Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [21]
But resentment stirs among the Buchanites. Some have gone missing. And it has been noticed that Hugh goes to Friend Mothers room at night. His wife-as-was speaks bitterly to him in a corner. "Isabel," he says sternly, "look to your own soul, for the time is short." After that they don't exchange a word.
By the end of a fortnight there is sickness, too, locked up in Buchan Ha. Some are not well enough to walk up Templand Hill at sunset for the hymn-singing. There are cramps, fevers, strange swellings. One of Hugh's children-of-the-body, the boy, vomits up whatever molasses-water Friend Mother gives him. She whispers soothing things in the boy's ear, but he turns his head away. "They will nevermore hunger or thirst," she tells him, "those who are washed clean in the blood of the Lamb."
Patrick Hunters daughter appears to be dying; her fever is high, her breath is weak. She has deliriums, sees devils in the ceiling. Friend Mother shakes her head over the girl, and says it is a lack of faith among them that has let this sickness in. Finally she produces a handful of oatmeal from the end of an old sack.
The girl turns her face away in revulsion. "Friend Mother," she gasps, "I need no earthly food."
"Dear lass, dear good lassie," says Friend Mother, and gives her another sip of molasses-water instead.
But then Elizabeth Hunter breaks her long silence. She staggers to her feet and says, "We've fasted long enough. June's near over. If Christ was going to come, he'd have done it by now."
Patrick Hunter belts her with the back of his hand for her blasphemy. The sound silences them all.
Friend Mother comes up close to the woman. For once she is not gentle. "You value your poor flesh, do you? I tell you this, you besom, the time is very close. If you desert us now, Christ's fire will melt all the flesh from your bones."
Elizabeth Hunter is clutching her cheek. "Whatever about myself," she weeps, "I'll not watch my daughter and my son and my husband die of famishment before my eyes. Patrick," she roars at him, "this is self-murder, so it is, and the murder of your own bairns!"
But he turns his face from her, and so do the boy and girl; when she tries to lift the children in her arms they are dead weights. So Elizabeth Hunter goes off with no companion but Katherine Gardner who used to be her maid in the old days. Katherine begs Andrew Innes to come too, but he spurns her. Hugh watches them go, then turns to count the Buchanites: barely forty of them left. Too few, too few; what kind of welcome party will they make for the Lord?
There is no day or night anymore, only this damp, warm, blanketed floor where the remaining Sisters and Brothers lie curled up together like worms. Their breaths are sharp; their faces are sunken. Friend Mother is all sweetness, all patience with their imperfections.
In bed, she interprets the Book of Revelations. "It has come to me that you are the one called the Great Man Child, my beloved," she tells Hugh excitedly. "Is it not written that the woman shall give birth to the Man Child, and the dragon shall seek him out, but he shall be so well hid that the dragon will not find him?"
Hugh smiles up at her, as when he was small and his mother used to tell him stories about bogeys in graveyards. He is drifting, vague, almost asleep. And then he smells bacon.
At first he thinks it is another of the hallucinations of hunger, one of those ghost scents that have been troubling him recently. But no, it really is a bit of lean, purple bacon. She has it in her hand; she touches it to his mouth. He jerks away as if burnt.
Friend Mother is smiling. "Hugh, don't you recall what the Prophet said? Eat that which is good, and let your soul delight in fatness!"
"The others are starving," says Hugh hoarsely. He begins to understand. So that's how she still looks so strong, so alive.
"For a little while more, aye," she says sadly, "they must be cleansed in preparation for Christ's Coming. But for the leaders there is exemption."