Deafening (6 page)

“You name her, Mother,” Agnes said. “You helped her into life. You name her.”

Mamo thought for only a second.
Gráinne.
But unless people were Irish they wouldn’t know how to pronounce the name when they saw it written. “We’ll spell it the English, the Canadian way,” she told Agnes. “Grania.” As she spoke, she saw Agnes’ colour come back. She saw the flush through her cheeks and she felt the sense of well-being in the room. Agnes dropped into a heavy sleep.

“Mamo?” Grania’s fingers were tapping at her sleeve.

“I named you because your name means love. I felt the love coming right at me. From you to me and back again.” Mamo made her sign for baby, rocking her arms. She wiggled her fingers to show the love that moved into her heart and went back and forth between them.

“Did my ears hear when I was a baby?” Grania knows the answer to this.

“Your ears heard every sound. I sang to you that first night and many nights after. You liked me to sing ‘I don’t want to play in your yard.’ That was the song you liked best.” Mamo sings the title to herself as she speaks, and nods, remembering,
Yes.

Grania likes this part best, the naming, and the ears hearing, and the song, and especially the love wiggling like fingers, back and forth between them.

“Graw-nee-ya!” she shouts, louder than she should have. Mother comes to the door of the laundry and stands looking at the two of them. Mamo knows she is there because she has heard the steps behind her back. Grania knows Mother is there because she can tell from Mamo’s face. Neither turns around to look.

“I’m telling the story of her name,”‘ Mamo says to her own back. “Again.”

And Agnes, who knows the story well because it is her story, too, has her own rush of remembering while she stands behind them at the laundry door. Her memory is of the long, deep fear during gestation that ended in the unexpected wave of strength and happiness that washed through her after the child was born. It was the night of the Great Fire and she remembers having difficulty breathing, and then joy at seeing her red-haired child. Her husband was away, not even in the house when Grania was born. An emptiness there. And after that, milk fever, which kept her low for weeks; and then, work, the move to the hotel, three children to care for—despite the help from Mamo—fatigue, more fear with another pregnancy, her survival of the birth of Patrick, and then Grania’s illness, the cold open passageway in winter, the scarlet fever that robbed the child’s hearing. Grania’s deafness was Agnes’ fault. She could do nothing but throw herself into work; there was always work. All of this, in seconds, sweeps the initial flush of happiness away.

Mamo hears her daughter’s footsteps recede.

“More,” Grania says. “More fire story, Mamo.”

But that is as far as Mamo will travel into memory today. Instead, her lips say, “Monday’s child.”

“Fair of face,” Grania blurts—a verse she once knew by heart.

Mamo looks at her and smiles but she is not surprised. She says only, “Ah, it’s still there.”

What she does not describe to Grania is the flood of images that comes to her now. Before Agnes’ labour had begun, Mamo threw a shawl over her shoulders and walked rapidly through wind and dusty streets to the eastern section of town, thinking she might be
of help. An unnatural darkness hovered like a low cloud as she walked. Smokestacks were down near the waterfront; wires were tangled; a chaos of trunks and chairs and mattresses and paraphernalia clogged the streets. She saw a chamber pot, a brass candlestick stuck inside. She remembers women in skirts who climbed the roofs with men, all pouring buckets of water handed up from below, losing the battle as they fought. A man brushed by with a bedraggled rooster tucked under his arm, the rooster beady-eyed in stillness, its feathers singed and black. When Mamo reached Second Street she saw a man she knew from church, Mr. O’Reilly, his mouth a perfect
O
, running from his flaming house with a china plate that held three boiled potatoes. She reached for him but he pulled away and balanced the plate as he passed and continued up the hill. It was the only item he’d taken from his house. When she turned back to look, she saw him sitting on the ground at the top of the hill, hunched over the plate of potatoes as if this were the most precious treasure saved from the conflagration that day.

On Thomas Street, Scottish Mrs. Hunter, her face and arms black with soot, was being kept forcibly from her burning house behind neighbours who stood in a line while men and women tried in vain to get the flames under control. Mrs. Hunter, who had been running back and forth behind the line of neighbours, began to wail in despair when popping noises were suddenly heard from inside her burning pantry. The first pop and the series of loud pops that followed came from jars of preserves, each adding its own sound to the bizarre rhythm. On the fringes of a tiny corner of an inferno that threatened half the town, Mrs. Hunter wept with fresh cries at every new explosion from her pantry shelf. “Oh, my chili sauce!” she cried. “Oh, my plum preserves!” With every pop she moved more deeply to the centre of hysteria. The fact that she had managed to evacuate her seven children to safety before her husband raced up from the waterfront was not mentioned. Nor was the fact that walls had collapsed, that every stick of furniture was gone, that the babies’ beds had burned to ashes. As each jar of preserves was
heard to explode, Mrs. Hunter could only moan, “Oh, my gooseberry jam!” Perhaps, Mamo thought at the time, Mrs. Hunter’s body was remembering the back-breaking work of the previous autumn. Bending over the wood stove, lifting heavy sealers with tongs, up and out of the bubble and steam of the speckled, now melted, pot.

But the worst of the images that comes to Mamo now is the one of the horses. Three drunken men—it was easy to see that they were drunk—were crammed into a wide rig and, with horrible cruelty, they were whipping and forcing a pair of horses down a narrow street between rows of burning houses. The fear of the animals was terrible to see, and men and women shouted, trying to stop the drunken men. This happened quickly—the roar of flames, the clacketing of the rig, the heavy horses whipped to a lather through their fear, the wooden wheels bumping and veering between flames—but, quick as it was, Mamo never forgot. On her way home, retracing her steps through the streets, she was not surprised to come upon one of the horses, dead. The massive bulk of its lustreless coat rose up like a sudden dark hill between road and boardwalk. Dead from fear, probably. Its heart stopped. She never forgot the sight, or the cruelty of the men.

That night, after Grania’s birth, while the town breathed drifted particles in the wake of the fire, while beds were found for those seeking shelter, while thieves robbed purses right out of victims’ trunks in the street, while farmers came from miles around to help, there had been no need to call in Uncle Am, who always came in after every birth to puff a cigar around the rooms, upstairs and down, to rid the house of birth odour and the scent of blood. Nor was it necessary to burn cloth on top of the wood stove as the midwives did during their cleanup—not with half the town smouldering.

As Agnes’ husband, Dermot, approached during his return journey with Bernard and Tress, his lungs inhaled smoke and fine particles of ash and he watched an unnatural glow in the sky from miles away as he urged his horses forward. His heart tightened. He took
shelter under the roof of an abandoned shed on the outskirts of town during the storm, and after that the wheels of the wagon churned through heavy mud. He would not force the horses. When he finally brought his children home it was to a newly arrived, newly named daughter, and a town half-gone. The smell of cinder and ash was to penetrate his and everyone else’s nostrils for days and weeks to come.

Strangers travelled from far away to murmur and stare at the ruins and debris: five hundred people arrived from Napanee; a special steamer excursion came from Picton; seventy bicyclists from Kingston rode into town one day, and three hundred the day after that. On Friday, the fourth day after the fire, a dwarf arrived by train and strutted on his short thick legs down the centre of Main Street to see the devastation. He was followed by crowds of children who shouted out to anyone passing that he’d come from Toronto, that he was an Englishman by birth. After the spectacle of the strutting dwarf, more people continued to come, and they gawked, and some helped as residents cleared and constructed and tried to renew their businesses and homes. But even with all the cleaning up, later in the summer—especially after rain—the oppressive charred-timber odour was still settling heavily into the earth beneath the town.

Chapter 2

If your friend says “pea” and you think it “bee” or “me,” you are perfectly correct, for you have seen the right movements. Do not worry that you cannot tell the difference.

Lessons in Lip-Reading

Grania steps out of her house, runs down the wooden ramp of sidewalk, crosses the dry road beside Tress and steps up to the boards on the other side. When the boards dwindle, she continues along the edge of the road where the dirt is packed and grooved. Watching her sister closely, she imitates every move: the way Tress carries her wide-strapped satchel, the way she positions her arms.

“Stop,” Tress says. “Don’t be a copycat.”

But Grania can’t stop. She has to know what Tress knows. Tress is her interpreter, her safety net. Tress will fill in the blanks when messages come at her from the frightening world they are headed for, called
School.

Tress shrugs and keeps walking but this time she half-faces Grania. Her upper body turns to the side so her face can be seen and her lips can be read. Using their private language and adding mime, she reviews the rules—though the rules have been told countless times at home.

“Line up, first bell. Girls on one side, boys on the other.”

“I won’t hear the bell.”

“The monitor holds the bell. Watch her hand. Run to the doors.” Tress’s fingers, despite holding the satchel, run up and down her
opposite arm. “Hang your coat on a hook in the cloakroom. Watch the others. Do what they do. Watch the teacher. When she calls your name say ‘Here.’”

“I won’t know when.”

“Watch my face. I’ll nod, and you can say ‘Here,’ fast fast.”

“Herehere,” Grania says, practising. “What if
you’re
not here?”

“Watch the person ahead of you on the list. I’ll tell you who.”

There is more. “No whispering or talking.”

“I talk to you.”

“I’ll be with the older girls. You won’t be allowed. We can talk at recess. Kenan will be there, in my class. And Orryn will be there. He might be in your row.”

Grania isn’t thinking about Kenan and Orryn, their friends who live in side-by-side houses on Mill Street. She knows they’ll be there. What she wants is to go over the list one more time—what is forbidden, what is not.

Tress hasn’t finished. “In arithmetic don’t count on your fingers. Teacher hates finger-counting. She carries a yardstick but she doesn’t whack.”

Grania has missed most of this except
whack.
She has not considered
whack.
She hasn’t thought about arithmetic either, although Bernard helps her to count coins when Father is sometimes out of the hotel. Grania sneaks around the corner and into the closed bar and Bernard stops his work and opens the cash register drawer and lets her count coppers, five-cent pieces, tens and twenty-fives. Sometimes he gives her a five-cent piece for herself. One that she can take to Meagher’s store to spend.

“If you need a drink,”—Tress makes their private sign for water, tapping at her lips—“there’s a cooler.”

Grania’s head is going to burst. Tress knows all of these things that she herself will never know.

“If you’re called to the chalkboard, the chalk is on the ledge.”

Is this, then, familiar ground? Will there be a chalkboard like the one she carries in her head? Every word she has learned with Mamo
is coiled against the white and shining surface of her imagination. She has never told Mamo about this. Or Tress. Nor has she told them that every word she sees on this surface is made of rope letters—twisted yellow rope.

The chalkboard at school, she quickly sees on her first day, is not white but black. It stretches across the front of the room and along the wall on one side. It holds numbers and sums and words and lines, and at the end of the day it is wet and slick and dries unevenly after the monitor washes it down. A cardboard alphabet in its proper order marches along the upper edge of the board. Grania knows the letters perfectly because long ago, after the scarlet fever, she and Mamo printed and cut out their own alphabet at home. Now, Mamo prints in the air, her index finger forming words beside her as if the air is a sheet of paper that Grania is supposed to see. The words are invisible but Grania sees them. Mamo used to print in capitals, but during the past weeks the printing has become writing. Air writing, she and Grania call it. Mamo twists her upper body to the side when she writes the message in the air, so it won’t be mirror-reading for Grania.

A chart of vowels is on the classroom wall. On the first day, the children mouth the sounds: A – EE – EYE – O – YEW. Grania follows their lip and throat movements as they chant. But vowels, she quickly learns, are unpredictable. Once they move inside words, they can’t be trusted because the way they are said is forever changing.

Grania is never called to the board. She sits in her desk, one of twenty-nine children in a room that holds a wood stove enclosed by a wooden barrier on four sides. The other twenty-eight students are paired, two to a desk. Grania sits alone and watches moving mouths and lips and tongues. Her teacher, a plump young woman with a round face and small pointed teeth, smiles at her the first day and takes her by the hand to her seat but, after that, she has no extra time to look in Grania’s direction. Words fly through the air and fall, static and dead.

Only the captions Grania has learned at home with Mamo take turns shifting and sliding in her head. This is what Mamo has given her, the gift of pictures and words, learned and remembered and stored. On the board, she recognizes words she already knows, but she learns few new ones. Instead, she sits in her seat and amuses herself silently by reviewing in her memory the captions in the
Sunday
book, the ones she practises in the evenings with Mamo. She twists and turns each letter, stringing words together with yellow rope.