Tell (2 page)

He wished Tress would return. He was sorry she was working late. He wanted to follow her up the stairs, watch her long, thick hair as she shifted it to one side. He wanted to hear her laugh again. He wanted to lie beside her, feel her skin next to his, listen to her voice as it was absorbed by the room’s dim light. He wanted to listen while she spun stories until the two of them drifted off to sleep.

And Tress would shake with laughter, teasing, and Kenan would reach with his good hand, this time for his wife.

But there hadn’t been much laughter, he reminded himself. Not for a while.

He heard loud steps and was instantly aware of the boardwalk on the other side of the door, only a few feet away. He had not turned on a lamp. As he backed into the parlour, two or three lights came on in the town and cast a glow over the dusty street. Most business establishments lay to the west of his house. Thirty feet to the east, Main Street ended at the place where the boardwalk stopped. Kenan’s heart raced as he thought of town and bay and wind. Bars of yellow light swung crazily across the stirred-up dirt. Lampposts swayed and tottered on both sides of the street.

For the second time, he walked to the vestibule and reached for his jacket, but once again he left it on its hook. He paced through the house and retreated to the back veranda. He imagined the cold beyond the door. Winter was moving in
early. He stared into a sullen sky that had begun to lower itself over the shadows of the bay.

K
ENAN HAD NEVER SEEN THE INSIDE OF THIS HOUSE BEFORE
departing for the war in 1914, though as a boy and a younger man, he’d walked past it often enough. Tress had returned to live in her parents’ house beside the hotel while he was overseas. But the week she received the telegram from the War Office, she rented this narrow house on the bay from Jack Conlin, the postmaster. Not long after that, she moved in, readied the place with help from her sister, and waited. That was weeks before Kenan arrived home. He was able to walk in, his two legs holding him up, injured but alive. He’d had a lengthy stay in a hospital in England while recovering from the damage to his face and the wounds to his arm and hand. When he was finally sent home, the war, and all its killing, was still under way. Tress had met him at the station in the nearby city of Belleville and they’d travelled together to Deseronto. It was a harsh winter day when he first stepped through the front door. The wind had driven a ridge of snow along the bottom of the storm door and he’d had to clear the snow away with the side of his boot before he and Tress could enter. He’d removed his boots in the vestibule and walked into the parlour of what was to be their home. When he’d taken his first look at the unfamiliar rooms, he’d been ambushed by a sudden unravel-ling of memory.

Gates and doorways of countless billets in France had risen before him. Every French village he’d entered was swarming
with troops, water carts, guns, horses, wagons, autos. Debris was piled high in the streets and along sunken roads; the ground never stopped shaking. So many dwellings were taken over, dwellings where soldiers slept like tinned smelt on rubber sheets laid out over salvaged boards, or on sandbags layered together, or on kitchen floors that were nothing more than hard-packed earth. The men were used to sleeping as close to the source of heat as they could manoeuvre their bodies. In winter, they tried to grab a place nearest the stove or fireplace, and slept under their overcoats in an arc-like formation around the heat. He thought of his friend Hugh, whom he’d met on the ship when they’d first set out after joining up. Somehow, they’d been assigned to the same outfit while in England, and they ended up in the same boxcar playing poker as they headed, weeks later, to the Front. He had heard not a word from his friend since returning to Canada. Hugh, who’d grown up in Prince Edward Island on the East Coast, might be alive or dead, equal chances. During the years they’d been overseas together, Hugh had a peculiar way of sleeping: face down, palms on the floor below shoulder level—on wood or stone, on earth or hay—as if making ready to pry himself up in his sleep.

Sometimes, Kenan and Hugh and the others in their unit were ordered to take cover in the ruins of shelled buildings. They waited in damaged attics or in dank enclosures, bodies pressed against one another in cellars that lay beneath suffocating rubble. Kenan had found a corpse bent in jackknife position in one of those cellars, the corpse of an elderly man who had perhaps lived in the building and refused to leave. Or maybe the inhabitants of the village had forgotten the old man when they’d
been evacuated. He might have starved to death; the family might have been killed. Perhaps no one had come looking. The stench had made it difficult to go down into the cellar, but men were to be billeted in that place, so Kenan descended and then went outside to dig a grave behind one of the outbuildings. It was winter. The roads were half-frozen; the earth was cold and hard; there wasn’t enough time; he needed rest. Hugh came out to help and together they dragged the body away. They threw a covering of straw over the man and returned to the house and took turns shifting beside the woodstove in a half-collapsed room, always edging toward the source of heat.

In summer and fall when the air was warm, Kenan had preferred to sleep outside. Against orders, he’d frequently abandoned his billet—a hayloft above a shed, a row of cots in the dormitory of an abandoned convent, a classroom in a school with shattered windows, a destroyed factory. He felt safer under open sky but understood the contradiction, knowing that he was more exposed. Inside or out, he knew that safety was no more than an idea in his head. The building where the men slept could receive a direct hit and they’d all be killed anyway.

And now, in his Deseronto house, every inch of which he’d explored with his good eye open and his good eye closed, he wondered if he had invented the memories of more than three and a half years of war. Memories of staring up into night skies, expecting the stars to explode. Waking up with dew dampening his uniform, puttees tightening around his lower legs. Standing in wisps of fog that rolled low along the ground in the mornings, so that in every direction, only heads and torsos could be seen above the mist, while legless men called back and forth to
one another as they shaved and laughed and groused and swore, and prepared to fill their mess tins for breakfast.

He might have invented those memories, but he had not invented the war. The newspapers Tress brought home from her father’s hotel had been emphatically real, emphatically clear about the Armistice and its aftermath. Half a year after November 1918, the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. These days, the papers had less and less to say about the conflagration. People wanted to move on, and who could blame them? Earlier in the week, the past Tuesday morning, the nation had been asked to devote two whole minutes—as Calhoun had written in the
Post
—”to concentrated thought in reverence to the dead, and in appreciation of the sacrifices of the living.” Tress’s uncle Am had connected the bell in the clock tower over the post office on that single occasion, and at the end of the two-minute silence, eleven strikes against the bell had clanged out over the town. From behind a curtain in his living room, Kenan had seen a few people on the street pause to bow their heads, but after that they kept on with what they were doing. The bell had been disconnected again, the show of observance over.

And now, would everyone forget? Surely not. Surely the men who marched through Kenan’s head by hundreds, hundreds of thousands, had not marched into oblivion, erased from collective memory.

How was he to know anything about the world as it was now, when he, himself, had dropped off its edge? Perhaps others like him had made similar choices. Reading the obituaries in a fall paper, he’d noticed the name of a Belleville soldier called Frank, whom he’d chanced to bunk beside on the hospital ship
on the way home from England. The man had been gassed and was being sent home. He was a talker, and didn’t mind Kenan’s silence. When their ship docked, a band on the pier below was playing “The Boys Who Fight for Freedom,” over and over, as if the musicians had learned only that one tune. The two men had been in different coaches on the train west to Ontario, but Frank had come to find him when they reached Belleville. He had shaken Kenan’s good hand and said goodbye. He planned to go back to work for the railroad, he said. Before the war, he’d had a good job working at the Belleville coal chutes and he knew he’d be given his job back, no questions asked. But he hadn’t lasted much more than a year, according to the date of the obituary. The coal dust had killed him and no wonder, given the damage already in his lungs. “The lungs of our boys who were gassed have turned into a spongy, decaying mess. We have to do something to help.” That was what one Toronto paper reported. The sentiment had come too late to help Frank.

Kenan thought of Hugh again and wondered if his wartime friend was at this moment looking out over some segment of field or road or sea on the East Coast. He wished Hugh were here beside him. They’d shared a few laughs; they’d helped and relied on each other. Was it too much to believe that they might be able to laugh again? Hugh had always greeted Kenan by saying, “Hello, old stuff.” Making fun of the Imperials.

Kenan hoped Hugh was alive. Hoped that unlike himself, his friend still had the use of both eyes. He wondered how to go about locating him. Wary of looking to the future in the midst of war, they’d never exchanged addresses. Friendship could take a turn over there and be snapped apart as soon as it had begun.

All of this was tiring to think about. Kenan looked through the windows of the back veranda again. The clothes on the line were so twisted in the shadows, their individual shapes were unrecognizable. He hated disorder. As if to punctuate his thoughts, a blast of wind shook the windowpanes. He retreated, and once more made his way across the house.

This time, he lifted the new jacket off its hook and pressed it to his chest. His right hand explored the inner lining while he estimated the warmth and weight of it. The jacket smelled of newness, though it had been hanging there for several weeks. Using his right arm to hold it in position, he slid his dead arm down into the left sleeve, the way he’d been taught by the nursing sisters in the English hospital. With that done, he pushed his right arm into place. He buttoned with one hand and pulled the toggles over a double strip of cloth that hid the buttons down the front. He reached back and pulled the hood up over his head. The hood was coarse and new to his fingertips, the weight of cloth evenly distributed over his shoulders. The jacket could not have been a better fit. He tugged at the hood in such a way that only half his face could be seen through the opening. The dead eye was covered.

He walked through the house again, but this time, for the first time, he opened the side door and stepped out. His heartbeat was erratic. He placed a foot on the outdoor step and understood that his exit had been rehearsed a thousand thousand times. He left the door unlocked behind him.

He thought he should stand on the stoop at the back and wheel in the line, one-handed, so that he could make an attempt at untangling the clothes. But he did not want to risk being
seen. Someone might look out an upper window of a neighbouring house, get a glimpse of the man who stayed inside, the man crazed by war. Was that what the town thought of him?
He went a bit strange. He was a bit funny in the head after he came home. Poor Tress, who has to put up with him.

He made his way toward the street, veered right and walked away. The town map opened in his mind. Leaves scuttered at his feet. He had once loved the sound; now it surprised and startled him. At the end of the boardwalk, he stepped down into hardened ruts in the road. He kept his head lowered. He knew he could turn back at any moment. He began to take long strides, making up for the many months of short, repetitive steps in the house. The worn path was there at the eastern edge of town, just as he knew it would be. He followed the path, kept close to the bay, wide of the old gasworks, sharply away from a rotting, unused pier. There was no one around. Not in this wind.

He had not been seen.

Relief attached itself to the old danger. Relief and danger, these were familiar edges he knew how to move between. He sucked in air stirred by the wind to which he’d listened all day. His lungs filled with cold. He registered the mix of scents: weeds at the edge of the bay; still, deep water; brittle and fallen leaves; damp and hardening earth. Portents of winter. Scents of such pleasure, they knocked him back in surprise.