“No,” I argued. We allowed ourselves three brandies apiece and I had downed my second. “When I am gone, after you and I succumb together to our longed-for oblivion with which this war will so graciously oblige us if we play our cards right, my king will send British governors of far greater acuity than Bigot or Vaudreuil, and they will institute a more merciless and pecuniary English rule than the French will ever be able to fathom and from which no Frenchman can find succor, save from piercing his own heart to end the half-life of England’s utilitarianism.”

“Nonsense,” countered Montcalm. “When I am gone, the second after my body succumbs on the plains, Vaudreuil and Bigot will confiscate all the spoils the British thought to commandeer from our people, and sell it back to them for the price of seven generations’ wages, with the right of priests to seize their daughters and sons under fourteen years of age for their beds for the same number of generations with a slice of eternity thrown in.”

“When I am gone,” I replied, “with French shot in my loins and my scalp dangling in your savage allies’ hands, England will establish the finest schools it knows how: every hall and lecturer bound by proclamation to entrench the tyranny of Lord, Earl and King—all tremulous or nascent wisdom and philosophy banished to the insane, the penniless, the homeless wanderer sucking his outlawed drop from the last wild brook….”

And so Montcalm and I continued, our valour cast off, our lamentations studded with forbidden complaints about the bog, the flies, the excruciating loneliness of the white-throated sparrow’s chorus, the scrawny, inhospitable trees.

And then we got back to work.

—

HOW YOU SCALP A CANADIAN is that you jam your hobnails between his scrawny shoulder blades as his nostrils fill with the scent of Labrador tea, which soon mingles, unfortunately, with the stench of his terror-propelled excrement.

You grasp a tuft of his greasy locks and haul skyward till his brow furrows like benevolent English sands at low tide. How I miss those sands!

I miss their soft-yet-hard bumps under my bare feet as I dimpled that shiny blue wetness reflecting a Kentish sky. I miss digging for winkles and boiling them in seawater beside a little fire, picking the meat out with one of my mother’s hairpins while I rested my head on her thigh.

There was always an unspoken rift between the son she wanted and the man I am.