The women’s sleeping shed was cobble-floored and timber-sided, with loose roof planks protected from the mischief of the wind by stone weights. It creaked as she entered, a sort of greeting to the newcomers but a nailless greeting, as once again the building was pegged and framed with wooden joints and hinges. There were no windows. The only light came from the open door and through gaps in the timber. There was no fire or grate, but it was warmer inside than outside, and certainly drier. She recognized the homely smells of women, washing, tobacco, and hog-fat candles.
Margaret chose a bed that was not already made up with a blanket and covered with possessions. She found a crib for Bella. The hut was empty of other residents. All were working, she presumed, maintaining their circles of effort and reward. The mattress was a luxury that she had almost forgotten, cotton ticking stuffed with chaff and moss. She fell asleep at once, with Bella on her chest, and neither woke until the daylight had gone entirely, robbing the shed of any definition. They slept until someone passed by with a mallet, beating on beams and doors, and calling out between the drumming of wood on wood, “Let’s eat. Let’s eat.”
It was not hard to find the dining hall, even though it looked exactly the same as the sleeping huts. Everyone was going there, holding his or her bone spoon. She followed, keeping her distance, not yet wanting to talk to anyone or introduce herself, but once she had handed over her token, climbed the three steps, and was inside the hall, she found a decent smile to wear and tried to look as if she belonged and was not at all embarrassed by the company of so many strangers, divided as usual into tables for men and tables for women and a circle of low planks for the children. The two tables nearest the door were reserved for pilgrims, devotees, and anyone else entitled to a loop of white tape.
Margaret should have known that her discomfort could not last. A woman with a baby, especially one as beautiful as Bella, is always welcome at a table of other women. Within a moment she had been summoned by another mother, whose child was old enough to handle his own spoon, and she was sitting among friends, with Bella on her lap. There was more good food in front of her than she had seen since Ferrytown. But no one was eating yet. One higher table at the side of the building was still unoccupied. They would have to wait, it seemed, for the latecomers.
When she saw them, it was not immediately clear how the Finger Baptists had earned their name. They wore long sleeves, long hair, long beards, and seemed to have trouble walking with any strength or commitment. There were exactly twenty of them. One had to die before another devotee could be elected to their group. Twenty was the holy maximum. They took their seats at the higher table, paying no attention to the crowded hut, and one of the attendants struck his mallet on their table to beat out the blessing, wood on wood, and to indicate that dining could begin. Margaret mashed some of the softer food for Bella first, and added a little milk to make it into a digestible paste. She broke up a piece of chicken into safe shreds and let the girl suck it while the paste was cooling, and then she took her too-large spoon and began to feed the stolen child, her boy Jackson, her girl Bella.
It was only when Bella was eating that Margaret looked across the room and saw that what she was doing was mirrored at the higher table. The twenty Finger Baptists were the Helpless Gentlemen. They did not want to feed themselves, it seemed. They sat before their food, their arms hanging loosely at their sides, their beards and hair pushed back, while devotees — one each — spooned food into their mouths and wiped their lips with cloths. The devotees lifted cups of water and juice and waited for their masters to sip. One was holding up a chicken leg for his Gentleman to gnaw. Another offered dry beans, one at a time, as if he were hand-feeding a turkey.
“What are they doing?” Margaret asked the mother who had befriended her.
“The very same as you.”
“So I see. But why?”
“Has no one told you yet? They’re not allowed to use their hands. The hands do Devil’s work.”
The Devil’s work, Margaret soon found out, included not only fighting and stealing, both of which indisputably required dishonest hands, but also art, craft, cooking, working, and the age-old and best-forgotten practices of technology for which all metal was the chilling evidence. The Helpless Gentlemen had set their minds and bodies against the country’s ferrous history. Wingless and with withered arms, they’d earn their places at the side of God.
So the winter passed. It was an oddly comfortable existence for Margaret and Bella. Much of the doubt, regret, and danger had been removed from her life, though what replaced them was mostly dull. In this respect, the Finger Baptists were proved correct — no blades, no blood. The emigrants were honest, because there was nothing to steal; sharing, because there was plenty to eat; sober, because there was no liquor. There were no misers, because there was no wealth to hoard; they were industrious, because it was work or starve.
As the mother of an infant, Margaret’s duties were long but light. It was her job to sit from sunup to sundown at the Ark’s water supply, a shallow well, protected from the cold by a three-sided shelter. For most of the time there was nothing for her to do except be patient and keep Bella amused and out of mischief. The girl was an adventurous crawler and then a reckless walker, who, like the worst puppy, would take any opportunity to slip away behind Margaret’s back to investigate and taste anything that caught her eye, whether it be a dangerous splinter of wood or a shard of ice or a scrap of crust or mud. Then Margaret had to clean out Bella’s mouth with her finger and force open her fists to remove any trophy. The child was growing, becoming more interesting and more difficult, first learning to recognize the word no and then learning to resist it. Once she had discovered how to pick things up and use them without help — her cup, for example, her spoon — it was not long before she devised the game of throwing things down for Margaret to fetch or simply to enjoy the sound of tumbling, rolling, and breaking.
There were busy times when Margaret had no choice but to strap Bella to her back and deal with the peak demands for water. The first to arrive were those emigrants whose duty it was that day to fill the family water jugs. There were eighty-two overwintering families in all, including Margaret and Bella, and so the line for water was often long and unruly, with impatient boys trying to jump the line and older men demanding precedence, especially as the first waters of the morning were the least cloudy and the sweetest. Margaret had instituted the Ferrytown method to prevent arguments. As people arrived at the well, they threaded a loose rope through the handles of their jugs. That fixed the line beyond question. Then they had no choice but to be patient and talk to each other rather than argue, or to play with the child.
Margaret’s still-short hair was long enough by now to be revealed to the women in her sleeping shed. She could safely recount to them the story of her illness and some details of her journey to the Ark. She could relive out loud and weep again at the horrors of Ferrytown, that rock-hard memory: every member of her family dead in sleep. Now she appeared to the women as a survivor, as someone who had once been alarmingly dangerous but was no longer. They were the only ones who saw her bareheaded, though, and they were the only ones, too, who inevitably saw Bella naked. So Margaret’s pretense that Bella was a boy called Jackson was short-lived. No, Jackson was a girl’s name in her family, she’d explained, despite the sound of it, its final unfeminine consonant. So she had begun calling Bella Bose “little Jackie.” It was more convincingly girlish. Bella did not seem to notice the change. Indeed, it wasn’t very long before she did not even respond to the word Bella. She became Jackie to herself. And Margaret was known to her as Ma, a not entirely dishonest pretense, given her first name. Ma for Margaret. Ma for make-believe.