Pocketful of Pearls

by Shelley Bates

  “Undo the buttons, Dinah.”

  But she was gone, and in the end Phinehas had to undo the buttons on her nightgown himself.

  Chapter 4

  THERE CAME A point when even the most disembodied person had to admit that the moon had hard edges and it was too bright to sleep.

  Not that she ever slept afterward.

  When Dinah came back into her body, she was lying crossways across her bed. Her hair hung down in a tangle off the edge of the mattress and trailed onto the floor. He insisted that she take it down beforehand, as though they were some kind of married couple, and she complied only because when she didn’t, he wasn’t quite so careful about not hurting her.

  She stirred, and this time, when she tightened her thigh muscles and pulled her knees together, it worked. Sometimes she wondered how long she could stand the pain in her legs caused by years of futile attempts to keep him from pulling her knees apart.

  But neither could she imagine trying to explain it to a doctor. Particularly when the doctor all the Elect went to in Hamilton Falls, Michael Archer, was one of themselves, and a member of Phinehas’s flock.

  Her pillow was gone. She crawled to the edge of the bed, snagged it off the floor with one hand, and curled around it.

  What she wouldn’t give to be holding Sheba right now, alive and warm and unquestioningly loving, giving affection because that was what they both did—giving and receiving in a single current that went in both directions.

  The pillow would have to do.

  But first, she had to get rid of the nightgown. She rolled off the bed and stripped it off, throwing the disgusting thing in an arc like a sail into a corner of the room and pulling the comforting black flannel over her head.

  Black, the color of the burned sacrifice. The color of coals, not completely consumed but ready for the match. The color every Elect woman wore in public to signify the death of her human nature.

  She had no idea where he’d found the white nightie, with its tiny tucks and narrow-edged lace. Probably in a mail-order magazine specializing in quasi-Victorian garments, and sent to a P.O. box in a town where his presence at the post office wouldn’t be noticed. She hated the wretched thing, covering her from throat to ankles while its fragile fabric exposed her so cruelly to his hungry, possessive gaze.

  And yet there was no way to stop it other than running away, and after the family’s humiliating disappointment with Tamara, she couldn’t do that to her mother. She was the good daughter, the capable one, the one who didn’t run when the going got so bad that running or death were the only options.

  Running wasn’t possible. Death was.

  So she died a little every time, offering up her body as a living sacrifice so that he’d be appeased. So that this wouldn’t happen to anyone else.

  Only her.

  It had begun when her period had started, when the private studies and special times she’d had with Phinehas as a child had lost their affectionate innocence and changed. He’d always touched her with love, and the novelty of it had made her hungry for more. A hug after a long absence, a caress on the hand or the cheek when she’d shared a particularly lovely thought from Scripture with him. She’d been his special princess, from the most favored family in the district, and that alone, he’d said, had set her apart from the other girls.

  Even Madeleine and Julia McNeill, who in Dinah’s eyes had everything she did not, were not as spiritually lovely as she was. Or so Phinehas assured her, and she believed him. She certainly never heard such things from her parents. For them, all that existed were rules and restrictions and do’s and don’ts. With her father, the Elect always came first—before himself, before his wife, and certainly before his daughters. In the Elect, you lived within a structure of biblical traditions and found beauty and protection inside it. But her parents, it seemed, wanted to make sure the fences were good and strong, to protect her from the wiles of Satan.

  At fourteen she’d become the confidante of Phinehas, listening as he shared his most intimate thoughts and longings. Things he could never tell another living soul—only Dinah and God knew. She learned from him how difficult was the celibate life of the Shepherd, how he had sacrificed the possibility of home and family to travel the state, bringing the gospel to hungry souls. She learned how difficult it was for a man to get close to God when his body’s demands drowned out his ability to pray.

  Her melting sympathy and desire to help him had been the catalyst that had begun it. It was her fault, really. He said he couldn’t resist her, and after that first kiss, the first touches, she had learned that she liked being needed. Liked feeling special, even beautiful.

  And she learned to make it easy for him. She learned which stairs to oil, and how to spritz WD-40 on hinges so they wouldn’t squeak.

  Because when she didn’t make it easy, all the love went out of her existence. He could withhold his care and approval as easily as he gave it, and the winter that descended on her young soul the first time he ignored her withered her so cruelly that in the end, during his very next visit, she had not been able to bear it any longer and had gone back to him, begging his forgiveness.

  Yes, she had gone to him. Because she had wanted something for herself. Because she had wanted to feel beautiful and needed. And for that selfishness God had punished her—with pain, with isolation, with a continuing struggle with the ambivalence of knowing it was wrong, of hating every moment of it, but wanting it anyway. She kept this dreadful secret she could never share with another living creature . . . except Sheba, who could give love but not sympathy in return.

  Dinah curled miserably around the pillow. A glance at the clock told her there were still six hours to endure before she could get up. She couldn’t even go downstairs for a shower. Her mother might not hear the water running at midnight—Dr. Archer’s pills would take care of that—but the guest room was right across the hall from the bathroom, and Aunt Margaret would be sure to wonder what she was up to.

  After ten years, she still marveled—in a faint, hopeless kind of way—that no one knew. She had kept their little secret. The ugliness. The pain and degradation. All were locked inside her body with no way out. No way to ask for help. And so, of course, no one saw—or wanted to see.

  No one cared.

  Not even God.

  Hours later, Dinah watched the sky fade from black to gray and when the alarm clock told her no one would question it, she threw back the covers and tiptoed downstairs to the lower bathroom to shower. It made more sense to use the upper one, but she couldn’t bear the thought of being naked and defenseless with Phinehas just on the other side of the wall. She stood under water so hot it steamed and scrubbed her abdomen and thighs with ruthless disregard for the redness of her skin. Then she dried off, wrapped her rose-sprigged dressing gown around her, and returned to her room, where she dressed swiftly.

  For a woman of the Elect, clothes were a burden and the source of much moaning and discipline. But unlike the local girls, Dinah couldn’t buy clothes in the stores in Hamilton Falls. Part of the reason was that hardly any of them stocked things in black that had the two additional qualifications required by Elect women—they had to be reasonably attractive while at the same time maintaining a woman’s modesty with high necklines and long sleeves.

  Dinah had a third qualification. She was so slender things literally fell off her. In the case of skirts and dresses, she usually wound up making her own. That was another reason she had envied Julia McNeill when they were teenagers. Julia could flit off to Spokane for a shopping trip whenever she liked, where Dinah was trapped helping her parents, who were older than most, with the home place. Just getting to the fabric store to make something for herself meant careful scheduling and juggling of other people’s priorities.

  Even putting food on the table meant work. They had the money to buy pickles and canned fruit until the end of time, but Mother insisted that they put up their own, the way she had learned in her own mother’s kitchen. And Dad
had fixed ideas about what constituted women’s work that were even more firm than the general Elect view. So there you were.

  On the rare occasions when she got to the library to indulge in the sin of logging onto the forbidden Internet and checking her father’s stock portfolio, Dinah would surf the Web and look longingly at all the professions a woman could take on if she had the training. But for a woman of the Elect, going to college and getting trained for something other than husband and family was, if not frowned upon, then certainly not supported. What man would marry a woman who was better trained and possibly even making more money than he was? Who would be the head of the household in reality, no matter what they were in a spiritual sense? The two heads had to be embodied in the same person, or chaos resulted.

  At the rate Dinah was going, though, she’d graduate with a PhD in nuclear physics long before she’d ever be a wife and mother. The thought of being married nauseated her. And of course, without the wife part, the mother part was impossible.

  Her own depressing thoughts drove her down the stairs and into the refrigerator, where she pulled out some eggs and bacon and quickly made herself her first breakfast, the one she could eat all by herself before the family and Phinehas appeared around eight o’clock.

  She would not think about Phinehas. She had learned to put him in a compartment and lock him in there while she went about her work. Otherwise she would wind up down by the river, screaming. And that would hardly be becoming to a daughter of one of the favored families, would it?

  At least today was Sunday, and she wouldn’t see much of him. He would take her father’s place and lead Gathering in their living room, and then later today he would take Melchizedek’s place at Mission and lead it, too. Between both obligations he would be sequestered in his room, preparing to preach the Word of God, and she would be free of the gaze that was like an invisible leash, tugging at her, controlling her, making her go where she didn’t want to.

  When she went out to feed the chickens, Dinah remembered who else was in the barn, and shook her head at herself.

  Lovely, Dinah. Hire the man, hide him, and then forget to feed him.

  She turned back to the house and fried some more eggs and bacon, slid them on a paper plate, and added an orange and a cup of coffee.

  Sheba ran to greet her when she pushed open the barn door, craning her glossy neck to see what was on the plate.

  “Sorry, darling. This isn’t for you.” Sheba didn’t listen. She hopped up and down on both feet, thrilled at the prospect of something besides lay crumble for breakfast. “No, pet. This is for Mr. Nicholas.”

  As if she’d called him, the man appeared from the direction of the hired man’s apartment. His skin and hair were damp, and his face glowed above the collar of a shirt that was as filthy as it had been the day before.

  “Is that for me or for Sheba?” he asked by way of greeting, his gaze fixed on the plate as hungrily as Sheba’s had been. The hen had given up and stalked off to make the best of the lay crumble.

  “For you. But she’s upset about it.”

  She handed him the plate at arm’s length and watched him gobble its contents down.

  “Thank you,” he said when he was finished. This time he didn’t lick it clean, so he must be feeling better.

  “I need to ask you about my duties,” he went on. “If cleaning up after the chickens isn’t a possibility, you might give me some instructions. I had a marvelous sleep on that very comfortable bed in there. I think I’m able to start today.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Sunday is a day of rest. And tonight we’ll be leaving for the Mission hall at about six thirty. So if you wanted, you could go into the house and do your laundry. You’d have two hours before we got back.”

  His fingers curled a little into the hay on which he sat, but she didn’t know why. Anger, perhaps? But at what?

  “Thank you. Thanks very much. I feel like seeds are going to sprout at any moment out of the pockets of this shirt.”

  She smiled. Not anger, then. But she couldn’t imagine what else it might be.

  “After all our guests leave, I’ll introduce you to my mother. Then you’ll have the run of the place. Do you have any clothes besides those?”

  Carefully he set the empty plate beside him on the bale. “A few things in a rucksack, equally as grubby.” He sipped the coffee slowly, breathing in the scent of it between each swallow.

  “Wash it all tonight.” She paused, then made up her mind. “My father was a bigger man than you, but you might be able to use something. Once everyone has gone we can look.”

  “I wish I could do something besides continually thank you.”

  She backed away from his gratitude. “You will. Once you start work, you will.”

  Leaving him there, she escaped into the chicken yard, made sure the birds had all they needed for the day, and went around to the back of the barn. There, she neatly disposed of her first breakfast and covered up the evidence with compost. Then it was time to prepare second breakfast for the family.

  With Aunt Margaret helping, Dinah was able to get the table cleared by nine forty-five, which left her fifteen minutes to put her hair up properly and put on a good dress. An Elect woman’s hair was supposed to be her glory, but Dinah hadn’t received much in that department. In response to the flapper haircuts of a hundred years ago, the Shepherds had decreed that a woman’s hair should be long enough to wash the feet of Jesus, as Mary the sister of Lazarus had done. At the same time, they said, the hair must be modest and a means of sacrificing vanity, so it had to be put up. Some of the women, like Madeleine Blanchard, could do an effortless French roll and look as elegant as any worldly woman while still maintaining the standards of modesty required by Phinehas—and by extension, God. But Dinah’s hair, while thick enough and as healthy as ordinary shampoo could make it, was uncontrollable. You’d think that with a head full of curls, it would curve prettily around her face and temples. But no. It went in whatever direction it felt like going in the morning, and sometimes the best she could do was wrap it into a bun and hope for the best.

  Promptly at ten o’clock, the first of the cars began to roll into the yard for Gathering. Phinehas was already in his chair in the place of honor by the fireplace, head bowed as he prepared to lead the flock in worship. After a hymn, Phinehas indicated the Gathering was open to sharing. One by one, the men got up to say what God—or their wives—had given them to speak.

  Dinah found it hard to concentrate in Gathering on the best of days; today, with Phinehas at the front of the room, it was impossible. How could she be grateful for the love of God when because of it she could barely get downstairs and into a chair without biting her lips from the pain?

  There were two Gatherings in Hamilton Falls each Sunday, in the homes of the favored families. Owen Blanchard led the other one. Poor man. His wife, Madeleine, was still in the hospital—or wherever she was after the doctors had finally diagnosed what was wrong with their little boy, Ryan. Owen faithfully got both his kids ready for Gathering by himself, now that his sister-in-law Julia had gone off with her biker and was no longer around to help. The kids seemed to have adjusted fairly well without their mother, but a number of the women were pitching in. The Bible said you were supposed to help a brother in need; as an Elder, Owen was certainly that.

  Thinking of this, Dinah made a mental note to take a couple of dozen eggs by their house and offer her help. It wouldn’t do for the Traynells to be seen as doing less for the Blanchards than anyone else.

  Phinehas announced the closing hymn, and she realized with a start she had daydreamed the entire service away. Well, at least she had looked involved and interested, and that was what counted.

  When everyone milled around the living room greeting each other after the hymn, people offered her their sympathies. She responded as best she could. She had learned to ignore the sidelong glances of the teenaged girls, especially the two oldest Bell girls, who thought they were little somebodies no
w that they had turned thirteen and fourteen. Dinah concerned herself with giving the other women as little to talk about as possible. Her hems were the longest, her heels the lowest, her conduct irreproachable. She no longer bothered to make herself attractive to the opposite sex by wearing blouses with ruffles and lace collars. And she would never dream of buying something fashionable in store-bought colors and then dyeing it black at home, the way Linda Bell allowed her daughters to do. That, in her opinion, was deceitful.

  At the door, Phinehas greeted people as they filed outside, shaking hands and exchanging words with a smile. Dinah touched Phinehas’s hand and let her own drop casually. To an observer, it would look like modest respect. No one could know her very skin was creeping off her bones and only pride kept her from taking off for the barn at a run.

  Her body shook as she waited quietly by the kitchen door for everyone to leave, and she concentrated hard on controlling it. Which was why she jumped when a voice spoke next to her.

  “How are you, Dinah?”

  Derrick Wilkinson, whom rumor reported was getting over the abrupt departure of Julia McNeill and starting to circulate, offered his hand. For a wild moment she considered running into the bathroom and locking the door, but that would make him question what was wrong with her, and that would never do.

  If he was circulating in her direction, she would put a stop to it right now.

  “Fine, thanks.” She touched his fingers briefly so he wouldn’t feel the tremors in hers.

  “It’s wonderful for you that Phinehas came to help you through these first few days.”

  Yes. Wonderful. She nodded, and added a smile as an afterthought.

  “Your mom must really appreciate it.”

  “She does. We all do.”

  “Listen, Dinah. I know this is probably terrible timing, but I wondered . . . if you wanted to . . . for a change of scenery, maybe you’d like to go for a drive and have lunch with me?”