The card in front of it read: The Branks—A punishment for women or slaves who talked too much, the branks was locked on around the head. The spoon in the mouth held the tongue down. The branks made speech impossible and could be locked on for as long as the master desired.

She looked back at the belt. The bowl of the spoon was dark with wear.

Deafness had many layers. Because she had a hard time keeping up with a conversation, people tended to assume she wasn’t smart. They did not ask her what she thought. If she offered out a novel idea, they would be startled. Rather than thinking her idea through, most people assumed she had misunderstood and re-explained the basics of the subject to her. She’d learned, over time, not to offer ideas.

At the museum, the teacher tapped her on the head to catch her attention and get her to follow the rest of the group.

She thought about the branks for a long time afterward. She imagined it locked around the head. With the spoon holding the tongue down, it would be impossible to eat or drink, or even swallow saliva. The woman or slave turned into a mute animal unable to plead, the dry weight of thirst building. Left on, it could kill within days from dehydration. Even an hour of wearing it would leave a physical memory in the mouth. One harsh look from someone in power and the thirst would return, the mute fear, the weight on the tongue.

At times, when she saw a teacher or boss or police officer stare, angry, eyebrows raised, at someone with less power, she noticed the reaction was shown frequently in the mouth. The person with less power closed the lips, moving the jaw from side to side, uncomfortable, and then just swallowed the saliva and the words, nodding at whatever the more powerful person had said. She wondered if a physical reaction, if fear, could be passed down from mother to child, if a mental branks could linger on the tongue for generations.

* * *

Each time Cora headed into the house/research center to visit the bathroom, she looked at the 12-foot-long glass tank in the main room, the narrow container Mother had been restrained in while they operated on her. It was fitted with foam cushions and straps to hold a dolphin motionless while the men worked. The tools lay on the table nearby, a strange combination of surgical and woodworking instruments. A scalpel, an awl, a hammer, forceps and some nails. Next to the tank was a large reel-to-reel tape recorder. Paper and notes spread everywhere.

Behind the tank were bookshelves, filled with leatherbound books with titles like Experimental Psychology, Journal of Animal Cognition and Linguistic Epistemology. On these shelves, there were more science books than in her whole high-school library, the books shared by just these three men. Here was their learning, their importance on display.

In school, unsure of what the teacher said during class, she passed the tests by reading and re-reading the textbooks. She tried never to speak any new word she learned from reading, because the word could turn out to be tricky phonetically. Lethal. Choir. Colonel. She’d pronounce the word the way it was written, and the listeners would pause, confused, then rock their heads back in a startled laugh.