“Samuel was afraid it was him. That’s why he took my sister so soon.” She drew a deep breath. “And he proved it wasn’t him, in barely any time at all.”
She wasn’t able to look at him, eyes scanning the sky as though she hoped for some sign, or maybe just winging doves. “Once he knew it wasn’t him, everybody else did, too.”
He could smell her, sitting there on the log, literally scent her like a flower, and he studied the taut symmetrical braid in her hair and realized she’d bathed that morning. Lavender, that’s what she smelled like. Purple lavender grew in the community’s gardens and by the door stoops, hung dried in bunches in the houses. Flavored the honey out of the bee boxes. She herself actually looked like honey. Smelled like lavender, but looked like honey.
She said, “You know I’ve heard of wives—met them, even—who’ve only mated nine or ten times in their whole lives, with nine or ten children to show for it?”
He thought about that a moment. He’d been around animals his whole life.
“I don’t think the math works. Even with critters that only come into cycle once or twice a year, it’s not always a one-shot shebang.”
She looked at him. “It’s possible, though.”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s also possible they’re lying.”
She frowned. “But they’re supposed to be the purest of all. The most exalted.”
He tilted his eyes at her. “You know you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think?” One of the smith’s lines.
She blinked at him, and for a second he almost regretted having said it. But she put her head back and laughed at the sky.
They sat just looking at each other, as though both were aware of some puzzle they didn’t quite have the code to decipher. Finally she said, “You know a lot of them think I’ve got something figured out, some special plant or concoction, to give myself an abortion. Do you know what that word means?”
He nodded. “There’s things that can make a cow abort a calf, I know that.” Still looking at her. “You don’t, though. Do you?”
She shook her head. “No. Like I said. We tried and tried.”
Two doves streaked in, braked in the air and fluttered into the tree. McKee looked up at them but didn’t move to raise the Parker.
“The thing is, E. When we were doing all the trying, Sam and me, before my sister came along? I got to liking it. Part of me did, anyway.”
He shifted his eyes to her, caught her own glance and looked back to the doves in the tree. “Why wouldn’t you? Horses obviously do. Rabbits. Don’t even get me started on goats.”
“You know the tenets. We’re supposed to be the opposite of animals. We’re supposed to keep the lamps out and our underthings on. We’re supposed to be without lust, or at least above lust. Pure, I guess. And in this little world you and I live in, in the middle of this desert? Purity is everything. At least for a woman.”
The doves still hadn’t exited the tree. One of them preened itself with its beak, evidently totally unthreatened. Sara seemed very fixed on them. She shielded her eyes to watch them in the light.
“They really are lying, aren’t they?”
“About nine or ten babies? In nine or ten tries?”
She shrugged. “Might only be the tip of the whole thing, but that’s a start.” She chewed her lower lip, that habit of hers. Those pretty white teeth.
“The math just flat doesn’t work. In more ways than one, I reckon.”
“But you know how it does work,” she said, “in this order. Every triumph, every blessing, every misfortune, and every tragedy—all of it gets explained by God’s judgment, or God’s approval. If the crop fails, the farmer must have done something to bring down wrath. If a woman delivers a healthy baby every year and her husband prospers, she’s in favor.
“But if another of his wives bears a crippled child, or loses a baby in delivery, surely that’s the outcome of her own behavior, her own mischief. Her own rebellion.”
McKee had begun to think of his future. He knew of boys sent off hither and yon for this infraction or that. Talking to a girl unsupervised was a standard one. Another dove came winging down the draw only to panic and flare in the usual fashion, and the lingering pair in the tree up and departed as well.
“I had my patriarchal blessing when I was twelve,” Sara said. “Five years ago already, with Uncle Lehigh, one of the elders in the southern sect. He laid his hands on my head and told me the blood of Jesus Christ flowed in my veins. That I had been a royal spirit in preexistence and that my children would serve as trainers to the ten tribes when they return to earth.”
She had her long braid in her fingers, seemed to study the taut plait as though it represented the woven strands of fate itself. “That’s why they sealed me to Samuel—his own blessing twined with mine.”
McKee had yet to receive a blessing. He knew many young people who had, certainly all the girls by the time they reached eleven or twelve. Usually they did not speak of the details the way Sara was, for fear of tainting its power. It struck him in the moment to wonder whether any of the boys who were ushered out of the community ever received any such blessing. He truly didn’t know. He also wondered whether he had in fact been making himself as useful as he might.
“Uncle Lehigh told me that I was destined to go through the veil as a goddess and that my children would achieve great and necessary things. So long as I lived the true faith and honored my husband.” She studied her braid. “I was always a good girl, too. Honestly, I was just relieved to go to a young husband and not become the nineteenth wife of somebody my grandfather’s age. So the only thing I can think of that would bring down God’s wrath? I turned out to be not above lust.” She had a tight little smile. “It’s the only mark against me, so far as I can tell.”
He didn’t quite know what to say, but he could only think that this honey-colored woman—girl, really—sitting next to him on a fallen log could not possibly be guilty of anything beyond having a mind.
“Why are we set up to fall this way?” she said. “Commanded to fulfill a destiny, but punished for the pleasure of it?”
He thought for a moment. “You know how in the Bible, when Jesus goes to his first Passover? He’s just a kid, maybe twelve or so.”
“Yes, it’s in the gospel of Luke.”
“His parents lose his whereabouts for a few days, right? And when they find him, he’s in with the Pharisees or whoever, and they’re all amazed he knows just as much as they do. Am I getting it right?”
“I think that’s the gist of it.”
“And a long time later he winds up crosswise with the same bunch, and now they’re certain he knows more than they do, and then what?”
“They kill him.”
“Right. Lynch him basically. Well, maybe the people who spout the rules the loudest ain’t the ones have any business spouting them in the first place. Maybe that’s just as true now as it was then.”
“You are bold.” She flashed her eyes around. “Better hope the trees don’t have ears.”
“I know it.” He’d wanted to touch her for days now, just something as simple as putting his hand over hers or pressing his palm to her cheek. Anything to connect. But so far, they’d had this small space between them, this silent frontier. The words just popped out, quick as a thought. “We’re playing with fire, aren’t we.”
“Is that a revelation? It’s not a bad one.”
“It’s not one at all. That math is easy as it gets.”
She reached over and pinched his arm, and he felt that one small contact go through him like lightning. “Want to hear my revelation?”
“Heck yeah.”
“I’m sealed to Samuel, but something’s obviously wrong. And you and I, well . . . we’re drawn to each other. Am I getting it right?”
“Heck yeah.”
“Have you stolen a kiss from a girl? Tell me the truth.”
He shook his head.
“Would you like to learn how?”
Surprisingly he felt less anxious than he would have expected. It occurred to him he’d been half hoping for this, maybe even anticipated it. He looked at her with one eye wide, the other clamped shut. “We are playing with fire. Aren’t we.”
“Yes, we are. And we might well get burned. Right at the stake, for all I know. Then maybe in hell.”
He let his clamped eyelid loose, took her fully in. “I don’t care.”
For the next few months they met as often as they could, in the creek bottom with a blanket while Indian summer lingered and later at an empty granary he knew about by a fallow field outside Cottonwoods.
He marveled at her naked body, the small swell of her pale breasts and the delicate sculpting of her throat. Though he’d never seen so much as a depiction of a naked girl previously, much less a fully developed one, he had assumed the latter would have a thatch between her legs the way males of a certain age did.
To his surprise her entire form was bare as ivory and nearly as smooth, although some degree of pelage did grow not only between but also down the length of her legs, as well as beneath her arms the way it did on a man. When she laid her wrist on the blanket above her head that first time, his eyes went straight to the exposed cup beneath her shoulder and he could see the stippled skin. When he moved his hand up the length of her calf, he felt the same faint rasp he recalled from his very early childhood, the few times he got close enough to his father’s face to feel the barb of shaven jowls. When he entered Sara that first time, he felt a similar slight prickle.
Despite a good bit of trepidation he finished in a jiffy, startled at the yielding clench of her flesh and then stunned by instantaneous white fire flashing into and through and out of him. But before he could even see straight, his general academic impulse had the better of him.
He ran a thumb through the swale beneath her arm and asked whether this was the usual habit of women.
“Hush a minute,” she whispered. She pulled him down again to the heave of her ribs and held him. She kept him in place and said, “Shortly before I married Samuel, my mother took me aside to explain what I’d need to know. Not all of it was about pain and sacrifice and duty—some of it had more to do with staying ahead, once there were other wives in the picture. For my own survival, I guess.
“She told me the best way to lock up a man’s attention, once there was competition, was to shave everything but my eyebrows.”
McKee raised his own, because this did beat all.
“Then she swore me to silence, which at the moment seems like a lot of water under the bridge.”
He hoisted himself back up to see her face. “What’s the difference, hair or no, if you’re only supposed to do this lamps-off and bloomers-on in the first place?”
“I imagine that’s why she swore me to silence. She must know full well herself that nine or ten babies in nine or ten tries is, um . . .”
“Hogwash,” he said.
He hoped to make her laugh, but she suddenly had a faraway look in her eyes. “Of course,” she said, “when my mother gave me that advice, I don’t think she had any notion my own sister would be next in line.”
She could go from babbling, mind-bent bliss to gales of grief in minutes, as though her heart were a pendulum with a wrecking ball’s swing. The first time she did this was the third time they sated each other, and contrarily, the first time he found himself fully able to fall out of his own head and into the moment, with its tumbling plunge.
One minute she panted and seethed into his ear, clawing the bare skin of his back, and the next she was curled into a ball, sobbing. His own warm wave curdled.
He was afraid to touch her then but he did anyway. With her back to him he saw the red flush from the scratch of the woolen blanket, felt the heat of it when he placed his hand there. “Did I do something?” He could barely get the words out, his heart lodged in his throat.
She gulped at the air like a fish dragged to shore. Finally settled a little. “No, no . . . shhh. It’s nothing. Not you. I promise.”
And though she wouldn’t say more, he knew that whatever did ail her, it couldn’t amount to nothing.
Late in the fall with the leaves blown from the cottonwoods and the doves long winged south, the smith took him with a freight wagon over to the coal operation a couple of miles out of the village. His normally jocular mentor had gone oddly grim over the past few days, and they were barely into the red desert before he started talking. The low tone of his voice held a grimness all its own.
“Been needing to talk to you, hoss.”
McKee studied the yaw of sky from the sway of the wagon. Hazy clouds a-smudge across the blue yonder, the sun low and mute. He crossed his fingers that this was about some bungle or other in the smithy. He very much feared otherwise.
“They’re onto you, kid. Or think they are anyway, and in these parts there ain’t much difference between the two.”
McKee risked a glance. “I guess this is where I’m supposed to ask what in tarnation you’re talking about.”
The smith shifted his own eyes right back, a look that said everything.
“All right, then. Yeah. I been at her, hammer and tongs. Guilty as charged. Or we’ve been at each other, if you want the whole untarnished truth of it.”
“Jehoshaphat, kid. Your brother’s own wife?”
McKee let the wind blast from his lungs like a gust through a canyon. “She’s pretty lonely, comes right down to it. Anyhow, Samuel and I mainly just share the same pappy.”
“Reckon that ain’t all you’re sharing.” He nudged McKee in the ribs, and they both did laugh a little. “She is about as pert as they come, I’ll give you that. Good work, if you can get it.” He ribbed the kid again. “While you can get it, anyway.”
“How bad’s it liable to be?”
“They gonna run you out, I expect. What I been trying to save you from.” Another sidelong look. “Maybe not my smartest play, come to think of it.”
McKee shook his head. “Ain’t talking about me. I mean how bad for her.”
The smith squinted up through the haze, at the pale disk of the sun. “They’ll keep it under the rug, I reckon. Keep her under the rug, too.” That sideways glance again. “This sorter thing ain’t exactly unheard of. Which ain’t to say it’ll much get talked about either, at least not in the wide-out open.”
“But they’ll keep her in the fold?”
The smith nodded his great beard. “She’s done sealed. After this I doubt anybody much lets her out of sight, though.”
“They never do run the girls out, do they? Even the barren, untrue ones.”
The smith snorted. He had no wives at all, save the one buried in the ground years ago, along with his first and only child. That’s about how much McKee knew. “Heck, kid. They don’t even run out the homely ones.”
McKee looked out at the towering features of the desert. Red rock and thin snow, slashing and slashing up the parapets and reefs. A beautiful waste. “They’d have run me off eventually anyway. Useful or not.”
“You got clan up around Ogden, right? Manifesto people?”
“That’s the story. I ain’t met any of ’em.” Ogden may as well be the Orient.
The smith thought a minute. “All right.” He slapped the reins, and the horses’ ears tilted back and they quickened their step. “There’s a trap meet up thataway at the end of the month. I got an idea.”
They rode along in silence, McKee calculating for himself what exactly this plan might entail. Finally he said, “Truth be told, I’d have bolted on out anyway of my own free election. One of these days.”
Sure enough, when he next went to the granary at their appointed time, Sara failed to arrive. He gave it a lone
ly hour and made his way back.
She came in like a ghost from the dusk at the end of the day, the embers in the forge still glowing. She had a shawl around her head and another around her shoulders, and framed the way she was in the doorway and bathed in the glow of a lantern, she looked for all the world like some Madonna of the desert. McKee knew already he’d never see her again.
One week later, at a trap range outside Ogden, he registered for the first time as a competitive shooter with the Parker 16. To his surprise, the meet was not a purely staid affair—there were plenty of churchmen, to be sure, but an even greater number of Gentiles from as far away as Denver and Cheyenne. An entire tent city sprang up with a carnival-like atmosphere of betting and drinking, the smell of gunpowder heavy in the air.
A lull in the competition brought sporting girls in a pair of gleaming touring cars. He’d never seen anything like them, never seen lips that were actually red and cheeks with a blush that wouldn’t fade. He found himself staring at first, his mind amok with the possibilities of what might be going on behind the flaps of tents.
Then he thought of Sara with her honey-colored hair, her honey-colored skin. Even her lips had a golden hue. In an unexpected flash he considered what she might look like painted up the way these girls were and he quickly roused inside his trousers, but for the first time in a way that made him feel not only unsettled but actually ashamed. A boom from the trap field rolled through the chill, bright air. He hurried away from the tents and tried to force her false painted image from his head.
He hadn’t quite managed a total purge by the time his round came up on the line, and he found himself so rattled by his own conflicted brain or the disorienting strangeness of the setting that he shot right over his first three targets.
The smith walked up behind him. “Gotta take your time, but you’ve also got to hurry up. Shoot quicker, before they start to drop.”
“Think I got too used to incoming doves.” The smith knew full well he’d barely shot any of those lately, either.
“None of the rest of this may look familiar, but I’ve thrown you plenty of targets just like these the past few years. Swing up through ’em and smash the daylights out of ’em.” He put his massive hand on the kid’s slim shoulder, as though to impart some insight beyond the utility of words.
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