Bloodline(76)

She pats my cheek matter-of-factly. “Then you better clean yourself up.”





CHAPTER 60

“For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death,’” Ronald intones, standing on a dais at the rear of the enormous basement.

The basement Dorothy hid me in for five days after she kidnapped me.

This basement once belonged to Johann and Minna Lily, if Rosamund Grant is to be believed. Like my memory of the lemon-yellow room, I recall only flashes of being held down here as a child, impressions of darkness and fear and a cot shoved in the corner of a tiny closet of a room.

Kris was right about the fugue state.

I followed the natural lines of the story Ronald told me, and then Ursula yelled at me. The ancestral poison began with Johann and Minna Lily, brother and sister. Only two of their children survived their deformities, and they concentrated the poison of the incestuous heritage by having kids of their own, and so on down the line. By the time the current Mill Street families came into the picture, all of them, every last one of those rotten, stopped-up Lilys, they couldn’t have kids of their own, not normal, healthy ones.

Because they were all, at best, first cousins to one another.

I think of how Becky Swanson described Quill Brody, pointing at her chin and ears, too polite to describe his deformities. Of the woman with the melted face that Deck and I encountered outside the furniture store. How many malformed Lily children—full-blood Lily children—are there, and where are they being kept, these “lifers” as Catherine described her son?

What have the Mill Street families done in the name of purity?

I see a glimpse of their commitment to this ideal in the basement they’ve taken me to for initiation. Ronald is speaking scripture.

All the Fathers are lined up on the left and Mothers on the right, facing away from him, staring at me. Was it the second or third generation of inbreeding that cemented the inability of descendants of the original settlers to have sound children of their own, that made the Lily husbands seek outside their Lily wives for “vessels”?

It doesn’t really matter. There are three times the people here that I’ve ever seen before. This truly stretches beyond Lilydale. This brittle, rotten old system has its veins threaded through all of Stearns County, maybe farther, and it’s fully alive.

That’s why Mildred is here with Angel.

Browline Schramel’s child, stolen from his mother to be raised in the Lily fold. Mariela had reported Angel missing. She’d paid the Lilydale price, not turning Browline Schramel in, but of course she couldn’t keep silent when Mildred demanded her child. Mariela had gone to the police, and I imagine she’d had as much success telling them her story as I had sharing mine. The system would not protect us.

“The Holy Word has taught us that children are a reward from the Lord, and we take that which He offers us,” Ronald is saying, his voice reaching the farthest corners of the large room.

I almost blow it, watching Angel’s fearful eyes.

I can’t bear his pain.

I will do nearly anything to end it, even if it means giving up my one chance of escape with my child.

I am moving toward him when Ronald strides forward, meeting me at the base of the stairs. He’s carrying a white Lily pin. The same pin that Deck came home with that first week we moved to Lilydale. The same design as the necklace I stole from Dorothy.

Ronald holds it aloft and faces the men.

“Who sponsors this woman?”

Deck is standing at the rear of the room, near the dais. He’s raising his hand, and I believe he is going to speak for me, but then he coughs into it.

“I do,” Dorothy says from behind me.

“And I,” Barbara seconds.

“And I.” Mildred.

“I,” Rue agrees.

Catherine is the last familiar voice to speak. She frowns as if she’s tasted something sour, but she says, “I.”

I duck my head to hide my smirk. I will pay her back for her kindness. Oh yes, I will.

“Very good,” Ronald says. He gives me his full attention. “Do you pledge your loyalty to the Mothers, promising to always put the needs of others before your own?”

“I do.”

“Do you swear to help those who are suffering, and to never turn a child away from your door? To honor human life above all else, and to honor your sacred duty as a Mother?”

Hypocritical bastards. “I do.”

He fastens the pin to my robe. He kisses me on each cheek and then the mouth. “Then let the Fathers welcome you.”

He steps back so each man in the room can repeat his gesture: cheek, cheek, mouth. Some of them grip my stomach before they step away, a furtive rub, as if I’m a stone to massage for luck. Stanley—my true father, after all—doesn’t seem to recognize me. He’s chewing on something he should have swallowed long ago, I think, when I lean down so he can kiss me. He sniffs my neck, or simply twitches, and when he leans back into his wheelchair, I spot a flash of something alert in his eyes. But then they cloud over, and he’s gone.

I intend to pay him back, too. For Frances.

When all the Fathers have kissed me, the Mothers are guided to deliver three kisses of their own: cheek, cheek, forehead. Their closeness and breaths and the intimate way they’re handling me is starting to take a toll. I fight off waves of dizziness.