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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 toone 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 shipon 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