by Wren, M. K.
Stephen rouses me with, “Do you remember Jeremiah when he was a baby?”
“Yes, I do. At that time Luke had fathered two children. One was Peter, who was born while Luke was away on his trek, and the other was Jeremiah. He was about fourteen months old. He had Luke’s blue eyes, and I hoped our child would be as fortunate.”
“Your child?”
“By late October I was fairly sure I was pregnant. The Doctor hadn’t included me in his record keeping—maybe he was giving Luke and me a grace period to conceive a child without his advice—and I didn’t tell the Doctor or even Luke that I thought I might be pregnant.
Stephen straddles the log, facing me. “Why not?”
“I didn’t know much about pregnancy, but I’d heard of false pregnancies. Sometimes women have all the symptoms of pregnancy—and I think I had most of them, including some of the more unpleasant ones—but there’s no baby. I just wasn’t sure. I was afraid I might not really be pregnant, and basically I was afraid I might not be capable of pregnancy. Yet it was odd . . . I was so intensely happy then. It was as if the hope was enough. It was my secret, and I thought when I was certain—well, I imagined how surprised and happy Luke would be, how the Doctor and the Flock would take me into their hearts.”
Stephen hesitates, finally asks, “When did you find out?”
“In November. The fifth day of November, in fact.” I lean down, run my fingers through Shadow’s silky fur. “For about two weeks before that, Luke had met privately with the Doctor a number of times after evening services, but he wouldn’t tell me what they talked about at those meetings. I just assumed it was Ark business, men’s business, and no concern of mine. And I . . . I loved Luke too much to doubt him.”
I straighten and look out at the slow cataracts of the breakers. “Sixty-six days. I don’t know why I remember that number so well. I’d been at the Ark for sixty-six days, and in that time I hadn’t read or even seen a book except the Bible or a hymnal. I hadn’t thought about anything except Luke and proving myself. And my child. I’d already privately named it Luke. Or Rachel, if it was a girl. Yes, I thought about Rachel, but only when I was alone, and that was rare. And when I did think about her, it was to count the months until spring, when Luke had promised we could go back to Amama to visit her.”
I turn to face Stephen, and he asks, almost whispering, “What happened on November fifth?”
“I learned the truth, Stephen. More of it than I wanted to know. After evening service that night, the Doctor asked Luke and me to come to his room. Just for a little talk, he said. Yet my first reaction was fear, and that surprised me. I mean, I should’ve been flattered to be granted an audience with the Doctor.”
Fear, I learned too late, was the truer response.
It is piously spoken that the Scriptures cannot lie. But none will deny that they are frequently abstruse and their true meaning is difficult to discover, and more than the bare words signify.
—GALILEO GALILEI, (1564–1642) THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE
IN PHILOSOPHICAL CONTROVERSIES
Mary had never seen the Doctor’s sanctum sanctorum. She had, more than once, been detailed to clean the adjoining examination room, but the door to the Doctor’s room had always been closed.
Tonight they entered by the other door, the one in the church to the right of the altar. The Doctor, carrying a three-branched candelabra, led the way into a small room with a low, plank ceiling. He crossed to the fireplace on the opposite wall and put the candelabra on the mantel. “We’ll need a fire. Getting a bit cold at night, especially with this rain.”
Luke went to the wood box. “I’ll take care of the fire, Brother.”
Mary stood uncertainly just inside the door, while Luke worked at starting a fire, and the Doctor at lighting an oil lamp. The rain sizzled against the window on the wall to her right. She drew her wool shawl up over her shoulders and looked around the room, feeling oddly like a voyeur. Yet there was little to see. Across the room, next to the fireplace, was the door that opened into the examination room. On the left wall was a narrow bed, and at its foot, a wooden chest; on the wall backed to the church, a small table. No doubt the Doctor took his meals there, the meals the women daily left in the church like offerings. There were two straight chairs flanking the table, and in front of the fireplace, a wooden rocker.
“Ah, that’s wonderful, Luke.” That was for the fire as it began to flare. The Doctor put the lamp on the mantel, blew out the candles, then sat down in the rocker. “Sister Mary, pull up a chair to the fire.”
She brought a chair from the table and seated herself on his right, then rubbed her stocking-clad calves. It had been a long, warm Indian summer, and her body didn’t seem ready for the cold yet. But she sat up and folded her hands in her lap at the Doctor’s cool stare. No doubt he found it unseemly for her thus to call attention to her legs. Or, as he would say, with Victorian primness, her limbs. She watched the shadowed curve of Luke’s back as he added another wedge of alder to the fire. Then he rose, brought up the other chair, and sat on the Doctor’s left, and a silence took shape, augmented by the sputtering fire, the hissing rain on the windows, the creak of the Doctor’s chair as he rocked gently.
“I asked you to come here tonight because there’s something I must talk to both of you about. Particularly you, Sister Mary.”
Mary glanced at Luke, but his gaze was fixed on the floor at the Doctor’s feet. What would the Doctor want to talk about particularly with her? Had he guessed she was—might be—pregnant?
He said, “I’ve been talking to Luke lately about his travels, especially about the woman Rachel.”
Mary stared at him. Those words were stunning not only because they were totally unexpected, but because there was something ominous in the way he said the woman Rachel. Mary looked again at Luke, but he was still staring at the floor. She faced the Doctor, waiting for him to go on.
“Sister Mary, tell me about . . . Rachel.”
“What do you want to know about her?”
“Well, how did you come to live with her at this farm?”
“Didn’t Luke tell you that story?” Luke’s head came up, then he seemed to find the fire a magnet for his gaze.
The Doctor said, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Mary shrugged. “I was on my way from Portland to Shiloh Beach when my bus was attacked by a road gang. I managed to escape, but I was shot in the leg. I ran into the woods and finally came to a road, but I was too weak to go on. If Rachel hadn’t found me, if she hadn’t taken me into her home and gotten medical help for me, I probably would’ve died. She saved my life, just as she saved Luke’s.”
That at least garnered a direct look from Luke and even a nod before he turned to stare into the fire again.
The Doctor rocked back and forth monotonously. “Sister Mary, how long did you . . . live with Rachel?”
The inflections in that aroused the first hint of anger, but it was little more than annoyance sharpened by apprehension. “You say that as if you thought we were doing more than simply sharing a house.”
“Is that what you think I meant?” When Mary didn’t fall into the trap of defending her assumption, but remained silent, he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“How long was I at Amarna? Well, about eleven years. I’d been there less than a year when the—when Armageddon came.”
“You must have been very fond of Rachel.”
“I am fond of her. We went through a lot together, and she’s an extraordinary human being.”
“Ah. How was she extraordinary?”
What was he after? Mary found it difficult to keep her voice under control. “Rachel is the kindest, wisest person I’ve ever known; the most knowledgeable, the most . . . wonder-full.” Then to be sure he understood that, “I mean, full of wonder.”
“At everything. At all of creation.”
“Did she wonder about . . . God?”
He stopped the movement of the rocker, leaned toward Mary. She hesitated only for a split second. “Of course. We all wonder about god.”
“Those of us who believe in Him do, certainly.”
A chill hovered at her back as annoyance gave way to anger edged with fear. “Do you think Rachel doesn’t believe in god?”
“I want to discover the truth of that.”
She looked past the Doctor. “Luke? What did you tell him to make him doubt that?”
Luke looked up at her. “I didn’t . . . I only told him the truth.”
The Doctor cut in. “And what he told me I find very disturbing, Sister. For instance, he told me there’s a tree she worships.”
No more testing feints, Mary thought, yet she still couldn’t understand his motive for this attack on Rachel. She brought out a derisive laugh. “That’s ridiculous. Luke, you couldn’t have said that.”
“Well, what I meant—what I said was that place, the tree, it was . . . like a church to her.”
The Doctor ignored that. “The woman Rachel also showed Luke books filled with pictures of idols made by heathens!”
Books. This was a thrust to the heart.
“Rachel is an artist and a student of art. Because she has pictures of idols doesn’t mean she believes in them. She is a god-fearing, god-loving woman, and in her every act and thought a good Christian!”
Rachel would be appalled at that, but Mary was ready to lie like a trouper for her.
She didn’t understand the motive behind the Doctor’s hostility, but she was beginning to understand what it could mean to Rachel. It could mean he wouldn’t accept her at the Ark.
“God-fearing Christian? Yet one night she told Luke that the light from some of the stars took a million years to reach the Earth!”
At least, he said nothing more about the books. Did that mean Luke hadn’t told him about the even more damning books on geology and evolution? Still, starlight a million years old was damning enough to a man who believed the universe was created in seven terrestrial days only six thousand years ago.
“Rachel likes poetry,” Mary said, trying to keep her tone light. “Sometimes—well, she takes a bit of poetic license with what she says.”
“The truth,” the Doctor pronounced, “needs no poetic license.” And with that he rose, crossed to the chest at the foot of the bed. The empty chair still rocked, its shadow rising and falling on the wall. When he returned, he was carrying a small, black-bound book.
Rachel’s sketchbook.
Mary’s impulse was to snatch it out of his hands. He had no right to touch it. But the anger and pain knotted under her ribs was paralyzing: the anger of realization, the pain of betrayal. Her world, which had assumed a semblance of order based ultimately on the keystone of Luke, began to shiver toward collapse. The keystone had cracked.
She spoke finally, the words hissing like the rain on the windows. “Luke, you took that sketchbook without asking me. You stole it from me!”
Luke’s eyes were wide in blank confusion, but he didn’t have a chance to answer her accusation. The Doctor said flatly, “Luke didn’t steal this book. I asked him to bring it to me.”
“Does that make it right, just because he stole it at your request?”
“Sister Mary!” The whip crack in his voice brought her up short and reminded her that she existed in this community at his whim. He could exile her with a word—and her child. If there was a child.
But now he was willing to be placating. He sat down again, crossed one long leg over the other. “Sister Mary, at the Ark no one owns anything, so it’s not possible to steal anything.”
She eased open her fisted hands. “That sketchbook was Rachel’s because she made the drawings. It’s mine because she gave it to me, and it’s precious to me for the same reasons. Luke was wrong to take it from me without asking. If he’d only asked . . .” She saw the misery in Luke’s always legible features, and she couldn’t go on.
He hadn’t intentionally betrayed her; it had never occurred to him that by taking that sketchbook he was betraying her.
She had misjudged her keystone. It was made of friable clay.
Mary ordered her mind into calm, but anger lurked like a shark under the surface of her thoughts. She asked the Doctor, “Why did you want to see that sketchbook?”
The firelight turned golden the gray of his hair and beard, glowed in the glacier blue of his eyes. “You find the contents of this book precious, Sister Mary? You say the woman Rachel was an artist?”
“Yes, I do, and yes, she is an artist.”
He opened the sketchbook, riffled through the pages. “And this—this is her handiwork?”
“Of course, it is.”
“And you approve of this, even admire it?”
“Brother, what game are you playing?”
She heard Luke’s quick intake of breath, but the Doctor wasn’t distracted. There was a timbre of triumph in his voice. “The Second Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’ ”
For a moment Mary could only stare at him, staggered. All the art of humankind from its exquisite beginnings in Lascaux and Altamira, all the striving of genius over the millennia to create visual images that expressed the yearnings and insights of the human mind—all that with a few words rendered sinful, and thus to be despised, and now, for the first time, she realized that she had never seen an object of art at the Ark, not even a representation of the gods of the Flock.
But she had read the Ten Commandments in the last two months, although she’d had little time for reading even the Bible.
She said, “Go on, Brother. Quote the next verse.”
Whatever riposte he expected, it wasn’t that. His eyes narrowed to slits as he quoted, “ ‘Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord—’ ”
“Yes!” Mary cut in. “ ‘Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor serve them.’ That passage is about idols. That’s what it meant by graven images. Those drawings aren’t idols to be worshiped. They’re only Rachel’s way of understanding what she saw, of making a record of it.”
The Doctor surged to his feet, loomed monolithically above her. “You’re twisting words, Sister! The Bible says thou shalt not make any likeness of any thing—”
“To bow down to! To worship! You can’t interpret that passage—”
“Interpret?” The whip crack was in his voice again. “You can’t interpret the truth!”
But she wasn’t brought to heel. “Tell me what Christ’s last words were!”
That stopped him; he couldn’t seem to make sense of it, and Mary rushed into the gap. “In the four gospels, there are three different versions of Jesus’ dying words. Don’t tell me finding the truth in that doesn’t take some interpretation. Truth is not a simple thing!”
At that moment Luke nodded anxiously and said, “Yes, Brother, that’s a truth. Rachel said that, I remember.”
The Doctor glared at Luke as if he’d struck him, and Mary rode a surge of gratitude for Luke’s simple affirmation, but she was too caught up in what she read in the Doctor’s face to respond to it.
Now she understood. The Doctor’s motivation for his attack on Rachel was manifest in his face, in the flush of rage underlain by stark fear. The combined assault left him speechless.
Mary asked, “Luke, did you tell him Rachel might come here to live?”
Luke seemed in the throes of realization of his unintentional act of defiance. He scowled absently, then nodded. “Yes, of course.”
/> Now she understood. The Doctor had been for all these years, through pestilence and starvation and terror, the sole arbiter of truth at the Ark. That was the source of his power. Then Luke had gone out into the ravaged world and found another potential arbiter whose interpretation of truth was at odds with the Doctor’s.
Luke would never think of Rachel in those terms, yet she had obviously influenced him, the Doctor’s only living relative, his heir apparent, and if she could influence Luke . . .
The Doctor turned on Mary, and he was totally the prophet now, larger than life in his overpowering wrath. “You’re venturing dangerously close to blasphemy, Sister!”
“Blasphemy!” The shark of anger lashed to the surface. “Because I know you’re afraid of Rachel? You’re afraid the Flock might listen to her, afraid they might find out your idea of truth isn’t the only one!”
Luke pleaded, “Mary, please!”
“God is the truth,” the Doctor crowed, “and you will answer to Him on the Day of Judgment that draws nearer—”
“But I won’t answer to you!” She rose, still forced to look up at him, but at a smaller angle. “Haven’t I proved myself here? Haven’t I worked as hard as any other member of the Flock? Have I ever done anything that anyone could take exception to? No! Not until tonight, until you showed me something you had stolen from me—”
“Silence, Sister! It is not your place to question me, and if you persist in questioning the truth, you will no longer be welcome at the Ark among the righteous!”
“Then maybe I should go back to the woman Rachel and raise my child at Amarna!”
And suddenly panic snared her. It was a hollow threat, and if she hadn’t given in to her anger and the heady pleasure of unleashing it, she’d never have made it.
Raise her child at Amarna? She was here because she had recognized the futility, even cruelty, of raising a child to live and die in sterile solitude. And the threat rang even more brazenly hollow when she reminded herself that she wasn’t even sure there was a child.