Deafening by Frances Itani Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    On Thomas Street, Scottish Mrs. Hunter, her face and arms black with soot, was being kept forcibly from her burning house behind neighbours who stood in a line while men and women tried in vain to get the flames under control. Mrs. Hunter, who had been running back and forth behind the line of neighbours, began to wail in despair when popping noises were suddenly heard from inside her burning pantry. The first pop and the series of loud pops that followed came from jars of preserves, each adding its own sound to the bizarre rhythm. On the fringes of a tiny corner of an inferno that threatened half the town, Mrs. Hunter wept with fresh cries at every new explosion from her pantry shelf. “Oh, my chili sauce!” she cried. “Oh, my plum preserves!” With every pop she moved more deeply to the centre of hysteria. The fact that she had managed to evacuate her seven children to safety before her husband raced up from the waterfront was not mentioned. Nor was the fact that walls had collapsed, that every stick of furniture was gone, that the babies’ beds had burned to ashes. As each jar of preserves washeard to explode, Mrs. Hunter could only moan, “Oh, my gooseberry jam!” Perhaps, Mamo thought at the time, Mrs. Hunter’s body was remembering the back-breaking work of the previous autumn. Bending over the wood stove, lifting heavy sealers with tongs, up and out of the bubble and steam of the speckled, now melted, pot.
    But the worst of the images that comes to Mamo now is the one of the horses. Three drunken men—it was easy to see that they were drunk—were crammed into a wide rig and, with horrible cruelty, they were whipping and forcing a pair of horses down a narrow street between rows of burning houses. The fear of the animals was terrible to see, and men and women shouted, trying to stop the drunken men. This happened quickly—the roar of flames, the clacketing of the rig, the heavy horses whipped to a lather through their fear, the wooden wheels bumping and veering between flames—but, quick as it was, Mamo never forgot. On her way home, retracing her steps through the streets, she was not surprised to come upon one of the horses, dead. The massive bulk of its lustreless coat rose up like a sudden dark hill between road and boardwalk. Dead from fear, probably. Its heart stopped. She never forgot the sight, or the cruelty of the men.
    That night, after Grania’s birth, while the town breathed drifted particles in the wake of the fire, while beds were found for those seeking shelter, while thieves robbed purses right out of victims’ trunks in the street, while farmers came from miles around to help, there had been no need to call in Uncle Am, who always came in after every birth to puff a cigar around the rooms, upstairs and down, to rid the house of birth odour and the scent of blood. Nor was it necessary to burn cloth on top of the wood