Three Day Road (21 page)

“I’m going,” he whispers to me in Cree, and before I can stop him he is up and running.

I lose sight of him in the rain and dark. This all feels wrong. A shout rises up from the nest and I see the flash of a rifle come from it at the exact moment that I hear its discharge. The sounds of scrambling and of more rifle fire cracking in the rain. And then a strange silence before the bright flash and muffled bang of the Mills bomb. Mud and speckles of flesh rain onto me.

I wait, but Elijah doesn’t come back. When it feels too long, and maybe it is minutes, maybe it is only seconds, I run toward where I last saw him. He isn’t far, maybe thirty steps. He is on his stomach, not moving. I throw myself on top of him. I can feel Elijah tense for the pierce of a bayonet into his kidney. He doesn’t know it’s me. I reach into his sack on his belt and prime another Mills bomb, then lob it. One more explosion blasts up from the nest as I bury my head in my arms and try to cover Elijah with the rest of my body.

I roll Elijah over. We are both covered in red mud. He looks like
he can’t see anything, but he appears conscious. I crouch and dig in my bag for the cotton charge.

I light it and drop it into the nest, then drag Elijah back to where we came from, bullets splattering in the mud around us like hailstones, their mortars popping and exploding. As I pull Elijah into our crater, the cotton charge booms and sucks the air up and away from us for a second before it crashes back down like a wave full of earth. We’re kept pinned in the crater as mortars and whiz-bangs continue to pop in the rain. I wonder where the others in the party are, if they are still alive. I want to get up and run with Elijah back to the safety of our line, but realize he can’t. He’s injured.

Fritz’s mortars begin to move away and I shake Elijah, say, “
Ashtum,
we must go now.” I grab Elijah by the collar and drag him back as best I can toward our side, the rain falling hard and the blasts of the shells around us threatening to split our heads wide open with their concussions. I look about for the others in the raiding party and when finally Elijah and I roll back into our trench, we are flanked by McCaan and Driscoll. Driscoll searches Elijah’s body for wounds. He smiles down at Elijah when he is done.

“Just a few scrapes, possibly a broken arm,” Driscoll says. “And what I imagine must be a pounding head.” Elijah moans out in pain, cradles his arm. Driscoll digs into his kit and pulls out a gleaming needle filled with the amber liquid.

I watch him sink it into Elijah’s arm and flood it. I see Elijah nod to him, then watch as he goes away to hands grasping him and carrying him to a different, calmer place.

Elijah’s wounds are worth nothing more than a few days’ rest behind the lines on the outskirts of a small, half-destroyed village. The whole unit joins us back here, having spent our designated days on the front.

“Just a sprained arm,” McCaan scoffs at Elijah as he and I sit together. “That and a minor concussion ain’t enough to send you to Blighty.”

“I’m glad for it,” Elijah says. His arm’s in a sling. “I’d go mad stuck in a hospital so far away from it all.”

“You fared better than Thompson and that new kid,” McCaan says.

Although McCaan tries to hide it, Elijah and I can see that he takes the blame for this raid gone wrong. But it isn’t his fault. It’s Breech’s. Elijah tells me he wants nothing more than to take Breech out into no man’s land and show him the young private, here not even a week. The kid was unlucky enough to be hit by a mortar and bits of him lie scattered in front of Fritz’s wire. Thompson took a bullet in the leg and shrapnel to most of the rest of his body and is close to death somewhere away from here. His loss to the section is not a good thing. I can see how the men are quiet even though they now have days to themselves without the worry of dying. I watch Elijah wander about and tell jokes and some of the men laugh with him. But the atmosphere is more one of a funeral. “Thompson will be back,” Elijah tells the others. “He’ll miss this place too much.”

A bullet had cut through Elijah’s wool tunic and grazed his other arm, leaving a little burn mark. Elijah shows off the hole in his uniform to the others. Another bullet grazed his cheek so that it still stings, he says. But again he was lucky. I escaped with nothing. There’s talk of a medal for Elijah for rushing the nest. Nothing mentioned of me finishing things up for him out there.

We try to stay out of the late summer rain as best we can, holed up in tents by a small copse of trees and a field. A barn and a blasted-out farmhouse is saved for the officers. There’s no shortage of the medicine for Elijah if he wants it, but I don’t see him take any, can tell he isn’t luxuriating in its warm grasp. I believe he wants to save it for when he truly needs it out there.

Elijah has decided to forgive Grey Eyes for his greed, he says. He’s not sure why. Grey Eyes and Gilberto made it back all right from the raid. Grey Eyes was back long before Gilberto tumbled into the
trench with a bleeding Thompson over his big, hairy shoulders. There’s talk of a medal for Gilberto too.

I watch as Elijah helps Gilberto compose a letter to his wife and children, telling them of this latest accomplishment, Elijah using his best nun’s English to describe Gilberto’s heroics and the saving of the corporal’s life. They sit in a tent as rain beats on the canvas, Gilberto writing in his big, awkward cursive, Elijah dictating. “My sweetest little grape,” Elijah begins. “A few nights ago I faced death and emerged victorious.”

“But I don’t want her to worry for me,” Gilberto says, looking up from the letter. “I want her to think I am somewhere safe behind the lines cooking food for the hungry soldiers.”

Elijah ignores Gilberto’s concerns about worrying his wife. “With enemy bullets falling like rain,” Elijah continues, writing, speaking for the big Italian, “I attacked the enemy and made him run. Sadly, my corporal was wounded in the struggle. He was near death, and so I carried him on my broad shoulders back through the dangers of no man’s land to safety. They speak of a medal for me. Tell our children so that they may be proud of their father.”

“Oh, too much, too much you say!” Gilberto tells Elijah, smiling. “My wife, she will think I brag and lie!”

“She will see you as the hero that you are,” Elijah tells him, patting his shoulder. “She will know that you are over here away from your beloved vineyard for the good of the Empire.”They laugh.

An innocence in Elijah’s eyes, that desire to help somebody else with his words, reminds me of the short time as a child that I was in residential school. I barely remember my mother, the one Auntie calls Rabbit. She gave me up when I was just old enough to begin having memories, and the nuns took me in. Elijah was the first boy I met. He became my only friend.

I do remember having to sit in hard chairs with little tables in front of them, and Elijah made sure to sit beside me. He was fascinated by
the boy who knew no English. We were taught the letters of their language, and how to string those letters together to form words. None of it made sense to me. Elijah always tried to help, whispering to me, even if this led to the both of us being switched.

One morning I remember him sitting beside me in the schoolroom as Sister Magdalene watched us children struggle to form words in her language. It was one of the rare times she allowed us to speak in whispers to one another. “You take this letter here,” Elijah said, drawing a
g
on a piece of paper. “And then you put this letter beside it.” He drew an
o
. “And then if you place this letter beside it, you have a word.” He drew a
d,
and I stared at the strange marks and asked him what it meant. “It says ‘god,’ stupid!” he laughed.

Sister Magdalene scowled at us in warning.

“And what is ‘god’?” I asked.

“Gitchi Manitou,”
Elijah answered.

I was very impressed by this.
God
is still the only word in their language I know how to write.

“Teach me another,” I said, staring down at the paper in front of me. Elijah drew another word from letters. Again I stared, this time at four letters squiggled on the paper. “And what does this mean?” I asked.

Elijah’s eyes brightened, and a smile stretched across his face. “It is what comes out of Sister Magdalene’s bum,” he giggled.

I looked at him, beginning for the first time to understand the power of these letters and words. Elijah’s giggles entered me too, and we tried to keep them in, but this only made us laugh harder. Sister Magdalene stormed up to us and Elijah tried to crumple the piece of paper, but she ripped it out of his hands.

She stared at the paper for a long time, her mouth a tight little line across her face. We stopped laughing. She began shaking, then dragged both of us from the room by our ears. I was sure mine was partially torn from my head. Outside of the schoolroom, in full view
of the children in it, she tore a thin branch from a tamarack and pulled down our pants so that we stood exposed. First she forced me to bend over and struck me until I cried out in pain. She continued the switching until I fell over in a ball, tears falling onto the dirt.

Then she did the same to Elijah. I looked up at his face above me and he winked as she began hitting him, then smiled to me as he cried out in mock pain. When it began to truly hurt him, though, his cries became real, until he too crumpled on the ground beside me. For good measure, Sister Magdalene struck us a number of times while we lay on the ground and covered our heads. “I will strike the heathen from thee,” she chanted over and over. I was not allowed another pencil or piece of paper again in my short stay in that place.

I look to Elijah and Gilberto laughing together, and even as they do, something tugs at my insides. I can see that Elijah is pulled away from this moment by the strong tide of wanting to try the morphine again. I know now that it is more than medicine. Much more.

O
UR SECTION SITS TOGETHER
, our socks and boots off, carefully examining our feet for signs of rot. In a couple of days we will be back in the lines, but for now we enjoy the warm weather and the rest in this place by the field. Graves talks under his breath to Fat. I wonder what he speaks about.

We all know Graves has seen far more battles than the rest of us. He is many years older, although how many years we are not sure. He was in Africa fighting the Boers when I was just a baby. I wonder how it is that he never made it to Officer after so many years in the army, until he explains to me that he left the army and came back only when this war began.

“I had nothing at home,” Graves says. “My wife left me. We never had children. I had a factory job that the army’s wages could match. They all said it would be over by Christmas. I remembered my youth and the hills and valleys of Africa, the beautiful black-skinned
women, the horses and cannons, our khaki uniforms. I says to myself, it all must sure as hell beat what I have here in Toronto. So just like Sean Patrick I lie about my age and the deal’s done. This hell,” he says, looking around us, “is not what I signed up for.”

Fat, Graves’s puppy, nearly Graves’s son, asks, “And you, X. Xavier Bird. How is it that a man comes by a name like yours?”

I’ve learned my English over this last year but still have trouble sometimes understanding Fat. I’ve told them all already where I am from, that I am James Bay Cree. What more do they need from me? I tell Fat once more the story of me, of my name.

Next time, I think to myself, if they want talk, I will tell them to talk to Elijah. We’ve been in the trenches for only five months in their time, but Elijah’s killed five men for every month that has passed. He is Whiskeyjack the Indian and Whiskeyjack the killer.

The other soldiers often ask Elijah about his name too. And he is happy to talk. His Cree name is Weesageechak. But that is something he doesn’t share with the
wemistikoshiw
. Whiskeyjack is how they say his name, make it their own. He has told me that what they do to his name is what sounds to my ears like a longer word for
bastard,
making his name a name without a family.

Weesageechak is the trickster, the one who takes different forms at will. Hudson’s Bay Company traders could never pronounce it with their thick tongues. But they saw the trickster in the whiskey-jack, the grey jay that loves to hear his own voice, is bold enough to steal food from their hands when they were not watching.

But here in this place Elijah is something more than just a bird, something more than the rest. Bigger and yet still more slight. Invisible.

The last few weeks in Saint-Eloi are quiet again. The end of August has arrived already. I know that it won’t be too long now until we are sent to the Somme. Oh, how Elijah wishes that we would be moved down now. Me, I can wait. Word travels to our company of heavy trench fighting in places with names like Sugar Trench, Candy
Trench, even a place called the Sugar Factory. And we are stuck here, Elijah says, as the newly formed Fourth Division is moved in to take over Saint-Eloi.

Between stretches at the front we are given leave to go into the village behind the lines five miles to a small house that serves as a pub, where we drink French beer and wine and cognac and shout back and forth to one another over the noise of living men. The soldiers call these places estaminets. Sometimes women come here and men line up to be with them in little rooms in back. The owner, he sees what happens but seems to ignore it. I watch it all, absorb it, but I am too shy.

Elijah takes me to the estaminet every chance he can in the weeks we are in this area. I learn to drink like the soldiers around me and get drunk enough once in a while that I talk freely with them. Twice I’ve seen a girl come in here, but she isn’t like the others. She’s shy like me and is thin with long hair that she wears on the top of her head. Elijah notices her too, and I feel a sharp sting when he sees me notice her and then boldly approaches her. They talk for a while, but I can’t make out what they say over the noise of this place. She smiles at him and I begin to feel very sad.