Father Said

Father said fear was a test.

If your hands shook, you prayed harder. If your stomach turned, you knelt longer. If your heart beat too fast, it meant the Adversary had found a crack and was trying to slither in. Good girls sealed the crack with obedience.

Sister Ruth tugged the white dress down over my shoulders and stepped back to look at me. The room was suffocating. Too many bodies breathing the same used-up air. My little sisters stood near the wall, their eyes shining brightly, as if they were looking at something holy.

“You look blessed, Diana,” Sister Ruth said.

Blessed.

I looked at myself in the small mirror nailed beside the washstand. This was the only mirror allowed in the house. Father says it is sinful to be vain.

The dress was plain and high-necked, the sleeves long, the fabric stiff where it brushed my skin. My braid had been wrapped into a crown around my head. I did not look like a bride the older girls whispered about, before they learned not to whisper at all. I looked like a paper doll someone had folded into place.

“Say thank you,” my mother murmured.

“Thank you,” I said.

My voice sounded far away.

On the other side of the door, I could hear feet crossing the floorboards and the low rumble of men’s voices downstairs. The Brothers came and went like the weather in our house—heavy, unanswerable, and ordained by God. We learned young not to listen in on their conversations. There were some truths that lived upstairs with women and some that lived downstairs with men, and to confuse the two was to invite sin.

Even still, I tried to listen.

This was my wedding day.

By nightfall I would belong to Uncle Nathan.

No one called him that to my face anymore. Once Father had a revelation, families were remade. Someone you once called uncle, will now be your husband. What had felt wrong in the body could be made right by obedience. That was what we were taught.

I had known Uncle Nathan all my life. He had yellow crooked teeth and a beard with more gray in it than brown. He smelled of dust and farm animals with the bitter stench of days old sweat from working the land. When he laughed, it came slow, like something dragging over gravel.

Last winter, when I carried the preserves down to the storage room, he had stopped me in the doorway and rested his hand on the back of my neck.

“Growing into a sweet young woman, Diana,” he’d said.

My whole body had gone still, the way rabbits go still when the hawk’s shadow passes over.

Afterward I prayed for an hour because my skin had felt wrong where he touched me, and Father had said that the body was deceitful and weak.

I had been told so many things my whole life.

Father speaks for God.

A daughter’s obedience builds her a crown in heaven.

A woman’s suffering is the fire that makes her pure.

If Father chooses a path for you, it is because God loves you enough to show you the way.

Father said that outside our walls there is only wickedness and hunger of the flesh. Immorality and sin come from both men and women.

I had swallowed every word until there was no room left for my own thoughts.

My mother stepped behind me and laid a hand on my shoulder. Her palm was warm through the dress.

“You must hold your chin up,” she said softly. “Today is an honor.”

I looked at her in the mirror. The skin beneath her eyes had gone thin and blue in the last year. There were lines at the corners of her mouth that deepened when she tried to smile.

“Were you scared?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Sister Ruth lowered her gaze and my sisters stopped fidgeting.

My mother’s fingers tightened once on my shoulder, then loosened.

“Fear is not the same as doubt,” she said. “Do not confuse them.”

She bent and kissed the top of my head. It should have comforted me, but instead it made me feel like crying.

“Come downstairs when called,” she said, and left with the others, leaving me all alone.

I sat on the edge of the bed, placing my hands over my knees. The silence in the room was deafening. Thoughts circled with things a girl was not supposed to think, on her wedding day.

On the bedside table lay my little brown Bible, the cover soft and worn where my thumbs had traced it. Beside it was the handkerchief Grandmother June had given me before she died. It had tiny blue flowers stitched into one corner, though blue was not a color she wore in public.

She had once told me, while shelling peas in summer heat, “The Lord gave you a heart for more than fear, child.”

I was eight then. I had asked her what she meant, and she only smiled sadly and told me not to let the men hear such talk.

Now, on my wedding day, I held that handkerchief in my fist and thought of her.

Downstairs, a door opened hard enough to strike the wall and the men's voices rose up even louder.

I stepped into the hallway and then knelt by the vent, listening, knowing full well eavesdropping was a sin.

“…don’t matter what the papers say,” a man said. I knew that voice. Brother Harlan. Thick and certain. “Father is being tested because he is chosen.”

Another voice answered, lower, older. Uncle Nathan.

“Chosen or not, marrying her is making me nervous. Since he got jailed, since all that mess—”

“Keep your voice down.”

“The girl’s only thirteen.”

My skin went cold.

A pause. Then a scrape, like a chair being dragged across the floor.

“She's of age,” Brother Harlan said. “That is enough.”

“I didn’t ask if it was enough. I said she’s thirteen.”

There was a strange note in Uncle Nathan’s voice. Irritation, maybe, like a man arguing over a horse with a bad leg.

Brother Harlan laughed once, dry and humorless. “You asked to marry her soon enough.”

A beat of silence.

Then Uncle Nathan said, “I asked because if I didn’t, Ezra would have. And he’s rough.”

My hand flattened over my mouth.

The floor seemed to tilt. I gripped the edge of the vent so hard the metal bit my fingers.

“You ought to be grateful,” Brother Harlan said. “A girl like Diana stays sweet and keeps quiet. She'll do her duty.”

I knew then that they weren't speaking of a blessing nor a revelation from God. Only arrangements. One man was taking me so another man could not, as if there were gentleness in any of it.

My heart pounded so hard I thought surely they would hear it through the floorboards.

And beneath that pounding came another sound.

Grandmother’s voice, or my own, or something I had buried so long it had nearly gone silent.

This is wrong.

I had felt it before, in bits. In the storage room with Uncle Nathan’s hand on my neck. In the way Mother stared too long at nothing, almost disappearing inside herself. And how the younger girls were taught to lower their eyes before they learned scripture.

But bits can be prayed away.

This could not.

I rose too quickly and had to catch myself against the wall. My breath came shallow. The hallway narrowed around me.

If Father said it, it was God’s will.

That was a lie. I saw it for the first time, ugly and enormous.

Not just about marriage, but about everything.

About the fear in our bodies being sin instead of a warning.

About pain making us pure instead of trapped.

About men being holy because they said they were.

I stumbled back into the bedroom and shut the door without making a sound. My hands would not stop shaking.

Run, something in me said.

Just as quickly another voice rose to smother it.

Run where? Into the wicked world? Into hell? Girls who leave lose God. Girls who leave, die.

I sank to my knees beside the bed.

“Please,” I whispered, not even sure who I was praying to anymore. “Please.”

No answer came.

Only the pounding of my blood and the muffled voices below and then the knowledge, steadying now instead of frightening, that if I stayed, the lie would swallow me whole.

I eased the window open and the morning air rushed in, sharp and cold enough to sting my face. Below was the narrow slope of the back porch roof and then the yard beyond it.

My wedding dress snagged on the latch as I climbed out, and for one awful second I imagined myself falling and breaking open on the ground like an egg, white fabric spread around me for everyone to see.

But I made it onto the porch roof.

From there I lowered myself until my feet kicked empty air. The drop was farther than I thought. I let go.

Pain shot through my ankles when I landed, but I stayed upright.

I ran.

My shoes slipped in the dirt and my skirts tangled around my legs. I kicked my shoes off and kept going, barefoot, braid coming loose down my back.

Behind me the house stood silent.

Maybe no one had gone up to fetch me yet. Maybe they were still arranging chairs, still speaking in lowered voices about righteousness and duty, still trusting the obedience they had bred into me like a brand.

I cut behind the chicken coop, then the shed, then through the strip of scrubland that bordered the back road. Sagebrush scratched my legs. Stones cut my feet. The hem of my dress darkened with dirt.

When I reached the road, I stopped.

The road was a strip of cracked blacktop spread out in both directions under a pale blue empty sky. But it might as well have been the edge of the world.

We were forbidden to go anywhere off the property.

Everything I had ever been warned against was down this road, and the fact that God hadn’t struck me by lightning yet didn’t escape me.

A sound rose in the distance—an engine, faint but growing.

I froze.

What if it was one of ours? What if they had already found out?

The old fear surged up, familiar as breath. Kneel. Repent. Go back before God strikes you down.

Then another thought came, calm and clear.

If God wanted that future for me, why did it feel so wrong?

The engine grew louder.

A pickup truck rounded the bend, sun flashing off the windshield. I stepped back instinctively, then forced myself forward again. My legs shook so hard I thought they might fold beneath me.

The truck slowed.

It was not one of ours.

An old woman sat behind the wheel, her gray hair tied up in a red scarf. Her eyes widened when she saw me standing there in a dirty white dress, barefoot, clutching Grandmother’s handkerchief to my chest like the child I was.

She rolled down the window and she said, very gently, “Honey, are you in trouble?”

I tried to say yes, but only a sob came out.

The woman looked past me toward the settlement road, then back at me. Whatever she saw in my face made her unlock the passenger door without another question.

“Get in.”

I stared at the open door.

One step, and I will lose my whole family.

One step, and maybe I would lose only the lie.

My mother would cry. Father will probably tell my sisters I was dead. I didn't know if I would see any of them ever again.

But I thought of the voices beneath the floorboards.

A girl like Diana.

I thought of Grandmother June stitching blue flowers where no man could see.

I thought of my mother, not answering when I asked if she had been scared.

Yes, I thought. Yes, she had been. Maybe all of them had been.

Maybe fear had never been sin.

Maybe it had been the truest thing we were given.

The woman leaned across the seat. “Honey.”

I climbed in.

She pulled the door shut, and the sound of it was solid and final.

As the truck rolled forward, I turned once to look behind me. The road back to the only home I had known lay empty in the daylight, dust lifting in small increments with the wind.

God didn’t reach down and drag me out by my braid and cast me back.

Thunder and lightning didn’t strike me dead in my tracks, nor Hell and damnation swallowing me whole.

There was only the road ahead, and my breath, and the terrible, marvelous ache of not knowing what would come next.

I pressed Grandmother’s handkerchief to my mouth and cried quietly as the settlement disappeared behind us.

I did not know who I would be outside their gates, I only knew I had not been born for a cage, no matter how holy they named it.