I guess Sophie thought that once I walked the Plains of Abraham I would return to normalcy, to being Jimmy Blanchard, perhaps even be able to have an ordinary life with her, working together at the snack van in summers, going to Montreal for the autumn and winter seasons, with her working at the Mission and me, well, she always had the notion that I could, if I pulled myself together, qualify for a subsidized bedsit and find a half-decent job like hers.

But my plan has always been different. My plan was that I might, like Wolfe, finally sleep. I believed he and I were destined to become one man on this same road. And I planned to fling my breast here upon the Spout and fall, in triumph, to join him.

I’ve managed, over eleven Septembers, to coax myself right to the edge of this Spout, balance on its ledge and hover over the column of spume so that it soaks my face. Years ago I couldn’t get this close. People say there are some who, upon reaching a ledge like this, would involuntarily hurl themselves over it with a compulsion that has nothing to do with suicide—but I am not that kind of man. My reluctance to balance here has been precisely because I know that I’ve always planned to fall.

How many soldiers get to choose this dynamic a grave, one that never stops rising and falling, heaving, breathing—calling out in the voice of loud waters to a coastline where all the birds, all the hares and partridges, the caribou and snowy owls and voles and seals and whales, hear the cataract’s lament? Men in the desert don’t get this grave. Elwyn will never have it. Montcalm and Wolfe have not found it. This is the one consolation being an ordinary soldier wins me. My own rushing waters, constant as the brook flowing from the Westerham hills behind Wolfe’s boyhood home, loud as the falls at Montmorency that Wolfe heard each day of his siege…I get my own, personal, ever-gushing geyser of sorrow.

Do not think I haven’t longed for this. It was to be my reward upon visiting Wolfe’s Quebec battleground. Alone, gloriously alone, I could have done it. Do not think I don’t have it in me.

Across the chasm, patient and golden, sits my companion.

Harold told me to keep her for as long as it takes.

He has given me instructions on how to live with Veronica as a workmate, how not to spoil her industry or her training.

Have you ever sat across the chasm of death and looked into a working dog’s eyes?

I haven’t seen anything close to that gaze anywhere except on the battlefield itself, in the eyes of a brother soldier, each prepared to die for the other.