Kanata (28 page)

Once they were warm they would walk downstream through the shallow water looking for buffalo bones and arrowheads. On the southern bank a hundred-foot cliff rose up, topped with pine. It was where the Blood had driven the buffalo, and Michael and Stanford found ancient vertebrae on the creek bed, white discs polished smooth by the current.

In late summer, a priest named Heeney came to their door, dressed in black, like a crow. He and their mother talked in the parlour for some time. She didn't offer him tea or lemonade. He sat there in his black robe, his large blue eyes, his hands moving when he spoke. A week later he returned and Stanford left with him, gone with the crow, stealing something shiny and precious. He was going to the residential school on the Blood Reserve to be taught by the Catholics. His mother was quieter than usual for two months. After Stanford went away, Michael went down to the creek on his own, but it wasn't the same. A year went by and he pined for Stanford every day.

A boy named Albert Lone Thorn jumped from the cliff in late autumn, as the poplar leaves dried to paper on the ground. He landed on the stones covered by moving water and lay there for three days. There wasn't enough water in the creek to carry him down to the Bow River. Two deer hunters found him, face down, crushed by the landing. He was naked and his clothes were at the top of the cliff, neatly folded. The hunters left him there and went to the Royal North-West Mounted Police office and two constables rode out and took Albert away.

It wasn't long after that that Stanford came back from the residential school, surrounded by silence. Michael was overjoyed at having him back, but when they went to the creek to fish there was no wrestling. They fished in silence and Stanford was quiet for months. That winter they walked the spine that jutted a hundred feet above the creek where it formed a horseshoe, a narrow spit of land. Stanford picked up a large rock and held it over his head and threw it down. They watched it fall and when it hit the ice a crack echoed in the cold air. The rock left a hole but still skittered across the ice. They scrambled down to see how thick the ice was and at the hole there was a trout, stunned. Michael pulled it out, laughing. What were the chances, he asked, a trout hit by a rock thrown from a hundred feet up, from the heavens. The rockfish, he called it. The unluckiest fish in the stream. Michael suggested building a fire and roasting it and eating it, but Stanford threw it away. “We don't want its luck inside us,” he said.

And now Stanford was here, somewhere, crawling in the same mud. Michael realized suddenly how hungry he was and struggled to find some rations. Every movement was an effort now, the act of raising his heavy, mud-coated arms a struggle. He had some beef left and as he was eating it the sky turned a strange, almost beautiful green, lit by German flares. Its light was otherworldly, and as it dimmed, the land looked gangrenous. He saw rats scurrying over the remains of a packhorse.

He wasn't sure how many hours he had been crawling. Beyond the bloated horse he saw shapes moving, maybe two hundred fifty yards away. Three men it looked like, though he couldn't tell whose they were. A helmet presented a brief profile, the familiar German angles, and Michael waited
behind the stinking horse. They were coming toward him, it seemed. He got his rifle ready and sighted it. He was wet through, and shivering through the wool. In the stillness he felt lice inch along his scalp and in his clothes, a constant twitching march. The men were two hundred yards away now, bent at the waist, swaying slightly under the weight of mud, passing a small hillock of corpses, each footstep a separate labour. Michael sighted the one on the left and squeezed the trigger and watched him fall soundlessly. He pulled the rifle over to the second and fired and he too went down. The third vanished, maybe lying in the shelter of a crater.

Michael crawled to his right in a wide arc, hoping to come up below him. It was getting cold and the mud was beginning to stiffen. His elbows were raw and bleeding from rubbing against the wool. The shelling was quiet, distant thuds that must be three miles away. There was only the rasping of his breath and the suck of mud.

He stopped every ten yards to listen. What was the German doing? Was he crawling toward Michael's original position? The two of them in a crawling dance, a slug's trail drawn in the mud that would form a perfect circle. Michael crawled for thirty minutes, his head up as far as he dared, his breath visible in the early November chill.

The phosphorescent beauty of another German flare lit the mud, a bloom of sunrise in the land of the dead. In the retreating pallor he saw the face of one of the Germans he had shot, lying less than three yards away. Michael crawled another yard and the man suddenly moved, turning his mudcaked face toward Michael, his mouth a black hole that was screaming something in German, a name and something else. Michael levelled his rifle and fired but no sound came
out. (“The Ross rifles they gave us are no good.”) The man began to roll onto his side, a whinnying sound coming with the effort, and Michael crawled after him and then half rose out of the mud and stabbed him through the shoulder. He screamed and Michael wrenched the bayonet out and stabbed him again, this time through the chest.

Michael lay behind the man, whose last breaths came out in a soft wheeze, and scanned the horizon, trying to control his own loud breathing. He looked frantically for the man's Mauser but couldn't find it. The other man he'd hit couldn't be more than twenty yards away, but what direction? He crawled in an expanding spiral that used the dead German as its centre. The shelling was getting closer. Maybe it was approaching dawn and the Germans were planning an offensive. He was exhausted, and to move he had to wrench each side forward and pull the other half of himself even. He found the second man twenty-five yards away, lying face up, a bullet hole in his neck. His rifle was near him and Michael reached for the Mauser, its comforting Aryan precision. A bullet hit two feet away and Michael pointed the Mauser and fired back instinctively, two shots. He looked up but couldn't see anything. The German must be in a crater. He scanned the horizon, looking for the distinctive helmet. His own helmet was gone, lost in the mud somewhere, and his head was slick with clay. A head appeared and fired two shots and Michael fired back but there was only one bullet left. He felt for his Mills grenades but there was nothing there. Eaten by the mud like everything else. A figure came over the hill, standing, bayonet out, stepping awkwardly, trying to run, moving slowly, as if he was running underwater. The man yelled, a guttural sound, his face obscured by mud, a member of some primitive
tribe, his eyes and teeth showing white against the darkness. Michael readied his bayonet and took an unsure step forward to brace himself for the charge. Stumbling forward, the German made a cutting motion, as if scything wheat, and Michael pulled back to miss the sweeping point of the blade and they both fell back. The man was on top of Michael's legs, struggling to climb up, his rifle flailing. His weight, along with the mud that had formed around Michael like a cocoon, was crushing. Michael writhed and gasped for breath and hammered weakly with his rifle. They lurched awkwardly, and Michael's boots pedalled the air, trying to find something solid. They were on the slight incline of a crater and tumbled down slowly with Michael twisting around and grabbing at the man's head. They settled near the bottom in three inches of water, the German face down, Michael's weight pinning him. He pressed the German's face into the mud and held it with all his strength, his arms shaking with the effort and the man finally stopped moving. Michael held him for another minute and then collapsed against the German's back and lost consciousness. Two men welded by mud.

Michael awoke and rolled off. There was a small patch of clear sky and a few stars were visible. He looked at the German's face, an inch away. It was hard to tell how old he was beneath the mud. His hair was grey. He might be fifty.

—What were you? he asked the dead man.

—I cleaned the streets of Magdeburg.

—You liked the work?

—I liked the result.

—You had a wife?

—Marthe. Homely and loyal. I loved her.

—Children?

—Our great tragedy. She was barren.

He drifted back into sleep.

S
omething shook him and Michael woke with a shudder and looked at Corporal Taylor, his thin officious face.

“Mountain Horse. Back with the living.”

Michael looked around. He was lying down. A medic was looking in his kit. The sun was high.

“You were out there three days, Mountain Horse.”

“Three days,” he repeated blankly. He was thirsty, his throat burning. “Water,” he said. Taylor handed him a canteen and he gulped the water.

“Patrol found you. Lucky thing. Damn near missed you. Covered in mud with the dead.” Taylor stood up. “They'll take you back behind lines, get cleaned up. Few days rest. You must be hungry. Mess is over there.”

Michael stood up, unsteady on his feet. He went to the mess table and got a plate of stew and some crusty bread that was soft inside. He ate quickly and drank more water.

An hour later, with a dozen men led by Taylor, Michael marched heavily toward a small farm near a village five miles away. There was an outbuilding that may have held hogs or chickens and inside were four wooden feed troughs that had been converted to bathtubs. The men stripped and gave their clothes to a French woman, who gathered them onto a cart and disappeared, unfazed by the dozen naked bodies. Michael scrubbed uselessly at the lice. After they were clean, they sprinted across the cold earth to a blazing bonfire. In the November air they stood telling stories and jokes as their clothes dried on makeshift racks by the fire.

“Mountain Horse, what the hell was so interesting out there you wanted to spend three days?” asked Poynter, laughing. He was a big man, heavy and meaty, his white skin chafed red in places. He looked like a farm animal. He was holding his testicles and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, swaying in and out of the heat.

Michael smiled. He moved with the flame, tempting it, moving back, feeling the cold air on his back, and repeating the dance.

“Christ must love you. Looked like two hundred pounds of mud when they brought you in.”

“Who brought me in?”

“Soldier from the 31st. Don't know how he dragged you that far on his own.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like you,” Poynter said, laughing again. “Covered in bloody mud.”

The men joked while Michael pondered this. Could it have been Stanford? If it had been someone else, they would have stayed, wouldn't they? Rested, been escorted back to their unit. But Stanford couldn't stay. He was alive, then. If it was him.

When their clothes were dry the men dressed and went to an
estaminet
where they drank wine and sang lewd songs half-heartedly. They were billeted in a barn at the farm where they'd bathed, and as they walked back uncertainly in the dark, Poynter listed the words that rhymed with Fritz. “Shits, fits, wits, sits, pits, hits, flits.” Poynter took a long drunken breath. “Fritz shits in his mitts.”

5

F
RANCE,
1918

The winter was quiet, cold days in the trench, grey time that moved slowly. The two sides were at a stalemate, lined up against one another, sending shells, small raids that yielded little. In the hopeful sun of April, Taylor took Michael aside. “Mountain Horse. You can ride, I gather. Horses. You're a rider.”

“Yes.”

“There's going to be a cavalry run. Rather big. Royal Canadian Dragoons are looking for men. I suggested you.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Grew up with them, I imagine.”

“Yes.”

“Fine. I'll tell them you're on board.”

Michael reported to the Dragoons, who were outside Amiens. Corporal Hensley, efficient and annoying, took him to his horse, a chestnut about seventeen hands high that reminded him of the one he rode down Eighth Avenue. Michael spent some time with the horse, talking in a low musical voice, patting its neck. There were hundreds of horses, moving regally in the large corral, sleek anachronisms. The war was about machines that delivered shells from a mile away, spreading gore, seeding the soil with guts. The cavalry arrived to find they were in the wrong century. But the tanks broke down, defeated by the terrain and abandoned in the muddy sea. And the horses were there, the beautiful relics.

There would be drills in the morning, Hensley told him, and then pointed out the mess tent. Michael got a plate of thin stew and sat at a table with two men. One of them was named Walters, with bristled hair and startled eyes. The other was Dawkins, a rounded, dark-haired man. Both were in their thirties and they had the thousand-yard stare of those who had been here since the beginning.

“Amiens. That's what they're after,” Walters said. “The last battle.”

“The Somme was the last battle,” Dawkins said. “Vimy was the last. Passchendaele,
that
was the last. All of them are the last, Walters.”