Wild Carrots & Broken Hearts

Iris sat by a window in the women’s dorm, mending a pair of Roth’s trousers, feeling misplaced and lost now that she no longer belonged in the children’s room. She sat on a crochet covered pillow to ease the pain of what he had done to her the night before. Rose had warned her. Rose had said it would be like fire forcing its way inside her. Iris closed her eyes and let out a slow breath, willing her body to be steady as she remembered that flame—the way she’d cried out, the way he’d hushed her, the taste of his leathery fingers as he slapped them over her mouth.

The Church In The Wildwood quote
“Come for a walk with me, Sister Iris.”

Her mother stood in front of her, looking like a stranger—horribly thin with sad, tired eyes. “Hello, Sister Margaret,” Iris said, shifting in her seat and sucking in her breath as discomfort swarmed her body. “I don’t want to walk.”

She had very little connection with her mother since they became part of life on the compound four years before. Other women and older children had been assigned to her care. From her whispered conversations with Rose she understood this was to cement the feeling of overarching family—that no one was confined to just a mother or just a sister—they were all part of one big unit. Blood was not thicker than the word of The Prophet.

“A walk will do you good,” her mother said. “Now that you’re a wife you’re allowed to go outside without a chaperone. You should take advantage of that. Plus the sun is shining today.”

Iris sighed and stood, setting the pants on the pillow and straightening her dress before following her mother down the stairs and out onto the grounds.

She tilted her head back, letting her hair be carried by wind that tasted so sweet she almost laughed out loud. The full effects of the sun kissed her pale skin, sending a rush of euphoria through her body, displacing, for a moment, the pain that lingered. After years of being allowed little more than flagpole ceremonies or open windows through which to feel the breeze, the freedom of the open air was a long awaited reward. The consolation prize for having left behind her childhood.

“It must have come as a shock,” her mother said as they wandered an overgrown path behind the building.

“What?” Iris asked.

“Your wedding night.”

Iris chewed the inside of her cheek and didn’t respond.

“I wanted to talk to you, to prepare you for what was coming but you know how the rules work—blood mothers do not mother their blood daughters—and no one really talks about these things…”

“Rose talked to me,” Iris admitted.

“So you knew?”

“Only a little.”

“Is there much pain?” her mother asked.

“He was angry with me because I was afraid of him.” Iris couldn’t look her in the eye. “He made me bleed.”

Her mother reached for her as if to offer an embrace but Iris ducked away from her arms, crossing her own over her chest as they walked.

“This way.” Her mother led them off the path and into the tall grass, back to a spot by a huge maple tree. She stopped where the grass gave way to Queen Anne’s Lace, their broad white heads bowing with the breeze, smelling a little bit wild and little like parsley. She began breaking the heads off the flowers that looked dead—the ones that were curling in on themselves into a vase shape like a small bird’s nest. She held one up for Iris. “We need the ones that look like this,” she said. “Not all of them. Just a few for now.”

Iris joined her in the patch and broke off two heads. “What are we doing, Mother?”

“You’re twelve-years-old, Iris. Roth wants you to have a baby. Is that what you want? At twelve years old?”

“Of course not.” Iris picked another dead flower.

Her mother came over to her and took the heads from her hand, dropping them into her dress pocket. One she kept out, rolling it between a thumb and finger until seeds fell into her palm. “The oil in these seeds blocks implantation.”

Iris stared at her dumbly, knowing nothing of such things.

“A baby can’t grow in you if you take them. It’s like medicine. You have to take them every day. A teaspoonful. And not longer than eight hours after he’s been with you or they might not work. You have to chew them completely so the oils are released. Here,” she held out her hand and a little pile of seeds. “Take them now.”

Iris opened her hand and her mother dumped them into her palm.

“All in,” she said. “And you can’t just swallow them. They’ll do nothing that way.”

Iris looked down at her hand. They looked like hairy little bugs. “What do they taste like?”

“Awful,” her mother said “Like strong mint tea mixed with castor oil. Just do it. You’ll get used to it.”
Iris dumped them into her mouth, immediately gagging, first at their texture and then at their heavy, oily flavour.

“Chew them completely,” her mother said again.

Iris ground them with her teeth, swallowed and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

“Every day,” her mother said. She reached into her other pocket and pulled out an empty salt shaker. She sat on the ground and began working on another flower head, handing one to Iris to do the same, carefully dropping the seeds into the shaker. “Hide this under your mattress,” she told her. “You can come out here and fill it up whenever you need more. We’ll figure out a way to store enough before wintertime.”

“Why are we here, Mother?” Iris asked. “Why did we come here?”

Her mother raised her eyes up to the sky and blinked rapidly. “Because I had nowhere else to go.”

“Are you happy?”

“It isn’t a woman’s duty to be happy, Iris.” She brushed back her hair. “A woman’s first duty is to the happiness of her husband.”

“Do you really believe that?” Iris dumped a small handful of seeds into the salt shaker.

Her mother didn’t answer, she just stared back towards the resort building. “I’ll bet this place was really pretty when it was a golf club,” she said, her eyes going soft as she imagined the good that once decorated the land. “I’ll bet it had beautiful gardens and fountains. I’ll bet graceful ladies in fancy hats would sit out on the back terrace with their glasses of sherry while their husbands golfed.”

“What was my father like?” Iris asked.

“You don’t have a father, darling.”

“Of course I do,” she protested. “Or I did. There was a photo of him. I remember it from when I was little. He had hair parted to the side and a thin nose like mine and he had a little mole just here.” She put her finger on her jawline just below her right ear. “Was he a good man?”

Her mother worried her bottom lip for a moment before throwing back her own handful of wild carrot seeds. She chewed without making a face and Iris realized her mother was the only wife who hadn’t delivered a baby in the last year. She had carried two in their first while at Harridan Bluffs. The first was a boy named Peter but Iris rarely saw him because he was kept in the boys dorm where a couple of the unchosen Promise Book girls took care of him. She never saw the second—only heard whispers of ‘poor Sister Margaret, another boy…’ but he was nowhere to be found. He simply disappeared. She had no way of knowing what became of him. No one talked of such things.

“He believed in aliens,” she finally said.

“What?” Iris looked up from the flower head she was deseeding.

Her mother picked a seed from between her teeth as she talked. “He had this old telescope he’d take out on our back porch on clear nights. I’d sit out there with him and listen to him talk about how the world was going to change as soon as people realized how much was out there and how he wanted to be there for the first contact. I always told him he was crazy but he’d just say, ‘you’ll see,’ and he’d grin like he knew something no one else knew.” There was a small smile painted across her tired face, her eyes focused on something far away as she remembered. “The night before he left for active duty he took me out on the porch and we danced while he sang some silly tune about living on the moon. He was my very own Fred Astaire.”

“You still miss him?” Iris asked.

She seemed to shake herself free of the memories and brought her eyes back to Iris’ face. She reached over and pinched her chin lightly between her thumb and finger. “You do have his nose,” she said.

She sighed and stood, brushing some small pieces of dead weed from the front of her dress before starting to walk back towards the building. “This is our life now, Iris,” she said. “You must make peace with it. If we were to leave we would have nothing—we wouldn’t even have shoes.” She lifted her skirts to show her dirty feet and drive her point home.

“That’s how he controls us,” Iris said, acutely aware of her own naked feet and the rough ground beneath them.

“Oh, Iris, you must stop this. He cares for us in his own way.”

Iris stopped in her tracks. “Does he, Mother?” She pulled up her own skirts high enough to show the fresh, raw cuts on her inner thigh. “Does he love me, Mother? Do you even care what he made me do last night?”

Her mother rushed back and wrapped her arms around her. “I have nothing to give you, Iris. I would give you the world if I could. I would fly you away to the moon just like your father’s song. This is what we have been dealt. We make the best of it we can. Do your duty.” She pulled back and tucked a strand of hair behind Iris’ ear. “You’re strange and precious, darling, just like the iris for which you’re named. Be strong.”

Iris had her face buried in her mother’s shoulder. “You should have protected me from this,” she said around the lump in her throat. Her eyes smarted with hot tears.

Her mother held her for a moment, petting her hair and hushing her with tender sounds that reminded Iris she was still just a child even though she was expected to behave as a woman.

“I don’t know how,” her mother finally admitted. Iris could hear the tears in her voice.

“I will never have a daughter,” Iris promised. “I will never bring another girl into this life.”

Her mother remained silent, still smoothing her hair.

“Has anyone ever left?” Iris mumbled into her dress.

“Only one that I know of,” her mother said, unwinding herself from Iris’ arms, taking her hand and leading her to the opposite side of the building near the skeleton of an old ski lift. A small mound of dirt was visible through the weeds and a red cross had been painted on one of the old wooden crossbeams. “They ran her down with the pickup,” she said.

“Are you trying to scare me?”

“You should know the truth. Accept it. Make the best of it. This is our life.”

“I will leave here someday,” Iris told her.

“Then I will lay flowers on your grave,” her mother said sadly, putting her arm around her and pulling her close to her side before guiding her back up the path.


LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CHURCH IN THE WILDWOOD

2 comments:

  1. Dang. I need the rest of the book now.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ahhh...the time will come, my friend. Hopefully not too far in the future :)

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