Deafening (2 page)

Tress’s window faces the slope of roof that tilts towards the upper balcony of the hotel. From up here, house and hotel appear to be joined, though they are not; there is a roofed, open passageway between. A second bedroom window looks over Main Street and the Bay of Quinte, a large bay that slips in from the great Lake Ontario, which is part of the border between Canada and United States. A single maple tree grows up past this front window of the girls’ room.

Almost every family activity takes place on the short stretch of road that is the Main Street of town. To the east, not far past Naylor’s Theatre, Main Street ends where land meets bay. The western end of Main, where Grania lives, tips up to join the old York Road, now Dundas Street, which leads west through Mohawk Indian lands and on to the city of Belleville, twenty miles farther along the bay. To the east, the same road passes through the northern part of town and leads to Napanee, Kingston and the St. Lawrence River. Much of the town of Deseronto lies below this road, on the edge of the bay.

The town is like an overgrown village, really, but the Rathbun industries have been here for years and have made it a company town that boasts a railway, and steamers, and numerous enterprises sprawled along the waterfront. Many of the factories and stacks of lumber, the mill, the coal sheds, the railway-car shops, the tracks and the turntable for the engines lie between Main Street and the shore. On both sides of Main there is a mixture of houses and places of business: telegraph office, confectioner, baker, grocer around the corner, Chinese laundry with steam-covered windows, gentlemen’s tailor, general store,
Tribune
printing office, post office with its high clock tower, barber on the other side of the street, Naylor’s Theatre towards the end, harness shop, fire hall and hardware. On the back streets are the undertaker, more grocers and bakeries, police and library in one building—library is where Aunt Maggie works—community halls and churches, and the billiard hall. Mamo names the buildings when she walks with Grania through the town, but Grania knows that she is permitted to visit only grocer, butcher and post office when she is on her own.

Father’s hotel is always busy because it is on the corner of Mill Street and Main, directly across from the railway station and the wharf, where the steamers dock.

In the girls’ upstairs room in the house beside the hotel, there is no window over Grania’s bed. Her side is wall. Wall on the right, windows front and left. She has learned right and left from Mamo. She thinks of the
Sunday
book and the new words beneath the picture. Neither calf nor girl will ever move towards each other. They will be waiting for her when she wakes in the morning and opens the cover. She will stare at them and there they will be, face to face, looking at each other on the page.

“You’re smart,” Mamo tells her. They are on the veranda and Mamo has brought the rocker outside. Mamo is relentless. She articulates firmly and carefully into the air, and Grania is expected
to keep up. “You could read lips before you were deaf. When your parents wanted to talk—grownup talk—they had to turn their backs to whisper because you were so nosy. Do what you’ve always done. Before you were sick. You’re the one in the family who sees.”

Grania watches Mamo point to her own eyes. “Since you were a tiny baby, you’ve seen what’s around you. As soon as you could raise your head, you peered up over the side of your cradle.” She laughs, thinking of this.

Grania knows when Mamo is talking about baby times. She can tell from the softening in Mamo’s face.

“Did I have thick sense?”

“Thick what?”

“When I was a baby. Aunt Maggie says I have thick sense. I know what she will do before she knows.”

Mamo smiles. When she smiles there is an up-and-down line between her eyebrows. “I see.” She holds her arms open, and Grania walks into them and waits while Mamo smacks a kiss onto her forehead.

Mamo turns sideways from the waist and draws a six in the air with her index finger. Grania watches the number assume its invisible shape.

“Six. Six-TH sense, not thick. If you have it, you shouldn’t be talking about it.”

Now Mamo’s pointing finger makes a circle. “I’m going to turn you around—keep your eyes open, wide open. When you stop, tell me what you see. Understand?”

A game. Grania understands. She feels Mamo’s hands on her shoulders and allows herself to be turned. Once. Twice. When she stops she is facing the end of her own veranda, looking between the pillars that support the hotel balcony, a dozen feet away.

She turns back to Mamo.

“Now look at me,” Mamo says. “Use voice, no hand signals. Keep the language you already have. What do you see?”

“Wood post.” This comes out high.

“Bring your voice down.” Mamo lowers her palm through the air.
She’s
using hand signals. “Colour?”

“White. Uncle Am and boys painted.” Two of her cousins had come to town from a farm near Bompa Jack’s, to help paint. That night, they were allowed to sleep in an upstairs room of Father’s hotel.

“
The
boys painted.”

“Not Bernard. He worked in dining room on paint day.”

“What else?”

“Man.”

“
A
man. Who?”

“Mr. Conlin. Beside telegraph office.” She has also seen the Telegraph sign nailed between two poles, but she doesn’t mention this.

“Wearing?”

Grania shrugs.

“Look again.”

One more look. She tries to focus, remember. Turns back.

“Funny hat. He wears
the
hat inside
the
post office where he works.”

“Good girl. Colour?”

“Like coal bin. The coal bin.”

“What else?”

“Hat is round like Uncle Am’s but with a hole punched in.”

“I know,” Mamo says, to herself this time—she’s forgetting the game. “He won’t replace it. He’s too proud.” She sits forward. “The fight was a few years back and he won’t buy a new hat.”

“Fight?”

“Ah, you read my lips even when I talk to myself. He helped your father get some rowdies out. They came in on the steamer. They weren’t Irish, those rowdies. Well, they did manage to get them out, sure enough.” She leans back again in the rocker. “Someone must have spilled salt that day.”

“Salt?”

“Means a fight. Never mind. Look again. Is there a band on the
hat?” Mamo’s fingers curl to create the width of a band.
More hand signals.

“Dark.” Grania’s hands instinctively cross in front of her face, semaphore flags. She cannot know that two years later she will be taught the same sign.

“What is Mr. Conlin doing?”

This time, Grania doesn’t need a second look. “Wait for Cora to pass because Cora is nosy. Then chew tobacco and go back to post office. The post office.”

“You’re the one who’s the Nosy Parker.”

Jack Conlin turns in their direction, and waves.

At night, Grania tiptoes across the rag rug, counting six steps between beds. She crouches by her sister’s bed, waiting. Tress has told her that the springs creak and will give them both away if Grania climbs in beside her. Mother and Father sleep in the next room and Mother will be listening.

“No talking,” Mother has warned. “Grania is not to leave her bed.” It was to Tress that she said this when she came to say good night, but Grania saw the frown on Mother’s face and read her lips before she finished speaking.

There is something else Grania has to consider in the darkness—the walls. Aunt Maggie, who lives with Uncle Am in the tower apartment above the post office, told Grania that the walls have ears. Mamo agreed that this was true, and she and Aunt Maggie smiled while Grania weighed the information. Every night now when Grania goes to bed, she scrunches as far away from the wall as she can because she does not want the wall to hear. She does not want to fall into the place where the wall swallows sound.

A shadow appears at the front window where the branches of the maple stretch up.
Things that move, things that don’t move.
The shadow slides across the oval mirror with the reed trim, and across the framed picture of daffodils. It slides past the washstand and jug,
and above the bureau and over the sampler Mother stitched when she was fourteen years old, lines from “The Breastplate of Saint Patrick.”
God’s eye for my seeing, God’s ear for my hearing.

The shadow slips out of the room. “Watch for things that move,” Mamo has taught Grania. “Watching will keep you safe.”

Shadows sometimes take Grania by surprise. Under the moon there are shadows. There are times when she walks outside with Mamo or Bernard in the evening, and electric lights shine out of a window and make not one but two shadows that glide beside her. She is startled by this, and keeps a close watch until the shadows merge again into one.

From her crouched position on the floor she allows herself to sink to the rag rug. In the same movement—holding back, even as her body leans forward—her shoulder nudges the edge of her sister’s bed. Tress’s hand slides out from beneath the sheets and slips into her own. Tress shifts some of the blankets over the side and bunches them to cover Grania’s shoulders. The two hold hands and sleep, one on, one off the bed, all through the night.

Mamo takes her by the hand and leads her to the clock in the front hall, the one that was carried in the burlap bag with the wide shoulder strap, the bag stitched by Grandfather O’Shaughnessy himself. He carried the clock all the way from the beautiful land called Ireland, where he and Mamo were born in the same town, and grew up and loved each other and married. When Grandfather died on the ship and was buried at sea near the coast of their new country, it had fallen to Mamo to carry the clock. When they reached Quebec, she and her four children, two daughters and two sons—Grania’s mother, Agnes, the eldest—hoisted the O’Shaughnessy trunk, the bundles, the clock in the burlap bag, and left the ship. They staggered to shore while their legs gave out beneath them. As weak as they were, they were glad to have their feet on land, even though they were facing a second journey. They travelled overland
to Mystic, Quebec, where Mamo had a cousin, the only person she knew from the old country. Later, when Mamo’s sons were old enough to work and her daughters to marry, they moved to Deseronto on Lake Ontario. All of this happened before Grania was born.

Mamo gave the O’Shaughnessy clock to Mother and Father when they were married. The clock is as tall as Grania’s arm is long, fingertip to shoulder, and stands on the pine table in the front hall. It has two short posts that come out at the top, posts that did not snap off during the long sea journey. Mamo gave away the clock but not the burlap bag, which is stored in the trunk along with the small wooden cross she placed there the day her husband was buried at sea.

Mamo stops the clock and turns it towards her, so that only she can see its face. She places Grania’s hand against its side. The hand accepts smoothness, cool and polished wood.

“I want you to
feel
time,” Mamo tells her. “If my hand can feel the chimes and the ticking, so can yours.”

Grania watches Mamo’s lips and stares into the shadowy end of the hall while her hand accepts the pulse of the clock. She feels the ticking against the base of her fingers and into the joints where fingers meet palm. Mamo stops the pendulum. The pulse stops and Grania looks up to Mamo’s face, and Mamo resets the hands of the clock.

“Ready? Count. How many chimes?”

New sensation.
Th-th-th
—a determined message, arriving through the skin. It stops.

Grania has been counting. “Five. Five o’clock.”

“Clever girl. Try again.”

Mamo signals.

“Not,” says Grania. “Not sounding.”

“Good. Now?”

“Three.” Each chime pushes into her hand more strongly than the chime before.

Mamo puts a key into the face of the clock and sets it for the last time. She signals, eyes laughing.

“Twelve,” says Grania, without using her hand.

“Monkey,” says Mamo. “Now you’re guessing. But you’re right. And being right has nothing to do with your thick sense.”

Father stays in his hotel office most of the time, because he has business things to do. It is hard work to own a hotel, he says. Everything must run smoothly and the guests have to be satisfied and the food must be good. Mother and her helper, Mrs. Brant, cook the food. Father sits at the head of the family table in the hotel dining room during dinner and supper but he is never there for breakfast. Father calls himself a wine merchant and sometimes he smells like wine, or damp fruit. His smells are different from everyone else’s. He has a moustache that curls at each end and smells like tobacco mixed with wax. He wears a ribbed vest with six buttons that Grania has counted, and a watch on a chain that is hooked through number five buttonhole on the vest. Father has broad thick hands, Irish hands that know how to work, he says. He has wavy hair and he wears a silver ring on the little finger of his right hand. One eyelid droops and he says that it is lazy. He has a brother in town—Uncle Am, the caretaker of the big post office building halfway along Main Street. Father’s town friends are Uncle Am and Jack Conlin, the postmaster.

Father wears a bow tie, like his own father, Bompa Jack, when Bompa Jack gets dressed up. Father has a new puppy, Carlow, who is allowed to sleep in Father’s office. Carlow has a brown patch that circles his left eye. His legs are white, and his back is brown. Grania is permitted to take Carlow outside at the back of the house, as long as they stay inside the fenced area. Carlow is never permitted upstairs in the bedrooms.

Grania shouts commands to Carlow. She makes up sounds and he obeys. But he does not obey Tress or Bernard or Patrick. It is Grania’s
voice that Carlow understands. Grania protects Carlow from the cat that prowls at the back. The cat that lives in the drive sheds.

Sometimes, when Grania is in the yard, Mrs. Brant opens the loading window at the back of the hotel where she works in the kitchen. If she sees Grania, she slides two raisin cookies across the flat ledge, one for Grania and one for Carlow. Mrs. Brant is a Mohawk woman and she has dark hair and dark eyes and a kind round face. She puts a finger to her lips when she slides the cookies across, and Grania knows that this is a secret between them. Grania loves Mrs. Brant.