“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.”