Deafening (24 page)

Colin tried to join up
, she wrote.
Third try. But at last minute, he was found out.

Grania thought of Colin’s blue eyes, how they must have burned with intent as he’d tried, once again, to bluff his way through. This time, using his considerable lip-reading skills, he’d managed to get as far as the end of the physical exam.

He turned away to pull on his clothes and Doctor spoke. Colin does not know what he said. When Colin did not answer, Doctor was suspicious. Then, special check of hearing was done.

I am not sorry. I know it is hard for you, worrying while Jim is over there. Colin volunteers with school cadets. On days they have drill, he helps when he finishes work in print shop.

Grania knew that Colin was again considering a move to Toronto to work as a typesetter. A deaf man who owned his own business had contacted him twice. It was one of the few ways the boys could get work after they left school. They’d already worked in the print shop; their visual accuracy was exceptional, and they could not possibly be bothered by the noise. There had been an article not long ago in
The Canadian
about printing presses owned and operated by deaf persons—there were five in the west, and two in Toronto. Fry’s parents still lived in Toronto and would be happy to have her there, but for Grania it would mean that her friend would be more distant. As it was, they visited back and forth as much as they could. The last time Grania had taken the train to Belleville was to accompany
Mamo, who needed a new coat. She and Mamo had met Fry, and they all had tea together on Front Street.

Colin knows former student who did enlist. Last spring, do you remember we were proud when Owen visited school? He wore Red Cross badge on his sleeve. Now he is corporal and we think he left Exhibition Grounds in Toronto to work in diet kitchen in military hospital. Teachers here say he will never be sent overseas. But Owen’s success makes Colin hope. And it is not first time Colin is rejected.

If we were allowed, we could do more. You and I could work for Empire. With our Home Nursing training we could help look after sick and wounded when boys come back to Canada. Instead, we volunteer, and knit pneumonia jackets and knee caps. I don’t think we are welcome in factories, either, where women our age work now, when many speaking boys are overseas. I am not feeling sorry, Grania, but something else happened to Colin and that discouraged me.

Grania set aside the last page of Fry’s letter, feeling discouraged herself. She had not received a letter from Jim for three weeks. The letters from England arrived in clumps on this side of the ocean, too, and not necessarily in order. Everything depended on the ships.

At least Jim was still in England the last time he’d written. He said he was training, and anxious to get across the Channel. It was worse for Tress, whose letters from Kenan were now sent from
Somewhere in France.

Grania picked up the “Locals” page that Fry had torn from the school newspaper and enclosed with her letter. The paper arrived by mail twice a month, but Fry, knowing how Grania loved to read what the children wrote, always had Colin bring home an early copy. She sent the “Locals” page ahead, even though Grania’s subscription copy followed a day or two later.

This week, the children at the school were preoccupied with the fire in Ottawa. Disaster would never stop being a main attraction.

We heard that the Parliament Building in Ottawa was burned last week. It was thought that the Germans set it on fire but we were mistaken. Sir Wilfrid and Lady Laurier had invited some ladies to a party; they heard that the Parliament Building was on fire and Sir Wilfrid got an auto to ride there. When Sir Robert Borden heard of the fire, he ran to see it without his hat and coat, so he lost them.

Some entries were about war.

There are a lot of wounded soldiers. Some men have their legs off, and some have one or two arms which have been blown off by shells or something else.

My Aunt has two sons at the war. They have gone to France and she is alone at home. Poor Aunt! Her sons are feeling fine and not worrying about the future, so my Aunt is trying to look on the bright side and will leave them in her Heavenly Father’s hands, knowing that He doeth all things well.

Our principal came to the chapel where we were watching the magic lantern show. He carried an Edison phonograph and played some music but I could not hear it because I am a deaf girl. The hearing people enjoyed the music very much. They looked pleased.

Last month we asked if we could have a carnival. We made funny clothes. I dressed in a plain dress and went as a suffragette—votes for women, you know.

Grania turned the page and read one of Cedric’s items.

Deaf and speechless, Jaime, the 6-year-old son of the King and Queen of Spain, finds his greatest pleasure in a moving picture theatre, which has been built in the royal palace for his amusement. Despite his affliction, the 6-year-old princeling is a bright and merry little boy. He is to be taken soon to the French Institute for the Deaf and Dumb at Paris, but the physicians hold out little hope of the restoration of his faculties.

She folded the tear sheet and put it away. She picked up the last page of Fry’s letter and read it to the end. It was sometimes like this with Jim’s letters. She had to brace herself to get through them at one sitting.

Tuesday after work, Colin walked to city and crossed footbridge over Moira. He was going to Front Street on errand for Cedric when two women he never saw before rushed up. They were speaking at same time and he could not lip read more than few words. They pinned white feather to his overcoat and marched off. He came home humiliated. For an hour he was upset and paced up and down before he told me. He said he pulled the feather off and threw it on road and came home. Cedric’s errand is still not done. This happened day after Colin tried to join up one more time.

Grania was certain that one of the words Colin had read from the lips of the two women had been
coward.
Her own Aunt Minna, in a letter to Mother, had written from Toronto saying that some women—women who had no sons, or whose husbands were too old to serve—were marching up and down the streets as if they’d been appointed by God, calling out to young men suspected of being indoors and safe behind the walls of their parents’ homes: “Come out, young cowards! Come out and sign up!”

She thought about Colin, deaf at birth, born to deaf parents, tall and fit-looking with his strong body, his wavy fair hair parted
almost in the middle. He would have looked carefree enough as he walked along the Belleville street. Who could know, or even imagine from outward appearance, how many times he had tried to slip past recruiting officers and medical examiners? Colin, with his hands shoved deep down into his pockets, had always made an effort to fit in. But there was something so deliberate about his stance, it succeeded only in drawing attention. When he was confronted on the street, he must have wondered what was happening, what the two women could want from him. The realization would have come when he had seen the white feather, shame and anger burning his cheeks.

Now in their twenties, Fry and Colin had known since their teens that their lives would be joined together. Not the way Tress and Kenan decided, at the age of ten, that they would marry when they were older. Not like that. It was knowledge that asserted itself during the last years they were students at the school. Everyone else knew, and did not question. Colin used to stand to the side at morning recess when the girls danced with one another—and his eyes never left Fry. He didn’t care that he was teased by his friends. Two by two, arms around waists, the girls danced. No music needed; there was only the swish of skirts, the scuffling shoes, the rhythm created out of silence. The group broke up suddenly when everyone had to line up for a slice of bread and a spoon of molasses. Grania shuddered when she thought of the thick syrup, how she had choked when she’d tried to make it slide down her throat.

In the afternoons, the girls went back to class to learn sewing while the boys went to the print shop or the shoe shop, or to carpentry. Most afternoons, the girls did fancy work, learning and perfecting stitches. It was difficult to come out of the Belleville school and not sew like an expert. Other days, they mended.

Miss Wyse, the sewing teacher, would reach into the basket of clothes that had been set in the centre of the room, sewing machines
along one side, a bolt of cloth spread down the long table nearest the door. Light streamed in from the peaked windows. But there was no fancy stitching on mending day. Once a month the girls mended the boys’ clothes, which usually meant patching trousers. Each girl picked up a needle and thread and went to the circle of chairs. Miss Wyse distributed the trousers, a pair to each.

“Why can’t the boys sew their own patches?” Fry had signed to Grania.

Miss Wyse signalled her to work. No talking, no signs.

But when the teacher left the room for a few moments, the girls checked the names in the waistbands, jumped up from their chairs, and swapped. Grania was handed Edgar’s trousers and shook her head,
No.
Edgar was a boy who tried to trip the girls on the rink during carnival. Edgar was foolish. She settled, instead, for Charlie’s. When Colin’s trousers were identified, they were quickly passed around the circle. Fry always sewed the patches on Colin’s clothes. No one ever disputed her right to mend for Colin.

Now, not so many years later, Colin was doing everything he could to leave Fry and go away to war.

Was it selfish to want the men to stay home? They were sent into danger. Many were killed. It was someone else’s war.

Grania knew what Jim would say:
This is our war, too. We are needed.

One evening, when he’d been singing in Aunt Maggie’s kitchen in the tower apartment, she asked what the song was and he told her, “Dear Hame hid awa’ in the Glen.” He wrote out the title for her; he had learned the words that week. While they put away the dishes after supper, she teased him about singing to the plates and pots and pans. She saw now that every moment they’d shared during the two weeks in the tower had been part of an elaborate farewell. They had shut everything and everyone else out. It was only later, after Jim left, that she understood the true intensity of their time together.

He had leaned over the backs of soldiers at the open window of the train. He had made her name-sign with his hand. She carried
the picture in her memory—Jim reaching across his tunic, the coach with the chalked number 5. There were no yellow-rope letters in this picture. Only her husband, searching for her in the crowd.

Now, the same trains that had crossed the country from west to east, collecting cheering boys who kept time to thrilling vibrations of marching bands, were crossing the country in the opposite direction. Pulling the same cars, half-empty, from one coast to the other. Puffs of steam rose into the air and vanished while the walking wounded helped offload the limbless and disabled. Some days, after a train passed through, the platforms in the towns were strewn with an unaligned jumble of vacant, staring, young-old men. Grania had seen them in Deseronto and in Belleville and in Napanee.

Jim had left Canada excitedly, heading for the country of the King, His Most Excellent Majesty of the British Dominions beyond the seas and Defender of the Faith. She thought of the children at school when Cedric had raised his ruler like a baton at the front of the crowded Assembly Room, and taught the motto of the Empire Day Movement. One King, One Flag, One Fleet, One Empire. The children’s hands had shaped the signs of loyalty, their earnest young bodies standing smartly to attention. She had been one of those children. And so had Colin. And so had Fry.

Grania folded Fry’s letter and slipped it into her pocket. She glanced up to see Bernard crossing the lobby. He smiled but did not stop to speak. She thought of Fry and Colin again, and was not surprised that they were both discouraged. Colin had been accused of cowardice. Grania felt her own anger rise on his behalf, but she knew there was nothing she could do. Nothing the three of them could do except continue to try to take charge of their lives.

It had been Miss Marks who had helped the students understand the concept of taking charge, and Grania thought of her now. “You will have to ignore some things outside of yourselves,” she’d told them. “But try to be in charge of your own information. If you rely
on others to tell you what is going on, then others will be in charge of your life. Some things you can act on, some things you cannot. Try not to be frustrated while you learn what you can do.”

Grania hoped that Colin remembered the discussions. He wanted badly to do his bit in the war but that was not going to be allowed. It would take courage to ignore the insults of people who did not know half as much about conducting themselves with dignity as Colin did.

Chapter 10

We left the station and went to a hotel, where we boarded, until Monday. A soldier introduced his mama to my mama, so my mama was not lonesome. The soldier was lame and his right arm was almost dead, but he was cheerful. It all happened one day when they were marching at Camp Borden. Some girls threw cigarettes to them and they all wished to get one, and our friend fell and his comrades fell on top of him. He has two brothers in khaki. One has been returned home crazy, and the other came home at the same time as my dad.

The Canadian

In the late afternoon, on her way home from the store, Grania stopped off at the post office. She reached into the box and there, in her hand, was the first item of mail sent to her from France. Proof that Jim was at the war, in the war, a part of the war. She tried to take in the information at a single glance: the right-slanted handwriting, the texture, the date,
April 8, 1916.
She thought of Jim’s long fingers, his gentle hands, one holding the card, the other holding the pencil. She raised the card to her nose but could detect nothing more than the scent of handled paper, of use.