Deafening

by Frances Itani

  The inside-out clock faces loomed before her, and Grania turned herself to the south, towards the front, to the giant milk-white face that presided over the bay. She searched for the spot between IIII and V where long ago someone had scraped away the paint and cleared an uneven space—the peering-out place. Up here behind the clock, she was always surprised to see the numeral IIII. She never gave it a thought while she was standing in the middle of Main Street below, looking up. Had she not learned her Roman numerals at school? Wasn’t the numeral four supposed to be IV? But clocks were like this. Except the O’Shaughnessy clock, which had numbers.

  She pressed her face to the scraped-away portion and stared. As she stared, she relaxed and felt herself become the fixed point. No one knew she was here. Hers was the eye that gazed through and looked down over the town.

  It was not washday, but a few bits of laundry were waving from the clothesline in McClellands’ backyard a little way along the opposite side of the street. Pillowcases pegged close to the stoop meant that women’s undergarments were inside, discreetly hidden. The glass in the side windows of McClellands’ house was wavery, distorted in shadows that were altering in the quickly fading sun. As Grania peered through the clock, Mrs. McClelland, a sweater gripped tightly over her shoulders, stepped outside, climbed the stoop, unpegged the pillowcases and their contents and hurried back to the house. Although June had begun, there was still a chill in the evening air.

  Patrick walked past, not knowing that he was observed from above. Mildred Clark, too, walked briskly along the street, probably heading home. For years, Dr. Clark and his wife, Mildred, had treated ruptures and dropsy, contusions and boils, women’s conditions, men’s ailments, broken bones, lumbago and despair. Every death certificate spanning a generation of town history had been signed by Dr. Clark, and most of the town births recorded in the registry also bore his name.

  Grania raised her gaze up and over the houses on the south side of the street, over the remnants of industry and the tracks and the station and the wharf, to the sweep of the bay that lay before her like a rumpled sea.

  There was Forester Island. There, the pointing finger of Long Reach and the Bay of Quinte, water slipping around and between the juts of land. Prince Edward County lay beyond, and beyond that, the great body of water that was Lake Ontario. All of this, from here, was imagined in the way she imagined Jim’s ocean, which she had never seen. Where passing ships pushed their way through waves that battered at their sides. Where the higher the waves, the louder the sound of their roaring. Had Jim not written about this during his trip across the sea? In letters penned in half darkness while he was suspended over the same beating waves he described? From his private place, inside an empty crate into which he slipped every night after “Last Post,” he wrote to her after darkness wrapped itself around crannies and outlines of a blackened ship that was odorous with bodies moaning in cramped sleep below. Below, too, were the horses, their tails wrapped with puttees to protect them from rubbing against the ship’s walls. Jim had been discovered by a lieutenant but was told that if he kept quiet and out of trouble, he could stay, the officer being aware of conditions below.

  Compared to hammocks strung over tables—the occupants roused before six every morning so that breakfast could be served—the crate was, for Jim, a luxurious and cavernous space. A space in which he created his own warmth, propped paper against his knees and wrote to tell her that he dreamed her face, her long red hair tucked beneath his arm, the smooth skin of her fingertips brushing lightly across his lips. So lightly, in his dreams he could not tell if her fingers were receiving his thoughts in the dark.

  There is no light, now, in the tower. Grania is still. She focuses until her thoughts are as sharp as she can hone them. She is aware of her heart pushing blood to her head, her torso, her limbs. She gathers her own silence, the comfort, the safety of it, the silence in which she lives. She expands this until it is outside of herself and fills every space around. She slides it past her fears about Jim—has he not promised that he will survive?—and pushes it beyond herself, and spreads it along the shore of the bay and into the woods at the eastern edge of town, and past the cemetery, and past the end of the great body of lake water, and east through the forests she has read about, and down the long waterway of the mighty St. Lawrence River, towards the sea. The more she is able to focus, the farther her silence extends, spreading slow and even, like moonlight over water.

  It crosses the ocean now. And on the other side, it routes its way past forests where, for miles, trees are covered with moss on only one side. It drifts over coastal lowlands, slips in and around high and narrow houses imploded on themselves, shards of blasted stumps, chalk pits, slag heaps, collapsed rooftops and shattered brickyards. It drops, suddenly, into a close-knit maze of saps and trenches, uprooted trees and snapping branches, parapets and firesteps and funkholes and odd-shaped patches of sheeting and tin. It searches for and finds one man. He is with his buddy Irish and more than twenty-four hours ago they were alerted for duty. Because they are always hungry, they have been sure to carry extra rations of hardtack and McConachie stew up the line. They have collected their steel helmets, which they are wearing for the first time. They’ve moved forward in small squads while shells explode around them, first to the Asylum, where the dressing station is in the cellar, and after that they have moved forward again.

  Part of the way, Jim has had to walk doubled over—sometimes at a run—through a communication trench. He is soaked from perspiration; he is played out when he arrives. There have been moments when he thought he would fall and block the trench and force others to step over him so that they could keep moving. The air is heavy with smoke and fume; damage to the main road is extensive. The Germans had begun bombarding Canadian positions all along the front lines of the Third Division, during the morning of the second of June. Underground mines were exploded after that. Now, there are more than thirty reinforcements, stretcher bearers from the 9th brought forward to work alongside bearers from the 8th and the 10th. They are told that many men from the Canadian Mounted Rifles were killed or taken prisoner early in the day; some were buried when the earth exploded and fell back down upon them. Several who survived were taken out but many remain behind. All of the forward positions in the Canadian area have suffered severely, Mount Sorrel and Sanctuary Wood among them. Men are half-crazed with the whine and burst of shell, the spout of flame, the continuous rattle and boom. The dressing station in Maple Copse took a direct hit and was blown in, and those who were still alive and could be saved were moved farther back again. Wounded men have crawled on their hands and knees or, pitifully, have tried to get back from the line on their bellies, hoping to reach any sort of shelter at all. Some of the evacuated are the ones who were wounded earlier in the copse, but the aid post is abandoned now, and the captain in charge tries to establish order, tries to organize the wounded into small parties, especially the walking wounded, who can be escorted back or who can help someone more seriously injured than themselves. Jim and Irish are put in charge of small parties and they carry the most serious cases for hours, and there are no breaks, and their arms and shoulders have numbed. A gas alarm is given and they pull on the detested masks and breathe hard, and saliva drools down, and the goggles fog over and still they carry the wounded. They are told it has been a false alarm and, relieved, they rip off the masks, though their eyes are pained and smarting. The communication trench they use for several of the carries is partly blown in and clogged with bloody limbs and body parts and dead boys, but there is nothing to be done for the dead. Men who have passed here before them have picked up some of the bodies and tossed them over the side so they could get through themselves, and the ground is covered with more of the dead. The soldier they are carrying now has been shot through the face; half the face is gone; it is just missing. A terrible sound is coming from the place below the hole where his lips and mouth should be. Some of the bearers set down their stretchers along the way and sto
p to dress the wounds of soldiers who are badly injured, but they themselves are killed. A dead bearer kneels on the earth with an open dressing in his hand, but nothing can be done for the dead.

  Jim takes a step and feels an arm roll beneath his foot. He knows it is an arm because in a glance down when the sky is exploding, he sees a fist at the end of a sleeve. He keeps on, trying not to think, trying to get those who are living out of this hell. Noise and blood and earth rain down and the air flies with metal. He sees an elbow poking out, a chin, a leg, a foot. He and Irish cross another trench, drop to their knees, duck, crawl forward themselves when they can no longer stand. And then, back up again, and this time it is sandbags that fly through the air. They cross Zillebeke Road and head for Zillebeke Bund where new dugouts have been cleared and where horse and motor ambulance are to meet them. They take the wounded there and to a farm nearby, and from these points the injured men are moved back to the cellars of the Asylum.

  They help load, and turn back for more. The route is pocked with craters, and almost impassable. They walk past dead horses, night bulks of flesh; they run alongside soldiers who are carrying supplies and empty stretchers and rations and blankets up to the Front. Someone shouts that two hundred more stretcher bearers are being brought up; they must keep on, relief is coming. But the Germans have broken through; they have taken some positions and are well inside Sanctuary Wood. In the distance, behind the Canadians, Ypres is heavy with smoke and fire from constant shelling, though more damage to that city could hardly be done, so thoroughly was it destroyed a year ago.

  The designated stations continue to change. When the road is blocked, the men are redirected across country to Menin Mill, where cellars have been cleared and packed with new supplies. A hut has been set up beside the mill, and those who have a bit of luck arrive just as others set up spirit stoves and get to work serving hot cocoa and bread. Jim and Irish grab a tobacco tin of cocoa and gulp it down, and back they go because there are still more wounded to carry back. Finally, it is almost daylight and just as the two are lifting a soldier, a shell explodes so close, bricks and shrapnel hit their skulls and backs and they are knocked to the ground. They get up, and they are breathing hard, and they are alive, and Irish yells, “We have to beat it!” and they manoeuvre the stretcher out of that place as quickly as they can. They assist the medical officers and they continue to transport to the Mill, to Hell Fire Corner, to meeting places where ambulances pull up quickly; and so the injured go from Advanced Dressing Station to Main Dressing Station to Casualty Clearing Station. It is while Jim and Irish are offloading patients that they learn that Major-General Mercer, who commands the Third Division, is missing and thought to be dead. The news is met with shock and disbelief but it only makes them more determined to keep moving, keep trying, keep doing what has to be done.

  After two full days without rest, after a counterattack on the third, Jim and Irish are told to find a place to catch some sleep and they crouch together, close and low, in the remains of a shelter that is far enough back to be deemed safe—as safe as they might be anywhere while still in range of Fritz’s guns. The shelter is partly dug from the earth, partly blown away; they shift and move and share the little water they have left between them. They are out of food and too tired to look for any, and Jim is grateful for the spelling off, grateful for the fatigue of his body. But his mind is filled with what he has left behind and he doubts that he will ever sleep again. “This is the land of hell,” he says, “the true Valley of the Shadow.” The sky lights up with exploding stars as he speaks.

  Even this far back he is rolled up inside a roar so constant he crouches and squints, as if crouching and squinting will protect his body and close his ears. He wonders what it would be like to shut his ears to sound—knowing that sound will enter him anyway, through his body. He is bloody and dirty and his eyelids are encased with soot and he forces them to close, and a silence—perhaps it is Grania’s silence, having searched and found—encompasses, creates a different sort of shelter, one that fits the contours of his lean young body and makes it safe. For a moment, a fraction of a moment, the entire world on both sides of the ocean is still. And Jim sleeps. And curled at his side, his friend Irish, who can command his body to rest anywhere, also sleeps.

  Grania rubbed her eyes. She stared at her hands and arms and felt her body sink into heaviness. She pulled away from the face of the clock and turned to leave but as she did so, she found herself reaching to steady herself against the corner beam as she had always done. Beneath her fingertips she felt the forgotten column of dates scratched into wood. Heading the column were two words she could barely see but which she knew to be there: Ice out. The scratchings of Uncle Am, part of the history of the town, each date recorded the day the ice broke up every year and left the bay. Ever since he had come to live in the tower apartment, he had added to the beam, satisfied—perhaps even comforted—by the continuity. Grania strained to see through the dusk: April 12, March 29, March 21, April 4, April 17. The columns marched through the years until they reached the present, this year’s date written not two months ago.

  She held tightly to the ladder and lowered herself rung by rung. She pulled the trap door shut and continued to descend until her feet touched the floor. The parlour was dark. Neither Aunt Maggie nor Uncle Am had returned. From below, a rising glow had begun to spread along Main Street as electric lights came on in house and business, here and there. Grania stood at the open curtains and watched an invisible breeze bend the tips of the trees and bow them to the town. Clouds were rushing across the sky, but the horizon remained darkly neutral. The early night sky was so like the colour of the bay, it was impossible to see the line between.

  A light flickered across the water—perhaps a lantern from a point of land. The southern arm of the bay blurred to darkness. Grania stayed at the window until bright light was cast behind her from the hall. She was not startled, but she turned. Aunt Maggie opened the parlour door and switched on the corner lamp, illuminating her own face.

  “I saw your coat in the hall,” her lips said in the lamplight. She did not ask how long Grania had been standing there alone in the dark.

  Chapter 11

  We know that our soldiers will bear themselves bravely and that where danger threatens they will always be there to do their part, battling for the Empire in this great world war. Should any fall, as fall indeed some must, in such terrific fighting, there will be mourning…but it will be a great consolation to the relatives to know that their loved ones will have suffered in a great and glorious cause.

  The Canadian

  He woke with his cheek and hand and wrist resting against cool earth. He had been dreaming of Grania. He was disoriented and, feeling dirt beneath him, wondered for a moment if he were in a grave. Stop, Grania told him. I stop, and focus. I try to make sense of the situation, and then I let in the extra cues. He looked up to a sky that was murky, stirred up, as if the battle below had churned it. He turned his head to glance at Irish who was still sleeping, chin tucked to chest, arms pulled in tightly, as if he’d been forced to make himself small to fit the space. His big hands were tucked into his armpits.

  Jim raised his own right arm to check his wristwatch. He looked at the dirt that was caked to his fingers and under his nails. Three days earlier, he had been asked to check off a list of supplies that were being unloaded from a service wagon, but he could scarcely force his hand to hold the pencil. He’d worried momentarily, and passed it off as fatigue. He turned his hand over now, as if asking it to explain what had gone wrong. Instead, he thought of Grania again, her small hand inside his own. Her fingertips had explored his palm the night they’d sat below the beam of the old pier after the performance at Naylor’s. He shouldn’t think of her. Not here. But he needed the thought of her.

  What did you expect? he asked himself, and he answered, Not this.

  If Grania were here beside him he would be able to tell her about the hands. If only he did not have to look at
the hands. In death they told more than the face; he knew that now. It was the hands that revealed the final argument: clenched in anger, relaxed in acquiescence, seized in a posture of surprise or forgiveness, or taken unawares. Clawing at a chest, or raised unnaturally in a pleading attitude. How can this be? My life, pulling away?

  He thought of the still-living boy he had been ordered to set down in the yard of the dead during his first night’s work. How could that have been only weeks ago? Old sandbags and straw had been thrown over the faces of the dead boys, but that did not keep their hands from being on display. He’d mentioned this to Irish, but Irish didn’t notice the hands and told him not to look if it bothered him. Jim never mentioned it again. There was silent agreement about what was talked about and what was not, even between the two of them. Jim did not tell Irish that sometimes he felt the irrational desire to kneel on the earth beside one of the dead boys outside an aid post, or beside someone who had been rolled aside in a trench. To kneel on the earth and break the boy’s fingers if he had to. Just to put the clenched and angry hands to rest.

  Irish jolted awake.

  “When I think of it,” he said. “The confounded drill always comes back.” He spoke from behind, coming out of his few hours’ sleep as if he were continuing some other conversation and not waking in a dirt hole, pressed together, cramped and stiff from the cold. “I hate how it kicks in. Sure enough, the two of us work like clockwork, Jimmy boy. But watch, if we ever get out of here, they’ll put us back at the drill again as if we haven’t a notion of what to do.”

  “I hate it, too,” said Jim. But he knew that long after the brain fatigued, the drill kept them moving. A sort of memory machine installed in the body: sturdy coordinated parts, well-oiled arms and hands and legs and feet. Two men or four to a stretcher, it was all the same. Without a stretcher, it was the three-handed seat. Bearer grasps own left wrist with right hand, other bearer’s right wrist with left hand, bearer to left grasps first bearer’s wrist with right hand, leaving left hand free to support. Elaborate words of the drill spilled from one area of the brain to another, whether the brain was worthy of the information or not.