Deafening (14 page)
After Grania has been home for three days, Mamo sends her to get the
Sunday
book. Apart from the pictures and their captions, there are stories, too—hundreds of words in stories that Grania still does not know. When they put the book down, Grania begins to teach Mamo the hand alphabet—which the old arthritic hands delight in learning. M-a-m-o, Grania spells, and she creates a name-sign, tapping a three-fingered
M
against her cheek.
Father has Grania’s roll of film developed, and Grania arranges her photos on the black pages of the new album that is waiting at home, a present from Bompa Jack. There are photos of Fry, and Fry and Grania together, and Nola, and Miss Amos, and Bridie and Erma and Celia and Grace. And there is one of the editor, Mr. Cedric, with the older boys in the print shop, all wearing their striped aprons, a kind boy named Charles holding up a copy of
The Canadian Mute.
There is a photo of the large rink in winter, and another of a group of boys standing beside a deep puddle outside the steps of Gibson Hospital, which Grania labels in her neat handwriting:
Boys at school.
When Father is not around, Mother prays for a miracle, and before Grania returns to school, she and Mother make the long trip east, first by train and then by steamer, down the St. Lawrence River, to the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré in the province of Quebec. Grania stares up at huge wooden chandeliers and a towering crucifix, and sees men and women around her standing, sitting,
standing. She feels Mother’s hands, one on each side of her head. Mother prays, and crosses herself, and Grania goes still and waits to see what will happen, but nothing changes inside her ears. She moves her lips in babbling prayers of her own when Mother tells her to pray to Ste. Anne, but she does not let Mother hear. Mother understands her voice and will know that she is making up the words. She watches to see what Mother will do next, and she follows as they walk between church and Cyclorama on their way back to the wharf. They are admitted inside and climb high steps to see the depiction of Jerusalem, and Grania, holding the railing, circles the platform and stays close to Mother in case large hands reach out of the giant panorama that surrounds them and pull something from her ears. Something that keeps her from hearing and that Mother wants removed. Mother crosses herself again and prays, and Grania keeps a close watch, and waits, and moves her lips in a babble. But nothing happens inside her ears.
Mother insists, during the trip, that Grania use her voice. Mother has not learned any of the sign language that Grania brought home with her at the beginning of summer. “Too busy,” she says whenever Grania tries to teach her. “I have too much work to do.”
At the end of summer, despite the trip to the shrine and despite Mother’s prayers, Grania is still deaf.
In September, her departure approaching, Grania takes Carlow to the fenced backyard and sits on the stoop beside him and pats him on the back. Her voice makes swooping sounds as she begins to sing. Up and down and out of her head, the words swoop like the flights of swallows. She sings the title, “I don’t want to play in your yard,” over and over, because that is the only part of the only song she knows. Carlow listens, and understands. And Mamo, standing behind the laundry window inside, also listens and understands.
Grania goes upstairs and folds her clothing into her sturdy canvas trunk. The trunk is sent ahead to Belleville, and she travels—again by steamer, westward along the Bay of Quinte, this time escorted by Aunt Maggie, who has errands to do in the city—to the dock at
the bottom of the slope across from the school grounds. The details of Grania’s first year away have already become lodged inside a hard casing of her memory. She tries to keep the summer memories of home in front of these, so that she can carry them back with her to the Belleville school.
And there is something else. Something Grania knows. Before she hugs Father and Mother and Mamo and Tress and the boys, and before she boards the steamer at the wharf across from her house on the corner of Mill Street and Main, she looks north, to the town she is leaving for the second time. There is her family home with the veranda and its leaning fence along the Mill Street side; there is the open passageway joining the two buildings, and the columns and steps of Father’s hotel. There is Carlow beside the veranda post, staring forlornly after her. She stares back, and waves, and looks hard at the upstairs window of the room she shares with Tress above the street. She does not cry. What she knows in that moment, and what she clearly understands when she looks back, is that there are things she will never be able to impart, things that will never be understood—not even by Tress or Mamo. Things that make up the portion of her life that is now lived, separate and away, at the institution in the land called
School.
The
Lusitania,
the largest and fastest passenger ship in the world, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine ten miles south of Kinsdale, near Queenstown, Ireland, on Friday, May 7th. The Germans gave the people of the ship no warning and she sank in fifteen minutes. 1150 persons—passengers and crew—were drowned, including 50 babies and 100 other children under 2 years, aged women, and heart-broken wives and mothers going to the bedsides of wounded husbands and sons. The survivors numbered but 767. Some 140 bodies were recovered and buried at Queenstown. To celebrate this murder of 150 babies, the ‘Kultured’ schoolchildren in Germany were given a half-holiday. By this slaughter of the innocents, is the Kaiser trying to out-Herod Herod?
The Canadian
Belleville, Ontario
“They tell me, at the school, that you’ll be joining up.” It was neither question nor statement—perhaps something of both.
Jim nodded. “But not until the fall.”
The man between them was stretched out on his back on the long board table in the kitchen, where he’d been carried before their arrival. His face was the colour of pale ash and he was looking up at the two of them. His glance darted from one to the other, as if reading their faces would tell him the sum of what he needed to know. A yellowed scar bulged through the man’s eyebrow, which gave his face an expression of calamity already known. His wife had stuffed a
bolster under his neck to support his head and, except for not knowing the fate of his leg, he looked as if he’d be all right for a while longer.
“Will you bring a clean towel?” the doctor asked, and the woman left the room, passing them as she did.
Dr. Whalen’s voice was deep and slow. The voice of patience learned. It was the way Jim thought of him, a tired man who had the necessary patience to get through the work that set itself before him from sunrise to sunset. Jim knew that he was called out in the night, too. And he was the regular physician at the Ontario School for the Deaf. He also worked weekends if a baby decided to be born, or if a patient in his practice—or a child at the school hospital—needed attention. The institution on the Trent Road had been part of the landscape on the outskirts of Belleville for forty-five years. A newcomer to the area, Jim now knew that the institution had changed its name a few years earlier, that it was a large school for a small city of ten thousand, and that deaf children were sent from every part of the province and from other provinces, too.
There was a tourniquet of sorts around the man’s upper thigh. No, Jim saw now that it was more bandage than tourniquet. It covered rather than constricted. It had been someone’s shirt, the cloth a dull moss colour, washed many times. It had been folded flat, and the sleeves were wrapped around and tied. There was surprisingly little blood on the makeshift bandage or on the man’s pantleg, which had been slit up the side as far as his waist. The man’s boot and stocking had been removed from one foot. Jim’s glance took in the scissors on a corner shelf near the single step that led up to the next room, where the man’s wife had disappeared. The edge of the step was smooth and worn, leading to a dining room or parlour. Every farmhouse had a parlour. Jim’s grandparents in eastern Canada had had one, and so did his uncle in Ontario—Uncle Alex, whose family Jim had stayed with when he’d first arrived.
The injured man’s son, who looked about twelve or thirteen, was standing at the far end of the kitchen where Jim and Dr. Whalen had
come in. His face was as pale and anxious as his father’s but he looked hopeful that he might be asked to do something. Jim could see the side of Dr. Whalen’s black Ford over the boy’s shoulder, through the window at the end of the room. A rifle hung on a rack above the window frame. There was another window near the stove and water reservoir. There was no electric light, but this was early afternoon, and there was light enough in the room.
Dr. Whalen unwrapped the makeshift bandage and spoke to the man directly for the first time.
“Ah, Herbert.” This caused everyone standing—the woman had now returned with three folded towels—and the man lying to look at him, waiting. “I think this is going to be all right. Can you move your foot? Your toes?”
As if encouraged by the doctor’s voice, Herbert not only moved his foot and toes but raised his leg, too, which caused him sudden surprising pain. He slid his jaw to the side and gritted his teeth, and his leg slumped back to the table.
“No no, not that,” said Dr. Whalen. “Give it a chance.” He pressed the leg firmly into its natural position and raised his glance slightly to Jim, who collapsed open the doctor’s leather bag. It split lengthwise into halves, and the doctor reached, without looking, for syringe and needle. He sawed at the crease of an ampule with a dull blade and snapped off the glass top. He injected the contents into the man’s upper arm. The man closed his eyes.
Dr. Whalen was working swiftly now, cleaning the wound, pouring solution while Jim propped Herbert so that the area could be fully exposed. It was a dangerously wide and uneven tear, six inches or more around the side and back of the thigh. Jim saw the layers of fatty tissue and muscle spilled out on the surface; these had flopped inside out instead of being tucked inside the skin where they belonged. The wound was almost bloodless. Gut had already been threaded through the eye of the curved needle; the suturing was finished in ten minutes.
“If you’d ripped an artery, you’d be a dead man, Herbert. There’s
not even a broken bone here. You’ll have a scar, a thick one, and it’s going to be ugly, but it’s the best I can do, given the wound. Rest a bit, will you? And try to stay off that jagged tin roof.”
Herbert managed a grimace. “I need the leg to work,” he said. “Can’t be running a farm hopping around on one foot.” He spoke sullenly, but his colour was coming back, the scar through the eyebrow less prominent now. Another calamity dealt with.
The leg was washed and properly bandaged. What remained of the trousers was cut the rest of the way through and Herbert was helped off the table, leaving the splayed trousers behind. He hopped on one boot to the kitchen sofa. There was a comic look about the movement, though no one smiled. The boy was outside now, admiring the auto that shone in the sun, circling round, reaching in to touch the steering column. He stood back to admire the pleated seat backs, the diamond-patterned seats. In the kitchen, the woman laid a quilt over Herbert’s legs, then saw the men to the door. On the faces of the boy and the woman, there was nothing to be read but relief.
“My boy will be leaving in July.” Dr. Whalen continued as if forty minutes inside the farmhouse had not interrupted the earlier conversation. “Artillery. He says he wants to be a gunner.”
At the word
gunner
, Jim looked down at his own hands. His grandmother, who had raised him, had taught him to play piano with those hands.
Dr. Whalen caught the look. “Have you thought of something on the healing side? Orderly? Field ambulance? Stretcher bearer? You’ve seen a few things working with me the past winter. There’s much you could do to help, Jim. I’d go myself, but I’m too old.”
They were following Cannifton Road and the narrow Moira River the short distance back to the city. Belleville, halfway between Montreal to the east and Toronto to the west, rested on the north shore of the Bay of Quinte, the same bay that Grania’s town, Deseronto, looked over. The Moira ran south through Belleville and
emptied into the bay, just east of the School for the Deaf. The school had been built back from the edge of the bay in 1870; it was there that the two men were headed now.
It had been a cold winter during the months Jim had been working for Dr. Whalen. Two months earlier, in March, men with horses and ploughs had cleared the snow from the bay in front of the school, marked the ice beneath, sawed it into chunks and floated them in the water. The ice, a foot and a half thick, had been pulled out block by block and loaded onto sleighs, individual blocks weighing three hundred pounds. The school had its own ice house. Now, because of the long winter, it was well stocked for the rest of the year.
Despite spring runoff, the water level of the Moira was dropping, though a good current could be seen from the Ford. Even so, there was a mood of stillness as the two men followed the course of the river. Clouds were banking high on the far side of the sky, and dust rolled out behind the motor car as they drove.
“I haven’t figured out exactly what to do,” Jim said now. “It might be November before I get away. Uncle Alex made me promise that when I finish working for you at the end of the summer, I’ll stay for the fall sawing.”
“The
Lusitania
helped my son with his decision, Jim. The drowning of those women and babies was a cowardly act. A brutal act by cowardly men.”
Jim had not mentioned Grania to Dr. Whalen, but it was she he had been thinking about during the conversation with the older man. He had first met the young woman with the red hair the previous fall, when he had been working for Dr. Whalen only three weeks. It was her stillness that compelled him to a halt. He had been humming; he had sprinted in from outside, down the stone steps of the school hospital and into the lower bandage room.