How could one keep going, when all the news was bad?
There’ll be no one left, she thought. Soon, there will be no one left.
When she first saw Patrick in uniform—after he ran away and signed up in Barriefield, and after Mother marched him right back and unsigned him because he was underage and still in school, and after he ran away a second time and signed up in Belleville, right after the backed-up ice let go in the Moira River and tossed the footbridge aside and caused violent flooding, and after a third time in Napanee, after Mother gave up and knew, as everyone did, that Patrick was leaving at four o’clock this spring day and was here to say goodbye—after all of this, Grania asked: “What did Grew play on the piano that night, the night of the big storm? What was the name of the song?”
Patrick was facing the lens while Grania stared intently down and into the tiny window, shaded by her hand. She was trying to keep her hands steady, and pressed the camera to her waist. Behind her young brother, as she centred him in the scene, she could see the
backyard of the house on Edmon Street that faced the side of their own drive sheds behind the hotel. A corner of slatted roof sloped low over the neighbour’s turkey run. No one would ever know from the front that there was a turkey run a half block behind Main Street. She had been told for years about the gobbling.
Father was behind Grania, slumped tiredly against the back stoop. Mother was inside, upstairs, lying on top of her tightly made bed. Tress had come from the other end of Main to say goodbye and was standing inside with Mamo at the laundry window, waiting for Grania’s camera work to be finished.
Patrick, now posed in the camera window, had an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. Grania had never seen him smoke. His arms hung loosely at his sides; the sleeves of his tunic were an inch too long. His puttees were tightly wrapped, the knees of his trousers baggy above them. His boots were narrow and slickly polished. His hair was short, his neck too small for his collar. One ear stuck out beneath his cap. On his face was a half grin. He was a boy who was heading across the sea to have an adventure. The family knew that he had lied about his age and invented a new name for himself. His name—he had finger spelled it for Grania—was now Vince. She did not know how or why he had chosen this name over any other. The only thing she could think of was that it began with the letter
V
after Patrick’s hero Vernon Castle. Castle had died in February, in an aeroplane crash during training in Texas, while he’d been teaching a young man to fly. The papers had been filled with local memories about him. Grania could scarcely bear to think of the handsome flyer who had moved with such grace, his slender dancer’s body falling hard out of the sky.
“Tell me the name of the song,” Grania said again. “The one Grew played that night.”
She had been shown the letter written by Richard’s platoon lieutenant. Grew received it exactly one month after the arrival of the telegram.
I must tell you that I have known your son from the time he enlisted. In losing him I have lost one of the best men from my platoon, and I am very sorry. Both officers and men desire me to say how much we miss him. You may be extremely proud of the fact that he was always ready to do his duty and that he was willing to sacrifice his all for the cause. He died nobly and in service of the Empire and his King. I am able to say positively, from witness reports, that he was killed by a sniper’s bullet while on night patrol in No Man’s Land, and that he died instantly. I know it will relieve your worries to learn that he did not suffer at the end. You should also know that one of our Canadian boys managed to kill the sniper almost immediately. It is most unfortunate that we were unable to recover your son’s body. Shortly after that episode, the area came under heavy fire and we were forced to remove ourselves to another location.
Grew had come to the house with the letter. He’d stood unmoving while the single page was passed hand to hand. He refused to sit down during the visit. Grania remembered, too, that every member of the family had remained standing until he turned abruptly and left.
“It was the one about the Irish Laddies,” Patrick’s lips said now. He was forming the words with care and she looked up quickly from the window of her camera so she wouldn’t miss the title of the song.
“The one Grew was playing was ‘The Irish Laddies to the War Have Gone.’”
Shrapnel shells were so named from the inventor, Col. Shrapnel, a British officer who fought in the Peninsular war. It was in this war that they were first used and so effective were they that the Duke of Wellington wrote to Col. Shrapnel a letter of thanks and congratulations on his great invention. The first shells were round and were not, of course, so destructive as the finished article of the present war
.
The Canadian
The first thing she noticed as she entered the room was that it was in shadow. The summer sun was bright enough outside, but the curtains in every room of the house except the kitchen were tightly closed. Her glance took in the outline of Kenan, sitting in darkness on the curly-birch chair that used to be in an upstairs hall of the hotel. At least he was out of bed, where he often stayed now. Tress must have persuaded him to come down to the parlour.
Grania detected a shiver of movement on the other side of the room, a shiver that seemed to happen without Kenan’s consent.
Things that move…
She felt a tiny rush of fear, gone in an instant. This is Kenan, she told herself. We played under the pier. He was my bully. We played hide-and-seek.
Hide-and-go-seek
Your mother’s a leek
We didn’t know how a mother could be a leak but we found that so funny we fell down laughing. It wasn’t until my third year in Belleville that I learned there are two words for the same sound. That a leek does not come out of a water pipe. Where the rhyme comes from, no one seems to know.
When Kenan left for the Front he stood on the veranda with Grania and Tress and did a little tap dance in his boots.
Charlie Chaplin went to France, To teach the ladies how to dance
. Curly-haired, long-legged Kenan. Now, before her, sat Kenan of one dead arm and a scarred half face.
She glanced over to Tress, who stood in the middle of the room looking like sorrow itself. Her dark hair had been pulled back severely, exaggerating her high forehead. Grania wanted to grab her sister’s wrist and make for the door.
Let us run for it, said Dulcie
. Every caption she knew, Tress knew, too. Had she not shouted them into Grania’s ears? Grania looked back at Kenan. In the elapsed seconds, he’d managed to shrink inside Tress’s palpable gloom.
What about me? Grania thought. What does Kenan see in my face?
Blend in, try to look normal
. Something I’ve always been good at; deaf people are. We are so well trained.
But this is not about me. This is Kenan, my friend, my bully, my brother-in-law. At the very least I could walk from room to room and throw open the curtains, prop the windows with sticks, arc back the sashes, let air swirl around walls and doorways and floors. That’s what is wrong. There is no fresh air to breathe here.
Instead, doing none of these, Grania walked over to Kenan and kissed him on the right side of his face, the side where he had a cheek. His curls were flopped over part of his forehead, on the left. The hand of his dead arm was shoved into his dead-arm pocket. She thought of Colin, who had always tried to draw attention away from his deafness by shoving his hands deep down into his pockets, but who succeeded only in looking as if he were trying to make himself disappear.
Grania looked up at her sister. Tress was talking and signing, not to Kenan but to her. In a glance she saw that Tress, without realizing, had slipped into their childhood language of hands, the one they’d invented many years ago. The body memory was there, everything understood. While Tress’s hands and arms fluttered, Grania’s peripheral vision caught a twitch and flutter of Kenan’s one seeing eye.
O Kenan, Kenan
.
Tress seemed suddenly relieved to have an excuse to get out of the room. “I’ll leave you two to visit,” she said. Grania watched the words spill into the air. As Tress turned and shut the drawing room doors tightly behind her, Grania said to herself,
We cleaned those windows, we hung those curtains, I teased her about being grand, I teased her about having drawing-room doors
.
She sat down and faced Kenan. The ceiling was low and the weight of it diminished them both; it held in and magnified the stale air. Although there was no need to light the fireplace, an odour of old smoke hung in the room. Whatever she and Kenan might have to say to each other, nothing would be said in here.
The boy was punished and locked in
. A tearful boy, locked in a tower room, stood on a stone bench and peered out through the bars of a narrow window. The boy was still locked in the room on the page—a page Grania had not turned for a long time.
Kenan had not moved. He seemed to be waiting for nothing and no one. She had to get them both out of this room. She thought of the glassed-in veranda at the back of the house. They could sit there and look out over the narrow width of yard that sloped to the bay. She motioned with her hand.
“Come,” she said aloud, but she knew her voice had betrayed her and escaped high.
Control the voice
, said the inner voice that was always there.
Kenan stood and followed, nonetheless. They went through the door at the far end of the room, crossed the kitchen and entered the
back veranda. Sunny, not much used, Grania saw. Not now. No one could stand sunny.
She bumped the small square table along the tile floor and dragged the wicker chairs to face the row of windows. Kenan’s body tensed and she understood again that she had made more noise than she’d intended.
“Here,” she said, but in her uncertainty, she left out the
r
. Part of the word stuck in her throat. “He-e.”
Now the chairs were side by side and they sat down. Grania pointed to the rocks on shore, the grey waters below. The sun had lifted itself high in the sky. There were small pleasure boats on the bay—a small white boat, a larger one with a fringed canopy under which two people idly sat. Grania’s hands made the sign for
peace
, for
quiet
, crossing in an X shape and arcing down.
Kenan’s right hand made half the same sign, half the X, and she glanced over, surprised.
There was no expression on his face.
Both afraid
. In a flood, she thought of the calf and the girl, herself and Mamo. Pages turned in her head. Mamo in the rocker and Grania at her side in her own small chair. Mamo’s lips shaping BOTH AFRAID BOTH AFRAID.
Everyone was afraid of something. Tress was afraid of what had happened to her husband and her marriage. Kenan was sitting beside Grania, a reminder that Jim, too, could be blown up. Or, like Grew’s son, he could be killed and disappear. Her breath quickened. She was afraid she would break down here beside Kenan, whom she had come to help.
“Both afraid.” The words blurted out. She had not intended this. At the same time, her hand shook out the sign for
both
in the space between them. How could she have hoped to be of any help?
Kenan’s right hand lifted and again he mimicked her sign, this time the sign for
both
. She looked directly at him. His lips moved, though he had never seen the picture of the calf and the girl facing each other on the page. His head nodded slightly, just barely.
Yes
. He
was
afraid.
“Poom,” she said.
Out of the depths of childhood
.
Out of the dugout they’d cleared beneath the pier
.
Out of the complicated and uncomplicated past. Out of the smell of damp and rotting wood, the odour of a child’s fart released into the already dank space that held four playmates and no confession, so they never knew or cared who did it. But they all remembered Grania’s refusal to learn the forbidden word when they tried to teach her, and they roared with laughter when she replaced it with a word of her own. “Poom.”
“She probably thinks it’s like poo,” Tress had said, and they all laughed again, even Grania
.
“Poom.” This was Kenan.
One eye watching. Fixed on Grania’s face the way she imagined it fixed on Tress when Tress could not move towards
him
, when he could not move towards
her
. When he would not permit his young wife to help.
Both afraid
. But now, he was not afraid.
And neither, any more, was Grania.
Had he spoken aloud? Or was she imagining?
His lips moved again. “Poom.”
The muscles of his body quivered, his dead arm tucked to his dead-arm pocket. Grania’s inward laughter floated, high-pitched and gasping, out into the air. And this was how Tress found them when she ran to the veranda. Grania, who could not stop laughing, her eyes dotted with red, her inward sigh moving out.
Kenan’s face, for the first time since he had come home, crumpled in a half smile.
She reviewed every exercise she could haul out of memory. For weeks, they went through the rote, one word at a time. An hour
Tuesday, an hour Thursday, all through the summer. Some days, during the lessons, Tress stayed in the house; other days, she went out. When Kenan could tolerate an extra lesson, Grania visited Fridays as well, leaving Tress and Mamo to go without her to the Red Cross work room.
They can tell Cora whatever they like, said Dulcie
.
Kenan watched Grania’s lips with interest. He listened with his head tilted, her soft melding voice as familiar as his own childhood.
an
ab
art
An abrupt departure.