The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  I look at what’s in front of me. A blinding prison jumpsuit. Arms with no hands. Angel.

  My head jerks up. “Then teach me.”

  “What?” she asks.

  “Teach me about the universe.”

  • • •

  Angel moves around the cell excitedly, drawing up book lists and websites I need to visit.

  “During your next rec time, you’ll check out the complete works of Carl Sagan.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Only my personal hero. If he were alive today, and like way younger, I’d walk to his laboratory and get down on one knee and propose marriage right there. I’m serious. You’ll understand when you read him. And oh! I can show you his documentaries online. I hope you like turtlenecks.”

  We’re stuck in our cell for the night, but Angel gives me a lecture on the Big Bang, how one moment there was nothing and the next there was an explosion of red-hot radiation that roiled out in every direction and took millions of years to cool, to form stars, to form planets, to form the animals of the earth.

  “And everything we are,” Angel says at the end, “every organism, everything the universe is, comes down to that one moment. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Yeah.” I smile. “Amazing.”

  Chapter 39

  The next day, when the bell rings for afternoon classes and I walk to Reading Is Power with the other girls in my class, we wait in a line in the carpeted hall while the previous class packs up and files out of the classroom. They line up against the opposite wall, gripping their binders and talking in low voices. Behind me, Rashida rattles on about a show she was watching during rec time and I nod along, half listening, because I spot Tracy in the other line, face buried in her tiny Book of Psalms.

  “Hey,” someone whispers from behind her. “Bible girl.” I glance down the line and see Krystal, her dark hair up in a tight ponytail and her fingernails newly lacquered in neon teal. Her eyes are locked on Tracy.

  “What?” Tracy whispers back.

  “Are you?” Krystal asks, holding her fingers up in a circle.

  “Am I what?”

  Krystal laughs, shoving her hand in her jumpsuit pocket. “What are you doing later?”

  “Homework,” Tracy says, “then some Bible study.”

  “Maybe we could get together,” Krystal says. “I could help you study that Bible.”

  “Really?” Tracy asks, her eyes turning bright.

  The other girls are watching this exchange curiously, some with trepidation stamped on their faces, but none of them say a word. Inside the classroom, Miss Bailey is talking to a student from the other class.

  Krystal sidles up to Tracy and places a hand on her shoulder, and I recall the solid feeling of her hand on my arm in the TV room, how it made my stomach squirm, but Tracy doesn’t seem to notice. “You should really come to youth group—”

  “Leave her alone,” I say, taking a step over the hard carpet.

  “What are you doing?” Rashida whispers behind me, and I can’t answer her because I don’t know what I’m doing, only that I am almost definitely making a terrible mistake.

  Krystal turns her head, taking a step toward me. “What did you say?” Her brows are high on her forehead, her face overwhelmed by Crayon yellow circles under her eyes.

  “I said, leave her alone. She didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Minnow, it’s fine,” Tracy says, her fingers absently playing at the tiny cross on her neck. “Nothing’s the matter.”

  “Yeah, Minnow,” Krystal says, imitating Tracy’s high voice. “We’re just having fun.” With the pads of her fingers, she pushes me in the chest and I stumble backward. The girls on either side of me shift their weight agitatedly.

  “Why don’t you go have fun with someone your own size,” I say. “Benny, for instance.”

  Krystal shakes her head. “What are you doing?” she asks. “You keep saying things like that, you keep getting in my way, I’ll be forced to deal with you.” She glances at my stumps. “And you’re not gonna win.”

  My chest starts to ache with the same adrenaline feeling from the night under the bridge, like my heart has morphed to the size of a small engine, and I’m suddenly running off something more powerful than blood. “If you think I’m gonna stand here and let you—if you think for even a second I’ll let you hurt any of them—”

  Very slowly, Krystal reaches a hand inside her pocket. She pulls out something long, off-white, and devilish. It hangs from her fist, limp as a dead rabbit.

  “Lock sock,” I hear the girls whisper. “Lock sock.”

  I put the words together slowly, the knotted tube sock, the sure outline of a metal combination lock in the bottom. Krystal starts to swirl the lock sock in front of her.

  “You don’t have your trained gorilla here to fight for you. You better step back,” Krystal says.

  Instead, I take a fumbling step toward her. I think about what Angel would do. I walk the remaining few feet between us.

  “Don’t mess with me, Krystal. I got Velcro shoes and you know what that means. I’m crazy,” I breathe these last words because my lungs are shuddering. “I won’t hesitate fucking you up. My charge is assault, not conspiracy to commit like you, pansy ass.”

  Krystal’s face stretches, livid. “I will kill you, hooker,” she screams, but beneath it, her voice quavers and in her face, for the first time, I see the unconscious tightness of the skin beneath her eyes. She’s afraid, and it almost knocks me backward. The feeling isn’t anything like what I imagined.

  She launches herself at me, lifting her shoulder and whipping the lock sock like a mace to bring down on my head. I stumble backward, my arms flying over my head.

  I can feel Benny’s footfalls before I see her as she charges into the hall. She grabs Krystal by the wrists, flipping her easily onto the carpeted ground with a thunk.

  Chapter 40

  Krystal and I are given three days in solitary confinement, soft-walled cells on the lower level with a slat for food and a rimless toilet so there’s never any reason to leave. As they march me down, I protest that I’m blameless but it does no good. The heavy metal door has only one window that the guards can watch me through, but it stays closed most of the time.

  The fluorescent ceiling lights give no indication of time passing. Girls go nuts in these cells, in the silence, the aloneness. The pull to replay moments from the past is impossible to resist. I keep thinking on a space of seconds after the verdict was read at my trial: my head bowed, sobbing, the courtroom disassembling into a teeming mess of jurors departing and journalists talking into voice recorders and mostly people just trying to get out of the stuffy wood-paneled room. And the part that makes the least sense, Philip Lancaster breaking every court precaution by stepping past the witness barrier and up to my table.

  “Hrrrrre,” I heard him say in a muffled voice.

  He stood above me, his ordinary eyes blinking down.

  “Tkk de Klllnxx,” he said. Through his lips, I could see the wires that kept his jaws closed. I glanced down to the table where he nudged a box of Kleenex toward me.

  I shook my head. “I can’t,” I said, holding up my stumps.

  He nodded and dragged a tissue from the box. He bent over the table and reached his hand toward my tear-stained face. With the tissue, he brushed away the tears. Small strokes, like a painter.

  “Bbbttrr?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Better.”

  I made a mistake, I wanted to say. I wouldn’t do it again, but before I could open my mouth, a police officer was leading me by the shoulder out of the courtroom to a waiting cop car.

  I replay the scene again and again, the broken mashed-up face looming over me, the knowledge between the two of us that I’d done it. That act of kindness is still more unfathomable to me than any cruelty.

&n
bsp; I sit in the middle of the padded cream-colored floor, rocking on my crossed legs. I can’t let this cell make me crazy. If I’ve learned anything, it’s how to be confined. I have to shake Philip out of my head. I have to go someplace else.

  The only place to go is to Jude, to a night the autumn I turned seventeen, the autumn I lost my hands, before everything changed. By then, there was nothing between us but a mile of dim-lit forest and October cold that numbed our breath when we kissed. I’d told Jude everything by then. I’d told him about my fear of marriage, how I’d once walked in on my father and one of his wives in their cloister, his hair-covered back, the black soles of their feet pushed out the end of the blanket.

  I’d told him how scared I was for my sister Constance, the way she commanded every eye in a room even though she was only twelve. How the men already whispered about what a fine wife she’d be, the way nobody’d ever whispered about me.

  I’d told him how fiercely I dreamed of meeting God. How I imagined him, a boy our age, walking down a street in a city or plowing a field or going to school. He could look like anything. The only certain things were his name—Charlie—and his brilliant green eyes. Jude just nodded, kissed the bend between my thumb and forefinger.

  One night that autumn, I sat on the porch outside the Prophet Hall, leaning back on my elbows. Inside, the Prophet had been preaching for hours and the Community breathed countless lungs’ worth of hot breath, until the place was suffocating and stifling and I had to step out. The night air was cool and smelled like browning leaves. Past the walls of trees, stars dotted the sky. My mind searched for a star with a greenish cast, one that might be a window to the place everybody goes when they die.

  In the forest in front of me, two stars stared back. It took a moment to realize they were Jude’s eyes, reflected off the candlelight from the Prophet Hall.

  I ran to the forest’s edge. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know. My daddy’s been drinking,” he said worriedly.

  He explained how his father was tearing through the house like a madman and he had run away, like he always did when his father lost control. I could tell he was afraid, but not for the immediate future. Not for that night. He was afraid for the rest of his life. That it would always be like this, living in that cabin with his father going slowly decrepit from homemade alcohol, getting meaner. I knew because it was the same fear I felt every day. Fear of being stuck in a place forever.

  I walked with Jude to our tree house. We held hands and didn’t speak. I felt like he must’ve been able to hear my heartbeat in my palm. When we were inside, I guided his shaking hand to the front of my dress where he fumbled to undo the row of buttons, hundreds of little blue buttons. I stepped out of the dress, and it sat up, stiff, almost like a person, the shape of a good Kevinian girl.

  The thought crossed my mind that Jude and I were doing something completely original, something no one had ever done before. It never occurred to me that this was the same thing girls waited under the covers for on their wedding nights, the thing the old men did with their wives to make children. This couldn’t be the same. This was as far removed from that world as was possible to get.

  The moon was broad and huge above me, cutting a path through the forest as I walked back to the Community. I didn’t worry that my buttons were done up crooked, that my hair was unbraided beneath my bonnet, because my body was humming with light, filled with a quaking that stretched to my fingertips. My heart thudded in my chest like it’d suddenly changed form, like it’d become something much sturdier that made a different kind of tick, and I realized this was the first time I ever felt meaningful. Like I might have something big and real and important inside of me that couldn’t be killed. If it’s possible to have a soul, mine was steel-plated and invincible that night, and I think that’s what love does, makes you strong. Makes you think nothing can bring you down.

  It’s the only kind of lie that I’d be happy to live with.

  Chapter 41

  The buzz of the unlocking door startles me out of the memory. I jerk up and open my eyes, taking a moment to remember where I am, the cushioned ground, the never-ending fluorescent sky.

  In the doorway is the silhouette of a man. For a moment, in my haze, I think it’s Jude, but the man takes a few steps into the room in his shined shoes, places a stool on the ground, and I can see it’s Dr. Wilson. He smiles as though nothing had ever happened.

  “Let’s talk about prophecies,” he says.

  “What the hell?” I ask groggily. “You were gone for weeks.”

  “So? We didn’t have a schedule.”

  “But I didn’t think you were coming back,” I say. “Mrs. New said some case manager was deciding if you’d still be my counselor.”

  “Did she?” he asks, eyes scanning his yellow notepad. “How interesting.”

  “So you’re still my counselor?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “What have you been doing all this time?” I ask.

  “Research.”

  “Researching what?”

  “What I said. Prophecies.”

  From his bag, he extracts a book. Its cover is a large piece of purple construction paper folded over a half ream of computer paper and stitched down the side with twine.

  “The Book of Prophecies,” I whisper, a little leftover reverence in my voice.

  He flips through it, revealing paragraphs of the Prophet’s even printing. It smells of pine, like everything in the Community did, and a strange feeling fills my stomach. I know the Prophet is dead, but looking at this book, it feels like he could’ve just stepped into the room.

  “Where’d you find this?” I ask.

  “It was bagged up with a lot of evidence from the wreckage of the Prophet’s house. No one’s had time to go through it all, and it’s unpleasant work. Just box after box of charred wood mixed with pieces of broken cutlery and twisted chunks of metal. I found this in a steel money box along with about five thousand dollars and some bottle caps from the sixties.”

  “I never read it,” I say. “I couldn’t read back then.”

  “How’s your reading now?”

  I shrug. “All right.”

  He holds the book to me. “Want to?”

  “I can?”

  “No one to stop us.”

  He flips through the pages. “You’ll recognize this one,” he says. I take it between my stumps.

  Thus Saith the Lord unto My acolyte the Prophet Kevin. It is My Will and commandment that ye set right true Order in My Kingdom. That the marriages of the Sainted male, Mighty and Strong, be plural and many with womankind to bring about the proliferation of My Servants. For I wish My work to continue rapidly and plentifully and without interruption. For this I shall greatly bless thee and multiply the seed of him who enacts My Will, for I am powerful and control all things. So Saith the Lord thy God. Even so Amen.

  I stare at it, the revelation that set it up for men to marry multiple wives. It looks so flimsy now.

  “You remember it?” he asks.

  “Yes.” The Prophet read it to us a dozen times, but seeing it written here in his own handwriting—black ballpoint ink, straight-backed letters—is a different country entirely. A different world. I can read it for myself now. The Prophet wouldn’t recognize me anymore.

  I hardly recognize the person I was, back when I believed this.

  The pages that are covered with prophecies are more flexible and stained slightly from where the Prophet held the book up during sermons. I set it down on the cushioned floor and, on its own, it falls open to an entry near the end.

  Thus Saith the Lord unto My acolyte the Prophet Kevin. Thou art unto Marcus, the first man, who did My will by engaging in spirit marriage with many women. It is my Commandment that ye do again this task, with Minnow, daughter of Samuel, for she be in need of s
piritual intervention of the kind that marriage provides. Curb her rebellious mind and carry her in your loving arms to the Great Infinity. My Will be done. So Saith the Lord thy God. Even so Amen.

  Slowly, I push the book away and slide backward so I’m wedged in a corner between two cushioned walls. I put my head on my knees, muscles slack.

  “His name wasn’t always the Prophet,” I say. “Why do we call him that, still?”

  “We could call him by his real name.”

  “Kevin?” I ask. “How could that be his name, really?”

  “I agree, it seems incongruous,” he says.

  “I don’t like to think of him that way, you know?” I say. “Calling him anything other than the Prophet makes all this . . .” I hold up a stump, as though that represents all the harm the Prophet had done to me, which it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. “It makes all this less meaningful somehow.”

  “How do you mean?” he asks.

  “Sometimes I wish he actually could talk to God. I want this to mean something. I want it to be special for more than that it hurt me.”

  “It was special,” he says. “But not because of him. It was special because of you.” And when I shake my head to tell him he’s blowing smoke, he continues. “It was special because you survived.”

  “But why was it on me to survive?” I ask. “Why couldn’t my parents have stopped this? They believed him. They didn’t have to.”

  “It would’ve been difficult, Minnow. People want to believe. It’s all any of us wants.”

  “I want to believe, but not at any cost. Not at the cost of reason. Not at the cost of human life.”

  “I think they thought they were doing what was right for their families.”

  I glance at the Book of Prophecies. “I can’t believe that.”