What I know is different. I have intercepted a deep-hearted sadness. You have become present to me, in the way of those I loved and whose bodies I have held but are now gone: my mother, my grandmothers, my grandfathers, each of whom has known love and loss and war.

Do souls depart?

You think not, I suspect.

I remember you, as I remember the faded presence of departed beloveds. Perhaps memory of a person is one thing, and the real, present person another, like a body separated from its shadow. I am, in your case, flooded by your memory without having touched you. As I walked your death-ground last autumn I mourned a soldier I feel I remember. Not in the flesh—rather, you were a light-body slipping through me.

I miss that light now. These pages are what remain.

Faithfully yours,

Genevieve Waugh

Part I: Yellow Man

1 Gregorian Chant

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2017.

AFTERNOON.

Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec

“SOPHIE!” I WAIL, BUT THESE barrens swallow my voice.

Behind me recede northern lakes, distant peaks draped with snow. Here come little bridges, fragile fences…I check the ditches, always check the ditches, because if I’ve learned one thing it’s that I’m not, in fact, invincible—one minute you’re fine then in a split second—fuck! Elwyn…

Is nobody around?

“Sophie!”

I’ve got no route-clearing equipment with me here, nothing but my eyes to check the culverts and ravines, that wadi up ahead—but no, it’s a harmless peat gully—am I back in Scotland, then?

Sophie would know. Far ahead of me, she has probably already pitched our tent. Not in Scotland, no…our tent is in…Montreal, that’s right. It was 1745 when I was in Scotland—god, was I only eighteen?

Here come the birches. I have to keep reminding Sophie that it’s easy to wonder where the hell I am, for the birches of Scotland and much of that land are one with this Gaspé outcrop, bitten off the same biscuit of ancient earth.

But Sophie has grown very impatient. Threatens this is the last September she’ll work with me. “It’ll be our eleventh year,” she warned last fall. “One for each day you claim was stolen off you. Jesus, Jimmy, why haven’t you come to your senses long before now?”

There is nothing wrong with my senses, especially my hearing. War’s din roars in my lugs like the sea in a pair of old shells: Elwyn screaming for me to haul him into our Coyote amid mortars and radio static, you don’t know whether the fire’s Russian or American, you don’t know what you’re hearing, all I know is Elwyn’s down that goat trail, he’s crawled behind the rubble, and meanwhile the head of Ned, my little brother, still rolls in Dettingen like a kicked pig-bladder.