Deafening

by Frances Itani

  The dugout was in ruins, the roof imploded, but there was enough space at one edge to provide shelter for the two men. They crawled into the place gratefully, their bodies exhausted. Jim grabbed at a ground sheet that was partly buried in the wall of mud. He cleared it off as well as he could and wrapped it around the two of them. He spent some moments trying to funnel rain down and away from their already soaked boots. Both he and Finner had long ago given up their puttees. Like every other bearer during the past days, they had used them as outer bandages for the wounded.

  He sank back against the soft mud and tried to force his body to relax, even knowing that this was a place where he would never sleep. He became sharply aware of the odour of decay, and behind Finner’s shoulder he saw what looked like hair. In disbelief, he found himself staring at a large eye embedded in the dirt wall. Detached of orbit and skull that had once housed it, it could have been planted there. Jim closed his own eyes, rejecting what he had seen. Finner reached back at that moment to push away a lump behind his shoulder, and his hand went through part of the carcass of a mule. There was a rush of foul-smelling liquid and gas. They both leaped up and Finner frantically scraped his hands and arms and clothes in the mud, trying to clean them. Without uttering a word, they found another shelter and crawled into it, this time without a ground sheet.

  Jim lay there with his eyes open. He thought of the surprise on Stash’s face, the way his friend’s hand had reached up to his throat as if to catch Death before Death could catch him. Jim turned his back to Finner, making sure that their bodies were still pressed together for warmth. Silently, his lips moved: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down…Just as silently, tears streamed down his cheeks. Finner’s body heat began to seep into him. The two men, moulded together, sank deeper, and settled into the stinking mud.

  “Have you ever been in pain?”

  From his chair, Jim looked at the soldier in the narrow bed. The young man seemed surprised to hear the shrill sound that was his own voice. Without waiting for Jim to reply, he went on.

  “I keep telling myself I should be able to bear this.” His voice lowered. “But the pain isn’t bearable at all. It won’t go away. It has a life of its own. I understand this now but I don’t know what to do.”

  “Tell me where the pain is.” Jim kept his own voice to a whisper, hoping the patients in the adjacent beds would not wake; they slept fitfully as it was. “Maybe there’s something to be done.”

  “There’s nothing to be done. It’s through my whole body. I thought the bottom half of me was shot off. But it can’t be, you see, because my hand can reach down and feel the skin on my legs.” He paused, and sucked in a long breath. “On the way here, bumping up and down in the ambulance, I tried to concentrate. I tried to think of ways to get the pain off me, to get it out of me. The way we flick lice into the fire. For the crumbs, at least, the pain is over fast.”

  “What’s your name?” Jim knew this full well; he could see it on the chart from where he sat.

  “Thompson. The boys call me Tommy. Strange, isn’t it, that my family never shortened my name. I never had a nickname until I came here. You know—What’s your name?”

  “Jim.”

  “You know, Jim, you always think—when you have to get out there, across No Man’s Land and fight—you think, well, I can’t. And then you tell yourself, I can, I have to, I have no choice. Other boys have done it and are out there now. You hear machine-gun bullets rattling inches over your head, but you know you have to go over the top. You hear Number One blow his whistle and you tell yourself, I can’t stay here. Get up. Step up on the level and go. The worst sound of all is the silence before the whistle blows. And after doing that, after going over the top, here I am alive and in hospital and now you would think I could handle the pain.”

  Jim wished the boy would quiet down. He’d had morphine, the nursing sister told Jim, but it didn’t seem to be working. Only the severe abdominal cases were brought here. The M.O. had worked non-stop for fifty hours and was asleep on a stretcher on the floor of the storage room on the other side of the hall. He had warned everyone not to wake him—real emergencies only.

  Jim was assigned the night shift and had reported at one in the morning. Irish had almost recovered now. His fever was gone and he had rejoined the squad before the route march out, when they’d headed for Warloy. Irish was still on light duties and was working during the day. Their billets were in a marquee tent and all the boys had had a bath and a shave. The caked mud had been scraped off, and new puttees had been issued. Everyone had clean socks and underwear. For the moment, the boys of the Ambulance were clean again.

  After the last stretch of duty, Jim had turned down a promotion. He and Irish were staying together, no matter what. Finner was now Evan’s partner, having replaced Stash.

  The beds were crowded in rows, and it was Jim’s job to keep an eye on this end of the ward while the two nursing sisters changed dressings—they had started at the far end of the room. A mixed odour of disinfectant and cleaning solution thickened the air and swelled his nostrils. If more patients arrived, he would go outside to help carry them in, and while he was out he would take some good deep breaths. For now, he had to sit here, in one spot. In the early morning, half past four, he would go to the tiny kitchen to prepare the liquid diets. In the meantime, he had to listen to the boy who refused to stop talking.

  “None of it makes sense,” said Tommy. “Going over the top into machine-gun fire doesn’t make sense. Joining up doesn’t make sense, not any more. I used to work in a newspaper office. I couldn’t wait to quit my job to get here.”

  Jim thought of the expressionless face of the German stretcher bearer with the grey-blue eyes. No, none of it made sense. War ground on like the headless, thoughtless monster that could not be stopped. The bad fairy tale that refused to end.

  “Maybe you should try for a bit of rest,” Jim whispered. “I could get a cup of Oxo. I can go and look.”

  At the end of the ward, a boy cried out as if from far away. The boys held conversations inside their own nightmares. Jim had known for a long time that the wounded talked incessantly in their sleep.

  “If I could sleep, I’d be asleep. There are strategies, aren’t there?” Tommy whispered, as if he and Jim were in this together. “How about a strategy to defeat pain? If I think about my breathing, the pain throbs along with my breath. But if I could get into a position to portion it out, or get behind it, I might have something left to meet it.”

  He rambled on. He was not looking at Jim now, but staring up at the low ceiling overhead.

  War made the boys old. Some of the boys who were twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-three, looked ninety-three. If Grania were here to see his own face, she might look past; she might not recognize him. He had left the training camp in England only five months before and already he was an old-timer. Many of the boys he’d trained with were gone. Gone west.

  “Pain has a colour,” Tommy said loudly. One of the nursing sisters at the end of the room looked in Jim’s direction and frowned. Tommy closed his eyes as if he were staring inwardly, right into the colour of pain. “Green is what I hope for. Black is bottomless. If I can get to red or orange, I’ll be able to hover somewhere between.”

  The living burrowed like cliff swallows into holes in the trench walls. Two of the infantry boys Jim had heard about had crawled into shallow funkholes scooped out side by side, their legs sticking out. When a shell hit, their four legs had been sheared off at the knees.

  “If I die, let me die cleanly, with my boots on and fighting to the last,” a boy in the 49th said to Jim one night. That boy was still alive; Jim had seen him come out of the line.

  Each of the boys, if he had to stay in the line any time at all, tried to protect his head, scratched out a space of his own. Some of the boys strung up canvas sheets and dove under them when they heard a shell go over—knowing that the sheets would do nothing to protect them. They all knew
that cover was an illusion. It was what one created in the mind that enabled one to keep walking and breathing. Many of the boys never sought cover—except from gale or sleet—and walked around unharmed. The boys who dove for protection every time they heard a noise were often the ones who were blown to bits. The ones who survived the odds again and again were called lucky—by some. If their luck continued, others stuck near them, especially new boys coming in, hoping to be safe in their company. Others stayed as far away as they could get, believing that because immunity had gone on so long, their number would be coming up. Irish never said much about any of this. But one day he grinned, and pointed to his own front teeth. “See this gap, Jimmy boy,” he said. “This is the mark of luck.”

  Jim wished his friend had never said that.

  “Pain is a trickster,” Tommy said. This time, Jim was startled by his voice. He thought Tommy had drifted off to sleep.

  Had Stash felt pain? His hand had reached up and at the same moment there had been a hissing noise. Jim thought of the expression on the face of Irish when he’d been told about their friend. Irish had not made a sound; he had turned away and had not spoken of Stash again. Evan, too, never talked about his former partner. He’d adopted the mongrel Tock, and carried him out the day they marched, and gave him to a small boy at the edge of a village where they stopped to rest.

  In the days before their march away from the battlefield where Stash had died, Evan and Jim had gone to see the new machine of war—thankfully on their own side. It was called by some a land boat and by others a tank. It was huge and heavy, but at least one of the machines had not protected the soldiers inside. Their charred remains had been removed for burial, and the burned-out tank had come to rest uselessly against a clump of trees. Many of the boys visited, to touch and wonder, but a few were killed themselves; the Germans purposely fired at the site. Evan and Jim went to see, but stayed back at a safe distance.

  Jim thought of Grania now: the way she leaned her head against him when he sang, the way she watched his lips for words he was about to say. Sometimes he felt as if she knew what he was going to say before he did. A letter had been waiting for him when he walked the long walk back from the Chalk Cliffs. He had smoothed out the sheet of paper and stared as if it were a missive from an unknown place. He had searched for Grania in the words; he had searched for face, eyes, lips, body, self. Wife.

  Grania loved him. Her letter said so. But how could he write to her of love from a place where body parts worked their way through mud; where death dropped from the sky in a blackened Albert that was bombed repeatedly; where a man who had willingly joined up in Barriefield was decapitated while driving an ambulance in France; where a bullet missed Jim’s temple by inches, lodging between sandbags in a place he had lain, wide awake, trying to get through another sleepless night?

  “One thing I do know,” said Tommy, whose voice sounded suddenly thin and weak.

  But Jim did not want to hear what Tommy knew. He wanted to shout: Stop! Stop talking like this about your own pain. Have some decency!

  But even thinking this—he who was in absolute health, who dared to move, eat, urinate, shit, speak with undamaged mouth and tongue—even thinking this, surely he was the one who should be accused of the cruellest kind of indecency. He was here, sitting upright in a ward, surrounded by wounded boys. And he had not been hit.

  He was the one who had better muster some decency.

  IIII

  1917-1918

  Chapter 13

  Three biplanes visited Belleville from Deseronto, and alighted in a field. Each was carrying an officer and an observer. When they came near, the cattle and horses at work were greatly frightened and ran around the fields.

  When the machines landed, a large number of citizens rushed to the place, and some from school ran to see the biplanes. For many, this was their first close view of a flying machine.

  The Canadian

  Cora had seen them, Grania was sure, but she’d already disappeared into the hall on Mill Street as Grania and Mamo and Tress reached the outer door. It was not a cold day but a fall wind was blowing straight up from the bay. Mamo walked slowly because of her arthritis. At home, it was difficult for her to get out of the rocker after she’d been sitting for long periods, and her back was sometimes in pain, but she managed to climb the stairs to get to her room every night, and she made her way through the passageway to breakfast every morning, where she lingered over her cup of Pekoe tea. “I keep going,” she said. “If I keep moving, I’m fine.”

  Most of the women in the Red Cross work room had taken their places. Some were sitting, or stood around the long centre table, ready to pack boxes and make up standard kit bags; others sat on chairs arranged in a circle and were sewing, or knitting scarves or cuffs or socks (socks must not have a ridge under the heel nor at the end of the toe) for the coming months of winter.

  Grania saw her friend Kay and gave her a wave across the room. Kay was still dressed in mourning—black hat, black dress—though her husband had been killed two and a half years earlier, in April of 1915. Grania had still been working at the school then. Kay, struck by grief, volunteered at the Red Cross every Friday afternoon and knitted for the boys at the Front. She had given up her house after her husband’s death, but instead of returning to her parents’ home, she had moved in with her grandmother, a widow who had a small house on Thomas Street, two streets back from Main. Her grandmother, known as Granny to the town, had been looking after Kay’s two-year-old son while Kay worked every morning at the glass factory. But Granny was having problems of her own: she was forgetful, and had begun to wander. Grania seldom saw Kay’s secretive smile any more, but what would there be to smile about?

  In the work room, supplies were stacked in corners, and on a desk shoved against the wall, and on open cabinet shelves. Cora had tacked a notice, eye-level, near the door so that no one would miss the latest news from Dominion Headquarters. The new instructions contained a list of items that were to take the place of the earlier “Comfort Bags.” Vermin shirts and cholera belts were no longer required. Cora, self-appointed woman in charge, had taken it upon herself to see that orders were carried out to the letter. There was a Dominion-wide knitting competition, too, and Cora had announcements to make concerning that.

  In the sewing circle, eyes looked down as the women followed their stitches. Grania watched conversation ripple from one pair of lips to another. As always, in a group, words jumped the circle quickly and could not be read. When Mamo and Tress were with her, Grania was included. She had only to cast a sideways glance at either to follow their familiar lips—lips that formed words without creating so much as a whisper, lips that supplied silent commentary as they had been doing since she was five years old. Keeping her inside the circle of information.

  Cora was reading aloud, her face tilted towards a sheet of paper. Tress went quickly to the doorway, untacked the copy of the same sheet and brought it to Grania so that she could follow along. The knitters looked up in unison, their hands never pausing while they listened to Cora’s voice. Grania wondered, idly, what Cora’s voice was like. She nodded to Tress and was reminded that looking into her sister’s dark eyes was like looking directly into Mother’s. She checked the sheet while Cora read.

  Handkerchiefs will be of unhemmed cheesecloth, 18 × 18 inches, laundered, tied up in dozens. No shaving brushes will be placed in kit bags on account of serious danger of anthrax poisoning. Trench candles of newspaper and wax are not satisfactory and are not to be sent to warehouses, as they can no longer be shipped overseas. Bed pads, 17 × 17 inches, 6 layers of newspaper, 1 layer of non-absorbent cotton, are to be covered with cheap gauze—not cheese cloth. Use pattern from Dominion HQ.

  For an hour and a half, Grania sorted and layered and packed. Each item that passed through her hands was carefully tucked into its own space: facecloth, toothpaste, toothbrush, writing pad, pencil, shaving soap, razor, small comb, chocolate, tinned fruit, chewing gum, cocoa, curry p
owder, matches, tinder lighter, pen nibs, toilet paper and, finally, a mouth organ.

  She hoped that a mouth organ would reach Jim. She thought of his long fingers creased over the stubby metal, his palms hiding the double row of shadowed gaps as he held the instrument to his mouth, his right hand cupping rhythmically. It was almost two years since Jim had held a mouth organ to his lips while the last of the guests listened outside on the veranda at Bompa Jack’s—hours after the wedding ceremony, after the feast had been praised and enjoyed, after the kitchen furniture had been put back in its proper place because the dancing was over, after the wedding guests who weren’t dancing had had a chance to sit in the parlour on high-backed chairs, to exchange news and have a visit.

  Bompa Jack had worn the same old bow tie to the wedding, along with the one good pair of trousers that he owned, and a truly new shirt that Great-Aunt Martha had ordered from Mr. Eaton’s catalogue. By the time the dancing had ended, he had changed back into his comfortable farm clothes. Grania thought of how content she had been to sit on the veranda beside Mamo as dusk settled over the milk house and the barn and turned their shapes to silhouettes. The remaining relatives moved in and out of the farm house. Father and Mother, Tress and Mamo had stayed overnight. Bernard and Patrick had left early, to return to town to look after things at the hotel.

  And then, fatigue had set in—from the excitement of the day’s events, from reading lips of well-wishers for hours. It had been a relief when darkness had fallen and she could no longer follow conversations. She’d thought she might collapse into a deep long sleep. And then Jim had come to the rescue and they’d left in the automobile that had been lent to them by Uncle Alex.

  Dulcie, rescued by her new husband, waved goodbye to the wedding guests and the couple drove away.