Tell (10 page)

Hugh had survived, and now Kenan had a letter to prove it. Bill had not survived.

In the moment captured by the photo, the expressions on the three faces said nothing more than:
Fill our tins with food and let us wash our socks. Hand over a few cigarettes and we won’t think of what we’ve just been through or what we’re heading into when we’re sent back up. Let us get rid of the lice and wash and be clean for a few days, let us find a quiet corner where we can read our mail. Mail is what we want. And please don’t ask us to think or talk of war.

They were kept busy. No time to think when they were out of the line. They’d finished their assigned duty; they’d buried hundreds of empty cans. They’d been hosed off with cold water; they’d immersed their bodies in a vat in the bathhouse. After mail call, there’d been training, more training, route marches, gas drill, weapons training, stops for tea or hot Oxo. And occasional sports, if they were lucky. One memorable day, a day of warmth and sunshine, they got to watch a ball game. There was a pitcher named Herb, a wiry man, a youngster from Ontario, but a wonder on the mound. Everyone knew about him. A captain from the YMCA, a giant of a man, a full head taller than anyone on either team, took on the role of umpire. The players
removed their tunics and stripped down to their shirt sleeves, braces hitching up their trousers. They all wore puttees, and changed from boots to canvas shoes. More than a few bases were stolen that day because some of the players could run like the wind. Hundreds of men on the sidelines around the makeshift diamond showed their appreciation with whistles and cheers.

Kenan heard Tress coming in through the front door. He took a last look and slid the photo into its envelope, along with Hugh’s letter. His hand was shaking.

Bill,
he said to himself.
Bill.
And he saw a man’s face, unrecognizable, the man’s lips shaping the words:
Help me.

Tress called out while she was removing her boots, and he answered from the veranda. He shoved the envelope deep into his pocket, knowing he’d pull it out later. He’d tell Tress about it soon enough. But until he had a chance to read it over a few times, he wasn’t ready to share.

B
REATHE
. B
REATHE
. W
E BREATHE TO SING
.”

Maggie took a breath and let it out slowly. She listened to Luc’s voice as if it were meant for her alone. Did every other singer do the same? She looked around and thought,
Probably.

Back to the music. They continued on and on, facing him from a double arc of chairs, though they stood to sing. Maggie watched the familiar movement as Luc’s hand pivoted at the wrist, created a circle, flicked upward. Every voice responded to the signal, stopped in unison.

Luc was looking around the room, taking in the faces of forty men and women. “Find the expression here. The phrase begins too slowly. Give it new life. Remember, this is a celebration. The audience will be spilling out into the street, ready to face the new year as they leave the theatre. Sing together, sing joyously.”

They were working on music for the second half of the concert. Maggie, Zel, Andrew and Corby were to sing solo parts
in Elgar’s “Peace, Gentle Peace,” which immediately preceded the finale, “Land of Hope and Glory.” Before intermission, the entire group would be singing two pieces: Henry Leslie’s “Annabelle Lee,” adapted from the poem by Poe. Andrew, as tenor, would sing solo for that. The other piece was the last of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s
Five Mystical Songs,
based on the poetry of George Herbert. Everyone loved singing that one.

As expected, “Auld Lang Syne” was added at the end of the second half. The audience would join in for that, as well as for the closing, “God Save the King.”

Luc resumed. “From where we left off. Shape the vowel correctly here. Every one of you has to shape the vowel in the same way. Please.”

They sang another few minutes and he stopped them again.

“Approach the last note from above. Try again? Good, good. No, that’s not quite what I’m looking for. Make a single statement, stay in tempo. Emphasis on the third beat, yes, yes. We must be together at this point or not at all.”

Two hours of this, and everyone was fatiguing. But Luc was not giving up. Not yet. “We need more emphasis on the strong syllables, not
all
syllables. Throw that note away, please. Throw it away completely so I won’t have to hear it again.”

A ripple of laughter. He thanked everyone, allowed a smile. Told them they’d done well and that was enough for the evening.

After rehearsal, Maggie walked the short distance home. It was past ten o’clock. She and Zel had stayed behind again to tidy up while Andrew stacked chairs at one side of the stage. Luc had asked Maggie to go through one of her solos again. Not only was she to sing Beethoven’s arrangement of “A Wand’ring
Gypsy,” she would also be performing “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” from
The Mikado.
The latter was technically more difficult, but Luc had assured her she could do both. He would work with her later on the Gilbert and Sullivan. This evening, Zel had accompanied her on piano for “A Wand’ring Gypsy” while Luc listened.

“Forget that you’re singing Beethoven,” Luc told her. “The song has a pleasing natural melody. It is completely in your range. Your challenge is to make it meaningful, give to it your emotion, vary the verses so that each is different from the last. Do not overthink the piece, Magreet. This is a folksong.”

Maggie was doing her best to sing with spirit. To stay focused. But it was neither Beethoven’s arrangement nor the gypsy song that disturbed her. It was the text from “Peace, Gentle Peace.” She was certain she’d sung one of the lines backwards during the earlier part of rehearsal. Mixed up the words. The father to the children’s arms? The children to the father’s? Had she? No one had said anything. No one seemed to have heard. Her voice must have blended with the voices of the others.

Later, when she and Zel parted in the street, Zel raised an eyebrow.

“What?” Maggie said. “Why are you giving me that look?”

Zel reached out, put her hand on Maggie’s arm. “I think you know. I’ll see you tomorrow, Maggie. I’ll try to stop in at the library for a quick visit.”

Maggie climbed the stairs to the apartment, all the while thinking about what her friend had said. There was an air of drama about Zel, a sense of urgency. Perhaps I’m drawn to her because of that, Maggie thought. When things happen in Zel’s
world, no matter what’s going on, she’s certain to maximize the drama.

This evening, for instance, she had worn a hackle-feather ruff to rehearsal. A trailing black ruff her late mother had worn around her neck thirty years earlier. The ruff stretched down past Zel’s hips. She didn’t give a whit for what people in town said about her sense of style. She set her own standards. Sometimes she walked hatless along Main Street, with pink and black ribbons woven through her greying hair. That was enough to keep people talking. And she created her own fashions. A cape when a cape wasn’t exactly called for; nonetheless, it was thrown over her shoulders with drama. A bright bow added to a shoe … well, who could predict what Zel would wear next? But despite her eccentricities, she was likeable and attractive. Nor could anyone deny her kindness.

Maggie knew that Zel was a strong woman. She had to be to survive on her own. She was capable of making half-turns away from situations that might otherwise contrive to pull her down. She was capable of helping others turn away from hardship and sorrow. She had a head for business. She’d set up a rooming house by herself. She had much to give, so much life to live. It seemed unfair that she was alone in her early fifties. She had married late, and she had loved her husband as she’d loved no one before or since. She told Maggie as much one day when Maggie was visiting.

“I felt responsible,” Zel had said. “Responsible for his death, even though my rational self knew that it wasn’t my fault. He died of consumption. I kept thinking that if I’d had access to different remedies, or special foods, or more advanced knowledge,
I’d have been able to keep him alive. At one time, he was so close to death, I hauled out the sad-irons and ironed my black dress for the funeral. He didn’t die until five weeks later, and I felt guilty because I’d ironed my dress too soon. Well, at least it was ready the day he was taken around the farm on the hay wagon. In his coffin.”

Maggie understood. The wake for her own father had been held in the parlour of her parents’ farmhouse, the single window at the end of the room wide open, the sheer curtains sucked out gently while the breeze wafted in. After the wake, her father was given the last tour of his land in the same manner Zel had described. Every farmer in the area received his final salute this way. A salute from the hard, rocky soil he’d worked throughout his lifetime. Maggie was present when the team was hitched up that October day. Her father’s body, in its coffin, was hoisted up to the very wagon upon which he had fastened Maggie to the crossboards with the reins when she’d been a skinny teenager, so she wouldn’t be yanked off by the horses.

She and Nola were already married when their father died. The two of them, along with their mother and their husbands, were joined by relatives and friends from neighbouring farms as they walked behind the wagon in October sun. The quiet, deliberate procession made its way around the boundaries of the fields, the horses staying close to the fenceline. The slow and solemn walk was still vivid in Maggie’s memory.

When they reached the field farthest from the house, Maggie’s mother began to sing. She sang alone, her gaze never leaving her husband’s coffin, her voice rising like a bold banner unfurling. She sang “The Bantry Girls’ Lament,” a song passed
down to her from her own family, who had come from County Cork. Maggie had never heard her mother sing so purely, or with so much heartbreak.

The procession passed cairns of stones Maggie’s father had heaped at the ends of the fields every spring. Picking stone had not been his favourite work. “The stones,” he always told his daughters, “multiply under the earth when we’re not looking. They wait until winter, when they’re under the snow and have nothing better to do.”

Maggie’s father had long ago dug the grave for his own father and mother, a grim task. And now, both he and Maggie’s mother were buried in the same country cemetery, in a plot beside the one he had dug for his parents.

Maggie had never sung the Irish lament. She vowed she never would. On the day she heard the lament, after her father had been buried and after everyone had gone home, her mother said to her and Nola, the three of them bowed by grief: “I wish eight children had been born to me instead of two, so that when sadness falls we could spread the pain more thinly among us.”

Zel had come up out of her own silence after talking about her husband’s death. “Isn’t it amazing,” she said, “how you think you can’t survive without someone in your life, and then you find out—you’re forced to find out—that you can, after all. Though a part of you goes on loving that person forever.”

Maggie had not replied. It was a rare private admission from Zel, who turned away after speaking, and refused to allow Maggie to see her face.

But Zel could also laugh. Loved to laugh her deep, dusky laugh. Laughter was an invitation, as if her life’s mission was to engage others in lightheartedness. Maggie could not imagine her own life without her friend’s laughter, though she and Zel had known each other only a few years.

M
AGGIE OPENED THE DOOR TO THE APARTMENT AND KNEW
instantly that Am was out. Even so, she went to the parlour and looked up the ladder. The hatch was open but she’d have sensed his presence whether it was open or closed.

One evening when she’d come home after rehearsal and found the hatch closed, she had quietly pulled back the door of the mahogany cupboard in the parlour. She’d ignored the pendulum cables that hung over the sand, and God forgive her, she had stood there and eavesdropped. Am had been up there with young Kenan, who had ably, it appeared, climbed the ladder. She’d imagined him making his way up to the tower. There was nothing wrong with his legs or feet; one of his arms was perfectly healthy.

The two men were talking and she had spied on them. She had spied, she now told herself, because she was concerned that Am was letting out the old sorrow. Breaking the pact of silence. A surge of anger flared as she thought of this.

It was Kenan’s voice she’d heard when she’d first opened the mahogany door. He was saying the word
egg.
And then he
cursed. She had recoiled, listening. Kenan never swore in her presence.

“Why did Uncle Oak never give me a goddamn egg to eat? He raised hens
—we
raised hens. I did as much work as he did when I was a boy. One egg a year, that’s what I was allowed.”

“Don’t be harsh on Oak,” said Am. “He did his best by you.”

“He rarely comes to the house anymore. Well, actually, he does visit, but I never know when to expect him. Weeks go by before he’ll stop in.”

“He doesn’t know what to do. He brought you up, a healthy and spirited boy. When you came home from the war, he didn’t—still doesn’t—know what he should say. If he did, he’d try to make you better.”

There was a long silence and then Am added, “The hurting. He’d want to make the hurting better.”

“I shouldn’t have lashed out just then,” Kenan said. “I eat all the eggs I want now.”

“Do you remember how many letters you sent to Oak from overseas?” That was Am.

“I wrote to Tress as often as I could, just about every week.”

“But to your uncle?”

“Four times, maybe. At Christmas. One for each year I was in the war. The last was from the hospital in England. Just a few lines. A nursing sister supplied the words and I nodded while she wrote them down. Before that, I figured Tress would pass on any news.”

“Five,” said Am. “That’s how many times you wrote to Oak. He kept the five letters in the pocket of his overalls. The bib pocket. Through the entire war, until you came home. The letters
were taken out of the pocket when the overalls were washed, and were tucked back in when the overalls were dry.”

There was silence then, as if Am had sensed that Maggie was eavesdropping below. She imagined him pointing to the hatch, letting Kenan know she was there. She had crept away, ashamed because she’d listened, ashamed at being caught.

Now she wondered if Am had ever spied on
her.
Wondered, for that matter, what they really knew of each other after twenty-five years of marriage. Maybe there would be surprises, if ever they tried to put this into words.

But they didn’t try. And wouldn’t, not after all this time. Instead, they blundered forward day by day.

She would know if he was up there brooding now, wouldn’t she? And he
had
been brooding. For weeks, he’d been climbing up to the tower and staying there for long periods. Sometimes he sat on a stool he had dragged behind him up the ladder. He told her he’d taken the stool up so he could reach to clean the cobwebs from the top rafters, but he hadn’t bothered to bring it back down.

The only thing she liked about Am staying up there was that Kenan was coming out of his house more to visit, if only after dark. She wondered if Tress knew where his wanderings led him. Kenan had a liking for Am, that was plain to see. When he joined Am in the tower, his visits were good for both men. In Maggie’s estimation.

She stood beside the closed cupboard now, wondering about the two chipping away at each other’s silence when she was out. She had to smile to herself.

She turned her thoughts to Luc. When he had stood before
the forty singers in the choral group this evening, he’d told them, “I want you to fill your own space. Don’t rely on the person next to you. Be aware of the singer beside you, but don’t rely. Take charge of your own space and fill it.”

Maybe when Am went up to the tower by himself, he was filling his own space. On his terms.

To Maggie, Luc had said, “When you sing, Magreet, watch me. Watch me and trust.” His eyebrows went up, his forehead wrinkled. He didn’t expect an answer. He wanted the singers to trust what each of them could do.