“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.
Maggie wondered if Luc ever dreamed about upcoming performances. She would like to ask. She had begun to dream about hers, and every dream ended the same way. She was onstage at Naylor’s, facing the audience, a full house. A disorderly sheaf of papers was propped on a music stand in front of her. She knew what she was supposed to sing, but as soon as she began, her tongue thickened. After a few phrases, her tongue flattened against her lower palate. Panicking, she looked down at the papers, only to realize that the wrong music had been placed there. She shouldn’t need the music at all, but she was unable to recall the text. Not a word, not a note. She began to have a heightened awareness of her own breathing. Her heart was beating too rapidly. She was afraid she would stumble, fall over. She was afraid she would cough uncontrollably. Her tongue and her throat were dry.
The audience became restless while she fumbled and leafed through the music. At the same time, her anxiety increased. And then, one person in the audience stood, and another and another, and whole rows of people began to shuffle into the aisles. They turned their backs on her and filed out through the exits. No one looked in her direction.
The emptying of the theatre occurred at a slow tempo—what Luc might describe as pesante. It was only when she faced the room of emptied seats that she realized the correct music had been in front of her all along.
Too late.
“A panic dream,” she told Zel after the first of the dreams. “Which makes me wonder if I’ll be able to perform in the actual concert.”
But there was something she hadn’t told Zel. A part she had held back. She wasn’t even certain this was part of the same dream. It might have been sensed, or added later.
After the exodus by the audience, two figures remained. They were crouched in the back row, side by side, looking up toward the stage. Maggie, her curiosity aroused, began to make her way toward them, down the centre aisle. She needed to know why these two remained when everyone else had left. As she walked, she found that she was unable to increase her pace, and was forced to maintain the same tempo set by the departed crowd. Because she was unable to move quickly, the two figures had vanished by the time she reached the back row of the theatre.
She wondered if Nellie Melba had ever experienced panic dreams in advance of a performance. She wished she had asked when she’d had the chance. And what would Luc say if he knew about Maggie’s dreams, or even about her encounter with Melba during the war? What would he say if he knew that she’d met the diva by chance, face to face? That they had talked and laughed like schoolgirls while hiding behind the walls of a booth in a Toronto diner. That Melba had sung softly to Maggie, “Donde lieta uscì,” from La Bohème.
Maggie had told no one. She had kept the memory of her adventure close and private. She hadn’t even told Nola that day, though she’d considered doing so at the time. She knew it was foolish of her, but she was afraid that if she shared the details, she would render the encounter less meaningful. She wouldn’t know how to describe what the meeting meant to her. And who would believe, anyway, that she and Melba had spoken to each other, not only as one woman to another, but as one singer to another?
She had never told Am, the man to whom she was married, so how could she now tell Luc, whom she’d known less than half a year? There was even a possibility that prior to the war, Luc had also met Melba, had watched her perform onstage in London or Paris or elsewhere. Still, she kept her memories of Melba to herself.
Maggie was under no illusions about her singing voice. She was forty-three years old. She was not ashamed of her background; she held no pretences. When she was growing up on the farm, she had known that her real gift was not her work in the fields alongside the men but her voice. She had been in demand for house parties and kitchen dances as she’d grown older. She had the gift; everyone said so. She had the wondrous soprano voice that made people stop what they were doing, circle round and listen.
What did one do with such a gift? There was no thought of studying singing. There were no voice lessons to be had. With no piano at home, Maggie had no place to practise except the schoolroom. Now, all these years later, she wished that she had insisted. But insisted what and to whom? She wouldn’t have known the possibilities that existed even if she had persevered.
Maybe she could have studied somewhere, travelled, found a good teacher. But there was never a suggestion or a single thought of becoming a singer or taking voice lessons. Not for the slender young woman whose schooling came to an end when she graduated from high school. Not for the young woman who could turn a load of hay on a dime, and who, during one January thaw in 1894, married Am from the next farm over, when he was not quite twenty-four and she was barely eighteen.
Chapter Ten
Deseronto: November 27, 1919
Dear Hugh
Your letter found me at home in the town where I grew up. I’ve wondered for a long time if you were alive or dead, and I’m glad to know it is not the latter. I’m glad, too, to have the photo, and I know precisely where we were when it was taken—though I don’t remember the name of the village. Nor do I have any recall of the person who held the camera. What I do remember is that Bill kept us going many a day and night with his never-ending banter.
He was writing too formally. He couldn’t relax. He began to take rapid breaths, in-out, in-out. The photo was beside him on the table. He go
t up from his chair, paced quickly through the house, returned to the table, sat again, picked up the pen, dipped nib to inkwell.
I’m sorry you’ve been confined to bed in a san all this time, but it sounds as if you have almost recovered. I was sorry enough, too, to hear of the earlier problems you have now overcome.
He didn’t have to ask what Hugh had meant when he’d described the coughing up of blood, the sensation of smothering or drowning, the threat of life being taken away. Every boy Kenan had seen die over there had hung on to his last breath. He couldn’t put a name to even one who’d wanted to die.
But they had. Died. The waste, the terrible, terrible waste of life.
And he was wrong: there was at least one who’d wanted to die. If there was one, there were more. A junior officer had once told Kenan that he’d held a wounded soldier in his arms and the man was so horribly injured, he’d begged the officer to shoot him.
I don’t have much to report, except that I spend much of my time sitting in my chair in our back veranda, which looks over the bay. I read for hours and days. No flapping kite to look at, as you describe, no cows sliding down the slope of the backyard. But there is plenty of fresh water, and ice has begun to form. The bay opens out into Lake Ontario—the largest body of water in our area, but never as big as the sea beyond the hills where you are undergoing the cure. Do you recall how we sailed and sailed on the Atlantic and never seemed to get anywhere after we set out from Canada? I looked out over that cold, dark blanket of sameness and could not help asking myself: What lies beyond? What lies beyond? The same question, I suppose, that sailors have always asked. I knew what was behind, but never what was ahead. Who did? We went off to war like children who’d been blindfolded for the occasion.
Here’s what I can tell you. Since stepping out of uniform, I have a job of sorts, keeping books for the local drugstore. The job started this year, not last. I account for items sold, items ordered, stock replacements, profits in, payments out, balances due and overdue. All of this, I manage from our dining-room table at home. You’ll probably remember me telling you that I had begun training at the local bank as a teller in 1913. War broke out before I’d had a chance to work a full year. I’ve always had a fascination with numbers, from my earliest years at school.
Kenan paused, pen over paper. He experienced a quiet rejoicing while thinking about the orderly range of items he listed in the books brought to him every week by Mr. Edwards. After half a year, he was familiar with, had even become fond of the sound of, each item listed neatly on the page of its purchaser, line by line in the ledgers. When he was alone in the house, he spoke aloud as he worked, the words rolling off his tongue as the letters formed up to create pictures in his mind: Arnica flowers, Beeswax, Bugleweed, Balsam of Canada, Ginger lozenges, Rochelle salts, Creolin, Fenugreek, Lysol, Queen of the Meadow, Medicated pelts, Menthol plasters, Cod-liver oil, Tan and freckle lotion, Oil of tar, McCrimmon’s Deodorant, Petroleum oil, Pitcher’s Castoria, Rheumatic capsules, Horse balls, Hair vigour, Smelling salts, Evaporated prunes, Orange sticks, Tooth powders, Horehound drops, Elastic trusses, Gold Label perfumes. And more.
I write page after page of columns. I line up the names of people in town who use poultices for treating boils in unseemly places, or plasters for congestion, or Sunlight soap to control itching. I’m allowed in on the secrets of ailments. I am learning a new language. I know who suffers from gout and arthritis, who has chronic constipation or a disease of indiscretion, whose hand was mangled by heavy machinery and who was kicked by his horse. Item by item, the entries line up beside the buyers in perfect order on the page.
He stopped and decided to add:
Keeping track gives me satisfaction.
Two ledgers are delivered to my home every Saturday, along with a fat envelope filled with copies of sales slips. These are most often in a mess when I receive them. My job is to restore order. I can accomplish this in two days’ work every week. Tress takes the ledgers back to the drugstore on Wednesdays.
I do not leave the house.
He pondered whether to remove this last sentence, and decided to leave it as it stood. After being through the war, Hugh would not think anything strange. Kenan’s blind walks through the house with his good eye closed. The fingers of his good hand so sensitive—he’d trained them to be that way—he could feel his way through darkness.
Actually, I’ve left the house seven times, but only at night. That many, you say, and over so long a period! Tress has an aunt and uncle who live in town and I’ve begun to visit the uncle in his tower that overlooks Main Street. Sounds peculiar, I know, but it really is a tower, up over the post office and customs house. The uncle is caretaker of the building, and he and the aunt live in the only apartment, up top. He’s a kind man. I’ve known him since I was a boy, and the aunt, too. They had no children of their own but were generous enough to everyone else’s. Am, that’s the uncle, says he’ll show me how to look after the clockwork and the clock faces in the tower. He says that with a bit of practice, even with my injuries, I’d have no problem taking over his job.
Kenan wondered if he should also mention his walks out of town, the walks that led him away from Main Street and into the woods in two directions, east and west. How he sought out places after dark. How he had returned to the widow’s barn. The falling-down barn where he knew he was safe. He’d found a half-bottle of whisky there on a shelf and had taken a swig or two. If Hugh were here, laughing beside him, he’d say to Kenan, “Take me there, Old Stuff.” And Kenan would. And Hugh would stand with him in that dark room that smelled of apples and rotting hay, and he would understand how, in that place, Kenan understood survival.
None of this was the kind of thing to explain in a letter.
You said you might be in the san another few months. Maybe when you are well and after winter is over, you can get yourself on a train and travel to Deseronto. We have an extra room and you can stay with us for a while. Tress would be glad to have a visit from any friend of mine.
Would she? Would she welcome a soldier in the empty room upstairs, across the hall from their bedroom? Kenan didn’t know the answer to that. Nor did he know if their lovemaking would be stifled if Tress was aware of someone’s presence in the bed across the hall. Everything might become more intense than it already was.
For the moment, none of this mattered. He had no intention of saying a word about a visit from Hugh. He’d wait until his friend wrote to say he was healthy and had been discharged from the sanatorium.
He tried to imagine Hugh sleeping in the extra bedroom, face down, palms pressed to the mattress at shoulder level, ready to pry himself up at a moment’s notice. He wondered if Hugh shouted out in his sleep, as Tress told him that he sometimes did.
Since you’ve asked, I’ll tell you that my two legs are fit. One arm is dead, my left, but it wasn’t taken off. The right arm is good. Right hand is good. Half my face is a mess of scars. I have no vision in the left eye but can see with the right. I can walk through the house with my good eye closed. I’ve become expert at getting around in the dark. Strange, I know. But you and I have witnessed worlds stranger than mine. I manage. Except for walls.
What was that? He looked at the word the ink had formed. Walls. The pen dropped from his hand. His arm stretched out with a will of its own and his palm sliced through air. Was that a sign? A sign that Grania had once taught him in the language of hands? Walls.
He flattened a blotter against the word. Tried to organize his thoughts.
If he were capable of doing so, he would tell Hugh that he relived scenes in his head, terrible scenes, imaginings in dreams. There was one dream he could never get into focus. The one that caused him to shout into the room. The one that filled him with anger because he and his friends were close to danger and no one was doing anything about it, no one was giving the order to move them out of reach of that danger.
Those imaginings—what he saw in his mind, what he dreamed and felt and tasted and sm
elled—were not imaginings at all. They were real, had been real the entire time he was overseas. He had never put any of this into words and did not want memories to start tumbling out now. Better to hold the lid on what was behind his eyes. Memory saw with two eyes, no matter if one eye was blind or not. If half the memories had disappeared with the sight in his left eye, he’d be the better for it.
His heart was beginning to pound. He needed to get up and walk. End the letter here, he told himself.
Write again and let me know when you are ready to visit. Get the fresh sea air into your lungs. I’m glad to know that you are alive. I’m glad we made it out. There were times when we could not have believed that. Do you know that men—women, too—have begun to line up to sail the Atlantic now that war is over? They want to travel to Belgium and France; they want to visit graves or places that might be graves. They can’t believe that their loved ones will never have a known resting place. They want to see for themselves. They want to ask why and why and why. God help them if they believe they will find an answer.
Kenan
Chapter Eleven
TRESS COLLECTED HER MAIL, WENT AROUND TO the side entrance and walked up to her aunt’s apartment. She tore open the envelope, slowed while she read the letter, finished by the time she reached the top stair. She turned around and went back down, stepping into the street while she absorbed the news. She began to walk.
Her sister was expecting a child. The baby would be born the following June. Grania was more than two months into the pregnancy, and she and Jim had decided to return to Deseronto next spring in advance of the birth, because she wanted to be close to family. The next part of the news was that, after returning, they planned to stay on in Ontario. Jim had received a letter with promising news of a farm that was coming up for sale, land and buildings, between Deseronto and Napanee. In the meantime, they were content to remain on the island, and had no plans to travel during the winter months. They had moved to the north shore; they had made friends, Jim had looked up some of his old schoolmates as well as neighbours of his late grandparents. They were renting a small house near Malpeque Bay and Jim had found work, once again helping a local doctor. Some days, when extra workers were needed, he went along to the nearby mill to put in a shift. He was well satisfied with his temporary work.
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