Deafening (33 page)

“I was saying how fearful it must be to know that someone could approach you from behind in the dark and you wouldn’t even know.” She was facing Grania, her lips articulating firmly. Without giving her a chance to answer, she snapped up the instruction page from Dominion Headquarters that Tress had taken down, and moved away to tack it up again, by the door.

“No,” Grania said, and saw at once that her voice had Cora’s attention. Cora’s back had tightened.

The raised voice of the deaf, this is what it sounds like when we don’t keep it close
.

The knitters looked up from their stitches, hands unfaltering in their rhythm. Mamo and Tress were staring.

“No,” said Grania again. She made her voice bigger. This was not the sweet little voice that Cora described. “I never, ever, think about what is behind.”

Cora’s back relaxed but she did not turn around.

Behind doesn’t exist
, Grania muttered to herself.
The dark, now that is another matter. Not one that I would discuss with you
.

On the way home, Grania put the old question to Mamo again. “Why is Cora like this? Why does she seem to be angry? Why is she always angry with me?” Her fingers were tapping the side of her skirt. Her very existence seemed to offend Cora.

But Mamo could only shake her head. “It’s a long road without a turn,” her lips said. She had a firm grip of Grania’s arm and they took their time stepping up to the boardwalk and walking back to the house. Tress had left them and had hurried ahead to Meagher’s store to see the newly arrived bolts of winter cloth that had been advertised in the paper.

Mamo caught Grania’s attention and stopped to speak. “Cora has a narrow way of looking at the world,” she said. “But if someone’s heart is small, you can be sure that the person always lives with the knowledge of it.”

While the women had been indoors, packing boxes for the Red Cross, Bernard, out walking, had been pinned with a white feather by Jewel, Cora’s visiting daughter.

Grania wanted to march right out to speak to Jewel.

“She doesn’t know anything about my lung, Grainy. There is no point explaining to her or anyone else.”

But Bernard had been humiliated. Grania saw it in his face as he left the house to go through the passageway. She thought about
him through supper and again when she went upstairs later and paced around her room. She looked at Jim’s photograph—he was squinting as he leaned back against the split-rail fence at the end of the path in the woods. She remembered how he had pulled the leaves from the strands of her hair. She ran her fingers over the surface of the photo, and then she stared out at the darkness of the bay. She closed the curtains, and sipped at the cup of tea she had carried up from the kitchen. She could not settle down. When Tress came upstairs, Grania left the room to go down.

She paused on the landing and looked through the porthole at the back of the house. She sometimes thought of the scene outside the glass circle as her own dark ocean—her ocean of land. She pressed her forehead to the thickness of glass. Another season was drifting by. Her husband had been gone for two years. She was at loose ends. Mamo had taught her long ago about
loose ends
. “Fidgety,” Mamo had explained. “When you don’t know what to do with yourself. That’s what it means to be at loose ends.”

Grania wanted to talk to Bernard.

She would wait until things were quiet. She would persuade him to stop what he was doing—cleaning up, or polishing glasses in the beverage room. He’d be working at something. His breathing was fine as long as he stayed away from stairs inside, or hills outside. As long as he moved at a measured pace.

Grania wanted to coax him to the lobby to sit beside her. They would behave as if they were guests—the way she and Grew sometimes sat across from each other during the late afternoons, reading war news in the papers. She and Bernard would sink into two of the grand leather chairs. They would converse non-stop. She would use voice, and he would pay close attention; he would speak softly and she would read his lips. He knew the single-hand alphabet, even if he had never learned as much of the sign language as Tress knew.

But Bernard kept his thoughts to himself. Still, Grania wanted him to be angry about Jewel pinning him on the street. She wanted him to know how valuable he was to her. She wanted to tell him,
too, that she had seen him early in the week, on the stoop behind the house on Thomas Street where Kay lived with her Granny. He’d been fitting storm windows at the back, helping to prepare the house for winter. She wanted to say,
Invite Kay for tea, Bernard. She’s lonely, too. She has been alone for a long time. I’ll invite her, if you like
.

Grania knew that it was becoming more and more difficult for Kay to leave Granny alone. Some people in town called her Runaway Granny now. Granny had made her way up to Aunt Maggie’s unlocked apartment one day, and climbed the ladder to the clock tower. Another morning, she had been found in her nightgown on Mrs. McClelland’s stoop. Kay was looking for a woman to help with her son, during the hours she worked at the glass factory. It was becoming impossible to leave Granny and the child alone.

Grania wanted to talk to Bernard about all of this. And after Bernard would speak, she would tell him—
What
would she tell him? That on Friday the twenty-first of September, 1917, she was filled with a desperate longing. A loneliness so brittle, she believed that she would break in two.

It was nine in the evening when she went through the passageway and over to the hotel. Bernard, as if he had known she was coming, was walking towards her across the lobby. He held an envelope in his left hand and before she could touch it, he rotated his closed right hand over his heart.
Sign language
. His lips were saying, “Sorry, Grainy, sorry,” before he reached her. She saw Jim’s letter coming towards her. It was the feather, the damnable white feather that had upset Bernard. Otherwise, he’d never have forgotten. He had stuffed the letter into his jacket pocket and there it had stayed. He’d meant to give it to her when she got home from the Red Cross. He was writing S-o-r-r-y in the air, in careful, even script. She stopped him. She was full of smiles.

“When I was out in the afternoon,” he said, “Jack Conlin asked me
to give it to you. He was making a special trip from the post office because he wanted you to have it right away. A second mailbag came in. He met me on the street, and then Cora’s daughter…” Bernard looked past Grania’s shoulder but not before he placed the envelope in her extended hand.

Grania hugged him and looked around the room. She and Bernard had the place to themselves. She headed for a large armchair in the corner and sank into it.

The envelope was wrinkled, but untorn. The handwriting was small but recognizably Jim’s. The envelope had an English stamp and an English postmark, and there was a thickening beneath the paper. Grania held her breath. She looked up to see Bernard, watching.

“Go ahead,” his lips said. “Open.”

She slit the envelope carefully. Every envelope, every letter, was stored in the biscuit tin in the house, upstairs.

She pulled out a picture postcard in sepia tones. Printed in the lower front corner in white lettering were the words,
The Leas Bandstand, Folkestone
.

Jim was on leave.

The picture showed a circular bandstand on the left, a wide terrace in the middle. Below that, were a grassy slope and a narrow boardwalk above the sea. A row of lampposts stretched off into the distance. Some people in the picture wore capes over their shoulders; others were being pushed in wicker wheelchairs. Men in more wheelchairs were lined up near the terrace. Taking the air. A scene, perhaps, of a Sunday afternoon. On the grounds were folding chairs made of wood and canvas, each with a high back and its own small awning. In the open-air bandstand, uniformed bandsmen were either playing their instruments or preparing to play.

Grania turned the card to see three words, handwritten:
On the Terrace
. Inside the envelope, Jim had tucked a thin sheet of paper. His once generous handwriting was tightly scrunched.

My Love

I have ten days’ leave. The bandstand you see on the card is on the Upper Leas. After every eight songs and marches, they play “Nearer My God to Thee.” It must be what the people want. There are some who have nothing more to do during daytime hours than stroll through the streets and walkways. In Radnor Park I watched model yacht races. Some sails are as tall as I am. The water is cold but there is a beach and enough hardy people to swim and play around shore. Sometimes I walk to the pier and watch the small turbine steamers as they prepare to leave. The water does not have a big sound. I sat on the pier and thought of you. I met a New Zealand boy who is also on leave. His name is Kirkpatrick and he’s from a place called Palmerston North. He was with the ANZACs in Gallipoli and has interesting stories to tell. His unit is now in France
.

I’ll mail this at the local Post. Enclosed is a souvenir. I think of you always
.

Believe me, I will be coming home
.

All my love, Chim

That was all.

Grania removed a second sheet of paper from the envelope and unfolded it to find a square of white silk, its edges expertly sewn in matching thread. Two stemmed flowers in shades of pink and mauve were embroidered into the lower corner. These were surrounded by pale green leaves, and tied with a silk knot. The stitching along the inside border was a continuous beaded pattern. In and around the flowers were the hand-embroidered words: “With All My Love.”

She held the handkerchief and thought of Jim’s hands, his long fingers touching the silk before he made his purchase. She looked again at the picture on the card and tried to imagine this place where he had taken his leave. If she had been with him, she could have
seen what he had seen. She could have tucked in against his side as they walked arm in arm, inhaled the grainy air of Folkestone, watched as he described the sound of the dark waves.

But the envelope had been sent weeks ago. Jim would not be safe in England at all. Not now. He would have returned to France before the envelope was even on board the ship that carried it across the ocean.

She raised the silk and pressed it to the soft spot below her ribcage, the spot at the centre. The place of the onset of breath before it becomes song. She held it there and did not move.

She looked up suddenly, self-consciously, remembering that she was not alone. But Bernard had slipped away and was in his tiny office behind the desk. Her body was still. She sat there for a long time, until two guests came down the stairs, men who tipped their hats in her direction and greeted her before they went out the main door and into the street.

The letter Jim did not send was written in his head while he lay staring at the ceiling from his bed in Folkestone. His photo of Grania was on the bedside table. He lay between clean sheets. When he’d first felt them against his skin, it was as if old memory had touched his body from a forgotten place. There was an eerie darkness in the room and in the town. No lights showed in the streets outside. Images took turns showing themselves to his mind while he lay there, as if a lantern show were in progress, projecting one picture after another, with no one at the controls.

There is a feeling, without my partner, of being unprotected, even here in England. So far, Irish and I have been untouched, though we’ve had our share of close calls. Some of the new boys try to stay near us when they hear how long we’ve been out, especially the ones sent up as replacements. Irish and I know that it is not a matter of luck. Evan always says, “If it is written,” and I am beginning to believe this myself.

Irish will be next for leave, when I return. He is worried that Fritz will interfere before he can gather his belongings. It’s the way I felt the last few days before I got away. It is natural to expect something to interfere, to see ourselves pinned there forever.

Things have been difficult, but no one seems to question the higher-ups. When Fritz lets loose the mustard gas it saturates everything it touches. The boys suffer terribly. We try to help but can do nothing but stand by. The skin bubbles up and some boys go blind or drown in their own froth and secretions—slow strangulating deaths, no place left for air. We try our best to get the boys out of danger. We are compelled to wear masks ourselves and there is a good deal of stumbling as we go. There is constant worry that the patients’ masks will slip or be pulled off during a carry. To be inside the mask is suffocating. You feel a tightness in the chest, as if there is no breath to take. Some of the boys rip off the mask when they think they are out of danger, but they end up suffering more for doing so.

The day before I left I carried a boy from Belleville, though I didn’t know his name. He recognized me when we did the lift and lowered him to the stretcher—there were four of us. “You used to work with Dr. Whalen,” he said, “in Belleville. Will you get a message to my mother? Will you look her up when this is over and tell her I tried my best to play the game well?” Irish cut in. “You’ll be home to tell her yourself, lad. No more about that.” We started out, a shoulder lift, and walked back, a mile and a half. Just before we got him to the dressing station I thought rain had begun and then I realized that only my collar and one shoulder were wet. The boy’s blood had seeped right through the canvas. He might have died shortly after we started out, or along the way. We’ll never know. I spoke to him and he didn’t answer; we stopped to check and had to leave him by the roadside so we could go back for the living. A burial party picked him up the next day. I made inquiries and found
out who he was; I’ll write to his mother. At least he’ll have a known grave—unlike the boys who are out there rotting on top of the soil, their entrails filled with gas, their faces gnawed by rats.