One of the locals who works in the laundry here insists on placing an empty chair outside the building if someone succumbs to this disease. A kind of tribute to a life lived. A stark reminder, and no one objects—neither patients nor those who are in charge. The empty chair appears on the lawn—or in the snow—at the front of the property the morning after the death, and is carried back in before dark. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen often, but when it does, word spreads through the building quickly. Imagine if we had placed a chair in no man’s land for every loss. Such a ritual would have stopped the war. No one would have been able to move through the mountains of lumber.
I try not to dwell on thinking about the bigger questions of why we were over there in the first place and what good it all did in the final run. How could we not be angry at the staggering waste of life—well, the millions of empty chairs? Somehow, we have to move on. We have to gather up what is left to gather and confront the world head on. I’m determined to keep my spirits up.
I was glad to know that you recognized the place where the photo was taken of the three of us, you and me and Bill. It’s strange, isn’t it, how we remember different angles of the same picture. Memory is a crazy thing—and I don’t mean that you and I are crazy. Just that one person can swear that such-and-such happened and so-and-so was present, or was standing just outside the frame of the picture. Another at the same scene will swear the opposite. What happened to our mate Bill? We could piece fragments together to try to figure out the answer. Or maybe it’s best not to dwell. Disappearances happened so quickly and brutally, I shouldn’t even be writing this down. Some episodes are best forgotten.
That’s about it for this missive. Not too much happens around here. We rely on news the staff brings in from outside, and from letters, to know what’s going on.
Well, Old Stuff, I send my best to you and your wife for a happy Christmas, and I mean that. Don’t forget to tell Tress that I look forward to meeting her. I’ll keep you posted as to my progress and when I’ll be discharged. I do wonder sometimes if I’ll be able to understand the outside world again when I’m let loose in it. A big part of me wishes my father were not waiting in the wings, hoping to convince me to enter his profession. It’s possible that anyone who has expectations is sure to be let down.
And speaking of “down,” keep your head down, mate, and stay out of trouble.
Yours, Hugh
P.S. One of my roommates was running a fever a few weeks back and kept insisting that the nursing sisters bring him salt herring to place on his feet. They refused to comply. I don’t know if they couldn’t get any herring or if they thought the practice barbaric. He was upset when the salt herring didn’t materialize, but his fever subsided without it, nonetheless.
Chapter Seventeen
FULLY DRESSED, KENAN STOOD AT THE BEDROOM window upstairs until the lights at both ends of the rink flickered and went out. Ten o’clock. He checked the sky, checked the surface of the bay. From here, it was difficult to appraise the condition of the ice. Not much of a glow from the moon, a thin sliver now. He watched while the caretaker of the shack crunched up the path toward Main Street.
Behind him, in bed, Tress was asleep. She had gone to bed early because she would have to leave early in the morning for the breakfast shift. Agnes needed her to fill in again for someone’s day off. Kenan didn’t keep track of who worked when; he paid attention only to Tress’s hours and schedule.
Safe in the darkness, he padded down the stairs in his socks. He tried his best to be silent at the front of the house while he lifted his jacket from the hook. He slid his dead arm down into the sleeve, fastened the toggles, pulled on his mittens and a warm hat with earflaps. He grabbed up his skates on his way out the side door.
The air was blue-black, crisply silent. He walked through the yard and down to the shore and along the path. When he reached the shack, he checked to be certain that no one was around. Two snow shovels had been propped against the outer wall. He let himself inside and sat on the bench. His feet slipped into the new skates more easily this time, but his fingers and hand were still awkward at tightening the laces. The shack was warm; the fire had not yet died in the stove. The woodbox at the end of the room was stacked high in preparation for the next day. A low glow cast shadows through the room. He needed no other light.
He hadn’t forgotten the hard fall during his first skate, and he was determined not to stumble this time. He reached the ice, tested, felt his blades scratch against the hard surface. He tried to relax, to let go, and surprised himself with a sprint that took him to the far end of the rink. He had not fallen. He had not once looked toward the wall of snow. He couldn’t stand the sight of it.
He stood still after the sprint and considered what to do next. His body would cool quickly if he stayed in one spot. A low wind was blowing in off the bay and he wanted to keep moving. He pushed off again, kept his knees bent, felt his blades carve ice, heard the sound—harsh, familiar, satisfying against the night silence. He tried to warm up, move faster. Tried again to let go, drop his weight, allow his legs to prove their strength. He skated the length of the rink, straight up the centre, reached the far end and almost panicked knowing he’d have to turn. Then, one foot crossed over the other, right foot over left, and he executed a quick three-step on ice, the dance of the feet, naturally, smoothly, the way he’d always done. One of his blades struck an uneven patch, a ridge in the ice, and he went down, but not so hard this time. He sat on his ass and laughed abruptly into the dark.
He got up again, not easily, but wanting nothing more than to lean into the skate, to keep his legs moving, to feel the release from the long months he’d spent indoors. The wind picked up and he felt, in some half-frozen, half-crazed way, that he was back. Back to something he knew, something that gave him history, his own small place in the larger botched-up, buggered-up world. He was disfigured, yes, but he wanted to be untainted by war. And now that he’d thought of war, there was no pushing it away. He was tainted. He’d been part of it, a party to it. He’d rushed off in 1914, responding to the call. He’d been a child doing a tap dance in his boots on the steps of Tress’s parents’ hotel.
Charlie Chaplin went to France
To teach the ladies how to dance
Who could have known? Who could possibly have known what awaited?
He tried to adjust to the imbalance of his body, tried to compensate. Let his good arm swing as it would, left to right and back again. He picked up speed, tried once more to free his thoughts. He wondered if his desire to fly across the ice this moment was anything like what it had been for pilots when their machines left the ground as they’d flown their Blériots or Bristol Scouts or Sopwiths—some that gave the appearance of being alarmingly flimsy—over the trenches. He’d met a pilot from Nova Scotia when he was on leave in London during the second year of the war. They’d shared a table for breakfast in a crowded restaurant one morning, and he’d listened, fascinated, while the man described what it was like to be up there in his machine, separate from earth, a new winged creature inserted into the territory of the sky. Kenan was envious until he heard the rest of the stories: forced landings, cylinders missing, engines cutting out, pilots forced to glide to earth in order to land. Later, he chanced to hear that the same pilot had dropped to his death over an occupied French village. He had fallen from his upside-down plane during a machine-gun fight in the sky. The pilot was given a military funeral by German officers, and written confirmation of his death was dropped in a package from a German plane over British lines. A strange sort of honour among enemies in the midst of war. Kenan had been thankful to have his own two feet on the ground, even if it meant living between subterranean walls of dirt much of the time.
There’d been other pilots, too. In Belleville, the year before the war began, Kenan had gone to see the flying tricks of Lincoln Beachey, Death-Defying Aviator. Two years later, Beachey fell from his own plane while performing manoeuvres over San Francisco Bay. Kenan n
ever forgot the thrill of watching Beachey loop the loop over the skies of Belleville, and he’d been saddened to read of the man’s death.
As for his leave in London, Kenan had begun to wish he’d never gone. The city was no part of any reality he knew. The clothes, the presence of real flowers, the shows, people laughing in the streets—all combined to make him understand that no one could possibly know what was going on across the Channel unless they were there themselves. He ended up walking the streets like an alien.
Kenan skated around the perimeter of the rink more than a dozen times, paying attention to the cues of the night, mindful of his balance, thankful for the generous length of cleared ice. He’d lost track of, did not care about, time. After a while, he slowed with deliberate ease. He kept his blades on ice without lifting either skate, and then widened and narrowed the gap between his feet, widening and narrowing again and again while making a continuous and regular pattern, his own mark, the length of the rink and back. He turned to look with satisfaction at the undulating lines, the double tracks, his path etched onto the surface. He faced the wind full on, but at the same time faced the low wall of snow. He felt his heart race suddenly, and he cursed and glided over to the opening where he’d entered the rink. He moved along the path, almost tripping, his blades cutting ruts in the hardened snow. He reached for and grabbed one of the shovels that leaned against the shack. This time, he made his way to the far side of the rink and swung the shovel. One-armed, he battered at the wall, his weapon flailing. Snow exploded back onto him, some of it splattering over the ice. He left a mess of white clumps scattered across part of the rink.
He dropped the shovel and returned to the shack. Removed his skates and buckled his boots. Walked quickly toward the house in the dark and locked the door behind him. He threw his hardened mittens onto a rack beside the stove. Brooding, he went upstairs to bed.
Tress murmured in her sleep. He reached for her and she shivered and woke up.
“You’re freezing,” she said. “Where have you been?”
Kenan had nothing to say. He was shaking uncontrollably. Words and images spun in his head. Hugh shouldn’t have reminded him of Bill in the letter. Kenan wanted to forget. He wanted to forget Bill. He wanted to forget Peewee, who’d been in the hospital bed beside him and who had inherited the tendency to believe he could smother at the slightest of causes. He wanted to forget every one of the boys he’d fought alongside and every one of the boys who hadn’t come back.
He and Tress held each other until he was no longer shaking. The heat of her body, the warmth of the blankets began to spread through him. He slept.
DESERONTO POST, DECEMBER 1919
Local Items
A few folks in this town are determined to find trouble, no matter what the season. In summer, they are bold enough to steal sheets off clotheslines, right out of their neighbours’ backyards.
Now it comes to our attention that a peculiar mystery is brewing while our small town braves early winter’s devices. Someone has taken to battering down the snow wall beside the rink on the bay. It’d be enough to make you laugh your kneecaps off, except that the snow wall was built up by men good enough to volunteer their time. These hard workers trudged out onto the frozen bay and scraped the ice and cleared paths and shaped a place where we could skate. A goodly amount of toil, but they didn’t stop there. They also built the skaters’ shack, using last year’s lumber. All for no reward except to know that our residents are assured of having healthy recreation throughout the winter. Now, for all their troubles, the men found a mess of snow scattered over the ice early one morning this week. Fortunately, there was no damage to the rink’s surface.
A warning to the troublemakers who are reading this: Set yourselves about skinning your teeth or finding some other pastime, and leave the rink and snow removal to those of us who are not full of useless mischief. Is this the joke of an errant night snowman?
To keep to the same line of thought, remember the snow by-law and let the boardwalks be kept clear for the next several months. This municipal regulation is not to be disregarded as heretofore has been too frequently the case.
Stomach trouble comes when the blood is weak and watery. Thin-blooded people generally have stomach trouble. Thin blood is one of the most common causes of stomach ache. Dr. Williams’s Pink Pills act directly on the blood, making it rich and red.
Chapter Eighteen
AM STOOD IN THE DARK BEHIND THE CLOCKS, the apartment below silent with unease. Mags had gone to bed immediately after practice. She was always tired now, or so she said. There was a time when they’d gone to bed together, same time every night. He didn’t try to remember how long ago. Instead, he thought of how Mags used to look when she unpinned her hair and slipped her nightgown over her head while he was in the room. She didn’t do that anymore. If he was in the bedroom, she dressed and undressed in the bathroom. Or she went to bed early and was under the covers by the time he came to bed. He thought of her slim body, her hip bone pressed against him as she lay on her side—when they used to sleep close. He thought of the flush of her cheeks when they’d been man and wife. Well, weren’t they man and wife now? They were. They slept in the same bed. But there was little connection between them. There was no comfortable silence between them. Not as before. Whose fault was that? They had once owned a silence so easy and peaceful, it went unremarked—until it was gone. Any silence now was fraught with tension, something he couldn’t name. One will rising against another, perhaps. Did he ever reach for her, or she for him? Was he afraid? Afraid that he had lost her? If so, what had he done about it? Well, maybe Mags was afraid, too. Or was she just plain angry?
When they lived on the farm, it had been Am’s habit to sit by the stove in the evenings, mending tools or fixing something or other, while she sewed or read or ironed after supper. In those days, they had talked into the late hours. Mags placed her sad-irons on top of the stove and kept an upside-down cake tin over them to hold in the heat. She smoothed a thick blanket over the end of the table, an old flannel sheet overtop, and used that as her ironing surface. While she ironed—this always looked awkward to him because she ironed with her left hand—she amused him with memories about herself and Nola growing up on the farm adjacent to the one that had belonged to his parents.
One evening, a cool summer night, she made a special bread pudding for him, adding in raisins and small, tart cherries. When the pudding came out of the oven they sat there with two spoons and finished the whole dessert between them. They’d laughed over that. Another evening, he came in from the barn, unable to hear properly. Something had bunged up his left ear. Mags knew exactly what to do. She mixed sweet oil and turpentine and, with a feather, dripped the mixture into his ear, one drop at a time. His hearing was as clear as could be after two days. If he had a boil, she mixed brown sugar and yellow soap. Mags could cure just about anything.
Am and Mags had known each other forever. A few of her stories he’d heard; many he hadn’t. Especially stories about church. He’d been brought up Catholic. Mags Healy belonged to one of the Protestant families in the area and had farther to travel to get to church, unless a visiting minister came by and preached in the schoolhouse in winter, or in one of the homes. But being of different religions had not stopped them from marrying. Am’s own family had uncles who’d married Protestant and switched. Mostly, it was the other way around. One thing he knew for certain: no one really knew what went on in someone else’s private space—he’d learned that much, even though he and Mags had been neighbours as children. There were things he didn’t know about her then, and things he never would. He understood that now.
Occasionally, he made an effort. He’d announced only this week that he was thinking of buying her one of the new electric irons Nola had recently described in a letter from Oswego. But Mags said she was afraid that if she used an electric iron, it would give her a shock and she would disappear. Someone had told her electricity could do that. They’d laughed, a rare lau
gh between them these days. A softening, perhaps.
They’d first lived with electric lights after moving to the tower apartment. What a marvel that had been. Walk into the kitchen, push a switch. Walk into the bathroom, push a switch. Mags had complained about the rules that went with having plugs and outlets and wiring throughout the building. “Why does lamplight have to be over my left shoulder when I read?” she wanted to know. “What difference does it make whether electric light beams down on the page from left or right?” He didn’t have an answer for that.
Other things were different, too. When they’d lived on the farm, after frost, sometime in November or early December, he worked around their small orchard, removing loose bark from the apple trees, exposing the larvae of coddling moths. Just before winter each year, he slaughtered a cow and a pig. He and Mags didn’t have much to buy in the way of supplies. Kerosene, flour, sugar, tea, raisins, soap—though Mags knew how to make her own soap and often did. She still made her own laundry soap. Even though everything was available in the stores in town.
AM STAYED IN THE TOWER AN EXTRA HALF-HOUR AFTER he was sure Mags was asleep. He liked to use a lantern in the tower instead of electric light. Sometimes he lit the lantern; sometimes he didn’t. He just liked being up here. And not because he was in pain and needed to be alone. Right now he had no pain, but something else was amiss. He’d been edgy all day. The edginess had begun after he’d read an article in the Post about someone in town battering at the heaped-up snow at the side of the rink, scattering it over the ice. This had happened earlier in the week, but no one knew who had done such a thing. He recalled peering through the clock one morning, watching two men out there scraping away at the ice.