The Final Chapter (Based on Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale")
It stands to reason that after being taken from her Commander’s home by the Mayday underground and then shuffled in between various way stations, The Handmaid was excommunicated and transferred to a facility in the Straits of Gibraltar, where, at the hands of captors, she was then supposedly executed. This was documented in reports that were found in the archives of local municipalities at the time.
However, case files found in Upper Gilead’s National Transfer offices tell of a different story. Apparently, after the revolt of Republic Nationalists during the war that ignited a nationwide crisis and leveled the playing field, some women were detained and used for various purposes, such as central intelligence, espionage, and even murder. It is here that the records remain spotty, but in one typewritten statement, The Handmaid gives background on a man named Luke, who we assume to have once been her lover or marital partner. Below is a transcript of said statement:
“After staying with various families within the network, I was captured near the border of New York, in what used to be Albany. At this time I was considered a high threat, and communication was minimal. During a routine walkthrough as I was being transferred to a facility, I caught glimpse of a man. The gaze, hands, and mannerisms, all were familiar. It was Luke, but…not Luke. He wore the full regalia - black and gold cuffed suit - of the Gileadean regiment. As we passed each other a spark of recognition registered in his eyes before they shuttered again. It was at this point that I began weaving distant memories into a fabric made more bearable to me. The Luke that I knew was dead. Any hope that I had of returning to normalcy could now be considered null and void.”
It is known that Luke’s work in what was once known as Information Technology made him a lucrative asset to the Eyes. Although he was tortured after his escape attempt, eventually he was trained and re-conditioned before being placed as a Second-in-Command to one of Gilead’s upper echelon.
After a few facilities The Handmaid, who we now know as June, was taken to the home of Winifred Spencer, a woman who oversaw some of the colonies. As documented in Manuscript Number 2341, June describes, “In the colonies was death, anguish, despair. I wanted the colonies; I wanted the serenity of certain death to be near.” Winifred was in charge of placement services. After a Commander’s wife died or was of no further use, their station needed replenishing. It was Winifred’s task to find Commander’s suitable new wives, or to “place” detained women in other government areas for research or intelligence purposes.
There were wanted women, a secret sect. There were always those needed to befriend the colony women, the wives, and the handmaid’s in order to bring information back to the Eyes. They were the only women in any position of power, if it could be called that. June outlined some of this in the Manuscripts:
“Those days are grey and hazy, but I do remember the needles, the experiments. I was married to a Commander in the 5th registry in North Dakota. I was recruited to assist in the executions of several of the resistance. Survival, they say, is a motivator for things the heart may otherwise not hunger for. Survival has no master; it only has one need: to be filled. It only asks for one thing – the will to live. The things I once knew as morals, integrity, were now remnants of a distant past.”
It is known that during June’s term as a wife with Commander Alex Von Schnabel’s household, a Handmaid was placed in her care, but there were complications. An argument had broken out between the two when June began to be suspicious of the Handmaid’s behavior around the Commander, and she accused her of pandering. When asked why she sent the Handmaid away to be banished to the colonies, June is supposed to have replied, “I felt for her, after all, having been a handmaid myself, but when we occupied the same space, she took up too much of it.”
Apparently, through a casualty of the system, the Handmaid in question placed with her was June’s daughter that had been taken during the Canadian escape attempt. After her capture, the girl had been placed back in the system, raised by a couple wives, and then put out for circulation. Her identity unbeknownst to June, she banished her to the Colonies, where her fate to this day remains unknown.
There is no evidence that June was aware the new Handmaid was in fact her daughter. Manuscript Number 1505 points to the fact that June indeed had trouble remembering her, but whether this is due to not having had contact in so long or because the remembering was too painful, it is difficult to tell. In Manuscript Number 1505 June commented, “She fades, I can’t keep her here with me, she’s gone now. Maybe I do think of her as a ghost, the ghost of a dead girl, a little girl who died when she was five.” (Atwood 64).
It is not known if June, a veteran of Gileadean rule and victim of much manipulation at this phase of her life, was securing her place in the household, or if she perhaps recognized the girl and, sensing some imminent danger, felt the need to send the girl away for her own safety. It is not known if June was aware she would be sent to the Colonies.
It is also greatly speculated that the placement of the girl in June’s current household may not have been through an error or oversight, but perhaps through more deliberate motives. It is well known that Luke’s position of prominence would have allowed him to send June’s daughter to her, in a risky yet well plotted attempt to do the only remaining thing that he could for June. There would be no way of telling how much Luke knew, or if he was even able to pass the information on to June. One would think she might have thought the girl familiar, but twelve years had aged the girl quite considerably, and June’s memory only extended to the image of a five year old child, forever young.
We believe June was executed in the summer of 1992, after a botched escape attempt. She was captured by the resistance, the very same group who once moved her from the Commander’s home so long ago. It was because of her transcripts to the Resistance’s head officers that we now know what little she has told us, before they carried out the execution orders.
