Tell (6 page)

S
UNDAY MORNING
, M
AGGIE WAS LOSING HER FOCUS.
She opened her hymn book and looked at the singers who stood facing her. She watched familiar heads tilted at a slant one way, the other way, rounded backs, slumped backs, tall backs, chins raised, chins tucked, heads burrowed into collars as if about to disappear. Flora, the alto next to her, gobbled at the air as she began the first verse. The movement startled, though Maggie always tried to be ready. Andrew, across the aisle, made a sudden dip forward as if his pointed chin would dig the notes right off the page. One of Andrew’s eyes was set slightly lower in his face than the other, and Maggie sometimes felt she was being looked at from two levels. Andrew glanced up at that moment and Maggie was certain that his upper eye winked. She grinned. Andrew, who had a fine tenor voice, had also joined the choral society and he, too, had been asked by Lukas to perform solo at the New Year’s concert. Maggie looked at the singers on either side of him. She knew every face in the church, had
known most members of the choir almost two decades. They sang as one, sat as one, and now leaned back into their seats as one. Her hymnary slid out of her hands and she caught it before it hit the floor. She stared down at the wide plank of polished pine beneath her feet. How could one tree have provided such perfect wood? She fidgeted, tucked the hymn book away and looked up at the arch of a window, where a single ray of light was bending in at a hard angle.

The minister stepped up to the pulpit and announced details of events leading to Advent. The sermon began. Maggie could not pay attention. She cast her memory back to a Sunday shortly after the end of the war, when a senior chaplain from Napanee had come to conduct the service. The church had been packed for the occasion. She was introduced to the visiting chaplain, and as he shook hands with her, one of his eyes looked off to the side, corrected and fixed straight ahead again. She wondered if he’d been wounded, or was suffering from the disease everyone was calling neurasthenia. The chaplain had spoken about his years at the Front. She was certain that everyone in the congregation had heard enough of the war, but not all of the men had returned home at the time and people were at the edge of their seats, hungry to hear any detail at all.

Maggie looked down at her lap now and saw that her hands were curved, palms up, as if in expectation of something dropping from the ceiling. She couldn’t help glancing upward to ensure that no object was making a rapid descent. She glanced over at the minister, who was finishing his sermon, and finally, finally, the service was over.

S
HE WALKED ALONG THE ROAD WITH
Z
EL, OUT PAST THE
edge of town. They’d made a plan to go directly to Zel’s house to have something to eat and then practise their parts for the concert, maybe even sew a bit on their skating costumes for the January masquerade. Maggie had told Am she’d be at Zel’s for the afternoon. Am no longer attended church services. He’d stopped years before, after he and Maggie first moved to town. No one had been successful in persuading him to change his mind—not the minister at the time, or the present one. Am did what he wished to do. Maggie knew that he’d soon be heading over to Kenan and Tress’s home for his Sunday afternoon visit.

“What did Am do to the back of his head?” Zel wanted to know. “I saw him in the post office a couple of days ago.” She took Maggie’s coat and hung it from a hook on the back of her kitchen door. They stomped clumps of snow from their boots and set the boots on a mat to dry.

“What do you think? He went to Grew for a haircut again. Even after I asked him to go to one of the other barbers in town.” Maggie sat herself down at Zel’s long kitchen table. “I could have done a better job myself.”

“Grew does have to earn a living,” said Zel. “There’s that to consider. And Am’s hair will grow back—hopefully.”

“He should be wearing a hat to cover the deed,” said Maggie. “But you know Am. No one tells him what to do.”

“Well, no one tells you what to do, either,” said Zel. “By the way, did you see Cora’s hat in the back pew this morning? All those feathers and wings. It looked as if it would fly up to the belfry at any moment.”

Maggie waved her off with laughter. “I didn’t see Cora’s hat,” she said. “I was having enough trouble staying with the music. Could you tell from where you were?”

“I saw that you were preoccupied,” said Zel, “and not by the notes on the page.”

“I lost focus. If
you
noticed, so did others. Well, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know what was wrong with me.” She looked past her friend and through the window, where a small bird, one she couldn’t identify, was flitting from branch to branch in a leafless tree. It settled and puffed out its throat as if rehearsing for a larger adventure. “What a beauty,” she said. “I don’t see many birds from the rooftop of our apartment. Anyway, most of the birds headed south weeks ago.”

“The almanac says we’re in for a long freeze,” said Zel. “Mrs. Leary made her declaration weeks ago.”

“Your tenant?”

“The same. When she isn’t reading her Bible, she has her nose in almanacs, past and present. She keeps a pencil on the sill in the parlour so she can mark passages in the Bible—and in the current almanac. I confess that I’m curious about what’s worthy of her attention, but so far I’ve resisted looking.”

“I wonder,” said Maggie. She tried to recall the kind of books Mrs. Leary and her husband borrowed from the library over the fire hall, where Maggie worked two afternoons a week. She thought of the titles she had entered in the register on their behalf: Sir Walter Scott novels,
Persuasive Peggy,
books about the Antipodes. Mr. Leary had requested
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
but it had been deemed too controversial for Deseronto’s citizens and had been removed years before. He’d
requested, instead, something about circus clowns. She had nothing to give him about clowns, but he’d borrowed one of two copies the library owned of
The Life of P.T. Barnum.
That had satisfied him at the time, though he’d returned the book with stains on its cover. She had wanted to ask, “Tea? Moonshine?” but she’d held her tongue.

“Most days,” Zel went on, “the two of them stay in the parlour with the double doors closed. Except when they’re having meals. In the evening, Mrs. Leary putters in the kitchen, though she doesn’t cook anything fancy. A pity there isn’t more for them to see out the parlour windows—except the road and the old barn that’s falling down. They do like to watch the birds. I keep that room heated in winter just for the two of them. When I’m home, I’m always in the kitchen. Anyway, they love to sit in there during the daytime. Mrs. Leary reads by window light. She brought her rocker with her when she moved in. Her husband plays solitaire, but never on Sundays.”

Does he slap down the cards?
Maggie wanted to ask. Am had installed a shelf up in the tower—two shelves angled between beams. He kept a pack of cards on one of the shelves and sometimes played solitaire for hours at a time. From below she could hear every card as it snapped hard against the wood. Each time she heard
snap slap
she wanted to shout up to him:
Don’t you have work to do somewhere in the building?

She stopped herself. She hadn’t discussed Am’s behaviour with Zel. Except for the haircuts.

Zel went on. “In good weather, Mr. Leary goes for walks. I swear he keeps a bottle of something stashed somewhere, because I sometimes smell liquor when he returns. When he’s
out, Mrs. Leary stays in the parlour and talks to herself. If he’s away for a long time, sometimes she’ll ask me to help her wash her hair.”

“Is that part of your agreement?”

“Not really. But there’s something wrong with her collarbone, something not quite in alignment. She has trouble raising her arm to scrub her scalp. I guess she doesn’t like to ask him for help. And she does need help. There are times when I think her mind is off with the fairies. One day, after her husband went out for a walk, she came into the kitchen and said, ‘This is what happens when we get old, Harold. You should have stuck around.’ The two of us laughed out loud as if we were part of a conspiracy. Another time, she told me, with no reference point except what was going on in her mind, ‘People don’t die, Zel, not really. We think of them just as often
after
they die, and just as happily.’ I had no answer to that. Nor do I believe the
just as happily
part.”

“Is she in the parlour now? Shall I go in and say hello? I haven’t seen either of them for a while.” Maggie was thinking of Zel scrubbing Mrs. Leary’s head at the sink, the fragile wisps of hair criss-crossed over the older woman’s scalp.

“They’re away for a couple of months. Didn’t I tell you? They boarded the last steamer and went to New York to stay with Mrs. Leary’s sister in Rochester. You can’t blame them for wanting to be with family. And they pay rent for their room while they’re away. Although I do give them a special rate over this period.”

“Maybe her sister will persuade her to move to New York permanently,” said Maggie. “I met the sister, you know. She
used to come across the lake to visit the couple when they lived in the centre of town.”

“I don’t know. The Learys are in their eighties, and I don’t think they’d move now. It’s easier for them to board here than to keep a house in town. Although there might come a time when they won’t be able to manage the back stairs to get up to their bedroom. I guess we’ll all face that when we have to.”

“They sold their house in town. That couldn’t have been easy for them.”

“They feel safe here,” said Zel. “Having others living in the same house.”

“And the teacher?”

“She’s still around, though she’s often out with friends on the weekends. She’ll be here until the school term ends in December, and then she’ll go home to her parents in Belleville for the Christmas holiday. I’ll be busy, because I still have a couple of rooms to work on so I can attract more boarders. I also want to cut some cedar boughs to strew throughout the closets. And I’ve promised the workroom out there to Lukas. Now that there’s heating—I had a stove put in—he can cook his meals and be completely independent of the main house. Eventually, we’ll move the piano out, too. He and the handyman will have to manage that with whatever help they can bring from town.”

“Lukas is moving here? Our music director?” Did Zel detect her reaction, her surprise?

“He came to see me about taking over the smaller building when the warm weather comes again. The space suits him better than the rooming house where he lives now. He’s already
moved in some extra furniture, including a new dresser and bed. He and the handyman did the lugging and carrying. They managed to get everything straightened around and presentable. They’ve quite converted the space. But don’t worry, you and I can still use the work table for our skating costumes. Lukas won’t move in until spring. Don’t forget, Maggie, he needs to have a piano wherever he lives. Mine isn’t used much except when I practise hymns for church, so here it sits, pushed against the dining-room wall. When he moves into the other building, he’ll be able to play whenever he wants. When Lukas was here to help straighten around the workroom, the teacher asked if he would play something for us, so he came into the house and sat at the piano and played Liszt—an étude. We sat in our chairs, transported. Sometimes he practises at Naylor’s when no one’s around. There are pianos in town, plenty of them, but not at his rooming house. He seemed pleased to know he could use the one here.” Zel stopped to remember. “No one has ever played my piano the way he did that day.”

“The boarders at his rooming house are going to miss him,” said Maggie.

“I suppose they might. Though from what I hear, he doesn’t talk much about himself.”

“It’s the same at rehearsals.”

“That’s true, but there are people who speculate,” said Zel.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” said Maggie.

“About where he’s from.”

“What difference does that make? He’s from Europe. And he’s creating something new in the town. People who care about music are glad he’s here. I’m glad.”

Zel went over to the oven to slide in a cookie sheet that was covered with bite-sized potato logs. She had prepared them before leaving for church, and now they had only to be heated and browned. The tiny logs, along with slices of cold beef and tea, would be their midday meal before they got down to work.

While Zel went upstairs to change out of her church clothes, Maggie thought about Lukas, who was responsible for the upcoming concert: her solos, three choral works, the tenor’s solo—everything on the programme that was musical, including his own performances. She thought of his hands, the way his long fingers became one with the keys when he broke into the silence. She thought of
Clair de lune,
the beginning notes that invited the listener to be attentive, expectant. She thought of the way he paused and then continued, seamlessly. When she heard his music during practice, she wanted to drift outside herself and into some parallel world. A world unbruised and filled with healing. She wanted to lie on the floor during those moments, and rest her head against someone’s arm. She wanted to close her eyes and imagine a world that held endless possibilities.

The previous week at Naylor’s, Lukas had returned to the piano after rehearsal was over. He knew that Maggie and Zel were staying behind to tidy up. Everyone else had left. Lukas played for the two women, and Maggie was in no hurry to leave while he was bent over the keyboard. At the end of the piece, he stayed at the piano for several moments, looking down at the keys.

Maggie and Zel did not move. They exchanged glances, waiting.

“He died only last year,” Lukas said, finally, his voice low so that the women had to strain to hear. “Debussy. He died early, in his fifties. He might have created so much more.”

He closed the cover over the keyboard then, and reached for his thin winter coat. The three, Lukas, Zel and Maggie, left the theatre together through the side exit, and said their goodbyes in the street.