“Absolutely. Knitting is an important part of the world’s healing process, so it needs to be seen. We use the idea of knitting all the time to talk about this. We talk about bones being knit or mended after they’ve been broken. We talk about knitting relationships back together after they’ve been torn apart. And my knitting is another way of bringing that healing about. And it takes time. I’m talking about sitting at an important meeting or in the battlefield for three or four good long hours of deep knitting. It’s hard work.”

He glistens with sweat thinking about it. I see he is talking about real exertion.

“I’m engaged,” he says. “I’m part of the proceedings. I’m not concentrating on the knitting. In reality, I’m not knitting at all.”

—

I LEAVE HAROLD BEHIND ON the plains.

I turn back once, to see him knitting at the foot of Montcalm’s stone. Harold said he will stay on the plains throughout this anniversary day of Wolfe’s death. For me he will loop the yarn around his needles while the ghost of my battle unfolds. In his golden shirt, looping the green yarn, he is the living image of Mrs. Waugh’s mysterious second tarot card: the two of pentacles, the one neither she nor I understood.

All this day and night of the thirteenth of September, Harold promises, he will remain on the site in my stead, brightness beaming off him in the midst of the battlefield. Smoke and fire, drums and death-screams will not obscure him. I leave him, high-visibility Harold in his yellow sweatshirt, seated on the grass knitting to the heartbeat of Ronnie, my not-yet-fallen drummer.

I climb down from the plains, their incline now so gentle, their embankment lazy and easy as the herring gull gliding in air currents over the Saint Lawrence River. I hear her needle-thin cry flung aloft and raining down on me this admonishment: Climb on, General Wolfe. Don’t involve me in your memories and your regrets—I’m above all that.

I follow the path of the school bus driving the students of Rimouski home: the bridge, the highway, walking and hitching ride after ride.

Vachon cake truck—

Nun’s red Yaris—

Drifter’s nicotine-stinking wagon—

Beer truck to the junction—

Back to this unmarked stretch on my Gaspé, between L’Anse Pleureuse and Manche-d’Épée without an ice hockey arena or even a road-sign warning motorists to watch for moose. No human is here to watch me reach the place where I leave James Wolfe behind.

Too soon, I approach signs of my return to life as Jimmy Blanchard: vetch leaves turning brown in the ditch, goldenrod high and going to seed, fireweed with its hot purple feathers waving overland to the estuaries.

27 Stolons

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13.

EVENING.

The Gaspé, Quebec

A MAN CAN BE IMPORTANT yet completely misunderstood.