Still Life

by Christa Parrish

  On one side of her, Tamar mumbles with sleep. Judith hardly breathes at all.

  “I saw your ears,” Ada whispers. “Who?”

  “Nathan Sumner.” Her sister’s voice smiles.

  So does Ada. Of all the young men ready for wives, she would have wished Nathan for Judith. The eldest son of the Sumner family, he’d been an afterthought of many in the community—too quiet to be noticed, too baboonish in face to be desired, too steadfast to be exciting. But Ada had seen true kindness in him, trusted he was someone who would love her sister, protect her, nurture her.

  Like Julian.

  “I’m glad.”

  “Ada. Tomorrow . . .”

  “What?”

  “Mary Anderson tried to leave too. About a month after you. She wasn’t gone four whole days. Father and the elders set up a restoration ceremony, like they’re planning for you.” Judith suctions her saliva through the gap between her front teeth. A nervous tick. “They drenched her with buckets of water mixed with lye, to wash the world off of her. She screamed, Ada. Her skin turned so red. And then they tied her to a post and left her there for the same amount of time she was away. They didn’t give her food, only a spoonful of water here and there. She begged forgiveness and mercy, and everyone ignored her. And then she went blank, and they cut her down, and she’s not the same now. She doesn’t hardly talk, and when she does she won’t look at you. She’s just . . . broken.

  “I’m afraid for you. It’s going to be worse because you were gone longer, and they blame you for Mary’s rebellion.”

  Ada swallows, hunching more tightly around the shirt she holds, now balled against her stomach. “It’ll be okay,” she whispers, licking the dry corners of her mouth.

  “No, it won’t.” Judith rolls to face the wall, away from Ada, her movements so seamless and without sound or twisted blankets or her nightgown creeping over her knees. When she speaks again, her words bloat with tears. “Why did you come back?”

  It’s not the same question Ada asked herself minutes earlier; it’s an accusation. In returning, Ada had stolen her sister’s own hope of escape. Judith wants to run. Perhaps she talked of it with Nathan, and they had planned something for after the wedding. Even though Mary had returned, with Ada still gone, it meant it was possible to break free. Now, Judith only sees everything Prophet Abram Mitchell says is truth.

  No one leaves.

  How easily things come back. The sleep of her sisters arching over her, the snores from the boys beyond the thin plank wall. The wind outside, manipulating the trees, leafless oak marionettes, their gnarly fingers scraping the house’s tin roof. The grandfather clock downstairs; how many nights did she sleep with her fingers plugging her ears because of the incessant tick, tick, tick. The smell, woodsy and smoky and human. Julian sometimes told her he smelled in color. She closes her eyes and tries to conjure the pigmentation of this place but there’s only the blackness of her eyelids.

  The familiarity is hypnotic. Close your eyes. You are getting sleepy. You are crawling through an underground tunnel, deeper and deeper into the belly of the earth, to your old life, before defiance, before unclean thoughts, before Julian. On the count of three, when I snap my fingers, you’ll be back there, given over to the teaching of your father. Obedient. Submissive. Ready to accept the consequences of breaking fellowship with the covenant and pursuing the lies of the ungodly. One . . . Two . . .

  She jolts awake as the clock chimes. Five a.m. The first ribbons of sunlight curl through the tops of the pines. She sits up, inhales thickly through her stuffed nose. Her head is soft with the cotton of sleep, but the remainder of her body has decided it will not stay. Pull back the covers. Stand up. She touches Judith’s hair on the way past, still black in the not-yet-dawn. Ada’s fingers feel its true color, copper, like not-quite new pennies, slightly tarnished from the warmth of someone’s palm.

  All her things are still packed in the Jeep. She’d left the keys there, as well, dangling from the ignition.

  Despite her tiptoed gait and her shoes hanging from her thumbs, in her ears it sounds as if she’s thundering down the stairs. As soon as she reaches the bottom, a light snaps on in the sitting area. There her father waits, feet up on the ottoman, hands resting on his lap, fingertips touching and pointing toward the sky.

  “ ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ ” His reedy voice smears over the room, over Ada.

  “Believes in who? God? Or you?”

  The smallest grin tickles Abram’s mouth, and he opens wide his arms. “I speak for God. There is no difference.”

  “It’s not my fault Mary left.”

  “Oh, yes, my daughter, it is.”

  The longer she stays in this one spot, the more firmly rooted she’ll become. So she takes one step backward, then another, until she bumps the dining table and begins feeling her way around it, knowing the front door is only around the next two chairs. Her father stands, raises his hand, and shakes it. Something jingles. Her keys.

  “You’ll need these,” he says.

  Back, back, hands frantic and searching behind her, and then she finds it. The doorknob.

  “I don’t need anything from you.”

  She runs from the house to the Jeep, kneels at the back bumper, and fumbles underneath it. Please, be there. And it is, the magnetic Hide-A-Key Julian left there, should he ever lock his keys in the car. When he showed her, she’d asked if it had happened before and he laughed and kissed her and said, Why do you think I have one? The driver’s side is locked now. Ada manages to slide the cover off the box, open the door, and start the car. When the engine roars her father comes out on the porch, anger twisting his face, but it’s too late. She jams the shifter into drive and steers onto the road, traveling toward the highway.

  Only when she sees the on-ramp, and the gas station right before it, does she think she should have left a way for Judith to find her. At least her phone number, her address at Julian’s brownstone. Tears overwhelm her vision and she needs to turn into the convenience store parking lot, jostling through several craters in the asphalt before coming to a stop with the Jeep still idling and crying with her cheek against the steering wheel.

  Trust me.

  The phrase startles her so much that, as she jerks back in her seat, she accidentally leans into the horn. A couple early morning truckers glance her way with creased brows. One flashes his middle finger at her. She ignores them, her limbs vibrating with some sort of electric pulse. She didn’t hear those words, not coming from the outside and traveling into her ear canal, bouncing against the eardrum like a child on a trampoline. It was more as though the words had been embossed on her soul, raised to the touch but oh-so-subtle. This is what Julian meant by in the Spirit, she is certain of it. Why isn’t he beside her to teach her more about his God?

  Trust me.

  It’s more an echo this time, dim, swirled with the chaos of her other thoughts. She tips her head toward the dome light; the crack in the cover looks like a broken arrow. She belongs nowhere. Not with Abram’s Covenant, not at the brownstone, not with Hortense and Mark. She’s a nomad. If she drives around long enough, she’ll cease to be. Forgotten in the minds of those who know her name, she will only exist on paper.

  She’s cold. Reaching over the front seats into the back, she unwraps the afghan from the picture frames she took off Julian’s hallway wall. The face of the soldier stares back at her. These people all knew Julian better than she does.

  Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

  An idea germinates, reverberating from the same place she heard those words. Trust me. Do this. She will find the ones in the photographs, and go to them, speak to them, and through them she will have pieces of Julian impo
ssible to her without them. And, perhaps, when she staples those pieces together, she will see more clearly his God.

  PART TWO

  JULIAN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  His writer friend Greg calls him and, without a hello, tells Julian he’ll be in the area and needs a photographer. He’s doing a story for the Times about pockets of separatist communities popping up with greater frequency across the United States. “They’re like Amish, but not. Interested?”

  “Where?”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “I’m booked, Greg.”

  “Come on, man. I need you.”

  “Call Roberto.”

  “Seriously, Goetz, you have to come with. You buy into some of this sh– stuff. You’ll be able to tell me what’s the psycho cult bit and what’s kosher.”

  “None of it’s kosher.”

  “Don’t be hating on the Jew, man.” Greg laughs. “I don’t know the Jesus lingo. That’s why it’s all you.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Fine. But you’re paying for gas.”

  Days later Greg picks him up and they drive ninety minutes across the border into the Berkshires, a place known for the arts and for liberals, such an unlikely home for an ultra-conservative religious sect. Perhaps it was planned that way.

  “What do you know about them?” Julian asks.

  “Called Abram’s Covenant, after the founder Abram Mitchell. Gotta love modesty. The guy’s almost sixty, former lawyer. In 1985 he said God told him he would be coming back soon and to prepare by leaving behind the things of the world. So he and a few others settled in this place. It’s grown to about 150 people here, but apparently there’s some sort of loose network of like-minded communities. They ship their kids back and forth for marrying so no one has three-armed babies.”

  “Lovely.”

  “I just call it like I see it.”

  “How in the world did you get an idea for a story like this?”

  “Mitchell contacted the Times. Thought someone might be interested in his freak show. Any publicity is good publicity. He wants to get his message out.”

  “I can’t wait to meet him.”

  Others use photography to peer more deeply into life, to pull the focus from themselves and onto the objects of their pictures. Julian uses the camera as a buffer. His eyes are microscopes, the tiniest details assaulting him from all directions. Chroma. Objects. Imperfections. He sees too much, always has, even as a child when he’d close his eyes and cling tight to his sister’s hand as she led him through the carnival, overwhelmed by the blinking lights whirling against the nighttime sky. Or the faces, each contorting in yet another expression, moving by him too quickly for him to decipher. The viewfinder blots everything out except the one thing at which he wants to look. There’s silence in the aperture. Breathing room.

  He rarely works in color. Colors not only distract him but they make his head ache with the sounds and smells. Blues crash over him like the ocean, reds are bright as cinnamon. Even his home is tone and shade, gray and wood and black.

  Fortunately the day is muted, a heather sky dull with clouds, the sun tucked deep behind them. Julian closes his eyes, counting the rhythmic thud-thuds beneath the tires.

  They stop to eat at a shiny retro diner, Greg darting from the car to use the restroom, Julian stretching, gathering his camera bag before going inside. Tall grass grows on either side of the pavement, hilly but mostly clear of trees or buildings. Something moves in the corner of Julian’s vision. He thinks it’s an animal streaking across the field, but he lifts his head and instead sees a woman, running, holding her long skirt in one hand so her feet won’t tangle in it, other arm pumping her forward. He points the camera in her direction. Presses the shutter release. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. One photo after another, capturing her movements. She slows as she approaches the only tree in the field, an oak, reaching out toward the trunk. Julian thinks she’s leaning against it to catch her breath, but as he zooms in he sees she’s clinging to it, arms above her head, face pressed into the bark.

  He’s intruding in her private moment, one of sorrow, or perhaps worship. And while all photos at their most base are voyeuristic, Julian isn’t comfortable being a peeping Tom right now.

  Greg bangs on the diner window, waves at him to hurry. He clips on the lens cap and after flopping into the padded booth he orders a double slice of the diner’s World Famous Humble Bumble Pie—or so the sign on the wall proclaims—à la mode, and a coffee. Greg wants bacon and eggs, decidedly not kosher, Julian points out. Greg says he hasn’t been to temple since he was fourteen. “No offense, Goetz, but I look around and think, if there’s some sort of higher power, he pretty much sucks.”

  When the waitress returns with their food, they ask about Abram’s Covenant.

  “Oh, well, I’ve been to the shop lots of times. They got great veggies at good prices, and sometime we use ’em here. They seem nice enough. Quiet, you know? The women and girls can’t leave the property. Aren’t allowed. But the men shop the local hardware stores and such. Won’t eat here, that’s for sure. This food ain’t pure enough for them.” She laughs. “Maybe not the help, either.”

  Greg drops a twenty on the table and, before leaving, Julian asks if he can take the waitress’s photo.

  “Sure, go right ahead,” she says. “Don’t know why you’d want to, though.”

  He snaps pictures of her balancing a pie on one hand. Her skin and teeth are abraded with the simple pleasures of life—chicken fried steak, sunshine in the perennial garden, comforting grandchildren in the night. Deep canals of laughter fan from her eyes. Beaten down by happiness, Julian thinks. Irene, the nametag reads. “Because I’m a photographer. I can’t help it.”

  Then they’re back in the car, Greg steering out of the diner parking lot and around the bend, stopping in a gravel driveway flanked by two short, splintery rail fences. Julian is suddenly reluctant to continue on this story, doesn’t want to see a bastardization of his faith, a reason for critics to point and shout, See, this is what Christianity does. But Greg is already dialing Abram Mitchell’s number, so Julian wanders toward the farm store. He expects the air to be different within the boundaries of this place, oppressive perhaps, weighed down with falsehood and insanity. He feels none of that, walking past baskets of spring onions and salad greens on the big front porch. Inside, women in long skirts and bandanas smile and assist a handful of customers.

  “Can I help you?” someone asks, a girl about thirteen.

  “I’m not sure. What’s good?”

  “Is this your first time here?”

  “It is.”

  “I can tell. You have that look.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you think you might catch something from us. Or we might bite you. Or convert you. All those are most likely equally awful, in your eyes.”

  Julian laughs a little. “You’re good.”

  Now the girl grins. “I know. Prophet Abram tells me I have the gift of discernment.”

  “Mara, come away from there and stop talking that poor man’s ear off,” the woman behind the register says, something other than simple censure in her voice.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Mara says, sparkle gone, expression as flat as week-old Pepsi, and she disappears into another room before Julian can say another word.

  “She wasn’t being a bother,” he says, approaching the counter.

  The woman looks up. She’s too thin, but pretty with speckled gray eyes that remind him of house sparrow eggs, and dark eyebrows against pale skin. Pink, slightly raised lines embroider her cheek and the side of her nose. Scratches from the tree bark earlier today. It’s the girl from the field. He’s certain of it.

  “ ‘Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words? There is more hope of a fool than of him.’ ”

  “A fool? Now that’s somewhat harsh, don’t you think?”

  “They’re not my words.”

 
“Proverbs, yeah. But I think Jesus might have had something to say about that, too, recorded by our good friend Matthew somewhere around, oh, I don’t know, chapter five, verse twenty-two, maybe?”

  The woman meets his gaze. “ ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.’ ”

  “Sounds pretty serious to me,” he says, a grin playing at the corners of his mouth.

  “I believe, sir, you are mocking me?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Mocking is decidedly old-fashioned. I’d say it’s more like teasing.”

  “Or perhaps harassment.”

  Julian hesitates, startled by the woman’s words. Then he sees she, too, has a little smirk on her lips, and he laughs softly at her nimble wit. “I’m Julian Goetz,” he says, extending his hand. She shakes it, fingers cold and not much more than bone, releasing quickly. “A pleasure, I assure you.”

  The young woman snaps open a paper bag, the rustling loud and pointed. “I’m not assured that anyone could decide what’s a pleasure and what isn’t in such a short period of time.”

  “I’m fairly decisive.”

  She stops, stares at him with round eyes, as gray and glassy as sea stones, her body unmoving. Finally, when a customer slides her jars of preserves and bag of garlic scapes toward the register, she says, “I believe you are, Mr. Goetz. Excuse me.”

  Dismissed, Julian circles the store, pretending to read labels on the tins of maple syrup, comparing the varieties of brownies offered, and peeking over his shoulder at the clever young woman now trying not to look at him. He silently berates himself for his foolishness; he’d been flirting with her and has no idea why. It wasn’t his way. He hasn’t been on a date in four years, rarely thought about dating unless Hortense threatened to match him up with someone, and certainly didn’t act with such unprofessionalism around anyone else. Something about the girl—she had to be at least ten, maybe fifteen years younger than him—made him feel like an awkward high school student trying too hard to win her over with his suave banter. What a dope. Still, he gathers an assortment of groceries in his arms and plops them down on the counter to pay. She shakes open the bag and punches numbers into the cash register. “I hope you enjoyed your first visit to our home, Mr. Goetz. Maybe we’ll see you again?”