If you could see this shore and its desolate bogs and stones, you’d ask yourself the questions I ask. You know I never plunder, but we were forced to seize the dried and salted cod that would have seen these families through the winter. We were instructed to let nothing remain that might reach and help sustain the fortress at Quebec.

I tried to help the fishermen and their families. I offered to let them keep their boats so they might retreat. I gave explicit command that their women were not to be harmed. But who can guarantee the effectiveness of such a command when one’s men are barbarians and their actions easily hidden by these wretched fir and spruce trees with old man’s beard dangling off the twigs and smoke from the burning houses and barns obscuring the whole shore?

Our clothing was worse than unsuitable—our breeches where mosquitoes burrowed and sucked, our insupportable hats, our shoes whose leather fell sodden even as we approached the man-eating bogs. Our white leggings blotted our own blood from flies’ bellies as we slapped and squashed them too late to prevent itching welts. I said nothing of this to my father—we never whined to one another about personal discomfort.

Our shorthand for the destruction of the fishing families in 1758 along that part of the river was “great exploit.” My father and I had both done the same on other coasts. We knew that in the British army, “great exploit” is a fine headline for Britons to read in the London Evening Post over their black pudding, though we soldiers perceived no greatness in our campaign.

And yet: today Vigneault sings to me.

The fisherman’s son reminds me it’s not quite true that my father and I did not whinge.

My father complained loud and long. “Britain produces shiploads of money,” he lamented, “but all of it for Sweet William, the king’s son, and for all sorts of dreary German nobles, while here I must badger treasurers like a beggar to see a penny of my salary years after I’m owed it.”

Maybe there’s a smaller difference between a Quebec fisherman’s family and my own than England’s kings might wish its soldiers to believe.

What’s Vigneault singing now? Though my French is good I find his poetry almost too elusive to catch:

When you die of our love,

I’ll plant in the garden a morning flower

half metal, half paper,

that will cut my foot just enough

to let a stain of blood fall to earth

and become its own flower…

As he sings, that phenomenon occurs where I become certain I glimpse a person whom I’ve loved, but who is dead.