A Maidens Grave

bought some new hearing aids. Generally they don’t work at all but these seemed to have some effect with certain pitches of music. There was a recital in Topeka I wanted to go to. Kathleen Battle. I’d read in the paper that she was going to sing some spirituals as part of the program and I thought . . .”
    “That she’d sing ‘Amazing Grace’?”
    “I wanted to see if I could hear it. I was desperate to go. But I had no way of getting there. I can’t drive and thebuses would have taken forever. I begged my brother to take me. He’d been working all day on the farm but he said he’d take me anyway.
    “We got there just in time for the concert. Kathleen Battle walked out on stage wearing this beautiful blue dress. She smiled to the audience . . . . And then she began to sing.”
    “And?”
    “It was useless.” Melanie breathes deeply, kneads her fingers. “It . . .”
    “Why are you so sad?”
    “The hearing aids didn’t work at all. Everything was muddled. I could hardly hear anything and the notes I could hear were all off key to me. We left at intermission. Danny was doing his best to cheer me up. He . . .”
    She falls silent.
    “There’s more, isn’t there? There’s something else you want to tell me.”
    It hurts so much! She only thinks these words but according to the fishy rules of her music room de l’Epée can hear them perfectly. He leans forward. “What hurts? Tell me?”
    And there’s so much to tell him. She could use a million words to describe that night and never convey the horror of living through it.
    “Go ahead,” de l’Epée says encouragingly. As her brother used to do, as her father never did. “Go ahead.”
    “We left the concert hall and got into Danny’s car. He asked if I wanted some dinner but I couldn’t eat a thing. I asked him just to drive home.”
    De l’Epée scoots forward. Their knees meet. He touches her arm. “What else?”
    “We left town, got onto the highway. We were in Danny’s little Toyota. He rebuilt it himself. Everything. He’s so good with mechanical things. He’s amazing, really. We were going pretty fast.”
    She pauses for a moment to let the tide of sadness subside. It never does but she takes a deep breath—remembering when she had to take a breath before saying something—and finds herself able to continue. “We were talking in the car.”
    De l’Epée nods.
    “But that means we were signing. And that means we had to look at each other. He kept asking me what I was sad about, that the hearing aids didn’t work, was I discouraged, had Dad been hassling me about the farm again? . . . He . . .”
    She must breathe deeply again.
    “Danny was looking at me, not at the road. Oh, God . . . it was just there, in front of us. I never saw where it came from.”
    “What?”
    “A truck. A big one, carrying a load of metal pipes. I think it changed lanes when Danny wasn’t looking and . . . oh, Jesus, there was nothing he could do. All these pipes coming at us at a thousand miles an hour . . .”
    The blood. All the blood.
    “I know he braked, I know he tried to turn. But it was too late. No . . . Oh, Danny.”
    Spraying, spraying. Like the blood from the throat of a calf.
    “He managed to steer mostly out of the way but one pipe smashed through the windshield. It . . .”
    De l’Epée kneads her hand. “Tell me,” he whispers.
    “It . . .” The words are almost impossible to say. “It took his arm off.”
    Like the blood running down the gutters into the horrible well in the center of the killing room.
    “Right at the shoulder.” She sobs at the memory. Of the blood. Of the stunned look on her brother’s face as he turned to her and spoke for a long moment, saying words she couldn’t figure out then and never had the heart to ask him to repeat.
    The blood sprayed to the roof of the car and pooled in his lap, while Melanie struggled to get a tourniquet around the stump and screamed and screamed. She, the vocal one. While Danny, still conscious, nodding madly, sat completely mute.
    Melanie says to de l’Epée, “The medics got there just a few minutes later and stopped most of the bleeding. They saved his life. They got him to a hospital and the doctors got his arm reattached within a couple of hours. For thepast year he’s had all sorts of operations. He’s having one tomorrow—that’s where my parents are. In St. Louis, visiting him. They think he’ll get back maybe fifty