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

home. Our truck was parked by the house. I changed and went to the barn to do the chores. The lights were on, but only the goats and kittens greeted me. Mouse and Pearl were missing.

Half an hour later, Pearl stormed into the house.

“Where were you? I was worried.”

“I arrived home, changed clothes, prepared the milking kit, and went to the barn. Mouse was gone! I walked to the lake to look for him, holding the flashlight in front of my face, scanning the beam, looking for eye reflections. I saw deer eyes but no horse eyes. I walked to the trunk road. Then I walked west,” she signed. “Mow … Mow,” she said with her voice. “I called Mouse’s name. I reached the big house with grass. Mouse was grazing! I held his halter and walked him home, two kilometers. The flashlight batteries died. The moon turned the road into a black ribbon under the stars. I hate walking in the dark because I am deaf and blind. We have no fence—and you want to board a horse!”

She put her face in her hands and sobbed.

I put my hands on her shoulders.

Pearl looked up as if nothing had happened.

“I have blisters. Gumboots are bad for long walks. We must finish the upper fence.”

The telephone rang. It was Gus.

“Ludd called me. He’s got the only lawn on the island, and Mouse was eating it! If it happens again, no one’s ever gonna board a horse at your place. Electrify that string! Leave a radio on! Leave a light on! Finish your fence! Unnerstand?”

My father came to help build the upper field fence. He and I held each fencepost in position while Eddie’s backhoe pounded it down. A dozen poles hit bedrock, so we set them in concrete. We built gates and corner braces, ready to support the wire.

Rainy weekend after rainy weekend, Pearl and I strung barbed wire. When the wire was strung, we nailed insulators to the poles and strung electric fence wire inside the barbed wire. Our work clothes were hung by the woodstove at night, where they developed a smoky aroma like Lapsang Suchong tea.

When the fence was complete, we opened the barn door. Mouse and the goats walked out, cantered about, and grazed.

Whisky annoyed the goats, so I tethered him while we dismantled the temporary fence. In a few minutes, I heard yelping. He lay curled in a ball, his paws over his head, cringing as the goats butted him. We laughed as we pulled the goats away and untied Whisky. He never annoyed the goats again.

Pearl and I registered Trout Lake Farm as a partnership and opened a Trout Lake Farm bank account. I set up business accounting in a portable computer from my office, weighing eight kilograms and costing $5,000.

I resumed MBA classes, sleeping on my sister’s floor twice a week. Pearl insisted I continue, despite the distance to the university and our projects on Bowen. To prepare for my encounter with Frank on the first night of the term, I brought the photo album of his work, but Frank had dropped out.

As the days grew cooler, the spiders multiplied. We developed the habit of holding an arm in front of our face while walking to the barn to break the cobwebs that the spiders had erected overnight—the “Bowen Island salute.” Mushrooms appeared overnight. The aromas of field and forest, horse sweat and manure, and even creosote—we loved all of them. Never did either of us need to encourage the other to do chores. Even in the rain, we enjoyed walking up the hill and down to the barn and climbing the ladder into the loft, breathing lungfuls of crisp air, and enjoying the companionship of our animals. We loved giving carrots to the horse and banana peels to the goats. We loved surprises like a deer in the field or an eagle overhead.

The cats learned that milk was associated with goats, but jumping onto the milking stand was associated with blows to the nose. So at milking time, they sat just beyond reach, their tails curled around them. We squirted streams of milk into their mouths, slowly raising the streams higher until the cats walked like Orwell’s pigs.

We ate cheese with every meal. We ate horiatiki salads with cheese. We ate pizza, pasta, grilled-cheese sandwiches, and spinach-and-cheese pie. We made cheesecake. Yet our refrigerator slowly filled with cheese.

“We need to buy a freezer,” signed Pearl. “If we don’t buy a freezer, then I want a washer and a dryer. I don’t like sitting in the laundromat in West Vancouver with strange people.”

As the days grew colder, the goats produced less milk, and the tide of frozen cheese began to ebb. We bought the washer and dryer.

Pearl brought our mail home from the post office box. A letter to me had been opened.

“It’s from my pen-pal in Madrid. She was helping me with my Spanish. Why is the envelope open?”

“I opened it.”

“Why? It’s in Spanish.”

“I asked a woman at work to translate it. How can I know what you are doing if I don’t check?”

“You have to trust. Without trust, no marriage can survive.”

“But so many men can’t be trusted. Every day, tell me what you did so I don’t guess.”

If Pearl had been hearing, I would not have forgiven her for opening my mail, but because she was deaf, I excused her occasional surveillance.

“Let’s buy another TTY for my office so you can call me at work.”

Pearl kissed me. “That will help.”

As winter approached, the air became rich with the scent of fallen leaves. The rain grew heavier, the darkness grew blacker, and the wind grew stronger.

“Ugh,” Pearl mumbled in the kitchen. “I found mouse shit in the oven mitts! The cold weather is making the mice come inside. Please buy some mousetraps.”

I drove to the General Store and bought mousetraps. I baited them with cheese and scattered them around the basement.

“Keep Whisky inside our room tonight so he doesn’t eat the cheese,” signed Pearl.

“Good idea, but if he tries, he’ll only eat from one mousetrap.”

That night as we lay in bed, I heard the crackles and pops of the woodstove punctuated by mousetrap snaps. In the morning, I reported, “Six pieces of cheese eaten. One dead mouse.”

I called an exterminator, discussed the problem, and ordered a Katch-All from him. He delivered the mousetrap to my office, to the amusement of our staff. He placed a steel box on the reception counter and turned the key on its side a few times. “This is the best trap ever invented. No bait. Just wind it up. Mice like to crawl through this little tube. When they do, they get flipped into a cage, like this.” He touched the tube. The mechanism rotated like a revolver cylinder, and a new tube snapped into place.

I brought the Katch-All home and put it in the basement. That night, I heard the crackles and pops of the woodstove punctuated by kaching! … kaching! … kaching!

In the morning, half a dozen mice huddled inside. We did the chores. Then we put the Katch-All outside the barn door and opened the lid. The mice scattered across the field, screaming. The cats ran after one mouse, then another, but because they failed to focus on one target, all the mice escaped.

Each morning, I carried the nightly collection of mice to the barn and released them, to the delight of the cats. In a week, the Katch-All was silent.

Pearl brought home a book, A Pictorial History of Boxing. “I heard my great-grandfather was a famous boxer. I want to look at the pictures to find one that looks like my father.”

“Ask your mother what she knows about him.”

“Mother will not discuss him. And she doesn’t show my father’s birth certificate to me. I told you the police never decided who caused the accident. She doesn’t show me all his papers, so she is hiding something.”

“What do your brother and sisters know about this?”

“They’re not interested. They accept Mother’s stories.” Pearl opened the bottom drawer in the kitchen cabinet and pulled out some clippings. “This is all I have.”

“These are newspaper stories about that accident. I can’t believe your mother is a killer, but I will help you find the truth.”

“Will you help me with my research?”

“Yes.” I kissed her.

“Your kiss feels like shocks. Sometimes, I am worried about our relationship. We make love less often. I feel like you are in love with the house, not me.”

“I love you both. Without a house, there is no place for a family, and without a family, there is no need for a house. Maybe I should quit school.”

“Don’t quit. Your MBA will support the security of our family.”

It was impossible for me to come home on class nights, except on the expensive water taxi, so, twice a week, my sister gave me bedroll space on her living room floor while Pearl did double chores. Over the next two years, with Pearl’s constant encouragement, I would complete my MBA.

The power failed. I lit the kerosene lamp, and we warmed our hands from it as the kitchen filled with the homey smell of kerosene.

“Another wet day,” Pearl signed. “We must clean the roof, but can we wait until the roof is dry?”

“We need to clean the gutters while the roof is damp. Dry cedar splits when stepped on. But wet cedar is slippery, so we must be careful when we go up.”

We put on our working clothes and water-resistant coats. I set the stepladder in front of the house where the roof was only one story high and steadied it on the uneven soil. Pearl climbed up, and I crawled up after her. We worked in opposite directions around the edge of the roof, sitting and facing outwards with our feet in the gutters. Scuttling sideways like crabs, we pulled handfuls of leaves, needles, and twigs out of the gutters and dropped them over the edge.

Two hours later, we were reunited. I held Pearl’s hand as she lowered a foot over the eve and set it on the ladder. Gripping the gutter with the other hand, she put her other foot on the first step of the ladder and started to step down.

The ladder buckled and collapsed.

I looked down helplessly as Pearl crashed. She lay on the ladder on her back, motionless. After a minute, she signed, “I broke my hip. Come down. Help me.”

“How? I have no way to get down and no way to call for help. Check your spine—wiggle your toes.”

“Jump down. Help me, please. Please!”

“I’ll break my legs! How will that help?”

“If you love me, come down and help me.”

“I can’t! You need to go to the phone and call for help. We could sit for days in the rain before anyone comes.”

Pearl glared at me.

“The ladder twisted slowly, so I don’t think your hip is broken. Wiggle your toes!”

Pearl rocked one boot back and forth, then the other. She stood up and threw her cap on the ground.

“The sawhorses are there. Drag them below me. Put some wood across the top. I will try to climb down.”

Pearl did so, and I lowered myself from the roof. We walked into the house and hung our soaking wet clothes by the woodstove. I added more wood and opened the flue and grate. We stood with our hands to the stove without communicating. When we felt warmer, we went upstairs.

Pearl sat limply in a kitchen chair. “Why do you always have to be right? Being right adds stress to relationships.”

I heard fum—fum—Fum—FUM thundering through the floor. I ran downstairs with Pearl. The woodstove was red hot, and through its open grill, flames flashed yellow light on the woodpile. The chimney was chugging like a steam locomotive, its flue thermometer pegged to the end of the scale. The sawdust on the dirt floor near the stove was on fire, ignited by the radiation. I shut the damper and grill while Pearl stamped out the embers. The heat scorched our legs. Pearl wiped the sweat from her face, her bruises temporarily forgotten. The stove groaned as it cooled.

“You could have burned down the house. Hearies are careless because they depend on hearing. Deafies do not make careless mistakes.”

Pearl’s prejudiced logic reversed cause and effect. We had just made a careless mistake together, and my hearing had saved our house.

“It’s not raining today, but water is running down the walls.”

I looked at the windows closely. “Frank installed half the