The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  “Will you teach me to read, Jude?” I asked one day in our second winter. I sat huddled inside a blanket we left in the tree house for chill afternoons like this. Jude had brought his mother’s Bible up to the tree house to show me where she’d written her name in curly pencil when she was twelve, and I held the thick, frayed book in my hands like it was made of precious metal. It had been years since I’d touched a book.

  “Teach you to read?” Jude looked up from where he was picking at the strings of his guitar. “What do you wanna learn that for? Don’t do me no good.”

  “I dunno,” I said. “Might come in handy. And I could read your Bible.”

  He stopped strumming. “I’m starting to think I don’t really like what’s in that book, besides my momma’s name. My daddy always talks from it when he’s angry, wickedness, damnation, sinning. Sometimes I think there ain’t no right way to live in this world, least not in my daddy’s view.”

  “Then teach me to sing,” I said.

  “What do you wanna sing?”

  “The first song you sang me.”

  “‘Ain’t We Got Fun’?”

  I nodded. “Your mother taught you it, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, strumming. “She was the prettiest singer.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked, then bit my lip. Jude’s brow furrowed a fraction and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. He never talked about her. She was dead, that I knew, but of what Jude never said.

  “Here,” he said. “Sit next to me.” He patted the floorboards near him.

  I stood and swung my legs over the side of the tree house and let the large skirt of my dress cascade down.

  “Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun?” he sang.

  I repeated him in a wobbly, high voice.

  “Not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun? The rent’s unpaid dear, we haven’t a bus, but smiles are made dear, for people like us.”

  “Why do they need a bus?” I interrupted. “Most people in town drive cars.”

  He paused. “Maybe they have a lot of kids.”

  “Maybe they’re Kevinians.”

  He laughed, and I startled. I’d never made anyone laugh before. The sound echoed out to where the forest sloped away toward the east. The sky was different there. Paler, as though it reflected light from a city. Below, I could see two sets of footprints in the snow, each coming from a different direction.

  “Play something,” I said.

  “All right. You gotta help though. Put your hand there.”

  I curved my fingers over the guitar’s neck and moved my fingers around to make different sounds. It was tight in the opening, and Jude had to prop his left hand behind him, picking at the strings with his right. At one point, Jude rested his left hand lightly on my rib cage. Each of his fingertips touched a different rib. Unconsciously, he pressed down with his fingers, as though he was still playing the guitar.

  I’d never been touched by a boy, not like this. Girls were discouraged from even sharing eye contact with the opposite sex. Physical affection was the domain of the Devil. Badness has a way of slipping between skin, easy, like badness does. This, right here, the warmth from his hand penetrating the navy thickness of my dress, my hip grazing his, was enough to damn me for eternity.

  It was worth it.

  Chapter 36

  Someday I’ll forget everything about juvie, but I’ll never forget the permeating grease smell of the place, recalling the thousands of onions and chicken nuggets that have been fried to death here, or the dull fluorescent glow of the classrooms and the teachers who flinch whenever one of the girls moves too quickly, or the movies on Wednesday afternoons in the cafeteria for those of us who earn the extra rec time. I’m quiet during these movies, the black-and-white ones preferred by the warden, probably because they present such unambiguous models for female behavior. A guard will tuck the first celluloid frame into the projector and hit the lights and just like that every girl in the room isn’t in jail anymore. They’re inside a dance hall or a Southern mansion or Oz. It’s a pleasure, always, to observe these pockmarked girls in orange jumpsuits lit up by the wide, expressive face of Orson Welles as he holds ice to the broken tooth of a girl he aims to marry. I can’t get enough of the girls’ faces in those moments, their eyes hollowed out by the film’s shadows.

  My entire life has been an experiment in tolerating the unimaginable. I’ve even gotten used to juvie, my body regulated to synthetic food made in factories and pressed together by machines in uniform shapes and sizes, gotten used to the constant reminder of what got me here, that green-eyed boy, that frozen winter night. And, after a time, I’ve even grown used to the missing hands, as much as I can. But I’ll never get used to the uncertainty.

  After the hands, after I stopped believing in God, or at least stopped believing that I could ever believe in God again, I also stopped praying. I realized my head had been inflated with prayers, and they always looked like:

  Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please.

  Who else on Earth would I beg to so shamelessly? Please stop the winter, my toes are numb. Please give Mabel an easy birthing. Please take away the terrible smell of Mabel’s birthing from the kitchen. Please give me a new pair of boots, my old ones pinch. Please make Jude love me forever and ever.

  Even so amen.

  Why did it never occur to me that anyone would get tired of hearing that after so many years? Now that I’ve stopped asking, I can tell I’d been going about it the wrong way all along. The space in my head where prayer used to live is filled with questions now. Some of them I’ve asked myself my entire life, only now they’re not content to go unanswered, instead beating the inside of my skull like an angry drum.

  And that’s why, after breakfast, when Angel leaves for her counseling session, I don’t go back to my cell. I walk down to the classroom corridor and find a yellow door, a piece of paper thumbtacked to the surface. I know I’m in the right place because the only thing on the paper is a large markered cross.

  The youth group meets in a blank room with plastic chairs tossed in a misshapen ring around a small multicolored braided rug. Of the twenty chairs, probably half are occupied.

  I only know three of the girls, Rashida, who’s sitting near the front next to Tracy, singing a ballad in a high-pitched whiny voice, her arms swinging back and forth at her sides like she’s running; and Wendy, who sits by herself with her ankles linked together. Tracy bounces up when she sees me.

  “Hi, Minnow!” she says. “It’s great to see you again. I’m so glad you decided to visit youth group. Why don’t you join us in the circle?”

  I sit between an athletic-looking girl with the cuffs of her jumpsuit rolled to the knee and Wendy, who I notice, even though she’s sitting still, wheezes a little at the back of her throat. The girl on the other side takes a look at my Velcro shoes and shifts over slightly.

  “Minnow,” Tracy says, folding her hands in her lap. “Tell us about what brought you to youth group.”

  “I just wanted t
o see,” I say, my cheeks flushing uncomfortably. “See what it was like.”

  “That’s great,” Tracy says. “Why don’t we all start by introducing ourselves?”

  The girls go around the room, sharing their names and their denominations. Some of them have been religious since birth and others found it in jail.

  “Isn’t there a pastor?” I ask, when they’ve gone around the circle.

  Tracy shakes her head. “We used to have a pastor, but he was called to do mission work in Burma. He’s doing great things there, and I’m certain all those little dying children needed him more than we did. Since then, we lead our own sessions. We read passages of scripture and discuss it, and we talk about the things we’re going through.”

  “How do you know if you’re doing it right without a pastor?” I ask.

  “Any questions we have, we consult the Bible.”

  “How—” I start to ask, but stumble on my words.

  “How do we know if the Bible’s right?” Tracy asks.

  “Never mind.”

  “No, no, it’s a valid question. Girls, what can we say to put Minnow’s mind at ease?”

  Tracy looks pointedly at Rashida who’s gnawing on a cuticle. Rashida shrugs and shakes her head.

  Next to me, Wendy leans forward and takes a big gulp of breath. “Tell her about your surgery, Taylor.”

  A small freckled girl with jittery muscles almost jumps out of her seat. “Yeah, yeah,” she says. “When I was fourteen, they found a brain tumor in me. I had to have, like, three surgeries to remove it. And during the last one, I felt the presence of God. His grace. And, after that, I knew I’d never have to question Him again.”

  “You really felt it?” I ask. “How do you know for sure?”

  “I just knew,” she says, tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear. “It felt like . . . sunlight. Like warmth.”

  “But . . .” I say, and even as the words come out, I know I should stop them. “Don’t you want proof? The light could’ve been a surgical lamp. The warmth could have been you pissing yourself; that happens during surgery.”

  Taylor’s face falls a fraction. “I guess I choose not to think that way. I’m an optimistic person. Why, do you think I’m lying?”

  “No,” I say, eyes darting to the side. “But I can’t believe in something I don’t know for sure.”

  “Well,” Tracy interjects from across the circle, “how do you know anything is real? I mean, Minnow, picture the most real thing you can think of. How do you know it actually happened? How do you know for sure?”

  Of course it’s Jude I think of. How can I prove he ever even existed? If I had my hands, I’d look at my palm where I had a scar from when he taught me how to whittle a fallen branch into something beautiful like he could. I spent an hour on a whittled sculpture of him but before I was done, the knife slipped over the smooth surface of wood and sliced the meat of my hand, and blood dropped over his wooden face. Jude propped the sculpture on the tree house windowsill. “It’s like you’re a part of me now,” he said. “That seems right.”

  But the hands are gone, and with them that scar and any proof I ever knew him.

  I look back at Tracy. “I guess the answer is you just do,” I say finally.

  “I think so, too,” Tracy says.

  She clears her throat and looks over at the others. “Girls,” she says to the group, “in honor of our new member, I think we should go around the room and tell one another what made us believers. Wendy, you want to start?”

  Tracy turns to Wendy, whose wheezing noise halts for a moment. “I never thought anything about God until Tracy talked to me on my first day here. She said, ‘Wendy, you may not believe in God, but God believes in you.’”

  The room grows silent. “That’s it?” I ask.

  Tracy darts me a look. “Thanks, Wendy. That’s really helpful. Rashida, want to share your story?”

  Rashida’s eyes twitch toward the ceiling, as if considering. “I just think it don’t make sense not to believe in God. If I believed and He turned out to be fake, how am I gonna know that after I’m dead? I’ll be stuck in the ground with nothing on my mind except there better not be any worms trying to get inside my coffin. But if I didn’t believe and He’s actually real, well then I just got myself a life sentence in Hades with, like, fire pokers jabbing my ass and having to sit in a Jacuzzi of boiling oil with Hitler and shit, and you are crazy if you think I’ll be putting up with that kind of treatment for the rest of time, no sir. This bitch is going to heaven.”

  Rashida claps her hands and sways in her chair, singing, “This bitch is going to heaven,” on a loop.

  “Well, compared with Rashida and Taylor, mine is going to sound super-lame,” Tracy says. “There was this moment when I was really young. I was just reading the Bible one day at my family’s horse ranch. I picked it up just like now.” She opens the Bible next to her and bends the cover back to the first page. “And I read the first line. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And God said “Let there be light.”’” Tracy pauses, casting her eyes around the circle emphatically. “‘And there was light.’”

  She darts an expectant look at me. Beside her, Rashida is still singing “This bitch is going to heaven.”

  “Yeah?” I ask.

  “You don’t see?” she asks, and when I don’t reply she shakes her head, her bangs whisking across her forehead in frustration. “I just realized, for the first time, how . . . beautiful it is. That everything in the universe was created in that one moment. Everything we are, everything that’s ever been and ever will be. Isn’t that amazing?”

  She’s looking at me a little uneasily, as though she knows I can’t picture it the exact way she does, can’t accept the eye blink of God creating the heavens and the earth and the creatures of the land and sky. And I’m about to tell her so when, in the next moment, I’m thinking of Taylor’s story, and Wendy’s, and Rashida’s.

  Maybe the amazing thing is the fact that they can believe, even in here, even when there’s no reason they should be able to.

  “Yeah, Tracy,” I say finally. “I think it is.”

  Chapter 37

  I talked with Jude about everything, but some things didn’t really translate. It was the first time I realized that two people could speak the same words and each get very different images coming into their minds. I stopped telling Jude about the Community at a point. He didn’t speak that language, and I didn’t speak his. We had to invent a new language together, one that didn’t have words for everything. When we talked, we navigated around those big ideas that didn’t feel right on our tongues. At least for a time.

  Once, the summer we turned sixteen, on a night bright with constellations, Jude and I stared at the sky from the tree house, not speaking, thinking our separate thoughts that terrified us. When I glanced at him, an unconscious folded bit of skin had settled between his eyes. He had begun to wear that face more and more. The stars did that to him, but he couldn’t look away.

  “What are you thinking about when you look up at the sky like that?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Come on, tell me,” I said. “I know you’re looking at something up there. Is it the stars? The moon?”

  “It don’t matter,” he said.

  Something had changed between us, the language of our childhood no longer fitting our mouths the way it used to. Our bodies had grown. The tree house no longer accommodated us at our full heights, and with every season the walls seemed closer together. We were sixteen and we didn’t know how to navigate each other anymore. We no longer ran through the woods together, unconscious and loose-limbed. We were awkward, never touching, always making sure to sit inches apart.

  “Jude, what do you suppose the stars are?”

 
; He tilted his head toward me. “What?”

  “The stars,” I repeated restlessly. “What are they, really? Sometimes the Prophet says they’re God’s eyes in a giant dark canvas, but other times he says that outer space goes on farther than our minds can picture, and the stars are each a fern-filled heaven waiting for us the moment we die, but he never answers which is which, and you get in trouble when you ask.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I never learned things like that.”

  “Neither did I, and that’s what drives me crazy. I wanna know things. I wanna know everything. But it’s like asking questions to a tree stump. There’s never anyone answering back.”

  “I can answer anything you need answered.”

  “But what if you can’t?”

  “Then it ain’t worth knowing.”

  I crossed my arms and looked away.

  “Look,” he said, a small huff in the back of his throat, “I can tell you about what kinds of rabbits make that chittering noise you hear sometimes at night, and how many fire ants’ blood is enough poison to bring down a squirrel. I can tell you how old this tree is, and how many strokes it’d take to chop it down. So,” he asked, “what do you wanna know about?”

  “Who put them here?” I ask. “Was it God? Did He do it the same time He placed all those lights up there in the heavens?”

  “The stars again?” He shook his head. “Why do you care? What difference does it make to your life?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “The stars . . . they matter to me.”

  Moments like this occurred more and more frequently, and I think that was the biggest difference between us. That we could look at the same stars in the same sky, but not have the same questions. Not want the same answers.