He can be remembered in bronze or in stone or only in the wind, yet all memory is a failed mirror.

Here come the barrens…hills stretch into the distance, snow on their round tops: rivulets fill the land’s crevices and cleavages.

So many things are the same between my two lives as I walk this road linking villages whose fishing nets Wolfe ripped and burned, toward my own forgotten village.

I have surveyed moor…desert…does the terrain’s name matter? Land outspans army and king. It outlives us, and will out-breathe us. Does the year of any given campaign—Dettingen, Culloden, Quebec, Ghundy Ghar—do its dates mean a thing? I dig up human bones everywhere—no matter where we fight a war, that land holds bones in it from previous warriors. I dig them up, shovel sand to pile on rock to pile on more sand, bones falling on me, pile ’em higher to make cover.

Shovels are the same throughout time.

Alone, I dig femur, sand and clavicle; I dig stones and myriad little bones of someone’s feet, delicate and connected and graceful as the armature of birds. A man might spread his fingers and toes and rise up out of the land having become avian, become weightless, become mobile and all-seeing.

But nowhere have I been more alone than I was in that peeling saltbox after Madame Blanchard had to leave me eleven summers ago. As summer ended I burrowed under quilts she had made in her healthier days: her pink one with the green rose leaves, or the orange zigzag number with the crocheted edge like symmetrical seaweed or a scallop shell’s crenellated hem. I kept La Grignotine Louise in business buying their Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs as well as mini ravioli because of the pop-top tins that do not need a can-opener and can be stacked on the bedroom floor, there being no heart in me for getting up and descending into the root cellar to face potatoes with their malevolent and overwhelmingly populous stolons, active in the otherwise comforting dark. The stolons, white and probing, turn into ghost-fingers that would like me to join them underground.

The stolons await me now again—I sense them already in this foyer to my solitude. Here the land lies, grasses sing under the wind’s voice, earth makes love to wind’s touch, the ground is pierced and made lonelier by cries of geese and crows—nothing is more fearsome than this land’s power to annihilate a man all by itself.

And a king believes he has subdued it?