Strange Children

by Sadie Hoagland

  This was all hanging around my life, all these things, like a harvest smoke, when things started to go bad, and I was trying my best to hold down our side, my Mama’s side, of the family. Emma was in all kinds of redheaded trouble with Jeremiah, the son of her betrothed, and was sneaking around thinking I did not know. And I had blonde hair and blue eyes and so was my mother’s angel she said, but still Mama was worried about her daughters and sons and wanted to keep us close; we were hardly allowed off the yard alone unless we were with someone for some fear of hers that I did not understand. It was true that boys had been disappearing like they had been ghost children that do not die, nor live on either when they are grown. They just left and no one asked about it. Generally, it was said that the Prophet would tell the father to tell the son to leave, on account of the fact that with the girls all being the fourth and fifth wives of the older men, it would be a while before it swung back around to firsts for any of those boys. But this was not the usual way, and there was a dissettlement about it around, buzzing, in the air, and my leg began to ache, to stir a little in its fleshy grave, like some big storm was coming though I knew August to be hot and dry.

  And then one day it did rain. A hot, quick storm came in from the desert to the West. My Mama and Emma and I all stood in the barn for shelter and watched it come down like some brief and passionate gesture of God’s hand. Emma wanted to dance in the rain but my Mama looked at her once and said she’d like to get a fever and die for that kind of acting. It began to lit up when Daniel, the Prophet’s son who had since holding my face into the mud grown up to fifteen same as me, appeared. He came through the West field, the afternoon sun coming out behind him and shadowing his fence-post figure as we watched him come closer. Who is that? Emma asked and I said I thought it was Daniel by the way he walked, heavy on his heels, and we stood under the barn and waited for our visitor even though the rain was right near gone. Daniel was soaked and cold but trying to act like he was neither when he came to us and looked straight at me.

  Prophet wants to see you, Annalue, you come now? Your Pa’s already talked to him. Daniel swung his jaw like he was chewing grass but there was nothing but these words in his mouth. I looked at my Mama to see if what he said about Pa was true or if she knew about it but she did not look back at me and looked down instead. That’s when my mouth felt like it was full of flour and I nodded but as I went to follow him best I could with that way I walked, I thought of Alice Parley Smith and wondered if the Prophet had decided with the help of God to kill me now before the Devil rose out of my leg and into my body, or to maybe send me off like the missing boys, into the desert, and so with these thoughts I turned and looked at Mama and Emma and saw that they too had fear in their eyes and Emma ran out into the wet sunshine then like she was going to stop me. But Daniel turned back around and looked at her and she stopped and looked at the footprints in the mud between us. We’ll be watching the road for you, which is what we women always said to each other when one was going out, but this time Emma said it to Daniel instead of me, and said it fierce, but he just snorted and kept walking so that I started again to follow in my way.

  The Prophet lives always in the big house at the end of town and all roads lead to it because right next to it is the gathering house and temple. The Prophet always lives in this house until he dies, and then the next Prophet moves in but this last time the new Prophet was the old prophet’s son, so he had already moved in to take care of his sick father. The new Prophet is not supposed to be the old Prophet’s son, but the new Prophet had insisted on this, and so much did he proclaim it as the Word of his father and God that there was a fear in choosing another Prophet, so he moved in and took his father’s seat next to the throne of God and started changing rules right off. I thought about this as we walked, because watching Daniel’s back from behind, which was hunched over from having grown tall too fast, I remember I wondered if he would do what his father had done and I hoped he wouldn’t because now looking back, nigh two years later, I think that when a son followed a father into that seat next to God, I think that’s when the trouble really started.

  When we got to the Prophet’s house Daniel made me stand on the porch while he told his father I was there and I waited for what seemed like a while and watched the whole world shine and dry in the sun while the clouds unmade themselves from the sky. There were sparrows making a to-do about drying their feathers and chirping like something grand had just happened in that summer storm. I watched them and felt things might be alright but then the screen door swung open and Daniel nodded that it was time to go in, and he held the door for me and pointed to the back parlor room where I limped slowly as the screen door shut and I saw that Daniel had stayed outside on the porch. I had never been in this house, as it was a place where the men communed and I was surprised how dark it was and also by the smell of cedar on everything. In the back parlor, the Prophet, our youngest one ever but still an older man, a little older than my father, was standing by the window his arms folded and gazing out like the word of God might come at any time from the sky or those noisy sparrows.

  Annalue, he turned and said, I have had a revelation.

  His voice was as human as they come, that’s one thing to be noted about Prophets.

  I have decided it would be best for you, as pretty a girl as you have turned out.

  And he walked toward me then and motioned for me to come into the room farther so that I had to swing my dead leg over the edge of a rug and drag it into the center of the room,

  It would be better,

  and the Prophet touched my blonde rope of hair then,

  if you were wed into God’s house after all and so I will wed you and you will be among my wives, and you will be raised up by this union and thus spared a life without an opportunity to please God and do his duty,

  and his hand fell onto my breast and I saw how old his hands were and I stood staring at the Prophet and ate my lip a little and did not say anything. He smiled at me then and I wondered what it was about this man that made me care so little about God and my duty.

  And now this is when God’s own Prophet must have read this in my eyes and so this is when things went bad for me. This all happened fast, and I warn you that I want to tell it even faster because of the way things like this like to stay unsaid unless spit out the mouth like a loosed tooth. The Prophet had his hands on my shoulders then as if to show me what he had just told me about me becoming his wife and I was afraid then partly because of his words but mainly because of his hands and the inevitable truth they were telling as he moved them to my hips, and that was a truth that I had escaped for three years but would no longer.

  The Prophet looked at me with his black eyes like he did not see me, and he put his hands around my back and put his mouth over mine and he tasted like old milk and smelt like cedar just like the house, and I wanted to laugh at how surprised I was, but not a happy laugh, rather just a sound of helplessness in the moment. Then he pulled me toward him and what happened then was that I lost my balance.

  I fell then into my crippled fate because my leg was stuck behind me at an angle I could not stand on and so that in falling, I went right into the arms of the Prophet just as I wanted to push away. It is the Word of God, he said and he lay me down on an old dusty couch and I heard the sparrows outside, all hallelujah still and so closed my eyes.

  I was back in the mud then, but on my back this time, laid there by the Prophet of God himself and it was him pressing his weight down on my body, and pulling up my dress and pulling off my underthings, the garments sticking on my straight leg that would not free them and my face not in the mud but still I could not breathe as I felt his fingers dry as paper on my face and my eyes still squooze shut and the sparrows still singing yellow as he did what he felt to do because I would be his wife, and when he was finished he got up off me and smiled. I did not want to look at him, but did not want to look away like some kicked dog either, so I saw when his eyes fell on my leg. What I s
aw is something like scorn come into his face, or maybe even disgust, as he looked at my poor stiffened leg, blue as it is for lack of blood and I saw this look on the face of the Prophet of God and for the first time ever not only did I understand Alice Parley Smith, but I also felt the Devil inside that leg, keeping me from some shame, wanting everything to burn, and for the first time ever I let it rise up toward my heart and let it give me the strength to push myself up from the couch, shake the white underthings off that poor leg, straighten myself and walk out of the Prophet’s house and past Daniel and back down the road where Emma would be watching for me, all with nothing but air under my dress while those white underthings lay still on the floor of the Prophet’s house, left by the Devil and waiting to be picked up by the hand of God.

  Listen. I am the ghost of the dead girl. I have come to Redfield to watch the end come as the beginning. Backwards to get forwards. To die to be reborn to bear witness and then testimony and try my hand at being the one who whispers prophecies. The one who asks you if you believe a whole world can disappear.

  I saw Redfield, half-finished houses and old ranchettes. Skinny horses, nubby grass, sage brush and cliffs that went from red to white like puckered lips as they wrinkled down to the mouth of the town.

  I saw them all. The children, the women. The sisters, blonde Annalue and redheaded Emma. Their brother Levi who was overripe and you could tell had gone from too sweet to half-rotten as he grew.

  His sister Mary, his mother Lizbeth. His half mothers shrewd Tressa and towheaded Cadence with skin as white as snow.

  I saw the changeling boy. Manti. I saw him and his mother Beth in her pain, in his pain, in the littlest one’s pain. I wanted to turn away.

  I saw the Prophet and knew I’d be back for him.

  First I needed to talk to her. To Emma. Across our worlds, like speaking through wool, I tried to tell her what he’d done to me. Before it was too late.

  Who he really was.

  I see her tender ear a cave in the night. I can waft in there, past her thick red hair. I can make my body sound, my bones syllables. Once I am in, I whisper

  Murderer.

  I come out in time to watch her start awake. To touch her throat, to catch her breath and shiver in the bleached light of the moon.

  Emma

  Some things are like gathering waters, they get heavier and faster until no one can stop them. That’s how it was with Jeremiah and me and that was how one day, when it was too hot for anyone to be paying attention to where each and all of their brethren be at, the trickle that had already been there, running down the side of Jeremiah’s temple all summer, started gathering and gathering.

  Even though there’d been time after that afternoon when Jeremiah sucked my hair until it was a wet rope for me to get back into His Prophet’s good graces and to get a clear thought in my head and quit what I was doing and stop that trickle from gathering, I didn’t for two reasons. The first reason is God’s light in you telling you what you are supposed to do which is powerful and strangelike and makes you do things you usually would not do, almost as if the Devil was in you in this way but I knew it must be God because I thought then my soul to be impervious against the Devil and his sins. The second reason is that even though I knew Jeremiah as my soul’s eternal husband, the Word of the Prophet cannot be undone so I knew I was going to be with Jeremiah’s father as his bride and wife, and so would do always what he said, and what his son said, and it seemed like in this one case desire and obedience were mighty aligned.

  So with this thinking, which seemed sound enough to be like something of God, Jeremiah kept coming to the tree, and we kept sending Mary away almost every day so that I began to fear that poor child might forget the sound of every word I taught her and I began to take her out earlier so that we might work more time before Jeremiah came. In that time out there together after Mary left, we would lie under the cottonwood tree our bodies so close that I could almost taste the salt of him and his hands would run over my dress so much that I would tremble at the way it made me feel so good and I began to wonder even if one of God’s hands was on my body, too (though I do know now that if it were any immortal I felt, it was that fiendish Other).

  It kept on in all purity like this and progressed so slow in a way that made it seem like our souls were already knowing each other plenty to be married and so it seemed like we were wed even when we really were not and did not have the Blessing, but it felt like we did and it’s in this way that our relations, in all truth, began to go to the side of the Devil without me really seeing it until they were already gone and while it shouldn’t a been a surprise it was one day when Jeremiah came earlier, and his face was red and he sent Mary away with a voice that put tears in her eyes and then he pulled the Book out of my hands and looked from me to the words for a half a minute and then he leaned down to my face close and he said real quiet, You, you, do you know this Book to be true, really? And I didn’t understand what he was about then and why he was looking like he was about to cry, but before I could answer he let the Book drop to the ground and then he pulled me down into the dust and the grass we had been sitting on all these days. I was not scared when he reached up my skirt and pulled down my underthings and began kissing my legs and everywhere up there, up my blue dress in a way that made it feel like the ground had fallen below and I could not stop his mouth and all I could do then was look up at the cottonwood leaves and pray to those leaves to forgive me for what I was not strong enough to stop and that was my soul’s love and need for the man that was then bringing his head up to my chest and my neck and tugging at my dress until he could get at more of me and I was pulling at him until finally he was inside of me and he had tears in his eyes so that I bit his lip to stop him from crying and also because by then it hurt me in a way I had not been hurt before.

  It was not long until he stopped and stayed on me and we were pinned there and the cottonwood leaves were a trembling with our sin and the light was laughing at us too and while he was like that on top of me I looked at him and told him I truly felt our souls to be of one, and that I wanted to marry him and not his father and that I felt that God also wanted this for us.

  Jeremiah nodded and didn’t speak, and he didn’t have to because I knew he knew the terrible part of our fix. And right then I felt myself to be knowing what he was thinking but now I know I didn’t. But then I knew he must have felt for my soul what I felt for his to come all these days and I thought that he was quiet because he was trying to fix a way for us to be together and not in the way that I would be his father’s wife and mother to his sisters. He pulled up his trousers and never did say a word before he left with his hat low over his eyes so busy was he thinking. That’s what I thought then, anyhow. Now I know I did not know what his mind held.