Obstetrix(28)
Via mending-corner gossip, I’d also found out that Sister Caroline, who led the women’s Bible study, was Pastor John’s wife. Joy’s mother had disappeared years earlier, from Benediction, their prior community, which was apparently less isolated than this one. Joy had been her mother’s only child. Caroline had a brood of six or seven, although her last had been born well before the move to Harvest.
Joy usually worked in the kitchen, but as her pregnancy progressed she started swapping into the mending corner, which displaced Emma to the food prep task, to both Emma’s irritation and Janet’s. When Joy was replacing Emma, Natalie was a little more willing to leave us unsupervised, setting aside her work for long trips to the bathroom that I suspected were more about snatching time for herself than about a need for a higher-fiber diet, but who knows. On Fridays, I also did “deep bows before the Lord” and “lifted my face to the mountains” and “leaned into the Lord” and relaxed in “Lazarus pose.” And then sat with everyone at women’s Bible study, thinking about how hard it was to “study” a text you could not simply reread.
Saturday was the pediatric clinic, where I made recommendations for children that went mostly ignored. Bethany’s glasses came—Brandon did a post office trip along with the feed pickup, apparently—and she did her best to use them. I identified several children with fine or gross motor delays, another who needed glasses, and one who was much smaller than he should have been. This cult believed in vaccinating, thank goodness.
And then Sunday, church day. Worship and singing, “religious education” for me with the children, “Bible stories” from Joy that might or might not be Bible stories, the prayer circle where any child with an actual complaint was told not to complain, and girls were taught to use their “gentle voice,” the saccharine tones all the women here used for literally everything.
Between prayer requests and mending-corner gossip, I pieced together some odds and ends of interpersonal information that seemed like they could be useful, maybe, somehow. Emma seemed to have the best relationship with her husband, of the women I saw regularly. She seemed to genuinely like and trust Jason. This didn’t seem to be true of Janet, who seemed deeply sad, and not just about her infertility. On one occasion, in a brittle voice, she asked for people to pray for her to have help to show a sunny disposition, and a joyful countenance when she looked at her husband. This seemed like something I could potentially build on if I ever had the chance to speak with her alone, but I didn’t.
The other thing I learned, which was satisfying if not exactly useful, was that no one liked the food.
I saw absolutely no phones. I saw absolutely no computers other than the one that Sarah would unlock for ultrasounds, which I used only under close supervision and which, I discovered when I did a little plausibly deniable poking around, had no Internet connection anyway. I thought there had to be phones, Internet, some connection to the outside world somewhere. Pastor John’s office, maybe. They were selling things on Etsy! Someone had to be maintaining the Etsy site! But that office was kept locked when he wasn’t in it. The keys were carried by him and a couple of the men. I might eventually reach the point where people forgot to be careful around me and I was able to get my hands on a key, sneak out in the night, and get into his office. But it seemed entirely possible that even if that happened I’d get in there and discover that the sole data connection was turned off and passworded.
The vehicles were also kept locked up in one of the outbuildings I’d seen my first day. There was the pickup truck used for feed delivery; there was the minivan that had been used to kidnap me, which was also used for grocery shopping. I heard from Emma that there was a small red Lexus that was Pastor John’s personal car, but it hadn’t been out in a while, and there was also a fifteen-passenger van that didn’t run, sitting in the barn waiting for some part.
The vehicles I saw out most often were the four-wheelers used by men and older boys for various agricultural tasks, especially herding the cattle, and the golf cart they’d used as a snowplow, which they also used to haul stuff around on the compound (it had a flat bed in the back and looked like a miniature pickup truck). They called the golf cart the Gator, and when it was clean and the vivid green color of it was visible, it looked kind of like a toy car. I thought that if I had an opportunity to grab a vehicle and make a run for it, one of those vehicles was the most likely. The four-wheelers were loud and would be quickly noticed; the Gator didn’t seem to go very fast. All of them were locked up at night, and if I took one of the four-wheelers, the odds that someone would quickly catch up to me on the other one seemed not in my favor, especially since I’d never used one before. I tried to at least observe enough that I’d be able to drive it if I had a chance.
Every now and then, I saw something up in the sky: mostly planes, occasionally agricultural drones, and I mulled over the possibility of climbing up onto the roof of the community building in the night to spray-paint KIDNAPPED, SEND HELP where the planes could see it and the community members couldn’t. I had taken to stepping outside every time I had a hot flash in the night, so that maybe they’d get used to that and stop watching me so closely, and it was maybe slightly working. The night guard these days only came over if I left my porch. But that still left several missing steps, like finding a ladder to get on the roof, and finding spray paint to mark the roof.