Broken Branch

by John Mantooth

  Rodney seemed to accept this and even took to reminding his little sister to be quiet by holding a single finger up to his lips and fixing her with an angry glare.

  Somehow, they made it to the front porch without waking up James. She could still hear his snores rattling the house when she let the door close silently behind her.

  She picked up the suitcase and saw Rodney’s expression change immediately.

  “It’s the offering,” she said. She didn’t know why. It just came to her. It worked, she realized, because offering was a sufficiently spiritual word for Rodney to feel like questioning her any more might be blasphemous. She hated playing on his weaknesses this way, but she saw no other choice. A young man’s dead body was hanging from a willow tree.

  They started across the clearing, and Trudy was beginning to think they might make the trees after all. Morning was here, but none of the roosters had called yet, and the clearing still seemed to be asleep. “Hurry,” she whispered. “We’re late.” Rodney picked up his pace, but Mary was dragging behind.

  They reached the edge of the woods. If they could just get inside the cover of the trees, it didn’t matter when the rooster crowed, they’d have a chance to make it to the road. But Mary was taking her time, zigzagging sleepily.

  “Mary,” she hissed. “Hurry!”

  But the girl either didn’t hear or was too sleepy to respond. Trudy was on her way back for her, meaning to pick her up and carry her if necessary, when the first rooster crowed.

  She grabbed Mary’s wrist and yanked her hard. The girl began to cry.

  She pulled her toward the trees. They had almost rejoined Rodney when she heard a door slam shut. She didn’t have to look to know it would be Otto. He rose early as a point of pride. He’d long explained that the shepherd should always rise before his flock.

  Trudy pulled Mary into the woods and clamped a hand over her mouth. She spun around and saw Otto standing near his porch steps, stretching.

  They had made it. From here, all they had to do was get to the road. At the road, they could either catch a ride or go on across toward the cotton fields. Either way, Trudy felt they would be safe.

  “Let’s go,” she said, unable to keep herself from smiling. She took the suitcase in one hand and scooped Mary up in the other arm. It wouldn’t be easier—she felt that immediately when her arm protested at the strain of carrying Mary—but she didn’t care. There would be a new start for them.

  She had taken no more than a few steps when she realized Rodney wasn’t with them.

  “Momma?” he said.

  “Baby, tell Momma later. We’ve got to go. We’re late.”

  “But you said Otto was waiting for us.”

  “He is, baby, I promise, he is—” She stopped, realizing her mistake because Rodney was still standing at the edge of the clearing, watching Otto as he paced beneath the oak tree.

  “You’re a liar, Momma. I bet you lied about more stuff too. Like Papa loving me. Did you lie about that, Momma?”

  “No, sweetie. I didn’t lie. I made a mistake. It was your papa that wanted to meet us by the road. He’s going to tell you how much he loves you.”

  Rodney seemed to consider this. He continued to watch Otto, occasionally glancing back at Trudy and Mary. At last, he said, “Okay.”

  Trudy breathed a sigh of relief. One day, she could explain it to him. One day, when he was older, he’d understand that every lie she told was to save his life.

  He’d turned and started over to her when another door slammed shut. She saw James through a gap in the trees rushing over to Otto and she had no doubt why he was rushing: he’d discovered the beds empty, the suitcase gone.

  “Come on, baby,” she said softly, trying to sound natural. Then Mary squirmed in her arms and pointed.

  “There’s Papa!”

  27

  “Papa!” Rodney screamed. Trudy dropped Mary. She tried to clamp a hand over her son’s face, but he slipped free and yelled for his father again.

  Trudy didn’t bother to look to see if he heard. Instead, she picked up Rodney and threw him over her shoulder. Then she grabbed Mary with the other arm and started to run.

  She’d only made it a few feet when she heard the sounds of the forest being torn apart behind her.

  James reached her first, knocking her to the ground. The children spilled out of her arms and tumbled through some undergrowth.

  “You going to leave me?” he said through gritted teeth. He put his hands around her throat then and squeezed. She couldn’t get any air, but he didn’t care. He squeezed harder, and in that instant, she made up her mind that she would kill him if she just lived long enough to do it.

  “Enough,” Otto said. “Do you want to kill her? If that’s what you had wanted, you could have just let her leave.”

  James let go of her, but not before shoving her face in the dirt. He stood and kicked her in the ribs.

  “She was taking my kids.”

  “The prophecy doesn’t extend to those that are still children,” Otto said.

  “I don’t care. They’re my children. She was taking them into the world, the wicked world.”

  If Otto responded to this, Trudy didn’t hear it. Her head pounded with a dull pain. It took all of her energy to breathe, all of her focus.

  Vaguely, she was aware of her children speaking. Mary, shy and uncertain, as Trudy would expect, but when Rodney spoke, his voice was as clear as a bell.

  “She lied to me. She said we were going to see Otto. Then she said we were going to see Papa.”

  “I think it’s time to show her,” Otto said.

  James nudged her with his boot. “Turn over.”

  She rolled onto her back. Otto and James stood above her, looming. She couldn’t see their faces, and for a moment she believed they didn’t have any, and that she was seeing the real men, with their masks off. Underneath, they were just blank, emotionless, their cores scraped clean of any mercy or humanity until they were as smooth and lifeless as automatons. And at their cores, they ran like machines, one turn after the next, smoky and hot and sure without any of the vague uncertainties that Trudy believed made one human.

  “She needs to be punished,” James said.

  “Of course,” Otto said. He leaned over until she could see his smiling face. “You’re the only one who doesn’t know, Trudy.”

  She spit at him. Missed. It went right past his cheek and landed on her arm.

  “Simpson’s dead,” James said. “I didn’t want to tell you because I thought you’d try to leave. But I see you have lost more faith than even I imagined.”

  “I already know,” Trudy said. “Otto killed him.”

  Otto turned away.

  James kicked her again.

  “Please,” she said. “Not in front of the children.”

  James looked over at them. They were sitting on the ground in stunned silence.

  “Rodney, take your sister back home. Stay in the house. Don’t come out.”

  Rodney rose and took his sister’s hand in his. They stepped past Trudy to where Otto stood with his back turned.

  As they walked by, Otto placed a hand on each of their backs and patted them reassuringly. “Do as your father says, okay?”

  They both nodded and continued to walk.

  Once they were gone, Otto returned. Had he been crying? Trudy couldn’t be sure, but the very thought disturbed her. If he had been crying, that made it seem unlikely he’d actually killed Simpson.

  The two men pulled her to her feet.

  James kissed her neck. “I’m sorry I kicked you.”

  This time her aim was true. Her spit landed in his right eye. He wiped it away. “I’m doing it for you and the children, Trudy. You ain’t right with the Lord; otherwise, what you saw out there would have been clear. Otto prophesied it, and it’s
come to pass. God’s justice is responsible for Simpson.”

  She shook her head. “Somebody killed him. God doesn’t do that.”

  “Lo, she can’t see what’s plain in front of her face,” James said. “‘And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken,’ thus sayeth the Lord.” He turned back to Otto. “I leave her to you. Will you punish her?”

  Otto looked Trudy in the eye. “That seems like the job of the husband.”

  “No. I want you to. You’re our leader.”

  Otto’s mouth creased into a poorly disguised grin. “Very well. I say she needs to spend some time in the storm shelter. We’ll check with her after a few days and see if she’s willing to withdraw her accusation that I am responsible for Simpson’s death.”

  “I withdraw it,” she said.

  “It doesn’t work like that. First you have to go into the shelter.”

  She glared at him and he smiled back. He put a hand on her cheek. “I love you, Trudy. I love all my flock. I loved Simpson too. With all my heart. Yet he chose to walk away from God, and God in His great wisdom chose to punish him. God wants each member of this place to believe in Broken Branch. He will speak to you in the shelter.”

  With that, they escorted her back to the clearing.

  James stood beside her while Otto rang the bells to signal a gathering of the congregation.

  “You don’t know Otto,” James said. “Not like I do.”

  “He’s a murderer.”

  “No, he’s a man of God. He loved Simpson. He was as surprised as anybody else when Ben found that tree.”

  Trudy shook her head. “What about you, James? Were you surprised?”

  James cocked his head. For an instant, he looked young again, like the man she married. For an instant, he looked unsure, the way he always did when someone asked him to sing a hymn and strum that old guitar. He always worked it out, though, after a few strums. He worked this out too, and then he was sure and deft again, his eyes locked on Otto’s lead as they performed.

  “No, I wasn’t surprised at all, Trudy.”

  28

  “I’ve called you here today because the Lord wants you to witness the way we love a sister in Christ,” Otto said, standing beneath the big oak tree. The storm shelter stood propped open off to the right. He nodded toward her. Trudy nodded back, keeping her head up, her eyes active, trying to meet the others’ eyes, but all of them looked away when they saw her gaze. She saw the Talbots and Rachel, and Henry and Redi Clark. She saw Eugenia standing, her face serious and sad. Probably for my soul, Trudy thought, remembering what Ben had told her about his wife. Ben was there too, his face turned away from hers. He’s thinking he caused this, but no one caused this but Otto. And James. And if Trudy were really honest with herself, she’d realize that she had caused it too. Her desperate seeking had brought her here, and before that, there had been other places along the way where she could have made a decision and stopped everything—this place, this insanity—from happening. She shouldn’t have signed the papers, she shouldn’t have married James, she should have left weeks ago, when she felt the first signs of queasiness creeping under her skin.

  She’d lied to Otto and James, of course, to keep Ben from being punished too. She told them she’d been walking, unable to sleep. She’d stumbled upon the willow and decided to leave.

  “I was afraid,” she’d told them, savoring the truth of these words.

  “Fear is the enemy of the Lord,” Otto had responded. Then they’d dragged her here and called everyone out of their homes. Except the children, who, thankfully, had been told to remain inside.

  She tried to meet Ben’s eye, to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but like the others, he wouldn’t look at her.

  “A lot of you were upset about the choice I made not to show Trudy the justice God poured out on Simpson. You worried that if she didn’t see it, then in a few days’ time she herself might be hanging there, tangled up in the justice of the Lord. Yet I knew that Trudy’s faith wasn’t strong enough to understand. By her husband’s own admission, Trudy has always struggled with her faith, with her relationship with God. I was right. Last night, she stumbled upon it herself. My foresight was true. Brother James and me caught her trying to escape with those children this morning.”

  Trudy took a deep breath. Her stomach shifted, and she felt like she might be sick again. Or maybe it was the demon again. Maybe it was finally waking up.

  “Further complicating the sin, she blamed Simpson’s death on me. She will be confined to the storm shelter for five days. At that point, the community will gather again in order to judge if she is remorsed of her actions and fully understands that God is in control of her life and that He has made it abundantly clear that her life is here in Broken Branch with her husband and wonderful children.” Then he did something Trudy had never seen him do before, and it frightened her more than anything else that had happened so far. He asked the congregation to approve his decision. “If you think this is a fair and righteous punishment, lift your voice to heaven and say ‘amen.’”

  A chorus of amens was cast up into the morning sky. Otto grabbed her arm and tried to guide her toward the opening, but she twisted free. She didn’t make it far before somebody else caught her. It was Earl Talbot. He was joined by James and Franklin.

  Franklin was grinning.

  It took four of them in all once Otto rejoined to move her toward the storm shelter. Trudy tried to stop them. She screamed and beat her fists against first James’s back and then anyone she could reach. She jerked and twisted until she couldn’t see the shelter anymore. She lost her footing, but they held her up and dragged her backward.

  The men picked her up and for an instant, she felt as if the demon was fully awake in her—she was swinging her arms and kicking her legs so violently. It felt good to have the demon, and in that moment, she never wanted the demon to leave because she always wanted to feel this kind of anger thrumming through her like whipcrack lightning. She’d been set on fire with it and the last thing she remembered before tumbling into the darkness was scratching her fingernails deep into the side of Otto’s face.

  Then she hit the bottom and pain bloomed inside her hip so strong and loud that nothing else seemed to matter except the light above her, and her desire to see it, but then the hatch swung closed, and she heard the men sliding a heavy rock across the top of the hatch.

  29

  She slept and didn’t wake until she heard the thunder booming outside the shelter. Climbing hand over hand, she reached the top of the ladder and pushed with everything she had, but the hatch didn’t move. From here, she could hear the rain battering the top of the hatch. Somewhere, she heard the crack of wood, and she knew lightning had struck a tree. She wanted out, not for herself but for Rodney and Mary. Was anyone with them? Both would be scared during this kind of storm, especially Rodney. She pounded on the door with both fists, as hard and as loud as she could, until her fists began to bleed. In the end, she climbed back down the ladder and lay on the dirt floor, feeling defeated.

  When the twister came, it happened very quickly. It must have been a terrible one because she could hear it from deep inside the shelter as it developed. First the rain changed. It seemed less insistent or maybe it was just being drowned out by the rumble of the tornado, churning up everything in its path and spitting it back out. She tried to think of something to compare the sound to, but the best she could come up with was the ocean. She’d been once or twice as a girl, and she loved to stand in it, wet up to her knees, and wait for the next wave to come. When the wave crashed over you, it made a sound—brief, momentary—but in that brief second the world itself would disappear inside that sound, and you knew that nothing else but that wave mattered. The twister sounded like the waves from her memory except it was one hundred, maybe one thousand times more powerful. The worst part was the trees. She
heard their branches popping off, their trunks splitting. Their roots being ripped from deep within the soil. She imagined them spinning into the vortex of wind and being shot straight into heaven above.

  Yet she was safe. That was the sad irony. The worst storm couldn’t touch her, but her children were pitifully exposed. She was safe and dry, but she’d have given up that safety in a heartbeat if she could have the chance to be with Rodney and Mary.

  “God help them,” she said out loud and was surprised when she realized she meant it.

  30

  She slept for a while and dreamed of a vast swamp, and an alligator that roamed the water, its snout only occasionally showing itself above the murkiness. Rodney and G.L. were there and there was a cabin, with a single lamp burning inside. A light mist of rain fell, yet the stars were bright beside a half-moon.

  The danger, G.L. explained to her, was the alligator. “There’s always one. I asked him why he had to be the alligator, why he couldn’t just be like the heron”—he pointed across the swamp at a bird standing on one leg, its long neck craning forward, studying the water—“or a fish that swims in the swamp and doesn’t bother nobody. You know what he said?”

  Trudy shook her head and waited for him to tell her, but it wasn’t G.L. that spoke. It was Rodney.

  “He said that he’s not like the heron or the fish. He said that he doesn’t fit in. He said not fitting in makes him angry.”

  G.L. regarded the boy for a long time, and Trudy thought she saw fear in the old man’s eyes. At last he sighed and said, “There’s no demon in you, boy. In fact, there’s no demons at all. Only people. Lord, with all the people about, who could have ever dreamed up demons?”

  Almost as soon as he finished speaking, the sky cracked open with lightning. The wind picked up, almost knocking Trudy over. She held on to the lowest limbs of an oak tree and watched as the wind caught G.L. and carried him up over the trees, where he was flung far across the sky until she couldn’t see him anymore.