Don’t leave yet, not without me.
He had to be with her. How to get with her? He saw her skirt had come up. A black skirt. Slutty, he would’ve teased her. He unbuttoned his pants.
This would be it. Emma was right. All this time she was right. He could feel what she’d said: God’s light in you telling you what you are supposed to do which is powerful and strangelike and makes you do things you usually would not do. So this was the way to be together in God’s light and the eternal Celestial heaven and there, there would be air and coolness. He felt his own limpness in his left hand and tried to make it hard. He pulled at her black thong, he would get it. He would get it. He would and then he would make sure he was dead too. He had to. He had to make it so that they would be together atoned in the light and the river and they could get out of here. He couldn’t just leave her. Not now, he couldn’t leave her. Not in all this blood. Couldn’t waste this blood.
Let his blood run into the earth, and run into Christ’s blood, and shore up his atonement for his earthly sins. Her sins. His sins.
He couldn’t get stiff. Couldn’t, though he tugged at himself with his hand an open wound. So hard it hurt. He couldn’t because he could hear now that the stars were screaming, he could hear his name, and he could hear his own voice from far away, from the desert night on the grass, he could hear himself singing, but he could see only the lights. The lights and the red. He put his face into her back, next to the hole he had made in her.
Ashes, ashes . . .
He almost had it, his hardness, he twisted her thong strap out of the way and felt for her, her way out. Doing it now to undo what had started that summer day under a tree, to start them back all over at the beginning. He hurt now, but he would do it. He looked up at her face and saw then that she was staring. Just staring. Like she had given up. He slumped over her body. Was so tired suddenly. He didn’t want to. But he had to, for her.
He just needed to rest a minute.
That’s when they pulled him off.
Annalue
When the moon was high and shadowing everything in the reverse of its color, my mother drew a bath for the foundling we unwrapped like a dressed wound, so sticky and raw and then Mama started talking to me like she was mine. She said good lord didn’t I know the child like to be hungry and hadn’t I best go quick before the last lights are out in Jenna’s who could give us some formula and wouldn’t she just bathe the thing while I went and wasn’t she too tired—by all the earth had shown her since the moon first rose like a vellum smudge on the good glass of the afternoon sky—to even wonder whose child this was. But probably some no-good townie from Pine Mesa thinking to rid themselves of their suckling sin.
But on the day of a dead child, she said. And a full moon. And everything else. Ain’t that strange?
Now git.
And I handed her the girl, who she would gently sponge in the warm sink water while I was gone, and reswaddle in an old gray diaper and clean white flour sack, and I walked the seventeen slanted steps to Jenna’s house and thought how a boy could get kilt, a baby left. Something was rotten all right because it meant someone had done these things. Wrong was among us. And if wrong was here, then right was not all here. So there was some great hold over the place starting to slip.
Jenna handed me the formula, two bottles and six diapers without a word, having heard everything one needed to hear already from Levi who was leaning on her porch, and her knowing not to say anything, and I walked back the seventeen steps, looking out for the shadow of a sibling, seeing none, and feeling my exhaustion as I once again hauled my dead leg up the porch steps and into the kitchen where Mama showed me how to heat a bottle in a pan of hot water, how to test the milk on the inside of my wrist, and the baby learned to take it, refusing it three times before finding the right mouth motions, the first muscles of desire.
Then awoke in her a fierce hunger I recognized.
And as she suckled I couldn’t help myself from warming.
And that first night she slept in a fruit crate packed with towels next to my bed, Mama saying she would have Levi get a bassinet from the barn tomorrow, and the both of us knowing without saying that this baby was ours because ours found it, mine because even at sixteen I didn’t have one yet, and the same thing that was making everything go slip, slip was going to make this baby stay.
Stay.
And then things are over. My name, twice. Haley. Haley. It’s Haley, right? Bodies shoving by, backpacks rubbing against my arm, the bell ringing. I’m going to be late to history class.
Haley.
Jesus, what?
He’s like a dog tonight. Everywhere I go, he’s there, he wants to show me something he found. He wants to give me a kiss. He’s high, so high and wants to hold my hand with his sweaty hand, he says he got something for me. A plastic baggie with some more of that shit in there. Jesus, I don’t want any pills. I’m in a vodka mood. I’m in a talk-to-my-girls mood. I’m in a leave-me-the-fuck-alone mood.
Haley.
Just leave me the fuck alone right now.
I’m on the porch, putting a cigarette out with the rubber of my sandal, he’s coming up to me again I know it. I just fucking know it. And I’m just starting to feel good.
Haley. Haley. Haley. Look. Haley.
The middle of my spine to the back of my skull is a stadium light. A sun.
The patio cement is cold and I can see a thin crack right next to my face.
Haley. Haley. Haley.
He is on top of me and he’s pushing it all out of me.
And I was already late to history.
All my life, all my voice, he is thrusting it out of me, and I don’t even remember a gunshot.
Jesus, now?
And he wanted to shake my hand. And I laughed.
Mercy Ann
His face in the paper didn’t look like him. He had shorter hair, first, and looked all yellow and unhealthy, but it was also one of those bad printings of the paper where there are two layers of ink not exactly one on top of the other so even the words look like they are moving.
I looked at it for a while trying to steady it with my eyes from across the table as Estelle sat reading the other side of the page.
My father’s picture was not in the paper, ever, not even during his trial, but then again, he didn’t shoot a girl in the back and then try to rape her as she lay dying in front of enough witnesses to fill a school bus but none of them present enough to stop him.
Estelle wouldn’t let me read it at first, I saw the picture from across the kitchen table and I said I know him, and she said what, and I said I know him, well knew him, he’s my cousin, and then I asked Estelle what he was doing in the paper right as I took a bite of my marmalade toast.
She began to look flustered and pushed her chair back and started looking around her feet like she dropped a pen or was looking to pick up that poor dead Rosie she still couldn’t always remember was dead and so I leaned over and tried to pull the paper over to me but she slapped her hand down on it and said Mercy Ann, you don’t need to be reading all this in the paper, it’s . . . it’s maybe not productive. And her voice seemed panicked and she called for Stan and he came in the kitchen, still doing up the buttons of his golf shirt. Estelle pointed, speechless, at the paper and then at me.
So I had to wait while Stan read the article, which he did standing up, drinking coffee, and Estelle kept interrupting to say, She knows that boy, her cousin or something, until he had to say Estelle I heard you the first time, Let me read, and then all was quiet except for the ticking of the kitchen clock and I ventured to finish my toast figuring Jeremiah had maybe gotten into some trouble like stealing. Or maybe he was dead.
Then Stan dropped the paper and looked at Estelle, This is God awful, he said and asked Estelle why she made him read it.
So then I dropped my L-shaped crust of toast on the plate and waited to hear. But they just stared at each other, Stan drinking his coffee still and Estelle waiting
too.
Well, can I read it now? I asked and Stan said then She’s going to hear about it at school anyway, so you might as well tell her. Estelle sighed heavily and said Oh my, oh my, before laying her head in her hands and beginning to speak into her lap so that no one could hear.
What? Stan asked, and then she raised her head with wet eyes and told Stan she did not think she could repeat the details of that vile story, and Stan said maybe he couldn’t either, and maybe it’d be best to let me read it. So the warmed-up paper came into my hands and I pushed my toast plate aside and smoothed the words in front of me, not knowing if the thing I read would have the same effect on me as these two people, familiar as I was with Jeremiah, polygamy, and that other world.
And that’s how I came to read that Jeremiah had been at a party, and had a gun, and was trying to talk to an ex-girlfriend, and then when she turned away from him he shot her in the back and then began to pull her underwear down and his own, like he might rape her as she lay dying, the party-goers gaping, no one moving, the girl dying. Bleeding out the back, and dying. Jeremiah softly saying her name.
Bystanders said.
When I was ten, before my father’s fool of a third wife ran away and then testified in court against him, I lived two roads over from Jeremiah. I used to pass his house to visit Emma, which I did a lot because I liked her brother Levi.
Levi taught me how to make braided bracelets out of horse’s hair, which he had a bunch because they’d had to shoot a mare that summer and then Levi asked if he could cut off the tail of the dead horse and nobody said no, so he did. First he tried with an axe, he told me, but swinging across the wiry black hair warming in the sun did no good, so he had to use the orchard pruning shears. When the hair was off he was surprised how it no longer held together but all fell flat, not a rope anymore but an unwoven rug. He also said the horse body looked so strange without its tail, with this broke off unburned end instead, that he had to look away though he was still happy to have the hair, and I was happy too because he taught me to make my own horse hair bracelet which I wore for two summers until Levi turned mean and then I buried it behind a dab of sagebrush with a prayer for him to get nice again.
And it was in those days, those horsehair summer days, that I knew Jeremiah most. I knew him because he was the only one who guessed my secret. When I walked by his house, he would singsong a little tease, Going to see your boyfriend, Mercy Ann? He would give me an over-wink of his blue eyes and once he even came into the road, saying in a woman’s voice, Now let me check your hair, make sure you look alright, before tickling me until I could get loose and run all the way to Brother Downs’s.
When I quit going to see Levi and had buried my bracelet, Jeremiah came to our fence one day and asked why I hadn’t been down the road. When I shrugged he said, Well you can always come to see me and then scratched his hair and walked away. I was too surprised to call after him, child as I was, as he was, but as he walked off there was something stooped in his posture; it was like he was heavy with the sun of that day and shouldering its light. He bent over to pick up a pebble then, like someone that knows he’s being watched, and I thought I saw a certain loneliness about him and so I briefly saw him not for a farm-worked kid like the rest of us, but for an old man weighed down by some unseen stone or past.
Estelle let me stay home from school that day. She said, No use going while the news is so fresh. It’ll air out, she said, in a day. Tomorrow, someone will shoot someone else and everybody will forget about your friend here. She said this and then patted my hand with papery little slaps.
She had been talking a lot since Stan had left to go golfing. They had both watched me reading the article so that I felt like I had to remake my face into dry clay so as not to move. I felt if I cried, or even said Oh No, that the floor of the room would tilt and we would slide across into a corner and be stuck, all piled together. Or maybe I was just worried Estelle would cry, make that dog sound she did when her bridge partner died.
It was not hard to stay still. It was too strange a story to really place someone I once knew in it. I reread the interview with the girl’s mother, who knew Jeremiah, and she kept saying that she was sad, and angry. At Redfield. At what they did to him. They, she said, had made him kill his own dog. Had put him, a child, out on the streets. She said she had loved them both, her daughter, and Jeremiah. She knew them both. It was terrible, she said. She was sad.
For some reason then I thought of a time, during my first couple of months here, when my math teacher asked me to stay after class. He had me sit down three desks away, as if calculating the distance and then he said, I just wanted to let you know, if you need any help to just let me know. He said this even though I was actually doing well in the class because Stan loved math and would help me with my homework, sometimes just saying the answers fast over my shoulder, as if we were in a race to do the problem. But this teacher saying this made me think maybe I wasn’t doing so well until he said, Even if it’s not about math, if you just need to talk, I am here. And it was difficult to picture this man who talked only in numbers and equations listening to anything so rounded and distorted-feeling as what I would say if I was to talk about anything outside of school.
I could picture him now, three desks away, saying, This is terrible.
After I finished reading the article, which was continued on another page in the same section I said, That’s terrible. Because the word was strong in my mind, but also because it seemed like the kind of thing you say when you want to be like everyone else who doesn’t know someone in the paper.
You okay kiddo? Stan asked then, but already seemed relieved as he turned and opened the fridge to find the small can of tomato juice he had every morning. And I nodded at Estelle, and couldn’t find any more words and so heard myself say Terrible, again.
So that is when Estelle said I could stay home from school, even though it was almost out for the summer. That is when she started punctuating the day with small comments, some about the reckless media, some about assimilation programs for “Lost Boys,” which is what they call Jeremiah, the exiled kind without foster families. His exile, I realized, was one of the things I’d missed, and didn’t know. I didn’t know he’d been exiled. I sure didn’t know anything about a dog. There had been no dogs, they’d been outlawed by the Prophet. When our family was pulled out, he was there and so now I had a measurement for how much I missed, for how much of the world I left, the world that was still the same in my mind, the same people at the same age, was no longer real, and existed only in my memory.
Through the morning I was thinking all them, of him, so when Estelle said something about justice or inappropriate educations, I didn’t always listen.
I saw him the day we left. I saw him, working out in the field. He was standing straight up, leaning on a hoe, holding his hand over his eyes like a strange salute as we rode away in those state vans that had come to get us. My father had already been arrested, there was no one to provide, and before the Prophet got a chance to remarry my mother and her sisterwives to other men, they came. We only had an hour to pack. Then we got in these vans and saw our town as never before, muted into sepia through tinted glass so it was like the last image of the town was our past already, driving out, and I saw Jeremiah in a field and put my hand up to wave before I realized he wouldn’t be able to see me through that dark moving window. He would only be able to see the hot blue sky reflecting back.
Estelle asked me if I wanted to go to the mall. She asked me this from time to time when she felt the need to walk and look at things. We never bought anything, unless I needed new shoes or hair elastics. I told her I didn’t, and I’d never said no before but thought it was probably okay to today, and she just nodded her head.
I want to sit outside, I said, and so I went out to the patio and she brought me a cold lemonade so I wouldn’t get too hot even though it was plenty cool in the morning shade and then she went to get her purse.
I didn’t wan
t to even taste the lemonade at first because I’d never had anything like it before I got here, and I didn’t want something of this new world in my mouth right then. I wanted to sit and stare and remember everything I could about that time. I wanted to remember and reremember Jeremiah as standing in that road, as tickling me, as leaning in the field, as if by thinking it I could keep it going; I could imagine into truth Jeremiah still there, not out here.
Estelle peeked out the patio door again and asked if it was okay if she went on without me, and I said yes, and was glad she was going though I felt it to be because I must be scaring her and she needed to get out the house. I imagined she might open up about her connection to the whole famous story to a sales clerk on break at the food court, and that would be all right as long as I wasn’t there to hear it, to hear that truth countering the one I was trying to visualize into being, to recreate.
She called out again to me that she’d be back soon before she changed her mind and came out and gave me one more hand pat, this time squeezing my shoulder with her bird bone hands before finally leaving.
The glass of lemonade got warm as the sun got high and hot in the sky. The condo was empty behind me and its hollowness breezed about me from the sliding glass door, making me feel like I was moving even as I sat.
I remember before Levi got mean, the Prophet gave a talk at the House. It was the kind of talk he would give with a shaking voice, whether with anger or passion I do not know, but the voice would tremble as he questioned us, our people, and asked if we were pious enough. He banned the playing of board games in this voice. But this time he was talking about relations. He said then that reward for the faithful was marriage deemed by God through him, and no other commune was acceptable. I did not know what he meant then, but I remember it because he kept saying. The faithful are impotent; God grants potency in his own time. Impotent are the faithful. Chaste was Christ.
Strange Children Page 21