The Lonely Polygamist (18 page)

Golden cannot hear Uncle Chick speaking anymore. The sun has gone down behind the distant mountains and left behind only shadow, everything cast in shades of charcoal, and Uncle Chick goes on with his tales of death and sadness until a few children begin to whimper and even some of the apostles, men who’d rather run naked down Main Street than cry in public, sniffle and rub their eyes.

Though Golden’s weeping is contained, it seems to him there are gusts of fouled air escaping his mouth and nose, sludge water leaking from his eyes, and only when it is all gone, when he is spent and emptied out enough to be allowed a single thought, does he understand that he is a changed person; his old self, that tattered, shitty thing he never knew he so much despised, has been tossed aside. Now Uncle Chick is finishing his testimony, affirming his faith in the gospel, in the saving Principle they hold so dear, and just before he finishes he smiles, as if apologizing for all the dramatics, and says, “Remember, brothers and sisters, God loves you,” and Golden knows it is true.

Uncle Chick lets go one last series of hacking coughs and, without missing a beat, comes up for air to remind everyone of the Pioneer Day Dance and Family Social to be held directly after the meeting. “Sister Maxine’s made her famous brownies, the kind with walnuts in ’em. And we’ll brew us up a kettle of homemade root beer.”

Sister Pectol hits the opening chords to “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” the official church anthem, a hymn sung at every funeral, sacrament meeting, and family gathering, and in showers and gardens all over the Virgin Valley. Though Golden has already heard it enough to last a lifetime, he has never really listened to the words, sung as if by the pioneers themselves trudging their way through the ordeal of their cross-continental trek and keeping hope alive with nothing but their faith and this song.

The congregation stands, relieved that their own ordeal is over, and sings:

Afterward, they stand together in the dry grass under a fully colored sky, a few bright planets showing themselves overhead, shaking hands and chatting quietly, the mothers calling for the children to stay close. At the refreshment table Golden steps aside to let the ones behind him pass, filled with affection for all of them, for the smelly old farmers and their red-cheeked sons and daughters and hard-faced women, and for his grinning father, who hams it up a little as he wheels the prophet between rocks and gopher holes, and for the God who has touched him tonight, who has given him new life.

I
n this house there is silence: dust on the curtains, the smell of stale sunshine, a hush in the rooms like a suspension of breath. Mother #4 gets up from the dining room table and goes into the kitchen for no reason she can think of, maybe to hear the chatter of her shoes on the pine floor. She turns on the tap, shuts it off, pulls out a chair, and sits. She checks the rooster clock on the wall—but this room and its objects refuse to acknowledge her, to bring her comfort or offer the feeling of home. She pulls the toaster off the counter and looks for her reflection in its polished chrome, knowing she will not like what she sees.

What does she see? A neglected woman, a woman scorned. A woman with crazy eyes and ridiculous hair.

You would never know it by the mundane quality of the light in the windows, the stifled, sterile air, but today is a special day: the eighteen-month anniversary of Son X’s birth and death. Though he arrived fully formed, so beautiful and pink-cheeked, because he died before birth (a mere technicality!) he is not included in the family’s tally of children, and therefore does not merit a number. When someone asks, as someone always does,
How many children are there?
the answer comes,
Twenty-eight!
at which point Mother #4’s brain cannot help but sing out a correction: Twenty-nine! Twenty-nine!

Though there is a child here, a living one, she makes almost no noise, only the occasional murmur or cough, the small house hoarding the sound like a just-rung bell.

When Mother #4 looks at the clock again she is startled to see more than an hour has passed. She calls down the hall to Daughter #10 (lucky enough to be numbered on the family list) that it’s time to go to the cemetery, and Daughter #10 pokes her head out of her bedroom and shouts,
Hooray!

Given the gravity of the occasion, the Mother thinks, she should be bereft and solemn, filled with the dark wine of grief, but all she feels is a buzzing irritation and the beginnings of a headache, maybe a migraine, like a thumbtack pressed into the back of her eye.

At the cemetery, a soft wind rattles the withered flowers, the dried stalks of baby’s breath. It’s spring, though only the weeds have started to grow in earnest. The Mother comes here once a week, sometimes twice, to tend her son’s grave. Every time, as a matter of principle, she invites the Father to come along and every time, as a matter of principle, he refuses. After Son X’s burial he has expressed his intention more than once never to return to this place again.

Once, when Mother #4 was a small girl, she asked her own mother what heaven was like. She described a house, a mansion, spacious and ornate beyond imagination. For someone who had been born and raised in a boxcar there could not have been a more compelling description of the place. Even now, when she pictures heaven she sees a house at dusk, a big white midwestern house with deep porches and elaborate gables, wheat fields in the distance pulsing green. The shapes of bodies move across the bright windows and she knows that these shadows are her lost children, watching, waiting for her to come home to them.

Now she is sad again—it hits her just like that—and she allows herself a short, messy cry. She tries to tell herself it is nothing but a fantasy, this heaven, this house of dreams, but she can’t deny it is more real to her than the small, quiet duplex in which she eats her meals and lies down to sleep every night.

Sniffling, she pulls up morning glory that has begun to web itself over the grave while Daughter #10 wanders through the stones and monuments like a cruise ship hostess, chatting up the dead. Mother #4 is not comfortable admitting it to anyone, especially herself, but coming out here is, without a doubt, the highlight of the girl’s week.

Mother #4 removes from her bag a clean cloth and a bottle of Windex and gives the black granite stone a good polish, taking special care to swab out the red dust from the letters of her son’s name and the dates of birth and death, which are the same. She takes great pride in this grave and this marker, beyond the fact that her child is buried here. The day after Son X’s death, Mothers #1–3 sat with Mother #4 on her bed and explained, with great kindness and sisterly forbearance, that there should be no funeral for the boy, no marker or grave. Among the three of them, they said, they had suffered a total of seven miscarriages and two stillbirths and none of those babies were given a name or laid to rest in a cemetery; they were angels, these children, spirit beings too pure for the ugliness and iniquities of this world. They belonged to God and God only, and He would name and consecrate them as He saw fit.

With nothing remotely close to kindness or sisterly forbearance Mother #4 let Mothers #1–3 know exactly what she thought about such nonsense. In fact, Mother #4 threw something of a tantrum. Tossing her blankets aside and burying a fist in a pillow, wild in her white nightgown, she said she didn’t give a good goddamn what the other Mothers had done or what God thought about the whole thing, she would name her son, just as she had her other two lost ones, and he would be buried with dignity in a place where she could go to visit, to make sure he knew he was remembered and loved.

If Mothers #1–3 thought this might be some kind of postpartum, trauma-induced dementia, they were mistaken. Driven by a mother’s protective instinct and a hot, gusting grief she could hardly contain, she shrieked, she raved, she made a fool of herself. In the face of the other Mothers’ mild protests and the wary counsel of the Father and the church elders, Mother #4 would not back down. And so, two days later in a quiet ceremony with only the immediate family in attendance, Son X was laid to rest in the oversized family plot in the Virgin City Municipal Cemetery.

Which goes to show that occasionally, if she throws a big enough fit, even the fourth of four wives can get what she wants.

It is getting dark now, the spring light thickening into a weak broth. Mother #4 calls out to Daughter #10 that it’s time to go. She stands up, knocks the dust from her knees, and gives the grave one last, proprietary glance. Daughter #10 protests, as she always does, shouting from the far corner of the cemetery, Ten more minutes, just ten more, okay, five, five more!

On the way back across the valley Daughter #10 sets her chin and pouts bitterly, asks where they’re going. Mothers #2 and #3 might need help with the desserts for the church social, Mother #4 explains, so they’re going to make a stop at Big House. Daughter #10 whines: she’s hungry, she’s tired, and besides, she hates going to Big House. Daughters #6 and #8 tell lies about her, Son #11 likes to pinch her arms and behind, and Daughter #8 calls her Casper the Not-So-Friendly Ghost. They are bad, bad kids, Daughter #10 concludes, and they are all going to hell.

Mother #4 isn’t listening, doesn’t hear a word of her daughter’s litany. She is thinking of the Duplex, dark and anonymous as a cell, and how she can’t face the idea of going back there, not right now.

She pulls up into Big House’s driveway and is comforted by the signs of life: most of the windows lit, shouting from the backyard, two bicycles abandoned at the edge of the lawn—no, it isn’t her house of dreams, but for now it will do. To get her daughter to release her grip on the handle of the glove box and exit the car, she has to promise a root beer float afterward at the TommyHawk Drive-in. They step onto the porch together, hand in hand. As she reaches for the knob the door swings open to a swell of voices, and with a sigh she lets herself fall forward into the light.

B
ECAUSE SHE LIKED THE COMPANY, BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO BE OF
use, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons Trish gave piano lessons. That she barely knew how to play the instrument herself seemed to bother no one.

Today was her first day with Rusty, who plinked out “The Volga Boatman,” sweating and blinking, as if someone were holding a gun to his head. He was a wide-faced boy who had inherited his father’s heft and his mother’s dark hair. He had a reputation in the family as a problem child, a troublemaker—Nola had even taken to calling him the “family terrorist” (which to Trish seemed more than a little severe, but Rose, his mother, freely admitted he could be “something of a handful”). Really, though, he hardly seemed remarkable; like some of the other kids in the family he’d decided that negative attention was better than no attention at all. But there
was
something different about him, she was noticing now. Maybe it had to do with the way he sat so close to her, allowing his thigh to touch hers, or the way he lost interest in the notes on the page and began to play his own sour little song with something like confidence, his fingers producing a series of remorseless sounds. A stranger walking by outside might have heard the noise and imagined a cat stalking a wounded housefly across the keys.

With a slight bow of his head he launched one last haunted-house chord of his own invention. He looked up at her. “Can we be done n—” Before he could finish the question she was already saying, “Okay then, why don’t we call it quits for today.”

The boy gave a contented sniff, slapped his lesson book shut, and leaned back a little so he could get a good look around the room. He took in the bookcase on the far wall, the small desk with its small typewriter, the water stain on the ceiling a series of yellow, nearly perfect concentric circles. He wasn’t interested in this stupid house, he just liked sitting here next to Aunt Trish, easily the prettiest of the mothers, who smelled nice, whose leg was touching his in a way that was making some things happen in his pants. He was eleven years old and full of a need so large and overwhelming that he wasn’t sure exactly what it was he needed.

“I like this house,” he concluded. “It’s quiet.”

Trish said, “That’s one way to describe it.”

Together they listened to the house: the groan of the old refrigerator, the kitchen faucet dripping with a dull
tap-tap
into the sink, Faye murmuring in her prayer cave around the corner. Out the side window the tall red cedar, which had started its existence as a potted plant next to the front porch steps, gently swiped at the window. Rusty sighed. Compared to this, Big House sounded like the prison cafeteria in
Escape from Alcatraz,
which he had never seen, but had heard about in great detail from the bad kids at school.

She asked the boy if he liked Kool-Aid, and in what might have been an attempt at a British accent, he said, “I don’t see why not.”

In the kitchen she was taking the sugar from a cupboard when she turned to see he had followed her, and was now standing in the doorway, staring at her intently with both hands positioned over his groin. His eyes were a cool green, his skin touched with tiny freckles, and he regarded her openly, his face wide and beseeching. He wanted something—that was clear—but what? Did he need to use the bathroom? Was he hungry? Maybe, after being separated from his own mother these last weeks, all he wanted was a kind word, maybe a hug?

Rusty didn’t need to go to the bathroom, though he was hungry and would have accepted a hug, no questions asked. What was on his mind was something else entirely:
tits
. Aunt Trish was framed by the window over the sink, a window full of late afternoon radiance that penetrated her old-fashioned loose-knit sweater so that he could make out, just barely, the silhouetted profile of her breasts suspended in a nimbus of light. This almost holy image released a profane stream of tit-related phrases in his brain:
Keep Your Tits On
and
Tit for Tat
and
Tough Titties
and
Texas Titty Twister
and
Titty-Titty Bang-Bang
.

“How about some cookies with your Kool-Aid?” she asked.

“Keep your tits on,” he murmured under his breath, to relieve some of the pressure. “What’s that?”

“Yes ma’am,” Rusty said, almost out of breath. “I would like some”—he almost said
titties
but corrected himself in time—“
cookies
with my Kool-Aid.”

Aunt Trish dragged Faye away from her prayer cave so she could sit in the backyard with them for lemonade and macaroons. The day was bright and cool, with a breeze that stirred the grass. Faye, who had a ghostly complexion and hair the color of apple juice, sat in her lawn chair and regarded Rusty with open suspicion. When Rusty tried to take a sip of his Kool-Aid, the girl piped up, “We need to say grace.”

Rusty, feeling uncharacteristically confident, wondered aloud why they had to say a lousy prayer every time they ate or drank something, why couldn’t they just have some danged lemonade once in a while without making a big deal out of it? Aunt Trish, who was quickly becoming Rusty’s favorite person in the world, gave him a sympathetic smile and started to say something but was interrupted by Faye, who shushed them both and launched into a prayer that lasted a solid minute and a half and touched on a range of topics, including the lonely old people of the world, the starving orphans of Peru and the fern in the bathroom whose leaves were turning yellow. She forgot to bless the Kool-Aid and cookies, but remembered to include a special request that Rusty get home as safely and as soon as possible.

Technically, Aunt Trish was one of his mothers, but Rusty didn’t know her very well, which made it a little easier to think about her without feeling weird about it. When she first came into the family she lived in Old House, and then she had the dead baby, who totally ruined the annual family camping trip, and now she spent most of her time here at the duplex taking care of creepy Faye and being sad.

After he had single-handedly dispatched half the macaroons, which he didn’t really care for, Trish went into the house for more. For a minute, Faye stared at him, which was like being stared at by a curly-haired doll possessed by a demon.

The other kids were scared of creepy Faye, but not Rusty. He stared right back.

“It’s time for you to go home,” she said.

“Says who?”

“Heavenly Father and His only begotten son Jesus Christ.”

“You’re talking to them right now? And that’s what they’re telling you, that it’s time for me to go home?”

“Yes.”

“What else are they telling you?” Rusty had to admit it, he was curious.

“That you’re a weak and bad person who is full of sin.”

Rusty blinked. Maybe she really
did
talk to them. “Well, you can tell Heavenly Father and his only begotten son Jesus Christ they can go suck eggs, for all I care.”

You should have seen the look on her face! She got all her power from talking about God, saying she knew what God and Jesus wanted. So all you had to do was tell God and Jesus to take a flying leap into a garbage heap and where was her power now? “Thou
shalt not
take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” said Faye, which was exactly what you would expect her to say.

“Or what?” Rusty said. “Heavenly Father and his hippie son Jesus Christ are gonna come down out of the sky and give me a noogie?”

Rusty snorked. He hadn’t really tried it before, but taking the Lord’s name in vain was kind of enjoyable.

Faye sat back in her chair looking sad. “God have mercy.”

“God have mercy on you too. With those huge nostrils of yours.” He snorked again. “Good luck getting a date in high school.”

And that was when Aunt Trish came back with more cookies. Faye got up and went somewhere, probably back to her prayer cave to ask God and Jesus to inflict Rusty with a bad case of cancerous leprosy or smite him with boils. Aunt Trish asked him how he was liking it over at Old House. She had heard about the underwear incident, which everyone thought was appalling, but to her seemed comical.

“Stinks, pretty much,” he said. “It’s not fair that I’m still doing it when no one else is.”

Trish could not argue with the boy. The family exchange program had been instituted with noble designs and high hopes: to unify a family that was, like so many overextended empires before it, coming apart along the seams. Trish kept her own little outpost, lived by her own rules, and was not much more than a spectator to the ongoing hostilities between the houses. As the children grew and the wives became more set in their ways, the differences between Old House and Big House were clearly deepening, becoming harder and harder to reconcile. Nola and Rose-of-Sharon, after years of trying to compete with Beverly’s high standards and regimented approach, had largely given up. In fact, much of their hands-off parenting style seemed designed to spite Beverly, to let her know her control and influence had their limits. Five years ago they took the drastic step of sending their children to public school, thumbing their noses at Beverly’s cherished home-schooling policy, which, she believed, kept God’s most precious souls from the evil influences of relativism, evolution, communism, feminism, and amoral hippies masquerading as teachers. The sisters not only released their children out into the impure world, they allowed the impure world inside: on any given day you could walk through Big House and find the kids inside reading comic books, playing ping-pong, eating generic-brand fudgesicles and listening to Satanic music by the likes of Bread and Captain & Tennille. While the Old House children lived according to an exhaustive master schedule—twice-daily family prayer and scripture study, five hours of home instruction, two hours of chores, recitations of Shakespeare and Frost every Wednesday night, annual performances of
The Sound of Music
or
Fiddler on the Roof
—the children of Big House slept and ate according to their whims, hollered and fought and caroused, listened to the radio and conducted impromptu boxing tournaments in the basement, and took great pleasure in corrupting the children of Old House.

During her first year in the family, she’d noticed these divisions—all families had them in one way or another, but lately they had become acute. More and more, the children were closing ranks according to their allegiances to the respective houses; even the younger children, sensing something beyond their understanding, were not mixing and playing together as readily as they once had. And now poor Rusty here seemed to be the last hope. If he, family terrorist and resident troublemaker, could be brought in line using traditional Old House methods (the prevailing sentiment seemed to go), then maybe there was hope for the family. If the experiment failed, and Rusty was sent back to Big House in disgrace, it would only reinforce the notion that the two families did not belong together, that their values could not be reconciled. Yes, it did seem a little unfair to put all of this on the head of an eleven-year-old boy.

Even though Nola and Rose were suspicious of Beverly’s motives in instituting the Exchange Program, Trish thought it was a wonderful idea, supported it wholeheartedly—she wished that she’d thought of it herself. Her first exchange child was Deeanne, who was supposed to be a playmate for Faye, to show Faye by example how a normal girl should act, to bring Faye out of her shell. Deeanne lasted two days. Faye, the girl insisted, gave her the willies. She begged to be allowed to go back to Big House, cried herself to sleep at night, claimed that Faye pinched her when Trish wasn’t looking and whispered into her ear that God was unhappy with Deeanne’s bad singing voice and secret nose-picking habit. One afternoon, while Trish was doing the dishes, Deeanne ran out into the street, hailed a passing pickup, and claimed she had been kidnapped by a drifter and needed a ride home.

Things went better, at least initially, with the next one. Em, Beverly’s oldest, bonded with Trish immediately. The poor girl had spent most of her life as little more than an indentured servant, a nanny and washmaid and cook, a lieutenant-mother who never had the chance to be a true teenage girl. In the first couple of days with Trish her earnest demeanor and industrious habits dropped away and she became another person entirely: a teenager who slept in, took extra-long showers, stayed up late eating Oreos and playing Uno and gossiping with Trish, giggling into the night like sixth-graders on a sleepover. There was no scripture reading or poetry reciting or hymns sung around the piano for them; they pretty much let Faye pray on their behalf. Eventually Trish gave in, dragged her toiletry case out from under the bed and instructed the girl in Makeup 101: how to mix and apply base for proper skin tone, the basics of rouge and mascara and eyeliner. Trish loved the way Em’s eyes grew wide when she saw her own face in the mirror. Somewhere along the line, Trish realized, she was closer in age to Em than to any of her sister-wives.

For both of them it was like a three-week vacation that came to an end a week and a half early. One Saturday afternoon in July, Trish and Em were cleaning the kitchen and listening to the Bee Gees on the radio. They had been out back on the deck sunbathing, and they were both wearing clothes from Trish’s suitcase: ribbed tank tops and cut-off jeans. The kitchen smelled like Pine-Sol and coconut oil.

Trish was doing a little microphone twirl with her sponge mop and straining to hit the high notes of “How Deep Is Your Love” when out of the corner of her eye she saw Em make a sudden lunge across the counter and pull the plug on the radio. Trish turned around to find Beverly standing in the kitchen doorway, holding Em’s clarinet case, and taking in everything with a demeanor that said,
Well isn’t this nice
. Reflexively, Trish saw the scene as Beverly surely saw it: Em, sweet and innocent Em, dressed up like a slut and cavorting to perverted music made by grown men hee-hee-heeing like prepubescent girls.

Beverly quietly told Em to gather her things and get in the car.