Broken Branch (7 page)

“I've called you here today because the Lord wants you to witness the way we love a sister in Christ,” Otto said, standing beneath the big oak tree. The storm shelter stood propped open off to the right. He nodded toward her. Trudy nodded back, keeping her head up, her eyes active, trying to meet the others' eyes, but all of them looked away when they saw her gaze. She saw the Talbots and Rachel, and Henry and Redi Clark. She saw Eugenia standing, her face serious and sad.
Probably for my soul,
Trudy thought, remembering what Ben had told her about his wife. Ben was there too, his face turned away from hers.
He's thinking he caused this, but no one caused this but Otto. And James.
And if Trudy were really honest with herself, she'd realize that she had caused it too. Her desperate seeking had brought her here, and before that, there had been other places along the way where she could have made a decision and stopped everything—this place, this insanity—from happening. She shouldn't have signed the papers, she shouldn't have married James, she should have left weeks ago, when she felt the first signs of queasiness creeping under her skin.

She'd lied to Otto and James, of course, to keep Ben from being punished too. She told them she'd been walking, unable to sleep. She'd stumbled upon the willow and decided to leave.

“I was afraid,” she'd told them, savoring the truth of these words.

“Fear is the enemy of the Lord,” Otto had responded. Then they'd dragged her here and called everyone out of their homes. Except the children, who, thankfully, had been told to remain inside.

She tried to meet Ben's eye, to tell him it wasn't his fault, but like the others, he wouldn't look at her.

“A lot of you were upset about the choice I made not to show Trudy the justice God poured out on Simpson. You worried that if she didn't see it, then in a few days' time she herself might be hanging there, tangled up in the justice of the Lord. Yet I knew that Trudy's faith wasn't strong enough to understand. By her husband's own admission, Trudy has always struggled with her faith, with her relationship with God. I was right. Last night, she stumbled upon it herself. My foresight was true. Brother James and me caught her trying to escape with those children this morning.”

Trudy took a deep breath. Her stomach shifted, and she felt like she might be sick again. Or maybe it was the demon again. Maybe it was finally waking up.

“Further complicating the sin, she blamed Simpson's death on me. She will be confined to the storm shelter for five days. At that point, the community will gather again in order to judge if she is remorsed of her actions and fully understands that God is in control of her life and that He has made it abundantly clear that her life is here in Broken Branch with her husband and wonderful children.” Then he did something Trudy had never seen him do before, and it frightened her more than anything else that had happened so far. He asked the congregation to approve his decision. “If you think this is a fair and righteous punishment, lift your voice to heaven and say ‘amen.'”

A chorus of amens was cast up into the morning sky. Otto grabbed her arm and tried to guide her toward the opening, but she twisted free. She didn't make it far before somebody else caught her. It was Earl Talbot. He was joined by James and Franklin.

Franklin was grinning.

It took four of them in all once Otto rejoined to move her toward the storm shelter. Trudy tried to stop them. She screamed and beat her fists against first James's back and then anyone she could reach. She jerked and twisted until she couldn't see the shelter anymore. She lost her footing, but they held her up and dragged her backward.

The men picked her up and for an instant, she felt as if the demon was fully awake in her—she was swinging her arms and kicking her legs so violently. It felt good to have the demon, and in that moment, she never wanted the demon to leave because she always wanted to feel this kind of anger thrumming through her like whipcrack lightning. She'd been set on fire with it and the last thing she remembered before tumbling into the darkness was scratching her fingernails deep into the side of Otto's face.

Then she hit the bottom and pain bloomed inside her hip so strong and loud that nothing else seemed to matter except the light above her, and her desire to see it, but then the hatch swung closed, and she heard the men sliding a heavy rock across the top of the hatch.

She slept and didn't wake until she heard the thunder booming outside the shelter. Climbing hand over hand, she reached the top of the ladder and pushed with everything she had, but the hatch didn't move. From here, she could hear the rain battering the top of the hatch. Somewhere, she heard the crack of wood, and she knew lightning had struck a tree. She wanted out, not for herself but for Rodney and Mary. Was anyone with them? Both would be scared during this kind of storm, especially Rodney. She pounded on the door with both fists, as hard and as loud as she could, until her fists began to bleed. In the end, she climbed back down the ladder and lay on the dirt floor, feeling defeated.

When the twister came, it happened very quickly. It must have been a terrible one because she could hear it from deep inside the shelter as it developed. First the rain changed. It seemed less insistent or maybe it was just being drowned out by the rumble of the tornado, churning up everything in its path and spitting it back out. She tried to think of something to compare the sound to, but the best she could come up with was the ocean. She'd been once or twice as a girl, and she loved to stand in it, wet up to her knees, and wait for the next wave to come. When the wave crashed over you, it made a sound—brief, momentary—but in that brief second the world itself would disappear inside that sound, and you knew that nothing else but that wave mattered. The twister sounded like the waves from her memory except it was one hundred, maybe one thousand times more powerful. The worst part was the trees. She heard their branches popping off, their trunks splitting. Their roots being ripped from deep within the soil. She imagined them spinning into the vortex of wind and being shot straight into heaven above.

Yet she was safe. That was the sad irony. The worst storm couldn't touch her, but her children were pitifully exposed. She was safe and dry, but she'd have given up that safety in a heartbeat if she could have the chance to be with Rodney and Mary.

“God help them,” she said out loud and was surprised when she realized she meant it.

She slept for a while and dreamed of a vast swamp, and an alligator that roamed the water, its snout only occasionally showing itself above the murkiness. Rodney and G.L. were there and there was a cabin, with a single lamp burning inside. A light mist of rain fell, yet the stars were bright beside a half-moon.

The danger, G.L. explained to her, was the alligator. “There's always one. I asked him why he had to be the alligator, why he couldn't just be like the heron”—he pointed across the swamp at a bird standing on one leg, its long neck craning forward, studying the water—“or a fish that swims in the swamp and doesn't bother nobody. You know what he said?”

Trudy shook her head and waited for him to tell her, but it wasn't G.L. that spoke. It was Rodney.

“He said that he's not like the heron or the fish. He said that he doesn't fit in. He said not fitting in makes him angry.”

G.L. regarded the boy for a long time, and Trudy thought she saw fear in the old man's eyes. At last he sighed and said, “There's no demon in you, boy. In fact, there's no demons at all. Only people. Lord, with all the people about, who could have ever dreamed up demons?”

Almost as soon as he finished speaking, the sky cracked open with lightning. The wind picked up, almost knocking Trudy over. She held on to the lowest limbs of an oak tree and watched as the wind caught G.L. and carried him up over the trees, where he was flung far across the sky until she couldn't see him anymore.

Only she and Rodney remained.

She reached for him, beckoning her son to her bosom. She wanted so badly to shield him from the storm. But he stepped away from her and turned to the wind, waiting for it to overtake him. She swore, and just before he was tossed into the deepest part of the swamp, she saw him look back.

When she woke, the rain was no longer beating upon the hatch. There was no thunder. She lay perfectly still, trying to work out some scenario in her mind where it was going to be okay, where the dream she'd had was just a dream, where she'd be allowed to leave this place and her son wouldn't turn away from her and face the wind.

She couldn't see it, though, no matter how hard she tried.

Some time later, she climbed the ladder again, dragging her bad hip along despite the pain, and tried the hatch. She wasn't expecting much—if anything, she hoped the rock had shifted enough for her to just peek out—so when it lifted open easily, she was stunned. Throwing it back, she pulled herself through the opening, only to find water up to her knees. She stood to her full height to see what devastation the storm had wrought.

Except there was none. The place was clearly changed, but other than the deep flooding (which, now that she thought about it, seemed too deep), there were no signs of damage. The trees were unbroken, their limbs strong and intact. A light misting of rain fell. The moon—half of it anyway—lay in the sky, half-tilted, as if napping.

She turned and gasped when she saw that all of the houses were gone. Only a single cabin remained, and she saw again that she was in the dream, except she couldn't be dreaming, could she?

It didn't feel like a dream, but, of course, the best dreams never feel like dreams; they carry the weight of reality, and there could be no doubting that weight was pressing on her now.

Something changed. At first it only seemed to be the light, but then she realized she was moving, tumbling, falling. When she finally stopped, she was back inside the shelter, the darkness so intense that she could almost pretend she wasn't there at all.

But she was, and hours later when she found the energy to get up and climb the ladder, the rock was still there and the hatch wouldn't move even an inch.

Trudy lost track of time inside the shelter. It was impossible to do otherwise, as the darkness muted any semblance of the outside world. She was alone, and she resigned herself to the fact that she was likely to die that way.

She was aware that everyone else might already be dead. The storm might have killed them all, in which case, she found her own fate a little easier to swallow. If her children were dead, Trudy had nothing else to live for anyway. How sad, she thought. Her life had once held so much promise, but she'd thrown it all away for James Sykes, a man she didn't even love. But that wasn't quite true, was it? She didn't love him, had never loved him, but he wasn't the only reason she'd thrown her life away. She'd also done it for God. Some people, she knew, had to be brought to the Lord kicking and screaming, but then there were others like herself that just craved to have that void filled in their lives. To say she needed God to fill that void might be oversimplifying. She needed
something
to fill it, something big, something larger and greater and more mysterious than her.

Because if there was nothing greater to the world than the laws of science and the greed of man, she didn't much see the point of it all.

Yet she'd risked everything to chase that mystery, to find the point to her life, and here she was paying with that very life, less sure about any divine being than she'd ever been before.

Though there was the swamp.

The swamp. G.L.'s swamp. She'd dreamed about it. But what about the second time? She'd been alone, and everything had seemed so real and authentic, even down to the pale moonlight on her skin.

Could that be the place where God lived, and if so, why did He only allow her a brief glimpse? She wished very badly she could talk to G.L. again. She'd make him explain all of it, from the very first time he ever went. Why hadn't she pushed him harder about it before?

At some point the hunger pains began, but she tried to ignore them. She tried to sleep, thinking it was her best defense against hunger and fear, but she couldn't.

Instead, she thought of Rodney and Mary, and how she could possibly ever help them. It occurred to her that her best bet, her very best chance, would be to play along, to become the meek follower. There were several advantages to this, she realized. One, she would get James and Otto off her back so she could think. Two, she would have time to regain Rodney's trust. His betrayal hurt her more than anything, but she didn't blame him. He was frightened like everyone else, and he was only a boy. Yes, she'd play along but subvert in private, getting Rodney fully on her side. After all, no one loved him like she did. The third advantage—and she realized now, this was the most important one of all—was that when she did act, no one would be expecting it.

She'd strike swiftly and without regret.

She closed her eyes, breathing deeply, satisfied in the plan. She ignored the small voice inside her that wanted to remind her that things rarely went so smoothly and thought instead of the demon she'd felt inside her. She'd tried so many times to push it back down, but now she wondered if she shouldn't embrace it. It was a demon that wanted to take her over, to lash out at anyone who might try to hurt her or her children. It was angry, and she liked the power she felt when it squirmed inside her. She'd have to control it. She'd have to let it swim inside her, feeding it with small crumbs of vitriol and promises of vengeance. And then when it was time, she'd let it fly, screaming from her belly to do the damage it wanted so badly to do.

Much, much later, after more sleep and more worry, the hatch opened and the brightest light Trudy had ever seen flooded her eyes. She felt the demon flip inside of her and was thankful that it was there.