Tell (13 page)

Maggie stopped, as if her family stories were escaping from someone else’s lips. “That was a long time ago,” she said abruptly.

But Tress wanted more. “Why did you and Uncle Am move to town? No one in the family ever says a word about that.”

Maggie was quiet for a moment. “Probably because we moved here when you were too young to remember. That’s old news now. Your father had already bought the hotel. He’s the one who heard about the job of looking after this building. He sent word to Am at the farm and told him to come to town quickly so he could apply. Told him the job included this apartment—the only one in the building. When I first saw it, the place appealed to me. Even in the middle of town. I like the daytime activity—I feel as if I’m connected to life that goes on below. And then, after five o’clock, the building becomes so peaceful there’s scarcely a noise to be heard. Unless Am is wandering around, doing his work.”

“I wish I could say we have peace at our place,” said Tress. “Everything, every part of our lives, has changed. I’ve tried to
talk to Kenan—about us, I mean—but my words sound thin and false, even to me. I know the problems have to do with the war. Sometimes I think it’s easier to bury whatever happened over there and let it stay buried. Kenan doesn’t exactly say that, but I think he feels the same. He says nothing of the war, nor do I ask.” She pushed her hair behind her ears. “Other things have changed, too.”

“What things?”

Tress tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Kenan spends much of his time in the veranda and stares out at the bay. He likes to sit by himself in the dark. I don’t think he notices when the lights are on or when they’re off. He forgets some events completely and remembers others in astonishing detail. He takes long, slow breaths before he talks. There are times when he speaks with extreme care. At other times, he becomes silent unexpectedly, as if he’s listening not only to me but to the room itself. That’s when I think he doesn’t hear me at all. I might tell him something important, and later, he’ll swear that he didn’t hear me speak. And yet, I have the feeling he’s storing everything away, every word. I tell him stories … well, I did. I made an effort to help him believe that’s he’s still a part of town life.”

Tress did not add that Kenan did talk about matters unrelated to war. That he blurted out memories of his childhood, of growing up in Uncle Oak’s house. Memories unrelated to anything she could point to—except what was unseen and turning over in his mind. Nor did she say that he sometimes woke up in the night, shouting, reaching for her. Frantic.

“He never used to be like this. He loved being around people; he was carefree, happy to discuss anything. Don’t you remember
him dancing on the veranda of Father’s hotel? Singing while he kicked up his heels? Now he behaves as if danger will come flying around a corner of the kitchen if he takes a step toward the doorway without checking first.”

They were both silent, and then Tress added, “We’ve had some good moments, but our old laughter together is what I miss the most.” She put her hands to her face. “So I turn away. I go out by myself or with friends because Kenan and I no longer go out together. I visit my brother Bernard. Sometimes Kay and I go to the moving pictures. Or we play cards. Or I stay and visit with Mother after meal shifts are over at the hotel.”

Maggie was alarmed. Tress had never before gone into detail about life behind the walls of her narrow house. Now she was unable to stop.

“Did you know that when Kenan was overseas, he had two of his uniform buttons made into earrings for me? He sent them to me during his first leave in England. I can’t bring myself to wear them, Aunt Maggie. I couldn’t wear them while he was at the Front, not knowing if he was safe, and then, after he was wounded, I still couldn’t wear them. What I want to do is throw them into the bay. They’re one more reminder of the war.”

“He probably doesn’t think about them at all,” said Maggie. “He has enough to deal with.”

“He’d like to work outside the house. I know he would. But he doesn’t want the stares or the pity.”

“He’s been visiting Am,” said Maggie. “That’s a good sign, maybe even a sign of healing. Am also tries to connect him back. Kenan has been coming out more and more now, even if it’s only after dark. You and I both know that many of his wounds
are inside and can’t be seen.” She experienced momentary confusion, wondering if she’d referred to her husband or Tress’s.

Tress hadn’t noticed. “Kenan reads about soldiers with shell shock all the time,” she told her aunt. “I wish he wouldn’t. What good will that do? Magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, he never stops reading. He joined the vets’ association, and that group has plenty to say. There is always a stack of papers and magazines on the floor beside his chair.”

“Have things changed since he started keeping the books for the drugstore?”

“He likes the job. It satisfies his sense of order, and we’re glad to have the money coming in. He’s already received the soldiers’ gratuity. That helped, though it was a one-time payout—six hundred dollars. I put it straight into the bank. We have the small pension because of his injuries, and the income I bring in from my parents at the hotel. Eventually, he’ll have to find something else. ‘One-armed work,’ he’d say if he were here. And then he’d add, sarcastically, ‘One-eyed, too.’ I hate listening to the sarcasm he sometimes aims at himself. At least he doesn’t aim it at me. But I hate to see him like this. No matter how I try to help. Sometimes I think I
am
living with a stranger.”

“I don’t know what else to say, Tress. Am and I are twice your age and there have been times when we’ve reached a blind or a standstill in our marriage, and wondered how we got there. You two are young, you’re obliged to—you
have
to—fix the problem. You owe that to each other.”

Maggie wanted to add,
For me. Do it for me. Show that it can be done. That whatever is wrong can be healed. So you won’t end up where Am and I are now. Too late to turn back.

There is no intimacy
, she wanted to add, bluntly. But she did not, and could not, speak this aloud.

She remembered, suddenly, something Nellie Melba had said to her in the diner when they’d met by accident during the war. “Love can distort behaviour, Maggie. Mine, yours, anyone’s. Love can be used as an excuse for the way we act.”

What had she meant by ‘used as an excuse’? By whom? Love given? Love wasted? Love for whom? What Tress was describing was only partly about love. Behaviour was distorted, but that was because of war. Kenan was damaged, and maybe all he could think of right now was being more damaged. But he
was
speaking, he
was
leaving the house. Progress had been made, however slowly.

Maggie didn’t know how to comfort Tress. Her twenty-five-year-old niece, whom she had loved since she was a baby and who should never have such cares, had worry lines in her forehead at a time when she might have been glowing with happiness.

How do we proceed? Maggie thought. How does any of us proceed when we are struck down?

And what about her own behaviour? How long had it been since
she
had loved and been loved in return? She thought of herself and Am, side by side in their bed, never touching. Not for a long time. Months? A year? Surely not that long. She did not want to remember.

D
ECEMBER
1919

The Bay Is Frozen

Take note, all you townsfolk. Pull your skates out of your cellars and sheds, and get sharpening the blades. We’ve heard rumours from reliable sources that the rink on the bay will be open before Christmas. And with Christmas fast approaching, boys and girls who are not yet in possession of their own skates can no better be pleased than by a pair waiting for them under the yule tree. Support our local merchants as we move forward into the season of whiteness and cold and winter fun.

Flying Trips to Europe

A local flier predicts that we shall within a few years fly across the Atlantic in the forenoon and return in the afternoon. We shall return in the afternoon, no doubt, because after paying the fare for flying so high, we shall have nothing left upon which to “do” lands beyond the Atlantic.

St. Mark’s Church (Anglican)

First and third Sundays in the month, Holy Communion 11 a.m.

Sunday School 3 p.m. and Evening Prayer 7 p.m.

$65 buys Gable Square Piano. This would make a first-class practice piano. It is yours for $50 cash, $5 per month. E. A. Houle, Deseronto.

If you like our paper, tell your neighbours; if not, tell us.

T
HE COLD SNAP LASTED MORE THAN TWO WEEKS.
Boats had arrived at the wharf well before freeze-up, dropping off hundred-pound sacks of sugar and flour for the town hotels, bakers and grocers. Snow and more snow had fallen. The landscape was white, the ice on the bay the colour of unpolished silver. The skaters’ shack had been constructed. On Wednesday morning, Kenan carried his tea to the veranda and sat in his chair.

Outside, men were slogging their way through newly drifted snow and onto the bay. Once they were offshore, they bored holes at several sites to test the depth of the ice. Now and then, some of the men paused to stomp their feet, expelling white clouds from their lungs as they worked. Even from a few hundred feet, Kenan recognized some of the faces.

An hour later, several men began the more difficult work of clearing snow. By eleven in the morning they had shaped a near-perfect oval. Holes were made at each end, and into each,
a tall pole with a high crossbar was lowered. Water was poured around the base to freeze each pole in place. Several men began to work on the wiring for the electric lights that would be attached to the crossbars.

Kenan nodded. The oval was becoming, recognizably, a rink. From the veranda, the cleared ice gave the appearance of being smooth, but Kenan knew better. Up close, there would be wind ripples and bumps and cracks that could trip the skaters. A few men began to work at levelling hard tufts of snow that were stuck to the surface.

Some of the cleared snow was left as a perimeter around part of the oval, and some was pushed back and tossed up to form a bit of a wall along the far side of the rink. This served as a backdrop to the rink itself and gave warning, letting people know they shouldn’t wander too much farther out onto the bay, at least not during the early days of winter.

Men had been going in and out of the skaters’ shack all morning. Smoke was rising from the chimney. Two men with shovels and scrapers now began to clear a wide path that led from rink to shore. Another crew turned its attention to fencing. Lengths of wire were unrolled and attached to short posts driven into the snow on either side of the path. The posts would serve to signal the path’s location, especially after any new snowfall. On the shore side of the rink, a walkway was cleared so that spectators could look over the waist-high snowbanks and watch the skating when they weren’t on blades themselves.

By afternoon the rink was ready. The men appeared to be satisfied with their day’s work, and Kenan, unseen inside the shadows of his veranda, could not hold back a slight grin. In heavy
clothing, the men’s bodies were stumpy and rotund. One man pulled off thick gloves and held them between his thighs while he massaged his fingers. He pulled a pipe from an inner pocket, lit it and jammed it between his teeth. He slid the gloves back on. A wisp of smoke floated in front of his face and disappeared.

Kenan looked beyond the men and off to the right. Later in the season, when conditions improved, a portion of the bay would be used for horse races that took place on the ice every year, usually during the latter part of the winter carnival, at the end of January. If the early freeze continued, some people from town would soon be crossing the bay by horse and sleigh, taking the shortcut to Napanee.

Kenan looked back toward the rink, the shack, the wire fencing, and realized that while he’d been daydreaming, the men had finished the job and left. As if from nowhere, a dozen waiting skaters, maybe more, swarmed onto the new rink. Most of them were young boys wearing jackets and caps, wooden skates and lace-ups, all of them in motion at the same time.

I
N THE EVENING AFTER SUPPER, TRESS SAID SHE WAS GOING
to the moving pictures at Naylor’s. She’d be late coming home. She was going out more and more on her own now, with her sister-in-law, Kay, or with other friends. Out to the pictures, to the ice cream parlour, to visit Aunt Maggie, to play euchre, to this, to that. Kenan was losing track.

Before leaving the house, she’d propped a pair of men’s skates against the coal scuttle near the side door. She said not a word about the new skates. She propped them there and left.

As soon as she walked away from the house, Kenan went to the side door and examined the skates. These were far more elaborate than his old blocks of wood with steel blades and straps that fastened at heel and toe. These were brown leather lace-ups with finely polished blades. He lifted a skate, held it between his knees and drew his index finger lightly along the steel. Such a blade would not snap like some he had seen during his childhood. He knew one boy from an outlying farm who’d come to town to skate on the rink and wore pieces of bone strapped to his ankleboots—shinbones from a horse or cow, smoothed and polished to a fine edge. The boy’s grandfather had brought the bone skates with him when he’d come to Canada from someplace in northern Europe—Kenan couldn’t remember exactly which country. Holland, maybe.

What Kenan did know was that every night at exactly ten by the tower clock, the lights on the poles at the ends of the rink went dark. The routine hadn’t altered since electricity was installed in the town.

He paced through the house, upstairs and down, sat in his chair, read the newspapers, paced some more. At ten, dressed in outdoor clothes, he stood in his own dark veranda and watched the lights over the rink and in the skaters’ shack go out. He waited another twenty minutes, until he was certain that the last of the lingering skaters had departed. He carried his skates out the side door and down the slope of his yard. The rink lay directly ahead. The wall of snow reared up on its far side and caught his attention. A sound roared inside his head and he turned quickly, to face the yard again. His heart was hammering in his chest. He had to will himself to stay calm, alert. He
remained motionless for several moments. He turned to face the bay once more but looked down this time, toward the footpath, and continued on to the rink.

He glanced off to the side. To the west, the frozen surface of the bay was hard and taut, stretching for miles beneath a charcoal sky. The moon, frozen in space, was a half-open eye that offered meagre light. Kenan continued along the path until he reached the shack. His boots crunched against snow, and the boards creaked as he entered. He left the door ajar and, in partial darkness, sat on the bench that was nearest the pot-belly stove. He tugged off his boots with his right hand and yanked up his socks so there would be no folds or wrinkles along the soles of his feet. He slipped his left foot down and into the new skate and felt the snug thud, the perfect fit of the heel. He slid his right foot in, flexed his knees one at a time and pushed his feet through air as if there were pedals beneath them. With effort, he managed to tighten and knot the laces, pressing one ankle against the other, using his dead hand to steady the lace, wrapping the extra length around each ankle before tucking in the ends. He teetered as he stood, but the skates held him upright on the plank floor. Solid.

He walked out into the night, his blades slicing through packed snow. He gasped in the cold air, left the path and stepped onto the ice. His torso shifted left. He shouted as his right arm whirled and he went down, left hip and shoulder slamming hard. He swore, and manoeuvred himself onto his knees. His forehead was resting against the ice. He waited, levered himself up, cursed the dead arm that dangled from his shoulder like an anvil.

The narrow strips of steel upon which his full weight rested were now threatening to tilt him into the surrounding
snowbank. He moved forward awkwardly, walking rather than skating toward the centre of the rink. He held his body rigid, could not relax his muscles. He could not get the feel of what he was supposed to do. He wondered if he could count on his legs and feet to remember for him.
Let the body remember.

Now that he was still, he became aware of the life and tremble of the bay beneath his feet. The colour of the sky had turned from charcoal to unrelenting black, and clouds were drifting across the thin face of the moon. The blackness flattened and spread itself horizontally. This was the same darkness, same horizon, same shore he had witnessed month after month from his chair. What he had not foreseen was how different the bay would be with him standing on its surface. It continued out and out, an unnatural frozen plain, pulled and stretched toward some unimagined vanishing point. He saw how insignificant and contained he had been during the long period he’d remained inside.

He tried to understand the darkness consciously now, not only above but below and all around. He imagined depth and danger. He shirked from neither. He was alone with the night. He had not forgotten the hard lessons about how to stay alive under protection of the dark.

His shins were stiff. He was cold and had scarcely done anything but fall hard and, after that, shuffle about on the new skates. Tomorrow, he’d have a bruise on his hip, probably on his shoulder, too. Once more, he pushed his right foot forward to see what would happen. He stumbled and thought he’d go down again, but saved himself by pulling back and righting his upper body. He knew he should drop his weight, bend his knees slightly, find the core of gravity he could trust. As long as he
continued to skate with his shoulders held high, his sense of balance would be scattered. He had a sudden vision of his limbs on short wires flung out from the sides of a tin noisemaker a child might flail from side to side.

His head drooped as he lowered his shoulders, and he began to talk to himself. Face your feet if you have to. Drop your centre if you want to stay upright. Let your weight sink. Relax your knees.

He felt the hint of a large shudder then, a surprising snap that spread beneath his feet. He remembered the sound, the old sensation, the ice reminding him of its presence, the bay alive beneath him.

He propelled himself forward and experienced a moment of freedom, a free-flowing movement. But this, too, was short-lived. His taut body kept him from leaning forward and letting himself glide. The tension kept his head down instead of up, kept his good arm from swinging purposefully, crossing back and forth in front of his chest, doing the work of two arms while he struggled with the balancing act of staying upright.

His voice told him that he would fall again if he stayed on the ice.

He grated his left blade against ice and stopped.

He headed for the shack and removed his skates.

He did not look back, not once. He did not want to see the wall of snow on the far side of the rink, though he was aware of it behind him as he made his way along the path and toward his own white-blanketed yard. Though the distance was short, his legs were numb by the time he stumbled through the side door.

The house was quiet. He wanted to curse against its silence. He wanted to shout out the dangerous words that were in his
head. He wanted to set things right. But what he knew and what he had done and what he had witnessed would never be set right.

He removed his heavy mittens, sat on a kitchen chair and peeled off his socks. He hung them, rigid and cold, over the sectional heat shield that stood behind the stove. As he stared at the socks he had another flash of memory, images darting. A quiet moment one evening in France. He’d been sitting in a trench on a low stack of sandbags. Bill, nearby, was perched on a bit of a ledge he had made for himself. They had just finished a meal of stew, cheese and jam. They’d turned over a bully-beef tin and Kenan had melted a bit of wax and stuck a candle on top. Behind the ledge was an opening Bill had dug into the dirt wall, a shabby attempt at a funk hole. Enough space where he could recline if he wanted to grab some sleep, his legs and feet sticking out. There were a few boards, reinforcements, strips of metal sheeting farther along.

Bill, with jam stuck to the side of his face, held up a worn sock that had a giant hole in its heel. He had rubbed his feet with whale oil and now he was showing Kenan his sock. He was grousing non-stop, chattering, laughing, swearing, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand. The never-ending banter continuing, as always.

A few minutes earlier, the two men had been given new socks, homemade socks sent up the line by the Red Cross. Kenan’s hands were still functioning as a pair then. He couldn’t remember exactly what Bill was saying, but he remembered pulling on his own new socks, registering as he did that they’d been knitted by some unnamed woman in Canada. Someone who had dutifully, perhaps even lovingly, followed instructions: no ridge under the
heel, no ridge at the end of the toe, no lump or bump that would cause a blister to form on the foot of a soldier. On his foot.

Tugging that pair of knitted socks up over his heels and ankles was a simple act that soothed during a lull in the war. He couldn’t help saying to himself,
A bless’ed pair of socks, a bless’ed pair of socks.
The socks had travelled far. He took a moment to think about each part of the journey they must have had until they’d reached their destination and were fitted snugly to his feet. Thinking about all of this had created comfort and longing. Yes, longing. To be home. To be in a warm bed. To be between sheets, clean sheets, any sheets. To be with Tress. To lie beside her. To reach for her.

But nothing had come out quite as he had imagined. He possessed every one of those yearned-for desires now that he was home again, but his life was … he could not put a name to what his life was now.

He walked up the stairs, barefoot, and got into bed. He was chilled through, could hear his own breathing. He got up again and hauled another blanket out of the closet. He threw it over the bed and slid back in again. When he was in France, the collection of an issued blanket was a sign that the unit would soon be on the move. The memory of the blanket, the socks, the memory of Bill disturbed. He did not want to stay awake; he would not wait up for Tress. She would crawl in beside him when she returned home, bringing warmth that might or might not wake him. At the moment, he wanted only sleep.