Little-red-dimpled not-mine cannot fall asleep. He has wandered Montreal all day in his red coat and here he is tonight, still little and red, and once again he belongs to no one.

I turn to Sophie’s painted walrus and whisper, “I need real help.”

Sometimes when Sophie is pretending to be asleep, she will throw her voice like a ventriloquist and make the walrus on the tent wall speak.

“Before I died, I had hoped,” I whisper, “that man as a species was moving—inching, to be sure, but progressing nevertheless—toward some greater purpose….”

“A greater porpoise,” mocks the walrus.

“I know I’m slight,” I tell it. “I’m thin and insubstantial, I know that, but I wanted to do something big for England.”

“Hmm…slight, yes. I see a parasitic whelk, a very tiny one, though it seems to believe in its heart that it is quite big.”

Rain hits the tent and damp filters into the sleeping bag.

“I tried to secure new territory, a home for Britain’s genius and evolution!”

“Right.”

“I mean—you know religion’s a delusion I never entertained—but I’m talking about the humanitarian soul of a nation. I hoped boys like Gus and Joe at Le Petit Québec—boys who became soldiers with me to gain a pay of mere crusts and breeches—I really thought the New World was supposed to give them a chance at a parcel of ground.”

“Ground you figured nobody else was using.”

“I gave ordinary boys a chance only privileged Englishmen knew before….I believed a seed in these youths could, in the New World I won for them, become glorious as Milton, or a second Cromwell….But the rich squash them here, just like they did at home! Geography transforms itself—or I thought it would—into psychological space, into freedom for the mind. The point of my efforts was that ordinary Englishmen might possess this land and flourish on it….”

“Excuse me,” mutters the walrus, “while I regurgitate this clam breakfast into your tricorne.”

“Instead, I find the old, weary bondage. I never claimed to be altruistic. I knew if we didn’t annex the New World, the bottom would fall out of England’s economy and ruin us all.”

“No more cucumber sandwiches.”

“But surely, a secondary good coming from our empire should have been that a youth having any spark might thrive here. Yet the poor toil here unexalted as ever. As for the well-provided, their banal crowing echoes the clang of trussell on planchet under every New World moment: a relentless strike of metal into coin.”

“I’m sorry, I’m half-asleep….Did you say something about the Second Coming?”

I give up. Rain patters on the tent.

Rain understands me. I welcome it in this place where all softness or questioning…all poetry or intelligence, has drained into the ground.

17 Watermelons

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9.

MORNING.

The Riverbank. Montreal, Quebec