Freedom's Child: A Novel

by Jax Miller

  He uses a Master Lock key to open the tall gate, rust flaking from hinges that whine. The chants subside as the officer and I start on a long dirt road that disappears ahead over a hill. He indicates toward a clunker of a pickup truck parked to the side at the edge of the forest. I climb in on the driver’s side and slide over. He hands me a navy bandanna from his front pocket. I wipe egg from my face and hair. In the mirror, a welt develops; flesh begins to turn red raw before my eyes.

  A Confederate flag sticker taped to the dashboard, a shotgun displayed right behind my head. I’m in redneck hell, I think. As we rattle up past several small white houses that resemble sugar cubes, the man, who said he was the sheriff, I think, spits his used tobacco into an old Chock full o’Nuts can he leaves on the side of his door.

  “This here’s the ol’ Paul house.” He puts the car in park beside a cop car, presumably his. As I look up at the porch from the truck, Carol and Reverend Virgil Paul step out from the house, a young girl running behind them to hide behind Carol’s skirt. I think my heart stops beating.

  I’m at the home where my children were raised, a place I’ve only conjured up in my dreams. And for a second, I swear I can feel them, as if they’re right here, standing next to me at the foot of the porch.

  The Pauls mean to be warm as they greet me. But their embraces are awkward, like they’ve only done it maybe once in their whole lives. Their dress, conservative: white turtlenecks and dirty Keds, a sight contradicting my ripped jeans and combat boots, wild, unbrushed hair that smells like smoke. They try to smile like they’re happy to see me; their teeth show, but their cheeks hardly move. Not knowing what to say, I fix my attention to the young girl.

  “And who might this princess be?” I hear the girl giggle through the cotton.

  “Boo!” she yells out before nicking her head back. Out of everyone here, she looks like the only one truly happy. And I could only hope that that was the case for Mason and Rebekah, being raised here.

  “This here is our daughter, Magdalene.”

  “Hi, there, Magdalene.” I smile at her. “My name is Freedom.”

  “So what’s your real name, anyway?” the reverend asks, more like an interrogation.

  I shrug. “That’s it. Freedom Oliver.”

  He curls his lip and looks at me like I have three heads. “So your parents were those kinds of people…” He trails off. Three minutes in, I already know I might end up biting my tongue right off through fake smiles that hurt my cheeks.

  Virgil shakes hands with the sheriff before he takes off in his cop car. He stands close to me, like he’s trying to remind me that he stands a good foot taller than I. “No luggage, I see?” I hold the jacket tighter around me, on the off chance that he can see the wire down my shirt.

  “It’s a funny story,” I start, not really knowing where I’m going with the answer. And I’m glad it’s not one I have to think up, as an old woman steps from the house to tow everyone’s eyes. The soles of her leather sandals scrape against the peeling whitewash of the porch. Gray marbles peer from a black scarf that hangs on to lazy shoulders, eyes that look like they can tell a million stories but choose to keep them in their respective decades. She holds the door open for us.

  Inside it smells like lemons and banana bread. A second hand ticks through the coziness of the living room. Old couches look like they’ve never been sat on, and balls of pink yarn and a pair of knitting needles rest on and near a black rocking chair in the corner of the room, near a small window that overlooks the driveway.

  The house looks like something from the Colonial period: large wooden beams supporting the ceiling, a wood-burning stove, creaky hickory boards for floors, and about a dozen needlework frames around HOME SWEET HOME, HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, yadda, yadda, yadda.

  “Well, let’s get you settled, shall we?”

  I jar with the entrance of a cuckoo bird. The bird sings, slightly out of tune. In fact, his words are my exact sentiment toward these people: cuckoo. But be polite, Freedom. Act like one of them. Act human. “I’d really love a shower more than anything, Reverend Paul.”

  “Plenty of time for that.” He opens the front door. He gestures with his hand for me to follow. With a snap of his fingers he demands of the old lady, “Amalekite, come.” The woman acts as his obedient lapdog. On instinct, I want to tell the man to go fuck himself. He continues to me, his voice matter-of-fact, “In this community, a man is not allowed alone with a woman without the presence of another female, I’m sure you understand.” I’ve no fucking clue what he’s talking about.

  If ever there were an internal creep-o-meter instilled in humans, mine rings off the charts: the women walk on eggshells, eggshells on the tongue, like they’re afraid to say or do anything unless it’s confirming or in direct obedience to the reverend. Magdalene jumps to her stomach on the living room floor to resume with her coloring book of Christ’s Resurrection, with only a purple crayon. “I’ll start lunch,” Carol says and disappears into the kitchen, probably an excuse to leave the awkward situation. “Magdalene, come with Mommy.”

  Magdalene goes to run past me and stops, stretching her head all the way back to see me. “You’re awfully pretty for a grown-up, Sister Freedom.”

  For the first time in God knows how long, it’s a compliment I cherish. “Why, thank you, Miss Magdalene.”

  She smiles a toothy grin. “But Sister Freedom is one funny name.” Carol tries to pull the girl away with one of those sorry-about-that chuckles.

  “It sure is.”

  A fat man who looks like he hasn’t bathed in weeks melts in a leather recliner that has no business being in a general store. Country music static drones in the background, Laffy Taffy products that expired years ago collect dust on the shelves, and outside are vintage gas pumps and a yellowed billboard that displays biblical scripture. On a cracked glass deli counter, a pig’s head and chicken claws and cow’s tongue, soul food of the like, attracting flies.

  “Why, she was just on her way home from school. And no one’s seen her since,” the man answers, sweating in front of an aging fan while Mattley bundles up his new jacket.

  “And this was the last place that anyone saw Michelle Campbell, is that correct?”

  “I supposed so. She and her brother, Clayton. They usually walked home from the school together, only lived right here on this road, up at the yellow house on the end. Just Clayton lives there now. Don’t see him too much no more, keeps to himself. Think he’s drinking or sumpin’.”

  “And you didn’t happen to notice anything peculiar about her that day, did you?”

  “Peculiar?” He doesn’t know the word.

  “You know, like funny, or strange.”

  “Well,” the general store owner recollects. “Looked like her ’n Clayton was arguing about sumpin’. Couldn’t say what, though.”

  A butch woman with dirty-blond hair huffs through the door on old crutches. She goes for the back of the deli counter, trying to balance her weight on the sticks, and grabs a slab of steak to hold over her bruised face. The man raises his head but never leaves his recliner. “What’s gone ’n happened to you there, Sue?”

  “The Paul farm, that’s what,” she growls as she crosses the floor and grabs a bottle of Colt 45 from a fridge with no working lights. She uses the only two teeth she has to rip the bottle top off. “Some new woman, ain’t from around here. Red hair, tats, a Yankee accent. Was just a peaceful protest, and she went all berserk and hit me for no reason at all! Think she broke my goddamn kneecap, the crazy bitch.”

  Mattley realizes this might very well be Freedom she’s talking about.

  “You mean you didn’t show her that left hook of yours?” He chuckles.

  “Was gonna, but then Sheriff showed up. Broke it up and took her inside the gates.” Her gums make wet noises; her jowls ripple with each word.

  “Why do people protest at the Paul farm, anyway?” Mattley asks.

  “Because them people are going to hell, that’s
why,” Sue barks. “Say they’re the only ones getting into heaven, trying to recruit, stealing members from our churches to go and live with them. Real fucked-up in the head. Once you go in? You ain’t never coming out.”

  —

  The yellow house at the end of the road, home to the Campbells. A junkyard of tractor and car parts scattered all over straw-like grass, empty beer bottles and old tires, the faint smell of gasoline. Shutters hang on their last rusty threads, the residual remains of yellow paint and plywood over the front windows of the first floor. The nearest neighbors are a good mile away. A mad pit bull tied with orange extension cord to a large oak tree with hundreds of dried-up wads of gum on it. The porch groans, decked with dozens of flypaper strips and a million cigarette butts.

  “Hello?” Mattley’s call echoes through the screen door and into the house, where something heavy metal plays from the back. But Mattley knows he doesn’t have time to wait around, not if the woman the butch redneck mentioned was at the compound was Freedom. He walks in, tiptoeing through and calling out, “Clayton Campbell?”

  Through the living room door, a pornographic film plays muted on the TV, the house full of smoke and an awful smell of chemicals. Through another door, a makeshift lab. The machinery is cold, the mechanical scent emanating from the room, windows boarded up with pentagrams spray-painted on the walls. On the floor, a still body with a gas mask on.

  Mattley rips the mask off the young man, a glass pipe broken in half at his side.

  The boy is recently dead, his face swollen with the telltale signs of an overdose, his body all bone, with signature scabs from picking at the skin while tweeking on drugs.

  Mattley isn’t sure if he should call the local cops just yet, not with him suspecting the town’s sheriff in this mess of a cult and Michelle’s possible ties to it. He sneaks upstairs, looking out every other window to make sure no one’s followed. Up in Michelle’s room, he finds nothing useful. Piles of clothes and old dolls, old test papers destroyed by dampness, the room stuffy, like it hasn’t been entered since she disappeared. Everything about the room feels soggy.

  Mattley sits on her musty bed among garbage bags full of clothes and old shoes, his head in his hands at the dead end. He finds nothing of significance and vents his anger by throwing books and bags of laundry across the room. He goes to leave, tripping over a pair of Converse sneakers that rattle.

  He composes himself on the floor and looks inside the sneaker to find a bottle of prenatal vitamins. Michelle Campbell was pregnant. He opens the vitamins, a chalky smell. And inside, he notices what looks like a folded piece of paper. He pulls it out.

  It is a pamphlet from the Third-Day Adventists, the header reading “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened.” There’s no doubt in his mind that it all comes back to this church in the hills of Kentucky. But first he decides to head to the Bluegrass, where Mason told him to go the night before and look for a man named Joe.

  Dear Mason and Rebekah, though once upon a time, you were Ethan and Layla,

  My name was Nessa Delaney and I spent two years in prison for a crime I did not commit. There was this woman who I’d shared a cell with. I slept terribly because of her wailing in the night, unmoving air entombed around us, broken by her weeping. She’d curl up on her blanketless cot and play with the tears she’d cry on the mat by making piles out of them and swirling them around with the ends of her hair. “I have to get home,” she’d say to herself. She’d chew her nails and pace like her steps might one day get her out of there.

  Oh, wait. That woman was me.

  Another plan, another thing I didn’t think all the way through. No weapon, no charges, right? The Sixth Amendment says I shall enjoy the right to a speedy trial. Our forefathers were fucking idiots if they thought anyone could enjoy their trials. But what isn’t afforded by most Americans is the right to a speedy holding process, that period between arrest and said trial.

  I suppose I’d watched too many reruns of Law & Order to know better. You know, those episodes when the cops are standing right next to the forensic techs when they get a match on a set of prints, or when at trial, a suspect is still bruised from an assault when taking the stand. How about “no.” Nothing is fast in the legal process. Nothing is simple. Nothing is easy. None of it is enjoyable either.

  Between the rape and Mark’s unexpected death, my brain wasn’t working. The defense argued that I was in a “state of shock” when I called the police. It was the evening that Mark died, a few hours later.

  Dispatcher: 911, what’s your emergency?

  Nessa: My husband (my voice calm).

  Dispatcher: Yes ma’am, what about your husband?

  Nessa: My husband is a cop and he’s in the shower.

  Dispatcher: Ma’am, do you or your husband need assistance?

  Nessa: No. He’s already dead. (I hang up.)

  That transcript made headlines everywhere, nationwide. Overnight, I went from Nessa Delaney the homemaker into Nessa Delaney the cop killer. When the police showed up, they could smell the blood. Even I could, thick with iron, and I made no attempt at trying to scrub it from the floors and ceiling. I was sloppy. They saw my bruises; they saw his blood in my hair that I did not see.

  I expected Suffolk County Police, that was where we lived. But because Mark worked at the NYPD, I was met by two counties. And news reporters. And sniffer dogs. And the bomb squad. (Why? I’ll never know.) The gun was hidden right under his body, in that compartment at the bottom of the shower, the one I discovered on the night Mark died. The dogs couldn’t detect it, not with its rightful owner resting in peace right above it. And I couldn’t tell the cops, because how the hell would I know where my brother-in-law would have put the weapon after killing his brother in a drunken rage over me?

  When they handcuffed me and led me out of the house, my heart sunk in my guts at the sight of Lynn Delaney holding you, Mason. My son. You saw me, and my mind raced with the notion that your last memory of me would be when the cops arrested me for killing your father. The way you screamed for me. The way you screamed…

  On the way from paddy wagon to courthouse, the cameras burned my retinas. I thought, Hey, I could spend a few days in the slammer until an anonymous call leads the cops to the gun, right? Then they’d find Matthew’s prints on it, which I planted there after getting him drunk, and I’d be good to go. I could live happily ever after with my son and the child I had growing inside of me. I thought of calling it my very own Mastic Beach fairy tale.

  It took one year for someone to find the gun. One year! One year, even after the call I made my lawyer make to the cops to tell them where the gun was. I would have had Peter make the call, but his stutter would have been too easy to detect.

  It took another six months to get the ballistics and fingerprints and such to point to Matthew.

  It took another six months to be dismissed of the charges.

  My defense waived the right to a speedy trial so they could build up a proper defense, in which I was urged to oblige, lest they take themselves off the case and offer disclaimers that could take months (I’ve heard even years) to process.

  When he finally released me, the judge apologized for the mix-up and thanked me for doing my duty as a citizen. Really? Two years in prison and all I get is a half-assed “I’m sorry.” I’m supposed to find some justification in it because my patience there is exactly what makes me a good law-abiding citizen. Twisting my arm to sign my parental rights over because you’d convinced me I’d spend my entire life here and because I had no one (but the Delaneys) to care for my children during my time here. Fuck that.

  I didn’t tell the judge out loud to go fuck himself. But I did express my fear of the Delaneys.

  It was already in the news that my house had been vandalized, the death threats from them. People knew just how bad they wanted me dead. Could you believe Lynn and her sons (all but Peter) went onto The Montel Williams Show ? Then the whole entire world knew how bad they wanted me dead, thoug
h they only made themselves look stupid. Doesn’t take much. Lynn even hired a certain correctional officer named Jimmy Doyle to break my kneecaps, but a case couldn’t be built from the rumors. Thankfully, there wasn’t any follow-through to those threats.

  Years later, I suspect this Jimmy Doyle was the same correctional officer who supplied Matthew with all the information about mine and my children’s whereabouts during his incarceration. And so the idea of Witness Protection was offered to me. Nothing like a criminal family from hell wanting to kill you and/or shatter your kneecaps to get you an offer for relocation with the Witness Protection Program. Please, they gave Witness Protection to almost anyone in the 1990s. It was practically a trend.

  When they went to arrest Matthew for Mark’s murder, they found locks of my hair that he’d tied with bows. They found dozens of photos of me hanging on wire mobiles over his bed. He had notebooks with my name written thousands of times on each page, a good twenty notebooks full. Matthew’s obsession with me made things very hard for him. And rightfully so.

  My name is Freedom, and in my paranoia, I wonder if they can tell I’m not the zealot I’ve claimed to be. “The storm we had last week brought quite the cold front,” Virgil says to no one in particular as we cross a hill, the smell of fresh dirt and the bell of a nearby church ringing through the fog. With Virgil ahead of us, I try to make eye contact with the old woman to my right. But every time I try, she looks down, each grip of her hand tight on the other. At the top of the hill, the church just ahead, we follow Virgil toward a shed with a heavy Dutch door, surrounded by overgrown wildflowers.

  “The church is impressive,” I comment, if only for Mason and the ATF agent to hear me from the surveillance van. “Are we going to this shed to the side of it?” Play dumb, always a safe bet. This wouldn’t be such a bad place to store guns.

  “It is here that you will be prepared for baptism,” Virgil tells me.