The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  “He was born in the woods.”

  He nods. “So, the last time you saw Jude was the night of the fire?”

  “The night they killed him, you mean.”

  “You’re certain he’s dead?” he asks. “They’ve found a few sets of human remains at the Community, but other than the Prophet, they haven’t confirmed identities yet. From what I gather they could’ve been natural deaths—we know through interviews that people died out there in incidents unconnected to the fire—an old man, a teenage girl mauled by an animal, stillborn babies. We don’t know Jude is dead.”

  “You weren’t there.” I choke out the words. “You didn’t see it.”

  “You know,” he says uncertainly, “there was talk among some of the wives, even some of the children, that you’d been killed in the fire, Minnow.”

  I flinch. “Well, you’re sitting here talking to me.”

  “Your little brother Hershel couldn’t believe it when I told him you were alive. He says he saw you die in the fire. He knew it was you because you had no hands.”

  My stomach begins to squirm. “Hershel’s six years old,” I say. “And I doubt he could tell you what I even look like.”

  Wilson gives me a meaningful look, then presses his hands together efficiently. “I’m curious. How much of your relationship with Jude was an act of defiance? To be with someone who was supposedly so evil.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “You’ve been learning about Rymanites.”

  He nods. “Interesting stuff. The Kevinians I’ve talked to seem pretty impressed by it, even now. How Ryman rebelled by marrying a Gentile woman and ignored his father’s order to kill her. And how as punishment, the spirit of God fled Ryman’s body while he writhed on the ground, turning his skin black.”

  “And so it shall be that the descendants of Ryman bear till eternity the mark on their earthly skins and the evil in their celestial hearts,” I finish.

  “So you were aware that your family wouldn’t approve of Jude.”

  “I wasn’t with Jude to rebel, if that’s what you’re saying. I was with Jude because of who he was.”

  “Still, I think this is important. Did you notice the color of his skin?”

  “Of course I noticed it. That’s a stupid thing to ask.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . because if I didn’t notice his skin, how would I be seeing him? If I missed that, what else would I have missed?”

  “But, you were raised to hate people like Jude.”

  I shrug off the suggestion. “It’s a good thing I hated the people who taught me to hate, then.”

  “When was the first time you realized that? That something wasn’t right about the Community?”

  “I don’t think you can trace it to a single event,” I say. “You don’t change everything you believe all at once.”

  “What was one of the moments, then? When you disagreed?”

  I press my dry lips together. “That girl you mentioned, the one they said was mauled by an animal.”

  He nods. “Roberta Hallowell? Her mother gave a statement that it was probably a grizzly bear.”

  I chuckle darkly. “No, not a bear.” I reach over and tap his notebook with my stump. “Get your pen ready. You’ll probably want to take notes.”

  • • •

  That first summer in the Community was the best I remember, when I was five and tiny and completely in awe of the Prophet, when the men were large and the women efficient and our very bodies shone with holy light. That summer, we watched a thousand ears of corn waggle out of the earth. We watched the men tear a pond of silty brown water into the ground. We broke in our stiff new clothes.

  We saw the first of us killed.

  Bertie was sixteen with ash blond hair and a top lip broken by a pink fold she’d had since birth. She was what the wives called “uncouth.” She showed a little too much of the skin around her neck, talked a little too loudly. She left a boyfriend back in the city, and had to be dragged to the Community by her parents.

  Donna Jo, the second of my father’s wives, already bow-backed from the weight of my first half sibling, Jedediah, told me to walk to the pond to gather water. As I tottered beneath the weight of the bucket, I spotted Bertie’s blue-clothed back beneath the willow, hunched over something open in her crossed legs. I walked forward, mouth agape at the way her fingers rested on the pages delicately, as though on the skin of someone she loved.

  “It’s a sin,” I gasped.

  Bertie’s head turned. “Minnow, go away.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “I found it.”

  “But there aren’t any books here,” I protested.

  She sighed. “All right, fine. I snuck it in with me.”

  “It—it’s from outside?” I asked.

  “Where else would it come from? ’Course it’s from outside. And you have to promise not to tell.”

  “But, it’s forbidden. God’ll hate you for it.”

  “God doesn’t give a toot.”

  “Girls aren’t supposta read.”

  “I been able to read since I was three years old and nobody’s going to take that away from me. Not the Prophet. Not God.”

  Bertie’s face was set hard. When I remember her, I picture that expression, like behind her eyes she had entire rooms that she didn’t let anyone see. And I realize now it was the book in her hands that’d made them.

  “What’s in it?” I asked, taking a tentative step forward.

  “If I say, you have to promise never to tell. Not anyone, even your parents.”

  I dragged in a deep breath. “I promise.”

  “Come here then.”

  I sat down beside her on a thick mound of moss that crept all the way to the pond’s edge. All around, the air rang with birds trilling and insects vibrating.

  “They’re called fairy tales. Do you remember those?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Here, let me read you one.”

  Bertie opened up the book and leafed through the pages expertly. The edges were stained tea-colored from all the fingers that had touched them over the years.

  “Godseyes,” I breathed. The text was so cramped, it made my mind swim. Attached to each story was a black-and-white woodcut of kings or dwarfs or maidens. Some of the maidens were being held at the jaw by some knight, which meant they were kissing, which meant they were in love. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a love like that.

  Bertie read me the story, and when I begged for another she indulged me, until an hour of stories had passed.

  “Are they real?” I asked.

  “No, they’re just stories for children.”

  “Why are they evil?”

  “They’re not,” she said, her face settling into a scowl. “Only the Prophet says they are. He doesn’t want us to know how to read. He doesn’t want us to figure him out.”

  That summer, Bertie taught me about letters and how to sound them together, and that’s why I can patch a semblance of meaning from words sometimes, if they’re not too difficult. I might’ve learned to read proper if Bertie’s mother hadn’t found the book under Bertie’s pallet and taken it straight to the Prophet.

  The Prophet had been saving a pair of metal slippers. They were crude, two rectangles of steel with straps soldered to the sides. A deacon put the slippers in the fire pit at the center of the courtyard and let them burn to a blistered red. They sent up sparks when he lifted them out with tongs. Everyone crowded around to watch.

  The deacons wrestled Bertie’s feet into the slippers. She danced around the courtyard, screaming in pain, the skin on her feet popping, the smell of burning flesh warming the air, dead and smoky. When she fell to the dirt, the Prophet gestured and someone put her on her feet again and forced her to keep dancing, her braid rising and
falling with each leap.

  The others looked on, their faces like puzzles I couldn’t solve.

  A few days later, the Prophet received a revelation to marry Bertie. He mostly married girls who had transgressed in some way, and he always managed to tame them. On her wedding day, Bertie couldn’t stand. Flies swam through the air around the dressings on her feet. The Prophet wore a smile that was slim and sharp.

  “The time hath come,” he chanted.

  “Thy deeds be done,” Bertie replied quietly.

  Bertie’s feet eventually healed but she walked crooked. Her entire body wilted. Weeks later, when the Prophet was conducting a sermon in the open air of the courtyard, Bertie stood, surveyed the sea of us, bonneted and buttoned, and hobbled away. I was the only one to notice her pass through the tree line and into the shadows there. I said nothing, even knowing she might be killed at any moment by the Gentiles’ heat-seeking missiles. I knew, somehow, that she would be safer out there than in the Community.

  When he noticed she had disappeared, the Prophet’s eyes were like clenched fists. He told the men to secure Bertie with any force necessary.

  They brought her body back. I caught a glimpse through the throng of blue-clad bodies. Her face. It looked almost normal at first. Then I saw the other side, kicked in at the eyeball so the whole side of her face sloped inward.

  What I remember most was that nobody screamed.

  • • •

  We knew to expect punishment for sin, but Bertie got the worst. It was hard in the beginning. With every kick, it’s like they were trying to quash everybody’s doubts. Because everyone had doubts back then, when we were just getting used to the mud and cold and realizing what it meant to be holy all the time.

  When I first told Jude this story, his face crumpled. “What will they do if they catch you out here?”

  “They don’t think I’d ever run away,” I said. My family knew I took walks in the forest, but I always came back, and as long as I did my chores, nobody bothered about it. That’s what happens in a household with twenty children. You get a little forgotten about.

  “What if they knew you were with me?” he asked.

  “They’d . . . they’d kill me,” I answered.

  He shook his head. “Ain’t you scared?”

  If I’d answered honestly, I’d’ve said no. Fear floated around like constant pollen, but none of us were allergic. But there’s a moment when it all becomes too much. And it was coming like a wildfire bent on burning the whole place to the ground.

  Chapter 14

  I walk down to the cafeteria for lunch. Benny stands inside the doors and nods at me when I enter, her mouth hitched up in a slight smile. She’s been helping me since I arrived here. I gather she was more or less assigned to me, or maybe she took the job herself because she saw how wobbly I still was on my feet. She’s usually got a book rolled up in her back pocket, and when I asked her about it she explained that she always carries a book in case she’s stuck somewhere with nothing to do.

  “What do you read?” I asked, still gobsmacked to hear a woman talk about books out in the open, where anybody could hear.

  “Nonfiction,” she said. “I’ve got a good one right now about the Haitian Revolution.”

  “Benny studied history in school,” Angel explained, “before she sold her soul to the state government.”

  When I grab my tray of food and find our normal table, Angel’s already seated, sneering at an Asian girl with a thick band of dull black bangs.

  “Minnow, it’s so nice to meet you,” the girl says brightly when I walk over. I don’t recognize her. Normally, Angel and I eat alone. “I’m Tracy. I just wanted to make sure I introduced myself. I know how scary this place is the first week. The girls can be a little ruthless.” Her eyes dart quickly to Angel.

  “What did I miss?” A girl so skinny that her limbs remind me of a deer’s slides her tray down the table and sits beside Tracy.

  “Minnow, this is Rashida,” Tracy says.

  “Nice to make your acquaintance,” Rashida says. “What happened to your hands?”

  “Rashida, don’t ask things like that,” Tracy exclaims.

  “Why not? Something happened to ’em. It’s not like they fell off by accident. They’s saying you got chopped by a serial killer, but I told ’em naw, she definitely a farm girl, probably got sliced by a combine.”

  “My father cut them off with a hatchet,” I say, just to see how the words sit in the air.

  Tracy’s breath catches in her throat, and Angel cocks an eyebrow from her fried chicken, but Rashida’s head falls back and she laughs a booming laugh that echoes across the cafeteria. “For real? I’d be telling that to everyone if that happened to me. With a hatchet? That’s way better than a combine any day.”

  I smile, too, because it’s impossible not to when she says it like that.

  “Rashida and I are in the youth group here,” Tracy says. “You should come sometime. We talk through things that are bothering us.”

  “And you think Minnow wants to talk through the fact that her dad chopped off her hands with you and Rashida?” Angel asks. “Now that’s funny.”

  “Someday, Angel—” Tracy seethes, “someday you’re gonna do something you can’t talk your way out of. And then you’ll be sorry.”

  “I think I already did,” Angel says, putting her fork down. “And do I feel sorry? Did I repent like a good little girl?” She holds her hands together as though in prayer. “Did I cry in front of the judge and say I made a big boo-boo and I’ll be good from now on? Fuck no. I don’t need forgiveness from some six-thousand-year-old pervert who sticks it to virgins when they’re not looking.”

  There isn’t another word out of either of them for the rest of lunch.

  • • •

  “Why don’t you believe in God?” I ask Angel after lights-out. We’re both in our beds, though I can tell Angel’s up reading by the line of yellow light visible between her bunk and the wall.

  She doesn’t answer right away. She’s quiet for so long, I wonder if she’s fallen asleep.

  “Because I don’t need to,” she says finally.

  “What’s that mean?” I ask.

  “Some people need cancer medication. I don’t, so I don’t take it.”

  When I don’t reply, she sighs. “I understand why people used to believe in God. Maybe I would’ve, too. They wanted to understand the world better. To explain why things happen the way they do. And God was pretty good at that. But we don’t need him anymore.”

  I know she’s talking about those books she reads, the ones that tell her what the earth is made of and why the sun burns and what happens when lightning strikes, but I can’t read those books. The Prophet never allowed girls to read, and I think it’s probably that fact more than my hands that makes me feel like I never stood a chance.

  “You don’t still believe in that stuff, do you?” Angel asks. “God and everything?”

  My mouth forms a frown. The silence stretches up through the dark lines of the jail.

  We were still in trailers when the Prophet taught us about God. We weren’t saints yet, just a bunch of fleshy forklift drivers and foremen beside their children and meek wives in old dresses. Everyone sat on couches inside our metal-walled house while the Prophet spoke, me on the carpet playing with alphabet blocks. I remember the look of my fingers, inflated with fat, bent around letters and spelling gibberish.

  The Prophet stood before us in my living room. “What you are about to hear is strange and wonderful. It is a story nobody has ever heard until now.” He drew a large breath. “It is the story of God.”

  God’s real name is Charlie, he told us. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1776, in the summer of the signing, when temperatures were high as rockets and humid as seas.

  Charlie was the son of a poor miller, a mean ma
n with a gammy leg and a spray of powder burns over his right temple from the war. When Charlie was just becoming something more than a boy, he went out into the creaking, old-growth forest to collect firewood. He came upon a stream that fell away, suddenly, into the earth. Charlie wanted to see where the water went. He leaned down and peered in.

  A spark. An alien pulse of light.

  He stared, transfixed, as every star, every galaxy in the universe flicked across his vision. The rings of Jupiter. The broken, sunburned back of Mars. Sights no human had ever captured with their eyes. And, just as suddenly, the feeling of every cell of every living organism hovering just beneath his fingertips, like piano keys. He could touch each one, if he wanted. He could control them.

  There are some who insist Charlie was simply lucky. That anyone who happened to walk by that stream on that morning, curious enough to lean over the odd water gushing into the ground, would be made God. They are wrong. Charlie was God before he was even born. It was only a matter of him finding out.

  Charlie lives in every generation. When he dies, he is reborn nine months later, a baby God. At any moment, you might meet him. He has been a Confederate soldier. He has been a bank teller. He has sat behind an oak desk in wire-rimmed glasses and a day’s growth of beard graying his cheeks. He has cooked dinner for his mother. He has driven to the ocean. He has fallen in love.

  The Prophet met Charlie once. Only once, but it was enough to transform his life forever, to transform all our lives.

  That incarnation of Charlie was a seventy-five-year-old janitor at the only mall in Ogden, Utah. The Prophet was seventeen, needed to pee, and ran into the mall to find a restroom. Charlie was mopping the floor when the Prophet entered the bathroom, sprinting toward a urinal. Charlie whipped out a bony hand and clutched his bare wrist.

  “Be careful, you,” Charlie said in a low croak. “Floor’s slippery.”