Jackie was not a predictable baby. She was ready to grant broad smiles to any woman or child who paid attention to her but was more reticent with men, especially the workmen and the craftsmen from the half-completed tower, who came throughout the day, smelling of sweat, stone dust, and timber, to fill their buckets. And when any of the twenty Finger Baptists came and required Margaret to draw water for them, Jackie was prone to burst into tears and hold on to her ma as if these Helpless Gentlemen meant to do her harm.

Margaret thought the girl was disturbed by the Baptists’ long gray robes, but actually she was smelling Margaret’s own uneasiness. Their greatest marks of holiness — their flaccid arms and lifeless hands, which had weakened over the years for want of use — were usually hidden in their sleeves. But when they came from their ablutions (where, according to the gossip, though no one had witnessed it, they cleaned their intimate parts by squatting in a shallow bowl), they liked to have their hands washed as well — force of habit from their less devout childhoods, she supposed — and Margaret had to hold back their sleeves while they dipped and trailed their emaciated fingers limply in the water. Then she had to take the washing block and soap them, sometimes as far up as their armpits. Their arms, especially those of the residents who had been there longest, who had not so much as picked their own noses for twenty years or more, were wasted from the shoulders down and weighed less than a strip of feather wood. Once the Baptists had washed, she had to dry them, too. She found the whole procedure unpleasant and disturbing. Their hands were weak and useless but not shrunken. In fact, with so little flesh and so much prominent bone, they seemed huge and corpselike.

Margaret tried to keep her eyes lowered and maintain silence when the Finger Baptists were at the well. She did not want to be selected as one of the emigrants who had the honor of serving these men in their private quarters. She’d heard — more rumors, possibly, but disquieting nevertheless — that duties might include massaging and masturbating them, washing them down all over, washing their hair, providing pellets of food, pulling their clothes on and off, cleaning their teeth, and helping the fatter and the older ones to sit and rise. But only once in those winter months had Margaret been asked to do anything more intimate than draw the water and wash and dry the arms. On that occasion, one of the younger Helpless Gentlemen, who, although his arms and hands were useless, was very mobile elsewhere, a speedy walker and a man with fat, expressive lips, had lifted his face toward Margaret and, with a series of commands—“Higher,” “Lower,” “Aah, just there!”—required her to attend to an intolerable itch on the side of his face.

“Count yourself lucky,” one of the women had commented that evening. “A man can itch in many places.”

There was no escaping the evening sermons, mostly delivered by a Baptist aspirant while all the families were eating. Metals were the cause of weaponry and avarice: “Think on iron, think on gold.” Metals were invaders in a world otherwise designed from fire, air, water, earth, and stone, all of which were more or less compressed versions of each other and indestructible; “Metal has brought death into the world. Rust and fire are God’s reply.” Sometimes the emigrants, their mouths oily with food and scarcely able to restrain their laughter, were required to repeat some favorite Baptist lines out loud. The diners were always happy to join in, though hardly any of them truly felt that tins and sins were quite the twins that the Baptist songs made them out to be.

Otherwise, Margaret’s life in the Ark was without problems and without external incident. The trickle of new arrivals — which, luckily, did not include any Boses — stopped as the snow thickened and the cold intensified. The world beyond the palisades became a memory of hardship and sore feet. She did her best not to dwell on Franklin or her family in Ferrytown. The devotees, pilgrims, and disciples who had arrived during the fall kept to themselves in the evenings, preferring to concentrate on their rites and religious ambitions rather than consort with people who were less hostile to the old ways of America than piety and reason demanded. Once in a while a group of devotees, expressionless as usual and wearing their sorters’ gloves, disturbed the domestic calm of the sleeping huts by enforcing an unexpected search for hidden jewelry or any other trace of metal. A nonobservant mason brought in from Tidewater during the summer because his carving skills were unrivaled was rumored to have hidden shards of metal between the tower walls to undermine its sanctity. The devotees had not found any evidence of that, but their confidence had been undermined. So they took no chances with the integrity of their new building. If anyone was caught with as much as a half nail or a splinter of tin, his or her whole family was expelled at once, no matter whether it was the day or night or in the middle of a storm. The Ark would not abide so much as a fleck of metal.

Margaret had nothing to fear from these occasional disruptions. She had no possessions that might harbor contraband. She did not care about the tower. She was without blemish and, in their eyes at least, lived a blameless life, hoping only to pass unnoticed or, at most, to be regarded as an attentive mother. She exchanged her token for food each day and earned it back by her attendance at the well. She slept and ate and grew more confident.

At mealtimes, when they could be stared at, the Finger Baptists were a source of great amusement among the younger emigrants, including Margaret. Afterward, gathered around the candles in the privacy of the sleeping shed, their faces animated by the warmth and light, the women of Margaret’s hut could laugh and joke at will and then exchange their hopes and ambitions for the coming spring.

In some respects, Margaret had never been happier. Of course, her happiness was always haunted by the all-too-recent and all-too-memorable loss of her family, her hometown, and her only man. The very thought of them was crippling. Nevertheless, Franklin had become the perfect husband and father in her imagination and in the stories that she told to her companions. He was her lover and her friend. He was the father of Jackie. She would never look at another man until she was certain he was dead. She could not shake off entirely the receding but nagging shame and guilt she felt for her abduction of the child. But for once she was part of a community that had not known her as a girl, that did not count her coloring as unfortunate, and that could not control the way she lived her life or how she raised her daughter. She was a woman with status, a mother, a wife with a lost husband, a good friend whose wit was appreciated in the hut. Here was a warmth and neighborliness that she had never encountered in Ferrytown, where the only common interests at times seemed to be avarice, jealousy, and competition. In the Ark, among her shed companions, there was the common interest of strangers sharing their directions and their hopes.

Over the months both Jackie and the half-completed tower grew higher and more ornate. The Finger Baptists hoped to move into the lower levels when the spring and a fresh intake of both pilgrims and travelers arrived. Everybody among the emigrants dreamed of walking out through the double gates to see a sail ship in the estuary. Another month would see them free again. A month was nothing to endure. Then America could be a nightmare left behind. Even Margaret began to believe that her best future — their best future — would be beyond the ocean, that taking to the ships would not be cowardly. That dream she’d had, up in the forest on the night when she had lost her way, that dream of being once again a safe and ancient girl in her soddy at the top of Butter Hill, had been a delusion. Yes, happiness was in the east. Wasn’t that what everyone believed?