What she held in her hand was a Field Service Postcard, pale and brownish coloured, with pencil lines drawn through print. Apart from the date and a dark amoeba-like smudge beside the year, the only handwritten word on the entire card was a name. He had signed at the bottom,
Chim.
She stepped back and took a breath and steadied herself against the wall. Why did the card seem more of a threat than a greeting? Jim had held it in his hands. It meant that he was alive—on the eighth of April. Of course he was alive; if he were not, she’d have received a telegram. But now it was the third of June. There must have been delays all along the way; this had taken longer to arrive than his earlier letters from England. She gripped it tightly with both hands and read the lines printed on the card.
Nothing is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.
Jim had obeyed instructions and had drawn a line through every sentence on the face of the card except
I am quite well.
Lines had been drawn through:
I have been admitted into hospital
sick
wounded
and am going on well.
and hope to be discharged soon.
I am being sent down to the base.
I have received your
letter dated _______________
telegram dated _______________
parcel dated _______________
Letter follows at first opportunity.
I have received no letter from you
lately
for a long time.
Grania now saw that one other word was bare and exposed. This was at the bottom of the card and the word was
lately.
Somehow
lately
seemed more personal than
I am quite well
at the top. But because she had sent a number of letters, she had no way of knowing which had been received and which had not. At the time of writing the card, Jim indicated only that he’d received no letter
lately.
They had planned to number their letters after his departure, but she had given up on that hopeless system almost immediately. Letters took four weeks, or five, or six—the card had taken almost two months—and it was her belief that anything received at all was entirely by chance. She’d received short letters from Jim telling her that he was safe, that he was learning new things in his training, that the boys wanted to get on with the show and get to France. Sometimes he wrote to her about sound. Or he mentioned his new friend, who turned out to be from a farm not far from Bompa Jack’s. From the time Jim had joined the Field Ambulance, he had something to say about his friend Irish.
She looked at the card and again she read
I am quite well
and
lately
, as if these words represented all that was unsaid between them. She rubbed her finger over the smudge at the top. Maybe it contained a truly private message. She smoothed the corners of the card and slipped it carefully into her handbag and went back out to the street.
She knew she could not return home immediately. She saw Grew on one side of the street, and Cora on the other, heading towards her. She ducked around the side of the post office and went in, taking the stairs past the landing and the offices on second floor. She did not, at this or any other moment, want to be told one more time by Cora that she had a sweet little voice. She continued up the stairs, inhaling the scent of oak, aware of the late-spring air, aware of the pulse of her own echo as she followed the curvature of the banister. Her palm brushed against the richly stained wood, her fingers tracing the ridge of pattern as she climbed. When she reached the top,
she was not disappointed to find that Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am were out. Quietly, she let herself in.
It was the first time she had been alone in the tower apartment since the day after Jim’s departure, when she came to collect her things before she moved home. That same evening, Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am had returned across Lake Ontario from their trip to Oswego.
She glanced left, then right, left, right. Each room opened off the wide main hall. She hung her coat on a hook and walked to the end of the apartment and began to inspect each room as if she were a visiting stranger, someone returning to a place she had known long ago in an intimate, remembered life.
Here is the kitchen, the long room at the end on the left. This is where Aunt Maggie cooks.
And where Jim had flipped French toast to perfection in the cast-iron pan, his lips singing as he presented it to Grania for her breakfast.
Across the hall, this is the place one dines.
But she and Jim had never dined here; they had eaten their meals picnic-style in front of the windows of the parlour so they could look out over the bay, setting the trays of food on the carpet between them.
Walk backward now; these are the chambers for sleep.
But not where she and Jim had made their bed.
Turn right and enter the parlour. How elegant this room, so seldom used by Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am. The room chosen by Grania and Jim
—she glanced at the carpet—
the place where they unfolded the blue blanket and placed the pillows on top, and two blankets on top of those. The place of sleep. The place of love.
She shut the hall door behind her. Against the back wall of the parlour, a small square window looked down over the inside stairs she had just climbed. The outer windows, the ones that faced the street, stretched up from the baseboard and lined the front of the room. She walked to these and looked over Main Street and the southern edge of town. The tower apartment was the only building
on the street to command a view from this height. Even so, she felt the urge to be higher. In the back corner of the room, ladder rungs had been built into the wall in direct vertical ascent to the tower. Mindful of her skirt, she climbed, rung by rung, remembering a day she had come up here with Jim. When she reached the trap door, she pushed it open and latched it back, and stepped up and over to the platform at the top.
As children, she and Tress had been permitted to climb the ladder inside the tower, but only when Uncle Am was behind, ready to catch them if they slipped. He had lifted them, each in turn, to the south face of the clock, the peering-out place, so that they could see past the Rathbun industries along the water’s edge and over the arms of the Bay of Quinte beyond. Each time she had looked out, Grania had imagined herself in the lighthouse that blinked from the page of her
Sunday
book. The C-shore page.
Dan caught the child in his arms.
While one part of her never accepted the girl’s passive sinking through the waves in the picture, another part of her had.
Under
was the calm beneath the surface.
Above
the surface, mixed-up things could happen, and did.
Now Grania stood inside the four faces of the clock and thought
under
, and
beneath
, and
behind.
She tried to think of places where, for the hearing world, all would be still and silent. Not here, inside a clock.
The only person who climbed the tower these days was Uncle Am. It was his job to oil the gears and wheels, to wipe a thick cloth across the iron structure, to rotate the long jutting rods that attached horizontally to the centre of each clock face so that the outside hands could be corrected. Jim had been up here to oil the clock during Uncle Am’s absence. When Grania had climbed up with him, she had shown him the peering-out place. Grew had been up here, too, almost two years ago. His son had left on the steamer to report to the barracks in Belleville, and Grew had raced up the stairs to the apartment and asked Uncle Am for permission to climb the tower so he could watch the steamer—and his boy—sail westward down the bay.
She imagined Grew’s long legs climbing the ladder, perhaps touching down on every second rung. She thought of how he had stayed in the tower long after the steamer was no more than a speck in the distance. “He stood,” Aunt Maggie had said, shaking her head, “even when there was nothing to see but water and sky.”
Grania understood why Grew had stayed up here to stare at the horizon. Just as she understood why the few remaining people on the platform of the Belleville station stayed, long after the troop train departed. Jim had been on that train and she’d been among those few. The ones who lingered stared into the vanishing point that had swallowed the train. When, finally, she had turned away, it was to turn towards a change in her life.
Jim had gone to war.
She had walked away from the station looking straight ahead, not wanting to see the face of anyone she knew, not wanting to speak or communicate. She did not cry; she never cried. Her feet had kept her moving.
Later that afternoon, she made her way through familiar streets and climbed the outside stairs to the apartment that Fry and Colin were renting in the small house not far from the school. She could not have told anyone where she had been during the intervening hours; to this day she did not know where she had wandered. Fry was home, and when she saw Grania, she did not ask questions. She pulled her in and hugged her tight and headed for the kitchen to put on a pot of tea. If Grania wanted to be alone, Fry would not be offended. If she wanted to stay over, she could sleep on the sofa. There was little extra room, but she was welcome.
But Grania had not wanted to be by herself. She sat in the kitchen and watched while Fry signed the news of their friends at school. Grania did not smile or pretend to be happy. When Colin came home after work he, too, understood. She was content to sit at the supper table and watch him communicate the things that had gone
on in the print shop that day. On his way home, he told them, he’d passed two soldiers on outpost duty on the road in front of the school. They had been placed there so that none of the troops in Belleville went out of bounds without permission. Colin had saluted as he’d passed.
Grania had watched the conversation, but had felt no need to nod or join in. What was most dear to her was being held in a tight place high in her chest. She felt as if she would be forced to take shallow breaths for days and weeks and months, until Jim would come home. She remembered Mamo helping her to keep her voice close; she remembered how she’d been trained at school to hold her words before letting them out. But this was different. Something else—not words—was locked inside her. Locked inside that tight closed place.
She reached out a hand now and touched the side of the huge tower bell. It was taller than her own height, and suspended over air. A massive, rigid clapper, attached to the workings of the clock, was perched above the outer rim of the bell and ready to strike. In Aunt Maggie’s parlour below, a tall mahogany cupboard cleverly disguised the clock’s long pendulum cables that stretched down through the tower and were suspended over a deep bed of sand. When Grania had first entered the parlour and walked past the floor-to-ceiling panels of the cupboard, she had not remembered the three-foot depth of sand at the bottom. “If the cables ever come crashing down…” Uncle Am once said, but he didn’t finish the sentence. The mahogany cupboard had been built upward from below, through the ceiling and into the tower. No one ever suspected that cables were suspended inside.
The inside-out clock faces loomed before her, and Grania turned herself to the south, towards the front, to the giant milk-white face that presided over the bay. She searched for the spot between IIII and V where long ago someone had scraped away the paint and cleared
an uneven space—the peering-out place. Up here behind the clock, she was always surprised to see the numeral IIII. She never gave it a thought while she was standing in the middle of Main Street below, looking up. Had she not learned her Roman numerals at school? Wasn’t the numeral four supposed to be IV? But clocks were like this. Except the O’Shaughnessy clock, which had numbers.
She pressed her face to the scraped-away portion and stared. As she stared, she relaxed and felt herself become the fixed point. No one knew she was here. Hers was the eye that gazed through and looked down over the town.
It was not washday, but a few bits of laundry were waving from the clothesline in McClellands’ backyard a little way along the opposite side of the street. Pillowcases pegged close to the stoop meant that women’s undergarments were inside, discreetly hidden. The glass in the side windows of McClellands’ house was wavery, distorted in shadows that were altering in the quickly fading sun. As Grania peered through the clock, Mrs. McClelland, a sweater gripped tightly over her shoulders, stepped outside, climbed the stoop, unpegged the pillowcases and their contents and hurried back to the house. Although June had begun, there was still a chill in the evening air.
Patrick walked past, not knowing that he was observed from above. Mildred Clark, too, walked briskly along the street, probably heading home. For years, Dr. Clark and his wife, Mildred, had treated ruptures and dropsy, contusions and boils, women’s conditions, men’s ailments, broken bones, lumbago and despair. Every death certificate spanning a generation of town history had been signed by Dr. Clark, and most of the town births recorded in the registry also bore his name.
Grania raised her gaze up and over the houses on the south side of the street, over the remnants of industry and the tracks and the station and the wharf, to the sweep of the bay that lay before her like a rumpled sea.
There was Forester Island. There, the pointing finger of Long
Reach and the Bay of Quinte, water slipping around and between the juts of land. Prince Edward County lay beyond, and beyond that, the great body of water that was Lake Ontario. All of this, from here, was imagined in the way she imagined Jim’s ocean, which she had never seen. Where passing ships pushed their way through waves that battered at their sides. Where the higher the waves, the louder the sound of their roaring. Had Jim not written about this during his trip across the sea? In letters penned in half darkness while he was suspended over the same beating waves he described? From his private place, inside an empty crate into which he slipped every night after “Last Post,” he wrote to her after darkness wrapped itself around crannies and outlines of a blackened ship that was odorous with bodies moaning in cramped sleep below. Below, too, were the horses, their tails wrapped with puttees to protect them from rubbing against the ship’s walls. Jim had been discovered by a lieutenant but was told that if he kept quiet and out of trouble, he could stay, the officer being aware of conditions below.