There is an old tapestry, fragile as a moth’s wing and colossal as a cloud, hung with care on the wall behind him. It depicts the founding of the island, each ancestor delineated by slightly different hair color. The ancestors alight on shore, build the church, build their houses, have children, have meetings with different children under fruit trees, stride around taming nature or yelling at birds (it’s hard to tell), comfort old men, die, and rise into the sky. The cloth used for the tapestry, while faded and tattered, is still gorgeous: furry green material with golden threads winking through it, water-spattered maroon cloth thick and slippery as a cut of meat, a pale yellow that Vanessa knows was once golden and luscious as a setting sun.
Alma Moses, another wanderer’s daughter, once told Vanessa that her father mentioned a machine that went awry in the wastelands and turned everything to flame. That pretty much the entire world caught fire. A lot of what the pastor says sounds like it. Fire first, pestilence after. The scourge. But then, wanderers go to the wastelands all the time and come back with cloth, metal, paper, even animals, none showing any sign of immolation. Perhaps everything burned up and then grew back again. Hannah Solomon, another wanderer’s daughter, said her father told her it was a disease, a disease that rotted flesh and killed people where they stood. Another girl, June Joseph, said that then the dead people rose and shambled around, setting things on fire with their eyes until their corpses rotted, but June is known to exaggerate and her father is a goat farmer anyway.
Now the pastor is talking about women, which as far as Vanessa can tell is his favorite subject. It gets him more worked up than anything. She pictures him striding about in his bedroom at night, lambasting his wife when all she wants to do is go to sleep. He has two sons, so she would be the only woman available to upbraid.
“When a daughter submits to her father’s will, when a wife submits to her husband, when a woman is a helper to a man, we are worshiping the ancestors and their vision. Our ancestors sit at the feet of the Creator, and as their hearts are warmed, they in turn warm His. These women worship the ancestors with each right action, with each right intention. Surely the ancestors will open the gates of heaven, and our grandfathers’ grandfathers will welcome us with open arms.” Vanessa feels Father staring at her and reluctantly stops gazing out the window.
“Only when these acts of submission are done with an open heart and a willing mind,” the pastor continues, “only when this is done with a spirit of righteousness, can we reach true salvation.” Vanessa knows that if you don’t get saved and go to heaven, you slip into the darkness below forever. Once, before she started having her nightmare, she asked Mother if that meant going underground, where the monsters lived. Mother laughed, but then sobered and said maybe. Thanks to her dream, Vanessa is now intimately familiar with the darkness below and the terror it brings. She struggles to be righteous all the time, especially in her thoughts. She imagines her ancestor, Philip Adam, scrutinizing each unworthy thought that comes into her mind and making a black mark on a piece of paper.
“Men, we are not without task in this,” warns the pastor. “We must treat our daughters with kindness and sensitivity. We must not hurt them at a whim, or damage them, but engage with them as the ancestors contracted when they left a forbidding land. We must deliver them safe, wise, and loved to their husbands. We must allow our wives to feel cared for, as cared for as they felt in the arms of their fathers as young children.”
Vanessa turns to look back at Caitlin Jacob, who always has fingerprint bruises on her arms, just as the people sitting near Caitlin turn their heads to look at something else.
“Our society is built on our women,” says the pastor, “on dutiful daughters and dutiful wives, but we must help them and protect them. We must be good shepherds. We must remember the teachings of the ancestors, and why they came to this land.”
There is movement in the corner of Vanessa’s vision, and she realizes with a start that Janey Solomon is staring at her from a few pews over. Vanessa and Janey are the only girls on the island with red hair, which gives them a certain status they would enjoy even without their other attributes. Vanessa’s is a clear, dark brown-red, which she finds boring next to Janey’s hair, which burns like fire. A red that is almost orange, it glistens and sparks, its coppery strands crackling outward. She seems to give off her own light from where she sits.
Vanessa hesitantly meets Janey’s eyes, which are gray to the point of colorlessness, and suddenly their pupils dilate until her eyes seem black. Frowning, Vanessa remembers the last time Janey stared at her, years and years ago, and what happened afterward with Father the same week. Her heart beats faster. Can Janey see the future?
Everyone is afraid of Janey. She hasn’t reached fruition at the age of seventeen, which is unheard of. They say she eats almost nothing, to keep herself from it, only just enough to keep her eyes open and her blood flowing through her veins. Vanessa tried it once, to see what it would be like to eat almost nothing. She got tired and hungry by the afternoon, and ended up eating two dinners.
Part of Janey’s aura of intimidation stems from memories of summer. When summer arrives, Janey and her younger sister, Mary, are unstoppable. Even the boys are scared of them. They say Janey gouged Jack Saul’s eye out and then made it look like an accident. They say her father is so scared of her he doesn’t even talk inside the house. They say nobody’s ever laid a hand on her without regretting it.
And now she’s staring at Vanessa. Breathless, Vanessa glances back, then away, unable to meet the black gaze. What does she want? Vanessa looks away until she feels dizzy and then looks back at her. But now she sees Janey’s staring past her, looking at somebody else—or maybe looking at nothing and running in circles in her strange, fiery head.
Vanessa watches Janey’s incandescent braid, so brightly colored it seems to move, writhing and snaking over her shoulder. When it’s time to stand, Vanessa forgets to get up until Father touches her shoulder. She jumps.