Gather the Daughters

by Jennie Melamed

  Pastor Saul ascends the scaffold and clears his throat to silence everyone. When that doesn’t work, he cries, “Attention!” People quiet and turn to him, although the teenage boys remain distracted until some women hiss at them.

  “My brethren, we are attending the shaming of Janey Solomon.”

  Vanessa freezes, and there is a buzz of shock. So Mother had heard correctly. But children are never shamed, no matter what their infraction—it is a punishment reserved for adults. Before she realizes what she is doing, Vanessa runs up to Father, ignoring the gasps from the crowd and glares from the other wanderers. “Father, it’s a mistake,” she whispers.

  “Vanessa, please go back with everyone else.”

  “But she’s not an adult! You can’t shame her.”

  “It’s done, Vanessa,” he says in a dull tone she doesn’t recognize, and she backs away. Looking around wildly, she sees her teacher, Mr. Abraham, who appears as stunned as everyone else. Running over, she tugs on his sleeve.

  “Mr. Abraham,” she hisses. “Stop them. They can’t.”

  He looks at her for a few moments, as if he doesn’t recognize her. “What do you want me to do?” he says finally.

  “Stop them! They can’t shame Janey, they don’t shame children, children belong to their parents—”

  “Janey doesn’t belong to anyone,” he says coolly, but then sees her distress and takes her hand in his.

  A moment later, Janey walks calmly toward the scaffold, her dress mended, her hair braided, looking like an amiable child tailing an adult. Vanessa stares at her eyes, searching for the glaze of a drug, but Janey’s eyes are darting around—not wildly, but with slow purpose. She catches someone’s gaze and shakes her head sharply, lightly, so it simply seems like a quiver. Then, staring harder, she shakes her head slowly from side to side like a tree swaying in a storm. Vanessa follows her gaze and sees Mrs. Solomon in the crowd, her hair a mess, both hands to her tearstained face. Mary, mouths Janey to her mother, and then looks away. Mrs. Solomon starts searching the crowd. Vanessa stands on her tiptoes to look for Mary but can’t see her, or Mr. Solomon either.

  Janey steps neatly before the stake, calm and sedate as they tie her wrists to it. The sound from the crowd is growing and swelling, some voices angry, some pleased, some alarmed. The girls, the good girls who have stayed away from the beach, glance at one another, hoping to find some signal or meaning from one of their peers.

  Pastor Saul steps forward. He has performed enough shamings that he doesn’t need Our Book, but he holds it in his hands anyway, for performance’s sake.

  “My brethren, we are attending the shaming of Janey Solomon,” he says again. “Philip Adam wrote, For those for whom the fear of the darkness below is not a deterrent from evil, let them fear the shame and disdain of their neighbor. We here on the island are all interconnected, and none could survive without the other. Let the poor opinion, the disgusted glance of family and friends, be the punishment and the terror that perhaps may sway their path, and save them from the darkness.”

  Pastor Saul puts the book down by his side. “Janey Solomon, you have blasphemed. You have lied. You have encouraged others in blasphemies and lies. You have disobeyed your wanderers. For shame.”

  “For shame,” echoes the crowd: not the lusty yell that normally accompanies this phrase, but a tentative whisper.

  The wanderer Mr. Balthazar comes forth with the lash; the crowd’s voice swells fuller. People seem to be arguing, remonstrating, encouraging—the din falls on Vanessa’s ears, and she flinches. Then Mr. Balthazar tears Janey’s dress down to her waist, and a sudden hush falls upon the congregation.

  Janey is so thin that Vanessa wonders how she continues to breathe. Her body is graceful in its starvation, posed in arcs and wings of bone, her collarbone soaring upward against her skin like a loosed bird. The hollows between her ribs are so deep that the shadows loom gray and blue, and the sockets of her shoulders are neatly encased in skin and little else. Vanessa thinks she can see her heartbeat, the tiny tremor of it, against the triangle of her sternum, and the pulse in her long, stemlike throat. Where her dress hung, Janey’s skin is so pale it glistens silver, her freckles faint amber motes.

  Mr. Balthazar pauses before this skeletal apparition and shoots a questioning look toward the wanderer Mr. Joseph, who stands at the head of the line of wanderers. Mr. Joseph looks annoyed and nods his head exaggeratedly. Even so, Vanessa can see by the way that Mr. Balthazar brings his arm back halfway, how he bends from the elbow and not the shoulder, that he does not intend to give Janey the lashing others have received. Possibly he fears she would fall apart.

  Janey’s beautiful speckled-eggshell skin is suddenly severed, cracked open, a rosy welt with a spine of crimson wrapping around to embrace her fluttering rib cage. She jerks, but her expression doesn’t change. Mr. Balthazar peers around to look at the front of her and make sure she is still alive. Wincing, he sends out another lash, this one striking her shoulder.

  “No!” From the crowd, from the trees, from somewhere, emerges Rosie, her dress in tatters and her hair matted and loose. Vaulting onto the scaffold, she sinks her teeth into Mr. Balthazar’s hand near the thumb. Hissing, he drops the whip and stares at her in utter befuddlement. “They’re liars!” Rosie shrieks wildly. “Don’t listen to him!”

  Janey stares at Rosie. Go, Vanessa sees her mouth say, and when Rosie doesn’t move, she shouts, “Rosie, get out of here!”

  “They killed Amanda Balthazar!” screams Rosie, pointing at the wanderers. “They killed Alma Joseph! They killed others too, but I can’t remember their names. They say they bled out, but they’re dead! They’re murderers, they’re liars! They’re the ones who should be shamed, not Janey!” She coughs and bends around the middle as a male arm snaps around her. “They’re liars,” she cries, gulping, and starts to cry. Mr. Joseph hauls her up against his waist and she goes limp, sobbing. “Liars!” she shrieks, and he strides away, carrying his tearful burden with him.

  Everyone is silent, wide-eyed, including Janey. There is a long, weighty silence before Mr. Balthazar picks up the whip and delivers Janey’s remaining eight lashes. Janey appears so astonished and lost in thought that they barely seem to register. When she is untied, Mrs. Solomon runs up to take her weight. They put their heads together and start whispering. Vanessa looks up at Mr. Abraham, and he stares down at her in disbelief.

  “What’s going to happen to Rosie?” she whispers.

  “Vanessa, I have no idea,” he answers, and she leans into him as they watch Janey shake free of her mother, pull the top of her dress back over her shoulders, and slowly shuffle toward the beach.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Janey

  Mary is carefully laying cold seaweed on Janey’s broken, wounded skin. Janey, facedown in the soothingly chill sand, winces. “I don’t see how this is supposed to do anything,” she says. “The salt stings.”

  “It feels better, though, doesn’t it, when the sting dies,” says Mary. She is right, and Janey feels icy silk crisscrossing her back, numbing the pain of the welts wrapped around her like hot wires.

  Janey sighs deeply. “Mother was there,” she murmurs. “Poor Mother.”

  “I wish I’d been there. Instead of on the beach, crying, wondering if they were going to kill you.”

  “You would have done something stupid, like Rosie,” says Janey. Mary nods ruefully.

  “Father wasn’t there,” Janey continues. “I wonder if they held him back or he just didn’t want to go. He never liked shamings. He might not even have known it was me.”

  “He knows now,” says Mary. “I’m sure everyone is talking about it. They’re not supposed to shame children. I think you were the first.”

  “I’m not a child. Not really.”

  “You’re not an adult either. Father is supposed to manage you.”

  “Well, maybe they thought he was doing a bad job of it.”

  Mary snorts. “I’m sure they’ve thoug
ht that for years.”

  “I wonder what they’ll do to Rosie,” says Janey. “She’s probably being beaten right now.”

  “And she’ll get up, no matter what they do to her, and come right back here, angry as ever,” predicts Mary. Janey imagines Rosie barreling across the island, brows lowered, trailing blood and pieces of bone, and shivers.

  “Was it terrible?” whispers Brianna Joseph, sitting nearby. “Them taking down your dress? In front of everyone?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” says Janey. “I felt embarrassed, but not for me. For them, the wanderers. For the people watching.”

  After Janey was taken, the girls remained on the beach, ignoring the sunrise. At first they clustered together for support in her absence, but they have remained there ever since her return. They squat and sit on the sand in varying distances from Janey, watching Mary tend to her. Some look anxious, some furtive, some furious, some tired.

  “What do we do now?” asks Mary, voicing the question in everyone’s head. “Carry on like we did before? If this continues, Janey, they’ll kill you. They already found us once.”

  “We could stay separate all the time,” says Brenda. “Never gather, just hide.”

  “Please, no,” says Brianna. “If we can’t all be together, I can’t do it. I’d have to go home.”

  “We won’t separate,” says Janey. “Being together is the only thing we have. And we have to keep going as we were before, after what Rosie did. She shouted the truth to everyone—she did what Amanda wanted to do—we can’t just go back now.” Janey pauses and sighs, her face growing longer. She hadn’t meant to mention Amanda.

  “But nobody will believe Rosie,” says Fiona. An incandescent sheath of fading bruises sweeps across her face and throat. “It doesn’t matter that she said it—they won’t believe her.”

  Janey is silent for a long time, as the truth of this washes over her. The girls shift uneasily. Their feet, chill and bloodless, look as if they are made from wax.

  “Maybe she planted a seed,” Mary finally says. “Maybe someday—”

  “If we go back,” says Janey gravely, “it means we agree, that it’s not the truth, that it doesn’t matter. We keep going. It’s daytime: we should be hiding, we should be sleeping. Tonight we’ll meet at the beach—” She thinks. “Meet at the stretch behind the fields next to the spinner Saul’s house. Maybe they’ll find us again, I don’t know. Right now, you should sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep,” says Violet.

  “Well, you can’t stay here,” snaps Janey, and slowly, painfully, rises to her feet. The slices of seaweed draped around her writhe in the wind like snakes, and suddenly she resembles some sort of arcane goddess, a silvery, flame-crowned deity wreathed in serpents and blood. Power crackles from her like electricity as she stalks forward, parting the girls, and they scurry to do her bidding.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Vanessa

  Vanessa was never particularly fond of Rosie, annoyed by her constant brashness and resentment. Yet she can’t help but admire her courage in trying to stop Mr. Balthazar’s whip. Vanessa is sure she must have suffered a harsh beating after her removal from Janey’s shaming. She wonders if Rosie has already returned to the beach, or if, like Letty, she is having a long and painful recovery at home.

  She cannot stop picturing her last glimpse of Rosie, being carried limp and sobbing by Mr. Joseph like a dripping side of meat, her limbs swaying, her filthy hair covering her face. Over and over again, Vanessa sees Mr. Joseph’s rapid, purposeful strides, Rosie bumping against the side of his knee, disappearing into the fields.

  After a couple of days, Vanessa stops by Rosie’s house after school. It’s a small, tightly built structure, and yet it shines like a palace next to the Jacobs’ ramshackle house slouching almost drunkenly next door. Vanessa knocks, waits a minute, and then knocks again.

  Mrs. Gideon slowly opens the door, her pretty round face splotched with weeping, her eyes scarlet. Vanessa draws back a little and then whispers, “I’ve come to see Rosie…”

  Mrs. Gideon begins sobbing in loud, hiccupping heaves. Tears wash down her face, laminating her cheekbones. She continues to cry, like a bleating sheep, while Vanessa stands there with her mouth slightly open and her hands half outstretched. Suddenly there are loud, angry footsteps, and she catches a glimpse of a furious Mr. Gideon, his dark, scowling face resembling Rosie’s, before he slams the door shut.

  Vanessa stands shocked for a few moments and then makes her way home, so lost in thought that she has to redirect herself a few times after absentmindedly walking into random fields.

  The next morning, instead of walking to school, Vanessa takes the path back to the Aarons’. Settling in the grass near the Gideons’ house, she watches for activity. For what feels like hours, nothing happens. Vanessa yawns, thinks vaguely of food, pokes at an anthill with some dry grass, daydreams. In the early afternoon, her patience is rewarded as Mr. Gideon leaves the house with a bag of tools. The hammer clenched in his hand makes her doubly glad she didn’t attempt the door again.

  She waits a little longer, in case he forgot something and decided to return home, and then creeps to the Gideons’ door and knocks. There is no answer, despite her continued knocking. Finally, taking a deep breath, she simply opens the door and walks inside.

  Mrs. Gideon is sitting at the kitchen table, her frizzy light hair haloed in sunlight, and she slowly raises her head and stares at Vanessa as if she were an apparition. “You again,” she says.

  “Hello,” says Vanessa awkwardly, crossing her arms in front of her and shifting her weight to one hip.

  “You wanted Rosie,” says Mrs. Gideon.

  “I just wanted—”

  “Rosie is dead,” hisses Mrs. Gideon. “She’s dead and you can’t see her.”

  They stare at each other, Mrs. Gideon’s light blue, flooded eyes meeting Vanessa’s shocked stare.

  “Brian says they were beating her,” says Mrs. Gideon. “They were beating her and she fell and hit her head. He says it was an accident.”

  “An accident.”

  “But I don’t believe him,” whispers Mrs. Gideon, her face suddenly contracted and ugly with hate. Her eyes narrow and radiate fury.

  “No,” says Vanessa. “No.”

  “They never showed me her body,” she cries bitterly. “They never let me see her. I wanted to dig her up and say good-bye but he won’t tell me where she is. He won’t tell me—” She breaks down in sobs, her tears falling gracelessly, splattering onto the kitchen table. Vanessa rises to comfort her, and realizes that her embrace would mean nothing, worse than nothing. She stands for a moment, respectfully witnessing Mrs. Gideon’s savage grief, and then walks quietly out of the house.

  Vanessa knows who to tell at school. She whispers the news to Letty, whose face is now amber with old blood. She tells little Edith Aaron. She tells Dorothy Abraham, a year older than her, slow and unpopular and constantly trying to win affection with secrets. She tells Mildred Balthazar. She tells Frances Joseph. She watches the sadness and anger and confusion bloom on their faces.

  Vanessa’s promise to stay home latches to her feet, weighs them down like shackles, like animals with their teeth cleaved to her ankles. She finds she cannot break it. And yet she is not completely powerless after all.

  Chapter Forty

  Janey

  They leave their homes, creeping out in the milky light of an early morning, slipping away during recess, simply walking out of class during the day. These are not older girls, like the first wave of Janey’s followers, but those Rosie’s age—eight, nine, ten years old: her friends, her allies, her peers and her enemies. They leave in twos and threes, clutching hands tightly until their knuckles are white. They blindly walk through the brush, kick through fields, peering behind rocks and under hedges, until they find a girl who has already left, who can tell them what to do and where to meet at night. They carry knowledge of Rosie’s death to the girls on the beach, spreadi
ng the dark news, eliciting stunned stares and tears of grief and confusion. Caitlin, who had begun to emerge from her shyness to talk and laugh with the other girls, endlessly wanders the beach, pale and silent in her sorrow.

  Unexpectedly more practical than their older counterparts, these new girls also bring blankets from their beds, flint and steel swiped from their kitchens, pots of fermented dough and wheels of cheese from their family stores. These supplies are heaped in hiding places, or dragged from the night beach to their daytime sleeping locations, becoming filthy and damp but still useful. Shoes and sweaters are shared with the other girls, often with giggling pairs shimmied tightly into the same sweater, high-stepping clumsily with one shoe each.

  Parents come out during the day, the injunction to ignore their daughters disregarded. They search, eager to drag them back and punish them, frequently hauling any child they find back to her home and depositing her there to be beaten, hugged, or lectured. The wanderers are busy, going to and fro from the wastelands, marshaling adults and holding their secret meetings, but they too search the fields, wrestling children home and demanding they receive a harsher beating than most parents would give otherwise. Sometimes the children, secretly relieved to be back with their devoted mother and doting father, in a warm bed at night, eating hot food until their stomachs bulge, will stay. More often they wait, recover, and flee again to their intoxicating, firelit existence.

  “It’s nice, having the young ones, isn’t it?” says Mary to Janey one night, and Janey sighs like an overworked mother. The supplies these girls bring are vital, and will hopefully keep them from freezing at night. And yet they are troublesome, crying on Janey’s shoulder for their mothers, squabbling and expecting her to adjudicate, forgetting the rules and frolicking on the beach during the day like wild animals. They cry and wail over scraped knees and hungry evenings. They eat the wrong berries and squat all night with diarrhea. They fret about the darkness below and look to her to argue them back into complacency. Janey wanted to lead the girls to freedom, not to end up being the counselor, comforter, and pastor of a gaggle of children. She tries to share the burden with the older girls, but they are still years younger than Janey and lost in their own play.