Look—there’s the boulder marking the border beyond which I’ve walked ten Septembers, and now this eleventh, from bog, from stony ground, from that desolate beach where no one but the summer snack-van attendant remembers my name, though she insists on diminishing it to Jimmy.

“Soph!”

The only reply is geese heading south in a noisy, honking V, abandoning the lonesome Gaspé, the place Sophie has always urged me to leave.

Likely she’s already pitched our tent on Mont Royal and hopped the orange line to the mission. Filled out her seasonal work forms, begun mopping floors, stacking Habitant soup tins, listening to every squeegee kid or drunk widower, every vagabond soldier…and quite unable to hear me.

Pure peat surrounding my boulder is easy to dig barehanded, though peat takes two thousand years to form. Compared with that, what’s any soldier’s puny history?

I retrieve my fanny pack with all my ID cards—expired by now, but vital if I ever try to renew them, according to Sophie. Update yourself, she yelled as we parted last September. Fight for your military pension. Bloody well visit Madame Blanchard and get your ancient papers sorted out! Stop obsessing about the number eleven. Eleven, eleven, that’s all I hear about from you, your endless Gregorian chant. This is how she views my need to recover the time fate cheated from me long ago.

September 3 through 13—that last being the number that marks the very anniversary of my death on Abraham’s plains. These are the lost days I hired Sophie, a decade ago, to help me find. At least, that is how I have understood our bargain. But like the birches dotting this Gaspé coast, our agreement now feels ethereal and broken, ready to scatter into bright, white paper pieces.

—

WHAT SOPHIE DOESN’T KNOW is that last year, near the end of our usual eleven days, I found a great cache of my old letters. I spied an article in the Montreal Gazette saying they’d been bought by the Fisher Library in Toronto for a million and a half dollars. Of course, I got on the bus to Toronto immediately. Imagine: every letter I’d ever written to my mother, and a few to my father, and my one plea to my beloved George Warde, ink and paper beautiful and intact. But by the time I arrived, a Mrs. Waugh had installed herself for days, sopping the nuance out of my letters laid in their sparkling cradles of archival sponge. I had to stifle my alarm.

Don’t salivate!

Stop cracking my spine!

Treat my letters like the creatures they are: papery skin, insubstantial bone….

I could have whispered every living word of those letters into her ear, though I’d inked my last full stop 238 years before, on the banks of the Saint Lawrence.