Amity & Sorrow (15 page)

They could stuff sausages at four years of age but they couldn’t write their names down, so the devil couldn’t trick them into signing his book. They didn’t know their address, so they couldn’t tell it to the police, who would want nothing more than to come onto their land and snatch them away. Isn’t that what they had been taught? She allowed it, even knowing that, should she ever lose her blissful, ignorant children, they would not know how to get back to her. They wouldn’t know where home was. They would stand by the roadside, waiting for a sign from their silent God. Knowledge was power, but ignorance was holy. It kept them humble and pliable, docile and safe as milk cows. She whittles and, when the stick is smooth, pictures it swishing and cracking across the pale flesh of the backs of her daughter’s legs. She calls for Amity to bring Sorrow to the house.

Sorrow is haughty until she sees the switch. Then, two pin spots of blood rise on her cheeks. She lowers her shoulders and lifts her chin. Amity twists herself around Sorrow’s arm with the strap.

‘Sorrow, I am going to hit you,’ Amaranth says.

‘Mother, no!’ Amity begins to cry. She tugs on the strap, to get Sorrow to run with her.

‘Do you know why I’m going to hit you?’

‘Because the devil is inside you.’

She bends her daughter over the porch railing and pulls the strap from between her daughters, throwing it down. ‘Do you know why I’m going to hit you?’

Sorrow folds her hands behind her back, over the knot of her apron, as she had seen wives and brothers do at home. ‘Because I will not forget my God.’

Amaranth lifts the bottoms of Sorrow’s skirts and folds them over her hands, to pin her down. Her underclothes are soiled and filthy, as are her legs, her arms. Her children are living like savages. Amity slides atop Sorrow, crying, ‘Hit me – it’s my fault!’

‘Out of the way, Amity, or I’ll hit you both – now move!’

Amity sobs as she’s shoved off Sorrow. She rears back, flailing, and Amaranth raises the switch to her. Only then does Amity slide down the porch steps to watch and snivel from the dirt.

Sorrow lies across the railing, still but alert. Amaranth brings the switch down on the backs of Sorrow’s legs, hears the swish and crack. Sorrow chokes back a sob and Amaranth wants to throw the switch down and cradle her, hold her like the child she was and never was, but Sorrow turns her head then, daring her, and she raises the switch again. She cracks it down. Two white stripes rise on the backs of her legs, white ridges in red furrows. She lowers the switch.

She thinks of the women and children hit, the belts and ties, the occasional cross. She remembers the feel on her own legs, the skin snapping, lifting, rising in welts as thick as snakes, for questioning a rule that said they should be kept from the fields, when for years she had walked wherever she liked. They all had, before the temple was built. They had the woods and a path along the rock mountain. She remembers when it had been a kind of paradise: fecund soil, abundant water, azure skies, and open land.

‘Father can see you,’ Sorrow says.

She hoists the switch and cracks it down a third time, hard as she can, raising a third stripe across the other two. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Let him watch.’

She takes up the switch and rushes for the fields. Her clogs totter over furrows between bristle-topped grasses, yellowing, crisp, and whispery on her skirts as she brushes past. The earth opens in great ruts between the crop rows, great crevices that speak of thirst and bare roots, burning below the unforgiving sun.

She sees him, arms outstretched, palms down to stroke the tops of crops. His eyes are dark beneath his cap’s brim.

‘I hit her!’ she calls to him, fields away. She works her way over dry rows to reach him. ‘I hit her.’ She gestures with the stick. ‘I’ve taught her. I’ve done it.’

A dark row of spikes stands between them. ‘That what you people do?’

‘She is willful. She has to learn.’

He nods. ‘My pa used to beat the crap out of me. Didn’t teach me nothin’, ’cept he was a bully. Big man, hittin’ a kid.’

She squeezes the stick. ‘I don’t know how else to reach her.’

‘Nothin’ to do with me,’ he says, and he slides his finger down a stem.

‘She burned your truck. I know she did. She is selfish, but I’ve never known her to be so – willfully destructive.’

‘She play with matches back home?’

‘She doesn’t play.’ She drops the stick, ashamed of it. ‘I want to tell you something.’

‘Don’t need your confession. She needs to say sorry.’

‘Well, I raised her. We taught her that the end of the world will come with fire. So …’

‘I love my truck, but it ain’t the end of the world.’

‘My husband set our temple on fire. He tried to kill us.’

He looks at her and his eyes are dark, tired, and lined. She is wearing him down just by being here. ‘So you can’t go back. I got it.’

‘He wouldn’t let us go. Not Sorrow. Not me. He let some go, but – not us.’

‘Some?’

She takes a deep breath and another. She looks up at him. ‘I am the first of his fifty wives.’

‘Fifty? Fifty wives?’

‘So if you’re picturing him alone somewhere, missing us, abandoned, I – I know he’s not alone. He deserves no sympathy.’

‘Fifty wives! That’s why you won’t go to the police. What you’re doin’ is illegal.’

‘It isn’t illegal. It’s immoral to some. This isn’t bigamy, it’s polygamy. It’s consensual. There are no laws against living with people or bearing their children.’

‘How ’bout settin’ ’em on fire? You’re damn right your daughter set my truck on fire. She’s learned from the master. Jesus.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’

‘What?’

‘Use His name like that.’

‘I can’t see your religion doin’ much for you here. Can you?’

She shuts her eyes. She wonders how to help him see what it was, not how it ended. How it began, who she was before it started, and who she became because of it. How each wife was brought back to life and given hope, the God-shaped want in them filled in a spinning circle, by the family she chose. ‘I have known such rare love,’ she tells him, cautiously. ‘An ecstasy in worship I did not think I had the right to feel. I don’t want you to think it was dirty. Or shameful.’ He bends to one of his plants and she knows she’s shamed him then. ‘I don’t want you to think that’s how I am, somehow frivolous or changeable. I loved him and I loved hard and I made some hard choices out of that love, because I thought we were building something. A new faith. Jerusalem. Utopia.’ She looks up at him. ‘Standing here, it sounds foolish.’

‘’Cause it wasn’t. Ain’t no utopia. Don’t I know it?’ He checks the underside of a floppy leaf and sighs. ‘It okay with you?’

‘What?’ she asks.

‘Being one of fifty?’

A lump clogs her throat. No one has ever asked her. Not even her husband, really. She tells him what her husband told her. ‘It is a good practice, in theory. It means that labor is shared. There’s never a shortage of child care or companionship. Historically, it meant that there would be a home for surplus women, on the prairies and whatnot, that everyone would be able to be a part of a family, not just the ones who were lucky or pretty or wealthy. There are so many women with no one.’

He nods. ‘And it’s okay with you?’

She shakes her head at that. It’s not okay. None of it is okay and it hasn’t been for a long, long time. She thought she had run to save her children. She now wonders if, perhaps, she has run to save herself from the husband who, long ago, had saved her. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Fifty wives,’ he clucks, shuffling down the row to bob leaves along his hands. ‘Fifty wives and I couldn’t keep one.’

She watches him go. She looks down at the stick at her feet and the hard cracks in the ground, running beneath her.

W
hen the wife who wasn’t to be a wife came, Amaranth thought she knew her husband’s history from his pioneering, polygamous ancestors who stitched their names across a sheet. But she didn’t know how many polygamous generations there had been since then, or that he had family, living among them still.

They were a family with twenty wives when Rebekah came, arriving on foot up their gravel path, carrying a cardboard suitcase tied with rope. It was midsummer and the wives were amazed. No new wife had ever arrived before autumn, before their husband did. He would still be months away, preaching.

She wore a pale pink gingham dress, full-skirted and puffy-sleeved, embellished with lace and rickrack trim. She looked like a frilly sweet pea against the dark shrubs of wives, their utilitarian work clothes all denim and black so as not to show dirt. More extraordinary was her hair – elaborately braided down her back; swooped, sprayed, and sculpted into arching wings around her face. Wives had taken to wearing bandannas and head scarves, as it was hard to make enough hot water to keep twenty heads of hair clean.

The girl said she had been sent up from Mexico to live with them, for she was Zachariah’s niece. She told Amaranth, over chicory and oatmeal squares, that she had come up the length of the country by bus then hitched to their road, told to look for their gravel path and mountain. She had been shown pictures of them, she said.

‘Pictures?’ Amaranth asked. ‘Like the tithing envelope?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘A photograph.’ And she pulled one out of her gingham pocket. There it was, their mountain and their woods, but from a long time ago, back before the temple was built or any of the outbuildings, back before the trees had been thinned. The only car in the photo was her husband’s van and none of the raised beds were there, not to mention the wives or their numerous cars. She wondered how old the picture was and how it had traveled to Mexico.

Amaranth found Rebekah a bed among the children in the attic, but she was alarmed. None of the girl’s story rang true. How had her husband come by a niece, when she knew he had no family?

Rebekah fit into their family immediately. She shared in the chores with a glad heart and taught the children to sing, ‘Come, come ye saints, no toil or labor fear.’ When women complimented her dress, Rebekah told them it was how they all dressed back home, and she ran circle skirts up from bedsheets on the sewing machine to show them how easily they were made. Amaranth drew out stories of her community over foaming mugs of goat’s milk, learning how each wife had her own house built for her and how a husband would never take more wives than he could care for himself.

When Zachariah returned in the fall, he was introduced to Rebekah. He was hot and rumpled from the journey, impatient, and Amaranth could see he did not recognize the girl. Her name and costume meant nothing to him. But when Rebekah told him her father’s name was Lehi, something shifted in his face, as if a thing long buried was being unearthed. ‘We’ll see you home, girl,’ was all he would say. He stomped into his house, past wives and children who proffered lips of welcome.

Amaranth followed, pestering him. ‘Who is she? Who is Lehi? Where are her people? Why is she here?’

‘Leave me be!’ he said.

Outside, Rebekah was surprised to see that two young women had arrived with her uncle, dressed in skintight T-shirts with short, short skirts. They studied each other with wonder and judgment as wives crowded around to watch.

After prayer and over dinner, Zachariah pronounced that the girl would be sent home. The fourth and fifth wives stood immediately, said they would take her all the way to Mexico if they had to.

Rebekah began to cry, ‘Don’t take me back. They’ll marry me to the prophet. He’s about a hundred years old.’ She laid her head on the table and sobbed like a child. ‘I’m supposed to stay and marry you. You can’t send me back!’ But she was bundled into his car and driven away, the two girls, not yet wives, watching in stunned silence.

In Amaranth’s bed, he got no peace until he told her what he knew. ‘You said we would have no secrets, husband,’ she reminded him. In the dark of her room, he told her about the Short Creek raid when he was a child, when the government burst into their chapel during worship to arrest four hundred fundamentalists, pulling babies and children from parents’ arms to put them into foster care. ‘They took me and they took Lehi,’ he whispered. ‘And by the time they sent us back, I didn’t recognize my own family. They could’ve been anybody.’

‘But they were your family?’ she pressed. ‘You did have family?’

‘They were changed and I was changed. I left before they could send me away.’

‘Why would they send you away? What had you done?’

‘Me?’ he said. He sat up and the bed jostled. ‘They let the government take us – they just handed us over, like we meant nothing to them. Like I meant nothing.’

‘That can’t be so,’ she told him. She couldn’t picture it. She couldn’t imagine the government wanting to separate families unless there was serious cause for it. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘We were polygamous. It was illegal and the government thought it was abuse – that we were being abused by it. You can’t make laws about how people live or love – no government should – and you can’t let them take your children, no matter what.’