“I been able to read since I was three years old and nobody’s going to take that away from me. Not the Prophet. Not God.”
Bertie’s face was set hard. When I remember her, I picture that expression, like behind her eyes she had entire rooms that she didn’t let anyone see. And I realize now it was the book in her hands that’d made them.
“What’s in it?” I asked, taking a tentative step forward.
“If I say, you have to promise never to tell. Not anyone, even your parents.”
I dragged in a deep breath. “I promise.”
“Come here then.”
I sat down beside her on a thick mound of moss that crept all the way to the pond’s edge. All around, the air rang with birds trilling and insects vibrating.
“They’re called fairy tales. Do you remember those?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“Here, let me read you one.”
Bertie opened up the book and leafed through the pages expertly. The edges were stained tea-colored from all the fingers that had touched them over the years.
“Godseyes,” I breathed. The text was so cramped, it made my mind swim. Attached to each story was a black-and-white woodcut of kings or dwarfs or maidens. Some of the maidens were being held at the jaw by some knight, which meant they were kissing, which meant they were in love. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a love like that.
Bertie read me the story, and when I begged for another she indulged me, until an hour of stories had passed.
“Are they real?” I asked.
“No, they’re just stories for children.”
“Why are they evil?”
“They’re not,” she said, her face settling into a scowl. “Only the Prophet says they are. He doesn’t want us to know how to read. He doesn’t want us to figure him out.”
That summer, Bertie taught me about letters and how to sound them together, and that’s why I can patch a semblance of meaning from words sometimes, if they’re not too difficult. I might’ve learned to read proper if Bertie’s mother hadn’t found the book under Bertie’s pallet and taken it straight to the Prophet.
The Prophet had been saving a pair of metal slippers. They were crude, two rectangles of steel with straps soldered to the sides. A deacon put the slippers in the fire pit at the center of the courtyard and let them burn to a blistered red. They sent up sparks when he lifted them out with tongs. Everyone crowded around to watch.
The deacons wrestled Bertie’s feet into the slippers. She danced around the courtyard, screaming in pain, the skin on her feet popping, the smell of burning flesh warming the air, dead and smoky. When she fell to the dirt, the Prophet gestured and someone put her on her feet again and forced her to keep dancing, her braid rising and falling with each leap.
The others looked on, their faces like puzzles I couldn’t solve.
A few days later, the Prophet received a revelation to marry Bertie. He mostly married girls who had transgressed in some way, and he always managed to tame them. On her wedding day, Bertie couldn’t stand. Flies swam through the air around the dressings on her feet. The Prophet wore a smile that was slim and sharp.
“The time hath come,” he chanted.
“Thy deeds be done,” Bertie replied quietly.
Bertie’s feet eventually healed but she walked crooked. Her entire body wilted. Weeks later, when the Prophet was conducting a sermon in the open air of the courtyard, Bertie stood, surveyed the sea of us, bonneted and buttoned, and hobbled away. I was the only one to notice her pass through the tree line and into the shadows there. I said nothing, even knowing she might be killed at any moment by the Gentiles’ heat-seeking missiles. I knew, somehow, that she would be safer out there than in the Community.
When he noticed she had disappeared, the Prophet’s eyes were like clenched fists. He told the men to secure Bertie with any force necessary.
They brought her body back. I caught a glimpse through the throng of blue-clad bodies. Her face. It looked almost normal at first. Then I saw the other side, kicked in at the eyeball so the whole side of her face sloped inward.
What I remember most was that nobody screamed.
? ? ?
We knew to expect punishment for sin, but Bertie got the worst. It was hard in the beginning. With every kick, it’s like they were trying to quash everybody’s doubts. Because everyone had doubts back then, when we were just getting used to the mud and cold and realizing what it meant to be holy all the time.
When I first told Jude this story, his face crumpled. “What will they do if they catch you out here?”
“They don’t think I’d ever run away,” I said. My family knew I took walks in the forest, but I always came back, and as long as I did my chores, nobody bothered about it. That’s what happens in a household with twenty children. You get a little forgotten about.
“What if they knew you were with me?” he asked.
“They’d . . . they’d kill me,” I answered.