“He lay here,” I insist, “yesterday in the afternoon, right where I lie now, then he sank away—he was one of mine, wasn’t he? You told me to come back at night and you’d tell me his name.”

Not one of yours.

Is it the animal I hear, or wind in the crabapple?

Or do the Plains of Abraham themselves possess a voice?

We hold him in safekeeping, as we safeguard all the lost.

Have I spent too many nights with Sophie and her walrus and her teachings so irrelevant to a man of my brutality?

Is the marmot not both silent and insignificant?

Let us hold safe the spirit remains of the lad, our red-haired Wolfe…

“You think he is yours!” I exclaim to the creature.

And of the beautiful Montcalm. And of the undetermined number of Amérindiens anonymes and British and Scots and Acadians whose blood is here with that of Wolfe, whom you wish to be but are not.

The plains and their animals and their wind and their whispering tree fall silent.

“If he’s yours,” I say, “if you hold Wolfe in your safekeeping, and he is not within me and I am not him, then who am I in the night, lost in September on his Plains of Abraham?”

Do the plains call me by that name I’ve feared since I heard the taunt in my Gaspé schoolyard?

Va-t’en!

Criss de tapette!

De fieffés imbéciles!

Get lost, Jimmy Blanchard.

25 Deathstalker

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13.

MORNING.

The Plains of Abraham. Quebec City, Quebec

THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS to forgive. Some are heinous, others small.

The last time I saw Madame Blanchard, she said, “I hope you’ll forgive me about the onions.”

“What onions?”

“The onions I used to fry every day as you were coming in from school. I wanted it to smell nice and homey for you, coming in. I never knew what I was going to do with the onions from one supper to the next. I started doing it the day you came home and said supper cooking in other boys’ houses made your mouth water. Fish cakes, caribou cakes—Madame Rivard and Madame Brunet were always cooking delicious things. I just wasn’t that kind of mother,” said Madame Blanchard. “If I had been, you might not be so skinny.”

But it was not the things Madame Blanchard was or was not that drew me in on recruitment day at school.