Strange Children

by Sadie Hoagland

  I watched them for a minute. The way she burrowed her head beneath his collarbone like that was safety and thought of Levi pushing me into the mud and so before I’d really thought it out I said You’re a good brother, and left the casserole for them to eat. After that, he didn’t put her in the cupboard when I came, but left her to play at his feet.

  Still I’d rather not gone anywhere after the Prophet’s house right then but because my Mama believed doing right was a cure for other injustices, I limped into the little house right at the start of October, not long after Emma married, and Manti let me in. This day the house smelled like wet plants, an early fetid rot, and the girl was hiding on her own under the table sucking her thumb and as I limped to the table, Manti started pacing and pacing and I felt a little chill run up my body, like you would with a dog who was growling at you from across the room though I never did see a dog since our last Prophet died. I put down the stoneware casserole dish with chicken and noodles and cream o’ mushroom and said goodbye so soft and was about to back out of the room when Manti turned to me.

  He walked right up to my face then, he was about a head shorter than me but still he looked right into me and grabbed my shoulders and I did try not to recoil, thinking that as with the dog it was better not to show any fear, any weakness other than the one written all over me, but he did not in the end want to hurt me but rather tell me something and so he said quietly,

  He’s afraid of you, you know.

  His breath was hot on me and smelled like crick mud, and the girl froze under the table, not even sucking her thumb but rather pausing with it pushed against her upper lip. I met his eyes but did not say a word back even though it’s not then that I was afraid as much as I was careful and if I am honest a little curious.

  Manti looked around, at the door and windows, before he whispered to me. The Prophet. He don’t know what to do with you, so he’s afraid.

  Manti paused and then broke into a wider grin, a face I’d never seen on him before. His grip tightened around my shoulders. And he should be, right Annalue?

  I couldn’t help but shiver then, but it was for no other reason than that my name in his mouth felt like cold water in my ear as if it had come from someplace deeper than the limited fathoms of his child body.

  Manti

  Bounce bounce bounce I hear it and I like it, the bounce is clear but there are a million sounds in it, too, like the rubber comes alive when it hits, and it’s something metal or shaking like when your mother hit you on the head and your brain shakes a little inside it, like that. Layered, vibrating, fruckin amazing shit and I love love love it.

  But just as I love it He musta hated it, He musta been sitting up there on his fruckin sky chair going crazy with all the basketballs down here, smiting man, venging himself, saying smite them, smite this, hate hate hating how beautiful the sound of something he didn’t make really was and maybe hating too that he couldn’t even make the sound because maybe they don’t have that game up there.

  He musta hated it because He told the Prophet to fruckin knock it off, and the Prophet told us that the game was unholy, idle, sinful, errant, immoral, aberrant, corrupt and that the ball itself was the shape of His eye on us so how dare we play with it.

  How dare we play. Bounce.

  I’m fruckin sick of this shit.

  I swear, I swear, I don’t care.

  Jesus gotta love me no matter what ’cause I just like him, with a fruckin father I can’t see. ’Cause the man is dead, living in heaven, just like ole Jesus’s dad and the rest of them from the Book that lived in the days of then. Though Jesus, his dad was never alive, never dead, just God, and my Daddy was alive, and he drove a truck all over this country and came home and taught me to say shit, hell, damn and f-r-u-c-kay. But now my Daddy is gone, shot straight out in the mouth by somebody nobody knows, or nobody talks about and nobody knows why or if they do they sure as heck ain’t saying.

  But dammit I got an idea or two, I know that the fruckin Indians shot him because my daddy used to tell me stories about them. They’re mad maybe because we’re here sharing their desert with them and they have all sorts of animal gods who get crazy ideas and love fire and they just rode into town one day and saw how good my Daddy’s face would look dead and how good his hair might hang on their horses and they shot him. Then they left before anyone could see.

  Because no one saw any Indians that day.

  Bounce.

  I ask my bitch mother who is mean and awful and has hair the color of coal like a witch and who does bad things and beats me but not my sister because if she touches her she knows I’ll kill her with a kitchen knife because she hit the little Peapod once and I got the knife and held it to her throat from behind. I had to climb on a table ’cause I wasn’t so fruckin tall as now, and jump on her back and hold the knife to her and she felt the blade and she was screaming and then she got the fruckin point ’cause now she doesn’t touch Peapod and barely even me now that I am growing big so as to be like to fight back.

  Though I’d never really hurt her.

  But I do ask her what happened that day, who kilt him and what meat or bone was the fight over and she just look away most the time but once she start to tell the story of the day and said it was October, and the outside smelt like harvest smoke and she knew that morning that if the moon rose it would be orange and she was feeding my baby sister from her teat and things were alright and the man she loved had come home for a few weeks from the big rig road and had a cloud in his face but didn’t he always and she was thinking bout making corn biscuits when she heard the shot and wondered what animal went sick now and sighed with the trouble it would be to bury something so big as livestock and so she began to get ready for the sick smell of burning horse and thought for sure she’d make the biscuits and shut up the house so as to only smell baking and not the funereal stink.

  She never make it past this part of the story and so the only dang information I get is that she probably didn’t fruckin kill my father, mean a bitch she is, and that she know how to make something besides pie which is all she makes now and also that maybe she wasn’t such a bitch when Daddy was alive with a face still there.

  Bounce.

  And if it weren’t Indians, it coulda been some mouth of God acting out some Blood Atonement, a word I know since I’m fixing to be a man, coulda been my dad was a sinned soul and someone trying to save his ass by killing it. He could a adulterated or killed or been smited and his body still walking around coulda been jeopardizing his soul so one of ours done him a sweet favor and killed him so that the praying for redemption could really get going without the body and the brain in the way.

  They might do well to save my soul from my body and fruckin smart brain and my horse groins and if they do I’ll probably forgive them once I get fruckin saved and am up there with the rest of them sly dead dogs who all know what we all waiting to find out.

  What’s up there, besides no fruckin basketball?

  And we’ll find out, sure as heck, but in the meantime we still got to figure out down here. We still got to figure out why everybody fruckin mean and why we can’t hear the bounce no more.

  ’Cause with no bounce the court is quiet. Far end of town, the only pavement around is now quiet, quiet, quiet and it makes one think blank-like. The bounce was prayer, but the silence is a crack for me to think of the things to shoot besides the ball, his eye, and all the things to mess and mess with and the ways in which this world ain’t fair and God himself must be one mean daddy up there in his sky chair where he couldn’t do nothing but stop us from having fun so we can get back to the atonement, with or without blood, and I think the silence is a crack, a long crack like the ball always in the air between bounces, a pause for me to get to wondering who pulled that fruckin trigger and made her mean and made me as bastarded as Jesus and made Peapod the only thing I got to work around.

  And even if I never know, I’m gonna roll that ball all quiet around that court, softly and hush-ly
and so infant-like that the Good Lord will never know and I’m going to think about where we can all go now in this time without basketball, and without fathers, and without half a sky ’cause winter’s coming.

  And I’m going to think of something because, shit, who can abide under this new rule?

  Cadence

  When that first baby died inside me and I had to give birth to its rabbit corpse anyhow, I tell you it warn’t the only thing that died inside me. And I don’t mean I got bloated with some grief. I mean I felt relieved. Same as I felt that day I first left home, running off the porch with no shoes on, my thighs smarting with wind, my stepfather yelling behind me to get my ass back there. He spoke like that, ’cause he was vulgar and ungodly. And I would talk like that too now probably, but I met Josiah Pratt, and fell in love with him and come to God. And then I became his third wife.

  No use saying all that happened between when I left that run-down mobile home in Cedar City, and when I found myself here among all these sisterwives and milk-fed children who know more about God than I do still I think, but here’s to say it warn’t pretty: there were nights in cow barns and there were nights in sweaty sheets and nights I don’t remember. And then there was the sixty-seven days that I was married to one of the most rotten men on earth whose very soul smelled of death long before he’s below ground ’cause when I left him he’d just beaten me until I could hardly walk, and all I remember thinking was that man smells like molding cantaloupe. Later, when I first heard the Prophet speak in House, I thought about that smell and decided it was the smell of a soul damned to rot in its own body, getting itself ready for the sulfur-colored fires of hell that the Prophet talked ’bout.

  And when I met Josiah he smelt like cinnamon and soap. He stepped out of the Hurry-Up Market in Broadview and was chewing a little on the wood end of a match. I was just sitting there, runaway, watching cars come and go and thinking what the hell am I going do now. Well, the way I figure it, God must a sent Josiah in there just so he could walk out and see me, getting dusty as I was, still a little beat up and bruised, some of my skin looking like chewed meat, and wanting a cigarette or something else so bad the bottoms of my feet were itching. He stopped and looked down at me and moved his jaw sideways and back for a while until I looked up and met his eye mean-like. I didn’t want no more trouble from men and even though this one was a looker, blonde hair and blue eyes like gems, I sure as heck didn’t trust myself to know the difference between which ones you marry for sixty-seven days, and which ones look to last longer. But he didn’t look away and we stared at each other until I turned away and looked up the road like I didn’t care. Which was when Josiah said. Listen Now, you okay? And I had to look back to make sure he was talking to me.

  I nodded, and then shrugged, and then felt suddenly like crying, ’cause I was not at all okay. I had no place to go where someone or myself wouldn’t hurt me in one way or other. And he pointed to an old Ford, and he says, Come on, you come back and eat with my wife and me tonight, and get a good night sleep. And I’ve always wondered which wife he meant that day when he said my wife, whether he met Lizbeth his first wife or Tressa his second. And if he said it now to some other sad woman, if he might mean me. ’Cause you don’t go around saying the word “wives” all over the place when you live a life like ours. It just ain’t safe.

  I’ve also always wanted to know why I went, and I think it was maybe God. But also I think I was too tired to care if he killed me or beat me or took me home to his wife and loved me. So I got in the Ford and the blue seat was hot with sun but I was so hungry that even the burn felt good against my white legs. And we drove out for two hours on dirt roads. And I thought of all the ways this man might murder me, but I couldn’t see nothing in the car with which he might do it. I even checked the glove box and there was nothing but an old wrench which I thought would be quick and painless. Josiah saw me fidgeting and told me Don’t worry I ain’t a bad man, I’m one of God’s people and I’m taking you to meet the rest of them. So I had a pretty good idea as to where we were going then. And when we pulled into Redfield, I knew right then for sure where we were because the women had those long dresses on from pioneer times and that braided hair that floats up in front. Josiah told me you best wait here a second while I tell the women folk you’ll be staying here until you see fit to go. And I sat in the car and watched a little girl washing shirts against a board like it was a hundred years ago. She staring at me with some hard blue eyes in the meantime.

  That first night I spent here, the children weren’t allowed to talk to me and Tressa made it clear she could talk to me but wouldn’t. Josiah told her to behave herself and we ate biscuits and canned fruit and boiled chicken at a table with more people than are in my own family times four. Lizbeth was the only one beside Josiah that was kind, and I saw already the way they were taking me in. The way they wanted to show me something about God and fatten me up, too. Lizbeth gave me three servings and even though I knew it was rude to eat so much, I did. And Tressa spoke finally to let me know that there were in fact seven children to feed, and three of them were her own, and she wasn’t about to let them go hungry for some stray.

  I stayed there for two weeks, helping Lizbeth’s little Mary with her washing and trying to figure out what the heck she was saying to me most of the time. I slept in a makeshift bed in the barn, but it warn’t like other times I slept in barns because I had blankets and I warn’t afraid. I would sit up and listen to the horses below me snorting, and sometimes a pig would grunt from right outside and their noises seemed so peaceful to me ᾽cause they were animals that got fed and did not really get beat much.

  Then I started thinking I can’t stay here forever. ᾿Cause Tressa had been reminding me of that very fact more than once every day. And ᾿cause I knew they weren’t having me do enough work for all I was eating, but mostly because there was no forever for me, not like for them.

  Their forever was something that seemed like the fairytales my grandmother would tell me. And I didn’t know if this was ᾿cause in my bones I was a faithless sinner, or if because I knew that in Broadview people talked about Redfield as something to destroy, and talked about when the State would “put a stop to it all.” Though at the time it did feel more and more every day like their forever might be worth looking into. Not something I could have, but real. But not something for me. So that made me think it was time for me to leave even though I was too tired to think about what I might do next. But then one night, when the moon was low and the barn was quiet save one merciless cricket trapped in the hay somewhere, I figured I would ask Josiah the next day to drive me back into town so I could start something.

  About that time Josiah came in the barn and said my name in a soft voice. Cadence he said. And I think of that night a lot now, the sound of his voice, me thinking right away that he wanted me to leave right then but instead him climbing the ladder to the loft where I slept. Sitting next to me and clearing my hair from my face and kissing me. I kissed him back but was confused and thinking of Lizbeth. So I asked him and he was saying, they know they know, as he touched me. I warn’t thinking I wanted it, but certainly warn’t thinking I didn’t. Also somewhere in the back of my head was my mother’s husky voice sayin’ ain’t nuttin in this world for free Cadence, and ain’t no one nice for no reason. And so I thought I be owing something, and this was something I had given before for worse reasons and given it without wanting to give it to bad men like my stepfather. So I let him touch me and hold me and I felt how gentle he was and I even wondered if there was some way I might enjoy this if I was not so surprised.

  When it was done we lay there half-naked and the moon was coming up higher. And he said, Cadence, I’ve had a revelation and the Prophet has confirmed it. I’d like you to stay here and become acquainted with God, and when you do that, I’d like you to become my third wife and help me to fulfill our duty to God by giving him a multiplicity of children.

  Now this was such a mouthful I couldn’t h
elp but giggle but I could almost hear the way Josiah’s handsome face was falling when I did. And so I asked him if he meant what he said.

  And he said yes, and told me I would have my own room and maybe someday my own house, and I’d have to work but I’d always have food and a family and so I told him: Josiah I been a bad woman. Drugs, sex, you name it, and for some reason I tell him a story about when I was twelve years old and I stole a pack of cigarettes and some Big League Chew. Josiah asked me What is Big League Chew, and I said Bubble gum. He laughed then and told me that he and God and his other wives would forgive me my past if only I could forgive myself. And let God and his Prophet into my heart.

  And then I cried and said yes I could. And I knew this was the nicest thing that had happened in my life. And I wouldn’t have no trouble forgiving myself ᾿cause really everything I’d done was things that happened to me, not things I wanted to happen, but things I didn’t have a say about. But this I had a say about, even though much later down the road would be the first time I would ask myself what Josiah would have done had I said No that night, and how much a say was really a say. But for the time, I was all giddy and light and wanted to make love again to Josiah as his fiancée but he said he had to go and talk to Lizbeth right away. But first he took out of his pocket a black arrowhead on a lanyard. He told me he found it tilling the western field the day before he found me, so he had made it for me. And he put it around my neck and kissed my head and then he left. So I spent the rest of the night alone in the barn, fingering the smooth edges of the obsidian and listening to that single cricket and thinking how my life would be easier. And that I would be better than I ever had before because now I had a husband who was upstanding and sober and also his God I had to answer to.

  And it was better in most ways, though Tressa liked to make my life hard, and even Lizbeth got tired of teaching me how to do everything. And I did hear her tell Josiah that this is why we don’t marry outsiders because for goodness sakes I could not even sew, let alone kill and pluck a chicken. And I hoped they’d see how hard I was trying, but the thing was, I couldn’t try as hard as I wanted to because the first month there I didn’t get my period and was slow moving like I’d been drunk for three days. But I warn’t, I was stone cold sober.