Read Online Deafening by Frances Itani - Free Book Online Page A

the steps. The family is staying in an upstairs room of the hotel. The children stare over at the house veranda, a few feet away. They would like to join the game. They hear Grania’s shout. It is not like the shout of the others.
    The children’s mother steps forward. “What’s the matter with your sister?” she asks Tress. She sees that Tress is the eldest.
    Tress steps in front of Grania. The game stops.
    “There’s nothing wrong with my sister,” she says. “She’s my sister, that’s all.”
    Patrick shouts and leaps to the chair. Tress and Grania go back to the game. They are making a ruckus. Grania has still not been out.
    There is no one in the kitchen and no one upstairs. Grania goes to the parlour to see who is in the house. The sun is down, the parlour curtains closed. It is only after she is inside the room that she realizes she is alone.
    Darkness has fallen abruptly. She turns to face the hall, but now the hall is dark. Mamo is not in her rocker, though someone has brought the rocker in from the veranda. Grania stands behind it, her heart pounding wildly. She inches back and flattens against the corner wall. She wants to move forward to get to the doorway, but she can’t; she is pinned by the dark. Someone will have to come and turn on a lamp. She calls out—she does not know what noise she has made. She calls out again. Where are Mamo, Tress, Patrick, Bernard, Mother, Father? Where is Carlow? They have left her alone. Shadows press around her. Her feet lock to the boards of the floor. When Mamo comes in and switches on a lamp, she is startled by a young body propelled forward off the wall like a stone from a sling. Grania rushes into her arms. Mamo comforts and soothes until the child is no longer afraid.
    After school, Mother gives Grania a folded note. She is to carry it to Mr. Whyte at the butcher shop on Main Street.
    Grania doesn’t want to go. She wants to slip away to the dugout, the new place where she plays with Kenan and Orryn and Tress. She turns away and pretends not to see, but Mother forces her attention back. “Give the note. Wait for the meat. Come straight home.”
    Mother’s face is dark; her lips are tight because she has been extra busy all day. Mamo has been in the hotel kitchen helping Mrs. Brant, but there is more work to do. Mamo is tired now; her arthritis bothers her. She is back in the house, upstairs in her room, lying down.
    Grania walks along Main Street. It is late October, a sunny afternoon. She is wearing her white blouse and her navy skirt. Every time her foot presses down on a cedar board in the sidewalk, a trill enters her foot. Music, she thinks. My feet are making music.
    Mr. Whyte takes the note from her hand and she stands to one side while he waits on two women who were in the shop before her. The soles of Grania’s shoes are buried in sawdust that is strewn overthe oiled floor. She shuffles her feet. The room is filled with choking odours. Mr. Whyte is wearing his blood apron; she has never seen him without it. Behind the counter, close to his hands, the scaly feet of a dead hen, stiff as yellow twigs, point to the ceiling.
    He finishes wrapping a string of blotchy sausages and wipes his hands, adding more specks of blood to the apron. He turns to Grania to speak but the voice part of him cannot be seen. She looks out through the screen door because the light in the shop is dull and because Mr. Whyte keeps turning his head, right and left, before he finishes saying his words. He shrugs to himself and checks the note and picks out a heavy cut of raw meat and slaps it onto waxed brown paper. Now Grania watches again. His hands weigh the meat on the scale. He lifts the edges of the paper and his fingers tie the package with long string that dangles near his face from a roll above his head. The roll is stuck on a hook in the ceiling; every part of it is splattered with dots of dried blood. He picks up a knife—there is blood on that, too—and he cuts the