A Maidens Grave

morethan that, she was Deaf of Deaf: both her parents had been deaf. Politically active in Deaf issues even at seventeen, accepted at Gallaudet in Washington, D.C., on a full scholarship, unyielding about the use of ASL versus SEE, militantly rejecting oralism—the practice of forcing the deaf to try to speak. Susan Phillips was the chic, up-to-the-minute Deaf young woman, beautiful and strong, and Melanie would rather have one Susan by her side at a time like this than a roomful of men.
    She felt a small hand tug at her blouse.
    “Don’t worry,” she signed to Anna. The twins hugged each other, their cheeks together, their remarkable eyes wide and tearful. Beverly sat by herself, her hands in her lap, and stared mournfully at the floor, struggling to breathe.
    Kielle signed, “We need Jean Grey and Cyclops,” referring to two of her favorite X-Men. “They’d tear them apart.”
    Shannon responded, “No, we need Beast. Remember? He had the blind girlfriend?” Shannon studied Jack Kirby’s art religiously and intended to be a superhero-comic artist.
    “Gambit too,” Kielle signed. Pointing to Shannon’s tattoo.
    Shannon’s own comics—surprisingly good, Melanie thought, for an eight-year-old—featured characters with disabilities, like blindness and deafness, that they could mutate to their advantage as they solved crimes and saved people. The two girls—Shannon, gangly and dark; Kielle, compact and fair—fell into a discussion of whether optic blasts, plasmoids, or psychic blades would be the weapons of choice to save them now.
    Emily cried for a moment into the sleeve of her dress, printed with black and purple flowers. Then she bowed her head, praying. Melanie saw her two fists lift and open outward. It was the ASL word for “sacrifice.”
    “Don’t worry,” Melanie repeated to those girls who were looking at her. But no one paid attention. If they focused on anyone it was on Susan though the girl was signing nothing, merely gazing steadily at Bear, who stood near the entrance to the killing room. Susan was their rallying point.Her presence alone gave them confidence. Melanie found herself struggling to keep from crying.
    And it’ll be so dark in here tonight!
    Melanie leaned forward and looked out the window. She saw the grass bending in the wind. The Kansas wind, relentless. Melanie remembered her father telling her about the sea captain Edward Smith, who came to Wichita in the 1800s and got the idea of mounting sails on Conestoga wagons—literally prairie schooners. She’d laughed at the idea and at her father’s humorous telling of the tale, never knowing whether to believe it or not. Now, she was stung at the memory of the storytelling and wished desperately for anything, mythical or real, to sweep her away from the killing room.
    She thought suddenly: And what about that man outside? The policeman?
    There had been something so reassuring in the way he’d stood up there on the hill after Brutus had fired his gun out the window and Bear was running around, his fat belly jiggling, ripping open boxes of bullets in a panic. The man stood on the hilltop waving his arms, trying to calm things down, stop the shooting. He was looking directly at her.
    What would she call him? No animals came to mind. Nothing sleek and heroic anyway. He was old—twice her age probably. And he dressed frumpy. His glasses seemed thick and he was a few pounds heavy.
    Then it occurred to her. De l’Epée.
    That’s what she’d call him. After Charles Michel de l’Epée, the eighteenth-century abbé who was one of the first people in the world to really care about the Deaf, to treat them as intelligent human beings. The man who created French Sign Language, the predecessor of ASL.
    It was a perfect name for the man in the field, thought Melanie, who could read French and knew that the name itself meant a kind of sword. Her de l’Epée was brave. Just the way his namesake had stood up to the Church and the popular sentiment that the Deaf were retarded and freaks, he was standing up to Stoat and Brutus, up there on the hill, bullets flying around him.
    Well, she had sent him a message—a prayer, in a way.A prayer and a warning. Had he seen her? Could he understand what she’d said even if he had? She closed her eyes for a brief moment, concentrating all her thoughts on de l’Epée. But all she sensed was the temperature, which had grown cooler, her fear, and—to her dismay—the vibration of footsteps as a