A Maidens Grave

the hand shape of the last word of the line was similar to that of the last words in preceding lines. Melanie recited:
    “Eight gray birds, sitting in dark.
Cold wind blows, it isn’t kind.
Sitting on wire, they lift their wings
And sail off into billowy clouds.”
    “Dark” and “kind” share a flat, closed hand, the palm facing the body of the signer. “Wings” and “clouds” involve similar movements from the shoulders up into the air above the signer.
    De l’Epée listens, fascinated. He watches her sign several other poems. Melanie puts almond-scented cream on them every night and her nails are smooth and translucent as lapidaried stones.
    She stopped in mid line. “Oh,” she muses, “I did it all. The National Association of the Deaf, the Bicultural Center, the National Athletic Association of the Deaf.”
    He nods. (She wishes he’d tell her about his life. Is he married? [Please no!] Does he have children? Is he older than I imagine, or younger?)
    “I had my career all laid out before me. I was going to be the first deaf woman farm foreman.”
    “Farm?”
    “Ask me about dressing corn. About anhydrous ammonia. You want to know about wheat? Red wheat comes from the Russian steppes. But it’s name isn’t political—oh, not in Kansas, nosir. It’s the color. ‘Amber waves of grain . . .’ Ask me about the advantages of no-till planting and how to fill out UCC financing statements to collateralize crops that haven’t grown yet. ‘All the accretions and appurtenances upon said land . . .’ ”
    Her father, she explains, owned six hundred and sixtyacres in south-central Kansas. He was a lean man who wore an exhaustion that many people confused with ruggedness. His problem wasn’t a lack of willingness but a lack of talent, which he called luck. And he acknowledged—to himself alone—that he needed help from many quarters. He of course put most of his stock in his son but farms are big business now. Harold Charrol planned to invest both son, Danny, and daughter, Melanie, with third-share interests and watch them all prosper as a corporate family.
    She had been reluctant about these plans but the prospect of working with her brother had an appeal to it. The unfazable boy had become an easygoing young man, nothing at all like their embittered father. While Harold would mutter darkly about fate when a thresher blade snapped and he stood paralyzed with anger, staring at the splintered wood, Danny might jump down out of the cockpit, vanish for a time, and return with a six-pack and some sandwiches for an impromptu picnic. “We’ll fix the son of a bitch tonight. Let’s eat.”
    For a time she believed this could be a pleasant life. She took some ag extension courses and even sent an article to Silent News about farm life and Deafness.
    But then, last summer, Danny’d had the accident, and lost both the ability, and the will, to work the place. Charrol, with the desperate legitimacy of a man needing heirs, turned to Melanie. She was a woman, yes (this a handicap somewhat worse than her audiologic one), but an educated, hardworking one at least.
    Melanie, he planned, would become his full partner. And why not? Since age seven she’d ridden in the air-conditioned cab of the big John Deere, helping him shift up through the infinite number of gears. She’d donned goggles and mask and gloves like a rustic surgeon and filled the ammonia tank, she’d sat in on his meetings with United Produce, and she’d driven with him to the roadside stops, known only to insiders, where the illegal migrant workers hid, waiting for day jobs at harvest.
    It’s a question of belonging and what God does to make sure those that oughta stay someplace do. Well, your place is here, working at what you can do, where your, you know, problem doesn’t get you into trouble. God’s will . . . . So you’ll be home then.
    Tell him, Melanie thinks.
    Yes! If you never tell another soul, tell de l’Epée.
    “There’s something,” she begins, “I want to say.”
    His placid face gazes at her.
    “It’s a confession.”
    “You’re too young to have anything to confess.”
    “After the poetry recital in Topeka I wasn’t going back to the school right away. I was going to see my brother in St. Louis. He’s in the hospital. He’s having some surgery tomorrow.”
    De l’Epée nods.
    “But before I went to see him there was something I planned to do in Topeka. I had an appointment to see