"Kennedy, Leigh - Belling Martha" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kennedy Leigh)

As he pushed her toward a metal shed, Martha said, "Don't know if they're still in the city." She was getting hazy from the cold and from being shoved around.

"We'll just find out in a little while." He opened the door. In the shed was a table with tools, greasy notices pinned on a board, and the kind of radio she'd seen in Brother Guy's office at the camp. Against one wall, a cot listed in a mended way.

"Lay down, spread your thighs. Ever done this before?" he asked, unbuckling his coat.

Martha tested the cot and figured it would hold her. "Do I have to?"

"Sure would make things easier for you, sweetie."

She shrugged.




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The jeep shot through the city, sometimes leaping off crevasses in the streets, sometimes jerking to avoid potholes, sometimes dipping one wheel in a hole with a thump. Martha sat beside the policeman driving, hunched over the bag in her lap.
They'd found her Aunt Jenny Skill in the directory. Martha couldn't remember much about what her father's sister had become, except she'd married in the city and either left or lost her husband. The check-in police told her that if her Aunt Jenny couldn't (or wouldn't) take her in, she would have to go to the WP camp.

Martha knew vaguely about WP camps. Sometimes they kept people doing construction or working in government janitorial jobs for years. One could get out by playing political or buying a bureaucrat's attention. Martha figured her aunt might know where her father was; even if he'd gotten stuck in a camp himself, she could find him. He would help her. Wouldn't he?

She thought about the last time she'd seen him Е "Renounce your ways!"

She'd run outside to see the battered truck with a chicken wire cage on the back. Standing inside the cage was an old woman with two apples in one hand and a potato in the other. Though she was grey and fragile, when she spoke to Martha straight through the cage, she had a strong voice.

"Renounce your ways!" she shouted, then pointed to Martha's father standing just behind her. "Come with us to the Lord's commune. We have food, we have warmth. Don't let your child be damned by your sinning ways!"

"Martha," her father said, but then was silent.

"Look at all the food," Martha said, noticing the lumpy bags of potatoes, apples, beans, and cheeses with heavy rinds in boxes, loaves of bread wrapped in paper.

"Forty miles to happiness," the woman shouted. "Forty miles to regular meals, a warm bed, and God-given peace of mind." She beckoned to Martha with an apple, unlatching the door of the cage. "You won't have to eat the flesh of your brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters in God's eyes! Renounce your ways! We understand! We forgive! We will save you!"

"Martha," her father said again with a voice as soft as snowfall, "do you want to go?"

Martha looked at more food than she'd ever seen at once in her life. She thought of the nights that her father wept and sighed after an especially trying capture and kill. She was still young enough to believe that a different life meant a better life, and if her father was willing Е

"Yes!"

"Come, child," the woman said, "come with us to pray with thanks for salvation."

Martha caught hold of the tailgate of the truck and boosted herself up to the cage door. Then she looked over her shoulder and saw that her father was standing still, just watching.

"Daddy!"

The woman grabbed her shoulders and pulled her headlong into the truck, shouting, "Take off, Brother Guy!"

The truck lurched. Martha skinned her knees falling forward. She crawled up to look out at the figure standing down the road and screamed, "Let me out, let me out, you old bitch!"