Mothers have the wrong status to go interfering in a soldier’s life when that soldier gets infected with romance. Mothers know they have no say: they are women, they are roses on the wane, they are the past generation. They’ve begun looking upriver to the source instead of downstream to that thrilling unknown. They are not beloved, and if they were—if some mother was strangely beloved by her son or daughter with a rare and heartbreaking intimacy—the child would still clamour to be one with the vivid stream snaking out of the village.

Madame Blanchard picked up the phone when she read the note saying the recruiters were coming. I heard her tell the principal he might as well invite the Pied Piper of Hamelin to our village. He must have asked her to repeat this, which she did a couple of times before hanging up gently and looking sadly out the window at our rhubarb and our blackcurrant bush.

I did not protest when she made phone calls like this, or when she visited the school to complain. When you are a foster boy from away, when you are spindly and pale, and you like talking about books with girls, you are already far from any hope of gaining approval in our village. Already boys shouted at me in the schoolyard, “Va-t’en, criss de tapette!”

The recruiting lieutenant outlined what would be in store for us glorious sons and daughters of Bougainville and Percé and Port-Daniel–Gascons. We’d amount to all a youth could hope to be or become or give. There would, he said, be a lot of giving: an extravaganza of elevated sacrifice. We’d learn the meaning of living, not the mundane meaning for which rural youths so tragically settled. And so on.

His heroic rhetoric was not the element that won me.

We were close to the start of summer holidays, about to be unloosed to reclaim softball bats in a blaze of hawkweed. We were to go trout fishing in La Rivière Malbaie, and climb that precipice shadowing the over-fall where every boy in Bougainville worth his life would jackknife down to the cold green pool below. It was not a wide pool and not always deep enough: once in a generation someone sliced his skull and released brains full of fresh algebra into Minnow Gulch.

The mothers said no. They spent wretched time beside the toaster, picking a shrivelled leaf from the coleus plant, scratching dried maple syrup off the kitchen table with a thumbnail. Don’t go, don’t dive in Minnow Gulch like Stéphane Durocher. Don’t come home from Afghanistan in a body bag like Guillaume Macdonald.

Mothers invoked the dead names, but no one listened. It remained each mother’s lot to flap her gums in the wind.

Madame Blanchard was a very good foster mother, almost the same, in every respect, as my real mother.