Deafening

by Frances Itani

  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 moni
tor 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.

  Bless them both, said Granny Moore.

  Give the password, was the next demand.

  Go at once for the nearest doctor.

  What is to become of us? asked Dulcie.

  There is a dictionary at the back of the schoolroom, on a shelf above the water cooler. Weeks after she starts school, Grania works up enough courage during recess to stand on tiptoe and lift the book down. It is heavier than she has imagined. Her arms sink as she places it on a lower shelf and props it open. She finds the pages with the letter G—the letter that starts her name. Column after column and page after page are filled with G words, hundreds more than she knows how to count. Her finger slides from one to the next, down and up and down again.

  Grania has questions about all of these words. She is brimming with questions but there is no one to ask. When the bell rings again, the plump teacher with the pointed teeth gives a lesson about nouns. She prints a list of nouns on the board and points to each word with her yardstick: desk, tree, horse, rain. She turns to survey the children’s faces and smiles as if these four nouns hold remarkable secrets. Every word contains a vowel. Teacher turns her back again. Grania watches as more and more words are added to the list, but she knows nothing of their sounds.

  After school, Grania fetches Carlow and takes him around the back of the house, where she sits on the stoop. Carlow is getting big now. Grania shouts commands so that he will understand her and obey.

  “AY,” she shouts, and Carlow wags his tail.

  “EE,” she shouts, and Carlow sits.

  “EYE,” and Carlow leaps towards her and licks her hand.

  Grania mixes up the sounds: YEW and O and EYE and AY and she throws in sk and ch and Carlow knows what to do. Carlow understands Grania’s voice.

  In the evenings, Mamo helps. Her long index finger moves in slow vertical strokes; her wrist bobs to fill the space. “Knee,” she says. “Sounds like tree.” She points to her knee and writes through the air, k-n-e-e, to show how the k slips in like a trick. The k hangs in the air after Mamo’s finger finishes writing. The k has to be ignored when Grania speaks knee with her voice. It is one more thing she is supposed to know.

  “Look for a little word inside a big one,” Mamo says. She reaches for the Sunday book and chooses a page that has one word beneath the picture.

  “Seashore.” Mamo’s finger points beneath the picture of two children playing on a beach. “Break the word in two. The first part is like the letter C. Now, add it to shore. C-shore.” Mamo makes shore with her lips.

  Grania is intimately aware of Mamo’s lips—soft and careful but never slowed. She studies the word as it falls. She says C and shore over and over again. She twists the word into yellow rope and stows it in her memory. This is how it sounds.

  Now she studies the picture on the page. Sea is where she would like to go some day. Sea is different from bay. She can look at the Bay of Quinte from her bedroom window any day. But the C-shore she has in mind is not the one Mamo’s finger points to now; it is another that Grania has found at the end of the book.

  In the end picture, a girl in a dress and sash and stylish hat is caught in waves that have swept up past her knees. She is falling sideways, but just before she goes under, she is saved by a fisherman. Or perhaps he is a lighthouse keeper—a light is blinking from a tower on a cliff above the scene. The man has a beard and wears a seaman’s hat, not unlike the one worn by the bearded captain on the cover of the book. It is clear that the man is taking long strides through the water and that he has every intention of rescuing the girl. He reaches out his arms and props her as she falls. For reasons Grania cannot see, the girl—her eyes bright with fear—does not seem to be able to help herself. Grania studies the girl and wonders.

  Mamo helps with the caption: “DAN CAUGHT THE CHILD IN HIS ARMS.”

  If Dan hadn’t reached out, would the girl keep sinking through the waves? Would she fight her way back to the surface? Grandfather O’Shaughnessy is under the sea, but that is different. Mamo told her the story of Grandfather dying on the ship after they left the beautiful land called Ireland. That is when Mamo became a widow. A sheet was wrapped around Grandfather’s body—around and around. Prayers were said and he was dropped over the side of the ship and buried at sea. Women were wailing, but not Mamo, not Mother. Their grief was silent. “Some grief is so big, it has to be held in,” Mamo has told her. Grandfather is under water now, somewhere in the big ocean.

  When Grania is alone, she goes to the drawer in her closet that holds her cutouts, and she brings out an earless girl who looks the same age as herself. She unfastens the shoulder tabs of the girl’s automobile coat and the waist tabs of a long skirt with large buttons. After that, she finds the remnants of Mr. Eaton’s bruised and cut-up catalogue and searches until she finds a picture she knows is there. It is the only bathing suit for girls or ladies in the entire catalogue. At first, it is hard to tell that it is a bathing suit at all, except for the scene that has been drawn behind the girl who wears it on the page. There are wiggly waves for water, and sand, and tiny figures sitting or playing in front of a sharply drawn horizon.

  Grania cuts off the girl’s head because part of an ear is showing. She trims around the neck, the sailor collar, the short puffed sleeves, the narrow waist. She needs only the bathing suit itself. The bathing skirt reaches down to the knees where it meets the girl’s high black stockings. Grania ignores the stockings and cuts off the girl’s legs. She leaves enough space for tabs at the shoulders, lifts out the suit and fits it perfectly to her own cutout girl.

  Her girl will go to the C-shore. Her girl, without ears. She will play all day if she wants to; she will kneel in the sand and let it run through her fingers; she will wade into the wiggly waves and hold her breath and duck under; she will open her eyes and feel water pressing from above. No one will see her or know where she is. When she wishes to surface, up she will come, popping into sight between waves the way the ladies’ cardboard heads pop through their marten collars.

  Grania moves the girl about and practises the C-word by sin
ging it into the side of the earless cardboard head. After she puts the girl and the bathing suit away in the drawer, she sits on the side of the bed and sings the sea word into the roof of her own mouth. She shapes her cheeks around it. Some day she will be able to say all of the words in the Sunday book. She will learn the breath and movement of each. If she makes a mistake, she will try again. She will try until she knows every sound.

  But words have no sound. Not for Grania. Only feeling, as they form inside her mouth and vibrate against the lining of her throat.

  “You should be at a proper school for deaf children,” Mamo tells her. “You’re losing time. You would learn new things. There is a special school in Belleville.”

  Belleville is the city that is farther west along the bay. Grania travelled there on the steamer last fall when Mother took her and Tress shopping for winter clothes. The steamer left Deseronto in the morning and stopped at Northport and carried on to Belleville. They were on the steamer for two hours.

  “Would I have to sit still? Like in Deseronto school? At my desk?”