Desert Wives (9781615952267) (15 page)

Stung, I heaved myself out of the chair, slipped the apron over my head, and trudged toward the kitchen, all the while thinking that if I had been back in Arizona, I would still be sleeping. But considering my dreams, maybe making biscuits was preferable.

When I entered the kitchen, which was almost as large as the living room, the amount of activity so early in the morning amazed me. With its spotless ceramic tile floor and commercial-sized refrigerators, ranges and ovens, the kitchen looked like something you would see in a top Scottsdale restaurant, but the women preparing breakfast hardly looked like sous chefs. Most of Solomon's widows were blonds, which didn't surprise me, and they ranged in age from pubescent girls to grandmothers. Except for the very youngest and oldest, all were pregnant.

They worked in concert, their movements as synchronized as those of a ballet troupe. A platinum blond removed items from the pantry, a honey blond carried dishes from another cupboard into the dining room, and yet another blond hovered by the sink, snatching at the dirty pots being passed to her.

A severe gray-haired woman stationed at a tub-sized mixing bowl barked orders. “Get moving! You're like molasses today!”

None talked back. As they worked, I noticed that the women's long dresses were in much better condition than those I'd seen at the community meeting, and their snowy aprons were ruffled and beribboned. At least Prophet Solomon dressed his wives well, even though their dental care had been neglected. Every now and then one of them would sniffle in an emotion I first believed was grief, but on closer inspection saw to be fear.

The elderly woman at the mixing bowl looked up at me. “I'm Sister Ermaline, Prophet Solomon's first wife. Get over here and watch what I'm doing.”

I took note of the swiftness with which she'd established her superior position in the family's pecking order. Although Saul had told me that Ermaline was in her mid-sixties, a life of hard work made her appear even older. She might once have been attractive but now her plump cheeks sagged into dewlaps and her pale eyes squinted through a pair of unadorned wire rim glasses.

When I didn't move quickly enough to suit her, she barked at me again. “Don't stand there gawking, Sister Lena. I expect you to work.”

Reluctantly, I moved forward.

At one end of the long work table, Cynthia, the girl I'd met the day before, patiently instructed dull-eyed Cora how to roll out the biscuit dough. The task appeared to be more than Cora could manage, because she kept dropping the rolling pin, eliciting more fierce noises from Ermaline.

“Stop dropping things, you clumsy girl!”

Ermaline's barks made Cora even more clumsy and she dropped the rolling pin again. When Cynthia bent over to pick it up for her, a book fell out of her apron. She tried to grab it, but Ermaline beat her to it.

“What's this?
Gray's Anatomy?
” She flipped through it quickly, her dough-sticky hands soiling the pages. “Pictures of naked people! Just what you think you're doin', girl, reading this trash?”

“It's just a text book, Mother,” Cynthia said, reaching for the book. “I told you I was interested in medicine.”

“It's no text book your father ever approved! Your husband, if any man is foolish enough to ever want you, will teach you all you need to know about bodies. I'm throwin' it out.”

“
No
, Mother!”

Ermaline slapped Cynthia's outstretched hand. “Don't you talk back to me.”

Cynthia didn't make a sound but Cora began to wail. “Cindy hit! Cindy hit!”

This made Ermaline so angry she drew back her hand again, but before I could rush to the child's rescue, Jean stepped in front of her. Taking the book out of the surprised older woman's hand, she said, “Let me throw this thing in the dump where it belongs, Sister Ermaline. The longer it stays in here, the more minds it'll corrupt.” She turned to Cynthia. “Apologize to your mother for reading this stuff.”

For a moment I thought Cynthia would refuse, then she darted a quick look at Jean said quietly, “I apologize, Mother.” She kept her eyes averted from Ermaline, however.

Jean then nudged Cora. “It's your turn. Apologize to Sister Ermaline for dropping the rolling pin.”

“I s-sorry, Mother.” Cora's voice held no more inflection than it had the day before.

“No, Cora,” Jean said. It's ‘I'm sorry, Mother Ermaline.' ”

With Jean's coaching, Cora eventually delivered her line correctly. My heart went out to her. The poor little thing was so beautiful. And so damaged.

Ermaline growled, “What good are apologies when the rolling pin has to be washed again? And what good are apologies when a daughter reads trash instead of doin' a woman's rightful work? Sister Jean, on your way to the dump, why don't you get Cora out of the kitchen before she sets somethin' on fire and kills us all?”

“Certainly, Sister Ermaline.” Jean whisked Cora away before she could enrage the older woman again.

I hoped Ermaline couldn't hear me grinding my teeth as I attempted to get my mind off the ugly scene by working out the compound's convoluted family system. The fact that Cynthia had called Ermaline simply “Mother” without the attached honorific “Sister” told me that the elder woman was her biological mother, but I could see no resemblance between the two. Their extreme difference in age probably accounted for that. Some quick math revealed that Ermaline had probably given birth to Cynthia at midlife. Maybe that was why she was so cranky.

To my discomfort, Ermaline turned her attention to me again. I stepped back. If she raised her hand against me…

But she didn't. “Well, Miss. I see Brother Saul picked himself a pretty lily of the field, all right, but you're one lily who's gonna learn how to toil and spin.”

A half hour later, with scant help from me, the first breakfast serving made it to the table. Or rather tables. Since the house had been built to house up to twenty wives and more than a hundred children, it boasted several living areas, dining rooms and kitchens. Sister Ermaline managed the largest kitchen because, as she explained to me, not only was she Prophet Solomon's first wife, but she had also produced the largest number of children.

“Fifteen children!” she'd told me proudly, while lifting golden brown biscuits out of the oven. “All perfect, all thrivin'.”

And all terrified of her, I thought, but at least they ate well. I snatched at one of her biscuits as she slid them off the pan and onto a banquet-size serving dish for the next go-around. The biscuit weighed no more than a snowflake, and it dissolved in my mouth like one, too. Ermaline could instruct me all she wanted, but I doubted that I could ever learn to make a biscuit like that. Good cooking was an art form, and I had no talent.

As the wives cooked, they ate. They had a bite of egg here, a sausage patty there, and helped themselves to biscuit after biscuit as they emerged from the oven.

“Feedin' all these kids don't leave time for much else,” Sister Ermaline said, pointing out the obvious, as she whipped up another batch of biscuits. “But idle hands are the Devil's work, and ever since Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, idle women been sinnin'.”

“That's what they say,” said Jean, back from her sojourn at the trash heap. Somewhere in her thirties, with her pale red hair and Irish green eyes, she would have been easily the best-looking woman in the room except for the thin lines of discontent around her full-lipped mouth. Perhaps her swollen belly explained that.

Not that her advanced pregnancy cut her any slack with Ermaline. If anything, the elder woman tended to speak even more harshly to her than she did to anyone else in the kitchen, except for her own daughter. Some old quarrel perhaps?

Trying to stay out of everyone's way, I kept folding pea-sized pieces of shortening into the biscuit dough like Ermaline had showed me. Within a few minutes my right hand began to cramp and I looked at it sorrowfully. First I'd banged it up in karate practice, and now this. Hopefully, the tendons would adapt.

Ermaline's harsh voice interrupted my thoughts. “We'll soon knock the idleness out of her, won't we, Sister Jean?”

I hoped she spoke metaphorically, but I wasn't sure.

Sister Jean's face revealed nothing. “Oh, I'm sure you will.”

Had Ermaline also knocked the idleness out of Jean? The older woman could quote Scripture all she wanted, but I recognized a tyrant when I saw one. And I was pretty sure I knew the reason for Ermaline's harshness. Maybe a woman's jealousy was considered Original Sin on the compound, but human nature was human nature, especially in Purity, where the more attention from her “husband” a woman received, the more likely she was to become pregnant. The more children a woman had, the bigger her household would be and the more power she would wield in the family. Sister Ermaline might have walked ten paces behind her husband, but among the household's women, she was top dog.

Until she stopped having children and they continued.

I wasn't here to make enemies, so I gulped down the last of Sister Ermaline's biscuit and gave her my brightest smile. “I know my past is cloudy, but I'm trying to be a good woman. Perhaps I can learn from your example, Sister Ermaline.”

Mollified, she smiled for the first time. “See that you do. The Lord loves an obedient woman.”

Oh, Saul, I'm going to kill you for this.
Hoping to turn the conversation to less biblical matters, I asked Jean, “How many children do you have, Je…I mean, Sister Jean?”

“Three. This'll be my fourth.”

Four children to Sister Ermaline's fifteen. That put her
way
down in the polygamy pecking order. Why so few children? Had Jean fallen out of favor with Solomon for some reason?

As more biscuits emerged from the oven, I helped Cynthia, who had returned to the kitchen, take them to the tables. Cora, she told me, was no longer allowed to carry food because of her habit of dropping things. Instead, the little girl now made sure the salt and pepper containers were filled.

“You should have been here the day she dropped the green bean casserole,” Cynthia said, apparently recovered from the loss of her anatomy book. “Beans everywhere, even on the ceiling. Cora's a sweetie, but she has her limits.”

With surprise, I saw Meade standing at the head of one of the tables, but when I said good morning to him, he hardly noticed. He was too busy holding a salt shaker steady so Cora could fill it. No matter where he positioned the shaker, the salt went elsewhere. To give the little tyrant his due, his voice expressed nothing but patience.

When Cora finally managed to fill the shaker, he made a fist and gave the table three sharp raps. The chatter in the room ceased.

“Brothers and sisters, it's time for prayer.”

The mystery of his presence in his old home was solved. As a male, albeit an unmarried one, he was qualified to lead the family in prayer. Women weren't. Since the gigantic family ate in shifts, did he also pray in shifts?

I bowed my head and ran through the alphabet several times before the long-winded Meade finally quit. But I'll say this for him: he did manage to mention food a couple of times in between the Heavenly reminders of male superiority and female subservience. When we'd all muttered “Amen,” I walked with Cynthia back to the kitchen.

“Does he do that every morning?” I asked her.

“Every morning, lunch and dinner. Brother Meade is very devout. That's why the Circle of Elders wanted to name him prophet, not Davis.”

I stopped in my tracks. “You're kidding, right? A fourteen-year-old boy?”

She shrugged, stopping with me. “We believe a prophet is born, not made. After my father's funeral, the Circle of Elders met all night and by morning, Brother Earl said he'd had a Revelation that the new prophet of Purity should be Brother Meade, but by then it was too late. The night before, Brother Davis had his own Revelation, and the other men in the compound, the ones that don't like the Circle of Elders much, let him assume the title of prophet. Things were pretty ugly around here for a couple of days, but then they settled down. They always do.”

I'll bet. A good old-fashioned power struggle, with everyone involved claiming to act for God. I wondered if the potshots taken at Prophet Davis from the canyon were signs that Earl Graff had organized a counter-revolution. Not that I cared what those fools did to each other. Cynthia's information did create a new suspect in the murder of Solomon Royal.

“How did Brother Meade feel about getting edged out for the job of prophet?” Kids had killed before, for stranger reasons.

Cynthia laughed. “The idea of being named prophet scared him to death, but he didn't want anyone to know that, especially not Brother Earl. After Brother Davis was anointed prophet, though, Meade looked like a thousand pounds had just slid off his back.” She fell silent for a second. “Just between you and me, I think Brother Earl wanted to be prophet himself, but knew he wasn't popular enough.”

Like his half-sister, Meade was no dummy. He'd probably guessed that Earl would use him as a figurehead only, and didn't want any part of it. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

An hour later the last of the children had eaten and it was time for me to return home. “It's seven o'clock,” I announced, slipping off the apron Jean had loaned me. “My husband must be starving.”

“Oh, and how is Brother Saul?” Sister Jean asked, straightening her own apron. “You two getting along okay?”

“Sure, other than his complaints about my cooking.”

She shoved a tinfoil-wrapped plate into my hands. “Here are some sausage, eggs and biscuits to take to Brother Saul, but by the end of the week you should be able to put together a decent breakfast for him.”

I doubted that.

Keeping a humble expression on my face, I hurried the plate back to Saul's house so he could eat Ermaline's biscuits while they were still warm.