Love for a Deaf Rebel - Derrick King (top 100 novels .txt) 📗

and that’s where I learned computers. Now I program assistive devices for the blind.”

“But I saw you reading!”

“Thanks to lasers, I eventually regained some sight.”

“Would you like a lift? My truck is in the cove.”

“No, thanks. I have to walk home because I counted burning those calories when I drank the syrup. Good luck with the Thaxter place.”

We bought a chainsaw, hardhat, and wedges. I studied the instructions, put on the hardhat, hearing protectors, and gloves, and carried our new chainsaw into the forest. I felled, limbed, and bucked trees. I was careful to make sure the trees fell in the right direction because they could have killed us if I made a mistake. While I bucked the trees, Pearl loaded the firewood into the truck. Each time the truck was full of wood, we drove back to the house and stacked it. We worked as a team and slept deeply every weekend, exhausted.

At the downtown bus stop, my new friend approached me and grinned. “Derrick, I’m Ralph.” The bus arrived. Ralph flashed a card to the driver, walked to the rear, and sat down.

I sat beside him. “How did you board without paying?”

“I’m a VIP.” Ralph chuckled as he showed me his Vision Impaired Pass. “Now you know why I wear sunglasses while I’m waiting for the bus. No one asked me to return my VIP pass when I could see again. And I was a licensed driver while I was blind—no one asked me to return my driver’s license!

“What did you do when you weren’t shepherding?”

“I’d go hiking with my goat, bring my cup, and milk her for refreshment. Sometimes, I had to wait for her to eat the roses along the way. My only problem was dogs. An ewe costs a hundred bucks. The .44 magnum on my belt gave me a reputation as a wacko even though it is legal to patrol your property with a gun.”

“I’ll bet that minimized visitors. You only shot dogs?”

“And deer. Fernie and I love venison, so he installed a propane freezer for me. Hunting is legal on Bowen with a longbow and a license. So I got a longbow and a license, and I shot them with my gun—in season, of course. One shot can’t be traced. Your barn would make a good hunting blind. At twilight, you could sit on a bale in your hayloft and wait for a deer to walk by. Hay muffles gunshots, but if you don’t want any noise, make a silencer.”

The bus arrived at the ferry terminal. Ralph looked at his watch. “We have an hour. Come, sit in my jeep with me.”

I followed him to his Suzuki, almost as decrepit as Rokus’s. “Look in my glovebox.” Ralph handed me his keys.

I unlocked the glove box and took out a revolver. “A Charter Arms five-shot belly gun! You must be paranoid.”

“Paranoia is why I prefer revolvers—the shells are retained.”

“I’ve got the Charter Arms folding rifle. Are you licensed to drive around with this?”

Ralph nodded. “I am. I am a member of the Barnet Rifle Club, and I have a Permit to Convey my gun to the range. Barnet is on the other side of Vancouver, so that lets me drive my gun anywhere between here and there when the range is open—and it’s open daily except Christmas. Last year I drove by a deer lying by the road near Tunstall Bay; someone must have hit it. I rushed home and got my gun, but by the time I returned, the deer was gone. Now I carry my gun in my jeep.”

Ralph was a good storyteller. I put the gun back.

“Dynamite is fun. I enjoyed stumping, clearing land. I kept my dynamite under the sofa. Once in a while, I’d invite a visitor to my cabin. At night, we’d sit by the stove in the lamplight, stoned in the silence of the woods. When the fire ran low, I’d add some wood, and then I’d take a stick of dynamite and toss it into the stove. You’ve never seen anyone bolt out a door faster into the snow.” Ralph roared with laughter. “Without a blasting cap, dynamite is safe. Two bucks a laugh but worth it every time.”

“What a lifestyle!”

“It was. Most people live parallel lives, where you live to work. You work and live every day, so you can’t optimize your work life or your personal life. A serial life is where you work to live. First, you work to build a stash. Then, you live your life if you still have the strength. People who live serial lives often end up bitter because by the time they have the money to retire early, they don’t have the health to enjoy it. I had a reverse-serial life. But that only works for stoics, like me, who are prepared to spend our youth in poverty.”

The ferry arrived.

“I didn’t expect to have to drive after dark. Please drive me home. At night, my vision narrows to a tunnel. But I can’t complain. I lived while I could!”

On Saturday morning, the telephone rang. “Have you let your barn?” said a man with an English accent.

“It’s still available. Why don’t you come over?”

Whisky barked as a yellow Volvo station wagon rumbled up the driveway. A man with a gray beard and a woman with auburn hair stepped out. Their names were Alan and Rose. Pearl made tea, and we sat at the kitchen table.

“When we moved to Canada, Rose dreamed we would have an acreage, ride horses, raise lambs, and spin wool,” said Alan. “We grew up with Barbours, Wellingtons, and Tweed, read Ten Acres Enough, and fantasized. Here we are—with no land. When Rose saw your advert, she thought we might arrange to keep a few sheep on your property.”

“Let’s see what we can do together. Fields need to be foraged. Saplings are shooting up already.”

The four of us walked around the property with Whisky. Back in the house, I put the property plan on the table, and Alan and Rose outlined their ideas for running a handful of ewes and their lambs in the lower, south field. They sketched a fence built with wooden posts, barbed wire, and sheep mesh. They would supply the materials and hire a tractor to set the fenceposts. Then we would build the fence together. Pearl and I would build an animal shelter in the lower field and, because the water in the lower field would freeze in winter, allow them to use the barn and the upper field in the winter. This meant that we would have to fence the upper field before winter. Their project would last two years, after which the lower field fence would be ours. We happily agreed.

“Whisky hears something.” Whisky was Pearl’s ears.

“It’s music. It must be coming from Fran’s, and it’s getting louder. It sounds like a party.”

The next morning, I signed, “There was music all night. I never thought I’d hear anything here but the wind in the trees.”

“Please check to be sure no one from the party is outside.”

I put Whisky on a leash and walked around our property on a glorious summer morning. The chirping of birds had replaced the thumping of rock music. Whisky and I walked down our driveway and looked across the road. A stage, built from pallets, stood in Fran’s driveway. It was surrounded by bottles, garbage, and crows. We walked back up the driveway to the barn. Whisky ran to the barn and leaped up and down below the hayloft, barking. Two sleepy heads peered down.

“Fran said we could sleep here,” said one.

“You have to ask me, not Fran. Whose party was it?”

“Fran’s son turned sixteen. We all got wrecked.”

“You can go now. I’ll tie up the dog for a while.”

After coffee, Pearl and I felled a dying maple tree on the property line near the barn. Disturbed by the chainsaw, the teens climbed down the ladder and shuffled down the driveway. That fifty-year-old tree yielded four truckloads of firewood.

The Howe Sound Queen rolled and pitched its way to Horseshoe Bay as I sat in our truck enjoying pastry and coffee from the Bowen Island Bakery. I loved the view of the mountains from the truck on the days when I drove off the island to buy provisions. A knock on the window brought me back to reality.

A man about my age asked me for a ride, so I told him to hop in, and I introduced myself.

“My name is Stanley. You and your deaf wife bought the Thaxter place, didn’t you? I couldn’t help notice the antenna on your truck. I’m a radio ham, too! I work downtown at Eaton’s department store, in debt collections. On the weekends, I’m a Vancouver Police reservist.”

“That’s interesting. I was a West Vancouver Police reservist for three years.”

“I wanted to be a career cop, but I didn’t qualify because I’m deaf in my right ear.”

“Then why did you join the police reserve?”

“I use the police databases to help me trace debtors. My wife, Gertrude, and I are building a house on Eagle Cliff. Come visit.”

We talked about our hobbies, and Stanley sketched a map.

A couple of weeks later, Pearl and I followed Stanley’s map to his house. We parked our pickup at the roadside and walked up his steep access road, the pavement turning to gravel after it passed a cluster of houses. Tracks branched out into the trees and led to houses in various stages of completion. Stanley’s place was beyond all of them, at the top. The gravel road stopped at an old four-wheel-drive GMC Suburban. We walked past spare truck parts to a single-axle trailer. Behind it stood the frame of a two-story house, the tarpaper sheathing braving the elements without the protection of siding.

“So small. I can’t imagine living in this trailer,” Pearl signed.

Gertrude, a small woman with straight brown hair, opened the door and beckoned us to come in.

“Welcome!” Stanley shouted. “Wait while I clear some space. We don’t get many guests.” We squeezed onto the bench seats on the sides of the table. Boxes, clothes, tools, and books blocked what little daylight penetrated the trailer through the forest and louvered windows. “We use the table-bed as a table, the sofa-bed as a bed, and the bunk bed as storage. There’s a Porta-Potty outside.”

Pearl looked around. “Where do you shower?”

“At work. When we can’t shower at work, we wash outside. We have to be living in the house by winter because we only have a heater running off an extension cord from my neighbor. The cord is so long, we can’t turn more than one thing on at a time. There’s no phone, so ham radio comes in handy.”

I pointed at a black oval sticking out from under a pile of clothes on the bunk bed.

Stanley grinned. “That’s my Remington 12-gauge.”

“It lets him feel he’s got something to protect,” said Gertrude.

“Things were better before. I was a bailiff. Then we bought a tow truck. But, one by one, the private lots contracted to UniPark, so we went bust. Gertrude’s waitressing kept us going.” Stanley sighed. “I once impounded a Rolls-Royce. Next day, a guy knocks and asks how many trucks we got.”

“I told him we had three,” said Gertrude. “But we had only one.”

“So this guy gives us three padded car covers and says, ‘If you ever tow a Royce again, you must cover it first.’ Ha-ha!”

Pearl laughed. “My boss had a Rolls-Royce. He owned a restaurant on Broadway where I worked as a waitress. I gave customers a paper and pencil with the menu, and they wrote their orders on the paper. I quit when I saw a dead body fall out from behind a curtain! It’s true! I’ve seen so many things you wouldn’t believe.”

“You were a waitress?” Her dead-body-behind-the-curtain story sounded like a cliché, but she was convinced it was true.

“I was a waitress after I left my husband.”

We all walked to their construction site. The front door was held closed by a stick on a rubber band through a hole.

“The house will have a kitchen, living room, and dining room downstairs, and three bedrooms upstairs,” said Stanley. “I’m doing the plumbing and wiring now. When that’s done, and I get a stove and some drywall in downstairs, we’ll move in.”

“Where’s your well?”

“That comes later.”

“How did you get a building permit?”

“I don’t have one, and that’s why we don’t invite many visitors. No permit means no mortgage, and that’s why it will take us years to finish our house. No one lives like this by choice.”

“How are you going to connect power? That needs an