Pocketful of Pearls

by Shelley Bates

  “It was me that turned him,” she said in despair. “He couldn’t resist me. He said so. And I liked it. I liked having something he wanted, because goodness knows I didn’t have much else.”

  “He manipulated you, Dinah. He pushed all the blame on you when you didn’t deserve it. That’s what abusers do, you know. They blame the victim and make her think it’s her fault because they can’t take responsibility for their own actions. But you don’t have to believe it any more. It’s all a lie. Your responsibility is to live the truth.”

  “I don’t even know what the truth is.” The confession was dragged out of her word by word. “I’m a lie, he’s a lie, God’s a lie. Everything’s a lie.”

  “I’m not,” he said quietly. “Tamsen isn’t. Schatzi isn’t.”

  Involuntarily, her lips twitched. “There’s nothing quite so real as a chicken. Or a baby.”

  “Phinehas created a woman who has to lie to herself and others in order to survive. And you see that woman when you look in the mirror. But she isn’t real. I want to know the real Dinah.”

  Dust was beginning to coat the surface of the coffee table, Dinah thought distantly. It was time to clean house again. “I’m twenty-four. It’s too late for the real Dinah, Matthew.”

  “I’ll never believe that. But the first thing you have to do is admit there is a real Dinah, somewhere under this illusion Phinehas has made. I’ve seen her a time or two.”

  “When?” How could he see someone who didn’t exist?

  “The first morning I was here. I saw a lovely girl with a bird on her shoulder, singing to the other chickens. That was very real.”

  Sheba, my darling. Dinah’s throat closed with loss.

  “And I saw her again, holding Tamsen, counting her little fingers. And just now, laughing at the kitchen table with a friend.” Matthew squeezed her shoulders, just briefly. “That’s the woman who deserves to live. The joyful one who finds beauty in a single moment and lets it shine out of her.”

  Beauty? Dinah could hardly remember any beautiful moments that hadn’t been tarnished by Phinehas or her father. But these had happened after all that. These had happened in the present, when there was nearly nothing left of her. How could that be?

  “I’ll agree with you that Phinehas is a lie,” Matthew went on. It was obvious he’d been thinking about this. A lot. For days, probably. “He’s a ‘whited sepulchre,’ looking on the outside like everything a person should be, and on the inside he’s dead and rotting.”

  She couldn’t agree more. Did anyone but she and Matthew see it, though? And what good did it do them? Phinehas was holy, untouchable. Even if she said something, no one would believe her. Matthew had said she was appropriating his filth to herself. Well, that was nothing to what the church would heap on her if she dared to open her mouth.

  “He’s recreated God in his own image for you.” Matthew’s voice, while still gentle, was tight. “You told me that night at the river that God was a punisher, throwing thunderbolts at you every time you turned around.”

  “He is. He does.”

  “If you looked at those thunderbolts closely, though, my dear, I wonder how many of them really came from Phinehas’s hands?”

  Sheba’s death. Her mother’s stroke. Tamara’s pregnancy and disappearance. All were connected in some way to Phinehas.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t intentionally, but his actions still reverberate in your life. And God has nothing to do with it.”

  “But the Shepherd is God’s representative here on earth.” Oh, for goodness sake. Even she could see how silly it was to believe that. “Never mind.”

  “He might be representing the God he sees, but it certainly isn’t the God I know and love. The one that loves you and whose heart breaks every time you paste Phinehas’s face on him.”

  It was difficult not to. That God was the only one she knew—and feared and hated.

  But what if it were true?

  Your whole life would have to change. Somehow.

  I can’t. It’s all I can do to survive right now. I can’t change anything.

  Maybe not. But Matthew sees beauty in you. That’s a change.

  Matthew is a homeless man who is just being nice because I feed him.

  Stop lying to yourself.

  All right. All right. Matthew is either pure of heart or completely naïve.

  You’re doing it again. Shoving him away. Putting yourself down so no one will do it for you.

  Fine! So he sees beauty in me.

  And?

  And there is beauty in me. Phinehas took it away. Took my pearls and threw them all over and ground them into the mud. He did it. Not me.

  His fault. No matter what you did, it’s still his fault.

  I have to be responsible for some of it.

  No. The only thing you’re responsible for now is what you’re going to do about it.

  Do? I don’t know what to do.

  I don’t either. But if Matthew’s right, there is One who does.

  THE MORE SHE thought about it—and that was a lot during the next few days—the more she could see that time after time Phinehas had manipulated events and her own thinking to make her accept the blame for his actions. Maybe that was why she’d taken refuge in control—of the household, of her body. Of Matthew’s fate, even. Maybe her soul was trying to get out from under the crushing burden of shame that should have belonged to Phinehas.

  Now, more than ever, she longed to talk to Tamara. Between the two of them maybe they could ease the burden it was clear they’d both carried for years. At least having someone to talk to who had been through what she had would ease some of the pain.

  Talking to Matthew, though, was a pretty good substitute. She could see that he carried some pain, some wound, deep in his heart, but was incapable of releasing it. However, the very fact of its presence made it easier to open her own heart, which she’d closed off from everyone in sheer self-defense. If she were patient, he might open up and tell her what it was that troubled him.

  He didn’t push her to talk, but if she wanted to, he listened. She watched carefully for any signs that he was judging her, but the most he did was make her think.

  And hurt. That happened a lot, too, but she could hardly blame him for it.

  She’d decided that since he knew part of the story, he should know it all. A little niggle in the back of her mind said that maybe if he knew it all, he’d admit she was right and she was really as filthy as she believed. Then he’d leave her in disgust and she’d be vindicated.

  But the new voice inside her, the one that wondered if beauty and realness were even possible, wanted to get it all out for another reason. Maybe if she could lance the boil, it would heal.

  Right. Until Phinehas comes back. Then what will you do?

  Hastily, she buried that thought. She’d jump off that bridge when she came to it.

  So, over several nights and days, she immersed him in her life—as it had been and as it was. Those childhood moments when the only brightness came from Phinehas’s affection. The days in her preteens when she’d been his little favored flower, receiving his caresses and special times of prayer and meditation as though they were refreshing rain in the cold desert of her family life. It took a couple of days to get through her teenage years, though, mostly because the story came out in jagged little pieces that tore and hurt, and he would gently withdraw to let her cry in peace.

  Sometimes she wondered what his motives were. Why did he bother? Was he some kind of saint? Because he never seemed to ask anything from her except the necessities of life. She gave him her past and his meals, and he gave her manual labor and understanding, and somehow she thought she was getting the better side of the bargain.

  Altogether, it was a strange way to treat a hired man.

  Oh, face it, Dinah, he isn’t a hired man.

  No, he isn’t. He’s more like a friend.

  Are you sure that’s all he is?
>
  Well, he certainly can’t be any more, can he? Not with everything he knows now.

  He’s still here, isn’t he? He’s not running for the hills.

  The paycheck is here, too. Don’t get ideas. The last thing I want to do is have everything be spoiled by—by that.

  By what?

  But Dinah went outside to feed the chickens and refused to give herself an answer.

  MATTHEW WAITED UNTIL Dinah had finished giving the chickens their evening treat—vegetable peelings, broken lettuce leaves, apple cores—and had gone inside. He knew how possessive she was about the birds. Well, perhaps possessive was the wrong word. It was more like she needed the time alone with them the way some people needed prayer. He could hardly begrudge her that, though he wished there was some way he could show her that the real thing—prayer—was a source of strength and comfort that could outdo even that of chickens.

  And speaking of which . . .

  He opened the door to the barn passageway. In the dimness, he heard a rustle and then a familiar sound like water bubbling in a pipe. Opening the door wider, he stood aside and a small golden hen poked her head into his kitchen, tilting her head to gaze up at him with a sharp hazel eye.

  “Hello, Schatzi.” He’d learned that when she greeted him, she expected a reply. In just the same manner the chickens greeted each other and Dinah . . . and for that matter, so did the people back home in Cornwall. How many times had he heard that abbreviated West Country greeting, “All right?” and answered “All right” without thinking about it? It was just what social creatures did.

  With a liquid cluck that sounded like a request for permission, the hen picked her way carefully across the linoleum floor. The first time she hadn’t known the floor was any different than that of the barn, and the results had been disastrous to her dignity. She’d come originally, he supposed, thinking that he was Dinah moving around in the suite, and he’d surprised her in the middle of the floor, on her stomach, feathers askew from the slip. He’d given her a handful of bran flakes to make it better, and every evening after that she’d come to visit after Dinah had gone in.

  He felt a little guilty about coercing one of her birds, but where was the harm, really? He and Schatzi had hit it off from the first, hadn’t they, and it was only thanks to her recommendation he’d been allowed to stay at all. Once in a while she left a small, round deposit on his linoleum, but that was easily cleaned up. Certainly she was never anything but socially acceptable when she hopped up on the back of his reading chair.

  The first time she’d done that she’d startled him so badly he’d nearly dropped his cup of tea in his lap. After all, one doesn’t expect a five-pound bird to suddenly land next to one’s head with an energetic flapping of wings. After he’d got over the strangeness of it, Matthew began to see why Dinah and her Sheba had bonded so magically. He had never earned the trust of a bird before, never felt this feathery warmth next to his ear and the relaxing of the feet that told him she was comfortable enough to sleep. Sometimes she did catnap there, while he listened to the radio in the quiet dimness of the room or read by lamplight one of the ancient ranching magazines that were stashed in the closet. Then he’d slip his hands under her and carry her into the barn, where he’d arrange her on her roost for the night.

  What would the little hen do when he left? he wondered, as she bubbled a comment and picked a bit of hay out of his hair. Not that he was leaving, mind you, when Dinah had said herself that she needed him. But at some point her mother would return and he would need to settle whether he was going to stay or take his small earnings and make his way back to California and his old life.

  Part of him wanted that old life. Part of him missed the summers of research and the rush of September with new classes and new students and new piles of paperwork. He missed the long talks with Paolo Martinez, the theater prof, on whether John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, was a syphilitic clown or a real poet who had been underappreciated during his lifetime and ignored by history since.

  Another part admitted that that life was gone forever. Yes, his name had been cleared and Torrie Parker exposed as mentally unstable, using him as a stand-in for the father who had abused her. But academic circles were small and tight, and a scandal like that had spread far and wide even without the help of the newspapers. Technically, he could work if he could get a position. But why would someone hire an assistant professor who came dragging such baggage when there were hundreds of fresh-faced PhD lecturers available for half the price?

  His options were to stay here on the ranch until the Lord only knew when, hiding from life, or start over again on the lowest rungs of the academic ladder in an attempt to make the best of it in another state.

  Washington, perhaps. Where he could be within visiting distance of Dinah.

  Is that what you want? something deep in his mind whispered. To visit?

  Well, yes. She’s in no shape for anything else.

  But what if she were? This Derrick Wilkinson person is already in line, it seems.

  She isn’t giving him the time of day.

  She gives you the time of day, doesn’t she? More.

  During the past few days he’d been exposed to more pain and ugliness than he’d known existed in the days of his youth and innocence. But then, under the veneer of civilization, it was hard to say what, exactly, was normal. The point was Dinah had shared with him secrets she’d never told a living soul, and while it had been agonizing for both of them, he could see that just saying such things aloud was helping to lift the burden somewhat.

  He couldn’t flatter himself that being around him was going to cure her. Far from it. But by being a sounding board and drawing on his experience and research into sexual abuse during the whole awful hearing process, at least he had been able to ask the right questions. And some questions, at least, might lead to answers for her.

  Schatzi made her hookah-pipe sound next to him, as if asking a question of her own.

  “What should I do, little one?” he asked, then smiled at himself. Dr. Nicholas, pride of the British university system, talking to a chicken. Well, she had more sense than many a department chair he’d known. He and Paolo had had their share of laughs at the head of the humanities department and his idiotic policies.

  “What do you think, Schatzi? Shall I ring up old Paolo and give him a coronary?”

  Schatzi fluffed her feathers and did not reply, though she kept one eye on him in case the sounds he was making indicated a treat was in the offing.

  Matthew pulled the phone closer and dialed the familiar number.

  “Martinez. Hola.”

  “You’re home. I thought you’d be in rehearsals.”

  A stunned silence hummed down the line. “Mateo? Is that you? Where in the world are you? Are you all right?”

  He laughed with the sheer pleasure of hearing his friend’s voice again. Paolo, at least, had stuck by him during the worst of it. Paolo had tried to stop him from leaving, and once that had proved fruitless, had agreed to store Matthew’s books and his few possessions in his tiny garage until he returned.

  “Yes, somewhere southwest of Spokane, Washington, and yes. It’s good to hear your voice, Paolo.”

  “You could have heard it sooner. What kind of friend disappears for weeks and doesn’t call? You could have been dead in a ditch, for all I knew.”

  “You sound just like my mother.”

  “No surprise there. I’m practicing to be a dad.”

  Matthew grinned with delight, though of course Paolo couldn’t see him. “A dad? Is Isabela pregnant?”

  “Four months. Which you would have known if you’d stuck around. How are you going to be godfather when you’re somewhere southwest of Spokane? And how did you get there?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Isabela’s in bed already. I have the time.”

  Briefly, Matthew outlined the circumstances that had brought him to Hamilton Falls, leaving out the hunger and the despair, w
hich would only distress his friend more than he had been already.

  “A handyman,” Paolo said at last. “You’re working on a ranch as a hired man? Am I having auditory hallucinations?”

  “No, you’re as sane as I am, though that isn’t saying much.”

  “Why on earth didn’t you call me, amigo? You know I would have come up there and brought you back. Lent you our other car. Done whatever. Not left you to thumb your way across half the state!”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You could have called Pastor Schultz, then. You know there would have been a money order wired up there the same day. You should hear the prayers, man. A Sunday doesn’t go by that somebody doesn’t lift you up and pray for your safety.”

  In a moment of sudden clarity, Matthew saw that his pride had not only been the means of his own destitution, it had put a burden of worry and concern on the people in the little church under the redwoods where he and Paolo and Isabela worshipped. He hadn’t meant it to happen, but then, he hadn’t been thinking of anyone but himself, either.

  “You’re right.” He sighed. “But I thought if I did things on my own, I wouldn’t be a burden to anyone. Looks as though I was wrong.”

  “It’s no burden to pray for someone we love. Or send them a money order when they’re in trouble. And we won’t even go into how well equipped you are to be a ranch hand, my friend. You’re not the one who grew up on fifty acres of scrub in New Mexico.”

  “As a matter of fact, you’d be surprised.”

  “What? You mean you’re slinging hay bales and roping cattle?”

  “Well, no, but I am supposed to be managing a stock auction. Somehow. I’m not quite sure about that, yet.”

  The silence on the line told him Paolo and Claire Montoya might find something to agree on there.

  “But that’s not what I meant,” he went on. “You know I could never understand why, out of all the faculty, Torrie Parker picked me to work her destruction on.”

  “I still don’t understand it. Not when that sonofagun Beiler is still keeping his sexual activity under the radar in the science department. If anyone deserved destruction by Parker, he did.”