Deafening Read online

  It was Mamo’s ability to tailor a man’s suit that had kept the family alive. Eventually, she made the decision to move to Ontario, to the rapidly growing one-company town on the Bay of Quinte. Later, when Agnes undertook to marry Dermot O’Neill in Deseronto, Mamo watched her daughter take on even more responsibility. First, with the birth of Bernard and his poor lung; the loss of a baby girl in childbirth after that; and finally, with the births of the other three. It was during the time between Grania’s and Patrick’s births that Dermot purchased the house and hotel. Agnes has never had a chance to pause. If the opportunity were given to her, she would probably not be able to stop. Mamo cannot even imagine Agnes looking around and saying, “Now, I will have a short rest.”

  Mamo knows that Agnes has not forgiven herself for Grania’s deafness, that she will always blame herself for the high fever. For taking five-year-old Grania, the night she was so ill, through the open passageway in winter so that she could keep her close, keep her on a cot in the hotel kitchen and watch over her while she worked. But the scarlet fever had been relentless. Grania’s temperature had risen higher and higher. Dr. Clark was called and gave instructions to sponge the child, to rotate wet cloths from groin to underarms to abdomen to forehead to chest. Wringing the cool cloths from the basin of water, lifting one and laying another, Agnes’ hands moved round the child’s body as if it were a clock face, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. But the fever did not come down.

  Agnes has been hard on herself ever since, but what she does not recognize is that she is also hard on the child.

  These are the thoughts that Mamo sifts and sorts through her mind as she sits and dozes by Grania’s bed. She has not changed from her long grey skirt, the knitted vest fastened over her high-necked blouse. Tied over both is a grey-blue apron with a wide band that buttons at the back of the waist. Mamo never wears yellow. Yellow is the colour of marigolds, the flower of death. She holds Grania’s hand and stays all night beside the child’s bed. She dreams of Agnes and the black rag around her neck. She is surprised when Agnes, the child she once was, stands beside her chair and laughs her lighthearted laugh. Mamo reaches out but she is not quick enough, and when she wakes, it is Grania’s hand she is holding.

  Now, another voice enters her dreamlike memory. It is a voice she overheard a few days ago, after she took Grania shopping and left Meagher’s store hand in hand with the child. The door made a clean slap behind them and a woman’s voice trailed through the screen and out into the summer air. “Did you see the way she looked at that child?” said the voice. “Oh, the love on her face when she looked at that poor deaf-dumb child.”

  “Tell me the fire story. The name story. Please.”

  She is sitting with Mamo on the back stoop outside the laundry. Beyond the stoop is a small bit of yard and after that, the paddock. To the right are the drive sheds. Above and behind is the porthole window, upstairs.

  Mamo likes the name story, too. The story of Grania’s birth and how she came to be named, the day of the town fire, the Great Fire, 1896, Monday the twenty-fifth of May, the end of the holiday weekend that celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday.

  Mamo doesn’t know how much Grania remembers from before the scarlet fever or how much she has read from lips with repeated tellings. When the scarlet fever took away the child’s hearing, whole chunks of language disappeared. On the other hand, small but surprising remnants have stayed. Her ability to memorize is extraordinary, but her memory of the spoken past is unpredictable in the patterns and combinations it releases. Part of what she retains seems to be by chance. It’s as if some words have been stowed with care, while others have been wiped away. All this time has gone by and she has not started school. But now that she is working at the Sunday book, a page every day, she is recognizing single words. She is, in fact, beginning to read.

  “The story, Mamo.”

  “I’m dreaming—daydreaming. Do you remember what that is?”

  Grania reads Mamo’s lips and nods. It means surprise words stuck together, like day and dream. Like apple and eye, which she finds very funny. “You’re the apple of my eye,” Bompa Jack, her grandfather, tells her every time he visits from the farm on the Ninth Concession. He has also taught her “hold your horses” and “kick the bucket,” which is more hilarious than apple and eye.

  “When we first came to Deseronto in 1880,” Mamo says, starting the story, forming the words with care, “it was still called Mill Point. A year after that, its name became Deseronto. A long time before we arrived, almost a hundred years before, Chief John Deserontyon and his Mohawk men paddled here in fifteen canoes. They left their homes along the Mohawk River in New York and made the long journey because they had been promised land by the British king. The Mohawks were rewarded because they were loyal to King George the Third during the American war that was called the War of Independence. Later, the Mohawk chief’s grandson requested extra land near the point, not so far from here, and the village began. After that, the village became a town, and because Chief Deserontyon had been a great warrior, the town was named after him.”

  Mamo does not know how much Grania understands, but she continues. Grania is silent, her eyes watching for the parts of the story she knows.

  “I was told by a man after I left the ship from Ireland that when my sons were older, there would be work for them in this place. I met the man on the road to Mystic and he told us about Mill Point. He said it was already on its way to being an important company town—a Rathbun town. The Rathbun men were from New York, and they were powerful and wealthy and they were clever. They knew that a good town needed good workers. When it was time for us to move, I brought my children here. I did not want to go to a place where there were tramps and burglars and clothesline thieves.

  “They built a railway here, the Rathbuns. And a roundhouse. And a railway-car factory, and mills and the steamboat dock, and they brought coal all the way from the Pennsylvania mines, across Lake Ontario, from Oswego in New York. The coal arrived on barges and ships that took lumber back to New York.

  “Many people moved to the town—more than five thousand. The Rathbuns brought electricity to the town, and they had the first two telephones. That was the same year we moved here, in 1880. Imagine!” She pauses to consider shouts into boxes nailed to walls, mix-ups that ensued. One of her own sons had been required to answer the phone when he worked as a shipper. Now he was an inspector for the railway, and lived in Toronto. Her other son had worked at the coal chutes until his lungs began to suffer from the black dust. After the Great Fire, he looked for another job and left to keep the books at the new mill built in Tweed. It was said that the Purdy family might be interested in buying the mill.

  Grania is watching Mamo’s lips for words she knows. “The flour, Mamo.” The word flour comes out high, as if she is singing.

  “The mill burned.” Mamo’s fingers become flames.

  “Because the spark…”

  “You’re getting ahead. It was the day you decided to be born. The steamer called—”

  “Reindeer!”

  “Yes, its name was Reindeer. It was close to the long shingle dock and a man said that it threw a spark and the cedar shingles caught fire and the fire began to spread. But the next day, the captain of the Reindeer said the spark did not come from his steamer at all.”

  Whatever the cause, there had been stacks of wood everywhere the eye could see—hardwood lumber and shingles and railway ties. And the wind was fierce, blowing from the southwest, when at three-twenty in the afternoon, the whistle sounded the alarm. That was when the cricketers stopped their game and made a rush towards the cedar mill.

  Mamo’s flame fingers waggle forward now, and side to side. The flames crossed the railway tracks and Water Street, and after that many buildings burned, more than a hundred, including the beautiful Catholic church that was built on the hill three years after she moved to the town. A man climbed up into the spire when a burning cinder lodged on the o
utside and took hold. He tried to smother the fire from inside but could not, and he had to get out. Within hours, only the spine of the building was left to show that it had been there at all. Father Hogan was the priest at the time, and he had been out of town that day. When he returned on the four-o’clock train there was nothing he could do but witness the burning. Prayer would not stop the flames. Mamo, remembering, crosses herself and then she makes a steeple with her fingers.

  “The church burned, the lumber burned, all that good lumber out on the docks.” Grania cannot hear the sorrow that is overflowing, now, from Mamo’s voice. There had been other fires in the town, earlier and later, oh yes. But that day, even some of the refuse burners had burned.

  “Our house didn’t burn, Mamo.”

  “Not ours. We lived in another corner of town then, back from the bay. That was before your father bought this house and the hotel. Before he moved the family to Main Street—and I moved with you. But your mother, she was bothered by the smoke that night, and that’s when you made up your mind to be born.”

  Mamo falls silent and contemplates the miracle of new life in the midst of destruction. Not only the mill—she considers the waste of flour, Crown Jewel flour, the unbaked bread, cakes and pies—but also the bran house, the cedar mill, the wheat-filled elevator, they too yielded to the flames. The winds were fierce; the air crackled with flying debris and chunks of cinder and shingle and wood. The docks burned to the water’s edge. High menacing flames were seen for miles. Black smoke whistled upward and there was a vast red glow across the sky. The Rathbun fire hoses were used for thirty hours without a single section bursting. Napanee sent a fire engine and men; Belleville sent members of its fire brigade; Kingston sent men and a Chatham engine. But with all of this help, with streams of water directed on the mill and the boilers and the chemical works, with men and women of the town using buckets of water in attempts to contain the fire, it was only when a heavy rain began that some of the larger fires were put out. Even so, piles of cordwood burned all night, illuminating the sky. And sodden, black wheat smouldered for days inside the ruins of the elevator.

  The rain began at nine-thirty Monday night, a downpour as violent as the fire itself. Lightning and thunder added to the chaos and increased the misery of the families who sought shelter. Water soaked furniture and clothing that were heaped in the streets and in passageways between buildings and outside burning homes. If the gale-force winds had changed direction, the rest of the town would have burned, too. But as it turned out, the citizens managed to confine the fire to the eastern section of town.

  There was no loss of human life; that was the miracle. As for the animals, horses were led away as fast as men could remove them. Later in the week the Tribune reported that a bantam hen and five chicks escaped the inferno and were found in Deseronto Junction, north of the town, where they were recognized and claimed by their owner. The editor fancied the story, but Mamo, who had seen other things, had not noticed any bantam hen or chicks.

  Perhaps it was a blessing that so many people had left town to celebrate the holiday. At eight in the morning, the Citizens’ Band played a rousing march as it paraded to the railway station to accompany a trainload of passengers on a thirty-mile excursion to the “Limestone City” of Kingston. Others took the hour-and-a-half steamer trip south across the Bay of Quinte, down the body of water called Long Reach and into Picton’s harbour to celebrate in Prince Edward County.

  Grania’s father was one of those who had left. But he had gone north with horse and wagon to the Ninth Concession in Tyendinaga Township, to visit his father’s farm. He’d taken Bernard with him, and two-year-old Tress, and some store-bought groceries for his father and his father’s sister Martha. Bompa Jack was a widower and Martha a widow, and she had returned to the pioneer farm to live with her brother. Mamo and Agnes had stayed behind in Deseronto because of Agnes’ condition. And heat and flame had levelled almost everything east of Fourth and south of Dundas, that furnace day in May.

  Agnes, awkward at the end of her pregnancy, had moved methodically from window to window, closing shutters, tamping wet towels on the floor to block spaces beneath the doors. As soon as she took to her bed, her labour began. Dr. Clark and his wife, Mildred, could not be found in all the need and confusion, and there was no time to send for anyone else, so it was Mamo herself who delivered Agnes’ third baby. Mamo was no midwife but she’d been at birthings often enough, including seven of her own in Ireland, with four survivals, and she had listened and she had watched, and she knew what to do. Even so, she was concerned because, the last time, after Tress’s birth, Agnes had suffered a dangerous loss of blood.

  Agnes was no longer able to see her, Mamo knew that. Not while she was lying in bed in the state of her own fear, perspiring and ranting, terrified of her own blood gushing forth, terrified of being unable to stop the flow. At the same time she knew she had to push forth the life that was about to begin outside herself. Her labour was mercifully short. But her skin became pale and colourless, and Mamo was shocked by the contrast when the red-faced infant, held upside down, wailed its short and sharp new breaths. The baby settled and breathed quietly, and her skin pinkened to a more natural colour. Mamo cut the cord and tied it with a clean white strip of bandage. She wrapped the smooth-skinned baby with the tiny feet and pale lashes and the thickness of red hair—as thick as the hair of a six-month-old child and as red as her own when she’d been a young woman—and it was then that she felt the child move towards her. Felt the strength of this miniature being move towards her like a wedge of falling timber aimed at her heart. Agnes, exhausted, lay on the bed coughing, her lungs irritated by the smoke that hovered over the town. The baby’s lungs did not seem bothered at all. The afterbirth slipped into the basin Mamo held for it, and it was then that Mamo began to pray. She prayed silently that Agnes’ life would not be taken away by the bleeding. Her warmed hands felt the ridge of fundus high up through the softness of Agnes’ abdomen. She waited, and checked again, trying not to show fear on her face. When she felt the ridge come down, felt it harden a little, she prayed again that her daughter’s life would not be taken. The baby made a small noise in her throat, as if to remind them that she was there.

  “You name her, Mother,” Agnes said. “You helped her into life. You name her.”

  Mamo thought for only a second. Gráinne. But unless people were Irish they wouldn’t know how to pronounce the name when they saw it written. “We’ll spell it the English, the Canadian way,” she told Agnes. “Grania.” As she spoke, she saw Agnes’ colour come back. She saw the flush through her cheeks and she felt the sense of well-being in the room. Agnes dropped into a heavy sleep.

  “Mamo?” Grania’s fingers were tapping at her sleeve.

  “I named you because your name means love. I felt the love coming right at me. From you to me and back again.” Mamo made her sign for baby, rocking her arms. She wiggled her fingers to show the love that moved into her heart and went back and forth between them.

  “Did my ears hear when I was a baby?” Grania knows the answer to this.

  “Your ears heard every sound. I sang to you that first night and many nights after. You liked me to sing ‘I don’t want to play in your yard.’ That was the song you liked best.” Mamo sings the title to herself as she speaks, and nods, remembering, Yes.

  Grania likes this part best, the naming, and the ears hearing, and the song, and especially the love wiggling like fingers, back and forth between them.

  “Graw-nee-ya!” she shouts, louder than she should have. Mother comes to the door of the laundry and stands looking at the two of them. Mamo knows she is there because she has heard the steps behind her back. Grania knows Mother is there because she can tell from Mamo’s face. Neither turns around to look.

  “I’m telling the story of her name,”‘ Mamo says to her own back. “Again.”

  And Agnes, who knows the story well because it is her story, too, has her own rush of remembering while she
stands behind them at the laundry door. Her memory is of the long, deep fear during gestation that ended in the unexpected wave of strength and happiness that washed through her after the child was born. It was the night of the Great Fire and she remembers having difficulty breathing, and then joy at seeing her red-haired child. Her husband was away, not even in the house when Grania was born. An emptiness there. And after that, milk fever, which kept her low for weeks; and then, work, the move to the hotel, three children to care for—despite the help from Mamo—fatigue, more fear with another pregnancy, her survival of the birth of Patrick, and then Grania’s illness, the cold open passageway in winter, the scarlet fever that robbed the child’s hearing. Grania’s deafness was Agnes’ fault. She could do nothing but throw herself into work; there was always work. All of this, in seconds, sweeps the initial flush of happiness away.

  Mamo hears her daughter’s footsteps recede.

  “More,” Grania says. “More fire story, Mamo.”

  But that is as far as Mamo will travel into memory today. Instead, her lips say, “Monday’s child.”

  “Fair of face,” Grania blurts—a verse she once knew by heart.

  Mamo looks at her and smiles but she is not surprised. She says only, “Ah, it’s still there.”

  What she does not describe to Grania is the flood of images that comes to her now. Before Agnes’ labour had begun, Mamo threw a shawl over her shoulders and walked rapidly through wind and dusty streets to the eastern section of town, thinking she might be of help. An unnatural darkness hovered like a low cloud as she walked. Smokestacks were down near the waterfront; wires were tangled; a chaos of trunks and chairs and mattresses and paraphernalia clogged the streets. She saw a chamber pot, a brass candlestick stuck inside. She remembers women in skirts who climbed the roofs with men, all pouring buckets of water handed up from below, losing the battle as they fought. A man brushed by with a bedraggled rooster tucked under his arm, the rooster beady-eyed in stillness, its feathers singed and black. When Mamo reached Second Street she saw a man she knew from church, Mr. O’Reilly, his mouth a perfect O, running from his flaming house with a china plate that held three boiled potatoes. She reached for him but he pulled away and balanced the plate as he passed and continued up the hill. It was the only item he’d taken from his house. When she turned back to look, she saw him sitting on the ground at the top of the hill, hunched over the plate of potatoes as if this were the most precious treasure saved from the conflagration that day.