“You don’t recognize your own hands?” Angel asks. “I told Dr. Wilson he should’ve had them flipping the bird, that way every time you look at them you can be giving the Prophet a big fuck you.”
I pick up my left hand. Inside me, something heavy and dense falls into place, a feeling of rightness I haven’t known in months.
“Dr. Wilson did this?” I ask.
She nods. “He had to break into an evidence locker. Violated about ten laws in the process.”
“Why would he do that?”
She shrugs. “He’s a weird guy. Said it was worth it because now you’re even. Now you’ve got something on him.”
The metal fingers are cool against my stumps, these fingers that once grew from my body, these fingers that began as chains of cells in my mother’s womb, and for seventeen years they existed as part of me, until they became something else, really just an idea. But to me, like this, they are perfect, like all along they were meant to be coated in silver, not flesh.
Chapter 55
After one of the wives threw a sheet over Jude’s body and the blood on the ground stopped steaming in the freezing air, the deacons led me to the edge of the Community near a giant pine whose boughs extended over my head like a rafters. I scanned the tree line and saw Waylon had gone. My chest felt a little lighter. I hoped he’d pack up, get in the truck, drive down the forest service road and never look back. And, an angry part of me thought, I hoped he’d understand now what a mistake it was coming to the woods to begin with.
The Community made low noises behind me, but I couldn’t look at them, the dull congregation in their dull, decade-old clothes, eyes so full of the Prophet they were almost popping out of their sockets, so I craned my neck to the sky. It was almost night. Dark clouds covered the pale blue in a holey blanket. To the east was the moon, almost full. My whole body was quaking, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that moon. Even as the Prophet approached me, shouting in a screeching voice that reached down into my soul and grabbed the necks of the angels that lived there, I could hardly care about anything but the almost-oval of moon hanging over the forest I’d known almost my entire life, clouds sliding across like doves.
The Prophet grabbed my chin hard and pointed it at his face.
“Are you listening to me?” he screamed.
He’d never hurt me himself before. The feeling of his hand around my face shook me awake. I looked boldly into his face and noticed his eyes were covered in a thin white film. He used to wear glasses, before the Lord fixed his sight.
“No,” I said. “I won’t ever listen to you again.”
Over his shoulder, I could see the color of blood seeping through the sheet they’d covered Jude in.
He threw me to the ground hard, but I stretched out on my back and put my arms behind my head, staring up at the moon again. The women looked uncertainly at one another. I was acting odd for someone about to be punished, but it could almost be happening to someone else, any other girl in any other society where girls are manhandled and bruised easy as pears.
When the men tugged the boots from my feet, I didn’t move. When they tied the rope around my ankles in a thick noose, and when they winched me up into the tree, hanging upside down, I didn’t move. I let my arms fall beside me in a graceful arc. The rope twisted, and for a moment I faced the forest, the dark bodies of hibernating pines crowded together. It looked almost black in there. I wondered how I’d ever convinced myself I might see the paleness of angels in that forest, if I looked hard enough.
Behind me, the Prophet’s heavy footfalls crunched over the ground.
“With this water, we cleanse you of the sin of fornication and disobedience,” he shouted.
Water hit me like a pane of glass. I gasped. The force of it made the rope spin till I faced the Prophet, an empty bucket in his hands. Behind him stretched a line of people, each holding a bucket of cold pond water in their curled white fingers. I couldn’t see all their faces because most of them held their heads down, ladies’ faces guarded by bonnets, but I was certain they were all there, all the people I’d shared my childhood with.
The Prophet jerked his head, and the next person in line, a deacon, marched up and doused me, and in his water was a triangle of ice from the surface of the pond. It hit my forehead and I was sure, from the sudden bloom of warmth along my hairline, that I was bleeding.
The Prophet waved his palm in a circle. “With this water, we cleanse you of the sin of fornication and disobedience.”