Mr. Skeel spoke to us for quite a long time, telling us that it was our duty to help the community please God, and then God would smile on us all. I quickly grew bored with the slow words that were repeated many times to be certain we understood them, almost as quickly as the boy who stood beside me. Pember had been in a sullen mood to begin with, resenting the need to stand before his father as the rest of us were required to do, but apparently knew better than to attempt to leave or disrupt the proceedings. His father was the one adult he dared not offend or disobey, and as the time passed he grew more and more outraged. I stood so near him I could almost feel the flames burning higher and higher inside him, and as soon as the address ended, his self-control did the same. As the adults left their places to either side of us and began speaking words of thanks to Mr. Skeel, Pember turned to me, bared his teeth in a grin of delight, and kicked me hard.
To say I was surprised would be to lie, for I’d known the boy would need to do something of the sort to ease his sense of outrage. That he chose a girl to do it to must have seemed even better to him, for he had already be^un bullying the girls and making them cry. To him I was no more than just another of the girls, but I saw the matter differently. To me I was someone who refused to be a victim of his bullying, which I showed him rather quickly. His kick was hard and brought tears to my eyes, but I doubled my hand into a fist as I’d seen one of my older brothers do, then brought the fist around just as hard into Pember’s eye. The boy screamed with shock as much as with pain, clapping one hand to his eye as he bent forward, and that was when I kicked him back, just as he had kicked me.
Quite a lot of shouting and yelling erupted then, intensified by Pember’s screams that made it seem as if he’d been cut into tiny pieces, but no one seemed interested in quieting the uproar. Mr. Skeel added his own volume by shouting names as he pointed to me, and my father took me by the scruff and shook me harder than he ever had before. No one asked the reason for what I had done as I thought they might, but as they already knew the reason there was little sense in asking. They cared only that I had dared to
touch Pember, and I was beaten hard for that, almost as hard as when I refused to apologize to the boy. I continued to refuse and continued to be beaten, until one day the matter was replaced with something else of concern and was never brought up again. Everyone forgot about it—except for Pember and me.
That was surely the beginning of it, but certainly not the end. Our community was one large farm, with everyone taking turns working the land and caring for the stock and occasionally hunting and doing everything that needed to be done. Our houses all stood close to one another inside the stockade walls, and at night the gates were closed and barred while everyone watched. Pember’s father, Mr. Skeel, was the leader of our community, even though he didn’t do any of the work. He was the one who got to say whether or not he liked the way things were being done, and if he didn’t like them he told people it was God’s will that they be done a different way. I remember following him around all of one day, not letting him see me, trying to find out how he found out what God’s will was, but I hadn’t been able to do it. The only things he’d done had been to sleep late, eat a better meal than most of us ever got, walk around with a frown on his face for just about everything he saw, and then go back home for another meal. If God spoke to him during that time, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t hear it; Mr. Skeel didn’t stop to listen to anybody, not at any time, which made me wonder how he ever heard anything from God.
Growing up in the community was a time of learning for me, and not only of the things my sisters and brothers and I were told we had to learn. Under the heading of “had to” came the Laws that made us a community, the Laws that said we were born to work for the good of all and never complain, that what we wanted wasn’t anywhere near as important as what our elders wanted, that to waste time laughing and playing was an affront to God and man alike. We were all given jobs to do as soon as we could walk and talk, and those jobs had to be done no matter what. If we had to be sick we could be, but not until after our chores were done. We also had to spend a lot of time sitting in one place all together, listening to Mr. Skeel tell us about all the things we did that weren’t pleasing God, and then mumbling out promises that we would try to do better next time.
What I learned for myself had a lot to do with the “had to” list, but it came at problems from a different direction. I learned that if I was sent to collect eggs left in the straw by the hens and did it too fast, I wasn’t told 1 had done a good job, I was given a different chore to see to in the extra time I had. I asked my mother why that was, and she answered without hesitation.
“God hates idle hands, Banni,” she said, paying attention only to the shirt she was sewing for my father, none to me. “We must all do as much as we can in this almost-barren land, so God will love us and give us more of what we need.”
“How do we know God hates idle hands?” I’d asked next, raising up on tiptoe to watch the needle flying over the ojd cloth. I wasn’t far from being old enough to learn to sew, and I was trying to see if I would find it interesting.
“We have Mr. Skeel to tell us what God likes and doesn’t like, child,” she’d said, glancing up to see how my older sisters were doing with preparing breakfast. “We’re very lucky to have Mr. Skeel, so we have to be sure to do everything he says.”
“If God hates idle hands, why doesn’t Mr. Skeel ever do anything to make his hands busy?” I’d asked next, peering over at the small, quick stitches that had been put in my father’s shirt. “And if this land is so bad, why don’t we go someplace else instead of just waiting for God to make it better? What if Mr. Skeel is wrong and he doesn’t know what God likes and doesn’t like? Then God won’t ever make this land better, and we won’t ...”
That was the point I discovered my father had come in for breakfast, and had heard what I’d said. He grabbed me by the arms and shook me hard, yelling that no child of his would ever voice such sinful thoughts under his roof, and then he beat me with his belt.
After the beating I was locked in the dark place under the stairs, and wasn’t allowed out again until it was dark outside as well and it was time to go to bed.
I remember that time better than almost anything else of my childhood, how frightened and confused and all alone I felt, how I hurt with no one to comfort or help me. When I’d first been put under the stairs I’d cried with the pain in my back, aching terribly and waiting for my mother to come and make it better, but time went by and then more and more time, and no one came. My father and brothers had left a lot earlier to tend the herds, but my mother still made no effort to see if I were all right. I heard her and my sisters moving around the house, all of them very carefully making sure they didn’t have idle hands, and after a long while I’d realized she had no intention of coming over to me. At the time I remember not understanding why that was, thinking that maybe my father had forbidden her to come near me, but eventually I learned better. My mother believed the exact same things my father did, and she hadn’t come over to me because I had sinned and she refused to encourage me to do it again by offering comfort. That was one of the major things I learned as a child, that my mother thought offering comfort would encourage sin.