The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  By the time we got to the Community, my mother was round and immovable. While the men raged against the trees and the earth, the wives gathered in a circle in front of the A-frame structures of the first versions of our houses to sew simple baby garments for her.

  One of the wives handed me a tiny muslin dress to bring to my mother where she sat on a felled log. I held it to her ballooned stomach. “My baby,” I said.

  “No, Minnow, your sister,” my mother corrected in a voice like a croak.

  “My baby,” I said again. Nothing belonged to me, not really. My mother belonged to my father and my father belonged to the Prophet. This baby, I knew, was supposed to be mine. She was the closest thing to mine I’d ever had.

  The day she was born, her hot body made steam in the frigid morning air. My mother passed out on the dirt floor of the new-hewn house so I was the first to hold her, all scum-covered and wailing with her flat livid gums, tongue waving like an angry fist. Holding her felt like cradling a part of myself, my liver or kidney, outside my body.

  When my father ran outside to shout, “Another saint is delivered to the righteous establishment of the Lord,” I held Constance tighter. I decided, right then, that I would protect her like the vulnerable, screaming thing she was.

  Chapter 21

  The next day, after showering and stuffing myself, half damp, back inside my jumpsuit, I sit on my bed and try to pick through my hair with a large yellow comb held between my stumps. Benny offered again to cut it for me. Easier to manage, she says, and I know she’s thinking a handless girl ought to have priorities above vanity. But it’s more than that, something muddied that I can’t sift out. Jude never knew me without hair like this.

  “Bly!” Officer Prosser calls from the skyway. She’s holding a thin piece of paper. I throw down the comb and catch the paper as she drops it inside the cell.

  I turn to Angel. “Can you read it?”

  “It’s a class schedule,” she says. “Looks like they’re finally making you go to school.”

  I’m only signed up for one class, which meets on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. It’s called Reading Is Power. I didn’t know classes could have names like that, in complete sentences, but all the classes here do, things like “Cooking Is Cool” and “Math Is Fun.” Angel told me about a group therapy session she’d had once called “Coping Mechanisms Are for Rock Stars!”

  After breakfast, I walk in line toward the bay of old classrooms in the west wing of the detention center, the only area of the repurposed school that’s actually used for its original purpose. A youngish teacher in a violet cardigan stands at the doorway of the classroom. She shakes the hand of each student and looks them in the eyes, pronouncing their names easily. When she sees me, she puts her hand behind her back.

  “Minnow?” she asks. “I’m Miss Bailey.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  She nods. “Your file showed up in my mailbox today.”

  “You’ve read my file?”

  She shakes her head. “I choose not to read students’ files.”

  “Why?”

  “I find it helps with the idea that detention is the start of a new life, not the continuation of an old one.”

  “But wouldn’t you rather know if you’re teaching someone who’s killed before? Who might knife you in the back?” I ask.

  “You aren’t your crime. I don’t look at the files because I refuse to treat you like you are.” She clasps her hands together. “You’ll be at computer number one today. Everyone takes a reading assessment when they arrive. For goal-setting.”

  She gestures to the back of the room. I walk to a gray cube of a computer with a piece of masking tape on top labeling it #1. From the back of the room, I observe my ten classmates, all around my age, dressed in the same bright jumpsuits. I spot Rashida sitting on an overturned orange bucket in a half circle around Miss Bailey’s rocking chair. “Where did we leave off?” Miss Bailey asks, opening a blue book.

  “Bud was going to the library,” a girl with freckles says.

  Miss Bailey nods and begins reading. My eyes move to the gray screen in front of me. A passage from a text perches at the top of the screen above four possible answers and their corresponding bubbles. I recognize the letters, but they are assembled in words and sentences that mean nothing. I blink, the strange light from the computer making my eyes blurry.

  I turn toward the window. Cellophane hearts in purple and pink are stuck to the windows with tape, rippled from sunlight and dust-covered. The classroom windows face a residential street, the first view I’ve gotten of the outside. Beyond the window, there’s a slash of short brown suburban homes, snow-covered lawns, and a twenty-foot fence fringed with double loops of barbed wire—the only thing separating us from them.

  I raise my arm in the air. Miss Bailey looks up from the book.

  “Okay, ladies. Stop and jot down what you think the Amoses’ motivation was for adopting Bud.”

  “They wanted the money,” shouts Rashida.

  “Write it down for me,” Miss Bailey says. Rashida makes a clumsy fist around her pencil and begins eagerly printing block letters into her notebook that even I can see from the back of the room.

  Miss Bailey approaches the computer.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say.

  “You click the answer you think is correct.”

  “Click?”

  “With the mouse.”

  I shake my head.

  “Here,” she says, crouching down beside me so her knees pin her calico skirt to the ground. “You tell me the answer you want and I’ll click it for you. The question is ‘Which word best describes the tone of Mercutio’s speech?’ What do you think the answer is—a, b, c, or d?”

  I stare at the text and look back at her, a prickling heat creeping into my cheeks. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you read the passage?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve been sitting here for ten minutes.”

  “I don’t know how,” I say.

  “To read?”

  I shake my head.

  Her hands fall to her lap. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. This classroom is full of emergent readers. Why don’t you join us in the lesson space and listen to the story. And later we’ll get you started on some phonics exercises.”

  I sit with the other girls and Miss Bailey continues reading. It reminds me of the days beside the pond with Bertie, the stories she’d bring alive with just her voice. I listen to the story and I don’t do any remembering for a long time afterward.

  Chapter 22

  The next day, during the strange lull that happens after classes and between lunch when everyone sits in their cells and keeps house the way they know how—organizing the photos tacked to their walls, chatting through the bars of cells like neighbors—a sudden cheer goes up farther down the cell block. Angel throws down her book and presses her face to the bars.

  “Oh, no,” she says. “Not again.”

  “What?” I ask, standing. Just then, Rashida and Tracy approach our cell, each carrying a battered cardboard box. Tracy looks away from our cell, absently touching the tiny metal cross hanging from a length of dental floss at her neck.

  “What do you want?” Angel asks. “I didn’t think door-to-door evangelism was allowed in jail.”

  “We’re here on official business,” Rashida says, smiling so that I can see all of her teeth which today are stained an otherworldly blue. She reaches into the cardboard box and pulls out two long cylinders, one vivid green and the other purple. “Mrs. New chose us to distribute popsicles that the food bank donated.”

  “How’d you two get chosen?” Angel asks.

  “Tidiest cell,” Tracy says, twitching her thick bangs from her eyes. “Something you’d obviously nev
er win.” She glances at the balls of wadded-up notebook paper along Angel’s bed, sloppy worksheets pushing out of her binder.

  “I wouldn’t take it anyway,” Angel says. “I’m immune to Mrs. New’s bribes. Minnow can have my popsicle.”

  Rashida passes them through the bars and I cradle the plastic coated frozen things against my chest. Tracy and Rashida walk down the skyway, finishing their popsicle rounds.

  “This should be illegal,” Angel says, arms crossed, surveying the jail.

  “Why?” I ask, tearing open the top of one popsicle with my teeth.

  “Every springtime this happens,” she says. “It’s either popsicles, or a makeshift water park in the yard, or picnics in the cafeteria.”

  “Sounds fun,” I say, and when Angel darts me an incredulous look, ask, “Why springtime?”

  “It’s statistically proven that prison riots occur more often when the weather gets warmer. The pills, the bars, and the bribes. Their proven cocktail for keeping us numbed and behaving. Bet you I can get one of the guards to cop to seeing Mrs. New bring those things in, not some food bank people.”

  “Is it really springtime?” I ask.

  Angel looks at me. “I think you’re missing the point.”

  “I loved springtime,” I say, lying down on my bunk and chewing on the end of the lime-flavored frozen stick. “We got to change out of our blue dresses for gray ones. I could always trick myself into thinking things would be different this year.”

  Angel climbs back up to her bunk, mumbling about my brain being turned like bad roast beef.

  At this time of year in the mountains, there would still be snow on the ground, but there’d be a smell in the air of the world beginning to experiment with spring. I’d be marching through the snow-clogged forest to meet Jude and would be struck by the green scent of wild onion or fiddleheads. Out there, you could smell it even with three feet of snow on the ground, like the plants were asking us to wait for them—they were still there, just buried deep, just smaller than the best versions of themselves. In jail, I don’t smell anything but cleaning products and cafeteria food, but the missing Jude washes over me anyway, and I have to bite down hard to stop the tears. It’s like Angel said. The remembering never stops.

  There was a time before Jude and I loved each other. A time when we were just figuring out what friendship looked like, each for the first time. It was about then that the tree house bloomed out of Jude’s mind. It was our first spring together. We met by the larch tree most afternoons, and on days I couldn’t slip away from the Community, Jude would write little notes and stick them to the bark with a tack. When I told him I couldn’t read, he drew pictures instead.

  He stopped the drawings the older we got. Instead, he only wrote two words, words that I learned to sight-read even in the pitch darkness: Miss you.

  On one of those early days, he walked out of the woods and pulled from the pocket of his rough, homespun trousers a yellow oblong of cake, smashed against the cellophane wrapper.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A Twinkie,” he said, a sparkle in his eyes.

  “Where’d it come from?”

  “Down there.” He nodded in the general direction of civilization.

  “You go there?” I asked. Nobody but the Prophet was allowed to leave the Community for basic provisions. Only he was pure enough to resist the Gentiles’ temptations.

  “My daddy goes sometimes in his truck to buy stuff,” Jude replied. “Tools and supplies mostly. But sometimes food.”

  He thrust the Twinkie at me. The plastic wrapper made an uncomfortable squeak against my teeth as I tore it open. A blue jay appeared over Jude’s left ear, but I couldn’t say a word because the cake had just touched my tongue. My pupils must’ve dilated. My skin must’ve flushed. I don’t think I’d ever tasted something so incredible. Something so not from the forest.

  “You know what?” Jude asked.

  “Huh?” I replied around a mouthful.

  “We should have a regular meeting place. Like a clubhouse.”

  I swallowed. “What’s a clubhouse?”

  “It’s like a place where you plan stuff and talk. Like from the Little Rascals.”

  I shook my head, confused.

  “They’re a group of kids who play and have adventures.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “Well, they don’t live anywhere. They’re stories from down there. You know, from TV.”

  “You got a TV?” I hadn’t seen one since we moved to the forest.

  “We used to. One time my daddy put up a big metal pole he’d scrapped in the woods and rigged up a kinda machine that goes into the sky and picks up the shows. And we watched Little Rascals for a while, and Laverne & Shirley and I Love Lucy, which I bet you’d like because you’re sorta like Lucy—”

  “Who’s Lucy?”

  “The woman on the show. I’m trying to tell ya. She talks a lot, just like you.”

  I ducked my head, my cheeks burning. The Prophet preached the virtue of quietude among women. I’d been quiet for most of my life, but meeting Jude, I felt I could talk freely for the first time.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. She’s just got a lot of things to say. And she tells them to her friend Ethel. And to Ricky, her husband. He’s Cuban and he’s in a band and sometimes Lucy does dancing for his shows.”

  “What’s Cuban?”

  “It’s like a place. Like an island where it’s hot all the time.”

  “It’s around here?”

  “Naw, it’s gotta be like . . . two hundred miles from here.”

  “Gawl.”

  “So, anyway, I think we should build our clubhouse out here, halfway between your house and mine.”

  “They’ll find it,” I said. By this time, Jude knew they were the deacons.

  Jude suggested we build it up high in a tree where nobody’d ever think to look. He knew how to lift even planks of wood away from a fallen log, and eventually we whittled together a little camp inside the boughs of the larch. By the time we finished, the larch’s fingers were mustard yellow again. The autumn smell of soil and tree breath seeped easily through our meek wooden walls.

  On one wall, Jude had tacked a colored photograph showing a brown-skinned woman beside a fair, lanky man with a sharp Adam’s apple. She wore a large ivory dress trimmed in violet lace. On the white border beneath the picture, someone had written a caption in pencil.

  “What’s it say?” I asked.

  “‘Waylon and Loretta,’” Jude said, “‘on their wedding day.’”

  “Your parents?” I asked, matching the features in his face to the people in the photo.

  He nodded from where he was cutting a window into the east wall with his father’s rusty handsaw.

  “Your father let you keep this?”

  “He won’t notice. He doesn’t much like to see pictures of my momma. Says he keeps the best pictures of her inside his head.”

  He let the saw’s handle fall over his wrist. “You know what I wonder sometimes?” Jude asked. “I think there was something my daddy was running away from. That’s why he left the city to live up here.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “I know my grandparents didn’t think it was right, him marrying my momma. They couldn’t be together unless they ran away. But I wonder why they wouldn’t just head to a different town?”

  “Yeah,” I shrugged.

  I wondered it, too. Why would my mother and father leave their families and homes and jobs for the ramblings of a man they barely knew? Why would Jude’s parents trek into the woods to live on forest service land with nothing but a camp stove and two Bibles under their arms?

  On those quiet fall days, Jude took to playing guitar. Tentatively at first, because a
t that height we were entirely in nature’s territory. Eventually, his strumming grew stronger, and he sang, too, high-pitched and clear in those days, rougher the older he got.

  “Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun?

  Not much money, oh, but honey, ain’t we got fun?

  The rent’s unpaid dear, we haven’t a bus,

  But smiles are made dear, for people like us.”

  He threw down his guitar and held his hand out to me. I grabbed it, and he wheeled me around the wooden floor in a kind of disjointed dance—neither of us had much practice. Our bodies were feet apart, but his hand felt dry and warm in mine. Beyond the window, the sky was half illuminated with a yolk-colored sunset.

  “In the winter, in the summer, don’t we have fun?” he sang, slightly out of breath now.

  “Times are rough and getting rougher, still we have fun.

  There’s nothing surer, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer,

  In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?”

  I was laughing loud enough to shake the trees around, to shake the bones in my own body. Jude swung his legs out the open side of the tree house and started plucking on his guitar again, the backs of his elbows moving up and down as he touched the strings, the sun touching his jaw.

  It hadn’t occurred to me before to love Jude. I barely understood it as a concept. My only training came from the fairy tales Bertie read me those days by the pond, the princess who recognized, easy as breathing, the moment she loved the peasant boy. The frog who brushed lips with a girl and changed, deep down in his biology. In these stories, the moment of first love was quickly followed by the ringing of wedding bells in the town, and the joy on the bride’s and groom’s faces at the unquestioned beauty of a minute-old marriage.

  Marriage meant something different to me. It was incongruous with my idea of love. But, the quiet, supple way Jude breathed the word “dear,” the thimbles of calluses enclosing each of his fingertips, the vibrating pitch in my marrow when his eyes held mine, were almost enough to black out my memories of cold Community marriages and barefoot winter weddings.