Will God hear her prayers now, from this forgotten chamber? Ruth hopes so.
Paul came back a limping shadow, could scarcely activate the code to let the Family know he had returned. He had to be helped down the ladder and led to the infirmary, shaking off fever and sundry topside afflictions. How tenderly Rebekah nursed him, pressing a damp cloth to his brow, petting his curls, and sponging the black soot from his skin. Paul’s scent heated the space between them. There were no pain pills left, only two or three aspirin. Rebekah rummaged in the supply drawers—a few squares of gauze, one roll of tape, half a jar of healing ointment, a heinous thick-jellied cream they slathered on to relieve the rattling coughs. A small bit of disinfectant she used to clean his cuts. Bruises had come up, blue spectres on his bare flesh, arms and legs and narrow chest.
He brought contraband—a purple flower with withered leaves drooping from its stalk. Ruth saw it on the cot between them and seized it.
“For me,” Ruth said, delighted.
Paul blushed but said nothing.
Rebekah busied herself with refreshing her cloth.
“Used to have them behind the house, near the woodpile,” Paul said. “Remember?”
“No,” lied Ruth.
“Try,” he said.
“That were the past. Hardly matters now.”
Paul struggled to sit. “The past is who we are. It’s partly who we become.”
“Must be your fever talking.”
Rebekah came then and dabbed at his temples, his brow. His lips.
“Listen,” said Paul. “Topside, the ruins is fenced off, quarantined. Guarded, but not as well as last time. Our homes, barns, our fields are all bombed-out. Our church. Even the school is rubble. Hand-painted signs, all over, calling us traitors. That’s our inheritance. We can hide down here for a hundred years, but it won’t change that past. Once we step out of this bunker, we got to accept the truth. All those bones. That’s on us.”
“You’re delirious,” Ruth said.
“The Burning Light,” whispered Rebekah.
Paul nodded. “We done that. Thousands died because of it.”
Ruth said, “‘The earth and all who dwell in it shall melt.’ Psalms, chapter seventy-five, verse three. We cleansed the earth and cast out demons, as God commanded. See any heathens up there?”
Paul’s voice shook when he said, “It weren’t nothing like Father says.”
Rebekah asked shyly, “Do flowers mean the earth is healing?”
Paul said, “Somewhat.”
“Then give the flower to Father Ernst,” she said. “Mayhap it’s a sign for the Ascension. Time for our Deliverance.” Rebekah lay her hand upon his chest. Was she checking his pulse?
Paul said, “I already showed Father. Only thing he done is give me a thrashing. Best get rid of it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Ruth.
Rebekah said nothing but she squeezed Paul’s fingers tight, tight.
Ruth twiddled the flower, imagined a garland of the purple blossoms to mount her dark hair for their union ceremony, dreamed of clasping Paul’s hands, the signing of vows. But Rebekah took the flower and put it in her mouth. She chewed, chewed, swallowed. Smiled from sweetness. Then puckered from the last bitter traces.
Ruth lets go of the bars and sits on the cousin board. She reclines, blowing on her sore hands. Her heels stretch almost to the end. Seven years ago, the ham-radio news coverage of the Great Standoff wasn’t what she had expected. Topside, nobody seemed to understand that God had commanded Father Ernst. That the Family was enacting God’s will. Lists of the bombing victims’ names were read aloud, for hours. Heart-wrenching stories, told and retold, by traumatized survivors. Down in the bunker, they sat and stewed until, filled with horror and remorse, some began to cry. Then Father Ernst shut off the radio and insisted they sing hymns instead.
Ruth’s mind turns. She daren’t think on the past, no matter what Paul says. The past is a dark bird, frantic, swooping, cawing at her. Ruth never knows how she’ll feel when a memory appears, or if things will still add up as they are meant to in the Doctrine.
At hand now is her due Reflection, and Father Ernst will want to hear some wholesome pronouncements. Once Ruth clears her mind, it comes, plain as a picture—sin is like a wild dog that scrounges and spawns a dirty pack. One snarling beast in front—that’s Ruth telling the wicked story. Trailing behind are all the other sins. Telling to impressionable girls, the vessels, more to the point. Then comes perjury; lying to Father Ernst. Begrudging Mother Susan, cursing the old woman’s joyless vigil, that’s also a sin. Casting blame on Rebekah, and on the nameless one who enchanted her with taboo tales in the first place, yet another whelp of sin!
Paul would have a different view if only he were here to untangle it like knotted string. He might say, ‘How can telling a story be worse than stealing the Family’s food?’ Cousin Silas is often whipped but rarely locked away for his transgressions. Paul might ask, “Is eating ideas worse than eating the rotting oats?”
And then there’d be consequences.
Ruth felt Father Ernst tremble when he held her by the wrist and spoke of her womanhood, her impending bride time. How fierce he is, a wiry explosion of beard and moustache, the damning glint of his eyes filling her with dread. Femaleness is the problem: that much is clear. If Silas, if any boy had done what she did, would Father Ernst find it so depraved? She doubts it. Ruth’s mind winds along villainous paths. She’s in deeper, up to the hilt.
Footsteps approach and veer off elsewhere. The infirmary? Ruth strains to listen. Some quiet rummaging. More steps. Then comes the whisper of a sound to distract her—cotton skirts on the concrete floor—and Rebekah’s solemn face peers in through the bars.
“Cousin,” says Ruth. She presses herself to the gate.
Rebekah says nothing. Shadows fall from cheekbones, skeletal. She is so changed in recent days. Musk comes in dank waves from her body, her dirty hair.
“Don’t worry, I’ll not say nothing about the book,” says Ruth.
Not even a blink from Rebekah. Just the staring of those eyes, the pupils of which shine, dilated and wet.
Ruth whispers, “What’s wrong?”
Rebekah won’t answer.
An unnamed fear fills Ruth. “Tell me, please.” She slides one stinging hand between the bars and flattens her palm. “If you cannot speak, do finger alphabet,” she says. Before Rebekah became a mother, she and Ruth would lie awake for hours after the night bell talking just so, spelling out messages back and forth.
Rebekah presses a bony finger to Ruth’s palm. It’s like a candle stub, waxen and cold. Ruth winces. Rebekah seems to notice the whip welts. She flips Ruth’s hand to use the backside instead, which is a blessing. But the backs of her hands are not as sensitive, and when Rebekah traces out the letters, Ruth is not sure. First is a capital ‘G’ or mayhap a ‘Q’. Then a large ‘U’ and definitely the letter ‘I’ with its slash and dot and then an ‘L’. She draws a letter ‘T’—or is it the Holy cross?
A clattering erupts in the hall, and Mother Susan is upon them like a bent nail. She thrusts the wire broom and dustpan at Rebekah. “Must I carry the entire workload? Hie thee!” She flicks her apron to rush Rebekah away.
“And you, Cousin Ruth. This is punishment, not a tea party. You will break Father Ernst’s heart yet with your wicked ways, don’t I know the truth.”
Ruth stutters, “I-I shan’t.”
“By the sign of your dark hair, I know you have invited the Devil inside.”
“I have not,” says Ruth. Why is Susan so mean?
“You’re to sit the night,” says Susan. “Not fit for the girls’ company, not until Father Ernst has had his word with you.”
Ruth sucks in her breath. Once, shortly after Hannah made her bride time, Ruth saw Father having a word with her, his door not quite shut. They were not words, they were actions—Father’s hairy buttocks moving against Hannah’s uplifted skirt, the sound of skin slapping sk
in, making her cry.
“Abide with me,” says Ruth. Her voice hiccups. She reaches through the bars. “I cannot have a word, I’m not ready. Mother Susan, you know it’s true.”
“Mayhap you will be more judicious henceforth, Cousin. ‘For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. For in one hour, is she made desolate.’”
When Susan turns, the soft ruffle of cotton hem on cement tears into Ruth. Susan’s footsteps echo to quiet, all the way to nothing, and Ruth is more alone than she’s ever been.
CHAPTER 10
Dear Sister. All of her letters begin the same way. Even in the quiet stillness of her own mind, Rebekah dares not use her Christian name, revoked during the casting-out. Rebekah composes with invisible ink, stores the letters in a mental corner, believes that if she concentrates hard enough she can send them like a radio frequency sends a song, with the power of her own conviction. This will have to do. For Rebekah hasn’t a clue what township or city her sister might live in or if she is even still alive. And she can hardly get a real stamp or post an actual envelope. Do they still deliver the mail topside?
This was the first of so many:
Dear Sister,
Did you make it to New York City? I hope you coloured your hair auburn just as you wanted. I wonder if you wear pumps and stockings and lipstick. Imagine. I miss you. Bunker living is a boring stink hole of chores. You’d hate it.
All my love, Rebekah.
Today it is even more loathsome to wake and fairly impossible to swing her legs over the bedframe or shuffle into the blue dress. Susan barks, “Haul yourself.” To her right is Ruth’s empty bed—still locked in Contemplation. The little girls murmur things, Rebekah doesn’t know what. A golden sunbeam beckons from cotton-candy clouds in that other dream world. She could curl in the fragrant grass and rest. She could lie on her back and watch the sky shift, minute to minute. Sing lullabies to the little wasted life inside. Then, small hands are patting her. Insistent. More shouting. She’s not to lie abed taunting the Devil with slovenly thoughts with her wanton woman’s body. She’s to get up. She’s to get to work! That Susan.
At long last, one thought rouses her: two pills left, taped and hidden. When the others are distracted she will fetch them. Keep them close, right in her pocket. There—at least she has some kind of plan. She begins a new letter.
Dear Sister,
Is this what it means to be in love? Hopeless in every hour, except for the one you spend with your beloved. Was it like this for you, so long ago? I have a hare-brained idea to find you, wherever you are. If I wait a little longer he promises to come too. Waiting—something I used to be quite good at—these many tainted years.
All my love, Rebekah
As a toddler, Rebekah fell down the rickety basement stairs in Mother Deborah’s house, arse over teakettle, and lay on the cement floor undiscovered for hours. Father Ernst was away on a speaking tour, and the boys were out in the field. Deborah was putting up the pickles and beets, had lugged jars and the oversized canner from downstairs, forgetting to latch the door. She sterilized lids in the steamy kitchen and kept the oven at a solid temperature to heat the Mason jars, which she lined up on baking sheets like soldiers. She iced cucumbers in the large sink—her secret extra step—to give them more crunch. It was hard work, and Mother Mary was to have helped but had stayed in bed with the flu. Deborah trimmed the vegetables with her favourite paring knife, the sharpest, the one with the plastic handle. Beet juice stained her fingers bright pink and dripped down the front of her pale apron. She stirred in sugar, salt, spices, and set the brine pots to simmer. She paused, mopping sweat from her brow. An unknown urgency overcame her, and she circled the ground and upper floors, even the little-used attic room, but could not locate her youngest child. Outside, calling her name around the garden and to the edge of the field. She ran back to the house, inside, and noticed the basement door ajar.
All of this Rebekah knows because she floated there, slightly above and behind her mother’s carefully parted and combed hair, while her twisted little body lay unmoving at the foot of the stairs.
The county doctor was summoned, and he diagnosed her with head trauma, concussion. It was serious, he said. Deborah followed his orders precisely, setting up the attic room for her convalescence, stripping it of colour, and covering the windows with thick curtains. Weeks passed. No music, no games. Not even the dogs allowed to visit. Rebekah sipped tepid broth and warm, watery oats. Deborah usually brought the meals and sat on the edge of the narrow bed to spoon-feed her, distraught, guilt colouring her cheeks.
When Father Ernst returned, sated from tour, he researched experimental treatments, and so Rebekah’s head was iced at regular intervals and she was made to wear a blindfold during daylight hours. He almost never visited the cramped upper room. Something about the way she lay so still unnerved him. Rebekah’s sense of smell became acute. She sometimes vomited from nausea when wafts of frying bacon reached her from the main floor kitchen, and she begged them to cease. Lying in bed blindfolded, her hearing, her hands, especially the tips of her fingers, became sharply perceptive. She had to remain calm, prone, regardless of newly violent impulses that wracked her small body. Regardless of the bold and frightening pictures, the visions invading her sleep, taking hold of her imagination. She spent days, weeks, in this Otherworld, pulled back to attic room realness only when someone arrived with medication or a cup of tea or a bowl of wholesome soup.
Her teenage sister, whom she adored, would break Father Ernst’s rule and sneak upstairs. Sometimes she scaled the house siding and propped a ladder on the porch roof in order to climb through an attic window. “Aren’t you lonely?” she’d say and tear off Rebekah’s blindfold. “How else will you see the drawings?” She read from a forbidden book—fairy tales—one she had discovered at a rummage sale and secreted home in her skirts. Her sister pulled out the nails from a loose floorboard in the attic room and tucked the book inside. “Now you can look whenever you like,” she said.
“I’m not to get out of bed,” said Rebekah. “Only for the chamber pot.”
“Nonsense,” said her sister. “You’ll waste away. You need to get strong again. Even Rapunzel escapes.”
“Read me that one again,” said Rebekah, shifting against the stacked pillows.
“Read it yourself.”
“The letters go blurry.”
“Fine. But follow along with my finger.”
Rebekah had little choice but to retreat into that great pool of fantasy in the book and also in her mind. Over the years it served her well. She was a happy, if somewhat aloof, child. She told no one but her sister about the secret world. They agreed: surely it was God’s Garden, the glorious place Father Ernst spoke of in sermons and in their nightly prayers. He’d be livid to know she could come and go on her own, without following his many Doctrine rules, wouldn’t he?
By the next summer, Rebekah was back in the shared bedroom, doing light chores alongside everyone else. The Family would jokingly refer to that worrisome period as Rebekah’s Fall from Grace. Young Thomas would, without warning, stiffen like a board and teeter slowly to the ground shouting, “Who am I?” setting off gales of laughter. They could have fun sometimes, before.
At Father Ernst’s insistence, her sister landed part-time secretarial work at the local medical clinic. “I get to use computers,” she said, beaming. On the Farm, none of the females were allowed. Then one night while they lay in bed, she whispered, “I’m to get a hold of the X-ray equipment supplies.” Rebekah could not fathom why. “They want it. To make bombs,” she said. Her hand, when it gripped Rebekah’s, was very cold.
Things changed after that. Her sister became furtive and withdrawn. She was home less often. Rebekah heard her sneaking out the bedroom window at night and creeping back in at dawn, her body reckless with adventure, skin lit by a clandestine flame. There was a boy, somewhere. Rebekah covered for her time and again, but eventually she was caught. Then, the casting-out. How could a
boy, how could anything be terrible enough to warrant that? A solemn lesson learned, for shame.
How they wept.
Now Rebekah is about the age that her sister was then, eighteen, and the pattern repeats. Despite the terrifying impression the ritual left on her childhood self, Rebekah, in the here and now, recreates her sister’s dilemma. Rebekah skulks and lies. She breaks commandments and revels in sin as much as her sister ever did. Leads a young man into temptation. Into danger. Loses herself in desire. In her quiet desperation, Rebekah snares Paul, who is trusting and kind and doesn’t yet know about the fragile life growing inside her. She has no right and every right to tell him. Had he known, would he still have left her below?
What kind of monster is she?
Human, she longs to shout. For isn’t it a simple question of nature? The unrepentant song of the flesh, joyous and sacred. Bodies coiled together in heat, minds and spirits united in love. Why is this seditious?
But she knows it is dangerous. It threatens the fabric, the structure, and the future of their small colony. One will eat the other, surely. What is duty? Rebekah would happily abandon everything—the bunker, the children, the Doctrine, and all of Father Ernst’s many rules—for a chance to experience real pleasure away from this shadow of shame. And if she would break the bond of her covenant, so too would others. The great unravelling. There’d be no Family, no Farm, after all. It only works when they all play their part, especially the mothers. Paul believes he can tend the wildness of their private calling and still keep his obligations to the Family, the children. But it’s impossible—he cannot protect them all. And she, seemingly, cannot protect anyone, not even herself.
He, noble boy, will eventually succumb to Family pressures. Yet she will choose Paul over the rest of them, again and again, if she has the chance. This will be the crux of their downfall.
“Who am I?” she says, lying on her lonely cot.
Little girls crowd around. “Mother Rebekah,” says one, “are you okay?” Whispering, cooing, like pigeons.
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