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

bathroom lined with washbasins at child height. “See this row of hooks? Our facecloths had to be hung by their corners in diamonds. The towels went on those racks and had to be in squares.”

Pearl laughed and pointed at the bathroom door. “We had a lot of fun. One time we were furious at the supervisor, so we soaped the floor. Then we started shouting and banging things. She came running through that door, slipped, and fell flat, sliding along the floor.”

“She was lucky she wasn’t injured,” I said.

“I remember. You were the leader,” said Joan.

“Several of us were punished, but I got the most punishment.”

“How did she punish you?” I said.

“She put chairs next to each other and lay a stick across them. We had to put our hands on our heads and balance on our shins on the stick—we got bruises! Sometimes, we had to kneel on salt or be spanked in front of the other students.”

“Pearl arrived a few years after we opened, and she left a few years before we disallowed corporal punishment and allowed sign language.”

“Why didn’t you report all this to your parents?”

“The school never punished us near the end of the term, so we didn’t come home with bruises. And we wanted our parents to think we had been good. Punishments made me tough. When someone asked if I was oral or deaf, I would answer, ‘I’m a rebel.’”

“Pearl was a rebel,” Joan signed and said.

“One time, my school friend and I were looking at dresses in a store. The woman saw our signs and told us to leave because she thought we had no money. So we threw a rock through the window and waited for the police. The policeman did nothing. That was our revenge on her. Some students were mean to me, too. Now when they see me, they say, ‘Remember me at school?’ I laugh at them and say, ‘I forgot your name.’ That lets them know that they are not important to me.”

I had an idea. “Can Pearl see her files?”

“Yes! I want to see what they said about me twenty years ago.”

Joan found her files in the storeroom. She untied the string around a manila folder, and we watched over Pearl’s shoulders as she flipped through thirteen years of her history. Her report cards were normal. She was intelligent, according to an aptitude test, but I didn’t see any achievement awards. A memo between a psychologist and the school mentioned something about counseling. I didn’t see any reports of incidents and punishments like the one that Pearl and Joan had just remembered.

Pearl closed the file. “I know all this.”

“I’m glad you visited. I may not have a job soon. We had ten kids in each grade at one time, but we are down to half of that now. Nowadays, parents view institutional schools as a last resort and mainstream their children if they’ve got any hearing at all.”

“Mainstream with interpreters?” I said.

“Yes. Residential deaf schools cost four times as much as living at home while mainstreaming in public schools with interpreters. And mainstreamed deafies are less likely to end up on welfare. They live with their families. They get a real-world education in a real-world environment, so they learn to compete in the real world. The deafies are interacting with hearing kids, and the hearing kids are interacting with deafie kids. That gives the hearies and the deafies respect for each other, and it gives the deafies self-respect. It’s difficult to help children mature inside an institution.”

Alan and Rose bought a mare named Yarby and boarded her with us. Pearl taught me how to saddle and ride, at first in our fields and then on the trails near the lake. I rode Mouse while she rode Yarby, her ponytail bouncing. We would pause on the trail to pick the salmonberries from places higher than the deer could reach. I kept a photo of Pearl riding Yarby on my desk.

Pearl and I prepared for winter. We seeded the pastures with rye. We wheelbarrowed rows of firewood into the basement lest snow, injury, or illness prevent it when it was most needed. I installed floodlights atop our new barn power pole, ending the need for flashlights at chore time but also ending the magic of the night.

Pearl dropped our mail onto the table, all of it opened. She held up a brochure for Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Education, the course required before applying for a hunting license.

“What is this?”

“I was thinking of getting a hunting license so we can have venison. Ralph suggested I buy a bow but shoot the deer by the barn.” I picked up another letter. “The Elks are inviting me to join.”

“The Elks are against signing. They say they support the deaf, but they only support the Hearing Resource Centre for oral deafies.”

“I won’t join. We are too busy, and it’s all old people.”

It was a mistake—I should have seized the chance to get to know Pearl’s family.

Clifford urged me to pay Frank the rest of our holdback, now with Frank’s legal fees added to it. We surrendered and paid Frank the $10,000 holdback plus $3,000 for both lawyers. We had lost a year, and we still had to repair more of his work.

So the water wouldn’t freeze, I bypassed the plumbing Frank had put in the attic with new pipes in the basement. We patched Frank’s dozens of drywall faults. I resumed MBA classes. The long joint baths that Pearl and I took became separate quick showers as my classes, her post office shift work, and our renewed home construction projects gently brushed our romance aside.

Father helped me to slaughter both pigs. It was physically demanding work, and slaughtering each pig took hours.

The next morning, Pearl and I began to butcher the sides by following Morton’s book, Meat Curing Made Easy. I sawed and trimmed; Pearl wrapped, weighed, labeled, and kept the records; and we carried armfuls of brown packages downstairs to the freezer. We put the bacon in trays for curing and the remainders in pails for sausages.

After twelve hours of butchering, I signed. “My arms are falling off.”

“We made 100 kilos of pork—that’s 500 servings!”

Every evening for a week, we made bacon and sausages. We rubbed curing salt into the bellies and back bacon. We ground the remainders with goat meat, garlic, pepper, salt, and spices. Pearl fed handfuls of meat into the electric grinder while I twisted the casings off the spout, sausage after sausage.

Even though we were exhausted, we knew it was worthwhile when we ate leek-and-potato soup, pork tenderloin stuffed with chèvre, and the last of our home-grown vegetables.

“Everything was made here: pork, milk, cheese, vegetables, pickles, and even our water. And we are warm because of our firewood,” I signed.

“I ache, but it is hard for me to explain how wonderful I feel. Frank is gone, and the pieces of a good life are coming together.”

I cut a Christmas tree for our second Bowen Island Christmas. Pearl gathered holly and made a wreath for the door. Our dusty home looked cozy.

At the company Christmas party, my boss’s boss, a Dutch aristocrat, met Pearl and liked her immediately. He was so taken by her that he made an exception to the couples-can’t-sit-together rule and asked Pearl to sit beside him, with me on the other side of her to be their interpreter. Sometimes, they wrote notes so I could eat.

At the end of the evening, he wanted to keep the notepad, but Pearl yanked it from his hands—she never liked others to keep her notes. He was startled that the pleasant guest, whose company he had enjoyed all evening, had two sides. I’ll never forget his sarcastic remark: “What a charming guest.”

“Look at this advertisement in the Undercurrent,” signed Pearl. “A new king-size futon for twenty-five percent off. We can keep our old bed for visitors.”

I called the advertiser, and we drove to her house at the end of a lane behind a paddock with two sheep. A huge beige cylinder lay across her living room floor. We offered the owner, Arlette, half the new price. She declined, and we left. A week later, we bought a new futon from the store where Arlette had bought hers, and I built a storage box underneath it.

24 December 1986 was Christmas Eve, Pearl’s birthday, and our anniversary. I added two diamonds to her wedding ring, even though it was money that would have been better spent on the house. Pearl was proud of it. I built a television into the dashboard of the truck, something unheard of in those days.

The telephone rang. “Derrick, this is Donna at the Bowen Building Centre. Pearl won our Christmas raffle—a clock radio! Should we put her ticket back in the bin?” She giggled crassly.

“Pearl wants her prize. We’ll be right over.”

We drove to the store, and Donna handed Pearl her radio.

“I enter every contest I can. Deaf people have hearing friends, so we need radios. Should blind people have no TVs?”

While we were talking to Donna, a Toyota pickup parked next to our Nissan, and Arlette walked in.

“You can have our futon for half price. No one else was interested.” Arlette grumbled, as if we were ripping her off.

“It’s too late. We just bought a new one.”

“What? Why didn’t you call me first?” Arlette glared at me as if I had disrespected her by declining her first offer.

I tried to be friendly, but Arlette had taken a dislike to me. Our paths would cross later on.

Part III: Divided by Destiny

I Want a Baby

Blaze arrived, Gus’s family’s second horse. Mouse, Senator, and Yarby knew their stalls, so within a day, four horses entered the barn in single file at feeding time, each going to his stall as if he could read the name sign I put over his manger.

“Trout Lake Farm is now profitable even before tax refunds,” I signed.

We continued to finish the house out of our cash flow. I installed a central vacuum cleaning system. The house wasn’t yet carpeted, but now it was easy to vacuum the dust.

Snow covered Bowen Island in white. With snow on the ground, we had to walk up and down the hill with backpacks and flashlights twice a day, but no pipes froze, and there was plenty of firewood in the basement. The floodlights on the trail to the barn made the chores easier, but because they obliterated the stars, we often left them turned off on clear nights. We felt like we were living in a fairy tale.

In February, I left for a one-week business trip. Pearl drove me to the airport, and she promised to pick me up when I returned.

I arrived at the Chicago Hilton at midnight. As soon as I fell asleep, the telephone rang.

“This is the Vancouver Message Relay Centre. Pearl King is calling for Derrick King.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why didn’t you call to tell me you arrived?”

“I told you, I will not call from the hotel telephone. It is too expensive. I said I would call you from the office tomorrow. It is three in the morning, and you woke me up.”

“You didn’t tell me your room number. The receptionist had to ask.”

“I told you my flights and my hotel. Rooms are assigned after you arrive. You’ve stayed in hotels before. You know that.”

“I will find out.” She hung up.

I waited for Pearl at the airport when I returned. I waited for an hour, but she didn’t arrive. I took a taxi to Horseshoe Bay, walked onto the ferry, and walked two kilometers up the hill to the house wearing a suit and Oxford shoes, carrying my briefcase and suitcase. My feet were wet, I was chilled to the bone, and my arms were aching.

I was furious, but the moment I saw the woman on the sofa who was watching TV, munching potato chips, and ignoring me, I calmed down—I realized a new Pearl had replaced the old, and I knew better than to get angry.

“I waited at the airport for an hour. I walked from the ferry. It’s cold. Why didn’t you come?”

Pearl pointed at the TV with a supercilious look. “I ordered cable TV while you were away. It’s your turn to do the chores.”

Pearl slept on the couch for the second time since we met.

Pearl pointed to an advertisement in the Undercurrent. “A businessman announces he will build a pub. He is offering a prize for the name. I will enter the name Bowen Island Pub.”

“That name is too obvious. I