Strange Children

by Sadie Hoagland

  And when I finally figured oh heck I must be pregnant, I had not the heart to tell Josiah there was a chance it was the child of my husband of sixty-seven days that I had not told him about at all, and also that this husband was not all white. And so I carried this secret for four months and smiled all the while, trying to keep so quiet about it until I couldn’t.

  Then I felt the pain of what turned out to be the baby dying. And then I buried that secret with a small shovel out back behind the barn with no crickets to sing and felt lighter in my womb and in my heart. But still I cried over that small shriveled child and its black fuzz for hair so unlike my own white blonde and even though I left it unnamed and moved on into today, where I can make rows and rows of mostly clean stitches, still I go sometimes and talk to that dark patch of crumbled earth underneath which lay my first child turning slowly into the ash of everything I was before.

  Listen I couldn’t turn away when she buried that child in its half-born state behind the barn and it stayed there, under the earth, in her mind. She would visit the spot and pet the dark earth there but knew not that the ground beneath was empty, freshly turned, but empty save for the worms that had begun to gather in hopes of helping ferry a body towards nothingness.

  It was empty because Josiah saw a coyote digging there and chased it away but the next night the bitch was back, pawing, leering, so Josiah chased it out again but this time fetched his shovel and begun to dig and when he felt his shovel hit something giving, not hard, he wondered which one of his children was soft as to bury one of the cats, but when he saw the white pillowcase acting as swaddling for the small thing and unwrapped it to see a small half life distorted by its early birth as much as by its early death, he held it to him not out of love or sadness but so as to avoid retching upon it when he leaned over and left his own bile in the hole where the child had been.

  He knew what the child was, and who it belonged to, he did, but could not do anything for how sad he felt. Although he was the type of man whose anger would allow him to bring that dead thing into the kitchen and drop it in the flour in front of Cadence as she stood making, he was too defeated by the sight of something so small and so the child in fact had the same effect its mother had had that day in Broadview when he saw her: he wanted to care for it.

  So he took it back to the edge of the field, under a big pinion and dug a hole deep enough, as a man digs a grave. For one needs to bury not only the thing but its smell, too.

  And then he took the thing and swaddled it tightly in its cloth. Then he laid the small bundle gently into the bottom of the hole, crouching down to do so.

  And even I, who could see all this, did not hear the words Josiah whispered then over that tiny carcass. But he did. Say words. He did.

  Manti

  Then one fall Sunday come that’s different ’cause of this new rule and no basketball and maybe He’ll change his holy mind so we got to go check. Go to House just to see. And it’s not that it’s easy to get Peapod out of bed, Up Up Up, I have to say and it’s November cold as shit come morning and light the color of fruckin mush but I get her up and say DAMMIT Peapod, and she moans and I help her pull her one good dress on that still ain’t no good and is a yesterday blue and torn on the back part but the bitch don’t do anything bout it, and Jesus don’t do anything bout it, so neither can I. I get warm water for her mouth and my mouth and comb her hair at least on top the bottom too knotted and we are quiet ’cause we don’t want to wake bitch mother and we hope the sun is already fruckin open over the eastern table top by the time we are walking to House otherwise our arms will be cold as shit and we’ll have to smite the Lord and his damn cold breath.

  We sit in the back like always and I fruckin listen like always but now I give god damn mean looks up ahead since the word came down that there’s no basketball and no other sin nor nothing to replace it. Peapod sleeps, her head on my shoulder and we hear that the Lord drinks our Obedience and it doth Nourish Him, and He doth with his renewal set to making our Heavens Celestial and preparing the Way for our eternal life with riches beyond any earthly capacity.

  Fruckin blah, blah, blah, no good stories this day like the one I like most that Old Prophet told and my mother told but this Prophet too stupid to, but that old story I tell Peapod later, bout the men lit out across the cracked earth and walked walked walked, until they came to this place and stopped. And then they made women and horses, don’t ask me fruckin how I tell Peapod, and worked the land with their hands and women braided their hair and when they did this the world was made in this place, a place God himself hollowed from red stone just to keep us in his pocket.

  I ain’t in no one’s fruckin pocket, but it’s a story that’s right in other ways.

  No new rules to not abide by just blah blah blah Amen and then it is over and the whole god damn place and even the bloody colored windows sigh, and we all get let out the doors in one big breath and outside people whisper and walk and watch us as we wander way into the day. Then we walk home and I’m fruckin sick of this part because of the dang families and they’re loud loud loud, millions of sisters and brothers all pushing at each other and pulling at braids and laughing and shouting and getting scolded and I hate hate hate them in all my heart and in my heart too I got Peapod and she holds my hand and asks me do I like flowers?

  I do, Peapod, I do.

  And I love Peapod.

  And then Peapod has a nap after House like always and bitch is still sleeping, her hair wild and not never fruckin braided and always in that blue nightgown and nothing else like she is furniture not mother. Not like the clean damn mothers at House with braids that shine like pony coats and I can’t fruckin stand it and get out always after House. I always go to play the game and bounce bounce bounce the ball but the game has been forbid so this day I do not go, so I am home and I see everything that happens when I am down the road because today I am not down the road.

  I am home and I see Him come, fruckin Prophet, to give my mother private sermon to give her nothing, to give her something and I hear her crying and his soft voice in her bedroom with door not even all the way closed and then I hear the thump thump thump. Shit, and I am not so stupid and know enough to know what he is doing Shit and I see my stupid mother’s sadness crack open like her door for all to see it and I sit on the porch and whisper Whore. Like Daddy would say.

  F.r.u.c.k whore.

  I am there on that porch with a piece of snake grass, pulling it apart each of its parts. Fresh green hollow a whistle in each one. I slit one longways underneath with my thumb nail and am bout to blow it when he comes out, wiping his mouth with a white cloth like he a fruckin God. He folds it and put it in his pocket. Stops at the top stair and looks down at me like I shouldn’t be there, at my own goddamn house.

  Fruckin whore.

  He don’t say nothing and steps down three steps and I want to trip the old stupid man and at the bottom of the steps, he turns to me and puts his foot up on my step and leans down and we are eyes same and straight.

  Man to man.

  And I can smell that old man old juice smell and look into his fruckin long face, his black eyes, square hand on his knee and I fruckin see all a him. Never mind before but now my jaw twitches I’m so mad and I fruckin hate him and I make my face say this. Smiting, venging look.

  He flicks his lip and makes a bitter laugh, dog coughing. He says, Boy. I look away. He says Boy and I look to him and I am bout to say F You Old Man but he musta listened in on my brain ’cause then he smacks me upside the head hard and fast so that I nearly fall off all the stairs. My fruckin brain is screaming a million things but none of them words.

  He makes his dog laugh again. Boy. Your father gave us quite a bit a trouble. He had to die for his bodily sins, by my hand, by God’s hand.

  Prophet touches his long smooth face now. Like he love it.

  But You, he laughed again, I won’t let you even get that far.

  He looks at the door behind us.

  Your fa
ther wasn’t worthy, spreading his seed to others’ homes and you are his son, and if you get to even thinking trouble, and he lean down toward me, I’ll get to you before you doing trouble because the Lord sees all and he tells all to my ear and I see, I hear all evil.

  He looks at me and I don’t a say nothin ’cause I am not fruckin stupid.

  He dog laughs one more time and nods like he knew it all along and then he leans forward and grasps my shoulders and squeezes them like he trying to close me like I was a fruckin open book and then he fruckin leans forward and his breath smells like Peapod’s sweaty feet.

  Then he fruckin puts face to mine and lips to my forehead and kisses it like I a basketball and he shootin from center court.

  In my head for God to see I spit in his face as he pulls away. I can see on his face that he did not see me spit in his face in my head, or that God not told him yet and he doesn’t know, so at peace is he as he backs down off the steps that I have to fruckin grin, and when he sees this then his peace sure as heck leaves his face and he pauses like he might hit me again but then this God’s man turns away and I watch him walk, Prophet he is, with one foot in front of the other, and with each step new blood blooms in my head,

  and I do like flowers Peapod,

  new ways to make his body bleed, until my mouth is wet and salty and I get up from my step to go spoon Peapod until she wakes up, so my mother won’t touch her with her filth and as I do I think for the first time:

  It warn’t no fruckin Indians after all and also that I would fruckin atone my father, my father who I see now eye to eye. My daddy, a man with a beard and a big laugh who took me on his knee and taught me to say fruck, like a man he said and winked his eye. A man who wants a little trouble, he said, but not too much.

  Daddy, I whisper. Daddy. We got trouble. Too much.

  My daddy who sees everything inside my head now, but tells no one. I’m going to think of something, Daddy, I am.

  Annalue

  The next sign that ill times were upon us was when the first government car came to town since they took Holden Brown, and then his family and even my friend Mercy Ann. It moved in one afternoon, driving back and forth through town. Big and black and slow, like some earthbound storm, and it left a dust so thick and unwelcome that it took half the day to settle. The warning bell at the top of the Prophet’s tall house rang and all the diminutive ones ran inside, and I was cutting Levi’s hair but quit cutting it to look out the window before he hollered that I best continue or he like to have half a cut when Kingdom come, as it was fixing to do any minute, he said, with that fevered bell ringing the high notes of trouble.

  So I wet my comb again and pulled his hair tight between my fingers like a loom and cut the edges up and down like he likes. The wet brown blades were sticking to my fingers and my dress and falling at my feet and one of the littlest came crawling in it, sticking bits in his mouth and I just watched as the fur stuck to his lips and gums not thinking to stop him, thinking only about the sound of the bell and the way it would sound, echoed in our minds, when it stopped. That kind of after silence when you can still almost hear what you just heard, though this time it’s coming from you, not from out there.

  The day was desert cool, a breeze from the west blowing other air our way, and it was a coolness that feels gluttonous at first winter and so there was a moment, when I pulled a smooth lock through my fingers again if I didn’t wonder whether they in the car had come to fetch their own temperate climate escaped to us, wanderers in a forsaken land.

  Emma appeared behind me and put her hand on the back of my dress, hanging there like we were small again. What are you doing she said, cutting hair at a time like this? And so I told her Levi wanted me to finish and he scoffed and went to turn his head so that I had to screw it back straight and tell him to Be Still.

  Emma began biting her nails and I told her stop now, stop, and asked her why she wasn’t helping Lizbeth or resting her new belly and I told her she best go get with her own and she gave me a look to fry an egg when I said that before she stomped off and I knew what she was thinking but did not know how to have been of help because I did not know.

  I did not know at the time if this meant news of Jeremiah, whose body we still had not seen to bury though the Prophet had dreamspoke his desert death clear as day, or if this meant that they would take one of the men, like they did Mercy Ann’s Pa, Holden Brown, and while I hoped it meant nothing it seemed little likely that the breeze and the car and the season’s rotten apples were not connected to form some inevitable conclusion of a change coming.

  The day they took Holden, the air was still, even the Mormon crickets were quiet. But it was a week later, when we all had just begun to breathe again that there was a breeze, and two large vans, and a news camera came and stopped in front of the houses of Holden’s wives and they loaded up Holden’s two remaining wives, the third, Adaleen, already gone and a party to this, and we watched as they went to the houses and took each child and my Pa later said they asked each one their name, their parentage and then had to take fingerprints and check teeth and give the children letters for names because the children would not speak.

  We lay on our stomachs in Josiah’s barn loft and watched through a small long crack in the planks while the children were lined up in front of the vans. The people in suits sweated and walked around them like they were playing Duck Duck Goose, and wrote things on pads and talked into radios. We watched Mercy Ann, who was sweet on Levi and always over at our house so that it was hard not to think of her as one of our father’s, and she sat staring at the wheels on the van, sitting in the dirt with one of the babies of that brethren on her lap, sucking at her fingers and I wanted to go to her, and I knew we all did, want to go to them, knowing different children in different ways, but we were too afraid that if we left the cool dark barn the sunlight of such a day as that would paint us the color of Holden’s children and we would be taken, too, with no one believing us that our father was a different man, still free, and standing at the fence, watching. Chewing grass, unafraid, our Pa and Josiah watched it all, and I admired the ground they held, for they were between those people and their homes, our homes and our land, and they did not move.

  That night, after the vans were gone and the houses of the Brown compound empty nobody spoke except to gather in prayer before a supper no one could eat. Emma crawled into my bed that night and was shaking, and so I noticed I was shaking too, and I told her that it would be alright, that as not-of-God as those people were, I knew they would feed the children, and give everyone a bed, and when Emma asked if they had a prison for children I told her no, though this was a thing I could not be certain of then.

  So when Emma came then with her child tug on my dress I knew she wanted me to say that it would be all right, but I could not. Could not, perhaps, because Levi’s hair in my hands. Strange Manti told me once that when we die our hair still grows, even though our soul is long gone, and I don’t know if that is true or how he learned it but with an immortal thing such as hair slipping between my mortal fingers that would surely rot off their own bones, I could not say something false or even something that would make her feel better because I felt a hollowness in me then akin to the sound on the other side of the ringing bell.

  And when I was done with the hair, the bell’s after ring finally out of my ears, I picked my mother’s youngest child at my feet up out of it and brushed the strands off his face and hands and told Levi to get a broom and then went upstairs to put that child to nap and sit on my bed because I wanted to go outside but was afraid to.

  I wanted to go sit in the cool by the creek and put my feet in the water. I wanted some unwalled place to think. But instead I sat on my cedared quilt and thought of Mercy Ann and wondered where she was and if she still had a braid, or if she was taller, or if she watched TV and went to school and if she liked any of it. I wondered if it was me who had been loaded into that van that day if I would be okay now, or still sad, and also if anybo
dy out there where she was also had a limp. I wondered what letter they named her, and thought that I might like to be named Z.

  I fingered a lock of hair stuck still to my dress and I rolled it between my fingers until the ends bloomed like a dandelion and then I opened my fingers and blew like as to make a wish. Though I did not.

  I thought about how there would be a House meeting, that there would maybe be news, someone gone, maybe, but nobody arrived, because once gone they never came back, and I knew this and we all knew this, but no one better than Emma.

  I wanted to find her then, to tell her that it would be all right, to say what I hadn’t said and to speak and sow and forest her head with the idea that our world would persist beyond a doubt, that we could sleep sound, and that she could be unafraid of her own child, and that the sky and the trees and the field and the creek and the barns and the houses and the fruit we bit would bear all our burdens, even time, and the ovarian sun would come and go above us and over us until we died. But perhaps it was really myself that wanted those assuring words closed like dirt over my head, a finality I think I already knew was not the one coming.

  Oh Emma. You are sad and you miss your sister and your Mama and to you it feels like the world is a barn rotting around you, eaten wood dark with the fur of time.

  And you think of the time when he was here, when he was alive for you to deposit your hope into, and you were going to be happy together, and not be afraid together, and even maybe live forever together.