The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (10 page)

M
y time was coming—most girls were married around seventeen—but somehow I'd come to believe that no man would ever ask me. I was weedy and black-haired and had my father's mannish nose, but more importantly, I'd heard the wives whisper that I was touched in a bad way by the outside. Not like my sister Constance. She was only twelve, but it was obvious she'd be sought after as a wife when she was older.

Everybody loved Constance. She was beautiful, with pale blond hair and a sweet pixie face with a little bow of a mouth that always looked slightly surprised. But it was more than that. She was the first child born into the wilderness. She was entirely Kevinian. She was pure.

Unlike me. The Prophet was the only man who ever regarded me with anything but basic tolerance. He often stared a little too closely, and his fingers could find their way to my waist without anyone noticing. He'd do subtle things, stroke my calf under the table and exclaim, “Such strong legs! You'll make a fine woman someday.” The sort of thing that no one could blink at, but which made my stomach go hollow. It was the greatest battle of my childhood, trying to determine whether I was allowed to hate someone so full of God.

I figured it out, in the end.

After the Prophet announced he'd marry me, my father wrapped his arm across my back and steered me away from the courtyard where the others still gaped at me. He marched me up to the maidenhood room, a small bedroom in the attic of our house. I wrapped my hand around the doorjamb.

“Do you really believe God told him to marry me, Father?” I asked.

“The Prophet speaks to God. You know this, child,” my father answered in the staccato manner he had adopted soon after he was appointed a deacon.

“How can God want me to marry him when I don't want to?”

“God's reasons are not always clear,” he said, his eyes clouding. “But in this case, they are.”

“What reasons?”

“The Prophet has seen evidence of the Devil in your eyes.”

He didn't lift his eyes as he said this. My hand went slack and dropped to my side.

After he closed the door, I rattled the handle though it did no good. The door of every maidenhood room was fitted with a finger-thick sliding lock on the outside. I'd watched ours bolted on years before. I never realized before that these were the only locks in the whole place.

For a while I lay on the pallet and stared out the small, plastic-covered window, watching the sky grow from pale blue, to navy, to black, thinking about what my father had said.

There was no defending against the Devil's mark. In the early days, the Prophet showed us a yellowing photograph of him and his father. His father had a beer belly and a plaid shirt with the sleeves torn off. The Prophet was a little boy with his knees together like he might wet himself at any moment, giant glasses that made his eyes look bug-like and blurry. He told us how his father leaned a hatchet against the wall in case the children ever misbehaved. And how he always lived in fear of getting the hatchet, and how one day, when the Prophet was grown, he spotted a red flash inside his father's eyes—the Devil's mark—and he understood.

He never told us that he took the hatchet to his father, but I always thought it went without saying.

I stared out that window all night until the noises of dinner and bedtime quieted and I knew everyone in the house was asleep. I didn't think I'd ever get free from that room. The times I snuck out to visit Jude, it was past walls made of thin fabric and through unlocked doors. Jude and I had never planned for something like this.

When I figured it out, I gasped out loud. I sprang up from my pallet and ripped the plastic sheeting from the window, slowly, so the staples popped out one by one. A blast of cold air swept into the room. The window had been built into the roof, and I could only just curl my fingertips over the bottom edge. I pulled myself up and hung there, legs flailing, until I could hoist myself out.

I stood on the roof for a moment, taking in the ugly loop of the Community before me. All of our houses were on the same courtyard which, at that time of year, was just a circle of frozen mud. Anyone could look out their front door and see me perched, birdlike, on the roof, but I paused for a moment. I'm not certain why, still. I think it was with an understanding that I was leaving home for good. I watched my breath rise in front of me, listening to the frozen, creaking music the trees made with their bodies, and filling my lungs fully for what felt like the first time.

I crouched and stretched one leg down the side of the roof, searching for a foothold on the dry shingles. I let go of the roofline and pressed my palms flat, edging down the sheer surface as quietly as I could. I was almost to the roof edge when I lost my footing. I scudded down on my boots and backside and landed hard on my spine, the breath knocked out of me.

The sound of bootsteps on the frozen ground.

I turned over. Barely ten feet away, Deacon Karl stood with a circle of glowing orange between his lips. Cigarettes were banned, so I didn't recognize it at first, not until a drift of ash fell to the frozen ground. Something passed between us, and I knew he understood exactly what I planned to do.

He took one step toward me. Then I ran.

“W
hat stopped you from running away before?” Dr. Wilson asks. He looks up from his notes.

I lean back against the cinder-block wall behind my bunk, the Post-it on my affirmation wall a yellow blur in my periphery. He doesn't realize what a big, uncomfortable question that is, or maybe he does because he has that crinkled look in his eyes like he knows the answer without asking.

“Fear,” I say finally.

“Fear?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No, not fear. The opposite, really. There was a feeling in the Community, like we could never be hurt. Not in the ways that counted. Our veins, our sinews were made of God-stuff. Even with everything that happened, I still felt untouchable. Like bad couldn't really reach me.”

“But it was different after the Prophet said he'd marry you.”

I nod. “Everything was.”

• • •

I sprang up from the ground, my knees crackling, my ribs and back still feeling like they'd only recently collided with the earth, and started sprinting into the woods to the sounds of Deacon Karl huffing after me.

“ESCAPEE!” he shouted. “ESCAPEE!”

I was flying into the forest, but I could already hear the footfalls of deacons punish the hard mud behind me. It sounded like a thousand rushing legs, though I knew it couldn't be more than ten men, and some of them were ancient. But some were spry and young and very capable of outrunning me.

I had the advantage of having taken this path countless times. The deacons crashed through the trees, but I felt swift and lean and gleeful still, for engineering this escape. I could feel heartbeats in each of my fingertips, blood buzzing inside my body, urging me on.

My feet fumbled over a root when I realized where I was leading them, straight to Jude's house. I lost a step or two while I pieced together a different place I could hide.

I cut to the right and tracked my way to the tree house. If I could scale the larch quickly, they wouldn't spot me. Hopefully they'd keep running around the forest all night, never looking up.

I could hear their voices faintly behind me when the tree reared up in the distance, indistinguishable from the others, all its characteristic yellow fallen away. When I got close, I launched myself onto a limb and straddled it, upside down.

Their footsteps charged closer. I couldn't risk catching their eyes by scuttling to a higher limb, so I held my breath and hoped they wouldn't look up. The night was moonless and black, and I was high enough to be concealed by branches.

Below, I heard the crunch of running feet over dead, frozen brush. Their footfalls slowed, then stopped.

“She went down the mountain,” one of the deacons sputtered. “Toward town, I'm sure of it.”

“We're better off waiting till light,” another said. “I can't see nothing in this pitch.”

“Hang on,” a younger voice called.

One set of feet crunched over the frozen undergrowth. I closed my eyes, pressing my face against the cold bark. My arm muscles started to quaver but I didn't dare readjust my hold on the branch.

The footsteps stopped abruptly.

Even then, I thought I was safe. I didn't remember that I'd left my bonnet behind in the maidenhood room. I didn't take into account my braid, hanging in a rope behind me.

I felt my scalp nearly ripped from my head. I crashed out of the tree onto my back on the needle-strewn ground. Abel, a deacon with a mean, pinched face and a patchy blond beard, crouched over me, my braid in his fist. He dropped my hair, picked up his boot slowly, and stepped on my cheek, holding me to the ground.

“You'll get it now, bitch,” he spat. “I can't wait to see what Prophet thinks up to punish you.”

He leaned over me, putting all his weight on my cheek, and I groaned in pain, fearing my jaw would pop like a chestnut from its socket.

“I hope he lets me choose,” he said, his voice sunk into a whisper. “I've got something in mind for you.”

I was breathing so hard that little orange orbs had sprung up over my vision, and cold tears fell from my eyes. I saw the boots of the older, slower men finally trundle into the clearing, watched them pause and take in the sight of me, and with them came the understanding that I'd be punished for this. Not only forced to marry the Prophet, but branded or cut or whipped or something else. Some wives who disobeyed their husbands had their heads shaved, only there weren't any razors in the Community so it was done with a knife. A blunt knife, by the look of their scalps afterward.

My father stood on the fringes of the group, not speaking.

“Get her to her feet,” Deacon Larry said.

“Let's just take care of her here,” Abel said. “The Prophet wouldn't care.”

“This woman belongs to the Prophet,” Larry said. “We'll leave it to him in his infinite wisdom to select a much more fitting punishment than we ever could.”

“Even so amen,” a couple of deacons replied.

They hauled me to my feet and frog-marched me through the dark wilderness. When we crashed through the trees, everyone was standing around the courtyard in their nightgowns, the wives holding lanterns, pushing back the night with little pools of light. In those moments, it felt as though this yellow-lit clearing was the only place on Earth, so walled-in were we by darkness.

It was clear from their faces that none of them expected I'd actually make it to freedom. The Prophet stood in the middle, just in front of the fire pit whose dying coals backlit him with a halo of orange light and smoke. He looked devilish, his eyes angrier than I'd ever seen. I could almost feel heat radiating off him.

“We found her about half a mile north, almost to the property of those filthy Rymanites,” Abel said. I looked at his face. They knew of Jude and his family. The idea started my muscles shaking.

“Did they spy you?” he asked.

“No, they must have known better than to show their faces to us.”

“Never count on the ability of a Rymanite to think logically. They are devious and unpredictable.”

“Don't use that word,” I shouted.

The Prophet tilted his head toward me, a smile almost playing over his lips. “I would be worrying about yourself right now, Sister Minnow,” he said, deadly quiet. “For it's you who is standing in the shower of God's wrath. It's you who will burn for this.”

My breath hitched in my throat and tears began surging from my eyes. I didn't even try to hide them. It was too much, the Prophet standing before me, all gigantic and imposing and furious, and the crowd shifting and excited at the mention of a punishment. I let loose a torrent of slippery unstoppable tears, heavy tears, the kind that feel like they could accomplish something.

The Prophet's smile disappeared. “What do you have to cry about?” he barked. “The blessing of the Prophet is nothing to cry about!”

“I'm crying because I'm sad!” I shouted. “That's usually why people cry, isn't it?”

The Prophet reeled back as though I'd struck him again. I'd never spoken to him—to anyone—that way before.

“God warned me of your wickedness, Minnow,” he said. “I was willing to accept you as a wife because you are so in need of a firm hand to guide you toward the path of righteousness. But God has informed me that a replacement may be acceptable. If you are in some way . . . incapacitated, Constance would serve as a worthy replacement.”

Behind me, I heard unconscious gasps leave mouths, enough to tell me I wasn't the only one who knew this was wrong. It went against the whole purpose of marriage as God decreed in his prophecy all those years ago. We married to make children. Constance was twelve, a child herself.

I searched for her face in the crowd, so small, like a pale moon among this sea of white nightgowns and black boots. Her mouth formed a perfect, pink
O
.

Once, the Prophet taught us that God speaks on a different frequency of hearing. And His voice is there, if we only listen hard enough. That when we pray, that's the pitch our minds speak at, too. In that moment, I heard it for the first time. But it didn't sound like comfort.

It sounded like screaming.

“A punishment is in order,” I heard the Prophet say. “A punishment deserved by a girl who has so overstepped the bounds of propriety.”

He gestured at the deacons to take me inside his house. The nearest ones gripped me with their heavy hands before I could even wince. I made my weight go dead so they had to grasp me beneath my armpits and around my waist, their bones like vices. I writhed. I scratched with my fingernails and tried to pull at their faces and the soft spots between their legs, anything to stop them from dragging me up the steps into the Prophet's house. But there were too many of them. I stared out into the crowd and saw my mother, soft tears coursing down her cheeks.

They pulled me inside the Prophet's house and slammed the door. I'd never seen inside his house and, under different circumstances, I would've been interested in the fancy fluted plates and canned food sitting in his open cupboards—all contraband. But I couldn't focus. The room was a crush of men in their rough wool suits and ragged breath and muscles like metal pinning my arms back and, in the middle, the Prophet.

By his side was a hatchet, almost hidden in the black folds of his robes. He raised it and I flinched, but he was only passing it to my father.

“I think this is a job for you, Samuel.”

My father's face emptied of blood. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, but the Prophet cocked his head to the side a little, like a question, and my father accepted the hatchet. The Prophet surveyed me for a moment, his head still turned to the side.

“The hands,” he said finally.

The deacons came at me in a rush, their eyes black with focus. Some grabbed my arms and the others wrestled me down. They slammed me to the wooden floor and my head knocked back hard. Each one was hanging on to a part of me. My legs, my neck. Someone was holding my hands in his hands. I realized the only person who'd held my hand in recent memory was Jude, and how differently he'd done it. How much more delicately. The idea made me sick, their big meaty hands touching me, their hands that had killed Bertie, that had punished so many girls. If I'd only known what those hands would do, not much later, maybe I would've fought harder. Maybe I would've cut
their
hands off.

My father stood above me, tears falling into his beard. Doing nothing, as always. And now, finally, he had a choice. The first choice he'd had in a dozen years. He held the choice in his hands. He could use the hatchet to hurt his first child, or he could throw it to the ground and stomp out of there and save us all from madness.

I stared up at my father, and for one lucid moment, the light came back to his eyes, and I thought the sight of me lying there, covered in the bodies of ten men, might be enough to shatter the armor that'd built up around his mind, deflecting any sensible thought.

The Prophet saw him waver, too. He clamped his hand heavily against my father's shoulder.

“DO IT!” he bellowed. “DO IT NOW!”

My father raised the hatchet above his head. It wobbled there, breath passing his chapped lips in ragged waves. He jammed his eyes shut as he brought the hatchet down and punched it into my wrists.