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.
“Did you write that?” I asked.
“Naw,” he said. “My momma sang it to me.”
“You ever write a song?”
“I tried. They weren’t no good.”
“Wish I could write songs.”
“Why cain’t you?”
“Never learned how to write,” I breathed. “Singing’s not allowed anyway.”
“Well, you can always sing up here.”
“I haven’t sung for a long time,” I said. “Or played music.”
“It’s easy. I’ll teach you sometime.”
He smiled, and from the side, I could make out the shadowed cleft in his cheek. I wanted to press my fingertip into it, kiss his jaw. The thought was like a kick in the gut. I’d never had such an impulse before. Surely it was forbidden. Surely the Prophet would find out.
Jude never did teach me to play guitar. There was always the unspoken certainty that we’d have forever. There would be time for all the things we wanted to do in our lives. That time could run out, that limbs could disappear from our bodies, was as unfathomable as death.
Chapter 23
My time was coming—most girls were married around seventeen—but somehow I’d come to believe that no man would ever ask me. I was weedy and black-haired and had my father’s mannish nose, but more importantly, I’d heard the wives whisper that I was touched in a bad way by the outside. Not like my sister Constance. She was only twelve, but it was obvious she’d be sought after as a wife when she was older.
Everybody loved Constance. She was beautiful, with pale blond hair and a sweet pixie face with a little bow of a mouth that always looked slightly surprised. But it was more than that. She was the first child born into the wilderness. She was entirely Kevinian. She was pure.
Unlike me. The Prophet was the only man who ever regarded me with anything but basic tolerance. He often stared a little too closely, and his fingers could find their way to my waist without anyone noticing. He’d do subtle things, stroke my calf under the table and exclaim, “Such strong legs! You’ll make a fine woman someday.” The sort of thing that no one could blink at, but which made my stomach go hollow. It was the greatest battle of my childhood, trying to determine whether I was allowed to hate someone so full of God.
I figured it out, in the end.
After the Prophet announced he’d marry me, my father wrapped his arm across my back and steered me away from the courtyard where the others still gaped at me. He marched me up to the maidenhood room, a small bedroom in the attic of our house. I wrapped my hand around the doorjamb.
“Do you really believe God told him to marry me, Father?” I asked.
“The Prophet speaks to God. You know this, child,” my father answered in the staccato manner he had adopted soon after he was appointed a deacon.
“How can God want me to marry him when I don’t want to?”
“God’s reasons are not always clear,” he said, his eyes clouding. “But in this case, they are.”
“What reasons?”
“The Prophet has seen evidence of the Devil in your eyes.”
He didn’t lift his eyes as he said this. My hand went slack and dropped to my side.
After he closed the door, I rattled the handle though it did no good. The door of every maidenhood room was fitted with a finger-thick sliding lock on the outside. I’d watched ours bolted on years before. I never realized before that these were the only locks in the whole place.
For a while I lay on the pallet and stared out the small, plastic-covered window, watching the sky grow from pale blue, to navy, to black, thinking about what my father had said.
There was no defending against the Devil’s mark. In the early days, the Prophet showed us a yellowing photograph of him and his father. His father had a beer belly and a plaid shirt with the sleeves torn off. The Prophet was a little boy with his knees together like he might wet himself at any moment, giant glasses that made his eyes look bug-like and blurry. He told us how his father leaned a hatchet against the wall in case the children ever misbehaved. And how he always lived in fear of getting the hatchet, and how one day, when the Prophet was grown, he spotted a red flash inside his father’s eyes—the Devil’s mark—and he understood.