Neither was it the rifles, nor the lieutenant’s enticements, nor the mechanical grasshopper squatting on the schoolyard dirt, glittering in parts but cavernous, a matte-dark foreboding in its manifold niches and inset grooves and important compartments, hundreds of these, folded or punched into the dark metal as if by manipulations of a robot genius. You could hide secret messages in any of a hundred niches or slots or little cubes of space. You could stick money in there, coins folded up in paper money. There were places where you could stuff a couple of bologna sandwiches for later.

The tank was a geometrically crumpled mountain of latent power.

I was very interested in it.

But the tank was not the element of recruitment day that won me. I was essentially unwinnable—I wanted books and solitude and would have been content to spend the summer of 2003 lying under our wild crabapples like this one here on the Plains of Abraham, except they were spring crabapples on that day, gnarled and interlaced and newly wind-robbed of the blossom clusters that dressed their gesticulations like insane gypsy brides.

But the visiting lieutenant had a young soldier with him—a boy from Luscious Bite—that’s how I heard the name of his village. Imagine a place called that, I thought, and this boy had come from it.

I searched for the outport with that name on maps of Quebec and the world that Madame Blanchard had Scotch-taped over our woodstove. Days and weeks after the general left town with that boy I looked, and never found it. I never knew until Elwyn wrote it on my hand for me two years later that the name was Lushes Bight, a tiny place, almost never found on any map. But Elwyn had a map that contained it, and I saw it with my own eyes on the northeast coast of the island of Newfoundland, a coast even more desolate and lichened and brine-encrusted than my Gaspé.

These plains are bucolic in comparison.

How long have I slept under this September crabapple?

Under my head, my envelope of papers is dew-damp and so is Wolfe’s coat.