Gather the Daughters Read online

  “Watch you don’t spill,” says Mother as Vanessa presses her fingers into the table. “Father wants you to go to bed early tonight,” she adds. “He says you don’t sleep enough.” Vanessa looks at her, but Mother is busy scraping burnt crumbs into a bucket by the wall. Sighing, Vanessa dips her fingers into the milk and presses them into the remaining cookie crumbs, making a paste. “Oh, and Janet Balthazar is birthing soon, so we’ll be attending that. Probably in the next couple of days.”

  Vanessa winces. Janet Balthazar has had two defectives, born blue and slimy and dead like drowned worms in a puddle. If she has a third defective, she won’t be allowed to have any more babies. Her husband, Gilbert, will be encouraged to take another wife. Occasionally, women choose to take the final draft rather than live childless. Pastor Saul likes to commend those women.

  Vanessa can’t imagine quiet, boring Gilbert Balthazar making any big decisions. He and Janet will probably grow old and sad, and then die quietly and without fuss when he is too useless to do anything. Hopefully he’ll have taught someone else how to forge by then. All the boys want to learn, betting that he won’t manage to have children and will have to train someone’s second son. He is constantly swatting them away from his fire and yelling at them to go play.

  “Do we have to go?” says Vanessa. She remembers Janet’s birthing of her last defective, which was horrifying and repulsive.

  “It’s our duty,” says Mother, which means yes.

  “Can I go into the library?” asks Vanessa.

  “If your hands are very clean,” says Mother. Vanessa recites the next phrase under her breath with Mother: “I want you to remember how lucky you are to have books at your fingertips. Nobody else on the island has that privilege.”

  All wanderers are also collectors. How could they not be, wading through the detritus of civilization past? Each wanderer family not only inherits a pile of treasures, but adds to it each time the wanderer visits the wastelands. Sometimes it’s all a jumble: delicate flowery plates and glittering jewels and pieces of machines. Sometimes there’s a theme; the wanderer Aarons have pictures and sculptures of horses, their strong legs unfolding while their delicate necks arch forward, eerie to island children who have never seen anything larger than a sheep or faster than a dog. Father, like all the Adams back to their original ancestor, brings back books. Their library is nearly as big as the rest of the house’s rooms put together. Father hid some books in a secured chest, saying they are only for the eyes of wanderers, and Vanessa has never been able to budge the lock. But most of the books are just stories, and these he keeps standing proudly on simple shelves that run around all four walls. The books are staggering in their variety: some as tiny as the palm of a hand, some so big Vanessa has to prop them on her stomach to lift them. They are covered in buttery leather finer than she’s ever seen, or cloth woven so tightly it hurts the eyes to pick out the warp and weft, or thick paper splashed with illustrations that never flake off. Vanessa thinks the prettiest is the book that has a very thin layer of gold on the peripheries of its pages, so when it’s closed, it looks like a shining treasure. Despite its outward glory, The Innovations of the Holy Roman Empire has no pictures to tell Vanessa what the Holy Roman Empire was, and no definitions to tell her exactly what it invented.

  Father scratches out the publication dates of all his books, saying wasteland years are meaningless, but he leaves in the names of the authors and everything else. The names bowl Vanessa over with their strangeness. Maria Callansworth. Arthur Breton. Adiel Waxman. Salman Rushdie. On the island, everyone bears the family name of an ancestor. First names are approved by the wanderers, the names of someone on the island who is already dead. Vanessa thinks her name is boring; she’d much prefer to be named Salman.

  They have books at school, huge ones that students share during class time. At school they don’t scratch out the dates, but that doesn’t mean much because nobody knows what year it was when the ancestors touched shore. As in Father’s books, the names of the publication locations are exciting and impossible to pronounce. Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Quebec, Seattle. The students have made up stories about what these places were like before they all became the wastelands. Philadelphia had tall buildings of gold that shone in the sun; Albuquerque was a forest always on fire; Quebec had such cold summers that children froze to death in seconds if they went outside; Seattle was under the sea and sent books up to land via metal tunnels.

  Vanessa finds many of the books in Father’s library dull. Father once gave her one he said was good for girls, but it was all about people who wouldn’t call each other by their first names and never thought about anything except getting married (the process of which seemed alarmingly complicated). Father was amused at her report and gave her The Call of the Wild, which she’s read eight times. There are dogs on the island, but not massive and ferocious and strong, like in the book. She learned so much from it; all about sleds, and competitions, and outdoor fires, and wolves. Sometimes she dreams of herself alone in the cold, striding through snowy emptiness with bristling, savage wolves at her side.

  Today, Vanessa picks out a book called Cubist Picasso and flips through the pictures. The first few pages are torn out, and the rest are only images. Father says he doesn’t know what Cubist or Picasso are. She likes the strange pictures showing things that don’t exist, grown people with eyes on one side of their head like defectives. Lindy Aaron once let her touch a painting, even though she wasn’t supposed to, and it felt rough and thick under her fingers. These images look like they would feel that way, but under her skin is just paper.

  After a while, Vanessa tires of lying around, and goes outside. Farms and gardens spread green in ragged patterns under the hazy sun, and the Saul orchards are a faint, dark line on the horizon. Since Father is a wanderer, he receives regular tribute from every island family of the freshest, most delicious food that the fields, gardens, and sea have to offer; Vanessa’s family thus only needs a small vegetable garden, and creamy grasses sweep and lean in the wind around their home.

  A dog is trotting around, brown and thin. Vanessa calls to her, and the dog lopes over happily. It’s Reed, one of the Josephs’ dogs. Reed puts her big head on Vanessa’s breastbone and grunts, and wriggles around like she is trying to bore through her rib cage. Vanessa scratches her ears, and the warmth from Reed’s forehead spreads through her. Vanessa wishes she were a dog; all she’d ever have to do is run around and eat things. Although so many litters of puppies are drowned that she would need luck to make it to doghood.

  Dinner is mutton and potatoes. Vanessa dislikes mutton, although Mother always tells her to be thankful for any meat they have. Her attempts to be thankful have failed; the mutton tastes like dirt. Father eats it with gusto, closing his teeth over the fibers and chewing lustily. Looking around, she sees chewing mouths, closing on flesh and turning it into slime, and she clenches her jaw against the turn of her stomach. She nibbles at a potato with butter and some burnt, crunchy mutton skin. Eventually Father notices and says, “Vanessa.” Forcing the mutton down, Vanessa barely chews, pretending she is a dog. Dogs don’t chew, they just swallow.

  “Would you like something to help you sleep tonight?” asks Mother. Father frowns. He thinks the sleeping draft is unnecessary and is always disappointed when Vanessa takes it. Vanessa nods at Mother, careful not to look at him. Her evening glass of milk has a bitter, acrid undertaste.

  That night, Vanessa barely awakens. When she does, the wind is making everything move rhythmically and tree branches are slamming into the walls. It’s almost summer, she thinks, and then darkness overtakes her once more.

  Chapter Two

  Vanessa

  The church is halfway underground. Mother says that when she was a child, it was mostly on top of the ground, but it’s been sinking ever since.

  When the ancestors came to the island, they built a massive stone church before they even built their own houses. What they didn’t know was that such a heavy bu
ilding would sink down into the mud during the summer rains. The enormous church slowly disappeared below the surface, its parishioners unconsciously hunching their shoulders lower and lower as the light filtering through the windows became obliterated, like a black blind drawing upward. Undaunted, the builders added more stones, and the church, in response, kept sinking. Every ten years or so, when the roof is almost level with the ground, all the men on the island gather to build stone walls on top of it, and the roof becomes the new floor. Vanessa asked Mother why they couldn’t just use wood, but Mother said it was tradition, and it would be disrespectful to the ancestors to change it. All the eligible stones on the island are long mortared into vanished church walls. The wanderers have to bring new ones in slowly from the wastelands; if they tried to bring them all at once, it would sink the ferry.

  Vanessa can’t help but think that if she were in charge, she would build it just a little bit differently, so it might last longer. But she suspects that when she is a woman, she will see no problem with the current method of church building. She’s never seen an adult express anything but enthusiasm for the process of building up and then sinking the church.

  The stones the wanderers bring in are beautiful and multicolored, and Vanessa finds the texture pleasing, the way they stick out from the clay walls. She likes to run her hands over the smoothest rocks, the same way she likes to rub a perfectly round pebble that she keeps in her pocket. One stone has the fossil of a small eel imprinted on it, and all the children enjoy staring at the graceful patterns of its bones.

  It’s disappointing to go down the long set of stairs into the dim building. The windows are carefully constructed from larger fragments of glass, which makes them appear fractured, like someone smashed them and then sealed them up again. Currently they are half buried in black mud. Sunlight hovers faintly near the ceiling, spreading in delicate veils. Vanessa always watches the windows carefully, even if she’s listening to the sermon. Letty swears that once a huge animal, like a big worm but with teeth, swam up against a pane until its white belly was flat against it, writhing and biting until it wriggled away. There are many legends of enormous underground creatures, bigger than the church itself; they glide through summer mud, curling around children in a soft, muscular embrace and then swallowing them whole.

  The pews are polished wood, the smoothest to be found on the island. Although they are worn with the imprints of hundreds of buttocks, Vanessa still slides around uncomfortably; she can never find a place to settle. Pastor Saul is at his lectern, framed by the massive stone wall behind him.

  As usual, he is speaking of the ancestors. “They came from a land where the family had been divided, where father and daughter were set asunder, where sons abandoned their mothers to die alone. Our forefathers had a vision, a vision that could not be satisfied in a world of flame, war, and ignorance. The fire and pestilence that spread across the land were second only to the fire and pestilence of thought and deed hovering like a black smoke.”

  There is an old tapestry, fragile as a moth’s wing and colossal as a cloud, hung with care on the wall behind him. It depicts the founding of the island, each ancestor delineated by slightly different hair color. The ancestors alight on shore, build the church, build their houses, have children, have meetings with different children under fruit trees, stride around taming nature or yelling at birds (it’s hard to tell), comfort old men, die, and rise into the sky. The cloth used for the tapestry, while faded and tattered, is still gorgeous: furry green material with golden threads winking through it, water-spattered maroon cloth thick and slippery as a cut of meat, a pale yellow that Vanessa knows was once golden and luscious as a setting sun.

  Alma Moses, another wanderer’s daughter, once told Vanessa that her father mentioned a machine that went awry in the wastelands and turned everything to flame. That pretty much the entire world caught fire. A lot of what the pastor says sounds like it. Fire first, pestilence after. The scourge. But then, wanderers go to the wastelands all the time and come back with cloth, metal, paper, even animals, none showing any sign of immolation. Perhaps everything burned up and then grew back again. Hannah Solomon, another wanderer’s daughter, said her father told her it was a disease, a disease that rotted flesh and killed people where they stood. Another girl, June Joseph, said that then the dead people rose and shambled around, setting things on fire with their eyes until their corpses rotted, but June is known to exaggerate and her father is a goat farmer anyway.

  Now the pastor is talking about women, which as far as Vanessa can tell is his favorite subject. It gets him more worked up than anything. She pictures him striding about in his bedroom at night, lambasting his wife when all she wants to do is go to sleep. He has two sons, so she would be the only woman available to upbraid.

  “When a daughter submits to her father’s will, when a wife submits to her husband, when a woman is a helper to a man, we are worshiping the ancestors and their vision. Our ancestors sit at the feet of the Creator, and as their hearts are warmed, they in turn warm His. These women worship the ancestors with each right action, with each right intention. Surely the ancestors will open the gates of heaven, and our grandfathers’ grandfathers will welcome us with open arms.” Vanessa feels Father staring at her and reluctantly stops gazing out the window.

  “Only when these acts of submission are done with an open heart and a willing mind,” the pastor continues, “only when this is done with a spirit of righteousness, can we reach true salvation.” Vanessa knows that if you don’t get saved and go to heaven, you slip into the darkness below forever. Once, before she started having her nightmare, she asked Mother if that meant going underground, where the monsters lived. Mother laughed, but then sobered and said maybe. Thanks to her dream, Vanessa is now intimately familiar with the darkness below and the terror it brings. She struggles to be righteous all the time, especially in her thoughts. She imagines her ancestor, Philip Adam, scrutinizing each unworthy thought that comes into her mind and making a black mark on a piece of paper.

  “Men, we are not without task in this,” warns the pastor. “We must treat our daughters with kindness and sensitivity. We must not hurt them at a whim, or damage them, but engage with them as the ancestors contracted when they left a forbidding land. We must deliver them safe, wise, and loved to their husbands. We must allow our wives to feel cared for, as cared for as they felt in the arms of their fathers as young children.”

  Vanessa turns to look back at Caitlin Jacob, who always has fingerprint bruises on her arms, just as the people sitting near Caitlin turn their heads to look at something else.

  “Our society is built on our women,” says the pastor, “on dutiful daughters and dutiful wives, but we must help them and protect them. We must be good shepherds. We must remember the teachings of the ancestors, and why they came to this land.”

  There is movement in the corner of Vanessa’s vision, and she realizes with a start that Janey Solomon is staring at her from a few pews over. Vanessa and Janey are the only girls on the island with red hair, which gives them a certain status they would enjoy even without their other attributes. Vanessa’s is a clear, dark brown-red, which she finds boring next to Janey’s hair, which burns like fire. A red that is almost orange, it glistens and sparks, its coppery strands crackling outward. She seems to give off her own light from where she sits.

  Vanessa hesitantly meets Janey’s eyes, which are gray to the point of colorlessness, and suddenly their pupils dilate until her eyes seem black. Frowning, Vanessa remembers the last time Janey stared at her, years and years ago, and what happened afterward with Father the same week. Her heart beats faster. Can Janey see the future?

  Everyone is afraid of Janey. She hasn’t reached fruition at the age of seventeen, which is unheard of. They say she eats almost nothing, to keep herself from it, only just enough to keep her eyes open and her blood flowing through her veins. Vanessa tried it once, to see what it would be like to eat almost nothing. She got tired and hung
ry by the afternoon, and ended up eating two dinners.

  Part of Janey’s aura of intimidation stems from memories of summer. When summer arrives, Janey and her younger sister, Mary, are unstoppable. Even the boys are scared of them. They say Janey gouged Jack Saul’s eye out and then made it look like an accident. They say her father is so scared of her he doesn’t even talk inside the house. They say nobody’s ever laid a hand on her without regretting it.

  And now she’s staring at Vanessa. Breathless, Vanessa glances back, then away, unable to meet the black gaze. What does she want? Vanessa looks away until she feels dizzy and then looks back at her. But now she sees Janey’s staring past her, looking at somebody else—or maybe looking at nothing and running in circles in her strange, fiery head.

  Vanessa watches Janey’s incandescent braid, so brightly colored it seems to move, writhing and snaking over her shoulder. When it’s time to stand, Vanessa forgets to get up until Father touches her shoulder. She jumps.

  It’s time for the reading of the island laws, which the pastor calls the ancestors’ commandments, and everyone else calls the shalt-nots. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not listen at thy neighbor’s walls. Vanessa’s mind drifts lightly as her mouth forms words so familiar that she could recite them in her sleep. Thou shalt not disobey thy father. Thou shalt not enter another man’s home uninvited. Thou shalt not raise more than two children. Thou shalt not fail to give thy wanderer proper bounty. There are plenty of shalt-nots, but she can’t remember a time when she didn’t know them. Father told her once that there used to be only ten or so, but the numbers rose as the wisdom of the wanderers increased. The voice of the congregation swells to support her absentminded murmur. Thou shalt not forget thy ancestor. Thou shalt not touch a daughter who has bled until she enters her summer of fruition.