Dreams of My Grandfather
“Like a dog, he hunts in dreams.” ―Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 1842
Past the hawthorne tree with its sharp-pointed leaves and hopeful red berries, I wander slowly through the cemetery, struggling to remember my grandfather, his dreams, and the memories of war that hunted within them.
“Pesky, oh yes, Pesky, he was a wonderful horse. Killed at Passchendaele, you know,” he’d answer in his eighties, when I was young and would ask about his War to connect through those memories still burning most strongly. “He wasn’t really a pest. I named him that because he had such a funny mind of his own. Whenever I passed in front of him, he’d nip at me or try nudging the cap off my head.” He evaded the details of combat, leaving me only with fragmented stories from which to fashion a narrative.
Like Tennyson’s soldier, grandfather may have dreamed of his childhood before the bugles called. In a photograph of him taken when he was 9, a stern-faced boy stares straight at the camera. He stands alone before his raw clapboard home on the flatlands of Lethbridge, a town pioneers hacked from the sere prairie and brought to life with a web of irrigation canals. His father was rising in the world and needed another wife after his first died of scarlet fever when he was two. An awkward teenager didn’t fit into this second family after the new wife’s dutiful delivery of two girls. “It’ll be better for you with your cousins in Ottawa where there are good schools,” his father may have said before he put his son on the train. Afterwards, grandfather saw his father only occasionally when business brought him east. Staring into my grandfather’s eyes in this photograph, I can’t divine whether they harbored loneliness or anger at his displacement.
Hanging on my wall, there is a formal portrait of grandfather in his dress khakis, his father on his right, and both looking at the camera full of solemnity. The portrait was taken before he left on his long journey across the ocean to the frontlines in France. The pith helmet of an artillery officer, useless to deflect gunfire, droops low over my grandfather’s forehead, shading his eyes. Grandfather never described his departure, only that he had been called up and went. If he left with a broken heart, or with a lover’s worn image tucked into his wallet, I never learned of it. He met and married my grandmother after the war. To imagine his heart filled with memories of innocence, I conjure up a young sweetheart to comfort him before discipline and training propelled him into the killing ground between the armies.
His two cousins volunteered at the same time he did to fight in the Great War. Within a week of each other on two different, anonymous battlefields, the cousins were killed. Their lives ended in a moment of youthful intensity, and they remain enigmas, robbed forever of the chance to dip, as Lord Tennyson mused, “into the future, far as human eye could see.” This, too, must have coursed through grandfather’s mind like a dog jerking and snapping in its sleep.
Brilliant as fireworks on a humid summer night in Alberta, I envision German flares bursting into the early morning while the bombardment of artillery thundered toward the Allied lines. The Canadian company huddled miserably in their weeping trenches, carved into the charnel landscape by the last battalion, or perhaps the one before. At the first hint of sunrise before the shadows fled, the shattered middle ground turned the hue of dying roses. The fetid smell of waste spilling from latrines and burnt cordite draped over the men like fog, as a mordant rot of decaying bodies and abused earth swept toward the Canadian line.
I imagine grandfather surging toward the enemy on Pesky, like a colon separating thoughts of life from death. “Forward, men,” he would have cried, as if to say that it was only a summer walk on the prairie, duty wrestling with his own youthful fear. A wave of boys in their woolen green uniforms and multicolored dreams, beyond any realm of reason, responded. Ignoring the bullets slapping the ground, they followed their young captain, but did not make it far. Pesky must have died quickly. Grandfather may have fallen immersed in the rancid mud, or perhaps, looking up at the grey sky, unsure if he were alive.
He never said. Evacuated to England where surgeons extracted shrapnel lodged in his hip, grandfather lived to return home at the end of the war. The fury of the moments before he was wounded are not part of the story he tells, not even at the end, when forgetting his dignity, he would stop elderly matrons before the elevator at his assisted living, enquiring hopefully whether they’d like to see his war scars?
Once, confronted with the sparse evidence of my first mustache, grandfather instructed me: “Sergeant majors wax their mustaches; officers never do.” Maybe this was merely an aphorism from the past that slipped out. Or was he reflecting the castes among men of his world? Amused then, I now cherish this wisdom so spectacularly unsuited for my time
As a loyal Canadian subject of the British Empire, grandfather had volunteered to preserve the Victorian order already fragmenting by the war’s start. The Russian Revolution, social unrest in Germany, the Depression, and the long march toward fascism and the Second World War finished off the stasis of his world. I first shaved after the Civil Rights movement had already undermined the foundations of Jim Crow, the legal framework of racial segregation in the South. At the age grandfather was called to his war in Europe, I was drafted into mine, scorching a more distant continent.
He slipped out of my life, as he did from his own, before I conceived a desire to understand the memories that haunt dogs and men in the quiet of night. On my solitary walk, all that’s left has been for me to reconstruct a reality of his War. Waking from my dream of his dreams, I wonder who is resurrected when we attempt to fix for a moment in time those we have known and loved.