This is my second story although parts of it predate the first. Feedback welcomed. Starts slowly, goes on quite a bit.
Prologue - Rachel
My mother met my father while they were in college. She was studying English and had always had a religious leaning. He was studying animal husbandry and was from an ultraconservative Christian fringe group. I don't know if my mother was ever really attracted to my father himself or rather to the discipline of his upbringing. Mind you i've picked up a lot of what I know second hand from Auntie Jen so it's been translated through the filter of her disapproval before it ever reached me.
Fundamentally though I think my mother had always been one of those people who really like being told what to do; and I have found some humour over the years thinking about all the other ways that might have worked out for her. As it was though she met my father while they were in college, and the rest, as they say, is history. Her history anyway I guess - only the first part of mine.
We were an exclusive group so the community was very small and everyone knew everyone else. Much like any other childhood I imagine, it is hard to explain how ordinary mine seemed when growing up inside it. At that time I wasn't much of a creative thinker, I suspect some people would say that is still the case, and looking back I must have been fairly blinkered. So I happily recited the passages, bared my soul before God, and learned the ways of my divinely determined path toward domestic drudgery. My education wasn't very academic. It focussed more on subjects like cookery, and home management, and the Bible - there was always the Bible. That was what it was going to be important apparently for a girl growing up in a mostly forgotten leftover exclave of the nineteenth century.
Back then Sarah was invariably at the centre of our games and schemes. She was full of energy and always up to something. In any conversation you felt you had her undivided attention and were the most important thing in the world. I idolised her and cherished each moment of her company but the three year age gap between us seemed like a chasm in those days and I couldn't really have called her a friend. She was the oldest of our little set because there was a clear distinction cut between children and adults. As we children grew up our eldest would each in turn drop out of our society into the grown up world and, at the time i'm thinking of, Sarah was next in line.
Girls tended to be married young and it was pretty much taken for granted that it would be Ben who was matched with Sarah. He was a couple of years older than her and the families were close. She seemed to like him and they were always smiling at each other and finding, or being tactfully given, time to talk. It all seemed to be going well for them but then Jacob Tulley's wife died and he was left a widower at thirty five.
The wedding was strange and even to a child it was obvious there was no joy to it. Jacob was dressed as well as he could be, in a suit which was tighter now than it had been when he last wore it, and Sarah pale and silent. All day she looked as if she was about to be sick. Even the elders of the community presiding over the ceremony were sombre while the ritual was completed. It was a sunny day in mid spring and afterwards Hannah, Ginny and I sat at the end of one of the long tables which had been placed out on the lawn.
I was watching some of the younger children chasing each other around between the trees. They were playing a hiding and chasing game which I could still remember although it looked as if the rules had changed since I had played. It seemed to me as if something vital was seeping out of the world and I felt ill and scared. Glancing over at another table I found my mother looking across at me and our eyes met. There was a long pause while neither of us would, or could, look away but after a time the moment passed.
My spirits remained subdued over the following months. Sarah had, as expected, disappeared into the world of adults and was no longer one of us. We all felt her loss I think, but isn't it hard to tell how much you colour your impressions through your own experience, it could have been just me. Presumably she was trying to build her way into a home in the shadow of Joanne Tulley's death and she can't have been prepared for it, who could be.
The next thing I can really remember is the night she hanged herself. The story, pieced together in retrospect from ghosts and whispers, was that she'd gone upstairs to put the girls to bed and when she didn't come back down Jacob went up to check everything was ok. He had found her strung up from a beam in their bedroom.
So the ambulance took her away. Some of the men, although strangely not Jacob, were dispatched along with Sarah's mother to speak to the doctors, presumably to the police as well, and when they returned word was quickly sent around that Sarah had left us in hospital. Naturally as suicide was a terrible sin there would be no funeral. She just ceased to exist.
This was a shock to all of us, children and adults alike, but I think it hit me particularly hard. As I said before I had really looked up to Sarah and it was horrifying to see her, I don't know how to say it even now, erased? excised? I was at a loss to understand how she had been turned from what she had been into the absence she had become and I lacked the tools I needed to cope with the grief.
Only a few weeks after that, without any warning, I was sent to stay with my mother's sister on her farm in the west country. I never really got a proper explanation of why but when I try to pick it apart now my best guess is that recent events must all have acted as a bit of a wake up call for my mother. I picture her forced to consider how different things were for women like her, who had married into the community as adults, to how they were going to be for those of us who were growing up with it.
So I was fourteen years old and i'd been turned into an outsider. It took quite a while before I was grateful for that final gift. Final because I have never seen or spoken to any of them since. They aren't allowed, it's called the doctrine of separation.
Prologue - Ray
Life with Auntie Jen was hard to come to terms with at the start. For the first couple of days I barely dared leave my room and Jen brought me up plates of food which I picked at dejectedly. She was the single mother of my twin cousins who were just starting higher education, Michael at agricultural college and Stephen studying business management. It was October and the harvest was all in but there was still a lot of tidying and pruning to be done in the orchards before winter, so they were all out working on that most of every day.
As this left the house empty I crept out to explore. Peeping into the boys rooms the musty scent of male adolescence made my nose wrinkle and the women in the posters on the walls left me shocked, scandalised, and fascinated. I gravitated eventually to the big farm kitchen, which was the most comfortable and familiar place, and that is where Jen found me when she came in for her lunch. She decided it was time to sit down with me and work out what we were going to do.
We made sandwiches and tea and then sat at the table and ate. Auntie Jen was patient, considerate and above all practical. She must have had the situation sprung on her with almost as little notice as I had, but she took it in her stride and this didn't even cross my mind at the time as I am sure she had intended. She went out of her way to make it clear to me that I was family, that they were happy to have me with them, and that my room was my own safe space where nobody would go without invitation.
Jen said most of her time was taken up with managing the farm and that it had been difficult for her having to bring up the boys as well. They were old enough now though to look after themselves largely speaking and were even taking over some of the farm work so she could make time for me now that I needed it. She also said she'd decided to keep me out of school for the year and spend some money on a private tutor instead.
I tried to take all of this in. Up to that point i'd been assuming that sooner or later i'd be going back home but that wasn't compatible with the way she was talking. So I thanked her and told her how sorry I was to be a burden and explained that I didn't know why my mother and father had sent me away.
She was quiet while she chewed up another bite of her sandwich and sipped her tea. After she'd finished she said reasonably that she didn't think it was so much about sending me away. Probably it was more about giving me an opportunity to see another side of the world and that she was pleased to be able to help me with that. This was an angle I had not considered and it was my turn to fall silent as I mulled that over.
We talked a while longer. Somehow over the course of our conversation we had started to become friends. After that she wanted to know if there was anything I needed right away so I asked her how to turn on the television and she laughed at that but she showed me.
Back in my room I went through the drawers, Jen had stocked them with clothes she thought would fit me, mainly hand-me-downs from my cousins. Wearing boys clothes seemed initially quite odd to me although i'd discover that on the farm, and around the farm kids at school (when I eventually went the following autumn) I didn't stand out at all.
That afternoon I was sat watching the television, more with bemusement than enjoyment, when the boys came storming home. I'd changed into jeans and a tee-shirt to try to get into the swing of things.
"Hello little mouse! Hey Mike! The little mouse has come out and she's got your old top on!" This from Stephen who was generally the louder and less diplomatic of the two.
"Give the mouse a break Steve," said Michael, "She's had a tough enough week without you taking the piss."
"And i'm not a mouse." I said with an edge of indignation, "I'm Rachel."
