by Jax Miller
I tiptoe to her and shake the lump under the covers. “Magdalene, I know you’re awake,” I say, making sure she can’t mistake my voice as being angry.
She pokes her head out. “You were saying terrible, awful, shameful cuss words in your sleep, Sister Freedom.”
I’m not sure what to say; I don’t think I’m all that good around children. They make me uneasy these days. “Magdalene, what was that noise?”
“What noise?” But the kid’s a bad liar.
“Honey.” She slides over so I can sit at the side of her bed. “I promise I won’t tell anyone if you were doing something that you don’t want anyone to know about.”
“It’s not a secret I’m hiding from anyone around here. It’s just a secret I have to hide from you.”
“Says who?”
“Says Mommy and Daddy.” She gasps at her own slipup, covering her mouth with her hands.
I smile at her. She’s five, for God’s sake. I can win this. “What if I make a pinkie promise not to tell?”
“On a stack of Bibles?”
“On ten stacks of Bibles.”
She smiles.
I pick her up and off the bed, her hair wild and poking in every which direction, her eyes full of sleep crust. When I put her down, she goes to her knees and pulls out a shoebox. “This is called my secret box.” She hands it up to me. On the top, a pistol. An honest-to-God, real-life pistol.
“Honey, where on earth did you get this?!”
“Everyone gets one. Didn’t you? You can use mine if you want.”
I’m at a loss of words. And before I ask, I fear I already know the answer. “Why does everyone have one, sweetheart?”
“For the Day of Freedom, silly.” She grabs the pistol from my hand and goes to put it to her head, a fucked-up version of show-and-tell. I stop her. “When Jesus calls us home.”
“Whatta ya say I take this for now, just until I get one of my own, is that OK?” I ask.
“Want me to show you how you’re supposed to fill it with the confetti?” She holds up a bullet from the box. “We don’t put it in until the Day of Freedom, and you can’t see the confetti now….”
They’re aiming for a fucking mass suicide! Breathe. Don’t panic in front of the kid.
“No need for that, I think I can figure it out.” Five years old. She has no idea what she’s doing. She has no idea of the consequences of a gun when it’s loaded. Suddenly, I feel sick; my heart begins to race. But I have to hide it. “Go back to sleep, honey.”
What the fuck have I gotten into? What have I let my children into?
I tuck her in, my mouth full of cotton, the sweat tickling my ribs under the heavy clothes, palms sweating through the gloves. As I go to put her secret box under the bed, tucking the pistol in the back of my underwear, I see a letter, a letter that I’d ignore at any other time. But this letter is singed at the edges.
And still smells of firecrackers.
I sneak it past Magdalene and take it to the window, where I can get some light between a full moon and a gaslight that illuminates the driveway below.
My dearest Rebekah,
I cannot imagine there being a right way to write this to you. My name is Nessa Delaney, and I met you twenty years ago and knew you a whole two minutes and seventeen seconds. I know this doesn’t seem like a long time, but even eternity can last only a moment.
I’ve watched you, I watch you from afar. And you look so incredibly happy, my only qualm in writing this letter. And if you are happy and content with where you are today, then please disregard this. But if you ever seek truth, hard and heavy truth, then there is something you need to know.
Before those two minutes and seventeen seconds, I felt you grow in my body and swim in my blood for nine months. I felt your first hiccups. I felt you kick. And I held you for your first cries, your first gasps of air on this earth. I loved you before I knew you. I loved you every second since. And I love you tomorrow as well.
I trust that your family has raised you well, raised you in a happy and safe home that I could not provide for you all those years ago. And I could say “I’m sorry” from now until my last dying breath, but it could never actually express my full sorrow. If only you could see how I’ve suffered with such pain, penance for all the terrible things I felt for making that decision. But if you asked me, “Do I regret that choice?” my answer would still be no. Because from it, you grew in a place where you were loved, and what mother could ask for anything else? But do I regret the choices I made and didn’t make that led up to that point? Well, the answer is yes, every day since. And for every day to come.
If you never want to see me or contact me, I will understand. But know this, above all else: I never loved anyone or anything in life more than you and your brother. You two were the only light I’d ever known in this dark world. And I never loved again, not since I loved you. I only wish that love was enough.
Be well,
Nessa Delaney
I look down at the driveway. All is silent but the resounding of the American flag flapping, the ropes hitting the pole in front of the house. I read the letter about a thousand times, maybe more, until daylight comes. I don’t move from near the window. I’m too afraid to go back to sleep, at the risk of one of those horrible dreams again. I smell breakfast. The sun comes up. The dew glistens in the morning; people dressed in clothes identical to mine start pacing around their yards with a buzz.
I’d heard from somewhere, a long time ago, that killing a person in your dream meant that you are losing self-control.
I dreamt I killed my daughter. Can I really be losing control? Or is it already lost?
Reverend Virgil Paul hopes to breathe a little easier when his office door closes behind him and Sheriff Mannix.
“This is turning into one giant clusterfuck.” The reverend shakes the light rain from his hair as he looks in the vanity mirror with worry. “This nonsense with the ATF. Something needs to happen.”
“Sure does,” the sheriff says as he removes his hat. “Lucky Mason spilled his guts when you saw him at the jail—my guys had no idea anyone was on to us ’bout the gunrunning.”
“Rebekah…” Virgil trails off as he plops in his chair behind the desk. “Too bad they were too late. We already have all the guns we need for the Day of Freedom. She did a swell job.” At the thought, Virgil stares out the window and looks down on the residents at their daily chores: the construction of a couple more homes, pruning the vines, chopping and collecting wood for the winter. He can smell that electricity in the air, the one that cautions winter is near. His thumbs play with each other on his lap.
“How’d you fare with Michelle Campbell the other night?” The sheriff leans his rear against the other side of the desk.
A lift of the lip shows his teeth. “I think I’m getting too old for this.”
“You didn’t bury her whole, did you?”
“Of course not, Don. What do you think I am?”
Virgil violently shakes his head at the thoughts: Whistler’s Field, a neighboring meadow outside the compound’s gates, where his secrets are chopped and buried. There was Michelle Campbell, the one who got the most media attention after she disappeared. There was Frannie Tish. There was Johanna Studebaker. There was Catherine Keller. There was Margot McDonald. There was Jenny Freemason. There were many.
The number of girls that the reverend and sheriff had buried in secret in Whistler’s Field was bordering on too many to remember. Virgil can never forget their skin, like porcelain on a warm evening. Their lips, as sweet as the peaches that grow in Georgia. Their hair that caught all of Virgil’s whispers when he came to them in the night. Their scents, fresh and brand-new, those scents of virgins.
Virgil has fathered a total of fifty-eight children within the past five years. Those girls’ tender bodies starting to thaw from childhood were perfect breeding grounds for Virgil’s seeds, the holy ones, the only holy ones that occupy this wretched and evil earth. And God deeme
d Virgil so worthy of the job that the young girls would welcome him with open arms, as they should. Who wouldn’t want to breed holy in their wombs, after all?
But then there were those few who rebelled, the ones who let Satan get those seeds, in the forms of miscarriages or the mothers dying while giving birth, and God has no place for such people on this earth. With the sheriff’s help, they were banished from the church, sent to Whistler’s Field.
“No matter what you decide, Virgil, I’ll back you up,” says the sheriff. He was Virgil’s most dependable friend; they had grown up right here in Goshen.
Sheriff Don Mannix had been part of the church since it began and remained loyal through all its transformations. He is a deacon of Third-Day Adventists, and that means he has one job and one job only: to kill off the survivors.
The Day of Freedom was upon them, when Virgil would lead their souls into heaven, rid them from the sins of this world, make the transformation complete. But Satan will tempt some of them to cowardly actions, and it will be the deacons’ jobs to complete their entrance into heaven, so that Satan cannot win.
—
“Where did you get such blasphemy?” Virgil screamed through his teeth at Rebekah, throwing the letter from Nessa in her face.
“This is wrong! This is all wrong!” Rebekah screamed back, at a volume that was foreign to her lungs. It made the skin of her throat raw; it turned her shades of red she’d never known. From the living room, the Amalekite took Magdalene upstairs to where Carol listened. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” she said, her words so loud that some syllables were absent of any sound at all.
Virgil backhanded her, her cheek tender, throbbing from his knuckles. She tasted the copper pennies, felt the newly formed groove of her bottom lip. “Your disobedience…You have the demonic blood of your biological mother. You and Mason both. You two were spawns of Satan! And I regret the day I ever let you enter this holy house! So go! Go, if that’s what you want to do! Find the woman whose sewer of a womb you crawled out of!”
Virgil left because he could no longer stand Carol’s whimpers while their daughter packed a suitcase. Rebekah barely said good-bye, but promised that she’d be back for Magdalene when no one was around to hear. Magdalene did not understand, but she cried at her big sister leaving. She followed her to the gates while the rest of the family remained at home. She squeezed the front of her face between the steel bars, yelled “I love you” to Rebekah, and waved her off.
Rebekah waved back, one last time before walking out of sight down the road. “I’m going to come back for you. I promise.”
And that was the last time she was seen near the Paul farm.
—
Together, Virgil and Don stuff Virgil’s wardrobe with stacks of cash, well over a million dollars: more than enough to get him and Carol and Magdalene over the Mexican border. It was the tithes he took from the residents, ninety percent of them for the past several years. It was their sacrifice, their keep; there were many things one could call these earnings. But they belonged to Virgil, they belonged to God’s chosen master. He dreamed of starting a ministry on the white sands of the Mexican coast. In several years, Magdalene would be at that age where she could procreate.
The mass suicide of his congregation was a surefire way of escaping, an assurance so that while the rest would be sitting at the right throne of God, Virgil could continue with his work, sowing his seeds, spreading his reach to the south, maybe even as far as Central and South America. He couldn’t let the laws of the earth, the ways of man, hinder this. Sure, they’d arrest him, saying he murdered all these girls. But Virgil didn’t abide by man’s law. He followed God’s. And after all, that was all in God’s plan, the girls and such.
Of course, little Magdalene had to believe in the Day of Freedom. If not, there was the risk of his escape plans falling through, the loss of his followers, had she told just one person that she’d not be entering the kingdom of God with the others.
The room smells like cash and anointing oil. He looks out the window, his sigh fogging the glass. In the distance, he thinks he sees Freedom, Magdalene trailing behind her. But Virgil thought he had more time. Between Mason’s declaration back at the jail cell of the ATF being involved; the meeting with the skinheads; Rebekah’s disappearance; their last arriving member, FreedomInJesus. Virgil thought there’d be more time before he had to say these words: “Prepare. The Day of Freedom is finally upon us.”
My name is Freedom and the heaviness of my skirt and robe slows me down. Men in construction trill their tools in the corners of my earshot as I shuffle into the dense forest, whipped by twigs, the scent of soil kind through my nostrils. Despite my lack of sense of direction, I aim for the protesters; I rip through the branches that catch the cotton like claws reaching out to stop me in my tracks. I rip, I roar, I bleed, but the pain only drives me faster.
In some way, I can feel it in my blood: the sense that I’m going in the right direction, the sense that I’m heading toward the clamshell roads that carry the crazies. But I’m slow, I’m out of shape. I wipe the snot with my sewn-on gloves. And I hear Magdalene trailing behind, but I pretend not to notice. I suppose it’s better that she follows me than is at home with the fucking psychos.
“Sister Freedom, we’re supposed to be washing floors! Why are we running through the forest?!” she squeals.
I see the black gates; I see the signs hung on them through the trees. Protesters’ voices take shape the closer I get, their chants transforming from a thick purr into glass-like comprehension. “Stay where you are,” I yell back to Magdalene, unsure of whether or not she hears me. I finally reach the gates. In a gesture of desperation, I pull myself up and stand on the lowest bar.
“You have to get us the fuck out of here,” I plead with the activists. “You need to go get help!” But my words seem to drown in their clamor. “Will you fucking listen to me, for fuck’s sake! Listen to me!”
I spit out words, words in no particular order: words like Mass, Suicide, ATF, Fucking psychos. And these are all attention-grabbing words. Yet their attention is elsewhere, settled somewhere between false gods and vehement indoctrination. The louder I get, the louder they become. I scream until my ribs ache and the walls of my throat might bleed.
And from the back, of fucking course, the short butch who egged me the day before makes her way to the front of the crowd. I reach through the gates and stare directly into her swollen eyes. “You need to get the ATF. There’s about to be four hundred fifty corpses behind these walls.” The woman seems to listen to me. Her shoulders rock from side to side as she walks to me at the gates. My heart rate drops down to a steadier pace when she shows signs of concern, when she listens. “You have to get help. There are children in here, for God’s sake.”
But her compassionate expression becomes a twist of the lips, there’s a strange glimmer in her black eyes, and she pelts me with a hard-boiled egg. I just manage to catch her by the fringe of her hood and pull her back to the gates. I grab her, double-fisted, pushing the gates with my heels. With her back to me, I wrap my arm around her throat and squeeze with every drop of panic that swims through my muscles. I scream in her ear, “Their blood will be on your hands, then. Their blood will be on your hands!”
Then the strong arms of another around my own throat. I release the butch when I’m twisted around like a rag doll, a tornado of heavy cotton being pulled in a headlock back toward the compound. It’s Reverend Virgil Paul, his pace faster than my thoughts. I cannot see Magdalene, but I hear her, her pleas for her father not to hurt me.
“Get on back home to your mother,” he yells out to her. On the way out of the forest, the workers and residents stare, eyes cold and distant, lifeless marbles peering from blankets of cloth. The only sign of life, their breath in the cold front that sweeps over this place, this fucking place.
Ahead is the shed. That’s where we’re going. The people, the scenery, it all seems to disappear, fade away from me. It’s only Virg
il and I. The Dutch door slams behind us, the noise turning my spinal fluid into ice water. He grabs me by my hair, and in one effortless heave, I’m thrown to the floor. I remember the gun, still in the back of my skirt. I need to find out where Rebekah is.
He grabs a five-pound bag of uncooked rice and pours it around me on the floor. I try my best to keep facing toward him so he won’t spot the gun.
“Kneel,” he demands. “Kneel on the rice.” It’s uncomfortable at first, but I obey without one word. He kicks me, right in the kidney, enough that it takes the wind out of me. I’m sure to piss blood later on. The pain shoots up to my armpit, I can’t make a sound through it. “For your iniquities, you do not deserve this Day of Freedom.”
“You’re a fucking murderer! This Day of Freedom is a lie. It’s a mass suicide!”
He punches me in the face; I swear I hear my skull split in half. I taste blood almost immediately. Virgil seems to regain his composure, leaning down to face me. “Who are you, Freedom? Who are you really?” I hear his bones grind, I smell his sweat above me.
“I’m a fucking ATF agent.” I’m not sure why this is the first thing to come out of my mouth—one of my most outlandish lies. But he doesn’t gamble with it.
“ATF, huh?”
I grin, a mouthful of blood. “So you can forget your plans to kill me. They all know I’m here. And there’s no way you’ll get away with this horror.” The rice begins to burn the skin of my knees.
From a standing faucet in the corner of the shed, Virgil fills two buckets with water. “I’m not going to kill you, Freedom. Because I’m not the murderer you think I am.” His voice is alarmingly calm. He places the handle of each bucket in one of my hands and makes me hold my arms up. He takes what looks like a broom handle and straps it on my shoulders, threading each end through the bucket handles. I am reminded of Christ’s Crucifixion, carrying the weight of the world. The grains of rice start to feel like glass, and my knees bleed under the weight of the water. But I don’t whine. I don’t groan. I refuse to give this guy the satisfaction he so desires. “But you will stay in here. And you will listen to those around you ascend to heaven. And you will live the rest of your life with their blood on your hands.”
