Obstetrix(26)

“Sister Ginny was so young,” Sarah said. “It broke everyone’s heart, losing her.”

“How young was she?”

“Seventeen.”

I blinked. Ginny had been Chloe’s older sister. “How old is Chloe?”

“Fifteen.” Sarah tilted her head to the side. “Pastor believes that it’s better to marry young.”

“How old is Nick?”

“He’s eighteen.”

I was aghast and trying to hide it, but I could tell from Sarah’s face that my reaction was leaking through, no matter how hard I was trying to feign neutrality. “Why does Pastor John say it’s better to marry young? Help me understand.” I need to understand enough that I can keep from radiating horror at these poor girls who are depending on me.

“Sex drives are strong in teens—I know, you just saw Nick, he’s hardly a good illustration of that point, but it’s good for the teenage boys to know they’ll be able to marry soon! Fertility is high in the young, so they’ll be able to have more children. Teenagers live up to the expectations placed upon them; if we treat them as adults, they act more like adults. Godly marriages know no age.”

“Isn’t Joy twenty? How long ago did she marry?”

“Oh, Joy married a little later. She was keeping house for her daddy, you see. He wasn’t ready to let her move out until he’d remarried.”

I nodded, trying to stuff my horror deep inside. “For my ‘continuing education’ today,” I said, “I’d like you to go over what happened with Sister Ginny, in detail.”

I did “continuing education” on Tuesdays; I had found it cloying when Sarah called it that the first week, but I had, in fact, learned a few new things. For example, how to use nitrous oxide in deliveries. I’d suggested twice that if they ordered me some medical textbooks, I could brush up on orthopedics. (Not that Surgical Exposures in Orthopedics would be relaxing recreational reading. It was more my equivalent of Bethany’s Blossoms of Morality.) Sarah had said she would consider talking to Pastor John and made it clear, mainly through vibes, that I should not hold my breath. In any case, hearing all the details of exactly what happened with Ginny would be useful ahead of future emergencies.

I’d heard that Tuesdays were “feed delivery” for the ranch. They had a small herd of cattle, which I’d seen only from a distance, but they also had a barn full of chickens, and chickens need grain, at least if you’re raising them at scale. “Delivery” made me think that maybe, maybe an outsider would be coming to the ranch, but no: Brandon (the same Brandon who helped kidnap me) took a pickup truck from the locked building and drove it somewhere, returning in late afternoon with a load of feed for the chickens and anything else people had told him to pick up in town. At the school, the children all got lectures on “history” and “science” from one of the men. He got a book, but the kids didn’t.

On Wednesday mornings, I did prenatal and postnatal care. The women here were, at least, getting more attentive prenatal care than most of my patients on the outside. The children doing beginner literacy did reading again; all the other children did math. In the afternoon, all the women and children went to the dining hall for what they called “Marketplace Day.”

The cult talked a lot about their goal of full self-sufficiency, but as the feed delivery and grocery shopping trips demonstrated, they were not at all close to that goal yet. They brought in income by selling things online. In addition to the hand-beaded veils and other custom clothing items, they had an Etsy store that sold handmade wood toys. A couple of the men worked on cutting, shaping, and assembling little wood trucks and trains. The most time-consuming and least skill-intensive part of making nice wood toys was the sanding: that’s what they had the rest of us do.

They set us up in a rudimentary assembly line, with the tables at one end working with coarse-grained sanding pads, the tables at the far end using polishing cloths. On my first week, I dutifully sanded the open-grained red-oak blocks I was handed, thinking about my father and how quickly the need for endless sanding had killed my desire to learn to do woodworking from him. Near the end of the afternoon I asked Sister Samantha, who I’d seen in the morning because she was four months pregnant and the mother of three already, whether there was a reason they didn’t have dust masks for us.

“Well, the men wear them while power sanding, of course,” she said. “But we’re just hand sanding.”

“It’s still a lot of dust,” I said. “It’s not actually good for us. We should be wearing dust masks to protect our lungs.”

“Oh. Maybe someone should say something to Pastor.”

I wondered if this was going to require a full-scale “you kidnapped yourselves a doctor, maybe you should listen to your doctor” fit, but the following week there were optional dust masks and after seeing me put one on, so did about half the other women.

Thursdays, I saw pregnant women in the morning. The children all did math, followed by one hour of reading practice, during which the older children were only allowed to read the Bible.

Thursday afternoon, I saw anyone else in Harvest who wanted to see a doctor. My second week I found out the kids spent their Thursday afternoons on “life instruction,” which generally meant farm chores for the boys and cooking and other household-type chores for the girls, because a teenage boy got brought in in the throes of an asthma attack.