Fall on your Knees

Content Warning: This section contains underage sex work and sexual assault.

James prepares breakfast peach porridge for the girls. The girls pretend to enjoy it until James leaves for the shed. But just after they pitch the porridge into the garbage, James returns to the kitchen and demands to know who was digging around in the garden. Frances owns up to it, but when Lily provides the reason—”We planted a family tree” (210)—James is mollified.

Frances has a dream that she is in the creek holding a bundle in her skinny arms, the water giving off a strange blue light. She awakens and shares her dream with Lily. Mercedes, in her room reading Jane Eyre, decides she is now her sisters’ mother.

Lily dreams of her dead brother Ambrose, his naked white body glistening, wrapped in a tattered blanket, and streaked with dirt. He stands at the foot of her bed. Lily screams and awakens from her dream.

It is summer, but the girls are not allowed to go out and play—the miners are on strike and the neighborhood is considered dangerous. One night, the strikers set fire to one of the mine warehouses and loot the company store. Mercedes gifts Frances a prayer book called My Gift to Jesus to help pass the hours.