Deliver me, o Lord, from the Devil man, preserve me from this stink, deliver me out of great waters, from the hands of strange children.
And my own child let his eyes fly open like wing flaps and looked at me clear as day, and he let his lips part a little and reached his toy hand up toward my face as if he himself was going to deliver the Lord’s benediction I had asked for, but instead he tugged on some loose strand of my red hair and pulled it toward his mouth.
And that’s when I began to cry and I sat falling into that tree and cried for all that had gone some other way than we had prayed it and God must have seen this, too, for his change was ever coming.
And then I opened my eyes and I was here. Red air, hot sky, a people I knew to be his.
And I was back again whispering to the Prophet.
I was listening to them discover my death, whispering it, getting it wrong in details. Not knowing how I’d bled.
Not knowing I’ve been with them all this time. Waiting for them to know me.
I watched them try to catch the blame like a wet live fish, how it flopped through their hands.
The Prophet’s fallacy larger now, the embarrassment of God’s misstep felt by all.
And there she was. Redheaded childmother for the women to hate.
But the men had their sights on him.
On you, my friend.
On you, Old Prophet.
I saw you Prophet on your knees. Asking, asking, squeezing your hands together as if to hold water. You were by the window of your great house with its burnt black corner and the night was coming through the glass like winter and the moon did not shine as you asked and I, in my death, laughed.
And you startled.
You could finally hear me.
Annalue
And when the word Jeremiah woke my morning, when Emma came running in the house with her face all hot and crying, pressing herself into me making no sense so that I thought Jeremiah who had already been dead, and then alive, was dead again and this time irretrievably so but as she began to slow her words so that I could hear one of them against another she told me that people were saying that he had strangled someone, a girl, up in the city, four nights before. He had his way with her and strangled her and he did it in front of people, and Emma was saying those liars, those Devils, those booze-licking heathens, they are trying to trick us and I was trying to tell her to breathe, but then she started saying how she had her own head inside a dead sow for that boy and if she didn’t know him no one did and she was like to go up to that Devil-sunk city and tell that dead girl all about it.
I got a cup of cold metal water then and dripped it back over her bastard hair and told her to shush and remember she was married under the covenant of God and his Prophet, our Prophet, to a man she was not crying over so she best do it quietly or not at all. Then I held the child-mother to my chest and tried to muffle her voice so that the many ears that live in our Mama’s house would not hear while she said how first and foremost it warn’t true, warn’t true at all and second how none of this would have happened if she and Jeremiah hadn’t a got caught, or if her Pa or Josiah would have let it go and let them just be the children they were, and children of God they were, she said, but most of all if Josiah hadn’t made Jeremiah leave for a world that wasn’t his and making the Prophet say he was dead, and that if this murder had in fact happened, she said, it was all the fault of Josiah for Jeremiah had had to die and then be reborn so who’s to say the Devil didn’t intervene then and rebirth a bad version of her love out there in the world. Josiah is at fault, she said, and maybe even I don’t know that Josiah isn’t the Devil’s right hand. And it was then I had to stop her with a light slap and hold her chin like a spool of thread I was getting ready to wind and tell her that she better bury those words that she just let fall out of her mouth or get ready to bury the both of us and her child, too. You make a grave inside you, I told her, and you make it big enough to fit all you just said and you close it up tight with dirt and wood and the stone-heaviest thing you got in you willful little Emma, or else we are all going to be in a lot of trouble, and then I held her while she worked herself greatly into her own silence.
I spoke to her then of small things we loved as children so as to calm her mind away from murder, fictitious or not. I spoke of a book we had had once about the King of France, and his beautiful wife, and their beautiful palace. I reminded her how we would take turns playing Louis and Marie, us both wanting to be Marie and how once we even put flour in our hair to imitate their white wigs, and pretended our mama’s oatmeal cookies were their fine cakes, and that our bedroom was filled with gold furniture, but how we would always make another ending for ourselves when we played the game so that rather than be beheaded we would meet our real selves, and come to God and give lots of money to the poor. In this way we baptized poor Louis and Marie.
And if she was listening to these things she already knew, I did not know, but she started to breathe regular and finally bit her lip and said she’d go check on her child and perhaps walk for a while but would be back later and she gave me a little kiss and walked away like one not quite in her body.
I did not even have the chance to tell her of the child new to our house not even two days before, that slept in my Mama’s bed as she sat weeping one room over.
I walked down later that day with the baby to see if I could see her at Josiah’s but the door was closed in such a way and me with this unstoried baby I dared not knock.
I walked back down the road with the swaddling to our house so small against the evening sky, and my Mama was sitting on the porch, rocking on the swing like time itself. Her voice was even as I came up the stairs as she told me trouble was coming. Not brought by God but by his men. Then she reached out and offered to hold the babe while I peeled carrots for dinner.
Emma came back the next afternoon steady as stone which did not surprise me as often she changed her mood and her belief into their exact opposite so quickly that it was not unusual for God and the Devil to be in one mere sentence for her. She came back and was finally looking in at the found baby sleeping and saying how it must a been a miracle given to me by God, didn’t I think so, when Mama came in the house from leaving her two smallest boys at Jenna’s and gossiping down the road and she looked at Emma, who looked away, before she said Don’t let no foolish tears run over this, Emma, you already walkin one thin line. And Mama came to her daughters then and I saw her hands were shaking and for the first time she lowered her voice and she did something like confide in us like we were women folk just as her and in fact we were. Mothers.
Tressa somehow blaming you Emma, she thinks you tainted the family name forever by seducing a son, and getting him exiled into the wilderness to become a slaughtering Lamanite and then she said, what will you do next, having seduced the father? And you better believe Josiah ain’t none too happy either and the Prophet is having to come over and tell them that Jeremiah had this evil in him from the beginning, and used it to so corrupt little Emma into disobeying the laws of God, and the Prophet, having had his holy dream of Jeremiah dead in the desert says he now misread it as one who was invoking hell rather than dead and inhabiting it and he, the Prophet, should have gone at that instant to find and murder Josiah’s son out in the desert.
God, the Prophet said, does not always speak in words.
Emma began to tell Mama how untrue this one was, and Mama clamped a hand over the child-mother’s mouth like her lips were a fly Mama was aiming to catch.
This is good, child, Mama said ever so slow then, and then again, This is Good. You are to wait here until someone come here and tell us that the Prophet has calmed them with His Words and revealed to them the unalterable destiny and prophecy of their son Jeremiah which has culminated in his murdering of a sinner, if in fact he even murdered anyone at all.
Emma was shaking with her own silence then and so with the baby still napping on my bed and my arms free I was holding her upright when Pa came in an
d looked at us gathered and clucked his tongue, It’s the women getting in all the trouble, he said, Don’t see why the boys have to leave. Then Mama gave him a look and he said Well, now you hiding babies, so don’t be surprised when we have no home if He deems fit. And then quick as a dust storm he left but by his words we knew the baby could stay, that he had talked to Josiah about it and as long as he had this one powerful ally, all he had to do was wait for a calmer time to tell the Prophet we found a lost gentile baby and were keeping it.
Then Mama said, Emma, go get a flour sack from the cellar, it’s time to make.
I asked her what she had in mind and she said our Emma here is going to make a Penny Cake for that Prophet so as to show him her appreciation for making her own home open to her again, so that she can go back and get her own son from the sadly clipped wings of that Tressa, and live in peace with her husband and Lizbeth and even that orphan wife. And she said this like it was fact, but really the only thing she knew was that something was coming and how she hoped it was this. Forgiveness. We going to make, she said again. Which even as differently as things went, I still think was a good idea on Mama’s part, as she was by far the best baker in Redfield.
And she started to roll up her sleeves and wipe the wood table clean ready and I knew then that I had never seen my Mama so shaken even as she readied to bake a cake, her hands were atremble and her eyes downcast so that I wanted to put my hand on her arm and steady her but knew that that was like to earn me a slap first and foremost and that I best keep quiet or she was like to make me beg the Prophet to let me be his wife after all in gratitude for what he done for Emma, but then as Emma came bumping a sack up the stairs she yelled Don’t Drag, Carry Girl, and her voice broke just a little so that she had to lay her rag on the table and as I stepped toward her, she turned to me and whispered something I won’t ever forget.
We never used to be scared. She said this and then began to look around the table as if she’d misplaced something and was sitting staring like this when Emma appeared, sack against her leg, bending her over to one side looking up at Mama and about to say What, when instead I shook my head at her and said I’d get the sugar though sugar sounded like the worst thing in the world right then, something about all this, displacement and anger and a murder, gruesome as it was, his hands upon her throat bruising up her skin, and blood somewhere, there must have been, somewhere she must have been bleeding and then Manti’s sunken head, bandaged for his grave and his sallow face like an aged glass doll now under the red silt and there we were, measuring out white sugar so as to make a cake to celebrate us not being punished for her death, or for his, as if Jeremiah was a true scapegoat sent out into the desert and the fact that we remained alive amongst the unfound blood was sweet.
But still the three of us quiet baked the cake, while we waited for someone to come, while the baby napped, and it took us longer than usual; I think now because we did not want to be done and still feel as if we were waiting. It was too many hands for one cake but we took turns. I watched the most as Emma and Mama beat in eggs, and pinched in salt and I wondered if either one of them would say anything if I leaned over and spit into that hay-colored batter, or if they would just stir in my perfidious saliva with silent accomplice against a force equally as silent or perhaps it was the sonority of the thing we felt to be quaking, reverberating in the air what we could not see, could not know, until some arced moment when it would finally show its apparition to our eyes.
So I whispered:
Oh Prophet.
Carry, carry Deseret.
Cup your old hands over it; let it buzz softly in your time worn palms. Bumping its felt head against your handchurch.
Let the honey body simmer until it has relieved you of your tired and ugly power.
He looked for me but couldn’t see me. He wanted to ask if God is finally speaking in words and not images and why this voice so young and so . . . but he dared not.
Carry it to Emma. Let it fly up into her cherry mouth. She started this, tell them, so she can end it. She is strong tell them, has known the Devil, will lead us well, tell them. I will make sure they will believe.
And then you go quietly into the desert.
It is that, or add your red to the land. Darken the stain with your own life. My blood is on your hands, you know now. I am the murdered girl.
Point, and shoot.
Annalue
We were baking and waiting. And then that baby cried awaking and had made such a mess of herself that as the batter went into the oven she went into the sink for a bath. And we kept our voices low but giggled at her tininess until a real and at once proverbial shadow came in across the doorway light, the darkening that just three nights before I had craved in reprieve from a bewitched full moon.
On the threshold, enjoying the effect made by his presence, was that Prophet I knew better than I ever hoped to know and whose smell made my skin itch still. We all stopped.
The first one to move was my Mama and she picked up that naked newborn in such a way, her hands straight under its unbaptized back so that I thought she might offer, in fact, this prodigal child instead of that Penny Cake as penance for the uncertain crime or crimes that did not really involve Emma, but could not be extricated from her when no culprit lay in punishable reach.
But Mama said nothing, as the air still quaked. But she took that child and wrapped it in a clean dish towel and took a step back, as if to perhaps hide its presence from that Prophet, or as if, I thought, Emma, was small again and could be swaddled. As if my Mama could protect us, her one trouble girl and her near-exile son and even me and my borrowed life, protect us from this man as she walked backward with this unknown child toward the cellar stairs so that my breath caught in my throat and I dared to wish that rather than the Prophet know her, that my mother would take her down, down those fruit-fly smelling stairs where one could feel metallic water seeping into one’s skin and bury that baby. Dig her a crib out of the summer soil, lay her down, sing to that babe, and then, crumble the cool pieces, like sweet cake topping, over the child. A blanket of dirt no one would have to cry over. And now I am grateful she did not, but that is what I thought, and knew myself to be thinking, when that shadow crested into our already forlorn light and my Mama backed away with the only body in the room she could carry.
The Prophet took a step in and nodded at my Mama. Sister, he said. And he looked tired, his lean shoulders were hunched forward, his face older than his fifty years, ragged and even, I thought, shriveling.
Emma, the Prophet said, and I’ll never forgive myself for the lightness I felt then. But Emma did not look up, her chin aquiver and oh how I wanted to take her, my baby sister, and disappear away somewhere with her.
Emma, he said again, and she looked up then at him, her lips so red and wet that her childhood was still a palpable thing within her, and she said, Why we’re making you a cake Prophet Ellis.
The trembling in the air now feels as if it was what it was: not enough. But at the time, it felt like it was all we could do, we as a group: sister, mother, daughter, not one of us willing to take one of the butter cutting knives and commit some murder, just like the kind we were presently trying to distance ourselves from. The trembling felt not like an earthquake, no shaking of the ground or glass, but a shaking of the air between us that you could feel both in and on your skin, though the Prophet perceived nothing that he admitted. Early summer wavered in a bird’s voice outside the window as He just stared at my temptuous little baby sister and extended a finger out to her, curling it like he already had it under her chin and was caressing her jugular.
Emma left the tableside to come and stand before him.
Then he turned to my Mama, and said All is Well, Sister Downs.
And as my own saliva droughted up from mouth he said, God has Spoken: it seems the Devil invaded here briefly in the form of a boy we thought our own, but it is our good fortune that I hath exiled him from our people’s land before he did worst; I acte
d before he could do to one of our sweet sisters what he has done elsewhere. And I have told Josiah and his brethren this: Emma, who was chosen to endure the most difficult of tests that God may have, came out unscathed from her consortiums with one of Satan’s earthly forms, showing her true Nephithetic faith.
The Prophet wiped his brow. His voice hoarsed down almost to a whisper.
Emma is a Savior Angel and they are to hail her as such.
And then the Prophet, who had been in me, and had scorned me, did something I never thought him to do, he knelt his grown form in front of my baby sister and he began to cry.
It started as a choking sound so that I thought I may be mishearing because the baby behind me had been making sounds, but now it was the Prophet of God under serious scrutiny that knelt before my baby sister and began to weep into his hands.
We have, he said, and looked up.
We have been saved. He palmed Emma’s cheeks.
We are saved, he said. I did not kill that Devil, though God asked me too, and I see that now, that’s what he wanted, like Abraham, out on that Egypt highway. I did not kill him, and I will be forever punished with the blood of that young girl.
And a desert hawk screamed, now, outside the window and we all started but for the Prophet who didn’t seem to hear it.
Instead he shifted on his knees and slowly unbuttoned his white collared shirt, each button a year without breath.
Then he slipped it off in our still kitchen to show us things we did not have eyes for.
I saw only briefly some of the self-inflicted lashings of a godly man before I heard my mother gasp and turned to her and the child.
The still wet child of nowhere was bout to fall out of my mother’s gaping hands and so I reached to take her just as my mother fell to faint, me catching her with my body, helping her to the floor where she slumped while Emma reached a shaking hand toward the Prophet.
Strange Children Page 23