Chapter 3
Monday, 4:00 p.m.
You’re picking up where you left off.
The dress hung wrong at the left shoulder, and Lavina said it was the shoulder's fault.
“You carry it higher than the other one, Selah. You always have. Drop it.”
Selah dropped her shoulder. The dress didn't move. Lavina pinched the fabric between two fingers, drew it back, and set a pin in it that grazed the skin without pricking. Lavina never pricked.
The sewing room was on the second floor, on the yard side, a long room with pine-plank walls no one had ever painted and a window that looked out on the cattle trailer and, beyond it, the alfalfa field and the grain shed. At four o'clock the sun came in at a slant and lit up the dust in the air, thousands of motes turning slowly and never settling. There was the big cutting table, the treadle machine, the electric one they used only for sheets, the boxes of spools, and, along the wall, nails driven in at a man's height where the dresses in progress hung. Since Thursday only one nail had been in use. The one with the sage-green dress.
Selah stood on the little stool with her arms held slightly away from her body, the way she'd been taught. She was hot. The new fabric smelled of sizing and of the cardboard boxes at the co-op store, and under the high collar a seam scratched at the base of her neck.
Jemima, on her knees, was checking the length in front. She was thirty-three, with bluish shadows under her eyes and a four-month-old baby asleep in a basket by the door that she glanced at every third pin.
“She'll be beautiful,” Jemima said. “She'll be very beautiful.”
She said it to Lavina, not to Selah. You don't tell a girl she's beautiful. You tell the other mothers, over her head.
Under the cutting table, Delphia was playing with the empty spools. She lined them up in rows on the floor and rolled them into each other. She was six, and her braid was so thin it looked like a piece of string. Every so often her small hand slipped out from under the table and took a full spool from the box, and Lavina, without looking, said, “Delphia.” The hand gave the spool back.
And at the far end of the room, by the window, on the low chair, their mother was sewing.
Verla didn't speak. She had the hem of the skirt across her knees, unfolded, a yard of sage green spilling down to the floor, and she was sewing it stitch by stitch, by hand, with a needle as long as a finger. She didn't look up when Lavina talked about the shoulder. She didn't look up when Jemima said Selah would be beautiful. She never looked up. At the House, in the yard, at the store, Verla Hallam watched the ground one step ahead of her feet, always the same step.
On Sunday night, after prayers, her father had called her into the study.
He hadn't closed the door. He never closed the door with his daughters. He was standing behind the desk, one hand flat on the wood, and behind him there was the black window and the lamp with the green shade. He hadn't asked her to sit.
“Saturday you'll be given. The Father received it.”
There it was. Eight words. She had been waiting for them for months, since the day her child's dress had been replaced with a long one, since she'd started seeing the other mothers look at her across the table as if they were measuring something. She had thought she would be afraid. She wasn't afraid. She was cold, that was all, in her hands and in her feet, as if she'd been put out in the yard in her nightgown.
“Yes, Father.”
He didn't say to whom. She didn't ask. You don't ask. The name comes the night before, that's the rule, so the girl won't have time to get ideas, and so the man will be to her like a door you open without having looked through the keyhole.
On her way out of the study she had passed the kitchen. The three mothers were there, Lavina, Jemima, and her own mother at the back, at the sink. Lavina had come over, taken her face in both hands, and told her what you tell a girl.
“Bend and bloom.”
Jemima had repeated it. Her mother hadn't said anything. She was washing a pot that was already clean.
“Arms up.”
Selah raised her arms. Lavina wrapped a tape measure around her chest, noted something in her head, took out two pins, put one back. The sun had moved; now it touched the back of Delphia's neck where she'd half fallen asleep against a chair leg, a spool in each fist.
“Go get the gray thread, Selah,” Lavina said. “In the box by your mother. Careful. Don't step on the hem.”
Selah stepped down off the stool. The dress hung heavy on her shoulders. She crossed the room in small steps, holding up the skirt with one hand, and crouched by the low chair to dig through the sewing box, an old tin biscuit box rusted at the corners.
From there, she saw her mother's skirt.
Not the green dress on her lap. Her own skirt, the gray one she wore every day, that came down to her ankles. A sprig of dry sagebrush had caught in the hem, a little gray-green twist snagged in the stitches, the kind that doesn't grow in yards, the kind you bring back when you've been walking in the dirt.
Selah looked at the hem. She looked at her mother's hands, red, chapped at the knuckles, drawing the needle through without a tremor. She looked at the lowered face, the gray braid pinned up in a crown, the part dead straight down the middle.
Her mother went only from the kitchen to the dairy, from the dairy to the laundry room, from the laundry room to the sewing room, and on Sundays to the House, always along the street. But in Peniel the wind put sagebrush everywhere, even in the sheets on the line and in the little ones' hair.
She found the gray thread. She stood up. She didn't make anything of it. There are things in Peniel you see and put away at once, without looking at them, the way you put a plate back on a shelf without checking whether it's cracked.
“Thank you,” Lavina said.
Later, when the pins were all in place and the dress had gone back to its nail, Selah stood in front of it for a while in her shift, arms crossed over her chest.
She was thinking about Ket.
She wasn't allowed to. Ket was lost, and you don't name a lost one. So even in her head she said “she.” She remembered her the way you remember warmth.
The last night, they had slept in the same bed, like always. Selah had put her feet against her sister's calves, like always, and her sister had said “Sel, your feet,” like always, and hadn't pulled her legs away. In the morning the place beside her was cold. Not lukewarm. Cold. The sheet had been pulled straight, smoothed flat, the way you pull a sheet when you want it to look like nobody used it.
Nobody mentioned it at breakfast. The other mothers dished out the porridge, the boys went off to the mill, and her mother fed the chickens at the exact hour, like every morning. That evening she was told her sister was lost, by the will of the Father, and that she wasn't to speak of her again. She was six. She had looked for her sister in the attic, in the shed, behind the barn, until someone brought her back by the arm.
And the winter she was eight, early in February, two Watchers had come into the kitchen after supper and talked to her father in the study with the door shut. Afterward her father came to get her from her room. He didn't tell her why. He led her out into the yard, to the cattle trailer, and opened the back gate. Three nights. The frozen straw, the smell of animals long gone, the stars through the gaps between the boards, and the cold climbing up from her feet into her stomach. In the mornings her mother brought her warm milk and said nothing. Every night Selah asked God what her sin was. God didn't answer. Neither did her father. She never found out.
Ever since, when she walked past the trailer, she held her hands one inside the other.
That evening, in the dairy, she was rinsing milk cans with Leora when Amos Pendry came in through the side door carrying a crate of empty bottles. He was seventeen, tall, skinny, his wrists always sticking out of his sleeves. He never spoke to girls. He set the crate down, bent to straighten it, and breathed, without looking at Selah:
“A Watcher saw a gray Corolla in Kanab. Nevada plates. They've been told to keep an eye on it.”
Selah kept scrubbing the can. Leora, beside her, hadn't heard anything; she was humming.
“And they say somebody went up to the water tank Sunday night. Late. They're trying to find out who.”
He picked up the crate and went back out. The door swung twice on its hinges.
The water tank.
Selah went up there every Wednesday. Everybody knew it. People thought she went to pray, and she did pray, a little, at first, before the trucks came. If they were looking for whoever had gone up to the tank, they'd come looking for her. They'd ask her. They'd take away her Wednesdays. That was what she thought of first, and she was ashamed that it was.
A gray Corolla. Nevada. She didn't know anyone in Nevada. She didn't know anyone anywhere.
After the dairy she didn't go straight back. She went through the barn, which was empty at that hour, the cows out in the pasture behind it, the warm smell of hay and manure, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. She stopped in the middle, on the packed dirt.
She wanted to get used to it. On Saturday, someone might ask her. The girls who were given always said something in the morning to the other girls while they were having their hair done. She had heard Prudence Gale say it last year, and Hosanna Yeates before her, with a smile. It's my turn. It had to come out right, it had to come out with a smile.
She straightened up. She said, out loud, to the empty barn:
“It's my turn.”
Her voice rose to the rafters and came back. She tried again, lower, just for herself:
“It's my turn.”
The bulb buzzed.
Selah stood still, her hands clasped in front of her without her deciding to. She had just heard herself. Both times, without meaning to, her voice had gone up at the end, the way a voice goes up when it's asking.