for Austin Workman-Bayard, Deafness was a family heirloom. The story of his great-great-grandparents had been passed down through the community with a reverence similar to the way hearing people spoke of war hero gallantry: on a rainy night in October 1886, Herbert Workman and Clara Hamill breached the perimeter of the Michigan Asylum for the Deaf, Dumb, Blind and Insane under cover of darkness and fog. All manner of terrible things had happened to them there—they had had their hands tied down to keep them from communicating; they had been deprived of food and water as punishment for signing anyway; they had been beaten with sticks and belts for each botched attempt at stealing food or sneaking out; a teacher had once tried to put his hand down Herbert’s pants. And they had gotten off easy. They left only when their friend Bucky had warned them about the operations.
Bucky wasn’t deaf—he was one of the insane ones. They had a joke about it: Herbert and Clara were locked up because they couldn’t hear voices, and Bucky was locked up because he heard too many. But he’d also heard the screaming. Six people in his wing had been sterilized, he wrote across Herbert’s wide palm at dinner, and who knew if it might cross over to the deaf wing. Bucky was older than they were, and said it had happened before.
Clara and Herbert mulled the warning over in their secret spot beneath the janitor’s stairs. On the one hand, Bucky was supposed to be nuts. On the other, they were institutionalized, too, and he’d never done anything weird to them. In the end, high on young love and the Industrial Revolution, they hoarded four days’ food and fled south across the Ohio border, where they walked until they hit Columbus. They slept on the steps of a church and begged for money and work until the foreman of a textile mill decided he liked the idea of employees who couldn’t back-talk him.
Clara trained to work a loom while Herbert shoveled coal for the boiler. They rented a room on top of a pub for cheap because the noise from the bar fights didn’t bother them. And they worked their way up in the world.
They moved to Cincinnati for the GE jobs, and had two boys—Jack and John—who cleared middle school before being released into the Queen City to work the line. The brothers bought row houses beside one another, took pay cuts in the Depression but proved their worth, even helped the war effort working weekend hours in the post office, searching for enemy microfiche concealed beneath the stamps.
Jack stayed a bachelor, serial ruffler of feathers at Cincy Deaf Club socials; John married and had a son, Willis, who grew up running between the two houses, equally at home in both. Willis finished high school before he joined the rest of the family at the factory. He had a fling with a redhead who did shorthand work for the foreman, but that could only last so long—he wanted, he was somewhat surprised to find, someone he could talk to. So, though it pained him to do it, he asked his mother and aunt to put out the call at the Society of Deaf Women’s Christmas party.
Enter Lorna Levine. Lorna had gone to college and taught history at River Valley, which was considerably less asylum and more actual school. She spoke well, or at least hearing people understood her when they went out to restaurants. She was smarter than Willis, and that scared him a little, but also made him want to cling to her. His mother offered him her own engagement ring, but he saved up and bought a diamond on installment.
Their wedding was the talk of the club—by now the Workmans were iconic—a boozy all-nighter with a discount band. Not a year later they had a daughter, Beth. Lorna was strict about her schooling, scrimping to put her through Gallaudet. School came easy to Beth, and she was the student-government representative for the cognitive science department by the time she was a sophomore. And it was there, at an SGA meeting, at a university for deaf students, that Austin’s mother fell in love with a hearing man.
Henry Bayard was a grad student, an interpreter fluent in ASL, and overenthusiastic about Deaf culture the way assimilates are, but this was all cold comfort to Beth Workman’s very Deaf family.
They’d come around at the birth of their grandson, Austin—fifth-generation Deaf in the Workman line, a fact they cherished just like anyone takes pride in a newborn’s resemblance to his family. Austin had a charmed childhood surrounded by sign language and people who loved him fiercely, and grew into the kind of bubbly, self-assured boy one can be only if he feels wholly understood, the prized child of the tri-county Deaf community.
Now whenever Austin struggled in school or was scolded for being moody, his lineage was served up to him like a fable, his relatives shining beacons of patience and fortitude in a world designed against them. And the moral of each story was this: Austin was very lucky.
He knew it was true. He caught it at school, too, from the teachers, the other kids. A lot of his friends did have it rough—solitary confinement in their own houses, their mothers crying over having birthed broken babies, constant prodding by surgeons and therapists. All this while Austin’s own mother had, on more than one occasion, told him he was perfect.
She’d found him less angelic this most recent summer, his tendency to irritate her growing in direct correlation to her abdomen and the morning sickness that came with her expansion. “An accident baby,” she’d called it once, though she’d told him not to repeat that. Of course they wanted the child, it was just that everything with the roof had made money a little tight right now, nothing for him to worry about, though. Then she’d cried. His father had found him distraught in the backyard and placated him with talk of hormones, but Austin still felt bad about the burden his insatiable appetite undoubtedly added to the family grocery bill.
Now it was late August in southern Ohio, and Austin’s mother was eight months pregnant and very hot. She sweated while she cooked, or shuffled from car to side door, or when she lay absolutely still on the couch in the front room, her hair matted down flat against her head like the skin of an onion. Even his father’s T-shirts clung tight across her stomach, a sweat ring around her protruding belly button.
It all made Austin nervous. He found himself eager for school and its distractions, his move back into the dorm. His family’s house was only a half hour from campus, but his mother had lived in the dorm at her school, and so had her parents—all four generations back if you counted the asylum—and every family had its traditions. His parents told him living with Deaf peers was important for his social skills. His teachers told him he was a linguistic role model for the kids who weren’t blessed with the lifelong exposure he was so very fortunate to have. Austin had always thought it was kind of silly to board when he lived so close and had such a good home life, but now he was glad for the arrangement.
He started packing two weeks out, something he’d never done before and, as it turned out, was an imprudent thing to do now. He’d quickly run out of clothes, especially with him and his father on laundry duty, and wound up digging through his suitcase each morning in search of boxers, another T-shirt, everything an indistinguishable rumple until eventually he’d dumped the contents of the case back out on the floor.
His father found him pantless amid this pile the morning they were supposed to move him in at school. He took a paternal surveying posture, as if deciding whether or not he was going to scold his son. Then he bent and fished a pair of shorts from the far side of the mound, threw them over.
Thanks.
Leaving in half hour. I’m going to put your bedding in the truck.