Free Deafening by Frances Itani

interested, perks up, sits straight in the rocker that has been carried out to the veranda. She tightens her fringed shawl around her shoulders.
    “Aunt Maggie. She said Mother will send out a Paw-C.”
    Mamo thinks for a moment.
    “A cowboy word,” she says. “In America. Though we were not unfamiliar with the word in Ireland. The sheriff and his posse chase a bad person. ”
    “Oh,” Grania says, not understanding. She has seen the last two words on Mamo’s lips— bad person.
    It will be her secret, then. Hers and Aunt Maggie’s. She will never tell anyone, not even Tress, about the Paw-C or about being a bad person or about the blood.
    “Did you choose a picture?” Mamo says, opening the Sunday book.
    She did, but now her fingers turn to a different page, not the one she’d chosen for today.
    A boy in a wide-brimmed hat is about to leave a campfire, and he is looking back. He has a sad face. A short rope dangles from his hands. A cowboy, seated on the ground beside the fire, threatens the boy with his fist. Another cowboy is rolled up inside a blanket, asleep. DON’T COME BACK WITHOUT THE HORSE.
    Mamo reads the words beneath the picture. She nods her head. “Well. You picked a hard one. This may take a few days but we’ll work on it as long as it takes. One word at a time. Watch carefully. If you can say a word, you can use it. Don’t ever forget.”
    Friday afternoon, Grania and Tress run out of the girls’ entrance, Orryn and Kenan from the boys’. For hours, Grania has done nothing but sit. Every time she tries to read Teacher’s lips, Teacher moves her head or turns her body away. After lunch, Grania was given a picture book to look through but she rested her head on its cover and fell asleep. Orryn poked her in the back to wake her, and Teacher didn’t even notice.
    She doesn’t want to be bothered with me, Grania tells herself. She slows to a walk. Agitated, one hand taps the side of her skirt to make a rhythm. Can’t be – baw-thered. Teacher – can’t be – baw-thered.
    Kenan, who has the longest legs, is the first of the four friends to run down towards the water, east along Main Street, past the post office, past Naylor’s Theatre, across the road and through the hidden path to the edge of the old Rathbun pier. Grania, sluggish today, is last; the other three have disappeared inside the dugout. She scuffs along shore, checks in all directions to be certain no one is around, ducks under the widest board and enters the tiny room that has been scraped from the earth. Above the dirt ceiling, planks of the rotting pier extend a few feet over water. The pier was abandoned long ago, long before the children took it over. The dugout beneath is carefully boarded on the sides—work done by Kenan andOrryn. Only the four of them know about this secret place and where to raise the widest board that allows them to slip inside.
    The room is large enough to hold them if they scrunch and face each other, two and two. Narrow boards have been nailed together to make a small bench on one side. On the other side are a milking stool and a driftwood stump. Grania, last in, sits on the stump and tucks her skirt around her so it won’t drag the ground. Sometimes baby frogs hop along the floor. The dugout is dry but holds the odours of dampness and old fire, the fire that swept through the town the day Grania was born. The earth floor is hard and smooth, like Bompa Jack’s root cellar at the farm. Light filters down, seeping through an opening between boards—streamers of afternoon sun.
    “Password?” This, from Orryn, half-heartedly.
    “Wooms.”
    Grania makes the wiggly worm sign with her index finger and they all laugh, Grania too, because the worm password always makes them laugh. It is Grania’s word and they say it Grania’s way, Wooms.
    Grania looks to Tress to see what the others have been talking about. Tress’s face is self-important, as if she is about to make an announcement. Her dark hair