Jack Conlin had kept his word about letting Tress know when he had a place and she had moved to the end of Main Street as soon as the house was ready. Tress had been saving every dollar she could from her pay assignment and separation allowance. Over Jack’s objections, she paid two months’ rent in advance. She had to be certain it was hers; she wanted a place of her own.
Once the cleaning was done, the entire family helped to furnish the house. Father delivered several pieces of furniture from the hotel—an iron bed, a seagrass mattress, four chairs, a chest of drawers. Tress ordered a kitchen table from Mr. Eaton’s catalogue and, for the veranda, a small square-topped table and two wicker chairs. As soon as the roads were hard-packed with snow, Bompa Jack brought in a screen for the fireplace and two parlour chairs, delivered by sleigh from the farm on the Ninth.
Mother sorted through linens and gave Tress the extras. Mamo stitched and crocheted. Bernard and Patrick arrived with Father’s tools and added pantry shelves, repaired window sashes and checked the fitting of the storm door, late in the season as it was. Even Kay sewed a mattress pad for Tress and took it to her as a gift.
When Grania first walked with Tress through the narrow, two-storey house, what she saw were rooms that reminded her of their childish creations when they’d furnished rooms from pages of the catalogue. The kitchen was the only large room; it stretched across the entire width of the house at the back. Behind the kitchen, there was a windowed veranda with a rough-tiled floor. Flat stones outside led to a slope that tilted narrowly towards the bay. Everything else, inside and out, seemed to have been created in miniature.
There were two rooms upstairs, one on each side of the peak of the house: the main bedroom, now furnished, and an empty room for a child. Grania knew of Tress’s disappointment both before and after Kenan’s departure, when she’d learned that she had not conceived. It was impossible not to remember the plans Tress had made for babies, the ones she would name Pritchett and Jane. Grania thought of the ledger in the school hospital, the
Nurses’ Central Registration
. At some time during the stay of every young girl at the Ontario School for the Deaf, a date was written beside her name, along with one other word: “Indisposed.” Indisposed meant that blood had appeared, blood in the underpants or on the sheets. Blood that was to be reported.
Blood had appeared in Grania’s bed, too, after Jim had left. But that event was met with silence and went unreported, and she had kept her disappointment to herself.
Tress has a house, Grania thought, and Kenan is safe. He is coming home and he will never have to go back to war. He may be damaged, but he is coming home. We have not lost Kenan.
It was only yesterday, coming down the road to our billets, I happened to meet one of his sergeants who told me about his death. He was the best friend I ever had
.
Letter from the Front
All day, the town had been preparing for the heavy March storm. The afternoon train arrived, even though the temperature was dropping and snow covered the tracks. Snow had begun to fall steadily, and swirled around the back of the hotel until drifts blocked the rear entrance and the stable doors. The family was locked in. Tress and Kenan were in their own house at the other end of Main.
From the porthole window, Grania watched the formation of peaks and troughs and rippled waves. Her ocean field was now entirely white. At four in the afternoon a cutter went by on the road in front, and after that there was no activity at all. The mail managed to get through in the late morning and had been fetched by Patrick. The storm had swooped in from the northwest and down the length of the bay. After supper, no sooner had the snow stopped falling than it was followed by freezing rain, a layer of bluish-white that locked on to doorsteps and encrusted the verandas of the town.
Was it possible that Jim lived outside in weather like this? It was. Sometimes he slept in lofts or huts, or on shelves in barns, or in billets, or on beds of straw. There hadn’t been much news since
Passchendaele in the fall, but the papers now boasted that Canadians were bravely holding parts of the line. Grania had no idea of Jim’s location. The last letter she received—stamped with the censor’s stamp—had been written five weeks earlier, at the end of January, and said only that the Ambulance boys were rotated in and out of the line and that she was not to worry.
Rest periods
, he wrote,
mean continuous parades and inspections. They are determined to keep us busy, but there is a more relaxed atmosphere behind the lines, and some evenings there are even concerts and entertainments. Last night there were skits, and a kazoo band
.
One night, he wrote from a French village where he slept on a chicken-wire mattress, nine men to a tiny room of three-tiered bunks. He had to sit on the floor to write the letter, he said, the page propped against his knees. He’d spent Christmas behind the lines at a small farm. He and Irish and seven others pooled their money to buy sausages and pork and gave them to the woman of the farm, who cooked up the meat for their Christmas dinner.
All the boys call her Mother because she is so good to everyone. At Christmas we were given cigarettes and tobacco, an orange each, and some filberts. We shared these with the woman’s family. Some of the boys had no trouble getting their hands on a bit of rum for our celebration
.
Grania thought of her own Christmas. There had been no guests at the hotel for four days, which meant that everyone had a rest from work. Tress, still living at home then, had hung a wreath outside the front door. In early December, Bernard and Patrick decorated a small tree in the lobby. Mother wanted a tree in the house, too, and it was put up later, Christmas week, in the far corner of the parlour. In the town, celebrations were subdued; it was the fourth Christmas of the war. Grania sent homemade chocolates to Kay and her young son, and asked Bernard to deliver them. She was sure she did not imagine Bernard’s quick agreement to have an excuse to visit Kay.
On the twenty-fifth, the family sat down to Christmas goose, and everyone joined hands around the table for grace. Mother said a prayer that Kenan would soon be home from England and another special prayer that Jim would be kept safe.
Father brought out a bottle of brandy and added some to the carrot and raisin pudding, and everyone drank a small toast at the end of the meal. Mamo had knitted gifts for everyone: for Grania, a woollen hat with a turned-up rim, in cornflower blue; for Tress a shawl in her favourite rose colour. Patrick had
La Grippe
during the holidays, and coughed continuously. Grania tried to stay out of his way because she was still vulnerable to infections, especially at this time of year.
Fry and Colin had stayed in Belleville to help out at the school because more members of the staff had left to join up. Fry wrote that they’d taken the children to Griffins Theatre to see a moving picture that starred Charlie Chaplin, and the children laughed throughout the entire picture. Colin had helped the students to decorate the chapel blackboards with Christmas scenes.
Cedric wrote his usual pre-Christmas notes in the December newspapers, and Grania read these in her room.
PARENTS:
Read This!
Do you want your child to have a merry and happy Christmas? If so, make sure that your presents are sent in good time for the distribution of boxes on Christmas morning. It would save us a great deal of trouble and anxiety if they all arrived before the 20th. If sent later, they are apt not to get out here in time. We will do all we can to make your child happy on that day. If he does not share in the joys of the occasion it will be your fault.
Among presents for girls, don’t fail to include plenty of hair ribbons. These are always in demand, as are also handkerchiefs. Other useful presents are kimonos, bedroom slippers, rubbers, over-stockings, mittens, toques, aprons, scarves and collars of lace. Both boys and girls are always anxious to have
skates, so don’t overlook these if your child has not already got a pair. Don’t send jam, fruit or catsup in glass bottles. Every year we get one box or more in which such things have been sent, but which got broken on the way, often to the ruin or injury of other things. The children get as much of such things here as is good for them.
Grania had spent every Christmas of her childhood at the Belleville school, from the time she was nine years old. In some ways, she missed those frantic days filled with expectation. So much excitement in the morning when the children were wakened at five-thirty and taken to the main sitting room of each residence to see the tall trees decorated with strung popcorn, and ropes of silver tinsel, and crocheted cone baskets, and tiny angels with cheesecloth wings. Then, after breakfast, no matter if the weather was disagreeable, the Roman Catholic and Anglican pupils were walked to church in the city, escorted by several of their teachers. Everyone bundled up and followed one another in a long line. At the churches, the deaf children were brought to the front. Sometimes they signed a carol or a prayer for the rest of the congregation, and sometimes they watched the congregation sing. After church, they were marched back to the school and into the chapel to see the Christmas address given by their superintendent, and then, finally, restlessly, they sat on benches before a platform that had been erected in the large sewing room of the main building. Every year, the platform was piled high with presents sent from the children’s homes. Every year, too, Father had sent a box of toques and mittens to the school—especially for the poorer children.
Some of the girls and boys brought their own hand sleighs—an easy way to carry parcels back to the dormitories for opening. It was only after she had become a senior that Grania understood that every box sent from home had been opened
before
Christmas. She had been called upon to help the assistant matron fumigate all clothing
that had been sent, and each item had to be put back in its rightful place in its Christmas box.
This year, in the January paper, Cedric followed up in his usual style: “We are sorry that the parents were not here to take a walk through the dormitories after the boxes were opened. Such sights are not often seen. The beds were littered with every kind of goody, while mechanical toys of all kinds were running over the floors. These did not last long, most of them being junk before the day was out.”
At home, all during the season, Tress had been preoccupied with the thought of Kenan returning. Now, she was gone. Although she was only ten minutes away, Grania missed her. She missed her the way she had when she first went away to school. She tried to shake the old feeling of loss but it slipped easily back into place. She was glad for her sister, glad that Kenan was home, glad they had a home to live in. Tress walked back three times a week to work during the midday meal in the dining room, but Grania, standing alone at the window in the upstairs room of their parents’ home, felt as if she had been snagged by a net.
Locked in the compound. Tell Dulcie to run for help
.
Was the house more silent now, with Tress gone? Was there more silence between their parents? Grania did not have to hear silence to know about it. Father had let Bernard take over more responsibility for the business of the hotel, but he himself was remote, staying in his office most of the time. He frequently went out in the evenings, and Grania had several times smelled alcohol when he returned.
As for Mother, Grania wondered if she felt alone, the way Grania did, without her husband. It would not be possible to talk to Mother about this.
At least Mamo was here. Mamo was always here. Sometimes, after dinner, she and Grania sat in the parlour and Grania read short items to her from the town paper. Mamo now had what she called “old eyes.”
Before Kenan arrived home at the end of January, Grania had stayed overnight with Tress a few times in the small house, sleeping in the bed with her upstairs. But Grania was needed early in the morning to help; it was easier for Mother if she remained home. And now, Tress and Kenan needed privacy. The family had been so happy to see him, to welcome him back. But Kenan had not spoken. He could use one arm and both legs. For the past five weeks he had not left the narrow house at the far end of the street. Not once.
Grania had not gone to Belleville with Tress to meet him, but Mother and Father had. They had been at the station to greet him and to bring him the rest of the way. When Grania first saw him after he arrived in Deseronto, she was ashamed of her reaction. Except for the fact that he was sitting beside Tress, she would not have recognized him. The young man who sat before her was smaller than the Kenan who had left in 1915. Diminished. His face was partially bandaged when he first came home, but now the bandages were off. The rest of his face, the undamaged half, was terribly pale. His dead arm hung from the shoulder, a loose limb. Grania did not know if she had made a sound when she first saw him. She did not know if Tress had either, or what Tress had said. Now, Tress and Kenan were at home, working things out.
As Grania considered this, she wondered if she had made up her own part about being a married woman. A woman who had once lived with a man for a short time. Had she not, since her husband had left, gone right back to her old home, her old room, only to sleep in her old childhood bed?
When Jim comes home, she said to herself…but that was where things became vague. She had no idea when that might be or where they might go. Some future time connected to events unseen and far away. Others were in charge of determining outcomes that affected her life and Jim’s.
Chim
. Thinking his name made her feel alone and unconnected. Everyone has lost something in this war, she thought. We have waited so long, and we have all lost something.
She stood at her bedroom window and peered out. In all of the
winter whiteness, perhaps silence was everywhere. She would ask Mamo. Beneath the window she saw undisturbed snow in the street, and a glistening over the new layer of ice. When snow covered the earth, did it also absorb sound? She felt safe during snowstorms, although this was something she could not have explained. Perhaps hearing and deaf people were joined in the same way for a brief time in a silent world. But logic told her that movement, even in snow, must surely make sound; that the layer of ice would alter the silence. And this year there was much snow and ice—there’d been no January thaw, no February melt. Fry had written from Belleville to say that the city was worried about the possibility of spring flooding and that ice was dangerously jammed in the Moira River.