The 19th Wife (41 page)

We drove for several blocks, stopping in front of a large shrub that had turned skeletal with autumn. “You must be very still,” Gilbert warned. We sat in the carriage for over an hour; the only sound was my heart in my ears. Then I heard footsteps. Gilbert pulled back the curtain. “It’s them.” He opened the door. My mother climbed in and the Strattons closed the door behind her. She took me into her arms. “I know, my child,” she said. “I know. But we’re not there yet.”

The driver pulled away. With the curtains drawn it was difficult to know our destination. I dared not ask, for both my mother and uncle had looks of grave concern. When the road roughened I could tell we had left the city’s limits. The carriage rocked and creaked and the night was filled with the sound of the crying springs and the horse leather. Eventually my mother released my hand from her grasp, and I assumed we were safe.

I climbed over to the window and pulled back the curtain. From the mountains I could tell we were driving up the Valley, headed north. We drove through bare orchards silvered by the moon. The patches of alkali shone in the night. In the fens geese were calling to one another. Across a meadow a herd of cattle was standing in the dark.

We turned off the road into a canyon. I saw the canyon walls narrow around us. Because I had no idea where we were going, I did not think to alert my mother. Eventually we were driving alongside a frozen creek. Everywhere neat mounds of early snow sat upon the ice. The moonlight, reflecting off the ice, illuminated the canyon. I pulled back the curtain farther to show my mother the ghostly effect.

She began to panic. “Where are we? What’s happening?”

Gilbert banged on the carriage roof and leapt out to talk to the man. I heard the driver say he must have made the wrong turn. “I was certain this was the way to Uintah,” he said.

“What if he’s working for Brigham?” my mother said when Gilbert was back in the carriage. “What if we’ve been had by our own plan?”

As we drove out of the canyon, the walls retreated. Eventually the Valley opened before us and the cattle were standing where we left them across the meadow.

It was forty miles to Uintah. We arrived just before daybreak, pulling up to the tiny station. We were waiting for the eastward Union Pacific. As you probably know, Brigham owned the line between Salt Lake and Ogden. That’s where you used to catch the U.P.—probably still do, I don’t know. Anyhow, I’m sure you understand my mother’s plan: anyone tracking my mother would have expected her in Ogden. By driving across the desert in the night, she bypassed their trap.

As the cold day took hold, and the sun revealed the tiny town encased in ice, we heard the air brakes from down the track. I could see the smoke puffing out of the engine. Shortly thereafter the train pulled into the depot, blowing snow all about.

Gilbert embraced my mother. To me he said, “Look after her.”

My mother took my hand and we ran to the platform. A porter in white coat and gloves led us to our compartment in the Pullman, where our belongings waited. When the train lurched forward, leaving the station behind, my mother collapsed onto the bench.

“May I speak?” I asked.

She was looking out the window and did not respond. Her profile was very beautiful and still. The morning light had turned yellow and it poured forth upon her, giving her a golden quality. She looked like a woman in a painting in a foreign museum. She studied the landscape as it passed—the high meadows white and yellow in late fall, the sparkling wool of the frost-covered sheep, the mountaintops padded with ancient snow that will never melt. I climbed into her lap and together we watched the world go by.

Three hours later the air brakes screamed and the conductor called, “Wyoming! Evanston, Wyoming!”

Having crossed the Utah border, she said, “Now you can speak.”

And there, Professor Green, in that little border town, my mother achieved her freedom. I could not understand the importance of the moment, of course. But I recall while we idled in the station how a cloud drifted before the sun, darkening my mother’s face, and how seconds later it passed and her face seemed to burst open with the clearest of light.

Oh look! The dolphins have returned. Explain it! The coincidence, I mean. We can’t. We simply have to take note of it and love it for its mystery. As you go about your research about my mother, I ask you to forgive her errors and vainglory. Is she any more guilty than you or I? When you publish your research, will you send a copy? I should like to know what you have learned, most especially how she spent her last days. Sometimes I can hardly believe I don’t know my own mother’s fate. It seems like a dismal twist at the end of an epic tale. But so it is, and oh how the unknowable keeps me up. With Rosemary gone, the nights are lonely. I lie awake burdened by my mother’s disappearance. I trust you’ll share with me whatever you discover, even if the news is grim. It’s the uncertainty I cannot bear. The not knowing. The endless speculation of where she was on her last day. A chill dashes up my spine when I think of it—there, just now, as if my mother’s loving hand were stroking my nape. She’s with me. She will always be with me. Remember this as you analyze her life and deeds.

I am, Most Sincerely Yours,

LORENZO DEE

A LITTLE SOMETHING SOMETHING

I drove into Mesadale and parked across the street from the Prophet’s house. Officer Alton was sitting in his cruiser by the gate, one arm thrown across the seat back, looking down the road, waiting for me. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

“I want to get this over with.”

“Go talk to Brother Luke.” Alton pointed to a guard standing at the gatepost. “He’ll let you in.”

“I heard about the FBI. What’s happening out here?”

“We don’t know.”

“How’s Queenie?”

“Anxious, like everyone. But OK.”

I looked over to the guard. He had his eye on me. I could tell he didn’t like that I was here. “Am I going to be all right?”

“Jordan, you have to trust me. Now go inside.”

I introduced myself to the guard. “I know,” he said. He brought a two-way radio to his mouth: “He’s here.” The guard led me through a door in the gate and locked it behind us.

Few people get to see inside the Prophet’s compound. My dad used to come here for meetings but he never talked about it. The house was by far the biggest in town, which makes sense because he had the most wives. Exactly how many was anyone’s guess but definitely more than a hundred. Maybe 150. I don’t know. I bet he doesn’t either.

“We’ll go through the kitchen,” the guard said. He was in dark pants and a white dress shirt and a short red tie. If you ignored the Glock 17 in his belt holster, you’d think he was on his way to a sales job at a car dealer.

Three wives were baking in the kitchen. One was looking up a recipe when she saw me. She froze with her finger on the page. The other two pressed themselves against the counter to step out of my way. “Evening, Sisters,” the guard said. The women nodded and looked at their feet. We walked down a hall, past a large reception room with a white marble tile floor. Across the hall, a dining room with a U-shaped table for fifty. I saw a steel-plate door leading to, what—a vault? a safe room? an armory?

“Is he here?” I said.

The guard led me up three flights of stairs. Along the way we passed four more wives. They were young, younger than me. Here they were—the reason the boys get kicked out. The Prophet wanted the prettiest, youngest girls for himself. The pervy thing was, they all looked the same.

On the top floor, at the end of a hall, the guard knocked on a door. “Sister?” He knocked again. “Sister, he’s here.”

The door cracked, then opened wider, then wider still. It was the Prophet’s first wife, Sister Drusilla. She waved us in with an old, blue hand. Her room was bare to the point of heartbreaking—a narrow bed shrouded by a dingy summer spread. A writing table with a goose-neck lamp. Two wood chairs. She poured a glass of water from a spiderwebbed pitcher and told me to sit on her bed.

“Is the Prophet here?” I said.

“What? You haven’t heard?” she asked. “They came for him.” Drusilla’s soft mouth sank in on itself.

“I heard the Feds couldn’t find him.”

“That’s because he’s gone,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” She looked up with watery eyes. “He could be dead.”

“He isn’t dead. I spoke to him a little while ago.”

“I wish I could be sure.”

The best way to describe Drusilla is something like a cross between the First Lady and the Virgin Mary. In the springtime there was a pageant in her honor. The girls in town would dress in yellow and dance to Pioneer hymns like “In Our House” while Sister Drusilla viewed the festivities from a platform. Other than that and Sunday services, we never saw her. Everyone loved her, but no one really knew a thing about her.

“I suppose you know I’m trying to find out what really happened to my dad.”

“The Prophet told me.”

“My mom’s just not the murderer type.”

“No one is until they are.”

“How well do you know Sister Rita?”

“My whole life.”

“I think she had something to do with this.”

“Jordan, you don’t know?” Drusilla’s right, livered hand trembled in her lap. Was she frightened? Early Parkinson’s? Or was she putting on a show to freak me out? “Rita’s gone. Disappeared. I don’t know when exactly. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours. I think they kidnapped her.”

“What?” And then, “Maybe she ran away?”

Drusilla shook her head. “I know what’s coming next. We’ve lived through this before.”

“Through what?”

“The Siege.”

The Siege. Every kid in Mesadale grows up learning about the Siege. We had to read about it, listen to the Prophet sermonize on it, in Sunday school reenact it, chirp songs exalting it, and the girls needlepointed scenes from it. Since breaking off from the Mormons in 1890, the Firsts managed to live in the desert for sixty years pretty much undisturbed. They started off as a cluster of renegades, led by Aaron Webb. Over time this minor outpost grew into a full-blown town, a polygamous theocracy tucked into the sands of the American Southwest. But by the early 1950s, the feds could no longer look the other way. Cut to July 26, 1953. Agents drove into town in unmarked cars, backed up by one hundred state troopers. Quickly they had Mesadale surrounded. You know this kind of scene: the troopers taking position behind car doors; the first-ins standing ready with rammer and shield; an agent in wingtips calling for surrender through a megaphone.

The Siege was about one man. The Prophet. Not the Prophet I’ve been telling you about, but his father. If he surrendered peacefully, the feds promised to withdraw. That’s what the agent shouted through the megaphone: “If you come with us, this can all be over now.”

At sunset the Siege began. The shoot-out lasted seven hours. By dawn seventeen Firsts were dead, including nine kids. Hoping to show the country the truth about American polygamy, the feds brought a news photographer. But one picture told the wrong story—that’s all it took for the plan to blow up in the feds’ clean, Barbasol faces. If you google it, you can find the picture: a little girl lying in a bean field, a neat bullet wound above her left eye. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d think it was a drop of jam. That picture ran in the evening papers. By the next morning the feds were caving. The Siege was over. The feds left town, trench coats between their legs.

But the feds got what they wanted. In the last hour a sniper nailed the Prophet. A shot through the neck. That’s how the current Prophet came into power. He was seventeen at the time. The day after the Siege, the new Prophet did two things: he buried his father, and he married his dad’s youngest wife, a pretty soft-chinned girl named Drusilla. A year later, on the first anniversary, the new Prophet renamed the town Mesadale. It used to be called Red Creek. He wanted America to forget all about the Firsts. And America obliged. Until now.

Sister Drusilla gathered up her skirts to sit beside me on the bed. “This time they want us all dead.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Your dad’s dead. How do we know Rita isn’t dead? And your mom—we all know what’s going to happen to her. Maybe they’ll say it’s her punishment, but it doesn’t matter, dead is dead. And now the Prophet. They want us all gone. But I’m not going anywhere.”

“You don’t have to.”

“This isn’t some story in the newspaper. This is my life. This is my family. This is what I believe.”

“I know, but all I’m really trying to do is get my mom out of jail.”

“They’re afraid of us, Jordan.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid of the Prophet, because they know he’s right.” Her shaky hand balled up into a blue-white fist. “After the Siege, the Prophet always said they’d be back. He always said, Just you wait. And now here they are.”

Seeing Drusilla sitting there, with her collar reaching high on her neck, I figured out one thing: some people don’t want your help. No point in throwing them a line, they’ll swim right by.

“The Prophet thinks you’re looking in the wrong place.”

“Wrong place? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We have so many enemies. In Washington, in Salt Lake City. Everyone wants us gone. Your father and the Prophet were very close. It makes sense they’d start with him. They want everyone to think we’re falling apart from within when in truth, someone’s standing outside and picking us off, one by one.”

You know that feeling when you think you’re almost at the end of a road, and you turn the corner and see only more road ahead?

“What do you think I should do?”

“Find that girl. Sister Kimberly’s daughter, you know the one I’m talking about—Sarah 5? She’s been working with organizations trying to stop us.”

“She didn’t kill him.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“And you believe her?”

“I do.”

Sister Drusilla’s worn face hardened into a mask. “Interesting.” I asked her what she was talking about. When she told me, I couldn’t believe it.

“Are you sure?”

“A hundred percent.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She’s hiding something.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it, it’s true.”

Turns out 5 was hiding a little something something: about twelve hours before he was killed, my dad took her as his latest bride.