Tell
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About this ebook
In the small, insular community of Deseronto, Ontario, two women welcome their husbands home from the Great War. But their joy is mixed with trepidation as they struggle to rebuild their lives. Tress’s husband Kenan is young, shell-shocked, and disfigured. He confines himself indoors, venturing outside only at night to visit the frozen bay where he skated as a boy. Her aunt Maggie, an aspiring singer, has problems of her own. Falling out of love with one man, and drawn intimately close to another, she and her husband Am are navigating an inevitable, ever-widening gulf in their marriage.
As the second decade of the twentieth century draws to a close, the tenuous futures of two couples become increasingly entwined. When startling revelations surface, the secrets of the past are unburdened—secrets that can either heal lives, or tear them apart forever in this “enthralling reminder of the toll the war—and all wars—take, not only on the soldiers but on the families who keep faith on the home front” (The Toronto Star).
Frances Itani
FRANCES ITANI has written eighteen books. Her novels include That’s My Baby; Tell, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Requiem, chosen by the Washington Post as one of the top fiction titles of 2012; Remembering the Bones, published internationally and shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and the #1 bestseller Deafening, which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Published in seventeen territories, Deafening was also selected for CBC’s Canada Reads. A three-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize, Frances Itani is a Member of the Order of Canada and the recipient of a 2019 Library and Archives Canada Scholars Award. She lives in Ottawa.
Read more from Frances Itani
Remembering the Bones: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Requiem: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deafening Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Company We Keep: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Season of Mourning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBest Friend Trouble Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for Tell
40 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This novel is beautifully written. However, that is not enough to save it for me. I found it quite dull. I struggled to hold my attention and could only read it when alone and quiet and I could concentrate on launguage. It took me most of the novel to keep who was who straight.I greatly prefered "deafening".
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poignant novel about the devastating effect World War I had on the inhabitants of a small town in Canada right after the war, particularly in the lives of one family: Kenan, who returned from the war shell-shocked with the loss his left eye and his left arm and hand rendered useless, along with his wife, Tress. Because of the trauma and struggling to regain their love and acceptance, their marriage falls into a shadow of its former self. Little by little Kenan comes out of his shell. The marriage of another couple, her Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am is also unravelling--the reason happened years before and has led to silence, sorrow and emotional distance on both sides. Maggie finds refuge in music, culminating in a gala Christmas concert and the aftermath.The author's prose was graceful and the story mesmerizing. Each word was well chosen; I felt the story was a labor of love. I liked how Maggie's chance meeting and conversation with Nellie Melba, the opera diva, was worked into the story. Also, I liked the device of the newspaper articles, which more and more towards the end, reflected some of the action of the story. I liked how the close-knit family members were presented. Itani's descriptions of the Canadian winter and the ice rink were vivid.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a novel of strong characters, a remarkably rich and complex plot and lyrical and spare prose. The story is set in a small Ontario town on the shores of Lake Ontario near the end of 1919. The book centers around young Kenan who has recently returned from hospital in Europe where he was sent to recover from catastrophic wounds he received in the Great War. Kenan's adjustment to his life after the horrors he experienced at the front and while trying to come to grips with his new reality is so very typical of what soldiers very often experience after the terrible things they've endured and witnessed in war. He is damaged and disfigured from the wounds he received, and he realizes with terrible clarity that life will never be the same for him. Kenan tries to adjust to life back in his hometown with his new wife whom he barely had time to know before he went off to war. With the help of Tress, his wife, and his uncle and aunt Am and Maggie who have lost their own way because of their own secrets, he manages to slowly reestablish himself in his small community. We see how long buried secrets and the consequences of keeping these secrets from the light of day, unacknowledged and unresolved, can destroy our lives. Ms. Itani's lyrical prose and total understanding of human nature is nothing short of remarkable. Her prose is spare and devastatingly descriptive. The story unfolds through Kenan's memories of the war as a constant backdrop. This is another worthy contender as a shortlisted novel for the Giller Prize.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I am certainly glad I wasn't sitting on the Giller Prize committee. Tell was won of the books short listed for the prize but the winner was Us Conductors which I have also read. Both were wonderful books but completely different and I would not have known how to choose the winner.Tell centers on the small town of Deseronto in the late fall and early winter of 1919. Kenan has returned from the war with physical and mental wounds. His left arm is useless and the left side of his face is severely disfigured. He has been staying indoors since his return since he doesn't want anyone to see his face. His wife, Tress, doesn't seem to care what he looks like but she is distressed about his mental state. She often talks with her aunt Maggie about it and Maggie urges her to be patient. Maggie and her husband, Am, live in an apartment in the building that houses the town clock. Am is the caretaker of the building and Maggie works part-time in the library. Maggie is also a wonderful singer. Recently a music director from Europe, Luc, has moved to Deseronto and started a choral society. He has chosen Maggie to sing several solos for the New Year's Eve concert. As Maggie gets more involved with practising for the concert she and her husband draw farther apart. When Kenan decides to venture out of the house after dark one of the places he goes is to visit Am in the clock tower. Kenan also goes skating on the rink cleared on the ice of the bay but only after 10 pm when the other skaters have left. The main characters have secrets that must be told if they are going to get on with their lives but telling is hard to do.I didn't know before I read this book that the story continues that of Awakening, a book that I adored. Tress is the sister of Grania, the main character of that book. Grania is gone from Deseronto for most of this book but she does make brief appearances in the form of letters to her sister or recollections by other people. There are some unfinished details in this book (such as Kenan's birth parents) which makes me think that Itani perhaps has a further book in mind. The details about the skating rink really resonated with me. I often skated on rinks cleared on the frozen river near our house (as well as on outdoor rinks constructed near school in town) when I was young. The cold wind in your face, the frozen mittens, the smell of the woodstove in the warming shack were all brought back to me. I haven't skated in years but reading this book made me wish I had a pair of skates to strap on.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5War was about defending and protecting. About allegiance, alliance, seizing and grasping territory. War was about death. A mass of lives, a tangle of human lives, young lives, had been clumped together to form exactly that, a mass. Millions of empty chairs. But couldn't the mass be disentangled, looked at as one life, and another, and another? Each with a story, a photograph, a history, a family to love and who loved? No one person ever stood alone. Page 237The town of Deseronto is like so many other Canadian towns of the time where the young men have left for war, some never to return, and others to return, neither whole in mind or body. Kenan is one of the lucky few who is able to come back from the war to his family and his young wife, but what he endured, what he has seen and heard will never be undone. Some stories are meant to be shared and others are forever trapped inside. A self imprisonment inside his own home, Kenan is unable to process what he has experienced and his inability to communicate the words that were lost on the fields of war leaves him paralyzed and separated from a community that has its own share of grief and secrets. I have never read anything by Itani before and in fact I've never even heard of this author, but the Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist placed her on my radar and there she will stay. Her writing is both effortless and cutting. Her story of the effects that war has on a community, the futility of it, the hopelessness, but at the same time, the redemptive power of love is fully orchestrated through her writing and the lives of her characters. Beautifully written and wholeheartedly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/53.5 starsIt's 1919. Kenan fought in the war, was wounded, and has come home to a small town in Ontario. However, he hasn't left the house since he got back and getting used to regular life again is hard on both him and his wife, Tress. Tress's Aunt Maggie is in a somewhat strained relationship with her husband, Am, and is finding solace in music. She has always been a good singer, but has never wanted to sing in public. Am is one of the few people Kenan feels comfortable talking to. It's not a fast paced book, but it was good. It was a “continuation” of the author's book, Deafening, which focused on Tress's deaf sister, Grania. This book has a completely different focus, however, and can be read without having read Deafening (though I liked Deafening better). Overall, though, it was good and definitely worth the read.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Have you never read a book set in small town Ontario circa 1920? Are you unfamiliar with the difficulty World War I vets had with re-entering society, especially if their comrades did not make it? Or can you not get enough of those old-timey stories about rural life and eccentric home remedies? Or perhaps you simply have never read a book with obvious foreshadowing so the evident conclusion actually startles you? Or maybe your brain wants the content of a short story stretched into a full novel so you can pretend to read but actually just let your eyes pass over the letters and when you do comprehend the plot you have missed nothing and can easily pick the thread back up and convincingly talk about the book as If you carefully read every line. If so, then read this book. If not, take a pass.
Book preview
Tell - Frances Itani
Copyright © 2014 by Itani Writes Inc.
Cover photograph Skating Night, 1919.
National Photo Co. Courtesy of Shorpy.com
Author photograph © Ottawa Public Library Foundation
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
First published in Canada in 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2336-7
eISBN 978-0-8021-9160-1
Black Cat
a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Aileen Itani, Soprano,
and for my aunts Jean Stratton and Carrie Oliver,
and my uncle, Harvey Stoliker,
whose stories I’ve listened to all my life
Also by Frances Itani
FICTION
Requiem
Listen!
Missing
Remembering the Bones
Poached Egg on Toast
Deafening
Leaning, Leaning over Water
Man Without Face
Pack Ice Truth or Lies
POETRY
A Season of Mourning
Rentee Bay
No Other Lodgings
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Best Friend Trouble
Linger by the Sea
But isn’t that why
we fall in love anyway, to be able to say the secret,
dangerous words that are in our heads? To name
each other with them in the dark?
—FROM ANTHEM, BY HELEN HUMPHREYS
Tell
Toronto: November 1, 1920
Zel glances around the room: oak floor, oak desk, wooden cabinet, two windows that look down over city streets three storeys below. Shelves behind the desk are stuffed with black binders. These, she suspects, are guarding secrets stored for generations.
She is in this room with three other women, a man and a baby. The baby, six weeks old, sleeps while nestled against her mother’s arm. Papers are arranged neatly before a woman who wears a tailored jacket over a grey dress. Zel sees compassion on her face; she senses it from her manner and her voice. A brooch in the shape of a miniature sleigh, with silver slats and curved gold runners, is pinned to the woman’s jacket. A tiny gold chain droops from the crossbar to represent a rope attached to the front of the sleigh. It’s as if the woman, who has introduced herself as Mrs. Davis, has a playful side, though not here, not as the official who will ensure that the documents on her desk are duly signed. In other circumstances, Zel would ask Mrs. Davis about the brooch, its origins, its maker.
A low rumble from the street railway outside seems far off, though sounds are muffled because the windows in the room are sealed. Tracks are being laid on nearby city streets, and in some areas it is difficult to cross from one side to the other. After a rain, the roads here must be a morass of mud, Zel thinks, and she looks down at her boots as if she will have to shake them later, dust them off. Earlier, from inside the cage of the ascending elevator, she glimpsed, as she passed the second floor, rows of women at sewing machines, whirring spools, strewn garments spread over long tables in a large, open room. She had already noticed the sign outside advertising LADIES’ WHOLESALE LINENS, and her fingers itched to manipulate folds of material on her own work table at home. There had been no advertisement for the office used by adoption officials, only a number beside the door at street level, which matches the number of the room where everyone is now tensed, waiting for the proceedings to end.
The woman who holds the sleeping baby is thin, green-eyed, taut with nerves. Her arms have begun to tremble and she rearranges the baby’s knitted blanket in an attempt to disguise the shaking left hand she can barely control as she leans forward to sign. Zel moves quickly to stand behind, to place her hands on the woman’s shoulders. To help her through this moment, this day. The baby stretches. A small fist is raised to her plump cheek; there is a tiny indent like a star in her fist. She does not wake.
The young couple rise together and now, as parents, receive the baby. They cannot hide their joy, their happiness at leaving with this new and precious daughter. Each of them embraces the woman who has given up her child. The two do not linger; they are first to exit the room. The baby, still sleeping, has shown no sign that her life has been set, this very moment, on a new path.
Zel watches the young man tilt his cap over his forehead as he steps through the doorway, shadowing his face before he returns to street level. There are many such men on the streets below, now that everyone is back from the war.
The three women who remain sit in silence, their thoughts perhaps stretching back to earlier moments in each of their lives. A noon whistle pierces the air from somewhere inside the building. Footsteps can be heard in the sewing room on the second floor. Feet clatter down the stairs to the street below as workers take their midday break. Mrs. Davis pushes back her chair and rises to her feet. She nods to Zel and then extends her hand to the mother, who has already begun to feel the physical absence of her child as if it were a spectre that has insistently returned to fill out its former shape.
You have a long journey ahead,
says Mrs. Davis, if you’re to travel across the lake to Oswego today.
She adds, as if she has said this too many times to too many women, Try not to look back. It will be easier if you don’t. Put your efforts into moving your life forward.
She goes to the window and looks down. The sleigh’s golden chain sways slightly with her movement. Somehow,
Mrs. Davis says, as if the words have been cut from the cloth of her own experience, somehow, we manage to survive.
DESERONTO POST, November 1919
Local Items
The wind came howling down Main Street near midnight last night. Those who rose from their beds were rewarded with the spectacle of rain rolling along the road like a grand carpet unfurling. While looking out over the tempest, one could not help but think that a winter freeze would be a welcome sight.
We have received news at this office that plans are afoot to set up a scholarship to commemorate students of Deseronto High School and other young men of the vicinity who took part in the World’s Great Struggle
just brought to a close, and especially those who made the Supreme Sacrifice in said war. Further details are to be announced about a War Memorial Fund, also to be set up by the high school.
They did their
bit for you. You do your
bit for them.
Late stragglers: On the morning before the heavy rains, several of our citizens saw a small flock of wild geese flying in front of an airplane. The birds appeared to be frightened as they headed south, but they were keeping ahead of the machine.
A horse belonging to one gentleman by the name of O’Neill made a lively runaway up Mill Street Tuesday afternoon.
Windsor Salt is on sale in the local stores. Purest and best for table and dairy. No adulteration. Never cakes.
Chapter One
There was no escaping the wind. Gusts blew in off the bay, gusts beat against shirts and trousers and linens pegged to the clothesline. Air pockets were trapped; sheets snapped out furiously. From inside the closed veranda at the rear of the house, Kenan Oak could not shut out the sound.
He closed the outdated newspaper he’d been reading and made an effort to align its edges. Once he’d folded it along the creases, he placed it on top of a neat and growing stack beside his chair. He had read about but had not attended the fall reception in town, nor had he attended the sports dinner or the grand ball—all of which had been held, as editor Calhoun, of the Post, had reported, to thank Deseronto’s red-blooded manhood for its sacrifices, its heroism and its gallantry on the far-flung battlefield.
The town had waited until late in the year for the big celebration. Decorate! Decorate!
Calhoun had urged the town. Decorate your lawns, decorate your homes, decorate your places of business, decorate your streets, decorate your autos— but decorate.
And people had responded, at least from what Kenan could see from his parlour window. Yes, the town had decorated, and waited until everyone was home—those who were alive to come home. The nearby city of Belleville had sent a brass band for daytime events and an orchestra for evening. Kenan, who had lived in Deseronto all his life, felt far-flung indeed, having brought the battlefield home with him. Or so Tress, losing patience one day, had accused. Kenan had come back as a walking wounded,
but he had not walked out of the house since the day he’d returned and set foot in it.
Wind hurled itself at the outer walls. The veranda windows rattled and this caused him to stand suddenly, as if he’d been yanked from his chair. He turned his back to the bay and saw a small black spider disappear behind a calendar on the side wall. He ignored the spider and told himself to escape, leave the veranda, walk through the rooms of the house.
Stay calm, he commanded himself. Stay calm.
He closed his good eye, the right, and kept it closed. He imagined himself threading a route through darkness, the way a blind man might. Did a blind man move forward because of faith in the unseen? Faith had not helped the men at the Front when poisonous gas drifted across no man’s land, dropped into the trenches, made its way between walls of dirt and clay as it sought its victims. Those men had been blinded, skin bubbling around their eyes, their lungs frothing as they choked and gasped for air. Kenan had witnessed such a group who had been brought back behind the lines. He’d rushed to help, just before the men were led away to a dressing station for evacuation—those who could walk. Others were lying on the ground. The walking soldiers, a dozen or more, had been formed up in a line. Each had a hand on the shoulder of the man in front; each had a field dressing covering his eyes, blistered skin showing on his hands and around the edges of his bandages. The soldier who led this piteous parade of afflicted men was unaffected by the gas; he’d been ordered to lead the others out. And then, just before they began to move, they tilted their heads down, all at the same time, as if each blind man had chosen that moment to stare into the same angle of darkness. Some still wore their helmets from up the line; others were bare-headed. None would be back for more fighting. The man at the front of the line suddenly shouted out and began to walk slowly, allowing his retinue to shuffle and stumble behind. From a nearby field hospital, the wounded soldiers would be sent on to Blighty and, much later, home.
Kenan, a witness to this, had the use of both eyes at the time. A few months later, he, too, became one of the wounded, but not from poison gas. His left arm was useless and bloodied; a field dressing covered the entire left side of his face. He’d been lifted onto a stretcher. His right eye had stared into a sky of protective, merciful darkness while the stretcher bearers cursed and bumped along, carrying him away from the battlefield in the night. Thunderous noises, whistling and sobbing, accompanied him as he was moved farther back from where he’d first stumbled into a trench, his hand holding the pieces of his face together.
He was in the parlour now, the soles of his shoes pacing a thin carpet Tress had laid over the floor. He took no step for granted; each was slow and considered. Feet could be swallowed by bottomless holes. Had he not watched men his own age swallowed by sinkholes? He had. He carried on, reached out with right hand, right arm. He felt for familiar objects as he began to trace a known sequence through his narrow house.
He did this only when Tress was out, only when he was certain that she would be away for hours, working in the dining room of her parents’ hotel at the other end of Main Street. If she were to witness the treks he made through the house with his good eye closed, she would think he was crazed by war. No, that was unfair. Tress wanted to bring him back from the darkness that held him down. She had not given up, nor was she likely to. Or so he told himself.
Now his fingertips brushed chairback, tabletop, circle of doily that slid under his hand. Upper edge of fire screen, pewter candlestick and curve of curly-birch chair. The knowledge of wine-coloured upholstery registered behind his closed eye. At the doorjamb, he dipped his knees and searched below waist level for a familiar indent. His fingers explored this smooth depression during every walk, as if acknowledging that a creature with a single tooth had dwelled here long ago. A creature who had stopped to take a bite from the wooden frame before ambling past.
He circled the kitchen, registered the aroma of bread rising in the dough box, soft butter on the countertop, an overripe apple. He smelled coal dust in the scuttle, lifted his foot over a slight ridge as he left the kitchen, never a step missed.
Kenan had lost the vision in his left eye when he’d been sent out on a trench raid for a second time. The locations blurred. The German dugouts were deep, he remembered his surprise at that. But going out two nights in a row, he’d been tempting fate. Or rather, the officer who sent him had. The night Kenan was wounded, shells had burst around him without warning, scattering shrapnel. One side of his body had been hit. As a consequence, the left side of his face was now sealed in rippled scars. He seldom looked in a mirror, knowing the damage without having to stare it down. His good side was the right side. His legs were fine. He had a good arm and a good hand. The war had left him with one seeing eye and one ear to hear. He’d escaped total blindness. Sometimes he thought of the lineup of gassed men and wondered why one of his own eyes had been spared, the events of the carnage having been so random, so finite. There was no explaining who walked away, who returned home, who vanished into a landscape of mud roiling with bodies, dead and alive.
He carried on, moved silently from room to room—expert at the silent part—continuing to honour the blind man’s pact with himself. He kept the good eye closed. The hand of his dead arm was tucked into his trouser pocket to prevent the arm from banging into door frames or knocking over the remaining vase of a former pair—the same arm had destroyed the other— or to keep it from swinging into Tress. All of these mishaps had occurred more than a year ago, when Kenan had first come home. He did not go out into the town, because it was safer to stay indoors. That was his reasoning. He was safe when he did not have to make the decision to leave. In his home, he was not subject to interference. He did not have to look at people, and no one had to look at him. Family members came, and he tolerated their brief visits. Dr. Clark visited from time to time, and he, too, was tolerated. Kenan had not left the house since the day he arrived home, the final day that marked the end of his war, during the winter of 1918.
He finished his exploration of the ground floor. Unable to escape the continuous billowing and snapping of the wind, he decided to include the upper level in today’s wanderings. He extended his right hand, touched the banister and allowed it to direct him up the stairs. On the landing, he took four sure steps to the left and entered the main bedroom. He ran his fingers along the metal bed frame and the solid mattress upon which, night after night, he and Tress slept. The place where he was certain of her warmth soaking into him. Where their love, their lovemaking—that, too, altered by war—had become resolute, intense. His intensity, perhaps. Or hers—possibly the other way round.
In the early months when he’d first come home, Tress had tucked into his good side at night, laughed and talked softly, evenly, pulling from the air, or so it seemed, the continued threads of story, sometimes their own.
Two children grew up in the same town, in houses on adjacent streets. They liked to run and play, lickety-split, along the boardwalk and in the schoolyard and on the paths around town. The boy did handstands in the schoolyard, so good was he at balancing. Occasionally, he was invited to the girl’s house for Sunday supper. The meal wasn’t actually served in her house; family meals were taken in the dining room of a hotel next to her house—the hotel owned by her father. When roast beef was served, the boy was asked if he would like the outside piece and he always said, Yes, please,
because the crispy part was his favourite. So the girl’s father carved the roast and said, Pass your plate along, young man.
More recently, Tress had become less talkative, settling, he thought, into some sort of grim resolve. She wanted a child. There was no child. She was trying to accept what Kenan had become. And what was that? She was adjusting to what she had become in response.
Barren, Kenan thought suddenly. We’re barren, the two of us.
The word startled him. He had seen barren. Charred landscapes where nothing would grow. Trees without leaves, branches without birds. Razed earth that supported no life. Villages without people. Oh, yes, he had seen barren. He had known it intimately.
And Tress’s behaviour had become confusing. Only a few nights earlier, they had made love, and afterward, instead of moving close against him, Tress had turned away and had begun to weep uncontrollably, sobbing for several minutes. Nothing he did or said would comfort her. When the weeping ceased, it was only to resume a few moments later, hiccups of sorrow escaping into the room. They’d both fallen asleep from exhaustion.
Barren, he thought again. There was no explaining why a child had not been conceived. He pushed the word aside. What of it? War changed everything. Including what went on in the bedroom. He crossed the upstairs hall and walked into the room opposite their own. Empty, except for a made-up bed, an extra blanket folded against the foot rail. Back to the hall again, he reached for a door between the two bedrooms and stepped into a closet that had been lined with shelves below the peak of the house. His fingers traced towels, wool blankets—every inch of space used efficiently beneath the ceiling that sloped on both sides. On the floor beneath the shelves, a few cedar branches warded off moths. He pulled the door shut and stood inside the cramped space. He did not have to open his good eye to sense darkness. His hand began to shape words in the silent language he had learned from Tress’s younger sister, who had been deaf since she was five. Grania had helped him to recover the language inside himself, the language of words he had not been able to utter after he had come home. He had heard people well enough. With his good ear he’d understood what they said. But his own words had stormed and tangled inside his head. He hadn’t been able to separate them into patterns. In some strange way not fully understood, he’d had to relearn the language he already knew. The bridge between, while he was stuttering his way back to speech, was Grania’s sign language. She had taught him signs he could make with his good hand, words he could spell, rhymes for his voice. He missed Grania. The entire family missed her. But she had moved away a few months after her own husband returned from the war.
Here in the dark closet, Kenan had not escaped the snapping sheets below, the invasion of blunt thuds. Tentacles of sound criss-crossed like maniacal weaving through his brain. His right hand made half the sign for peace,
for quiet,
one side of an X arcing down. He pressed his palm over his ear as if to slow a swelling that would not be contained. He left the closet and walked down the stairs. To keep the blindman’s compact, he did not open his good eye until he reached the bottom.
He tried to remember what Tress had said when she left for work that morning. She’d opened the front door, and wind circled its way into the house. She’d called to him over the sound to say she’d be late coming home. Someone had the day off—the name had blown away with the wind. Usually, Tress was home Mondays. She’d done a wash and hung the clothes before she left. He had spent the morning alone, working at the table, completing the work found for him by the GWVA. He had joined the vets’ association without leaving his house; the work they’d found for him could be done at home. For that, he was thankful.
The light outside was fading. Kenan returned to the veranda and stood beside the wicker chair. A one-eyed foreman, he inspected his intimate patch of backyard and bay. Shadows cast from the house next door transformed the clothesline tangles into menacing lumps. He considered the earlier snaps and thuds—benign compared to the way gusts were now battering at the windows of the veranda. He had a sudden flash of memory, an image of himself as a small boy leaving the house where he’d been raised by his uncle Oak. He saw wind puffing up the inside of his jacket. He saw himself trying to press air from his pockets, fastening the top toggle to prevent the jacket being ripped from his back and blown out over the waves. Whipped-up waves that now, almost twenty years later, distorted the surface of the bay.
He began, again, to pace. He walked to the small enclosed vestibule at the front of the house and reached up to the hook that held his new jacket. Tress had purchased the jacket several weeks earlier: a heavy mackinaw, navy blue, hooded and lined with tweed. She’d placed it on the hook and there it had remained, hanging limply, waiting for Kenan to slide the insensate hand and arm down into the pit of the left sleeve.
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