“The men whose home you were living in. Who were these men?”
Alarm bites at the heels of my fear. “They had nothing to do with this. Leave them alone.”
A tiny muscle twitches in his right cheek. “You are my wife, Byrdie.”
My tongue is too fast to catch the dangerous words that spill out, “Because you forced me to be.”
The hands clasped behind him slowly unwind, and I edge back.
He turns and walks away, folding his hands behind his back as he wanders the room.
And always, I’m conscious of the silent compound, and I’m certain there is no escape from this room. Not unless Jeremiah wills it.
“Doubt is a form of disease. A… leprosy,” he says quietly, and turns to smile at Jason, one of his acolytes. “Is it not?”
Jason smiles pleasantly back. “It is, Jeremiah.”
“Leprosy spreads until it affects healthy skin. A good doctor—one who cares about others—wishes to prevent the spread of that rot. A good doctorremovesthe leprosy. He doesn’t allow it to spread and infect innocents. He saves.”
It is sick of him to mention rot, and I hate him for it.
He does it on purpose to taunt me. My mom died because he refused to get her the medication she needed. She died in agony from an infection that she didn’t have to die of at all. And she died, like a child, believing that if Jeremiah prayed hard enough for her, she could avoid the antibiotics she needed to stop the gangrene spreading up her leg and turning it black.
“Miriam…” Jeremiah looks at me. “You remember Miriam from my sermons, don’t you?”
I root around in my mind for a memory I let go of almost as soon as I heard it.
Between Jeremiah’s two-hour-long sermons, the lessons I had with the other women, and my mother repeating Jeremiah’s lectures over and over during mealtimes as if I hadn’t been sitting right beside her for them while desperately wishing myself elsewhere, his words played like an eternal loop in my head.
Leaving the compound has made me fumble to remember.
“From the Old Testament. She criticized Moses,” I say slowly.
He beams at me, and Ihatemyself for how warm and pleased I am as I bask under his radiant smile. “She criticized him, and for that, what did God do?”
I shake my head.
He looks at Deacon.
Deacon stands taller as he says, “God punished her with leprosy. And she went out into the desert, and there she died.”
My heart clenches.
In the same gentle voice, Jeremiah echoes, “And she went out into the desert, and there she died.” He pauses for a second too long, smiling again when I start to inch away. “But Moses was not a cruel man. First, he tried to treat her sickness. They bathed her in holy water, and they shaved her hair, and they hoped that would be enough to hold back the rot from spreading. Do you know what happened then? Did the rot continue to spread?”
At that moment, I notice the razor on his desk, and I feel lightheaded and sick.
I shake my head, my teeth chattering loudly in the too-quiet room. “I d-don’t know,” I stutter.
“The rot spread because it had taken root in her heart for daring to raise her voice against the vessel God had chosen tospeak through. But Moses still tried to save her. I can do no less for my wife.”
He walks over to the desk, and he picks up the razor, and I try to run, but his acolytes already have a tight hold of me.
They don’t care if they bruise. They ignore my screams and my yells as they force me down to my knees, and Jeremiah takes the razor to my hair, and he hacks and he hacks until it’s all around my knees.
My head is light. So light. My body is heavy as the acolytes lift me from my knees to my feet, and they take me in a stunned daze out of Jeremiah’s cabin and to the women’s bathing room.
They look, but they don’t see my body when they strip my clothes off me and plunge me in water so cold it shocks me to my bones.
