Tell

by Frances Itani

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

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  MAGS 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.”

  AM DID NOT LIGHT THE LANTERN. NOR 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.

  “We went outside together. The sun shone that day; I’ll never forget how cold and bright it was. I laid the bundle that held them on the shelf I’d carved out of the snow.” He was sobbing hard. “And I sealed it up. I sealed the hole in the snowbank because Donal and Annie had to stay inside it until spring. I chose a snowbank we couldn’t see from any window of the house, but it made no difference because we never stopped seeing. We never will. Not until the day we are laid in the cold ground ourselves.

  “Every time I emptied the ashes and went out to the shed for a bucket of coal. Every time I picked up the poker to shake down the coals. Every time I lit a spill and held it to a candle or a piece of kindling, every time I watched a log burn or a blue flame, or felt a glow of heat spread through the kitchen, I thought of the babies out there in the snow. How could I get something like that out of my head? Mags and I were sheltered in the house while their little bodies were outside, rolled up, frozen inside a wall of snow. In spring, I was able to dig a proper grave—Dermot came up from town to help. We put the babies in coffins I built myself, and we buried them side by side in the ground. A special place we chose in the woods, their graves sheltered by trees. They’re still there. No one has disturbed the site since.”

  Silence hung over the two men. The lower edge of the web that had kept Am’s sorrow in place was flapping dangerously. In gale-force winds it had loosened.

  “We stayed on the land for a while, but I’d had enough of the farm, and so had Mags. Eventually, we put out the word that our acreage was for sale. Dermot owned the hotel by then, and he was the one who heard about the job of caretaker in this building. I applied and got the job. The work kept me busy and still does. It may seem crazy to you but I get satisfaction from climbing up here, looking after the tower and the big clock. The clock is like an old friend now, ticking away up here. The hands could fall off and it would still go on ticking.

  “After we moved to town, there were no more children for us. Mags did not become pregnant and we never spoke openly about our hopes of another child being born. E
very family around us had riches, but ours were buried. We loved Dermot’s children, but they weren’t ours. Loving them was like watching over borrowed children from a careful distance. You, too. You were one of the children we loved and watched over because you grew up with our nieces and nephews and you were always together.”

  We are all caught in thick webs, every one of us, Kenan was thinking. Tress, too, because she is so desperate to have a child. But what he said was, “I thought I was going crazy. I didn’t know who else could be bashing at the snow out there, breaking it up, spreading it over the ice.”

  He saw Bill’s face again, laughing, chattering, and then, when the second explosion came, his mouth shaping the word Help. Bill reached for Kenan from the trench wall, his hand outstretched. If Kenan had been quicker, he could have dragged him out in time. But he hadn’t been quick enough. There was a sudden wound in Bill’s chest that Kenan could have put his fist inside—he saw it. There was so much confusion; the trench was exploding around them. They had to pull back, retreat. No one knew what the hell was going on. The noise, always the obscene, profane noise. And flashes of light, he remembered those, and Bill’s face and the way, in an instant, it was covered with dirt and yellowish mud, his friend smothering, and Kenan couldn’t reach him because already he had leaped for safety and the entire part of the trench where Bill had been only moments before had disappeared. Kenan was knocked back, all sound gone, his bones vibrating, his chest vibrating. Hugh was on the ground, too, his arms over his head, but he was farther along and couldn’t see what was going on. And then, everyone was shouting, running—if they were alive, if they were able to run.