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 powder, 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
.
Now, Great-Aunt Martha was dead; she had died of a stroke in the spring, and Bompa Jack was alone again. Father went back to the Ninth Concession every two weeks to visit his father, taking supplies Bompa Jack might need from town, and staying overnight. Grania had gone with him at the end of August, and Father had surprised her during the supper meal at Bompa’s table. He talked more than he ever did at home, telling her about the days when he had been a boy growing up at the farm in that very house. “We did our chores, and once they were done we were allowed to play cards—except Sundays,” he said. He waved his hand over the table at which they were sitting. “The boys against the girls. Brother Am and I were great players in those days. We played forty-five, and in the fall when the geese were fat we twice won a goose, playing partners.
Rummy 500—that was another game we liked. On Saturday nights there was sometimes a party in someone’s home; in winter we went with a team on the sleigh. There was always a violin, someone fiddling. Sometimes a man brought a banjo. If there were enough people, there was square dancing in the kitchen. One year the teacher boarded with us and she helped my mother make soap on Saturday mornings. But the summers were hard. We all put in time picking stone. Back-breaking work. And we cleared hardwood to burn, to make potash that was taken to Kingston to be sold.”
Bompa Jack loved the old stories. It was all Grania could do to keep up with the two of them, when one added details to a reminiscence of the other. Late in the evening, Father went outside to fetch a bottle of whisky—though Grania had not seen him bring one to the farm—and that was when she had gone upstairs to bed.
Grania’s hands selected and tucked and dipped into the box, the positioning of each item determined by its shape. She had fallen back into her old cocoon, no longer looking to Mamo and Tress to see what was going on. She thought of the latest package of tinned chicken and cake that she had sent to Jim. Last year in the fall, Bompa Jack had asked her to send apples from the farm. He would want her to send more again this year. The first time was an experiment; she’d wrapped eight, each one separate in a layer of newspaper, all sent with the hope that they would be edible on arrival. Jim had received them weeks later and reported that they hadn’t rotted at all. He’d been grateful to have them. This year, if she could keep the parcel a reasonable size, she would send more—a dozen, perhaps.
But when she carried parcels to the post office, she still felt as if she were dropping them into an abyss that might or might not lead to
over there
. Each time she left the building, she felt as if she had given up something dear. The sending was an act of both belief and disbelief. Anything sent in the direction of the ocean might be swallowed by darkness and waves. Even after the trouble and care that went into the preparation, only a tiny part of her believed that what she had gathered and wrapped with her own hands would cross the
wide ocean and be unpacked by the hands of the man she loved. As if to encourage this lack of faith, the sender was asked to write a second name on the outside—in the event that it could not be delivered to the first. She had begun to print Orryn’s name as the alternate address, in case Jim was on the move and the parcel did not catch up to him.
Many times, Grania had imagined Jim reaching out, the tearing of paper, the careful folding of string—tucked into Jim’s pocket for future use—the lifting and examining of contents, one item at a time. Sometimes, months after she sent a parcel, a letter arrived thanking her for khaki handkerchiefs, for Oxo, for candy, for the navy blue scarf, for knee caps. But the acknowledgements were so long coming, they were by then unconnected to the earlier act of mailing.
She thought of the
Empress of Ireland
, which had sunk in 1914, a few months before the war began. She’d been working at the school—it was the end of May, a Saturday morning. She had been invited to the sewing room to see the girls’ train dresses, the ones they designed and cut out and sewed for travel home in June. It had taken a full day for the news of the
Empress
to filter into the school and into the room where the students were finishing their fittings. Miss Marks walked past the doorway and saw Grania with the girls, and came in out of the hall to say—with lips and hands and serious face—that a ship had gone down in the St. Lawrence River, on its way to England. It had been rammed by the Norwegian collier
Storstad
—the teacher held the newspaper in one hand and finger spelled the name of the collier with the other. Many people had drowned. Grania remembered Miss Marks shaking out the
P
sign with her hand, to show the passengers going down and down and down.
It was much later—in the fall when they were at school again and Grania was back at work in the hospital—when the second story of the
Empress
came in. Rosaleen, an Irish woman, a hearing woman
on the domestic staff at the hospital, came running down the stone steps from outside, one of her thick heels missing from a shoe. She had lost it on her way across the grounds and the loss of it meant that she entered the bandage room at a running limp. She was waving an envelope, a letter she had mailed four months earlier to an aunt in England. The same letter—everyone present was allowed to look and wonder and touch—had come back that morning, stamped with the miraculous words:
Recovered by divers from the Empress of Ireland
.
It was Cedric who uncovered the story for the school paper. The Canadian Pacific had hired divers to go down and blast a hole in the hull of the sunken ship. Not only had the divers retrieved silver ingots and cash and jewels from the ship’s safe, they had also brought up four boxcar loads of mail, and all of this had been dried and sorted and delivered back to the senders. Cedric was so taken by this, he published the details. “Rosaleen’s letter has been reposing on the bed of the mighty St. Lawrence River, ever since the sinking.” That was Cedric’s word,
reposing
. “The stamp was washed off, but the writing was perfectly distinct when the envelope was returned to sender.”
How they had marvelled at that one letter surviving inside a mailbag deep under water. Under water with bodies. Grania had not forgotten that part of the story. More than a thousand people drowned when the ship went down. No one tried to blame that on the Germans. But when the
Lusitania
was torpedoed and took its place in the news, the
Empress
was forgotten because so many horrible events in Belgium had by then intervened. Now, both ships were in watery graves—one at sea, and one in the mud of the St. Lawrence.
Grania thought of Grandfather O’Shaughnessy, the sheet twined round and round him before he was buried at sea. She thought of Mamo, living without him all these years. Grania had not considered adult loneliness when she was a child.
She looked over at Mamo now. Instead, she saw Cora’s lips moving
and Cora’s gaze directed at
her
. Cora was telling everyone about her daughter, Jewel, arriving this very day from Ottawa, by train. She would be waiting at home and they would have a visit—a good visit, Cora said, once her duties at the Red Cross were finished for the day. Jewel loved living in the capital. She had even been close to the Parliament Building when it was on fire last year, and she was able to report in some detail the tragedy of the event. One boy who witnessed the fire, Cora said, had never been right in the head since.
Grania pretended not to understand what Cora was saying. She looked down at her hands and methodically packed the box. Sometimes the easiest way to deal with Cora was to pretend. At least Jim’s name had not been shaped on Cora’s lips. Some days, she came right up to Grania and said, “Have you had a letter from Jim today?” If Grania had not, it was difficult not to feel badly. Mail was the event of the day for most people in town—mail and papers. But not for Cora, who had no family member overseas.
Grania remembered the first wet winter of the war when Orryn was training in England and sent a letter to Kenan from Salisbury Plain.
We’ve had another fierce storm here, and the mail tent blew down. Most of the letters were sucked up into the sky and have never been seen again
.
She imagined thousands of envelopes drawn up into a funnel of darkness hovering over the land. Not like Rosaleen’s letter, which had gone straight down. Rosaleen’s had
reposed
on the bed of the St. Lawrence and had risen again to be
returned to sender
.
Cora was beaming now; she was on to another topic—Vernon Castle. She had been honoured to meet him, she said. She had shaken hands with him and his wife, Irene, and they had promised to dance at a benefit in Deseronto. Now that he was teaching flying here at Camp Mohawk, the town would be seeing more of the famous dancing couple.
“Moving picture stars,” said Cora’s lips. “Imagine. In our little town. And he has an expensive automobile.”
Tress and Grania exchanged glances, but Mamo did not look up.
Vernon Castle had visited the hotel. He had stopped in at the dining room for a meal because he’d been told about Mother’s cooking. He wore his uniform and silver wings; he had a delicate fine-featured face, with a broad forehead and seagull hairline. He’d chatted with the whole family. Father came out of his office to meet him. Patrick wanted to know about his pet monkey, and was told that it was back at the camp. Tress and Grania shook his hand. The Flight Commander told the family that his squadron would have to move to Texas in November, because of the winter flying conditions around Deseronto. Patrick, still in high school, had been thrilled to meet the famous flyer; Castle was his hero. Grania knew that her younger brother was itching to go off to war himself, despite being under age. On the weekends, he often ran out of the house and stood on the street or in the yard at the back, and looked up to the sky. When Grania asked, he told her he’d heard the buzz of an aeroplane. He had already visited both training camps, Rathbun and Mohawk, to have a look around, and he had talked to the men who were learning to be flyers. One of them permitted him to sit in the front pit of his machine while it was parked in a row between other aeroplanes.
Grania glanced Cora’s way again.
“We were talking about fears,” Cora’s lips said. The sentence seemed to be directed at Grania.
Grania stopped daydreaming. She’d been left behind in the last conversation. But this time she couldn’t ignore Cora because the woman was right beside her, peering into the box Grania had just finished packing.