The Prophet looked into Charlie’s face, taking in the name tag pinned to his uniform and his eyes, a startling, bottle-glass green. The teenage Prophet couldn’t know that the touch had transferred something so powerful into his body that, in the coming years, he’d possess the ability to hear the ministrations of God. He relieved himself, jiggled himself dry, and left.
It wasn’t until years later, when the Prophet found a glyph-printed foil in the mountains, that he realized he’d been touched by God. When he heard God speak through the earth, it was in the old croak of Charlie the janitor from all those years before.
We never knew when Charlie would die. This was the precarious thing about believing in a human God. At any moment, he could pass on and the world would be without a God until he was born again.
A day before we left for the wilderness, the Prophet called for a final meeting, each of us wearing our newly constructed blue garments that sat up around our bodies rigidly. I could sense the significance of this day, so I sat quietly with my hands folded in my lap. The Prophet swept through our front door, tears streaming down his face.
“Why are you crying, Prophet?” my father asked.
“I am crying, Deacon Samuel,” he breathed, “because God is dead.”
The room gasped.
“Oh, yes! He has died a dozen times. You have felt it. When He dies, the earth mourns. Catastrophe reigns until He can be reborn. Five years ago, the great wildfires overtook Montana. The flames of hell pushed through the crust of the earth while God gestated. When he was birthed, the heavens opened up, and the fires were doused with sacred water. All became right with the world again.”
“So, God isn’t really dead?” asked Deacon Timothy.
“God is always both alive and dead. His great sorrow is dying, always dying.”
“Who is God’s mother?” asked Deacon Sean.
“Her identity is inconsequential. Her only purpose is the duty her womb performs in growing the body of God. That is truly the highest calling of womankind. Any of you should be lucky enough to birth God.”
He looked down into the near audience, where the children sat on the curled carpet, boys and girls separated. His eyes caught on mine.
“Maybe you, Sister Minnow, will someday have the honor of giving birth to God. How would that be?”
“That would be . . . glorious,” I breathed. “Glory be to God our savior.”
The Prophet’s approving gaze filled my stomach with burbling pride. I looked back at where my parents sat. A smile had crept through my father’s new beard. My eyes flicked to my mother. She was heavily pregnant with Constance and doubled over her stomach, drawing designs on the stretched fabric of her dress. She hadn’t heard a word.
“Does He live in our country?” asked Deacon Karl.
“Of course. God is American.”
“How did He come by the name God, if His real name was Charlie?” asked Deacon Martin.
“There has always been a name for God. He just wasn’t there to use it yet.”
None of the children asked questions, even the older ones. I was the youngest child by far, but I still felt bolstered by the Prophet’s suggestion that I could birth God, so I raised my hand.
“What happens when Charlie dies?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t call Him by that name, Minnow,” the Prophet said. “It’s a special name. One reserved for special times.”
“What happens when God dies?” I asked.
The Prophet smiled, his eyes crinkling. “He is reborn.”
“But what if He decides not to come back?”
“He always comes back. It’s His great sacrifice, to live among us and concern Himself with human problems instead of dwelling in the Great Infinity.”
“Will Char—I mean, will God always come back?” I asked.
“Always,” he said. “God is the one person you can always count on.”
Though the Prophet discouraged it, I never stopped thinking of God as Charlie. A human God. How preferable to an invisible God, I thought, one you’re not even sure exists. I was never taught basic math, but by the time I figured out how to finger count, I deduced that Charlie was around my age.
Sometimes I could barely remember what came before the Community. I had to remind myself forcefully, create faces of people I might know if I ever found a way off the mountain. Somewhere, there was a girl by a train. Somewhere, there was an old man swinging loaves of bread into a shopping cart. There was a woman selecting the clothes she’d wear to work, the coral-colored blouse that would touch her skin all day while she typed at a computer and commuted on a bus that smelled of the seconds after lightning.
And somewhere was a teenage God. A boy with vibrant green eyes. A boy named Charlie. I could meet Him, if I left here. So why didn’t I? And why didn’t they?
It was years before I asked. The Prophet stood before the congregation again, but now at the front of the massive wooden structure of the Prophet Hall, nestled inside an unending sea of evergreens. Stretched between his two hands was the Scroll of Salvation, the sheath of silver foil he found on the mountain the day he discovered he was a prophet, covered in glyphs that contained the language of God.
I still sat on the ground with the children, but now I was the oldest, my half sisters Prudence and Leah sitting to my left and right. Constance sat behind me, and every once in a while I could feel her stroke the tail of my braid with her tiny fingers.
“Why don’t we live in the lowlands?” I asked. “If that’s where God lives, why don’t we live where God lives?”
“We will, Sister Minnow,” the Prophet replied. “He will let us know when the time is right.”
“How?”
“That’s for Him to decide.”
“So, we have no way of knowing when we can go back?” I asked. “I could be eighty by the time He decides. I could be dead.”
“Don’t be impertinent,” my father’s third wife, Vivienne, hissed. In that moment, I became aware of the creaking of dry wooden pews as the dozens of adults behind me shifted in their seats.
“You’re not a prisoner here, Minnow,” the Prophet said in a measured tone. “You are free to go whenever you want.”
I swallowed. This wasn’t true. I knew the consequences of running away. I recalled Bertie’s dead-eyed face, indented like a thumbprint in a peach. “No, I wasn’t saying . . . I’m just excited to meet God.”
The Prophet smiled and extended his hands gracefully toward the congregation. “Aren’t we all?” The room nodded as one.
The Prophet focused his eyes on me once more. “I hope you decide to wait for God’s call, Minnow. We are the chosen. The Sanctified Prophets of Heaven. We will be rewarded grandly if we do God’s will. You won’t just meet Him. You will dine at His table every night. He will bathe you and heal you. He will touch you with His unknowable green eyes, and you will be saved.”
Chapter 15
In the Community, I woke up early each morning to milk goats and punish the earth with a trowel to fill it with seeds or dig grown things out. I’m used to waking up before dawn, so every day, without thought, my eyes open at exactly the same time, when the air is the bruised color of winter mornings and everyone in the jail is still sleeping. Sometimes, the echoed weeping of a girl winds through the scaffolding, but most mornings the place is quiet and still, and it’s possible to imagine the bars and the guards and the razor wire away, imagine there’s nothing surrounding you but your own soul.
Until six, when every fluorescent bulb in the place spasms to life, the light like a punch to the face. The noise starts a moment later, talking and shouting and girls using the toilet and trudging down to the showers.
During showers, I have no choice but to strip down in front of the others, their eyes taking in the parts of me I was taught to keep hidden.
Here, the scars usually shi
elded beneath yards of orange cotton are on display, the whip marks scoring my back from countless childhood punishments, the thick bands of red scar tissue cuffing both ankles. But, when I cast my eyes at the other bodies, I see skin tarnished with small holes of cigarette burns and pink puckered knife wounds and white lines like hash marks on forearms. Here, my scars are the only part of me that could be called normal. It seems like every girl here has had their own personal Prophet.
And then it’s breakfast, and runny oatmeal and juice with a straw, and after that, the pill line.
There’s a long corridor beside the cafeteria by the nurse’s office. From a small window in the door, white paper cups are passed to each girl. Every ten seconds or so a new girl approaches the window, picks up her cup, and slams the tiny white and blue and red circles down her throat.
Angel sidles up to the window. Her cup is heavy with pills. She upturns it over her mouth and chews.
“Why don’t you just swallow them?” I ask.
“Makes them work faster,” she says. “Plus, the Adderall tastes like Skittles.”
They give me only one pill, a giant speckled one shaped like a bird’s egg.
Angel’s asked me a hundred times what it is. “It’s not Ritalin. It’s not Xanax. It might be Thorazine, but why’d they be giving you that?”
I never respond. I don’t want her to know. The woman doctor who saw me when I was locked up only said it was very important I take it every day.
“Don’t let anyone try to buy this pill from you,” she said firmly.
She explained that my growth had been severely stunted, probably from malnutrition. She instructed me to eat everything that’s put in front of me and take the high-dose multivitamin every morning, even though it rakes my throat on the way down.
We arrive back at the cell and I can tell the pills are starting to work because Angel’s talking to me, her voice higher and faster than when she’s unmedicated.
“I think it’s time I educated you,” Angel says.
“In what?”
“Prison life.” She flops down opposite me on the floor. “First thing you gotta know, there’s cliques here worse than on the outs. Girls stick together and the alliances mean something. The Mexicans are okay. If you ever got nail polish to trade, they’ll be your best friend. Don’t mess with the meth girls. Most of them had their brains turned mushy from it, still talk about finding more meth, like they can just buy it at the commissary. And when you remind them nicely that they’re in jail, they scratch. Crazy bitches.”
“Which one are you in?”
“Don’t really got one. The lezzes can be all right. Mostly just stick to themselves, and sometimes I talk to the smart girls, the ones who always go to class and study and stuff. Really trying to make their lives better. But they can be so damn serious. I don’t know. Ain’t no one here really just to talk to.”
“What about me?”
She shakes her head. “You’re a trial run. I’m still feeling you out.”
“Not like you could get rid of me if you decide you don’t like me.”
“I can. You be here as long as me, you start calling the shots.”
“How long’s your sentence?”
“Nunyo.”
“What?”
“Nunyo business. That’s personal.”
“Ha, real personal,” I snort.
“What’s that sposta mean?”
“Godseyes, I can hear you pee at night,” I say. “Not like we got much personal stuff, anyway.”
“That’s why I like to keep private what I can. Not all of us are little blab mouths like you.”
“Have your secrets, then, Splashy,” I say. “That’s my nickname for you. Because of the pee.”
Angel’s eyes narrow and she looks like she’s thinking about smiling, but the muscles in her face tighten just as quickly. “Couple things you should know,” she continues. “You gotta lose the way you talk.”
“What way?”
“Like you’re in church all the time. You don’t talk like the girls here. ‘Godseyes!’” she mocks. “You sound like they dug you out of a time capsule.”
“But I don’t know any swears.”
“Jesus, I’ll make you a list then.”
She stands and rips a square of paper from a spiral notebook on her bed and scribbles out five or six words with a small pencil. She hands it to me.
“I can’t read,” I say.
“You can’t even sound the letters out?”
“Only a little.”
Her mouth shifts to the side. “Here.” She places her finger next to each penciled word and pronounces it, then makes me repeat after her. My heart beats hard, and not only because I’m holding the Devil’s words in my mouth. This is the first time anyone has taught me to read since Bertie.
“Get these ones down and you should be all right.”
“Why are you helping me?” I ask.
“It saves me a headache later on. If you get in trouble, you’ll look over at me with those pathetic eyes and expect me to help you. Well, it ain’t happening.”
She leans heavily against the wall again. “And second, if you don’t understand what someone’s saying to you, don’t respond. Don’t say a word. You’ll get yourself trapped.”
“Like what?”
“Like, if anyone ever holds up their hand like this,” she makes a circle with her fingers, “that means they’re asking if you’re gay.”
“What?”
“They’re asking if you like girls. And if they wanna know if you have a friend on the outs named Britney, they’re trying to claim you, ’cause a Britney’s the name for someone’s bitch, someone to have sex with. A Candy is a coward and a Tricia is someone with something to trade.”
“Gawl,” I say, my head teeming.
Angel scowls at me.
“I mean . . .” I clench my eyes, thinking. “Shit.”
“Better.”
“I guess I can’t ever ask someone if they like girls,” I say.
“Huh?”
“No fingers.”
Angel squints.
“That was a joke,” I say. “Don’t you ever laugh? Even I laugh sometimes and I got a lot more reasons than you to be depressed. About . . .” I hold up my arms and look down to where my fingers had been. “. . . ten reasons.”
Angel carries on, ignoring me. “You’ll be deciding soon what gang to join,” she says. “I ’spect you’ll be with the Christian girls.”
“I’m not Christian,” I say.
“No, but you’re leaning in that direction, I can tell. You got religion in your blood. Trust me, by next week you’ll be quoting Job to me, telling me what Jesus said about this and that. I heard it all before.”
“You were raised religious, right?”
She nods. “Everyone around me was. My uncle . . . he was real religious.”
I don’t ask if this is the same uncle she’s locked up for killing.
“What’re the Christian girls like?”
“Like Tracy,” she says. “You know, fake.”
“Like how?”
“The dumb ones really think they mean it ’cause they’re scared, and they think they can actually turn their lives around. But the smarter ones are only pretending ’cause they wanna look good in front of the parole board. That’s all religion is. Strategy.”
“How are you so sure?”
“I’m good at spotting liars. And that’s all they are. They’re just real good at lying to themselves,” she says, her voice low. “Real good at it.”
Chapter 16
I’ve been wondering if jail does anything it’s supposed to. It’s not true justice, not really. Philip’s organs aren’t knitting themselves together any faster because I’m locked in here, and it’s not fixing me, either. It’
s punishment, and for now I probably need a little time sitting under the weight of everything I’ve done. I deserve to feel the blackening caverns of my heart pull inward every time I remember Philip’s blood sketched across the fallen snow. To look my guilt about Jude and Constance straight in the eyes. To sink down in the pain and let myself feel exactly as bad as I should.
“You did nothing wrong,” is what Angel says on the occasions I talk like this, but I know it wasn’t natural or right what I did, and I question how it all could have happened. Not just for me, but everyone in the Community. How each of our hands went from farming and praying to hurting and killing.
It was never supposed to be like that. From the beginning, things were supposed to be better than they’d been.
Before we came to the Community, nobody could’ve mistaken us for saints. With my parents, there was always something unspoken and static-charged beneath the surface, but I was too preoccupied with childhood to notice. My days were simple and divided up into clear segments: the time of eating cereal, the time of watching my mother fold laundry, the time of my father arriving home. My mother would pull the zipper on his yellow jumpsuit, and he’d step out of it like a discarded shell, his undershirt salty with drying sweat.
The world was small where we lived, on a dirt lot that all the trailers on our street backed crookedly on to, where the neighborhood children ran on chubby legs in raggedy, stained clothes and diapers that dragged on the ground. We’d congregate at the rusty swing set and dented slide that sounded like sheet metal shaking every time someone went down. The lot wasn’t much to look at, covered with trampled brown snow in the winter, and in the summer a weed clawing out of the earth every few feet. The only spectacular things in that place were the view of the mountains, so big they could stun you every day with your own smallness, and an apple tree that grew from the very center.
The day my father brought the Prophet home for the first time, the leaves of the apple tree shone almost silver in the sunlight, and the apples were unripened green buds the size of my fist.
I stretched my hand high in the air, trying to reach the lowest hanging apple, just to see if I could.
The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly Page 6
