by Brent, Cora
“Good morning, wife,” he said cheerfully, kissing me on the cheek with such affection I stared at him in shock.
“Good morning, Winston,” I said quietly.
Winston peered into the frying pan and grinned. “Scrambled?”
“Yes.”
He stood behind me as I tried to concentrate on the setting of the eggs. When I heard his breath began to quicken in a familiar way my eyes closed, my mind already knowing what my body was about to endure once again.
The knock on the door was sharp. I exhaled with relief, grateful for even a temporary respite.
Winston went to answer it and I heard the murmuring of multiple low male voices. I thought I recognized my father’s among them.
“Promise!” Winston called in an irritable tone.
I turned off the burner and wiped my hands on my dress. I moved slowly, stiffly, from the violence which had been inflicted on me.
In the small living room stood my husband, my father and my uncle. All three men looked grim and serious.
“Our guests are thirsty,” Winston explained without looking at me.
I went back to the kitchen and poured three glasses of water, bringing them promptly back to the living room. My uncle was talking.
“Regrettable to take you away from your new bride so quickly.”
Winston shook his head. “I will bring Promise with me.”
Aston Talbot was displeased. “You should not allow her back into the world so soon. She has ideas after her time away.”
Winston drew me to his side possessively after I silently gave out the water glasses. “Nonsense. Promise is docile,” he said, circling an arm about my waist.
I winced, and not only because the way he’d spoken about me as a man would speak of a dog. The pain in my body shrieked with even the slightest touch. Vaguely I wondered if one or more of my ribs were broken.
My uncle grunted and shook his head but didn’t object further. My father, however, stared directly at me. I stared back at him. Something like sadness colored his face but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of any hint of a smile, any reason for him to believe this was all right. It would never be all right. Finally he looked away.
“Pack enough clothing for three days,” Winston told me shortly when the men had left.
I was confused. “Where are we going?”
Winston was on the couch opening a briefcase and sorting through papers. “Phoenix,” he said absently. “And then Los Angeles. I have business in both cities which requires some attention. We will be leaving within the hour.”
“Business?” I frowned. “You mean about the orchards?” As far as I knew Winston Allred owned and operated a massive pecan orchard outside Jericho Valley. He hired the women and children of the town during harvest season.
Winston slowly raised his head and looked at me. “You just do as I say, woman.”
***
He would not allow me to pause at my mother’s house. I settled back into the plush passenger seat of the Cadillac Escalade, wondering if that was for the best anyway. It would have been difficult to keep both my physical pain and mental anguish from my sister. It might be easier for me to be away for a few days.
Once we left Jericho Valley behind, Winston became almost amiable. We did not stop driving until we reached Flagstaff where he bought me lunch at a pleasant diner. I noted the way the other patrons stared at the long, plain design of my dress and my simple black shoes. A few of the women regarded me sorrowfully.
They all looked so casual and easy. I wondered if any of them could guess at the horror of my wedding night. I wondered if they would help me if they did know.
“Promise,” Winston said sternly.
I snapped back to attention.
He frowned at me and took a bite of his roast beef sandwich, chewing slowly before swallowing and continuing to speak. “I hope I did not make a mistake in bringing you along. You will be expected to behave appropriately.”
“Of course,” I murmured, staring at the thin gold ring on my left hand.
Winston patted my arm lightly. “Good. Then let’s have no more of the unpleasantness which was required last night.”
I took a drink of water, feeling disconcerted again. I saw the way his eyes glinted when he obliquely referred to the things he’d already done to me. It wasn’t ‘unpleasantness’ to him.
But I was obliged to play along with the act. I covered his hand with my own. “I really want us to begin our life together well.”
He nodded and took another bite of his roast beef.
I pursed my lips together. The night before as I lay in painful darkness I had rehearsed what I would say when the time came.
“Winston.” My husband looked at me. “I believe I am such a happy bride today because I had those years at the college. There was plenty of time to consider whether this life was what I truly wanted. It’s how I am able to be sure that this the righteous path.”
His eyes narrowed. “I believe you wavered yesterday morning, Promise.”
I lowered my head. “Sometimes the devil finds us no matter how prepared we believe we are.”
Winston nodded. “That he does.”
I gave him a smile which was every inch the lie. “I am grateful that you will be at my side to guide me.” He seemed satisfied so I pressed further. “It would serve Jenny’s future husband well if she was given the same opportunity to find her way.”
“Jenny,” Winston frowned.
“Yes,” I clutched his fat hand. “Please think about it. You have tremendous influence in the church.”
His eyes seemed to dim. He pulled his hand away and his tone became icy. “No female needs to tell me what I should and should not consider.”
I bit my lip. I was not artful in the way of most women and I’d been wrong about Winston Allred. He was not reasonable in the way of most men. Or maybe he was exactly as most men were.
When I stepped out of the car in Phoenix the heat seemed impossible. It was July, the thick of summer everywhere, but there in the desert, summer meant a special kind of misery. I felt faint as I followed Winston to a room in the lavish hotel where he had evidently stayed before on other mysterious business trips.
Once the door to the room was open I went immediately to the bed and sat down weakly. There were more agonized locations in my body than I cared to dwell on but it was my ribs which troubled me most.
I gingerly touched the place to the left of my spine where the sharpest pain emanated. Trying to sit upright for all those miles of driving had been pure hell. I thought if I could only get some rest it might make a world of difference. I hoped Winston’s elusive meetings could occur without me.
“Well now,” he said softly, swaying over to me with his hand on his belt buckle. “You’re an eager one.”
I knew if I cried, if I fought, it would only drive him to hurt me further. With grim resignation I lay back on the bed as he lifted my dress. The intrusion of his thick body was as sharp and painful as ever. I stared at the wall, toward a picture of the Grand Canyon, and silently prayed to a god I no longer believed in for it to be over quickly.
It wasn’t.
***
Winston made it clear he was not in favor of allowing me to remain in the room alone. I wanted to tell him he didn’t need to worry about the possibility that I would take off. Not if there was a chance that by enduring I could help my sister.
I sat in a chair in the corner of the lush conference room on the first floor of the hotel. The three men who sat around the table with Winston were dressed casually but the watches on their wrists and the air of entitlement they exuded labeled them as men of some means.
Sitting in that chair, trying not to keel over, I was so consumed by my fog of pain I couldn’t make much sense of their tense conversation. I gathered that the men were demanding some assurances from Winston, who spoke over them in a smooth, confident voice. I did catch one puzzling phrase which was uttered repeatedly.
&n
bsp; “The Faithful Cooperative.”
I stared at the other men. They were not of the church, I was certain. One of them, the youngest, glanced at me curiously a few times and seemed on the verge of saying something. The man seated across from him caught the look and shook his head vehemently, glaring at the younger man. I closed my eyes and summoned a happy memory. Of sunlight. A green meadow. And picking wildflowers with my sister.
I must have dozed off lightly because I was jerked awake by Winston’s rough grab of my elbow. The other men had already departed the room.
“Come along, Promise. I’ll feed you dinner now.”
I rose painfully. “Winston,” I blushed. “I need to use the restroom.” Not only was my bladder in full scream mode, but a warm trickle between my legs warned me I was bleeding again.
Winston was impatient. “You can wait until after our meal when we have returned to our room.”
I resisted the urge to slap his sweaty arm away and run like hell. It was difficult. Winston towed me along as if I were nothing more than a lavish accessory. He ordered food for me and then scrutinized the fact that I didn’t eat to his satisfaction.
Winston wiped shrimp sauce from his mouth with a white napkin. I stared at the smear of red on the clean linen. “Promise,” he said sternly. “You will need to learn to take care of your body if you are to bear a houseful of children.”
I dropped the soup spoon I’d been clutching and bit down on my tongue so hard I tasted blood. But the words came out anyway. “Take care of my body? It would be a sight easier to ‘take care of my body’, dear husband, if you would refrain from using it as a punching bag to satisfy your perverse desires.”
I immediately realized what a mistake I had made. Winston threw down his napkin, his face white with fury, and gave me a murderous look. I stared back at him, knowing full well he couldn’t touch me in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
He knew it too. Our waitress, a pretty, young Asian woman, returned and happily refilled our water glasses. Winston didn’t take his eyes off my face.
“I would like the check now, please.”
The waitress had a chirpy, cheerful voice. “Can I interest you in our dessert menu?”
“No,” said Winston with a cold smile. “We’ll be having dessert in our room, thank you.”
The only way I was able to force myself to accompany him back to the room was the silent assurance I kept giving myself. This would not be my sister’s lot. I would do what I had to in order to prevent that.
This time Winston Allred would not be satisfied with merely assaulting me physically. He forced me to strip down to nothing and stand in front of the bathroom mirror. The lighting cast a harsh radiance over the bruises which covered me from the neck down. He stood beside me and ordered me to look at myself while saying the filthy things in his mind.
And all the while I thought, how could I have been so wrong? I had supposed Winston to be a man merely like my father; domineering and enamored of himself, but never really violent. But Winston was more than that. He was a tyrant, a monster. Maybe my father was a monster too. Maybe all men secretly were.
I did not allow myself the tears of humiliation which threatened. But when he took off his belt and began whipping me about the legs a few shook loose anyway.
When his arm grew tired he grabbed me by the long auburn braid which hung down my back. “You will show respect for your king and husband now.”
I nodded weakly, crying out only a little when he grunted and pushed himself furiously inside my battered body.
Chapter Five
The next morning when we were in the car driving to Los Angeles, Winston’s courteous façade had returned. But now I knew enough to recognize the lie. The man who bought me a donut and carried my bag to the car for me was not the same man who brutalized me away from prying eyes.
Once on the road he chatted cordially about the weather and pointed out the peculiarities of the desert as we traveled away from Phoenix and into this brown wasteland which sat between the metropolitan area and the California border. He asked me questions about midwifery and told me how eager the Jericho Valley women were for my help now that I had finished my schooling.
When his hand landed on my knee I had to battle my own will not to pull away.
“Promise,” he said. “I am so pleased that you and I are finally man and wife.”
I nodded, trying to shift my body in such a way that my back didn’t graze the seat. If my ribs had not been broken before last night, they most certainly were now. “Yes,” I said in a small voice. “So am I.”
And he returned to grinning and talking about things which didn’t matter at all. When we were well into the shimmering desolation of the desert, Winston pulled off the road to a rest stop. Fleetingly I glimpsed a plainly lettered sign indicating that we were in the town of Hope. Winston ordered me to remain in the car as he filled up the vehicle with gas. I didn’t object. It was too painful to move anyway.
A car pulled in next to ours and a laughing man emerged. His little daughter, who couldn’t have been more than six, exited from the back and leapt into his arms. She kissed him on the cheek and wrapped her small arms around his neck as a woman popped her head out from the passenger side and grinned at them.
The man kissed the little girl on the forehead and she looked at him with a perfect blend of love and trust. “You’re the best daddy in the world,” she said with the sober sincerity only a child could muster.
The woman, a petite, older version of the little girl, looked at her family fondly as the man kissed the child on the head and sent her off with the woman. They walked hand in hand toward the tiny convenience store attached to the gas station.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on drawing shallow breaths. I dearly hoped the little girl’s parents loved her as much as they seemed to.
When Winston closed the door the vibration bit into my tormented back and I winced. At my small cry he I sensed him watching me but I kept my eyes closed and after a moment he turned the ignition.
When I felt the car beginning to accelerate towards the freeway again I opened my eyes. A carefully painted billboard on the side of the road outside Hope, Arizona cleverly spelled out: “You Are Now Beyond Hope.”
The words were agony.
I stared dully out at the parched ground. The sky was an impossible dome of blue but I felt no pleasure in it. And then a small gasp left my throat at the next road sign I saw.
Quartzsite: 37 miles.
Winston glanced at me sharply but I gave him a small smile of reassurance and he faced back to the road, forgetting me and turning the dial to some classical music.
When we reached the boundaries of Quartzsite, I stared hungrily out the window, searching for some sign of my beautiful cousin.
Rachel. Rachel.
Even the voice inside my head sounded weak and plaintive. Still I called to her silently, wanting her to know that I was here, that I knew now that she had been right. And that if it weren’t for my fierce obligation to protect my sister, I would gladly take whatever help she would offer.
Rachel.
Within a few moments we passed Quartzsite by and were closing in on the border to California.
The time spent in Los Angeles was every bit as bleak as Phoenix. I began to yearn for Jericho Valley where Winston’s attentions could not be so resolutely focused on me. There was another puzzling meeting which I couldn’t concentrate on carefully enough to discern anything but the words ‘Faithful Cooperative’ once again. I knew that the Faithful leaders branched out into many different business forms. I gathered that these men Winston kept meeting with had something to do with it all. But I didn’t know why their words were so tense and hushed. Frankly, I didn’t care much anyway.
Later that night I sat up in the king-sized hotel bed I shared with my husband and watched him with a hatred so intense I nearly couldn’t see. If he had opened his eyes he might have been alarmed at the sight of me glowering beside him
like a furious wraith. But he only slept on peacefully, untroubled by anything he had done to me, or anything he planned to do. With every harsh blow my husband inflicted on me I was reminded of a story I’d read as a girl. The story was about a spirited wild horse and the brutal man who had captured her. He systematically began the vicious process of domesticating her, ‘breaking’ her, smothering her iron will so that she could meet his expectations. With some wryness I mused that Winston Allred must have read the same book.
Carefully I lay on the plush mattress in a way which would cause the least amount of pain. I was glad that tomorrow we would be taking the long trip back to Jericho Valley without stopping. It would be dark by the time we reached home. I was learning how to mask my feelings and I would hide everything that had happened to me since Winston put his arm around my shoulder in my mother’s house. I would do everything in my power to help Jenny escape the life I was resigning myself to. And my other young sisters too, the daughters of my father’s wives. I would care for women and deliver babies as I’d been taught. With a sickening feeling I realized I might become a mother sooner rather than later. Though I tried not to think it, the idea of Winston Allred’s seed implanting and growing inside of me was enough to make bile rise in my throat. I swallowed hard and turned my head. There was nothing to be done about it now.
Winston was again cheerful in the morning. He kissed me on the cheek and told me how delightful the past few days had been. He let me know it was an uncommon treat for a man to have the luxury of so much private time with his newest bride.
“Won’t you eat?” He frowned, shoving the plate of toast closer.
I nibbled a bite of toast. All around me happy patrons dined on their breakfast and paid scant attention to a strangely dressed girl and the portly man who accompanied her.
Winston loudly chewed his bacon and slurped some orange juice. His eyes twinkled.
“Promise,” he said grandly, “you’ll be happy to know your wedding dress has already found another use.”
