Deafening (40 page)
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.”
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.
Mamo has helped her and Tress to pack. “Two dresses that won’t crease too much. Enough underwear for three days. And keep your hat on at all times except when you’re in bed.” She has arranged for them to stay in Toronto with Mother’s brother Uncle James and his wife, Aunt Minna, and it is she who has bought the tickets. Grania now knows that the secret hours Mamo stayed in her room were spent sewing a suit for Dr. Clark’s wife, Mildred. Her arthritic hands remembered the old skills and created a splendid tailored suit of fine English broadcloth with a calf-length skirt, and a long jacket with sleeves that narrowed at the wrists. The money she received has funded the trip to Toronto. It is Mamo who has noticed the coolness between the sisters and who has insisted that it is time for the two of them to get away.
“The mail will be here when you return,” she told Grania. It is Mamo, too, who dreamed up the idea that she herself would move into the little house with Kenan while Tress has three days away on her own. A change. Neither of the sisters has considered taking a trip or thought about “a change,” but now they find themselves side by side, leaning into the velour of the seats, each seat with its rectangle of laundered cloth fastened over the headrest. Excitedly, they shift and settle and focus silently and self-consciously, and they stare out the window.
Grania stares at the freight train that slides past and makes it seem
as if she herself is moving, though their own train hasn’t left the station. She glimpses the backs and noses of cattle between slats of the moving freight cars, chunks of straw sticking out beneath the boards, dirty water—or is it cow pee?—dripping onto the tracks. And then her own coach gives a tug and pulls away from the platform. The train gathers momentum as it crosses the narrow Moira River, passes the houses, the fields, the ponds. Ducks fly up in startled pairs from marshy areas near the tracks, and the city is left behind.
They face forward, and because of the newness of the journey it is ten or fifteen minutes before they begin a soft conversation of lips—not hands; they don’t want busybodies staring. Tress does not have to speak aloud—what reason would there be to do so?—but shapes words with her lips, and Grania watches and replies in low tones, keeping a close eye on Tress’s expression so she’ll be sure to see the signal if her own voice begins to rise.
The peach-basket lady is on board, riding backwards in an end seat that faces them, and, while the train sways side to side, constantly correcting its own balance, the peach-basket lady looks out the window and back to the aisle and keeps up a whispered conversation with herself. She is wearing a long dress, and wisps of hair stick straight out from under a navy straw hat. Everyone on the train seems to know her. Grania and Tress have seen her during the past few years, riding the trains between Belleville and Deseronto and Napanee. She simply appeared one day, and since then she has been sighted as far as Queensboro, travelling to the pyrite mine and back. She may or may not have a ticket or a pass, buried under the heap of clothing at the bottom of her basket; if she does, the conductors never ask to see it. There is a wide rack above her, stretching the length of the coach, but she does not place the basket up there, preferring to keep it beside her or on her lap. There are never peaches inside, only her clothes and always a quart sealer of maple syrup poking up. If this is consumed and replenished from time to time, no one knows for sure. Her husband, it is said, was once a brakeman with the Bay of Quinte Railway and was killed by a moving engine
moments after checking the switching on his section of track. And then, years after the accident, with her few belongings in the basket with the half-hoop wooden handle, the peach-basket lady began to ride the trains. She whispers silently and continuously to herself, and Grania lip reads the words from her own seat. When Grania smiles, Tress’s lips shape the silent question, “What did she say?” and Grania replies, in a low breath, “She says her fat is jiggling because it’s a jerky ride today.” Tress smiles and settles back. If they were children, they might have made the crazy sign beside their ears, but now they just wonder about how she gets her food and if she washes in the train lavatory or at the stations, or if people give her money, or if she has relatives in some town along the way. No one knows anything about her except that she has no children and that she is always riding the trains.
In Toronto, Grania plans to buy presents for Christmas with the money she has been saving from Jim’s assigned pay. She receives fifty dollars a month now; when Jim first left, her allowance was forty-five. She has made a list of what she wants to buy: a Windsor tie for Father, almond-scented hand lotion for Mother and, as a surprise for Patrick when he comes home—in hopes that he will go back to school—a dictionary with 763 words. She saw it advertised for nineteen cents in the Toronto paper. She has already sent an early Christmas parcel of chocolate and pound cake to Patrick, and eight separately wrapped apples from Bompa Jack’s farm. Patrick is still training in England, and Grania prays that he will stay there until the war is over. People are saying it really will be over soon, after the August push began a new momentum against the German lines. But this has all been said before.
For Mamo, she will buy an extra bottle of Canada Bouquet. For Bernard, a Tipperary collar. She is not certain, but Bernard disappears several times a week when he is off work, and he has been seen going into Runaway Granny’s house. One day, he was there to oversee the delivery of coal. He says nothing about this to anyone, and Grania is hopeful that he and Kay will find a place for each other
in their lonely lives. She has not breathed a word of this to Tress because Tress is preoccupied with her own troubles. Besides, Grania knows that Bernard likes to be private. If anyone speaks to him about Kay now, he might run in the opposite direction. She mentioned this to Mamo, and was not surprised to know that Mamo has noticed and is keeping quiet, too. Grania looks over at Tress and wonders if there are things that they won’t be able to talk about now. But Tress’s eyes are closed; she is resting.
The Exhibition is on in Toronto, and Grania and Tress plan to attend during their visit. Last year a Toronto cousin wrote to tell them that the grandstand show included a mock night attack on the dugouts of the Hun. Grania does not want to see such a spectacle this year, not while Jim is
over there
, not while the headlines are shouting about the big push. Nor does she want to see blood-stained trousers that reveal the exact place a man’s leg was torn off. She has imagination enough to fill the picture gaps, and does not need artifacts to point the way. Instead, she will go to see the livestock, and the food exhibits, and the midway, and she will take in the outdoor sights at the fair.
Their first venture out, the day after arrival, they treat themselves to a ride on the streetcar and a trip to Mr. Eaton’s store. For three hours they browse through women’s clothing, coats and collars, serge skirts and kid gloves. They go up to the Grill Room on the fifth floor and indulge in the 25 cent Afternoon Special, and they order what they would never find in the hotel dining room at home: lobster salad with mayonnaise dressing; fancy pastry with whipped cream to go with a shared pot of tea. “Aren’t we grand?” Grania says. Her words can scarcely be heard, but Tress knows exactly what she says and shapes her own words back. Again, they avoid the use of the sign language in public, though they use it animatedly enough in front of their cousins and Aunt Minna and Uncle James. If Grania misses a reference to someone’s name, or if everyone is talking at once, Tress scrolls out the words for her into the air. Tress is relaxed here; Grania has noticed that she smiles more and joins
the shared laughter with the cousins. She is more like the old Tress, but Grania still detects the anger.
On their last afternoon in the city, they hurry through crowded streets and find the moving picture theatre where Lillian and Dorothy Gish and the handsome, moustached Robert Harron are starring in
Hearts of the World
. They arrive just before the moving picture begins; the screen is the largest Grania has ever seen. The lights dim and she sits, rigid and straight, and focuses her attention so she won’t miss a single thing. Tress sits close beside her. Grania frowns when she sees how rapidly the scenes change. She squints, trying to follow the multitude of detail, trying to get into the rhythm of the changing pictures. She strains to read the actors’ lips on the silent screen, and sees two French words,
libre
and
merci
—words she knows because when the war began these travelled from lip to lip at the Belleville school. Tress nudges, not knowing the French words, not being able to lip read the way Grania can, and Grania whispers their meaning into her sister’s ear.
But there is action in this picture; so much happens, Grania can hardly bear to watch. Earth erupts like a volcano spewing high. Young men in trenches grimace at one another; men go over the top and fall down. More men are running running towards the enemy, and jumping down into trenches and stabbing with bayonets. There are flame throwers and explosives with long handles and mud, and more mud, and water, and marching men, fighting men, battle after staged battle. She almost believes that one of the uniformed men who wears a cross on his sleeve will turn his face to the audience in Toronto, in the dark, and that the face will be Jim’s.
Tress reaches over and clenches Grania’s hand. She won’t let go; she nearly wrings it off. There is so much sadness in the film: a mother dies, a father dies, another mother from the village. There are caved-in buildings, and bodies buried under rubble. The youngest boy, the brother with the angelic face, makes Tress cry, but Grania’s favourite is the Disturber, the young woman who is full of life and up to mischief. The Disturber even helps to save the young
lovers, in the end. Grania lip reads the wedding ceremony performed by the lovers themselves as they prepare to die in each other’s arms. Again and again, Tress, with no warning, wrenches Grania’s hand and, finally, when they are out on the street and standing in the fall sunlight again, Grania stops and faces her sister and, not sure of what she has missed, asks why the movie upset her so much at some times and not at others. And Tress says, “The music. The music was so intense, so rapid, my heart started to pound and I thought I would have to get up out of my seat and run out.”
They go to a restaurant and have tea again and they both look as if they have come through the war themselves.