The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  “I know what Angel thinks. I’m talking about what you think. It’s my opinion that you shouldn’t deny your mind the chance to stretch, to go places, simply because you don’t have evidence. I think it’s high time you figure out what you think.”

  • • •

  That night, with the dark of the jail unchinked by even a single pinprick of light, I lie on my thin mattress and consider this. I’m realizing that I’m the only person I never asked my questions to. I never thought I could count on my own answers.

  I think about the universe, and the earth, and the stars, and I ask myself a question.

  Is Charlie there?

  No.

  But is something there?

  Maybe.

  Maybe.

  • • •

  In the morning, Benny drops an envelope off at my cell. Inside is an official notice that my parole meeting is on the 15th. My eighteenth birthday. Three days from now. I have prepared myself for it, how I’ll look over my shoulder at the meeting room door, hoping Dr. Wilson will show. But he won’t. Waiting with held breath for their decision to fall, which will crash over me like a chest of broken china. Denied, they will say in their voices of metal. I’ll be shackled by some brusque guard who will drive me to Billings and dump me in a group cell block of muscled women with face tattoos and rotten teeth. And suddenly every good thought this place managed to inflate inside me will be punctured, because that cell door will clang shut behind me and nothing will be my choice again. The future is locked in place.

  I’ll have to say good-bye to Angel, whose work getting me into the Bridge Program will have been for nothing, and Benny and Miss Bailey and Rashida and Tracy, and everyone at juvie I’ll miss when I’m gone. I wonder if Dr. Wilson will say good-bye. I wonder if I’m useless to him now that he knows I will never give him the truth he wanted.

  And I wonder if I’ve really lived out my life. If, even when I’m eventually free, a year or two or five from now, I’ll still be trapped, just like my parents were in their trailer park lives, in the drudge of everyday, the weeds in the backyard that never died, the rusted-out truck that broke down every morning. The only thing that blurred that to the periphery was the Prophet, who cast a new kind of clean light on their lives with every step he took closer to them.

  And I almost understand now how you can be so trapped you’ll throw the whole world away just to get free.

  But I didn’t understand it then, the last time I saw the Community, before the fire ate it all and ruined everything. That night, there was no room for anything but one thought: get Constance. Save her.

  • • •

  Jude lifted Constance in his arms. She was bucking and fighting, her screams cutting through the empty house. We ran down the stairs and Jude wrenched the back door open with his free hand. Standing in the doorway was my father. I only saw his face for a moment because Jude kicked the door closed and shouted, “Run!”

  We tried the front door, but it was no good. They were all there, filing out of the Prophet Hall and into the courtyard. From their fists hung lanterns. In their eyes burned hatred.

  The men came at us quickly. Jude set Constance on the ground and put his hands in the air. This means surrender, in the real world, but we weren’t in the real world. We were in some nightmare world where there’s no such thing as justice.

  The deacons dragged Jude to the center of the courtyard, his boots scraping against the frozen ground. I ran for him, but someone ripped me away and held my stumps with iron grips. I lost all my breath, saw the scene through a gauze of white pain.

  My eyes scanned the courtyard, taking in their ruddy scowling faces, and I realized I never could have rescued them. I thought all I’d have to do was tell Constance she could be free, that soon the rest of them would follow us off the mountain. But the offer of freedom doesn’t mean anything to people who already think they’re free.

  The Prophet marched out of the crowd with a kerosene lantern held high. He brought the lantern near Jude’s face where he struggled on the ground, then glanced at me, and it was clear in his steel-tipped smirk that he understood.

  He walked over to Constance. “What has occurred, wife-to-be?”

  “Minnow came back with that boy to steal me away. They live in sin together in the woods.”

  A great gasp went up. The Prophet straightened, holding his arms out to the sides. Even though he wasn’t standing in the Prophet Hall, I recognized these motions. He was preparing a sermon. He was thinking through a punishment.

  He raged on about fornication and sin and damnation and fraternizing with Rymanites, but his face was calm. He looked happy. Overjoyed. This was his moment to smite someone, really and truly. On the ground, Jude jerked beneath the grips of the deacons.

  Finally, the Prophet ended his diatribe, and it became so quiet in the courtyard, I could hear the trees creaking. The Prophet savored it. He stretched out the silence, looked at me, then at his deacons.

  “Kill the Rymanite.”

  I watched the words fall from the Prophet’s grizzled lips. I hear those words in my mind still. They are a chant. A hymn. I thumb the words in my mind like prayer beads. That was the moment I realized there would be a cost for all of this. A cost for believing. A cost for thinking there was a way to escape.

  The deacons stood and there was a silent moment when Jude might’ve tried to make a break for it. He levered himself up on an elbow but, in the next moment, Deacon Jeremiah swung back and landed a fist into Jude’s face and he flattened back to the ground, a curved crimson wound cupping his eye bone. I traced the trajectory of each pair of heavy boots and tightened fists, the rush of blood that flew from Jude’s mouth with the first few kicks to the face, the molar that sailed gracelessly through the air and became lost in the mud, planted like a sunflower seed. His cheek puffed up and bruised with blood, and broke apart like an abscess after a cruelly aimed kick from Deacon Timothy. The deacons each took a turn, their fists and boots and knees and elbows hammering Jude down long past the time he’d stopped moving. I screamed, just to avoid hearing the sound of their fists sinking into Jude’s body.

  I didn’t pray when my hands were cut off—it was much too fast and my mind could only process the basic information of the moment. Now, though, I screamed at God—at Charlie—at anyone—to make it stop.

  “Samuel!” the Prophet shouted. My father had been standing to the side with his wives. “Are you a deacon or not?”

  My father’s mouth was clenched. He swallowed with difficulty, then marched toward where Jude lay. He swung his leg back for a kick and I shut my eyes, screaming still, because Jude had stopped screaming. He’d stopped making any noise at all.

  The women started to look uncomfortable and covered their children’s eyes with large hands. The rabid energy in the crowd gradually bled away as Jude began to look less like a boy and more like something butchered. The deacons panted, their kicks growing feebler and feebler. In the clearing, it became so quiet practically the only thing you could hear was my sobs.

  And then my father, of all people, uttered, “That’s enough,” barely loud enough to hear. The deacons looked from him to the Prophet, their faces shiny with sweat and flecked with blood. The Prophet nodded and the men stepped away. It felt awkward then, those men covered in gore standing in a loose circle, shifting their weight from foot to foot. The outsider’s body on the ground was like a spotlight on every ludicrous aspect of the entire place. The men who’d been holding me let their grip go slack, and I ran to Jude. I knelt beside him.

  His eyes roved around, unfocused. It was hard for him to wipe the fear off of his face. He tried to smile but the teeth were broken in his mouth, protruding in different directions. He tried to talk but it came out like a gargle. He swallowed some of the blood and said—and said—

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

 
His voice echoed around the clearing. Tears fell from the bridge of my nose and cleared a path through the blood on his cheek. “Not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun?” he continued.

  “The rent’s unpaid dear, we haven’t a bus,” I began, but Jude had stopped singing. He was struggling to breathe.

  “But smiles are made dear, for people like us,” I sobbed.

  His eyes slid shut, and I heard the Prophet pronounce, “The Rymanite is dead,” and my father’s impossibly strong arms pulled me from the ground.

  “No!” I screamed, jerking against my father’s grip, but he didn’t let go.

  The ground was so frozen, the blood just pooled on the surface and rolled over to where they were standing, touching the hems of their dresses and pants. They backed away from it, like death was catching.

  And I beat against my father’s arms the way I should’ve years and years before, because all I wanted was to keep looking into Jude’s face, but by then the tears were obscuring my vision, and the white-hot rage was coloring my periphery, and so I contented myself with sobbing his name over and over so if he lived, he’d know I was still there.

  The last thing I remember, before they dragged me away, was looking into the woods and catching sight of Waylon, his face a half-moon behind the trunk of a tree. He must have followed us. His mouth was open in a silent scream, fingers gripping his face like claws.

  His eyes latched onto mine. I opened my mouth and screamed.

  “RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!”

  Chapter 54

  I wake up the day of my parole hearing, and around me the world is acting as if everything is normal. It’s not. It’s my last day in juvie. The last day I’ll drink powdered soup in this cafeteria, the last time I’ll observe this procession of girls in orange, the last time I’ll see Angel for who knows how long, the last day I’ll go to reading class. I sit beside Rashida on our upturned buckets around Miss Bailey’s rocking chair as she opens up The Giver and begins to spell out the story of a boy who learns to see the world as much more than he’d ever imagined.

  Jude is waiting for me, right now. While Miss Bailey reads, I bring to mind the directions he gave me to the cave where he’s living: south of the bend in the big river, near the heron pond where we fished once. The place he wants us to spend the rest of our years, the cave in the wild where he thinks we’d be safe.

  A knock comes from the classroom door. Benny peeks her head inside the room. “Miss Bailey, Minnow is needed upstairs.”

  “Can’t it wait until after class?” Miss Bailey asks.

  “No, it’s important. Official . . . prison business.”

  She sighs. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  I stand and walk with Benny out of the classroom. She’s acting strange, glancing around corners before she enters hallways, and her pace is much quicker than usual. I have to hop to keep up with her.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “Shh,” she hisses. “Can’t you tell we’re doing something covert?”

  When we arrive at my cell, the door is open and Angel stands beside my bed, her hands clasped in front of her.

  “Happy birthday!” she says, gesturing toward the bunk.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “We pulled some strings,” Angel says. “I told you I run this place. Go ahead. Open your presents.”

  On my bed, there is a small collection of items. One of them, unwrapped, is a book with a picture of space on the cover. “I got you your own copy of Cosmos,” Angel says. “You’ll need your own wherever you’re heading next. Benny helped me order it.”

  I stroke the book and look up at her. “Thank you,” I whisper.

  “And Benny got you a Spanish doubloon.”

  Inside the folds of Benny’s hand is a rough-edged gold coin. I take it between my stumps. “What is it?”

  “It’s just a replica,” Benny says. “Back in pirate times, if you lost a limb, the captain would pay you. A missing hand got you thirty doubloons. Not a replacement, more of an acknowledgment of something lost. It was the sense of justice, more than anything. Figured you deserved a little compensation.”

  I smile at her, a warm feeling rushing up from my stomach.

  “Thanks, Benny,” I say, slipping the coin onto the copy of Cosmos.

  The last gift on my mattress is a shoebox. The lid has already been removed and placed to the side. Inside, I can see only a mound of crumpled gold tissue paper.

  Lightly, I dig through the jumble of paper till my stumps touch something cold. I push the paper aside and see them. Two hands made of silver. My mind can’t make sense of them, but my heart is drumming hard against my ribs, like it recognizes them. Even in the artificial light, they gleam. The fingers are thinner than real fingers, leaner, like knobby twigs.

  “That doctor of yours is pretty full-service,” Angel says. “House calls, obstruction of justice, the whole nine.”

  “What are these?” I ask.

  “You don’t recognize your own hands?” Angel asks. “I told Dr. Wilson he should’ve had them flipping the bird, that way every time you look at them you can be giving the Prophet a big fuck you.”

  I pick up my left hand. Inside me, something heavy and dense falls into place, a feeling of rightness I haven’t known in months.

  “Dr. Wilson did this?” I ask.

  She nods. “He had to break into an evidence locker. Violated about ten laws in the process.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  She shrugs. “He’s a weird guy. Said it was worth it because now you’re even. Now you’ve got something on him.”

  The metal fingers are cool against my stumps, these fingers that once grew from my body, these fingers that began as chains of cells in my mother’s womb, and for seventeen years they existed as part of me, until they became something else, really just an idea. But to me, like this, they are perfect, like all along they were meant to be coated in silver, not flesh.

  Chapter 55

  After one of the wives threw a sheet over Jude’s body and the blood on the ground stopped steaming in the freezing air, the deacons led me to the edge of the Community near a giant pine whose boughs extended over my head like a rafters. I scanned the tree line and saw Waylon had gone. My chest felt a little lighter. I hoped he’d pack up, get in the truck, drive down the forest service road and never look back. And, an angry part of me thought, I hoped he’d understand now what a mistake it was coming to the woods to begin with.

  The Community made low noises behind me, but I couldn’t look at them, the dull congregation in their dull, decade-old clothes, eyes so full of the Prophet they were almost popping out of their sockets, so I craned my neck to the sky. It was almost night. Dark clouds covered the pale blue in a holey blanket. To the east was the moon, almost full. My whole body was quaking, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that moon. Even as the Prophet approached me, shouting in a screeching voice that reached down into my soul and grabbed the necks of the angels that lived there, I could hardly care about anything but the almost-oval of moon hanging over the forest I’d known almost my entire life, clouds sliding across like doves.

  The Prophet grabbed my chin hard and pointed it at his face.

  “Are you listening to me?” he screamed.

  He’d never hurt me himself before. The feeling of his hand around my face shook me awake. I looked boldly into his face and noticed his eyes were covered in a thin white film. He used to wear glasses, before the Lord fixed his sight.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t ever listen to you again.”

  Over his shoulder, I could see the color of blood seeping through the sheet they’d covered Jude in.

  He threw me to the ground hard, but I stretched out on my back and put my arms behind my head, staring up at the moon again. The women looked uncertainly at one another. I was acting odd for someone about t
o be punished, but it could almost be happening to someone else, any other girl in any other society where girls are manhandled and bruised easy as pears.

  When the men tugged the boots from my feet, I didn’t move. When they tied the rope around my ankles in a thick noose, and when they winched me up into the tree, hanging upside down, I didn’t move. I let my arms fall beside me in a graceful arc. The rope twisted, and for a moment I faced the forest, the dark bodies of hibernating pines crowded together. It looked almost black in there. I wondered how I’d ever convinced myself I might see the paleness of angels in that forest, if I looked hard enough.

  Behind me, the Prophet’s heavy footfalls crunched over the ground.

  “With this water, we cleanse you of the sin of fornication and disobedience,” he shouted.

  Water hit me like a pane of glass. I gasped. The force of it made the rope spin till I faced the Prophet, an empty bucket in his hands. Behind him stretched a line of people, each holding a bucket of cold pond water in their curled white fingers. I couldn’t see all their faces because most of them held their heads down, ladies’ faces guarded by bonnets, but I was certain they were all there, all the people I’d shared my childhood with.

  The Prophet jerked his head, and the next person in line, a deacon, marched up and doused me, and in his water was a triangle of ice from the surface of the pond. It hit my forehead and I was sure, from the sudden bloom of warmth along my hairline, that I was bleeding.

  The Prophet waved his palm in a circle. “With this water, we cleanse you of the sin of fornication and disobedience.”

  One by one, they threw their water till I was soaked and shivering with a vehemence that could’ve broken bones.

  My father’s wives came in a group and threw their water all at once. They turned around without a glance. My siblings came after, the smaller ones with their arms quaking from the weight of the bucket, lifting it onto their thin shoulders and tossing it with all their might. My oldest brother, Jedediah, threw his water directly on my face and I had to lean up, body doubled, coughing, trying to blow the water from my nose. I didn’t see Constance. They must’ve taken her back to the maidenhood room.