This morning being Sunday, and none of them at church, they were sitting on three camp stools near the bank. Patrick had arrived early, his trousers soaked with the dew that had covered the orchards he had to cross on his route from the farm to the Heights. He had helped himself to the coffee that bubbled over the fire and had accepted an offer of bacon and eggs. He and David discussed and then rejected the idea of church, looking as pleased as schoolboys taking a day off.

All of this is so innocent, Fleda thought to herself angrily. The men had a secret pact. They knew what they should do and they knew how to be gleefully guilty when they weren’t doing it. Never a thought that desire and duty could possibly mesh. Never a thought that the deepest desires were a duty in themselves. Somehow she felt that the men would either snicker or turn away in horror from her intensest wishes, even though they had some, not unlike hers, locked away in some corner of their heads – in a place where she couldn’t get at them, and they couldn’t either.

She began to hum hymns, quietly, and then with increasing volume, when she realized that neither man was paying any attention. They were discussing the war.

“Did I ever show you the garden in Queenston where Brock paused to draw his breath, just before he scaled the Heights?” David was asking. “Just imagine him there, alive one minute in a flower garden, and the next hour completely dead.”

Fleda decided to add words to the tune she was humming:

Rescue the perishing, care for the dying.

Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave

“Why did he do it, do you think?” Patrick opened his hands earnestly. “Was it for the sake of a magnificent death? He must have known. Wouldn’t he have known?”

“You have to remember,” David continued didactically, “that Brock would have had Nelson as a model and General Wolfe. These men were happy to use their bodies as targets.”

“Targets?”

“Um-hmm, a wonderful thing to do. After all, to aim at the leader distracts the enemy, if only briefly.”

“Soldiers of Christ arise, and put your armour on” Fleda sang. And then:

Leave no unguarded place
No weakness of the soul
Take every virtue, every grace
And fortify the whole

As a child she had memorized practically the whole Canadian Hymnal, it being the closest thing to poetry that graced the shelves of her father’s house. She remembered the shape of the book… its cover was oddly square and coloured an unpleasant shade of green.

“But isn’t that rather self-defeating?” Patrick was saying. “I mean, once the target is hit, as it inevitably has to be, then there is no more leader.”

“Oh, but the men respond to that with increased fervour, better fighting. ‘Revenge the General!’ they cry.”

“So, what did Brock’s men do, after he died?”

“Well, they ran about shouting, ‘Revenge the General!’ for a while… a few attempted to rush up the Heights. Then they retreated, took Brock’s body back to the flower garden. It’s at the old Hamilton house – the garden, I mean. I really must take you there some time.”

“They took him back to the flower garden?”

“Yes, and then they made one last valiant attempt to capture Queenston Heights.”

“And?”

“Complete chaos, severed limbs, death, the usual.”

Fleda searched her memory for another verse.

“But don’t you see,” David continued, “the whole thing was so wonderful. A young country like ours needs dead heroes. Someone to mourn. Someone to make a monument for.”

“Yes, but he was English.”

“Only while he was alive. After that, he became entirely Canadian. Not that he ever wanted to be, Lord knows… but that’s of little consequence. Canada claimed him and nothing will ever change that. ‘Push on, brave York Volunteers!’”

David held his clenched fist in the air for a moment, and then laughed, finding himself in a ridiculous posture.

Fleda sang, her voice becoming gradually louder:

God send us men with hearts ablaze
All truth to love, all wrong to hate
These are the patriots nations need
These are the bulwarks of the state

David finally looked in her direction. “Fleda, for heaven’s sake, what… ?”

But Patrick interrupted. “I believe I am a pacifist,” he said. “I believe that nothing could induce me to place my body in the direct line of fire.”

“It depends,” said David, “on what you are fighting for.” Actually, he didn’t care at all what they were fighting for as long as he could write about it afterwards, but he knew it was important to have something to be fighting for.

“What were they fighting for?” Patrick wondered out loud. “Were they fighting against the Americans, for Canada, against Napoleon, for the Empire… I could never figure it out. I mean, either way we lose, right? We’re either the property of one nation or another. We’re either Americans or we’re British, the only difference being that, after these conflicts, some of us are dead.”

“I believe that they were fighting for their own country, the Canadian militia, the Indians,” David’s voice was beginning to rise. “They may not have known this at the beginning of the conflict, but by the time it was over they knew. They knew they had a country. It was all vague before that, but after… after, they became a race!”

Fleda began to march around, slowly circling the men. She remembered having felt like this when she was a child, annoyed by adults in rooms and their serious conversations, their orderly behaviour. It occurred to her that her activities were childish, but nothing in her wanted to stop. David was noticing, was beginning to become distracted, but Patrick was lost, out there somewhere, imagining battlefields.

“Battlefields are beautiful,” said Patrick, “when the grass comes back. You can see the marks of fighting but they are so benign… like scars… no… smoother than scars. More like memories. Battlefields are so soft, after the grass comes back.”

He was really speaking to himself, but David responded. “They should be preserved. We never preserve anything. I want to make a museum… a better museum. Can’t get anyone to preserve anything. There is Brock’s monument, of course, but even it has been blown up once.”

“There are these wounds in the earth and then the grass comes and covers it all up, like skin, without scars.”

“On the other hand, you could hardly blame the Fenians,” said David, not listening at all to Patrick. “The Irish certainly have suffered, have been the victims of an overbearing aggressive imperialistic neighbour. The Irish and the Canadians have much in common and will have a great deal more unless we are very careful.”

Lord, thought Fleda, these theories… no humans there at all. No actual people in these landscapes. What about the pain?

“There is that tower at Lundy’s Lane,” David continued. “But what, tell me, do you see from it? Butcher shops, funeral establishments, greengrocers. And the part of the battlefield that is visible isn’t even properly marked. It’s scandalous!”

The child in Fleda, meanwhile, had decided to take a slightly different tack. She wanted a response from Patrick and now knew she would have to address him directly in order to receive it. Moving closer to that place where he sat, she sang softly, confidentially, wickedly:

Though your sins be scarlet
They shall be as snow, as snow
Though they be red, like crimson
They shall be as wool.

This was a verse she had whispered to herself as a child before going to sleep, so that she could enjoy, in the dark, the wonderful pictures it brought into her imagination: sheep stained bright red, the sinful, bloody scarlet hearts depicted in Papist lithographs, a pair of bright red mittens lying in a snowdrift, white sheep sinfully butchered, stained this time irregularly with their own blood. All this and more … images of red-hot coals and of scarlet flowers opening, of mouths moistening and of arteries pumping. As a child, she had loved this verse.

The effect on Patrick was instant, though subtle. She saw him wince and then send a brief, chilling glance in her direction. He turned back to David, hoping, she suspected, that if he shut her out entirely, she would stop. She should stop. At another moment she might have even tried to stop. But it was out of her hands now. These crazy hymns she had memorized as a child were taking over. She sang the verse again louder now, but still directed towards Patrick. He was not looking at David any more. His gaze was fixed instead on his hands, his face and neck beginning to colour.

“Though your sins be like scarlet,” she began again. She was unwilling to give it up, the anger she suddenly felt, once again, towards him, towards his own vain masculine will.

Then, inexplicably, in mid-verse, she relaxed, became composed, uncaring. She shrugged and turned away from both men, the neutrality of the word wool still hanging in the air and finally entering her mind.

She stopped, at that moment, responding to either one of them.