A Maidens Grave

percent use of his arm eventually. If he’s lucky. But he lost all interest in the farm after that. He’s pretty much stayed in bed. He reads, watches TV. That’s about all. It’s like his life is over with . . . .”
    “It wasn’t your fault,” he says. “You’re taking the blame, aren’t you?”
    “A few days after it happened my father called me out on the porch. There’s something about him that’s funny—I can lip-read him perfectly.”
    (Like Brutus, she thinks, and wishes she hadn’t.)
    “He sat on the porch swing and looked up at me and he said, ‘I guess you understand what you’ve done now. You had no business talking Danny into doing something as foolish as that. And for a selfish reason all your own. What happened was your fault, there’s no two ways about it. You might just as well’ve turned the engine over on a corn picker when Danny was working on a jam inside.
    “ ‘God made you damaged and nobody wants it. It’s a shame but it’s not a sin—as long as you understand what you have to do. Come home now and make up for what you done. Get that teaching of yours over with, get that last year done. You owe your brother that. And you owe me especially.
    “ ‘This is your home and you’ll be welcome here. See, 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.’ And then he went to spray ammonia, saying, ‘So you’ll be home then.’ It wasn’t a question. It was an order. All decided. No debate. He wanted me to come home this last May. But I held off a few months. I knew I’d give in eventually. I always give in. But I just wanted a few more months on my own.” She shrugs. “Stalling.”
    “You don’t want the farm?”
    “No! I want my music. I want to hear it, not just feel vibrations . . . . I want to hear my lover whisper things to me when I’m in bed with him.” She can’t believe she’s sayingthese things to him, intimate things—far more intimate than she’s ever told anyone. “I don’t want to be a virgin anymore.”
    Now that she’s started it’s all pouring out. “I hate the poetry, I don’t care about it! I never have. It’s stupid. Do you know what I was going to do in Topeka? After my recital at the Theater of the Deaf? I had that appointment afterwards.” Then his arms are around her and she is pressing against his body, her head on his shoulder. It’s an odd experience, doubly so: being close to a man, and communicating without looking at him. “There’s something called a cochlear implant.” She must pause for a moment before she can continue. “They put a chip in your inner ear. It’s connected by wire to this thing, this speech processor that converts the sounds to impulses in the brain . . . I could never tell Susan. A dozen times I was going to. But she would’ve hated me. The idea of trying to cure deafness—she hated that.”
    “Do they work, these implants?”
    “They can. I have a ninety percent hearing loss in both ears but that’s an average. In some registers I can make out sounds and the implants can boost those. But even if they don’t work there are other things to try. There’s a lot of new technology that in the next five or six years’ll help people like me—grass-roots deaf and peddlers and just ordinary people who want to hear.”
    She thinks: And I do. I want to hear . . . I want to hear you whisper things in my ear while we make love.
    “I . . .” He’s speaking, his mouth is moving, but the sound dwindles to nothing.
    Fading, fading.
    No! Talk to me, keep talking to me. What’s wrong?
    But now it’s Brutus who is standing in the doorway of her music room. What are you doing here? Leave! Get out! It’s my room. I don’t want you here!
    He smiles, looks at her ears. “Freak of nature,” he says.
    Then they were back in the killing room and Brutus wasn’t talking to her at all but to Bear, who stood with his arms crossed defensively. The tension between them was like thick smoke.
    “You give us up?” Brutus asked Bear.
    Bear shook his head and said something she didn’t catch.
    “They picked them up outside, those little girls.”
    The twins! They were safe! Melanie relayed this to Beverly and Emily. The younger girl burst into a smile and her fingers stuttered out a spontaneous prayer of