“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said smartly.
Sam’s bluff had officially been called. She sighed.
“Let me get my bag.”
Chapter 16
For many years, he eschewed all forms of technology in his personal life, basking in his Luddism. He didn’t have a television or a computer. He built his bombs and cooked his juice by perfect recall of books he’d read in the library. They were wrong, those amoral creatures who spent their time staring at computer screens, rewiring their brains into hyperinflated mush. To waste your mind was a sin, one of the many he saw committed day in and day out, carelessness and selfishness and greed stamped on their foreheads like so much chattel as they shopped and chatted and commented and simpered and swooned.
What a waste his society had become.
He got his news the old-fashioned way, in letters, and from the shortwave radio he kept in the barn, away from the girl, so she wouldn’t be tainted. He needed to keep her clean, to keep her unsullied. Her mother was a perfect example of what the slow march of technology could do to a person. Once unsullied herself, pure and clean and beautiful in her homespun, she was a beauty to behold. And she’d chosen him. Him.
They’d been married in the custom of their people, with the full and complete will of each individual bound in a collective spirit, no license needed, no priest, just the acknowledgment of their love and the dispersion of property from one parent to a spouse. Like it was supposed to be. And after, she’d lain with him, and he’d found the true glory of life. He found himself hurrying through his chores so he could return to the house and blow out the candle, take her to his bed. Shirking his duties, never, but finding ways to make them go faster, to be more efficient. Then he began coming home for lunch, and filling himself both with her food and her body.
It must be a sin, the pleasure, because he was not single-minded in his objective. The delights of procreation perhaps outstripped his beliefs. But his faith said to be fruitful and multiply, and he obeyed with tireless drive. Since he enjoyed it so much, more the better.
When she had fallen with child he had never been so proud. He’d created life. More than cultivating vegetables, and husbandry with the animals, and the high, wide stalks of corn in the fields—he had created a different kind of life, through his love and his joy and his gratification.
They were at last content.
And then it all went to hell.
She was a small woman, and begged to have the child in a hospital, where it would be safe, fearing the wilds and the vagaries of chance. He dismissed that notion out of hand; he knew plenty about birth, he’d been shepherding his flock into existence his entire life. There was no need for strangers to handle the delivery, he could do it himself. He studied the books and relayed the information to her at night. She was resistant to the idea. She actually fought back, told him no. She would not allow it.
As her husband, he was her lord and creator. She had no right to disagree, to disobey.
She did not obey.
When she was six months pregnant, she disappeared.
Six months after that he found her. She was living in the most wretched city in the world, and the child was not with her. He watched her for days, trying to discern what she’d done with his babe, the rage and fear and anger building in him to the point where he thought he would burst.
He began to despair, fearing the child had been lost after all. So he went to her and knocked on her door, and when she opened it she screamed in fear and tried to slam it shut, but he stuck his heavy shoe in the crack, and pushed with his fists, and the door opened wide before him, and she cowered on the couch while he asked her where their child was.
When she revealed their daughter was with strangers, he beat her senseless, and then started his most important journey. The mother was of no consequence to him anymore. It was his progeny he wanted.
Adoption.
That word shrank his soul.
He was a big man, strong, intimidating. It took little time to establish the child’s new home, in West Virginia, a small mining town, with small people. Took less time to release the child from her bonds, and return her to her proper place.
He named her Ruth, for his mother. The obedient one.
Whither thou goest, I will go.
They’d left the group when she was three, because he felt it was time for them to be on their own. He built their camp by hand: the cabin, the stable, the work shed, the fields. And they lived happily in the mountains, eating the food he caught and grew, being entertained by books from the library in the town forty miles away. He educated her himself.
And Ruth grew older, and began to look exactly like her mother.