The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  I heard a little boy whimper that he was cold. I heard water slide from my dowel-straight hair and collect on the ground. And I heard the Prophet’s repetitious chanting as though from miles underwater. Every minute, I felt myself dip almost out of consciousness until the next bucketful landed and I’d come rushing back.

  Eventually, the water stopped. Over the groan of the rope, I could make out the smack of boot falls as the Community receded into their houses. The Prophet, too. Beneath me, the water was forming a thick pile of ice. My hair was hard with it.

  I realized, then, that they were going to leave me here. To freeze to death. Without thought, I accepted it as one does a hand of cards. I relaxed and tried to ignore the burning in my legs, the bright blush in my cheeks from heat that didn’t make sense. Jude was dead. There was nothing left. No future to imagine. I wanted to sleep, just to sleep.

  Like a meteor, into my mind came the memory of Constance locked up in the maidenhood room, her whole body burning with infection, her mind burning with lies she’d been fed since our mother pushed her out into the world. More than anything, it was my duty to keep her safe. And she’d never be, not with the Prophet still around. I would die and he would marry her and this place would go on for years, tucked tightly inside this forest, inside its own twisted, violent logic.

  I knew it would be a choice. To let myself disappear or to straighten my limbs, wake the cells from their dying sleep, and try to get out of this.

  I started swinging. Mostly to see if I could. I budged my body back and forth, my frozen hair barely moving. After a moment, I was swinging fast, and I bent up, doubling myself in half. I tried to wrap my arms around my legs, but I slipped and fell back, my body rocking, the rope tightening around my ankles. The tree groaned loudly and I held my breath, praying no one would leave their houses to check on the noise. When no one came, I swung myself again and managed to wrap my arms around my legs.

  The tail end of the rope was looped through the middle of the noose. If I could tease it out, the noose might loosen. I bent my knees and gripped my legs with my elbows, my back bent as far as it could. I lifted my mouth to the rope. With a massive hoist, I latched my teeth around the bottom loop. I yanked at it, tugging with my whole head. It was frozen, and the tucked-in piece wouldn’t budge. When my teeth were aching and my body felt like it might break in half like a frozen blade of grass, the rope began to slip free. I tugged it away from the noose and the rope unwound lazily, then went slack, and I fell to the ground in a heap.

  I held my stomach and breathed against the hardened mud and ice. My bottom lip had broken against the ground and I tasted salt. Slowly, I eased myself up from the ground, thrusting my shivering, bloodless feet back into my boots.

  The courtyard was quiet, and I saw for the first time that Jude’s body was no longer there, the only evidence of him a few crimson puddles and a wadded up sheet, stiff with frozen blood. I stared at it for a long moment. I was uncontrollably angry, but it was a quiet kind of anger, the kind that doesn’t even simmer, doesn’t make a noise. Real anger, the deadly kind.

  This was the moment I’d been hurtling toward my whole life, and I knew what I’d do. The Prophet lived by himself. His wives slept behind his house in a couple of ramshackle cottages. He must have enjoyed his privacy, because most never saw the inside of his home.

  I climbed his porch steps, careful not to let the old wood creak. I took the Prophet’s round door handle between my wrists and pulled in opposite directions, leaning against the door with my elbow. The handle clinked. The door drifted open.

  I stepped lightly over the threshold. A low fire burned in the hearth, illuminating the front room enough to make out a massive dark stain on the wooden floor. My blood. My eyes drifted to the fireplace. Over the mantle, beneath the silver scroll of salvation thumbtacked to the log wall, were a set of white finger bones, held together with loops of golden wire. They rested on the heavy wooden mantle delicately, like ornaments.

  It was almost a privilege, the sight of them, fingertips slanted like they could’ve been playing the piano. Not many people get to see their bones outside their body. I grabbed the hands between my stumps and placed them in the pockets of my loose trousers, wrist end first.

  Behind me, a squeak. I turned. From where I was standing, I saw straight into the only other room, the Prophet’s bedroom. He was sitting up in his unmade bed. I could tell he’d just woken up by the dark half circles under his eyes, puffy with sleep.

  He saw me. His eyes stretched wide.

  My boots were almost silent on the cold floor. His breath started leaving him heavily, eking from his ribs with a loud, almost-afraid sound. In the heat of the house, water began to drip from my thawing clothes.

  I sounded like a cloudburst. I felt like thunder.

  “You thought I was dead, didn’t you?” I asked, my voice low.

  His breath came louder, like he’d just run a great distance, his fingers grabbing the sheets on his bed with bloodless knuckles. I wondered at this. Did he fear me? The idea was electrifying.

  “I’ve figured you out, you know that?” I said. “The way you lied to us. The way you converted us—”

  “I didn’t convert anyone. God converted you.”

  “You’re sick,” I spat. “You’re a killer.”

  “When the children of God become disobedient—” he sputtered. “And idolatrous and wicked—they suffer at the hands of God.”

  “The hands of God,” I scoffed. “God isn’t the reason Jude is dead. You are.”

  “I act for God,” he sputtered. His breathing grew more beleaguered.

  “Did you act for God when you cut off my hands?”

  His fingers pulled at the neck of his robes like the touch of the collar on his skin was choking him. This wasn’t fear, I realized. This was something else, something beyond me. He wedged his stiff fingers beneath his mattress. In his hand he held a curious object. Part plastic, part metal. I couldn’t figure it out, until he raised it to his lips and squeezed.

  He squeezed again and again but it obviously wasn’t doing what he wanted because he groaned, a high whining sound, and threw the object to the ground. In the next moment, he was keeling off the bed, hitting the floor knees-first with a bone-shaking smack. He curled to the ground, his chest jerking upward, calamitously.

  A dial turned in my mind, slowly. “You said God cured your asthma,” I breathed. “You . . . you . . .” I processed this like my entire world was being translated to a different language. “You lied,” I whispered.

  His fingers reached toward a dry pine dresser on the opposite side of the room. I walked over and kicked open the bottom drawer. Inside, five more inhalers rolled like wayward spinning tops.

  “Please,” he gasped, his forehead pressed to the floor.

  “Why should I?”

  “You can—come back—to God. He is—forgiving. He will—bestow hands—on you—anew.”

  His rib cage buckled under his heaving gasps, fingers stretched toward the dresser.

  I stood a long moment, listening to the sickening sound of his throat slapping together.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

  He turned his head toward me, creases of fear cut into the beardless places on his face. I recalled the photo he’d shown us of him as a five-year-old boy with thick eyeglasses, hiding behind the moon-colored creases of his father’s jeans. The man who made him fear hatchets. The fear that bred fear that bred fear. On this night, I would end the cycle. I would kill it forever.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t reach it,” I said. “I haven’t got hands.”

  He let out a groan from deep in his throat. I stared down at him, the pale lump of him, the tar-colored beard of him. The spasms grew slower. His eyes began to slide shut.

  I might’ve stood there longer if not for the smell of fire. The room had grown hot, but I didn’t notice at
first. The heat radiated from the roof, off the thick thatch and pine shingles. The roof groaned loudly, then snapped. A mass of thatch in the main room fell to the floor in a fiery mess. In seconds, the house filled with smoke. I ran from the bedroom, past the aluminum foil on which the gibberish words of God had been scrawled. It was melting, curling away from the yellow thumbtacks that fastened it over the mantle.

  I grabbed the door handle between my forearms and tried to twist, but my shaking arms were clumsy and sweating. I heaved against the door as the smoke drove into my eyes, into my mouth, into the delicate pink passages behind my face.

  Finally, the door handle turned and I crashed out of the house, down the front steps, onto the cold mud of the courtyard, gasping for clean breath.

  Before me, the Community was a circle of flame. Nearly every house was burning from its roof, streams of embers and back-lit smoke wending through the black sky. And in the middle of it all was Waylon.

  Chapter 56

  In the beginning, I wasn’t sure who I was protecting, myself or Waylon. It’s still foggy who did the killing that day. But a couple things have parted that fog. One of them is the return of something I lost long ago—not the hands, but what they meant. A kind of power I never knew I had while they were attached to me. The power to do what I know is right. The power to free myself, finally.

  An hour before my parole meeting, Dr. Wilson comes in like he always does, unannounced, except this time he doesn’t ask me how I am, or what’s happening, or what motivates someone to kill. He doesn’t say a word. He just looks at my face as if to say, What else is there to talk about? And I understand. There’s nothing else to say. Nothing but the final thing.

  I look down to where the silver hands rest in their box beside me on the bed.

  “I wanted to thank you for . . . what you did,” I say.

  He nods.

  “You could get in big trouble for this, couldn’t you?”

  He shrugs. “What are you going to do with them?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “People who get limbs amputated sometimes bury them, have them cremated.”

  I shake my head. “The Prophet had them on his mantelpiece. Like a trophy,” I say. “I don’t want to hide them away. I want to see them every day, like he did. They’re my trophy now.”

  He nods wordlessly.

  “Are you going to be at my hearing?” I ask to break the silence.

  “Remind me of our deal again.”

  “I help you find the killer, you recommend my release.”

  “That was it.”

  “So?” I ask, undeterred. “Are you gonna be there?”

  He smiles. And waits. He waits and waits and waits.

  In the beginning, I didn’t trust him. But he’s proven good on his very first promise, to help me. And he’s proven something else. They’re not all the same. They don’t all want to hurt. They don’t all want to lie. So maybe he deserves a little trust. A little truth.

  I lay the pieces out one by one, the inhalers, the Prophet’s lungs straining in the smoke-strewn air, the moonshine bottles and the blue flame they made, the way the hollow houses fell easy, like nothing was really holding them up.

  • • •

  Waylon stood at the edge of where Jude had lain, and at his feet was a wooden box filled with bottles of moonshine. He stuffed a cloth down the neck of a bottle, lit the cloth with fire, and threw it to the roof of a house where it exploded in a sheet of sharp-tongued flames. From his throat came rusty noises, like a truck engine refusing to start.

  “Get out of here,” I shouted. “They’ll see you.”

  Waylon fell to his knees beside the puddle of blood, taking in the empty space that Jude had occupied before someone had dragged him away. His eyes squeezed shut in a sob. “He’s d-dead?” he asked, even though the answer was, even as we spoke, soaking into the knees of his trousers. “He’s dead?”

  “You need to leave,” I croaked. “They’ll kill you, too.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, blankly, as though looking at a wall, or the sky.

  “Waylon?” I asked.

  “Look at what we are,” he said, his voice raw. “We ran away to the wilderness ’cause we thought the outside weren’t civilized. But the wild don’t change who we really are. It makes it worse.”

  In his lap, his hands tore at each other, gripping the rolled sleeves of his shirt.

  “Look what it turned us into. Savages.” He was yelling over the roar of the flames. Flakes of ash drifted through the air.

  “You need to leave. Now!” I shouted.

  He shook his head, eyes mad with tears.

  The noise of the fire vibrated my eardrums. “If you want to live, Waylon, get out of here! For Jude. Make this worth something.”

  Without a word, he started nodding, mouth stretched in a deep frown, then stood and shuffled toward the woods, arms wrapped around his moonshine box.

  I ran to the tree line and crouched in the dark of the forest, watching my home smolder. At first I thought everyone would burn in their sleep because none of them had emerged from their houses, until I heard a shout, then screams. Slowly, white shapes streamed from the houses, first only a handful, then a flood of men and women in long nightgowns and little nightcaps, children dragged along like lost white flags in a windstorm.

  I braced an arm against a tree and watched my family pour from the front door of our house, littlest children in the arms of their mothers—their real mothers. Constance still hadn’t stumbled out with the rest of them, stuck up there in that attic room, the door likely latched. A moment later, my father reeled out of the front door, his face shell-shocked and covered in soot, with Constance behind him. She coughed into the crook of her handless arm.

  My mother stood with some of the small children, her eyes bright and conscious. She hunched over the baby in her arms, her newest, a girl with double streaks of smoke beneath her nostrils.

  “Where’s the Prophet?” Constance asked. Her voice cut through the churning sound of the flames.

  People looked around, aware that nobody had thought of him before that moment, too caught up in pressing their children as close as possible to their bodies. They lifted their heads, taking in the trappings of their Kevinianness burning around them. They couldn’t have known that the body of Kevin burned then, too. Their entire religion up in smoke within the span of moments.

  “WHERE IS HE?” Constance screamed.

  She ran around the crowd, staring into soot-streaked faces, frenzy in her eyes. Surely she was thinking of the sacrifice she’d made for him. If he was dead, it all meant nothing.

  Her pink, sockless feet slapped over the frozen ground, running toward the Prophet’s house.

  “Constance, stop!” my father screamed.

  She pushed through the door of his smoldering house.

  Everyone loved Constance. This was true up to the moment of her death. When she stepped over the crumbling threshold of the Prophet’s house, the fire fell in love with her. So much so that it devoured the delicate blond threads of her hair in screeching, smoking kisses, instantly filled her cheeks with pink and red. It loved her so much that, in an instant, the entire house collapsed around her in a hug.

  I think I screamed, though no one heard me because in that moment the entire world screamed, the physical screaming of faithful people, the screaming of fire as it demolished the hard labor of a decade, the screaming of trees as their sap boiled inside them, the screaming of tiny mammals woken from the peace of hibernation to find their bodies aflame.

  Hours later, after I’d climbed down the mountain, the sky blushed with sunlight. Snowflakes started falling like white moths, and the stars winked out one by one, without a sound.

  Chapter 57

  “We found Constance’s remains at the crime scene,” Dr. Wilson sa
ys.

  I nod.

  “Can I say something?” he asks, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “I just want you to know, you’re allowed to feel badly about this.”

  I pick up my head. “What?”

  “You’ve been through something terrible. And maybe I haven’t done my duty in assuring you that you have no reason to feel guilty. None of it was your fault. Losing your hands, your childhood, Constance dying—”

  “Of course Constance dy—” I swallow a throatful of bile. “Of course her being gone is my fault.”

  “I can see why you might feel that way. But it’s not logical. It’s grief making you see things unclearly. Do you realize that, as long as I’ve known you, these many months, you’ve never actually acknowledged that she is dead?”

  “Why is that important?”

  “So you can accept it. So you can move on.”

  “Move on?” I ask, the blood rising in my face, my veins stretching with it. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You’re so out of touch, you know that? As if you can relate to a single thing I say. You with your expensive clothes. With your tie clip.”

  “My tie clip?” he asks laughingly.

  “Nobody who wears a tie clip could possibly understand.”

  “And why not?” He smiles like the whole thing is a joke, and that makes me angrier.

  “You don’t get it. If you did, you wouldn’t tell me to move on. Hey, why don’t you move on? Get yourself back to DC and live your nice life in your fancy house with shiny things that make you feel good inside. And go out with your wife and eat expensive food, and give your son a car because that’s what good fathers do. And give up on me and give up on the Prophet because he’s deader than dirt, and so will we all be someday.”

  “You’re very intuitive, Minnow. You got so very much right in that last statement. All but one thing. I don’t have a son anymore.”