. Elijah finds out that the French will be on our right flank and wonders if he might find the friends he’d made. Only half of them were left living when he snuck off to visit last Christmas. They are a secret society and do not admit new members easily, even when their own ranks are so thin now. Elijah was amused to realize that as mad as they are, they looked at him as somebody far more so. Is he mad? Elijah wonders. Who isn’t in such a place?
We walk across the darkness of no man’s land. Elijah’s laughing, rifle in hand and bayonet fixed. He walks beside me, standing upright, not crouching like he has all of the other times we’ve been in this place between. The smell of exhaust fumes from the tank ahead makes us light-headed. It lumbers and squeals, moans and creaks, Fritz’s machine-gun bullets bouncing off of it uselessly.
The shrill whistle to go over the top had come in the dark and fog of night. The sun won’t even begin to climb up for another hour. The plan is wise. To attack at dawn is the standard for both sides. The popular theory is that large groups of soldiers can’t operate as one body in the darkness. Imagine the mass confusion. But the Canadians challenge that theory on this morning in early August. We take Fritz by surprise.
The tank that we walk behind drops big hooks behind it, pulling the barbed wire out of the way, creating a wide path for us. The tank rolls right into and then out of the German trench. Elijah and I can see the silhouettes of soldiers in the fog desperately climbing out and running. We jump into the trench, walk up and down it, shooting and bayoneting the brave ones who stay behind to fight. Elijah finds a box of potato mashers, picks it up and calmly walks to each dugout, pulls the fuse of a potato masher, lobs it in, then walks on, the grenade exploding behind him with a muffled boom, destroying the contents of each place.