Billy waited until I came out of the shower and stood outside the door and as I stood there naked and streaming water he dried me with the heated iron of his gaze.
Billy came toward me with his arms out, weeping, saying that no one could comfort him but me.
Billy made the children and me kneel until we fell over gasping.
We drank sour, clotted milk as he grabbed our necks, hissed in our ears.
He said he loved us to the very death, me, the children, that’s why he would not take his eyes off us. He watched us sleep all night.
Billy put his head in my lap the next morning, and snored while I sat still for hours, thinking.
Billy caressed me until I fainted inside and then he stopped and fell asleep.
Billy said he wanted me and then he made himself come.
Billy brought me a little tray on which he’d placed a cup of steaming hot chocolate. With a boy’s pride he watched me drink it.
Billy made me come with my eyes shut, with my mouth taped, with my ears sealed, with my legs and arms bound.
Billy said he was going to make me his forever. Wait right here.
Billy scratched the moving figure-eight sign of eternal life into the inside of my thigh with a needle. He sang to me to soothe me while I wept. He licked the blood away and pressed his mouth to my center to distract me while he touched the wound with alcohol. He rubbed raw ink, dark red ink, into the sign.
His was there, even darker.
The next night after he marked me, I brought my serpents into bed with me, naked. Get in, I said when my husband entered the room. Billy stretched his hand toward his pillow and the rattle shook.
Gentle, gentle, I said.
You get them out of there, said Billy. You get them out of here, Marn, please do it.
They loved to curl in my armpits where my heat was strongest. It brought out their scent, which was a powerful, raw odor pure as sex.
Look at them, Billy. They’re my lambs of god, I said.
You get them out of here, Marn. They don’t like me.
It’s because your flesh is cold and you sweat cold, I said. They don’t like the smell of sweat. And you’re too full of light. Me, I’m dark inside. Hot.
There is something bad in you, said Billy. I wish that I could cast it out.
No you don’t, I laughed. You wouldn’t cast out what you needed worst. It’s the bad in me you need so bad.
Put them away, put them away right now, he said.
But he loved to fuck me with the musk of the snakes on me. He was smelling his fear.
WORK BEGAN AFTER the meditation. I was on kitchen attention. This was work we all did, even Billy, though at rare intervals. Cooking was done with love of spirit, and because Deborah was my partner I had looked forward to the tasks, especially since, in the middle of the afternoon, we were allowed to bring our children from the binding compound.
We were careful and precious about the things we ate and what we fed to one another. We had to be. There wasn’t much. We tried to grow hothouse and hydroponic produce and failed. Our chickens were picked off by hawks. Our turkeys looked up in the rain and drowned. The geese flew off. The goats ate the garden. Weasels got the baby pigs and coyotes got the calves. Nobody knew how to farm except me and I missed my dad. Every two months we bought a fattened hog or steer and butchered it in the big cement killing room — an ugly process. I’d bought a bolt gun so I could kill efficiently, and after the moment of slaughter I always left. I couldn’t stand watching the others hack the animals apart. It was nothing but chaos and waste.
Whenever Deborah and I had our children for the afternoon, we cooked. At least there were two of us who knew how to cook. We connected the big pasta machine and mixed up our dough for that, as well as for our breads and cookies. We peeled and riced our carrots for a creamed soup with dill. Our other vegetable was store-bought broccoli and we worried over it until we realized that if we mashed it with bread crumbs we could bake it with cheese and milk and it would go around further. When, at two, we went to get our children, we were exhausted and happy with our work and I could almost have forgotten myself in the flower of the day except that I couldn’t stop my eyes from catching on certain things — the lock on the gate of the play area, the intercom in diapering, the way the windows shut and locked from inside, the walls built heavy, reinforced, a bunker.
A year ago I would have said the bunker kept the children from harm, from the outside, from corrupting influences, from the clouds and confusion of all that lived and breathed and moved outside the kindred. Now, gathering Judah, now, holding Lilith, stroking her unbearable warmth, bearing the joy of her arms hard and fierce at my waist, her whisper, small and vehement, Mother, a word banned except in secret, between us, I thought different. I kept my eyes fixed empty and smiled with careful neutrality over her shoulder. Anguish, their caretaker, gleamed in dull bereavement, a woman who’d lost all of hers. Drunk, she’d dived out of the flaming trailer. Left, her children burnt. Not mine. She wouldn’t get mine. I was gathering myself in order to escape with them.
Judah breathed, hot, against my neck. Something had happened, again. Maybe the thing with Anguish, her prying touch, which I had complained about to Billy. I could not afford to complain again and alert any suspicion in his heart, so when I questioned Judah I begged for it not to be Anguish.
“Did she?”
“No, uh-uh, it was just, I disappointed Father, just now, just a few minutes ago, he was here and I got so nervous, got so nervous I forgot the week’s maxim from the manual and he derided me.”
“Derided?”
“He gave me schedule.”
I held Judah, grabbed him close. Schedule! It meant that instead of school, Judah would be on schedule. There was always one of us in the room where we held our circle. One of us had to stay there and suffer. Pain kept the room clear for spirit, Billy had been told. But Judah was too young!
When?
Tomorrow.
You’re sick. I’ll do it for you.
There was a rule that another of us could suffer for the scheduled if they were too ill or being cleansed. I took Lilith and Judah back to the kitchen and smiled and joked and held them, as did Deborah, her children, while I searched the cabinet.
“What are you looking for?”
It was Billy, behind me, his voice deep and musical. But I had already hidden the soy sauce — a bottle of it choked down and Judah would run a slight fever. Enough to keep him off schedule, while I went on.
TO STAND STILL for an entire day, to lose yourself in immobility, to feel your blood pump painfully, pool — I feared schedule so much that adrenaline surged up in me at the certainty. To get ready for schedule I ran. I ran my long route, my rattlesnake route, my porcupine grass route. To run is to revel in a pretend freedom. I spring along slowly, matching my breathing to my stride, passing the usual fences and fence lines, and thinking. Running is like riding on a train after a while, a motion that allows thoughts to drop down clear from a place in your mind that surprises you.
I saw that I was running in a wide false circle, hopelessly awakened.
Awakened, things had changed in me. Schedule, I’d never questioned. And the harm and the casual pain. Part of processing spirit was a discipline of the afflictions, for we only meet our maker in the unmaking, Billy would say. We mainly chose for ourselves. Bliss had a calcified heart. She beat her chest, and instead of a tiny diabetic’s needle she used a Novocain plunger, long and satisfyingly grim. Anguish mortified her fingernails. Frances slept on bare boards, no blanket. Ate flesh only, therefore stank. My friend Deborah practiced servile and incomplete sex and welcomed her migraines. Billy practiced — just being who he was. Pain enough.