The board had thirty-two sockets. Thirty-one were labelled in my father's handwriting: bakery, clinic, school, the houses above the reservoir. The last label had been scraped clean. When I took the night shift, he told me to leave it that way.
I worked at the exchange because the village had not yet replaced its telephones, and because I could not sleep at home. My wife had died in February. After that, every ordinary noise in the house seemed to require an explanation. At the exchange I could point to a relay or a fan and say: that is what made it.
The first call came at seventeen minutes past two. No lamp lit. I heard the bell behind the board, the little bell I had assumed was broken. A plug lay on the desk where there had been none before, its braided cord disappearing into the unlabelled socket.
I put on the headset. A woman said, "Could you send him home now?"
Her voice had the thin, clipped sound of an old recording. Behind it I heard crockery being put away. I asked who she wanted. She waited until I had stopped speaking, then repeated the question. I pulled the plug. The bell stopped.
In the morning I asked my father about the socket. He was cutting an apple into pieces he could chew. He set the knife down. "Some of the houses were lost when they filled the reservoir," he said. "We never finished taking out the lines." I told him there was a woman on one. He looked at the little pieces of apple for a long time.
"Did she ask you to send somebody home?"
That night he sat with me at the exchange. He brought a flask, two sandwiches and the screwdriver he had owned since before I was born. At two he went behind the board and cut the wire. He held the cut ends up for me to see. We drank the tea without talking.
The bell rang at 02:17. My father closed his eyes. This time the plug was already in my hand. I had been holding it while I ate.
"Could you send him home now?" the woman asked. I said we had disconnected the line. "His supper is getting cold," she said, and somebody behind her laughed. My father took the headset from me so quickly that the metal band caught my ear. He did not speak into it. I watched his face change. Then he put it on the desk very carefully, as though something inside might spill.
On the walk home he told me there had been a house at the bottom of the valley. A woman lived there with her son. When the other families left, she kept putting supper on the table. The boy had fallen through river ice that winter. They found him in the sluice gate. She would telephone the exchange to ask whether anyone had seen him coming up the road.
"What happened to her?" I asked. My father stopped under the streetlamp. "We stopped answering," he said. That was all he would tell me.
I changed my shift. For six nights I worked from noon until eight. On the seventh I came into the exchange and found the morning operator sitting on the steps. He had removed the bell. He had removed the headset. The noise had been coming from his coat pocket.
He put my house key into my hand. He had found it on the board beside the unlabelled socket. I had left it in the kitchen that morning.
I went home before dark. The kitchen window was steamed from the inside. There were two plates on the table, and a saucepan on the stove. I stood in the doorway until the steam settled into drops. My wife had disliked that saucepan because its handle came loose. She had wrapped the handle in a folded cloth, exactly as it was now.
The telephone rang. I did not pick it up. The receiver lifted by itself, just far enough for me to hear.
"Could you send him home now?"
It was my father's voice. From the kitchen, my wife called that I should answer him. I was letting the heat out. The food was getting cold.
