by Truddi Chase
“I take it that you mean the church.”
“We know that for every nun, priest, and pope you turn over, there’s restriction underneath. The church leaves us cold, it’s full of dogma that chains up the mind and cuts off growth.”
“If Sister Mary bothers you so much, how is she going to have space within your ranks?”
“Sister Mary will have to learn to take her beads elsewhere and pray in silence. The woman goes out of her mind when she hears the chanting.”
“Perhaps it comforts Sister Mary.”
“Nothing comforts Sister Mary. The sexual recall is anathema to her and there’s no escaping it now. She’d like to stop, turn back. But it doesn’t work that way.”
She observed Stanley’s pen moving resolutely over the clipboard.
“Yes,” she said tonelessly, “write it down. The nonsense has got to stop. Sister Mary has her place in our structure. She earned it by rejecting the stepfather’s sexual demands. Sister Mary, because of her religious leanings, has been greeted by heartfelt scorn among us; yet she’s the one who said no to the stepfather. Of course she wasn’t the one who paid; Rabbit took the pain whenever the stepfather lashed out.”
The word “pain” had an effect. Perhaps her words had triggered what started to happen then, or perhaps the Troop member trying to emerge heard them and reacted. Up to this point, she’d merely sat there, eyes unblinking, shooting bulletlike sentences. She did not, as in the case of some of the Troops, straighten her hair or fidget with a bracelet or even move an eyelash. At the word “pain,” however, there was a flurry of activity, in both her eyes and body, as if she were warding off something or someone.
He watched the effort it took to keep her footing.
“You want a name for me,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “There are blank spaces on your clipboard because you think that eventually I’ll give you my name. I won’t.”
The change this time hadn’t seemed to materialise fully and there was still only the hint of another Troop member behind her. He’d contemplated earlier the possibility of two or more persons within the Troop Formation being able to share exactly the same space at one time. Now he was positive.
“Pay attention.” She leaned over and rapped smartly on his clipboard. “Someone is hitting on me. You know that, you can sense it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can.” It always gave him an eerie feeling when Troop members anticipated his unspoken thoughts. Had Marshall not mentioned that research was showing that gifted children were familiar with the paranormal, with precognition, he would have discounted each incident.
“I’m going to talk fast,” she told him, “there isn’t much time. Those who sit in the front lines must consider the total welfare. I will never be a Front Runner; it is not my nature to care about anything or anyone. Having no scruples, morals, or other impediments, I’m more capable in certain areas than any other Troop member.”
Stanley did not interrupt; she did not give him a chance. He wondered if he would ever get used to her eyes.
“I’m only here,” she said, “to ensure that our Troop Formation remains intact. The stepfather told us every time, ‘I’ll kill you if you tell.’ The mother said for any infraction of the rules, ‘I’ll kill you if you do that again.’ The little ones believed them both, because the parents’ actions reinforced their words. The children are petrified now because, to them, breaking the rules by telling in the manuscript or by talking to you means death. Their fears and ours are being transferred to the woman. She believes the fear is her own. But she will only have to experience what we lived through.”
Her rush of words caused Stanley to ask quickly how she felt about telling after all these years and especially in such a permanent, public way.
“I don’t care if the whole story is carved in cement and hung outside the United Nations building. The mother stressed the value of one’s reputation. ‘It’s all you’ve got,’ she used to say. ‘Protect it. Once your reputation is gone, you’re dirty for life.’ Well, our reputation will have to rely on its own merit. On those two farms we followed the mother’s advice and never said a word because that would make us ‘dirty.’ Our silence only protected the stepfather.
“You’re wondering,” she said, “what other purpose someone like me serves. I am also the safety mechanism between Catherine and the Big Three, the means by which Catherine siphons her anger off so that she operates in the world without killing anyone. If wishes were deeds, Stanley, there wouldn’t be a living soul within a hundred miles of Catherine.”
She told him how the rage was siphoned off. Even with the change already taking place, she managed, hurling one word after the other.
“I’m a filtering process,” she said. “Catherine feels the rage; it’s red-hot. By the time it’s filtered through me, it’s still potent but the urge to kill is deadened. Do you see now? Read it in my eyes, Stanley. There’s more than one kind of ‘dead’ in this world.”
He said that the Troops had survived, that they had a chance now at many things. He started to name them. But the thin ring of black around her eyes had disappeared and the twin dark centers had widened. She was gone.
“Survival? To what end?” The question was asked woodenly; the shoulders hunched as if a weight rested on the back of the seated figure. “Life starts at birth and continues until death takes us away. There is no happiness, no joy; only the illusion of it.”
“That’s a pretty bleak picture of life,” Stanley said. “What about the joy that children bring to a parent, or that lovers bring to each other?”
“None of that means anything. Life begins, it ends. In between, people lie to each other and create misery.”
“Don’t you love Page?”
“I love no one. One Christmas, we sat at the front window and wished that the father would drive up and take us away from there. He never did.”
If the previous pair of eyes had bothered Stanley because of their lack of human emotion, these bothered him because of their lack of hope. They were empty, as if the life had been drained out of them.
“People leave you,” the wooden voice told him, “and they never come back.”
The Troops could scorn familial affection and with good reason. But behind those empty eyes lay both the desire for love and the death of all reasonable hope for it. Given the proper circumstances, this Troop member was a prime candidate for suicide. Except that she did not display enough energy to lift a finger, let alone do herself in. Was the compartmentalisation strong enough to seal off the suicidal one, whoever she was, and prohibit her from acting?
To the Troop members who were listening in on that session, the comments and attitude of their lifeless fellow member were puzzling. No emotion, no interest—who was this? No Troop member seemed to know.
Someone who did know reached out and, very gently, led the Suicidal Warrior back to where it was warmer, safer. That someone laid strong hands across the shoulders that were rigid, as rigid as if a last sleep had already begun. And the song heard that night in the back of the woman’s mind was an Irish lullaby, the kind that old warriors used to sing—to young warriors fallen in battle from wounds so deep they would not recover.
TWENTY-ONE
RELEASED from what had been the lethargy of the Suicidal Warrior’s prolongued evidencing, the woman experienced again the high energy level of the other Troop members.
Stanley had been busy the last few weeks, jotting questions about two cores and a woman who did not think for herself or consume her own food.
Finally, he called Marshall, long distance.
“The strain on the woman is awful,” Stanley said, “sometimes she just shakes. I’m trying to figure out who she is.”
“I don’t know,” Marshall said. “But one thing is certain. She isn’t the first-born child.”
“I keep hoping she is and that I’m just taking things too literally. . . .”
“This is their world, Stanley. They’ve got ways of dealing. As to the cores and their exact location in that throng of humanity, you’re close now, you’ll figure it out. Have you noticed that spring holds a great significance for the Troops? I think that’s when the first-born child died and probably both cores were born in that same moment. The Irishman is the one who rocks me. By nature, he’s a high-handed giver. I sense him choosing a day in time on which he’s going to make a major move. The bomb has been activated. I’d say you’ve got about four months and the bomb’s going off. Whammo. A Troop gift, a celebration.”
With the same sense of impending upheaval as Marshall, Stanley decided that a dose of logic might be in the Troops’ best interest. The woman had told Stanley some time ago that pride, guilt, fear, and cowardice were her biggest problem.
“You’re not too proud to ask for help,” he told her in the next session, “you’re too scared. Pride in one’s accomplishments is nothing to be ashamed of. Pride in one’s appearance isn’t cause for ridicule, but you can’t even comb your hair in front of someone or shop for a new dress, for fear you’ll be thought of as vain. You aren’t vain, you aren’t proud, you’re terrified that you’re ugly and that someone will notice.”
He’d known he couldn’t reach everyone with his statements today. But he smiled when a haughty look shot across the features in front of him. Catherine might not regard herself as ugly, but she did have other hang-ups.
Catherine, who shopped, as the bumper stickers said, until she “dropped,” so that she would never look unfashionable, took heed. Stanley’s words had also made her remember writing on the flowered wallpaper of the second farmhouse, in complete darkness so that no one could decipher her literary efforts.
You should be proud of us, Elvira yelled at the surfacing woman who heard and understood through Catherine, you’re hanging in there, and we’re helping you. Go for it, bitch.
“Bitch” was said not in a derogatory way, but as a street language paean, the kind of invective that is hurled with a sense of humour—not to wound or impede but to rally one’s friends to higher horizons.
Pride. Viewing now through Elvira, although the woman wasn’t aware of her because Elvira had yet to evidence fully, some of the world’s power to frighten was gone. She examined the measure of trust she’d felt between Mean Joe and Miss Wonderful; between Mean Joe and the few children who’d evidenced; she herself and even Stanley being trusted at times by them. Whenever Stanley pointed out the progress, she’d been blind to it. All she’d seen were the number of steps remaining and she berated herself for being in this situation.
“As to the guilt that’s been transferred to your every action,” Stanley said, “one day you’ll realise the guilt isn’t yours. And the real coward in all of this is your mother.”
* * *
The woman slept fitfully that night, hearing Stanley’s words repeated in her mind, and sensing, but not privy to, the awful awakening process going on around her.
Twelve knew the Irishman was up to something. She sat at his side, watching the Outrider move around the Troop Formation. Both the Irishman and the Outrider seemed to focus on one far-off, silent figure.
Am I right? Twelve asked the Irishman, hardly believing what she absorbed from him.
That silent figure is the adult core, he said. Were she ever t’ evolve and need t’ move freely in the world, the woman is what she would wear as a new skin.
Twelve sat mulling that over and wondered why the Irishman was preparing the woman for something that would never happen.
Not in this world, the Irishman told her, but the next.
Twelve ignored him. It was macabre . . . true, the woman, incapable of her own thought or emotion, was merely a conduit for everyone else’s. The Buffer sat in front of her just in case anything at all might leak through to the sleeping cores.
And then, almost before he spoke, she knew the reason behind his plan. The potential child and potential adult cores had slept from the moment of their birth, unaware of anything. Their mirror-images could not verbalise or understand the concept of the sex act, beyond fondling. Neither could the dead first-born child. As to her child mirror-image—Twelve didn’t know what she knew or understood. Which brought her back to the woman.
Go carefully, Twelve, the Irishman told her. D’not let y’r thoughts through t’ anyone else. When one o’ us expresses emotion too strongly, that creates a kind o’ residue which the Weaver must take away, lest the cores or their mirror-images be harmed.
You’re playing games with real people, Twelve whispered.
Nothin’ on earth will change the woman’s structure. Right now, out o’ all that he’s taken away, the Weaver is weavin’ a temporary kind o’ second skin o’ memory. When the signal is given, the skin will be in place. ‘Twill be an awful moment, but when ’tis here, the Weaver’ll weave for the cores and their mirror-images alone.
There is, said Twelve, more than a hint of the Machiavellian about you.
T’ be sure, but as Front Runner, y’ve got t’ take y’r guts in both fists and fly w’ the devil himself. Such behangidness creates a taste o’ time and all the warriors down through it. So. Are y’ flying w’ me or are y’ lay in’ low?
I think, Twelve said, that I’m too young to be hanging out with you.
No, child. Y’ve got the mind o’ a witch and an Irish warrior’s backbone.
All this preparation, Twelve said, what’s it for?
F’r Christmas, darlin’. The time o’ the high feast.
* * *
That same night, moonlight flickered in the loft bedroom, through the leaves and branches of a very old tree hanging over the skylight. The one in the Tunnel depths sent a barrage of preparatory goodwill and a generous sense of his natural hospitality. Almost as if the woman were a visitor on his territory.
While struggling into the white flannel nightgown, her mind shifted, almost as if someone had tilted it abruptly. Rabbit’s whimpering sounds produced a hail of confetti.
As the storm halted, a sudden flick against the woman’s mind stood still, longer than ever before. The flick, intricately beclouded as it was, revealed that there had been sexual contact with the stepfather past childhood, into teenage years.
The idea shocked the woman. She looked at the bed twice before seemingly nonexistent muscles allowed her legs to move forward and spill her onto the mattress. Suspicion hidden in the marauding thoughts of other Troop members had told her over the years that the abuse had not stopped until the stepfather had left the house for good. But each time they’d erupted, the Weaver had taken those suspicions away. What he’d always left was nothing more than the idea that sexual contact meant lurking and spying and fondling. Not penetration. And not past childhood.
Faced now with the knowledge that as an adult teenager there had definitely been sexual contact with the stepfather enervated her beyond anything she’d previously experienced. She burrowed into the quilt, torn between seeking the darkness under its folds and wanting to strangle herself with it.
A child was too small to fight off an adult demanding sexual favours (and again in her mind, that meant spying or fondling) and might be just too scared to refuse someone who could turn mean in the blink of an eye. But a teenager?
Elvira moved to the surface, humming snatches of any song that appealed to her as being sufficiently “snake level, belly low,” using her humour like a synthetic adrenaline against the woman’s fading strength. The woman heard it all vaguely but, crushed by the idea of her own inadequacy, was unable to move.
Elvira tossed the inadequacy right out of the woman’s mind and pointed out strength and, again, the idea of progress. The cellar recall was definitely progress, but there had been a second farmhouse. Rabbit’s whimpering grew. Grimly, Elvira’s humour reached the woman, spurring her on. Relaxing the way Stanley had taught her, she got her breathing synchronised and started the
count back. Rabbit, having evidenced to her fully, was no longer a voice. The woman addressed her by name. And Rabbit was down on the front lawn of the second farmhouse, leading her to the smudged cellar window. They were inside, passing the rows and rows of gemlike canned goods: corn and carrots, peaches and strawberries, cherries and plums, and even the beef the mother had salted too heavily that year. The produce in the clear glass mason jars with grey metal lids was testimony to the mother’s countless hours at the big black cookstove, to her hours out in the fields and orchards, tending and picking. It was also, even in the dim light, like having the mother’s glinting eyes following her own and Rabbit’s progress through the cellar.
Damp, musty smells, and the old fuse box high on the stone wall to her right and another window dead ahead . . . but a tall figure was silhouetted before the window, blocking the light. In a deadly silence, contrived by his own stealthy movements, the stepfather’s hands moved out and took her around the waist even while broad calloused fingers worked at her white cotton pants, separating fabric from flesh, from the space where thighbone met pelvis. And she rode the pink thing forward and back, no more than five years old now and less than six. She should have known better than to try the recall on her own again.
Because right on the heels of it, so fast that she couldn’t avoid the blow, came another flick. This time it wasn’t a child but a teenager and there was the stepfather, and the flick wouldn’t let go; it showed her, made her feel, the two of them entwined in some kind of crazy position and the look on his face and worse, what was happening to her own body right now, to her mind, and the stimulation became a flood. . . .
The screams and the tears mingled with undeniable sexual arousal and the broken dishes surrounding her now. And how had she gotten from the loft to the kitchen, with the teakettle shrieking madly on the gas burner and the cigarettes burning in the ashtray?
On the following afternoon, the woman told Stanley about the cellar recall. In shamed tones, she explained the physical reaction it had caused. Someone else told him about penetration. Stanley listened as the woman berated herself because she couldn’t remember ever defending herself against the stepfather, told him that somehow the knowledge had been passed to her that there had been sexual abuse into her teens.
