I don’t know what to say. No one ever asked me if I believed it because it wasn’t like other beliefs they talk about outside, like Stan’s politics, it was just the way we lived.
Estelle puts it this way then, as if she’s trying to help me, she says, Do you wish you could go back Mercy Ann?
And this is when I get up and walk away. I don’t even pick up the TV dinners, I just walk out of the room and down the hall to my little bedroom and I imagine when I open the door I will be doing just that, going back. I will open the door and see the big fields, and the chestnut tree we played under, the road down to Old Ephraim’s place, and all his legendary twenty-two wives and past that the House, and Levi’s house, and then the Prophet’s house; it will smell like sweating sage and then I’ll walk into our house and it will smell like bread. All yeastlike.
I don’t see my trundle bed, and the card table set up for me as a desk, and the Mickey Mouse lamp Estelle found at a garage sale and bargained down to eight dollars. I don’t see the world as made of two entirely separate places and if I did, if I could see the way things got divided so completely, with nothing between then and now, then I would understand, and believe, and even tell Estelle, that there is such a thing as heaven and hell and as far as I can tell you are either in one place or the other.
I heard the Prophet thinking again about the basketball, heard him think about the unsmooth rubber, color of old blood, gripping into the hands.
When he is finally listening, I tell him about the dry, dry desert, how it will creep into his ill heart until the sand sticks to his slippery arteries. How it will kill him. How I will go on and on talking like this until it’s over, until there is nothing left to sow the seeds of my already-done death and I will tell him that no one who ever means evil is good at it.
Your heart is black, I will say. And when the time is right, I will tell him to punish himself. Tell him to atone for his sins.
You can hear the future, I tell him.
Just listen harder.
Jeremiah
None of the many possibilities the boys had talked about that night, the night that Duke began to refer to as “the night Jer went all gangsta on Jimmy” ever came to be. Probably because the one possibility they hadn’t talked about happening was nothing. And that’s what happened. Nothing. Jimmy stayed away for a week and then showed up like nothing happened. He patted Jeremiah on the back in the kitchen and said he was sorry things got a little crazy. Booze, he said, booze and shook his head back and forth. Jeremiah stared back at him and then just nodded. He didn’t retreat to his room, just kept his distance.
That first night Jimmy didn’t disappear with anyone. He didn’t even stay that late. But the whole time he was there Jeremiah felt like a dog, edging one of Haley’s perfect compassed circles, always keeping a full diameter away from Jimmy, hack up.
After he knew he wasn’t maybe leaving just yet after all, time moved faster. The days were shorter and colder now. One of the other boys from the Home, Taylor, helped him get a job where he worked. Pizza Hut. He filled out the application for him and put down “refugee” under work history. Trust me, he said, this lady hired me because I was homeless. He told the manager that a “lost boy” needed help, and the manager, a thirty-something woman with a round body and bleached-out hair interviewed him. He was soon working five nights a week, putting pizzas in and pulling them out of the hot ovens. Shimmying them into boxes. Closing them and folding the corners. Trying to smile.
He went to school with Duke when he could. He still had his visitor’s pass and if he went in the sidedoor so he didn’t have to walk past the office, no one seemed to notice. He talked to Haley more. He invited her to come see him at work. He gave her a free pizza. Pepperoni that someone had ordered but never came to pick up. He had kept it warm for three hours under the lamp hoping she’d come. Finally, she did, and smiled and made him laugh and touched his shoulder when she left.
Duke helped him buzzcut his head, like his own. Jeremiah didn’t know if it was the pizza or the hair, but the next time he saw Haley in the halls, she invited him over to her house after school. She only lived a couple of blocks from the school, in a mustard brick house, stout and long like all the other houses on the street. He met her mom. Her mom was young and had a nose ring. She poured him a Diet Coke into a glass with ice and wanted to know everything about Redfield. Haley had to pull him away while her mom still fired off questions. She pulled him to her basement bedroom that had pink walls with black posters of different bands.
Down, there, she kissed him. She stuck her hand down the front of his pants. She pulled off his shirt. Not just that first time but then almost every day after school, they went to her house unless Jeremiah, Jer as she called him, had to be at work early. She always started it. At least for the first month, until she made him feel an ache, a want, that seemed to soak through from the back of his mouth into his brain and that would start as soon as they walked into her house and he smelled its smell, a sweet, lemony smell. It was a pull and an ache and a need and it was all the time right alongside a guilt or something like a guilt. Part of his brain, the Pa part maybe, still spoke to him and told him this girl was bad. She was it. The wickedness. The harlots of their world, the Prophet had said. This meant then that he was bad for being with her, but that made the want part of his brain even louder.
Sometimes as they kissed and petted he had to push away just to get a breath and when he did it was the kind of breath you take if you’ve been underwater.
Then without meaning to, he got used to it.
He got used to that part of himself that was like a shadow slipping up under his skin. The bad part. The himself that lived out here in the place only the Wicked lived. On his way to hell, he could do these bad things. Should do them. While they heard her mom move around upstairs they could fool around, pressing their hands into each other, rubbing, grabbing, tugging, fingering until they came and he could breathe the whole time and the Pa voice was still there but somehow now he could ignore it.
It was a coldness that let him do it.
But not an indifference, more of a removal. A distance. Like it was someone else that would open his eyes when Haley came and watch her face close up and then release open, her jaw going slack, her mouth making a soft yes. He would think of this face as the mask of her desire and he knew no woman wore it where he came from. No righteous woman.
Even Emma, erring as she was, as they were, had lain with her eyes closed and face still, a sweet smile on her face like it was a holy gift she was receiving instead of his quick thrusts.
He didn’t like to think of her.
Haley never talked about love. Or being in love. Or marriage. Or any context for what they did that would make it right. Sometimes in his coldness he looked at her and thought Slut. Because, he thought, she always just wanted it.
Until she didn’t.
I watched Annalue by the creek. After House, I watched her try to clean herself of him again in water not yet muddy from the rain. This was only the second time. After this, when she saw Him, crossing the road, standing on the porch talking to her father, she again started to squirm. Like she had an itch. She’d wash her hands, again and again, scratching her skin raw. I’d watch her wipe her hands again and again until finally she’d slip away for a bath, the water so hot it scalded her skin red, and only then would her body release back into its natural state.
But this time, the second time, was more ceremonial. A deep exhalation, like she hoped it would be a closing parenthetical to what had happened. A baptism of its own. I watched her and I watched little Manti watch her. It was in the time people left the House and his mother said for him to go since she knew He would be coming. Even after the fire, the day after the fire, he would come? He gritted his teeth and left, wandered far up the creek where usually it was quiet. Where he’d washed his hands after he lit the fire. He watched her figure approach on the other side, just upstream. He knew her, her limp gave her away even be
fore he saw her face. When he did see her face he moved back into the bushes before she saw him. He had left Peapod sleeping in her bed. But he didn’t leave, instead he crouched and watched her and sucked a knuckle and when she took off her clothes he looked good and hard at that leg. He saw what I saw, that it was a little bluish and thin, but regular otherwise. She lowered herself down into the cold water and Manti raised his shoulders to his ears. She sat her body down slowly into the water and then lay all the way down like she was dead. I watched as he noticed her dress on the bank and shifted forward in his weight a little.
Was he thinking about taking it? Or of jumping in to save her from the icy water? Or of pushing her shoulders down softly until her blue blue eyes opened wide and forever? And did he see three ghostly versions of himself do all of these things? In the end he did not move, but watched her stillness until finally he just quietly crouched to the down-creek water and cupped the cool that had run over her skin, held it dripping, dripping her, to his mouth and drank. Then he wiped his hand on his pant leg and squinted at her figure, still as stone whispering so that only I could hear.
He’s afraid of you, and afraid of me.
Then he crept back, into the willows, up the sandy path, through the fields and into Josiah’s barn just before it started to rain.
She stayed until she was much too cold. She got out shaking, but her face held a peace that I knew wouldn’t last. I knew that she was already getting back in as soon as she was getting out into the cool air. Was beginning to know her own circle, the one she had stepped into that August day.
Jeremiah
The dull, the ache became something brighter, sharper after they had sex for the first time. In a motel room before the Valentine’s Dance. They drank warm vodka because the ice machine was broken and he didn’t ask her if it was her first time and he knew she thought it was his. Still, he looked in her eyes the whole time and after she lay on his chest and traced letters on his skin with her fingertip for him to guess, spelling words. V-a-l-e-n-t-i-n-e, he said the letters back to her and let her sound the word. Do another, he told her.
P-o-o-d-l-e. For no reason, she said, only the first had been too obvious. They lay there until they almost missed the dance.
After that he wanted to see her every day, had to see her every day.
And the cold part of him went away and she made him feel good. Not lonely but whole. With his paychecks from Pizza Hut he bought her things from the drugstore next door to Pizza Hut. Like a stuffed bear holding a shiny red heart. Like a pair of bird earrings.
This all looked to him like love. Being in love. Though that whole story was relatively new to him. He’d only seen a few of the movies where people fall in love. It wasn’t a word people used much back home. Not like “I love you,” and “you love,” but rather God’s love. Always through Him first. But not with Haley. With Haley is was just the two of them and that was the most all right he’d been since he left.
He was in school officially now too, thanks to Haley’s mom. He stayed most nights at Haley’s. Her dad wasn’t, as Haley’s mom put it, “in the picture,” and her mom didn’t seem to care as long as he paid her in stories.
He had to tell her something about Redfield every day.
After they talked in the kitchen, each sipping Diet Cokes, Jeremiah would sneak downstairs to where Haley was but before he was even out of the room he could hear her mom dialing the phone. She always told her sister what he said.
He told her mostly mundane things, like about school there. Mostly priesthood history. No geography. Girls and boys separate after age ten, if they stay in school. If not, they work.
Or about marriages. The Prophet performs them, mostly in his own house. He chooses who marries who. It was an arrangement more than an event.
Never the stuff that mattered. Everybody helps each other out. I can never go back. I had my own horse and sometimes I wonder who takes care of him now. I left, so I will burn in hell for eternity. According to them, to everyone.
She did ask him one day—when she was out of Diet Coke and he’d reluctantly accepted a Fresca, which Haley said tasted like cancer when he later went down to her room with the can still three quarters full and warm—if he had always known that he would someday leave.
No, he answered quickly, too quick, he realized by the way Haley’s mom paused in opening her own can of Fresca and raised her penciled eyebrows. I used to imagine having my father’s land, I used to sit in Sunday House and pick out my wives.
Well, then when did you know? What did it?
I knew when I saw Emma’s Pa standing there in that field. I thought, this is the end, and walked right up to it. He took a sip of his Fresca, even though he didn’t really like it. It was still cold. But no, it must have been before that, before Emma. It was everything. The Prophet. The changes.
Easter, he said.
Easter? Which Easter?
When He cancelled it, a few years back.
Who? Prophet Ellis? He cancelled Easter? How could he do that?
The Prophet can do anything he wants, and technically it warn’t him that done it, but God. It was too hedonistic, he said. Too idolatrous.
The bunny? Haley’s mom had her elbows on the kitchen counter and was leaned forward towards him, her eyes big. Why does she find this so interesting?
The bunny, the eggs. Too praising of ourselves in Jesus’ resurrection or something like that.
Did you really dye eggs before that?
Yeah, Jeremiah laughed, With beet juice and spinach juice and raspberries, things like that, I think. The women always made the bowls of dye and then all the kids, we’d get to dip and roll and bathe the eggs in it. They were so pretty, the eggs. They would hide them in the small town park. Always a raven or two would be squawking in the cottonwoods overhead, waiting for us to leave one. And it was always a nice day, not too hot, and we had House late, so we could get the eggs first and then after House there was always a big meal and some special treat, homemade caramel or fudge or sometimes both. And then all that was gone.
So, the Easter lover in you said enough is enough? Haley’s mom stood up and laughed loudly before she caught herself and brought her body back down onto the counter, posing herself like a teenager, a confidante. I mean, seriously, though, she said, That’s sad. Why did he do it?
Jeremiah shrugged, Prophet Aldridge Ellis died and his meanest son took over and a few years later he said on the Sunday before Easter that God did not like our festivities in light of his Son’s suffering. That we were to pray in the quiet spirit of forgiveness that Easter and that was that.
And no one argued?
You can’t argue with God.
Haley’s mom nodded.
But that was just the beginning. Then it was the holidays. Basketball. Children’s books, even ones about the Bible. All of it was banned. But it warn’t even that, really. That was part of it, yeah, but it wasn’t what the Prophet said but the way they obeyed him. Even big men, even Pa, had ignored his wives’ pleas and went through the house with a trash bag, collecting puzzles and books, Pa prying one with a torn cover about Noah and his animals out of my own hands when I was eleven. Removing my fingers one by one from my grip on the book, open to the best picture, one where the ark sailed under a rainbow with all the animals on board. Prying so it hurt and I cried out at Pa and when Pa finally yanked it from me, ripping the rainbow in half, I threw the rest of the thin books in the room at him and he just stood there, hands at his side, while pages flapped like broken birds in the air. Pa just stood there and waited for me to calm down. But I never really did.
Geez, that’s extreme.
I know. That’s why I’m never going back, Jeremiah said and took another drink of his soda, a swig, Duke would say. This time he made a face.
Another day Haley’s mom tried to explain to him the legality of the situation, how they should get him fixed up with an “emancipation” as a minor so he’d have rights. She worked in a law office as a parale
gal and had already talked to her boss about it. He liked this idea. But he didn’t like it when she talked about his world back to him. She started to scoff at the fact that his Pa hadn’t given him any money, had not even driven him all the way to town.
Sometimes she went so far as to bring up his mother. How could she do this? She’d ask and shake her head. If someone took Haley away and said she’d never come back . . . I’d never let them . . . and she’d trail off, never sensing the cool shadow that Jeremiah felt slipping back into him when she said something like that.
First, he wanted to say, Of course you wouldn’t, you don’t live there. But he never did. He knew she’d argue that it didn’t matter where she lived but that was the one thing the Wicked, as he called them without always meaning to, always got wrong. That it’d be so different. That they’d never do the things his people did, no matter if they’d been born where he was or not.
And he knew they were wrong about that. If they heard the story, about the Celestial kingdom, where man is God. His own king.
Second, he wanted to say, none of the things that you think or see or do here mean the same as they do there. You wouldn’t let Haley be taken away, because it wouldn’t mean anything for you to fight for her.
For his mother, it meant everything.
Not just her other children. Her home. Her safety. But on top of that a golden stairway. One that was so shining and magnificent and they’d heard about so much that Jeremiah was sure that not even Haley’s mom could refuse it.
Not even if they took Haley away.
Which no one ever would, because the rules were different here anyway.
But what of the Prophet? Did He feel when He saw her sitting in his congregation again? He did not see her, no doubt, as often as she saw Him. But He did see her. Get up from her chair that day. He saw her limp down the aisle to the door, her blonde braid swinging, saw her presence after an absence, as it was His job to notice these tokens of impiety with everyone. But especially that one. That one had plagued him since she was born and then more and more as she got older. He bit the corner of His lip ever so slightly, a twitch almost no one would notice but that I could see meant He was thinking.
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