Savage Love (10 page)

S
gt.
Collins stumbles into Surgeon Kennedy, both reeking of spirits. Kennedy has stripped to his shirt in the rain to operate, every gesture spare and perfect and strong. His body a furnace, the damp steams off his shoulders. He pokes lint stoppers soaked in gin up his nostrils to combat the stink, steeps laudanum in a teapot, tipping the spout to his lips from time to time.

Collins wears his pantomime frock, burst at the waist, grey with filth.

Kennedy: “S
gt.
, why are you dressed like that?”

Collins, reeling: “With permission, sir. Not my colour, I know, sir. There was a want of blue taffeta in the camps. Cruel treatment for a poor industrial wheezer like me, sir.”

Kennedy: “Yer a bold squireen,
S
gt.
Collins.”

Collins: “Nought can touch me now, yer honour, sir.”

They are old friends from fights on the Ohio shore and at Moraviantown, when things went south for us, but Kennedy orders Field Punishment for the sake of form. Five strokes with his wrists bound to a medical wagon. Cut down, Collins drops on his knees, shakes himself like a dog, then staggers back to the sick looking refreshed, the flame inside burning fierce and hot.

At the Battle of the Raisin, Collins was on detached duty with C
apt.
Crawford's command, Shawnee savages dressed in scraps of stolen American uniforms, with Springfield and Kentucky rifles, hatchets and knives made of stone, sharper than razors. He conversed with Tenskwatawa and drank home-brew whiskey with the Potawatomi skin-changer Crippled Hand, men whose style of bravery was mystical and unearthly cruel.

He was like Saul dancing among the prophets, and when he returned, he was not the same.

“I am not afraid,” the girl says.

“
You should be,” says Collins, more strange than human, more alive than the rest of us. “I am conjoint with Death,” he says.

The brown girl's soldier boy dies at her breast. For an hour she commits adultery, becomes his lover, vows she will meet him in Paradise, kisses his cracked and infected lips, whispers dirty endearments in the shell of his ear where her tears catch, and presses his lank, algorific fingers between her legs to warm them.

She forgets herself in her pity, gives everything fiercely, a strange, grim joy in her heart.

She knows she has become a guide to the Land of the Dead. She knows the way.

Her present groom, centuries behind her in his naïveté, looks sickly with the recognition of the unknowable risen up in the heart of his gamine lover. A pot roast man, clever with his hands, no imaginative throw, dull as a trivet.

She covers the boy's face with a blanket tail and turns to the next.

The first man she helps evacuate makes her gag, but she cleans him gently and thoughtfully, pouring hot water from a kettle, washing herself in the lake.

S
gt.
Collins blows on a horn spoon dripping blood soup, picks out the solid bits with his fingers, and lifts Edith's head on his arm. Her thin blue lips refuse to open. But her eyes widen in fright. She does not want to be brought back.

“I shall go to him,” she whispers.

The rain is turning to damp, feathery snowflakes.

I limp past the horse lines, climb into a canvas-topped wagon out of the rain, and nod off sharpish after wriggling into a sailcloth bag lying close to hand. Smell of sawdust and rotten meat in my nostrils, two coffins stacked on end, peaceful as a grave.

Wake up when they start to pile fresh corpses above me.

A drummer boy with a pencil and a list, look of terror on his face, says, “You b'aint dead.”

I am paralyzed, wedged in, the wagon suddenly crowded with fatality. “I'm not dead,”
I say, testing the hypothesis. Corpses like cordwood on either side and on top, stiff and cold. I recognize old comrades, including Kingsland, the amateur thespian, hugging me in his bare blue arms, teeth bared in a snarl of rictus. The icy skin of a dead man is always a surprise.

“You were talking,” the drummer boy says. “I was sheltering and I heard voices in the dead wagon. I thought the dead was talking.”

“Can you get me out?” I say. “
I'm really not dead.”

“I told you,” he says.

I crawl out of the dead wagon in time to watch great steaming drays lean into the incline as the first drafts of returning prisoners ferry up the cliff track and off on the road to Burlington, where there is a real hospital.

There was another boy, just like this, shot for a deserter at Camp Bull. Out for a ramble, he got lost. A friendly innkeep said to stay the night and he
'd vouch for him in the morning. But the innkeep hotfooted it to the camp and turned the boy in for the reward.

The firing squad wept. The boy awaited the sting of the musket balls with a look of weary disdain, disgusted with a world that had failed to live up to his expectations.

At the Battle of Lake Erie, we had farmers, distillers, printers, tanners, tailors, cobblers and carriage makers to sail the ships, with the usual result. Moraviantown was a rout. We made a stand at the Thames River, but our hearts weren't in it because everyone knew we were only saving the General's coach and baggage. The Kentuckians marched up in waves and fired at thirty yards, mostly missing us, but we broke notwithstanding, the savages in the trees on our right fighting on gallantly to cover the retreat till Tecumseh fell, the last honourable man in British Canada,
by which I mean a fool.

S
gt.
Collins and the one-day bride hover over Edith, the beach being depleted of all but hopeless cases.

The girl's nipples stand up like acorns in the rain.

Collins thrusts his hand into the fire. His eyes roll up white. Smell of burning hair. When he takes it out, it glows but is otherwise whole. Some parlou
r trick he learned from the wabeno warriors.

He says, “I'll be dead in a month. I have the sight.”

Fires still blaze, souls blaze, the cliff face glimmers like the walls of a crypt under a ceiling of darkness. Wisps of mist drift in off the lake.

Surgeon Kennedy rests on a fish rack, tapping his clay pipe against his teeth, eyes smouldering with exhaustion and despair. Bodies not flames any more but skin bags, all the same on the inside, bone and gut and blood, fragile as a bubble. The face a thin mask of identity, the soul a hopeful mystery.

In his laudanum dreams he sees himself commanding the rearguard against Death and the intrepid Black Imps of Satan. But he's tired of fighting.

Edith bears herself in silence. You can see her thinking fiercely. There is much to remember, much to tally, going toward the Gate.

I shall go to him, she thinks, but he shall not return to me.

S
gt.
Collins minds me watching, calls me, “Here, Lazarus,” like a dog.

I think there's an earthquake but then notice I am trembling violently with ague. I note the telltale horripilation of the skin.

I am hallucinating, or the place seems tremendously holy. You can reach out a hand and touch the Other World.

A kindly apothecary's mate of the 41st, someone I once knew, wraps a blanket over my shoulders and bids me come closer to the fire. But I want to watch. I am already nostalgic for the yeasty richness of life, its sudden turns and dramas, its deep sadness, its mysterious and gorgeous purposelessness.

No one knows why Collins cares for Edith, but he is sudden and belligerent and understands by doing, not thinking. He accepts what he cannot parse, doesn't mind that he will die, despises pain but doesn't fear it, and thus is completely at home in the world.

The girl from the clifftop feeds him soup while he chafes Edith's hand. She fears only that this moment will end, afraid she will be left to change her dress and become a wife. For her too, action has leaped beyond what she can know. She thinks all life must be quest for style.

An hour before daylight, a dreadful, somnolent calm falls upon the beach. Fires down to embers, the living, dead and dying blanketed lumps in the sand, one or two, still awake, stare at the glowing coals.

The girl says, “It's my wedding night.” She pulls Collins down beside the jacent Edith.

Only one person has an eye to see, sleepless for fear he will sleep and die.

In the morning, a white rime of frost blankets the sleeping and the dead. The lake is still as ice.

Edith's skin is like the lake, translucent, blue and cold.

I shall go to him, she thinks.

Surgeon Kennedy presses her eyelids shut, thinking how she has attained invisibility (a flame, a burst of light) and a higher knowledge.

S
gt.
Collins draws a uniform from stores, hangs it over his bones, whistles through his teeth hefting a new Springfield and a bayonet, tools of the trade. He is a man happy to have enemies, a regular Jonathan among the Philistines, and the Americans are so handy and numerous.

We blink, we wake up, we are in Canada, we are among the living.

It's not so much, state of anticlimax, chilly, damp, vexing people.

The sunlight over the lake is like milk.

In Sandusky, we were in the company of saints. We thought God was in the worms and maggots that ate the dead. Smoke blasts from the horses' nostrils. Soldiers in red jackets (embers, flames) blow on their hands, kick sand over fires, piss against the cliff. The chinking of harness sounds cheerful and mundane.

The girl in the wedding dress takes a seat in the wounded wagon. Her face is pale, pinched, fierce and proud.

At the top of the track, as the wagons trundle through the village, the girl's husband strides along beside, waving his bandana like a pennant, begging her to get down. But she doesn't answer, doesn't look.

Remnants of a wedding, slab tables in a stumpy field, clusters of wild asters in pots, a flag, a spit and a smoking ash pit.

She takes one final glance at the slate expanse of the lake, landscape of unease, imbrued with qualities that contradict reality.

At the last sorry log house, where a loyal Canadian pig roots in a garbage heap and another stands at the open front door, the husband stops and shies a rock at the departing column, face crimson with fury.

Five men of the 41st silently fall out, stack their muskets and chase him down among the houses, beating him unconscious with their fists.

Two weeks later, S
gt.
Collins volunteers to go slaughter more Americans and dies (a tongue of flame, explosion of light) leading militia against the Kentucky cavalry at Malcolm's Mills. It is said the Canadians panicked and broke, leaving him on the field, where his body was much abused by Kickapoo scouts.

Of the girl, nothing else is known.

INTERMEZZO
MICROSTORIES

The Ice Age

Dead of winter. Snow falling for days on end. Snow up to the rooftops. School cancelled. The yard is as bright and blank as a computer screen.

The children and I climb onto the roof with plastic shovels. We carve a fantasy of crenellated walls marching along the eaves and over the peak, with watchtowers at the corners and a gate with snowmen for guards. It takes all afternoon. We dangle a pair of my undershorts from a rake handle for a flag. We name it the Castle of Narth.

At night, the neighbours come over, and we climb the roof with camp chairs, sleeping bags, and down comforters and crouch around Coleman lanterns, sipping Swedish vodka inside the castle walls, watching shooting stars between the drifting clouds. The children toss tennis balls for the dog, who leaps off the roof with its ears streaming, then swims back through the snow like a seal.

The Snivelys have not been getting along of late, the usual tectonic drift of marriage. She says the snow makes her think of Eskimos. She asks did we know that Eskimo men share their wives with strangers, and looks at me. Snively swan-dives off the roof, then climbs back with a lopsided, embarrassed grin.

The next day, it snows again, almost silent except for the infinite whispers of flakes. City plows block the driveways, then vanish to concentrate on the main streets and arterials. By consensus, the drone of snow blowers goes into remission. The children burrow tunnels between houses, constructing elaborate mazes where they play hide-and-seek and ambush the dog with snowballs. Snively's boy Mose and the Czernik girl, both high school seniors, lose their way, switch off their phones, and canoodle in a forgotten hollow.

My wife discovers a bag of votive candles and says, “These might come in handy.” And then she says, “I wish Loreen Snively wouldn't look at you like that.
”

“Like what?” I ask.

“You know,” she says.

We snap on cross-country skis and shush to the strip mall, dragging a toboggan for supplies, past brand new backyard skating rinks, golf-course toboggan runs, knots of red-faced, laughing children, regiments of snowmen. My wife sticks out her tongue to catch the flakes, which makes me want to kiss her for about eight hours.

That night,
the
TV
forecasts Arctic Clippers and blizzards. Pundits speak earnestly of a new Ice Age. But the Internet rumours of power outages in the North, vanished towns, wolves appearing on the city outskirts, have more the flavour of UFO sightings than anything real.

My wife climbs the roof and lights candles along the castle walls. The castle looks like a fairy tale, a dream of fire, blazing up against the falling flakes like a bubble of light.

The neighbours arrive with pots of stew and torrents of mulled wine. We sing campfire songs and golden oldies and watch the children nodding in the lamplight, hot in their synthetic down and microfibre cocoons.

Loreen Snively says her dreams the night before were disturbed by men in fur returning from the hunt, flinging down carcasses of polar bear and seal, and having their way with her. Snively says we ought to start planning hunting parties, maybe train the dog to sledding. “You never know,”
he says, trying to look prudent and manly in his faux rabbit fur Mad Bomber hat.

My wife cuddles with our eight-year-old against me. She gives a little shiver, though she can't be cold.

We watch the candles on the castle walls gutter and go out.