Deafening (19 page)

Danger? Grania hadn’t given a thought to danger. She had always shared a room with Fry in the residence. She had planned to stay on and work at the school hospital. It was Jim who was heading into danger. She had looked to Mamo for support but, for once, Mamo sided with Mother.

Mamo had different arguments. The hotel needed help. Another of Father’s employees had left for the war. Bernard was already working long hours in the afternoons and evenings. Mother and Mrs. Brant needed help in the kitchen and dining room. Mrs. Brant was getting older and didn’t move quickly any more. Mamo’s arthritis bothered her and she couldn’t help out the way she used to. And Mother was tired. Grania knew that Mother had lost weight. Her face was gaunt, her apron tied tighter. She seemed to be worried all the time.

The final argument was that Tress was moving home as soon as Kenan left for the war. Grania and Tress would share their old room again, sleep across from each other in their old single beds, live there as if they had never left. Bernard and Patrick stayed out of the discussions, but everyone wanted Grania to come home.

Grania understood the real reason—the one never stated. No one quite believed that she could take charge of her own life. Mother had finally agreed to the wedding, and Grania had agreed to come home. She refused to delay her marriage until after the war, even though that was what Mother wanted. The price of Grania’s refusal was that she would move from one area of protection to another. Even so, Mamo had blessed the marriage. She had made an emphatic announcement to the family when Mother was arguing and Father was silent—but siding, Grania thought, with Mother. “Jim,” Mamo said, “is a truly decent man.”

Now Grania was to return home as if nothing had changed. But everything had changed. Grania had not lived at home—except during the summer months—since she was nine years old. Tress did not seem to mind moving back; she had never left town. In September, after Kenan left, she had given up their rented rooms and moved home. She was already installed in the old bedroom upstairs.

The married sisters were not so independent now.

Tress had made it clear to their parents that she intended to start looking for a house to rent at the first sign that the war would be over. Grania knew that Father would have her and Tress at home as long as they would stay. Despite spending most of his time in his office, or with his horses, or visiting Bompa Jack on the farm, he wanted his family around him. He wanted to know that his sons and daughters were near. And the truth of Mamo’s arguments could not be disputed: it was wartime; people were leaving; the hotel needed help.

No, the sisters were not so independent after all.

Grania glanced up at her old bedroom window above the veranda, half expecting to see Tress’s face. Most of the leaves on the tree at the front were down. She looked at Jim, and watched his lips from the side as they passed. He was humming again, she could tell. He, too, wanted her to stay with her parents while he was away. She had left the school, left her work at the hospital and said her goodbyes.

Right now, she didn’t want to think about any of this. But she had never been good at pushing things away.

“What else?” she said. “About sound.” They were nearing the rocky place at the edge of the woods by the shore. She had never told him about her walks here with Mamo, when Mamo carried the O’Shaughnessy clock bag. She had never told anyone.

He looked around and saw a plump bumblebee hovering against a fall blossom. The bee darted sideways in their direction and disappeared, a zigzag flight she followed with her eyes.

“Bee,” he said. “The bumblebee is small and fat but makes a big sound.”

“Like?”
Mamo always said, “Sounds like…” and then explained.

“Like an
M
.”

Grania watched him form an awkward
M
with three fingers of his right hand.

“Like an
M
pushed through paper wrapped around a comb,” he said. “When it comes out the other side, it turns to a buzz.”

“I know about the buzz through the comb. Tress and I did that when we were children. The buzz felt like fur on my lips.”

“You tell me something,” he said. “Something I’ve noticed.”

She waited.

“When we are with people, in your parents’ home, or Bompa Jack’s—or anywhere—if there is a noise inside the house, a loud thump or something that sends out vibrations, you never look in the direction of the noise. You look to someone’s face, instead—to see what’s happened, to find out what’s going on. You don’t look for the sound, you look for the information.”

“Maybe. I don’t think about every single thing I do.” She had not considered that.

They entered the path and Jim leaned forward and scooped a handful of red and yellow leaves from the ground and threw them at her. Several landed in her hair.

“Feel them crackle,” he said. “Drag your feet. They make an autumn sound like no other.”

She didn’t tell him that for years she had played in leaves, gathered them, helped the small boys at school as they filled their hand carts on the grounds. Before she left home to live at the school, Mamo had often brought her here. They had scraped their feet through the leaves. But no one had ever told her that leaves made a sound like no other.

Well then, what sound like no other?

“When they first fall, there’s a softness. The shoe pushes into them—
shoosh-shoosh
—with each step.”

She saw the sound on his lips, was not certain enough to try.

“But when the leaves are brittle and dry and the shoe breaks them into pieces, cracklings can be heard. Many cracklings. All at the same time.”

“Cracklings?” She laughed at the word.

It was her laugh he loved the most. The sound of an inward sigh.

And the way she murmured when she was sitting by herself. A murmur that sounded like a softly sung
I see, I see.

And her hands, the way they shaped language.

And the way she said his name. He sometimes asked her to say it, and he listened, and wanted her to say it again. It came out as a clipped “Ch” that joined the “m” with scarcely a vowel sound between.
Chim.

He picked at bits of broken leaf and tugged them along the strands of her red hair. He had never known that hair could be so soft and thick at the same time. They continued without speaking and stopped at the far edge of the woods where the path came out on the other side. A split-rail fence began where the path ended. She took his picture there, as he leaned against the fence. When he was permitted to move, he tapped his fingers against the wooden rail. There was more to tell about sound.

But she had pulled inside. Sound was outside of her and all around. She knew that.

“Tell me in words,” she said. “That will be enough. I will put the rest together by myself.”

His arm pressed against hers as they sat in the second row of Naylor’s Theatre. He was wearing his uniform. It was a brownish colour, khaki, scratchy and thick. She had seen hundreds like it when she worked in Belleville, when soldiers marched past the school. And on the streets, and at the station when trains went through. She pressed her arm back against his and they held the tension like that, allowing it to flow between them. Their days and nights together kept them close. There was little time left.

She removed her hat as the program requested and placed it on her lap just as the light was dimmed and raised up to the centre dome. The Women’s Patriotic League was responsible for Friday-night entertainments. This week there were musical solos, recitations, a speech by a visiting colonel from Belleville, and several tableaus. Jim had bought the tickets and made sure they were seated close to the front so that Grania could see the colour and movement of the performances, the dramatic stillness of the tableaus.

There were four of these:
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
;
Good-Bye Daddy
—a soldier leaving his daughter and son—a tableau Grania did not like to watch, though the audience around her was enthusiastic.
An Autumn Girl
was the third; and the final was
The Allies.
Grania recognized the town girls, and some of the young men. She studied each extravagant, motionless pose. No lips to read. Women around her clapped their hands fervently. Grania was as motionless as the figures on the stage.

During the mandolin player’s performance, she felt nothing, but she watched his strumming hand. It was during the piano solo that music began to enter her feet through the pine floor. She was certain she had the rhythm of the vibrations; she concentrated hard. Jim reached across in the dark and lifted her hand towards him. He traced a fingertip around the edges of her palm for several moments and she sat, motionless, scarcely breathing. She was afraid she would make a noise with her throat. They were surrounded by people on both sides, in front and behind. In that crowded place, every seat taken, Jim rested the back of her hand against one of his, and with the other he silently placed a word in her palm. She felt the flush in her cheeks. She did not see the scene change, not until the lights became brighter and the colonel stood on the stage to give the address.

Everyone knew that the real reason for the concert was to step up the drive for recruitment. When the colonel spoke, Grania could not see his lips. She understood nothing. She knew that the event was the tip of a persuasive wave rolling across the country, gathering
available young men and sending them to fight for
Mother England.
She watched people cheer around her.

Kenan was gone. Their childhood friend, Orryn, had left the year before, at the beginning of the war, and was now a lieutenant. Grew’s son, Richard, a private, had been one of the first in town to sign up; he, too, had gone the previous year. Grew had apprenticed Richard to be a barber like himself, but Richard had been one of the early soldiers who’d first travelled to Valcartier. After that, he had embarked on one of the thirty-two ships that transported the First Contingent to Plymouth. In the barbershop window on Main Street, Grew proudly displayed a postcard Richard had sent, showing the names of all thirty-two ships. An arrow pointed to “my ship”—the
Royal Edward
, the third ship down the centre column.

Grew had been the piano player tonight. Sometimes he played for the moving pictures, too. His long legs had been tucked awkwardly, his tall body bent to the keys. Grania wondered, with his son in France, what Grew thought of tonight’s show of patriotism. Richard had already seen action. Whatever his feelings, Grew did not let anyone know.

When the crowd finally spilled out onto the boardwalk in front of the theatre, Grania put on her hat again, and firmly took Jim’s arm.
Husband
, she said to herself.
Husband.
There had been several other uniformed men in the audience. People outside were shaking Jim’s hand, wishing him luck. She caught a glimpse of Cora, but quickly turned away from the inquisitive stare. She had thought of Cora not so long ago. The day Jim’s uniform was issued, he’d walked away from the tower apartment in the morning wearing his brown trousers—his civilian clothes—for the last time. But the sharp creases in his trousers had been pressed the wrong way, down the sides. Jim had always pressed his own until that one pair. Grania had not been taught that in sewing class at school—not while she was doing fancy work—but she had wanted to surprise him. He’d held up the trousers and laughed and, despite Grania’s objections, pulled them on anyway. Her cheeks had burned with humiliation—what
if Cora were to see?—but Jim hadn’t minded at all. He walked out the door with the creases down the sides of his pants and, when he’d come back, he was wearing his uniform.

He was humming again as they walked along the street, his fingers tapping against one trouser leg. Grania thought of all the words she had spelled to herself that way, tapping against the side of her skirt. She laughed aloud, thinking of the two of them tapping different messages. Jim’s message was always music. Her tapped words were a kind of music, too. Music for the upset or alone.

“What are you humming?” she said. “Which tune?” She watched his lips for the answer. His face looked as though he’d been caught out.

He stopped. “Mandolin solo,” he said. “I can’t get it out of my mind. I recognized it, but I can’t think of the name.”

He took her hand and tugged her across the street and they walked back up the east side of the boardwalk, in the direction away from the apartment. She did not know where he was taking her, but she didn’t protest. He knew about the path, the one that led to the bay at this end of town, by the old burned-out pier. He laughed and pulled away from her, and stepped off the boardwalk, disappearing into darkness. For a moment she stood still, looking into the black space where he’d vanished. She and Tress had walked here in the early dusk during the summer months, fireflies blinking around them, a galaxy of flitting lanterns forming and reforming the shape of light.

She waited for a flicker of movement from Jim. When it did not come, she stepped down and walked forward, unafraid. She was not afraid of the dark when he was inside it with her.

A low remnant of the abandoned pier jutted harmlessly into the bay, its upright timbers black with age. The dugout where she had once played with Tress and Orryn and Kenan was beneath—collapsed perhaps, or even filled in. Now, there were cement sides, and squared-off timbers with wide spaces between. These led to a slightly lower cement platform at the end of the timbers, and this stopped abruptly over water.

Jim was in the shadows. There was a moon, but it had slipped behind a cloud. He stepped in front of her but she was not startled. This time, she was the one who led the way, walking with surety from the end of the path to the place where there was a toehold in the crumbling cement side. She found the notch easily and, despite the weight of her jacket, despite the skirt, which she tugged up to enable her to climb, she pulled herself up quickly. She was already shifting along the edge of one timber before Jim, behind, had found the notch for his boot. She pointed, and he hoisted himself up. She stayed low, inching her way along the beam. When she reached the end she stepped down to the platform and looked back to see Jim at full height, walking effortlessly along one of the beams.
Foolish
, she thought. A cloud of insects could dart in from the bay and flit into his face and he could lose his balance on the narrow surface.
If he falls, he’ll disappear.