The Lonely Polygamist (62 page)

A
T NIGHT, AFTER HER SHIFT AT THE HOSPITAL, SHE WOULD DRIVE
home, the stars aligning haphazardly in the eastern sky, the shadows of dusk soaking into the fields and foothills. She often sat for long stretches in her idling car in Big House’s driveway, considering the prospect of another night with the illustrious Cooter in the swanky confines of the utility closet. Because there were no longer enough parking spots to accommodate Golden’s work vehicles and the wives’ cars, and because all rules of order and common sense seemed to have been suspended until further notice, she had taken to parking in the middle of the lawn.

Her mornings and afternoons were filled with a noisy amplitude, with the piping clamor of children calling her name, demanding her presence. But nights were a different story. Nights were a long slog of the mind, her thoughts sliding past one another but never catching, the gears of her brain stripped smooth. Sometimes she would reach that point in the early morning when all the birds of the world went quiet, that perfect half hour when even the most psychotic starlings slept, and the silence would reach such a pitch she would find herself singing half-forgotten Beach Boys lyrics to ward it off.

And it wasn’t helping at all that her body was sending her messages—the pangs in her uterus, the swelling of her breasts—trying to convince her, dumb beast that it was, that it had the power to conceive a bit of joy amid so much uncertainty and grief, that anything was possible. At times it was hard not to feel like the butt of a cosmic joke, lying alone in her dark little cave, wide awake, the owner of a body so hopeful and full of yearning, while not thirty feet away slept her strapping husband, sad and impotent as an old shoe.

Every night she would venture into the dusky atmosphere of the dining room and stare into his sleeping face, searching for some change, a glimmer in which she could read a future for herself, but all she could see there were crosshatchings of exhaustion and bewilderment, a trace of pain around the eyes. Each evening he arrived home well after dinnertime, beleaguered and spent, and, after a quick meal, family prayer, and a good-night kiss for each child and wife, dived headfirst into the Barge’s questionable comforts. Besides the new mantle of authority he seemed to be fitfully trying on for size, the only real change in him was in his attitude toward the children; he had always been sweet with them, mild and forgiving, but now his tenderness had a custodial quality to it. He no longer tried to hide or to escape them, to find a quiet corner where, his back to the wall, he could ward them off with his rolls of blueprints or the phone receiver pressed to his ear. During those first days at Big House, she came upon him more than once holding one of the younger ones, Jame-o or Sariah or Pet, clutching them with such an intensity he seemed to be trying to beam a promise or a prayer of forgiveness into their damp foreheads.

Each night, after making a circuit of the house, and checking in on Faye, who had taken to the new family situation with an enthusiasm rivaled only by that of the Three Stooges, Trish would retire to the utility closet. Each night by the blue glow of the water heater’s pilot light she would reread June’s letter, and then spend much of the early morning hours trying to chase down the possibilities it set loose in her head.

And then one late Friday she dozed off only to be wakened by the sharp, needling pain of ovulation—the charmingly named
Mittelschmerz
, the middle pain. This time it lasted only an hour or so and ended with that almost pleasurable sensation, deep in her abdomen, of a nickel dropping through a slot. Afterward, she would try to remember what was going through her head as she pulled on her tennis shoes, walked past Golden’s sleeping form to the front door, where she took her keys off the hook. But there was nothing there, as far as she could tell, except a buzzing mental static. She emerged into a crisp, late spring night and settled into the driver’s seat of the Rabbit without a thought in her head.

Only when she turned onto Water Socket Road did she realize where she was headed. She drove fast with her window open, the turbulence tangling her hair, and when she got to the mailbox with the name
HAYMAKER
painted on the side, she pulled onto the rough two-track without touching the brakes. She bumped over potholes and clattering tablets of sandstone, letting the car roll to a stop as she crested the shallow rise. Down below it was dark except for a single lit window at the back of the first Quonset hut. And there it was: June’s Ford parked in the night shadows out front. She let out a hard, shuddering breath.

But she did not go down. She stayed in her seat, listening to the lowing of a train passing somewhere to the south. She got out and paced around the car under an impossible net of stars, seized by a black flash of confusion. What was she about to do? Where was Faye? With a burst of relief she realized she had forgotten something. She got back in the car.

The hospital parking lot was nearly empty. She walked down the long corridors, past the darkened rooms and the abandoned nurses’ station. Nola had the eight-to-twelve shift tonight, and Trish found her in the soft easy chair next to Rusty’s bed, head thrown back and snoring in rhythm like a well-oiled machine. Trish woke her, told her as long as she couldn’t sleep she might as well take the rest of Nola’s shift, and Nola wandered off, stretching, smacking her lips, saying, “Thanks, Trishy dear, you’re a doll.”

Earlier today, Rusty had spent most of Trish’s shift down in Radiology getting a few more X-rays at Rose’s request, in hopes the doctors would find a miracle: the metal fragments in his brain suddenly accessible and therefore removable or, better yet, disappeared altogether, spirited away by the hand of God. The family had been fasting and praying for such an outcome, gathering each night to say a special prayer on Rusty’s behalf, and Rose in particular seemed convinced that faith, exercised with staunch vigilance, could bring back her son.

And so today Trish had not given Rusty his bath, which was why she was here now. His body was slowly transforming itself into an expression of the trauma visited upon his brain; head craned to the left and into his shoulder, his neck held rigid, his knees drawing up under the sheets, his left hand clenched and beginning to curl inward at the wrist, as if his body were trying to fold itself around the last mote of life at its center. Even the simple task of taking off the gown had become difficult—the joints stiff, the tendons like sun-hardened leather—but once she had removed the diaper and quickly swabbed the genitals, bringing the straining body to a quick, shuddering release, she felt it relax, the flesh softening, the neck going slack, the head easing into the pillow.

She’d always rushed through bath duty in the perfunctory manner she’d learned from the nurses, but here, now, in the deep hush of night, with no one to see or to judge, she took her time. First the feet, cold and bone-white and decidedly feminine—the nails carefully tended, she knew, by the boy’s mother—and then on to the calves and thighs, the full hips and soft belly, the chest with its nipples so faint and vestigial they were hardly there at all, and then the smooth arms, limp and wet in her hands. Except for a scattering of freckles and the few faint curling hairs on the groin and in the armpits it was still very much the body of a child, pale and sweet and untouched by time.

With great care she soaped and rinsed the pleats of his neck, the shallow sockets behind the ears, and for a moment, in that dim room, she could not help but see the face of her own son in the features of this boy, in the cupped chin with its off-center dimple, in the low cheekbones and full, fleshy lips, each a shared inheritance from their father. Bending close, anointing every crease and crevice of that face with the tip of her damp cloth, she felt the entirety of her loss as both love and emptiness—for her, two strands of the same cord—a deep, pained mourning for this child, for the children she had lost, for the children she might never have.

In a daze, and feeling suddenly exhausted, she climbed onto the bed, breathing in the soapy scent of the boy’s neck, pulling him close, feeling the heat and weight of him against her chest, and as she dozed off she thought she could sense him lifting, releasing, taking her with him into some bright place—heaven, she hoped—where the souls of children pulsed like sparks, lighting up the dark.

She was awakened by a noise in the hall—a nurse making her rounds, or maybe Beverly come to start her shift—but she did not move. She stared at the cracks in the plaster ceiling, feeling the knowledge rise in her, stirred by this breathing child in her arms, that despite everything that had been taken from her, despite all she had lost and could never have back, this emptiness inside her could be filled again.

She took the long way back, slowing as she passed the little cemetery on the ridge where Jack was buried. Though she did not stop—visiting a cemetery in the dead of night struck even her as a bit morbid and inappropriate—in her mind she called out to him and to her other two lost ones, told them no matter what happened she would not abandon them, they would always be loved, they could never be replaced.

When she pulled up in front of June’s the place was dark. She got out of the car, looked up for a second at the deep sky layered thick with stars and galaxies, tasted the dust of the road on her tongue. Before she could knock, the porch light came on. And there was June, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding his glasses, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, freshly shaven, as if he had been waiting for her all along. The look of open expectation on his face nearly broke her heart.

“I can’t go with you,” she told him. “But I’d like to stay the night if you’d let me.” Something flared in his eyes and went out. He nodded, letting out a single, sharp breath, and opened the door wide.

After that night, she returned four times over the course of the next ten days. Each time he begged her to come with him, showed her maps of the places they might go: Mexico, British Columbia, California, anywhere she wanted. She listened, dreamed a little along with him, but made no commitments. At every visit she noticed more material and equipment missing, compressors and arc welders sold at auction, piles of lumber and rebar hauled off their piers. The house grew progressively emptier and more cave-like until it contained nothing but a bed, a refrigerator and a small chair and card table in the front room. The last time she went, a warm breezy night at the beginning of June, the place was abandoned, the Quonset huts dismantled and gone, nothing but two concrete pads and a few scraps sifted over with red dust, the desert already come to reclaim its own.

T
HOUGH RUSTY MCCREADY RICHARDS WAS NOBODY SPECIAL, JUST
a kid, his funeral drew the largest congregation the Living Church of God had ever seen. Not only had the strange story of his accident, his miraculous five weeks of survival, and eventual death been featured in the
Dixie Weekly
, but the superintendent of schools had decreed that any student who attended the funeral would be given an excused absence for the day. It was standing room only, then, the multitudes spilling out well into the cinder parking lot.

After the service, Golden stepped out of the church and was immediately pulled into the gears of the crowd, the mourners and well-wishers and malingerers, eventually finding himself spit out on the other side. He scooted past a local family he vaguely knew, gave quick handshakes, fended off hugs and, desperate for a few moments alone, ducked into the driver’s side of the hearse, pulling the door shut behind him.

The pallbearers had already placed the casket in the back, and the red velvet curtains were drawn, lending the car’s interior a warm Martian glow. Golden held on to the steering wheel for a while, then gave it a single desultory shake. He had promised himself he wouldn’t cry; for the past month he’d been swallowing tears and now seemed to have a permanent ache in the hinge of his jaw. He had managed to hold himself together for most of the service, even while around him his wives and children sniffled and wept. It was when Uncle Chick gave the final prayer and closed the lid of the casket that he lost himself, just for a moment, and let out a short, breathless shout through his teeth.

Be strong
, he told himself one more time.
You’ve got to be strong
.

He remembered the mess he had been at Glory’s funeral more than three years ago, so much weeping and carrying on, as if he alone had lost something. He had insisted on making the drive from the church to the cemetery by himself, just the two of them, and it seemed to him now that all his mistakes as a husband and father could be summed up in that single gesture.

He rolled down the window and called out to Em, who was being consoled by a clutch of girls doing an admirable job of pretending to be distraught. Em, radiant in a dark navy dress, her hair done up in a duenna’s bun, came right away. She bent down a little so she could look in his eyes, and when she put her hand on his neck and said, “Daddy,” in a soft voice, he had to turn away and clench his jaw to hold back a sob.

He swallowed, nodding to buy a little time. Then told her to gather up the children, that they would all be riding to the cemetery together.

“All of us?” she said, and he said, “Everyone.”

It was five and a half miles from the church to the cemetery. The procession moved slowly, never more than ten miles an hour, with the sheriff and his new deputy taking the lead, lights flashing feebly in the summer sun. Traffic was stopped at the county cutoff, and all along the way cars and pickups and flatbeds with heeler dogs in the back pulled over and waited for the procession, more than a quarter mile long, to pass. Housewives and their youngsters stepped out onto porches, men paused in their work, calling to each other to shut down their machines. A crew of Mexican laborers cutting the first alfalfa of the season gathered in a ragged line, the field green and brilliant beneath them, each one removing his hat to make the sign of the cross.

If any of those people noticed the long Cadillac hearse was packed floor to ceiling with a seething mass of bodies, feet jutting up at odd angles, arms and faces and whole torsos hanging out the windows, they had the good decency not to gawk or point. The first mile or so was the worst. The kids were heaped all over each other, having dog-piled into the car as if they were going for a joyride. To accommodate the casket, Golden had had to remove the three homemade bench seats, so only the front and rear seats remained, upon which fourteen of them, including Golden with Pet on his lap doing much of the steering, were now haphazardly stacked, while the back bay was crammed full with the other thirteen, including Rusty in his casket. Even before they pulled out of the parking lot the wailing and carping had started. Ferris hollered at no one in particular, Alvin claimed in a muffled voice he was being asphyxiated by someone’s butt, and Darling, because she had lost her shoe, wept louder and longer than she had during the funeral service. Smuggled in from Nola’s station wagon by Clifton and lost somewhere deep within the pile, Cooter howled and whined as if he were being boiled in a pot.

There were a dozen minor scuffles as they grappled for position, the bass-drum thump of someone’s head landing on the lid of the casket, a shouting match over whose foot was being jammed into whose back. And the heat inside the car was a punishment (though Golden had the AC cranked and all the windows open, the tight knit of bodies stymied any kind of airflow and radiated a sweatshop heat of its own). But eventually they began to sort themselves out. In their badly knotted neckties and wrinkled funeral dresses they negotiated for space, wiggling into niches and voids, the older ones taking the brunt of the weight, stiffening their arms and spines to protect those underneath, bracing their legs against seat backs and door handles, managing a quickly engineered scaffolding of limbs held in a trembling balance, bodies leveraged against one another until they seemed to be holding each other aloft.

Now the procession crested the cambered incline of Grover’s Hill, filed past the remains of the old rodeo arena, the wooden corrals and chutes silvered with age, and onward to the north past a group of Herefords who could not be bothered to lift their heads.

“Doing good, kids,” Golden called out to them, his voice thick, “it won’t be long.”

He let Pet steer the downslope straightaway and swiveled around to make sure no one was suffocating or succumbing to heatstroke. From the dregs of the rear seat came a weakened, desolate whine and from the farthest back somebody—possibly Naomi—said in the most matter-of-fact of voices, “I think my whole body is starting to cramp.”

“Okay then, all right,” Golden said. “Just hold on, you’re all doing great, all of you, just hold on.”

For a while there was nothing but the subterranean gurgle of the car’s engine and the children’s collective breathing, a noise like the gentle crash of surf that lulled Golden into a moment of heavy-lidded torpor—which was interrupted when Pet discovered the Cadillac’s horn. She pressed the shiny chrome button at the center of the steering wheel, giving it one short blast and one long, like a medieval call to arms, making everyone jump, causing the sheriff to crane his neck out the window to see what was the matter and Golden to raise both arms in demonstration of his innocence. It was at this moment that Pet gave it one more good blast and from behind there was a wheeze and a giggle and then the children were all laughing at once, a swelling, cackling cheer that was one of the sweetest sounds Golden had ever heard.

The cemetery in view now, they rattled over the last cattle guard on the way up the hill. There was a full minute of peace before an agitation started in the rear seat, a ripple of an argument that crescendoed in a burst of complaint and backbiting, which triggered a structural collapse in the far back, setting off a general howl of woe, and then the last straw, a sharp, bitter stench that quickly filled the car. Novella, sitting next to Golden with Louise on her lap, covered her mouth with her hand and said, “Oh,
dear
,” and that was when it hit him. At first he thought it had to be something wrong with the engine, a melted hose or failed radiator, but then he realized that Cooter, spooked by the commotion or moved by simple spite, had relieved himself under the seat. Those who could pressed their noses toward an open window and those who couldn’t cursed the day Cooter was ever born.

Finally, they rolled through the cemetery gates and everyone, including Cooter, bailed out in a slipstream of tumbling bodies before Golden could bring the hearse to a stop.

Only Golden took his time getting out. For a few moments he was alone again, just him and the boy, and there under the outstretched arms of an old locust, the other cars filing slowly past, he let himself have his cry.

ONE MORE CHILD OF GOD

In the sharp heat of noon, the graveside ceremony was mercifully short. Uncle Chick dedicated the grave, said a few final words, and that was all. The mourners offered their condolences and went back to their lives. Soon it was only the Richards family, the funeral director, Mr. Baugh, who sat sulking in his Buick because, once again, he had not been allowed to drive the company hearse to transport the body, which was only customary and proper and part of the
comprehensive funeral package
, and, of course, Tellis Blackmore, the county grave digger, waiting patiently to finish his job.

The Richards family plots took up most of the northwest corner of the cemetery. There were sixteen of them, an area of nearly seven hundred square feet bisected by a three-foot-wide walkway. Royal was buried just southwest of the center, Glory three plots over to the east, and Jack’s small headstone stood at the far southeast corner next to a red currant bush. Rusty’s grave, dug with meticulous care by Tellis Blackmore and his backhoe, lay just kitty-corner to his grandfather’s. Golden stood in the expanse of all that pristine red dirt and realized it would never be sufficient, never close to enough.

Later that afternoon, during the funeral luncheon, he would get a call from a Mr. Edward Pinsker, one half of the snowbird couple who had purchased Old House with the intention of transforming it into the Jewel of the Desert Bed and Breakfast, who, having been back and forth to Minneapolis for the past month and not terribly interested in the local media, would have no idea that Golden had just buried his third child in as many years. For the sixth time, according to his records, Mr. Pinkser would be calling to complain that some of the house’s old outbuildings that were supposed to have been razed, per the purchase agreement, were still very much standing, and he would wonder when he might expect to see them gone. Golden would not respond except to hang up the phone, go out back where the old Case front loader was parked among all the other machines currently being put to use in the Big House renovation and, still in his funeral clothes, the knot of his tie thick as a fist at his throat, drive the mile and a half to Old House, where he would chug up the driveway at full speed, lowering the big bucket as he came, and plow through the old chicken coops, flattening them in a hail of splinters, as if they had never been there at all. He would continue along the side of the house, his necktie slapping him in the face, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Pinsker watching from behind the safety of the screen door, and under a black haze of diesel fumes push Doll House, with a great shrieking of nails and snapping timbers, thirty yards across the grassy banks and into the river.

(All of this would be reported later by Nephi, who had been enlisted by Beverly to follow Golden in the work truck, to make sure he didn’t do anything extreme; she had heard his end of the phone conversation and had seen the look in his eyes.) Sitting stiffly in the rusted spring seat, the exhaust pipe clattering and belching smoke, Golden would watch the remains of Doll House float out of sight, debris spreading out and disappearing along the big bend in the river, and then would spend a minute or two considering Raymond, loitering near the fence to watch the proceedings. Raymond, of course, had survived the accident that had taken Rusty’s life. His breast feathers had been singed and he’d taken shrapnel to one of his legs, but other than a mild limp was no worse for wear; he stood at the fence with his head held high, blinking his girlish lashes. After a time Golden would back up the loader and pull up next to his work truck in which Nephi sat wondering how, exactly, he was supposed to have stopped his father from doing, as his mother put it, “anything extreme.” Nephi would later report the look on his father’s face as “kind of weird and freaky” as he told Nephi to move aside, casting around under the bench seat and coming up with a strange, old-fashioned long-barreled pistol. Carrying the pistol close to his leg, he would walk down the driveway, across the bridge and up to the ostrich pen, which he would open, letting the gate swing wide. Nephi was sure, he would later say, that his father was going to shoot the thing, the way he brought the gun up at it, but would end up pointing a few feet over its head, the echoing
crack
sending it charging from the pen, around the house and into the road, where it would pause on the double yellow line, looking around as if wondering how it had managed to end up there. Golden would discharge the gun once more, and with his memory now refreshed, Raymond would sprint through the Pettigrews’ south pasture, scrabble wildly over a sagging barbed-wire fence and strike out across the raw desert, growing smaller and less distinct as he weaved and bobbed through the brush, dissolving and reappearing under the lip of the horizon until he seemed to have vanished into the sky.

All of this would happen a few hours from now, in a final tide of anger that, after everything, Golden would not have believed he had left in him. But here, surrounded by his wives and children, he was merely exhausted, aching, sapped by the heat of the day. It was all he could do to stand in place in front of the casket mounded with flowers and let Rose lean in to him.

The other mourners were long gone, the children getting restless, the younger ones beginning to wander out among the stones and monuments, their shoes and pant cuffs powdered with red dust, but Rose showed no signs of being ready to leave; she stared at the casket almost without blinking, as if trying to memorize the pattern of its grain. Mr. Baugh got out of his Buick and started toward them slowly, professionally, both hands clasped behind his back in a way that suggested
all things must come to an end
, but a cold look from Golden stopped him in his tracks.

At some point Trish stepped away from the graveside to help Beverly and Em gather wayward children; a few of the girls were collecting beauty-pageant armfuls of dried-out wreaths and bleached plastic flowers, Herschel and the Three Stooges were climbing all over Tellis Blackmore’s backhoe and Ferris already had his pants down and was pressing himself into the cool, polished marker of one
MRS. ONEITA TORGERSON, 1901–1959, CHERISHED SISTER AND AUNT.