The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  One of those days, not long after, we sat beside each other in our tree house, sunlight filtering through the moss of the larch and casting the entire forest in lime-green light. The air was itchy with a tension that neither of us could articulate.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked awkwardly. “And don’t tell me it don’t matter.”

  His face was almost empty, staring off into some other time. His eyes shifted on to mine and stared deep. “My momma.”

  “You don’t talk about her much,” I said.

  “She said the stars were souls, and every time someone dies, a new star gets put up there in the heavens. I look up there, look and look, but I never see her.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was wonderful,” he said. “On days like this, she’d order me outta the house to do something productive, pick a pail of berries. She’d say ‘You’re in my way and I have a house to clean!’ but I knew she weren’t serious because there was a smile in her eyes. And because, by the time I came back with the berries, she’d always have a piecrust ready.”

  “She sounds like a nice mother.”

  “She was,” Jude croaked. Tears were standing in his eyes now.

  “Then she got so sick. She started holding the top of her belly, where her ribs ended, and she would press down hard until the pain passed. She kept a plastic pail near her bed, and she’d spit out mouthfuls of yellow stuff, saying I’m sorry’ every time, like she could help it.

  “My daddy was drinking bad by then. He couldn’t stand to see her in that kinda pain, but he never cried in front of her. He’d go upstairs to the little attic space there and howl and drink, and downstairs both of us could hear him. I asked him to take her to a hospital but our old truck had broken down and we didn’t have no way to get her down the mountain. My daddy told me he and my momma made the choice when they moved here to go without things like hospitals. Over time, it was like we all realized, one by one, that she was gonna die. My momma knew before any of us. And I figured it out last.

  “But, my momma wouldn’t die. She kept getting worse and worse, and with every turn I’d think this couldn’t be life anymore because it looked so much like death. I spent every day working on the truck without knowing how to fix it. I took each part out and cleaned it and saw that everything was plugged in right but the engine would never budge when I turned the key. When I finally fixed it, it was too late. It was just a little silver cap I needed. My momma died cause of one little piece of silver. It makes me so mad sometimes I just wanna take off running and never stop.

  “One morning, my daddy came out back to the truck where I was working. He put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘Son, it’s time for you to do a man’s job.’ He’d been crying and drinking. I could tell because his face was red and his eyes were red. And before he even explained, I knew what he meant. I started running. I turned around and whipped the wrench at him, but it only bounced offa the ground, and he was already doubled over with his hands on his knees. Crying or puking, I couldn’t see.

  “I spent two days out in the wild. I never went farther’n the farthest place I’d ever gone. I just couldn’t make myself push past it, to the south, where a big stand of aspens grows. I looked out at those aspens, wanting so badly to lie down in the little hollow between ’em and stare at the stars. But I couldn’t. I walked the entire night, and by the time I woke up the next morning, I knew. I knew what I’d do.”

  Jude’s entire body was convulsing with sobs. His speech dribbled out of his mouth with the force of an unstoppable river. I didn’t know any other way to stop him so I covered his mouth with my hand. He brushed it away.

  “I walked back the next day, slow as I could, until I stood in front of the door, and walked in, and picked my daddy’s shotgun up from where it was leaning against the wall. My mother saw me, and she closed her eyes and breathed in, then looked up at me and nodded. I plugged two cartridges in, and put the barrels to her head, and—and I pulled the trigger.” His face was screwed up tight but somehow tears still seeped out.

  “I kilt her, Minnow. I kilt her and she’s dead because of me.”

  This time, I covered his mouth with my mouth, and it worked. He gasped like he’d had an epiphany. He looked at me with his mouth open, his eyes open. In that moment, the tension broke. We both felt it, the rush of it leaving us, and no longer was there tentativeness. There was immediacy and hunger. He reached over and kissed me hard, a first clumsy kiss, a first step in a different direction. And I understood what had been holding us back. We were no longer children with children’s bodies and children’s thoughts. We wanted more from each other.

  Undaunted now, I touched his wet cheeks with my fingertips, brushed them with the back of my hand. His hands tumbled beneath my bonnet and into the dense braided hair, fell to the thick parts of my waist, squeezing me there over the walls of my dress.

  For years, we had stood on opposite sides of a divide, calling across because we could never jump the distance. This was the moment we discovered that, if we both shifted our weight forward, if we abandoned our fear of the drop below, not looking down, we could touch the tips of our fingers together. And though it wasn’t much, in that moment, it was enough. We stepped headlong into a new place where we knew there was something other than good daughters and sons inside us. Because for the first time, somebody bothered to tell me why they were in pain. Everybody around me was in pain, I realize now, but none of them ever poured it out of themselves into another person.

  Jude taught me what love was: to be willing to hold on to another person’s pain. That’s it.

  Chapter 38

  After every reading class, I stay behind in Miss Bailey’s classroom. This is normally her lunch period, but she says she doesn’t mind giving it up to help me with my reading. We’ve moved up to real books, slim ones with illustrations, and mostly she just sits in her rocking chair, chewing a sandwich and listening to me fight my way through a story, which for the past week has been about a pig named Wilbur who becomes friends with a spider.

  I put down the book, suddenly exhausted.

  “What is it?” Miss Bailey asks.

  “They used to tell us in my—in my church,” I say, remembering how she doesn’t want to know anything about our pasts. “They told us that if an animal ever talked, that was a sign it was infected by the Devil.”

  Miss Bailey uncrosses her legs and sits up straighter. “Really?”

  “Every morning, after I woke up, I had to walk behind my house to the barn and look each goat in the eye and ask them ‘Are you the Devil upon this Earth?’ And if they didn’t reply, I could milk them and know that drinking their milk wouldn’t give the Devil a foothold in our minds.”

  She considers this. “Do you suppose Wilbur’s possessed by the Devil?”

  I look at her face to see if she’s making fun of me, but she looks serious.

  “No,” I say.

  “Me neither,” she says. “You know, when I was little, my dad told me that if I misbehaved, he’d send me to live with a witch who ate children.”

  “Really?”

  She nods. “I was so afraid of the witch. Feelings are magnified when you’re that young, I think, and the fear can stay with you for a long time. I eventually grew out of the fear but even now when I read something with a witch, my mind always traces back to that story. Isn’t that weird?”

  “How’d you grow out of it?” I ask. “The fear.”

  She takes a long moment to answer. “I read lots and lots of books about witches.”

  • • •

  The next day, when the bell rings for rec time, I pace downstairs to the jail library.

  I roam around the stacks for a while before Ms. Fitzgerald, the twiggy librarian with a mess of caramel curls, asks me if I need anything.

  “Can I check out a book?” I ask.

  “That
’s what this place is here for,” Ms. Fitzgerald says. “What book?”

  I tell her I’m not sure, but I describe the type of thing I’m looking for, the words I’ve practiced in my head since my session with Miss Bailey.

  “Yes, I can probably find you something,” she says. I walk behind her around the shelves as she pulls out copies of the Koran and the Book of Mormon and the Bible. She takes me to the science-fiction section and scans the rows before pulling down a few more books, frayed paperbacks, then to the poetry section, and finally into the dusty nonfiction corner that looks like it never gets used.

  “There’s more than one place to find answers,” Ms. Fitzgerald says, unloading the stack into my outstretched arms.

  She lets me check them out even though I have more than the permitted three titles in my stack, and I sit at a large wooden library table, sliding my stump over the pages, trying to sound out the difficult words. On one of the very, very thin pages, I read something that stands out.

  “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

  In the back of my mind, it occurs to me that this is something Dr. Wilson might say. And in that moment, he is all I can think about, how he’s been gone for weeks, how I think the reason he must’ve come to Montana was to escape something in Washington, DC, something he lost.

  I traverse the packed brown carpet and sit at a computer. Its face is blank and frightening, like the computer from reading class. I raise my arm in the air. Ms. Fitzgerald approaches.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “I want to research a death,” I say.

  “Like a historical death?” she asks.

  “No, something more recent.”

  “All right,” she says, drawing out the first syllable. “Whose death?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Can you just open up the Internet?”

  “Have you ever used a computer before?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “You should spend some rec time here,” she says. “I can get you computer literate in no time.”

  “I’m barely even regular literate,” I say. “Now can you push the buttons for me?”

  She grabs the mouse and opens an Internet box.

  “What do you want to search?” she asks.

  “I got it,” I say, taking a pencil in my mouth, lead-end in. With the eraser, I type all the words I can think of that might confirm my suspicion: “Dr. Wilson” and “Washington, DC” and “death.” For good measure, I throw in “wife or son or daughter or maybe parent?” Ms. Fitzgerald fixes my spelling and pushes the search button. About a billion results come up. I scan the page and see results about local news events in Washington, DC: murders, car crashes, home accidents. I make Ms. Fitzgerald click on a bunch of links, but nothing adds up.

  “Can I ask why you’re searching this?” she asks.

  “I just have a feeling about something,” I say. “Just a feeling that something happened, and I wanna know what.”

  “Well, your search terms are too broad. You need a full name or a year at least.”

  I nod, leaning forward to press the pencil into the delete key.

  • • •

  When I get back to the cell, I go to set my stack of books on my bunk but trip over something on the ground. Angel’s binder. I step around it but see a stapled packet of papers protruding from the top. “The Bridge Program” it reads. With a toe, I push the paper free of the cover.

  It’s the application that the girls have been working on. It’s turned to the essay questions. “Why do you think you are a deserving candidate for acceptance to the Bridge Program?” I kneel down and budge the letters with my mind until they form words.

  I’ve been through a lot. You only have to Google me to confirm this. And I could make a list of every sad thing that’s happened to me as a case for why I deserve something better, but my guess is you’ve already read plenty of entries like that. I’m not like that, anyway. I try not to dwell too much on the bad that happened to me growing up, in the past. So I’m going to tell you a little about my future. It is beautiful. I write books and get degrees and get married and have babies and go on to do a million other wonderful things that I haven’t even thought up yet. I am deserving because even after everything, I’m still hopeful. The people who hurt me couldn’t kill my spirit. I’m dreaming still. See me, right now? Dreaming. And, given everything, that’s pretty wonderful.

  So that’s why I’m deserving. Not because I need your help. But because I am going to make it with or without anybody’s help.

  My knees are indented from the grated metal floor by the time I finish reading. I have to run my eyes over the paper several times to understand, sounding out difficult words like Miss Bailey taught me, watching them sit in the air strangely. It doesn’t make sense. Angel told me she wasn’t going to apply. She said she stood a better chance of winning the Nobel Prize. I guess she changed her mind. Maybe she figured it couldn’t hurt to apply.

  I pull my lip inside my mouth and wonder, Why, then, don’t I give it a try?

  Sifting out the answer is like looking directly into a bright light I’ve been ignoring. It’s just that I don’t think I could tolerate answering those questions, opening myself up the way some girls do with sneaked-in razor blades and the metal edges of rulers, a thousand small wounds that might end me.

  I look up from the essay and flinch so hard, my front teeth nip my lip painfully. Angel stands on the other side of the barred door, watching me. The door buzzes and she walks calmly inside, picking up her binder and throwing it onto her bed. She takes the essay from me and doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t move to climb to her bunk like she normally does, doesn’t reach for a book. She stands there, looming above me.

  She nods at the Bible on the top of the stack of books on my bed. “What are you doing with that?”

  I swallow. “I checked it out.”

  “So you’ve gone and done it,” she says. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “You obviously have!” she shouts. She holds up her hands, suddenly furious. Her eyes are shiny and she blinks a few times. “I thought you were different, but you’re just like the rest of them.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.” She points to the Post-it on my affirmation wall. “Anger is a kind of murder you commit in your heart. See? You’re starting already.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “That was Jesus who said that.”

  I look from the Post-it to her. Her cheeks are framed with palm-size patches of redness.

  “Angel, I’ve read exactly one line of this Bible. And you know what? I liked that line. In fact, maybe I’ll read more.” I lift the Bible and pantomime reading. “Oh, now interesting! This is soooo much better than science. Evolution is wrong! Praise the Lord!”

  Angel’s face twists into the start of a smile. “No, fuck you, you’re not going to make me laugh.”

  “Just listen to this, Angel. ‘Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.’ Isn’t that interesting? I think it is. You can think something’s interesting without drinking the lemonade.”

  “Kool-Aid.”

  “Whatever.”

  She sits opposite me against the wall. “I guess.”

  Farther down the skyway, I can hear the faint voices of Rashida and Tracy arguing over a game of Old Maid in their cell. “I went to youth group, too.”

  Angel looks up. “Are you trying to make me disown you?”

  “I’m not ashamed,” I say. “It’s not as bad as you make it out to be. They’re just looking for answers.”

  “Are you going back there?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But probably not.”

&
nbsp; “Why?”

  “They’re not looking for the same answers as me.”

  She nods slowly. “You know why I really hate Tracy? She’s just as fucked up as the rest of us, but she hides behind religion, like that somehow erases the fact that she knifed her English teacher’s wife.”

  “She did?” I ask.

  Angel nods. “Tracy looks sweet as pie, but behind that face, she’s all kinda crazy-ass. She had a crush on her teacher and when she saw him in the school parking lot with his wife one day, she went ape shit. The lady almost died.”

  “But we’ve all done stuff, Angel,” I say, picturing the pool of blood steaming in the air around Philip Lancaster’s body. “I heard this girl Taylor tell a story during youth group. She said she had an epiphany during surgery. That she felt God. And I just think, as long as I live, I’ll never feel as sure as her about anything.” I rest my chin on my knee. “I know what you say about the Christian girls, but she believed it was true. She was so sure.”

  “Yeah, I heard that story before. Gets all kindsa mileage with the Jesus Freaks. Personally, I think it’s bull. Those blind-but-now-I-see moments, miracles, all those things you see on the news about the Virgin Mary on toast, I don’t got time for that shit. There’s no easy explanations for nothing in the world.”

  “Religion’s not necessarily easy.”

  “It is, though, because if there’s ever any errors, you can blame it on having faith. ‘Oh yeah, according to carbon dating the Earth’s older than four thousand years, unlike what the Bible says, but we’ll ignore that because we just have faith.’”

  “Not everyone who’s religious talks like that,” I say.

  “Like what?”

  “All nasally.”

  “Well, they do in my head,” Angel says.

  “You hear a lot of things in your head, don’t you?”

  She lets a little grin touch her mouth and runs her long fingernails over the gaps between her cornrows. “If God is real,” she says, “he’s part of science. But he’s never shown up. He’s like a deadbeat dad you wait for all day after T-ball practice. He’s not in DNA. Not in the Large Hadron Collider. Not in thousands of years of fossils. Not a shadow of him. But if he ever does show up, it’ll be science’s job to explain him. Until then, we deal with what we’ve got in front of us.”