Tell (8 page)

T
URN AROUND,” SAID
M
AGGIE
. “O
THER WAY
.” She and Tress were standing by the parlour window, where they could watch over the comings and goings of the town. Across and beyond Main Street, despite the biting cold, sun dazzled the whitening surface of the bay. An industrial chimney spewed smoke that hovered over the waterfront in a puffed mass, its frozen shape pressed to the sky as if by a thumb. From a clothesline beside a house across the street, a skirt and pillowcase hung stiffly, the latter indicating undergarments hidden inside.

“Mrs. McClelland,” said Tress. “She washes every day. A small load like that isn’t worth the waste of soap.”

“She believes in being extra clean,” said Maggie. “And she launders six days a week, not seven. I know, because I get to look at her clothesline. She also uses my recipe for soap.
Castile, ammonia, sulphur ether, glycerine, alcohol,
” she chanted, as if she were standing there with a wooden spoon and basin in
hand. “Look at that skirt,” she added. “Must be her daughter being hopeful.”

“Her daughter probably sewed it herself,” said Tress. “It isn’t as long as the ones we wear now. Isn’t it shocking how for years we’ve swept the town streets with every step? Maybe she knows something we don’t.”

“Won’t I be the first to cheer when hemlines are up to our knees and we’re no longer required to wear hats,” said Maggie. “Women should rebel, every one of us together. Now, turn again.”

Tress felt her aunt’s hands ladder up her spine, finger thumb, finger thumb. She reached back to shift her long hair. On her days off, she loved wearing her hair down, loose and free. When she worked in the hotel dining room, her mother insisted that it be pinned up severely.

Maggie counted aloud while she tracked rows on the knitted garment Tress had thrown over her shoulders. The laddering stopped at Tress’s neck.

“Arms wide. Stretch.”

Her niece assumed a scarecrow pose.

Maggie’s lips moved silently this time. She counted the rows crosswise, shoulder to shoulder and down one sleeve.

“This won’t be difficult,” she said. “I don’t have a pattern, but your Mamo—may her soul rest—designed so many of the clothes she knitted, a pattern won’t exist. I want to knit one for myself, but mine will be a different colour, green, to match my eyes. Let me write down the numbers before I forget.”

Tress slipped her arms out from under and watched her aunt write quickly before she ran her fingers along the inside of the garment, identifying the shape and life of it so that she could
put wool to needles and replicate the design. Maggie was the busiest person Tress knew. She had recently finished a striped scarf for Am in contrasting browns. When she sewed, she did beautiful fancy-work: cuffs, collars, piping, buttonholes. She did needlework, too, using Berlin wool, though no one called it that anymore.

“Mamo described this as a shrug,” said Tress, trying to be helpful. “It isn’t exactly a shawl. She made it with sleeves and cuffs so it can’t slip …”

She did not go on, and Maggie didn’t try to fill the gap. The year before, Tress’s grandmother had died of the terrible flu that swept through the town and the country just as the war was ending. Mamo’s grave was on a hill that overlooked the bay. Although Tress had never voiced this aloud, she couldn’t bear the thought of Mamo’s body lying in the cemetery under cold earth.

She looked away from her aunt and felt a cold stab of anger. Kenan’s life might have ended under the earth in France—beneath a ton of mud. France had kept part of him buried anyway, a living part. She wanted to believe that she and Kenan were as close as they’d been before he joined up, but he never spoke about the war. That part of him was unreachable.

Stop, she told herself. He came home alive, didn’t he? Hasn’t he walked out of the house for the first time since he returned? She knew, because his new jacket had been worn. She’d found a brittle leaf attached to one sleeve. The jacket had been replaced on the hook by the front door, and the leaf had crumbled in her hand when she’d plucked it from the fabric. She had smiled to herself, even though she’d felt like shouting, like weeping.

How many times had Kenan been out? They hadn’t spoken
of this, either. The act, the knowledge, was too raw, too new. The best she could do was to keep believing that walking outside was an ordinary act. For someone like Kenan.

Reading her thoughts, Maggie spoke softly. “Do you think you can persuade Kenan to skate on the bay this winter, now that he’s been out? You know how he loved to skate when he was a boy. He had to be chased off the rink at closing every night.”

“You knew he left the house?”

“Am saw him from the tower. Not that Am says much. But he told me that.”

Maggie could not tell Tress the rest. Could not say that by telling her about Kenan, Am had broken one of the silences that stretched for hours, sometimes days, between them.

“Kenan wore the jacket I bought for him,” said Tress. “But he isn’t talking. Well, he’s talking, but not about leaving the house. And who’s to know about skating? Should I be asking for a miracle?”

“He’s taken a step forward,” said Maggie. “A long stride. According to Am, he went out just as it was getting dark. He probably waited until then so he wouldn’t be seen. Better not say too much, for the moment.”

“I was working,” said Tress. “He chose a time when I was away from the house.”

“Maybe the time chose him,” said Maggie. “He might not have had a deliberate plan. But he faced this alone, it’s important to remember that.”

“One way or another, knowing for certain makes me feel as if the earth has moved,” said Tress. She pushed at her hair, shoved it back behind her ears.

“The earth does shift underfoot on occasion,” said her aunt. She thought of Luc. His world must also have shifted during the war, though she knew no details of that.

“Grania told me months ago that Kenan would walk out of the house when he was ready—then and only then,” said Tress, thinking of her sister’s prediction. “Everything he does has to have order—some internal pattern I don’t understand. He was never like that before he left for the war. Now he gets upset easily if his sense of routine is disrupted or altered. I never touch his stack of papers, magazines—anything of his, really. If I do, he’s thrown into confusion. He wants everything to be stable, predictable.”

“You have to be patient, Tress, and you are. More than the rest of us, because you live under the same roof as a man who has been through a terrible war. He’s had experiences you and I can only attempt to imagine. Maybe he isn’t able to imagine being completely better … not yet. But he will.” Maggie wondered if she sounded convincing.

Tress was thinking to herself but did not tell her aunt that she was not so patient after all. A few weeks ago, she had lost her temper completely. Several mornings in a row, Kenan had refused to come downstairs. He seemed to be losing ground. He stayed in their room until late in the day and came down only after dark. After a few days of this, she had gone upstairs and stood in the doorway and shouted at him to come down. To stop. Stop what he was doing, stop the isolation, stop and join the world because he was driving her crazy. To her surprise, he came down immediately. He went to his chair in the veranda—his safe place—and picked up a paper and began to read.
That was the end of him staying in the bedroom during the daytime. Later, she felt badly, ashamed of the scene she’d created. He could have been pushed to do something unspeakable, something terrible, though she had no idea what that might be. There was anger beneath the surface of him; she had sensed it from the day he’d returned. She had smelled it on his skin.

She could have made things worse.

“If Kenan does get out onto the rink,” Maggie went on, “I think he’d be happy to be on skates again. I can’t help but remember him as a boy racing around the ice. One time, he skated all the way to Napanee—late in the afternoon, as it turned out. He might have frozen to death. He and Orryn, his friend—well, your friend, too—didn’t get back until after dark.”

“Neither of them showed up for supper in the evening. Uncle Oak came to our place looking for Kenan, and so did Orryn’s father. Everything turned out to be all right, thankfully.”

“Well,” said Maggie, “I’ll never skate as far as Napanee, but I intend to take part in the masquerade in January. Zel has persuaded me to work on a costume. Something we can skate in without tripping. Don’t ask what we’re planning. We’re working on an idea to go as a pair.”

“A secret. I don’t mind secrets. I won’t pry.”

“We work at Zel’s place whenever we have a chance. Once a week, sometimes twice. Zel is good company and we do laugh together. We use the workroom for sewing, the small building next to the house. You know the one I mean. Zel will be taking in another boarder next spring, she tells me. The second building has only one room but it’s big and wide, plenty of space.”

Maggie did not mention that it was Luc who would be moving into the workroom when winter was over. Zel’s new boarder. That was private information. Though the whole town would know soon enough.

“I want to skate in the carnival,” said Tress, “but I haven’t decided on a costume.” She was thinking that she, too, would like to be with someone with whom she could laugh. Laughter was becoming rare in her own home. There were times when she came through the front door and felt that a curtain of darkness had been drawn, a curtain that could suffocate.

“There will be women on the rink in furs and muffs,” said Maggie. “The muffs are shaped like melons this year.”

“I’ve seen them on guests at the hotel. And the men in town will dig out their buffalo mitts and their mouldy beaver hats so they can go as old-timers.”

“Someone is sure to dress up as Charlie Chaplin. Last year there were four Charlies. Calhoun, from the town paper, will be a magician. We can count on that. He hauls out his black cape every year.”

“There’ll be a nun and a bride,” said Tress.

“But not the two together.” Maggie allowed a wry smile, acknowledging that she and Tress were of different faiths, attended different churches. Though each attended her separate church without the company of her husband.

“I’d like to wear something different,” said Tress. “Something that hasn’t been thought of before. Maybe I’ll borrow my brother’s old hockey uniform from school and go as ‘Canadian winter sports.’ Though that’s nothing new. Anyway, I still have plenty of time; the rink isn’t ready yet.”

“It will be soon,” said Maggie. “This part of the bay should be frozen by the end of the year. Am helped, one afternoon, to carry lumber to shore for the skaters’ shack. According to him, the weather has been so cold, the men are prepared to build. One more freeze-up is all they need. People are already coming into the post office to stand around downstairs to gossip and stay warm.”

“Do you remember the year Kenan and I dressed as gypsies for the carnival? That was just before the war started.”

“I do. The two of you danced around the ice like dervishes. I remember how happy you both were.”

“Kenan won’t be with me this year. Will Uncle Am dress up?”

“I don’t know,” said Maggie. And she didn’t. Am had said not a word about the carnival.

“You two used to skate, didn’t you? Together, I mean.”

Maggie nodded, though she wanted to stop there. Her niece knew nothing of that time in her life.

“There was no rink at our farm. Who would have made such a thing in the country? We skated on ponds or the creek—it was known as
the crick.
The crick meandered through fields and woods and joined one pond to another. The ice was lumpy and rippled from the wind, but we skated just the same, even in moonlight. That was my favourite time to skate, nighttime. If there was no moon, Am carried a small lantern, a brass one we still have. He was the best man I knew on blades, and then some. If I tired, he was strong enough to pull me along behind. One winter he made snowshoes from birch, with leather straps, and we tramped over the snow around the woods on our farm. He was a man of imagination.”

She frowned when she realized she had used the past tense, and wondered if Tress had noticed. But while bringing up the past, she had also called up for herself Am’s younger, firmer face, the life and sparkle of his eyes, his wide, strong shoulders, even his narrower hips. None of this, she told herself, has anything to do with my life now.

“Uncle Am can do anything,” said Tress. “But he says the same about you. The last time he was at our place to visit Kenan, he told me that when you were in your teens, you were the only girl on the Ninth Concession who worked in the hayfields alongside the men. He said he had to wait for you to grow up so he could marry you.”

“He said that? Well, he did have to wait, because he’s six years older. And it was my father who got me working in the fields. He taught me to drive the team because he knew I loved the horses. I was skinny and didn’t weigh much, so he wrapped the reins around my body and fastened me to the crossboards at the front of the wagon so the horses wouldn’t yank me off. He bragged to his friends that I could turn a load of hay on a dime. When I drove the horses, that freed up a man to pitch hay. I
was
good then, though I’d never do it now. I wouldn’t be able to.”

Maggie laughed softly inside the memory: the raising and lowering of the horses’ heads, dust stirred by their hooves, the clanking of harnesses and reins, the scent of new-cut hay, the odour of sweating men around her, an occasional word echoing through the silence that encompassed and made them a single unit with a single purpose. Am had often been part of the crew, keeping an eye out for her, always.

“At the end of the day, it was Father who drove the team through the fields and back to the barn. He sat me on top of the load of hay, and I perched there like a banty rooster.” She laughed again because she remembered her father’s pride. He had worked hard on the farm because of his love for her, for Nola, for their mother.

“Whatever I did to help,” she said, “was a long way off from working two days a week in the town library—and I’m thankful for the job. I’ve always loved a good book, and now I can put my hands on any one I want.”