The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (23 page)

I
wake up the day of my parole hearing, and around me the world is acting as if everything is normal. It's not. It's my last day in juvie. The last day I'll drink powdered soup in this cafeteria, the last time I'll observe this procession of girls in orange, the last time I'll see Angel for who knows how long, the last day I'll go to reading class. I sit beside Rashida on our upturned buckets around Miss Bailey's rocking chair as she opens up
The Giver
and begins to spell out the story of a boy who learns to see the world as much more than he'd ever imagined.

Jude is waiting for me, right now. While Miss Bailey reads, I bring to mind the directions he gave me to the cave where he's living: south of the bend in the big river, near the heron pond where we fished once. The place he wants us to spend the rest of our years, the cave in the wild where he thinks we'd be safe.

A knock comes from the classroom door. Benny peeks her head inside the room. “Miss Bailey, Minnow is needed upstairs.”

“Can't it wait until after class?” Miss Bailey asks.

“No, it's important. Official . . . prison business.”

She sighs. “Fine. Go ahead.”

I stand and walk with Benny out of the classroom. She's acting strange, glancing around corners before she enters hallways, and her pace is much quicker than usual. I have to hop to keep up with her.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Shh,” she hisses. “Can't you tell we're doing something covert?”

When we arrive at my cell, the door is open and Angel stands beside my bed, her hands clasped in front of her.

“Happy birthday!” she says, gesturing toward the bunk.

“What's going on?” I ask.

“We pulled some strings,” Angel says. “I told you I run this place. Go ahead. Open your presents.”

On my bed, there is a small collection of items. One of them, unwrapped, is a book with a picture of space on the cover. “I got you your own copy of
Cosmos
,” Angel says. “You'll need your own wherever you're heading next. Benny helped me order it.”

I stroke the book and look up at her. “Thank you,” I whisper.

“And Benny got you a Spanish doubloon.”

Inside the folds of Benny's hand is a rough-edged gold coin. I take it between my stumps. “What is it?”

“It's just a replica,” Benny says. “Back in pirate times, if you lost a limb, the captain would pay you. A missing hand got you thirty doubloons. Not a replacement, more of an acknowledgment of something lost. It was the sense of justice, more than anything. Figured you deserved a little compensation.”

I smile at her, a warm feeling rushing up from my stomach.

“Thanks, Benny,” I say, slipping the coin onto the copy of
Cosmos
.

The last gift on my mattress is a shoebox. The lid has already been removed and placed to the side. Inside, I can see only a mound of crumpled gold tissue paper.

Lightly, I dig through the jumble of paper till my stumps touch something cold. I push the paper aside and see them. Two hands made of silver. My mind can't make sense of them, but my heart is drumming hard against my ribs, like it recognizes them. Even in the artificial light, they gleam. The fingers are thinner than real fingers, leaner, like knobby twigs.

“That doctor of yours is pretty full-service,” Angel says. “House calls, obstruction of justice, the whole nine.”

“What are these?” I ask.

“You don't recognize your own hands?” Angel asks. “I told Dr. Wilson he should've had them flipping the bird, that way every time you look at them you can be giving the Prophet a big fuck you.”

I pick up my left hand. Inside me, something heavy and dense falls into place, a feeling of rightness I haven't known in months.

“Dr. Wilson did this?” I ask.

She nods. “He had to break into an evidence locker. Violated about ten laws in the process.”

“Why would he do that?”

She shrugs. “He's a weird guy. Said it was worth it because now you're even. Now you've got something on him.”

The metal fingers are cool against my stumps, these fingers that once grew from my body, these fingers that began as chains of cells in my mother's womb, and for seventeen years they existed as part of me, until they became something else, really just an idea. But to me, like this, they are perfect, like all along they were meant to be coated in silver, not flesh.

A
fter one of the wives threw a sheet over Jude's body and the blood on the ground stopped steaming in the freezing air, the deacons led me to the edge of the Community near a giant pine whose boughs extended over my head like a rafters. I scanned the tree line and saw Waylon had gone. My chest felt a little lighter. I hoped he'd pack up, get in the truck, drive down the forest service road and never look back. And, an angry part of me thought, I hoped he'd understand now what a mistake it was coming to the woods to begin with.

The Community made low noises behind me, but I couldn't look at them, the dull congregation in their dull, decade-old clothes, eyes so full of the Prophet they were almost popping out of their sockets, so I craned my neck to the sky. It was almost night. Dark clouds covered the pale blue in a holey blanket. To the east was the moon, almost full. My whole body was quaking, but I couldn't take my eyes off that moon. Even as the Prophet approached me, shouting in a screeching voice that reached down into my soul and grabbed the necks of the angels that lived there, I could hardly care about anything but the almost-oval of moon hanging over the forest I'd known almost my entire life, clouds sliding across like doves.

The Prophet grabbed my chin hard and pointed it at his face.

“Are you listening to me?” he screamed.

He'd never hurt me himself before. The feeling of his hand around my face shook me awake. I looked boldly into his face and noticed his eyes were covered in a thin white film. He used to wear glasses, before the Lord fixed his sight.

“No,” I said. “I won't ever listen to you again.”

Over his shoulder, I could see the color of blood seeping through the sheet they'd covered Jude in.

He threw me to the ground hard, but I stretched out on my back and put my arms behind my head, staring up at the moon again. The women looked uncertainly at one another. I was acting odd for someone about to be punished, but it could almost be happening to someone else, any other girl in any other society where girls are manhandled and bruised easy as pears.

When the men tugged the boots from my feet, I didn't move. When they tied the rope around my ankles in a thick noose, and when they winched me up into the tree, hanging upside down, I didn't move. I let my arms fall beside me in a graceful arc. The rope twisted, and for a moment I faced the forest, the dark bodies of hibernating pines crowded together. It looked almost black in there. I wondered how I'd ever convinced myself I might see the paleness of angels in that forest, if I looked hard enough.

Behind me, the Prophet's heavy footfalls crunched over the ground.

“With this water, we cleanse you of the sin of fornication and disobedience,” he shouted.

Water hit me like a pane of glass. I gasped. The force of it made the rope spin till I faced the Prophet, an empty bucket in his hands. Behind him stretched a line of people, each holding a bucket of cold pond water in their curled white fingers. I couldn't see all their faces because most of them held their heads down, ladies' faces guarded by bonnets, but I was certain they were all there, all the people I'd shared my childhood with.

The Prophet jerked his head, and the next person in line, a deacon, marched up and doused me, and in his water was a triangle of ice from the surface of the pond. It hit my forehead and I was sure, from the sudden bloom of warmth along my hairline, that I was bleeding.

The Prophet waved his palm in a circle. “With this water, we cleanse you of the sin of fornication and disobedience.”

One by one, they threw their water till I was soaked and shivering with a vehemence that could've broken bones.

My father's wives came in a group and threw their water all at once. They turned around without a glance. My siblings came after, the smaller ones with their arms quaking from the weight of the bucket, lifting it onto their thin shoulders and tossing it with all their might. My oldest brother, Jedediah, threw his water directly on my face and I had to lean up, body doubled, coughing, trying to blow the water from my nose. I didn't see Constance. They must've taken her back to the maidenhood room.

I heard a little boy whimper that he was cold. I heard water slide from my dowel-straight hair and collect on the ground. And I heard the Prophet's repetitious chanting as though from miles underwater. Every minute, I felt myself dip almost out of consciousness until the next bucketful landed and I'd come rushing back.

Eventually, the water stopped. Over the groan of the rope, I could make out the smack of boot falls as the Community receded into their houses. The Prophet, too. Beneath me, the water was forming a thick pile of ice. My hair was hard with it.

I realized, then, that they were going to leave me here. To freeze to death. Without thought, I accepted it as one does a hand of cards. I relaxed and tried to ignore the burning in my legs, the bright blush in my cheeks from heat that didn't make sense. Jude was dead. There was nothing left. No future to imagine. I wanted to sleep, just to sleep.

Like a meteor, into my mind came the memory of Constance locked up in the maidenhood room, her whole body burning with infection, her mind burning with lies she'd been fed since our mother pushed her out into the world. More than anything, it was my duty to keep her safe. And she'd never be, not with the Prophet still around. I would die and he would marry her and this place would go on for years, tucked tightly inside this forest, inside its own twisted, violent logic.

I knew it would be a choice. To let myself disappear or to straighten my limbs, wake the cells from their dying sleep, and try to get out of this.

I started swinging. Mostly to see if I could. I budged my body back and forth, my frozen hair barely moving. After a moment, I was swinging fast, and I bent up, doubling myself in half. I tried to wrap my arms around my legs, but I slipped and fell back, my body rocking, the rope tightening around my ankles. The tree groaned loudly and I held my breath, praying no one would leave their houses to check on the noise. When no one came, I swung myself again and managed to wrap my arms around my legs.

The tail end of the rope was looped through the middle of the noose. If I could tease it out, the noose might loosen. I bent my knees and gripped my legs with my elbows, my back bent as far as it could. I lifted my mouth to the rope. With a massive hoist, I latched my teeth around the bottom loop. I yanked at it, tugging with my whole head. It was frozen, and the tucked-in piece wouldn't budge. When my teeth were aching and my body felt like it might break in half like a frozen blade of grass, the rope began to slip free. I tugged it away from the noose and the rope unwound lazily, then went slack, and I fell to the ground in a heap.

I held my stomach and breathed against the hardened mud and ice. My bottom lip had broken against the ground and I tasted salt. Slowly, I eased myself up from the ground, thrusting my shivering, bloodless feet back into my boots.

The courtyard was quiet, and I saw for the first time that Jude's body was no longer there, the only evidence of him a few crimson puddles and a wadded up sheet, stiff with frozen blood. I stared at it for a long moment. I was uncontrollably angry, but it was a quiet kind of anger, the kind that doesn't even simmer, doesn't make a noise. Real anger, the deadly kind.

This was the moment I'd been hurtling toward my whole life, and I knew what I'd do. The Prophet lived by himself. His wives slept behind his house in a couple of ramshackle cottages. He must have enjoyed his privacy, because most never saw the inside of his home.

I climbed his porch steps, careful not to let the old wood creak. I took the Prophet's round door handle between my wrists and pulled in opposite directions, leaning against the door with my elbow. The handle clinked. The door drifted open.

I stepped lightly over the threshold. A low fire burned in the hearth, illuminating the front room enough to make out a massive dark stain on the wooden floor. My blood. My eyes drifted to the fireplace. Over the mantle, beneath the silver scroll of salvation thumbtacked to the log wall, were a set of white finger bones, held together with loops of golden wire. They rested on the heavy wooden mantle delicately, like ornaments.

It was almost a privilege, the sight of them, fingertips slanted like they could've been playing the piano. Not many people get to see their bones outside their body. I grabbed the hands between my stumps and placed them in the pockets of my loose trousers, wrist end first.

Behind me, a squeak. I turned. From where I was standing, I saw straight into the only other room, the Prophet's bedroom. He was sitting up in his unmade bed. I could tell he'd just woken up by the dark half circles under his eyes, puffy with sleep.

He saw me. His eyes stretched wide.

My boots were almost silent on the cold floor. His breath started leaving him heavily, eking from his ribs with a loud, almost-afraid sound. In the heat of the house, water began to drip from my thawing clothes.

I sounded like a cloudburst. I felt like thunder.

“You thought I was dead, didn't you?” I asked, my voice low.

His breath came louder, like he'd just run a great distance, his fingers grabbing the sheets on his bed with bloodless knuckles. I wondered at this. Did he fear me? The idea was electrifying.

“I've figured you out, you know that?” I said. “The way you lied to us. The way you converted us—”

“I didn't convert anyone. God converted you.”

“You're sick,” I spat. “You're a killer.”

“When the children of God become disobedient—” he sputtered. “And idolatrous and wicked—they suffer at the hands of God.”

“The hands of God,” I scoffed. “God isn't the reason Jude is dead. You are.”

“I act for God,” he sputtered. His breathing grew more beleaguered.

“Did you act for God when you cut off my hands?”

His fingers pulled at the neck of his robes like the touch of the collar on his skin was choking him. This wasn't fear, I realized. This was something else, something beyond me. He wedged his stiff fingers beneath his mattress. In his hand he held a curious object. Part plastic, part metal. I couldn't figure it out, until he raised it to his lips and squeezed.

He squeezed again and again but it obviously wasn't doing what he wanted because he groaned, a high whining sound, and threw the object to the ground. In the next moment, he was keeling off the bed, hitting the floor knees-first with a bone-shaking smack. He curled to the ground, his chest jerking upward, calamitously.

A dial turned in my mind, slowly. “You said God cured your asthma,” I breathed. “You . . . you . . .” I processed this like my entire world was being translated to a different language. “You lied,” I whispered.

His fingers reached toward a dry pine dresser on the opposite side of the room. I walked over and kicked open the bottom drawer. Inside, five more inhalers rolled like wayward spinning tops.

“Please,” he gasped, his forehead pressed to the floor.

“Why should I?”

“You can—come back—to God. He is—forgiving. He will—bestow hands—on you—anew.”

His rib cage buckled under his heaving gasps, fingers stretched toward the dresser.

I stood a long moment, listening to the sickening sound of his throat slapping together.

“I'm sorry,” I said finally.

He turned his head toward me, creases of fear cut into the beardless places on his face. I recalled the photo he'd shown us of him as a five-year-old boy with thick eyeglasses, hiding behind the moon-colored creases of his father's jeans. The man who made him fear hatchets. The fear that bred fear that bred fear. On this night, I would end the cycle. I would kill it forever.

“I'm sorry. I can't reach it,” I said. “I haven't got hands.”

He let out a groan from deep in his throat. I stared down at him, the pale lump of him, the tar-colored beard of him. The spasms grew slower. His eyes began to slide shut.

I might've stood there longer if not for the smell of fire. The room had grown hot, but I didn't notice at first. The heat radiated from the roof, off the thick thatch and pine shingles. The roof groaned loudly, then snapped. A mass of thatch in the main room fell to the floor in a fiery mess. In seconds, the house filled with smoke. I ran from the bedroom, past the aluminum foil on which the gibberish words of God had been scrawled. It was melting, curling away from the yellow thumbtacks that fastened it over the mantle.

I grabbed the door handle between my forearms and tried to twist, but my shaking arms were clumsy and sweating. I heaved against the door as the smoke drove into my eyes, into my mouth, into the delicate pink passages behind my face.

Finally, the door handle turned and I crashed out of the house, down the front steps, onto the cold mud of the courtyard, gasping for clean breath.

Before me, the Community was a circle of flame. Nearly every house was burning from its roof, streams of embers and back-lit smoke wending through the black sky. And in the middle of it all was Waylon.