I Am Not Esther (7 page)

‘Magdalene, listen to me if you please.’

Normally, she would have shut up for a week when he used that voice on her. All she did now was rock against me and cry in that high, eerie voice, ‘Miriam is dead and I saw her. She is a ghost.’

He stood in front of her and addressed her as if
she was an assembly. ‘Your sister has not died. She is dead to us because she refuses to live according to the true principles of Godly life. She refuses to keep the Rule. She has damned herself forever, and her behaviour would have contaminated you and her brothers and sisters.’

As if Maggie would understand all that even if she could listen. But the message was probably for me rather than her.

‘What did she do?’ I whispered.

His grey stare shifted briefly to me before it hit the wall somewhere over my shoulder. ‘She insisted on remaking God’s universe in her own image.’

I hugged Maggie tight. ‘I don’t understand.’

Another dose of the grey glance. ‘You will notice, Esther, that in our house we do not have photographs or paintings. We do not create objects that might become idols to be worshipped in place of the Lord. Miriam insisted on painting. She drew and painted and when we discovered that she was defying us we commanded her to stop. We prayed that she would return to the path of righteousness, but she refused.’ So that was why Maggie had had fifty fits when I said I’d draw her a picture. Uncle Caleb looked briefly in my direction and added, ‘She left us, Esther. We did not cast her out. But now she is dead to us unless she repents.’

‘How do you know she hasn’t repented?’ Miriam’s anguished face would stay, a picture in my head, forever.

‘She was dressed like a whore,’ he said calmly.

‘But her skirt was right down to her ankles!’ I gasped.

‘Her hair was uncovered, unbraided and she had cut it.’

‘It was still long!’

He explained patiently and inflexibly, ‘The women of our faith never cut their hair. They wear it long and in a single braid. That way it does not tempt the eyes of their men to stray.’

Men. Always it was the men who controlled what the women could do. But he hadn’t finished. ‘She wore no head covering, the flesh on her arms was exposed and her skirt was bright and gaudily patterned.’

All at once, I was sick to the stomach. How could he look at his daughter and only see her clothes? How hadn’t he seen the hurt and the longing? I got up. ‘May I put Magdalene to bed, please?’

He looked her over, as if she were a prize exhibit in a show, before he nodded. ‘Very well. You are both excused.’

Great. Let me remember to thank you one day
.

I carried Maggie into the bedroom. I kicked the pile of cushions and plopped down on them. I talked to Maggie, tried to make her listen. Clowned around and tried to make her laugh. But all she did was cry that Miriam was a dead ghost and the devil had got her.

I was frightened. She couldn’t hear me and I was
sure she didn’t know who I was or even where she was. I lay her on the cushions and she just grabbed hold of a cushion and rocked backwards and forwards, crying.

I ran. Knocked on the study door. Burst in. ‘Aunt Naomi … can you come? Please! I don’t know what to do.’

Wonder of wonders, when she looked at Uncle Caleb for permission, he actually nodded. She stood up, a hand pressed into her back, and came with me to our bedroom. Maggie was exactly how I’d left her, face pressed into the cushion muffling the wailing.

Aunt Naomi marched over to her, sat beside her. Grabbed her by the shoulders and wrenched her upright. Then she pulled back her arm and slapped Maggie hard on both cheeks.

Maggie gasped but her eyes lost the blankness and she stopped crying. Her mouth open, she stared at her mother and her eyes swam back into focus. Aunt Naomi took a hanky from her apron pocket and wiped Maggie’s face. ‘That is better. Now let Esther help you get your clothes off and you can have a little rest. It has been a big day.’

Maggie breathed in deeply, with only a few hiccups on the way. ‘Mother … I saw Miriam. She was a ghost.’

Aunt Naomi reached for Maggie’s hands and held them firmly. ‘No, she was not a ghost. She does not want to live a Godly life any more and
that is why she left. She is dead to us, Magdalene. Do you understand?’

Maggie said nothing, her eyes huge in her blotchy face.

Aunt Naomi got up. ‘We will not speak of her again. Go to sleep now.’

I undressed Maggie. Usually she insisted on doing everything herself, even to untying the wretched tapes on her skirt. Today she sat like a limp rag doll. I picked her up and dumped her on her bed. ‘Miriam gave me a message for you,’ I whispered. She turned her head and looked at me. ‘She said: “Tell her I miss her. Tell her I love her.”’

‘Why did she go away then?’ Maggie demanded, her voice wavering. ‘I hate her! She is mean and horrible.’

She curled up in a ball, facing away from me. I rubbed her back. ‘And you want her back. Just like I want my mother back.’

She twitched her shoulders but didn’t say anything. I kept on rubbing her back and shoulders and between one second and the next she went to sleep.

I sat there, waiting until I heard them leave the study. When I went back to the family room, Aunt Naomi asked, ‘Is she asleep?’

I nearly yelled, ‘A fat lot you care!’ It was only the thought of the discipline room that kept me quiet. Instead I nodded my head.

Nobody said anything. Not about the shopping,
or the picnic and definitely not about Miriam. But she was there in all their thoughts.

That evening, after prayers and stuff, the twins sewed their verses and their mouths were clamped shut. Usually they chattered away about nothing. Abraham didn’t ‘accidently’ kick a door or a chair when he was sent to bed the way he normally did. Luke stayed close to him, his eyes on the floor. Daniel had a Bible in his lap but didn’t turn a page all evening. Aunt Naomi went to bed an hour earlier than usual. My uncle stayed in the study.

I put down the skirt I was hemming and went and sat on the verandah. Mum, Miriam. The experiment. So many mysteries, so much sadness.

It was a long time before I slept that night.

THE NEXT DAY AUNT NAOMI shook me awake, saying, ‘I want you to come to the Circle of Fellow ship today, Esther. You can meet Charity and Damaris. They will be starting school with you.’

I’d been dreaming of Miriam. Just in time, I shut my mouth on telling my aunt. I yawned and rubbed my eyes, trying to stay in bed for a few extra seconds while looking like I was getting up.

‘Great,’ I muttered. ‘I’m really looking forward to that.’

She didn’t say anything then, but I got an extra dose of chores, which was actually a lot better than being prayed over.

At eight o’clock I was told to go and wake Maggie. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to let her sleep?’ I asked.

‘Do not question your elders. Please go immediately.’ I reckon if she hadn’t found me so useful, I’d have been dumped in the discipline room.

I woke Maggie, scared in case she was off in another world where I couldn’t reach her like yesterday. But she smiled at me. ‘Hello, Esther.’

I hugged her, ‘Hello, Maggie.’ Should I talk to her about Miriam? Damn it, why not? I wished they’d talk to me about Mum, let me read her letter, tell me why she left. Maggie might feel the same. Or she might have hysterics again.

I pulled her out of bed, tumbling her on the floor and tickling her. She squealed with a hand over her mouth so her father wouldn’t hear. ‘Do you remember about yesterday?’ I asked, picking her up and sitting her at the dressing table so I could brush her hair.

She sat very still. ‘Miriam,’ she whispered. ‘I saw Miriam’s ghost.’

I hugged her tight. ‘You thought it was her ghost because you thought — and so did I — that she was dead. But she isn’t, Maggie. She just had to leave. And she loves you. Remember? She said to tell you.’

She twisted in the chair and stared up at me, frowning. Finally she said, ‘I do not like God if He does not like Miriam painting.’

Oh, sweetheart, I couldn’t agree more!
‘For chrissakes don’t let your mother or father hear you say that,’ I whispered.

But she was okay for the rest of the day. Not brilliant, but okay. We trundled off after lunch to the Circle of Fellowship. It was in the next street so we could walk. Abraham stared at the low stone wall he
always walked along when we went to the park, but today he kept to the footpath.

The Circle of Fellowship was the pits. Aunt Naomi introduced me to the five women, starting with the one whose place we were at. ‘Sister Dorcas, this is Esther.’

I muttered something and stared at her. She was older than Aunt Naomi and had a well-worn look about her. Dorcas. I was quite pleased they hadn’t called me Dorcas.

Then there was Leah who turned out to be a bossy cow, Dinah who had the most
gorgeous-looking
kids including Damaris, who was the most gorgeous of all. Charity’s mother was called Hope and she had a baby, and then there was Thomasina who was very young and very pregnant. They called each other sister, and us kids called them aunt.

First we prayed. Then the six women took it in turns to read the Bible and talk about it. A girl a bit older than me with buck teeth and pretty, dark hair said, ‘I would like to read the word of the Lord too, if you please, Aunt Dorcas.’

Dorcas smiled and said, ‘Praise the Lord! Of course you may, Beulah.’

Beulah! And buck teeth. And she was the bossy cow’s daughter.

The kids sat still and the room got hotter and hotter. Each of those women, except Thomasina, must’ve had around four or five kids with them.

After a million years, Dorcas said, ‘You older girls
can take the young ones outside.’

We filed out, the girls automatically reaching for their head scarves. Beulah stayed where she was. There were trees in the back garden and the younger kids raced for them and scrambled up into the branches. That was when I had a most riveting conversation with Damaris and Charity, the two girls who’d be going to school with me.

‘I suppose you will take Miriam’s place now that she is dead,’ said Charity, flopping down in the shade of an apple tree and whipping her scarf off.

‘She’s not dead,’ I snapped. ‘I saw her yesterday.’

‘She has broken the Rule,’ Damaris said. Her scarf was off as well. ‘My father told us that Uncle Caleb said he would pardon her and receive her back into the bosom of the family if she repented.’ She flicked the scarf at a fly.

That was news to me. ‘What good is that, if he isn’t going to let her paint?’ I demanded. It was so good to talk about this with people who’d talk back. But I bet they weren’t supposed to be talking about it.

‘She should not want to paint,’ Damaris said. ‘The word of the Lord and the Rule should be enough for her.’

‘Why? Why should it be enough? And where the hell does it say in the Bible that she can’t paint?’ I thought I’d shock them, but they both giggled.

‘How many psalms do you know off by heart?’ Charity asked, grinning.

‘Only three, plus Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians,’ I said, smiling back in spite of myself.

Damaris sighed. ‘You would probably know the entire Bible by now if you lived in our house. My father said he thought Uncle Caleb was being too lenient and that if any of us transgressed like Miriam did, then he would cast us out before we had the chance to run away.’

‘Your old man’s stricter than Uncle Caleb?’ I asked. ‘Nobody could be!’ I stared at her, awed. How did she manage to stay sane? She was so pretty. Real model material with huge eyes and high cheekbones. I’d give a lot to look like that.

‘Her grandfather is our leader,’ Charity said. ‘And when he is called to the Lord then her father will take his place.’

‘How do you stand it?’ I asked, staring at Damaris.

‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I like to keep the Rule. I feel safe in the love of the Lord. My faith means a lot to me.’

I was shocked. Really shocked. How could a kid my age want to live like they did? I turned to Charity. She laughed at me. ‘Yes, me too!’ she said. ‘There is so much hate and unhappiness in the world. But not in our families.’

‘Try mine,’ I muttered.

Their faces grew serious. ‘I think Miriam was wicked,’ Damaris said at last. ‘She has brought great unhappiness to her family and to the whole community.’

‘She’s unhappy too!’ I burst out. ‘You didn’t see her! She’s aching to come home.’

‘It is easy, then,’ said Charity. ‘She can just come back. We think Uncle Caleb is amazingly kind to her.’

‘For crying down the sink!’ I yelled. ‘Is it kind to stop somebody using their God-given talent?’

‘She must find some other way of channelling that talent so that it is in tune with God’s law,’ Damaris said.

‘Like what?’ I snapped.

‘Needlework, gardening. Creating a beautiful garden is glorifying the Lord. Producing children and nurturing them in God’s love.’

Shit.

Damaris slid a look at me. ‘Which brings us back to the original question: are you going to take Miriam’s place?’

‘I guess I do already.’ I lay on my back and pulled my stupid skirt up to sun my legs. ‘I get to do heaps of housework and baby-sitting.’

‘No,’ said Charity, ‘we do not mean like that.’

‘Well, what do you mean, then?’

‘Miriam’s chosen partner was Gideon,’ said Damaris and then she shut up. There was an electric silence.

‘What d’you mean, her chosen partner?’

Damaris was staring at me. ‘The man she was to marry.’

‘On her sixteenth birthday,’ Charity added.

They had my attention. I sat up in a hurry. ‘You’re kidding!’

‘We had the betrothal celebration on her fourteenth birthday,’ said Damaris. ‘It was fun.’

I couldn’t take it in. Sixteen? Married? I stared from one to the other of them, sitting there in the sun in an ordinary New Zealand back garden, so near the twenty-first century you could practically smell it.

‘Did she like him?’ I managed to ask at last.

‘Oh yes. He is nice. We all like Gideon. He is fun — not intense, like Daniel.’ Damaris pulled a face.

Charity giggled, ‘Damaris is to be betrothed to Daniel, but she is not very happy about it. That is why she hopes you will not take Miriam’s place.’

Damaris smiled dreamily. ‘I would much rather have Gideon. He is so cool — and he will be twenty when I am sixteen.’

I couldn’t say anything, my jaw wouldn’t work. I just stared at them and felt very pale and very shaky. ‘Do you think,’ I asked slowly, struggling to form each word, ‘do you really think that Uncle Caleb will try to marry me off? At sixteen?’

‘Why would you not want to be married?’ Charity asked. ‘It is what all girls of our faith want.’

May the good Lord save me! I shut my eyes. ‘How many are there in your faith?’ I asked. How many men did they have who wanted wives and was that why they were so all-fired keen to get Mum back? A marriageable woman with a marriageable daughter.

‘There are twenty-three families in Wanganui,’ Damaris said. ‘But we might all move to Nelson and join a community there. They were talking of it before Miriam died’

‘She isn’t dead!’ I gritted my teeth, but they just smiled at me and carried on as if I hadn’t spoken.

‘My father says it will be easier to keep the Rule if the children are not exposed to evil influences while they are growing up,’ Charity said.

Didn’t their mothers have any opinions? ‘When d’you think they’ll go?’ I’d be out of it by then, for sure.

Damaris flipped over on her stomach. ‘Soon, my father thinks. We will have our own school too. It will be so much better.’

I shivered in the hot sun and looked into a future where there would be nobody who thought the same way I did. A future that was going to be increasingly difficult to escape from.

Damaris was watching me. ‘If you do not like it, why do you not just walk out? That is what Miriam did.’

I sat with my head leaning on my hunched up knees. ‘I don’t think I could. My mother … How would my mother find me again? I don’t even have her address. And Maggie. Maggie’s a mess right now. And where would I go? Where did Miriam go?’

Charity shrugged. ‘My father says she wandered around until the police picked her up. They took
her home and Uncle Caleb refused to have her back unless she repented, so they took her away again.’

‘There is a guidance counsellor at our school. Go and see her on Monday,’ Damaris suggested. ‘She could tell you how to get away.’

She sure was keen to get rid of me. ‘You don’t need to worry about your precious Gideon. Nobody, but nobody is going to tell me who to marry. Especially not when I’m only sixteen.’ Especially not to somebody who believes the dumb stuff you guys believe.

Just then, Dorcas called us in to help prepare afternoon tea. It was pretty sumptuous, she must’ve been cooking all day. We called the children in. Abraham was the oldest male there so he got to say grace. It bugged the hell out of me the way the women put themselves in the background.

The kids all waited politely while the women handed the plates around. They only took one cake or sausage roll at a time. They didn’t talk with a full mouth. They didn’t fight or push or spill their drinks. It made me sick.

‘Did you have a nice chat with Damaris and Charity?’ Aunt Naomi asked on the way home.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was most enlightening.’

‘They are lovely girls,’ said my aunt sadly. Thinking of Miriam, I guess — more important in her absence than she ever was when she was with them, I’ll bet my knickers.

On Sunday we went to church as usual but what was different for me was I started looking at people instead of keeping my head down, swearing to myself and wishing I was back home. As we were having the fellowship meal afterwards, Charity and Damaris grabbed me. ‘Aunt Naomi, may Esther help us pour the tea?’

Aunt Naomi smiled, ‘Of course. I am happy to see her fitting in.’

Maggie hadn’t let go of my skirt all morning so we took her with us. Charity pulled up a chair. ‘You pour the milk, Magdalene.’

It was a great job for finding out who people were. All the adults were called aunt and uncle. ‘Are you all related?’ I asked.

Damaris giggled. ‘Heavens no! Only by faith.’

I poured tea for Aunt Adah — not a name I’d keep in my head in case I ever did have children — and one for Uncle Theophilus. Holy hell! Not that he came and got it himself. His daughter, who was called Kezia, trotted over and got it for him. ‘Gideon was asking where you were,’ she hissed at Damaris.

‘Really?’ Damaris’s face glowed.

Kezia was busting with news. ‘And Daniel heard him!’

So what? That was significant? It seemed that it was.

‘What did he say?’ Charity gasped.

Kezia glanced at Maggie, but she was carefully wiping up three drops of spilled milk. ‘Nothing! Absolutely nothing. I swear to you!’

Charity and Damaris absorbed this stunning piece of news. It seemed to me that it swelled inside them until they were about to burst with the impact of it.

‘So what?’ I cried at last. ‘What’s so g … , er — really important about him saying nothing?’

They looked at me, pity in their eyes. ‘He is intended for Damaris. If he wants to keep her …’ and Charity’s tone suggested who wouldn’t want to keep her, ‘then he should be making it clear that she is his.’

I poured tea for the very young, very pregnant woman who had been at the Circle of Fellowship. Aunt Thomasina. She took it and one for her husband who sat on his chuff and let that poor girl run after him. His hands were too big for his wrists, his hair was spiky and stuck out from his head and she smiled at him like he was God on earth.

I turned back to the other three girls. ‘So how does he make it clear Damaris is his?’ In my world, he’d put his arm round her and kiss her and stare into her eyes, but I couldn’t see that happening here.

Kezia was scornful. ‘You don’t know much, do you? He should have said to Gideon, “She is over there, would you like me to pass on your good wishes?”’

‘Or he could have said,’ Charity added, ‘something like, “she is doing what she does every Sunday and do you not think the light of the Lord is in her face this day?”’

‘Is that instead of saying she’s looking particularly gorgeous today?’ I asked.