At last I have stood on Quebec’s famous battlefield and know it ludicrous—as with all the other battlefields I have seen, or Wolfe has seen, or Elwyn DeMaldaire or George Warde or any other soldier has seen—ludicrous to call the land owned, conquered, taken by one small group of men who do not even plan to stay on it.

Heaven help me, here comes the chasm, the boiling fissure of the Spout!

Its geyser rises, a pillar with its exploding silver head just waiting for me to succumb. Who hasn’t wanted to fling himself on it and descend—what a rush it’d be, what a way to go dark, down with the herring and the seals. Weeds and brine and water-music then nothingness, no pain…why have I made it wait?

What waits for me at Madame Blanchard’s empty house?

Alone last February I kicked my way under the frozen tarp covering the cut spruce in the yard. Alone I sharpened the axe to make splits and start a fire.

Alone I slept late and retired at five o’clock and felt a pounding in my ears like the sea. Alone I climbed the stairs to the landing and tried to look out toward Elwyn’s homeland, tried to imagine that he had returned there, though he has not; tried to picture him eating breaded chops with his sister and mother, a dessert of homemade bread slathered in clotted cream and jam.

Alone, I cried in the creaking bed under whose iron frame sits Madame Blanchard’s willow-ware pisspot that has quite a nice English scene on it. Alone, I read, or tried to read, old newspapers and National Geographics, and, always, my beloved history books.

In corners of Madame Blanchard’s house has grown a black mould—not an onslaught; mere lines, lacy and delicate. I find it pretty, like frost ferns, only dark. Mould enjoys the chill, it likes aloneness.

Alone in that house I gathered my stories about the English hero Wolfe under my covers and gleaned more about him than I’d ever known as a boy. Wolfe, who for so many, like Tippet and Galbraith—those thugs of my childhood now working in the oil sands—remains a forgotten antique. Anything not in the books, any gap in his letters, occupied my solitude until James Wolfe’s days transpired again with golden clarity in what has otherwise been Trooper James Blanchard of Squadron B’s fog of…is it envy? Is it, as Sophie claims, depression? Or is it that yearning all soldiers like me feel to act, to matter, to make even a tiny difference in this world?