It’s time for the reading of the island laws, which the pastor calls the ancestors’ commandments, and everyone else calls the shalt-nots. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not listen at thy neighbor’s walls. Vanessa’s mind drifts lightly as her mouth forms words so familiar that she could recite them in her sleep. Thou shalt not disobey thy father. Thou shalt not enter another man’s home uninvited. Thou shalt not raise more than two children. Thou shalt not fail to give thy wanderer proper bounty. There are plenty of shalt-nots, but she can’t remember a time when she didn’t know them. Father told her once that there used to be only ten or so, but the numbers rose as the wisdom of the wanderers increased. The voice of the congregation swells to support her absentminded murmur. Thou shalt not forget thy ancestor. Thou shalt not touch a daughter who has bled until she enters her summer of fruition.
Vanessa wonders, as she always does, why the commandments use words like “thou” and “thy” when she has never heard anyone talk like that. other than when reciting the shalt-nots. Even the pastor doesn’t talk like that. She imagines saying to Fiona, “Shalt thou invite me to thy house after school, that I may play with thy dog and eat thy cookies?” and has to bite her tongue to keep from snickering. A baby starts shrieking, a long howl that turns rhythmic as her mother starts bouncing her, cooing the shalt-nots into her face like a lullaby. Thou shalt not allow thy wife to stray in thought, deed, or body. Thou shalt not allow women who are not sister, daughter, or mother to gather without a man to guide them. Thou shalt not kill.
After the shalt-nots, the collection plate is passed, and the needle. Father has it in his lap and is sucking blood off his finger. You don’t have to do it until you reach fruition, but Vanessa, always precocious, started when she was eight. She carefully takes the needle, inserts it into the pad of her finger, and squeezes a drop into the red, gelatinous puddle. Afterward, the clotted blood will be poured over a crop field that’s struggling. To Vanessa, whose family has never had to farm, the crop fields are huge holes all waste goes into: animal dung, human waste, blood, dead bodies. She tries not to think about the fact that her food comes out of those holes as well.
Talking is forbidden after the service, until the home worship is complete. Her fingertip tastes like metal. Getting up, people file out of the pews and up the long steps to the doorway. Vanessa glances hopefully at the sky, but it’s a bright blue. She smells heat in the wind. The last few weeks before summer are always the worst.
They walk home quietly, nodding at other families processing toward the church; services will repeat all morning. Once they reach their house, Father opens the altar room, which has a separate entrance. Most houses don’t have special rooms for their altars, but Father built one when Vanessa was a baby, and soon the other wanderers followed suit. Mother cleans it faithfully, with a rag and soapy water, but it always becomes dusty. Motes twist and whirl, glittering in the sun like tiny weightless birds.
The altar is made of a light wood, polished and carved in a way that Vanessa has never seen an island carver achieve; it’s a piece Father found in the wastelands. Propped up on the altar is a tattered copy of Our Book. The originals have dwindled to dust, and part of the pastor’s duties is carefully scribing new ones. Next to Our Book is a beeswax candle speckled with tiny black dots—gnats must have found their way into the wax as it cooled—and a picture of the first Adam, Philip Adam, and his family. Father says it’s not a drawing, but a way to capture a moment in time that people used before the scourge. Like the pictures in the schoolbooks, but glossy and vivid and alive. Vanessa assumes this means that people back then were almost gods. How else could they capture time on paper?
Philip Adam stands tall and strong and blond, smiling like he’s about to laugh. His dark-haired wife is partly turned toward him, gazing at him with adoring eyes, her hands placed lightly on his side. Next to them is a lanky boy, tall but without breadth, grinning awkwardly and showing too many teeth. On the other side is his daughter, thin like his wife, too thin. She’s dark as well, her shadowed eyes like holes in her head, her mouth a dark line. At their feet a baby with an impossible tuft of blond hair looks wary. You could have more than two children, back then.
On the island, worshiping God is about as useful as worshiping the sun: words of praise or words of pleading are unlikely to move either. God sits high and untouchable, a creator with nothing more to create, a father who lost interest in his children ages ago. It is the ancestors, those godly men of yore, who watch over the mortals on the island. It is their strong, capable arms that greet the dead into heaven or strike them into the darkness below. Any prayer is passed from their lips to God’s ear, as well as any lapse or blasphemy. “The ancestors see everything, everywhere on the island,” says Our Book, and for a time in her childhood Vanessa felt like she was defecating for an audience of thoughtful ancestors.
Each family will be worshipping its ancestor right now. Other families are gazing at drawings or relics of Philip Adam, one of the first ten ancestors, and offering him their words of worship. It seems somehow licentious that more than one family can call Philip Adam their own. When Vanessa marries, she will praise a different ancestor, which will be strange; she has spent so long gazing at the miraculous picture of the handsome blond man that she worries the next ancestor will be a disappointment. They say Philip Adam was a genius. He wouldn’t sleep for nights on end, scribbling copious notes that would eventually be condensed into Our Book, then lapsing into trances, having to be fed and cleaned while he wept. He gathered the other ancestors and urged them to the island before the apocalypse he foretold. He was the first pastor too and planned the first church.
“In your name, Philip Adam,” Father says, kneeling in the dust and touching the picture with a reverent finger. “In your name.”
“In your name,” parrot Mother and Vanessa, while Ben says, “In name.”
“First ancestor, bring us strength. Teach us wisdom. Reach to God with your arms, bring Him into our lives, wind Him around our thoughts, bury Him within our breasts. Let the men be strong like trees, and the women like vines, the children our fruit. And when we sink into the earth, gather us into your arms and take us to God’s domain, and let us not look downward into the darkness below.”
“Amen,” say Mother and Vanessa. Ben has gotten distracted by a small shimmering moth. Mother pinches him, but this only makes him yowl and clench his small fists.
Chapter Three
Amanda