The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (6 page)

I
walk down to the cafeteria for lunch. Benny stands inside the doors and nods at me when I enter, her mouth hitched up in a slight smile. She's been helping me since I arrived here. I gather she was more or less assigned to me, or maybe she took the job herself because she saw how wobbly I still was on my feet. She's usually got a book rolled up in her back pocket, and when I asked her about it she explained that she always carries a book in case she's stuck somewhere with nothing to do.

“What do you read?” I asked, still gobsmacked to hear a woman talk about books out in the open, where anybody could hear.

“Nonfiction,” she said. “I've got a good one right now about the Haitian Revolution.”

“Benny studied history in school,” Angel explained, “before she sold her soul to the state government.”

When I grab my tray of food and find our normal table, Angel's already seated, sneering at an Asian girl with a thick band of dull black bangs.

“Minnow, it's so nice to meet you,” the girl says brightly when I walk over. I don't recognize her. Normally, Angel and I eat alone. “I'm Tracy. I just wanted to make sure I introduced myself. I know how scary this place is the first week. The girls can be a little ruthless.” Her eyes dart quickly to Angel.

“What did I miss?” A girl so skinny that her limbs remind me of a deer's slides her tray down the table and sits beside Tracy.

“Minnow, this is Rashida,” Tracy says.

“Nice to make your acquaintance,” Rashida says. “What happened to your hands?”

“Rashida, don't ask things like that,” Tracy exclaims.

“Why not? Something happened to 'em. It's not like they fell off by accident. They's saying you got chopped by a serial killer, but I told 'em naw, she definitely a farm girl, probably got sliced by a combine.”

“My father cut them off with a hatchet,” I say, just to see how the words sit in the air.

Tracy's breath catches in her throat, and Angel cocks an eyebrow from her fried chicken, but Rashida's head falls back and she laughs a booming laugh that echoes across the cafeteria. “For real? I'd be telling that to everyone if that happened to me. With a hatchet? That's way better than a combine any day.”

I smile, too, because it's impossible not to when she says it like that.

“Rashida and I are in the youth group here,” Tracy says. “You should come sometime. We talk through things that are bothering us.”

“And you think Minnow wants to talk through the fact that her dad chopped off her hands with
you and Rashida
?” Angel asks. “Now that's funny.”

“Someday, Angel—” Tracy seethes, “someday you're gonna do something you can't talk your way out of. And then you'll be sorry.”

“I think I already did,” Angel says, putting her fork down. “And do I feel sorry? Did I repent like a good little girl?” She holds her hands together as though in prayer. “Did I cry in front of the judge and say I made a big boo-boo and I'll be good from now on? Fuck no. I don't need forgiveness from some six-thousand-year-old pervert who sticks it to virgins when they're not looking.”

There isn't another word out of either of them for the rest of lunch.

• • •

“Why don't you believe in God?” I ask Angel after lights-out. We're both in our beds, though I can tell Angel's up reading by the line of yellow light visible between her bunk and the wall.

She doesn't answer right away. She's quiet for so long, I wonder if she's fallen asleep.

“Because I don't need to,” she says finally.

“What's that mean?” I ask.

“Some people need cancer medication. I don't, so I don't take it.”

When I don't reply, she sighs. “I understand why people used to believe in God. Maybe I would've, too. They wanted to understand the world better. To explain why things happen the way they do. And God was pretty good at that. But we don't need him anymore.”

I know she's talking about those books she reads, the ones that tell her what the earth is made of and why the sun burns and what happens when lightning strikes, but I can't read those books. The Prophet never allowed girls to read, and I think it's probably that fact more than my hands that makes me feel like I never stood a chance.

“You don't still believe in that stuff, do you?” Angel asks. “God and everything?”

My mouth forms a frown. The silence stretches up through the dark lines of the jail.

We were still in trailers when the Prophet taught us about God. We weren't saints yet, just a bunch of fleshy forklift drivers and foremen beside their children and meek wives in old dresses. Everyone sat on couches inside our metal-walled house while the Prophet spoke, me on the carpet playing with alphabet blocks. I remember the look of my fingers, inflated with fat, bent around letters and spelling gibberish.

The Prophet stood before us in my living room. “What you are about to hear is strange and wonderful. It is a story nobody has ever heard until now.” He drew a large breath. “It is the story of God.”

God's real name is Charlie, he told us. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1776, in the summer of the signing, when temperatures were high as rockets and humid as seas.

Charlie was the son of a poor miller, a mean man with a gammy leg and a spray of powder burns over his right temple from the war. When Charlie was just becoming something more than a boy, he went out into the creaking, old-growth forest to collect firewood. He came upon a stream that fell away, suddenly, into the earth. Charlie wanted to see where the water went. He leaned down and peered in.

A spark. An alien pulse of light.

He stared, transfixed, as every star, every galaxy in the universe flicked across his vision. The rings of Jupiter. The broken, sunburned back of Mars. Sights no human had ever captured with their eyes. And, just as suddenly, the feeling of every cell of every living organism hovering just beneath his fingertips, like piano keys. He could touch each one, if he wanted. He could control them.

There are some who insist Charlie was simply lucky. That anyone who happened to walk by that stream on that morning, curious enough to lean over the odd water gushing into the ground, would be made God. They are wrong. Charlie was God before he was even born. It was only a matter of him finding out.

Charlie lives in every generation. When he dies, he is reborn nine months later, a baby God. At any moment, you might meet him. He has been a Confederate soldier. He has been a bank teller. He has sat behind an oak desk in wire-rimmed glasses and a day's growth of beard graying his cheeks. He has cooked dinner for his mother. He has driven to the ocean. He has fallen in love.

The Prophet met Charlie once. Only once, but it was enough to transform his life forever, to transform all our lives.

That incarnation of Charlie was a seventy-five-year-old janitor at the only mall in Ogden, Utah. The Prophet was seventeen, needed to pee, and ran into the mall to find a restroom. Charlie was mopping the floor when the Prophet entered the bathroom, sprinting toward a urinal. Charlie whipped out a bony hand and clutched his bare wrist.

“Be careful, you,” Charlie said in a low croak. “Floor's slippery.”

The Prophet looked into Charlie's face, taking in the name tag pinned to his uniform and his eyes, a startling, bottle-glass green. The teenage Prophet couldn't know that the touch had transferred something so powerful into his body that, in the coming years, he'd possess the ability to hear the ministrations of God. He relieved himself, jiggled himself dry, and left.

It wasn't until years later, when the Prophet found a glyph-printed foil in the mountains, that he realized he'd been touched by God. When he heard God speak through the earth, it was in the old croak of Charlie the janitor from all those years before.

We never knew when Charlie would die. This was the precarious thing about believing in a human God. At any moment, he could pass on and the world would be without a God until he was born again.

A day before we left for the wilderness, the Prophet called for a final meeting, each of us wearing our newly constructed blue garments that sat up around our bodies rigidly. I could sense the significance of this day, so I sat quietly with my hands folded in my lap. The Prophet swept through our front door, tears streaming down his face.

“Why are you crying, Prophet?” my father asked.

“I am crying, Deacon Samuel,” he breathed, “because God is dead.”

The room gasped.

“Oh, yes! He has died a dozen times. You have felt it. When He dies, the earth mourns. Catastrophe reigns until He can be reborn. Five years ago, the great wildfires overtook Montana. The flames of hell pushed through the crust of the earth while God gestated. When he was birthed, the heavens opened up, and the fires were doused with sacred water. All became right with the world again.”

“So, God isn't really dead?” asked Deacon Timothy.

“God is always both alive and dead. His great sorrow is dying, always dying.”

“Who is God's mother?” asked Deacon Sean.

“Her identity is inconsequential. Her only purpose is the duty her womb performs in growing the body of God. That is truly the highest calling of womankind. Any of you should be lucky enough to birth God.”

He looked down into the near audience, where the children sat on the curled carpet, boys and girls separated. His eyes caught on mine.

“Maybe you, Sister Minnow, will someday have the honor of giving birth to God. How would that be?”

“That would be . . . glorious,” I breathed. “Glory be to God our savior.”

The Prophet's approving gaze filled my stomach with burbling pride. I looked back at where my parents sat. A smile had crept through my father's new beard. My eyes flicked to my mother. She was heavily pregnant with Constance and doubled over her stomach, drawing designs on the stretched fabric of her dress. She hadn't heard a word.

“Does He live in our country?” asked Deacon Karl.

“Of course. God is American.”

“How did He come by the name God, if His real name was Charlie?” asked Deacon Martin.

“There has always been a name for God. He just wasn't there to use it yet.”

None of the children asked questions, even the older ones. I was the youngest child by far, but I still felt bolstered by the Prophet's suggestion that I could birth God, so I raised my hand.

“What happens when Charlie dies?” I asked.

“You shouldn't call Him by that name, Minnow,” the Prophet said. “It's a special name. One reserved for special times.”

“What happens when God dies?” I asked.

The Prophet smiled, his eyes crinkling. “He is reborn.”

“But what if He decides not to come back?”

“He always comes back. It's His great sacrifice, to live among us and concern Himself with human problems instead of dwelling in the Great Infinity.”

“Will Char—I mean, will God always come back?” I asked.

“Always,” he said. “God is the one person you can always count on.”

Though the Prophet discouraged it, I never stopped thinking of God as Charlie. A human God. How preferable to an invisible God, I thought, one you're not even sure exists. I was never taught basic math, but by the time I figured out how to finger count, I deduced that Charlie was around my age.

Sometimes I could barely remember what came before the Community. I had to remind myself forcefully, create faces of people I might know if I ever found a way off the mountain. Somewhere, there was a girl by a train. Somewhere, there was an old man swinging loaves of bread into a shopping cart. There was a woman selecting the clothes she'd wear to work, the coral-colored blouse that would touch her skin all day while she typed at a computer and commuted on a bus that smelled of the seconds after lightning.

And somewhere was a teenage God. A boy with vibrant green eyes. A boy named Charlie. I could meet Him, if I left here. So why didn't I? And why didn't they?

It was years before I asked. The Prophet stood before the congregation again, but now at the front of the massive wooden structure of the Prophet Hall, nestled inside an unending sea of evergreens. Stretched between his two hands was the Scroll of Salvation, the sheath of silver foil he found on the mountain the day he discovered he was a prophet, covered in glyphs that contained the language of God.

I still sat on the ground with the children, but now I was the oldest, my half sisters Prudence and Leah sitting to my left and right. Constance sat behind me, and every once in a while I could feel her stroke the tail of my braid with her tiny fingers.

“Why don't we live in the lowlands?” I asked. “If that's where God lives, why don't we live where God lives?”

“We will, Sister Minnow,” the Prophet replied. “He will let us know when the time is right.”

“How?”

“That's for Him to decide.”

“So, we have no way of knowing when we can go back?” I asked. “I could be eighty by the time He decides. I could be dead.”

“Don't be impertinent,” my father's third wife, Vivienne, hissed. In that moment, I became aware of the creaking of dry wooden pews as the dozens of adults behind me shifted in their seats.

“You're not a prisoner here, Minnow,” the Prophet said in a measured tone. “You are free to go whenever you want.”

I swallowed. This wasn't true. I knew the consequences of running away. I recalled Bertie's dead-eyed face, indented like a thumbprint in a peach. “No, I wasn't saying . . . I'm just excited to meet God.”

The Prophet smiled and extended his hands gracefully toward the congregation. “Aren't we all?” The room nodded as one.

The Prophet focused his eyes on me once more. “I hope you decide to wait for God's call, Minnow. We are the chosen. The Sanctified Prophets of Heaven. We will be rewarded grandly if we do God's will. You won't just meet Him. You will dine at His table every night. He will bathe you and heal you. He will touch you with His unknowable green eyes, and you will be saved.”