The Lonely Polygamist (27 page)

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, but her attention was locked on Raymond. “Bird?” he called out experimentally. “Hey bird?”

She closed her mouth, screwed her face into a mask of almost frightening concentration, and said it, “Mmmbbbiiirrrdddtt.”

“Yes!” he cried, so loudly a couple of cows that had come over to see what was going on bolted in panic. “
Bird!
”

He thought about picking her up and taking her back to Old House so she could show off to the rest of the family, but then he had a better idea. He told her not to worry, he’d be right back, he was going to get the others so they could all see Raymond too. “Bird,” he said to her, and kissed her freckled cheek. “Bird!”

He skipped through the water and sprinted across the pasture to the house, barefoot and heedless as a hippie maiden. He’d watched his two oldest kids take their first steps, but he couldn’t remember being present to hear any of his children utter their first word; he was always at work, at another house, at church, always somewhere else. Too often he’d come home to find one of the babies who was fluent, as far as he knew, in nothing but standardized infant gibberish, sitting in her high chair and carrying on in simple but very plain English, “Baby drink! Please! Baby drink!”

“Since when can Sybil talk?” he’d ask.

“Oh jeez, Goldy, she’s been talking for a good three weeks,” Nola would tell him.

“Wait. Three weeks?”

“Maybe more than that. Where’ve you been?”

The thing was, he had no idea where he’d been. He often wondered if he wasn’t suffering from some mental disease characterized by memory loss and intermittent blackouts: whole chunks of his life fallen away into some dark swirling hole in his mind. Sometimes it felt like he was living in an ongoing time warp, the hours collapsing on themselves, days and weeks speeding ahead of him, and he’d have to claw his way forward through the chaos and fatigue just to catch up, and always, without fail, to lose his focus and fall behind again. But Glory slowed things down for him, moved along at a pace that matched his own. He did not miss anything with her: her self-feeding program and color recognition and toilet training, every minor progression in motor skills and range of motion, her first steps with the parallel bars, then the weighted buggy, then the crutches. He spent eight months teaching her to put on and remove her orthopedic shoes. And now, her first word. His daughter was six years old, doomed to a life without language, and he’d been there to hear it:
bird
.

As he loped across the lawn he was feeling so elated, his chest filled with the bubbling gasses of fatherly pride, that he tried something he’d never so much as considered before: taking the porch steps, all five of them, in one great leaping stride. His big toe caught the top of the last riser and he went down, elbows and knees clapping hard against the wood, but he felt nothing. He scrambled to his feet and yelled, “Bird!”

It did not take him long to gather the whole family and hustle them out through the west pasture and across the river, the children stumbling bewildered and shoeless before him like prisoners on a death march, splashing through the river, stopping to catch tadpoles and splash-bomb each other with rocks. Beverly came behind, clutching a crying baby against her breast, and, in between shouted promises of bodily harm if the children so much as got their pants cuffs wet, demanded to know what he, Golden, had been
thinking
leaving Glory outside
all alone
, not
twenty feet
from a
wild animal widely known for attacking and injuring defenseless young people
.

Golden did what he always did when Beverly scolded him: he smiled mildly and did his best to move out of earshot.

Glory was where he’d left her, perfectly safe, in a staring contest with Raymond across the fence, her knees knocking together in delight. The kids, normally forbidden from going near the river, much less crossing it, even when it was only inches deep, called out to the ostrich, offered him pebbles and blades of grass to eat, tossed dirt clods at him when Beverly wasn’t looking. Even the baby had stopped crying, mesmerized by Raymond’s unlikely shape and wet, hypnotic eyes.

“All right, now,” Golden coached, “be quiet for a minute everybody and listen to this.”

He glanced at Glory, who was completely absorbed with Raymond’s come-hither stare, and said, “Glory. Come on, Glory, look! Bird!”

She seemed to grin a little, and tilt her head, but said nothing.

“Say it, Glory. Bird! Bird!”

“She can’t talk,” said Parley, who was nine years old at the time and seemed offended by the very thought. “She’s
handicapped
!”

“She said it,” Golden said, “just a minute ago.” He knelt down in front of her and said it right into her face, whispering this time, “Bird.”

She cocked her eyebrows and opened her mouth. She said, “
Ahhhhnk
.”

The kids laughed and the baby clapped her hands.

“No!” Golden said, almost shouting now. “Bird! Remember? You just said it.”

“Maybe she said something that
sounded
like bird,” said Beverly in her carefully cadenced mother’s voice, the one she normally employed with grocery cashiers and children under the age of five. “She does that sometimes, Golden.”

“One time I heard her say
bazooka
,” Clifton offered.

“No.” Golden stood and pointed at Raymond. “She said it twice. I was standing right here.” He positioned his mouth next to her ear. “Bird,” he said with a husky emphasis, as if trying to hypnotize her. “
Biiirrrd
.”

Glory turned and looked directly at him now, offered a lopsided smile. She said, “Uhhngg.”

The children laughed again—even Beverly grinned—and Alvin grabbed his belly in a pantomime of hilarity and fell backward into the grass. Raymond himself seemed to shake his head in disbelief and Josephine shouted, “I think she just said, ‘Uhhngg’!”

At that moment, the object of high ridicule by an ostrich and nine of the people he loved most in the world, he felt the hot wash of disappointment at the back of his throat, along with a tinge of irritation at Glory for letting him down. Only later, after turning it over in his mind, would he understand the memory in a way that rescued it from his colorful and extensive collection of shameful and embarrassing moments. That day, with the family gathered around and expectation in the air like an audible buzz, he hadn’t understood the look in Glory’s eyes, the same sly, knowing look he had noticed for the first time on their drives to the clinic. He’d been too addled to see it then, but he was sure of it now: she had set him up, played a little joke at his expense. His own little girl, bless her heart, had pulled one over on him good.

THE RIVER’S EDGE

That winter it snowed, it rained, it froze, it blew. The sun came out hot one day, melting the snow off the cliffs and mesas, sending ropes of red water twisting down sandstone walls, and the next day a three-week pocket of cold settled in and killed the locust saplings along the driveway, burst the water pipes on the Old House’s north side. For five months he’d made almost no progress on Glory’s Doll House, so when he had some downtime in the first warm days of April, he dedicated an entire week to its completion. He built the miniature stairway to the second level, covered the exterior plywood with cedar shakes, trimmed the windows and door. On the second day, with the temperature pushing into the seventies, he decided that, for the first time all year, it was warm enough for Glory to sit outside and do some Raymond-watching. He situated her in her wheelchair the way she liked it, unbuckled, with a foam pillow and blanket on each side to keep her tucked in place, her feet planted firmly against the canted steel plates, her crutches across her lap.

He told Beverly that he was taking Glory out to work with him, and wheeled her across the muddy pasture to a firm, gravelly spot twenty feet from the river, which was moving deep and fast and quiet with snowmelt, cutting new banks along the far edge of the bow. Most of the other kids had escaped Old House for the outbuildings and willow thickets and muddy yard. They spied on and chased and attacked each other, shooting their rubber band guns and lob-bing mudballs, pausing to hatch plots and form alliances which were exposed and broken in frantic whispering sessions behind the old chicken pen.

Golden locked Glory’s wheels and waited with her until Raymond, taking his time like a star of stage and screen, made his appearance, still shaggy with his coat of winter feathers. Glory squealed, clanged her crutches together, called to Raymond in a way that made him strut and puff out his chest a little more.

Golden told her he’d be back in a minute, and because the older boys were avoiding him in an effort to avoid conscription into the Doll House construction crew, he had to go himself to the detached garage for more finishing nails and his carpenter’s square. He couldn’t find the square, ended up searching the cab and bed of his work truck, without luck. Back inside the Doll House, he knelt to cut two pieces of oak molding before he looked out the window to check on Glory. From this angle he could only see the back of her chair—a square of black naugahyde and two glinting chrome push-handles—and Raymond, just beyond the chair in his line of sight, standing against the fence now and really putting on a show: bobbing his head wildly, flexing his pygmy wings, as if trying to will them to flight. He had taken up the next length of molding, made two back-and-forth passes with the miter saw, when he felt shaken, as if by a large, cold hand. His ears rang, his throat caught, his heart seemed to stop and clench painfully for several beats before starting up again, allowing him to breathe. He struggled to his feet to look out the window. Something was wrong: in Raymond’s weird behavior, in the stillness and silence of the chair—it should have been rocking and shaking with Glory’s spastic jerks. Even from this distance he should have been able to hear her squeals, the clanking of her crutches.

He threw down the saw and ran. The chair was empty. He stood next to it and turned in place, scanning every horizon for an explanation, trying to make himself believe that maybe the kids had carried her off as a joke, stowed her behind the old chicken coop just to give their old gullible dad a fright, or maybe, in the two or three minutes he’d left her, she’d managed to crutch-walk herself down to the willows, fifty yards south, to hide. Still turning slowly, as if suspended from a wire, he looked down and was met with a sight that would stay lodged in the edge of his vision until the day he himself would go to meet his Maker: Glory’s tiny orthopedic shoes, placed side by side, a few feet from the river’s edge.

STILL WATERS

It took them three days to find her. Though the Mormons in the valley were suspicious, even openly antagonistic toward their polygamist brethren, a child had gone missing; they formed search parties, set up a command center at the chapel in Hurricane, shut down their farms and shops and businesses to comb miles of riverbank, probing the water with poles and grappling hooks, investigating culverts and fishing holes for any sign of the missing girl. Golden, wandering in a fog of loss, allowed himself a small measure of hope he sipped at greedily, like a secret flask of whiskey, until the second day when a boy found one of her crutches snagged in some tamarisk at the mouth of Dutch Creek. On the third day, the Prophet, who had been fasting and praying in seclusion, had a vision: he saw an angel of God sitting in a willow tree, presiding over still waters.

The word went out and a flotilla of dusty pickups was dispatched to look for willow trees along the river. Golden rode in an old black Packard that brought up the rear, with Uncle Chick at the wheel and the Prophet dozing in the back seat, his gurgling colostomy bag keeping him company. When the men clambered out of their pickups to search, Golden stayed behind, pacing along the side of the highway, looking up with terror at every shout or unexpected sound, biting the margins of his thumbnails until they bled. It went like this all afternoon, one stop after another until they’d worked all the way down to Martin’s Point, where the river descended into a narrow gorge. The light was failing and the men were starting to give each other questioning looks. They had parked next to the old trail bridge, and were picking their way through boulders and wild oak to the river below, when the Prophet made a noise and motioned for Golden to stay in the car.

“Going to bless you,” he said. After his strokes years ago, the prophet had regained some of his ability to speak, though the words came out rasping and sideways, as if through a mouthful of sawdust. His face was smooth and colorless, obliterated by the weather, worn pale like an old stamp.

He leaned forward and said, “Your head.”

Golden slumped all the way down in the front seat so the old man could place his hands on the sides of his head, just above his ears. The prayer was short, but came out with such a deliberateness, a gulf of one or two seconds between every crackling word, that it took a good minute to deliver: “Dear Father. Give this man comfort. You took his sweet baby from him and he don’t understand. Comfort him. Bless him with thy Spirit. Bless him with the strength to keep on.”

Inside that old car that smelled like leather and Uncle Chick’s chewing tobacco, Golden absorbed every word; a liquid warmth in his scalp washed down his neck and shoulders, unlocking the muscles strung tight with relentless hours of worry and grief, and he slumped deeper into the seat until it felt like the only thing holding him upright were the ten blunt fingertips pressed into the sides of his head. When the Prophet finished his blessing he released Golden and, with his black locust walking cane, reached over the seat and pressed on the button in the steering wheel to sound the horn. Uncle Chick, sweating and covered in red dust, came up the bank and helped his father out of the car. The Prophet stood at the passenger-side window and bent down to whisper to Golden, who did not have the strength to open his eyes or acknowledge the old man in any way, “You stay here, son. We’ll bring her back to you.”