Three Day Road (27 page)

“We should have brought a light machine gun with us!” he shouts as the Canadian troops advance to the point where aiming at the Hun is becoming tricky without hitting one of our own. “Look, X! Look! We are going to take their trenches!”

The ringing has dissipated, but I pretend not to hear him, just keep shooting when a target presents itself. Elijah turns his attention back to the firing.

An hour later the Canadians have swarmed that part of Candy Trench and they move along its traverses, Fritz falling back to Sugar Trench and beyond. Elijah and I hurry to pack up our gear and leave the cellar, dragging the piece of canvas with us. We have an idea.

Along another rise, a much higher one, we find a spot with a view into Courcelette. The good positions to fire from don’t offer any cover, though, so we get to work with our knives and the canvas, slicing holes into it and slipping branches into the holes. In ten minutes we’ve created a blanket to cover ourselves with. Elijah crawls under and asks me to stand back and look at it from a short distance. When I crawl back inside I tell him that we’ve become a part of the earth. We poke our rifles from underneath the canvas and scan the ruins of the town for Hun.

From here we have an excellent view of the fighting going on in the trenches and of what’s happening in much of Courcelette. I spot a group of Fritz setting up a machine gun on its tripod beside a crumbled wall, but it must be more than seven or eight hundred yards away.

“What do you think?” Elijah asks.

“I’ve only got a few rounds left for the Mauser,” I say, “and I am not used to this Ross any more.”

“I’ll shoot,” Elijah says. “You spot. Tell me where you see the round hit and direct me to the soldiers if I miss.”

Elijah peers through his scope and finds the target. The men are a long way off, even through the looking-glass. A little wind blows, and he estimates he must aim just above them to hit them from this far away. He sights in on the one instructing the others, aims above his head on the assumption he will hit him in the chest, and pulls the trigger. His bucking rifle doesn’t allow him to see the outcome, but I immediately report, “He’s down. You hit him in the neck.” I know Elijah focuses in and sees the man writhing on the ground. Immediately I think of Sean Patrick. Elijah reloads quickly as the other three bend to the man, aims at the one with his back to him and fires again. The man drops. “He’s down too,” I say. “Fire again before they take cover.” Elijah reloads and takes aim at the blond-haired one who looks up toward him with a look of wonder on his face. Again, Elijah aims above his head and pulls the trigger. “You hit that one in the neck as well!” I whisper. Elijah sees through his scope it is the blond one’s turn to writhe. Before Elijah can fire at the fourth, the man scrambles behind the wall and out of sight.

The best shooting I’ve done,
Elijah says, looking at me.

I stare at his lips and nod. My hearing has left me once again with Elijah’s gun so close to my head.

Are you having trouble hearing?
Elijah asks.

I understand from the way his lips form the words. “Too much loud noise,” I say in English.

Before dusk, the town is overrun by the Canadians. Elijah and I make it back to the trenches of the night before. Exhausted, we find Lieutenant Breech and report to him. Sergeant McCaan is somewhere in the field. Breech listens to the report, Elijah talking, me standing wordless behind him. Breech sounds incredulous when Elijah reports taking down the machine-gunners in Courcelette.

“Was an officer present to verify?” Breech asks, standing and stretching.

“No, sir,” Elijah says.

“Your claim seems a little exaggerated to me.” Breech laughs, as if other officers are in the room to laugh along with his humour.

“I’m a good judge of distance, sir,” Elijah says.

“Yes, I’m sure you are,” Breech answers. “How many canoe lengths did you say they were from you?” he says, smiling, sitting down and picking up his pen. “I’ll make sure to note it in my report.” He stares at Elijah, his smile daring him to respond.

Elijah smiles back. “Very good, sir. Very good joke!” He’s good at hiding his anger.

“Get some hot food and an hour’s rest, then re-equip yourselves. Report is that Courcelette is putting up stiff resistance still.”

Elijah and I salute and leave. The medicine is almost gone now, I can see, and Elijah feels the headaches coming. Although he cannot remember the last time he ate, he’s not hungry.

“I need to sleep for a while,” he says to me, finding our dugout and crawling in.

“I’ll be here,” I say, crouching by the entrance and leaning on my rifle.

Elijah lies down and feels the lice crawling, closes his eyes to the artillery exploding and rifles cracking not so far away.

For the next two weeks Elijah and I move about, searching out the enemy from a distance. Breech orders us to report back often, noting any enemy movements we see, even the sighting of smoke from cook
fires. The Canadians have cleared out Courcelette and now focus on taking the Hun trenches to the north, trenches with names like Hessian and Kenora and Regina. Elijah and I concentrate on harassment fire, finding weaknesses in their trenches and shooting at parties as they try to work.

Eleven days after Courcelette, another big push begins, and we watch for the first time a tank rumble across the field. I’d heard the rumour of them during the attack on Candy Trench, didn’t know whether to believe that these great iron monsters were real. But there one is, rolling past our nest on the very edge of Courcelette. To the left of us, troops march behind it, and Elijah and I ready ourselves, searching out machine-gun nests in the smoke and rubble hundreds of yards away. Fritz is not so ready to give up these trenches today, and Elijah and I fire our rifles and watch as hundreds of Canadians fall ahead of us. For a moment I feel like I’m watching something private that I shouldn’t be, Canadians on the ground screaming out in pain or lying still as the earth, but then the black anger washes over me and I fire the Ross I’m forced to use until the barrel is too hot to touch and the poorly made rounds begin to jam.

No more ground can be won in this area, and after the Canadians’ gains, both sides dig in once more. Our company is sent back to Albert for respite. The men drink hard. We join in even though I’d rather retreat to somewhere private. I’m not enjoying this war like Elijah is.

Elijah, he tells me a story of a night in Albert. He has no choice but to tell me. I am his listener.

One evening he climbs the steps of the basilica, rifle in hand. He’s drunk on wine and the morphine courses through his veins in such a way that he floats more than walks. He makes his way up the crumbling bell tower, scaring pigeons out of their roost. Their wings beat into the night and he watches as feathers fall about him, reminding him of fat snowflakes, then of home. It is the wrong time
for melancholy, it will ruin his mood, and so he straps his rifle onto his back and makes his way out the window of the tower and onto the ledge. Above him the giant virgin leans straight out, glowing gold in the night, her baby Jesus in her hands as if in offering to the war below. He climbs up to the roof and scrambles onto the foot of the statue. He scuttles up further so that he straddles her. Shimmying, he makes his way out along her back, daring himself to see how far he will go. She seems to be anchored to nothing, and Elijah’s weight as he rides her back like she is a great horse threatens to knock her down, smash her into a thousand pieces on the ground below.

He’s made his way to mid back and makes the decision that he will reach her golden crown. She shakes with the effort of holding him as he slides out further onto her. Elijah is surprised to find he’s become hard with the excitement of this. He has his first erection in months, it seems. He lies flatter on his stomach and continues sliding himself up her back, the ground below beckoning them to it, Elijah shaking now as much as she is, her crown almost in reach. He stretches his arms up to the rim and grimaces, pulls himself the last foot to her head and begins to convulse in waves, the virgin below him vibrating along with him.

He lies there a long time, staring down at the world below. Reaching into his pocket he pulls out a cigarette, lights it and inhales. He unstraps the rifle from his back and peers through the scope into the night. There isn’t much light, just the rage of battle on the horizon. He focuses in on that, the dancing colours just like the
Wawahtew
back home. He cannot escape thinking of the place he comes from on this night. He slips off the safety and aims at the dancing colours, squeezes his trigger, firing a single bullet into the light.

In the freezing rain of late November, we march back into the forward trenches, and Elijah tells me his world would be a perfect
place if only he were able to rid himself of what he eats. It seems the medicine won’t allow him to.

Constant back-and-forth shelling around here and the trenches have been pummelled so often that some of them are more like shallow ditches than trenches. A constant threat of being attacked looms over us. More days of cold, relentless, pelting rain than days of dryness, and even with duckboards, the trenches fill with water. Many men fall to pneumonia, and many others suffer skin irritations from being constantly wet that turn into nasty festers. We’ve been issued tall rubber boots that reach up to the thighs, but in many places these are not even tall enough and fill with water. A new expression to describe the condition of feet rotting in watery boots has appeared. When the soldiers see that their feet are black and swelling, they call it trenchfoot.

Elijah and I immediately think of home here. In the spring and autumn when we goose hunt along the rivers and the sodden, soft shores of the Great Bay, we live in cold rain for days on end and must learn to navigate the mud. It is a part of Cree existence. Elijah and I don’t complain like the others but focus our energy on staying alive and finding the little comforts, wait out the autumn, and avoid the shells that scream in randomly from the grey sky. We wear the tall moccasins I made for us a long time ago back in Canada. They dry quickly and allow our feet to breathe, and in this way we avoid foot trouble. The moccasins are the one break in dress code that McCaan will allow. “Just don’t let Breech see them,” he mutters.

Trench raids against Fritz are impossible right now as they are too well dug in, and even night patrols are rare in this weather. The mud and water hold the Canadians captive. We dig deeper into it and await what winter will bring.

I am sick of the corpses around us, but in his boredom Elijah volunteers for burial detail, taking the dead out of the line and down the dangerous alleys of support trenches that are constantly
bombarded, stacking the corpses in rows like cordwood and helping with the digging of graves. “It isn’t all that difficult in this soft muck!” he says. They try to bury the dead out of range of Fritz’s guns so that they won’t be disturbed again. Elijah goes through the dead men’s pockets and takes out coins and combs, pictures of wives and girlfriends and children, Christian medallions to help ward off death, letters from home and letters not yet sent, billfolds, knots of hair, baby teeth, bullets, cigarette cases and lambskins, morphine pills and wedding rings and baptismal certificates and prayer cards and maps and wills and poems. Elijah places these things in envelopes and marks the names of the owners of them and brings them in piles to the officer.

Before he leaves a corpse, Elijah tells me he has taken to opening each man’s eyes and staring into them, then closing them with his calloused right hand, letting a strange spark of warmth accumulate deep in his gut each time that he does it, noting the colour of the iris, knowing that he, Elijah, is the last thing that each will see before being placed into the cold mud and water here. Before they go to their place.

Elijah, he says the spark fills his belly when it gnaws for food.

PAHKONIKEWIN
Skinning

O
N CHRISTMAS
, what seems like an uneasy peace settles over the trenches for a few hours. For the first time since I’ve been here, the pounding sound of the big guns does not serve as background to everything that we do. The quiet is unsettling. Our section is one of the lucky ones sent back in a nice bit of timing to behind the lines where festivities for the troops are planned. In a nearby village a great rowdy affair begins and the rum runs freely and we run from house to house drinking and visiting with soldiers from many different places. Gilberto is as happy as I’ve ever seen him and has become close with Graves and Fat. The three walk ahead of Elijah and me, arms around each other’s shoulders, singing an Italian song that Gilberto knows, a bottle between them.

Grey Eyes catches up to us with his glassy eyes dulled a little by the drink. He has been scouting around and brings with him half a goose stolen from the table of some British officers a few houses back. We all tear off a chunk and I eat mine as I walk, the taste reminding me of that place where I was born that feels so impossibly far away right now. I look to Elijah, his lips smeared with the fat of the goose’s skin, and in his eyes I see the sadness of what he too feels.

The sound of an accordion and a fiddle comes from a darkened house along the street and we are all drawn to it at the same time. Inside, Frenchmen with blue uniforms and dark hair and unshaven
faces sit around a room lit by candles and sing in accompaniment. The words are soft and pretty and the music swirls around my rum-filled head so that I feel a peace I’ve not felt in a long time. I look over to Elijah. He feels the same thing, I see. He goes to a corner of the room and lets himself slide down the wall so that he’s sitting on his haunches, eyes closed and head swaying with the sound. The music stops but I know it continues to echo in his head as it does in mine. Eventually, he sits and stretches his legs and opens his eyes, seeing that only I remain in this room with the Frenchmen, keeping an eye out for him.

The men act as if Elijah and I are not even here, talking and gesturing and drinking from the many bottles on the table. A few of them hold long knives with thin, wicked blades and brass knuckles for handles and play games with one another, placing their hands out on the table and spreading their fingers, allowing the other to tap the point of his knife as fast as he can between the digits, a blur of glinting metal between fingers. Elijah is mesmerized by the game. He stares with his head tilted and his mouth held loose. One man, tall and thin and wiry strong, stands and gestures wildly with his knife, then acts out a scene of struggle with an imaginary enemy, sneaking up behind him, making the motion of slitting his throat, then grabbing the head of his crumpled enemy on the floor by his hair and slicing the scalp from the skull. He is good with his movements, fluid so that I can tell he has done that very thing many times before. The men all raise glasses and repeat words that I don’t know, then drink again. I’m as fascinated as Elijah.