The Testaments (35 page)

It was really close. We almost kicked the bucket. We could have been swept out with the tide and ended up in South America, but more likely picked up by Gilead and strung up on the Wall. I’m so proud of Agnes—after that night she was really my sister. She kept on going even though she was at the end. There was no way I could have rowed the inflatable by myself.

The rocks were treacherous. There was a lot of slippery seaweed. I couldn’t see very well because it was so dark. Agnes was beside me, which was a good thing because by that time I was delirious. My left arm felt as if it wasn’t mine—as if it was detached from me and was just held on to my body by the sleeve.

We clambered over big rocks and sloshed through pools of water, slipping and sliding. I didn’t know where we were going, but as long as we went uphill it would be away from the waves. I was almost asleep, I was so tired. I was thinking, I’ve made it this far and now I’m going to lose it and fall and brain myself. Becka said,
It’s not much farther.
I couldn’t remember her being in the inflatable but she was beside us on the beach, I couldn’t see her because it was too dark. Then she said,
Look up there. Follow the lights.

Someone shouted from a cliff overhead. There were lights moving along the top, and a voice yelled, “There they are!” And another one called, “Over here!” I was too tired to yell back. Then it got sandier, and the lights moved down a hill towards us along to the right.

Holding one of them was Ada. “You did it,” she said, and I said, “Yeah,” and then I fell over. Someone picked me up and started carrying me. It was Garth. He said, “What’d I tell you? Way to go! I knew you’d make it.” That made me grin.

We went up a hill and there were bright lights and people with television cameras, and a voice said, “Give us a smile.” And then I blacked out.

They airlifted us to the Campobello Refugee Medical Centre and stuffed antibiotics into me, so when I woke up my arm wasn’t so puffy and sore.

My sister, Agnes, was there beside the bed, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said
RUN FOR OUR LIFE
,
HELP FIGHT LIVER CANCER
. I thought that was funny because that’s what we’d been doing: running for our lives. She was holding my hand. Ada was there beside her, and Elijah, and Garth. They were all grinning like mad.

My sister said to me, “It’s a miracle. You saved our lives.”

“We’re really proud of both of you,” said Elijah. “Though I’m sorry about the inflatable—they were supposed to take you into the harbour.”

“You’re all over the news,” said Ada. “ ‘Sisters defy the odds.’ ‘Baby Nicole’s daring escape from Gilead.’ ”

“Also the document cache,” said Elijah. “That’s been on the news too. It’s explosive. So many crimes, among the top brass in Gilead—it’s much more than we’ve ever hoped for. The Canadian media are releasing one disruptive secret after another, and pretty soon heads will roll. Our Gilead source really came through for us.”

“Is Gilead gone?” I said. I felt happy but also unreal, as if it hadn’t been me doing the things we’d done. How could we have taken those risks? What had carried us through?

“Not yet,” said Elijah. “But it’s the beginning.”

“Gilead News is saying it’s all fake,” said Garth. “A Mayday plot.”

Ada gave a short growly laugh. “Of course that’s what they’d say.”

“Where’s Becka?” I asked. I was feeling dizzy again, so I closed my eyes.

“Becka’s not here,” Agnes said gently. “She didn’t come with us. Remember?”

“She did come. She was there on the beach,” I whispered. “I heard her.”

I think I went to sleep. Then I was awake again. “Does she still have a fever?” said a voice.

“What happened?” I said.

“Shh,” said my sister. “It’s all right. Our mother is here. She’s been so worried about you. Look, she’s right beside you.”

I opened my eyes, and it was very bright, but there was a woman standing there. She looked sad and happy, both at once; she was crying a little. She looked almost like the picture in the Bloodlines file, only older.

I felt it must be her, so I reached up my arms, the good one and the healing one, and our mother bent over my hospital bed, and we gave each other a one-armed hug. She only used the one arm because she had her other arm around Agnes, and she said, “My darling girls.”

She smelled right. It was like an echo, of a voice you can’t quite hear.

And she smiled a little and said, “Of course you don’t remember me. You were too young.”

And I said, “No. I don’t. But it’s okay.”

And my sister said, “Not yet. But I will.”

Then I went back to sleep.

Our time together is drawing short, my reader. Possibly you will view these pages of mine as a fragile treasure box, to be opened with the utmost care. Possibly you will tear them apart, or burn them: that often happens to words.

Perhaps you’ll be a student of history, in which case I hope you’ll make something useful of me: a warts-and-all portrait, a definitive account of my life and times, suitably footnoted; though if you don’t accuse me of bad faith I will be astonished. Or, in fact, not astonished: I will be dead, and the dead are hard to astonish.

I picture you as a young woman, bright, ambitious. You’ll be looking to make a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist by your time. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does. You’re frowning slightly, a habit that will increase as you age. I hover behind you, peering over your shoulder: your muse, your unseen inspiration, urging you on.

You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits as you go, developing the fascinated but also bored hatred biographers so often come to feel for their subjects. How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

And so we come to my end. It’s late: too late for Gilead to prevent its coming destruction. I’m sorry I won’t live to see it—the conflagration, the downfall. And it’s late in my life. And it’s late at night: a cloudless night, as I observed while walking here. The full moon is out, casting her equivocal corpse-glow over all. Three Eyes saluted me as I passed them: in moonlight their faces were skulls, as mine must have been to them.

They will come too late, the Eyes. My messengers have flown. When worst comes to worst—as it will very soon—I’ll make a quick exit. A needleful or two of morphine will do it. Best that way: if I allowed myself to live, I would disgorge too much truth. Torture is like dancing: I’m too old for it. Let the younger ones practise their bravery. Though they may not have a choice about that, since they lack my privileges.

But now I must end our conversation. Goodbye, my reader. Try not to think too badly of me, or no more badly than I think of myself.

In a moment I’ll slot these pages into Cardinal Newman and slide it back onto my shelf. In my end is my beginning, as someone once said. Who was that? Mary, Queen of Scots, if history does not lie. Her motto, with a phoenix rising from its ashes, embroidered on a wall hanging. Such excellent embroiderers, women are.

The footsteps approach, one boot after another. Between one breath and the next the knock will come.

Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, International Historical Association Convention, Passamaquoddy, Maine, June 29–30, 2197.

CRESCENT MOON:
First, I would like to acknowledge that this event is taking place on the traditional territory of the Penobscot Nation, and I thank the elders and ancestors for permitting our presence here today. I would also like to point out that our location—Passamaquoddy, formerly Bangor—was not only a crucial jumping-off point for refugees fleeing Gilead but was also a key hub of the Underground Railroad in antebellum times, now more than three hundred years ago.
As
they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

What a pleasure to welcome you all here to the Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies! How our organization has grown, and with such good reason. We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.

A little housekeeping: for those who would like some Penobscot River fishing, there are two excursions planned; please remember your sunscreen and insect repellent. Details of these expeditions, and of the Gilead Period town architectural tour, are in your symposium files. We have added a Recreational Gilead Period Hymn Sing at the Church of Saint Jude, in company with three of the town’s school choirs. Tomorrow is Period Costume Re-enactment Day, for those who have come equipped. I do ask you not to get carried away, as happened at the Tenth Symposium.

Now please welcome a speaker familiar to us all, both from his written publications and from his recent fascinating television series,
Inside Gilead: Daily Life in a Puritan Theocracy
. His presentation of objects from museum collections around the world—especially the handcrafted textile items—has been truly spellbinding. I give you: Professor Pieixoto.

PIEIXOTO:
Thank you, Professor Crescent Moon, or should I say Madam President? We all congratulate you on your promotion, a thing that would never have happened in Gilead. (
Applause.
) Now that women are usurping leadership positions to such a terrifying extent, I hope you will not be too severe on me. I did take to heart your comments about my little jokes at the Twelfth Symposium—I admit some of them were not in the best of taste—and I will attempt not to reoffend. (
Modified applause.
)

It is gratifying to see such a large turnout. Who would have thought that Gilead Studies—neglected for so many decades—would suddenly have gained so greatly in popularity? Those of us who have laboured in the dim and obscure corners of academe for so long are not used to the bewildering glare of the limelight. (
Laughter.
)

You will all remember the excitement of a few years ago, when a footlocker containing the collection of tapes attributed to the Gilead Handmaid known as “Offred” was discovered. That find was made right here in Passamaquoddy, behind a false wall. Our investigations and our tentative conclusions were presented at our last symposium, and have already given rise to an impressive number of peer-reviewed papers.

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent studies have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat. The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data—coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against repressive digital surveillance in many countries—means that it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must be assumed. Within that range, however, we are as confident as any historian can usually be. (
Laughter.
)

Since the discovery of those momentous tapes, there have been two other spectacular finds, which, if authentic, will add substantially to our understanding of this long-gone period in our collective history.

First, the manuscript known as
The Ardua Hall Holograph
. This series of handwritten pages was discovered inside a nineteenth-century edition of Cardinal Newman’s
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
. The book was purchased at a general auction by J. Grimsby Dodge, lately of Cambridge, Massachusetts. His nephew inherited the collection and sold it to a dealer in antiques who recognized its potential; thus it was brought to our attention.

Here is a slide of the first page. The handwriting is legible to those trained in archaic cursive; the pages have been trimmed to fit within the excavation in the Cardinal Newman text. The carbon dating of the paper does not exclude the Late Gilead period, and the ink used in the first pages is a standard drawing ink of the period, black in colour, though after a certain number of pages blue is employed. Writing was forbidden for women and girls, with the exception of the Aunts, but drawing was taught at schools to the daughters of elite families; so a supply of such inks was available.

The Ardua Hall Holograph
claims to have been composed by a certain “Aunt Lydia,” who features somewhat unflatteringly in the series of tapes discovered in the footlocker. Internal evidence suggests that she may also have been the “Aunt Lydia” identified by archaeologists as the main subject of a large and clumsily executed statue discovered in an abandoned chicken battery farm seventy years after the fall of Gilead. The nose of the central figure had been broken off, and one of the other figures was headless, suggesting vandalism. Here is a slide of it; I apologize for the lighting. I took this picture myself, and I am not the world’s best photographer. Budgetary constraints precluded my hiring a professional.
(Laughter.
)

The “Lydia” personage is referenced in several debriefings of deep-cover Mayday agents as having been both ruthless and cunning. We have been unable to find her in the scant amount of televised material surviving from the period, though a framed photograph with “Aunt Lydia” handwritten on the back was unearthed from the rubble of a girls’ school bombed during the collapse of Gilead.

Much points to the same “Aunt Lydia” as our holograph author. But as always we must be cautious. Suppose the manuscript is a forgery; not a clumsy attempt made in our own times to defraud—the paper and ink would quickly expose such a deception—but a forgery from within Gilead itself; indeed, from within Ardua Hall.

What if our manuscript were devised as a trap, meant to frame its object, like the Casket Letters used to bring about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots? Could it be that one of “Aunt Lydia’s” suspected enemies, as detailed in the holograph itself—Aunt Elizabeth, for instance, or Aunt Vidala—resentful of Lydia’s power, craving her position, and familiar with both her handwriting and her verbal style, set out to compose this incriminating document, hoping to have it discovered by the Eyes?

It is remotely possible. But, on the whole, I incline to the view that our holograph is authentic. Certainly it is a fact that someone within Ardua Hall supplied the crucial microdot to the two half-sister fugitives from Gilead whose journey we will examine next. They themselves claim that this personage was Aunt Lydia: why not take them at their word?

Unless, of course, the girls’ story of “Aunt Lydia” is itself a misdirection, intended to protect the identity of the real Mayday double agent in the case of any treachery stemming from within Mayday. There is always that option. In our profession, one mysterious box, when opened, so often conceals another.

This leads us to a pair of documents that are almost certainly authentic. These are labelled as transcriptions of witness testimonies from two young women who, from their own accounts, discovered through the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives kept by the Aunts that they were half-sisters. The speaker who identifies herself as “Agnes Jemima” purports to have grown up inside Gilead. The one styling herself as “Nicole” appears to have been some eight or nine years younger. In her testimony she describes how she learned from two Mayday agents that she was smuggled out of Gilead as an infant.

“Nicole” might seem too young, in years but also in experience, to have been assigned to the hazardous mission the two of them appear to have carried out so successfully, but she was no younger than many involved in resistance operations and spywork over the course of the centuries. Some historians have even argued that persons of that age are especially suitable for such escapades, as the young are idealistic, have an underdeveloped sense of their own mortality, and are afflicted with an exaggerated thirst for justice.

The mission described is thought to have been instrumental in initiating the final collapse of Gilead, since the material smuggled out by the younger sister—a microdot embedded in a scarified tattoo, which I must say is a novel method of information delivery (
laughter
)—revealed a great many discreditable personal secrets pertaining to various high-level officials. Especially noteworthy is a handful of plots devised by Commanders to eliminate other Commanders.

The release of this information touched off the so-called Ba’al Purge that thinned the ranks of the elite class, weakened the regime, and instigated a military putsch as well as a popular revolt. The civil strife and chaos that resulted enabled a campaign of sabotage coordinated by the Mayday Resistance and a series of successful attacks from within certain parts of the former United States, such as the Missouri hill country, the areas in and around Chicago and Detroit, Utah—resentful of the massacre of Mormons that had taken place there—the Republic of Texas, Alaska, and most parts of the West Coast. But that is another story—one that is still being pieced together by military historians.

My focus will be on the witness testimonies themselves, recorded and transcribed most likely for the use of the Mayday Resistance movement. These documents were located in the library of the Innu University in Sheshatshiu, Labrador. No one had discovered them earlier—possibly because the file was not labelled clearly, being entitled “Annals of the
Nellie J. Banks
: Two Adventurers.” Anyone glancing at that group of signifiers would have thought this was an account of ancient liquor smuggling, the
Nellie J. Banks
having been a famous rum-running schooner of the early twentieth century.

It was not until Mia Smith, one of our graduate students in search of a thesis topic, opened the file that the true nature of its contents became apparent. When she passed the material along to me for evaluation, I was very excited by it, since first-hand narratives from Gilead are vanishingly rare—especially any concerning the lives of girls and women. It is hard for those deprived of literacy to leave such records.

But we historians have learned to interrogate our own first assumptions. Was this double-bladed narrative a clever fake? A team of our graduate students set out to follow the route described by the supposed witnesses—first plotting their probable course on maps both terrestrial and marine, then travelling this route themselves in hopes of uncovering any extant clues. Maddeningly, the texts themselves are not dated. I trust that if you yourselves are ever involved in an escapade such as this, you will be more helpful to future historians and will include the month and year. (
Laughter.
)

After a number of dead ends and a rat-plagued night spent in a derelict lobster canning factory in New Hampshire, the team interviewed an elderly woman residing here in Passamaquoddy. She said her great-grandfather told a story about transporting people to Canada—mostly women—on a fishing boat. He’d even kept a map of the area that the great-granddaughter gifted to us, saying she was about to throw out that old junk so no one would have to tidy it up after she was dead.

I’ll just bring up a slide of this map.

Using the laser pointer, I will now trace the most likely route taken by our two young refugees: by car to here, by bus to here, by pickup truck to here, by motorboat to here, and then on the
Nellie J. Banks
to this beach near Harbourville, Nova Scotia. From there they appear to have been airlifted to a refugee processing and medical centre on Campobello Island, New Brunswick.

Our team of students next visited Campobello Island, and on it the summer home built by the family of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the nineteenth century within which the refugee centre was temporarily located. Gilead wished to sever any ties with this edifice, and blew up the causeway from the Gilead mainland to prevent any land-based escapes by those hankering after more democratic ways. The house went through some rough times in those days but has since been restored and is run as a museum; regrettably, much of the original furniture has vanished.

Our two young women may have spent at least a week in this house, as by their own accounts both were in need of treatment for hypothermia and exposure, and, in the case of the younger sister, for sepsis due to an infection. While searching the building, our enterprising young team discovered some intriguing incisions in the woodwork of a second-storey windowsill.

Here they are on this slide—painted over but still visible.

This is an
N
, for “Nicole” perhaps—you can trace the upstroke, here—and an
A
, and a
G
: could these refer to “Ada” and “Garth”? Or does the
A
point to “Agnes”? There is a
V
—for “Victoria”?—slightly below it, here. Over here, the letters
AL
, referring possibly to the “Aunt Lydia” of their testimonies.