Deafening (10 page)

The last photo is taken by Bompa Jack. It is a photo of Grania and Tress and Patrick, sitting on the rough bench that has been dragged out from under Bompa’s favourite tree.

The evening meal is served early because everyone is hungry and because some of the aunts and uncles have to return to their farms and homes before dark. A lamp that sits on the wide window ledge is now lit. Everyone joins hands around the table while the great-uncle who is a priest says grace. The talking stops while food is passed around. There are potatoes that have been browned in the pan alongside the roast beef. Another pan is filled with gravy that is flecked with dark brown bits that have broken away from the roast. Before supper, when Aunt Martha poured the juices from the pan into the gravy, she looked at Grania as if they were conspirators and her lips said, “We always save the goodness in the pan.” There are new carrots from the garden, and creamed peas, and a pot of fresh tea for the adults, and milk for the children, carried from the milk house and poured into an enamel jug. There are pickled beets and corn relish and, finally, cooled rhubarb pie served with fresh cream.

After everyone has eaten and beds have been allotted—Tress and Grania will share a narrow room upstairs that has a curtain across the doorway and a pipe hole in the floor—and after the uncles have gone back to their farms with their wives, and after the priest returns to Marysville, Grania sits on the veranda with Bompa Jack and the others. The sun sinks lower and lower until lips can no longer be seen.

She is glad to let go of the conversation. She is worn out from trying to store the events of the day, from watching eyes and throats and lips and teeth and tongues. She sinks into the warmth and haze of family that surrounds her and she falls asleep. She is carried by tall Aunt Martha upstairs to bed. Tress and Patrick are right behind. They follow the dense odour of kerosene and the flame that darts and flickers while Bompa holds the lamp high and precedes them up the stairs.

In the early morning, Grania tiptoes down before Tress wakes, and watches Bompa Jack as he stands at the kitchen washstand that has a bucket under its open drain. He lathers his face with his badger-hair shaving brush and shaves his cheeks and throat in long soapy strips. He plunks his hat on his head and sits at the table with Grania, while Great-Aunt Martha makes his tea and prepares breakfast.

When it is time for Uncle Am to go and get the horses ready, Bompa Jack gives each of the children a gift: for Tress, a gold wishbone pin that belonged to Grandmother Sarah; for Patrick, a small carved horse that he can hold in his palm; for Grania, the camera, which is placed in her hands. She is not sure of all that has been said, but she is certain that the camera is now hers. Goodbyes are said quickly because it is Sunday morning and Uncle Am is going to take them directly to the church in Marysville on the way home. Once again, while the children are being hugged and kissed, Grania thinks she sees the word
school.

Chapter 3

Vibration plays an important part—the voice, in some instances in the making of letters, coming from the chest, then from the throat, the nose, the chin and often times the top of the head.

Lecture, The Toronto Fair

August. The heat soaks into Grania’s skin. She and Mother board a steamer and they cross the bay and then Lake Ontario, a long journey of almost nine hours before they reach the state of New York. By the time they are met and reach Aunt Annie’s house in Rochester, it is time for Grania to go to bed. She follows Aunt Annie up the stairs, through a shadowed hall and into a room where Grania and Mother will share a narrow bed. Aunt Annie is Mother’s younger sister. She has eyes that look like Mamo’s, and her chin moves the same way Mother’s does when she talks. Aunt Annie and Mother have catching up to do, and it is late when Mother comes to bed.

In the morning, a taxicab is hired. It has a flat roof and high wheels and black sides, and Grania steps up behind Mother and sits as straight as she can, and hangs on to the hardness of the door while the taxicab lurches and jolts through the streets. They are driven to a modern office building where, on the second floor, they find the office of a special doctor who knows about ears. They are beckoned into the waiting room, and Grania sits on an uncomfortable chair that is too high for her, and she tries to look in every direction at once. When the doctor comes to the doorway, Mother
flutters her hand to show Grania that she is to follow, that she is to sit up on the edge of a padded table inside a smaller room. The doctor helps her up. His skin is mottled; his cheeks are lumpy; his eyes are the brightest blue. Grania is relieved to see that his eyes are kind. While the doctor’s face is turned towards Mother, Grania inspects four charts along the nearest wall.

She is astonished to see that every chart contains an ear. A giant, coloured ear. Each huge ear is different from the next, each drawn to reveal a maze of meandering tunnels and shapes. Letters and words and arrows point into and out of the ears. Inside one, a black shape is coiled like a shaded snail. In another, a network of tightly packed tunnels resembles beehives that have been sliced open to reveal the activity inside. The tunnels in this chart shoot off in many directions. In the third ear, there is a shape like a bent wishbone. A green balloon—or is it a pea?—is stuck inside that ear’s passageway. The last ear holds the shape of a tiny horseshoe.

Grania has never before seen the inside of ears.

The doctor peers inside her own ears with a light. He taps a smooth stick along a series of bells that are suspended from a wooden frame on his desk. He picks up a small angular hammer like the one Grania has seen in Dr. Clark’s office in Deseronto. After that, something two-pronged and silver. The blue-eyed doctor raps this on top of the desk and places it behind Grania’s right ear. He taps again and holds it behind the left.

Thud. Thud.

While he is doing this she thinks,
sea
, or is it
C
, the word she sings when she is by herself. The doctor forces her attention back, and signals that she is to close her eyes. He holds something to her head and this time it sends vibrations into her skull.

She opens her eyes. He raises a hand to conceal his lips but she sees that his cheeks are moving. He lowers his hand to his side.

“Did you hear?” his lips ask. “Did you hear the word I made?”

He leans towards her. Mother leans forward in her chair. Four eyes are watching for the answer.

She pauses.

“Grania,” Mother’s lips say.

“No,” she says, with her voice. “No.”

But she feels. She feels the sea singing deep inside her head.

She watches Mother’s disappointment.

“She blocks us out,” Mother tells the doctor. “She keeps her focus away unless it pleases her to pay attention. She turns away from me.”

“She picks and chooses?”

“Exactly.”

“The girl is totally deaf,” he says. “There is nothing I can do. Scarlet fever has done this to thousands. She should be sent to a school with other deaf children. She is nine years old—no longer a little child. You don’t want to waste more time before beginning her proper education. She has already lost several years. We have a school here in Rochester—a good school. I could give you a referral, make inquiries on your behalf.”

“No.” Mother stands and faces Grania. Her lips say that they are returning to Canada. They are going home.

“It would be a simple matter to arrange a meeting,” the doctor says.

But Grania sees the set of Mother’s chin. Grania is glad they are going home.

They leave the office, but not before Mother pauses and turns back to face the doctor. Mother has remembered her manners.

“Thank you for seeing my child,” she says. “Thank you for your advice.”

“What are they saying? Is it about me?”

Father and Mother are in the parlour and Grania has been sent from the room. She and Tress are in the kitchen. Mamo is nowhere to be seen; she might be upstairs in her room or outside on the
stoop. Tress lifts her chin, turns her head so that her ear closest to the parlour can hear.

Listen.

“Not loud enough,” the lips say. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

But Grania sees from Tress’s face that this is not true.

“Tell.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Are they sending me away?”

Tress’s hand makes the signal for quiet.

“Tell,” Grania says again. She tries to make her voice whisper. “Are they sending me to deaf school?” Between her and Tress hangs a tiny puff of air. Now her voice changes.

“
Tell.
”

She feels her hands being lifted by Tress. There is a look on her sister’s face—what is it? Something that has not been there before. What? Something twisted, her mouth. Tress is looking far far back. Or maybe far far ahead.

“They’re sending you away to live at the school,” she says. Grania is frightened when she sees that Tress is crying and she, too, begins to cry. Her whole body is shaking. “The school in Belleville,” Tress says now. “The one for the deaf and dumb.”

It is Grania’s last day at home. After a special supper at the corner table in the hotel dining room, she and Mamo walk along the shore of the bay, hand in hand, heading towards the rocky place near the edge of the woods. Mamo carries the lumpy clock bag, its strap slung over her shoulder. When they return home, Mamo pulls Grania to her lap in the rocking chair and they rock together for a while, and Mamo blows into her ear.

Father comes to the house to get her and takes her to his office in the hotel and sits her on his knee. She knows that he has been outside
this evening, because his sleeves smell like stable and horse. He gives her a hug and a kiss and they sit quietly together. Carlow is on the floor and puts one paw over his pirate eye and Grania says “YEW,” to make him feel better. Father’s moustache has been trimmed by Grew and, when he begins to talk to her, Grania understands most of what he says. He tells her that if she is afraid of the dark at school, she should say her fears out loud. She should send them out into the dark.

Grania is surprised. How does Father know that she is afraid of the dark? Maybe Father knows about the ankle rope, too.

“Say your fears into the dark, my darling, and they will go away,” his lips tell her.

Grania tries to understand and she nods and smells Father’s tobacco smell and he takes her by the hand through the passageway, back to the house.

Now Grania is in her own bed, tucked in by Mother. It is late and she thinks about Patrick and Bernard in their beds in their shared room at the end of the hall. She thinks of Mamo in her room, of her parents on the other side of the bedroom wall. Do they have fears? She thinks of everyone in the family sending their thoughts out into the dark. Does everyone want her to go away?

She pulls hard at the ankle rope, her lifeline, the ribbon of night language she will no longer have with Tress. She senses stillness across the room. She moves her foot. No response. She tugs the rope again. Tress is suddenly beside her, standing at the edge of the bed, leaning over and pointing to her own lips.

“Stop,” she says. “I have to sleep, Graw. I’m tired.”

Grania closes her eyes and commands her body to be still. If she moves too much, Tress will detach herself and slip the end of the rope over her foot and off. If that happens, Grania will be cut adrift, cast out into the floating dark.

Her leg tenses while Tress returns to her bed on the other side of the rag rug. The pattern of leaves outside the window flutters
against the shade. She has to keep Tress attached but she also has to fall asleep. She tries to dull her brain but she can’t turn off the pictures in her head.

She gets up, risking Tress’s anger.

Tress is still awake. “What’s the matter now?” Instinctively she raises her head so that Grania can see her lips in the zigzag of light.

“I can’t sleep. It’s too dark.”

“Tell your brain to stop thinking.”

“What?”

“That’s what I do. It’s easy. I tell my brain to stop thinking and then I go to sleep.”

Grania returns to her bed, but her brain won’t stop thinking. The more she tries, the more her brain creates pictures. She drifts in and out of half sleep. She finds herself inside a sea of tunnels. She follows hand signals and painted arrows and the sluggish movement of snails. Her ears are below water but she fights against going completely under. The seashore girl at the end of the
Sunday
book drifts by, lifting her head off the page to look at Grania as she passes. She is wearing her hat and sash and dress, and she is still waiting to be rescued. A flotilla of earless ladies with willowy waists and trailing skirts sails by. Oscar, the cutout man with the black pointy toes, floats past in his catalogue underwear. Despite his stout belly, he does not seem in danger of sinking. Grandfather O’Shaughnessy’s body surfaces, turning over and over in the rolled-up sheet. The cutout girl in her new bathing suit dips down and pops up through the waves, but she is alone and makes no sign that she has seen the others.

Grania thrashes soundlessly in her bed as she feels the press of water from above. She forces her arms and legs to move. She rises to the surface. In the morning she wakes and finds herself in bed with her sister, snuggled close. Warm and covered, safely tucked, deep down inside the blankets of Tress’s bed.
Mamo sits in her rocker in the parlour, alone in the house. She has slept poorly, the night before. Bernard is next door at the hotel, Patrick with Mrs. Brant in the hotel kitchen; Tress is at school. It is a fine September day but Mamo does not go out to the veranda. Even so, with the windows open, she is alert to a change in the air. Autumn has begun. In the early morning, she placed her gift inside the child’s new canvas trunk before the trunk was loaded onto the back of the wagon. Agnes and Dermot have not yet returned from Belleville.

Mamo feels as if the creases in her face won’t yield, as if her lips won’t speak. She can do nothing but sit by herself with the school newspaper,
The Canadian Mute
, on her lap, and think of the child during each step of her journey.