Strange Children

by Sadie Hoagland

  I tried to clean up my dress as best as I could but when I came into the backdoor my Mama was standing there looking like murder, so bloody was she, and I remembered then that in the morning she had told me to come and help herself and Annalue kill and bleed and gut a sow and that’s when I saw Mary was standing there, behind my bloody Mama, looking like she had forgotten how to speak and they both looked at me and my Mama looked at my dress which was still stuck with pieces of grass and dirt on the back and she turned and she said, The flames of hell are hungry, and I see you plan on feeding them Emma Downs, then she slapped my face so that I could feel the burn of hell already on my cheek. Before I could even look at her she said for me to get out to the meat shanty, and she pushed me out the door and I tripped on the steps and I heard Mary let out a little noise like a goat when she saw my Mama grab my braid and pull me like I was a horse and my hair was a lead. I tried hard not to cry because I thought then it was true I was a bad, bad girl, and an even worse woman, and on top of all of this I was in the depths of the love that God makes between a man and a woman and it’s a bad fix to be in when one’s just getting to be a woman. And I did keep in my tears even though I think now I would a cried if I knew how good I really am and if I knew in that moment what was far ahead in days or even just ahead in minutes because when we got to the meat shanty, Annalue had the sow dead on the draining table cut from throat to belly and it was bleeding good but smelt for want of gutting. My Mama pushed past Annalue who looked at me with a fear a God she don’t usually wear but she said nothing and my Mama pulled me right over to the sow and it wasn’t right but just then I thought how I remembered when this sow was born because it was one of that first farrow I helped birth and then I didn’t think about anything because my Mama grabbed the back of my neck and she took my head and she shoved my face into that sow’s open and bleeding belly.

  I couldn’t breathe none at all and it was dark and wet and warm and I didn’t dare gasp even though I wanted air for fear of it all getting in my mouth and she just kept pushing me farther inside of the pig until I could feel the ribs against my own skull and the insides all making their way for me and so I thought for sure that my Mama had decided to send me to the Devil right then and there after all.

  When she let go I fell backwards and coughed on the blood that got into my mouth and my nose and couldn’t see or breathe for all the hot iron rot it smelt like and my Mama said something but I didn’t hear because I had already set to throwing up and the next thing that was clear to me was Annalue throwing a bucket a water over me so that I could see her and the mess on me and it was strange because right then I felt the soreness of where Jeremiah had been inside me and it made it better even though I was sullied so to look like one just born and not yet washed.

  Annalue looked down on me then, she was standing crooked in the sunlight from the meat shanty door and the flies were starting around me and around the sow. She laughed then but it did not make me mad because then right away after she said let’s get you cleaned up good so that Pa don’t find out and kill you and she pulled me up by my hands and took me to the washbasin and I sat there and she washed my face and my hair and she sang a song with no words that I didn’t know and even now don’t know where she learned it but I was grateful for her and felt that even though I’d been through all that I would keep going because I had the same faith that I have now in God only then I was praying he would find a way for me to be with my soul’s eternal love.

  Sow’s blood or not.

  Annalue

  No one ever did say anything about that August day, not right after when I limped slowly, finally down the drive, knowing that my leg that had never seemed to be part of myself really, had now revealed itself to be not only attached at my hip but to be in fact the whole of my body and my life, and not that night when I asked my Mama to be excused from dinner and she said No, best not to lick our wounds, by which I knew she knew something had happened, had guessed it, and that meant my Pa knew, too, which made me feel the shame of the Prophet’s gaze on my leg all over again. And though my Mama did allow me some kindnesses in the days that followed, and excused me from temple in the service of babysitting, my Pa looked me even harder in the eye while I could not meet his and though that first night he tried to wrap his arms around me before bed and squeezed harder than usual which now, looking back, I can see as a gesture of his own helplessness against the Prophet, at that time it did not seem so. When he touched me, I felt only the stiffness of my leg spread into my pelvis and torso and neck like a small death.

  No one ever did say anything but that did not stop Emma, whose red hair forever foretold her own rebellious temperament, from writing notes to me and leaving them in the hollow in the log leg of my headboard, where a small peg had been once but had fallen out, a place that as a child I liked to rub with my finger in falling asleep—a thing she had often watched me do while she fell asleep in her own bed. These notes were investigatory at first, some with just three question marks, and I did not respond, not wanting to write what no one would speak even, and not wanting to tell her how my whole body was now what my leg had always been. I did not respond to her inquiries about what Prophets say and do and when I did not, her correspondence turned threatening until a few days after the day I went to the Prophet’s, she wrote that if I didn’t tell her I warn’t her best sister no more and she took to working alongside me silent and cold in our boiling and filling and boiling again of jars for canning and stayed this way for a few days until finally one day she was smiling to herself as she pulled at the pump handle to wash her hands, coming in for lunch, and she saw I was watching her and that night I found the last note on this particular subject. A thin piece of paper was rolled tightly around a crushed red flower, an Indian Paintbrush, and it said only that it was all right and she had forgiven me and that I was still her best friend and favorite sister and my greatest ally against our brother Levi who tormented us always. Now I know that she had likely only forgiven my secret because she was growing her own, but at the time I felt what must have been disappointment—a weighty notion that if she could give up on knowing my own fate so quickly, then she too had decided to become complicit in it which meant I alone was left to contemplate the lonely threat of my deformation and the solitude ahead and what it might lead me to do, to be. I was certainly no Alice Parley Smith, but I alone knew this, same as I knew that I was no wife neither which meant I was no scapegoat but also no lot for the Lord, and so could not write my life so easily as one fully formed. And even now these two years later, now that I know the way the world can expand beyond the edges of our vision, I still sometimes feel that disappointment again, and I wonder if I had written a note back to her, told her what had happened, what he had done and who he was to me, then maybe now things would not be as they are.

  Listen. I see things I can’t help but see.

  I wanted to turn away. But when I first saw the strange little Manti, back in the circle of time, he was standing on a three-legged stool that wobbled with one short leg. He was pulling down a cloth sack of sugar from a high kitchen shelf and a tiny figure with messy, curly hair, dark like her brother’s, and big blue eyes stood watching him with her little hands clasped.

  A mother, or a shape of a mother, lay on a bed with eyes open but unseeing. She was alive, I could see, but more than her body I could see that she was enveloped in an ethereal moss. Like time was for her a slow, heavy growth.

  I heard him say to the little hands—three fistfuls, that’s all you git Peapod. That’s all you git ’cause we don’t want the bitch to know. He said this last part so soft it was like he meant a word other than “bitch.” Something more tired and tender. I watched as he took only half a fistful for himself. Carefully palming the sugar into his mouth before licking his fingers clean.

  I saw they were hungry. I had not been hungry like this. I wanted to touch their sticky small hands together with mine.

  I reached out.

  But they were there a
nd I was here.

  Still, I said, I whispered: Let him say his mean words but let us try to hear the softness in them. Let us hear the sound of this image:

  He puts the sugar bag back and softly tucks the stool under a table. He picks up the girl and kisses her cheek and tells her he loves her before he takes her outside to show her a flower, a small sego lily growing next to the foundation in the back of the house. A flower he found just for her, he says.

  Can she pick it? She can.

  Manti.

  Levi

  The boys was droppin like flies which is somethin my grandmother said but only ’cause she warn’t born here, of us, but came from outside. Ran way from Phoenix, Arizona which I know ’nuf about ’cause she told me and that’s where I will go first thing if the Prophet comes back and says it’s time. Or maybe he’ll send his son Daniel like he did for my sister Annalue, but for now I can stay and everyone can stay though for a while boys was droppin like flies and there was hardly anyone left to pick up trash, as that is the lot of unmarried brothers young and old, but I was pious and kept at my rounds to the dump and was as good as ever for the longest time. In fact I have only done one thing in my life to be shame of, and I know I got plenty of time to make it up to God before it’s my turn to get my own heaven in the Celestial Kingdom, ’cause it’s easy to see that even though I done this one thing, I am not right for the lowly Terrestrial Kingdom ’cause as my Mama says, I was born on high. Sunday morning baby I was.

  But ’cause I am honest and I absolve myself most every day I will tell you the first thing I did wrong that led to no other things like it really and even though I disobeyed in other ways, this is the one thing that I still have great shame now, but also you should know it warn’t my doin, my thinkin, it was somethin done to me under the yoke of the Devil.

  It was one night at the end of a work day and it was two falls ago and so already almost dark and there I was in the animal-smellin, checkin and scrapin the hooves of Blackie who is a horse that was almost mine, or was to be mine when I got my own barn, ’cause my Pa said I is better with Blackie than anyone, even him I guess.

  So it was why I was bent over, the fetlock in my hand, cleaning it with the other, picking out dried shit and mud from the bad shoe done in there by the only smith here who we have to make do with.

  When I stood up to clean the last hoof, the back right, I saw that Manti, who is a cousin in some way not close and who was four years younger than me and so eleven at this time was standing in the barn door, leanin and watchin me, arms crossed. He was a scraggly kid, with stick arms and freckles and black hair that was woods-messy, so in the doorway so suddenly he looked like some sprite from another world.

  What’d you want? I said right away because Manti was not straight in the head, don’t know why or what it was but it was somethin, somethin in the way he was always tellin jokes that made no sense, or were just about somethin gross and then he’d laugh like a dog with barn cough and couldn’t stop.

  But right then Manti was standin there and sayin Levi, Levi, like it was a song and I was a cat he was looking for and I said What. He said Levi Levi I got somethin to show you and out of his pocket I saw him pull white so I let Blackie’s hoof down and patted his rear and go over.

  Know what these are? he said, and he danced a little with his feet and got some face I didn’t like on him. The light in the barn was just one moon and just one bulb and so in his face I saw dark and light both and his eyes were changin all the time like a candle.

  I shook my head and crossed my arms because I was bigger than him and said Nope. He waved the white so close in front of my eyes I couldn’t see.

  These be, the un-Der-Gar-ment of your be-lov-ed, he said then and waved the white underwear away from my face. Dancin back and pullin them wide between his hands so that I saw.

  And THEY ARE DIRTY, he said before he started his wild coughin laugh. I snatched them white panties way and asked truth.

  Ellen Mai’s?

  And the little dog laughed again.

  Ellen Mai is who I want to marry though she will marry the Prophet when she turns fourteen in two months. It is her hair I like, which is black like Blackie’s tail.

  First thing I did I shouldn’t a done is I put the white fabric to my face and I smelled it and I couldn’t believe how sour so I did it ’gain.

  Manti was watching me and I could hear Blackie stompin behind me like he wanted smell too.

  Where you get these? I said and sneak ’nother smell.

  I was over saying hello just when the washing started and they was right there on the basket and I said um um, I know who like to see these, Manti covered his mouth and snorted into his hand to quiet his laugh but his shoulders were shakin up and down anyways.

  You like it, you like it, he said then quiet and I looked at him, the under in front of my face and so I dropped my hand and didn’t answer. I didn’t give them back.

  I know, I know Levi, Manti said in whisper, all flappin his hands, and he told me then one way to make Ellen love me like a husband or get an idea how to is to put the unders ’gainst my own dick and somethin in me must have wanted this otherwise I would known it to be crazy.

  Come on, Levi, Come on, it’s a man thing to do. Manti said then and he rubbed his little hands together. I smelt the things ’gain and now I was wantin to touch them to me down there and I was thinking maybe Manti needed me to do it to know how much bigger I is.

  But first I said, Nah, and I looked at Blackie like to go back to my working him.

  And so I turned a little away from Manti and I unbuttoned and I stuck the panties down ’gainst my own which was blooded full then and they were soft ’gainst me so that I couldn’t help but rub some.

  A barn owl who-whos then and it scart me some so that I opened my eyes I did not know I closed and saw Manti there with his lips a licking, looking down at my dick and then what happened is what I got to be explainin careful like so understanding is His forgiveness.

  I wanted to keep smellin and keep rubbin though I knew it was wrong it was not so bad ’cause I do want to marry Ellen Mai plus I hated the other smell, of hay and manure, right then I did. Manti said then he wanted to hold the panties and so he put his hand down there and grabbed them and then he put them up to my face, coverin my mouth and then before I knew it he was kneeling like he tripped, down me and then I felt the end of my own in something warm and wet and when I looked down over the unders pressed on my mouth, I saw the back of his head and then he did it to me, he did it to me and I know he was being evil but I could hardly do nothin, so yoked was I, my thing in his mouth and all. I didn’t want him to bite.

  Blackie snorted while I let him do what he did and the wind swung the barn door back and forth four times and I was expectin someone to walk in and stop this and then the owl spoke ’gain and it was done, the bulb buzzin a little and the moon hidden by the barn wall.

  Manti wiped his mouth and stood up then he did somethin that made me all a fire ’cause I wanted to look away, I wanted him to leave but then he grinned at me so wide his lips still wet his face in dark and light so that it was all I knew to do; I punched him cross the mouth and he fell backwards out the barn door which swung back and hit the barn and made a loud noise but Manti made none, he lay there holdin his face like it was worth havin still.

  The owl was scart and flew out too at this same time, big wings shakin air, and I put the unders in my pocket and did my pants and went back to Blackie’s right rear, patting his tail-head, my face feeling like iron.

  Manti took his hand way then from his mouth and he was laughin, standin then leavin, skippin out way from the barn, me thinkin how it didn’t mean anything in this barn place of animals and their big hair-gone sexes, that God didn’t care if I was practicin to numerate his people and he know I like Ellen Mai anyway and want her as a wife and my eternal partner for the Celestial, so I went back to scrapin the shoe out, hard this time, the owl flown, my head finally clear ’nuf to pray.
<
br />   Emma

  Jeremiah didn’t come the day after we were together like that, he didn’t come when Mary was reading to me and I understood that he was being careful and I was also relieved because I knew my Mama had her watch on me and also I will tell you I was still hurt down there beneath my underthings. So I sat there and heard Mary’s voice but not the words and I knew from the sound that she was reading bad, and that she was nervous and though I did not blame her for all that had happened, I only wanted to close my eyes and lean against the tree and feel its bark through the back of my dress until the next day when Jeremiah might come back. But he didn’t come the next day or even the next and I still couldn’t even bring myself to listen to Mary stutter over the words so busy was I thinking and waiting for him. It pained me to know how I was suffering with missing him so he too must be suffering and I began to imagine God coming unto the Prophet and commanding that Jeremiah and I be together or perhaps even coming unto me and telling me where to lead Jeremiah, out into the desert, where we could start having a family in our own Zion and now when I think of those days I can only see the ways the world was preparing me and my imagination to receive the wisdom of God directly.

  A week after my Mama took me out to the meat shanty, Jeremiah came and Mary didn’t even have to be told, she just got up and left us beneath our tree and Jeremiah sat right up next to me and I told him all that had happened. About Mary and the slap and the sow but also how it was okay because my Mama punished me herself and did not even tell my Pa and that night he had even supped in our house, and not in the house of any other wife, and had even asked why the women were so quiet and she had just told him it was on account of being tired from all the slaughtering. Jeremiah listened and he fingered a piece of long dry grass and I wished then he’d finger my hair instead but when I was done telling he looked at me and he looked so sad and also far away, like he knew everything that was to be but couldn’t see it.