{"id":271,"date":"2023-04-14T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sumacliterarymagazine.com\/staging\/2534\/?p=271"},"modified":"2023-08-23T16:07:23","modified_gmt":"2023-08-23T16:07:23","slug":"the-king-of-ithaca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sumacliterarymagazine.com\/staging\/2534\/the-king-of-ithaca\/","title":{"rendered":"The King of Ithaca"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
This Piece Features a Content Warning<\/h5>
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Descriptions of physical disfigurement present.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The letter said, \u201cI\u2019m not as pretty as I used to be.\u201d Underneath was written the time his train would arrive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In those days you could hear a train arrive in town. The locomotive\u2019s whistle, and its shove-shove-shove,<\/em> sound across the valley. Cars were a rarity enough that we could sit in the street on hot days, stirring at stray pools of tarmac with sticks broken from the elderflower bush on the corner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

James is seven years old and has been preparing for this day all his life. Now he can no longer wait and sets off at a canter along the street, the flats of his leather school sandals slapping the brick of the sidewalk. \u201cDad! It\u2019s dad\u2019s train!\u201d The railway station is a mile away so I don\u2019t know what he thinks he\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJimmy,\u201d I call after him on that Spring afternoon. \u201cWe\u2019re to wait here! The taxi cab will bring dad.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The little ones, Billy and Robbie, sit in stifled confusion on the front step, itchy Sunday shirts pestering their necks. I am happy to be in the sharp folds of my smart summer dress, as violet as this morning\u2019s sky, the short sleeves crisp and adult. Billy trundles a small wooden horse between his feet, a toy that dad had originally crafted for James from bits of leftover wood at the building site. It overcomes little indents and tufts of weeds in between the bricks, but it stops sometimes, jarred against one of the more stubborn patches of growth. When this happens, the whinnying sound Billy makes rises in his throat, a little louder with every shove of the toy. Sometimes it takes six shunts or seven, Billy\u2019s horse impression fuller and throatier until it is the only sound we can hear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBilly!\u201d I hiss at him. \u201cHush now.\u201d But as I say it the horse suddenly progresses along the pavement and his horse sounds return to a whisper. He looks up at me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They remember nothing of their father. Robbie was born in the final year before the war. The Czechoslovakia child, he was the last, best hope for peace. Looking back now, I wonder if there were a thousand children like him, or a million\u2014their conception executed in furious action, countless parents rubbing together in the night time of so many countries back in 1938, that fevered final season of love. Desperately did they aim to stave off the tanks and trucks and rumbling divisions that were to march across Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Billy is the war child, bred of it, dressed in it, fed the barren starch of it. He knows nothing else but adults with their constant worries, and curtains that are guarded and drawn tight. Like Robbie, he refers to the man we await today as father, not dad. Having known powdered egg and whale meat all his life, he is the easiest to feed for he knows nothing else. Sweets and treats are merely myths imparted to him by me and James, simultaneously abstract and real, a pantheon of chocolate bars and chewy candies of which he has only ever heard tell. As we regale him with these tales, recounted by the fireside, curtains pulled firmly as the first lamps of evening are lit, I think beyond these nights and imagine how it will be for him when he understands. There is more than war.<\/em> Mum tells me that it will be over in a number of weeks. Then there will be sweets and oranges and bananas, for which I long, not to feed to myself, but to give to my little brother, to cram into him, to pour him hot chocolate, and to force feed him biscuits and cakes and cream puffs and sweet buns. It\u2019s over, Billy<\/em>, I will whisper, it\u2019s all over, <\/em>and I will push more chocolate bars and walnuts and peppermint candy canes into his hungry little mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am ten years old: half peace and half war.  \u201cMum!\u201d I shout over the little boys\u2019 heads and up into the house. \u201cWe heard the train!\u201d Our home is tiny and can barely contain us\u2014two rooms upstairs and two down. \u201cWorkers\u2019 cottages\u201d they optimistically label these row houses. The tin bath by the stove in the kitchen, the outhouse in the yard. Only dad is strong enough to latch the coal hatch door properly, and he has been away since 1942. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a harlequin pattern of tape crisscrossing the window panes to stop the glass flying should a bomb drop nearby. Once\u2014when had that been? Last year? The year before?\u2014Mum heard a clattering outside and went to see. Along the rooftops of the houses opposite, as merry as a performing horse, danced a Messerschmidt 109, rattling the terracotta tiles with cannon fire. Horrified, she realized all four of us were upstairs that morning, bouncing on our beds. \u201cGet down here NOW!\u201d screamed that quiet women. But the plane flew on, to impart different deaths to different children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James, cut short by my shout, turns now and runs back toward us. From the bottom of the hill we hear the gentle trap-trap-trap <\/em>of the milk cart horse. We pay it no attention as it trundles past us. Nor to the posse of Spitfires that immediately afterward shudders the skies with its gallop, France-ward in its flight. We have seen a thousand flurries of planes this year, seen them chase the Nazis down, seen them burst open in flight, spill their flaming passenger into the blue night, seen them hit each other and fail with florid trails across the robin\u2019s egg of a July sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The train whistles again. It is going to pull out. Dad will be on the platform, helped down from the carriage by the porter or the station\u2013master. All we know is that he was in Italy when it happened. He has made his way back on hospital boats through multiple stations of the injured, places that mean nothing but news stories on the wireless: man pitted against armour\u2013clad man, clashes of steel swords and high\u2013prowed war ships, monstrous sieges and flames in the night. Names romantic and fearful: Syracuse, Tunis, Cairo, Gibraltar, Casablanca; then a year in a hospital in Glasgow; and finally to nearby Brighton. The blindness from the blast lasted only six weeks; he is recuperated sufficiently to hobble on crutches, his last letter said. He has a cage of ironmongery to heal the shattered leg, but he can move on his own now. His chest wound is also better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we have also been prepared by Mum, as she read from his letter: I was injured in the face, Love. I\u2019m not as pretty as I used to be.<\/em> We don\u2019t know what that means. We\u2019ve seen the ones they call the \u201cguinea pigs,\u201d the pilots who made it out of their burning planes but may have wished they hadn\u2019t\u2014noses, lips, eyelids no longer as distinct as once they were. We have seen men come back with jaws blown off, noses or eyes left on the bitter beaches of Dieppe or the salty meadows of Carthage. We don\u2019t know what Dad will have wrong with him, but we know it is something. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stare down the empty street. After knowing for weeks that this day would come but never picturing him, I suddenly imagine a man with Dad\u2019s vest and trousers, his brilliantined hair, dark as a pit pony, but his face skewed, blurred, ripped and pink, mysteriously obscured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not as pretty as I used to be<\/em>. Silly Daddy: Men aren\u2019t pretty. But then I understand. This is that same blithe understatement I hear them use all the time. Since the war has started I have heard men who have lost a leg say, \u201cMy dancing days might be over.\u201d And a man blinded by gas in the last war might say, \u201cRead that to me, love. I don\u2019t have my glasses.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I turn away from my little brothers. Dad\u2019s letter\u2014breezy, quietly funny, all chuckles and silliness\u2014was patching over a broken face, like he\u2019d nicked himself in the front of that winter mirror and was dabbing at it with a little patch of toilet tissue. What did it matter to the little boys? They never knew him when he was strong and handsome. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out comes Mum now, almost as short as me. She wears her \u201cSunday best\u201d although we haven\u2019t bothered with church, not since the war began. I glance around at her. Billy and Robbie stand up, they hold hands, and then Billy takes Mum\u2019s hand. I don\u2019t go over to them. It will be minutes now, just minutes, until the taxi cab turns up the road and to our front door. There has never been a taxi call at our house before. Who would we know with that kind of money? And then I know I won\u2019t be there to greet it.  As much as I want him back, I don\u2019t want to see him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSally? Where are you going now?\u201d I hear my Mum\u2019s voice but I don\u2019t listen to it. I walk down the street, the herringbone of bricks dissolving to a blur under my scuffed Mary-Janes. I don\u2019t have to go far; Auntie\u2019s house, identical to ours, is just twenty yards down the street. By the time I reach the front door, which is open to the summer\u2019s breeze, I have broken into a run. I push my way straight through to the kitchen. She is making a pie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIs he here?\u201d Auntie Edith drops the pot on the table and rubs flour from her hands. \u201cIs the taxi here?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then she sees it is something else. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d First she is scared\u2014too many people have walked through the door with the ultimate news in the past six years for us all not to feel that sickness whenever anyone enters our house. Then she understands: this is nothing more than a child, over-wrought, utterly exhausted by five years of dealing with this mess, this war of men. So instead of speaking more, she holds my head in her apron as I cry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is nothing more essential and nutritious than the breaths you take as you sob into the apron skirts of your favourite aunt when you are ten years old. In a minute I can speak again, and in two I can elaborate. She sits me on a stool and gives me a plum to eat. She disappears into the street for a moment. I hear her call to her sister, \u201cI\u2019ve got Sal in here. She won\u2019t be a minute.\u201d In the intervening silence I imagine she has signaled my upset in that invisible language these sisters have.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe\u2019s still your Dad, Sal. And he needs you to be brave. You are the bravest girl I know, doing all these years without him. Now you can be brave one more time.\u201d Auntie makes it sound so easy, like putting one foot in front of the other. Then she is holding my hand, and we are walking back along the brickwork. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAre you alright, Sal?\u201d asks Mum. The boys are oblivious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe\u2019s great,\u201d says Edith, and she squeezes my hand as she looks down at me. And then we hear the laboured shift of a gear box negotiating from first to second gear. A car is coming up the hill. When we hear the gears shift again we know the moment the cab will turn the corner and appear. I can see it now as I saw it in that moment, and as I did then, I wonder always: Where did this man go? What did he see? Tied to the mast with resin in his ears, this lowly brick layer\u2014my father, transported and transformed, in Carthage, Pompeii, under the smoldering slopes of Vesuvius, to the very gates of Rome. He, and ten million more, the no-ones who destroy the Cyclops. My father, in the land of the Lotus-Eaters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now he is there, out of the taxi, hobbling across the street and into our clasp. He is returned to Albion. His leg is in its scaffolds, but his arms are already hoisting me up so I can look and at him and kiss him on that wounded face which is so much prettier than before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n
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\"Black<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Andrew Riddles<\/strong> is originally from Britain and moved to Canada in 2003. He has worked at Carleton University for fifteen years, during which time he has won two prizes in the CU Writing Competition. As well as writing, his hobbies include singing opera, getting tattooed, and travelling at every opportunity he can find, with Japan, Syria, and Armenia among the highlights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The letter said, \u201cI\u2019m not as pretty as I used to be.\u201d Underneath was written the time his train would arrive…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42,48,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-1a","category-issue-1-prose","category-prose","style--link-3"],"yoast_head":"\nThe King of Ithaca - Sumac Literary Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The letter said, \u201cI\u2019m not as pretty as I used to be.\u201d Underneath was written the time his train would arrive.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sumacliterarymagazine.com\/the-king-of-ithaca\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The King of Ithaca - 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