Deafening (39 page)

Absolution of sin.

ock

ick

The clock ticks.

But not for Grania. The clock pulsed for Grania. Thinking about it, she could feel the pulse against the palm of her hand.

mis

Met with mishap.

Mistakes will happen.

A great misfortune.

The drills she thought she’d forgotten, the ones she had recited for Miss Amos and Miss Marks, flew into her fingertips and into her head, came off her lips like childhood rhymes. Kenan tried to say
que
and
qui
and
qua
—and his mouth remained open. They worked with
sp
and
sm
—sounds that looked so nearly alike.

And she remembered sitting at the child-size table in front of the tilting mirror at school, specially designed furniture for little deaf
mutes; staring at her own lips until they became so distorted she had to turn away.

bre

Breathe.

Breathe through your nose.

Kenan made sounds. In three weeks he was rhyming nonsense syllables.

mafasa

safama

Grania watched
s
follow
p
, pulled down by the scar of his lower lip. She watched forward and backward movement of the muscles of his unscarred cheek. She checked his profile, his good side, the way she’d been trained, yes, trained, to grasp meaning, even sideways, from the speaker’s lips and face.

pro

Proceed with care.

Proclaim the good tidings.

Words tumbled from Kenan’s mouth.

Lesson over for the week.

They joined their right hands, and squeezed.

Before walking back up Main Street to return home, there were days when Grania stayed and had tea with Tress. But Tress was pulling away; Grania felt this, even as Kenan was coming back. One day, she asked what was wrong, but, in response, Tress moved sharply about the kitchen, her arms and hands abrupt and quick, her elbows pointed out. She did not want to talk.

On the way home, Grania went over and over Tress’s reaction. She could not clear her mind; she could not take a step without seeing Tress’s face. Tress was angry and the anger settled over Grania like a cloud.

At home, she looked for Mamo, but Mamo was busy. Mamo had begun to stay in her room more and more, in what was almost a secretive way. And she was always tired when she walked through the passageway to join the family for meals in the dining room.

By the end of August, there was no longer any need for exercises, but Grania continued to stop in, to sit with Kenan and visit. Kenan was speaking well, but he had not walked out of his own house. Women from town occasionally brought berry pies, molasses bread, jars of currant jelly. Tress accepted each gift at the front door, along with messages for her husband, but Kenan never came to the door himself, never allowed himself to be seen.

Tress had become more remote, and Grania began to wonder if she should visit at all. She resolved to speak with Tress today, ask if she no longer wanted her to come. She glanced up the stairs as she entered—she had not been up there since before Kenan came home. She thought of the empty room across the hall from the main bedroom. And the pain on Tress’s face. There was always pain, mixed with anger.

Tress was wearing her summer jacket when Grania arrived; she quickly signed that she had to go out. There was no opportunity to speak.

Kenan was in the glassed-in veranda, seated in one of the wicker chairs. The other chair had been arranged to face him, and Grania sat down. She was weary and her limbs felt heavy. A gloomy sky streaked with grey hung over the bay. She had nothing to say, nothing to tell. She looked out at the water. This was their bay; this was their town; these were their lives. They had all been children together, their futures before them: Tress and Grania and Kenan
and their friend Orryn, who was still alive in France. And then, at nine years of age, Grania had been sent away and her life had become separate. But her life had been separate before that, too. She began to talk. Face to face, this is what she told Kenan. Unplanned, it all spilled out.

Those years they were growing up as children together in a company town. A Rathbun town with an exploding population. Early years, after her deafness but before she was sent to the Belleville school. Everything Kenan had been hearing with his ears, she had been stowing in pictures in her memory. Different childhoods, same town. They might have been on different planets. Had she missed things? She didn’t know what she’d missed. She had constructed her world in her own way—without background conversation, without overheard information, hearsay or noise. Protected by Mother and Father, extras added by Mamo and Tress, later by Patrick, and whatever could be picked up from Bernard, who was older than the others and most often at work in the hotel.

She’d learned that she had to have an extra eye.
Dulcie dreams her own third eye
. She needed it when she was a child and she needed it now.

“Tell me,” said Kenan. His careful lips. “I want to know.”

Tell
.

“The names of people, the people you could hear,” she told him. “I learned them from the way I could see and from what I could put into pictures. Mr. Dow had no teeth on one side, the left. His first and second wives died. The third was young but she had an old face. Tress and I called her the old child bride.

“Father O’Leary had a birthmark behind his right ear. It was shaped like the pipe he clamped between his teeth. When he died, it was a hot summer—do you remember? I was home from Belleville. He was laid out in the coolest room of the house beside the church, a downstairs bedroom. The window was open and the wet cloths were kept in a basin of cool water on the bureau. Two women took turns wringing out the cloths and changing them, putting them over his
face so it wouldn’t turn black before visitation. Mamo took me with her. She told me not to be afraid, that life and death went together. Just before the mourners arrived, the basin of water was shoved under the bed.

“Mrs. Grimes was so large her body moved side to side even though her feet walked forward. She looked as if she would never make any progress. Anton, her husband, owned the store. When I see his name printed, I still think,
The man with the beautiful name
, and I say to myself,
An-ton
.

“Frenchie, who used to work at the mill, had wavy hair. I trusted him but not Meryl, his wife. She had sneaky eyes. The family moved away, remember?”

“More,” said Kenan, the years of his own childhood washing over him in pictures.

“Kay—every minute of the day, held her cheeks as if she’d swallowed a secret. She still does. She’s the best knitter in town. We saw how good she was when she started coming to the Red Cross. She still comes, even though her husband…”

Months after Kay’s husband, Lawrence, had been killed, and after Grania had moved home again, she still had not gone to Kay’s house. She knew that Lawrence had been sent out one night to a listening post in No Man’s Land, and that the post had suffered a direct hit. The shell could have killed anyone but it had chosen Lawrence.

By visiting Kay, she would have to admit that one more young man from the town was dead. Mother tried to make her go; Mamo urged her to visit. But Grania could not. Not because she didn’t care, but because she cared so much. And Jim had only recently left.

She had seen Kay with Lawrence before he left for the war; their love was visible. Kay’s baby was born after Lawrence marched away. Lawrence never saw his son except in the one photograph Kay sent across the ocean. The boy was now three.

When Grania was able to release some of her own selfish fear, she went, by herself, to visit. The two women hugged each other in the
doorway, and sat at the kitchen table across from each other. Grania could easily follow the words on Kay’s lips; she had known her all her life. She wanted to ask how Kay was managing. How the days were bearable. But she did not.

She did read the word
barren
on Kay’s lips. “The house is barren, an empty shell. It isn’t a home.” Kay hated everything about it except her child, whom she loved fiercely. But she did not want to return to live under her parents’ roof. Shortly after that, she moved in with Runaway Granny. Though her grandmother was known only as Granny then.

But Kay had found ways of supporting herself. She was hired to do etching at the Clapperton glass factory. She worked in the basement alongside twelve other girls from the town. And she took in sewing. She had six paying customers. She could knit anything and she was good with a crochet hook. Kay had skated with Grania the past winter, when the ice was thick on the bay.

Had Grania been speaking aloud about Kay? From Kenan’s face, she saw that she might have been, though she wasn’t sure.

“Go on,” he said. “I want to hear.”

It was true; he did want to hear. She could tell from his one eye. He wanted to hear what she could see.

“Mr. McClelland, the baker, has a stern face and a pucker at the side of his mouth. He holds his wife’s hand in the summer. They sit on the stoop at the side of their house on Main Street, and he doesn’t look stern at all when he’s with her. Cora’s daughter, Jewel, pinned Bernard with a white feather and I hated her for that, though Mamo told me I should never hate. Jewel used to love to dress up in fancy clothes. Remember the borrowed jewellery and the fancy lace-up boots? She moved to Ottawa after she married. It was when she came back for a visit that she pinned Bernard.

“Billy Needles looks like the youngest in the family but he’s the eldest. He’s still alive—at the war.”

She bit her lip. This wasn’t meant to be about who was alive and who was not.

Keep going
.

“Marguerite has a twin brother who moved to Montreal. I could never say her name correctly after I saw it printed. The spelling confused me. When she talks about her twin, she looks to the left as if he’s invisibly attached to her side. Mr. Whyte, the butcher, moves his head right and left when he speaks, and his wife, Doree, talks so quickly I’ve never been able to lip read a word she says. Do they understand each other? Mr. Felix has a moustache that hangs over both lips; he’s hopeless.

“Mrs. Martinez has a Spanish accent that takes me by surprise every time I meet her. Any word she says that contains an
r
and I’m in trouble. Her daughter has a lisp. There’s a space between her front teeth and the way she shapes the letter
s
is different from the way everyone else does. I understand her. I just have to remind myself to adjust when we have a conversation.

“Minnie’s hair is as straight as a yard of pump water—that’s what Mamo says. Minnie makes me laugh. Every time we meet, she has a happy thing to say. Her husband has a thin nose and a beard that interferes. He and I have never had a conversation, but he has the most beautiful hands of any man in town.”

Except my Jim, but he’s not from the town
.

“The Jamieson twins go to the side windows of the glass factory on their way to school because they know the seconds are placed on the inside sills to cool. They ask the girls for them and then they sell them door to door for a few coppers.

“Jack Conlin chews tobacco. When he’s not chewing I understand what he says. And Cora—she’s the easiest person of all to lip read and the one I wish I couldn’t. She used to tell me what a sweet little voice I have. But not any more.”

Cora, who had said to Tress in disbelief when she’d first learned about Grania’s marriage: “She married a hearing boy? Your sister. A hearing boy.”

Grania stopped. She was running on and on. Blurting it out. Soon
she would be telling him that she used to see words in twisted yellow rope.

“All of this.” Kenan was speaking softly, to himself. “You see all of this.”

What Grania was seeing was that Kenan’s face was beautiful, as it had always been. Only now it was beautiful and terrible at the same time. He did not flinch under her inspection, and she
was
inspecting, looking into the ripple of scars, the obliterated eye, the deep folds on a surface that had once been smooth skin.
No one else looks at his face
, she thought.
He doesn’t give anyone a chance
.

“Do you know what I said, Grania? When the sentry challenged me? I came close to being shot because of it.”

Her body went cold. Had she read his lips correctly?
Who
challenged? What had Kenan said? She knew he had not once spoken about the war since coming home. Not even to Tress. Grania knew she must pay attention. She had to see every word. She had to read past and through the scars.

“What do you mean? Say slowly.”

Tell
.

“The sentry, the guard.” Kenan was speaking carefully, slowly, directly to her. “He gave the challenge and I was supposed to give the counter-challenge, the password. I approached from the side. We’d been sent out on a trench raid. But shells started bursting around us and we scattered and I was hit. I lost my way and came back at the wrong point, and I stumbled into the post…it was after midnight…it was so dark. So much noise. There was no silence in that place. The boys went mad from the sound. Some tried to dig their own graves.

“I had to prove I was not the enemy—not Fritz. I had to do it in a split second. The sentry was crouched at a corner—sandbags were piled high, at an angle. I had lost my direction. I saw a glimmer of bayonet in the dark. I knew he was nervous, I could tell from his voice. I thought sound was coming from his rifle, off the blade. My
arm wouldn’t move. I was holding my other hand to my face. I had no rifle. I didn’t know how badly my cheek was blown apart. I could barely see. I said, ‘Don’t shoot me,’ but I couldn’t think what I was supposed to say. I knew then that I was going to pass out. I couldn’t think of anything except,
Get past this man, Get past this stranger
. And then a word popped out of my head. I heard my throat make—my mouth was full of blood—I heard my throat make the sound
Wooms
. Your sound, Grania. Our old password. The only sound I ever made that gained me entry to anything.”