A Maidens Grave

deaf.”
    “Please . . .” He seems genuinely curious.
    Melanie had planned to be a musician, she tells him. From the time she was four or five. She was no prodigy but did have the gift of perfect pitch. Classical, Celtic, or country-western—she loved it all. She could hear a tuneonce and pick it out from memory on the family’s Yamaha piano.
    “And then . . .”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “When I was eight, almost nine, I went to a Judy Collins concert.”
    She continues, “She was singing a cappella, a song I’d never heard before. It was haunting . . . .”
    Conveniently, a Celtic harp begins playing the very tune through the imaginary speakers in the music room.
    “My brother had the concert program and I leaned over and asked him what the name of the song was. He told me it was ‘A Maiden’s Grave.’ ”
    De l’Epée says, “Never heard of it.”
    Melanie continues, “I wanted to play it on the piano. It was . . . It’s hard to describe. Just a feeling, something I had to do. I had to learn the song. The day after the concert I asked my brother to stop by a music store and get some sheet music for me. He asked me which song. ‘A Maiden’s Grave,’ I told him.
    “ ‘What song’s that?’ he asked. He was frowning.
    “I laughed. ‘At the concert, dummy. The song she finished the concert with. That song. You told me the title.’
    “Then he laughed. ‘Who’s a dummy? ”A Maiden’s Grave“? What’re you talking about? It was ”Amazing Grace." The old gospel. That’s what I told you.’
    “ ‘No!’ I was sure I heard him say ‘A Maiden’s Grave.’ I was positive! And just then I realized that I’d been leaning forward to hear him and that when either of us turned away I couldn’t really hear what he was saying at all. And that when I was looking at him I was looking only at his lips, never his eyes or the rest of his face. The same way I’d been looking at everyone else I’d talked to for the last six or eight months.
    “I ran straight to the record store downtown—two miles away. I was so desperate, I had to know. I was sure my brother was teasing me and I hated him for it. I swore I’d get even with him. I raced up to the folk section and flipped through the Judy Collins albums. It was true . . . ‘Amazing Grace.’ Two months later I was diagnosed witha fifty-decibel loss in one ear, seventy in the other. It’s about ninety now in both.”
    “I’m so sorry,” de l’Epée says. “What happened to your hearing?”
    “An infection. It destroyed the hairs in my ear.”
    “And there’s nothing you can do about it?”
    She doesn’t answer him. After a moment she says, “I think that you’re Deaf.”
    “Deaf? Me?” He grins awkwardly. “But I can hear.”
    “Oh, you can be Deaf but hearing.”
    He looks confused.
    “Deaf but hearing,” she continues. “See, we call people who can hear the Others. But some of the Others are more like us.”
    “What sort of people are those?” he asks. Is he proud to be included? She thinks he is.
    “People who live according to their own hearts,” Melanie answers, “not someone else’s.”
    For a moment she’s ashamed, for she’s not sure that she always listens to her own.
    A Mozart piece begins to play. Or Bach. She isn’t sure which. (Why couldn’t the infection have come a year later? Think of all the music I could have listened to in twelve months. For God’s sake, her father pumped easy-listening KSFT through the farm’s loudspeakers. In my bio, they’ll find I was reared on “Pearly Shells,” Tom Jones, and Barry Manilow.)
    “There’s more I have to tell you. Something else I’ve never told anyone.”
    “I’d like to hear it,” he says, agreeable. But then, in an instant, he disappears.
    Melanie gasps.
    The music room vanishes and she’s back in the slaughterhouse.
    Her eyes are wide, she looks around, expecting to see Brutus approaching. Or Bear shouting, storming toward her.
    But, no, Brutus is gone. And Bear sits by himself outside the killing room, eating, an incongruous smile on his face.
    What had dragged her from the music room?
    A vibration from a sound? The light?
    No, it was a smell. A scent had wakened her out of her daydream. But of what?
    Something she detected amid the smell of greasy food, bodies, and oil and gasoline and rusting metal and old blood and rancid lard and a thousand other scents.
    Ah, she recognized it clearly. A rich, pungent smell.
    “Girls,