Project Purple

23 - The Goatwench

The eyes-That was the thing one noticed first.

The Goatwench carried a film over them that looked like heavy, blue-black hollows. The others had them, too, gentler versions. Henri's were different, though-deeper and absolute, telling of the ordeal raging within her.

"What's wrong child?" the Matron asked a few days after the lashings, as the waning days of summer began to cool. "Your marks will heal. We're not monsters."

Henri, on her knees, wrung the dress soaking in the bucket, "Should've saved the fabric-Blood never washes out."

She straggled through her chores like the undead, rarely speaking, as if battling an illness that seemed intent on eating its way through her. The punishment, like water into dry soil, consumed her life force; only a dessicant husk of her former self remained. She slept long on the bed of the Bibliothecary-sometimes through the whole day-curled into a kind of pupae, and the colony slogged on around her. After all, she was indisputably sick, though with what ailment they only conjectured.

Once she woke in the middle of the night, saw the poor Bibliothecary squeezed into a bed with the Pickleherring, and stumbled back to the floor of the Preacher's hut. They found her there in the morning, and brought her back, and she didn't resist.

She still did her chores when she could, but she didn't talk with anyone. Things were drying up within her; she felt herself to be in some state of indeterminate deterioration, and she didn't know what, if anything, would remain.

She joined in, gathering natural foods from the woods throughout the early fall-berries, nuts, and other edible vegetation that the colonists were game enough to try-and they were preserved and stored, in readiness for their imaginary winter. There was a bounty of thin patches of red fruit about the size of blueberries, which grew low on the ground cover in open stands of timber, and they yielded to her pickings.

Autumn was the time of year when food was most abundant, the time of real thanksgiving-so the preacher's tireless Sabbath sermons went:

"We are rewarded for our hard labor and for the grace of God, leading, of course, to the better lives which we seek in the new world."

The others nodded with all the grit within them; it seemed to Henri that they so wanted to serve the bedraggled colony, to play the game to the very end. And she sat on her wobbly stool in the back row, next to the vacant stool of the departed Cowleech. She was present for the Sabbath-She no longer played hookie, no longer took hikes to explore the terrain that surrounded them.

She stayed put. She obeyed.

Some inferred the corporal punishment had worked. The newfangled upgrade-the multi-tailed whipping instrument-had done its job in bringing the wayward Goatwench into line.

Under candlelight at the quad table one evening, the Woodcutter tapped the book that served as their Charter with a forceful finger, "It can get even worse for her."

He flipped the thick manual around and showed illustrations to those opposite him, and the men craned forward in their disbelief-It was of a woman whose lips had been sewn together.

"Gal's in agony," said free man Iverson, squinting at the photograph on the table.

The Bibliothecary hunched over the picture, frowning, "It's a digitally-enhanced photograph." She regarded the others, "Do you know what that means? It's happened before, somewhere on this Earth, and recently."