“I might not know my own real name, or the name of my original hometown where the woman called Noémie gave me up to social services, but I knew when I came home from Ghundy Ghar I wanted to look out from Madame Blanchard’s landing, past Cap-d’Espoir to Anticosti and the North Atlantic then Newfoundland where Elwyn spent nineteen years of his life without my having an inkling he existed. If I looked long enough I saw him in the fog.

“I’d stay and I’d watch and I’d drive Madame Blanchard nuts, not doing anything, not cutting firewood or helping around the house, hardly recognizing her except to sit and eat cod and potatoes she’d leave for me with a plate turned over it on the stove. She wanted me to go to the city, to Montreal, to get help. Finally, in the middle of summer 2007 when her own health gave out and she had to go to La Résidence Dernière Rose, what was I to do? I paced the floorboards, stayed up all night, didn’t eat properly. I started remembering more and more about James Wolfe, how no one understood him the way I did, not even in school when I was a boy, long before I knew anything about a real battlefield.”

“You felt you were the one who really knew him,” replied Harold.

“Yes. I spent the whole latter part of that summer alone in the house thinking of him, comparing myself with him and falling far short, at first.”

“You felt yourself a lesser soldier than he was?”

“Of course. Next to James Wolfe, James Blanchard of B Squadron really was a nobody—a twenty-one-year-old redhead nobody from Bougainville.”

“So being James Wolfe made you a somebody.”

“I lay on the daybed with my eyes shut, willing Wolfe to help me, to impart something of himself to me, make me more like him. I spent July and August begging him for that. Then September came and I was forced to venture outside as the nights were getting cold and I’d no more fuel for the stove. I climbed down to the beach to find driftwood and that’s when I met Sophie, working in Germain Medosset’s van.”

“And by that time, Wolfe had become part of you.”

“Without having come to know the heroic Wolfe as I did through that lonely time, James Blanchard would continue to be just another ruined soldier trying to find his way back home. Sophie calls it my dead-end delusion.”

“Hmm.”

“You don’t call it that, too?”

“I don’t call it anything like a delusion,” Harold says. “I call it the heaviest possible dose of reality.”

26 Bright Game

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13.

NOON.

The Plains of Abraham. Quebec City, Quebec