He had a point. She flashed back to the slam of the sidewalk and the choke of terror, and she could hardly believe she was entertaining any of this. “What, then?”
“Way I see it, the element of surprise is key. You tell them you’ll meet on a backroad, just you and your cousin. What you don’t tell them is that you’ll be on horseback, and they never will get a glimpse of old Huckleberry.
“They set the watch in the road in front of the car, you drop theirs behind and keep a good berth riding back around. Nothing that lets them anywhere close to you. The second you’ve got what you’re after, you hit the spurs and get hell-for-election out of there.”
Something else struck her. “I’m assuming you’ll be with Houston.”
“I will be about.”
“You’d better.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it.”
Later in the office she watched the steady jump of the second hand at her wrist, and someone was evidently watching the identical hand on the identical watch, because the telephone did indeed jangle exactly on time.
“Miss Clutterbuck.” Same detached voice. “I take it you’re ready to deal.”
She told him she’d meet no more than one of them at the county junction near Horsethief Creek. “If there’s more than one, I won’t even show myself.”
McKee nodded at her from across the office.
“You be alone as well, then.”
“No. No way. I’d have to be out of my mind, and I can assure you, I am not.” The words sounded laughably ironic even as they left her mouth.
“I understand your concern, but I myself am not a fool. I’m not going to show up solo only to have half the high school football team come out of the weeds. Or your redneck uncle, or your gun-toting boyfriend. Never mind the police.”
“Now that’s pretty rich, coming from a grown man who helped two other grown men jump a lone girl on a dark street.” She couldn’t stop herself. McKee pointed at her with one hand, raised his middle finger at the telephone with the other. She said, “It’ll just be my cousin. Houston.”
A long pause.
“All I want is my watch back, with as little trouble as possible. But I don’t trust you.”
The pause again. “Just your cousin, then. Believe me, I get it. When can you do this?”
Monday, McKee mouthed.
“Monday,” she said. “Eight in the morning.”
“Early, okay. Early is good.”
“What will you be driving, so I know it’s you?”
“Ford sedan. Green.”
McKee gave her a thumbs-up.
“No guns.”
“All right.”
“That I don’t believe for a minute,” she retorted, and hung up the phone. She looked at McKee. “I’m scared.”
He nodded. “I know, but we’ve got this figured. And unbeknownst to them, I will be hovering.”
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “You damn well better be.”
“Who are you, anyway?” She yawned into his neck, burrowed into his blankets and wrapped around him. She wanted to go to sleep and knew she couldn’t.
“What do you mean?” He riffled the curls at the back of her head.
“I feel like I know you, and I don’t know you. You’re some mechanical genius or something, but how? How do you know all this stuff? Motors, metal. Guns.” She loved the feel of his fingers, the throb in his chest against her cheek. She yawned again.
He laughed. “Have a knack, I guess. Even as a kid. Dodged a big-ass bullet and wound up in the right place at the right time.”
“Tell me then. You told me you would.”
He spoke against the top of her head. “Guess I do have you where I want you.”
McKee
I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.
—A.E., letter to George Putnam before their wedding
By the time of his birth in 1914, the holy writ of celestial marriage had been running against simple math for decades.
His great-grandparents on his mother’s side joined the burgeoning faith clear back in New York, although McKee knew little more than the skeletal details. He could imagine them young, caught in the countryside fervor of revivals and awakenings, seeking piety and ecstasy and truth in a unified impulse against the workaday knocks of weather and season and crops.
They must have been ripe for the picking, in that time of seer stones and painted hexes. He imagined them falling under the magic vision of a spell-wrought seeker, a visionary with conviction coming out his very pores, lightning in his eyes and a trance in his head and the wreath of his hair like the flaming bush itself. At the prophet’s decree they would migrate or pilgrimage or flee with him, Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, where McKee’s father’s line came into the fold.
This required less in the way of speculation, as the facts were solidly anchored in the foundational lore of the Church. Lemuel McKee had also been a young seeker, but with a hot head and righteous indignation clear to the marrow, the twelfth of fourteen boys born to a mash-stilling, mash-swilling, rifle-making Kentuckian. Lemuel was the only one of the clan whose customary baptism in the river seemed to endow a principled aversion to both drink and general helling around—he was saved before he ever sinned. His siblings called him Parson before he could shave.
He’d heard of the Saints and their troubles down in Missouri and held already a keen interest in persecution, in the suffering for faith. More yet in the lashing back against it.
So when he encountered a pair of roving missionaries on the wharf in Paducah, he unleashed a font of questions. Was it true the red Indians were in fact the Lost Tribes of Israel? Did the revelations of the prophet indicate the coming of the Great Rapture? How many presently belonged to this newest manifestation of the faith?
The number was nothing short of stunning. Ten thousand and more were at that very moment building a citadel up in Illinois, with fresh converts trickling in by the day, some from as far away as England. One thing really pricked his ears—after the routings in Ohio and Missouri, the prophet organized and trained a massive armed militia, the Nauvoo Legion, at least half the size of the U.S. Army. Never again would the faithful flee, submit, or otherwise take a drubbing.
This was exactly the kind of conviction young Lemuel could get behind. He left the wharf’s smudge pots and its clanging, belching commerce with a wagonload of barrel blanks for his pappy’s smithy and Another Testament of Jesus Christ for himself. Three months after that, he took himself and his apprenticed skills north to see Nauvoo firsthand. He never laid eyes on Kentucky again.
Fifty-two years later he died at Provo Bench, Utah, mourned by a quorum of wives and thirty-nine living sons and daughters.
Animosity toward the faith in general and plural marriage in particular had even then reached the level of congressional edicts and federal raids and mass incarcerations. With the patriarch dead and persecution coming down like Gentile brimstone, most of the clan migrated south to Cottonwoods, a stronghold in the wild canyon lands for those clinging to the prophet’s original condemnation of the cosmic evil called monogamy.
So the marriages and endless birthings went on for another generation in relative solitude, beyond the scrutiny if not the rumor mill of the Gentile world outside.
It was all just life by the time young Enos McKee came along, his mother’s first child but then she herself was only thirteen years old at his birthing, and the nineteenth wife of Lemuel’s eldest surviving son. Other babies followed in more or less annual succession, and two additional young sister-wives by his sixth birthday. With his child-bride mother perpetually either pregnant or nursing a new baby, Enos was weaned and shooed out early from the petticoats, tended in part by the combined efforts of half-siblings and sister-wives b
ut raised in any real sense by himself alone. His father remained a distant figure, an elder in more ways than one and the progenitor of dozens of offspring, busy with the affairs of the church and a collection of business interests ranging from a cattle ranch to a stone quarry to a water mill.
Young Enos gravitated to the town smithy as though his very blood held magnetic particles, and the blacksmith for whatever reason let him loiter and learn. By the age of eight he was already a capable hand fitting horseshoes and smithing tin, and had as well a rudimentary intuition for the way mechanical parts regulate and time—the lock of a gun, or the arms and wheels of a stationary engine. He learned to temper springs, to hammer and file a knife blade from a billet.
“Make yourself useful, sonny,” the smith told him many times. “If you learn anything, learn that.”
The smith also taught him to shoot. Rifles at first, but as soon as he’d grown enough to fit a sixteen-gauge Parker built for a lady, live pigeons and trap as well. These last were the smith’s real passion, his one extravagance, and he traveled to competitive meets down in Arizona and up in Salt Lake two or three times a year. The kid longed to go with him, to see for himself and to keep learning, but the elders held a tight rein on travel outside the community, in an almost total sense for women and girls but nearly with the same stringency for young males.
Until they were no longer so young.
He saw the math earlier than most. His own sprawling enclave of siblings and half-siblings lacked even a one-to-one ratio, on account of his father’s tendency to sire more boys than girls. Otherwise, even at roughly one-to-one, the community at large simply could not reconcile the vexing overflow of virile young males to the celestial doctrine of plural marriage. Eternal godhead could be achieved only through an obedient man’s union with no fewer than two wives, and a quorum of at least seven as the actual goal. And only sister-wives could attain the status of goddess for all eternity. Such was the principle, handed down to the prophet by Christ Himself.
McKee watched his half-sisters married off as fourth and fifth wives to elders and bishops three times their age. He saw widows with an existing brood sealed to a new marriage covenant, and budding daughters betrothed in turn to the same demigod.
And he watched the boys depart, cast out at sixteen or seventeen into a world they’d never known, as missionaries to Mexico or conscripted laborers hither and yon, advised to find a bride on the outside before returning to Cottonwoods. But they never seemed to reappear.
Just after McKee’s twelfth birthday, his half-brother Samuel took a fourteen-year-old bride from a community even farther south, in Arizona, a supreme blonde beauty named Sara, and two years after that, Sara’s younger sister Eleanor became Samuel’s second wife.
Samuel owned a special place in the family. The youngest child by their father’s first bride, and the direct subject of a specific prophecy about the future leadership of God’s elect, he would never, like so many of his brothers, be quietly if summarily ushered from the community.
So when Sara failed to conceive, month after month, whispers and murmurs rippled through the houses and gables. With Eleanor by contrast visibly pregnant within half a year of her own marriage, the expected order of things, the proper order, seemed to have gone awry. With the station of a celestial wife wholly dependent upon her creation of new life in the present, it was simply unthinkable that the Almighty might so ordain a barren woman.
By the time Eleanor delivered twins, Sara was no longer the subject of mere whispers. She remained as lithe as ever and so represented at minimum a failure and very possibly a deceiver, right in their midst. She tended to her sister and her sister’s babes, but was otherwise kept at arm’s length from the general circle of women.
Which was how she came by the freedom of solitude, with solitude’s natural outfall—loneliness. Until she began to encounter the community’s other outlier, her husband’s young and restlessly curious half-brother.
McKee had been around her in a general sense, but the two had barely exchanged a word in the three years since her marriage. He was hunting down in the creek bottom outside town the first time he encountered her alone, rambling along with the Parker 16 and making his way toward a snag at the mouth of a drainage that drew mourning doves on September afternoons. He could see the little gray rockets fairly far out on his approach, whistling down the draw out of the milo field on the flat up above. But he saw as well that they flared right back out again, most of them not even fully settling before flaring away with that panicked, erratic whistle.
He understood why a few steps along, at the glint of lemon sunlight on her blonde hair as she stooped and bobbed at the base of the tree.
Sara, his brother’s first betrothed, was hunting herself, after a fashion. Everybody knew she had a knack for plants and wild herbs and their healing properties, that she could make nostrums to cure morning sickness and poultices to ward off infection. Barren or not, this nonetheless made her grudgingly useful. He stopped to watch her pull handfuls of some plant near the base of the dead cottonwood, that golden hair like a late-summer halo.
Her beautiful head. He saw this now, felt the tight bud of such a knowledge bloom inside his consciousness, as though the dead cottonwood behind her were the biblical tree of good and evil. He did not want to scare her by skulking, and he heard himself say her name.
He watched her flinch and straighten bolt up, watched her put a hand to her eyes against the sun. He broke the Parker and started toward her.
“Hello,” she called. “You must be hunting.”
“This is my dove tree,” he told her, when he strode within speaking range.
“They have been flying in the last little while.” She smiled when he drew nearer. “You have very blue eyes. I never noticed before.”
He gestured at her shock of plants. “Some kind of daisy?”
She took in her own yield as though seeing it for the first time. “It’s feverfew. I guess you don’t know it?”
He shook his head. “Never paid much attention. What do you do with it?”
“It prevents headaches, for one thing.” She held out her hand so he could smell them. White flowers and featherlike leaves, the scent of which brought to mind the lemonade he’d once had at a wedding. Sara breathed them in herself, watching him over the flowers. “It also helps with certain girl troubles.”
“Plenty of that around here, I guess.” The words just popped out.
She chewed her bottom lip. “You aren’t shy, are you?”
He didn’t know whether he was or not, but now that she’d brought it up, he did wonder if he hadn’t just put his foot into something. But his mouth again ran ahead. “Seems like there aren’t enough of you to go around, is all. Can’t be, really. Unless you know some plant makes more girls than boys.”
Two more doves fluttered into the limbs overhead, and they both watched the birds startle and cry their way into flight again. She turned back to him and said, “Funnily enough, feverfew is also called bachelor’s button. But that’s not the sort of girl trouble I’m talking about. Do you want me to leave, so you can hunt?”
He did not want her to leave, actually. She had the prettiest teeth he’d ever seen and he wanted her to smile again. “You were here first. I sure don’t mind moving on.”
“How old are you, Enos?”
“Fifteen. For a few more weeks, anyway.”
There, that smile, and thank God. “Well. How about this—do you mind if I just sit with you awhile? Watch you shoot? Or I can maybe be your retriever, if you kill anything.”
“You don’t have to retrieve nothing,” he told her. “But maybe you can just help me watch for incomers. Two sets of eyes, you know.”
“I would like that.” She breathed in her flowers again. “But, Enos? You know we aren’t supposed to be out here like this. Alone, I mean.”
He did know, and he re
alized right then he didn’t give a tinker’s damn whether he was supposed to be alone with her or not. He just wanted to see her smile. “I can keep a secret.” He pointed again at her sheaf of flowers. “Tell me what kind of girl trouble.”
She didn’t, on that particular outing, but they met again at the same spot a few days along and again after that, and he shot very few doves because mostly what they did was sit by the creek and talk. And eventually she did explain.
She was the first assigned wife for one of the elect and she couldn’t conceive a child, or hadn’t yet at least, and this had raised not only eyebrows but also suspicions, like hot embers blown up out of a fire. Quietly among the council of elders, but pointedly and even triumphantly within the circle of women.
There was so much competitive henpecking anyway, so many household rivalries. There was solidarity as well, out of both necessity and genuine sisterhood, but by the same turn, jealousy and envy and injury in spades. Condescension, criticism. Gossip wielded like a weapon. The curse of proximity, and the endless cycle of fleeting possession and mandated sharing. And in that, this particular barren beauty—a principal wife no less—may as well have had a target on her back.
“Think about it,” she told him. “Put yourself in my place. I was named to an exalted position and I couldn’t fulfill my husband’s destiny. Oh, and we tried, too—more than the rules even allow. Tried when we weren’t supposed to try—do you have any idea what that means?
“No matter. Let’s just say we got to trying all manner of things after a while, just caught up in our own frustration, and our own impulse, and praying something would work, and at the same time scared sick that we were dooming our own chances the more we strayed from the rules—that God was watching, and letting out more rope for us to hang ourselves with.
“But we tried anyway, and it didn’t happen, and didn’t happen, until the shine wore off, and then it got to be like trying at gunpoint.” She reached over and patted the stock of the Parker.
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