Episode 278 · Reil

The next morning the sound started a little after eight, from the shed in the yard. A dull thud, then another, evenly spaced, like somebody splitting wood who never missed.

Maxim had gone at seven with the delivery slip in his inside pocket and his collar up. Krista was at the kitchen table with her report for the man in gray, nine pages now, writing with her arm curled around the paper as if somebody might copy it. She did not look up when the thudding started.

— Since seven, she said. Both hands.

Soles put his coat on over the bandage. It took him longer than it should have.

The shed was cold and smelled of coal. Tesa had hung a sack of it from the beam on a length of rope, and she was working it in the gray light from the door: left, left, right, the right wrapped in a dish towel over the doctor’s tape. Every time the right one landed, the towel showed a little more red.

— He said a month, Soles said.

— He said if I hit anything.

She hit it again.

— This is coal.

He came round the sack and stood behind it, where it swung. He could not have held it still; he knew that from Mina. He held it anyway, his good hand flat on the sacking, and felt the next punch come through it into his palm.

Tesa stopped.

— Move.

— No.

She looked at him the way she looked at a man across a ring: his feet, his shoulders, the side he was keeping back. She had seen all of it already. She had been watching him since the chamber.

— You can’t even hold that, she said.

— I know.

She hit the sack once more, low and short, on the far side from his hand, so the jolt never reached him. Then she let her arms hang.

— Mine came back, she said.

He waited.

— In there. At the end. It went for the light. I felt it go, like somebody grabbing your shirt from behind. And I pulled. I didn’t decide anything. I just didn’t let go of you, and I didn’t let go of him.

She put the wrapped hand against the sacking, gently, as if it were the sack that needed it.

— Krista let hers go. For your wrist. Maxim wasn’t even in the room, and he lost his anyway. And I’m the one walking around with mine.

— It wasn’t one or the other, Soles said. If you’d let go, you’d have lost him too. They’d still have lost theirs.

— I know that.

— Then—

— I know it, Tesa said. It doesn’t help.

A crow walked along the top of the yard wall, looked in at them, and walked away.

— Reil never went down, she said. That’s what he is. They paid him to go down in the sixth and he couldn’t. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Even when going down would have kept him safe. She looked at her hands. I used to think that was the best thing about him.

— And now?

— Now I think it’s just what he is. And I’m it too.

She unwrapped the towel. The tape underneath had come loose at the knuckles, and the skin there had opened along the old lines. She looked at it without much interest.

— You can take things out now, she said. You said so. With the light one.

— What I put in. Not what was already there.

— But you could.

He thought about the drawer with the spoons and what lay at the back of it, and the sentence he had said to himself over it last night. He thought about putting that blade to Tesa, who had stood him up at the edge of the slit and told him she had the heavy side.

Not for this. Not to make anybody even.

— No, he said.

— Because you can’t?

— Because I won’t. I’m not cutting anything else out of anybody. Not this week. Maybe not ever. And not out of you, so you can feel you’ve paid for something you didn’t buy.

For a moment she looked as if she might hit him after all. Then she laughed, one short bark, the way she did when somebody landed a clean one on her in the ring.

— That was a good one.

— I’ve been saving it.

He held out his good fist. She looked at it, then touched it with her left, knuckles to knuckles. After.

❦

Maxim came back at four with eleven doors crossed off the slip. Two of them had known him by his voice, he said, and one by his van, and the rest had let him say who he was and believed him. He ate standing up and did not want to talk about it, and then talked about it for half an hour.

It was full dark when somebody knocked at the back gate.

Lucky got there first, stiff-legged and silent. Soles went out behind him with the lamp. Halloran stood in the lane with his cap pulled down and snow on his shoulders and a loaf under his arm, wrapped in brown paper the way they sold them across the river.

He did not come in. He looked past Soles to the kitchen door, where Tesa stood with her hand held against her chest, and held the loaf out to her over the gate.

— Zora sent it, he said. White. They had the oven going at five.

Tesa came down the step and took it. She held it in both hands, against her coat, and for a moment did not seem to know what to do with it.

— He had one of these, she said. Under his arm, for his sister. The night he won. They were waiting for him outside, and they took it off him with everything else.

Halloran did not know who she meant, and did not ask. Soles knew.

Tesa’s brother had not come home at all, with bread or without.

— Tell her thank you, Tesa said.

— Tell her yourself. Halloran glanced back down the lane toward the river. Not tonight. She won’t leave him.

— Leave who? Soles said.

— He’s been on the pontoon since this morning. By the measuring board. He won’t come in and he won’t eat. His chair’s up at the top of the steps where it always is, and he hasn’t sat in it.

Halloran turned his collar up and stepped back from the gate.

— He says the water’s wrong.