The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

Author:Carol Shields
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Warren

‟How old are you?” Warren asks his mother.

She is folding sheets and pillowcases and kitchen towels on the dining room table. ‟That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

‟Well, what year were you born in?”

She considers, then says, ‟1905.”

‟And now it’s 1947.”

‟Yes.”

He thinks about this for a while. ‟What year was I born in?” He’s asked this question before, often, but is always forgetting the answer.

‟You were born in 1940. In the early days of the war.”

Now he remembers why he keeps pestering his mother with the same question. So he can hear that shivery phrase—in the early days of the war. The image of a rising sun swims before his eyes, blood-red in color like the Japanese flag Billy Raabe’s got tacked up on his bedroom wall. He, imagines, too, a tense startled night silence broken by the high pitched rat-a-tat-tat of bullets, and all this fragmented noise is backed by a deeper, thunderous growling of guns. The War. The Second World War.

‟Was that when Pearl Harbor was?” He loves the words Pearl Harbor. He loves himself for remembering them, for getting them right.

‟This was before Pearl Harbor, a whole year before.”

‟Why was I born then?” he asks.

‟Because you were.”

‟Alice was born before the war.”

‟Yes.”

‟And Joan, what about Joan?”

His mother’s head is shrunk tight today by rows of pincurls. The bobby pins catch winks of light from the bay window. She is counting pillowcases. He can see her tongue ticking off the numbers at the same time her thumb travels down the neat stack—one, two, three, four, five. ‟Joan?” she says absentmindedly, ‟Joan was born in the middle of the war.”

The war is like a wide brown tepid river the world’s been swimming along in, only now, ever since Victory, there’s nothing. Peace doesn’t feel all that different to Warren. His body is the same body he’s always had, his scraped shins and knees and bony feet, and his face in the hall mirror has the same round look of surprise. But sometimes at night he wakes up with a stomach ache and calls out to his mother, who gives him a glass of something fizzy to drink and tells him he’s suffering from indigestion, that he’d be fine if only he didn’t wolf down his food so fast. But he knows it’s the war that gives him a stomach ache, the fact that the war is over and there’s nothing to hold him up and keep him buoyant.

He and Alice and Joan are joined together like the little dolls Alice cuts out of newspaper, that’s how he thinks of himself and his sisters. He’s located there in the middle, always in the middle, the one who was born in the early days of the war, which is the thought he must try to hang on to. There’s something thrilling in this knowledge. And there’s tribute too, a place reserved for him, for Warren Magnus Flett, born in the blood-red dawn of the war.

He almost never thinks

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