Elijah tells me I just stared into the fire after he told this story. I didn’t say anything. I was always like this with Elijah, he says. Quiet and calm and listening, but never saying what Elijah needed to hear.
The next morning we got up before the sun again and found the moose tracks. We followed them and flushed the animal out of the thicket where it was hiding. Elijah shot her through the lungs and she did not run far before collapsing. Between the hide and meat, there was almost too much for us to paddle back with. But we did. You were happy, Niska, to see our prize. You smiled proudly at us from the shore, your long hair loose in the wind. You were always worried about having enough for us to eat through the winter. Elijah never quite knew why you worried.
And he never spoke of that experience again.
Elijah and I are tired and we’re actually relieved to find that the Second Division is to stand back while the Fourth and First Divisions spearhead an attack on a canal. We sit behind the line a little ways one night and watch the flash of the big guns like lightning across the horizon. Another new lieutenant has been sent to us now, and he is young and proper and understands that Elijah and I are
corps élite
. Elijah does not think he will bother us much.
We sit with a group of others by a fire tonight, and I notice that Elijah smiles a lot, the warm flow of the medicine carrying him along. The smell of roasting meat is in the air and we know that in the next couple of days our brothers will do something brave and great once again and push through Fritz’s desperate lines. They must ford a canal, though, and it will be dangerous, miserable work. In this early autumn evening, Elijah tells everyone he’s happy for once to sit back and let it happen without him.
I remain my silent self. Elijah jokes a little with me, knows I do not like what he did, but he feels he had to if he and I are to survive. We talk in Cree. Elijah does not want the others to know what we say.
“Fritz has nearly had enough,” Elijah tells me. “It will not be too long now before this is all over and we return to Mushkegowuk.”
I nod, but do not answer. I am very sad, Elijah sees.
“I know I’ve done horrible things here,” Elijah says. “I know that you think I have gone mad.” He pauses. “Sometimes I feel like I was mad too. But I feel like I must leave this place, that I am ready. We will go back home and you and I will return as heroes.” He points to the moccasins that he wears, the ones I made him so long ago back in Ontario. I have re-stitched them many times, but they are clearly near their end.
“There’s no fixing those,” I say.
“Despite what I’ve done here, what you’ve done here,” Elijah says, pulling my eyes from the campfire, “we can still go home together like we always planned.”
Still, I do not answer. Elijah needs me to. I can see that this emptiness inside him cannot be filled up.
“We can go back into the bush and live with Niska,” he says.
I turn to him when I hear this. His words release the agony that I have not been able to face till now, that I have not been able to speak aloud until now. I have lost everything. “No, we can’t,” I say. “Niska is dead.”
WEESAGEECHAK
Hero
W
E ARE IN THE LONG PART
of the afternoon. Only wispy remnants of the medicine remain in me. My body cries out for more, not wanting to believe there isn’t any. “Paddle me to shore, Auntie,” I call out.
When the canoe’s nose settles into the mud of the bank, I pull myself out and crawl into the bush, nothing more than a wounded animal. I get my pants down just as the badness of my body leaves me in a stinking rush. The cramping eases a little, and I clean myself best I can with leaves. I pull myself back out to the shore and see that Auntie is making camp. It is a good place with a flat grassy plain and dried hard driftwood lying about.
“We will camp here,” she says when she sees me. “And I will help you through this.” She builds a fire and leaves me by it to go into the bush.
I am sweating. My shirt is soaked through. Waves of cramps hit my belly, bend me over and make me grit my teeth. It feels like the stab of a bayonet. My body has been wrung out and yet great invisible hands twist it more until I want to scream. I place a small piece of wood between my teeth to ease the pain in my jaw. Just one more needle. I wish I had one more needle. I begin to think of all those times I took the medicine in the last months when it wasn’t needed. I might better have saved it up, stored it away for the hard months.
What was I thinking? Didn’t I realize this day would come crashing into me? Elijah would call it my lack of foresight.
Elijah. He should be here. We could help each other through this. A pain squeezes my guts so bad that I cry out in a long growl. I need to sleep. Sleep will help me.
I look over to the woods where Auntie went, a little like the woods in our last days over there, a thick stand. Nicest woods I have seen, the trees big, the ground soft and dark. The section advances quietly, makes our way through a mist that hovers about our knees so that we can’t tell what we are about to step on. Me, my ears are no good today. A dull buzz, people’s voices echoing in my head. I must rely on my eyes and keep a watch on Elijah. Elijah will be the first to notice anything.
Fat keeps tripping and falling, and Elijah turns to him.
You will kill us all if you keep this up
, his dull eyes say. The rest of the original section is dead. I find it hard to believe that Fat is the only one to have survived this long. None of our dead friends would have believed Fat would outlive them.
The
crack
of rifle fire echoes back, bouncing through the trees. We crouch and continue. We are close. Elijah stops and motions for us to split into two groups. I watch Elijah telling me to take one and go fifty yards up the right flank. A pocket of Hun wait ahead, his lips say, holed up in a deadfall. I will know it when I see it. Both groups are to lob Mills bombs into it, and then Elijah’s side will advance to mop up while my soldiers offer covering fire.
Just as Elijah called it, I find the deadfall ahead. It is as if Elijah’s been here before, has seen the lay of the land.
I let Elijah’s side throw the first bombs, and I follow suit. Screams and shouts and the muffled racket of Elijah’s group charging in travels my way. The sharp smell of cordite tingles my nose. I see movement through the mist, bodies advancing toward me from the deadfall. They are running from Elijah. I point for the others to see
and they shoulder their rifles, kill the first few who approach us. Their startled eyes. The stragglers that follow throw up their arms and we quickly take them prisoner and collect their weapons.
“There is no time for prisoners,” Elijah scolds when he comes up to me and sees the men I’ve captured.
A dull anger thumps in my rib cage. “Would you rather I kill them, Corporal?” I ask.
Elijah looks at me, something like sadness in his eyes. “X, you’ll have to take them back. Fat, you go with him.”
I am satisfied to do this. I no longer have the stomach for what I do. Fat and I begin the journey with our prisoners back behind the line. Five of them walk along, three very young-looking, one my age, the fifth old enough to be the father to all of them. Blood runs from the old one’s ears. Our Mills bombs must have popped them. Rumour on both sides is that we do not take prisoners, that they are killed on the spot or taken back and tortured. I offer these five cigarettes, place the cigarettes in their mouths and light them, smile so that they know I mean no harm. Their eyes have the look of long and terrible fighting, of seeing things that men should not be witness to, the same look that is in my eyes, I should think. For them, at least, the war is over. I wish I could say the same for myself.
An idea comes to me late at night when I’m most vulnerable. If I’m wounded badly enough, they will send me to Blighty, maybe even home. But how to accomplish this? I could ask Elijah to do it. No, not a good idea. In his blood-lust Elijah would probably kill me. I laugh to myself. Am I a coward for thinking such thoughts?
The air in the mornings is sharp, the smell of hardwood fires travelling for miles across the open country. We’ve broken through the Marcoing Line and stand before Cambrai. The city is important, Fritz’s major rail centre. To take Cambrai is to be a short way to victory. At least this is what the officers tell us.
We make our final preparations on an October evening. I watch as
men write last letters to wives and children, clean rifles and check gear, pray silently with moving lips or just stare up at the sky.
Elijah and I are sent in before dawn. We are to be advance scouts, report back on what we find, on troop movement, on how well fortified the city is.
We sneak into the first crushed outer buildings of the city just as the sun is threatening to rise. We crawl over rubble, keep one eye out for the enemy, one out for a good place of cover, and steadily move into the town. It is deserted. Elijah stands up from his crouch and boldly begins to walk along the street that we’d been leapfrogging along. I tense, ready for the shot of a sniper to ring out, but nothing happens. Elijah walks further down the street and I follow. The sun is up now. No one’s here. They have abandoned the city.
Elijah is ahead of me and his shoulders are shaking. I think he must be upset. Me, I’m happy that we’ve not had to fight any more today. Elijah turns around, but anger is not on his face. A smile broadens it. He looks young again, like himself.
“What is wrong with them?” he laughs. “They are not ready to give up already, are they? They are going to do this to me?”
He begins to laugh louder and I want to believe it’s a crazy laugh. Elijah walks away from me, back toward our line. I follow at a distance.
After Cambrai we are relieved, given time to recuperate and prepare for our pursuit of the Germans. The others talk of how Fritz retreats further back toward his homeland, refusing to surrender. The Germans still have the capability to keep this war going for months, even years. The thought depresses, then infuriates me.
Telling a superior about the murder of Grey Eyes and the lieutenant begins to appeal to me. Telling might purify, something that the
matatosowin
, the sweat lodge, can no longer do. Elijah crossed the line, crossed it long ago. He won’t stop. Is it up to me to stop him? I wish that I had you here to ask, Niska. You are the only one who
might help me figure this out, but you are gone. I’m alone. It’s as if I’ve lost my way in the bush, and the panic is starting to flash its ugly face from behind the trees.
We’ve been surrounding, then attacking villages for the last couple of days, clearing them of our enemies and liberating the towns. The villagers are ecstatic at our arrival, dance in the streets and give us flowers and wine. Elijah fights hard, takes many chances. Sometimes I find myself hoping that Elijah will go too far, will be killed in action. I will be able to rest easier then, my conscience clean enough at least to turn myself in for what has been done, to the woman and child, to Grey Eyes and the lieutenant, to the countless others Elijah has surprised and massacred in the night. The others watch Elijah in action, say that he is brave, a warrior of the highest order. To me he is mad. I am the only one now to know Elijah’s secrets, and Elijah has turned himself into something invincible, something inhuman. Sometimes, though, I feel as if I’m going mad too.
On a beautiful morning we’ve advanced as far east into France as any of us has been. I am once again alone with Elijah, advance scouting and looking for enemy movement. We come out of a stretch of trees and to the beginning of a pretty meadow. I find it hard to believe that a war ravages it. The meadow rises slowly and becomes a slope, the top of which is covered in trees. Perfect place for an ambush. I can see that Elijah senses this too.
“I’ll go up twenty yards and stop. You cover,” Elijah says. His hair has grown longer. It is dirty and matted. “The grass is tall enough to disappear into if I come under fire. Just try to mark where you see it coming from.”
“Why don’t we just wait until the others get here?” I say.
“No time. No time.” It seems as if Elijah knows that something approaches. An end to this, maybe.
Elijah slips into the grass, and I can follow his movement a little
way before he disappears completely. I wait tensely for a minute, then for another. A rifle shot cracks out and I hear a shout, and finally silence. Quickly as is safe, I move along the small indent of a path that Elijah’s left.
Elijah kneels in the tall grass, a young German pinned below him. The German is bleeding but still alive, looks up in shock and fear at Elijah. Just as I approach from behind, Elijah cuts hard into the soldier’s solar plexus with a knife, muttering. I can’t make out what he says. The man below him writhes and screams. I watch as Elijah plunges his knife once again into the man. I can see the horror in the eyes turn to the dullness of death as Elijah’s hand moves to his own face.
“Elijah,” I mutter.
Elijah turns to me. Blood is smeared across his cheeks. His eyes are wet with tears.
“Why did you kill him?” I ask. And why is his blood on your face? I want to ask him.
“What do you mean why did I kill him?” Elijah asks calmly. “Moments ago he was trying to kill me.” He tries to wipe the blood from his mouth, but smears it more.
Our company has been moving so fast that we must wait for our own artillery to arrive. A cavalry company is camped by us. This is one of the only times in four years of fighting when they have been able to advance and be used as intended. I can smell the horses. I’m reminded of the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto, of the ship over.
I sit by myself and look at the horses in the dusk. They are tall, healthy animals pawing at the earth, some with noses to the wind, a few with heads bent to eat. Elijah suddenly stands beside me. I did not hear him approach.
“I was talking to you,” he says. I am used to reading lips now to compensate for my ears. “I stood behind you and spoke to you but thought you were ignoring me. Your hearing has worsened, X.”