Deafening (42 page)

Other news at school—naming of cows occupies the children. So far they have chosen Molly, Roos, Mrs. Gordon and Snow Queen. And—no surprise—there are more rumours that the sign language will be phased out. We predicted, remember? Soon there will be no positions for deaf teachers. Superintendent says Oral Method is the future—now we copy United States. Some teachers already discourage use of sign. Who can believe that deaf children will stop creating language with their hands? It’s as natural as air we breathe. If children are not permitted—in dorms, in classrooms, when they are out to play—they will be dull children and we will all be sorry. Already, we hear of children being punished for using sign
.

Grania had read the letter twice. She stood still now as she thought of what her friend had written, and she steadied herself again. Her hand was tapping against her skirt. Leaves were falling as if they were weighted, but just before they touched the ground the wind caught them and tossed them up again. The air was spinning with reds and golds and browns. In a few weeks every tree would be bare. Invisible gusts off the bay rattled at her clothing, and grains of dirt pelted her face. She choked as she inhaled. In a moment of panic, she thought she might fall to her knees.

There is something amiss
.

She faltered, but as she reached the edge of the woods, her legs were steady again. Her vision blurred. Just before she entered the path that was partly hidden by trees, she looked over the water and saw the noon steamer moving up through the bay. In a soundless world, black clouds puffed out of the smokestack and were grabbed
by a wind that thinned them to wisps of grey. In five minutes, a crowd would tumble onto the wharf—sightseers out for a fall excursion, visiting both sides of the bay. They would disembark and cross the road and pack the dining room where Bernard would at this moment be moving between tables as swiftly as his body would allow without breaking into a run. Mrs. Brant would be sagging into a kitchen chair, reaching for a saving cup of tea now that the main work was done. Mother would be calling out commands, making a last check. Pulling her apron over her head and folding it across the step stool. She would stride to the desk in the lobby and her hand would lift the bell. Not that the overnight guests needed prompting. Most of them returned because of the cooking. In the evenings they hovered at the bottom of the stairs, a restless clump, awaiting the signal for supper. Every one of them knew the story of Sir Wilfrid Laurier who had once left his campaign train, crossed the street and entered the hotel to have a bowl of Mother’s soup. Every one of the guests knew that Sir Wilfrid had paid high compliment as he left.

Grania could not remember what she was doing here. She was on the path but had no recollection of entering the woods. She tilted her head to look up to the tip of the highest tree and saw that it was bent in the direction of the town. A good fall wind.

The wind howls, but not the leaves
.

She imagined the sound of wind around her.
It all depends
, Jim had told her.

She searched the sky as if there might be howling to see. Would Tress say she was silly? Would she make the crazy sign because Grania was trying to see the sound of the wind? No, Tress would not do that. But Tress had played; Tress had entered the old nighttime language, with no rope between.

Grania stepped forward again and this time she went down, holding the half crouch that caught her, surprised by her legs crumpling so completely. She tried to push herself up from the earth with both hands but she couldn’t rise. It was easier to stay crouched in the
leaf-filled hollow between criss-crossed roots. She had a momentary thought that no one but Carlow knew she had gone out.

She closed her eyes and pictured Jim. Each time a letter was placed in her hands there was a belief in the merging of their lives. But after each letter had been read and added to its bundle—a fourth bundle now, for 1918—she had to fight the fading of that belief. She knew how small she was in world events, how small her town, how small her country. And how big the war. The Kaiser punished everyone by continuing to fight. Jim had been gone for three years. Every day, when she opened the papers, she could not keep her body from lurching towards the lists of wounded and dead. So many boys from surrounding farms and towns and cities were gone forever.

At the time of his last letter, Jim had been behind the lines. But the day he wrote the letter, he was preparing his kit:
We’ve been ordered to turn in one blanket
. That meant the unit was moving again. Now the papers were filled with more news of the push forward. “The Hun is on the Run,” one headline had stated.

Of course there might be no letters at all. It was what everyone feared but no one said. One of Uncle Am’s friends who’d worked at the sash and door factory had received a telegram
and
letters. Even after being notified of his son’s death, he received two more letters—one written the evening the boy was to go up the line, the other written the morning he died. It was a horror, Uncle Am said. His friend wanted the letters but dreaded the missives from his dead son as much as he had dreaded the imaginary telegram before it arrived.
Deeply regret inform you…
To make matters worse, letters sent overseas by the boys’ parents had begun to come back, “Killed in action” stamped across each envelope. These arrived weeks after the boy was in his grave. “At least he has a grave,” Uncle Am had said. “Not like Grew’s son, lost and buried in clay and mud. At least the boy had a decent Christian burial.”

Grania’s vision blurred and she pressed her hands to her cheeks as if contact with her own skin might affirm her presence. She thought
of Mother’s beet juice as she sank—this time she went all the way down. She thought,
My skirt will be filthy
. She thought,
I’m cold
. A pain shot through her ribcage and for a moment she could not take a breath. She rolled, feeling the leaves shift beneath her. She tried to sit upright, knowing that if she could not get up she would choke. She struggled with the button on the collar of Jim’s jacket and tried to force it open. She pushed herself up on her hands and knees and began to crawl, her skirt and stockings scraping dirt. In her urgency to reach the clearing she kept her mind focussed so that she could stay on the path. She felt a gurgling sensation on one side of her chest, and in disbelief she lifted a hand and pressed it beneath her left breast. At the same time, she said,
Bubbles. How can there be bubbles in my chest?
Fluid tilted up and over her tongue and spilled onto her hand, which was now bright red. She tried to pull forward the last few feet but sank to the earth, face down. Air moved in and out, past the gurgling in her mouth.

Chapter 19

If we could decapitate a singer in the midst of a song…the beauty of the voice would be gone, and you would simply have a reed-like effect
.

Alexander Graham Bell

“Do you ever wonder about your breaking point?” said Irish. “What it might be?”

They were off for a few hours and were leaning back against the wall, their cups filled with tea. They were in a tiny shack they had built from salvage, behind a tile factory in Bourlon that had been battered to pieces. In the past few days they’d been in Cagnicourt, Queant, Inchy, across the canal bank to the old German front line, and then ordered back to the Inchy side again. They were badly shelled Friday night, and relocated again on Saturday. Everything was speeded up, moving fast, the Canadians fighting alongside the British. Irish had heard that the French and Americans had taken eighteen thousand prisoners. The Hindenburg line was gradually being cleared. The positions won reached the outskirts of Cambrai, an important road and railroad centre. Between shifts, Jim had gone to the top of Bourlon Ridge to get a view of Cambrai and the surrounding towns.

During the fighting, every road leading to the front had been crammed with guns, tanks, motor machine-gun units, infantry, cavalry, engineering supplies, cooks’ wagons, water carts. All night Saturday, at the Advanced Dressing Station, stretcher bearers had
transferred cases from horse ambulance to motor ambulance. Two hundred stretcher cases came in, and one hundred walking. The men were fighting hard. More than fifteen thousand casualties had been evacuated in six days. As wounded men were loaded onto trains, empty cars returned carrying dressings, blankets, more and more stretchers. Flat cars and French boxcars with layered stretchers inserted into their sides were used constantly. The Red Cross was right on the heels of the army, making daily deliveries and supplying comforts for the wounded.

Despite the high number of casualties, the advance was continuing. The clearing of the battlefields and the treatment and evacuation of the wounded were taking place as if every man was an essential unit of a massive, oiled machine that was beyond the reckoning of any one part of it.
Regimental Aid Post, Advanced Dressing Station, Collecting Point, Main Dressing Station, Clearing Station, Depot
. Everyone knew his place, where to collect, where to carry, where to report. The locations changed as divisions rolled forward or replaced one another. The wounded were moved back by stretcher, by strong arms and shoulders, by wheeled stretcher if the roads allowed, by wide-gauge rail, truck, horse-drawn wagon and motor ambulance.

Jim was staring at Irish. They had talked about everything else, but not about breaking points. Irish had Clare’s picture out of his pocket and was running his thumb over its surface. Jim patted his own pocket over Grania’s photo.

“Every man thinks about his breaking point,” Jim said, after a silence.
Time lag
, he thought.
The moment between utterance and understanding. Or between understanding and utterance
.

Irish did not interrupt. He was waiting. He tucked Clare’s picture back into his tunic.

“You’ve seen the boys leave their senses, Irish. Gone over the edge.”

“But do you feel it lurking?” Irish was insistent. “In the air beside
you, or creeping up behind? Especially here. Things are moving so fast we can scarcely keep up.”

“It keeps us off balance,” said Jim. “So much movement, the speed of things.”

“That’s what I mean. Things are off balance.”

“Off balance might be a good thing, who knows? I don’t trust a fellow who believes he has everything under control. For me, off balance is real, a companion that travels close. I might be surprised by something, I might not.”

“You’re canny, Jimmy boy. Canny will get you through.”

“Canny? I don’t think so. But I do things. I take measures—to hold things at bay.” He hadn’t intended to say this.

“Measures? What measures?” Irish was pushing, laughing a little, the gap showing between his teeth. They’d been together for three years and he hadn’t heard this.

“You know. A chant under the breath, a line from a song.”

“Tell me.”

Tell
. Jim thought of Grania.

“Sometimes I say—fast—to myself:

Infirtaris,

Inoaknonis,

Inmudeelsis,

Inclaynonis.”

Irish laughed so hard he could scarcely speak. “Tell me again.”

Jim repeated the verse, faster this time. “It’s supposed to sound like Latin. My grandmother taught me. She said it came from the time of Henry VI. It’s nonsense. But it helps if I say it in the noise of the guns, when we’re trying to get a carry out of a tight spot.” Another pause. “Something else, too.”

“What might that be?” This time, Irish looked as if he did not plan to be surprised.

“The boys,” Jim said. “The ones who are terrified. They’ve never accepted war. What war is. The ones who do, it seems to me, know they’re prepared to die. That doesn’t mean they think about death, or dwell on it. You know how they hate talking about this stuff. They accept. But some just can’t. You’ve seen them, Irish, crying for their mothers, holding their hands over their ears.”

“More than I care to think of.”

“I can’t be the only one who notices that the ones preoccupied with dying are the first to be killed. Always looking over their shoulder. It’s better to carry on. Know our tiny job in the order of things, and get it done. That way, we’ll all get home sooner.”

He thought of the boys he’d taken back to the Self-Inflicteds. They were kept together in one spot as if they had measles or some other communicable disease. Some died for it.

They had finished their tea, but Irish reached for the last mouthful in the cold cup.

“Don’t, Irish, it’s bad luck to leave it sit and then drink the last bit.” He tried to take the tin cup from his friend’s hand, but it was too late. Irish gulped it down, laughing. Jim was sorry he’d spoken.

Evan came into the shack with Finner. Ahead, Cambrai was burning. And anything else Fritz could put a flame to. The two men had carried in boards to fix up the place. Evan had also brought a scarred tabletop—a slab of wood two feet by two—and propped it low on heaps of fractured tiles until it rested evenly. They all sat on the floor, one on each side of the square, admiring; it gave them immense pleasure. Evan laid some bacon on top of the slab, for morning. He’d been scrounging. Evan was harder now. The tic in his cheek was there, but he was harder. And he was never still. Jim thought of him as the most restless man he’d ever known.

Finner threw an extra blanket into the already cramped corner of the shack. They had done everything they could to make the place comfortable, even though they’d probably be leaving in the morning.

Finner was upset about the cook. He lined up his complaints. The meat at supper had turned, and had a bad taste. There was to be no
hot breakfast in the morning—rations only. The food gave him stomach pains. He went on and on about the cook.

“Never mind the grousing,” said Irish. “It’s no use. There’s probably nothing else the man can do. He’ll make us a good porridge when he can. We’re off for the evening, so let’s try to enjoy ourselves. Anyway, Finner, when you point a finger at someone, remember that three fingers are pointing back at you.”