Gather the Daughters

by Jennie Melamed

  He chuckles at that, glancing at her handful of button-sized clams. “I don’t think me saying that will do much good.”

  “It’s true,” insists Janey. “We eat well. We had chicken yesterday.” She doesn’t mention that after Mildred Aaron had triumphantly carried back the squawking, bristling chicken, nobody wanted to kill it.

  “It’s so pretty,” little Evelyn Jacob had said. “Look at its feathers.” They all stared at its snowy, fluffed feathers like thistledown.

  “It could be our pet,” suggested Mary.

  Janey didn’t want to kill the bridling, noisy bird either. However, she knew that the other girls were hungry all the time, and that they didn’t have her fierce determination to keep their hunger at bay. Biting her lip, she snatched the chicken by its fluttering, gulping throat and snapped its neck, which gave like a salt-bleached twig. A few girls burst into tears, but Minnie Saul, obviously used to this process, grabbed the carcass and began expertly plucking the feathers in a flurry of snowfall. Half the girls swore they wouldn’t eat it, but once the smell of the skin curling and crackling in the fire began disseminating through the air, everyone ate a small slice of meat and sucked the bones clean.

  Janey blinks, feeling an unaccustomed wash of guilt. “I’m fine,” she says determinedly. “Tell Mother I’m fine.”

  “I know,” he says, holding out the basket. She takes it and cradles it in her arms. The bread is still warm, and the gentle heat radiates into her rib cage. Unable to resist, she pushes a fingertip through the firm golden crust into the soft, spongy bread below. Mother used to get angry at her for doing that as a child; she would leave an intact loaf of bread to cool and come back to a pockmarked, half-eaten mutation with Janey nowhere to be found. Janey raises a fingerful of hot, grainy, barely cooked dough to her mouth and swallows without thinking about it. Unused to such richness, her body shimmers with pleasure.

  “She’s been trying to do this for days, but I haven’t been able to find you,” he says.

  “How did you find me today?” she asks tensely.

  “Janey, the island isn’t huge,” he replies. “They can find you, as soon as they want to. And they’ll hurt you.”

  They gaze at each other, and Father blurts suddenly, “I’ve been unhappy here since I was born.”

  Janey blinks. “What?”

  “I just…I’m not a very good man, I think. At least, I don’t follow the ways of the ancestors well. I suppose I don’t believe in them. I know everyone thinks I’m scared of you, but that’s not it. It just never felt right to me. I know it’s supposed to be good for you, good for Mary, a father’s duty. I know I’m supposed to believe, supposed to pray, supposed to…do a lot of things. It’s a sin, disobeying the ancestors and the wanderers, but God gave me a mind too, and the way we do things never seemed right to me. Ever since I was a boy. Lots of things. I’m not a fighter like you, but I can still think.”

  Janey is taken aback; this is the most she has ever heard her father say. It never occurred to her that Father could do anything but passionately believe in the ancestors’ ways.

  “It’s going to get colder,” he says. “You and Mary can come home whenever you need to. Your mother and I will welcome you.”

  “I can’t come home,” says Janey.

  “How long do you think you can stay here?”

  Suddenly she feels exhausted, like the weight of her own body is dragging her to the ground. “I can’t think about that.”

  “You will need to,” he says gently. “It’s getting colder.” His eyes are glistening. “You are getting thinner and thinner. You can’t keep doing this without starving. Dying.”

  “Mary,” she murmurs. “You have to protect Mary.”

  He snorts joylessly. “Protect Mary?” he says. “Do you have any idea how many men are waiting for her to come to fruition? How many are desperately putting off their own until she’s ready? She’s on her way, Mary. I can try to counsel her on which of the men will be the gentlest, the least likely to cause her pain, but Mary will have her summer of fruition soon, and she will marry, and she will have children if she is able.”

  “I don’t want that for her,” Janey says brokenly, tears coursing down her cheeks. “I want her to be happy.”

  “Some women are happy, with their husbands and their children,” he says.

  “She never will be,” says Janey, “and it’s all my fault. I’ve ruined her for it. I should have left her alone.”

  “You couldn’t,” says Father. “You need her. And whatever happens, the days she had with you will always be the ones she remembers and longs for.”

  “And she’ll never be happy again,” finishes Janey, and they both bow their heads at the truth of this.

  Father takes her slender hand. She jumps at the unexpected contact, but doesn’t pull away. Then suddenly he laughs.

  “What?” says Janey, suspiciously.

  “I’m just trying to think of a man who wouldn’t be petrified to marry you,” says Father. “And I can’t think of a single one.”

  “I would end up with the one too drunk to know what he was doing,” offers Janey. “He would sober up and take one look at me and run straight into the sea.” Holding hands and inhaling the smell of fresh bread, they tilt back their heads and laugh upward at the emerging starlight.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Caitlin

  Caitlin doesn’t sleep. She is terrified of waking up back at home, in her own bed. At night she lies listening to the collective breath of sleeping children. If she drifts off, she snatches herself awake immediately and lies in a state of peaceful torpor, inhaling the dark and salt and rich smell of sea-stiffened dresses softened by sweat and play. At dusk and dawn, when the sun is hovering in the sky, sometimes she feels safe enough to curl up on the sand and doze. Sometimes Roro decides to stretch out beside her, and she wakes up with a mouthful of wet sandy fur, his huge heart thumping against hers.

  A day or two after Caitlin’s flight, Fiona is the first to be caught. She is last seen at twilight, chasing a rabbit into the brush with a homemade slingshot, then simply disappears. Shaken, the girls debate whether she was captured, or just decided to leave and go back home. Fiona returns to the beach two days later, her body painted in lush bruises of indigo and gold, her lip split and stuck together with clotted blood, her hands shaking.

  “It was Father,” she says thickly through her swollen mouth. “He just…took me. But the wanderers were there too. They said he had to punish me properly. They said if he didn’t, they would. And so he beat me, and then left, and then came back and beat me some more. Mother cried and put me to bed and I left as soon as I could walk again, but they know where we are. They knew where to find me.”

  Caitlin, staring at Fiona’s damaged face, feels a sense of sinking, filthy inevitability. She had gotten carried away by the utter joy of these past sweet days and nights, but of course they won’t be allowed to stay on the beach. There are houses to be scrubbed, dishes to be washed, animals to be fed, men to be married, children to be borne, and the fathers have had enough.

  “We’re not stopping,” Janey says in a voice so low and grating that Mary jerks in surprise. “They can’t have us. I won’t let them. Not yet.”

  “What do we do, then?” asks Diana.

  “I don’t know,” says Janey. “They’re going to find us one day and take us. Hurt all of us.”

  “Not if we kill them,” growls Rosie.

  There’s a shocked silence, and Violet says in a horrified tone, “I don’t want to kill anybody!” just as Mary says, “We’re not killing anyone.”

  “There’s more of them than of us,” says Janey, sidestepping the question of violence to focus on practicalities. “And the men are stronger.”

  “Even if they weren’t, we’re not murderers,” says Mary slowly and intently, staring at Janey, who holds her gaze for a long moment, then looks away and nods slightly.

  “They are,” Rosie mutters, but nobody answers,
and the idea trails off into the darkness. Shoulders loosen, lungs sigh with deep breaths once more.

  “We can’t sleep together during the day. It isn’t safe. We need to hide. We can still be together at night, but we’ll change where we meet each time and set girls to watch for intruders. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we can do.”

  “But what if they find us during the day?” asks Helen Abraham.

  “Then we’ll be taken, and beaten, and maybe never come back,” says Janey. “I don’t think they’ll kill us, there’s too many of us out here, and we’re children.”

  The weight of this statement, with all its possibilities, settles heavily over the girls. Joanne Adam starts to cry. “I don’t want to be beaten,” she says.

  “Then go home,” advises Janey. “Say you’re sorry and start going back to school and living with your parents.”

  “I don’t want to do that either!” wails Joanne.

  “It’s not like we haven’t been beaten before,” Fiona points out to Joanne, talking slowly and painfully. “It’s worse, but it’s the same. Hasn’t your father ever beaten you for something?”

  Joanne sniffs, nodding.

  “Well, me too. Not this badly, but almost, that time I—well, it doesn’t matter. They’re not going to stop me by beating me. I’m going to hide, and if they catch me and beat me again I’ll come back anyway.” Fiona tosses her head, then looks at Janey for approval.

  Janey sighs. “It’s best if we sleep alone, or in pairs. Try to choose places people won’t find you, even if they’re looking. That means no sleeping on the beach—it will have to be inland. The woods where there’s no houses will be good, but then again they’ll be looking for us there. Choose as best as you can. We’ll be together at night. Please don’t lose hope.”

  “What’s…what do you want to happen, out of all of this?” asks Violet.

  “I want something to change,” says Janey, “and I’m not even sure what could or would change. But I want things to change for us. Maybe a big change, like going to the wastelands. Maybe a small change, like we have a little more freedom, not just in summer.”

  “How would this bring us to the wastelands?” asks Fiona, confused.

  Janey sighs. “I don’t really know,” she says, “but Amanda died for it.” And there is silence.

  The next day, Caitlin sleeps in the brush next to the Saul orchards, curled up under the thicket in the hopes nobody will find her, and nobody does. That night they meet at the beach off the Gideon cornfields where the two willows meet, and excitedly exchange sleeping locations: a thornbush (from a Helen covered in scratches), a haystack, a roof. Violet brazenly snuck into her house and slept in her own bed after her father left, exiting in late afternoon. “I think Mother might have known,” she confessed, “but I never saw her.”

  That night, Diana is missing, and she returns the night after, beaten bloody. “I pretended I couldn’t move,” she says spitefully, “and then I just walked out.”

  “Who beat you?” whispers Caitlin.

  “The wanderer Solomon found me and took me to my father with instructions for a beating,” she says. “Father seemed happy to do it.”

  “But now what if they catch you again?” asks Isabelle Moses fearfully.

  “Then they’ll beat me again. And I’ll come back again,” says Diana, and spits. One of the girls, farther into the darkness, gives a little cheer.

  One by one, not every day, but often, the girls are discovered, and each time the beatings seem to get worse. Nina comes back missing a patch of hair, Natalie with a broken finger, and Letty doesn’t come back at all. Rosie sneaks to her house during the day and peers into a window, and reports seeing Letty in a bed with the covers pulled up over her dark hair. “So at least she’s alive,” says Rosie. “They wouldn’t put her in bed if she was dead.”

  Marks from the beatings become badges of honor. The girls compare injuries, competing for the deepest-black bruise, the grisliest swellings, the most blood dried to crackling brown on their faces. Elsie Jacob waits to return to the beach and a circle of girls before she triumphantly removes a tooth knocked almost out of the gum, displaying the long-rooted, blood-slick piece of enamel in her fingers like a battle trophy. Helen, with two immobile fingers swollen like sausages, walks with her hand held before her like it was draped in ostentatious jewelry, making sure the girls see the damage thrust in front of them. Fiona, with her iridescent face, is envied and admired, and she walks around, tilting her head up toward the sun, so her skin glows in navy and violet and gold. Diana doesn’t wash the blood from her body, spending the next few days looking like a thinly coated summer child. And yet Caitlin hears them at night, when darkness renders them unknowable: sobbing quietly, creeping to the sea to immerse fingers and feet, wrists and faces, and numb the agony of their suffering bodies. When Helen slinks away to the woods, Caitlin knows she will drop to her knees out of sight, hold her fingers to her chest, and rock in silent affliction.

  Since Caitlin arrived on the beach, she and Janey have become closer. Janey seems to like her, although Caitlin isn’t sure why. They talk softly sometimes, about little practicalities or nothing in particular, and often move close to each other in the moonlight and watch the other girls, or the sea, or the star-soaked sky. Sometimes they simply sit in silence and look at the dark. Caitlin enjoys the lines of energy that seem to radiate from Janey’s form, even when she is quiet and still. At one point, Janey puts a bony arm around Caitlin’s back, and Caitlin freezes as if a bird had landed on her shoulder, wanting the moment to last.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do about winter,” remarks Janey.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s almost here,” says Janey. “It’s getting colder and colder, and we’re half freezing already. Some of the girls don’t even have shoes. And it would be too dangerous to try to steal our winter clothing. We’d all have to go home.” Caitlin has a sudden vision of barging into her house, rushing to the cupboard, and running out, streaming sweaters and blankets behind her like a river of warmth.

  “So what will we do?” ventures Caitlin after some prolonged silence.

  “I don’t know,” says Janey, deep in thought. “We can build fires at night, at least small ones, but even that is dangerous. I suppose we could build them during the day, wherever we find to sleep, but I don’t trust some of the little ones not to burn the entire island down.”

  “I’ve never actually heard of someone freezing to death,” says Caitlin tentatively. “I mean, they say you will, but I’ve never known it to actually happen. Maybe it’s not true, that people freeze. Maybe you just get colder and colder.”

  “I’ve never known anyone to leap off their roof, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t break their bones,” replies Janey.

  There are watchers at night, for movement, for sound, and they crouch in the cold sand, often falling asleep until Janey begins rotating them more often. Fitful and nervous, they envision the wanderers swooping in like birds of prey, seizing the girls with their talons and carrying them off to break their bones and tear their flesh. The wanderers, who have always represented majesty and order, now resemble monsters. And yet the only intruders to break their peace are boys: a runaway pleading to join them, or a little brother seeking the solace of his sister.

  And then, the next night, they come. The girls are alerted by Sarah Moses’s shrill scream from the edge of the woods. Sarah comes flying toward the girls, who flutter and flurry like a flock of hens, until Janey runs straight toward the wanderers with her arms outstretched. “Run!” she cries. “Run down the beach and into the fields!”

  She collides with the men, and Caitlin can’t tell if they’re trying to contain her or she’s trying to contain them. All she can make out is a tangle of dark, twisted limbs like fallen trees in a storm.

  “Run!” yells Janey from within the scuffle, and cursing herself for her cowardice, Caitlin does.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven
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br />   Vanessa

  One morning, as Vanessa is leaving for school, Mother stops her. “There’s a shaming today,” Mother says, sounding confused. Usually everyone is informed of both the infraction and the punishment well before the day of a shaming arrives, and school is always canceled so the children can watch and learn.

  “Who?” Vanessa asks.

  There is a pause, and then Mother says, “Janey Solomon?”

  Vanessa shakes her head. “No, that can’t be.”

  “No, it can’t,” says Mother, sounding more confused. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  But nothing makes sense lately. Half the girls are missing from school. Letty showed up last week with a broken arm splinted to her side and two black eyes that she refused to talk about. She spoke about the beach, though, as if she would go back soon. “I did whatever I wanted,” she said dreamily. “I slept in the sand and fell asleep by counting stars.”

  Mr. Abraham, usually such a stickler for attendance and rules, seems to have given up. Vanessa has the feeling she could get up and walk out of class at any time and he would barely react. Most of the time he has them reading from textbooks, or Our Book. He didn’t mention a shaming when he dismissed class yesterday afternoon, as he usually would.

  Vanessa does not look forward to shamings the way some children do, those who love the unique opportunity to mock and jeer an adult. They are simply part of island life, a punishment for those who blaspheme, or have secret meetings, or refuse their chosen profession, or a hundred other reasons. They tend to be fairly perfunctory, unless the crime is something particularly scandalous, like when Jonathan Balthazar lay with June Gideon before her summer of fruition; they were both shamed and then exiled.

  When Vanessa arrives at the field, it is milling with people, most of whom are taking the opportunity to catch up with friends and neighbors. Mrs. Joseph the beekeeper’s wife is exchanging some vats of honey for fluffy, peeping chicks from Mrs. Aaron the weaver’s wife, and there is a flock of teenage boys by the edge of the field, voices swelling like there is about to be a fight. The small scaffold is empty, nine wanderers standing nearby in a line, looking solemn. Usually all ten are present, but Vanessa has heard that Mr. Gideon is badly ill and confined to his bed. Father tries to catch her eye, but she gazes in another direction.