“You have grieved me.”
I press my forehead harder against my knuckles. “Yes, Father. I am sorry, Father.”
A pause. I hear him breathing on the other side of the door, slowly and patiently.
“Sorrow is good,” he murmurs. “Sorrow is the beginning of cleansing. But sorrow alone does not purify the flesh, does it, Sister Prudence?”
“No, Father.”
“The flesh requires its own lesson. You understand this.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Fifteen lashes at the post.”
My stomach turns. I swallow it down. Fifteen. Sister Mary only received twelve when she defied Elder Wilson last spring, and she could not lift her arms for a week. Housemother had to feed her with a spoon. Fifteen is more than I have ever been given. Fifteen is the number for serious rebellion.
“Thank you, Father,” I whisper around the lump in my throat, because thanking him for my punishment is part of the liturgy. Gratitude for correction is the eighth virtue.
“What have you to say now regarding our upcoming union?”
This is a test. I know it is. What happens if I fail? I know I should be elated. It is a true honor to be united with our spiritual leader through whom the Lord Almighty speaks. Or, itshouldbe an honor. Yet I feel only dread.
I lift my head.
“Father,” I whisper. My voice scrapes out. “I am unworthy.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “You are. But the Lord lifts up even the unworthy when it pleases Him.”
“I do not—” I stop myself before my sinful truth emerges and instead say, “I am grateful, Father.”
He is quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I wonder if he has left the door. Then, softer than before, he asks, “Are you?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Because I have been told you wept.”
Housemother Ruth. She told him.
“I was overcome, Father.”
“By joy?”
“By unworthiness, Father.” I’m lying. Lying is a sin, yet I cannot bear to tell him the truth.
A longer pause. I hear the rasp of his thumb along the doorframe. I picture him on the other side, head tilted, turning my answer over like a stone, deciding whether to accept it.
“Fifteen lashes,” he confirms at last. “Cleansed flesh for our holy union.”
His footsteps move away across the dirt.
I clasp my hands together. I hear a high, thin ringing in my ears.
I know I am sinful and defiant. Yet I cannot purge these doubts. And the questions—I have so many.
Why are only the women punished? If suffering brings a soul nearer to God, why do the elders never kneel on the dirt? Why do the brothers never bare their backs for the whipping post?
These are the questions that have put me in this box forty-seven times. Forty-seven, and this one makes forty-eight, and very soon I will be a wife, and after that, I do not know what will become of me.
