Freedom's Child (33 page)

My name is Freedom and my mind races too fast for my hands. They tremble, I drop bullets, but I manage to load my gun. Magdalene’s gun.
I’ll get these bastards, Rebekah. I’ll get them all, my only promise to you
.

The house practically shakes under me at the noise. It cracks through the cold air like the God they adore so much cracks his knuckles in the sky. Four hundred–plus pistols going off at the same time. It happens that fast.

I feel my knees give way. Magdalene. All those lost men, all those women, all those children. Magdalene.

Then, earth-shattering silence unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. An awful silence, a silence that would plague all my dreams to come. I fall on the bed, but it’s not deliberate. I find myself inhaling the scent from Rebekah’s pillowcase. I mourn for the daughter I never knew, and even more, I find my heart breaking over Magdalene. She’s gone. Now they’re both gone.

If anything could bring me back to life right now, it’d be Magdalene’s voice. And here it is; as clear as a whistle, splitting through the house, I hear Magdalene cry. I hear her scream in terror, but it’s not as terrible as hearing Virgil and Carol Paul accompanying her.
Suddenly, currents of electricity replace my blood and breath rushes through my airways. I’ve never felt more alive. I’ve never felt so alert. But I stay quiet. I listen. Not even they believed their own sermons. They never even had faith in their own twisted versions of God.

“Well, you shouldn’t have gone public with Rebekah’s disappearance,” Carol barks.

“I didn’t have a choice!” Virgil yells back. “Magdalene, get upstairs.”

“Did you at least get the tithes? The money?”

“We’ll get it now, just get your stuff! We have to leave right this second, before anyone catches on.” I hear a cry from Carol, and Virgil, in a more reassuring voice, says, “The witnesses are taken care of; they’re all dead. The deacons will take care of the rest. We just have to avoid them, and we’ll be fine. We’ll head to Mexico. But I’m not kidding, Carol, we have to leave now!”

As Magdalene cries on her way up the staircase, I crouch behind the door. When she comes in, I pull her down to my lap and cover her mouth, whispering in her ear, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you,” the same words from the dream where I gunned down my own daughter.

She turns and wraps her arms around my neck. “Stay as quiet as you can,” I tell her.

The conversation between her parents downstairs continues. “You think it’s the way I wanted? You think I wanted to hurt Rebekah?” he cries.

“You did what you had to do, Virgil,” Carol reassures him.

That fucking cunt! Crying to me the other night because she missed Rebekah. She knew she was dead the entire time, the whole fucking time!

“She deserved better than the others chopped and buried in Whistler’s Field. I couldn’t help myself,” he says. “I only meant to find her at the Bluegrass and take her back home. But things just got out of hand. Oh, Carol, if you only saw what I saw when I went to get her. She was dressed like some whore; bleached hair; getting in the car with some thug. The sight was horrible Carol, just god-awful.”

“Stay right here,” I whisper, as I carry Magdalene to her bed. I look out the window to see the Amalekite pacing on one side of the shed. A man approaches the other side of the building with a rifle, wearing a golden crown on his head. Magdalene pulls my arms, silently sobbing, begs me not to leave her.

But I have to. There’s no way out of this. I can’t prevent what I’m about to do. I can only prevent a five-year-old from watching me gun down her parents. And that is all.

If you think about it, it’s a flawless scenario in which to murder two people: amid a massive suicide. If I can keep the angles right, it can be attributed simply to that. Plus, let’s not forget the gloves sewn onto my sleeves. No fingerprints. It’s almost perfect. And this perfection brings a smile to my face.
Does this make me an evil person? A sick one?
I creep down the stairs.

Perhaps it’s only natural of a mother. I don’t know the rules.

My hands are surprisingly still. My aim suddenly impeccable. Their faces freeze when I walk into the kitchen, gun raised.

“What’s going on, Virgil?” Carol asks, the scent of her fear filling the room, lemons in the background. They’re unarmed.

He puts up his hands. “She’s ATF.” And I’d love to sit here and deliver some speech to them, some Hollywood scene where I reveal who I really am, taking off the mask.
You’re Rebekah and Mason’s biological mother!
But none of that happens, because there isn’t any time. I have to get to the Amalekite before the man with the crown does.

I point my finger left, toward the window. “Look, it’s Rebekah!” I lie.

I shoot Carol first as she looks. One shot, in the side of the head. I can afford only one bullet per person to make it look like a suicide. Virgil’s screams are interrupted by my second shot. He falls on top of her. They bleed. Bits of their faces and heads over one of their
HOME SWEET HOME
needlepoint works on the wall. And while I’d hoped that I’d find some relief in this, there isn’t any.

The sight brings me back to my old kitchen twenty years ago
with Mark’s body. A cuckoo clock chirps through the house, breaking the silence.

My heart races; my head fills with warm cream soda. A panic attack. The perfect fucking timing. The walls pulsate around me. My ears ring, but I’m not sure if it’s from the attack or from shooting two shots indoors. I grab for something to hold on to, keep myself from falling off something that doesn’t exist. But there’s no time for this, I have to move, I have to keep moving.

Through the panic attack, my trip up the staircase feels more like a swim.
I’m coming, Magdalene
. And I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten until I hear the cries of an infant that Theresa is in the house. “Get the baby,” I yell up to the girl. “Stay with the baby.” I pull myself up by the railing and reach the top of the stairs just in time to see Magdalene hurry from her room and into a back one where the baby’s cries rise, a tornado of cotton and pigtails up the hallway.

Through the sobs, Magdalene shushes the baby. “It’s OK, Sister Theresa, there, there.”

“Stay in there for just a minute,” I call out to her when I enter Rebekah and Magdalene’s bedroom. I sit on the windowsill, resting my sore ribs against pink lace curtains. I open the four-squared windows; chips of white paint and dead flies cocooned in dust fall to my thighs.

Now my hands tremble from the anxiety attack. But the deacon, by some act of God, has not yet spotted the Amalekite. A ray of sun pokes through the clouds and the light rain, it sparkles off his golden crown. A rifle rests like a beauty queen’s sash across his chest. He’s about to turn the corner to where the Amalekite is. I aim my piece; I inhale as slowly as I can to stop the tremors. I squint against an unforgiving but low, cold sun breaking through the leadenness of a waning autumn.

Then, like it has no business being in such a place, color appears from the corner of my eye, right when I’m about to put the pressure on the trigger. Three columns of color, crossing the browns and rotting yellows of a dying fall. I recognize them right away.

The Delaney brothers: Matthew, Luke, and John.

They walk around as if they’re lost, wandering like children who can’t find their mother, tourists who lost sight of the bus leaving for the hotel. Contrasting with those in white, like a blemish on the heaths of Kentucky.

“Stay in there, Magdalene,” I call, quiet enough so no one can hear me through the silence outside, making sure she wouldn’t do something as regretful as walking downstairs to the kitchen to see her parents, dead on top of each other on the floor.

“OK, Sister Freedom,” she whispers back at me.

For a moment, I can picture myself sitting up here on the second floor, looking down, with one of those old-fashioned red-and-white striped popcorn bags, eating away, laughing at some comedy, hard enough that it aches my ribs. But in real life, I’m quiet as the deacon guarding the shed who sees the three men crossing the hill toward him. I fold the smile behind my lips. I have to stay in control.

I’ll let the deacon do me this favor.

One. Two. Three
. Three seconds to wipe out an entire family, each shot echoing like the sirens that called the rest into heaven…or somewhere.

Like puppets having the strings cut from above them, they fall to the ground. And in this moment, two decades of pain, of being tormented by my own memories, of self-hatred, seems to just dissipate. Like for the first time in twenty years, I take my first fresh breath. The memories of rape, no longer demons that come out when I drink enough to forget about them, seem to feel like something I’ve conquered, something I was pulled through. The weight of my husband’s death no longer feels like a loss, but instead like a feat I braved. The loss of my children…well. Not sure if there’s anything that can fix that. Not even watching the men I hate most in the world die right before my eyes can fix that.

The shooter is a virgin, gets sick all over the side of the shed, his crown falling disgracefully in his own vomit on the wildflowers that
line the building’s edges, color against white walls. Fragrant. Pleasing to the eyes. Abundant. Sprayed in vomit. Such is life.

The Amalekite hears the shots, hears him retch.
Don’t worry, Amalekite. I got you
.

I aim, a shaky, imaginary line that vibrates on the side of his face while he wipes the puke with his sleeve.
I got you, Amalekite. Bang!
The hot shell casing stings my cheek, gives me a fright. I didn’t get him where I wanted to; instead, I think I got him on the side of his ribs. But he’s immobile. He’s not going anywhere.

Beyond him, I see three more deacons, separated, but working in perfect unison, visiting house to house. Occasionally, the sound of a gunshot ringing in the air from one of the small sugar-cube homes. We have to get the fuck out of here. I reach under Rebekah’s bed and help myself to two large handfuls of bullets, dropping them into deep pockets. I poke my head out into the hallway and whistle. “Bring the baby here.” I take the front of my skirt and turn it into a sling for Theresa, fisting a bunch of cotton in front of me and putting it in my teeth to hold it together. I carry Magdalene on the other side of my body, mantled against my elbow, as I make my way down the stairs and through the kitchen. “You must close your eyes now, Magdalene,” I say with the knot of cloth at the side of my mouth, held in my back teeth. “Keep them closed as tight as you can until I say so, all right?”

“OK, Sister Freedom.” Her sobs have stopped, and the girl displays a level of bravery I could only envy. Truth be told, I’m scared to death. I’m not brave. I am not strong. I’ve only kept moving. That’s all I’ve ever done in times of trouble, when shit hits the fan. I just moved. But I can’t let it show.
Just move, just fucking move. React, Freedom. React
. “And don’t make a peep, sweetie.”

I carry the girls out the back door, stepping over Virgil’s dead arm at one point, Magdalene’s head buried in the crook of my neck. When we reach the back of the house and I peek around a corner, I put Magdalene down, maneuvering the makeshift sling to my side,
holding Theresa like a football. “Magdalene, you can open your eyes, but keep them looking at the ground, all right? You gotta stay as quiet as you can, but hold on to my elbow and run as fast as I do; only stop if I stop. OK? And if anything happens to me, take Theresa and find the Amalekite behind the shed, understand? Do you understand everything I just said to you?” I take the bunch of cotton and put it back in my teeth, using my finger for the baby to suck on when she starts to move in her sleep, the same arm that Magdalene holds on to, as instructed.

“I’m so scared, Sister Freedom.”

“So am I,” I tell Magdalene, my words garbled with the fabric in the side of my teeth, high in my cheek. “But I believe in God. God’s strength will get you through this. Do you believe that?” I’m not sure that I do. But the concept fills her face with determination, for which I am grateful. And out of desperation, I try. I ask the God that I hardly believe in to grant me strength, to help the girls make it out on the other end of this alive. He can take me, just save these girls. Because, while I may deserve what’s in store for me, they don’t.