Pocketful of Pearls

by Shelley Bates

  “SHALL I CATCH you up on what’s been going on?” Dinah pushed open her mother’s bedroom door with one hip and came in with the tray. On it were two pieces of toast, honey, and two boiled eggs with their tops already cracked off. Dinah had also added a small bunch of crocuses in a little vase, picked when she’d gone out to wave good-bye to her aunt and uncle as they’d driven off.

  Elsie plumped up her pillows against the headboard and looked over the tray with interest as Dinah put it on her lap. “This looks nice. The crocuses are up already.”

  “We’ve had some sun lately. March went out like a lamb.”

  Elsie tucked into her eggs. “What else could possibly have happened besides Tamara bringing this baby home?”

  “Tamsen’s kind of cute once you get to know her, Mom. Eats like a horse. And she’s really loud. But I think she’s developing a sense of humor, so that’s a good sign.”

  “I hope you don’t get attached to her, Dinah. As soon as Tamara is found, she’ll take her back and that will be that.”

  “How are you going to find her?”

  “That woman—” Elsie paused and spread honey on a piece of toast. “Evelyn is making inquiries, apparently. And Uncle John is going to as well.”

  “Auntie Evelyn has been quite a lot of help, actually. I think she’s nice.”

  “She might be, but she’s a divorced woman living with a divorced man. She turned her back on the way of God and is living a sinful life. Don’t forget that.”

  “Wearing color and having her nose done.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Mom, you know, if she decided not to stay in the Elect there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with those things.”

  “She broke your grandmother’s heart,” Elsie pointed out, as if this were a good reason for a lifetime of shunning. “And your father’s, too.”

  It was news to Dinah that her father even had a heart. It probably broke a few slats in the structure he lived in, though, and that would have hurt.

  “Uncle John is going to put out the word among the Elect in various places,” Elsie went on around her toast. “Tamara doesn’t know any worldly people. She does know Elect families in Seattle, Spokane, and Richmond, though. We’ve been on the phone to all of them, so if she does turn up or they hear of her, they’ll call us.”

  “Mom, she’s gone Out. She’s wearing color now. I don’t think she’s going to go to an Elect family and ask for a place to stay.”

  “We’ve told them she’s confused, and to expect some odd behavior.”

  Confused was an Elect euphemism for a person who was undecided whether to stay in or go Out. It also meant a person who was unwilling to put herself on the altar as a sacrifice. If Tamara was said to be in that gray area covered by confused, the Elect would take her in and encourage her to do the right thing.

  Dinah was no longer sure she knew what that was.

  “I hope she turns up,” she said mildly. “I just want to know she’s all right.”

  “That’s what we all want. Goodness knows the papers are full of what happens to young girls when they get off the train in some of these places.”

  “If she’s smart enough to fool me into taking Tamsen, she’s smart enough to avoid a situation like that.”

  “Let’s hope so. And let’s hope we find her quickly. I don’t know what people are going to say. I tried to tell these families to be discreet, to consider the Kingdom, but I’m not sure how well it will succeed.”

  “Oh, they’re already saying it. All of Hamilton Falls knows Tamara took off and the baby is here.”

  Elsie pushed the empty tray away. “So much for considering the Kingdom.”

  “You can’t keep something like this quiet. The first time we show up in Gathering with Tamsen, people will talk.”

  “Oh, I won’t take her to Gathering,” Elsie said grimly. “Think of the disgrace Alma Woods could spread far and wide about our condoning sin.”

  “Mom, she’s only four months old. It isn’t her fault Phinehas raped Tammy and made her pregnant.”

  The words popped out of her mouth with all the force and surprise of a jack-in-the-box, a toy Dinah had always hated. Time ground to a halt in the room as her mother stared at her. The silence was deafening, a roar in Dinah’s ears.

  “Sorry,” Dinah said at last. “I tried to tell you before. Danny Bell told me when I went over there to make him stand up to his paternal responsibilities. I had no idea.”

  Elsie’s mouth worked, but no sounds came out.

  Dinah felt the first prickle of alarm. “Mom? You’re not going to have another stroke, are you?” She snatched the tray off her mother’s lap and put it on the floor. Then she took her wrist and felt for a pulse. It seemed fast, but Dinah was no medic. “Mom?”

  “Don’t you dare,” Elsie finally got out and pulled her wrist back, where she cradled it against her body as if it had been injured. “Dinah, for the love of God, you must never, ever say such a thing.”

  Dinah sat back on the bed, and Elsie moved her legs a few inches away.

  “I believe it’s true. If he’s been raping me for ten years it’s not that much of a stretch to believe he got to Tammy, too. Although I have to say I thought I was the only one.”

  “No—!”

  “Yes, Mom.” Dinah’s voice held none of the shaking and fear that fluttered inside her like a frantic, trapped bird. But the words had to come out. She just prayed she wouldn’t send her mother into a relapse. “He started when I was fourteen, but he’d been buttering me up for years before that. Since Tammy is only seventeen it’s a good bet he started when she hit puberty. He seems to like them young.” She paused. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to warn Linda Bell not to leave her girls alone with him, would it?”

  “Don’t you dare speak of this!”

  “Oh, I won’t. But it isn’t going to happen here again, Mom. Ever. If he comes back and tries it, I’ll scream the house down. Matthew will come running and he certainly doesn’t have a problem calling the police, even if you do.”

  Elsie stared at her again, her mouth opening and closing as sentences rushed to her lips and were bitten back.

  “Matthew is our new hired man,” Dinah explained. How was she pulling this off? A month ago she couldn’t imagine taking charge like this. Making her mother listen. It was frightening, but in a way it felt good to stick by her resolution to keep the air clear. It felt like a gift to be able to stay calm and almost kind, leaving behind the brutal sarcasm that she might have used as a weapon in the past.

  “He’s staying out in the suite in the barn and he’s very smart. He’s a university professor on a walking tour, and I offered him a job to tide him over until he saves up a bit of cash.” That was a good story. Nobody needed to know that they’d practically dragged each other back from death.

  “A hired man,” Elsie said faintly, evidently thankful to have something harmless to talk about. “That’s good.”

  “I’m glad you agree. But I meant it about Phinehas. He’s welcome here for your sake, but if he tries my door it’s over.”

  To her surprise, instead of turning away, her mother’s gaze pinned her in place with an honesty as new as her own.

  “Not over,” Elsie whispered. “Never over.”

  Silence fell again, the echoes of Elsie’s broken whisper like the sound of fragile wings beating against a window.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s never going to be over,” Elsie repeated. “You, me, Tamara. Probably even the child, when she’s old enough.” Her gaze faltered and she looked down at her hands, lying palm up and empty in her lap.

  Cold showered over Dinah’s skin, soaked through her flesh and into her heart. “What?”

  Elsie’s hands closed into fists. “He’ll never stop, Dinah. He used me, and then when I married Morton all he had to do was wait until I had girls. He knew I would never speak. Never. Not even when my heart broke and I wanted to jump out of the hay window in the bar
n. I never spoke.”

  Elsie’s eyes were wide and dark and terrifying as she raised her gaze again to Dinah’s face. “And you won’t, either.”

  Chapter 16

  YOU, TOO?”

  Dinah had never had an easy time with empathy. She had all she could do to control her own emotions, and as a result trying to imagine the emotions of others was too much for her.

  But this . . . this was dreadful. The shock of it was still seeping through her veins, out to her fingertips, chilling them. She couldn’t have moved off the bed if a fire had broken out.

  “He abused you, too?”

  All the fight had gone out of Elsie’s body, but the warning still lit her eyes. “I was twelve. An early bloomer, as they used to say. He would come into our home and my parents would bend over backwards to make him comfortable, as we all do. So comfortable that he felt completely safe doing what he did in my dad’s old Chevy, out in the garage.”

  “And you couldn’t say anything.” She felt as if she were speaking for herself, for her mother, and for Tamara. None of them could speak. Until now.

  “He said the only thing keeping him in God’s service was my service to him. That if I refused, hundreds of souls might go to hell because he couldn’t carry on God’s work.”

  “Sounds like he’s been telling the same story for thirty years.”

  “He told me how difficult it is, how often he wanted to just disappear and give it all up.”

  “What, give up being offered the best people have? The best bed, the best food, their money, their cars?”

  Dinah struggled to control her voice as her emotions seesawed between shock and anger and simple, childlike astonishment at never having known. Of never having seen in her mother what she lived with daily in herself.

  Or maybe she had seen it, she thought suddenly. That lack of emotion, that steely control. Was that what she’d been emulating unconsciously for the past ten years?

  “But think what he had to give up,” Elsie said. “His own will. The hope of a family of his own.”

  “That was his choice. That’s no excuse to go preying on little girls.”

  “It’s our service, Dinah.”

  “It is not, Mom, are you crazy? It’s wrong. Criminal. I can’t begin to tell you the damage he’s caused.”

  “It’s part of our sacrifice,” Elsie said stubbornly. “If the gospel gets carried to one more seeking soul, then a little mortification of the flesh has been worth it.”

  “Mortific—” Dinah stopped before her voice spiraled out of control. “It’s rape, Mom.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” her mother whispered.

  “It was for me.”

  “I made myself be willing. It was my service. And . . . and it wasn’t so bad, really. He’s a much better lover than—”

  “Mom!”

  “Well, all right. When I was married, it ended. At least then I could welcome him into our home and serve in other ways. And then you were born.”

  “Your little preemie. I know.”

  “That’s what I told people. My, what a trial you were. I was so unprepared to be a mother.”

  “Wait a minute. Back up. What do you mean, that’s what you told people?” Dinah had always known she had been born prematurely. She’d consoled herself with the thought that at least back then she’d been wanted, even with her unexpectedly speedy arrival. That her parents must have loved each other to have wanted to start a family so quickly.

  “Well, what else could I do?” Elsie asked simply. “I couldn’t very well tell the Elect that I was already pregnant when Morton put the ring on my finger. I was marrying into a favored family, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You and Dad . . . ?”

  “No, dear. Me and Phinehas.”

  Dinah sat, stunned, as the last of her illusions about herself came crashing down around her.

  IT WAS A miracle she didn’t break her neck as she carried Elsie’s supper tray down the staircase. Her body was functioning at some practical level while her mind was unraveling time, scrolling backward faster and faster, as if to locate the truth and put some kind of lens on it that would help her see her life differently, help her understand.

  That’s why Dad never loved me.

  Phinehas doesn’t know.

  Dad knew. And he never said a word all those years. He was the one who allowed it. Not Mother.

  I’m his daughter.

  No, don’t think about that.

  Dinah stumbled through the yard and made it almost to the barn door when her stomach revolted and she lost everything in it. She gripped the doorjamb and breathed in and out, in and out, until her head cleared.

  The door to the hired man’s suite was closed, but a strip of light shone under it. “Matthew?” she croaked.

  The old chair creaked, and in a moment footsteps crossed the kitchen. “Dinah?” He peered out, then blinked. “Oh, my dear, what’s happened now? Come in.”

  She detoured into the bathroom and rinsed out her mouth, and stole a bit of toothpaste to freshen her breath. When she came out, feeling marginally calmer, she found him in the kitchen putting on the kettle for tea, that panacea for the world’s ills.

  “Tea?”

  “Yes. Oh, Matthew, I’ve—” She stopped, staring into the living room. “What is Schatzi doing in here?”

  His shoulders hunched a little bit, as if he were guilty of something. “I didn’t mean to coerce her. Truly. It just happened.”

  “What are you looking so guilty for? With Sheba gone, she’s the alpha hen. She can do what she wants.”

  He straightened and gave her one of his rare smiles, the kind that made his eyes glow and made something strange happen to her stomach. “I wasn’t sure you’d be all right with it. I know how you are about your birds.”

  “You’re the guy that shovels poop. You care as much as I do.”

  “Well, yes, but now that you don’t have Sheba to cuddle with, I thought maybe Schatzi . . .”

  “She’s never been the cuddly type. But she’s always liked you.”

  “She doesn’t cuddle. She keeps me company. Our tea is ready. Do you feel better?”

  Talking about the chickens and the prospect of tea hadn’t made her feel better, but it had distracted her for a welcome moment. The sick, horrified anger at herself, at Phinehas, at her family was still there, lying under her ribs like a cancer, needing to be excised if she could only figure out how.

  While Matthew poured them each a mug of tea and handed her the honey, she told him the secret Elsie had kept hidden in her heart for twenty-five years. When she was finished, Matthew sat down heavily in the kitchen chair, and Schatzi craned around from her comfortable perch on the back of the easy chair to look at them both.

  He bowed his head.

  “Dear Father, I come to you with a desperate prayer,” he said quietly, while Dinah gazed at him in astonishment. “Please give Dinah the strength to deal with this revelation of her mother’s. Give me the wisdom to help, if that is your will. And please, Father, help us all to learn to forgive.”

  Dinah was so amazed that she just stared as he lifted his mug and took a sip of hot tea.

  “What?” he asked after a moment.

  “Do you always start conversations with God in front of people?”

  He exhaled sharply in what might have been a laugh. “No, only in moments of extreme stress or need on my part. And usually when I’m alone. But I didn’t think you’d mind, being a praying person yourself.”

  “I’m not.” Another reason she had always thought herself to be a misfit. The Elect were very firm that a person should pray twice a day, minimum, on one’s knees if possible. But prayer brought you to the attention of God, and Dinah wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  Besides, doing anything on her knees, even washing the floor, caused her excruciating pain. On the rare occasions when she did pray, it was face down on the bed, with her back toward heaven.

  Matthew nodded at her bleak words. “
It would be difficult to pray to that guy in the sky with the lightning bolts. I prefer to pray to the One who made Schatzi, there, and caused the crocuses to come up outside the tack room door. The One who gave his very self on the cross so that I would know grace.”

  It was going to be a long, slow process getting to know that God, Dinah thought. But Matthew was so quietly happy and trusting in his worship that maybe there was something in it. Certainly most of the Elect, with the possible exception of Rebecca Quinn, could not be said to be all that happy.

  “So,” Matthew said. “Tell me what you’re thinking about this news of your mother.”

  Dinah took a sip of tea and shook her head. “I’m still reeling. I don’t know what to think. Phinehas is like some horrible hereditary disease in the Traynell family, like sickle-cell anemia.”

  “He is a very disturbed individual. He needs to be incarcerated somewhere where he can get treatment.”

  “That will never happen.” Dinah’s voice was flat. “No one will believe it, least of all him. He is completely convinced of the rightness of what he does. Otherwise, how could he do it? And speaking of that, how could my father do it? All this time I thought it was my mom who was allowing this to happen to me—us, I mean. That she was handing me over to him because she hated me.”

  “Your mother must have a very difficult time with boundaries. Hers, her daughters’, her husband’s.”

  “I don’t think Mom knows what boundaries are. As long as it’s all in the family, it’s okay with her.”

  “That’s harsh,” Matthew said.

  “I feel harsh right now. Harsh and angry and confused. It’s going to take me weeks to come to terms with this, and that’s only possible because I can’t fight the truth.”

  “If anyone deserves your forgiveness, it’s your mother, don’t you think?”

  “Why? She still could have done something.”

  “Have you ever been able to do anything when your father didn’t want it to happen? What sort of man was he?”

  Dinah tried to slow her agitated breathing and think. “Immovable, I guess you could say. Hard. He ran Gathering with this sort of gentle authority that I know for a fact the other Elder tries to emulate. But to us he was cruel. If we wanted to do anything other than go to school, Gathering, or young people’s meetings, he said no. The only thing that softened him up was getting cancer.”