I searched for her face in the crowd, so small, like a pale moon among this sea of white nightgowns and black boots. Her mouth formed a perfect, pink O.
Once, the Prophet taught us that God speaks on a different frequency of hearing. And His voice is there, if we only listen hard enough. That when we pray, that’s the pitch our minds speak at, too. In that moment, I heard it for the first time. But it didn’t sound like comfort.
It sounded like screaming.
“A punishment is in order,” I heard the Prophet say. “A punishment deserved by a girl who has so overstepped the bounds of propriety.”
He gestured at the deacons to take me inside his house. The nearest ones gripped me with their heavy hands before I could even wince. I made my weight go dead so they had to grasp me beneath my armpits and around my waist, their bones like vices. I writhed. I scratched with my fingernails and tried to pull at their faces and the soft spots between their legs, anything to stop them from dragging me up the steps into the Prophet’s house. But there were too many of them. I stared out into the crowd and saw my mother, soft tears coursing down her cheeks.
They pulled me inside the Prophet’s house and slammed the door. I’d never seen inside his house and, under different circumstances, I would’ve been interested in the fancy fluted plates and canned food sitting in his open cupboards—all contraband. But I couldn’t focus. The room was a crush of men in their rough wool suits and ragged breath and muscles like metal pinning my arms back and, in the middle, the Prophet.
By his side was a hatchet, almost hidden in the black folds of his robes. He raised it and I flinched, but he was only passing it to my father.
“I think this is a job for you, Samuel.”
My father’s face emptied of blood. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, but the Prophet cocked his head to the side a little, like a question, and my father accepted the hatchet. The Prophet surveyed me for a moment, his head still turned to the side.
“The hands,” he said finally.
The deacons came at me in a rush, their eyes black with focus. Some grabbed my arms and the others wrestled me down. They slammed me to the wooden floor and my head knocked back hard. Each one was hanging on to a part of me. My legs, my neck. Someone was holding my hands in his hands. I realized the only person who’d held my hand in recent memory was Jude, and how differently he’d done it. How much more delicately. The idea made me sick, their big meaty hands touching me, their hands that had killed Bertie, that had punished so many girls. If I’d only known what those hands would do, not much later, maybe I would’ve fought harder. Maybe I would’ve cut their hands off.
My father stood above me, tears falling into his beard. Doing nothing, as always. And now, finally, he had a choice. The first choice he’d had in a dozen years. He held the choice in his hands. He could use the hatchet to hurt his first child, or he could throw it to the ground and stomp out of there and save us all from madness.
I stared up at my father, and for one lucid moment, the light came back to his eyes, and I thought the sight of me lying there, covered in the bodies of ten men, might be enough to shatter the armor that’d built up around his mind, deflecting any sensible thought.
The Prophet saw him waver, too. He clamped his hand heavily against my father’s shoulder.
“DO IT!” he bellowed. “DO IT NOW!”
My father raised the hatchet above his head. It wobbled there, breath passing his chapped lips in ragged waves. He jammed his eyes shut as he brought the hatchet down and punched it into my wrists.
Chapter 25
It’s hard to figure the worst part of those moments. Maybe it was the ricochet the hatchet sent up my arms, my bones twanging like harp strings. Maybe it was the pain. That’s the obvious choice. But, no, I think what hurt the worst was knowing that the hatchet hadn’t completely severed the bone, watching it swing down again and again, bloodier each time, the expression on my father’s face increasingly frantic, like a boy who’s had to shoot his rabid dog, but the dog refusing to die.
There was an eerie, mute moment when there was no pain. It stood slightly offstage, blinded and nervous of the commotion. After a beat, I felt it. The severance. The blood falling away from my wrists with the force of geysers. Every star in the universe bursting over my vision and my jaw careening open and sucking air into my lungs in one long, lurching gasp. I learned later this sudden, explosive pain was the final cutting-through of nerves, the limp bundle of them running like a pale noodle along the length of each arm. My vision turned white. I’m sure I was screaming.