Deafening (16 page)

Grania felt unevenness beneath her shoes as she almost stumbled over a clump of earth. New shoots had shoved up through last year’s old grass and the surface was damp with dew. Every year, the older boys pushed the heavy roller over the lawns to flatten the lumps. She looked back to see if her feet had left an imprint. She had been counting under her breath—316 steps from dorm to hospital door, part of her internal knowledge of the place. As she approached, she saw movement and looked up. Miss MacKay was on the upper veranda, shaking a blanket over the railing. She waved, and made the sign for
La Grippe.
Like most of the staff she was a hearing person, but she knew more of the sign language than most. She held her nose and, with one hand, flung out her fingers:
La Grippe, almost gone.

Grania signed back,
We hope.
She laughed, a muffled sound coming from her throat.
La Grippe
had raced through the dorms, tiring everyone out. Only a month before, the children had been quarantined for another reason: there had been so many measles cases in Belleville, no one was permitted walks or excursions into the city.

Grania glanced to the right as she rounded the building and paused when she saw soldiers marching on the road past the school. Reminders of war were everywhere; she was surrounded. Soldiers were frequently seen near the Armouries, and at the Belleville station where they said their farewells and joined eastbound trainloads of other soldiers passing through. Uniformed men in brown were also seen on Zwick Island, where they sometimes did their drill, and on Front Street and along Cannifton Road.

When word of the
Lusitania
had first arrived at the school, Cedric
had stopped everything to pen his editorial, and Colin and the boys in the print shop had had to work extra hours to reset type. Grania had been frightened by the news. She remembered a small boy who had drowned in the Bay of Quinte one summer when she’d been home for the holidays, and she recalled the sorrow on the faces of his parents. After the funeral, Mamo had shaken her head grimly and said that the boy’s family had been known to grow marigolds, the flower of death, in their garden. Now, it was impossible for Grania to expand the image of one dead boy to encompass the picture of 150 dead babies floating in the sea off the coast of Ireland.

The beautiful land called Ireland. It wasn’t so easy to conjure that, either. The picture she had always had in her head was the one her grandmother had given her through story. With the sinking of the
Lusitania
, Mamo’s word picture was being replaced by another, one that held murky waters and dark sea and drowning babies washing up through waves. It was this picture that lurked in her mind, the one that erupted no matter where Grania was during the day.

As she ran down the steps and into the bandage room, she checked the clock. She was not late. She was wearing her knitted sweater coat, a gift from Mamo that kept out the chill at this time of year, and she braced herself before she pulled it off. Sometimes, in the early morning, every building on the hundred-acre grounds was bleak with cold. But the sun was up. A warm day was promised.

Grania had been invited to work at Gibson Hospital the year she graduated, because she had the aptitude—or so the charge nurse had told her. “The aptitude for putting those animated hands of yours into the fray.” She did not have a delicate stomach. She could clean up after a child who had thrown up without throwing up herself. She could change a dressing and compress a stye. She could smooth a counterpane with forty-five-degree corners. She could make a bed, with and without a child between the sheets, and had done both hundreds of times. She worked six days a week and occasionally had two days off together. The infirmary never closed while school was in session—except on “Miracle” Christmas Day the previous year,
when not a single child had suffered from indigestion or an infected throat.

Today, once the sick children were washed and bathed, it would be her job to prepare the ledger for tomorrow morning before Dr. Whalen visited. Mrs. Sutton, the charge nurse, would be back Monday as well. The charge nurse never worked weekends except in times of epidemic, and there hadn’t been one of those since early winter, when the thirty beds had been filled with children spotted with chicken pox. The sign had been common enough in the school halls—two fingers plucking at the cheek—as students searched one another’s faces for telltale spots.

Grania thought of Fry and hoped her friend had managed to stay awake; Fry was notorious for sleeping in. After she and Colin married, it would be Colin’s responsibility to push her out of bed in the morning. If he stayed. He had invented every trick he could think of to try to join up, even knowing that the army didn’t need deaf boys. And Fry didn’t want him to go. They had talked about moving to Toronto, where their families lived; Colin was certain he could get a job in a print shop there. But if Fry left her job in the school kitchen, the only hope she would have for work would be as a domestic. Ads from Toronto were frequently placed in the school paper:
Good deaf girl, wanted for domestic work.
If Fry were to leave, Grania would be without her best friend.

In the late afternoon, after work, Grania had an hour to fill before she was to meet Fry. They planned to walk up through the orchard after supper, before the evening chill settled over the grounds. She stopped off at the main building to pick up a copy of the school paper to take back with her to the residence, and she leafed through it as she walked.

The school paper, printed twice monthly since 1892, had started out as
The Canadian Mute
but changed its name during the 1913 school year, after the official name of the school changed. The
school dropped the word
Dumb
; the paper dropped the word
Mute.
When pupils were enrolled at the school, their parents were sent a copy in hopes that they would subscribe, fifty cents a year. The paper did more than report school news; it shared information with schools for the deaf in many parts of North America and, in some ways, was a wide-reaching community paper. Students continued to subscribe after they left school, and some sent news back. Mr. Cedric had been editor-in-chief and teacher in the print shop for the past fourteen years.

Grania always read Cedric’s editorials, as well as articles and stories and “Items of Interest,” but her favourite page was the “Locals” because it was here that the children spoke for themselves. Cedric made corrections, repaired grammar and put the children’s words into what he called the King’s English. Much of the time, he flattened the voices until they merged to become one. But some voices refused to be flattened, and this was what Grania looked for—voices that were too distinct to be made to disappear.

This week, as always, the students were drawn to disaster. Because the
Lusitania
had been torpedoed after the submission deadline, most of the writings were about other forms of disaster. Grania lay back on her bed, propped by pillows, and read what the children had to say.

I received a welcome letter from my mother. My cousin has gone to War. My uncle fell and broke his arm and split his nose in pieces. Another cousin ran a nail through his thumb and blood poisoning set in. They live in England.

My brother wrote that when he was in the trench many bullets went over his head and he heard a noise like bees buzzing.

Yesterday some boys told me that some German soldiers took a Canadian soldier and they hammered the nails into the Canadian’s hands. He was very much hurt. They were brutes.

I heard that my Uncle died at the first of the month. He left a widow and seven children. Uncle was sick with heart trouble. He is better off out of this wicked wicked world.

I have an uncle who is doing garrison duty in Bermuda. When he left, he looked such a brave soldier, I could hardly keep my tears inside my little eyes.

Grania smiled at this, written by young Paddy, who was twelve and whose heart melted at every occasion. Another boy, Charles, wrote:

Mr. Sails went to the barn and caught 35 chickens. He chopped off their heads and carried them to the kitchen where the feathers were plucked. The cook put them in the boiler.

Chicken and dumpling day, a Sunday two weeks before. Grania and Fry, who’d been off that day, helped the children, who sat at side-by-side tables. Every child had a plate, knife and fork. Every table had a cloth, five children to a side, enamel serving bowls at both ends. Colin, on the other side of the room, went up and down the rows tucking napkins into the collars of the little boys. Colin would be a good father if he and Fry ever had children. Which, Grania thought, would not make Mr. Bell happy—if he were here to know. Colin, unlike Fry, had been born deaf to deaf parents. Mr. Bell had worried himself over marriages between deaf people, even though he had worked with deaf children in Boston when he was a young man, and had married a deaf woman himself. Now he lived close to the sea in Nova Scotia, not far from the province in which Jim had grown up. Grania turned a page of
The Canadian
and read the notice about Mr. Bell’s new book, available from New York. “Professor Alexander Graham Bell has made a profound study of the human voice and, in this work, has actually taken apart the human larynx and all its accessories as if it were merely a telephone.
His disclosures are fascinatingly interesting and highly instructive.”

Maybe our own students here at school will have a better chance for learning, Grania thought. Better than we had. The schooling had recently been extended to ten years, rather than the seven she had put in before her own graduation. Maybe, she thought, the students will have a real chance, now, to improve reading, writing, spelling, the big problems that are often never overcome.

Fry had struggled with written English all through school, and Grania had worked many long evenings beside her, trying to help, trying to pass on what Mamo had taught.

She turned back to the paper and a change of news.

I received a nice letter from my cousin. She was at a dance in California. She got the first prize for waltzing. She has learned the fox trot and all the new dances.

I am tired of hearing about this war.

And so am I, Grania thought, so am I. It made her body clench to think of it. It was a war Jim would soon be heading into. But she had not given up the hope that it would be over before he would have to leave.

The last two items were written by Cedric.

King George V has forbidden the use of liquor in his household, during the continuance of the war. His Majesty’s example has been followed by many prominent people in England, including Lord Kitchener and Premier Asquith.

The children, naturally, have faith and trust in all that comes from home and when they have been taught in school to write ‘a pair of boots,’ and then read in a letter from home ‘a pare of butes,’ they are placed, as it were, on the horns of a dilemma.

Grania wondered if the parents who sent the letter would be reading Cedric’s high-handed column.

A shadow crossed the doorway; she saw the movement before Fry entered the room.

Fry plunked down on the edge of her bed and stretched out her legs. “Four weeks,” her freckled hands signed. “Four more weeks, and Colin and I will be married.”

“You look so far away,” Fry signed to Grania.

They were sitting side by side on a mound in the orchard, up behind the farm buildings. Asparagus grew wild beneath the apple trees, which were in full blossom. Grania marvelled at the rows of trees and their geometric pattern; she could look around her from any spot and no matter in which direction—ahead, behind, diagonally—the lines of trees, like spokes from a hub, were exactly straight, whether the ground beneath them was uneven or flat. Every tree had the same distance between it and the next, on all sides, allowing for sunshine and growth.

The ground was still warm from the day’s sun, the air heavy with fragrance. The aroma that enveloped the two friends varied with the shifting breeze—sometimes strong, sometimes faint. It was the strength of this aroma that told Grania when to look up at the leaves to detect the activity of the breeze. The slow, purposeful flights of the bees had diminished in the past few moments; the sun was about to set. Far off, three flattened clouds drifted over the bay. It was a place of such peace, Grania wished she could sit here forever. She inhaled the scent deeply and thought of Mamo and her Canada Bouquet, and she tried not to be homesick. Soon, she would be back with her family in Deseronto for the summer. Jim had promised to visit as often as he could. She missed him now, though it had been only three days since he’d last been at the school hospital with Dr. Whalen. Next weekend, they were to go on a picnic with Colin and
Fry, in Jones Woods near the bay. Grania and Fry had already made plans for the food they would take.

“I am far away,” Grania replied to her friend. “But I like coming to the orchard. I never get tired of it.” Her right hand was undulating. “You know, when I look at clouds drifting, I think
song.
Or maybe
music.
Problem is, I don’t know what goes with the words. Mamo told me she always sang one song that I liked when I was small. Before I was deaf.”

“The hearing,” Fry said, “when they meet us, they always ask the same.
Do you miss music? Do you miss the songs of the birds?
As if nothing is worse.”

“Music and birds are important to the hearing.”

“When I’m in a bad mood I say, ‘How can I miss what I don’t know? So what if I can’t hear birds. I can see them.’”

Grania had never tried to explain to Fry that she believed, or imagined she believed, that music and song were everywhere. Not only in clouds but in flights of birds, in oak leaves that brushed the dorm window, in the children’s legs as they raced across the lawns. “It’s silly, isn’t it,” she signed. “My memory of sound is gone for all those years—fourteen years—but I feel as if my brain remembers music.”