Deafening (45 page)
“Do you remember cracking hickory nuts?” he said to Irish. “Do you remember how plentiful they were? That first fall I stayed with Uncle Alex, we had a sackful to bury. We collected the blackened husks after the frost, and if they didn’t come down on their own, we climbed the tree and tapped the branches to help them along. There were trees all along the fenceline. If the husks didn’t crack open then, they did after another good frost, once they were in the ground. Before winter, we dug them up and put them in the root cellar. Uncle Alex asked me to take some to Dr. Whalen, and I did.
“In the winter, we spilled out a heap of them on the floor in front of the stove. Placed them one by one on a two-foot section of rail someone had given Uncle Alex—a railroad man—and we cracked them with the shaker. Aunt Jean placed a piece of oilcloth under the rail to catch the shells, but no matter how careful we were, bits and pieces scattered around the kitchen floor.”
He paused, thinking of the nutmeats inside each cool brown shell.
“There was a hickory tree on every farm, Irish. You must have grown up with them all around.” He stared at nothing, tried to keep the conversation going.
“Cambrai was taken on the ninth. The Canadians, the Royal Naval Division to the south, everyone was so strong. The Australian infantry fought their last; they captured Montbrehain on the fifth, before they handed over to the Americans. Cases poured into the dressing stations in our area on the eleventh—Canadians and Imperials—so many, we had to call other sections to help. By the twentieth I was in a truck, driving through Douai.
“Fritz has not treated the civilians well, Irish. As we move forward we see people who are horribly undernourished and thin. The young men were taken away. I saw two girls who might have been twelve and thirteen, digging a grave. A man’s body was on the ground beside them. I heard the shovels hitting earth, grating against rock. A stray dog ran down a path, its ribs showing. Stash would have whistled for it, made it his pet. I passed the scene in a moment, but the sound of the shovels stayed in my ears all day. And the look in the girls’ eyes—I knew they would not stop until they’d dug the space they needed.
“We receive great welcomes in the villages and towns. But Fritz has been looting as he retreats. Even roadside niches are bereft of statues. The engineers are busiest of all; every bridge has been blown up along the way. There are booby traps, too, and warnings of poisoned wells. But the billets get better and better as we move forward. Our dressing stations are treating civilians now—I was
embarrassed at first, because most who come in are women. I’m no longer embarrassed—they are only needy and hungry and in want of medicine and care.”
Jim did not say aloud what he was also thinking. How one night after a fourteen-hour shift he lay on a stretcher and tried to sleep and realized only then that he had not thought of Irish the entire day. He had forgotten his friend in the midst of chaos and responsibility and fatigue. He had lain there, staring into the dark, feeling a uselessness that was mixed with betrayal and shame for being alive.
“Next stop for the Canadians and the Imperials may be Mons, Irish. The end of the fighting is near. Five weeks. If you could have managed five more weeks. I have already written to Clare. I sent the letter to the address you gave me. I’ll visit your parents, and I’ll visit Clare, too, if I ever get home.”
11/11/18: France: Canadian Corps 0645 aaa Hostilities will cease at 11 hours on November 11th aaa Troops will stand fast on the line reached at that hour which will be reported to Corps HQ aaa Defensive precautions will be maintained aaa There will be no intercourse of any Description with the enemy aaa Further instructions follow
.
Grania was pulling herself to a sitting position when Tress, pale and excited, and waving a newspaper, burst through the door. “Come to the window, Graw. You must,” she said. “I’ll help.” She ran to the bedside, but Grania insisted on getting up by herself.
A crowd had gathered on the steps of the hotel. Men and women were on the veranda and even more were walking down the middle of the road. Everyone was waving and laughing. Children at the edges of the crowd were striking pots and pans with sticks and wooden spoons. Grania watched rhythmic hands rise and fall. Some of the arms were shaking handbells. Automobiles draped in flags were driven up and down the road. Occupants waved their hats in their hands and people jumped out of the way. Two figures in an open car were dressed like Charlie Chaplin, each with a brush moustache. They waved their Charlie Chaplin sticks and pointed them to the sky. Grania recognized Mr. McClelland, the town baker, his stern face opened in laughter. And she saw Cora, watching everything, her lips moving non-stop. A man on a splendid white horse
rode up the edge of the street, just below the boardwalk. He turned and rode back. Was this the horse of one of her Irish great-uncles, ridden in the July parade?
Bernard was downstairs on their own veranda, talking to several people. Men were shaking hands and hugging the women in the street. There was a glimpse of Mother in a black dress below, and then she was gone.
Grania’s heart was beating quickly. “What?”
“The war. It’s over. News started to come in by wire at three this morning. The Kaiser has run away. The noise is unbearable outside. I came as soon as I could. Kenan is at home, trying to see from an upstairs window.”
Grania looked down at the Ottawa paper that Tress had thrust at her and which she had dropped to the floor. An oversized headline read “PEACE!” and below that: “
WORLD WAR ENDS; ARMISTICE SIGNED; KAISER IS OUT; REVOLUTION GROWS
.”
“Father?”
“Out there somewhere, in the street. Jack Conlin closed the post office and rushed here to get him. Bernard said he would stay at the hotel to keep an eye on things.”
“Mamo?”
Tress’s face. As if she’s been struck
.
“We couldn’t.” She clenched her teeth hard, and breathed out, and then she looked directly at Grania. “We couldn’t tell you, Graw, not when you were so sick.”
It was certain, then. What she’d been afraid to ask. Grania’s legs gave out without warning. She felt Tress’s arms tighten around her. Tress half dragged her back to the bed. They sat on the edge.
“The orange,” Grania said. “I dreamed the juice, squeezed onto my tongue. It was Mamo who looked after me.”
Tress nodded.
The empty chair, rocking
.
“The flu?”
Tress nodded again.
“When?”
Watch the lips. Tell
.
“Just as you began to get better, when the fever came down. It was so quick, Graw. The funeral was three weeks ago but Dr. Clark said you couldn’t be told until you were strong and well.”
She has no recollection of October. It is gone, lost to her. And she is not strong and well. She has only tried to come back for Jim. But she has not thought of Mamo. Somehow she kept believing that Mamo was there. Mamo has always been there, to help her live. Mamo, who wiggled her fingers to show the love moving back and forth between them moments after Grania was born. Now there was nothing but emptiness. Nothing at all
.
Mamo removed every trace of yellow from the room because yellow was the colour of death
.
Mamo was in the rocker all those nights. The scent of Canada Bouquet
.
Mamo nursed her back
.
They held each other, the two sisters. They were so, so tired. They held each other, and though Grania’s body was shaking, and the whites of her eyes were streaked with red, it was Tress who cried and cried and cried.
Resolution: The Deseronto Town Council requests that the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, demand that the Kaiser, his sons, and members of his staff—civil and military—be brought to the bar of justice in the same manner as any other notorious criminals. And further, that all those of the German people or their allies who may have been in any way responsible for such atrocities as have scandalized the world, be similarly dealt with so that none may escape
.
Minutes of the Regular Meeting
Jim was safe. Patrick was safe and still in England. Dr. Whalen’s son and Aunt Annie’s son were safe. Letters and papers were scattered about the floor as Grania sat in the rocker and read. She was up more hours in the day now.
One morning when she was alone in the house, she made her way to Mamo’s room, pausing to lean against the wall to rest along the way. The blinds were pulled. She sat on Mamo’s bed and looked around her in partial darkness, her breath quickening, the old feeling of tightness constricting her chest. She held it in, pressed it close, remembered Mamo telling her that some grief was so big it had to be kept inside. Understanding this was no solace. There was no energy to fight bleakness or despair. Mamo was not there to love or be loved. She was not downstairs, reading in the parlour, or rolling out dough in the hotel kitchen, or sitting at
the family table drinking P-Ko tea. Grania could not turn to see her coming through the doorway, to take her arm as she walked back along the hall. Mamo had become ill, and she was gone from Grania’s life, and now there was only emptiness where she had been.
Grania stood, but before she returned to her own room, she went to the bureau and lifted the stopper of Mamo’s Canada Bouquet. She had to steady herself. She held the small bottle to her nose and breathed in the scent, and tried to keep it with her all the rest of the day. And for days after that, she went back to the room, and inhaled the scent, and sat on the edge of Mamo’s bed.
During the weeks that followed the November eleventh celebrations, the newspapers had much to say about the end of the war. Pic-ton had held a torchlight parade. Belleville celebrated with fireworks and bonfires and a long torchlight procession. The deaf children at the school wrote about seeing crowds of people who were ringing bells and about men and woman dressed up in funny costumes, parading through the streets. Confetti was thrown, and talcum powder, and children blew whistles, and flags were waved. Men had put the figure of the Kaiser on a wagon and horses had pulled the wagon around the city.
There was speculation about how and when to get the boys home, and everyone had an opinion. The cowardly Kaiser had run away and the Dutch had let him in. Uncle Am came to tell the family that eight days after the Armistice, the town council passed a resolution that was to be sent to the prime minister, in Ottawa. A thousand copies had been printed. Some ended up in the hotel lobby, and Uncle Am dropped one off in the parlour downstairs.
The aviation camps, Rathbun and Mohawk, were closing, and the authorities were wasting no time. The engines had been taken out of the aeroplanes, coated with Vaseline, and were stored away.
Grania thought of Patrick. She wondered if, when he came home, he would miss the buzz and manoeuvre of aeroplanes around Deseronto’s skies.
After the Armistice, too, the school paper arrived in the mail. The superintendent had put in a notice about the Spanish influenza being almost eliminated from the school. “All restrictions, all indulgences that resulted from its prevalence, are now removed.” The embargo on the receipt of mail and parcels had also been lifted.
Of all the papers that came to house and hotel, it was this one, from the Ontario School for the Deaf,
The Canadian
, that Grania decided to save for Jim. Because this was the one that described the Armistice celebrations in words of sound.
She thought of Fry. She thought of Colin who had tried so many times to join up but who had never got to the war. She thought of the hundreds of children at the school and how they would have learned about the Armistice from hands and fingers and lips. She thought of the hearing superintendent and the hearing staff at the hospital and the hearing matron and hearing teachers and hearing dorm supervisors, and she thought of Cedric, the hearing editor, who had printed in his paper, for all of the deaf community scattered about the province, the country and the continent to read:
In the wee sma’ hours the bells in the city of Belleville began to ring, and every work shop, factory or yard that possessed a steam-whistle blew that whistle; and every person that owned a bell rang it; and every train that passed through the city wasted the company’s steam in blowing a continuous shrill whistle that wakened the heaviest sleeper and made every old cow grazing peacefully near the tracks lift her head in wondering surprise. There were church bells, fire bells and dinner bells; steam whistles, horns, bugles, trumpets, fiddles and tin cans; milk pails, tin trays, enamel dishes, old kettles and biscuit
boxes. There was noise enough to reach to the furthest planet in the heavens. But who cared? Din? It was music, grandest music, and the very sound of it was life-giving, hope-inspiring, the very best noise we ever expected to hear.
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.
Wednesday afternoon. The hands showed ten minutes before one on the O’Shaughnessy clock. In the morning, Grania had done nothing more than stand at the porthole on the back landing and watch the birds as they flew in hungrily to pick at seeds and crushed corn she had set out below. Bernard came through the passageway from the hotel, and she met him in the downstairs hall.
“Grainy? Do you still want to go?”
She nodded. “Stop worrying. I’m all right.” The last words melded together like a song; she could feel them. She slipped into her coat and covered her bare head with the blue hat Mamo had knitted two winters before, and she wrapped her scarf tightly around her neck. Soft snow was puffed along the veranda railing. The tree branches, too, were pocked with snow. She was well buttoned up when she crossed the street and walked the short distance to the barbershop, holding tightly to Bernard’s arm. It was no
longer snowing, but the clouds were low and heavy and allowed only scant light, even in the middle of the day.