Deafening (7 page)

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 singing 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?”

“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.