Strange Children

by Sadie Hoagland

  I wanted to brush his shaggy hair back out of his face. He reminded me of a little cousin I used to babysit. Who used to fall asleep on my lap. Call me Hay Hay.

  I placed a hand on his head. A hand he couldn’t feel or know, and I wished I was full of kindness and love for him but I only had one thing to do here.

  I bent down so that my mouth was smoke in his ear.

  Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, I whispered my song.

  I heard Beth stir.

  Your house is on fire, I whisper sang.

  Then she sat up and I looked up. She looked right at me. The whites of her eyes rising. She grabbed a pillow and hugged it, pushing back against the couch.

  She looked right at me. She saw me as I turned back to Manti’s ear.

  And your children shall burn, I sang, my voice rising.

  Beth screamed then. Get away! Get away from them!

  And so I knew, as Manti started awake, swearing, I knew her secret.

  Cadence

  My husband who I share with three other wives was gone. Gone out because something warn’t right among the men. And the four of us wives were sitting around a table trying to find a thing to say to make everyone else feel at ease bout it. Also at the same time it seemed we were trying to convince everyone else that we each loved him more than the others in case the feeling we all had was right. In wives, I was no place near the top. Even less than Emma who was barely thirteen. An outsider, and they all somehow knew that I had been with other men before I was married. Heck, Tressa still acted like I was a danger to her kids or something. So I really wanted to tell her that I loved him maybe even more than she did, since I chose him and warn’t assigned him by no Prophet. But this warn’t the time with a black car, just like the one they say took Holden Brown sometime last year, driving all slow until our alarm bell was ringing and the day stopped.

  I saw it. The car. It looked like an oily dark eye just taking everything in, gazing all through town, staring too long, with no apologizing. For a second, the hair on my neck stood up and I wondered if they could be looking for me. If my Ma had called someone to say I was runaway. But then I knew it warn’t. Not a car like this. A runaway would mean a cop car. This looked like the feds. And my Ma wasn’t looking for me.

  And then that evening Josiah was meeting with the other men, and Tressa whispered that they even met without the Prophet himself. So the whole place was quiet like the dusk was meat and everybody got their mouth full.

  So I sat there and didn’t say anything about how I loved him, or about what I knew of these outsiders that had come looking in at us. And I just let Lizbeth’s baby sitting in my lap suck my fingers, his empty gums clamping in that baby-mouth way that nothing else in the world feels like expect maybe a finger gnaw from Bitsy, that toothless old horse of Josiah’s that he say he don’t have the heart to shoot. And though I was just sitting there and not saying anything, it warn’t that I hadn’t learn to love my husband. Josiah had made me a better woman and a mother come next summer, if this one takes. And I did, in my own way and right, see my God more clear. I think He really did mean for me to be Josiah’s, and I know he was trying his best to remove temptation from my path.

  But still then and even now, I miss things like good black coffee and potato chips. And sometimes early in the morning when the light is just beginning to get a little up in the sky, I think about taking Josiah’s old Ford and heading out to Broadview and getting a hot coffee and a pack of cigarettes and some Cheetos and candy bars. Being back before anyone missed me. I haven’t gotten the courage up yet to do it, but just thinking about it gets me drooling. Even though it was that very temptation to eat and drink and smoke and get high that brought me here.

  And when I was first married, you’d a thought I was a dog. Tressa kicked me around so much with do this and do that. And always the last worst jobs, cleaning toilets and bathtubs and then the last worst burnt corners of casseroles for dinner. It’s better now, since Emma came, and she’s got someone new to hate. And no matter what it’s better than what I had, but still I’d like to visit that old life sometimes. But I am ashamed to admit it, and would never tell my sisterwives this. Not now and not that day while we sat waiting.

  While we sat there, I did say that Josiah wouldn’t do no good in prison. (But I did not say I knew this because I had done my own small time in jail.) And at first Lizbeth glared like she was mad I said it but then Emma, with her own baby bumping under her dress, said that No siree, nobody would match his socks for him and we all got a quiet laugh.

  Lizbeth said Helpless, that man is.

  We nodded at this and I remembered the day Josiah sat on the edge of my bed and tried to sew a button on himself ’cause he said I didn’t do it right and so I told him, well then do it yourself. And I thought he might scold me for my mouth, but he tried. We laughed when the button pulled right off clean as a scab: the plaid fabric a spot darker where it had just been. But I didn’t say this to my sisterwives, ’cause I didn’t think I could stand their looks if they knew I had dared make him do it. Especially after a day like this one.

  Lizbeth kept talking and she said, Sometimes I know God show us the darkness when one least expects it, but seeing that black car today was like an omen.

  When I was a child, she said, during that last famous raid it was very much like the end had come. They came before dawn, we knew they were coming. The Prophet Lehi, and a holy, holy, holy man he was, had heard from God. So they came thinking they would find us in our beds still sleeping, but no, we were all in front of the House, we were singing our hymns. Singing while the littlest children played around us. They came into our collective body so strong and broke us up and arrested everybody, and took us children away from our parents in milk delivery trucks and we were afraid, and we slept in a school gymnasium for some days and I waited for God to strike the building down, for the walls to come apart and fall to the ground and free us from the policemen guarding the doors, and the nurses passing out cartons of milk. It was cold at night, and I slept next to my sisters on the hard floor and I prayed and prayed. For three days we stayed quiet and pious and in the end, they put us back in the milk trucks and drove us right back here and no one, not even the Prophet, went to jail, and all returned to the way God intended. But it was a test, for certain it was, and I fear that soon there may be another test: a reprehension maybe, and a test of our faith and of our people.

  When Lizbeth said the word faith, we all got quiet. I looked out and saw that the day really was getting on. Saw out the small uneven window the sun drifting down like a lazy eye.

  Persecution, Emma said, but she too was looking far away, patting her belly lightly in a rhythm too wild for a heartbeat to follow. And I knew that Emma had been through a lot for a child so young, and that her youth was a crime, her belly the evidence. And I knew all about that outside world and what they accused us of, could see it plain as day in Emma. And I thought about how to tell this to the others, how to explain why it was seen as wrong and I opened my mouth once but then shut it. I had become friends with Emma, and I thought she was wiser than her years. I had listened to her all the time about Jeremiah in those first days she was here and married to us and didn’t tell no one about it. So I thought we were sort a close. So I didn’t want to tell them that it was her that would really do us in if they came to look hard. I didn’t want to give Tressa more reason to hate her.

  Tressa was more sure than anyone that she loved Josiah best. She’s got dark hair and mean eyebrows and a big bosom and big hips and big everything. She thinks her body was, she says, made the most right by God for wiving, and she liked to tell Emma and I, who are not old enough for her figure, that we are sad excuses for wives. She pokes at the bones that show below our collarbones. Like a couple a skinned birds, she says. And she had been hanging her head and crying a lot at this time, and we didn’t always know why as she only talked to Josiah. But that day I knew it was because the big black car that drove around slow and left.
Then after we came out and stood there in the dust cloud, and then the men called a meeting and left us wondering if our lives would change. That was why she was sad that day and why while we were sitting there, around the big pine table in Lizbeth’s kitchen, she let out occasional wails to wake the ghosts.

  But then she said, If God is testing us, I am not unsure that one of us will not pass, and she glared at Emma and mouthed Jer-e-mi-ah, as if Emma didn’t know the name of her own sin and then she looked at me also.

  So Emma grabbed my hand and squeezed. Lizbeth said Have Mercy, Tressa, times like these we be a family, the way Josiah would want, then, as she let her voice fall off she said too, The way Jeremiah would want. This part surprised me and I looked up quick but she was looking away and shaking her head. So I thought maybe I didn’t hear her right. I hoped for Emma’s sake that she did say that. That she could see like I did that Emma was a child who didn’t mean no harm, and were only doing what she felt and being young and stupid. A place I knew well.

  But now that she had a good old baby belly to rest her hands on, Emma already seemed much more grown up and Lizbeth treated her like it. Lizbeth, who, as we sat at that table, started saying what we had all been thinking. If one of those gone boys talked, she said, but she didn’t finish. She was looking at her hands, old with washing, as she talked. Like she did when she was trying to name all the prophets past which Tressa made her do from time to time. Tressa was always testing Lizbeth, just like she tried to do with Lizbeth’s new little boy. She picked him up one day from his cradle when he had been fussing just barely, and she got out her boob and pressed him to it for a drink even though she didn’t have any milk, or shouldn’t a. When Emma saw her and screamed, Lizbeth came over from her washing and asked Tressa what in the Devil’s name did she think she was doing? Tressa looked then like a kid who’d stole some candy, her eyes all big and her lower lip all wet and quivering and she handed the sweet baby back to her. Since that day I haven’t trusted her. But I also feel bad for her and the way things don’t seem right with her. Her oldest is three, which seems old for no new baby. And I don’t know why but I prayed to Him that it was not because Josiah had not done it with her, because I know that would break anyone’s heart. Not just mine.

  Outside it was getting darker early, and the day crickets of fall long since hushed. Even the desert knew the signs of winter. It felt much later in the kitchen than it was.

  Telling-on is bad luck, Tressa said then and Lizbeth looked but no one said anything back to this because the boys that might have told, that might bear witness, already knew bad luck. They’d already fallen from the Prophet’s graces, and had left with no reason to save us. Worse luck than seeing a coyote, Tressa added, almost whispering. I thought it was a weird thing to say until Lizbeth told me later that Tressa was always invoking the beliefs of other desert people until Lizbeth like to scream.

  But right then I thought about the way a coyote howls, like a woman screaming, and I got the taste of sour milk suddenly in my mouth. Then Lizbeth said, Cadence give me the child, he fussing, and you go get some of the Lord’s air in your heart.

  So I handed her the baby and she took it and I felt the shadow of the weight of the child gone, and the heat where his body been against me, and the stiffness in my arm from crooking it to hold him. And I walked out the door and into the evening where the sky looked like a nectarine, all beautiful, as if it was making jam from our troubles.

  As soon as I stepped off the last porch step and felt the earth under my bare feet, I smelt a little smoke in the air. All smells were so strong to me now that I was pregnant. I turned toward the center of Redfield and saw our world different than it had ever been, like some great altar on fire in the dusk. I saw Josiah far down the road walking home and I thought how much I loved him. And how it was he who knew my secret name to whisper when end times come and whose soul would be with my soul for eternity but who right then had other duties while I had this newly growing child. A plum hard in my soft.

  I waved at his figure against the peach sky, but just then I had a bad-like feeling watching him.

  I whispered my secret name, my password into paradise, and knew no one else heard it out in that yard with the world all pink and orange. I felt like the black car and its memory had seeped a well inside me, and I could taste the deep dank water in my mouth just beyond the shape my tongue made round that ghost name.

  But before I could get to crying or feeling even scared, I finally saw what I had smelt. It was a wavering line of smoke and I understood for the first time that nobody was burning a field, because that’s something the men do and they were busy, and so something else must have been on fire. I saw then that flames were bucking up into the eastern sky, near the Prophet’s house, and the first thing that I thought, ashamed as I am to admit it now, is Good Riddance. I didn’t much like that Prophet and I couldn’t really say why. But I didn’t take my eyes off the smoke dusk sky being peeled by the night, and I sidled up the steps and pushed open the door with my heel and I yelled Lizbeth,

  Something’s on fire out here.

  Jeremiah

  Everything was loud, all the time. In and outside. Then one night the city, the Home, his blood, seemed to boil up and around inside him so that his skin was so hot he couldn’t tell the inside of it from the outside. Jimmy had come over, and Jeremiah was drinking a beer, and he could feel it and he was having a good time watching Flynn do an impression of some tough guy from TV that he hadn’t heard of but it was funny anyway, Flynn so small and all. He was sitting on the big brown couch and laughing and then he saw that Jimmy was watching him from across the room, a red flush on his pocked cheeks, arms folded, leaning a hip against the kitchen counter. He looked away quick and took another sip of his beer but could feel Jimmy looking at him still. It reminded him of when he was sitting at Pa’s early morning prayer circle with the rest of the family and he could feel Pa watching him, making sure his own eyes stayed low and reverent. If he looked up now or then it would mean trouble. So Jeremiah finished his beer and then went to the bathroom down the hall so that they’d all think he was coming back, but after he was done he ducked into his bedroom and shut the door as quietly as possible.

  This time it didn’t work, though.

  A knock came at the door just as Jeremiah had started to pull off his T-shirt. He yanked the shirt back over his head and stood still, staring at the door. None of the boys knocked. Ever. He saw his folding knife sitting on the card table that sat between his and Duke’s beds. He grabbed it and put it in his pocket before opening the door halfway.

  Jimmy stood there grinning with a clear plastic cup of whiskey in his hand. Jimmy brought over whiskey for himself when he brought them beer, but he didn’t let anyone else have any.

  Super Mormon tired already? Jimmy leaned his arm up on the doorframe and his head dropped toward Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah could tell he was drunk.

  He could also hear the boys go quiet down the hall; he could hear them trying to listen.

  How come you never stay up late? Jimmy dropped his arm from the doorframe and took a half a step toward Jeremiah. Jeremiah didn’t take a step back; he kept his hand on the doorknob. He was maybe one inch taller than Jimmy. Stronger, for sure.

  I’m tired. Jeremiah’s voice was hoarse. His mouth was all dried out in a way that reminded him of the air at home. But he was so far from there, I am here among the wicked, and it turns out, they are wicked. He was, he thought, really very tired.

  He could feel the weight of the knife in his right pocket.

  Come on, how can you be tired? Jimmy reached into the room and playfully pushed Jeremiah on the shoulder. Jeremiah felt some dogtail inside him want to curl under with shame. This must be what the others felt, this closing, this nauseating surrendering.

  They are wicked and now I am here among them.

  Jimmy had dropped his hand, but Jeremiah could still feel the touch. He felt like it was making him spin.

  I
have to get out of here.

  Jimmy took a step into the room and toward Jeremiah, but Jeremiah was faster. He sidestepped around him, pushing Jimmy against the doorframe with his shoulder, and ducked out of the room.

  He took a few quick steps back down the hall to the kitchen. The boys sat gaping at him.

  If Pa knew. If Pa saw.

  Jeremiah cleared his throat. What? Thought I’d have another one.

  Duke hopped up to get him a beer from the cooler he was sitting on, the red and white cooler Jimmy had brought over.

  Alright, the polyg kid wants to party! Finally! Dude, I’ve been waiting—Duke stopped talking and Jeremiah could feel Jimmy behind him.

  Hey—and then the hand was on his shoulder. Again. The second time he’d touched him. Same shoulder. His fist tightened, and then Jimmy gave his shoulder a little squeeze.

  Why don’t you just relax, mo-man? Jimmy’s laugh was high, and across the room Flynn echoed it with a sound even more unnatural. It reminded Jeremiah of the sounds coyotes sometimes made after a kill. A wheezy round of squeals. Night there, so open and flat. Not like this room, a closing hand.

  Jeremiah turned around, shaking Jimmy’s hand off him.

  Don’t you ever fucking touch me again.

  Jimmy’s smile shrunk and for a brief instance Jeremiah saw a pitch change in his eyes, saw the way he wanted to kill Jeremiah, to do worse maybe. Their eyes stayed locked for what seemed like might have been a time outside of time.

  Seconds that were really generations.

  He didn’t look away but finally Jimmy did, gave another forced laugh. Flynn echoing again, from closer this time. Jeremiah noticed then the way the room was moving, the boys were shifting. Duke had taken a step closer to Jeremiah. Flynn was slinking around behind Jimmy’s back. A big blond kid named Brett was leaning forward in his seat, and two others, a pair of brothers, were pulling themselves off the floor. Dogs in the night. Jimmy folded his arms and snorted.