Page 118 of Kiwi Sin
“I’d like to hear you lay out your plan first,” Uncle Aaron said.
The Prophet talked. Nothing we hadn’t heard before, because it was everything on the list Valor had handed out. Open gates. New recruits. Wages for everyone. The gift shop. Aunt Constance giving master knitting classes, Gabriel giving woodworking classes, and Uncle Aaron running it all. Brochures showing it, too, and I could just imagine. Gabriel in a work shirt and braces, shoulder muscles straining, doing something manly with tools. He’d end up as a model after all if he came back here, I thought, and fought an insane urge to giggle.
The Prophet didn’t include me, but then, he didn’t know what I could do.
Uncle Aaron waited through all of it—it took a long time—and then said, “And the tax authorities?”
“The community has always paid taxes,” the Prophet said.
“So they haven’t come around asking for more documentation?” Uncle Aaron asked.
“They’ve asked,” the Prophet said. “The accountants and lawyers are answering. Harassment, that’s all.”
“And the emergency hearing with the Employment Court?” Uncle Aaron asked. “What do the lawyers say about that?”
I could swear that the temperature in the room dropped. The Prophet asked, “How has that knowledge come to your ears?”
“It hasn’t,” Gabriel said. “It’s come to mine.”
The Prophet swiveled his gaze onto him, and Gabriel sat even taller. I was so proud, I wanted to marry him right then.
“False witness,” the Prophet said. “Persecution. Everyone here has willingly given their labor. You can attest to that, Aaron.”
“Mm,” Uncle Aaron said. “What provisions are you taking to deal with sexual abuse in this new world? Child abuse? Spousal abuse? What about the abuse in the past?”
Silence, and the gooseflesh rose on my arms.
“There is no abuse here,” the Prophet said. “Only men and their wives living according to God’s law, and raising their families.” Then he quoted that same thing Uncle Aaron had, that thing I’d heard all my life. “‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’”
Uncle Aaron said, “That isn’t what the law says. It says that a wife has sovereignty over her body, and so does a child, to a lesser extent. To the extent that a parent can’t lay hands on them in anger. How will you address that?”
“We will fight,” the Prophet said, “as we have always fought. Are you with us?”
Uncle Aaron didn’t answer, not quite. He said, “Dove Worthy.”
The air was so cold, I shivered despite my cardigan. The Prophet said, “What about her?”
Uncle Aaron said, “Her sisters want to take her home with them, and they want to talk with their mother.”
“Impossible,” the Prophet said. “She’s barely fourteen. She stays with her parents.”
Loyal spoke for the first time. “Who are you,brother,to take my child from me?”
Gabriel said, “She’s not your child. Her mother is dead and her father’s in prison, and we all know it.”
The Prophet’s eyes flew around the table. Everyone stared back, and everyone, I was fairly sure, trembled somewhere, even if it was deep inside.
Gabriel said, “My father may be loyal. I’m not. Oriana and Priya and Frankie and Daisy will all bear witness to their abuse at the hands of their father, and I’ll testify to what I’ve seen. Oriana and Patience Trueblood laid complaints two days ago against Valor for sexual assault, going back to the age of four and ending with an attack I witnessed myself, and Oriana is still only seventeen. How many more girls will there be, once the police start asking questions? How many more men will join Gilead in prison?”
The Prophet said, “False witness,” again, but his jowls were quivering.
I would have said I was frozen solid. My feet to the floor. My hands to each other, in my lap. My lips most of all. Somehow, though, I said, “How many little girls will it take? How many little girls do you think there are? Gilead drove his wife to suicide, and you took her baby and put her in a household that was almost as bad. I’m sure Charity thought that at least her baby would be taken away now, that she’d be safe. Instead, Charity died for nothing but escape. Sixteen years old, hanging herself in hospital, where she should have finally been safe, because she’d known so much despair that she couldn’t even hope anymore. Do you want the world to hear that story?”
“Blackmail,” the Prophet said. “The Devil speaking through an ungodly woman.”
Well, probably true. I probablywasan ungodly woman at this point, and when we’d consulted the lawyer, the woman named Victoria who’d also helped hatch the plan to get Frankie out, she’d said it might be blackmail, too. “But if it works,” she’d said, “it’ll definitely be easier, as long as you’re willing to take the risk.”
“Public exposure?” Daisy had said. “He won’t want that. That’s a very nasty secret. I think it’ll work.”
