The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly by Stephanie Oakes Page A

reaches over and sticks it to the wall behind my bunk.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I ask.
    â€œStarting your affirmation wall.”
    I stare at the letters on the Post-it. I can make out a general sense of words, but can’t understand the entire sentence. “What’s it say?”
    â€œAnger is a kind of murder you commit in your heart.”
    If this is true, I’m a daily murderer. My heart is more full of blood than I ever imagined.
    â€œHave you talked to your father since the fire?” he asks.
    I shake my head. “I saw him on the news at his trial.”
    â€œHe will almost certainly be convicted on all charges. He’ll be in prison for a long time.”
    â€œIs that supposed to mean something to me? I don’t care what happens to him.”
    â€œI don’t blame you. He’d be a difficult person to have as a father. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago.”
    I blink.
    â€œDid he say anything interesting?” I ask. “A revelation that the Lord is reborn in a chicken nugget, maybe?”
    He smiles. “He mostly wanted to quote the Book of Prophecies at me. I got a lesson in the rather interesting Kevinian theory of astronomy, and he showed me dozens of journals filled with scrawl he says was written by the angel Zachari. He thinks his prison food is poisoned. And two days ago he was thrown out the courtroom for disruption.”
    â€œWhat’d he do?”
    â€œWhile the judge was reading the charges, he started shouting in tongues and writhing on the floor.”
    â€œWhat an act.”
    â€œIt won’t help his case.”
    I want to ask, Can you get the death penalty for killing because you’re told to? How does the legal system prosecute someone under the influence of faith, someone who kills because God wants a little death sometimes?
    â€œHe did say one thing I found interesting,” Dr. Wilson says. “He had a message for you.”
    â€œI don’t want to hear it.”
    â€œAre you sure? It might help.”
    I shake my head, my face contorting as though it doesn’t know whether to laugh or burst into tears. There is nothing, I am confident, nothing my father could say to fix anything.
    â€œGo on then,” I say.
    â€œHe asked me to tell you how sorry he is. How terribly sorry. For everything that happened.”
    I freeze where I’m sitting, like the moment after a bone is broken when you know the pain is coming but you foolishly hope it won’t. And the full force of the words slams into me. My head begins to shake back and forth, my hair whipping the orange canvas of my jumpsuit. I want so badly to scrub my fingers against my face, to take great fistfuls of my hair and pull until I have a real reason to scream.
    This is what thinking about my father does. Into my head comes the picture of him swinging the hatchet, the picture of the Prophet’s dry lips speaking into his ear. But there’s also the memory of those aluminum benches at the greyhound park, him smiling, leaning forward so his belly thrust out, eyes following the dog wearing the bib labeled lucky number seven. And how he’d rise up off the stands when the dogs neared the finish, dirt flying beneath paws, and my father’s fingers clenched in fists that weren’t for punching but for thrusting into the air when he won.
    More often, he lost. I guess that’s what it comes down to.
    I never knew my father like I knew my mother, hadn’t memorized the curve of his hip with my body, but he meant something to me, down deep. Before the Community, when he railed about his boss, and his face turned florid against his black mustache, I’d sit in my place in the plushest part of the carpet and feel my small world teeter. His voice could do that.
    And then my father stopped gambling and started attending rallies with other men from work. Just drinking with the boys, he called it, though he’d stopped drinking by then.