In the Wilderness (23 page)

We polished the old oak pews and mended the hymnals with tape, cut the grass and trimmed the roses. I worked beneath the late summer sun, modest and hot in my long sleeves and borrowed, sagging skirt. The sanctuary held little light, and when I stepped into the shadowed room to escape the heat, the air was heavy with the coolness of wood.

While Sarah, pregnant with twins, took her afternoon nap
and Sister Lang attended Tupperware meetings, I found once again the plain chords they had taught me at Cardiff and played for hours on the old upright. They granted me this time alone, but little other. My privacy was a commodity I bartered for their trust. I had no money and was dependent upon them for my toothpaste and tampons (Sister Lang shaking her head), for the antihistamines I needed to subdue my allergies. Except for the church, I was allowed to go nowhere without them, but where would I have gone? I was no longer a runaway. I had no other friends. Even my parents seemed dead to me. Yet the more obedient my behavior, the tighter their surveillance. I accepted this, expected it. I had much to pay for. My debt was great.

Even greater was my need for Luke’s approval. He had become more attentive, taking my hand when we walked to the store, reminding me to cover my knees when I sat. I had forgotten the modest ways and now I must relearn them. I shuddered at the memory of my first night with the Langs, at my grotesque desire for Luke, at my act of inhaling his smell. But the guilt could not override the stir of pleasure I felt even in memory: the warm musk, the dusky odor I associated with strong men and hard work.

Once again I spent hours on my knees, pleading with God for strength and purity of thought. Often I’d find myself, still kneeling, my head resting against the altar, surfacing from a dream of Luke. Even my prayers deceived me. Satan surely knew my weakness and found me unguarded even in this sacred place. I denounced His evil presence. My salvation lay in virtue, and virtue was never true if not tried: in the trial itself lay the merit. I pushed my thoughts forward, imagining our wedding night, when with the blessings of God and our elders he would draw from me a sacred and binding blood.

And I gave thanks for this: that somehow my virginity had
remained intact. I believed that even when I was lost to the world some part of me had resided in grace. Perhaps, all along, I had been saving myself for Luke.

“What’s the answer?” I tapped my pencil against the table. “Do you remember the equation?”

Luke stared blankly at the paper, chin resting in his hand. He shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

I released a dramatic sigh of exasperation, then began ciphering in the margins. “If
X
equals seven, then …” Luke’s index finger traced small, ever-widening circles on my knee, “then
Y
must be … Stop!”

“What?” One corner of his mouth curled into a weighted grin. I pushed his hand away. He slid the pencil from my fingers, so slowly the room darkened before I remembered to breathe.

It had been this way for a week. Each night we stayed up late and strangely alone, he a student of home correspondence schooling, I his tutor.

Each night he scooted closer until our shared breath lifted the book’s pages. When his leg first brushed mine, I shifted, conscious of the heat between us. But this too became familiar, safe because it went no further. His hand on my knee I knew trespassed the boundaries of virtue, yet each night found it there again, until finally I gave in and reset my boundaries: no higher.

My choices seemed few to me then. I could not risk anger, I believed, which would surely turn him away from me. And wasn’t anger itself a sin? I had been charged with getting him through his home schooling and was flush with the honor of such responsibility. If instead of knowledge I presented him with temptation, then it was my presentation that was at fault.
I must purify my own thoughts. I was the woman and as such was charged with yet another responsibility: with my patience and purity to diffuse the man’s instinctive carnal urges into quiet domesticity.

I could tell myself these truths as they had been taught me. But what of the desire I myself felt rising like smoke from the friction of skin on skin? No one had ever given me the prayers to diffuse my own carnal lust; no one had spoken of the hunger of women. Surely it must be particular to my own perversion that this want grew in me.

I steadied myself with the rationale that we were nearly engaged. Another year, I promised myself, and we would be married, free to couple and lounge wholly naked, every inch of skin slick and revealed. Already, the names of our children were written in the margins of my Bible: David and Caleb, Jessie and Sarah.

I let my fingers touch the roughened skin of his knuckles, then felt the wedge of his hand between my legs, gently widening the space until his palm rested hot against my thigh. His eyes never left my face. I could see his mouth open a little, his white teeth, the tip of his tongue. I jerked when his hand brushed the crotch of my panties.

“Hey,” he whispered, “you don’t want to wake them up.” He nodded toward the ceiling as though it were a window. They were sleeping, I knew, but God never slept. I closed my eyes, ashamed, afraid, unable to move.

Then the hand was gone. I opened my eyes to see him standing before me, once again grinning. “You’d best go to bed,” he said, then left the room, leaving me to the light.

I shuffled the papers into order, then rose unsteadily. What had happened? Nothing. I ascended the stairs to my room—a doorless closet in the hall, really, just outside the real bedroom, where Terry and Sarah slept.

The sheets cooled my skin. I opened my Bible to the passage underlined in red: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

I must have faith, I told myself. I laid my glasses on top of my Bible and turned off the light. I could barely discern the stars out my window, but I knew they were there and kept looking into darkness until sleep took me and stars no longer mattered.

I stood at the kitchen sink, running hot water over the plates and looking out the window. The temperature had been hitting one hundred the last several days and air rose in snaking ribbons off the streets of Spokane.

The water scalded my hands, but I had learned not to mind the heat that turned my skin crimson. Sister Lang and Sarah could dip their hands quickly into the steaming rinse basin and pull out dishes sanitized and gleaming. In the bathtub each night I practiced, closing the cold water faucet down a turn at a time until only the hot ran over my palms.

For the last several weeks I had been watching the women carefully. I had much to know about keeping house and cooking, and always before I had resisted participating in any of the kitchen chores my mother had asked me to do. If I were
to be a good wife for Luke, I must work hard to learn his preferences: how much salt he liked on his eggs, how much sugar in his coffee. I folded the sheets into tight rectangles, following Sarah’s careful instructions. Each towel was doubled, then triple-folded and nested neatly in the closet. On my own initiative I had begun to clean the tub each evening after Luke’s bath, wiping away the greasy smudges. Gathering his dirty clothes in my arms, I felt proud—so different from that other self, who might have shunned such a simple and loving task. Now I was fulfilling my duty, and the Langs surely must see how grateful I was, how worthy I was to be their daughter-in-law.

My every prayer had been answered. Even the problem with Luke seemed under control. Only once since that night at the table had he touched me in a bad way, and then just for a moment. We had finished his homework and stood to go to bed. As I’d turned toward the stairs, he’d slid his arms around me from behind and hugged me close against his chest. I could feel his heat at my back, his breath at my neck. I’d thought he might turn me toward him and kiss me. A kiss would be fine, as long as it went no further. I’d wanted him to kiss me, something he had never done. Instead, I’d felt his hands rise, cup my breasts, and then he was gone.

“Thank you, Lord,” I’d whispered, for surely God had seen my weakness. I spent the rest of the night on my knees, imagining Luke at his own bed doing the same, our prayers rising to mingle like vapors above the sleeping town.

Yet instead of drawing us spiritually closer, that night seemed only to have made it harder for us to be together. Luke seldom looked at me across the dinner table, and he’d taken to sitting in another pew at church. I believed I knew why: only by separating himself from me could he gain control of his physical self. I bowed my head in understanding, comforting
myself with the knowledge that he and I waged the same battle.

Perhaps what the Langs were discussing in private had to do with Luke and me. I lifted the plates gently, trying to cushion the clatter of glass so that I might hear the murmur of their voices coming from the bathroom. They were all in there—everyone except me crowded in the tiny space, leaning against porcelain, because it was the only room with a locking door.

I had been told to remain where I was and finish the dishes. Why? Had he told his parents of his sin, and of mine? Were they in there deciding what must be done? I shook my head. No. They were a family and needed to speak of things that I was not yet privileged to hear, and I must be patient. Suspicion was the work of the Devil.

This was not the first time they had closed themselves off. I had been asked to go outside just yesterday because, Sister Lang said, they needed to have a family meeting. I’d stepped out into the hot afternoon, squinting my eyes against the light. Family, family, I thought. I live here, eat, sleep and pray here. Isn’t this my family?

“Lord,” I prayed, “just let me be here. Just let me stay.”

Was that Terry’s or Brother Lang’s muted voice? I strained to make out words, to detect some pitch or intonation that might calm me. I need not know the ways of the Lord, I thought, but more than anything I wanted to tiptoe across the kitchen and put my ear to the door. I watched the water filling the sink and leaned forward to catch the steam on my face, breathing in the moisture. Something was working at my guts, something dark and foreboding—the tremor of recognition I had been fighting to suppress.

Suddenly I knew what it was I was feeling, and I stepped back from the sink, grabbed the dishtowel and held it to my
forehead and chin, wet with the steam and now sweat. It was all too familiar: the set of their mouths, the way they became silent when I entered the room. I remembered my mother leaned against the counter, the paper in her hands damp and curling, her quiet crying, her tears dropping into the scalding water as she read the letter from Lola.

The wave of certainty broke over me, threatened to consume me with panic. These people had saved me, had believed me worthy of love. If they were to refuse me, where would I go? If my desire for Luke had brought this on, I would purge myself. I would fast, shut myself away in a room without food, take only water and that so sparingly my body would know its true thirst.

The lock clicked. I could not bear for them to see my fear and kept my back to them as they filed by. There was nothing in the basin I could wash, nothing I could wrap my hands around and rinse clean. The screen door opened, sighed shut. Car doors slammed, an engine started. I spun around, suddenly afraid that I had been left. Sister Lang stood looking at me, and I was both embarrassed and relieved to find her there, hair tightly braided, familiar in her housedress cinched at the waist by a terry-cloth apron. Her ramrod back reminded me that I was slouching, and I tucked my shoulder blades and raised my chin, forgetting for a moment my misgivings. She liked to see me standing straight, my own braid hanging toward the floor like a plumb bob.

She moved into the dining room and motioned for me to follow. Already the heat had invaded the house, settling into the corners, sucking the breath from the morning. All the curtains were closed to shield against the sun, and the tempered light slowed our movement, as though sound and motion were somehow connected to the clarity of our vision. She pointed to a chair and I understood we would talk.

She began simply. “You should know,” she said, “that Brother Lang has felt the presence of Satan in this house for some time now.” I nodded in giddy agreement, aware that demons populated the very air we moved through. Only constant vigilance held them at bay; only prayer and purity kept them from burrowing like maggots into our souls, where they would fester and burst forth in a frenzy of vile destruction. When Christ cast out Satan’s Legion from the possessed man, even the pigs in which the demons took refuge knew that it was better to hurl themselves from the cliff rather than be made monstrous by such evil.

I felt my jaws tighten, the saliva pool behind my teeth. Not until she reached out and pulled the dishtowel from my hands did I realize I had been stripping it between my fists, spotting the table with water. I rubbed at the spots with my palm, then looked at my hand, the creases damp and shiny.

“We’ve heard strange noises, the stairs creaking in the middle of the night. Evil stalks this house.” Then she pointed her finger, the towel hanging down like a skin. “You,” she said. “You have brought these demons into our home.”

I watched the movement of her mouth. I could see her talking, but her words floated from her lips and into the air, mixing with the sounds of flies and Saturday traffic. I sat with my palm still open, feeling my body let loose its hold, feeling that part of me that wanted to rise screaming and begging instead drift slowly downward, inward, settling somewhere deep, unreachable. I could just as easily not be there. I could be anywhere I wanted—outside feeling the hot sidewalk through the soles of my shoes, or sitting at the piano, safe in the dark church. I began to hum a little to myself, rocking in my chair.

There was more. She told me she knew of my love for Terry, the husband of her true daughter. Hadn’t I called him
one day to the shadowed sanctuary? Hadn’t I pressed myself against him and whispered in his ear the name of some dark familiar? In the church, she said, I had seduced him.