Tell (20 page)

His nephew was full of surprises. Not only could he see in the dark with one eye, he also drank another man’s whisky. Am liked the feel of the raw liquor against his throat. He liked the old barn. His eyes were adjusting to the shadows. He understood why Kenan would be comfortable here, even if it was to stand in the dark. The place would make sense to Kenan. He could be out of his house, but he also had a place where he could retreat.

Kenan was looking through an opening in the boards. Smoke was coming from the chimney of the main house and from the smaller building next to it. The smaller building was in darkness. He cleared his throat, said he had something to ask.

“What is it?” said Am.

“I wondered—I’ll give you the money for it—if you would pick up Tress’s Christmas present for me. At the jeweller’s. I want to buy her one of those new bracelet watches.”

“I will,” said Am. “I’ll go tomorrow at lunchtime and get one.”

“The one that was described in the ad in the
Post,
” said Kenan. “That’s all.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll buy the watch tomorrow and drop it off at your house while she’s at work.”

Am looked through the opening in the boards and saw a light come on in the small building next to Zel’s house. The door opened and a woman hurried out. She was not wearing a
coat. She moved along the short path to the door of the main house and let herself into the boarding-house kitchen.

Moments later, the light went out again in the small building. A man dressed in a dark jacket, his head bare, a scarf around his neck, left the workroom and shut the door behind him. He walked quickly toward the road and down the slope, passing close to the abandoned barn as he did so.

Neither Kenan nor Am moved. From the crack between the loose boards where he stood, Am strained to see the man’s face as he passed.

Lukas, the piano player, the music director.

The woman who had hurried through the doorway and into Zel’s house—he would never mistake the lines of her body; he would never mistake the way she moved. The woman was Mags.

In this year of “Peace at last,” your editor and his staff at the
Post
wish all of our loyal readers a very Merry Christmas!

The Women’s Patriotic League has been raising money to contribute to the War Memorial Fund. Dig into your hearts and your pocketbooks during this season of giving, and remember our fallen heroes who made the supreme sacrifice in the World’s Great Struggle, so recently brought to a close.

The entire town awaits Naylor’s New Year’s Eve concert. What can be in store for us?

Assuredly, we know that the singers and musicians have been working hard. Members of many of our town families are involved in this production, and they are certain to be rewarded by the appreciation of ticket holders. The concert is sold out!

The successful businessman is the man who stays with his business and does his outside work by telephone.

M
AGGIE LAY AWAKE HALF THE NIGHT
. A
LL
night. Part, all, she didn’t know how long she’d been awake and how long she’d slept.
Do you remember how we used to have hope?
she wanted to say to Am. He had returned to the apartment late, long after she had gone to bed, and had lain motionless beside her. She did not speak when he came to bed. There was whisky on his breath and the smell of whisky in the room.

So much hope,
she wanted to say.
For anything, for everything. We were so young. We wouldn’t have known what to call it then. Our energies worked toward loving each other, even though we didn’t say that in so many words. We needed no confirmation of love; it was just there, moment by moment, day by day.

How did we allow that part of us to drain away?
she wanted to ask.

But she could not and would not ask. Because what she was this morning, this moment, was a woman who loved another man so dangerously, so recklessly, there was no turning back. What
was done could not be undone. Every action she took would be swallowed by the town. Everything would come to light. After that, regardless of the consequences, whatever happened would be covered over in darkness, the way things always were.

She reached for the chain that hung around her neck, beneath her nightgown. Smoothed her fingers over the gold locket inscribed with the letter H. Luc had given it to her. It had belonged to his grandmother, he said, and after that, to his mother, Hanna, who had died in her thirties. He wanted Maggie to have it as a Christmas gift. He wanted her to have the locket because it had been in his family and it was precious to him. He’d fastened it around her neck while she was dressing in the dark, preparing to leave and go home.

W
HEN SHE HAD SLIPPED INTO THE WORKROOM, HE HAD
turned the key in the lock after she closed the door behind her. She did not object, but had a fleeting thought that it was probably the first time the door had been locked since the former owner, the salesman, had kept his supplies in the building, long before Zel had purchased the place.

Luc was glad to see her, happy that she’d returned, that she had come back to him. She had visited Zel first, stayed for a while, exchanged gifts, left her coat in Zel’s kitchen and then went on to the workroom to take Luc’s scarf to him. Luc was at the long table when she arrived. He returned to his chair after locking the door. They spoke for a while and then he turned out the light and led her to the back of the room, the part that was curtained off. She followed, to his bed. She had lain naked
beside a man who was not her husband. She had allowed herself to love, to be made love to by a man who was not Am.

She went over every detail in her mind. She had turned on her side, stretched the length of the mattress, scrunched her pillow. Luc’s fingertips had traced the prominences of her spine, one by one, soothingly, tenderly.

“When we find caring, when we know there is love,” he told her, “we hold on. We hold on as long as we can.” The sadness in his voice, always the sadness. But even as she heard the words, Maggie knew that other words had been choked off, remained unspoken.

Once again, she thought of what Nellie Melba had said to her in the diner. About men and women using love—the state of love, even the word “love”—to excuse the way they behaved. Melba had loved other men and her marriage had come to an end. The world knew all about that; Melba was a public figure.

Maggie tried to push aside what others might think of her own behaviour. She was not ashamed of loving Luc. She did not want her friendship with him to be an excuse for anything. But she had known Am a long time, since childhood. It was impossible to sort out her feelings.

“What are you thinking that makes you so serious?” Luc asked.

“I once met Nellie Melba,” she said. “I was thinking of something she said to me during that meeting.”

He pulled back in the bed, surprised by her answer. The two of them laughed together.
How long?
she thought, in the midst of releasing laughter.
How long since I have laughed like this with a man?

“It’s strange to think of her now, I know,” said Maggie. “She and I had breakfast together one morning during the war. An accidental meeting in Toronto. She said things to me then that I thought of now.”

“What things?”

“About how love can distort, how love can excuse our actions. I suppose she was saying that we can excuse anything.”

“We need not excuse or distort anything,” said Luc. “We need no excuses to love each other. It is this moment that is important. For both of us.”

There was nothing Maggie could say to explain herself. She had placed herself close to a fault line that was shifting.

“I never met Melba,” Luc went on. “But I heard her sing. She is a passionate woman onstage. Passionate, controlled. I saw her in London. I heard Madame Albani, too. Her final performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 1911. Such a privilege to hear both Melba and Albani during my lifetime.”

“Do you miss …?” Maggie wasn’t certain how to finish. “England? Europe? What those places offer to someone like you?”

“What does Europe matter? Parts of Europe are destroyed. People have been destroyed. Vanished.” His arm swept out and his hand collided with the wall in the cramped space. “Someone like me is from anywhere, Magreet. From everywhere. I am like you, no different. I am here now. That matters. We are here together.”

He said nothing about Am. Nor did she. And what she saw in that moment was that no matter how intimate she and Luc had been or would be, they were responsible for their actions. Each
had made a decision. Alone and together, they had decided. To ward off longing, to seek what each could give the other, to find again what they had once had.

W
HEN
M
AGGIE WOKE AGAIN, SHE COULD TELL BY THE
light coming in around the curtains that it was mid-morning. She hadn’t slept so late in years. She was startled for a moment, because she thought she felt movement at the end of the bed. There was no one in the room. Nor was Am in bed beside her. She had not heard him get up. She could hear no footsteps in the apartment. He must be working on one of the floors below. He must have boiled the water for his tea, poured too much milk into his cup, prepared his own breakfast. She looked at the wind-up clock. It was after ten. She was almost certain someone had been in the room with her. Who? What? Her heart was beating rapidly, but she lay still and forced herself to remain calm.
Don’t allow the past,
she warned herself.
Don’t allow it in.

She spoke aloud, into the room.

“Get up, get washed, get dressed. It’s Monday. Knit from a pattern. Sew. Deal with ripped seams, loose buttons, elastic waists. Walk over to the hotel and visit Agnes. Find out what she wants you to contribute to the family meal on Christmas Day. Ask, even though you know she’ll have every detail in hand. Go out into the air and talk to someone about anything, about the overcast day, about decorations in store windows, about whether to buy potatoes by the bushel or the peck, or whether one family will cook goose for Christmas dinner and another will cook turkey … it doesn’t matter. Just go out.”

She must start her day as if it were an ordinary day.

But it was not. Her entire body knew there was nothing ordinary about this day.

She stayed there, thinking about getting up and having tea with toasted bread and jelly, and she remembered the luscious wild grapes that had grown on the farm and probably still did. She’d loved the deep blue clusters as they ripened each year. One time, she had made her own raisins, but that had been too much bother. For three days, the grapes had to be spread out under the sun on framed wire—covered, to keep off the flies. There were flies aplenty on the farm. Every night she carried the frame into the house so the grapes would stay warm, and every morning she carried them out again, in and out for three days, until the tiny raisins were finally dry enough to bring inside for storage.

Grape jelly was less trouble. She made this after the first frost, straining the juices from the fruit mash through cheesecloth slung between two chairbacks at one end of the kitchen. The juice dripped all night through the sagging cloth and into a bucket on the floor. All she needed were grapes, sugar, an orange if one was available. The results were worth every bit of effort when she saw the gleam of light that shone on the wine-coloured jars lined up in rows on her pantry shelf. Every December, she and Am opened the prize, the first jar of fall jelly for their breakfast Christmas morning.

She stretched and made herself get up, sat on the side of the bed. She thought of Kenan and how he spent his days indoors. She was almost certain he would venture out in daylight sometime soon. He’d been coming to the tower to visit Am more
and more frequently, still after dark. He’d been out on his new skates several times—always after the rink closed at ten. Changes had taken place slowly since his return from the war, but now he seemed to be moving forward at a rapid pace. Not too rapid, Maggie hoped. A misstep could throw him into confusion again. She knew how fine a line both he and Tress were walking right now.

During the last decades, it had been easy to love Dermot and Agnes’s four children: two boys, two girls. Red-haired Grania, finding her strengths, learning to embrace life. Tress, the beautiful older sister with the dark hair, longing to have a baby, forced to learn strengths she didn’t know she had. But as much as Maggie had always loved her nieces and nephews, loved them as children and now as adults, the love had been at a distance because they had never been hers.

She thought of Luc again. She could not stop thinking of Luc. She knew Zel would be leaving early the next day for Belleville, which meant that Maggie could not go back to the rooming house after tonight, not until her friend returned. Her dear friend, who asked no questions, who neither judged nor interfered, who somehow seemed to understand.

Luc had told her the night before that Andrew had invited him to spend Christmas afternoon and evening with his family. Maggie was glad that Luc would not be alone. She could hardly invite him to join the family dinner at Dermot’s hotel—not now. Though he would probably be welcomed by his former boarding house on Fourth Street. The owner and roomers there would want to have him join their Christmas celebrations, she was certain of that. With all the talk in the
town about the upcoming concert, they would consider it an honour to include him.

She would go to him again, today, tonight. She had already decided. She had decided even before waking, before getting up.

M
AGS LEFT SHORTLY AFTER SEVEN AND HE DID
not try to stop her. He could have. He could have stopped her with a word. She left with her music in hand, the last evening she would be able to practise, she told him, because Zel was to leave the next morning for Belleville. After Christmas would be too late—with only one rehearsal remaining.

Am paced the floors of the apartment, took a pink pill, climbed the ladder, brooded in the tower, looked out through the clock. The temperature had been dropping all afternoon and evening. Wind was blowing in off the bay, and passersby were bundled in thick clothes. The surface of the bay glistened with cold. The ice would be thick and deep and reliable, on the rink and far out across the bay. It would stay frozen like that for months; he had
ice out
dates carved into the beam as past proof. He wished he still owned a horse he could take out onto the bay, race around the ice in the cold air with a sleigh hitched behind. He thought of how Mags had always been good with horses.
She had a way of approaching them. She could take charge but put them at ease; they trusted her.

He wasn’t certain what to do. The past was inching forward and he could no longer ward it off. Neither he nor Mags was able to handle, to live with what they’d left smouldering behind. They’d done their best, but their best had not been good enough.

He wanted to go out into the cold; he didn’t care if his face froze or his fingers or his feet. He’d take his skates and skate hard around the rink until he was fatigued, until the pain was gone. He would talk to Mags. He would say something, but he was not sure what. He would put his thoughts together when the occasion arose. After Christmas, perhaps. Get Christmas out of the way, and after that, her concert, and then … he couldn’t think this through. Everything he had known and counted on was zigzagging like a crack in the ice, its sudden angles altering a surface over which he was forced to step.

When he saw the lights go out on the rink, he grabbed up his skates and left the apartment. There had been few people skating because of the cold, but he was used to raw nights. He’d walked in worse and he’d skated in worse.

He left his boots inside the shack and got himself onto the rink and let the wind push him around. He had to face the bite of it every time he turned to do a half-lap. The wall of snow was still there, on one side of the rink, slight and diminished but there. He thought of the way he’d battered at it with the shovel. But only days earlier, someone else in town had done the same.

He skated through the dark and the wind, bent over when he had to, the skin on his face needled with cold. He saw
Kenan’s figure rise up before him, emerging from the shadows but this time on skates. Am wasn’t alarmed. He’d half expected Kenan to show up, an apparition in the night. They didn’t speak immediately, but when Am stopped, Kenan stopped too, and skated near. Am saw that Kenan’s dead hand was tucked deep down inside his jacket pocket. The two of them were facing what remained of the buildup of snow. They looked at each other and, with a shock of recognition, decided at the same moment. They made their way to the shack and grabbed for the shovels. Their blades crunched and cut through the path as they reached the far side of the rink, and then they demolished the rest of the wall, once and for all. The satisfaction was enormous. Am was astonished at the one-armed effort of his nephew. Kenan wielded the shovel as if a hidden rage had boiled to the surface with the first swing. As for himself, Am didn’t know what to do with the energy he still had left to release.

“Come back to the tower,” he said to Kenan. “We’re both damn near frozen. We’ve done what had to be done, and let the town be damned if they don’t like it. That heap of snow has never been needed there anyway.”

A
M DID NOT LIGHT THE LANTERN
. N
OR DID HE FLICK THE
electric switch. Shadows shifted around them from lights in the street below. The two men were winded from the cold air and the skating and from breaking up the snow, and they sat there in the dark surrounded by clocks. Am pulled out the flask and they drank from the shot glasses he had carried up.

With a half-grimace, he stood to look through the front clock. He came back and sat on the stool again and glanced over at the younger man.

“I grew up around silent men,” he said, and nodded into the shadows. “Father, grandfather, uncles, men on nearby farms. Speak when spoken to. That was the message.”

Kenan nodded, too, but said nothing. He’d been raised by one of those silent men. Kenan helped himself to another whisky and poured to Am’s glass as well. Knowing that Maggie was out, he glanced at Am’s face and then quickly away. He should say something to take the older man’s mind off his marriage. But what was to come could not be deflected. Am’s sorrow was bursting all around him in the dark.

“I’ll soon be fifty years old,” said Am. “I loved her so much. I’ve loved her all my life. She was eighteen and I was twenty-four when we married, but this happened later. You’d have been four years old. What I have to tell, it’s her story, too—goes back to the terrible winter of ninety-eight.”

There was a long pause, and Kenan understood that Am had decided not to continue. But another noise erupted beside him.

“Mags and I,” Am blurted out. He wasn’t looking Kenan’s way now; he was looking at the lower hand of the front-facing clock. “We’ve been living two sets of lives in the same life. One on the farm, the other after we moved to town—when I took the job of looking after this.”

He motioned to the tower around them, to the building beneath their feet.

“In our first lives, Mags and I had children. The reason you never knew was because our loss wasn’t talked about. The
women were in this as much as the men. No one allowed it. Mags wouldn’t allow it. It was unmentionable.”

Kenan looked at the older man as if seeing him for the first time. Throughout their lives, Maggie and Am had loved and indulged their nieces and nephews—Bernard, Tress, Patrick, especially Grania. Kenan himself had been a childhood friend right alongside Dermot and Agnes’s children. He had grown up and married Tress and joined the family, and there had never been any mention of Uncle Am and Aunt Maggie having children of their own.

How was it possible for an entire community to maintain silence? Others in town would have known. Tress’s parents. His own uncle Oak—he had been silent, too. The community had created a grim kind of solidarity. And as Kenan began to understand, he saw that he was as much a part of this as any other. He’d been brought up in the same town. Ranks closed around certain of life’s events. He’d been adopted but had no idea who his birth parents were. Someone had to know. But there had been no discussion about that, either. Yes, ranks had closed.

And hadn’t the same thing happened when he’d come home from the war? No one was pushing him to behave in any particular way. He’d chosen to stay—had been left to stay—in his house until he was ready to leave. His condition had, in some ways, become unspeakable. Still, it was almost impossible to believe that no one had ever spoken about Am and Maggie’s children.

As if reading his thoughts, Am said, “To speak was not possible. Mags forbade it. She forbade the mention of our own babies. We had to behave as if they hadn’t existed. After you’ve
bottled up the words long enough, they get sealed off so tightly you don’t say them anymore. I bit down hard on the jealousy that twisted inside me when I saw other fathers with their children, leaning down to tell them something, or to listen. Even if they shouted at them in anger.”

He spoke loudly and with anger, himself, now.

“It was the diphtheria that took them. Donal, two years and one month. Annie, four months and three days. Our beautiful children. If you could have seen them.

“So much snow fell that winter, the drifts on Boundary Road were higher than the horses and sleighs that drove between them. It was the same all over the county. Most of the time, I couldn’t get to town. Even with the big sleigh and the strong team I had. For weeks, it was impossible to buy supplies. Sometimes a couple of neighbouring farmers would make it through the snow as far as our farm on a Wednesday night after chores. We couldn’t go anywhere. We’d pull out a pack of cards and play Forty-Five, or Five Fingers. The rules were the same no matter what we called it. We were filling in time in winter.”

Am paused. “And then, the deep cold set in. And the illness.”

Kenan had stopped hearing. He was beginning to see death. The faces of friends and the faces of enemies. He was seeing Bill’s face, and now Hugh’s. Hugh was farther along, at the other end of the trench, but Kenan knew he was there. Bill was directly beside Kenan when the first explosion came.

Kenan bent forward at the waist, his good hand pressed to the side of his head.
How do we learn to love and hate? How do we learn to grieve and mourn?

Am looked at the younger man and realized he shouldn’t be speaking like this. Kenan’s body was leaning toward the nearest clock, and Am reached out with a hand as if to stem his own words. How could his pain compare with Kenan’s pain from the war, the wounds in Kenan’s mind? He shouldn’t have told him about the babies. Mags was right to keep the silence.

But pain was pain. One person’s and the next person’s and the next. One kind of pain was no more weighty than another, surely. Where the pain took place, the map of it, made not a speck of difference.

He went on, unable to stop. “Donal had a hernia, a rupture in his little groin.” His voice softened as this new memory burst. “The lump showed itself soon after he was born. But right away, Mags knew what to do.” He was smiling to himself now. “She told me to bring her a silver dollar and she washed it off and wrapped it in a piece of foil. She moulded the foil around the coin. She did this with so much love. The foil came from a package of tea, Salada tea.” He laughed out loud, harsh tears trapped in the creases beneath his eyes. “She sewed a tiny pouch out of cotton and slid the silver dollar inside the pouch, then closed it with a safety pin and stitched it onto a band of flannel that we wrapped around Donal’s groin. It was a simple matter to take out the coin when the pouch was soiled—both the band and the pouch could be washed easily enough. Well, that bit of extra weight from the silver dollar, that’s what kept his little hernia from popping out. And then, Mags lifted him into her arms. If you could have seen the rush of pleasure on her face when she picked up our babe.”

More and more. He couldn’t stop. “Donal had his second birthday a month before the illness. We had no birthday candles
at the farm, so Mags stuck two long wooden matches into the icing on the cake, and I lit them and they flared up. Donal blew them out and laughed and clapped his hands.

“When he and Annie got sick within days of each other, Mags and I took turns sleeping in the kitchen beside them. We brought both cot and cradle to the kitchen because the stove was there and we knew there’d be no icy draft in the room. There was a long narrow couch, tobacco-coloured, at one end of the kitchen. I was used to having a quick nap after lunch before I went back out to the field or the orchard. I slept less than an hour in the middle of each day, but I liked that quick nap.

“After the babies came down with the diphtheria, Mags and I took turns sleeping on the brown couch all night so we’d be beside them and hear every sound. If I dropped off to sleep I dreamed of Donal’s face, his shout of glee when the candles flared on his birthday cake. And then I’d wake up and put a hand to his forehead, and to Annie’s, and their skin was so hot, so hot. We couldn’t cool their bodies, no matter what we did. Mags tried cool cloths and willow bark. The doctor came—we got him there by horse and sleigh—but he had little else to offer. I can still hear them coughing. Their throats were swollen; they were strangling from the disease.

“After … after they were gone, Mags refused to have the brown couch in the kitchen. She refused to have it in the house, insisted on getting rid of it. Every time she slept on it when the babies were sick, she had nightmares.”

Am’s head bowed forward and he stared at the boards of the tower floor. “She told me to take it outside and burn it. I had to pound down the snow, flatten it with my boots and
the back of a shovel, to make a clearing before I could drag the damned thing outside. I remember the smell of matches, sulphur on winter air. Kneeling down, hunched over, pieces of match-head flying off, trying three or four times. The couch was hair-stuffed, went up in flames in a shot. Mags was at the window watching; I didn’t have to turn to know she was there. I burned it good,” he added fiercely.

Kenan was remembering a big grey house that had burned at the top of Mill Street when he was a boy; he might have been ten or eleven. Early evening, dead of winter. The whole town turned out to help, though no act of heroism could save the house. The most anyone could do was stand by helplessly and watch. The entire house had burned to the ground. The destruction didn’t take long; nothing was left but a thick layer of sparks and burned timber and glowing ruins. Nothing, that is, but two clothesline poles in the backyard, and those survived intact. On the line between the poles hung a pair of frozen long-johns, icicles dangling from the sleeves. One sleeve had frozen at an angle and appeared to be waving.

“I was glad to see the goddamn flames shoot out of it,” said Am, and Kenan realized he was still talking about the couch. “We couldn’t bury the babies until spring because the ground was frozen up tight. The snow came up past the window on the north side of the house. We’d have made tunnels through the snowbanks if the children had been older—and healthy. For playing. We’d have made tunnels and forts to crawl in and out of.

“Around the back, I had to scoop out a space about halfway up, long and wide enough to hold both children. I made a little shelf inside the snowbank. Mags dressed them and wrapped
them separately in thick baby blankets, and then she laid them beside each other inside one large bundle made from an adult blanket. She wanted the woollen blanket to keep them warm. She said it would keep the cold from penetrating.