Freedom's Child (31 page)

The Amalekite sews new gloves to the sleeves of my dry outfit, identical to the last. I’m craving a cigarette. I’m craving a drink even more. But most of all, I crave to know my daughter’s whereabouts. With the old woman to my side, and Carol across the dining room table, Magdalene goes to kiss Carol good night.

“Welcome to our family,” she says to me as she jumps to kiss me on the cheek. “I made your bed all nice for you, Sister Freedom. For when you come to sleep.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I tell her as she runs off upstairs.

“You may leave us as soon as you’re finished, Amalekite,” says Carol, as the old woman stitches the last of the gloves to my sleeves. I mean, really, can I just not put the gloves on separately? Do they really have to be sewed on?
For fuck’s sake
.

Spools of white thread and a thimble disappear with the old woman, who hurries off without a sound. I am alone with Carol. And I can’t put my finger on why, but I hate her already.

“How do you find yourself adjusting to Third-Day Adventists?” she asks, her thumbnails digging into the peels of lemons at the table. The rest of the house is dark, and God knows where Virgil is, not that I care too much.

“Oh, I like it just fine,” I lie. Above the silence, the ticking of the
cuckoo clock pings through the room, the smell of lemon making my mouth water. Carol’s head rocks like she has a song stuck in her head, or maybe she’s too used to sitting in the rocking chair. “Can I help you with the lemons?” She lifts her head. Has she never been asked such a question before?

“Why, thank you,” she says, her answer hesitant.

I switch seats and grab a lemon from a porcelain bowl. “That’s sure a lot of lemons. What are you doing with all of them?”

“They’re for Sunday,” she says, her head still swaying. “I make fresh-squeezed lemonade for the whole congregation, a treat for everyone after service.”

“The
whole
congregation?” I ask.

“That’s right. All four hundred fifty-three members. Well, four hundred fifty-four, now that you’re here.”

“I’m sorry,” I say as I fumble with a lemon. “I didn’t think I could be so useless with these gloves.” I think she’s smiling. But upon a closer look, she’s crying, turning her face away from me so I can’t see. “Did I say something wrong?”

She shakes her head, covering her snout with her arm. “It’s my daughter.” She bites her lips shut to subdue the whimpers. “I just miss my daughter, and I feel like I’m the only one around here who cares. Virgil doesn’t talk about it; no one does. It’s like saying her name is a sin around here, and I just can’t take it.” I don’t say anything, just let her talk. I put my arm around her shoulders. She grunts. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be such a mess in front of you.”

Act oblivious
. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Rebekah.” She wipes the tears. “Rebekah Jane.”

“And where is she now?”

A baby’s crying from upstairs breaks the bond between us. “Is that a baby?” I ask.

“Yes, a girl. Her name is Theresa.” Carol rises and picks pieces of lemon peel off the table. “We just took her in. Her mother died during childbirth. Tragic.”

“Rebekah, Magdalene, and Theresa. No sons?”

“No,” she says as she shuts off the kitchen lights. “Thank you for being someone I can talk to.” She disappears up the stairs, toward the room of a crying infant.

I look down to hundreds of parishioners at Third-Day Adventist Church. All of them, toppling over one another with fear, and I don’t know why. I wave my hand. When I move my hand to the right, they run left and vice versa. I’m screaming at them, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.” I don’t understand why they’re screaming at me in terror. I see Carol. I see Virgil. I see Magdalene. I see the Amalekite. I see Mason. I see Passion. I can see everyone. I wave my hand faster and faster, side to side, and they try to hide, they cannot leave the sanctuary. “Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Eeny meeny miny moe.” I laugh. I’m not sure why I say these words. And when I finally stop my hand, I’m pointing down the center, right down the aisle. I’m pointing at Rebekah
.

That’s when I see that in my hand, I’m holding a pistol. And that’s why everyone is terrified. I aim it and I shoot. Rebekah falls dead, her head clean off. And I keep shooting, aiming for everyone, like shooting fish in a barrel, but Rebekah is the only one I kill. I keep waving my hand; click-click-click goes the now-empty pistol. But the clicking in my dream…

I jump from my sleep. For a moment I don’t know where I am. The room’s almost dark like the rest of the house, but for a night-light at the side of Magdalene’s bed. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I see Magdalene jump back into bed and hide under the covers.

Breathe, Freedom. It was just a nightmare
. I force a steady breath and sit up. I’m tangled in the heavy cloth I’m forced to wear; my legs can’t find their way out. No wonder I’m having nightmares when sleeping in my missing daughter’s bed. “Magdalene,” I whisper. She doesn’t answer, but I see her shift. I know what I heard. I might be crazy, but I know what I fucking heard.

I tiptoe to her and shake the lump under the covers. “Magdalene, I know you’re awake,” I say, making sure she can’t mistake my voice as being angry.

She pokes her head out. “You were saying terrible, awful, shameful cuss words in your sleep, Sister Freedom.”

I’m not sure what to say; I don’t think I’m all that good around children. They make me uneasy these days. “Magdalene, what was that noise?”

“What noise?” But the kid’s a bad liar.

“Honey.” She slides over so I can sit at the side of her bed. “I promise I won’t tell anyone if you were doing something that you don’t want anyone to know about.”

“It’s not a secret I’m hiding from anyone around here. It’s just a secret I have to hide from you.”

“Says who?”

“Says Mommy and Daddy.” She gasps at her own slipup, covering her mouth with her hands.

I smile at her. She’s five, for God’s sake. I can win this. “What if I make a pinkie promise not to tell?”

“On a stack of Bibles?”

“On ten stacks of Bibles.”

She smiles.

I pick her up and off the bed, her hair wild and poking in every which direction, her eyes full of sleep crust. When I put her down, she goes to her knees and pulls out a shoebox. “This is called my secret box.” She hands it up to me. On the top, a pistol. An honest-to-God, real-life pistol.

“Honey, where on earth did you get this?!”

“Everyone gets one. Didn’t you? You can use mine if you want.”

I’m at a loss of words. And before I ask, I fear I already know the answer. “Why does everyone have one, sweetheart?”

“For the Day of Freedom, silly.” She grabs the pistol from my hand and goes to put it to her head, a fucked-up version of show-and-tell. I stop her. “When Jesus calls us home.”

“Whatta ya say I take this for now, just until I get one of my own, is that OK?” I ask.

“Want me to show you how you’re supposed to fill it with the
confetti?” She holds up a bullet from the box. “We don’t put it in until the Day of Freedom, and you can’t see the confetti now….”

They’re aiming for a fucking mass suicide! Breathe. Don’t panic in front of the kid
.

“No need for that, I think I can figure it out.” Five years old. She has no idea what she’s doing. She has no idea of the consequences of a gun when it’s loaded. Suddenly, I feel sick; my heart begins to race. But I have to hide it. “Go back to sleep, honey.”

What the fuck have I gotten into? What have I let my children into?

I tuck her in, my mouth full of cotton, the sweat tickling my ribs under the heavy clothes, palms sweating through the gloves. As I go to put her secret box under the bed, tucking the pistol in the back of my underwear, I see a letter, a letter that I’d ignore at any other time. But this letter is singed at the edges.

And still smells of firecrackers.

I sneak it past Magdalene and take it to the window, where I can get some light between a full moon and a gaslight that illuminates the driveway below.

My dearest Rebekah,

I cannot imagine there being a right way to write this to you. My name is Nessa Delaney, and I met you twenty years ago and knew you a whole two minutes and seventeen seconds. I know this doesn’t seem like a long time, but even eternity can last only a moment.

I’ve watched you, I watch you from afar. And you look so incredibly happy, my only qualm in writing this letter. And if you are happy and content with where you are today, then please disregard this. But if you ever seek truth, hard and heavy truth, then there is something you need to know.

Before those two minutes and seventeen seconds, I felt you grow in my body and swim in my blood for nine months. I felt your first hiccups. I felt you kick. And I held you for your first cries, your first gasps of air on this earth. I loved you before I knew you. I loved you every second since. And I love you tomorrow as well.

I trust that your family has raised you well, raised you in a happy and safe home that I could not provide for you all those years ago. And I could say “I’m sorry” from now until my last dying breath, but it could never actually express my full sorrow. If only you could see how I’ve suffered with such pain, penance for all the terrible things I felt for making that decision. But if you asked me, “Do I regret that choice?” my answer would still be no. Because from it, you grew in a place where you were loved, and what mother could ask for anything else? But do I regret the choices I made and didn’t make that led up to that point? Well, the answer is yes, every day since. And for every day to come.

If you never want to see me or contact me, I will understand. But know this, above all else: I never loved anyone or anything in life more than you and your brother. You two were the only light I’d ever known in this dark world. And I never loved again, not since I loved you. I only wish that love was enough.

Be well,

Nessa Delaney

I look down at the driveway. All is silent but the resounding of the American flag flapping, the ropes hitting the pole in front of the house. I read the letter about a thousand times, maybe more, until daylight comes. I don’t move from near the window. I’m too afraid to go back to sleep, at the risk of one of those horrible dreams again. I smell breakfast. The sun comes up. The dew glistens in the morning; people dressed in clothes identical to mine start pacing around their yards with a buzz.

I’d heard from somewhere, a long time ago, that killing a person in your dream meant that you are losing self-control.

I dreamt I killed my daughter. Can I really be losing control? Or is it already lost?

Reverend Virgil Paul hopes to breathe a little easier when his office door closes behind him and Sheriff Mannix.

“This is turning into one giant clusterfuck.” The reverend shakes the light rain from his hair as he looks in the vanity mirror with worry. “This nonsense with the ATF. Something needs to happen.”

“Sure does,” the sheriff says as he removes his hat. “Lucky Mason spilled his guts when you saw him at the jail—my guys had no idea anyone was on to us ’bout the gunrunning.”

“Rebekah…” Virgil trails off as he plops in his chair behind the desk. “Too bad they were too late. We already have all the guns we need for the Day of Freedom. She did a swell job.” At the thought, Virgil stares out the window and looks down on the residents at their daily chores: the construction of a couple more homes, pruning the vines, chopping and collecting wood for the winter. He can smell that electricity in the air, the one that cautions winter is near. His thumbs play with each other on his lap.

“How’d you fare with Michelle Campbell the other night?” The sheriff leans his rear against the other side of the desk.

A lift of the lip shows his teeth. “I think I’m getting too old for this.”

“You didn’t bury her whole, did you?”

“Of course not, Don. What do you think I am?”

Virgil violently shakes his head at the thoughts: Whistler’s Field, a neighboring meadow outside the compound’s gates, where his secrets are chopped and buried. There was Michelle Campbell, the one who got the most media attention after she disappeared. There was Frannie Tish. There was Johanna Studebaker. There was Catherine Keller. There was Margot McDonald. There was Jenny Freemason. There were many.

The number of girls that the reverend and sheriff had buried in secret in Whistler’s Field was bordering on too many to remember. Virgil can never forget their skin, like porcelain on a warm evening. Their lips, as sweet as the peaches that grow in Georgia. Their hair that caught all of Virgil’s whispers when he came to them in the night. Their scents, fresh and brand-new, those scents of virgins.

Virgil has fathered a total of fifty-eight children within the past five years. Those girls’ tender bodies starting to thaw from childhood were perfect breeding grounds for Virgil’s seeds, the holy ones, the only holy ones that occupy this wretched and evil earth. And God deemed Virgil so worthy of the job that the young girls would welcome him with open arms, as they should. Who wouldn’t want to breed holy in their wombs, after all?

But then there were those few who rebelled, the ones who let Satan get those seeds, in the forms of miscarriages or the mothers dying while giving birth, and God has no place for such people on this earth. With the sheriff’s help, they were banished from the church, sent to Whistler’s Field.

“No matter what you decide, Virgil, I’ll back you up,” says the sheriff. He was Virgil’s most dependable friend; they had grown up right here in Goshen.

Sheriff Don Mannix had been part of the church since it began and remained loyal through all its transformations. He is a deacon of Third-Day Adventists, and that means he has one job and one job only: to kill off the survivors.

The Day of Freedom was upon them, when Virgil would lead
their souls into heaven, rid them from the sins of this world, make the transformation complete. But Satan will tempt some of them to cowardly actions, and it will be the deacons’ jobs to complete their entrance into heaven, so that Satan cannot win.

“Where did you get such blasphemy?” Virgil screamed through his teeth at Rebekah, throwing the letter from Nessa in her face
.

“This is wrong! This is all wrong!” Rebekah screamed back, at a volume that was foreign to her lungs. It made the skin of her throat raw; it turned her shades of red she’d never known. From the living room, the Amalekite took Magdalene upstairs to where Carol listened. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” she said, her words so loud that some syllables were absent of any sound at all
.

Virgil backhanded her, her cheek tender, throbbing from his knuckles. She tasted the copper pennies, felt the newly formed groove of her bottom lip. “Your disobedience…You have the demonic blood of your biological mother. You and Mason both. You two were spawns of Satan! And I regret the day I ever let you enter this holy house! So go! Go, if that’s what you want to do! Find the woman whose sewer of a womb you crawled out of!”

Virgil left because he could no longer stand Carol’s whimpers while their daughter packed a suitcase. Rebekah barely said good-bye, but promised that she’d be back for Magdalene when no one was around to hear. Magdalene did not understand, but she cried at her big sister leaving. She followed her to the gates while the rest of the family remained at home. She squeezed the front of her face between the steel bars, yelled “I love you” to Rebekah, and waved her off
.

Rebekah waved back, one last time before walking out of sight down the road. “I’m going to come back for you. I promise.”

And that was the last time she was seen near the Paul farm
.

Together, Virgil and Don stuff
Virgil’s wardrobe with stacks of cash, well over a million dollars: more than enough to get him and Carol
and Magdalene over the Mexican border. It was the tithes he took from the residents, ninety percent of them for the past several years. It was their sacrifice, their keep; there were many things one could call these earnings. But they belonged to Virgil, they belonged to God’s chosen master. He dreamed of starting a ministry on the white sands of the Mexican coast. In several years, Magdalene would be at that age where she could procreate.

The mass suicide of his congregation was a surefire way of escaping, an assurance so that while the rest would be sitting at the right throne of God, Virgil could continue with his work, sowing his seeds, spreading his reach to the south, maybe even as far as Central and South America. He couldn’t let the laws of the earth, the ways of man, hinder this. Sure, they’d arrest him, saying he murdered all these girls. But Virgil didn’t abide by man’s law. He followed God’s. And after all, that was all in God’s plan, the girls and such.

Of course, little Magdalene had to believe in the Day of Freedom. If not, there was the risk of his escape plans falling through, the loss of his followers, had she told just one person that she’d not be entering the kingdom of God with the others.

The room smells like cash and anointing oil. He looks out the window, his sigh fogging the glass. In the distance, he thinks he sees Freedom, Magdalene trailing behind her. But Virgil thought he had more time. Between Mason’s declaration back at the jail cell of the ATF being involved; the meeting with the skinheads; Rebekah’s disappearance; their last arriving member, FreedomInJesus. Virgil thought there’d be more time before he had to say these words: “Prepare. The Day of Freedom is finally upon us.”