A SOMATIC WEIGHT HANGS OVER Quebec City as Harold, Veronica and I tumble out of the Volvo of our driver, a Mrs. Lovage who kindly allowed us to squeeze among several buckets of rhubarb and some sheet metal with which she planned to fix her chimney in Port-neuf-sur-Mer. I cannot, at first, understand how so much golden loveliness hangs over Quebec’s streets, it being the second Monday in September. There are no drifts of blossom and no new bright leaves—in fact the mornings came in cold all last week in Montreal, as I nuzzled cold-snouted with Sophie, chill creeping into our bones. But Quebec City, a day and a half before the anniversary of my battle, is heavy with sumac and late roses. I’ll have to undo my red jacket and tie its sleeves round my waist in order to walk my old hills.

Harold has paperwork: there is a health office on Boulevard Saint-Cyrille Ouest where an official is updating his medical care card, and he wants to visit the office of the registrar of births to find his mother’s death certificate which, he says, will let him access five dollars a day that he is not now receiving as part of his government cheques—it has something to do with his mother’s years of work as a teacher in La Beauce.

“All the government offices are here,” he says. “We both need to go and get our files updated.” He insists the government has not been paying me my due. He says I’m entitled to more than the pittance owed an uninjured veteran: three hundred dollars a month extra, which I have not been receiving. “You should be on the program called social solidarity,” he says, “for persons whose capacity for employment is severely limited—trust me, I know the ins and outs of that.”

In his notepad he has written down enough errands with stars jotted beside them to keep him busy for months, with a special Quebec City section. There’s a wool shop on Rue Saint-Jean where a woman he met three years ago in Tulsa promised to give him a skein of discontinued pea-green silk. He has a fourth cousin whose friend inhabits a cellar crammed in one of the higgledy-piggledy alleys between the Grande Alleé and Abraham’s Heights: Harold has scrawled the address in his notebook as constituting a possible couch to sleep on. Finally, he has a bone to pick with a program officer named Yvette Leblanc at la campagne sur la santé mentale on Rue Jacques-Parizeau.

We agree to meet at eight thirty on the morning of my anniversary, September thirteenth, on the stools at Dépanneur Bonenfant where coffee’s fifty cents and the toast is complimentary. Harold and Veronica will sleep at the flat of his fourth cousin’s acquaintance and I will sleep on the plains.