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

He taught me what to do. He skinned the first kid as if he were undressing it, removing the whole skin in one piece. I killed and slaughtered the second kid while Tom coached me. We hung the carcasses next to my BMW.

The next day, while Tom and his family began their long ride home, Pearl and I butchered and wrapped the meat.

Shooting Pigs in a Sty

We were astonished to see a mobile home appear next to Trout Lake, barely visible from our property through the trees.

The next day, when I returned from work, I saw a pink extension cord crossing our driveway.

Pearl was anxious.

“Whisky ran to the bedroom window, barking. A man was walking through the forest, unrolling wire. When he reached our door, he knocked. I put the gun in my pocket. I held Whisky back and opened the door. It was Wayne!”

Pearl handed me her notepad. It said:

“We need power for a few months. We will pay.”

“I must ask my husband.”

“Fran is developing her property around the lake.”

“Derrick will talk to you.”

“We need power tonight.”

“Wayne pointed to the power outlet by our front door. Then he left. Say no! If we start, it will be impossible to stop.”

I changed my clothes. Pearl gave me the gun, and I put it in my pocket. I dragged the wire back to the mobile home. Bear barked inside it, but no one was home.

A few days later, we found surveyor’s tapes nailed to our fence, so I called Laurent.

“Fran and Wayne are living in a trailer by the lake. A few days ago, they asked to borrow power through a hundred-meter extension cord. Now, surveyor’s tapes have appeared along our property line. What’s up?”

“I can’t tell you that. But, because the bids were published in the Undercurrent, I can tell you that Fran won the Bowen Island garbage collection contract. Her bid was by far the lowest. Did you hear a bulldozer across the road?”

“Yes. I was wondering what a bulldozer was doing over there.”

“You know garbage must be trucked off the island, by law. You might guess that Fran has been burying garbage on her property with her bulldozer, just 200 meters from the reservoir and in breach of environmental laws.”

“Might I guess that our former neighbors are squatters?”

“Tell Pearl to relax; they won’t be there much longer. The survey tapes around the lake are a red herring.”

Pearl and I set up a sty with automatic water and an electric fence, and we drove to the Fraser Valley Livestock Auction. Even though Pearl couldn’t hear the auction, it was entertainment for both of us. The only piglets at auction that day were unneutered males, so we bid on two even though we would have to castrate them. They were cute, and we could carry them like puppies.

Before releasing them into our sty, we touched them to the electric wire to train them to avoid it, and we held their snouts to the watering nipple to show them where to drink. The piglets trotted into their shelter, our decommissioned outhouse lying on its side, and lay down to rest.

The power failed a few minutes later. Pearl and I ran to the sty. The piglets had walked out through the disabled fence.

We searched for half an hour. We didn’t know what to do except to report their loss to the police; if they weren’t captured, there would soon be two feral boars on Bowen Island.

“Are they pink? Do they have four legs?” Laurent howled with laughter. “Thanks for calling. I’ll call you back if anyone reports them.”

The power had come back on. Pearl and I went out to search again and, to our astonishment, found the piglets with Mouse and Senator in the paddock, rolling in horse manure. We were thrilled when they allowed us to pick them up and carry them back to their sty. We were not thrilled that our clothes were covered in mud and manure.

I called Larsen back, and he laughed. “You made my day. I love Bowen! I’ll rue the day I’m ever transferred to Toronto.”

The pigs never approached the fence again, even when the power failed. In addition to Buckerfield’s feed, we fed them the whey from our cheese-making. When we poured it into their trough, they sucked it down in seconds, competing with each other in pure primal greed.

We studied the castration procedure in Small-Scale Pig Raising. The Elastrator couldn’t be used; we had to do surgery. It had to be done; otherwise, the boars could become aggressive, and their meat would taste gamey.

Pearl sat on the milking stand, braced her back against the wall, held a piglet on its back with its head in her crotch and a hind leg in each hand, and nodded. Our hands were full, so we couldn’t sign.

As soon as I dripped iodine on its scrotum, the piglet started kicking. Pearl’s arms were no match for the strength of its legs, and there was no way I could operate on a moving target, so we swapped roles.

The piglet screamed as I struggled to hold it still for Pearl. She cut with an X-Acto knife to expose a testicle. The pig shrieked so loudly that Pearl heard it, too. She pulled out the testicle and held up her hands to show me they were trembling. She excised the second testicle and sprinkled blood stopper powder on the wound. The piglet stopped screaming. I put it down, and it trotted about the barn as if nothing had happened.

Pearl was crying when I brought her the second piglet.

Rokus knocked on the barn door while Pearl and I were doing Sunday morning chores. “Could you give us a hand next weekend? We bought piglets three months ago, so now we have 200 kilos of pig. Bring your gun. Bowen Island’s closed to the discharge of firearms nowadays, but two shots an hour apart shouldn’t be a problem.”

When we arrived, a fire was crackling underneath a drum of steaming water.

“The first pig should be an easy shot,” said Rokus, “but the second will be terrified.”

Rokus dropped a handful of grain on the ground next to the fence, and the pigs ran over to eat it. I fired straight down into the center of the closest skull. Behind a cloud of blue smoke, the pig screamed and staggered, blood pouring from its jaw. Rokus was furious that the pig was suffering, so I gave him the gun. He jumped over the fence and shot it again. It collapsed and began its death throes.

Rokus’s neighbor walked over. “Two shots for one pig?”

“Give us a hand,” said Rokus.

He, his neighbor, and I dragged the carcass to the drum. Rokus stabbed both hind trotters and pushed a pipe through them. Jenny and the neighbor steadied the drum while Rokus and I each gripped an end of the pipe and hoisted it. We lifted our arms straight up, but we couldn’t raise the carcass high enough for its head to clear the drum. We lowered the carcass to the ground. Rokus asked his neighbor to bring his backhoe.

His neighbor returned in his vintage backhoe. The machine hoisted the carcass into the air and down into the drum. After a few minutes, the backhoe lifted the carcass onto a bench. Rokus scraped it with the back of a knife.

“The water’s not hot enough to loosen the hair!”

The backhoe hoisted the carcass into the air, and the neighbor shut off its engine. While the carcass hung, Rokus used a propane torch to burn the hair away; then, he slit the neck to bleed it. He rolled a wheelbarrow under the carcass and gutted it, showing Pearl and me how to do it without soiling the meat. He dropped the entrails into the wheelbarrow and tossed the spleen to his dog. He turned the intestines inside out, for sausage casings, and rinsed them and the organ meats. He sawed off the head, sawed the carcass in half, and rinsed the sides, explaining everything as he worked. We hung the sides in his shed to cool overnight.

Rokus shot the second pig.

After the scalding failure at Rokus’s, we prepared carefully for the work we would do three months later. We bought a freezer. I bought a cast-iron bathtub from a scrapyard, a better scalding bath than a drum because the carcass could be lifted horizontally. It was so heavy it took four men to lift it onto our truck. Halfway up the driveway, the tub slid back and bent the tailgate, almost smashing it open.

Pearl was furious. “You didn’t tie it down! Are you an idiot? Look at our truck now! Bent!”

We ate dinner without signing, and Pearl watched TV alone.

At bedtime, she climbed into bed on her edge of the mattress. I turned off the light and put my arm around her shoulder. She rolled over and punched me in the chest. I jumped out of bed and turned on the light.

“Hit me! Hit me hard! Come on, I dare you! You don’t want to give me a bruise I can show to the police!”

I stared at her.

She relaxed and smiled serenely. “Are you going to hit me or not?”

“No.”

She lay down and closed her eyes. I turned off the light. I heard her breathing settle into sleep, and only then could I sleep. I couldn’t understand why she had become violent and had then forgiven me. I sensed that her overreaction was part of a bigger problem I didn’t understand.

On the last day of June, I stared at the ATM screen:

Transaction declined.

Insufficient funds.

It was right after payday, yet my balance was zero. I rushed inside and was told the bank had received a court order to transfer all the money in our account to a lawyer representing Frank Schutt. I called Clifford.

“Frank will do this again unless you add someone who isn’t a party to the suit, such as your mother, to your joint account. Your problem is that there are more homeowners who don’t pay than there are contractors who don’t deliver, and courts like simple explanations. Arguing quality is useless. Pay him to get rid of him.”

Pearl was furious when I broke the news. I apologized for hiring an amateur, trusting Frank, and not taking the contract to a lawyer. But neither of us could accept that Frank deserved full payment, so we paid Clifford a $1,450 retainer to defend Frank’s claim, and we added my mother to our joint account.

We continued to avoid touching Frank’s work. We improved the drainage in the upper field. I installed gutters around the barn so the paddock would be less muddy. We had a pole erected for the barn’s electrical cable, lifting it off the ground. Our improvements added value to the property, but they brought Pearl no closer to her dream of having a family.

“Let’s whitewash the barn to make it bright,” signed Pearl. “My uncle said whitewash is cheaper than paint.”

We bought lime and salt, mixed a batch, and whitewashed one stall. It looked good. We admired our work and smiled.

“I told you so,” signed Pearl. “Let’s mix more, and paint when we have time. Slowly, we will cover the inside of the barn.”

A few days later, my secretary shouted. “Derrick, telephone, quick!” I heard a noisy radiotelephone connection.

“This is the Bowen Island Water Taxi. Your wife is on a stretcher. The ambulance crew is bringing her to Lions Gate Hospital. She’s blinded herself with whitewash.”

I was horrified! I borrowed my boss’s car and rushed to the hospital. Pearl lay on a gurney, her eyes closed, wearing overalls and gumboots. Her clothes were soaked.

A paramedic held a bag of saline solution over her head and was dripping it into her eyes.

“Is she is deaf?”

“Yes. How is she?”

“We don’t know because we haven’t been able to open her eyes.”

Pearl’s hand, strong from milking goats, clamped mine like a vise. I kissed Pearl on her salty lips, and she relaxed. She raised her other hand and signed, “I love you.”

“The doctor will see her now,” said the nurse, wheeling her away. I took care of the paperwork while Pearl was being treated.

The doctor called me into the examination room. Pearl lay with her eyes open but with plastic tubes sticking out of them, so she couldn’t see anything. Each tube ran to a bag of saline solution.

“We’ll leave the irrigation contacts in for an hour. Please tell her.”

I fingerspelled on Pearl’s hand.

“It’s too soon to say if her corneas