hand back. Stood. “You won’t be burdened by the day-to-day care of them at all. Once you turn them over they will become part of the Body. With time it will be like you’ve never known them as anything more than a face among many. You’ll see everyone like that eventually. No more roles. No more labels. It wastes time, valuable time that we could be using to shoot people with spirit.”
Denay’s smile fell. “What will happen to us?” she asked him.
Vern looked exasperated for a moment, as if there were a textbook on church babies we had not read before class, but he recovered. “You’ll do it all again, of course. The common family structure can just fall away. We will be one big family.”
“Something like this in the Bible?” asked Taffy meekly.
“Psalm 127, dear.” Vern cleared his throat and recited from memory:
Children are a heritage from the Lord,
offspring a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court.
The room was still. The verse struck me as beautiful in the way most verses did. My mother had called me sentimental more than once, my eyes threatening tears during the Sunday readings, but now my life was a verse. Now the verse seemed abstract, inapplicable to any of us in a practical sense. I looked at the boys’ club. Why did it have to be Lyle? Why couldn’t one of these boys have committed the act with me? But I knew why. This way, there could be no real love to distract us. Nothing could turn romantic. We girls would stay in our shame, where we were most pliable. We would hand the babies over, relieved.
“When all this comes to pass, I don’t want people thinking I didn’t contribute anything here,” Lyle whined. He looked to me finally. “Marrying that infidel behind all our backs. When will she pay the price for that little stunt?”
“Lyle, stand down,” Vern said. “You’re giving her the power to upset you.”
Lyle looked at his hands and pushed out deep loud breaths. Vern told the girls we were to go with Derndra, and the boys were welcome to have fellowship out behind the church, where there were snacks and cards for games. Vern had gotten the boys white baseball caps to wear to keep the sun from their eyes. Something useful, I thought. I could have used a cap. The sun was always in my eyes, my nose always in various states of peeling sunburn. But that was the way with boys. Always getting things that made them better—pants with pockets, tools for building—while girls received adornments, things to make us appear better to others.
Derndra appeared from the back of the church and led us up the stairs into Vern’s small office, where we could be alone. We crowded together on the floor and she stood above us, presented us each with a large swath of white cloth and a small sewing kit. Then she passed out fun-size bars of Hershey’s chocolate.
“I craved chocolate when I was pregnant with Trinity Prism,” she said, smile curling her lip. It was more than I’d ever heard before about her personal life. To crave chocolate seemed so human. It made me wonder what else there was.
Trinity Prism remained stoic sitting on a stool behind her mother, set apart from us as usual.
“This cloth will become your Birthing Day dress,” Derndra went on. “Everything you do from now until the babies are due is all for the Birthing Day.”
“What’s going to happen then?” Taffy said. I looked at her belly, oddly high and firm. She saw me and covered it with her hands.
“The thing you might not know about God,” Derndra said, “is that He loves a party. He’s gonna grant each of you labor and the babies will appear all together as a family. We will let them know they are welcome.”
Denay smiled. “God is going to really understand how much we love him. He’s going to rain down upon us.”
“Whose baby is that?” I asked Denay.
Derndra cut in. “Thank you, Lacey. I was going to get to that. Sometimes God must move as a human to complete His deeds but the specifics are not important. These are God’s children come from a blessed quiver. The babies within you are God’s and no one else’s.”