Deafening

by Frances Itani

“I don’t suppose your feet will get pins and needles.”

  Did she see the lips correctly? Pins and needles?

  If at special school they put pins and needles in the children’s feet, she will never go. She will run away instead. Like the girl in the Sunday book.

  “Goodness,” said Mother. “Dulcie seems to have run off.”

  Grania is playing on the veranda with Patrick and Tress. They have invented a game. They are supposed to shout out a sound and bounce from chair to veranda railing and back to chair. They have to touch the railing; they have to be quick. If they aren’t quick, they’re out. The last one to reach the chair is out. Grania must watch closely. So far, she has not been out.

  Two children come out of the hotel dining room with their parents and hop down the steps. The family is staying in an upstairs room of the hotel. The children stare over at the house veranda, a few feet away. They would like to join the game. They hear Grania’s shout. It is not like the shout of the others.

  The children’s mother steps forward. “What’s the matter with your sister?” she asks Tress. She sees that Tress is the eldest.

  Tress steps in front of Grania. The game stops.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my sister,” she says. “She’s my sister, that’s all.”

  Patrick shouts and leaps to the chair. Tress and Grania go back to the game. They are making a ruckus. Grania has still not been out.

  There is no one in the kitchen and no one upstairs. Grania goes to the parlour to see who is in the house. The sun is down, the parlour curtains closed. It is only after she is inside the room that she realizes she is alone.

  Darkness has fallen abruptly. She turns to face the hall, but now the hall is dark. Mamo is not in her rocker, though someone has brought the rocker in from the veranda. Grania stands behind it, her heart pounding wildly. She inches back and flattens against the corner wall. She wants to move forward to get to the doorway, but she can’t; she is pinned by the dark. Someone will have to come and turn on a lamp. She calls out—she does not know what noise she has made. She calls out again. Where are Mamo, Tress, Patrick, Bernard, Mother, Father? Where is Carlow? They have left her alone. Shadows press around her. Her feet lock to the boards of the floor. When Mamo comes in and switches on a lamp, she is startled by a young body propelled forward off the wall like a stone from a sling. Grania rushes into her arms. Mamo comforts and soothes until the child is no longer afraid.

  After school, Mother gives Grania a folded note. She is to carry it to Mr. Whyte at the butcher shop on Main Street.

  Grania doesn’t want to go. She wants to slip away to the dugout, the new place where she plays with Kenan and Orryn and Tress. She turns away and pretends not to see, but Mother forces her attention back. “Give the note. Wait for the meat. Come straight home.”

  Mother’s face is dark; her lips are tight because she has been extra busy all day. Mamo has been in the hotel kitchen helping Mrs. Brant, but there is more work to do. Mamo is tired now; her arthritis bothers her. She is back in the house, upstairs in her room, lying down.

  Grania walks along Main Street. It is late October, a sunny afternoon. She is wearing her white blouse and her navy skirt. Every time her foot presses down on a cedar board in the sidewalk, a trill enters her foot. Music, she thinks. My feet are making music.

  Mr. Whyte takes the note from her hand and she stands to one side while he waits on two women who were in the shop before her. The soles of Grania’s shoes are buried in sawdust that is strewn over the oiled floor. She shuffles her feet. The room is filled with choking odours. Mr. Whyte is wearing his blood apron; she has never seen him without it. Behind the counter, close to his hands, the scaly feet of a dead hen, stiff as yellow twigs, point to the ceiling.

  He finishes wrapping a string of blotchy sausages and wipes his hands, adding more specks of blood to the apron. He turns to Grania to speak but the voice part of him cannot be seen. She looks out through the screen door because the light in the shop is dull and because Mr. Whyte keeps turning his head, right and left, before he finishes saying his words. He shrugs to himself and checks the note and picks out a heavy cut of raw meat and slaps it onto waxed brown paper. Now Grania watches again. His hands weigh the meat on the scale. He lifts the edges of the paper and his fingers tie the package with long string that dangles near his face from a roll above his head. The roll is stuck on a hook in the ceiling; every part of it is splattered with dots of dried blood. He picks up a knife—there is blood on that, too—and he cuts the string and knots it outside the package.

  Grania accepts the parcel of meat. “Thank you,” she says, but the words stick in her throat and come out wrong. Keep the voice close. It’s good that Mamo isn’t here. Here to hear. Grania smiles, immensely pleased with herself because she knows the difference. Like see and sea. I see the sea in the picture. She thinks of the earless cutout girl, and the C-shore, and Grandfather O’Shaughnessy at the bottom of the ocean, and Mamo telling her that he is at peace. Mamo says that in the beautiful land called Ireland, fresh breezes blow in every day from the sea.

  Mr. Whyte looks at her again and smiles because he thinks she is smiling at him. He picks up a pencil and enters the cost of the meat in the ledger. He bows formally as if he is part of a picture in her Sunday book. Grania wants to get away from the odours in his shop. Dulcie grabbed the package and ran. Unless she can get outside this minute, the smell of animal blood will never come off her clothes. She shoves the push-bar that is nailed diagonally across the screen door, runs down the short ramp to the boardwalk, and keeps running until she reaches the next block.

  She slows to look around, lifts the package to her chest and presses tightly. Soon the workers will be spilling out of the factories and mills and will be heading home for their supper. She sees Kay, a girl who sits beside Tress at school. Kay smiles and her hand makes a small wave. Kay has a kind face that seems to hold a secret. Her cheeks look as if they are hiding acorns inside. Grania likes Kay, and waves back.

  She reaches the post office corner and is about to step down to the ridges and grooves of dried mud before she crosses the street, but she feels something wet against her skin. She looks down and sees, with horror, that a crimson stain has seeped across the front of her white blouse.

  Trouble. She runs around to the side door of the post office and up the wide staircase, up another flight, up and up, and she bangs on Aunt Maggie’s door. Sometimes when she visits, Uncle Am lets her climb to the clock tower above the apartment, but not today. Uncle Am will be working somewhere in the building.

  Aunt Maggie opens the door, sees the red splotch, sees the package, sees the tears and pulls Grania in by the hand. She sets the meat on the table, unbuttons Grania’s blouse and helps her off with it, her lips making the shape tst-tst as she shakes her head.

  “We’ll have to fix this. Your mother…”

  She wraps Grania in a dressing gown and goes to work, soaking and rinsing the blouse in a bucket of cold water. With each quick rinse and dip, the water becomes red and then pink and pale and finally clear.

  “We’ll have to be quick,” Aunt Maggie says. “Before your mother sends out a posse.” She lifts the irons that are always at the ready on the back of the stove, and exchanges them one by one, pressing the blouse against a towel that she has folded onto a corner of the kitchen table.

  “No time flat,” she says, but Grania misses the words. The blouse is crisp and dry, except for the seams.

  “Can’t be helped,” Aunt Maggie says. She holds it out for Grania to slip into. The blouse sticks to Grania’s skin but the stain is no longer there.

  Grania runs for the door and down the stairs, runs back up again because she’s forgotten the package, holds it away from her blouse and runs the rest of the way home.

  Mother is busy in the dining room when Grania slips through the passageway and into the hotel kitchen. Mrs. Brant is there; she holds a finger to her lips. Grania slides the package onto the pull-out metal surfa
ce of the cupboard, and Mrs. Brant slips her a raisin cookie and shoos her back to the house. Mother does not even know that Grania is late.

  The following afternoon, Grania brings a new word to Mamo. A word she has taken from Aunt Maggie’s lips. Paw-C. A little word inside a big one?

  “Who said it? When?” Mamo is interested, perks up, sits straight in the rocker that has been carried out to the veranda. She tightens her fringed shawl around her shoulders.

  “Aunt Maggie. She said Mother will send out a Paw-C.”

  Mamo thinks for a moment.

  “A cowboy word,” she says. “In America. Though we were not unfamiliar with the word in Ireland. The sheriff and his posse chase a bad person.”

  “Oh,” Grania says, not understanding. She has seen the last two words on Mamo’s lips—bad person.

  It will be her secret, then. Hers and Aunt Maggie’s. She will never tell anyone, not even Tress, about the Paw-C or about being a bad person or about the blood.

  “Did you choose a picture?” Mamo says, opening the Sunday book.

  She did, but now her fingers turn to a different page, not the one she’d chosen for today.

  A boy in a wide-brimmed hat is about to leave a campfire, and he is looking back. He has a sad face. A short rope dangles from his hands. A cowboy, seated on the ground beside the fire, threatens the boy with his fist. Another cowboy is rolled up inside a blanket, asleep. DON’T COME BACK WITHOUT THE HORSE.

  Mamo reads the words beneath the picture. She nods her head. “Well. You picked a hard one. This may take a few days but we’ll work on it as long as it takes. One word at a time. Watch carefully. If you can say a word, you can use it. Don’t ever forget.”

  Friday afternoon, Grania and Tress run out of the girls’ entrance, Orryn and Kenan from the boys’. For hours, Grania has done nothing but sit. Every time she tries to read Teacher’s lips, Teacher moves her head or turns her body away. After lunch, Grania was given a picture book to look through but she rested her head on its cover and fell asleep. Orryn poked her in the back to wake her, and Teacher didn’t even notice.

  She doesn’t want to be bothered with me, Grania tells herself. She slows to a walk. Agitated, one hand taps the side of her skirt to make a rhythm. Can’t be – baw-thered. Teacher – can’t be – baw-thered.

  Kenan, who has the longest legs, is the first of the four friends to run down towards the water, east along Main Street, past the post office, past Naylor’s Theatre, across the road and through the hidden path to the edge of the old Rathbun pier. Grania, sluggish today, is last; the other three have disappeared inside the dugout. She scuffs along shore, checks in all directions to be certain no one is around, ducks under the widest board and enters the tiny room that has been scraped from the earth. Above the dirt ceiling, planks of the rotting pier extend a few feet over water. The pier was abandoned long ago, long before the children took it over. The dugout beneath is carefully boarded on the sides—work done by Kenan and Orryn. Only the four of them know about this secret place and where to raise the widest board that allows them to slip inside.

  The room is large enough to hold them if they scrunch and face each other, two and two. Narrow boards have been nailed together to make a small bench on one side. On the other side are a milking stool and a driftwood stump. Grania, last in, sits on the stump and tucks her skirt around her so it won’t drag the ground. Sometimes baby frogs hop along the floor. The dugout is dry but holds the odours of dampness and old fire, the fire that swept through the town the day Grania was born. The earth floor is hard and smooth, like Bompa Jack’s root cellar at the farm. Light filters down, seeping through an opening between boards—streamers of afternoon sun.

  “Password?” This, from Orryn, half-heartedly.

  “Wooms.”

  Grania makes the wiggly worm sign with her index finger and they all laugh, Grania too, because the worm password always makes them laugh. It is Grania’s word and they say it Grania’s way, Wooms.

  Grania looks to Tress to see what the others have been talking about. Tress’s face is self-important, as if she is about to make an announcement. Her dark hair has been braided and pinned up by Mother, which makes her look older. She raises her shoulders, lifts her chin and glances around at the other three.

  “I’m going to marry Kenan,” she says. “When I grow up.” She half-turns and her finger writes marry in the air beside her. Grania reads the spacious letters that link up before they disappear.

  Orryn, whose hair is so black it looks as if he has slapped water on it to flatten it down, laughs as if this is preposterous. Orryn likes to laugh and joke. “Is it true?” He wants to hear from Kenan himself.

  Kenan smiles his sweet smile. His curly hair flops over his forehead. “It’s true. But we aren’t going to tell my uncle or Tress’s parents until we grow up.”

  Grania looks from one face to another and wonders if this is something all children decide when they are ten years old.

  When Cora’s daughter, Jewel, marries Mr. Whyte’s son, Tress and Grania walk up St. George Street to the Presbyterian church and lean into the fence and watch the wedding guests spill out and down the steps. This church, with its stone tower, is not like the new Catholic church that was built after the fire. The Catholic church, where Mother prays twice a week and where Grania is taken with the family every Sunday, has a square tower and two sets of double doors. Grania has never been inside the Presbyterian church.

  The guests at the wedding are dressed in fancy clothes and hats; some of the women wear short capes with ruffles around their necks. Mrs. Whyte’s flounced skirt has rows of dark silk banded around the bottom. Grania stows the information to tell Mamo. She and Tress try to get a close-up look at Jewel in her wedding dress. Jewel and Mr. Whyte’s son will be moving to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, after the wedding. A gust of wind catches Jewel as she reaches for the arm of her new husband, and she grimaces as the folds of her dress flap against her hidden legs.

  Cora looks towards the street and, seeing Grania with Tress, says to her husband, “Who will marry that pitiful child when she grows up? She may have a sweet little voice, but no one except her family can understand a word she says. If they don’t find someone deaf and dumb, she’ll end up living with her mother the rest of her days.”

  Grania grabs Tress’s arm and yanks her away from the fence. “That’s what she thinks,” she shouts.

  Tress runs along sideways, trying to keep up. “What? Did you read Cora’s lips? Did she say something mean?”

  Yes, and yes. It is easy to read Cora’s lips. But Grania will not tell.

  Later, she goes to Mamo. “Why does Cora hold her mouth so tight?”

  “That’s the way she is,” says Mamo.

  Mamo continues, this time talking to herself. It’s the way Grania picks up information, watching Mamo’s lips spill extra words into the air. “It’s part of the general burden that must be borne. Cora’s self-righteous ways.”

  “Burden?”

  “Did you see that? Heavy load. Cora is one of the town’s heavy loads.”

  Grania does not understand. “She looks like a crabface to me.” Grania thinks of Cora’s narrow chin, her pointed noise, her thin ankles and feet.

  “You’d better not be saying that in front of Cora.”

  Mother has something else to say. Grania watches Mother’s lips. “I’ve known Cora since before I was married,” she says. “Cora was unlucky enough to grow up without brothers or sisters. If you grow up in a house full of people, you have more than yourself to think about. Cora had only herself and she became selfish. That’s what happens to an only child. That’s all there is to it. She was an only child.”

  Grania is more confused than ever.

  What does Mother mean, “a lonely child”? How does being lonely make Cora selfish?

  Grania does not ask. But she does know that when she grows up, she is not going to live the rest of her days with her mother.

  “Don’t let deafn
ess hold you back,” Mamo tells her. “Don’t let it defeat you.”

  Defeat?

  In the Deseronto school, she doesn’t want to be separate from the hearing children but she is always separate. She sits at the edge of the room, alone in a double seat. At morning recess, the children tease. Not every day, but some days they tell her that the way she talks sounds funny.

  “Say spit.”

  “Thpit.”

  “Ha Ha. You said thpit.”

  Grania makes the crazy sign at them, her cupped hand waggling beside her ear.

  Long-legged Kenan comes to her rescue in the schoolyard. Someday, Kenan will marry Tress. He will be part of the family and he will keep Grania strong. Mamo says that Kenan is a good boy. Kenan is Grania’s bully.

  After Kenan sends the others packing, Grania goes to the edge of the schoolyard and lies back against a stump. She looks up at stump’s neighbour, tall tree, and she watches leaves and branches flicker and sway at the top. If she stays here with stump and tree, she is safe. The teasing children can do what they want. For her, alone is best.

  By noon, she has forgotten morning recess. The children shout and play, run and holler. They pair off and grip each other’s wrists and swing in fast circles until they spin and spin and fall to the ground. Grania joins in. Plants her feet against the earth, turns and turns until she is reeling with dizziness. She drops, breathless, to the grass and stays there, cross-legged, tucking her skirt beneath. The others sit, and make a sudden circle with Grania at its centre.

  A new game begins, unfolding as it is imagined. Is that a word? A sound? Grania watches one mouth move, then another, and laughter on the faces around. She is caught up by this and she laughs, too. Someone at her side says something; other faces are watching. She turns her head but misses the sound, the word. Whatever it is bounces from one child to another, erupting the way mayflies erupt on the surface of the water, quick, impossible to catch. A word hopping, one pair of lips to another. Excited, she reaches for but can’t see the sound. The children keep it in front, overhead, behind, to the side.