“Fawn!”
Fawn called back, “Come
An engine revved far behind in the blackness. They were coming. Charity glanced over her shoulder and saw nothing but the outlines of boulders and brambles and the quarter moon, hovering like a cat’s eye in the near-black sky.
The engine sound faded, disappeared.
Baring her teeth, she pushed on. Her heart hammered, her lungs drew in and out like bellows against a fire.
Then Fawn slowed. She bent over, clutching her knees, wheezing, spitting blood. Charity reached her and grabbed her arm.
“Are you all right?”
Fawn nodded.
“No, really!”
“I bit my tongue.”
“Oh!”
Fawn glanced up; her eyes were creased at the edges, terrified, flashing white in the faint moonlight. But she nodded again. “I’m all right.”
“We should rest. Somewhere. We can hide.”
“They’ll catch us, certainly. But Flinton isn’t too far, I don’t think. Just a mile, maybe.”
“Can you run with me? Can you be free with me?”
Charity whispered, “Yes.” Fawn took her hand and they ran, into the blackness, zigzagging across the Arizona desert, heading for Flinton. Heading for freedom.
Flinton had a reputation for sin. Whoring. Gambling. Murders. Loud music, televisions, and a movie theatre that showed films glorifying violence and sex. People dressed in clothes that revealed shoulders, midriffs, and bare thighs. Children running without supervision. Women out of their homes unescorted, drinking with each other and with men into the wee hours of the nights. Charity had heard all these things in passing, whispered stories that skittered through the sanctified compound of Gloryville like thorny tumbleweeds on a foul breeze.
The men of Gloryville went to Flinton to trade, sell, and buy. It was the closest Outsider town. It had stores and banks. And so they went. But they always stamped their boots clean of Flinton’s foul dirt before they re-entered their own town.
And though Charity had dreamed of escape as she lay trembling on her cot at night, she could not reconcile her longing with the fact that the only place to run to would be Flinton.
It was Fawn who first spoke the dangerous words. She had sneaked to Charity’s bedside one morning before the rest of the household was awake, kneeled down and whispered, “I’m going to run away, dearest. Come with me.”
Charity had pulled her pillow over her head, pretending to be asleep. Fawn had poked her in the shoulder and whispered again, “Friday. After prayer meeting. We can pretend to go looking for Pips.”
Charity whispered into the pillow, “Why would we look for Pips? He’s a faithful dog. He would never leave Rufus.”
“We can hide him, tie him up so he looks to be missing. That will give us the time we need before anyone wonders where we are.”
Charity was silent, though her heart pounded so hard the cot shook beneath her.
“All right? Charity? Please? I don’t want to go alone. We’ll be safer together. And I don’t want to leave you behind. You’re the only person who loves me.”
Charity felt herself nod. Fawn slipped away, back to her room, a whisper of slippers on bare floor. And Charity slept not at all until dawn, trying to breathe, staring at the wall, thinking of the dangers in Flinton, seeing images of Satan and the Prophet glaring at her, one with eyes of blazing orange, the other with eyes of ice-cold blue, wrangling over her soul.
But she wanted to leave as much as she wanted to live. And life in Gloryville had become unbearable.
Over the days that followed, Charity fought hard to keep from letting the rest of the family notice her nervousness. She was certain the fear of the impending escape was obvious, etched on her cheeks and mouth like the scars cut into Fawn’s shoulders from the beating Rufus gave her when she resisted him on their wedding night. Yet, as the fourth and youngest wife of Elder Rufus Via, Charity was overlooked most of the time, her ranking in the expansive family just a little higher than that of Pips.
Charity had married Rufus, a smelly fifty-eight-year-old goat farmer, brother to the Prophet though a lesser church elder himself, thirteen months before on her fourteenth birthday. She had looked forward to the marriage and the assurance of a place in the highest realm of heaven for obeying the expectations of her sex. She thought she knew what would be expected of her, having grown up in a family with three sister-wives and nineteen children. But her own father, a carpenter who worked hard and said little, was quite different from Rufus Via, who didn’t work very hard and said quite a bit. Rufus stomped and yelled, then would disappear for several days, expecting not only the housework to be done but all the farm work, as well. If it wasn’t done, and done to his liking, there was hell to pay.
The first two sister-wives, Prudence and Faith, were humble women, busy with their babies, and with little time to help Charity adjust. They assigned the youngest sister-wife the most tedious chores, as was to be expected. Laundry. Scrubbing the floors. Mucking goat pens. Gathering eggs. Cleaning the dishes. Changing the diapers of their growing brood – eleven and counting, as all of the other sister-wives, including Fawn now, were expecting. Fawn, however, had taken Charity under her wing. The two girls had known each other before the marriages, had lived in adjacent homes. They’d played together when there was time to play. They’d sat near each other during the long church services that all Gloryville residents were required to attend in the windowless chapel in the centre of town. Occasionally they dared pass notes back and forth, snickering silently over which boys were cute or which woman had a hole in her stocking or a bug in her hair.
So when Charity wed Rufus, Fawn was quick to give her advice on how best to submit to him when he wanted her and how best to stay out of his way when he didn’t.
“He wants to make you scream when he takes you,” she said. “If you are silent, he thinks you aren’t paying attention. If you lie still, he thinks you are in contempt of him. It’s best to writhe and scream and call out to God. He may spank you with a belt, or make you do things with your mouth. Oh, Charity, just say yes to it all. Then he will be done with his business more quickly and will leave you alone.”
And so Charity screamed. She writhed. She prayed she would never have his child. She prayed he would die, then she prayed she would die. Then she prayed God would forgive her for her prayers. She didn’t really want to die. She wanted to be gone, gone far from the man and his brutal hands and body.
She peeled carrots and potatoes. She washed. She minded the others’ babies. She bent over in the shed when Rufus found her there. She bore his beatings when he came to her and found she was in the midst of her unclean days. She endured his curses when she did not conceive.
And she cried on her cot in the pantry behind the kitchen. How could she stand this for another sixty years? If this was God’s plan, then God was as cold and cruel as Rufus. Maybe Satan would be kinder. He certainly couldn’t be much worse.
According to the whispered rumours, Satan lived in Flinton. The road to Flinton was likely the road to hell.
And it was also the road to freedom.
They reached the outskirts of Flinton and stumbled along the shoulder of the road, at a walk now, panting, sweating. Charity’s hair had long since fallen free from its pins and lay like a tangled brown shawl about her shoulders. Each time a vehicle whizzed past, they shuddered and prayed it was not the Prophet. Each set of receding tail lights looked like glowing devil’s eyes, daring them to follow. Along the roadside were flat-roofed houses, tangled chain-link fences behind which dogs snarled and howled. They passed an abandoned building with rusted gas pumps, and trailers set like litter carelessly tossed, their porch lights winking. Inside, there was loud and
