Kanata (25 page)

Stanford's integumentary system was good. Nervous system, joint and osseous systems, special senses. Teeth, gums, tongue. Good good and good. The doctor handed him a sheet of paper with a series of checked boxes and shook his hand.

He enlisted with the 31st Alberta Battalion, and in the optimism of that first autumn they left Calgary on a train to Montreal. A thousand people were at the station, hanging
on to one another in small, shifting dances. All those boys. Stanford had grown to his full height, his blue-black hair combed back, and wearing the uniform added five years and Michael stared at this transformation. Catherine held Stanford tight and kissed him on the lips and touched his hair. “I'll be careful,” he said softly.

Michael shook hands with his brother and they embraced and Stanford said, “You take care of things.”

“I'll be there in two years,” Michael said.

“It'll be over in six months.”

Stanford got on the train, a crush of uniformed bodies, all waving and blowing kisses. The train pulled away slowly and half the crowd instinctively moved with it, sending their love.

Michael and his mother rode back to Cochrane with Dunstan O'Connell, who had said goodbye to his own son, Colin. Michael sat in the back. His mother was in the front seat, listening to O'Connell, whose wife had died five years earlier and who was now working his way toward Catherine's heart as slowly as a winter cattle drive. A gentle rain began to fall. O'Connell's big raw hands gripped the wheel like he was trying to kill it. After eight painful silent miles, he managed, “You're a handsome woman, Catherine.” When she didn't respond, he just kept his eyes on the road and gripped the wheel tighter. Michael stared out on the pastures, wishing lightning would strike the car.

Every day Michael rode to Cochrane and checked the news of the war, which was posted outside the newspaper offices. At night, he sometimes woke up to his mother's fractured cries. One night he saw her in front of the house in her nightgown, staring at the stars, singing, and
shifting rhythmically from one foot to the other. In his room, Michael plotted troop movements on a map of Europe that he had sketched onto four deer hides stitched together and stretched over a wooden frame. The map was drawn meticulously to scale from the Brown & Attlee Atlas his mother had given them; to the south, it ended with Spain, to the north, Russia. Who knew how much territory, how many countries would be involved? He wrote the names of the battalions in blue ink with red arrows and dates to show their progress. The symbol for Stanford was a delicately sketched red eagle feather, currently outside St. Eloi. In a notebook he listed the populations of Germany, Britain, Canada, and France, and the reported casualties from each. It was a race to see which country ran out of people first.

T
he months leading up to Michael's eighteenth birthday went slowly and each week the unspoken issue of his enlistment became larger. He didn't see that he had a choice. And he ached to be there, to find Stanford. Michael wrote him letters, telling him about O'Connell, who had come calling and who sat in their parlour for an hour looking like a heifer on the killing floor. Their mother told O'Connell that ranchers were like bulls in the bedroom, and that she had no interest in it, none. O'Connell looked even more doleful and ate another piece of cake. Michael thought that if he offered the man a pistol, he might happily shoot himself.

O
n Saturday morning, Michael rode out to Jumping Pound Creek and set up targets. The trees had begun to
bud but the early-May air was still cool. He made crude wooden targets using cross-sections of fir picked up from the Ghost River sawmill. He drew detailed German faces on them, with black moustaches and helmets and menacing features and scars. These heads were nailed onto poplar limbs, fashioned into enemy soldiers that he placed on the flood plain. Closer in he had empty forty-ounce lard tins, and closer still were jars that had once held tomatoes and pickles, near enough that he could experience their comforting explosions. He had a rifle of his own, and a Colt pistol that was given to him by O'Connell that his mother didn't know about. O'Connell also gave him three hundred rounds for the pistol, part of the war effort, he told Michael, a bribe that had yet to bear any fruit. After school on most days Michael rode over to O'Connell's and worked the horses that he was raising for the cavalry. O'Connell had thick grey hair and sad brown eyes and every day he looked like he was mourning something. Michael could see that he expected help or guidance or at least complicity regarding his mother, and he was careful not to offer any. So O'Connell moped by the fence as Michael rode the horses, bringing them into line. Like Stanford, he had become expert at breaking horses, whispering and soothing and riding them until they were quiet.

Michael took a few long shots, lying still, the rifle propped against a piece of deadfall. Then he backed up and charged with his pistol, firing at the lard tins and jars, feeling the satisfaction of each hit. When the targets were all down, he walked over to the large rock that slanted into Jumping Pound Creek and sat there to bait his line. Above him swallows weaved tight concentric circles around the nests built on the rock face. The sun was warm and he was
comfortable in his wool shirt. After an hour, he had three good-sized trout, which he gutted and filleted with his bone-handled knife and then fried over a small fire.

He set up all the targets again, arranging the Germans in new poses, grouped tightly and advancing toward him. He tried angling their heads slightly, making a smaller target. Another hour went by in glorious battle.

His battlefield heroics were interspersed with manufacturing the perfect girl to leave. He began with her sympathetic eyes, which were brown, and filled with a sorrow and pain (and muted desire) at his leaving, at the possibility of his not returning. She was beautiful and dark haired, and talked to him of war and its injustice. Michael comforted her, and during their long walks she whispered that she couldn't live without him. When he tired of going over the same territory and couldn't think of anything to refine (her face already like a goddess, her breasts perfection), he threw in arbitrary traits; she could ride, she made him a blueberry pie, she taught him how to waltz. Occasionally they had a baby who looked just like her.

When he got home, his mother said, “Go and change. We have company for dinner.”

“Who?”

“Change.” She returned to the kitchen.

Michael went up to his room and checked his map. Stanford went from Armentières to Ypres and then toward St. Eloi with the Alberta 31st, which was being used as a feeder battalion to replace casualties. Gas had been unleashed at Ypres, the drifting greenish yellow cloud hugging the ground, invading the French trenches, leaving grotesque corpses behind. One hundred and sixty tons of chlorine gas a half mile deep. The English hospitals were
filled with men who had blood blisters the size of walnuts, their skin darkened, breath poisoned. This new style of warfare had caught them by surprise, and outside the post office in Cochrane Michael got uninformed versions of this horror from whoever was loitering there.

Company could only mean O'Connell. Who else? Michael put on his dark wool pants and the white collarless shirt with pale charcoal stripes. How did this come about, he wondered. He sat on his bed staring at the map and gathering his dread, then went downstairs.

When the knock at the door came, Catherine opened it and there was O'Connell, his hair slicked with something, dressed for church, a melancholy salmon come to dash himself against the rocks. In one hand were a bunch of wildflowers.

Catherine invited him in and took the flowers and disappeared. O'Connell joined Michael on the couch and they talked about the war.

At dinner, O'Connell said, “I think poison gas is about the lowest thing a man can do in war.” He realized that he had articulated the danger their respective sons were in and a silence slowly filled the room. As he struggled soundlessly with the roast chicken, Michael imagined this silence expanding out to the foothills, where it would eventually quieten the coyotes, the cattle, the birds, the West. He knew his mother's epic capacity for stillness.

After what seemed like an hour, O'Connell looked up from his plate and said evenly, “I have my own property and I have never mistreated another human being and have never voted Liberal and I don't think I deserve this.”

Catherine looked at him and for the first time, it seemed, noticed he was there.

Michael stood up and took the plates to the safety of the
kitchen. He did the dishes and swept the floor and could hear talking. Whether this was a good or bad thing he couldn't decide.

T
he parade down Eighth Avenue was led by a piper, a man with wild hair and a kilt, his face liver coloured, eyes mad with effort as he piped them along. Michael was on a chestnut mare that he broke at O'Connell's, trotting slowly past the grateful city, the stenographers waving shyly, the men applauding.

At the train station, Catherine held him for three full minutes, clutching him tightly, then turned to go. On the way home in O'Connell's car, she took out the photograph he had given her, taken in a Calgary studio in full uniform. Michael had reached his full height, more than six feet, slimmer and taller than Stanford, and with his mother's dark eyes. The backdrop in the photograph was a painted clouded sky, a Roman scene with broken pillars and pedestals, the pageantry of war. Michael's face had an unpractised grimness that the photographer had coaxed out of him, the boy inhabiting a foreign landscape that he had no claim to. Catherine examined it all the way back to Cochrane.

T
hree days later, a letter arrived. It was from Stanford, addressed to Michael, and Catherine waited a week before opening it.

2

F
RANCE,
1916

In the chalk hills that run southeast from Thiepval, in a cave dug into the earth, two German officers played chess on a large board with heroically sized military pieces. An oiled machine gun sat by the window covered with a piece of canvas. The morning sun came in through the narrow slit and landed on one of the Germans, bisecting him with a brilliant vertical stripe that bleached his sculpted head and turned his blond hair white. They'd spent months digging in, and now the hills were a honeycomb of caves and tunnels that bristled with weapons.

In September the Australians took Pozières and the Canadians were sent in to help take Mouquet Farm, north of Pozières.

Michael sat in the trench with the rest of his battalion, lined up in crooked, nervous miles. He had been shocked when he first saw this landscape, its barrenness, an abstraction of land, the prize itself a ruin. The horizon on all sides revealed not a tree or house or sign of life. A colourless world.

The artillery barrage began before dawn. Michael sat for an hour listening to the heavy explosions. The soldier across from him was half asleep, a slumped pile. He opened his eyes and looked at Michael. He was maybe nineteen.

“Those our guns or theirs?” he asked.

“Ours.”

“That's a comfort.”

It wasn't. Regiments had been wiped out by their own guns. That was the rumour.

“This doesn't look like any country I've ever seen,” the soldier said. “I guess I imagined something different. Looks like hell after a rainstorm.” He lit a cigarette, cupping it carefully. “I heard they're about ready to call her quits. I hope they pick tonight.”

They stared at the sky, heavy grey clouds that were low.

“We go over the top this morning,” the soldier said.

“That's the order,” Michael said.

“First one has surprise on his side. Second man has a chance. Everyone after that is a target, I figure. I'm going first.”

Maybe the first man was the target, Michael thought. The Germans had their rifles trained on the trench and the first thing that presented itself drew twenty bullets.

The sergeant, a heavy-set man named Cross, crouched along the trench, mustering them, motioning the men up the ladders. The first wave was torn apart by sniper fire and
machine guns. Michael crawled over the lip and flattened against the earth, which was without any natural smell, a sponge for blood, lead, and gas. His hearing was deadened by the big guns and he could see Cross's mouth twisting out orders but couldn't hear anything. Machine-gun fire stitched Cross in a diagonal that began at his jaw, the words disappearing into his crumpled face, and he fell dead, ten yards away.

Michael ran in erratic lines, low to the ground, stepping over the dead. He slid into a crater and leaned against its shallow side. A minute later, he saw a figure rushing toward him, and then heard the sound of machine-gun fire; the man pitched forward and landed beside Michael, splayed in an awkward pose. His guts were exposed, leaking over the wool of his tunic. It was the corporal from Millarville. Michael couldn't remember his name. He looked for his papers. Lance Evans, a boy who worked his parents' ranch. He might have been fifteen.