A moment later, Janey walks calmly toward the scaffold, her dress mended, her hair braided, looking like an amiable child tailing an adult. Vanessa stares at her eyes, searching for the glaze of a drug, but Janey’s eyes are darting around—not wildly, but with slow purpose. She catches someone’s gaze and shakes her head sharply, lightly, so it simply seems like a quiver. Then, staring harder, she shakes her head slowly from side to side like a tree swaying in a storm. Vanessa follows her gaze and sees Mrs. Solomon in the crowd, her hair a mess, both hands to her tearstained face. Mary, mouths Janey to her mother, and then looks away. Mrs. Solomon starts searching the crowd. Vanessa stands on her tiptoes to look for Mary but can’t see her, or Mr. Solomon either.
Janey steps neatly before the stake, calm and sedate as they tie her wrists to it. The sound from the crowd is growing and swelling, some voices angry, some pleased, some alarmed. The girls, the good girls who have stayed away from the beach, glance at one another, hoping to find some signal or meaning from one of their peers.
Pastor Saul steps forward. He has performed enough shamings that he doesn’t need Our Book, but he holds it in his hands anyway, for performance’s sake.
“My brethren, we are attending the shaming of Janey Solomon,” he says again. “Philip Adam wrote, For those for whom the fear of the darkness below is not a deterrent from evil, let them fear the shame and disdain of their neighbor. We here on the island are all interconnected, and none could survive without the other. Let the poor opinion, the disgusted glance of family and friends, be the punishment and the terror that perhaps may sway their path, and save them from the darkness.”
Pastor Saul puts the book down by his side. “Janey Solomon, you have blasphemed. You have lied. You have encouraged others in blasphemies and lies. You have disobeyed your wanderers. For shame.”
“For shame,” echoes the crowd: not the lusty yell that normally accompanies this phrase, but a tentative whisper.
The wanderer Mr. Balthazar comes forth with the lash; the crowd’s voice swells fuller. People seem to be arguing, remonstrating, encouraging—the din falls on Vanessa’s ears, and she flinches. Then Mr. Balthazar tears Janey’s dress down to her waist, and a sudden hush falls upon the congregation.
Janey is so thin that Vanessa wonders how she continues to breathe. Her body is graceful in its starvation, posed in arcs and wings of bone, her collarbone soaring upward against her skin like a loosed bird. The hollows between her ribs are so deep that the shadows loom gray and blue, and the sockets of her shoulders are neatly encased in skin and little else. Vanessa thinks she can see her heartbeat, the tiny tremor of it, against the triangle of her sternum, and the pulse in her long, stemlike throat. Where her dress hung, Janey’s skin is so pale it glistens silver, her freckles faint amber motes.
Mr. Balthazar pauses before this skeletal apparition and shoots a questioning look toward the wanderer Mr. Joseph, who stands at the head of the line of wanderers. Mr. Joseph looks annoyed and nods his head exaggeratedly. Even so, Vanessa can see by the way that Mr. Balthazar brings his arm back halfway, how he bends from the elbow and not the shoulder, that he does not intend to give Janey the lashing others have received. Possibly he fears she would fall apart.
Janey’s beautiful speckled-eggshell skin is suddenly severed, cracked open, a rosy welt with a spine of crimson wrapping around to embrace her fluttering rib cage. She jerks, but her expression doesn’t change. Mr. Balthazar peers around to look at the front of her and make sure she is still alive. Wincing, he sends out another lash, this one striking her shoulder.
“No!” From the crowd, from the trees, from somewhere, emerges Rosie, her dress in tatters and her hair matted and loose. Vaulting onto the scaffold, she sinks her teeth into Mr. Balthazar’s hand near the thumb. Hissing, he drops the whip and stares at her in utter befuddlement. “They’re liars!” Rosie shrieks wildly. “Don’t listen to him!”
Janey stares at Rosie. Go, Vanessa sees her mouth say, and when Rosie doesn’t move, she shouts, “Rosie, get out of here!”
“They killed Amanda Balthazar!” screams Rosie, pointing at the wanderers. “They killed Alma Joseph! They killed others too, but I can’t remember their names. They say they bled out, but they’re dead! They’re murderers, they’re liars! They’re the ones who should be shamed, not Janey!” She coughs and bends around the middle as a male arm snaps around her. “They’re liars,” she cries, gulping, and starts to cry. Mr. Joseph hauls her up against his waist and she goes limp, sobbing. “Liars!” she shrieks, and he strides away, carrying his tearful burden with him.
Everyone is silent, wide-eyed, including Janey. There is a long, weighty silence before Mr. Balthazar picks up the whip and delivers Janey’s remaining eight lashes. Janey appears so astonished and lost in thought that they barely seem to register. When she is untied, Mrs. Solomon runs up to take her weight. They put their heads together and start whispering. Vanessa looks up at Mr. Abraham, and he stares down at her in disbelief.
“What’s going to happen to Rosie?” she whispers.
“Vanessa, I have no idea,” he answers, and she leans into him as they watch Janey shake free of her mother, pull the top of her dress back over her shoulders, and slowly shuffle toward the beach.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Janey
Mary is carefully laying cold seaweed on Janey’s broken, wounded skin. Janey, facedown in the soothingly chill sand, winces. “I don’t see how this is supposed to do anything,” she says. “The salt stings.”
“It feels better, though, doesn’t it, when the sting dies,” says Mary. She is right, and Janey feels icy silk crisscrossing her back, numbing the pain of the welts wrapped around her like hot wires.
Janey sighs deeply. “Mother was there,” she murmurs. “Poor Mother.”
“I wish I’d been there. Instead of on the beach, crying, wondering if they were going to kill you.”
“You would have done something stupid, like Rosie,” says Janey. Mary nods ruefully.
“Father wasn’t there,” Janey continues. “I wonder if they held him back or he just didn’t want to go. He never liked shamings. He might not even have known it was me.”
“He knows now,” says Mary. “I’m sure everyone is talking about it. They’re not supposed to shame children. I think you were the first.”
“I’m not a child. Not really.”
“You’re not an adult either. Father is supposed to manage you.”
“Well, maybe they thought he was doing a bad job of it.”
Mary snorts. “I’m sure they’ve thought that for years.”
“I wonder what they’ll do to Rosie,” says Janey. “She’s probably being beaten right now.”
“And she’ll get up, no matter what they do to her, and come right back here, angry as ever,” predicts Mary. Janey imagines Rosie barreling across the island, brows lowered, trailing blood and pieces of bone, and shivers.
“Was it terrible?” whispers Brianna Joseph, sitting nearby. “Them taking down your dress? In front of everyone?”
“It’s hard to explain,” says Janey. “I felt embarrassed, but not for me. For them, the wanderers. For the people watching.”