Deafening (29 page)

It was, in fact, a small house, not a restaurant or tavern at all. The front room had been converted and there were square tables and chairs, so many squeezed into the one room that it was difficult to stand, once seated. From the entrance, Jim caught a glimpse of a tiny kitchen that held not much more than a counter and a tile stove and two deep stone sinks—one filled with dirty dishes and jars, the other with unpeeled potatoes. Two long sausages hung from hooks beside a planked door on the far side of the airless room.

The main room, only twice the size of the kitchen, was dim and crowded and choked with smoke. Sound bounced from one wall to another. Candles of the type sent in packages from home were jammed into bottles and stood upright on saucers, stuck into melting wax. The flicker and glow of flames threw shadows around the room as men waved their arms about. Everyone was talking at once, and there was laughter. Several voices called out a greeting as the four friends entered and pushed their way through to the only empty table in the place.

Jim sat, and thought how good it was to hear laughter. He asked for the same as the others were eating—eggs and sausage and
frites
—and Madame Camillone, a thin-faced woman in her forties who ran the business with her plump sister Marie—disappeared into the hallway beside the entrance and returned seven or eight minutes later with the food. The red wine was homemade. A
verre
was served to each of the boys, a
verre
that was a small jar. There were no glasses to be had.

Off-key voices had begun to sing in a back corner while the four were eating, and right away Jim recognized the song. He had seen the outlines of a battered piano when he’d come in, but it was shoved against the end wall and chairs were pushed against it; there was no room for anyone to sit at the keyboard and play. The song
the boys were singing was “The Aba Daba Honeymoon,” and many voices were sputtering hilariously over its speeded-up lyrics. Several tables provided different versions, one set of lyrics flying into another. The result was a staccato-like pelting of words colliding in mid-air over the boys’ heads.

Irish, first to finish his meal, shouted in Jim’s ear. “Why don’t you sing for us, Jimmy boy. Show them what you can do at the piano.”

Jim shook his head. Apart from Irish and the other two, he preferred to stick to his own company. Few of the boys in the 9th knew about his ability to play. In any case, for now he was content to sit on the hard chair in the warm and noisy room and feel the wine as it tilted over the rough rim of the jar and onto his tongue and into his gullet.

Madame Camillone and Marie were making signs to each other over the heads of the boys, and Jim saw Marie’s plump hands signal that she was going to the back to start cleaning up.

Irish was pointing at Jim now, and the other boys picked up the call and began to clap and hoot for him to go to the keys and sing.

There was no way out. He took the last gulp from the jar that had warmed in his palms and he stood, feeling hands on his back as he was pushed and propelled towards the wall. Chairs were scraped back to make room. The piano, he saw, was missing its top panel. An empty seat quickly appeared before the keyboard. The boys waited while Jim sat down, and he stared at his hands, now resting on the keys. He had the Lloyd hands. Everyone from his island family had been musical. After his grandmother had died he’d left the only home he’d known and travelled a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast to Ontario, and now he had a job as a stretcher bearer and that was good enough for him. He and Irish and Evan and Stash knew what to do and how to do it.

He thought of Grandfather Lloyd holding the fiddle with tenderness, as if it were a living thing, and he had the old feeling he’d once had when the older man had stood at his back. His fingers came down on grubby keys, the ivories more grey than white. The piano
needed tuning, but he carried on as if Grandfather were right there behind him. He did not know who was responsible for keeping time; they’d always passed the rhythm back and forth. Loose piano wires did not bother the two of them; nor did a flat note here and there—though on this piano, many notes were flat.

To start, his fingers raced through “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and the boys in the room clapped wildly. He chorded in between, as if accompanying an island reel, and then he played “Our Boys in Brown.” After that he slowed the pace and sang “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” and the boys joined in. Madame Camillone and Marie had stopped their work and were squeezed together in the doorway, their aprons brown with dirt and splattered with spills of wine.

It was after Jim stood up, ready to return to his table, that he reconsidered and decided to play one more tune. He sank to the chair and, this time when he sang, the other voices fell away so that his was the only voice, and it filled the room. He had learned the song in Deseronto during the short time he’d lived in the tower with Grania. They’d been lying on the blue blanket, and he had sung the song for her, every verse, and she had shown him the spot between diaphragm and abdomen—the place that she said was the origin of song.

“On life’s fitful ocean ‘mid glamour and strife,

As I wander afar among men

O, my heart often sighs for fond tho’ts will arise

O a hame hid awa’ in the glen.”

He sang three stanzas in his strong clear voice, his eyes raised unseeing to the wall in front of him. When he finished, three Jocks in the room stood and held their jars high in praise. Except for Jim’s chair scraping away from the piano, there wasn’t another sound in the room as he returned to his table. His friends were looking up at him, and he paused to see their faces before he sat down. Evan was
relaxed; for once the tic in his cheek could not be seen. Stash looked fierce but could not keep from smiling. He met Jim’s eyes and nodded. And Irish—a low appreciative whistle came from the gap between his teeth. And then, suddenly, hooting and laughter surrounded, and everyone in the room began to talk at once.

Irish slapped him on the shoulder with his big hand. “Good for you, Jimmy boy. It wasn’t an Irish song but it did just fine and was loved by all. But you’ll have to get that wife of yours to make an honest man of you. And next time, sing us an Irish tune.”

The four stood amid shouts and entreaties to return, and after paying the two sisters, they pushed and manoeuvred their way between crammed-in tables, and stepped outside onto the uneven cobbles of the darkened street.

All day Thursday, the four friends fumigated blankets. By nine in the evening they had handled and stacked an even eight hundred. After that, when the tents were taken down, they were advised to sleep in the local schoolhouse. Thursday night after dark, Stash left camp and walked back to the village they had visited, and deposited the white kitten in the care of Madame Camillone and Marie, at the
estaminet
. He returned with four precious eggs, which the boys—though they’d had their supper—cooked up immediately and ate with a loaf of bread scrounged by Evan. The sisters had sent fond wishes to “Jeem,” who had played the piano.

By Friday at two in the morning, September the eighth, after an eleven-hour march, they were sitting in the third-class car of a slow train. When they stopped, it was to eat canned beans and hardtack and drink lukewarm tea. Their fatigue was so great, not one of the Ambulance men had the energy to grumble.

Jim stared out the window at the dawn and wondered if sleep was a mythical part of his past. Everyone else had crashed out moments after boarding. Snores and odours filled the car. The train pulled past woods of dark and eerie shades of green. Travellers and woods
seemed joined in a world that was moody and undersea. At seven in the morning the train passed through Calais; later, Boulogne and Étaples, where Jim saw M.O.s and nursing sisters walking near the rails and between tents and buildings. It was said that in the graveyards close to the hospitals, there were separate sections for officers and men. He thought of the friend he’d met during training, who worked here now. Wullie had sent a letter in August telling him that the King had made an unannounced visit to Number 1 Canadian General Hospital. The following day there had been a service in the cemetery, the second anniversary of the Declaration of War.
Every grave was decorated with flags and flowers
, Wullie wrote.
It was a mournful and dignified occasion, and there was a strange and solemn beauty to the affair
.

Jim looked out to a grey sea and thought of Grania, how she wanted to be taken to the ocean, his ocean, on the east coast, directly across the water from where he now found himself. He had spent his childhood on rolling field and red soil that faced out over the north shore and the Gulf of St. Lawrence where it widened into the Atlantic. He tried to pull that scene inside himself now, and thought of the house and parlour where he had grown up. From the time he was a young child, after his parents died and he’d been taken in by his father’s parents, he had been aware of the world of music. His own ears had listened to Grandfather’s bow moving with grace over the strings of his instrument. The older man had the same long, slender fingers that Jim had inherited from generations of Lloyd men who had lived before them both. Jim had been present to see Grandfather Lloyd step-dance two weeks before his unexpected death, when his heart had stopped abruptly.

Jim remembered the old cookhouse on the cliff—once a part of a now-abandoned lobster cannery; the changing attitude of the dunes as sand heaped against the slopes or washed away in winter storms. He thought of waves crashing into shore and licking up the sides of those same dunes, every year displacing the red sand. He thought of the thick mush of the red roads and the mess while trying to get
through them; the pack ice in the Gulf when red soil streaked through spring-dirty chunks that broke up beneath the cliffs. One of Grandmother’s hounds had disappeared over the cliff the same winter Grandfather died. The hound had been Grandfather’s favourite. Jim followed the tracks through the snow right to the edge of the cliff, and neither he nor his grandmother could account for the dog’s behaviour. Grandmother’s geese had not fared any better. In early summer, the dozen she’d raised and cared for were found dead by the pond one morning, close to the farmhouse.

In the fall, the days were sunny and the evenings cool, and wild geese called overhead as flocks followed the coastline in resolute Vs. The island took on mellow tones, giving no sign that the season would be followed by wind and stormy weather.

Jim’s Uncle Alex, his father’s younger brother, had stayed with farming, but in Ontario, having left the island as a young man. As there was no other Lloyd relation on the island after Grandmother’s death, the farm was sold. Part of the money had come to Jim, and was now in the Bank of Montreal—a start for him and Grania when he returned home.

Home. Wife. They had joined their lives together. He tried to conjure Grania’s face: the way her eyes watched his lips, her intense focus and alertness, her always-questioning gaze. He thought of the touch of her fingertips and he was sorry, deeply sorry, that no ship was waiting on this French coast to take him home across the Atlantic. Instead, he and the boys were on a train that, with rhythmic click and side-to-side sway, was transporting them towards the Somme.

Entire camp cities had sprung up behind the lines—cities of never-ending noise and activity. The effort expended to transport food and water alone was astonishing. And there was endless activity related to water treatment, garbage disposal, movement of guns—it was impressive to see the line-up of big guns—ammunition, horses,
mules, service wagons, relief parties, ambulance, medical supplies, blankets, tents and stores. The whole machine was bigger than one imagination could dream up. While they were on the move, the boys began to hear stories of the Australians’ fighting spirit at Pozières. The Aussies, known for their stubborn courage, had fought during July and August and had captured from the Germans, at colossal cost, the crest of the Pozières ridge. Stories of their bravery and endurance made the rounds.

Irish had had a chill since the men of the 9th had begun their march. They crossed rolling open plains of French countryside, interspersed by woods, where they rested for their breaks. Before and after the march, officers stood over them to ensure that they rubbed their feet with whale oil and changed their socks. By the time they stopped overnight in an orchard, Irish had a low-grade fever. He accepted bread and cheese and beans brought to him by Jim, grinned weakly, and fell into an immediate and deep sleep. Jim and Evan propped him between them and half-dragged him to the barn. They bunched together some straw, pulled his blanket over him, and left him like that while they went back out to the orchard.

Mail had caught up to the Ambulance while Jim was in the barn: there were three letters from Grania, and a package of fudge. He shared out the fudge, kept four pieces for himself and Irish, and walked down to the brook where some of the boys had been washing. Rinsed-out socks and underwear lined the bank, all sizes, ragged and ridden with holes—and lice, too, Jim reckoned, as he glanced at the motley display. Long benches had been set up, where some of the men were shaving. Stash was sitting at the end of one of these, one hand holding a letter from home, his free hand stroking the back of his newest pet, a mongrel pup with outsized ears that stuck straight up and gave its tiny face a permanent comical expression. Jim met the new stray, who had been named Tock. He walked farther along the bank until he was alone, and took the letters out of his tunic and spread them on the ground, arranging them by date. He flattened the creases and placed his photo of Grania beside the
letters and read slowly, as slowly as he could, and tried to draw her into himself as he read.

In the morning, he had a hard time rousing his friend. Irish lay on his side, one big hand flopped open, the tiny photo of Clare resting in his wide palm. After a breakfast of cheese and porridge, they put on their packs and marched until twelve-thirty. The extra socks that had been rinsed out the night before hung from the outside of packs to dry while the men marched. Irish was feeling no better. By Wednesday, during the march towards the damaged town of Albert, he had a high fever and was urged to report sick.