by Jax Miller
The pain makes me impulsive. “Where is Rebekah?”
“Is that why you’re here? Over her disappearance?”
“What does it matter if you tell me the truth now?”
“I loved Rebekah. What makes you think I had anything to do with her disappearance?”
“We know she was running guns for Third-Day Adventists.”
His words become hisses. “Rebekah was the last one of this congregation to make me angry, to turn her back on this church.” He walks around me. “So I’d choose my words wisely.”
“Or what?”
Virgil gazes out the window. “What happened to Rebekah should be of no concern to you.” He opens the top of the Dutch door and calls out to one of the nearby workers, demanding he fetch the Amalekite. “It had nothing to do with the guns.”
“Just tell me where she is,” I scream.
The Amalekite arrives with the other worker, head down, cotton dirty. “Stay here with the infidel,” Virgil instructs them. The man with us is a thin one who looks like the offspring of a Holocaust victim and a scarecrow.
“Answer me, Virgil! Where the hell is she?”
He doesn’t say anything at first. He just stares at me with cold, hard eyes. I’m shaking with rage. He leans down, close enough that I can feel his breath. “Which part?”
The blood rises up my neck to my bleeding face. I think I break a few teeth with my own jaw. The buckets of water shake with my hands, my body breaking under the weight, along with my heart. I want to chase the man down as he leaves; I want to rip him open with my bare hands. We listen to him lock the only door of the shed from the outside.
“Amalekite.” It’s hard to breathe. “Amalekite, you have to help me. You have to help me before it’s too late.” Her head doesn’t move. She narrows her eyes toward the scarecrow. “You can’t let this happen. You can’t let all these people die like this!”
“We have a higher purpose,” says Scarecrow. “We’re gonna ascend to the thrones of the Lord.”
“God’s purpose has nothing to do with mass suicide, can’t you see that?” The rice digs into my kneecaps. “What God wants this? You’re not worshiping God, you’re worshiping a monster who doesn’t give two flying fucks about you!” The scarecrow scuffs his toes on the wood floor. I direct my attention to the Amalekite. “You can’t let them hurt Magdalene. I know how much she means to you, I see it every time you look at her.” There’s sorrow in her eyes, the kind that begs to speak, the kind that’s afraid to speak.
Suddenly, the sounds of a siren blaring through the compound. Everyone holds their breath. Everyone freezes. Everyone swallows their fear.
“What the hell is that?” I ask the Amalekite.
“The Day of Freedom has arrived.”
I drop the buckets. I pull the grains of rice from my skin. I grab the Amalekite by the shoulders. But Scarecrow gets brave; he gets too brave for his own good. He tries to stop me. Really? Your 140 pounds against a mother hearing the news of her daughter’s death? I don’t think so, buddy. I’m insatiable, unstoppable, and I have this insane lust for violence right now.
I grab my empty pistol from behind me and whack the scarecrow on the side of the head with all the rage I have in me, every cell of this bag of blood you’d call a body. He falls to the ground, unconscious. Consider it a favor, kid.
“Do you know where they store the ammo?” I ask as I creep to the window. Outside, the people in white scatter home; they call out to one another. My rage turns to vitality. Hurt turns to ambition. It all turns into vengeance.
“I know who you are.” Her pronouncement cuts through the air like a dull butter knife on dry meat. “She looked just like you.”
“He’s not going to get away with this.”
“We’re never going to make it out of here alive.”
“Ye of little faith.” I look around for a way out. “I just need the ammo.”
“I know where it is.”
“How much time do we have?” I ask.
“A matter of minutes.”
I don’t have a plan. I don’t know where to start. There is no time to think. There is only just enough time to react. I find a spare pile of clothes in the shed, letting the bloody ones fall to the floor. The windows are painted shut, but no one seems to be paying attention from the outside. I wrap the soiled clothes around my fist and break the window opposite the church. I climb out, using my foot to kick the remaining shards from the pane. I help the Amalekite out after me.
“How fast can you get it?” I ask.
“It’s up in Rebekah’s room. Under her bed.”
“Where will the Pauls be?”
“In the church,” the Amalekite says. “They will all be there for the Day of Freedom.”
“Shit.” React, Freedom. React. “I’ll get the ammo. I’ll meet you back here.”
Mason and Peter take the tea that one of the ATF agents brings back from the Circle K. With the draperies of the cabin motel room drawn and the cloudy weather, it feels later than it is. Without asking, Mason reaches down to Peter’s leg and pulls the flask from his sock. A shot in each one of their paper cups. “Bourbon’s my poison of choice too,” says Mason.
“You definitely have the Delaney blood in you.”
“I shudder to think.” Mason walks over to the radios that came from the Redindelly’s eighteen-wheeler, the contents of which are now stationed in the one-room cabin only two minutes from the Paul farm. Closed-circuit screens show shots of different areas of the farm from the gates, but nothing beyond them. With the exception of the protesters huddling around the south end of the gate for reasons beyond the camera’s vantage point nearly an hour ago, there hadn’t been any movement on those screens since Freedom arrived. He stands shoulder to shoulder with the bald skinhead he met in the truck. “No word from the wire yet?”
“Not since she was with the Amalekite getting undressed yesterday.”
Mason swallows hard. “How much longer are we going to have to wait until we do something?” He takes a quick sip of the tea. “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”
“We’re not going to jeopardize this case because you’re having mommy issues,” says the skinhead, without taking his eyes off the screens. “So just chill out and take a seat. Let us big boys do the work.”
Mason rolls his eyes and walks back toward Peter, muttering the word “asshole” under his breath. He sits at the foot of the bed next to Peter when Joe pours another shot into Mason’s mug for him. “Tell me about Rebekah,” Mason says as he rubs his brow. “I’ve missed her. And I feel like I know absolutely nothing about her, given what I’ve just learned about her in recent days.”
“She is kind.” Joe moans as he slides his back against the wall and sits. “She would come in, every Sunday, like clockwork. She’d come in with her father’s cash, by the hundreds, used to take the bus in.”
Mason tries to imagine his sister on a bus.
“The guys would strap the guns to her, duct tape around the legs. It was easy. There’s no security with the Greyhound buses, and the clothes from her church covered all of them. Hell, on a good day, we could strap her with up to sixteen at a time. Then she’d take the bus right back to Goshen.” Joe looks over and sees in Mason’s face that these aren’t the kinds of things he wanted to know. He shifts the subject. “Her favorite food was biscuits ’n gravy.” Joe stares off. “Before business, the kid always asked for biscuits ’n gravy and a Pepsi.”
Necks turn, headphones land on the shoulders. “What the fuck is that?” says Peter.
The room freezes until one of the agents starts yelling into a radio, “We’re going in, we have to go in now.”
Mason runs outside and looks toward the direction of his family’s home where the sirens come from. And suddenly it clicks. He turns back in and grabs the skinhead by the shirt. “You told me domestic terrorism, you sonuvabitch!” he screams in his face. “They’re about to kill themselves, aren’t they? They’re pla
nning a fucking suicide. Tell me! Tell me, goddamn it!”
The skinhead’s at a loss for words. The color of Joe’s face goes white, his jaw dropping to the floor.
“Joe, we got something!” yells one of the agents by the radios. While the rest of them call for backup and storm out of the cabin, Joe turns up the radio.
On the other end: “Is there anybody there?” The voice comes from the wire they hooked onto Freedom. But the voice doesn’t belong to her. “There are children in here, you have to get us out. Please, God. Somebody help us!”
As Mason and Peter go to follow the ATF team, Mason stops at the last second when he spots movement on one of the surveillance cameras: on it, three men scale the gates and break into the church of the Third-Day Adventists.
My name is Freedom and my mind races too fast for my hands. They tremble, I drop bullets, but I manage to load my gun. Magdalene’s gun. I’ll get these bastards, Rebekah. I’ll get them all, my only promise to you.
The house practically shakes under me at the noise. It cracks through the cold air like the God they adore so much cracks his knuckles in the sky. Four hundred–plus pistols going off at the same time. It happens that fast.
I feel my knees give way. Magdalene. All those lost men, all those women, all those children. Magdalene.
Then, earth-shattering silence unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. An awful silence, a silence that would plague all my dreams to come. I fall on the bed, but it’s not deliberate. I find myself inhaling the scent from Rebekah’s pillowcase. I mourn for the daughter I never knew, and even more, I find my heart breaking over Magdalene. She’s gone. Now they’re both gone.
If anything could bring me back to life right now, it’d be Magdalene’s voice. And here it is; as clear as a whistle, splitting through the house, I hear Magdalene cry. I hear her scream in terror, but it’s not as terrible as hearing Virgil and Carol Paul accompanying her. Suddenly, currents of electricity replace my blood and breath rushes through my airways. I’ve never felt more alive. I’ve never felt so alert. But I stay quiet. I listen. Not even they believed their own sermons. They never even had faith in their own twisted versions of God.
“Well, you shouldn’t have gone public with Rebekah’s disappearance,” Carol barks.
“I didn’t have a choice!” Virgil yells back. “Magdalene, get upstairs.”
“Did you at least get the tithes? The money?”
“We’ll get it now, just get your stuff! We have to leave right this second, before anyone catches on.” I hear a cry from Carol, and Virgil, in a more reassuring voice, says, “The witnesses are taken care of; they’re all dead. The deacons will take care of the rest. We just have to avoid them, and we’ll be fine. We’ll head to Mexico. But I’m not kidding, Carol, we have to leave now!”
As Magdalene cries on her way up the staircase, I crouch behind the door. When she comes in, I pull her down to my lap and cover her mouth, whispering in her ear, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you,” the same words from the dream where I gunned down my own daughter.
She turns and wraps her arms around my neck. “Stay as quiet as you can,” I tell her.
The conversation between her parents downstairs continues. “You think it’s the way I wanted? You think I wanted to hurt Rebekah?” he cries.
“You did what you had to do, Virgil,” Carol reassures him.
That fucking cunt! Crying to me the other night because she missed Rebekah. She knew she was dead the entire time, the whole fucking time!
“She deserved better than the others chopped and buried in Whistler’s Field. I couldn’t help myself,” he says. “I only meant to find her at the Bluegrass and take her back home. But things just got out of hand. Oh, Carol, if you only saw what I saw when I went to get her. She was dressed like some whore; bleached hair; getting in the car with some thug. The sight was horrible Carol, just god-awful.”
“Stay right here,” I whisper, as I carry Magdalene to her bed. I look out the window to see the Amalekite pacing on one side of the shed. A man approaches the other side of the building with a rifle, wearing a golden crown on his head. Magdalene pulls my arms, silently sobbing, begs me not to leave her.
But I have to. There’s no way out of this. I can’t prevent what I’m about to do. I can only prevent a five-year-old from watching me gun down her parents. And that is all.
If you think about it, it’s a flawless scenario in which to murder two people: amid a massive suicide. If I can keep the angles right, it can be attributed simply to that. Plus, let’s not forget the gloves sewn onto my sleeves. No fingerprints. It’s almost perfect. And this perfection brings a smile to my face. Does this make me an evil person? A sick one? I creep down the stairs.
Perhaps it’s only natural of a mother. I don’t know the rules.
My hands are surprisingly still. My aim suddenly impeccable. Their faces freeze when I walk into the kitchen, gun raised.
“What’s going on, Virgil?” Carol asks, the scent of her fear filling the room, lemons in the background. They’re unarmed.
He puts up his hands. “She’s ATF.” And I’d love to sit here and deliver some speech to them, some Hollywood scene where I reveal who I really am, taking off the mask. You’re Rebekah and Mason’s biological mother! But none of that happens, because there isn’t any time. I have to get to the Amalekite before the man with the crown does.
I point my finger left, toward the window. “Look, it’s Rebekah!” I lie.
I shoot Carol first as she looks. One shot, in the side of the head. I can afford only one bullet per person to make it look like a suicide. Virgil’s screams are interrupted by my second shot. He falls on top of her. They bleed. Bits of their faces and heads over one of their HOME SWEET HOME needlepoint works on the wall. And while I’d hoped that I’d find some relief in this, there isn’t any.
The sight brings me back to my old kitchen twenty years ago with Mark’s body. A cuckoo clock chirps through the house, breaking the silence.
My heart races; my head fills with warm cream soda. A panic attack. The perfect fucking timing. The walls pulsate around me. My ears ring, but I’m not sure if it’s from the attack or from shooting two shots indoors. I grab for something to hold on to, keep myself from falling off something that doesn’t exist. But there’s no time for this, I have to move, I have to keep moving.
Through the panic attack, my trip up the staircase feels more like a swim. I’m coming, Magdalene. And I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten until I hear the cries of an infant that Theresa is in the house. “Get the baby,” I yell up to the girl. “Stay with the baby.” I pull myself up by the railing and reach the top of the stairs just in time to see Magdalene hurry from her room and into a back one where the baby’s cries rise, a tornado of cotton and pigtails up the hallway.
Through the sobs, Magdalene shushes the baby. “It’s OK, Sister Theresa, there, there.”
“Stay in there for just a minute,” I call out to her when I enter Rebekah and Magdalene’s bedroom. I sit on the windowsill, resting my sore ribs against pink lace curtains. I open the four-squared windows; chips of white paint and dead flies cocooned in dust fall to my thighs.
Now my hands tremble from the anxiety attack. But the deacon, by some act of God, has not yet spotted the Amalekite. A ray of sun pokes through the clouds and the light rain, it sparkles off his golden crown. A rifle rests like a beauty queen’s sash across his chest. He’s about to turn the corner to where the Amalekite is. I aim my piece; I inhale as slowly as I can to stop the tremors. I squint against an unforgiving but low, cold sun breaking through the leadenness of a waning autumn.
Then, like it has no business being in such a place, color appears from the corner of my eye, right when I’m about to put the pressure on the trigger. Three columns of color, crossing the browns and rotting yellows of a dying fall. I recognize them right away.
The Delaney brothers: Matthew, Luke, and John.
They walk around
as if they’re lost, wandering like children who can’t find their mother, tourists who lost sight of the bus leaving for the hotel. Contrasting with those in white, like a blemish on the heaths of Kentucky.
“Stay in there, Magdalene,” I call, quiet enough so no one can hear me through the silence outside, making sure she wouldn’t do something as regretful as walking downstairs to the kitchen to see her parents, dead on top of each other on the floor.
“OK, Sister Freedom,” she whispers back at me.
For a moment, I can picture myself sitting up here on the second floor, looking down, with one of those old-fashioned red-and-white striped popcorn bags, eating away, laughing at some comedy, hard enough that it aches my ribs. But in real life, I’m quiet as the deacon guarding the shed who sees the three men crossing the hill toward him. I fold the smile behind my lips. I have to stay in control.
I’ll let the deacon do me this favor.
One. Two. Three. Three seconds to wipe out an entire family, each shot echoing like the sirens that called the rest into heaven…or somewhere.
Like puppets having the strings cut from above them, they fall to the ground. And in this moment, two decades of pain, of being tormented by my own memories, of self-hatred, seems to just dissipate. Like for the first time in twenty years, I take my first fresh breath. The memories of rape, no longer demons that come out when I drink enough to forget about them, seem to feel like something I’ve conquered, something I was pulled through. The weight of my husband’s death no longer feels like a loss, but instead like a feat I braved. The loss of my children…well. Not sure if there’s anything that can fix that. Not even watching the men I hate most in the world die right before my eyes can fix that.
The shooter is a virgin, gets sick all over the side of the shed, his crown falling disgracefully in his own vomit on the wildflowers that line the building’s edges, color against white walls. Fragrant. Pleasing to the eyes. Abundant. Sprayed in vomit. Such is life.
