The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  Chapter 10

  The night we met was warm, stars hot in a black sky. I sprinted through the trees with tears tumbling down my face. I was fourteen, and I had decided I was going to run away.

  I knew I must’ve been one of the first to ever leave the Community. The Prophet taught us that our little clearing was protected by God, that if we ever left, the Gentiles would hunt us down with their bullets and heat-seeking missiles and poison gas, that on every telephone pole in every city hung wanted posters with our faces. He said that every Gentile knew the name Minnow Bly, and they cursed it.

  Earlier that night, I’d fought with Vivienne, my father’s third wife. I’d dropped a dish during washing, and she stuck out her rigid finger and gave me that tired old lecture about how it was almost time for me to marry and no man would want me if I didn’t arrange myself into the shape of a good woman. “Fine, then I won’t marry!” I said, and she reminded me that the job of a Kevinian woman was to marry. If a woman doesn’t marry, what’s the purpose of her? I threw down my dishrag right then, because I knew everybody else agreed with her.

  I was out of breath from running. A stitch in my side made me gutter to a stop at the edge of a clearing.

  My footfalls were almost silent over the scattered, dead pine needles, but he noticed. The boy, sitting on the front porch of his family’s handmade cabin. I had never seen someone like him for so many reasons, for the way his shoulders fell back easy as he stripped pine needles from a twig, for the way his feet sat bare and dusty inside the rolled hems of homespun trousers, for the way his skin was a brown color I hadn’t seen since we moved to the Community. I could feel the window through which I viewed the world—no larger than a pinhole back then—broadening somewhere at the back of my mind just by looking at him. I couldn’t open my eyes wide enough. I wanted to stare at him for lifetimes, the perfect pores of him, his high eyebrows serene, like he’d never seen how angry God could be.

  His eyes found me where I stood, sheltered in the shadows. There was a quiet moment when neither of us spoke, each of us standing with a new tension in our backbones, his shocked forehead, my parted lips and fingers splayed to my sides.

  “Are you one of those cult people?” he asked after a moment.

  My lips snapped shut. “We’re not a cult.”

  “That’s not what my daddy says.”

  “Well, I’d know, wouldn’t I?”

  He squinted at me. “You sure look like a cult person.”

  I glanced down at my long navy dress, belled at the elbows and waist. I touched my little white bonnet self-consciously.

  “And you look like a ragamuffin,” I responded. “Don’t you have shoes?”

  “I got ’em. I just don’t wear ’em unless I need to.” He buried his toes in the fallen pine needles. “You’re not supposed to be here. There’re signs all along our land. ‘Keep Out,’ ‘Private Property,’ ‘No Trespassing.’ Didn’t you see ’em?”

  I remembered the livid black and red signs speared to tree trunks with railroad spikes. “I saw.”

  “Then why didn’t you keep out? Cain’t you read?”

  I pulled my bottom lip into my mouth and pressed my teeth together.

  “You cain’t read?” he asked, quieter.

  “And you can?” I asked.

  “Sure, my momma taught me.”

  “You got books?” I asked, taking a step closer.

  “We got two Bibles.”

  “What’s a Bible?”

  “You don’t know what the Bible is?” His mouth opened so I could see a minuscule chip in his front tooth.

  “No,” I said. “Else I wouldn’t ask, would I?”

  “It’s, like, a big book with stories that God wrote,” he said.

  “We got one of those. The Book of Prophecies.”

  “But the Bible don’t just have prophecies; it has stories.”

  “The Book of Prophecies has stories, too,” I said. “Like Chad and the Golden Bear, and Eric turning blood to gold, and Victor stealing a demon’s pheasant-green slippers that held all its power. And—and Marcus, the first man, who married the first three women, who were born out of three chestnuts in the same lime-colored pod—”

  But Jude was shaking his head. “Those sound made up.”

  “They’re not. Marcus made all the wheat fields out of the hair of his blond wife, and the trees out of the hair of his brown-haired wife, and fire out of the hair of his redheaded wife. We wouldn’t have fire and trees and wheat if it weren’t for those first wives.”

  “That ain’t in the Bible.”

  “So?”

  “So they ain’t real. They sound like bedtime stories.”

  I fell backward a step. Nobody had ever talked like that. If the stories were wrong, the Prophet was wrong, and even thinking that could poison the blood in a person’s veins. God had claimed the Prophet years ago, had cured his astigmatism and taken away his asthma so he no longer needed to puff from his inhaler as he walked across the factory floor. I was there when he took his thick, yellowed glasses in his fists and bent them until they broke. The Prophet was a miracle.

  “You—you don’t know what you’re talking about,” I sputtered. “Your Bible’s probably just lies.”

  “No, it ain’t! It’s all true and if you think that, you’re not a real Christian.”

  “You’re right, I’m not a Christian! I’m a Kevinian.”

  “A what?” he asked.

  “That’s our religion. Our prophet’s named Kevin.”

  “A prophet named Kevin?” Jude scoffed. “Now it’s definitely all made up.”

  “How do you know, huh? You’re probably telling tales just so you can be right.”

  “No, I ain’t. My daddy taught me everything I know, and he’s not wrong about nothing.”

  One of the little twists of his dreadlocks fell onto his forehead and he brushed it aside angrily. All at once, I had to purse my lips to keep down a breathy, giddy laugh. Here I was talking to someone. Fighting with someone. What a novelty. What a prize.

  “You didn’t even choose it yourself, then?” I asked. “You just go along with what your daddy says? Some of us make our own decisions. Some of us don’t just think whatever our parents tell us to.” I didn’t mention the fact that everything I believed, I believed because of my parents, too.

  Jude’s face fell. “I have to do what my daddy says.” His voice came quiet.

  The sorrow that pounded out of Jude’s eyes made me stagger backward a step. It was hard sorrow, hot sorrow, the kind that’s had a long time to ferment. I couldn’t have known that, in that moment, Jude wasn’t thinking of me but of the empty cavern of his mother’s skull, the after-smell of a gunshot.

  “I better go,” I said softly. “I’ll get in trouble if they know I left.”

  “Okay,” Jude said. “Maybe . . . maybe we’ll see each other again sometime.”

  The wind whipped past my ear, and I imagined it was the Prophet’s cold breath.

  I wasn’t supposed to talk to people like Jude. He was a Gentile, an outsider, and that meant he was wrong and wicked and wanted us dead.

  Worst of all, he was a Rymanite, people the Prophet had warned us about, people God had abandoned centuries ago, and they were the worst kind of evil.

  Except, I thought, and after that nothing was really the same again. Except Jude didn’t seem evil at all.

  I clenched and unclenched my fingers.

  “Yes,” I said, holding my hand up in a wave. “I know we will.”

  Chapter 11

  “You’re remembering,” Angel says.

  I look up at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “They don’t prepare you for the remembering,” she says. “You’ll be staring at the ceiling, at some pattern of light on the metal, and without realizing it you’re back in the ho
use you grew up in. And it’s like you’ve walked right back into that place, the feelings, the smells. All that from some pattern of light your brain recognized. Funny, eh?”

  She’s lying on her bunk with her head propped on the wall, feet crossed at the ankles so I can see the dirty soles of her white socks.

  “The key is choosing what you remember,” she says. “Choose the happy things, ’cause the bad things are waiting at the corners of your mind for the moment you’re not ready.”

  I nod. Almost every day, I’ll be lying on my bunk and, without thinking, hop up because I have the impulse to walk to the tree house to meet Jude. Angel watches me, her eyes peeking over the top of a book, because by now she knows everything that’s flicking through my mind in those moments: The tree house is burned. The larch tree with it. I’ll never see Jude again.

  • • •

  Jude used to talk about the way his father could quote any line from the Bible. He hated that when he got older, but when we first met, he mentioned it with something like pride. He must’ve believed his father was as holy as I once thought my parents were.

  After the night we met, I went out looking for him almost every day, but the forest looked different in the daylight, the shadows rearranged and the trees smaller somehow. It took about a week to find him, and the day I did, I’d already been wandering the woods hopelessly for hours, wondering if I’d imagined the cabin and the strange boy in the night. I leaned against a tree to get my breath. The woods ticked with the noise of insect bodies, the trills surging from inside sparrows’ throats as though celebrating something greater than feathers and hollow bones. I closed my eyes and listened.

  Music. I could have sworn I heard music. I hadn’t heard anything like it in years. It was forbidden. I followed the sound, my neck craned till I found a mossy western larch. Above, high on a branch, Jude sat hunched over a guitar. One shoeless foot was hanging down, tapping. He was playing this little concert for nobody but himself and the birds and the trees and whatever else lived that deep in the forest.

  It’s that idea that hurts worse than anything, because it’s all a pile of ash now, so burned maybe nobody will ever go there to play a song again. That’s the real tragedy, even worse than the idea of Jude being dead.

  “Hi ho!” he called.

  My eyes shot open. “Hi.”

  He hopped out of the tree, clutching the guitar’s neck. I could see that his fingers were calloused from picking at the strings. I was very conscious of his fingers after that, followed them as they rubbed an eye or scratched his hair, which he hadn’t yet shorn off. His fingers took on an air of importance I’d never attributed to anything. If his fingers could do that, what was the rest of him like? What was inside this boy?

  “You can make music,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “How’d you learn that?”

  “My mama taught me,” he said.

  “And your mother . . . you only got the one mother?”

  “One mother? Yeah. You got more than that?”

  “Four.”

  He made a face. “That’s too many.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says nobody. It’s just a common fact.”

  “But, if you lose one mother, you have three others to take her place.”

  “Nobody could take the place of my mother,” he said seriously.

  I felt nervous, like I was walking very closely to some precipice.

  “You all alone out here?” I asked.

  “Just my daddy and me.”

  “No brothers and sisters?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I bet you got a lot of siblings over there.”

  I nodded.

  “Bet you’re never lonely.”

  I shook my head. “There are a bunch of little kids, and some older ones who are married off or getting close. I guess—I guess you’re the first person my age I’ve met in a long time.”

  He scratched the underside of his chin with the head of his guitar. I knew he was thinking about how he’d never met someone his age, either.

  “Why do you live out here in the forest?” I asked.

  “I was born here. My momma and daddy settled here before I was born. My daddy told me once about the people down there, in the city, how the smoke and chemicals cover everything. That isn’t how man was meant to live. But this is.” He lifted a finger toward the blooming wilderness. “This is what God wanted for us all along.”

  “The Prophet said the same thing.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  “Well, sure,” I said, tossing my shoulders up in a shrug. “It’s gotta be. I mean, the Prophet says God’s in the stars, and you can hardly see any stars in the city. If you look real hard, you can see angels playing in the forest at night. They don’t got angels in the city.”

  “You’ve seen an angel?”

  “’Course,” I said.

  I don’t know why I lied. Every night, I’d stare into the dark canopy, even for the seconds I snatched walking from the house to the Prophet Hall, but never saw the flash of wings or blinding pixels of skin. Never. No matter how hard I looked, there was only ever just darkness between those trees.

  Chapter 12

  “Constance, Jedediah, Regent, Patience, Hershel, Amos, Leah, Eliezer, Prudence, Tobin, Silence, Ephraim, Solomon, Halla, Eustace, Gideon, Martha, Liberty.”

  “You missed one.”

  “What?”

  “That was only eighteen,” Angel says. “You said you have nineteen siblings.”

  “Oh,” I say. I lean back against the cinder-block wall, and in my mind sort my siblings by their mothers. Donna Jo with stocky limbs and wide fingers, Vivienne who gave her black eyes and hair to her children, Mabel who was only seventeen when she married my father. And my mother. We weren’t supposed to know our true mothers, but all of her children could easily be picked out by their pale hair and cornflower eyes. I was the only one who looked like I didn’t belong to her.

  “Virtue,” I say finally. “I forgot Virtue. She has the strangest eyes I’d ever seen, such a pale blue they are almost white. We thought she was dead when she was born. There were a lot of babies like that. She took a minute to pull in any breath, and when she finally did, she didn’t cry or make a sound. Just stared straight ahead.” I recall the image of my mother, leaned over Virtue’s blue-red body lying between my mother’s feet on the packed earth floor, her knees up and shrouded in the cloth of birthing.

  “She never did learn to talk,” I say.

  “They didn’t take her to a doctor?” Angel asks.

  “My mother asked, but . . .” I trail off. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. He said we made that choice, long ago.”

  My eyes stray to the spot where the doctor sat a couple days ago. A square foot of grated metal flooring. Whenever I think about him, about the truth that he came here for, I can’t arrange my thoughts properly. Everybody’s better off without the Prophet around. Why can’t he see that?

  “What’s wrong?” Angel asks, looking down at me.

  “That FBI agent,” I say. “I’m just wondering when he’ll come back.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky and he won’t,” she says. “Those guys, they’re great at intimidation, not great with the follow-through.”

  “No, he’ll come back. He’s looking for who killed the Prophet. There’s an investigation. They think he was murdered.”

  Angel props herself up on her elbow. “And what’s this guy think you’re gonna tell him?”

  “Who killed him.”

  Her eerie pale eyes, like the petals of a flax flower, regard me. “Will you?”

  I shake my head. All at once, bile rises in my throat. I run to the toilet and throw up a couple heaves of acidy amber liquid. I press my forehead against the cold steel of the toilet rim and sense Angel crouching besi
de me, though she doesn’t touch me.

  “I remember the moment he died,” I whisper.

  Angel crouches still, a black shadow on my periphery. “Did you kill him?” she asks flatly.

  I grip my eyes closed. Something soft and delicate inside me tears at her question. Because I wonder the same thing. Did I really? Is he dead because of me?

  “Hey,” Angel says. “Don’t you dare.”

  I turn toward her, my forehead wrinkling.

  “Don’t you dare feel guilty,” she says. “That guy deserved everything he got.”

  “No one deserves to die.”

  “Are you kidding me? Of course people deserve to die. When you make life unbearable for other people, you deserve to be taken out. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I’m afraid,” I say.

  “Do they have a confession? Have you admitted anything?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she says. “Don’t say a word to him. There ain’t no reasoning with cops. Not with detectives, or lawyers, or judges neither. They see what they want. And what they want’s an easy target. The crazy girl who’s been messed up her whole life’s the easiest target of them all. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think any of us is here? He’ll send you away for life if you give him the chance.”

  I nod slowly, feeling like I’m getting my bearings again.

  “You fought back. There ain’t no shame in that,” she says, quiet. And, even quieter, “Don’t let them do to you what they’ve done to me.”

  Chapter 13

  Dr. Wilson returns a few days later, his notebook wedged beneath his elbow, his square teeth smiling like he’s actually happy to be sitting inside my metal cell.

  “Tell me about Jude Leland.”

  I grip my tongue between my molars. “How do you know about Jude?”

  “You gave a statement to the police, remember? After your surgery.”

  I frown, trying to recall my days in the hospital. “There was a detective.”

  “He wrote of a boy you mentioned, Jude, and I did a little digging, interviewed some of the wives who are in protective care. They told me how you came to the Community with a boy the night of the fire. He’s totally off the grid. No birth certificate, no social security number, not even any medical records.”