Tarry This Night

by Kristyn Dunnion

  She stares.

  “Sit,” he says. “I insist.”

  Susan limps over but cannot lift her leg high enough to straddle the bench. Rather than move over, Hannah sidles out to let her in. Susan lowers stiffly beside Ruth, hands folded on the table in front of her. No bowl. Hannah reclaims her spot at Father’s left hand.

  Ruth has eaten nothing in days. Water helps, but she’s had precious little. She knows she can go almost three weeks without food as long as she has water. She spoons the gruel, raises the spoon. Susan’s eyes bore into hers and that brooding heaviness quells the pang in her middle. She lowers the spoon. Susan bows onto clasped hands, her lips move in silent prayer. Her eyes close. Ruth lifts the spoon again. She looks from Susan’s profile to her bowl, back again. Hunger wins. Metal on tongue waters her mouth. Warm broth, the sweet and salt of it. Thick chew of meat. She grinds it in the back molars into a paste that she swallows. The greasy after-coat is a ghost glaze, indicting her.

  CHAPTER 26

  The children are pink-cheeked from meat. The twins play a hand-clapping game that Susan hasn’t heard in months. The boys want more, but she refuses. It’s happened before—shrunken bellies rejecting second servings. Nothing worse than puking and, frantic, trying to eat the sick off their own shoes. As far as Susan can tell, they’re oblivious; they haven’t connected this food to where it came from. Or else they cannot bear the truth. How can it not alter them in some primal way? She observes them as though from a faraway planet, through the cold lens of space, remote as the moon.

  She stands inside the kitchen alcove, scrubbing the roast pans. What a grisly, crackling mess. From here she can lean and take in the Great Hall, the children, Silas working the generator, and Father Ernst’s locked door. He’s inside again. Who knows what madness will overtake him next? Susan has not uttered a word, but fear consumes her. Like the tropical snake she saw in a television documentary as a child—fear has an unhinged jaw, it can swallow anything.

  Her mind cannot settle. Memaw. The Farm. Rebekah’s face, Rebekah’s limbs, pools of sticky blood. Susan’s stepfather, his figure and voice only, the face lost to her, finally, after so many years. Now and again it is Father Ernst’s face on that other cruel body. She shakes herself. Focus.

  Ruth is right: They will need strength to climb the ladder if they are to ever leave this place. The children will need help. Silas and Ruth have some wits about them, at least. Father Ernst is more intent than ever on burrowing inside his mystifying dreams. The Ascension is clearly no longer a priority. His plans for the bunker are vague but seem to hinge on Ruth transforming into a graceful matriarch, somehow embodying the spirits of the two other Ruths: Memaw and their only daughter, who died giving birth.

  “I’ll eat my own hand first,” Susan mutters.

  From the tunnel door, Ruth slips into the Great Hall and heads to the kitchen. She sets her hunting sack on the counter and cleans off her beloved knife. “For you,” the girl says, shuffling her feet. “Need your strength.”

  Susan lifts the bag and weighs it in her hands. A half-pounder. The girl noticed she would not eat the other flesh. The girl cared. Emotion heats Susan’s throat and she coughs to distract from that ambush, tenderness. “Thank you,” she says, and shoos Ruth away. She skins the rodent quickly, guts it, and places the still-warm body in the oven to cook.

  “What’s the difference,” she says aloud. It’s all skin and muscle and organs and indigestibles. Couldn’t rats also grieve? Are they equally horrified to find themselves, from time to time, desperately feeding on one of their own?

  “A matter of survival,” Father Ernst said. “Aught we know, civilization depends on us; extinction’s far worse than slitting Martyred skin, hanging it to drain, divvying meat in the kitchen.”

  But how can God condone it?

  On the Farm they often ate meat, especially the men. But Memaw declined, ate only grains, vegetables, fruits, and eggs. Of these ye shall freely eat. That was her motto. The days that Father Ernst led a haltered animal to the culling stone floor in the small, windowless hut at the edge of the field, he sought refuge with one of the other wives. He delivered the blow, slit the throat, or fired the gun. He bade Susan do the rest.

  Lately, the entire bunker has called to her mind that kill house, with its stagnant air, bloodied and fecal, animal terror and hopelessness pumped into the cold stink. Sometimes she can still feel their struggle—rolling eyes and bucking hooves—the snorting and screaming. Then surrender, which sometimes felt like a blessing. Their deaths left her weak with a private sorrow she never discussed with anyone. Of them all, Susan can set her mind to any task and plod through, regardless of inner turmoil. Regardless of her own vicarious suffering. She learned to do that early in that terrible house of violence in the place she was born and from which she eventually fled.

  So much is a circle coming back around. All that she abandoned chases her of late. Hunger and terror and hurting—the accompanying isolation, the paranoia.

  It can’t go on.

  Susan is bone-tired when she finally makes her way to the girls’ bedroom. Voices inside. Thought they’d be asleep. But there are the chirping twins and breathy Leah. Susan pauses to listen.

  “What will we eat in Heaven?” says Rachel.

  “Yes, what,” says Leah.

  Ruth’s dreamy voice says, “Peach cobbler. With vanilla ice-cream.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ooh, ice-cream is the best. It’s cold and sweet and melts in your mouth. And the cobbler is hot from the oven. It is fruit with jammy sauce and oatmeal on top.”

  “Oats. Yuck.”

  “Not like oats we eat here,” says Ruth. “You’ll love it.”

  “I can’t wait to go to Heaven.”

  “Me either.”

  “Soon, maybe.”

  “Soon.”

  “Glory, Hallelujah.”

  Susan clasps her hands and presses them to her lips. Why didn’t she think of this sooner? She could deliver the girls from this miserable struggle. Send them swiftly to God’s Garden, where they can play and dream and, finally, eat in peace. She herself will suffer—there will be no redemption for her. But she can set the children free. Like so much else in life, this fermenting idea is terrible. Almost impossible to hold in the face of God. But Susan is strong. This is simply one more twisted test that she must pass.

  Tonight she will sleep. Tomorrow, her new work begins.

  CHAPTER 27

  The girls are down. Susan, too, snores fitfully. She was exhausted, the poor woman. More haggard than ever. But Ruth lies awake in bed, cold and preyed upon. Rebekah’s absence looms as though her body, which once housed mystery, released it into the air when she died, filling the women’s chamber with a secret unrest. The writing—Ruth carefully reaches beneath her mattress, where she hid the comb and its paper wrapping. She lights a candle stub, sets it on the top of her trunk, and holds the page as close as she dares without singeing it. This is Rebekah’s hand, certainly—ghostly loops, precise crosses, and dots—her fading cursive.

  Girlhood

  Morning

  Set to chores, sweeping and scrubbing

  I am bored

  Pinning up sheets in the dirt yard

  Men’s clothes, sweat-stained, reeking tobacco, manure,

  gasoline—I scrub, scrub on the lawn

  Lunch bell

  Pitch the water

  Soup and Memaw’s bread with hard cheese and lemonade

  When no one’s looking, take one more slice

  Afternoon

  Legs pumping, I outrace the boys

  I am strong

  This field, this orchard, my Empire

  I climb the sap-sticky bark of a tree; nest in leafy branch

  No one can see me, not even God

  Dinner bell

  Climb higher

  Calling and calling my name but no one comes looking

  I laugh and laugh

  Twilight

  Itc
hy backside, my stomach sings

  I am hungry

  Supper was yams with salted chives

  Maybe wild greens, cob corn, and sliced radish; maybe tomato,

  sweet as a grape pulled from the vine

  Vespers

  I’m forsaken

  Legs cramp and mosquitoes bite and I’ve got to pee

  I won’t leave; still, nobody comes

  Nightfall

  Bats skitter, owl hoots from her perch

  I am tired

  Lift cotton skirt, hug the gnarled trunk

  Don’t need them in Heaven so toss stockings and bloomers to

  the grass below, piss in the wind

  Midnight

  So sleepy

  Coyote carries my underpants off in his mouth

  Moon spills silver on my face and limbs

  She sees me

  Knows where to look

  Ruth reads it again and again. It could be her up on that tree branch, hiding. She remembers doing the same thing when they lived aboveground, when the children were allowed to play freely until dark. Why doesn’t the girl climb down for dinner? But somehow Ruth understands. She can’t put it into words, not like Rebekah has done. But something flutters inside when Ruth reads the poem and when those pictures enliven her own small mind. Giving up comforts for freedom is something the Family can relate to. But this is some other kind of freedom entirely, the one Rebekah sat waiting for. Freedom from the Family itself, gifted by the moon.

  Silas described the hanging to her in far more detail than she’d wanted, and this haunts her. It took conviction and physical strength, what Rebekah did. Severing her hair, tying a noose. Fixing it high in the ceiling and climbing onto the bed’s foot rails. Why? At least her earthly pains are over. Now begins the endless turmoil of God’s fierce punishment.

  “Forgive her, Father. Show Your mercy. Let her wandering soul rest in Your Garden, I beg You. Amen.”

  Ruth is sick with guilt. The anger that churned inside now feeds on itself. Her mind jumps from fresh wounds to older, festering ones. “The Mothers keep dying,” she said to Paul years back. And he said, “Yes. Do you ever wonder about the men? There used to be a church full of them.”

  Ruth remembers packing, the church divided into sections: bedding, dry and canned goods, tools and weapons. Personal items were grouped by family name. Women canned preserves in great batches. Older kids helped. Men carried heavy loads to the bunker door, stacking them outside. Only Father Ernst and the builder actually entered. For Ruth and the other little children it was a time of great excitement—singing, praying, and speaking in tongues. A recklessness infused their play as they careened around skids piled high above their heads.

  Paul prodded her. “Think, Ruth. Why did no one else come below?”

  Ruth said, “They were Martyred in the Burning Light, of course. Soldiers who fought in God’s army.”

  Paul slowly shook his head, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing. She was missing his point, as usual. Truthfully, Ruth had expected their dad to join them below. Expected all the families to be there, not just Father Ernst’s wives and offspring. She and Paul were the only exceptions. Their dad’s betrayal was devastating to Ruth. How could he, with poor Father Ernst declared an enemy of the state and government sharp-shooters surrounding the compound to pick off Martyrs one by one? And how could she love a traitor?

  Paul’s questions gnawed at her, so much so she even approached Father Ernst. The blue-green of his eyes rushed like river water. “Did Cousin Paul put that in your head?” he boomed. “Men always come to blows. One bull per herd. I alone am Adam, God’s first Son. Remember that.”

  Boys disappeared the closer they got to manhood. “No coincidence,” Paul muttered once. Ruth pinched to shut him up. Still he whispered, “How many babies were stolen in the night? It’s not Satan’s work, it’s Father’s will.” How could he say such a thing? If Paul is cast out, Ruth will be alone in this world. Bereft. Life will be as it is now—empty, pointless, her relentless fears and half-thoughts stuttering into madness. No one to talk to. No one left to trust.

  Unless.

  They’d been bunkered for about a month when Silas made a dolly with corn silk hair and grass skirt for himself and Ruth to play with. He was whipped and locked up. Wailing filled the bunker and Ruth cringed, willing him to silence. Even as a child he was slow and desperate for affection. He could not grasp Father Ernst’s new rules separating boys from girls—he and Ruth had crawled the same linoleum squares in Mary’s topside kitchen with impunity while her dad worked the field. It was as if he could only learn through error, over and over again. They’ve grown apart, she and Silas, but he still has affection for her.

  Ruth gets out of bed. She adds another warm layer and tiptoes down the hall. She has never entered the boys’ chamber at night. She checks the hallway twice before sliding open their door. It’s smelly, worse than the women’s, certainly. Most of the bunks are empty. Abel’s hosts a small lump. The cousin bed in the far corner belongs to Silas. What if he resists? Silas might drag her straight to Father Ernst for another whipping, or worse.

  Ruth peers as close as she can, her face an inch from the sleeping boy. She shakes him gently at first, then vigorously.

  “Cousin!” he says.

  She claps a hand over his mouth. “Come,” she whispers. She tugs his pyjama sleeve, pulls back the blankets. His eyes widen. She creeps to the door, slips out to wait in the dark. She prays he will hold off complaint long enough to listen and to do what she bids. She has a bold plan coming now—to force the Ascension—and she will need his help. Hannah is a lost cause, and Susan is almost as terrifying as Father Ernst. There is no one else to ask. Besides, who else knows the intricate details of the Doctrine? Who else might know the mysterious signs and symbols that Father Ernst waits on? Mayhap between the two of them they can create some false evidence and convince Father Ernst. She shivers. Such deceit. And yet, why hadn’t she thought of this ages ago?

  Minutes pass. Finally, Silas appears. He has wet and combed his hair, parting ridiculous bangs in the middle like a gap tooth. Silas reaches for the chest of her thin nightdress. She slaps him, once, across the face. “Philistine!” she whispers. Silas’s heat must come strong if his gelding and this foul air cannot dampen desire. “I’ll tell Father!”

  “Please don’t,” he whimpers.

  “You are not to look at nor touch us, not even the hem of our garments.”

  “Then why’d you wake me?”

  “To talk. Why else?”

  “Rebekah used to come for Paul. Weren’t for talking.”

  Ruth is glad the darkness hides her shock. “Liar.”

  “Am not. I seen them. Thought you knew.”

  Nothing comes from Ruth’s open mouth. The floor tilts. She steadies herself by leaning on the wall behind her. Rebekah and Paul? Impossible!

  “I never meant harm. Forgive me, Cousin,” he says.

  Ruth’s jaw snaps shut. A hundred tiny clues rush at once—Rebekah squeezing Paul’s fingers in the infirmary, the tender way she cleaned his wounds. That flower—not meant for Ruth, after all. Paul’s eyes locking onto Rebekah’s. All the things they were saying in some private, silent tongue.

  Ruth knows in her belly it is true. She has been a fool, pretending a claim on Paul when, really, she was only their cover—a decoy, lending them excuses for proximity. Ruth will never homestead with him. That image—flowers in her bridal veil—is a falsehood. Did they laugh at her childish fantasy? One tear burns down her cheek. Rebekah is dead, and Paul may as well be.

  “Please,” Silas begs.

  Ruth could use Silas’s fear. Make him swear to do her bidding. She wipes her face with a sleeve, grinds down on her molars. Bullying. That’s how things get done. She’d be no better and no worse than the rest of them for it.

  Suddenly Ruth sees something, a movement behind Silas. It is Rebekah in the dim hallway, hair braided as it once was, wearing a loose robe. An appa
rition? Her skin glows with a radiant light, and her feet do not touch the cold floor, but hover just above.

  “Do you see that?” she whispers.

  Silas turns, shakes his head. A hallucination. It happens. Or could this be a vision from God?

  Rebekah raises her hands, palms up, reaching slowly to the ceiling. Her chin tilts, her face peers skyward.

  Ruth feels those blackened eyes roll onto her and is chastened to the marrow. It’s as though Rebekah knows Ruth’s dark heart, her hurt and anger. Had she come to punish Ruth for not helping her in time? Or to clean and suture this fresh wound, her and Paul’s deception?

  “The Ascension,” says Ruth. “She’s telling us to leave.”

  “Shh,” says Silas, trying to comfort—not touching her shoulder, not touching any part of the startled girl. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m here.”

  There is no one else now, just Silas and Ruth shivering in the frigid hall. A dripping pipe. Quick thud and stutter inside her chest. Confusion. And the sorrowful sounds filling the black night belong to Ruth alone.

  CHAPTER 28

  Heathens. Bandits. That’s who approaches. Wild things in strange clothing with coiled hair. Two armed men step from the greenery. They look similar, but as Paul slows his breath and looks carefully, one to the other, he notices details, differences.

  The larger man comes forward, knife unsheathed in hand. He’s got Paul’s food pack, the one strung in a tree for safe-keeping. That and the gas mask, the UV hood. He didn’t notice or didn’t bring the throwing stick. He’s much taller than Paul, older, and easily twice his weight, with long black hair, and a broad face. He nudges Paul with his foot. A crossbow and arrows over one shoulder, pistol holstered at his hip. Inked patterns curl up the man’s bare skin, swirling into phantoms and ogres on his forearms. One huge bicep hosts a dragon. The mark of the Beast: this must be the leader.

  “Followed him in, got his things,” the huntress says as she reties Paul’s wrists with rope. “He came across the sands alone. Says he’s on God’s side.” The way she says ‘God’ sounds like a mockery. Somewhere, angels weep.