Deafening

  “Poom,” she said.

  Out of the depths of childhood.

  Out of the dugout they’d cleared beneath the pier.

  Out of the complicated and uncomplicated past. Out of the smell of damp and rotting wood, the odour of a child’s fart released into the already dank space that held four playmates and no confession, so they never knew or cared who did it. But they all remembered Grania’s refusal to learn the forbidden word when they tried to teach her, and they roared with laughter when she replaced it with a word of her own. “Poom.”

  “She probably thinks it’s like poo,” Tress had said, and they all laughed again, even Grania.

  “Poom.” This was Kenan.

  One eye watching. Fixed on Grania’s face the way she imagined it fixed on Tress when Tress could not move towards him, when he could not move towards her. When he would not permit his young wife to help. Both afraid. But now, he was not afraid.

  And neither, any more, was Grania.

  Had he spoken aloud? Or was she imagining?

  His lips moved again. “Poom.”

  The muscles of his body quivered, his dead arm tucked to his dead-arm pocket. Grania’s inward laughter floated, high-pitched and gasping, out into the air. And this was how Tress found them when she ran to the veranda. Grania, who could not stop laughing, her eyes dotted with red, her inward sigh moving out.

  Kenan’s face, for the first time since he had come home, crumpled in a half smile.

  She reviewed every exercise she could haul out of memory. For weeks, they went through the rote, one word at a time. An hour Tuesday, an hour Thursday, all through the summer. Some days, during the lessons, Tress stayed in the house; other days, she went out. When Kenan could tolerate an extra lesson, Grania visited Fridays as well, leaving Tress and Mamo to go without her to the Red Cross work room.

  They can tell Cora whatever they like, said Dulcie.

  Kenan watched Grania’s lips with interest. He listened with his head tilted, her soft melding voice as familiar as his own childhood.

  an

  ab

  art

  An abrupt departure.

  Absolution of sin.

  ock

  ick

  The clock ticks.

  But not for Grania. The clock pulsed for Grania. Thinking about it, she could feel the pulse against the palm of her hand.

  mis

  Met with mishap.

  Mistakes will happen.

  A great misfortune.

  The drills she thought she’d forgotten, the ones she had recited for Miss Amos and Miss Marks, flew into her fingertips and into her head, came off her lips like childhood rhymes. Kenan tried to say que and qui and qua—and his mouth remained open. They worked with sp and sm—sounds that looked so nearly alike.

  And she remembered sitting at the child-size table in front of the tilting mirror at school, specially designed furniture for little deaf mutes; staring at her own lips until they became so distorted she had to turn away.

  bre

  Breathe.

  Breathe through your nose.

  Kenan made sounds. In three weeks he was rhyming nonsense syllables.

  mafasa

  safama

  Grania watched s follow p, pulled down by the scar of his lower lip. She watched forward and backward movement of the muscles of his unscarred cheek. She checked his profile, his good side, the way she’d been trained, yes, trained, to grasp meaning, even sideways, from the speaker’s lips and face.

  pro

  Proceed with care.

  Proclaim the good tidings.

  Words tumbled from Kenan’s mouth.

  Lesson over for the week.

  They joined their right hands, and squeezed.

  Before walking back up Main Street to return home, there were days when Grania stayed and had tea with Tress. But Tress was pulling away; Grania felt this, even as Kenan was coming back. One day, she asked what was wrong, but, in response, Tress moved sharply about the kitchen, her arms and hands abrupt and quick, her elbows pointed out. She did not want to talk.

  On the way home, Grania went over and over Tress’s reaction. She could not clear her mind; she could not take a step without seeing Tress’s face. Tress was angry and the anger settled over Grania like a cloud.

  At home, she looked for Mamo, but Mamo was busy. Mamo had begun to stay in her room more and more, in what was almost a secretive way. And she was always tired when she walked through the passageway to join the family for meals in the dining room.

  By the end of August, there was no longer any need for exercises, but Grania continued to stop in, to sit with Kenan and visit. Kenan was speaking well, but he had not walked out of his own house. Women from town occasionally brought berry pies, molasses bread, jars of currant jelly. Tress accepted each gift at the front door, along with messages for her husband, but Kenan never came to the door himself, never allowed himself to be seen.

  Tress had become more remote, and Grania began to wonder if she should visit at all. She resolved to speak with Tress today, ask if she no longer wanted her to come. She glanced up the stairs as she entered—she had not been up there since before Kenan came home. She thought of the empty room across the hall from the main bedroom. And the pain on Tress’s face. There was always pain, mixed with anger.

  Tress was wearing her summer jacket when Grania arrived; she quickly signed that she had to go out. There was no opportunity to speak.

  Kenan was in the glassed-in veranda, seated in one of the wicker chairs. The other chair had been arranged to face him, and Grania sat down. She was weary and her limbs felt heavy. A gloomy sky streaked with grey hung over the bay. She had nothing to say, nothing to tell. She looked out at the water. This was their bay; this was their town; these were their lives. They had all been children together, their futures before them: Tress and Grania and Kenan and their friend Orryn, who was still alive in France. And then, at nine years of age, Grania had been sent away and her life had become separate. But her life had been separate before that, too. She began to talk. Face to face, this is what she told Kenan. Unplanned, it all spilled out.

  Those years they were growing up as children together in a company town. A Rathbun town with an exploding population. Early years, after her deafness but before she was sent to the Belleville school. Everything Kenan had been hearing with his ears, she had been stowing in pictures in her memory. Different childhoods, same town. They might have been on different planets. Had she missed things? She didn’t know what she’d missed. She had constructed her world in her own way—without background conversation, without overheard information, hearsay or noise. Protected by Mother and Father, extras added by Mamo and Tress, later by Patrick, and whatever could be picked up from Bernard, who was older than the others and most often at work in the hotel.

  She’d learned that she had to have an extra eye. Dulcie dreams her own third eye. She needed it when she was a child and she needed it now.

  “Tell me,” said Kenan. His careful lips. “I want to know.”

  Tell.

  “The names of people, the people you could hear,” she told him. “I learned them from the way I could see and from what I could put into pictures. Mr. Dow had no teeth on one side, the left. His first and second wives died. The third was young but she had an old face. Tress and I called her the old child bride.

  “Father O’Leary had a birthmark behind his right ear. It was shaped like the pipe he clamped between his teeth. When he died, it was a hot summer—do you remember? I was home from Belleville. He was laid out in the coolest room of the house beside the church, a downstairs bedroom. The window was open and the wet cloths were kept in a basin of cool water on the bureau. Two women took turns wringing out the cloths and changing them, putting them over his face so it wouldn’t turn black before visitation. Mamo took me with her. She told me not to be afraid, that life and death went together. Just before the mourners arrived, the basin of water was shoved under the bed.

/>   “Mrs. Grimes was so large her body moved side to side even though her feet walked forward. She looked as if she would never make any progress. Anton, her husband, owned the store. When I see his name printed, I still think, The man with the beautiful name, and I say to myself, An-ton.

  “Frenchie, who used to work at the mill, had wavy hair. I trusted him but not Meryl, his wife. She had sneaky eyes. The family moved away, remember?”

  “More,” said Kenan, the years of his own childhood washing over him in pictures.

  “Kay—every minute of the day, held her cheeks as if she’d swallowed a secret. She still does. She’s the best knitter in town. We saw how good she was when she started coming to the Red Cross. She still comes, even though her husband…”

  Months after Kay’s husband, Lawrence, had been killed, and after Grania had moved home again, she still had not gone to Kay’s house. She knew that Lawrence had been sent out one night to a listening post in No Man’s Land, and that the post had suffered a direct hit. The shell could have killed anyone but it had chosen Lawrence.

  By visiting Kay, she would have to admit that one more young man from the town was dead. Mother tried to make her go; Mamo urged her to visit. But Grania could not. Not because she didn’t care, but because she cared so much. And Jim had only recently left.

  She had seen Kay with Lawrence before he left for the war; their love was visible. Kay’s baby was born after Lawrence marched away. Lawrence never saw his son except in the one photograph Kay sent across the ocean. The boy was now three.

  When Grania was able to release some of her own selfish fear, she went, by herself, to visit. The two women hugged each other in the doorway, and sat at the kitchen table across from each other. Grania could easily follow the words on Kay’s lips; she had known her all her life. She wanted to ask how Kay was managing. How the days were bearable. But she did not.

  She did read the word barren on Kay’s lips. “The house is barren, an empty shell. It isn’t a home.” Kay hated everything about it except her child, whom she loved fiercely. But she did not want to return to live under her parents’ roof. Shortly after that, she moved in with Runaway Granny. Though her grandmother was known only as Granny then.

  But Kay had found ways of supporting herself. She was hired to do etching at the Clapperton glass factory. She worked in the basement alongside twelve other girls from the town. And she took in sewing. She had six paying customers. She could knit anything and she was good with a crochet hook. Kay had skated with Grania the past winter, when the ice was thick on the bay.

  Had Grania been speaking aloud about Kay? From Kenan’s face, she saw that she might have been, though she wasn’t sure.

  “Go on,” he said. “I want to hear.”

  It was true; he did want to hear. She could tell from his one eye. He wanted to hear what she could see.

  “Mr. McClelland, the baker, has a stern face and a pucker at the side of his mouth. He holds his wife’s hand in the summer. They sit on the stoop at the side of their house on Main Street, and he doesn’t look stern at all when he’s with her. Cora’s daughter, Jewel, pinned Bernard with a white feather and I hated her for that, though Mamo told me I should never hate. Jewel used to love to dress up in fancy clothes. Remember the borrowed jewellery and the fancy lace-up boots? She moved to Ottawa after she married. It was when she came back for a visit that she pinned Bernard.

  “Billy Needles looks like the youngest in the family but he’s the eldest. He’s still alive—at the war.”

  She bit her lip. This wasn’t meant to be about who was alive and who was not.

  Keep going.

  “Marguerite has a twin brother who moved to Montreal. I could never say her name correctly after I saw it printed. The spelling confused me. When she talks about her twin, she looks to the left as if he’s invisibly attached to her side. Mr. Whyte, the butcher, moves his head right and left when he speaks, and his wife, Doree, talks so quickly I’ve never been able to lip read a word she says. Do they understand each other? Mr. Felix has a moustache that hangs over both lips; he’s hopeless.

  “Mrs. Martinez has a Spanish accent that takes me by surprise every time I meet her. Any word she says that contains an r and I’m in trouble. Her daughter has a lisp. There’s a space between her front teeth and the way she shapes the letter s is different from the way everyone else does. I understand her. I just have to remind myself to adjust when we have a conversation.

  “Minnie’s hair is as straight as a yard of pump water—that’s what Mamo says. Minnie makes me laugh. Every time we meet, she has a happy thing to say. Her husband has a thin nose and a beard that interferes. He and I have never had a conversation, but he has the most beautiful hands of any man in town.”

  Except my Jim, but he’s not from the town.

  “The Jamieson twins go to the side windows of the glass factory on their way to school because they know the seconds are placed on the inside sills to cool. They ask the girls for them and then they sell them door to door for a few coppers.

  “Jack Conlin chews tobacco. When he’s not chewing I understand what he says. And Cora—she’s the easiest person of all to lip read and the one I wish I couldn’t. She used to tell me what a sweet little voice I have. But not any more.”

  Cora, who had said to Tress in disbelief when she’d first learned about Grania’s marriage: “She married a hearing boy? Your sister. A hearing boy.”

  Grania stopped. She was running on and on. Blurting it out. Soon she would be telling him that she used to see words in twisted yellow rope.

  “All of this.” Kenan was speaking softly, to himself. “You see all of this.”

  What Grania was seeing was that Kenan’s face was beautiful, as it had always been. Only now it was beautiful and terrible at the same time. He did not flinch under her inspection, and she was inspecting, looking into the ripple of scars, the obliterated eye, the deep folds on a surface that had once been smooth skin. No one else looks at his face, she thought. He doesn’t give anyone a chance.

  “Do you know what I said, Grania? When the sentry challenged me? I came close to being shot because of it.”

  Her body went cold. Had she read his lips correctly? Who challenged? What had Kenan said? She knew he had not once spoken about the war since coming home. Not even to Tress. Grania knew she must pay attention. She had to see every word. She had to read past and through the scars.

  “What do you mean? Say slowly.”

  Tell.

  “The sentry, the guard.” Kenan was speaking carefully, slowly, directly to her. “He gave the challenge and I was supposed to give the counter-challenge, the password. I approached from the side. We’d been sent out on a trench raid. But shells started bursting around us and we scattered and I was hit. I lost my way and came back at the wrong point, and I stumbled into the post…it was after midnight…it was so dark. So much noise. There was no silence in that place. The boys went mad from the sound. Some tried to dig their own graves.

  “I had to prove I was not the enemy—not Fritz. I had to do it in a split second. The sentry was crouched at a corner—sandbags were piled high, at an angle. I had lost my direction. I saw a glimmer of bayonet in the dark. I knew he was nervous, I could tell from his voice. I thought sound was coming from his rifle, off the blade. My arm wouldn’t move. I was holding my other hand to my face. I had no rifle. I didn’t know how badly my cheek was blown apart. I could barely see. I said, ‘Don’t shoot me,’ but I couldn’t think what I was supposed to say. I knew then that I was going to pass out. I couldn’t think of anything except, Get past this man, Get past this stranger. And then a word popped out of my head. I heard my throat make—my mouth was full of blood—I heard my throat make the sound Wooms. Your sound, Grania. Our old password. The only sound I ever made that gained me entry to anything.”

  Grania did not move.

  “It saved my life. He could have shot me but he didn’t. He must have caught a glimpse, must have seen something of my
uniform at the same moment. Who knows what he saw? It was so dark, it was impossible to see the fingers of our own hands.”

  Grania looked down. “Tell Tress,” she said softly.

  Kenan ignored her.

  “The sentry said ‘What the hell did you say?’ ‘Wooms,’ I said again. He started to laugh, not loudly, a low rumble. I can see him laughing now. Even though I was seeing him with one eye, I’ll never forget his face. Then he saw my face and he said, ‘Oh, Christ,’ and that’s when I fell forward and down. My hand couldn’t hold my face together any more. He shouted. And the stretcher bearers came running to carry me back.”

  “Tell her,” Grania said. “She needs you to tell her things. She wants to help.”

  “I don’t need her help.”

  She thought of Tress knotting together the belts, the stockings, the ties. Tress had thrown her a lifeline. Tress had pulled her to shore and tugged her out of the floating dark.

  “Tress was in our fort,” she said. “She knows the password, too.” She thought of Tress shouting down and into the deadened tunnels of her ears, “Give the password was the next demand!”

  “Yes,” Kenan’s lips said, but his one eye was looking past Grania now. “Tress was in the fort. She knows the password, too.”

  Chapter 17

  Toronto Exhibition:

  In the glass case I saw the blood on the Prussian soldier’s overcoat, and on the British soldier’s cap which had been struck by shrapnel. I saw a pair of Belgian trousers which were torn away by a shell. I think the Belgian who wore them lost his leg. I liked to see the wonderful things from the great war.

  The Canadian

  She loves the train. The feel of it, the largeness, its strength and its might. She and Tress travel first to Belleville, where they wait outside the station to change again, for Toronto. She loves the smell of cinder around the tracks, the odours from the cattle yards beyond, the activity as men haul the express wagons loaded with freight, pulling the wagons by their long handles along the platform. Beyond the men, she sees in the distance the coal chutes and the conical cinder piles where the engines dump their fire, and the water tower with the long dangling chain. She loves the way the men stand. Patient, waiting, shifting their caps to the back of their heads while they speak into the air and stare down the empty track, ready to go into action, set to offload and then load the baggage cars. She loves the anticipation as puffs of black smoke rise beyond the vanishing point in the tracks. Moments later, the train rumbles and shakes into sight. It slows as it approaches, and the engineer and the fireman glide past, smiling down over the iron wheels. She loves how the engineer, his arm leaning on the open sill, manages to stop the passenger cars directly at the spot where she and Tress are standing, just feet away from the moving train; and how the brakeman swings down and the conductor hauls out the step and places it before the open door. Tress climbs aboard and Grania puts up a hand to steady her hat, and she follows her sister. They turn left past the water cooler and choose a double seat three rows from the end. Grania sits by the window and leans back, and now she is swallowed by the tunnel shape of the coach; she is suspended between the life she left behind this morning, where all is familiar, and the sudden faces of strangers and the possibility of adventure that might open up before her.