To distract him she leaned forward, enduring the ugly man's ominous stare, and slowly, cautiously, with her burgundy sleeve wiped the sheen of his sweat from the teacher's face. He was perplexed by the gesture then angered. He shoved her back against the wall. Her head hit the tile with a thud. There she sat until he finished and lay gasping. Finally he rolled off her. Melanie saw a slick pool on the woman's thigh. Blood too. Bear glanced furtively into the other room. He had escaped undetected; Brutus and Stoat hadn't seen. He sat up. He zipped his filthy jeans and pulled down Mrs. Harstrawn's skirt, roughly buttoned her blouse.

Bear leaned forward and put his face inches from Melanie's. She managed to hold his eye – it was terrifying but she would do anything to keep him from looking around the room. He spat out, "You… word about… you're…"

Delay, stall. Buy time for the twins.

She frowned and shook her head.

He tried again, words spitting from his mouth.

Again she shook her head, pointed to her ear. He boiled in frustration.

Finally, she leaned away and pointed to the dusty floor. He wrote, Say anything and your dead.

She nodded slowly.

He obliterated the message and buttoned his shirt.

Sometimes all of us, even Others, are mute and deaf and blind as the dead; we perceive only what our desires allow us to see. This is a terrible burden and a danger but can also be, as now, a small miracle. For Bear rose unsteadily, tucked in his shirt, and looked around the killing room with a glazed look of contentment on his flushed face. Then he strode out, never noticing that only four shoes remained in place of the twins and that the girls were gone, floating free of this terrible place.

For a few years I was nothing but Deaf.

I lived Deaf, I ate Deaf, I breathed it.

Melanie is speaking to De l'Epée.

She has gone into her music room because she cannot bear to think about Anna and Suzie, leaping into the waters of the Arkansas River, dark as a coffin. They're better off, she tells herself. She remembers the way Bear looked at the girls. Whatever happens, they're better off.

De l'Epée shifts in his chair and asks what she meant by being nothing but Deaf.

"When I was a junior the Deaf movement came to Laurent Clerc.

Deaf with a capital D. Oralism was out and at last the school began teaching Signed Exact English. Which is sort of a half-assed compromise. Eventually, after I graduated, they agreed to switch to ASL. That's American Sign."

"I'm interested in languages. Tell me about it." (Would he say this? It's my fantasy; yes, he would.)

"ASL conies from the world's first school for the deaf, founded in France in the 1760s by your namesake. Abbé Charles Michel de l'Epée. He was like Rousseau – he felt that there was a primordial human language. A language that was pure and absolute and unfalteringly clear. It could express every emotion directly and it would be so transparent that you couldn't use it to lie or deceive anyone."

De l'Epée smiles at this.

"With French Sign Language, oh, the Deaf came into their own. A teacher from De l'Epée's school, Laurent Clerc, came to America in the early 1800s with Thomas Gallaudet – he was a minister from Connecticut – and set up a school for the deaf in Hartford. French Sign Language was used there but it got mixed with local signing – especially the dialect used on Martha's Vineyard, where there was a lot of heredity deafness. That's how American Sign Language came about. That, more than anything, allowed the Deaf to live normal lives. See, you have to develop language – some language, either sign or spoken – by age three. Otherwise you basically end up retarded."

De l'Epée looks at her somewhat cynically. "It seems to me that you've rehearsed this."

She can only laugh.

"Once ASL hit the school, as I was saying, I lived for the Deaf movement. I learned the party line. Mostly because of Susan Phillips. It was amazing. I was a student teacher at the time. She saw my eyes flickering up and down as I read somebody's lips. She came up to me and said, The word "hearing" means only one thing to me. It's the opposite of who I am.' I felt ashamed. She later said that the term 'hard of hearing' should infuriate us because it defines us in terms of the Other community. 'Oral' is even worse because the Oral deaf want to pass. They haven't come out yet. If somebody's Oral, Susan said, we have to 'rescue' them.

"I knew what she was talking about because for years I'd tried to pass. The rule is 'Plan ahead.' You're always thinking about what's coming, second-guessing what questions you'll be asked, steering people toward streets with noisy traffic or construction, so you'll have an excuse to ask them to shout or repeat what they say.

"But after I met Susan I rejected all that. I was anti-Oral, I was anti-mainstreaming. I taught ASL. I became a poet and gave performances at theaters of the deaf."

"Poet?"

"I did that as a substitute for my music. It seemed the closest I could hope for."

"What are signed poems like?" he asks.

She explains that they "rhymed" not sonically but because the hand shape of the last word of the line was similar to that of the last words in preceding lines. Melanie recited:

"Eight gray birds, sitting in dark.

"Cold wind blows, it isn't kind.

"Sitting on wire, they lift their wings

"And sail off into billowy clouds."

"Dark" and "kind" share a flat, closed hand, the palm facing the body of the signer. "Wings" and "clouds" involve similar movements from the shoulders up into the air above the signer.

De l'Epée listens, fascinated. He watches her sign several other poems. Melanie puts almond-scented cream on them every night and her nails are smooth and translucent as lapidaried stones.

She stopped in mid line. "Oh," she muses, "I did it all. The National Association of the Deaf, the Bicultural Center, the National Athletic Association of the Deaf."

He nods. (She wishes he'd tell her about his life. Is he married? (Please no!) Does he have children? Is he older than I imagine, or younger?)

"I had my career all laid out before me. I was going to be the first deaf woman farm foreman."

"Farm?"

"Ask me about dressing corn. About anhydrous ammonia. You want to know about wheat? Red wheat comes from the Russian steppes. But it's name isn't political – oh, not in Kansas, nosir. It's the color. 'Amber waves of grain…' Ask me about the advantages of no-till planting and to how to fill out UCC financing statements to collateralize crops that haven't grown yet. 'All the accretions and appurtenances upon said land…' "

Her father, she explains, owned six hundred and sixty acres in south-central Kansas. He was a lean man who wore an exhaustion that many people confused with ruggedness. His problem wasn't a lack of willingness but a lack of talent, which he called luck. And he acknowledged – to himself alone – that he needed help from many quarters. He of course put most of his stock in his son but farms are big business now. Harold Charrol planned to invest both son, Danny, and daughter, Melanie, with third-share interests and watch them all prosper as a corporate family.

She had been reluctant about these plans but the prospect of working with her brother had an appeal to it. The unfazable boy had become an easygoing young man, nothing at all like their embittered father. While Harold would mutter darkly about fate when a thresher blade snapped and he stood paralyzed with anger, staring at the splintered wood, Danny might jump down out of the cockpit, vanish for a time, and return with a six-pack and some sandwiches for an impromptu picnic. "We'll fix the son of a bitch tonight. Let's eat."

For a time she believed this could be a pleasant life. She took some ag extension courses and even sent an article to Silent News about farm life and Deafness.