A Maidens Grave

performance at the Kansas State Theater of the Deaf Summer Recital. How long the gaze coursed over the little girl. He reluctantly walked back into the main room of the slaughterhouse.
    Get them out, Melanie told herself. Whatever you have to do, get them out.
    Then: But I can’t. Brutus will kill me. He’ll rape me. He’s evil, he’s the Outside. She thought of Susan and wept again. He was right, her father.
    So you’ll be home then.
    She’d be alive.
    There’d have been no secret appointments after the recital in Topeka. No lies, no hard decisions.
    “Get back, against the wall,” she signed to the girls. She had to get them away from Bear, keep them out of sight. They moved as instructed, tearful all of them except lean, young Shannon, once more angry and defiant, the tomboy. And Kielle too—though she was neither angry nor defiant but eerily subdued. The girl troubled Melanie. What was in her eyes? The shadow of exactly what had been in Susan’s? Here was a child with the visage of a woman. My God, there’s vindictiveness, chill, raw hatred.Is she the one who’s really Susan’s heir? Melanie wondered.
    “He’s Magneto,” Kielle signed matter-of-factly, glancing in Brutus’s direction and addressing her comment to Shannon. It was her own nickname for Handy. The other girl disagreed. “No. He’s Mr. Sinister. Not part of Brotherhood. Worst of the worst.”
    Kielle considered this. “But I think—”
    “Oh, you two, stop!” Beverly burst into their conversation, her hands rising and falling like her struggling chest. “This isn’t stupid game.”
    Melanie nodded. “Don’t say anything more.” Oh, Mrs. Harstrawn, Melanie raged silently, please . . . How you cry! Red face, blue face, quivering. Please don’t do this! Her hands rose. “I can’t do it alone.”
    But Mrs. Harstrawn was helpless. She lay on the tile floor of the killing room, her head against a trough where the hot blood of dying calves and lambs flowed and vanished and she said not a word.
    Melanie looked up. The girls were staring at her.
    I have to do something.
    But all she remembered was her father’s words—phantom words—as he sat on the front porch swing of their farmhouse last spring. A brilliant morning. He said to her, “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.”
    (How perfectly she’d made out the words then, even the impossible sibilants and elusive glottal stops. As clearly as she understood Handy—Brutus—now.)
    Her father had finished. “So you’ll be home then.” And rose to hitch up the ammonia tank without letting her write a single word of response on the pad she carried around the house.
    Suddenly Melanie was aware of Beverly’s head bobbing up and down. A full-fledged asthma attack. The girl’s face darkened and she closed her eyes miserably, struggling ferociously to breathe. Melanie stroked her damp hair.
    “Do something,” Jocylyn signed with her stubby, inept fingers.
    The shadows reaching into the room, shadows of machinery and wires, grew very sharp, then began to sway. Melanie stood and walked into the slaughterhouse. She saw Brutus and Stoat rearranging the lights.
    Maybe he’ll give us one for our room. Please . . . .
    “I hope he dies, I hate him,” the blond fireball Kielle signed furiously, her round face contorted with hatred as she gazed at Brutus.
    “Quiet.”
    “I want him to die!”
    “Stop!”
    Beverly lay down on the floor. She signed, “Please. Help.”
    In the outer room Brutus and Stoat sat close together under a swaying lamp, the light reflecting off Stoat’s pale crew cut. They were watching the small TV, clicking through the channels. Bear stood at the window, counting. Police cars, she guessed.
    Melanie walked toward the men. Stopped about ten feet from them. Brutus looked over the dark skirt, the ruddy blouse, the gold necklace—a present from her brother, Danny. He was studying her, that damn curious smile on his face. Not like Bear, not staring at her boobs and legs. Just her face and, especially, her ears. She realized it was the way he’d stared at devastated Mrs. Harstrawn—as if he was adding another specimen to a collection of tragedies.
    She mimicked writing something.
    “Tell me,” he said