Deafening

  “His arm swings like a missile,” Tress said. “The dead arm hits. He has no control over it.”

  Grania saw the bruise the day Tress told her this, an ugly swelling on Tress’s side. She had put her hand on Tress’s skin. She thought of Kenan rolling over in their bed, the iron weight of the arm that was left behind. Or when he tried to lie down, the arm swinging forward. Kenan, who wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  It had become apparent, too, that he suffered terrible pain, especially in his hand. The pain in the dead hand seemed, at times, to be unbearable. During the day, the hand was shoved deep into his pocket to keep the arm from swinging uselessly as he walked from room to room in the house.

  But the worst thing of all was that he remained silent. Dr. Clark visited and revisited and said that in spite of the severe injuries to his face, Kenan’s throat was undamaged. Vocal cords, tongue, larynx, pharynx—all were intact. “Give him time,” Dr. Clark advised. “Gradually, he’ll resume a normal life.” Kenan accepted the Veronal prescribed by Dr. Clark, but he refused all visitors except the family. His silence had spread like a fog through the small house, and now the fog had encompassed Tress.

  Grania had found herself saying to Tress, during one of her visits, “Let me try. I’ll come and talk to him alone.” But she had no idea how she would do this. She had studied home nursing; she had worked at the school hospital. But she had never dealt with anything like this. She was relieved when Tress’s lips replied, somewhat pinched, somewhat forced, “What can you do that I haven’t tried?” Tress was practised at pushing things out of her mind; Grania knew that very well. I tell my brain to stop thinking, she used to say when they were children. And then I go to sleep. But Tress did not look rested now. Tress looked as if she were not sleeping these days, at all.

  A shadow slid across the parlour and Grania looked up. Grew, the barber, had somehow come into the room without her seeing him and now he stood beside her chair, his presence breaking into her thoughts. He must have entered from the hall. Who had let him in out of the storm when they were all here? Patrick? No, she saw surprise on the faces around her. The door was never locked. Grew had known this and, unannounced, had walked in.

  He was wearing a long wool coat, a cap and a dark green scarf. His overshoes must have been left at the door; his shoes were dry. An odour of whisky wafted from his clothes. He has a private supply, Grania thought. Never mind the Temperance Act. She thought of Father then, going out in the evenings. Father and Grew together. Now it made sense. Was that why Grew had come?

  Grew took off the heavy coat, removed the cap, held the coat over one arm and the cap in his opposite hand. His face looked a hundred years old.

  Father made a sudden move, an attempt to intercept, as if he had done this countless times before. Carlow pushed himself up from his front paws and watched. Grew staggered and then straightened, and made himself rigidly tall. He seemed to be using every one of his muscles to hold himself upright. He leaned forward, tried to place the coat on an empty chair, missed his footing and ran four or five steps across the room. Things that move…He was so drunk, Grania wasn’t sure he had seen Father, who, startled, had taken a few running steps alongside. Grew couldn’t see any of them; Grew was looking inside. She sat upright in her chair, tensed—as were Mother and Mamo in theirs.

  “Come on, Grew.” She read her father’s lips. “I’ll take you home.”

  “No,” said Grew. “No.”

  It was at this moment that he seemed to notice, with some surprise, that the cap was still in his hand and the green scarf around his neck. One hand plucked at the scarf until it slid off and dropped where he stood. The cap fell on top of it. Father bent forward to pick these up and Grew took advantage of the moment to hurry towards the corner, where he slumped quickly onto the round stool in front of the piano. Because the stool had been wound low, Grew’s knees popped up, and this made his height seem ridiculous.

  His upper body began to sway. He tilted forward over the keyboard and then, far back; for a moment it looked as if he might fall off the stool. His hands were stretched in both directions; the notes must be falling out of his fingers. Mother and Mamo were staring as if he were a home invader they had never known or met. Grania did not know what he was playing, but his right foot pumped one of the pedals and the music crossed the hardwood floor and entered her feet. The sound that entered her was ragged, like the shaking down of coals. It vibrated against her arms as she gripped the wooden panels of her chair. There is something amiss, something amiss.

  Mamo stared hard at the scarf over Father’s arm. Grew’s hands were rising and falling against the keys and Grania wanted to slam her own hands into something to make him stop. But she sat frozen like the others, as if the four—five now, Patrick was in the doorway—had been handed tickets and must see the performance to its terrible end.

  Only Grania’s eyes had seen the descent of the folded strip of paper as it had fluttered from Grew’s bony hand when he first bumped down on the stool. The paper was resting now, almost hidden, on one knee; it jiggled precariously while his foot continued to pump the pedal. The paper was narrow. TELEGRAM. She didn’t have to see the words to know its message: Deeply regret inform you Pte Richard Grew officially reported killed in action.

  Only son of.

  Now they all knew. Mother’s mouth was open—was she wailing? Carlow was scrambling back and forth to the doorway in the hall. Grew’s hands were propped unmoving on the keys and then he stood to full height. Father, still holding the cap and scarf, was saying, “I am sorry, Grew. I am truly sorry.” And then he swore. “Damn,” he said. “Goddamn the war.”

  Grania’s legs were trembling, her arms too. She pressed one hand into the other to force them both to stillness. Richard is coming home to be a barber like his father. No, Richard won’t be coming home. She forced herself to look at Grew’s face and then she stood and walked to his side. Unbidden, unwanted in the midst of the terrible grief that now filled the room, a line from her Sunday book erupted inside her head.

  He rushed to the woodshed and wept as though his heart would break.

  She knew the whites of her eyes were as red as if miniature blood vessels had burst without warning around her pupils. She had no tears. She felt Grew’s sagging shoulder beneath her hand. At least, she thought, angrily, he won’t have to stand in that anxious cluster of people outside the windows of the newspaper office after every battle. He won’t have to do that any more.

  When dispatches came in, the lists were posted on boards outside: Missing, Wounded, Prisoners of War, Burials, Gas Burns, Transferred to hospital, Removed to England, Died, Killed in action.

  How could one keep going, when all the news was bad?

  There’ll be no one left, she thought. Soon, there will be no one left.

  When she first saw Patrick in uniform—after he ran away and signed up in Barriefield, and after Mother marched him right back and unsigned him because he was underage and still in school, and after he ran away a second time and signed up in Belleville, right after the backed-up ice let go in the Moira River and tossed the footbridge aside and caused violent flooding, and after a third time in Napanee, after Mother gave up and knew, as everyone did, that Patrick was leaving at four o’clock this spring day and was here to say goodbye—after all of this, Grania asked: “What did Grew play on the piano that night, the night of the big storm? What was the name of the song?”

  Patrick was facing the lens while Grania stared intently down and into the tiny window, shaded by her hand. She was trying to keep her hands steady, and pressed the camera to her waist. Behind her young brother, as she centred him in the scene, she could see the backyard of the house on Edmon Street that faced the side of their own drive sheds behind the hotel. A corner of slatted roof sloped low over the neighbour’s turkey run. No one would ever know from the front that there was a turkey run a half block behind Main Street. She had been told for years about the gobbling.

  Father was behind Grania
, slumped tiredly against the back stoop. Mother was inside, upstairs, lying on top of her tightly made bed. Tress had come from the other end of Main to say goodbye and was standing inside with Mamo at the laundry window, waiting for Grania’s camera work to be finished.

  Patrick, now posed in the camera window, had an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. Grania had never seen him smoke. His arms hung loosely at his sides; the sleeves of his tunic were an inch too long. His puttees were tightly wrapped, the knees of his trousers baggy above them. His boots were narrow and slickly polished. His hair was short, his neck too small for his collar. One ear stuck out beneath his cap. On his face was a half grin. He was a boy who was heading across the sea to have an adventure. The family knew that he had lied about his age and invented a new name for himself. His name—he had finger spelled it for Grania—was now Vince. She did not know how or why he had chosen this name over any other. The only thing she could think of was that it began with the letter V after Patrick’s hero Vernon Castle. Castle had died in February, in an aeroplane crash during training in Texas, while he’d been teaching a young man to fly. The papers had been filled with local memories about him. Grania could scarcely bear to think of the handsome flyer who had moved with such grace, his slender dancer’s body falling hard out of the sky.

  “Tell me the name of the song,” Grania said again. “The one Grew played that night.”

  She had been shown the letter written by Richard’s platoon lieutenant. Grew received it exactly one month after the arrival of the telegram.

  I must tell you that I have known your son from the time he enlisted. In losing him I have lost one of the best men from my platoon, and I am very sorry. Both officers and men desire me to say how much we miss him. You may be extremely proud of the fact that he was always ready to do his duty and that he was willing to sacrifice his all for the cause. He died nobly and in service of the Empire and his King. I am able to say positively, from witness reports, that he was killed by a sniper’s bullet while on night patrol in No Man’s Land, and that he died instantly. I know it will relieve your worries to learn that he did not suffer at the end. You should also know that one of our Canadian boys managed to kill the sniper almost immediately. It is most unfortunate that we were unable to recover your son’s body. Shortly after that episode, the area came under heavy fire and we were forced to remove ourselves to another location.

  Grew had come to the house with the letter. He’d stood unmoving while the single page was passed hand to hand. He refused to sit down during the visit. Grania remembered, too, that every member of the family had remained standing until he turned abruptly and left.

  “It was the one about the Irish Laddies,” Patrick’s lips said now. He was forming the words with care and she looked up quickly from the window of her camera so she wouldn’t miss the title of the song.

  “The one Grew was playing was ‘The Irish Laddies to the War Have Gone.’”

  Chapter 16

  Shrapnel shells were so named from the inventor, Col. Shrapnel, a British officer who fought in the Peninsular war. It was in this war that they were first used and so effective were they that the Duke of Wellington wrote to Col. Shrapnel a letter of thanks and congratulations on his great invention. The first shells were round and were not, of course, so destructive as the finished article of the present war.

  The Canadian

  The first thing she noticed as she entered the room was that it was in shadow. The summer sun was bright enough outside, but the curtains in every room of the house except the kitchen were tightly closed. Her glance took in the outline of Kenan, sitting in darkness on the curly-birch chair that used to be in an upstairs hall of the hotel. At least he was out of bed, where he often stayed now. Tress must have persuaded him to come down to the parlour.

  Grania detected a shiver of movement on the other side of the room, a shiver that seemed to happen without Kenan’s consent. Things that move…She felt a tiny rush of fear, gone in an instant. This is Kenan, she told herself. We played under the pier. He was my bully. We played hide-and-seek.

  Hide-and-go-seek

  Your mother’s a leek

  We didn’t know how a mother could be a leak but we found that so funny we fell down laughing. It wasn’t until my third year in Belleville that I learned there are two words for the same sound. That a leek does not come out of a water pipe. Where the rhyme comes from, no one seems to know.

  When Kenan left for the Front he stood on the veranda with Grania and Tress and did a little tap dance in his boots. Charlie Chaplin went to France, To teach the ladies how to dance. Curly-haired, long-legged Kenan. Now, before her, sat Kenan of one dead arm and a scarred half face.

  She glanced over to Tress, who stood in the middle of the room looking like sorrow itself. Her dark hair had been pulled back severely, exaggerating her high forehead. Grania wanted to grab her sister’s wrist and make for the door. Let us run for it, said Dulcie. Every caption she knew, Tress knew, too. Had she not shouted them into Grania’s ears? Grania looked back at Kenan. In the elapsed seconds, he’d managed to shrink inside Tress’s palpable gloom.

  What about me? Grania thought. What does Kenan see in my face? Blend in, try to look normal. Something I’ve always been good at; deaf people are. We are so well trained.

  But this is not about me. This is Kenan, my friend, my bully, my brother-in-law. At the very least I could walk from room to room and throw open the curtains, prop the windows with sticks, arc back the sashes, let air swirl around walls and doorways and floors. That’s what is wrong. There is no fresh air to breathe here.

  Instead, doing none of these, Grania walked over to Kenan and kissed him on the right side of his face, the side where he had a cheek. His curls were flopped over part of his forehead, on the left. The hand of his dead arm was shoved into his dead-arm pocket. She thought of Colin, who had always tried to draw attention away from his deafness by shoving his hands deep down into his pockets, but who succeeded only in looking as if he were trying to make himself disappear.

  Grania looked up at her sister. Tress was talking and signing, not to Kenan but to her. In a glance she saw that Tress, without realizing, had slipped into their childhood language of hands, the one they’d invented many years ago. The body memory was there, everything understood. While Tress’s hands and arms fluttered, Grania’s peripheral vision caught a twitch and flutter of Kenan’s one seeing eye.

  O Kenan, Kenan.

  Tress seemed suddenly relieved to have an excuse to get out of the room. “I’ll leave you two to visit,” she said. Grania watched the words spill into the air. As Tress turned and shut the drawing room doors tightly behind her, Grania said to herself, We cleaned those windows, we hung those curtains, I teased her about being grand, I teased her about having drawing-room doors.

  She sat down and faced Kenan. The ceiling was low and the weight of it diminished them both; it held in and magnified the stale air. Although there was no need to light the fireplace, an odour of old smoke hung in the room. Whatever she and Kenan might have to say to each other, nothing would be said in here.

  The boy was punished and locked in. A tearful boy, locked in a tower room, stood on a stone bench and peered out through the bars of a narrow window. The boy was still locked in the room on the page—a page Grania had not turned for a long time.

  Kenan had not moved. He seemed to be waiting for nothing and no one. She had to get them both out of this room. She thought of the glassed-in veranda at the back of the house. They could sit there and look out over the narrow width of yard that sloped to the bay. She motioned with her hand.

  “Come,” she said aloud, but she knew her voice had betrayed her and escaped high. Control the voice, said the inner voice that was always there.

  Kenan stood and followed, nonetheless. They went through the door at the far end of the room, crossed the kitchen and entered the back veranda. Sunny, not much used, Grania saw. Not now. No one could stand sunny.

  She b
umped the small square table along the tile floor and dragged the wicker chairs to face the row of windows. Kenan’s body tensed and she understood again that she had made more noise than she’d intended.

  “Here,” she said, but in her uncertainty, she left out the r. Part of the word stuck in her throat. “He-e.”

  Now the chairs were side by side and they sat down. Grania pointed to the rocks on shore, the grey waters below. The sun had lifted itself high in the sky. There were small pleasure boats on the bay—a small white boat, a larger one with a fringed canopy under which two people idly sat. Grania’s hands made the sign for peace, for quiet, crossing in an X shape and arcing down.

  Kenan’s right hand made half the same sign, half the X, and she glanced over, surprised.

  There was no expression on his face.

  Both afraid. In a flood, she thought of the calf and the girl, herself and Mamo. Pages turned in her head. Mamo in the rocker and Grania at her side in her own small chair. Mamo’s lips shaping BOTH AFRAID BOTH AFRAID.

  Everyone was afraid of something. Tress was afraid of what had happened to her husband and her marriage. Kenan was sitting beside Grania, a reminder that Jim, too, could be blown up. Or, like Grew’s son, he could be killed and disappear. Her breath quickened. She was afraid she would break down here beside Kenan, whom she had come to help.

  “Both afraid.” The words blurted out. She had not intended this. At the same time, her hand shook out the sign for both in the space between them. How could she have hoped to be of any help?

  Kenan’s right hand lifted and again he mimicked her sign, this time the sign for both. She looked directly at him. His lips moved, though he had never seen the picture of the calf and the girl facing each other on the page. His head nodded slightly, just barely.

  Yes. He was afraid.