The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

From the seat in front of me, Angel chuckles.

  “Well, gimpy’s got a sass mouth!” Officer Prosser says. “Now sit your ass down.”

  I settle into the plasticized leather seat and let her chain me to the floor. She tugs hard on my belt after she’s fastened the lock.

  The girls are entirely quiet as we watch Missoula slide past the windows. The rocking motion of a moving vehicle still makes me a little queasy, and the muscles that cup my eyeballs are strained in minutes, but I can’t tear my eyes away. It’s all too fascinating, a ring of fallen pine needles beneath every tree and the new bottle-shaped flowers freeing themselves from the earth, the blinding way the sun covers everything in cellophane white.

  The bus makes waves of dust along the dirt road bordering the wild orchard. We unload and they run a plastic-coated metal cord through each of our belt loops so we’ll have some freedom of movement. Angel is in front of me in line. I’m the last.

  “All right, ladies,” Officer Prosser says, puffing herself up. “You’re here doing a good deed. Pay attention to how it feels because, for some of you, it’ll be the first time.”

  We shuffle forward as a unit through the knee-high grass, a clinking snakelike thing so orange it might offend nature. The fruit hanging from the trees are bell-shaped, yellow-green, and speckled. Pears. They smell like newborn autumn. They hang low enough to touch a mouth to.

  Angel and I walk far, the cord tying us to the other girls whizzing through the metal loops at our belts, until we’re deep enough into the trees to barely hear the voices of the other girls. The pears are still unripe, none yet fallen to the ground, so Mrs. New instructed us that the best way to glean them was to take a limb of a tree in our hands and shake. Angel approaches a branch and reefs on it. A shower of pears falls. She reaches down and tosses them in a wooden crate nearby.

  I kneel on the grass and roll a pear toward me with a stump, up the length of my leg, and hold it to my stomach. I drop it in the crate. Angel’s picked twenty by the time I manage one.

  I get tired of that pretty quickly so I approach the nearest pear hanging from a bough. I open my mouth and fit my teeth over the buxom curve of it, still slightly hard. It tastes sharp and sweet.

  Angel smiles. “You gonna eat your way through all these?”

  “If I have to.”

  I feel the tension around my waist loosen as the guards let out more of the plastic-coated cord so the girls can climb into the trees to reach the higher branches. I walk a few minutes by myself, craning my neck so all I see is the tops of trees, steel-gray mountains, and the sky. I haven’t walked through the wild like this since I left the Community. I feel it might not be too late to relearn wilderness, the way shadows bloom like footprints under trees, the way it is never truly silent.

  Do I want to? a small voice asks.

  The last time I saw the sky like this, it was still swathed in smoke from the fire that devoured the Community. Now, the sky is jewel bright and radiating blue heat, and it’s almost enough to make me forget that fire, forget the final moments of the Prophet’s life, the room like an oven, smoke falling through the roof in ribbons. Sometimes all I can remember of that night is gray smoke. I try to follow the lines back to that moment, but they get crossed, blurred in all that choking fog.

  I’ve walked so far, the only indication that I’m not all alone out here is the soft voices of the girls through the walls of trees and the silver cord around my waist. I bring my head back down, and my eyes fall to the tree line beyond the meadow. That’s where the real wilderness starts, the shadowed pines that absorb none of this sunlight.

  A shape at the forest’s edge materializes. The silhouette of a person, ragged clothes hanging off bone-sharp limbs. His skin is dark brown, and his pants hang so loose, his suspenders are the only thing holding them up. I stare, and he stares back with big hollowed eyes.

  “Jude,” I whisper. I glance around to make sure no one hears me. Angel is far behind, buried in the branches of a tree, only visible because her boots are propped up on a low branch. All I can think is I can’t let anyone see him. They might catch him and throw him away.

  I walk beyond the orchard toward him, but the cord quickly grows taut. Warily, he edges out of the pines and runs from tree to tree until he’s not more than ten feet from me.

  He sidles to the tree I’m behind, his face stretched in surprise. Bones protrude from his face. He’s been starving. His nose was broken and healed in an odd direction, and beneath one of his eyes is a persistent purple sickle of bruise. Over his shoulder is a burlap sack, and I can discern the shapes of pears inside. He must’ve been raiding the trees before we showed up.

  “You’re alive?” I whisper, tears springing to my eyes. “I thought they killed you.”

  His voice comes in an unused croak. “I thought the same of you.”

  His hands are shuddering, and he presses the pads of his fingers over my cheeks.

  “You’re really real?” I whisper.

  “I don’t know anymore,” he says. “I’ve been lost for a long time.”

  I can’t put my hand to his cheek, so I lean in and close my eyes and let my lips traverse the scars on his face, the warm breath sluicing from his nose, the exhale of relief at the touch of skin on his skin. My lips find his open lips and our mouths feel for each other frantically. Jude tastes unwashed and desperate.

  “How are you alive?” I whisper.

  He hangs his head into the bend of my neck, and I feel him shake his head. “I don’t know. I remember them coming at me, and after that nothing but darkness. And then, I don’t know what else to call it . . . an angel, a real one with a halo made of orange light and blond hair.”

  “Blond hair?” I ask. “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. She dragged me away. And when I woke, I was way out in the forest. I could never’ve gotten there on my own. I woke up ’cause there was fire in air. It was blowing away in the opposite direction, but I could smell the smoke. I got up and started walking and found a cave. That’s where I been.”

  “Are you hurt bad?” I ask.

  “Only from not knowing where you were,” he says, though I can tell by the sunken-looking bone of his eye, the way he holds his chest inward, that that’s not true.

  “Why don’t you come into the city?” I ask. “You could go to a hospital.”

  His forehead crinkles. “That place is exactly as evil as I thought. I’ve seen it, from the hills. You seen the cars? You smelled the air down there? It’s poisonous. You heard their loudness? And seen the colors of their clothes?”

  “Like this?” I ask, toeing my jumpsuit with a boot.

  “You can’t help that.” He repositions his legs and winces painfully, his hand wrapping around his middle.

  “Jude, you need a doctor,” I say.

  “I done fine.”

  “You’re hurt.”

  “It’s nothing I cain’t handle.”

  “All right, ladies!” Officer Prosser yells from the area of the bus. “Time to pack it in!”

  I dart my eyes behind me, through the tall grass. Angel is stepping down out of her tree. She looks over her shoulder, and I know she’s seen us. She brings her lips inside her mouth and turns to walk back to the road.

  “I gotta go,” I whisper.

  “Go?” Jude asks. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Come with you?” I ask.

  “I bet I can pop that lock open with my crowbar.”

  He yanks on the lock hanging from the belt and pulls me forward a step, rummaging in his burlap sack.

  “Jude,” I say. “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “I—I don’t know if I can go with you.”

  The words ring out in the still air, and the hurt in his face strikes me right in my chest.

  “What d’you mean?” he asks. “I gotta get you outta here
.”

  But I’ll miss reading class, I almost say. I shake my head. “I’m in juvie for a reason, Jude. I gotta stick this out. I—I just need a little time.”

  “I don’t unnerstand,” he says. “The cave I told you about, it’s—Minnow, it’s nice there. Safe. Good stream not far. We could live there, make a life together.”

  “A cave?” I ask. “Jude, I don’t think I can live in a place like that. And neither should you.”

  “But, look where you been,” he responds. “Wouldn’t a cave be better than that?”

  “Better than prison?” I ask.

  “We could be happy there.”

  “We’d be all alone.”

  “We’d be together,” he insists.

  “That’s not enough,” I say. And it’s not. It’s really not.

  His face falls. And I finally hear it, the small voice in my mind that I never let speak until now, a voice that asks if you can grow out of people the way you can grow out of tree houses.

  “I know it’s hard to understand, Jude, but I can’t go with you right now. I can’t run away from this.”

  “You just got free of one prison, and you choose another one?”

  “It ain’t that simple, Jude.”

  “Minnow Bly!” I can hear Officer Prosser yell from beyond the trees. The cord around my waist tugs. I stumble backward.

  I turn to Jude. “I—I gotta go now.” Tears brim in my eyes.

  “Wait!” he says. “The cave where I’m living, you can find it easy. It’s just south of where the big river bends, you remember? Near that heron pond we fished in once. Find me,” he says. “Find me,” he begs.

  I look over my shoulder one last time, then sprint to the bus.

  Chapter 45

  Incinerated. This is what it feels like to think about Jude. The feeling of my own cells burning out one by one. I imagine the cave where he’s sequestered himself, farther in the backwoods than even the Community, practically a lifetime away from another person. The way his nose had knit back together, the haggard way he walked, like he’d been broken and would never heal. So different to how he used to be, but then so is everything. Even the tree house is gone, the tree house that weathered winters of knee-high snow and summers so hot the smell of bodies in the Community was almost too much to bear. Everything Jude and I went through happened in that tree house.

  Jude found me there the night I ran away. He stood beside the larch, chopping wood, an ax clutched in his hand. His face was smiling, but it contorted when he saw me, saw what was missing. I didn’t realize till Jude caught me that I was falling.

  We crumpled to the ground, and I only remember flashes after that—Jude’s ax lying discarded in a drift of yellowed pine needles, the sleeves of my dress choked with blood, the blood already on Jude’s shirt.

  He carried me the rest of the way to his house. In the doorway, his father stood frozen. His skin was pale and flushed heavily at the cheeks, the way I’d learn that his face always looked, as though a lifetime of hard winters and hard alcohol had burst every blood vessel. He looked like a shadow of Jude, like a less alive version with a mess of wiry white beard and a look in his eyes like he couldn’t believe what had just crashed into his life.

  Jude brushed past him through the open door and laid me down on the couch. I got a good look at my stumps and started shivering. My heart still jerked angrily and my toes had turned a pale yellow, a color the exact opposite of blood.

  “What in Sam Hill?” Waylon shouted. His speech was slurred, but I don’t think he was drunk. It was just how he talked, like the hinge of his mouth wouldn’t close properly. “Who’s that?”

  “Her name’s Minnow.”

  “She one of them cult people?”

  “Yeah, and she’s hurt real bad. Oh God, she’s hurt real bad.”

  “Why’s she bleedin’ so—” He stopped when he saw my stumps, darting a hand to his face. “They did this to her?”

  “Shut up, Daddy, and do somethin’ useful!” Jude shouted. His hands were squeezing my wrists to try and stop the bleeding.

  Waylon scanned the room helplessly and ran out the back door. Jude whimpered a little, his fingers slipping over the blood. “It’s gonna be just fine,” he whispered, but his throat was shaking so hard, his voice was all but lost.

  Waylon barged back inside with a boxy bottle full of clear liquid in his fist. I knew it had to be the moonshine he made, the stuff that had turned his legs to jelly and his mouth to mush.

  “No, Daddy! She ain’t drinkin’ that.”

  “It’s her choice, son,” Waylon said. “The drink’ll make the pain better.”

  I shook my head.

  “We gotta get those things cleaned,” Waylon said. “It’ll hurt like a bitch without somethin’ to take the edge off.”

  “I don wannit,” I slurred.

  “Fine, fine, I hear ya,” he said.

  Waylon ordered Jude to get a pail and heat some water.

  “She gon’ be feverin’ soon, if she’s not already. Thas what’ll kill her, if anythin’. Gotta be ready to fight it.”

  Jude carried in a pot of water from out back and placed it over the fire. After he stoked the embers nice and hot, he kneeled and leaned over me so his face was all I could see. Waylon sunk each wrist into a shallow bucket of moonshine. I tried to hold the scream in because surely they could hear me in the Community, but it tore through my chest on its own.

  “I know, I know, I know, I know,” Jude chanted. He held my face in his hands, bloodying my cheeks. He was blinking and crying, glancing around frantically as though searching for something to take the pain away.

  “Minnow,” he said. “You see that light?”

  My eyes roved jerkily. The cabin had one glassed window and through it I could see the torsos of pines ringing the house, lit with moonlight.

  “That’s the forest folk’s lanterns,” he said. “They’re knee-high and they bite, but if you catch one, it has to grant you three wishes.”

  A fresh wave of pain rolled hotly over me, and I let loose another scream, stifled by my clamped teeth. I knew the pain was unbearable and yet, somehow, I kept continuing to bear it.

  Jude spoke again, his voice high and fragile. “I’ll go out later and catch a forest folk, Minn. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I parroted.

  “I’ll wish your hands back first. Then, I’ll wish us away from this place, to our own little home somewhere no one has ever been. You hear my words?”

  I nodded and nodded, but that could’ve been the tremble that had hijacked my muscles.

  “And lastly . . . lastly I’ll wish the death of the man who did this to you. I’ll do it. I’ll make sure he never breathes one more breath in this world, or the next.”

  • • •

  I woke up the next day throwing a mass of acid up from my stomach onto the packed dirt floor. I let it drip from my mouth, because I couldn’t lift my leaden arms to wipe my lips. I turned my head slowly back onto the couch cushion. The skin on my arms was white until it reached the stumps where it became swollen with purpleness. A thick ridge of stitches ran across each one.

  “You look like death,” a voice said.

  I turned my head slowly. Waylon was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. I saw for the first time the inside of the cabin, roughly furnished, every item made by hand. Made by Waylon, I guessed.

  “I feel like it,” I said.

  “He never told me about you,” he said. “Not even once.”

  “I never told my family about him, either.”

  “Why not? Children shouldn’t keep things secret from their parents.”

  I remembered all the times Jude had come to me with bruises and gashes marking his skin, scarring it. All the times he’d seemed scarred worse on the inside. Maybe you should ask yourself why Jude felt like he coul
dn’t tell you, I thought.

  Jude walked in the back door with an armful of wood. He walked to the fireplace and stuffed the wood in, stoking it so none of the winter air beyond the walls penetrated the cabin.

  Waylon stood and walked out the back door.

  Jude sat beside me on the couch. His eyes were dry now and there was something different about them. His jaw had taken on a harder set. Angrier.

  “What’s wrong, Jude?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “No, really. What?”

  He sighed, touched his forefinger to the dark half circle under his eye. “I jus cain’t . . . cain’t figure it out.”

  “What?”

  “How someone could do this.”

  “My father’s the Prophet’s man. I’ve known that mosta my life.”

  “Your father did this to you?”

  “He was on orders, Jude.” I said this with trepidation because in the air between us was the knowledge of what he’d done on someone’s orders, what he’d done for faith.

  “But, all those people, they musta known you was in there. Bein’ . . . bein’ hurt.”

  “Yeah.”

  “None of ’em did anything. They let it happen. How? How?”

  Something strong was pouring from his eyes now, scarier than tears.

  “They’re crazy, Jude. That’s all. Crazy people do crazy things.”

  He opened his mouth then, and his words were so quiet and low I could barely make them out. “I’m gonna kill him.”

  “The Prophet?”

  Jude nodded. “He’ll be dead someday anyway, so it cain’t be a sin. I want it. I want it on my hands.” He held his hands before him, fingers curved. “I want him to look in my eyes and realize all he’s done.”

  This was the second time he’d said this, and I knew now that he meant it. To Jude, violence still held meaning. He truly believed enough of it could make the Prophet realize his errors and repent.

  In those moments, I wish I could’ve articulated how unremarkable brutality is. How common. Till the moment he saw me without hands, Jude hadn’t known how capable we all are of violence. But I was so comfortable with it, I didn’t hesitate for a second to commit some when I had the chance, when Philip lay prone on the snow-packed earth.