The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  At the corner of the shot hangs a noose, drifting lazily in the wind. My throat closes at the sight of it.

  “Bly is one of twelve men charged in connection with the events that took place in this clearing, where a religious group existed in total isolation and self-sufficiency for more than a decade. The world only came to know of the cult when a fire started here two months ago, killing the group’s leader. The group’s total population is estimated at over one hundred. The remaining women and children are being housed in undisclosed locations.”

  The image switches to a slick-lipped woman talking too fast about an upcoming snowstorm. I stay kneeling in front of the TV, my head falling forward on my shoulders.

  “You all right?” comes a voice behind me.

  I turn and see a girl I vaguely recognize standing with a hand on her hip. She’s tall and big-chested with thin eyebrows. I don’t know much about her, but she wears Velcro shoes.

  “Fine,” I say, standing.

  “Your name Britney?”

  My eyes pinch in confusion. “My name’s Minnow.”

  She laughs like I just made a joke. “My name’s Krystal,” she says, placing a hand on my breastbone so I can’t turn. “I think you and I should get to know each other.”

  I glance away. Angel’s eyes stare firmly at the TV screen. Rashida sits cross-legged on the duct-taped chair, her bottom lip between her teeth and a wrinkle between her eyes. Nobody in the room moves.

  “You got real pretty hair,” Krystal says. She pulls a lock of my long, crooked hair out of the wild mop that cascades down my back. I shiver at the feeling of her fingers. In the Community, our hair hid inside bonnets and braids, never touched by anyone.

  Slowly, she slides her hand across my chest until it reaches my arm. She squeezes.

  “Don’t touch me,” I say, the words coming out mild and strange. Krystal’s smile stretches even broader.

  I’m shuddering. This girl could be the Prophet. The fingers gripping my arm could be his rough and wire-haired fingers. The feeling in my chest is the same wasted, powerless feeling he always put inside me. I can’t break free, and I’m about to start dragging frantic breaths into my lungs when the girl’s head snaps back. I stumble backward, free of her grip.

  Angel’s fist hangs in the air.

  Krystal has miraculously managed to stay on her feet, but her cheek is crimson where Angel’s fist connected.

  “Krystal, we’ve missed you in gen pop,” Angel says. “What a shame your latest attempt to off yourself was unsuccessful. Next time I suggest drinking the whole bottle of bleach.”

  Krystal chuckles darkly. “I like your new toy, Angel,” she says, raking her eyes over me. “I didn’t think pink-bellied newbies were your type. I thought you went for older men.”

  Angel slugs Krystal in the stomach before she can react. When Krystal is doubled over, Angel forces her to the floor, her knee pressing hard into her gut. One hand leans against Krystal’s forehead and the other is suspended in the air, ready to strike.

  Angel’s next words come in a muttered breath. “You don’t get to hurt people,” she says. “Not here.”

  Krystal twists her head to the side and screams, but is silenced when Angel lands one punch into her temple, then another, then too many to count. The room is quiet but for Krystal’s grunts. I glance around the room for a moment and everyone’s faces are still. Krystal’s arms flail against Angel’s face, but Angel doesn’t slow. Her jaw is set but otherwise her face is relaxed.

  For a moment, I can imagine her killing her uncle, strangling him or stabbing him or shooting him with that look painted on her face, and it doesn’t seem so impossible anymore.

  Finally, Angel stands, shaking out her wrist. Krystal is still on the floor, dazed, the side of her face blown up and purple.

  Angel walks to the window in the metal door and knocks twice. Benny’s large face fills the meshed glass. At the sight of Angel, she opens the door.

  Benny looks over to Krystal, who’s moaning on the carpet.

  “She tripped,” says Angel.

  Benny nods and grips Krystal by the armpits. “Get up, Krystal.”

  Krystal shakily rises to her feet, darting an evil look at Angel with quickly swelling eyes. She and Benny shuffle out of the TV room as Angel falls back down onto the couch.

  “Now, I’m changing it back to the science channel,” she says. “Anybody going to disagree?” The remaining girls exchange big-eyed, terrified looks.

  Angel laughs.

  Chapter 19

  I don’t hear anyone talking about what Angel did to Krystal, but by dinner, it’s clear that everyone knows. They always avoided her; now they retract into themselves when she comes near, make themselves unnoticeable, turning their eyes to study the floor.

  I wonder, at the back of my mind, how they would react if they knew what I did to Philip. A little pang jabs just beneath the breast pocket of my jumpsuit, somewhere near my heart, like it does whenever I think about that night beneath the bridge.

  “I can tell you’re dying to ask something,” Angel says after we get our dinner. “Just get it out. I can’t stand looking at your face all folded up in concentration like that.”

  I turn my head to the side. “Why does everybody do what you say?”

  “You’re really asking that?”

  “I mean the guards and everything.”

  She shrugs. “I practically run this place. Been here longer than anybody. I’ve seen three wardens, a couple dozen guards, hundreds of girls come and gone, and here I am, rock steady through it all.”

  Angel’s bashed-up fingers rest on the table, the hard skin on her knuckles split open like grapes.

  “What about Benny?” I ask.

  “I got here when I was twelve. Benny was the first person I met. If anybody raised me, you could make a pretty good case for Benny.”

  • • •

  Dr. Wilson visits the next day after breakfast. Immediately, he eyes the new additions to my cell: two stuffed animals and a paper crane. I have recently been inducted into the complex trading system in juvie. Angel gave me a pack of gum Benny gave her for helping clean up puke in the cafeteria, and at lunch I traded the gum with a redheaded girl with a neck tattoo for a powder-blue stuffed bear. Later, I got a red turtle whose stomach had been removed to smuggle something inside, and an elaborate origami crane an albino girl hands out to everyone as part of her counseling.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place,” he says.

  “Decorated it myself.”

  “And might I compliment you on your choice of stainless steel.” He nods toward the toilet. “Timeless yet functional.”

  I almost laugh but in the next moment he’s opening up my file and scanning his notes.

  “I heard the guards talking about your roommate. Said she got into a fight.”

  “She was defending me,” I say.

  He nods. “You should be careful with lifers like Angel. They have less to lose.”

  “Lifers?” I ask.

  “Angel’s here on murder charges, and she’s not getting out anytime soon. Inmates with longer sentences sometimes like to groom other girls. Get them to do things for them on the outside.”

  “She’s not like that.”

  “Maybe not. Just be careful. You’re out of the Community, and that’s a good thing. That’s the best thing, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t people here who’d take advantage of you.”

  “No,” I mutter, and I feel my brain tip sideways. His words smack me as something obvious, something basic that I should’ve come to on my own. Since I’ve learned all the wrong the Community held, I’d begun to think of the cities as peace-realms, places I might really be safe.

  It’s not true. No place is ever safe.

  “When do you want to talk about what happened with Philip?
” Dr. Wilson asks.

  I look up quickly. “How about never?”

  “You’ll have to at some point. He’s part of this, too.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to talk about him ever again. Ask another question.”

  “All right,” he says, leaning back. “Tell me about losing your hands.”

  “That?” I shrug. “I barely remember it.”

  He lifts his eyebrows.

  “Fine,” I say. “But I want to tell it my way.”

  “Of course.”

  “No interrupting,” I warn.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  • • •

  When I woke up that morning, my bedroom was humid with the breath of my ten sisters. The plastic sheeting stapled over our only window was beaded with moisture.

  I smelled the smoke before I opened my eyes. Everyone knew what it meant when the purple smoke unfurled from the Prophet’s chimney and smudged the sky. It meant that, at that moment, the Prophet was in his house, talking with God, hearing the whisper of it inside his ears, and writing everything down into the Book of Prophecies.

  Everyone was a little on edge, waiting for the prophecy. We tried to go about our daily chores—the women milking, the men carving new tools out of fallen pines—but it was difficult with the smell of that smoke filling our nostrils. Prophecies could be meaningless—“And lo it is Commanded that thee plant wild onion in ampler supply.” But prophecies could also change everything. It was a prophecy that brought us to the wild. It was a prophecy that named each deacon, and it was prophecies that punished us.

  In the courtyard, I did laundry with my younger sisters Martha and Regent, both raven-haired like their mother Vivienne, until the Prophet rang the little silver bell on his porch that meant he was ready to speak the message that God had told him. He waited for us to congregate, his long black robes shaking in the cold breeze, arms stretched in the air.

  “God has sent me a message,” he called. “I am to take another wife.”

  The crowd exhaled. The Prophet had received this message many times since we moved to the Community. He already had eight wives. They were huddled close to the porch railing, looking lost. No children jostled into their calves like the other women. None of them, not a single one, had managed to bring a baby to term. They’d produced some crooked little skeletal things that might’ve been babies in some daydream of God’s, but that’s all.

  “And the woman who will be my new wife,” the Prophet continued, “who will serve God through me, who will bear beautiful children of light, is our own dear Minnow.” A smile bloomed under his big, gray beard.

  I didn’t understand at first. I was too conscious of other things, like my hands chapped from scrubbing clothes on a washboard, the purple smoke burying into my sinuses, and the image of Jude’s face that I couldn’t shake out of my eyes no matter how hard I tried.

  The Prophet approached me.

  “What do you say to this, Minnow?” he asked. “Do you not rejoice?”

  “No,” I said, my voice traveling.

  He placed his hand on my shoulder, his thumb tracing the strap of my undergarments.

  “Does it not please you, Minnow, to know you will be servant to God’s chosen messenger? That you will bear the children of God’s chosen messenger?”

  I searched the crowd but no one would catch my eye. No one but my mother. She stood at the other end of the courtyard. From beneath her bonnet, I could see a strand of the simple blond hair I didn’t inherit and the dead eyes I’d grown used to, not registering any of the unfolding events. Silent, impassive.

  “I don’t want to marry you,” I whispered.

  The Prophet smiled as though I’d made a joke. And it was a joke. There was no choice. I’d be forced to marry him whether I wanted to or not.

  “I am sure you will feel differently when your belly is round with a child of God.”

  I breathed a sharp breath and, without thinking, slapped him hard across his bearded cheek. Everyone gasped, including me. I held my hands together over my open mouth and took a quick step back.

  His fingers found his reddening face. I could practically see the plans forming inside his head, the tortures, the punishments marching into formation like soldiers, hot pokers and stocks and cleverly tied rope.

  He took one step toward me, then another, until all he had to do was lean forward to place his lips near my ear.

  “You will be my wife,” he whispered.

  He straightened and looked for my father. “Take her to the maidenhood room where she shall be sequestered until our wedding day, praise God.”

  Chapter 20

  Dr. Wilson holds his hands on either side of his face. He hasn’t written any of this down, just listened. It occurs to me that he may have heard this story before.

  “What did your father do?” he asks.

  “I told you not to interrupt.”

  He dips his head. “Sorry.”

  I exhale and stare at the black paint peeling away from the frame of my bunk. “What do you think he did? He followed the Prophet’s orders.”

  “Yes, but how did he appear?”

  “Just . . . the same as always. Like he’d had his insides ripped out and the Prophet’s hand thrust up in his body cavity, like a puppet.”

  “Stunning visual,” he says. “How do you feel about your father now?”

  “I hate him,” I say without pausing.

  His head tips to the side.

  “What?” I demand. “You think I shouldn’t?”

  “No,” he says. “I think you should be angry if you’re angry. But it’s also true that hate has a way of hurting you more than the person you’re hating.”

  He pulls a pad of Post-its from his bag and writes something down. He reaches over and sticks it to the wall behind my bunk.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Starting your affirmation wall.”

  I stare at the letters on the Post-it. I can make out a general sense of words, but can’t understand the entire sentence. “What’s it say?”

  “Anger is a kind of murder you commit in your heart.”

  If this is true, I’m a daily murderer. My heart is more full of blood than I ever imagined.

  “Have you talked to your father since the fire?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “I saw him on the news at his trial.”

  “He will almost certainly be convicted on all charges. He’ll be in prison for a long time.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me? I don’t care what happens to him.”

  “I don’t blame you. He’d be a difficult person to have as a father. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago.”

  I blink.

  “Did he say anything interesting?” I ask. “A revelation that the Lord is reborn in a chicken nugget, maybe?”

  He smiles. “He mostly wanted to quote the Book of Prophecies at me. I got a lesson in the rather interesting Kevinian theory of astronomy, and he showed me dozens of journals filled with scrawl he says was written by the angel Zachari. He thinks his prison food is poisoned. And two days ago he was thrown out the courtroom for disruption.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “While the judge was reading the charges, he started shouting in tongues and writhing on the floor.”

  “What an act.”

  “It won’t help his case.”

  I want to ask, Can you get the death penalty for killing because you’re told to? How does the legal system prosecute someone under the influence of faith, someone who kills because God wants a little death sometimes?

  “He did say one thing I found interesting,” Dr. Wilson says. “He had a message for you.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Are you sure? It might help.”

 
I shake my head, my face contorting as though it doesn’t know whether to laugh or burst into tears. There is nothing, I am confident, nothing my father could say to fix anything.

  “Go on then,” I say.

  “He asked me to tell you how sorry he is. How terribly sorry. For everything that happened.”

  I freeze where I’m sitting, like the moment after a bone is broken when you know the pain is coming but you foolishly hope it won’t. And the full force of the words slams into me. My head begins to shake back and forth, my hair whipping the orange canvas of my jumpsuit. I want so badly to scrub my fingers against my face, to take great fistfuls of my hair and pull until I have a real reason to scream.

  This is what thinking about my father does. Into my head comes the picture of him swinging the hatchet, the picture of the Prophet’s dry lips speaking into his ear. But there’s also the memory of those aluminum benches at the greyhound park, him smiling, leaning forward so his belly thrust out, eyes following the dog wearing the bib labeled lucky number seven. And how he’d rise up off the stands when the dogs neared the finish, dirt flying beneath paws, and my father’s fingers clenched in fists that weren’t for punching but for thrusting into the air when he won.

  More often, he lost. I guess that’s what it comes down to.

  I never knew my father like I knew my mother, hadn’t memorized the curve of his hip with my body, but he meant something to me, down deep. Before the Community, when he railed about his boss, and his face turned florid against his black mustache, I’d sit in my place in the plushest part of the carpet and feel my small world teeter. His voice could do that.

  And then my father stopped gambling and started attending rallies with other men from work. Just drinking with the boys, he called it, though he’d stopped drinking by then. And shaving. He came home with new ideas and the word “Prophet” on his tongue. And soon it was like my father had stepped into a new identity. He wasn’t Sam anymore. He was Deacon Samuel, suddenly sober, suddenly bearded, suddenly righteous.

  My mother became pregnant with Constance, and the house grew quiet with my father’s praying and my mother’s sitting in silent rooms not moving. I thought she was praying, too, but now I wonder if it was something else. The Prophet told us soon after that we were to take the bus to a rest stop, walk into the trees and never return.