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Your husband is in his undershirt. His shoes are lined up beside yours at the foot of the bed. Only a bedside lamp is on, crook-necked: as his great reluctant bulk crosses the room, his shadow leaps through its spotlight on the wall. You perch in your nightgown on the edge of the mattress, hands jammed beneath your thighs. The comforter in your parents’ guest room is slippery as horsehair, with a bulky, mushy, insubstantial inside, and your toes press hard into the floor to keep you from sliding off.
He closes the door and, after a beat with his hand tight on the knob, turns to face you.
You have been dreading the arrival of this moment.
Three stomach-knotting hours ago: family dinner. You, him, your parents, his parents. His sister and her family. His brothers and their wives. You have no siblings. “Our little miracle,” your mother used to call you, when you were younger. You used to have a foster sister, from when you were eleven to when you were fifteen, but she ran away. Your parents never mention her and you never think of her.
But despite your husband’s clan outnumbering yours, as every family in church outnumbers yours in both members and generations, the authority at the table is absolute and sacrosanct: at its head, your father, the pastor of the First Church of the Family of the New Resurrection.
Everyone you know is a congregant of your father’s church, faithful, in loyal attendance three times a week: Sunday service, Wednesday night women’s group, Friday night Bible study. All this is your father’s, and your only work is in its ministry. You even met your husband at church, in youth group (Tuesday afternoons). You were the diligent unbeloved, hunched over your accelerated-study textbooks long after the rest had finished their language arts homework and gone out to the yard; he was the shy counselor who sat on the steps, adored by everyone for how flagrantly he neglected his disciplinary duties in favor of filling journal after journal with longhand writing, which he never let anyone read. Back then you called him Mr. Nigenad.
You married him the summer after graduation. A posy of blush-pink rosebuds strangled in your numb teenage fists; your face bloodless; the barrel-curl blowout his sister had given you going limp with cold sweat. His parents were close with the pastor and they wanted a wife for their sweet, sensitive boy—high time, they’d said. As you had already revealed yourself to be a problem daughter who was unlikely to appeal to any husband, let alone a good Christian man, this arrangement suited your father fine.
Likewise weekly: family-dinner Saturdays. The whole Nigenad clan always stays over with your parents on Saturday night to attend service in a body the following morning. It is a tradition that you uphold only because it would otherwise crush you, caryatid-like, beneath its venerable weight. Every Saturday dinner is therefore identical in its guests, its menu, and its conversation. This one was no different. Once your fathers had exhausted the week’s happenings in the wide world of sports, and the womenfolk their nauseating store of adorable child-anecdotes—as usual, Ortus took the floor.
He discoursed at great and mournful length as your mother plied him with polite questions about his “theological study,” the multi-volume monstrosity on speculations and schisms among the Early Church Fathers he’s been generating reams of ever since you’ve known him. In all that time, its ending—or even a coherent arc to its thesis—has never gotten closer. In your opinion, he chose the topic on purpose out of pure contrariness, as a nominally legitimate area of research that would nonetheless interest as few readers as possible.
“And the chapter you’re working on right now,” your mother murmurs, “is about—hmm—was it Ignatius?”
It’ll be the third time you’ve heard him expound on it this week alone. You grimace at her not to encourage him, but she cuts her eyes hard at you and turns back to Ortus with a maternal smile.
“Athanasius,” he replies somberly. “Not unknown by any means, but as an Alexandrian…”
By now, you could recite each of his monologues in his stead, word-perfect. You kick him under the table; he appears insensible to the blow.
“… and when one situates his refutation of the Arian heresy in its proper historical context, one comes to understand the importance of Athanasius’s role amongst the monastics. Without his Life of St. Anthony, the ascetic tradition and particularly the development of the anchoritic life would never—”
You’ve long since learned to hold your tongue around your father, but being in company with Ortus makes you careless.
“When one situates oneself as anything other than completely obtuse,” you say, in a high, clear voice, “one comes to understand when one’s dinner companions are about to stick a fork in their eye out of boredom.”
Like a kitten growing up without littermates to teach it to modulate its viciousness, your barbs tend, needlelike, to sink deep. You don’t realize how cruel you sound until your husband’s face flushes a dull red, with a shame that has long ago set aside surprise. Your conscience pricks you for it, briefly; then you remember you have an audience.
The table has gone quiet. “Harrow, be sweet,” your mother hisses reproachfully, but you barely hear her. Your father’s look across the table has shriveled you in its blast. His brow lowers not so much with shock or anger as with disgust.
Your rebellious, bitter-hearted behavior disrespects your family and the Lord. You are a grown girl and I expect you to conduct yourself accordingly.
He won’t correct you quite yet, though; he’s waiting for your husband to do his duty. But Ortus says nothing.
“And I thought I wasn’t much of a reader,” one of his brothers tries to quip, to no effect.
Your father casts an expectant, disapproving eye at your husband. “You’re going to take that kind of talk from her?”
“No, sir,” says Ortus.
“Who can tell me,” says your father, raising his voice to address the entire table, “what the Apostle Paul instructs us in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians?”
You lift your gaze to meet his, though you sicken to do it. The two of you stare at one another. A hot, queasy rill courses through you.
“‘As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything’?” quotes one of the brothers’ wives hesitantly, at last. “Verse 24?”
“That’s right,” says your father, and finally returns his attention to Ortus, whom the exchange has suitably squashed. You try not to sag in relief as his eyes leave you. “Valuable words.”
“Yes, sir,” says Ortus. He sits like a post, with his hands empty.
“Just remember that, son,” your father says, and indicates the salt so that your mother will pass it to him.
As she does so, she says, “I just read a wonderful digest article about a new commentary on Ephesians,” and smiles at Ortus’s parents. “It’s by a Bible scholar who’s a DD! Have you ever—”
The conversation picks back up immediately, all the couples relieved that the marital balance has been restored. One of your nieces glances at you, then casts her eyes down at her plate.
Your muzzled and stricken silence extends through the remainder of dinner. You help to clear the table, then briefly excuse yourself to vomit; but only a little clear bile comes up. Afterward, everyone retires to the vast downstairs den for PG-rated movie night, where you sit beside your husband with your hands in your lap, the smell of popcorn butter turning your gorge. You’ve associated that smell with Saturday nights since childhood. She was barred from participating in family night more often than not, with how much trouble she was always in. Sudden sound effects make you startle once or twice in the darkened room.
Now—after the overhead light comes on, after everyone joins hands for evening prayer, after the rest of the family has departed for their respective beds and pull-out couches with noisy sounds of fellowship—now, Ortus has made himself ready to do his husbandly duty.
It’s at times like this that he seems his age; his black hair is touched with salt at the temples, and his cheeks sag with exhaustion. He hates this ritual nearly as much as you do. His reluctance is cold comfort to you, though, you reflect bitterly. He’s not the one who’s going to feel it.
The first time your husband punished you, it was with a few token swats to your backside as you stood bent over the footboard at home. When you’d straightened and looked at him, he took a step back. Be a man, why don’t you, you’d forced out at last, past the knife in your throat, if you really think I deserve it.
“You know it’s easier for you, after,” he tries to remind you, though you haven’t spoken. “For us to—”
“I can only hope you aren’t feebleminded enough to imply that you’re doing me a favor.” You are deeply relieved to expel some of the venom you’ve choked down. It almost makes you feel toward your husband something like real gratitude. “The only thing I need less from you than a lecture is some fat-fingered attempt at sympathy.”
“Please don’t give me that kind of attitude in front of your father anymore.” He looks miserable, or maybe weary. He has made similar requests of you before.
“I don’t see him here in the room with us,” you snap. “Unless you’ve been keeping him in the linen closet as a surprise.”
With his hand on his cheek, Ortus regards you with a faint kind of pity. He used to look at you like that, standing in the door of the youth-group room. But your answering glower forces him to avert his eyes and retreat into fragmentary mumbling. “When we are guests under his roof… Not that I agree with all his teachings on the topic… The Church Fathers—”
“Spare me.” Your stomach hurts. “I’d rather have the whipping.”
Ortus just sighs. He unplugs his phone charger and bundles the long cable in his hand. This, too, is proof of his compassion: if he were to use a paddle, a strap, or even something as innocent as his broad and uncallused palm, the sounds of smacking would escape the guest room’s narrow walls and filter down through the rest of the house. The fall of the USB cable is near-silent. With it, all you have to stifle are your own cries.
There is no more delay. Your armpits start to sweat as your husband bends you over his lap, familiar gutsinking posture. Despite yourself, you grab for a decorative pillow at the head of the bed and throttle it in your arms. You can imagine your father down the hall, the door ajar to the master bedroom, keeping one ear open for the whacks of a paddle.
You’re still not completely sure who else can hear the two of you now: as a child, you were always punished in your bedroom, but the guest room you and your husband are staying in tonight is on the other side of the corridor, much closer to the stairs. And when your father punished her, it was always on the spot, the minute the bad behavior happened, in the den or over the dinner table or pulled to the side of the road. Anyone could hear it across the whole house.
You never knew whether to pity or envy her. Since her punishments were almost invariably in mixed company, she only ever had her pants pulled down to the tops of her thighs, sometimes not even that if the family was out in public. You were required to strip.
You have no secrets from God. And it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, young lady. Now let me see you touch those toes.
The USB cable lies slack against your thigh as your husband pulls up your nightgown and pulls down your underpants. Your heartbeat hurts your chest. Hurriedly, you make this vow: none of his family will hear you, not a single sob. The door doesn’t lock—none of the doors in your parents’ house do—but you won’t give anyone a reason to come looking. You won’t give them so much as a whisper.
Ortus holds his breath. His fist tightens on the back of your nightgown, bunching the pile of excess fabric at your shoulder blades. The bedside light casts a shadow on the wall of his raised arm wielding the bundled cable. It makes a hackneyed, heavy-handed picture of doom, but the fear still sickens you anyway.
I want to hear you praying. —Put your head down. Don’t you lift your head again.
Then the cable falls.
When the pain blooms, you are a child again; and you are more afraid of being a child again than anything else in your life.
The first strike is a bar of fire. Your face was already buried in the pillow in your arms, so your first gasp is muffled. The next blows fall in steady succession, stripe after stripe, that build to an insupportable agony in a matter of less than a minute. Despite your promise to yourself, you are already hissing through your teeth. But then, your whole life has conspired to make you accustomed to defeat.
Over and over, as a child, you would disobey, out of carelessness or ignorance or sheer cussedness. (Your parents had always called you strong-willed, but not even the most godless unbeliever could have labored under the belief that it was a compliment.) Each time, as you awaited the appointed hour, you would gnash your teeth and swear to yourself a bloody oath: this time, your father would not win. Each time, he would discipline you as a loving parent should. And each time, without fail, your hateful defiance of his authority would be trampled to earth beneath the fall of the switch.
I’ve prayed so many nights for my daughter. I’ve prayed that her straying heart be reunited with the Lord. And through faith alone I know she shall be saved.
The slash and thwack of the USB cable terrorizes you and makes your world small. Your backside is aflame. You can’t take any more, you can’t, please, God, you can’t. You squirm your hips away from the blows, but they follow you as you cringe this way and that. Ortus’s thick fist in your nightgown holds you down.
Each time, as a child, you would cry—you would always cry—partly out of pain and naked humiliation, but also from the sin that your punishment had revealed in you. God could see every part of you: before He had formed you in your mother’s womb, He had known you. You knew He could see the hardness of your heart, and you knew it made Him sorrow. You burned with the knowledge of your own wrongdoing, in resisting your discipline, in your disobedience of God’s will which had given you into your father’s care; and you burned with the ease with which he nonetheless took you in hand and made you obey. On bended knee you prayed to the Lord to be made anew.
It breaks my heart that a child of mine should stray. It breaks my heart, Harrow.
When you got older, you still wept when you were punished, but God had less to do with it. He still knew every part of you, and He was still with you every hour of the long, dark night. But you knew He loved you only as one of His children who had fallen far from the hope of redemption. As a girl, your misery was largely animated by pettier, more worldly goads: stubbornness; hatred; and the knowledge that, through the streams of your tears, the forgiveness you had begged Him for your entire life would inevitably be bestowed upon you by none except your father.
In your parents’ guest room, your punishment continues, as it must, until the tears come. The number of licks is irrelevant; what matters is your repentance. You kick your feet and hyperventilate. You heave giant silent sobs into the pillow. Your chastisement has humbled you, as it ought to have done, as it always must, and now beneath the stroke of the lash all you want is to disappear. But the gnawing fire drives through your flesh, making escape impossible.
Inside you is the noise of a great tumult. Each stripe crushes another shard of your overweening pride, and as each is crushed, it sends through you a dart of fire. A shuddering builds at the heart of the blaze, face flaming, wet with tears and mucus, as you gasp your shame into the sodden pillow. You lie limp across his lap—no longer fighting, no longer resisting. What your father would have called a surrendered heart.
Good girl. I rejoice not because you are grieved, but because you are grieved into repenting. There’s my girl. All done. Come here, now. Come here.
The last blow falls. For just a moment, you are erased, and what was once you curls hard around an animal submission. Ortus drops the cable with a thump as you seize trembling across his lap.
Shh, shh. Good girl. There’s my good girl. Relax…
A held breath in the room, his, yours: a drenched and swollen thunderhead with a single drop about to fall: then the tension deflates, and you crumple.
“I’m sorry, Harrow,” mumbles Ortus, as you sob with fury. Another of his uxorious mercies: he lets you lie there weeping and seething for as long as you like. He does not bestow endearments or caresses. He does not require you to hug him, or thank him. He just rests his elbows on your back, in such a way that you know his face is in his hands, and gives you some privacy.
The hot, distended welts crossing your buttocks throb in pitiless time with the beat of your impenitent heart. You don’t know what it is that compels you to fight; to resist your husband’s, your father’s, God-given authority. You long for your own good to bend your neck to the yoke of complete and joyous subjection, as a child should, as a wife should. But something was made wrong in you that refuses this duty.
At long last, you drag yourself off Ortus’s lap to kneel at the bedside and clasp your hands. You don’t bother to pull your underpants up or your nightgown down; the door is closed, and he of all people isn’t staring at your backside. Besides, the cool air soothes the welts. You must look a sight right now, though. You’re all over sweat and your hair is a wild nest around your shoulders. If your mother could see you, she’d slap your shoulder sharply and tell you to go brush it, so strangers won’t think your mama didn’t raise you.
Your husband kneels beside you, and gives a brief squeeze to your forearm before he clasps his own hands and bows his head.
“Thank you, Lord,” he recites, with immense relief, “for the authority to make my wife holy, and to guide her into Godly behavior, as you guide your believers into righteousness.”
“Thank you, Lord,” your larynx produces, “for the humility to be subject to my husband, who loves me as Christ loves the church, and to be sanctified alongside him in the kingdom of Heaven.” Your voice is still clogged with snot.
Then it’s time for the two of you to pray together. The sound of your twinned voices is not a usual one in your nightly domesticity; you’re fortunate that he prefers to pray alone most evenings. If ever you pray together, it’s only when Ortus remembers, or is reminded, that he ought to set a good example.
“May the church adore and follow Christ,” you both recite, “as the wife adores and follows her husband.
“May the Lord bless and preserve our marriage. May our sins and all that belongs to our earthly nature be put to death, and may we be clothed in the garb of compassion, humility, gentleness, and peace.
“May the man work in his wife as the yeoman plows the furrow,” you mumble along with him at the last, “and may the fruit of his labors be bountiful.”
Then Ortus visibly gathers his courage, draws back the blankets, and takes you in his arms. You sink back in quiet, miserable obedience. If it were your father bending you over, you would have fought harder, been a willful little brat, even as it earned you more stripes, and in the end crushed you wholly; since it is your husband, and it is Ortus, and you know what it is for him to do this to you, you accept him without resistance.
He pulls the heavy comforter back up over his shoulders before he enters you. As you rock with him, your searing buttocks compress against the mattress with every thrust. No longer are you shocked by the squirming, shrinking, annihilating pleasure these couplings bring you. You have fallen far from God and are only worthy to be held in the Spirit through retribution and repentance. A moan escapes your parted lips, high and trembling. This is what it means, you have learned, to be humbled before the Lord.
But at the sound your husband goes soft and stills in you. Instantly you clench your teeth together—mistake. You should have known better than to make a noise. He works at himself with his eyes closed until he can regain some semblance of a functioning manhood; then he starts again, laborious, half-hard. You don’t reach down, but you do tilt your pelvis upward against his for a better angle on the place where his lower belly rubs against you. That rhythm, plus the painful crush of your beaten flesh beneath both your bodies, forces buzzing waves through you that make you feel like a woman and a wife.
You only think of her once, very briefly, when your eyes fly open to stare at the ceiling; and you are pleased by how quickly you can thrust the image away.
His release arrives shortly thereafter. He props himself on his elbows above you, panting burred with spittle, and kisses your cheek. Then he rolls away, pulls up his boxers, and takes up a thick book from his nightstand, thereby signaling that the rite is done.
Much later that night, when you are sleepless in bed beside your husband, the crotch of your underpants sodden with your mingled fluids, Ortus snoring with the weary bovine peace of the utterly resigned, she comes back to you. Immediately you try to smooth the picture away, imagining your untamed head of frizzy hair being gradually brushed and brushed into glossy loveliness; imagining each stroke untangling your tortuous rat’s nest of a mind. Damp carpet overlaying a rotten and mildewed floor, and you tiptoeing from plank to plank, feeling out the rottenness with the balls of your trembling feet, and steering clear of the soft parts.
She was a tall kid. She begged your parents to pay for her JV equipment fees when the foster program would not. She shaved the back of her skull in the upstairs bathroom, and bore the consequences so nobly that you wept with rage to see her so ill-used.
Rotten floor; the smell of mildew.
She had lain with you in a smaller bed than this. She had taken your hand in your black bedroom, two heads on one pillow, when you could not speak; her breath, hot and spaghetti-scented, had blown across your cheek loud as wind. She had been witness. But you never thought of that anymore.
In the driveway, she’d screamed obscenities. Muffled, barely audible from inside: words you’d honestly never heard before. Your mother had shuttled her few cardboard boxes and her backpack downstairs, nostrils deformed with fury. You’d sat frozen in the den, the corduroy of the big armchair like corrugated tin beneath your palms, utterly paralyzed by the strangeness of the right-angled corners of the black TV screen. Her touch still burning on your dry-scaled lips.
Afterward your parents had sat you down and told you that she was on drugs, that she had stolen from them, that the placement agency had failed to mention something, another thing, and something else; and, at last, that she had run away. You prayed for her safety for a few weeks after that, only in silence and when you were sure you were alone. Then the book had been closed. But you hadn’t tried to remember the details in years.
It takes you a long while to fall asleep; but you never break a plank and crash through to the basement, and your long-repeated strokes gradually smooth the thoughts away. Ortus stirs and groans plaintively in his sleep, as though with an uneasy dream. Your hand reaches up robotically to rub his back.