eyes turned away. She shuddered and then continued, “. . . After he punished me.” Punishment in church vernacular meant rape. “I know for sure and certain who the daddy is. I know the very day Jedidiah and me got me pregnant.” She looked down at her belly and rubbed it with the fingers of one hand, as if her stretched skin was itching and painful. Her eyes followed her leafy hand. Softer, she said, “I remember every single moment. The very minute. It was magical and wonderful.” Her face hardened. “And yet he stood up in devotions this morning and divorced me in front of the entire church, claiming I was unfaithful to him.”
“Do you want to be married to him?”
Esther raised her eyes to me, and I could see thoughts running around in the back of hers, chasing each other, half-confused, half-determined. Her voice firmed. “I love him. I want him to love me. If’n he don’t, well, I reckon I’d rather be alone than be an unloved wife in a house full of loved wives.” She held my gaze as if the answer to her next question was the most important thing she had ever asked. “How . . . how did you’un do it?”
“Get away from the church?”
She nodded.
“One day at a time. Just like you will, if that’s what you decide. You’ve been having trouble with Jed for a while. You’ve been here off and on for a month, grieving your loss of humanity and being afraid of being alone and uneducated with a child and no home. But unlike me, you’re not alone. You can get education. You have people who will show you how to live independently. You don’t feel strong, but you are, and so the main thing you have to do is stop grieving and stop letting him hurt you.
“You have to start making decisions and follow through. You’re cleaning the house like a madwoman, but you’re being lazy about everything else.”
Esther flinched. Being called lazy was the worst insult a churchwoman could be called.
I went on. “You have to be willing to learn how to live outside the church. Being willing means learning a new way to work, a new way to live, a new way to be.”
Esther held out her hands and whispered, “If’n I stay at the church, someone will try to drive the devil outta me for growing leaves. Someone will take me and punish me again.” Our mama had been punished, which was why I had a half-brother who wasn’t Daddy’s. Esther had suffered the same kind of punishment, which likely triggered her leaves. “Someone will kill my baby for being a devil child. The older ones will call for me and my baby to be burned at the stake.”
“Like a witch,” I said, “but we aren’t witches.”
“That’s what you’un say,” she said, holding up a leafy hand.
“We’re genetic mutants, likely from being interbred for so many generations.”
“That’s disgusting,” Esther said, but without the anger she had expressed the first time I explained about us.
“I’ve told you about trauma, especially sexual trauma, as it relates to stimulating the secondary genetic mutations of plant-people.” Esther had been punished by a churchman, had been raped. We had talked about it, quietly, in the dark of night, after Mud went to bed. “The more violence, and the more we stay in contact with the earth, the more plant-people we become. It’s likely that pregnancy hormones have the same effect, because that’s so hard on the body.”
Esther raised her eyes from her hands on her belly to me. “You’un got your’nself a plan for me?”
“I’m not telling you what to do. But I have advice.”
“I’m listening.”
“The next step after a man has demanded divorce? The wife can demand counseling by the elders. They don’t tell us that, but it’s in the church constitution.”
Her chin tucked in surprise. “We’uns have a constitution?” She sounded incensed. “Like with rules even the menfolk has to follow?”
“Yeah. Not that anyone follows it. Sister Erasmus slid a copy into my wine delivery a month or so past and I spent a weekend reading it. It’s interesting.”
“Well, I’ll be a dinosaur on Noah’s ark.”
I chuckled quietly. “To request counseling and a hiatus in divorce proceedings, we need to be willing to tell the truth about your condition.” She looked confused, so I pointed at her hands. “The leaves. The real reason he’s declared divorce.”
“So who would I talk to? What elders will keep that kinda secret?”