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Every mother thinks her child is special. Sarah knows that, knows about oxytocin and so many other things congregants that have been to university remember and repeat to each other. Holy words as they work the fields, milk the cows, dye the cotton brought in from town, build the outbuildings, patch the roofs. Knowledge is a gift, and for those that have dug it from the hard ground of the land outside the Ranch – it's more of one, because of that, because of how unexpected a place it was found.
Sarah even knows every mother is right, in some way beyond platitude – human life is sacred, somehow. She knows it.
There isn't anybody else who's special like Alton is special. She knows that, too. She's known that for so long she almost can't remember a time when she didn't know it in her bones, in her blood, fear for her brave boy squeezing her lungs so much she can hardly breathe.
He's so smart, so kind, so thoughtful – but most of the Ranch, all they can see is how he looks to the sky, and speaks the words he finds there.
Holy words, they say.
Sarah doesn't think they're listening.
--
Roy finds time to be with them. Roy's always been clever at finding time and opportunity. He snuck her kisses, and quiet companionship, in the first months, and then also soft slippers and anti-emetics and hard candies he'd managed to get on supply runs to town while she was pregnant with Alton ("Elden doesn't mind little things," he tells her, when she asks. "Now, Doak ..."). Well, times other than the married-people times when they got to be together.
Before Alton was born, Sarah thought it was romantic. When she'd had a boyfriend – just the one – before the Ranch, they'd spent every free moment together with the thinnest of excuses, and she can't even say now that she knew him. Her memory of him seems so flimsy, not rooted in the land. But the church gave her a husband she knew to be good, because people said it, and found to be true because of how he cared for her. She loves how seriously he considers his surroundings, how kindly he thinks of people's motivations while accepting their flaws, how she can make his face light up with her questions about his work or gleaned knowledge from hers, with jokes she thinks up just to swindle quiet laughs out of him.
After Alton is born, Sarah realizes his cleverness to be necessity. Roy believes her fear, takes her hands and holds them to his face even when she can't speak it, smooths the hair of their son with an expression of awe he can't hide and never really loses. Children whose fathers aren't elders usually have no real reason to know their dads are good, except because people say it, until they join them at their work. But Alton knows it; he never has to question that his parents will do all they can to protect him.
By the time he's three, they start failing. He's too special to hide.
--
It happens so quickly. He's just learning to read picture books, and then he's reading the sky, and then not weeks later Pastor Meyer starts to consult with him, to give Sarah a notebook and a pencil to transcribe what he says, because he is still small enough to fall into startled silence at times when she is not there. That is okay for little boys who are not as special as Alton, but for those who speak what sound to be holy words...
Sarah tries to be grateful for time away from meat preparation, and the time spent with her son. But as he gets older, he'll be less scared to be away, and she knows it won’t last. Soon enough, a woman with the gift of childcare will look after her son during the day, and she'll only be with him for the nights.
(Some days, she could swear he glows. She closes the curtains on those days, takes him further inside. He's so uncomfortable when it happens, and increasingly so, like he's trapped inside his skin.)
He watches her during his strange days, sometimes, instead of the sky but with the same intensity. He takes her hand, the one with the pencil, and brings it to his face.
"You'll be okay, Al," she promises, and smiles as best she can.
"Okay," he says, solemn. She hopes she isn't lying. She hopes it will be truth.
Alton looks at other people, too, when they ask him to, and they see something she doesn't – something big, and beautiful, and like home. Sometimes Alton will tell her about it, and she believes him, but she's never seen it. She thinks he doesn't want to show her, and she doesn't know why, but she accepts it. Showing people tires him.
Roy's never seen it either, he tells her, in the quiet privacy of their marriage room. The elders asked him to come, to look Alton in the eyes, and Alton only gazed back with a faint question.
"I told him it was okay," he says, into her ear, arm loose but comforting around her. "In my head."
"He isn't psychic," Sarah protests, turning in the bed to look at him, elbow knocking into his ribs. He lets out a gust of breath, almost like a joke, and smiles at her.
"He's good at reading faces," he says. His free hand, the one not tucked under his head, tangles itself in her hair. "That's all."
She kisses him. Because he's kind, and beautiful, and because there's almost never time or opportunity for sneaking anymore, not without Alton around. And she's grateful, that Alton gets to see his father, but she misses—this.
Pastor Meyer wants them to have another child, another Alton, but they've agreed between themselves to not. It's unholy, a betrayal, to keep another prophet from the world so in need of truth. But neither of them would survive it. And her Alton is a child, he needs his parents to protect him without their attention divided.
--
In the end the trouble that drives her out is Sarah's fault, but it had to be done. She told them it hurt him, she tells them, but they keep bringing him into the sunlight, like his burning and screaming is holiness instead of a little boy in fear. They hold her back from dragging him into her arms until more than just bulbs and juice glasses started shattering, until the floor quakes and beams crack and she breaks free, and pulls him to herself; until the world goes quiet and they take an exhausted Alton away.
She tells everyone. She tells everyone, not just the elders, not quietly. Not loudly, either, she is too angry to be loud, but she buzzes with it, and everyone knows.
They change service times to night. Not because of the worry over Alton that Sarah has stirred up in the community, of course. Only because they had already been concerned. Of course.
They ban her from church. Not in those words. Everyone has to take service shifts, sometimes. To tend to what needs tending during service, what can't be left to tend to itself for a few hours. Sarah is assigned them every time, now. She misses service, and the easy friendliness of the rest of the Ranch. No one is unkind, but – they know she is being punished, and they know the elders are wise.
She only sees Alton at breakfast, just after nightfall, when she can. He sits with her, and watches the rest of the room, wearing the goggles the elders had let Elden get him. They let Roy see him more, now that she almost doesn't see him at all. Alton hadn't liked sleeping when he didn't know where she was, and they think Roy is a safe substitute.
She hates them, and she is breathless at how foolish they can be to not see danger in her husband's care for their son. She hates him, too, for his ability to hide his anger from them, even though she knows his hiding is necessary. She hates herself, for her inability to hide it, even though she knows it's the only reason Alton has recovered as much as he has.
She doesn't hate Alton, but what she feels is almost like a blank empty space instead of anything real when he's not pressed against her. She is so tired, and she doesn't know how to protect her son.
--
Roy wakes her up one afternoon, a finger along the inside of her wrist, and she follows him out of the single women's dorms she's been pushed back to, since Alton was taken away. All noise is muffled by the pouring rain on the roof, a drumbeat and a lullaby. They stop under the eave just outside.
He's closer to her than he's been in months. She's the enemy of the elders, and he can't be her ally, and she knows it, she knows it, but she's relied on him to be her steadying ground for so long she almost doesn't know what to do with him back.
"Sarah," Roy says, and it takes her a moment to realize he's holding back tears. "It's Alton. Calvin Meyer's taking him. He says – it'll be safer, if he doesn't have contact with the congregation except during communion."
Alton doesn't have a birth certificate, they didn't need a hospital. Meyer needs no one's permission to take their son. By the eyes of the law, she and Roy aren't even married off the Ranch.
She stares at Roy, and looks down. There's been a thought in her head for months, and she stops swallowing it.
"When do you go into town, with Elden?"
"Friday next," Roy says. "Why?"
"I need you to contact my mother."
--
Sarah sees Alton, once, while she's waiting to hear if her mother has replied. She's patching a piece of fence a cow had broken through a few hours before, in her knees in the mud. Someone else could fix it better, but it's service time, and Sarah almost never puts off what needs to be done.
Alton shows up, and she barely sees him before he crashes into her, embracing her in a hug. She hugs him back, and laughs quietly so she doesn't cry, trying not to get mud on him and failing.
"You've grown," she says to him, because he has and because there's so little else to say. He looks tired, but not too tired – she thinks it hasn't been communion for a good ten days. She cleans a hand on her dress, and rests it against his face, and smiles as best she can.
Alton smiles, then hesitates. He glances over her shoulder, and Sarah figures soon enough his minder will find him, or he'll have to leave so she doesn't. Then he looks back to her, voice quiet and careful. "Dad says you love me all the time, so I don't forget, but I haven't been able to say it back."
Sarah swallows, and smiles, so he doesn't mistake her pending tears for sadness. "Thank you, Al. I won't forget."
Alton watches her, carefully. "Do you promise?"
"I promise."
He nods, relieved. "I have to go," he says, "before Lacey looks over here."
"Yes," Sarah says. She bites her lip, and pulls her hand away. "Thank you."
--
When Sarah leaves, she does it by lacing her boots, adjusting her dress, and packing a rucksack with some water, sandwiches, and a pair of Elden's jeans he let her steal. Then she walks out through the front gate. It's one of the last warm days of September, and she's only once more briefly seen her son. His minder had him by the arm, and hurried him out of view, while he turned to look at her. She thought it will be okay at him, with all of her heart, and hoped he read it on her face.
No one stops her. She's nearly apostate as it is, so what are these extra steps to them? She's grateful, almost, for the kindness of the way they turn away, as if they are not aware of her anymore.
No one in town knows what to do with her. They know she's from the Ranch; she's even been out of it once or twice when she worked in sewing, to buy fabric at the big store. Women from the Ranch come to town. But never without sisters, never without brothers. Only the men do that.
In town, there's a bank, and in that bank there's a safety deposit box that only she and Roy have the keys to. There are two envelopes, one big and one little, a Greyhound schedule, and a pocket knife. In the big envelope there's nearly four hundred dollars in 20 dollar bills, her mother's new address, a cell phone not unlike the one she had in high school. She's surprised to see her old driver's license, expired, but better than no identification.
She doesn't open the second envelope, tucking it with the first into the pocket of her rucksack. Unlike the first envelope, which has an address and everything to a PO box in this town, it's just labeled Sarah in Roy's careful handwriting.
She'll read it later, when she's well and truly gone. She's leaving, so Roy will have a place to bring Alton when he decides it's time. She needs to find roots, quickly. She needs to have a place to keep her son safe. She needs to wake herself up, out of this tiredness, so she will be ready to move when it is time.
She goes into the bank's restroom, and cuts her dress into a long shirt, tucking it into Elden's jeans. She feels unnatural, and dressed for war. She puts the leftover fabric in her rucksack, in case she needs it. She can't take any chances.
Sarah must keep her promises.