Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Mother insists, during the trip, that Grania use her voice. Mother has not learned any of the sign language that Grania brought home with her at the beginning of summer. “Too busy,” she says whenever Grania tries to teach her. “I have too much work to do.”

  At the end of summer, despite the trip to the shrine and despite Mother’s prayers, Grania is still deaf.

  In September, her departure approaching, Grania takes Carlow to the fenced backyard and sits on the stoop beside him and pats him on the back. Her voice makes swooping sounds as she begins to sing. Up and down and out of her head, the words swoop like the flights of swallows. She sings the title, “I don’t want to play in your yard,” over and over, because that is the only part of the only song she knows. Carlow listens, and understands. And Mamo, standing behind the laundry window inside, also listens and understands.

  Grania goes upstairs and folds her clothing into her sturdy canvas trunk. The trunk is sent ahead to Belleville, and she travels—again by steamer, westward along the Bay of Quinte, this time escorted by Aunt Maggie, who has errands to do in the city—to the dock at the bottom of the slope across from the school grounds. The details of Grania’s first year away have already become lodged inside a hard casing of her memory. She tries to keep the summer memories of home in front of these, so that she can carry them back with her to the Belleville school.

  And there is something else. Something Grania knows. Before she hugs Father and Mother and Mamo and Tress and the boys, and before she boards the steamer at the wharf across from her house on the corner of Mill Street and Main, she looks north, to the town she is leaving for the second time. There is her family home with the veranda and its leaning fence along the Mill Street side; there is the open passageway joining the two buildings, and the columns and steps of Father’s hotel. There is Carlow beside the veranda post, staring forlornly after her. She stares back, and waves, and looks hard at the upstairs window of the room she shares with Tress above the street. She does not cry. What she knows in that moment, and what she clearly understands when she looks back, is that there are things she will never be able to impart, things that will never be understood—not even by Tress or Mamo. Things that make up the portion of her life that is now lived, separate and away, at the institution in the land called School.

  II

  1915

  Chapter 5

  The Lusitania, the largest and fastest passenger ship in the world, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine ten miles south of Kinsdale, near Queenstown, Ireland, on Friday, May 7th. The Germans gave the people of the ship no warning and she sank in fifteen minutes. 1150 persons—passengers and crew—were drowned, including 50 babies and 100 other children under 2 years, aged women, and heart-broken wives and mothers going to the bedsides of wounded husbands and sons. The survivors numbered but 767. Some 140 bodies were recovered and buried at Queenstown. To celebrate this murder of 150 babies, the ‘Kultured’ schoolchildren in Germany were given a half-holiday. By this slaughter of the innocents, is the Kaiser trying to out-Herod Herod?

  The Canadian

  Belleville, Ontario

  “They tell me, at the school, that you’ll be joining up.” It was neither question nor statement—perhaps something of both.

  Jim nodded. “But not until the fall.”

  The man between them was stretched out on his back on the long board table in the kitchen, where he’d been carried before their arrival. His face was the colour of pale ash and he was looking up at the two of them. His glance darted from one to the other, as if reading their faces would tell him the sum of what he needed to know. A yellowed scar bulged through the man’s eyebrow, which gave his face an expression of calamity already known. His wife had stuffed a bolster under his neck to support his head and, except for not knowing the fate of his leg, he looked as if he’d be all right for a while longer.

  “Will you bring a clean towel?” the doctor asked, and the woman left the room, passing them as she did.

  Dr. Whalen’s voice was deep and slow. The voice of patience learned. It was the way Jim thought of him, a tired man who had the necessary patience to get through the work that set itself before him from sunrise to sunset. Jim knew that he was called out in the night, too. And he was the regular physician at the Ontario School for the Deaf. He also worked weekends if a baby decided to be born, or if a patient in his practice—or a child at the school hospital—needed attention. The institution on the Trent Road had been part of the landscape on the outskirts of Belleville for forty-five years. A newcomer to the area, Jim now knew that the institution had changed its name a few years earlier, that it was a large school for a small city of ten thousand, and that deaf children were sent from every part of the province and from other provinces, too.

  There was a tourniquet of sorts around the man’s upper thigh. No, Jim saw now that it was more bandage than tourniquet. It covered rather than constricted. It had been someone’s shirt, the cloth a dull moss colour, washed many times. It had been folded flat, and the sleeves were wrapped around and tied. There was surprisingly little blood on the makeshift bandage or on the man’s pantleg, which had been slit up the side as far as his waist. The man’s boot and stocking had been removed from one foot. Jim’s glance took in the scissors on a corner shelf near the single step that led up to the next room, where the man’s wife had disappeared. The edge of the step was smooth and worn, leading to a dining room or parlour. Every farmhouse had a parlour. Jim’s grandparents in eastern Canada had had one, and so did his uncle in Ontario—Uncle Alex, whose family Jim had stayed with when he’d first arrived.

  The injured man’s son, who looked about twelve or thirteen, was standing at the far end of the kitchen where Jim and Dr. Whalen had come in. His face was as pale and anxious as his father’s but he looked hopeful that he might be asked to do something. Jim could see the side of Dr. Whalen’s black Ford over the boy’s shoulder, through the window at the end of the room. A rifle hung on a rack above the window frame. There was another window near the stove and water reservoir. There was no electric light, but this was early afternoon, and there was light enough in the room.

  Dr. Whalen unwrapped the makeshift bandage and spoke to the man directly for the first time.

  “Ah, Herbert.” This caused everyone standing—the woman had now returned with three folded towels—and the man lying to look at him, waiting. “I think this is going to be all right. Can you move your foot? Your toes?”

  As if encouraged by the doctor’s voice, Herbert not only moved his foot and toes but raised his leg, too, which caused him sudden surprising pain. He slid his jaw to the side and gritted his teeth, and his leg slumped back to the table.

  “No no, not that,” said Dr. Whalen. “Give it a chance.” He pressed the leg firmly into its natural position and raised his glance slightly to Jim, who collapsed open the doctor’s leather bag. It split lengthwise into halves, and the doctor reached, without looking, for syringe and needle. He sawed at the crease of an ampule with a dull blade and snapped off the glass top. He injected the contents into the man’s upper arm. The man closed his eyes.

  Dr. Whalen was working swiftly now, cleaning the wound, pouring solution while Jim propped Herbert so that the area could be fully exposed. It was a dangerously wide and uneven tear, six inches or more around the side and back of the thigh. Jim saw the layers of fatty tissue and muscle spilled out on the surface; these had flopped inside out instead of being tucked inside the skin where they belonged. The wound was almost bloodless. Gut had already been threaded through the eye of the curved needle; the suturing was finished in ten minutes.

  “If you’d ripped an artery, you’d be a dead man, Herbert. There’s not even a broken bone here. You’ll have a scar, a thick one, and it’s going to be ugly, but it’s the best I can do, given the wound. Rest a bit, will you? And try to stay off that jagged tin roof.”

  Herbert managed a grimace. “I need the leg to work,” he said. “Can’t be running a farm hop
ping around on one foot.” He spoke sullenly, but his colour was coming back, the scar through the eyebrow less prominent now. Another calamity dealt with.

  The leg was washed and properly bandaged. What remained of the trousers was cut the rest of the way through and Herbert was helped off the table, leaving the splayed trousers behind. He hopped on one boot to the kitchen sofa. There was a comic look about the movement, though no one smiled. The boy was outside now, admiring the auto that shone in the sun, circling round, reaching in to touch the steering column. He stood back to admire the pleated seat backs, the diamond-patterned seats. In the kitchen, the woman laid a quilt over Herbert’s legs, then saw the men to the door. On the faces of the boy and the woman, there was nothing to be read but relief.

  “My boy will be leaving in July.” Dr. Whalen continued as if forty minutes inside the farmhouse had not interrupted the earlier conversation. “Artillery. He says he wants to be a gunner.”

  At the word gunner, Jim looked down at his own hands. His grandmother, who had raised him, had taught him to play piano with those hands.

  Dr. Whalen caught the look. “Have you thought of something on the healing side? Orderly? Field ambulance? Stretcher bearer? You’ve seen a few things working with me the past winter. There’s much you could do to help, Jim. I’d go myself, but I’m too old.”

  They were following Cannifton Road and the narrow Moira River the short distance back to the city. Belleville, halfway between Montreal to the east and Toronto to the west, rested on the north shore of the Bay of Quinte, the same bay that Grania’s town, Deseronto, looked over. The Moira ran south through Belleville and emptied into the bay, just east of the School for the Deaf. The school had been built back from the edge of the bay in 1870; it was there that the two men were headed now.

  It had been a cold winter during the months Jim had been working for Dr. Whalen. Two months earlier, in March, men with horses and ploughs had cleared the snow from the bay in front of the school, marked the ice beneath, sawed it into chunks and floated them in the water. The ice, a foot and a half thick, had been pulled out block by block and loaded onto sleighs, individual blocks weighing three hundred pounds. The school had its own ice house. Now, because of the long winter, it was well stocked for the rest of the year.

  Despite spring runoff, the water level of the Moira was dropping, though a good current could be seen from the Ford. Even so, there was a mood of stillness as the two men followed the course of the river. Clouds were banking high on the far side of the sky, and dust rolled out behind the motor car as they drove.

  “I haven’t figured out exactly what to do,” Jim said now. “It might be November before I get away. Uncle Alex made me promise that when I finish working for you at the end of the summer, I’ll stay for the fall sawing.”

  “The Lusitania helped my son with his decision, Jim. The drowning of those women and babies was a cowardly act. A brutal act by cowardly men.”

  Jim had not mentioned Grania to Dr. Whalen, but it was she he had been thinking about during the conversation with the older man. He had first met the young woman with the red hair the previous fall, when he had been working for Dr. Whalen only three weeks. It was her stillness that compelled him to a halt. He had been humming; he had sprinted in from outside, down the stone steps of the school hospital and into the lower bandage room.

  He’d fallen silent because there she was, standing like a small contained island in the middle of the room. Perhaps a gathering moment before she organized the tasks that would move her forward in several directions at once. Despite this being a hospital, he could hear a cacophony of activity from children in the ward upstairs. He had taken three stone steps down and through the shaded passageway, and now he felt the brightness of artificial light in the open room. He had come in at the side, the delivery entrance, where the bricks were coated with a thick display of vines. He thought of the thickness of the vines. He thought, She hasn’t moved, why hasn’t she moved? But he was the one standing there with packages stacked to his chin.

  The vine leaves were darkening outside. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to say something about the lime green streaks through the leaves; how they twined—perhaps they’d been cut back intentionally to frame the windows upstairs. But she would know this. She worked here; she would think he was not in his right mind.

  The hospital, Gibson Hospital, initially intended as a place to isolate children with infectious diseases, was divided by a hall down the middle, on the first and second floors. Jim guessed that upstairs, beds were assigned to boys on one side, girls on the other. A balcony on each level stretched across the front of the building and the effect of the whole was that of a large and elegant two-storey house. As for the young woman with the smock over her calf-length skirt and her back to him and her bright red hair swept up and pinned—he had never seen her before.

  He walked forward and set the packages sent by Dr. Whalen on the shining surface of the countertop. Miss MacKay, the nurse on duty, entered the room from a short corridor, having come down a set of stairs herself. What was surprising when she spoke to him was that the young woman with the red hair—she was facing Miss MacKay—still had not moved. He walked behind her and his arms—as they reached over the counter—flickered, or so he imagined, into her peripheral vision. She showed no sign of being startled. She pulled a list from her pocket, looked it over, and tucked it into her pocket again.

  She was deaf. Too late, he was sorry he had approached from behind. Any hearing person would have jumped a foot if he’d moved in from behind like that. No, a hearing person would have been aware of the noise made by his feet, would have been aware of the sound of him running down the steps of the passageway.

  He hadn’t intended to startle. But she wasn’t startled.

  “This is Grania,” Miss MacKay said, introducing. “Grania O’Neill. She’s been working with us for several years, ever since she graduated. She did the Home Nursing course when she was a student, and then she stayed on. We’re short-handed these days, we always are. It’s been worse since one of our nurses joined up—people at the school seem to be leaving every day.”

  Grania watched Miss MacKay’s lips and Jim watched Grania—a visual triangle. Miss MacKay was explaining. “He helps Dr. Whalen; he works for him. He moved here from the east, from Prince Edward Island, and now he stays in Belleville.”

  “Jim Lloyd,” he said, and held out his hand. He watched Miss MacKay’s fingers spell his names into the air, a quick but emphatic pause between the two.

  Grania’s eyes were on the nurse’s right hand, not on Jim’s face—or only fleetingly. She looked at him directly then, and returned the greeting. Her voice. A lilt of song.

  “How do you do.” A small soft hand in his. She saw a speaking man, a lean young man with dark brown hair and dark eyes whose arms hung down as if they were loose in their sockets. He had long slender fingers, and he was taller than she, and he had an earnest face. She saw earnest in his eyes.

  What Jim saw in Grania’s face was strength. A strength so still, it was possible she did not know it was there. Her skin was pale and clear, her eyebrows furrowed slightly, giving her face a quizzical expression, as if she were figuring things out. Her eyes were brown, and when he looked at her he felt that she knew something, perhaps something peaceful, or wise, that no one else could possibly know.

  Miss MacKay continued. “We’ve had a card and a letter from our nurse in England. During the crossing no one was allowed to take off their clothes or their boots at night. They had to be ready to get into the small boats quickly in case they were torpedoed by a submarine!” She was breathless using the words torpedoed and submarine, as if these were threats that were spoken of every day.

  Jim turned back to Grania.

  But Grania was gone. She had disappeared up the back stairs. He heard light footsteps, a pause at the top. And then, the sound of her was lost in the general inside and outside noise of the place.

  Chapter 6

&
nbsp; The son of one of our employees, who is at the Front with the first Canadian Contingent, was at the now famous battle of Langemarck where the Canadians so distinguished themselves. He had a very narrow escape when a German bullet, whizzing past his head, cut the lobe of his ear. He dropped to the ground and a Captain fell dead on top of him. Later in the battle, while assisting to move one of the big guns, he had his foot crushed by one of the wheels and is now in a hospital where he is doing well and hopes soon to be “at it” again.

  The Canadian

  Grania had been dreaming, same old dream. She sat on the edge of her bed and pushed back her long hair. She reached for and expertly slid two curved combs along the sides to hold the hair in place. She pulled up the counterpane and slipped into her dressing gown, and in her rush past the mirror detected movement from the bed on the other side of the room. Fry rolled over and opened one green eye and then the other, and she made a face. One pale arm, blotted with freckles, was outside the covers. She had been rubbing half-lemons on her arms since Grania had first known her, insisting that this diminished the number of freckles, but Grania had never noticed a bit of difference in all the years they’d shared a room.