The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  And from this perch in space, for this moment at least, it seems unimportant whether someone made it, or if it made itself.

  Chapter 49

  The stars bump around in my chest for days and days afterward, light as carbonation against the edge of a glass, and I start waking up in the morning thinking about stars or cities, or nothing: entire seconds spent not remembering to touch the hurt spot where Jude and Philip and Constance live for entire seconds, minutes even.

  I have started to think this isn’t such a bad thing.

  • • •

  “Did you like the book?” Dr. Wilson asks when he visits again.

  I shrug in agreement. In truth, besides picturing the sky every moment I can, I’ve done little but read Tess of the d’Urbervilles since he gave it to me.

  “What did you like about it?”

  “Tess isn’t a victim,” I say. “I mean, she is. For, like, the whole book. But she fights back in the end.”

  “How does she stop being a victim?”

  “She kills the man who abused her.”

  He nods. “What do you think about that?”

  “He deserved it.”

  “And, by that logic, didn’t she also deserve her punishment?”

  “No,” I reply. “He made her life miserable. He earned the knife in his belly.”

  “Still murder, though.”

  “But sometimes murder is justified, and don’t look at me that way, that’s not a confession or anything. Sometimes circumstances are . . .” I search for the word.

  “Extenuating?” he asks.

  “Yes, extenuating. And the fact that the law didn’t see that makes it cold-blooded, not Tess.”

  “You seem very certain.”

  “I am.”

  “And just consider how a few months ago you said you weren’t certain of anything. Now you’re almost too much the opposite. What do you suppose is responsible for that?”

  “If I had to guess, Angel.”

  “I agree,” he says. “I think Angel is becoming a negative influence on you.”

  “She’s a good person.”

  He laughs. “Is that so?”

  “Angel’s the best person in here.”

  “Angel is a convicted murderer.”

  He says it as though that’s all there is to know about her.

  “It was self-defense,” I say.

  “She told you that?” he asks. “She waited in her uncle’s bedroom for three hours, a loaded gun in her hand. When he got home, she crouched behind his bedroom door until he was less than a foot from her, and do you know what she did?” he asks. “She shot five bullets into his neck.”

  I look away, unconsciously pressing my stumps together. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you’re not like her. You shouldn’t aim to be.”

  “Angel fought back against a man who made her life a nightmare.”

  “Do you know how many murderers try to excuse their actions by saying they were victimized? It explains their actions, but it can’t excuse it,” he says. “There is no justifying murder.”

  He sees things so clearly. But he’s never lived in fear. He’s never had to dread the choices of big men with their large, dark-haired hands. “I’m just sick of the victim being judged for fighting back.”

  “It was a victim who killed the Prophet, wasn’t it?” he asks. “That’s why you won’t talk to me. Because you think whoever did it doesn’t deserve consequences.”

  I clamp my lips together. If I answer, the entire story might fall out of my mouth, and that can’t happen, not yet.

  “People like you see murder and motive and malice everywhere,” I say instead. “Whatever I tell you, you’ll take it and twist it and make it sound wrong. Just like they did at my trial. That lawyer made me out like a monster, and I’m not gonna let that happen again. And don’t try telling me you wouldn’t do it. You’re a—”

  “Don’t say cop.”

  “Well, you are.”

  “And you’re a convicted felon. Have I ever treated you like one?”

  I wince, the image of Philip coming into my head, the understanding that I’ll never, as long as I live, not be a criminal.

  “You never planned on telling me the truth,” he says. “I figured that out the moment we made our deal. But I’d hoped that by now I would’ve gained your trust. I can see I’ve fallen short.”

  He sighs and stands, taking his stool with him.

  “But I do trust you,” I whisper when he’s gone. More than almost anybody, I’m realizing.

  But not enough. Not when he still has all the power. Not when I’ve still got none.

  Chapter 50

  Constance never left my thoughts when I stayed at Jude’s cabin. The wedding preparations were surely going on uninterrupted; the porridge and meat pies already being made; the salves for their wedding night mixed in big stone bowls. If the place my hands used to be was a physical ache, images of what was going to happen to Constance formed a mental one. It would surely be weeks until the wedding, but the idea of their marriage made me want to push up from the couch and start running.

  But for the first couple of weeks, I could barely move for the blinding pain and shaking in my limbs that made me sick, and I grew to miss the green liquid they had given me in the Community. Even then, even shivering and burning on Jude’s couch, I pictured how I’d sneak back into my family’s house, unbolt the door, and whisk Constance out of the maidenhood room to freedom.

  I kept all this to myself, and I’m not sure why. There was still that deadness in Jude’s eyes, the strange energy that made him never sit still, constantly fetching more firewood until the room was always stifling hot, and the blood-covered couch made the air constantly smell of iron.

  “They’re gonna follow the smoke, Jude,” I whispered. “The deacons.”

  “Let them,” he muttered, putting more logs in the fire.

  It was weeks before I could stand and move around a little, haltingly, with my bandaged stumps held stiffly in front of me. Jude gave me a pair of trousers and a button-up shirt that’d belonged to him, and outside, on a fair day when I was strong enough to stand, I watched as he stuffed my old dress through the top of a rusted-out oil drum and set fire to it. I imagined I could smell it, the wool, the blood, the fears that had seeped into the fabric over the course of years, the only thing to show for it a thread of smoke sewn through a white winter sky.

  I stayed there through Christmas, a holiday I only vaguely knew about, the baby and the mother and God mixed together in a way that made my head hurt. We ate potatoes and boiled jerky and Twinkies, and they lit special beeswax candles and sang a couple of songs, though nobody’s heart was in it. Waylon sat in a straight-back chair to the side of the couch, eating from his dented metal plate with slow concentration. Jude and I stacked together on the couch, close to the fire. The house smelled like pine needles and skin.

  “What do you do for Christmas?” Waylon asked out of nowhere.

  “We don’t have Christmas,” I said after a moment. “But, in spring we celebrate the story of Chad and the Golden Bear. Chad is one of our heroes. He killed a bear who was terrorizing America and wove a crown from the fur.”

  “That sounds ridiculous,” Waylon said.

  “So does Christmas to Minnow,” Jude interrupted.

  “Christmas ain’t ridiculous,” Waylon said.

  “Would you shut up, Daddy?”

  “It’s my duty to spell out wrong when I see it.”

  Jude slammed his plate down on his knees. “Don’t you dare, Daddy,” Jude said. “Nobody wants to hear it.”

  Waylon looked like he’d been struck. He opened his mouth to respond but Jude spoke first.

  “I can tell you’re getting ready to tell Minnow she’s a sinner, tell her she’s damned,
and get your Bible to thump at her, but I won’t let you.”

  “You kept this girl secret all this time, doing who knows what in those woods, for years. Fornicating out of wedlock, for all I know. Ya’ll are sinners!” Waylon bellowed.

  “Who hasn’t sinned, Daddy?” Jude said, shouting now. “You made me a sinner. You made me violate the most important commandment when I was too young to know better. You’re the worst sinner of anybody here. And I won’t sit by and listen to you tell me we’re damned because you’ll be damned before us, you old drunk!”

  Waylon breathed in through his nose loudly. Jude’s limbs tensed, as though ready to spring up at any moment. In the fireplace, a log fell over and sent a spray of embers up the chimney. I watched a spark land on the couch and burn straight through to the stuffing.

  “I—I know I done wrong by you,” Waylon muttered.

  “Darn right you have,” Jude said.

  “I know you deserved a better daddy than the one you got.”

  Jude crossed his arms.

  In his lap, Waylon kneaded his reedy fingers. “I didn’t know how to be a daddy, truth is. You don’t know this but your momma had a baby before you was born. Jezebel. She came out perfect, but she had something twisted and hard in her belly. We couldn’t afford no doctor, so we tried to take care of her at home. When we took her to the emergency room, it was too late. They wheeled her away in one of those little gurneys for babies, with them clear plastic sides. She was paining, but she stretched out her hand to us, to your momma really, all her fingers reaching for her. She weren’t never baptized in church. They let us see her one last time, and your momma sprinkled water from the tap on her even though she’d already died by then. I didn’t tell her it wouldn’t do no good. I thought, if anyone could bless a child’s soul to heaven, it was your momma.”

  Jude swallowed hard, his jaw clenched.

  “We buried Jezebel in the poor cemetery, and nobody came to the funeral but your momma and me. There were lots of people who said we were deserving of it for letting her go without baptism, for not being married.” He shook his head. “It weren’t about the Bible, what they were saying. It weren’t about God neither.”

  Waylon wiped his sleeve over his face, sniffed hard twice. He stood from his chair and opened the back door. A chilly gust blew into the room as he left.

  “Off drinking,” Jude said to my unasked question. “He’ll never quit. He needs that stuff to keep from coming unglued. Trust me, he’s better with it than he is without.”

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked, and he knew I was really asking him if he was going to stay here forever.

  Jude shrugged. “Someone has to stay with him. He’d die if there weren’t no one here to take care of him.”

  “What if you were free to do whatever you wanted?” I asked. “What if you could leave the mountain? What if you could start over in the city? Live in a real house?”

  “Ain’t never gonna happen,” he said in a voice colder than I’d ever heard.

  “Why?”

  “My momma and daddy wouldn’t have moved out here if it was such a good life in town. It’s poison down there. I know that’s why momma got sick. The dirty sprawl, the factories blacking out the sky, the people stealing your own breath because they can. Here’s the only place you can be safe from that. I figgered it all out.”

  “What?”

  “Why people move to the wilderness. Remember we used to wonder about that, why they leave everythin’ behind? It’s not to run away, like I thought. And it ain’t got nothing to do with God,” he said. His eyes were stretched open like large windows. “It’s hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “Hope for somethin’ better. A better future. My momma used to talk about it. People have been expanding into the west”—he spread his fingers wide—“longer than memory. They were called pioneers. Pioneers. Ain’t that a good word?”

  “I guess,” I shrugged. “So?”

  “So, what if we did it, too? Made a life for ourselves out here? What if we made a new civilization, just us two?”

  “What’s wrong with the civilization down there?” I gestured toward the direction of the town.

  “It ain’t ours. We lived our whole lives in these woods. You think it would be easy to start over there? You think they’d let us? They’d take us to homes, orphanages. They got laws about that. They’ll lock us up because we don’t make no sense to them.”

  “What do you wanna do, Jude? Run and hide?”

  “I’m only talking about you and me, living.” He smiled, and for a moment he looked like the boy I met in the night all those years ago. But there was something sharp underneath, too, something that never used to be there.

  “This isn’t the first time, Jude,” I said, realizing it even as I said the words.

  “The first time what?”

  “That you’ve made me feel like you’d bottle me up in one of your father’s moonshine jars if you could.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “I cain’t see you getting hurt again. I cain’t see it.”

  “This just sounds too much like . . . like the Prophet.”

  “Don’t say that! I ain’t nothing like him. I don’t even think God’s real anymore.”

  Jude’s face was still.

  “Don’t you?” I asked.

  “No. I haven’t for a long time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just do.” He shrugged. “You know what my daddy used to say when I’d cross him? ‘I brought you into this world and I can take you out just as easy.’ And ain’t that just like God? Like you’re at some old man’s mercy, someone who don’t even have his own life together?” Jude swallowed hard. “He told me my momma was up in heaven but I know better now. I knew it, that moment. The moment I kilt her. Inside her head, where my daddy told me the soul lives, there weren’t no soul. Jus . . . jus gray sponge, jus mess.” He set his jaw.

  The air had turned black and heavy with Jude’s words. My lips could barely find air to breathe, but Jude seemed relieved. He sat back on his haunches and picked up his guitar. He strummed it absently.

  “I’m never gonna learn to play now,” I whispered, and at once, the image of Constance came into my mind. I had to save her. I felt it in the thrum of my entire body, and even though I still walked crooked and my stumps felt like fire, I knew the time had come to rescue her.

  “Jude, I been thinking—” I started.

  “You won’t need hands,” he said at the same time. I closed my mouth to watch him fiddle with the strings. “Not when you got me to play you songs. I never forgot what you told me. I been starting to make my own, just simple ones. I wanna keep writing you songs forever.”

  He picked the strings faster and faster until a quick harmony grew. He started singing.

  “Once I had my own fine girl

  Smile so wide and eyes like pearls

  Filled my heart with peaceful sound

  Said ain’t nothing gonna bring us down.

  Ain’t nothing gonna bring us down.

  “If evil comes with his evil plan

  To touch our hearts to the muddy ground

  Take us away and see us drowned

  Tell him ain’t nothing gonna bring us down.

  Ain’t nothing gonna bring us down.

  “When I get out this far-eyed wood

  Love you true like I said I would

  I’ll build a house with my own two hands

  Tell you ain’t nothing gonna bring us down.

  Ain’t nothing gonna bring us down.

  “When we’re old as the desert sand

  I’ll sing my songs and sow my land

  Pick daisies and make you a crown

  Say ain’t nothing gonna bring us down

  Ain’t nothing gonna bring us down.”r />
  The song petered out and he put down his guitar.

  “You like your song?” he asked.

  I nodded, though a knot had formed in my chest that I couldn’t name.

  “I been thinking,” I said again. “Thinking about going back to the Community.”

  He looked up from his guitar strings. “What?”

  “I’ve gotta get my sister, Jude. It’s been nagging me since I came here. The Prophet said if I ran away, he’d marry her instead. And I know he wasn’t bluffing. He announced it in front of everyone.”

  “But, Minnow, they’ll kill you if you go back there. You know it.”

  “She’s only a kid, younger than us the first time we met. Can you imagine letting a little girl get married off and doing nothing to stop it?”

  “What makes you think she ain’t already married?”

  “She might be. But, the courtship is usually longer, sometimes a month or two.”

  “If they catch you, they won’t let you leave.”

  “Then I won’t let them catch me. I’ve snuck out a thousand times, and I never once was caught.”

  “Yeah, ’cept that one time. When they cut your hands off.”

  “Well, they can’t cut them off twice.”

  He shook his head slowly, eyes clenched. “I don’t unnerstand it, Minnow.”

  No, you don’t understand, I thought. I was realizing how much he didn’t understand about me. He didn’t understand why I couldn’t let the Prophet touch my sister. He didn’t understand the desire to leave the wilderness that grew every day. He didn’t understand why singing me a song wasn’t ever going to replace me never being able to play music myself.

  “At least I’ll be with you,” he said. “I’ll protect you.”

  “No,” I said. “Stay here and I’ll meet you when we get back.”

  “I’m not letting you go in there alone. And I meant what I said. If I get the chance to kill that old man who hurt you, I’ll take it,” he insisted. “I’m going with you.”