When you grow up in a religious cult, you have no idea it's a religious cult. Things that might seem weird or messed up to regular people are just normal to you.
That's how it was with my brother and me, born and raised in a closed community.
In line with tradition, I was named Charity, and he was named Gabriel, after the archangel. But to each other we were Gabe and Char, those adult versions too big for our children's tongues. Born less than a year apart, we were very close, and felt more like twins than plain old siblings.
As we grew up, we became less nuisances underfoot, and more two useful pairs of hands to help with the endless chores around the commune. There was always something to do; milking cows, raking hay, churning butter, darning clothes, chopping wood, mending roofs, rolling wax, carding wool, or cooking endless vats of stew. But busy as we were, children will always find idle time - even if they have to create it for themselves.
The commune itself was huge. A massive tract of land on the plains, three creeks wound through it, each spawned somewhere west, from the mountain melt. Most of the place was farmland, though there were a few scattered patches of pine plantations, the fast-growing trees destined to be milled in the village and turned into more buildings, or chopped into firewood for the brutal winters.
We were allowed most places. Nobody particularly cared about roaming children, so long as we didn't stray outside the bounds of the commune. Once, when I was six, I took my brother by the hand and ran off down the gravel road that ran for miles to the boundary fence, determined to leave the farmlands and see what was outside. Thirsty and tired, we were picked up halfway by our neighbour, Daniel Hopeful, who was returning from a delivery to the world outside. He lifted us into his cart with his strong, penance-wrapped hands and said he'd drive us home and not tell our folks, for which we were mighty grateful.
But there was one place within the boundary where we weren't supposed to go. So of course, we made it our mission to go there.
Deep in the western heart of the commune, beyond two of the creeks, lay the Penance Field.
The leader of our religious commune, Patriarch Chrism, sometimes talked about the Penance Field during Sunday sermons, telling us how it was in part our tithe to our Heavenly Father, and partly our punishment for our sins. All Gabe and I knew was that nothing grew in that spot; that come summer, the wheat or corn planted in that strange space would evaporate as though reaped by the hands of angels. It wasn't the whole field, of course. Our Heavenly Father wouldn't be so cruel. It was just one corner, faithfully planted every year, and every year that portion of the crop would vanish.
The older children had been there, I knew. They never said they'd been there, but I could tell they had, from their furtive whispers and sideways eyes whenever Patriarch Chrism spoke of it.
When one of the older girls appeared one morning with new penance-wraps of unbleached linen around the fingers of her right hand, I knew she'd been there. And so, in the manner of all young people in the throes of puberty, I decided I was going to go there too - I was going to get my own penance-wraps and be just as grownup as she was.
Our first trip to the Penance Field was nothing but a great disappointment. Sneaking away from our Saturday chores, Gabe and I ran through the hedgerows, ducking behind trees whenever we saw someone working in the fields. There was nothing remarkable about the Penance Field; it had the same wire-and-wood fences as all the others, surrounding the same yellowing summer crop.
