Strange Children

by Sadie Hoagland

  Pa pulled his face right close to his. Jeremiah could smell the sweat, and he thought, the iron salt of the blood on his shirt.

  Jeremiah kept his eyes down. No, sir.

  What you say?

  No, sir.

  No, what?

  I am afraid.

  Pa let him go. Good, he said, and wiped his nose. Good.

  Jeremiah didn’t move, waiting for Pa to tell him that it was all right, to go on. You go wash that blood out then, and as you do, you remember that that’s sinner’s blood, spilt to atone for the earthly sin of adultery, and you remember that good.

  Jeremiah nodded, Yes sir, and waited till his Pa shooed him away. He went to fill two buckets at the pump and walked them over to the truck, laying them in the bed. He went to get a horse sponge from the stable.

  Jeremiah hopped up in the truck bed. He stood over the bloodstain and thought it looked like the silhouette of a flying bird, one wing up. He tipped a bucket over it slowly and as the blood turned pink, Jeremiah swept it out of the bed with his sponge.

  It took two more buckets of water to be sure. And when he was done he went back to work, but it was in his head all day, and for days after, even months when he used the sponge on a horse, squeezing water out of it to cool a mare the way he had squeezed blood out of it. He swore it was still stained, so it stayed in his head. Not only the half face, and the no stone or marker, but what little had been said. Jeremiah had only a vague idea of what adultery was then, and later he’d hear more about it from the other boys—Manti’s Pa had been loose. Spreading his seed in sin outside of his wedding bed, they said. And in the years before Emma he would think about that sometimes in his bed at night, not touching himself as that was forbidden but rolling onto his stomach and rocking his hips, rubbing against his bed, back when he was still trying to be good. But more on Jeremiah’s mind in those first days after was what the Prophet had said about how one’s sinning blood might run down into the red clay earth, a stream of different red, and run down into what Jeremiah pictured as an underground river of blood, of Christ’s and all atoning sinners, and that this would then make it right.

  Blood would get them back to that place, to that one place. Paradise. Home. To where it matters.

  But how could he have told Duke about that? And it wasn’t about Jimmy, it was more about saying that what Jimmy had done, even if he’d done it with Duke, was in Jimmy’s blood. Could I taste it, tonight, the wickedness? He remembered spitting out that red foam, he could still taste the iron saltiness he thought. He felt his lips in the dark, but they were dry. He wiped them with the back of his hand to be sure.

  How could he have even begun to tell this story of Manti’s Pa here, in this world? This modular home, this place where there was no river of blood underground, where there was no Celestial heaven where men ruled as gods, there was no hell even, just an empty husk of a word that people weren’t afraid to use and without it there was only the immediate and empty days of cereal and television and sleep.

  A heavy sleep that Jeremiah longed for as the night wore on.

  Annalue

  After the black government car came belly-crawling through slow like a snake, there came the first fire. The men were all at the gathering House and we smelt town smoke, not fields burning but things built and made, Cadence running down the road and yelling for Josiah, yelling for everybody to come quick, and then we heard the bell and saw the house of the Prophet’s wives was afire and exploding with children and the boys who are assigned to townfire, only three of them left it turned out, came with their hose to attach to the pump and the children were screaming and the whole town gathered as the back porch and one upstairs corner of the house burned, then smoldered, then sat like a black shell still smoked with fire’s hunger but no flame as night began to come. One armchair sat in the yard blackened down to glowing coils in its seat, a pulsing skeleton tall among the clothes and dolls grabbed in haste.

  It would be rebuilt in three days, as that is how things were done there.

  No child was kilt, but one was burned some on arm and face, only on one side, one corner of the body like the house, but not repaired in three days. He was small and would carry the scars and their heat for years. He had been hiding under the back porch because he was in trouble with his mother. He would not say what for. He would not say if he knew how it started. He was already burnt and so spared a beating. The priested came in their line. Pa, Josiah and three others, wrested from their secret meeting that everyone knew about.

  The Prophet looked on silently. It was only a fire, He said.

  Then the next day was Sunday and there was House. And I went though I had not been. Had not been since I was wived by the heavenly speaker of God but not housed. Had stayed with Jenna’s babies for a season of Sundays. Had watched the slow walk of everyone I knew disappear down the road from a porch while an infant half sister sucked my finger.

  I did not go that Sunday because something had burnt, but because of the black car and the meeting interrupted and the priested standing there watching the fire but not even thinking about it. Because it made me feel we were being watched not just by them but by something else. Haunted, maybe, by Jeremiah’s ghost. Because even me, with the Devil inside my cold leg and body too, needed the words of our place, though perhaps it was not the words so much even as the silent and pious story of us all listening together, hundreds of ears resounding with a hope, a harmony, a plan.

  I came down dressed in the kitchen in my better shoes and Mama and Levi and the littlest ones were all there, and Mama looked me up and down and said well I hope you told Jenna that one of hers better watch the rest of hers, and then we stepped out into the heat and into the road where already many walked in woven pilgrimage. And Mama nodded her hellos and the littlest ones fell in with other kids and Levi waited to see if he could see Ellen Mai coming and I limped behind them and in front of him as we made our way into the thoughts and voice of God.

  The gathering House was white and square and smooth against the red and wrinkled mesa like some dollhouse furniture placed carefully by His hand. There was colored glass in nameless shapes and rows and rows of folding chairs on the concrete floor and a painting of the last prophet past in his Celestial heaven with his wives and children at his feet, a halo of dawn behind him, his hands outstretched and painted too large for his body. Daniel, favorite son of the Prophet as he was, stood lighting candles and fingering the blue silken fringe of altar cloth and then He came out of the small stage door in a black suit and black shirt and all was hushed and the colored shapes splintered and stretched among us like they were also waiting and I warmed my hands in the red sail of light that had landed in my lap.

  And I looked at this light and not at him. But that’s not to say I didn’t hear him, I did. I heard him as he told us it was God’s behest to prepare ourselves for persecution. As he spoke words that contained not the stories of black cars and fires and boys taken before their time, but of older times of persecution and statehood and those who lost their faith, who turned the words of that original Saint and Prophet so as to suit themselves to the greater country of sinners. That we would not succumb. That since our birth and first death, our fall from heaven, we were sent to battle the armies of Satan and that we as a holy order of people would overcome in the end when the Lord cometh again to resurrect us brightly into this land which would then be our eternal land, to each his own, the men becoming gods, and the women Celestial mothers and wives and the rest of everybody else damned to Satan’s darkness. And the proof of this was in the eternal geology of the mesas around us, the eons their layers bore for us to show us time as man had not yet been able to imagine it, an unbounded time that we should try to conceive of, for our lives would go on and on forever once we died our second death and He came and we were risen.

  I heard Him as He spoke in slow summer cadence and incantation; as He told us of the lies of the outside world and its power of corruption, the colored shapes shifted and the
temple grew warm and though the pious dared not restlessness, a haze settled in between the voice and the ears, and the dust in the light was a sleepy smoke, a nodding breath as that same eternal time bore on.

  And then He said:

  You, the priested people of his holy will, must be worthy. And I closed my eyes and heard his voice of that August afternoon.

  You, you must be clean.

  So I will wed you.

  God turns away from those unworthy.

  And you will be raised up by this union.

  The heavenly father will not speak into the prophecy of an unclean people.

  And I entered into his voice, as he had entered me, and I could feel the muscles of the voice gripping me, resisting me, until I was back on that long limp home, walking out the western field to the crick, taking off my shoes, standing in the cool water, staring at my naked white feet among the dark smooth stones that shone like eyes.

  You must cleanse yourselves of those among you who have wavered in their obedience to God’s will.

  And I was lifting my dress, a dried dripping of blood on one thigh.

  The revelation says that people that turn away from our great law will be destroyed.

  Another kind of wetness too, white and eggy.

  Our Saint tells us to atone with blood.

  And I cupped the cool clean water, and the edges of my dress fell into the crick as I first poured, then brushed the coolness over my legs, afraid to touch the center of the pain until finally I felt a hot wetness from within, from behind my throat and eyes and also from where he had been and I pulled my dress all the way up.

  Only through our laws can life continue forever, and increase.

  And I lowered my hinds on the quiet stones so to let the water run through me, to let it carry away all that God had seen fit for me, to dilute my blood into the crick’s unfeeling passage.

  These are the words that were revealed to me as I slept, the words that I as His servant must reveal to you.

  And as I was cleansed again, I pulled out of his voice and the crick and I opened my eyes in House as the Prophet began to speak not as himself but as God:

  Now be ready and awake and not unto your earthly body, as I am Jehovah and the Great I AM. I am the darkness and the light, the beginning and the end, and when the evil snake of the world finally consumes itself, I will make rise again your blood, and skin, and hair and remake you in death what you were at your finest in life. But only if you obey me, and obey my laws, and my servant your Prophet. Men, you must pray and pave your path to the Celestial. Women, you must bear the children, the fruit of our eternal tree. Questioning your Prophet, or being tempted by the evils of their world—their frivolity, their lust—mark you as unworthy. For I shall make rise only a people who are cleansed and anointed of all that is unholy, and who have taken the blood of all who have sinned as atonement for the blood I shed in that, my first earthly time. Now, go and be faithful as my servant your Prophet guides you to everlasting life, and be aware of the Devil working among you and within you.

  And I felt Levi next to me, his flesh shifting slightly around his still bones. And the Prophet looked down, signaling to his people that he would no longer speak for God when he spoke again.

  Our Heavenly Father has been clear. We must not rejoice until we are saved. And he disappeared through his door. And there were no songs as He had not ordered them. And the choir looked helpless, their hands still poised on open hymn pages. And the people looked around, and opened and closed their mouths, their tongues afraid of their own words as the call for blood, Our Saint tells us to atone with blood, lay wet within all ears like a fresh coat of paint. And the faithful obediently filed out into the desert winter of the world not yet eternally theirs.

  And I walked in the sun on the road with the many but did not go home.

  I went to the crick. I took off my shoes, and my dress, and everything and I lay quiet in the winter water so cold it made my back skin forget his voice while my front skin rose above the surface like a long white woman stone of one who once was alive but now lay waiting quietly for the time when that redeemer would come, and blood and breath deliver her to a world unmediated by men.

  Some things are always already over.

  I watch little Manti start a fire, light up the woodpile stacked against the back corner of that holy house. His face a look of serious glee and giddy and after the pile has caught, has momentum, is brightening, he scampers away like a spirit, back into the fields. Back near the creek where he stops beside it and waits for his breath to even, his heart to let up its patter.

  He rubs his hands cold in the creek water. Rubs off imaginary soot.

  Does not look in the sky behind him for the veins of smoke.

  Only breathes and says Just one thing right.

  Just one thing right, just one thing right old Daddy.

  Mercy Ann

  After my father went to prison and not just jail, I got my own chair, and as it seems I’m not going anywhere for a while, Estelle asks me the questions she didn’t before. She asks me about the community, only she calls it a commune like it’s something different than is everywhere else and I know better than anyone else that it is, but I wish she wouldn’t call it that.

  One night, when we are done with the TV dinners and Married with Children comes on, which Estelle hates because she thinks Al Bundy is the ugliest man she’s ever seen and what are they putting him on TV for, she says, if I wanted to see people like that, I’d just go down to State Street, so she turns off the TV. Stan makes a noise like a snort and gets out of his chair, saying no need to go ruining it for everyone else and he goes off somewhere and Estelle and I stare at the TV for a minute like it’s still on.

  Then she says, Tell me more about your family. It’s funny she doesn’t know that yet, but she told me when they gave me to her that they’d told her not to ask about my past, to focus on a future. She’d said this my first week and then paused, and said Of course you can tell me anything you want, though. But I didn’t. But now I say I got two sisters and four brothers.

  And she says that’s it? Like she’s been ripped off and turns from the TV to me. Well, those are the ones by my same mother. She waits longer and I pick at the plastic on the TV dinner box.

  By my same father, it’s a lot, he’s got two other wives, and the oldest of them has twelve children.

  Estelle shakes her head and clucks her tongue like she does when she reads something in the paper that she thinks is “A real shame.”

  I don’t know what to do so I get up and take my TV dinner box, and Estelle’s box, and Stan’s which he left on the floor by his chair and I go into the kitchen and put them in the new trash compactor and shut it and push a button and listen to the sound of the plastic getting crushed.

  But now that she’s asked one question, the rest start coming, sometimes even during commercials. What are your sisters’ names? And I think of Bess and Ziona and how strange their names are really, when even if I say the words out loud for the first time in months, nothing is really said about them that feels real. But I say the sounds and don’t hear them answering me back but instead I hear Estelle asking me what they are like, if they look like me.

  So I tell her, I tell her they are older. I tell her Bess is not someone to get in the way of, but now is married and Ziona is by far the smartest of us all, even the boys.

  I never told anyone about my family before, because no one who didn’t already know ever asked me. I don’t like it. I wished I could say I don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t know what would happen to Estelle’s face if I said that. Stan never stays in the room to listen and when we are done I get into my bed and dream about what I feel I never should have said. Like the color of everybody’s hair was some sacred secret belonging to I don’t know who.

  It’s hard to go from then to now and back, even if it’s just talk. Here, I got school to go to, and I got homework, and no kitchen work really. And I got to figure out which a
re the nice kids and which are the not nice kids and it’s not like home, where there are families of kids, but it is like home, the way the kids still group up even though not by brother or sister or mother but by things they like or something I don’t quite understand, and since I don’t even know how to play tennis, I am an outsider through and through but then there are other outsiders, so you never go an entire day by yourself, anyway.

  The thing about Estelle is that she’s trying to get me to say something. I’m not sure what, but I can tell that some of my answers are not what she is looking for. It’s like she wants me to take a stand or something, and these little conversations after a few weeks really make me wish they’d cancel Al Bundy’s show and put on something Estelle likes, so we can go back to just watching all together. It doesn’t help that Redfield is in the news all the time since my father was convicted, and that everyday there is some Polygamist Community Under Investigation headline and it seems they want to prove the Prophet doesn’t treat kids right. I start to dread when the TV goes off and Stan grunts and leaves the room, and I sort of feel angry at him, especially because I tried to follow him once, and Estelle said Mercy Ann, stay and chat a while, so I had to sit back down.

  I start to feel like the condo and its green shag carpet and butter color walls is too small, like a sweater you’re growing out of, itchy.

  And then one night Estelle asks a question that she will later refer to as “the wrong button,” which I’m not sure I understand.

  She asks me if I believe in that Church still. She says it while a commercial for missionaries in Africa is on TV and they are showing tiny children with bellies like they are pregnant and asking for money to feed them. I watch the whites of the eyes in the black faces for a moment and pretend not to hear her. Then she starts to ask again and I surprise myself by saying, I heard you.

  I feel my face go all sun burnt then turn to see if Estelle is mad, but she’s not, she is just looking at me, waiting for me to go on.