The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (5 page)

“Y
ou're remembering,” Angel says.

I look up at her. “What are you talking about?”

“They don't prepare you for the remembering,” she says. “You'll be staring at the ceiling, at some pattern of light on the metal, and without realizing it you're back in the house you grew up in. And it's like you've walked right back into that place, the feelings, the smells. All that from some pattern of light your brain recognized. Funny, eh?”

She's lying on her bunk with her head propped on the wall, feet crossed at the ankles so I can see the dirty soles of her white socks.

“The key is choosing what you remember,” she says. “Choose the happy things, 'cause the bad things are waiting at the corners of your mind for the moment you're not ready.”

I nod. Almost every day, I'll be lying on my bunk and, without thinking, hop up because I have the impulse to walk to the tree house to meet Jude. Angel watches me, her eyes peeking over the top of a book, because by now she knows everything that's flicking through my mind in those moments: The tree house is burned. The larch tree with it. I'll never see Jude again.

• • •

Jude used to talk about the way his father could quote any line from the Bible. He hated that when he got older, but when we first met, he mentioned it with something like pride. He must've believed his father was as holy as I once thought my parents were.

After the night we met, I went out looking for him almost every day, but the forest looked different in the daylight, the shadows rearranged and the trees smaller somehow. It took about a week to find him, and the day I did, I'd already been wandering the woods hopelessly for hours, wondering if I'd imagined the cabin and the strange boy in the night. I leaned against a tree to get my breath. The woods ticked with the noise of insect bodies, the trills surging from inside sparrows' throats as though celebrating something greater than feathers and hollow bones. I closed my eyes and listened.

Music. I could have sworn I heard music. I hadn't heard anything like it in years. It was forbidden. I followed the sound, my neck craned till I found a mossy western larch. Above, high on a branch, Jude sat hunched over a guitar. One shoeless foot was hanging down, tapping. He was playing this little concert for nobody but himself and the birds and the trees and whatever else lived that deep in the forest.

It's that idea that hurts worse than anything, because it's all a pile of ash now, so burned maybe nobody will ever go there to play a song again. That's the real tragedy, even worse than the idea of Jude being dead.

“Hi ho!” he called.

My eyes shot open. “Hi.”

He hopped out of the tree, clutching the guitar's neck. I could see that his fingers were calloused from picking at the strings. I was very conscious of his fingers after that, followed them as they rubbed an eye or scratched his hair, which he hadn't yet shorn off. His fingers took on an air of importance I'd never attributed to anything. If his fingers could do that, what was the rest of him like? What was
inside
this boy?

“You can make music,” I said.

He nodded.

“How'd you learn that?”

“My mama taught me,” he said.

“And your mother . . . you only got the one mother?”

“One mother? Yeah. You got more than that?”

“Four.”

He made a face. “That's too many.”

“Says who?”

“Says nobody. It's just a common fact.”

“But, if you lose one mother, you have three others to take her place.”

“Nobody could take the place of my mother,” he said seriously.

I felt nervous, like I was walking very closely to some precipice.

“You all alone out here?” I asked.

“Just my daddy and me.”

“No brothers and sisters?”

“Nope,” he said. “I bet you got a lot of siblings over there.”

I nodded.

“Bet you're never lonely.”

I shook my head. “There are a bunch of little kids, and some older ones who are married off or getting close. I guess—I guess you're the first person my age I've met in a long time.”

He scratched the underside of his chin with the head of his guitar. I knew he was thinking about how he'd never met someone his age, either.

“Why do you live out here in the forest?” I asked.

“I was born here. My momma and daddy settled here before I was born. My daddy told me once about the people down there, in the city, how the smoke and chemicals cover everything. That isn't how man was meant to live. But this is.” He lifted a finger toward the blooming wilderness. “This is what God wanted for us all along.”

“The Prophet said the same thing.”

“You think it's true?”

“Well, sure,” I said, tossing my shoulders up in a shrug. “It's gotta be. I mean, the Prophet says God's in the stars, and you can hardly see any stars in the city. If you look real hard, you can see angels playing in the forest at night. They don't got angels in the city.”

“You've seen an angel?”

“'Course,” I said.

I don't know why I lied. Every night, I'd stare into the dark canopy, even for the seconds I snatched walking from the house to the Prophet Hall, but never saw the flash of wings or blinding pixels of skin. Never. No matter how hard I looked, there was only ever just darkness between those trees.

“C
onstance, Jedediah, Regent, Patience, Hershel, Amos, Leah, Eliezer, Prudence, Tobin, Silence, Ephraim, Solomon, Halla, Eustace, Gideon, Martha, Liberty.”

“You missed one.”

“What?”

“That was only eighteen,” Angel says. “You said you have nineteen siblings.”

“Oh,” I say. I lean back against the cinder-block wall, and in my mind sort my siblings by their mothers. Donna Jo with stocky limbs and wide fingers, Vivienne who gave her black eyes and hair to her children, Mabel who was only seventeen when she married my father. And my mother. We weren't supposed to know our true mothers, but all of her children could easily be picked out by their pale hair and cornflower eyes. I was the only one who looked like I didn't belong to her.

“Virtue,” I say finally. “I forgot Virtue. She has the strangest eyes I'd ever seen, such a pale blue they are almost white. We thought she was dead when she was born. There were a lot of babies like that. She took a minute to pull in any breath, and when she finally did, she didn't cry or make a sound. Just stared straight ahead.” I recall the image of my mother, leaned over Virtue's blue-red body lying between my mother's feet on the packed earth floor, her knees up and shrouded in the cloth of birthing.

“She never did learn to talk,” I say.

“They didn't take her to a doctor?” Angel asks.

“My mother asked, but . . .” I trail off. “My father wouldn't hear of it. He said we made that choice, long ago.”

My eyes stray to the spot where the doctor sat a couple days ago. A square foot of grated metal flooring. Whenever I think about him, about the truth that he came here for, I can't arrange my thoughts properly. Everybody's better off without the Prophet around. Why can't he see that?

“What's wrong?” Angel asks, looking down at me.

“That FBI agent,” I say. “I'm just wondering when he'll come back.”

“Maybe you'll get lucky and he won't,” she says. “Those guys, they're great at intimidation, not great with the follow-through.”

“No, he'll come back. He's looking for who killed the Prophet. There's an investigation. They think he was murdered.”

Angel props herself up on her elbow. “And what's this guy think you're gonna tell him?”

“Who killed him.”

Her eerie pale eyes, like the petals of a flax flower, regard me. “Will you?”

I shake my head. All at once, bile rises in my throat. I run to the toilet and throw up a couple heaves of acidy amber liquid. I press my forehead against the cold steel of the toilet rim and sense Angel crouching beside me, though she doesn't touch me.

“I remember the moment he died,” I whisper.

Angel crouches still, a black shadow on my periphery. “Did you kill him?” she asks flatly.

I grip my eyes closed. Something soft and delicate inside me tears at her question. Because I wonder the same thing.
Did I really? Is he dead because of me?

“Hey,” Angel says. “Don't you
dare
.”

I turn toward her, my forehead wrinkling.

“Don't you dare feel guilty,” she says. “That guy deserved everything he got.”

“No one deserves to die.”

“Are you kidding me? Of course people deserve to die. When you make life unbearable for other people, you deserve to be taken out. That's all there is to it.”

“I'm afraid,” I say.

“Do they have a confession? Have you admitted anything?”

“No.”

“Good,” she says. “Don't say a word to him. There ain't no reasoning with cops. Not with detectives, or lawyers, or judges neither. They see what they want. And what they want's an easy target. The crazy girl who's been messed up her whole life's the easiest target of them all. Why do you think I'm here? Why do you think any of us is here? He'll send you away for life if you give him the chance.”

I nod slowly, feeling like I'm getting my bearings again.

“You fought back. There ain't no shame in that,” she says, quiet. And, even quieter, “Don't let them do to you what they've done to me.”

D
r. Wilson returns a few days later, his notebook wedged beneath his elbow, his square teeth smiling like he's actually happy to be sitting inside my metal cell.

“Tell me about Jude Leland.”

I grip my tongue between my molars. “How do you know about Jude?”

“You gave a statement to the police, remember? After your surgery.”

I frown, trying to recall my days in the hospital. “There was a detective.”

“He wrote of a boy you mentioned, Jude, and I did a little digging, interviewed some of the wives who are in protective care. They told me how you came to the Community with a boy the night of the fire. He's totally off the grid. No birth certificate, no social security number, not even any medical records.”

“He was born in the woods.”

He nods. “So, the last time you saw Jude was the night of the fire?”

“The night they killed him, you mean.”

“You're certain he's dead?” he asks. “They've found a few sets of human remains at the Community, but other than the Prophet, they haven't confirmed identities yet. From what I gather they could've been natural deaths—we know through interviews that people died out there in incidents unconnected to the fire—an old man, a teenage girl mauled by an animal, stillborn babies. We don't
know
Jude is dead.”

“You weren't there.” I choke out the words. “You didn't see it.”

“You know,” he says uncertainly, “there was talk among some of the wives, even some of the children, that you'd been killed in the fire, Minnow.”

I flinch. “Well, you're sitting here talking to me.”

“Your little brother Hershel couldn't believe it when I told him you were alive. He says he saw you die in the fire. He knew it was you because you had no hands.”

My stomach begins to squirm. “Hershel's six years old,” I say. “And I doubt he could tell you what I even look like.”

Wilson gives me a meaningful look, then presses his hands together efficiently. “I'm curious. How much of your relationship with Jude was an act of defiance? To be with someone who was supposedly so evil.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “You've been learning about Rymanites.”

He nods. “Interesting stuff. The Kevinians I've talked to seem pretty impressed by it, even now. How Ryman rebelled by marrying a Gentile woman and ignored his father's order to kill her. And how as punishment, the spirit of God fled Ryman's body while he writhed on the ground, turning his skin black.”

“And so it shall be that the descendants of Ryman bear till eternity the mark on their earthly skins and the evil in their celestial hearts
,”
I finish.

“So you were aware that your family wouldn't approve of Jude.”

“I wasn't with Jude to rebel, if that's what you're saying. I was with Jude because of who he was.”

“Still, I think this is important. Did you notice the color of his skin?”

“Of course I noticed it. That's a stupid thing to ask.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . because if I didn't notice his skin, how would I be seeing him? If I missed that, what else would I have missed?”

“But, you were raised to hate people like Jude.”

I shrug off the suggestion. “It's a good thing I hated the people who taught me to hate, then.”

“When was the first time you realized that? That something wasn't right about the Community?”

“I don't think you can trace it to a single event,” I say. “You don't change everything you believe all at once.”

“What was one of the moments, then? When you disagreed?”

I press my dry lips together. “That girl you mentioned, the one they said was mauled by an animal.”

He nods. “Roberta Hallowell? Her mother gave a statement that it was probably a grizzly bear.”

I chuckle darkly. “No, not a bear.” I reach over and tap his notebook with my stump. “Get your pen ready. You'll probably want to take notes.”

• • •

That first summer in the Community was the best I remember, when I was five and tiny and completely in awe of the Prophet, when the men were large and the women efficient and our very bodies shone with holy light. That summer, we watched a thousand ears of corn waggle out of the earth. We watched the men tear a pond of silty brown water into the ground. We broke in our stiff new clothes.

We saw the first of us killed.

Bertie was sixteen with ash blond hair and a top lip broken by a pink fold she'd had since birth. She was what the wives called “uncouth.” She showed a little too much of the skin around her neck, talked a little too loudly. She left a boyfriend back in the city, and had to be dragged to the Community by her parents.

Donna Jo, the second of my father's wives, already bow-backed from the weight of my first half sibling, Jedediah, told me to walk to the pond to gather water. As I tottered beneath the weight of the bucket, I spotted Bertie's blue-clothed back beneath the willow, hunched over something open in her crossed legs. I walked forward, mouth agape at the way her fingers rested on the pages delicately, as though on the skin of someone she loved.

“It's a sin,” I gasped.

Bertie's head turned. “Minnow, go away.”

“Where'd you get that?”

“I found it.”

“But there aren't any books here,” I protested.

She sighed. “All right, fine. I snuck it in with me.”

“It—it's from outside?” I asked.

“Where else would it come from? 'Course it's from outside. And you have to promise not to tell.”

“But, it's forbidden. God'll hate you for it.”

“God doesn't give a toot.”

“Girls aren't supposta read.”

“I been able to read since I was three years old and nobody's going to take that away from me. Not the Prophet. Not God.”

Bertie's face was set hard. When I remember her, I picture that expression, like behind her eyes she had entire rooms that she didn't let anyone see. And I realize now it was the book in her hands that'd made them.

“What's in it?” I asked, taking a tentative step forward.

“If I say, you have to promise never to tell. Not anyone, even your parents.”

I dragged in a deep breath. “I promise.”

“Come here then.”

I sat down beside her on a thick mound of moss that crept all the way to the pond's edge. All around, the air rang with birds trilling and insects vibrating.

“They're called fairy tales. Do you remember those?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“Here, let me read you one.”

Bertie opened up the book and leafed through the pages expertly. The edges were stained tea-colored from all the fingers that had touched them over the years.

“Godseyes,”
I breathed. The text was so cramped, it made my mind swim. Attached to each story was a black-and-white woodcut of kings or dwarfs or maidens. Some of the maidens were being held at the jaw by some knight, which meant they were kissing, which meant they were in love. I couldn't remember ever seeing a love like that.

Bertie read me the story, and when I begged for another she indulged me, until an hour of stories had passed.

“Are they real?” I asked.

“No, they're just stories for children.”

“Why are they evil?”

“They're not,” she said, her face settling into a scowl. “Only the Prophet says they are. He doesn't want us to know how to read. He doesn't want us to figure him out.”

That summer, Bertie taught me about letters and how to sound them together, and that's why I can patch a semblance of meaning from words sometimes, if they're not too difficult. I might've learned to read proper if Bertie's mother hadn't found the book under Bertie's pallet and taken it straight to the Prophet.

The Prophet had been saving a pair of metal slippers. They were crude, two rectangles of steel with straps soldered to the sides. A deacon put the slippers in the fire pit at the center of the courtyard and let them burn to a blistered red. They sent up sparks when he lifted them out with tongs. Everyone crowded around to watch.

The deacons wrestled Bertie's feet into the slippers. She danced around the courtyard, screaming in pain, the skin on her feet popping, the smell of burning flesh warming the air, dead and smoky. When she fell to the dirt, the Prophet gestured and someone put her on her feet again and forced her to keep dancing, her braid rising and falling with each leap.

The others looked on, their faces like puzzles I couldn't solve.

A few days later, the Prophet received a revelation to marry Bertie. He mostly married girls who had transgressed in some way, and he always managed to tame them. On her wedding day, Bertie couldn't stand. Flies swam through the air around the dressings on her feet. The Prophet wore a smile that was slim and sharp.

“The time hath come,” he chanted.

“Thy deeds be done,” Bertie replied quietly.

Bertie's feet eventually healed but she walked crooked. Her entire body wilted. Weeks later, when the Prophet was conducting a sermon in the open air of the courtyard, Bertie stood, surveyed the sea of us, bonneted and buttoned, and hobbled away. I was the only one to notice her pass through the tree line and into the shadows there. I said nothing, even knowing she might be killed at any moment by the Gentiles' heat-seeking missiles. I knew, somehow, that she would be safer out there than in the Community.

When he noticed she had disappeared, the Prophet's eyes were like clenched fists. He told the men to secure Bertie with any force necessary.

They brought her body back. I caught a glimpse through the throng of blue-clad bodies. Her face. It looked almost normal at first. Then I saw the other side, kicked in at the eyeball so the whole side of her face sloped inward.

What I remember most was that nobody screamed.

• • •

We knew to expect punishment for sin, but Bertie got the worst. It was hard in the beginning. With every kick, it's like they were trying to quash everybody's doubts. Because everyone had doubts back then, when we were just getting used to the mud and cold and realizing what it meant to be holy all the time.

When I first told Jude this story, his face crumpled. “What will they do if they catch you out here?”

“They don't think I'd ever run away,” I said. My family knew I took walks in the forest, but I always came back, and as long as I did my chores, nobody bothered about it. That's what happens in a household with twenty children. You get a little forgotten about.

“What if they knew you were with me?” he asked.

“They'd . . . they'd kill me,” I answered.

He shook his head. “Ain't you scared?”

If I'd answered honestly, I'd've said no. Fear floated around like constant pollen, but none of us were allergic. But there's a moment when it all becomes too much. And it was coming like a wildfire bent on burning the whole place to the ground.