Astray (26 page)

Mr. Brown crouches next to my chair and Mrs. Brown moves behind me, gathers my hair in her hands. It’s all I can do not to leap out of the chair, I’m that sure that she’s going to cut my hair and make me bald. I grip the edge of the chair to force myself to stay put. But instead she begins to braid it the way that my mom used to. All of the girls in the Community wore their hair in one when we were little. Maybe she’s trying to make me feel like that again—little and helpless.

“They told you we were wrong. They told you Pioneer was a bad man. A criminal. Crazy.” Mr. Brown smiles a sad sort of smile. “But did they ever tell you about their own pasts? Did they ever tell you all the things that they’ve done wrong? Or how they found out what kind of man Pioneer was before he was with us?”

“They showed me articles about his first arrest on the Internet,” I say cautiously. I’m not sure what he wants me to say or where he’s going with this. Behind me, Mrs.
Brown keeps working on my hair, pulling it tightly as she goes. Too tightly. I squirm a little.

“The Internet.” Mr. Brown pronounces it like “enter-net.” “People can post stuff on there and claim it’s the truth when they know it’s a lie. They don’t even get in trouble for it. That’s why Pioneer forbid us from having it in the first place.”

There’s a knock on the door and then Jonathan comes in. He’s holding a laptop. He looks at me, his blue eyes bright, his head cocked to one side. “Brian said that you needed this?” He looks excited to be helping with whatever’s going on. I eye him suspiciously. He’s definitely in on the poisonings, I can feel it, but unlike Mr. Brown and the others, I am not sure of his motives.

“Oh, good, thanks, son.” Mr. Brown rises and takes the laptop from him. “I’ll get it back to you in a few minutes.”

“How’s your hand?” I ask him to keep him in the room and stall for time. I stare pointedly at the wall and the blackened wood.

He holds it up. The bandage is white and fresh and the skin around his fingers isn’t as raw-looking as before. “Better.” He is utterly calm standing there. He doesn’t even look at the wall. It should make me doubt myself, but it doesn’t; it only makes me more certain that I’m on the right track. He was doing something in this room, there was a fire, and that’s how he burned his hands.

“I’m glad to hear it. I was worried about you yesterday.”
I make my voice sweet and smile when I really want to shake him and Mr. Brown both until they admit what they’ve done and what they’re planning next.

His mouth curves up at the corners. “I’m fine. The ones you should worry about are the sheriff and his son. They’re the ones who are sick. You’re very lucky that you were spared.” He looks almost disappointed and a chill runs up my spine.

“When did you become one of us?” I ask, because I can’t figure it out—why he’s so committed to a man and cause he barely knows.

“I haven’t made any final decisions about the Brethren, not yet,” Jonathan says, and I can’t help but gasp. So then why is he involved? “Pioneer’s been talking to me about them for as long as I can remember, ever since we met at a gun show some years back. I may not be a true believer, but we do agree on one thing. This country is going to hell in a handbasket and nothing short of a serious tragedy is going to shock it into change.” He rubs his hands as if the wounds are a reminder of this somehow.

Mr. Brown’s jaw clenches and he looks close to saying something, but he thinks better of it and directs his focus to the laptop instead. “Son, if you don’t mind, we’ll need just a bit of privacy here.”

Jonathan looks reluctant to leave, but after a moment he does.

“Here, I want you to watch this, Lyla,” Mr. Brown says as he places the laptop across my legs.

“Is he one of us now?” I ask.

Mr. Brown looks up. “Almost. Pioneer feels that he has potential, but in order for him to have a place with us he’s going to have to earn it. He has to believe all the way, not just hate the Outsiders.”

“What about the other Rangers? Do they have potential?”

Mr. Brown snorts. “No, they do not.”

“Then why are they here with us?” I ask. I want to make positively sure that what I suspected outside is true, that they have nothing to do with what happened last night. Then maybe I can ask them to help me figure out what’s going on.

“Because we needed them to get back on our feet after the government seized our land. And Pioneer needed a lawyer, which they were more than willing to provide if we let them use Pioneer’s case to further their own causes. Listen, think of them as spiders—beneficial if you’re trying to keep other insects away, but repulsive nonetheless. When all is said and done, they’re no better than those outside of our Community. Just because they choose to help us doesn’t really change that. They don’t believe in Pioneer or the Brethren. We tried to talk to them, but they won’t see the truth. They’re using us to make some kind of anti-government statement. So we’ve decided to use them to help Pioneer get out of jail and to keep this Community together. And isn’t that the ultimate irony? That we can manage to use evil to keep good going?” He
leans back on his heels. “Now lookee here at what I just found on your Internet.”

I look down at the laptop. On the screen is a website called True News. Taking up most of the page is an article. I glance at the title. “Local Election for Sheriff of Pickens County Thought to Be Rigged.” I begin to read it in earnest then. It basically says that at least two of the voting stations set up county-wide had volunteers at them who were somehow related to Sheriff Crowley and that these volunteers were being accused of throwing away votes for the sheriff’s opponent. Machines at both spots malfunctioned and the ballots had to be counted by hand. I can feel Mr. Brown watching me read it. The article is accompanied by pictures of people standing in line to vote, and toward the end there’s one of the sheriff holding a hand up to his face like he’s trying to hide from the camera. He looks angry—and guilty.

“You see, Lyla, if you dig long enough and deep enough, nine times out of ten you’ll find out something that you don’t know or like about a person.” Mr. Brown moves closer and pushes the arrow key to scroll down further. “And if you aren’t real, real careful, you’ll never even realize that it probably isn’t true.” At the bottom of the page, the article’s author is named. And it’s Mr. Brown.

“I made it up this morning—got the pictures from some local election and the one of the sheriff with his hand near his face is from the other day at the courthouse. See, unless you did a whole lot more digging, you wouldn’t
know that, would you? And the sheriff might never even realize that it’s out there for a while, which means that anyone who ends up on this page could have an impression of him that’s altogether untrue. Now, if I can do that right here, right now, to him, don’t you think that he could do the same to Pioneer? You told your parents that Cody showed you something online that made Pioneer look like a criminal, right? How do you know for sure that he didn’t just make it up? How do you know that he and his dad didn’t purposely lead you to believe that just so you’d help them when the time came and they stormed our property? Takes less than an hour to set stuff like this up, and look how much damage it can do.”

I stare at the screen and the sheriff’s picture. The article looks believable, even though Mr. Brown’s just made it up. I try to remember back to when Cody showed me stuff about Pioneer and the natural disasters back at the hospital. But I can’t remember much about the actual web pages he showed me—probably because I had a concussion at the time. Suddenly I feel a flicker of doubt.
Could that be why he showed it to me right then? Because I wasn’t going to be able to think clearly about it or ask questions?
No. Wait. Mr. Brown can’t be right. I know Cody. He wouldn’t lie to me. And this doesn’t explain away what
I
know about Pioneer, what I saw him do to Marie. It doesn’t explain away the questions the press asked Pioneer about his past.

“And take this sickness that’s spreading out there. Don’t get me wrong, I do think it’s the Brethren’s will and
that it was bound to happen, but how long do you think it’ll take for them to put the blame for it on us? Like we somehow found a way to poison them? Make us look bad? Think about it. We know that it’s an answer to prophecy, but they’ll spin it as some kind of planned attack. It won’t be hard to make it look like somehow Pioneer arranged it, will it? How long do you think it’ll be before the sheriff’s deputies show up here to raid us again even though we don’t have guns anymore or any way of producing the salmonella that they keep mentioning? You don’t think that they could plant evidence to the contrary while they dig around our barn and trailers? Don’t you see? They don’t want there to be any Brethren. They don’t want there to be a prophet like Pioneer. If they acknowledged the truth, then they’d have to admit that they’ve been wicked. They don’t want to be doomed, so you know what they’ll do? They’ll spin a bunch of lies. And the other Outsiders will believe them. They see our shaved heads and our fasting and praying not as proof of our devotion to our beliefs, but as proof that we’re crazy. They can’t understand that Pioneer is our family and that we will support our own in times of trouble. Cancer patients’ families have been known to shave their heads out of support when their loved ones go through chemotherapy and lose their hair. No one calls them crazy or mindless or dangerous because of it. Just because we do it symbolically to protest Pioneer’s being in jail doesn’t make us strange.”

Mrs. Brown makes a noise of agreement in her throat. She’s done braiding my hair and has banded it off at the bottom. It lies in a weighted line along my back. I’d forgotten how it felt when it was done up this way. There’s something strangely comforting about it, familiar and calming.

“They’d rather make us disappear and destroy what we’ve built. They want to separate us from one another and make us weak. If they can manage to do that, then it’ll be easy to convince themselves that their way is fine. A-okay. They can justify all the damage they do each and every day to one another because they’ll make us look so much worse than they are. You’ve been to their schools. You’ve seen them in action. Tell me, do they treat you and the others with kindness and respect? Or do they constantly look for ways to hurt you with their words? I think if you look past the surface, you’ll see that any kindness they might have showed you was calculated.” Jack’s face pops into my head. “Tell me, when the sheriff and the others started getting sick, did you really decide to come home all on your own or did they tell you to leave?”

Taylor. It seems impossible that he knows this, that he’s guessed something I never even saw coming. She told me that she wished I’d never come to live with her family. Her mom didn’t try to make her take it back or defend me when Mrs. Dickerson came after me right after that.
Were they only being nice to me because they had to for the sheriff so he could keep an eye on me or something? And what
about the poisonings? Is it possible that some of the Outsiders could’ve done it to make us look bad, like Mr. Brown’s saying? Mrs. Dickerson and her group hate the Community and want all of us out of town. Some of them were at the restaurant too. I can’t remember if all of them were sick. Could some of them have done it?
Suddenly it seems possible.

“There now. You’re seeing it, aren’t you?” Mr. Brown beams at me, and Mrs. Brown squeezes my shoulders and kisses the top of my head. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? They put a lot of questions in your mind and so, so many doubts, but I promise that by the time we leave this barn today, you’ll be back with us all the way.”

Recentering is what we call time spent focusing on the Brethren and their will for us. Pioneer always felt that the only way we could be certain of our path is if we spent time clearing our minds so that they would be emptied out of all of the worldly things that might disrupt our concentration and make hearing the Brethren’s thoughts—sent through a million or more miles of space—impossible to hear. Usually we do this all together, the entire Community gathered and focused, like an antenna on what the Brethren are transmitting. Pioneer led a lot, but Mr. Brown and Mr. Whitcomb did it sometimes too. Still, I’ve never been asked to do it like this with just him, his wife, and me.

Mr. Brown takes the laptop and places it outside the door. He has me stand up. Mrs. Brown takes the chair and folds it up, leaning it against the far wall. She puts her hand over mine and Mr. Brown does the same with my
other hand. We stand side by side. Their eyes are closed. I can’t quite get myself to close my own.

Mrs. Brown peeks at me. “Close your eyes.” It isn’t a request. I squeeze them shut immediately.
I can do this. Just because I do what they say doesn’t mean I have to believe it
.

“Breathe. In and out. Nice and slow. That’s it. That’s it.” Mr. Brown’s voice is low, rhythmic, and sure. Beside me, Mrs. Brown pulls in a long breath and gradually lets it out. The air whistles a little as it rushes out of her nose. I fight the urge to laugh. I know they won’t like it if I do. Plus I don’t want them to start over. Recentering has always felt a little like being stuck in a sleep that I can’t totally wake up from. I lose track of time and everything goes all fuzzy, like somehow I’ve been underwater. It isn’t painful or anything, but I’ve never fully liked it either.

We stand still and breathe for so long that my feet start to hurt and I have to shift from one foot to the other. One breath in. Exhale. Another breath. Exhale. Mr. Brown drones on and on and on, chanting the words Pioneer always used in our recentering sessions.

Mr. Brown nudges me and I begin to say the words with him, over and over. It isn’t long before our voices blend, before the beginning of the chant becomes indistinguishable from the middle or the end, an unbroken chain of words forever circling in my head. I can’t concentrate on anything other than saying the words.