She reached toward the man kneeling before her, and time stopped.
Time stopped. And I lost my baby sister.
I lost her and could see I was losing her as she began to trace a map of His open wounds with her finger and the voice of God must have winced but I do not know because I did not take my eyes from her face. Her pale freckles were still and entranced as the Prophet began to moan, to cry, to be salvated, and Emma also began to sound and I heard the two of them making tiny exasperated sighs of some tired pain, the sounds I imagined that they imagined to be the sounds of souls suffering and I saw her reach a stuttering hand to the balled forehead of our leader and I knew that she was lost.
He had given her a silver fish for bait, and she, little sister, had swallowed it immediately and wholly.
I knew she was lost.
And I was already walking out the door when that man whose weight I had been under told Emma, sweet, sugar-crusted fingers Emma who was baking a Penny Cake that he would take her. Take her. Teach her. Take her.
And as I left with the swaddled child, I heard her saying, I heard her saying I made a cake, I made a cake and I imagined a hot batter poured over the two, the un-risen sweet mud concentrated over them like some unholy blanket and I took this baby out into blooming day where the rising moon was again beginning to unbed itself as chipped on one side but still almost full and I was all the way to the edge of the field when I heard those clod steps behind me.
I found it.
Levi stood behind me, hands in pockets, sick with his own grin.
Whose is it? I swallowed.
None of your business, he said. Might as well be Jesus, he said then, stepping toward me.
You don’t know, and I began to sidle away.
Still, I found it, I want to see it.
No, Levi, leave it.
Boy or girl? And he stepped forward. He’d left us to this child for three days, hiding, and now he wanted to know it.
I looked at the small ungendered face, like a small pale nut of new fruit. He could not see it was a girl. Could not know it was a girl. Could not know the way the word girl hurt in a world like ours.
Bastard is what it is, Levi said then, leaping at me so as to grab the child like she was some toy he wanted but I stepped back and he missed and I began to run through those cottonwoods, as fast I could, which is not very fast owing to my limp, but Levi didn’t follow and only his laughter chased me through the underbrush, the ducksound always just behind me.
I ran until I felt my chest bones the way you suddenly do when you are on some verge and I was holding this runt child, whose mother I did not know, and whose father I wouldn’t water, and suddenly I didn’t know what reason I had to save her because in the northern lands of my uncertain mind, I had not yet planned to care for her forever.
In fact, I had that first night in the kitchen planned to do just as I imagined Mama doing. I had imagined giving it some kind of soft bed of death where it would not have to run through the night carrying its likeness just to protect it from that thing she didn’t have a name for, that other trembling sonority that didn’t haunt, but buzzed with light in the back of a head, the way that the softness of the skin of something that would live would pulse with the inevitability of its time for this world.
V
I whispered again to Emma: If you turn your mind-dirt over to where it’s dark, where you don’t often go and it smells cool and mineral, then maybe now you are ready to listen.
This is what your Prophet does whenever he tries to dream God but I’m talking so loud he hears me instead.
Mercy Ann
We are working on root words and origins in English class so as to give us a “one-up,” as Mrs. Kendricks likes to say, and so we each get a letter and we have to go home and look up the origin of ten new words that begin with that letter and then write a sentence that will help us learn it. I get “B.” Stan pulls down the dictionary with the best etymology, and then wonders with a giggle what the etymology of etymology is, but he doesn’t bother looking.
B. As in belittle, betroth, betray, beloved, behoove.
As in Banish, from vulgar Latin, cognate, bannire: bandit. As in, we must banish any bandit from the community to keep our people pure and worthy.
As in Beasts. From Latin bestia. The word for wild creatures until it was ousted in the 16th century by animal, from the Christian Apocalypse story. As in, the four horsemen. As if the original animal is actually a man connected to an animal, a two-bodied figure. Animal, as in, that which is alive, living, from “anima” breath, soul, current of air. As in, the animal breathed hard as it tried to outrun the Beast.
As in Belittle: A new word, coined by Thomas Jefferson. To make someone feel small: As in whenever you remind me I never learned multiplication tables, you belittle me. As in, when you ask me how I’m adjusting to the real world, it belittles my other world. As in, when you tell me that it’s okay, I’ll catch up someday, I feel belittled. It’s an act of belittlement when you tell me, too, that it’s nice I’m trying so hard, or that at least I can read.
As in Betroth: Be- as in transit, Troth- as in truth. When my mother became my father’s betrothed, she promised to be true to him and the laws of plural marriage and so cannot come back for me. Never mind that I would never have done that to her. Never mind that when Estelle tries to make me feel better by saying, you just got to remember that that life is all she’s ever known, I want to yell, But she knew me! She would have me and Ziona and Bess and wouldn’t that be something. But beget, as in, Old English, begietan, to get by effort, has no root meaning to keep true.
As in Betray: Be- as in thoroughly, Trair- as in hand over. My father’s third wife, Adaleen, betrayed us when she handed us all over to the authorities. She didn’t miss a single one of us in her palm. She ran away in the night, picked up by a nurse she met in town a year before when she’d had to go the doctors because of a hemorrhage that wouldn’t stop. The nurse stopped the bleeding and then plugged her with an IV needle and as she did she said that no man had a right to marry her at fourteen. Not in this great country, no siree. Adaleen tells me this story. She tells me she wanted to go to school, she tells me on the phone when she calls that first time. She tells me how she never wanted to be married, how she fought my father kicking and screaming that first night. She wanted us all to go to school and not have always just to obey and to have babies. She wanted some breathing room. She wanted the best for us all. For me. And I hang up on her.
As in Belie: From Old English beleogan: deceive by lying. When Estelle asks me if I’m okay after Adaleen’s call, I tell her I’m fine and I hope my face belies my feelings. I never lied back home. Now, I lie all the time. When kids ask me if I was promised to some old man, I say of course not and try to think about whether Brother Jens is old. He wasn’t old there, only in his forties, but he would be here. There he’s a husband, because he has a house and two other wives but here he would be a teacher or a gym coach or some other adult, on the other side of a line from us kids. There, it was ordained. Here, it wouldn’t be appropriate.
As in Believe: Old Germanic, literally to hold dear, love. As in I believe my mother would have stayed if she held us dear. If she loved us. She would have held us because she knows that while she can go back, we can’t. Not by our laws but by state laws. We are wards, believed to be in danger from our parents. We are held dearly away from them. I believe I never would have left her. And if I had children, I would hold on to them, too.
As in, you have to believe me, Mercy Ann, Adaleen says. As in, I do.
As in Behold: from be- thoroughly, halden- to hold. Behold, the document in my hand is the one you sign for me, saying I will be yours, and not my mother’s anymore. Understand it thoroughly, so you can’t hold it against me later, when I am getting Fs in school and have started hanging out with someone besides you and Stan. For behold, at that day shall he rage in the hearts of the children of men.
As in Blood, from old English
blod, as in to swell, gush, burst. As in, when they took my blood to verify my parentage, it gushed into the glass vial but when they took it again to see if I had been vaccinated as a baby, they couldn’t even get the vein right. As in, the blood of the saints shall cry from the ground against them. As in, trying to get a word out of you today is like trying to get blood out of a stone. As in, they’re out for blood. As in, when the phone rang again not one minute after I hung up on Adaleen, my blood boiled.
As in Behave. Be + have, from Germanic sich behabben, to have oneself in a particular way. As in, when my mother told me to behave myself when she said goodbye, she was really telling me to have myself, because she wouldn’t anymore.
As in Brethren. From the Book of Mormon, plural for brother, meaning brotherhood even among sisters. As in Adaleen is my mother too, a betrayer who believed the brethren were beasts and who betrothed and belied my father and still I pick up the phone that second time because she is all I have left.
As in Burn. From Old English, birnan, to be on fire and boernan, consume by fire. As in, the whole of it is on fire, and so will burn to the ground. As in, to leave the community is to ensure your soul will be consumed by fire, to burn, but to leave your child. There’s no law for that. Not when outsiders are involved.
As in, I’ll burn this. As in, I’ll burn this in the bathroom with a match and flush the ashes down the toilet and rewrite the assignment with words like backgammon and breathless. I’ll meet with Adaleen maybe just once, but not yet. Not until I finish this school year I’m barely hanging on to.
Not until I look up something for Stan:
Etymology. As in -ology, the study of, and -etymos: truth. As in, the true sense. As in, etymology can help us understand a word’s many histories.
As if, in studying every letter of every word, the truth would just surrender itself, hands up, and tell you what it means.
And not until I look something up for myself:
Polygamy. 1) From Greek poly–many + gamos–marriage. Betroth. 2) Zoology: Having more than one mate. As in, when someone is polygamous, they have more than one mate. As in, they have children. As in, even if you, Adaleen, bled out your first and only baby, it doesn’t mean your sisterwives didn’t have children. Beget. 3) Botany: the condition of bearing some male and some female flowers on the same plant. As in, children on your same plant, some male, and some female. Brethren. 4) Prophet: It is through our laws that men become gods, and women become heavenly mothers. Behave. 5) Mother: The only path to eternity, to be adhered to no matter, with children who are living so as to be with their mothers, forever, in the world they knew entirely but did not know to love or not love. Blood. 5) Estelle: It’s just not how people are meant to live. Beasts. 6) Stan: Well, to each his own. Animals. 7) Adaleen: It’s a sick world, and as soon as you get used to being away from it, you’ll thank me. Beholden.
8) Me: My mothers, my sisters, my lamb, my bed, my room, my house, my road, my friends, my Pa, the spoon in my mouth, the dust in my nose, the water in my hair, the earth at my feet.
Banished.
Annalue
The next night after she became some Angel of hearsay, Emma came into our bedroom, now just mine, when I was awake lying down and watching the little face, seeing if its hard beginning had left any kind of sign, and I saw my sister’s shape move like one on stage. I asked her if she was not all right.
Yes, she said. And then she began to talk quietly, quickly, saying well at first she just couldn’t believe it and was just going along with it but then she’d had such dreams the night before that now she really did see how it was all as meant to be. Her Celestial love for Jeremiah had been a mistake, a misinterpretation of God’s will, still God’s light and love but in the wrong direction, and that she had always felt herself to be different, matchstick hair and all, and didn’t I think it all made sense now, now that the Prophet had declared her, no not just the Prophet but God himself speaking through the Prophet, to be made of the same material as God himself, female as she was, something of her was light and power and hadn’t she always prayed the hardest, believed the most, even when I spoke my doubt and even when the Devil catcalled her and sucked her neck she was still there, in God’s light because she was of it, didn’t I see, and I listened to her with a stone in my throat, and I turned on my side, my back to her cadence, my face to the baby, and I saw the world for the first time in two stories.
There was the Prophet, there was the story of God and his will and his words and his wrath and his light, with revelations and testimony and resolving all doubt and all was God or Satan. And then there was the second world of I and the baby, the world of Alice Parley Smith, Emma’s lust and Levi’s restlessness and my disgrace and Jeremiah’s murder and murdering, there was language as empty as an oil drum, there was a long road where a girl had sinned and a boy had disappeared and a man had lied and yet only spoke more words on top, the layering words of His world, words that made Angels out of sisters and wives out of children and that had now taken Emma for its own.
When she rose and came around to the fruit crate and asked me if I wanted her to bless the child, I spoke like choking water around the stone and said not yet. She said she really thought she should, lest it die in the night and I told her “it” was a she and she wasn’t like to die in the night, and that blessings should be done in light not in dark to which she acquiesced and then she fell silent and I was left to wonder for this child and I. Us two of that second world, and whether we could really hold on if things got slipperier, hollower.
And the end was so nigh, you could feel it in the air.
And in the next days, Emma was gone, walking the world now like it was the top notes of a hymn. And Mama sat me down to tell me that in fact what the Prophet hadn’t said, or maybe he did but she’d never know it, fainted out cold as next day meat, was that Josiah would not be taking Emma back, on the count of Lizbeth whose heart too had been strangled or shot up by her son’s hands. That raising up Emma was the Prophet’s last way to save face against Josiah, who would not obey this man any longer.
She said that Emma now was like one with a fever, dazed and walking, and went to Him, and lived with him as not just a wife but as some kind of heavenly mother/angel/darling prophet the likes of which this place has never seen and isn’t one never too old to have seen it all.
She was gone, and all was amiss, and the end was so nigh but it was not over yet.
And still it was not over when I learned to whom this baby belonged, would hear from my Mama who heard it from Lizbeth who heard it from Josiah that Cadence had seen Manti’s mother, Beth, had seen her big-bellied and now she was not. And now this baby. And what man had gone to her? What man visited her? It was not hard to guess.
So I began to understand her perfect little hands to be the product of that same pain I had had inside me. Later I would begin to remember that pain as not coming from without, from Him, but from within, from her. As if it was childbirth that left me limping home that long ago August day, my thighs slimy. And even though it wasn’t until a year after that she was found, she would still be mine. My gift. And even if she was also His, I had given her a name that would not be known to Him. And it was I who would see when she grew the first white grain of her first tooth, and I who would finally know how to read all her motions and hear her sounds, and I who would know that she had not just a cry for hunger, sleep, and pain, but also one that was more desperate. One that told me we would leave.
But not before the eastern sky blackened once more.
Emma
I was hungry less and less. While I fed my child still from my own breast, I was at home less and less, living now in the home of the Prophet where he would kiss my hand and take me to his bed but only if I desired and if I did, it was not a base sentiment of the inadequate body, but a desire to know God closer and to hear him better myself and perhaps I did and perhaps I didn’t in the short time I lived with Him before He was called to His own becoming.
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nbsp; Josiah spoke no longer to me, and while his face carried what looked like anger, I knew it myself to be fear. He was afeared of his young prophet wife so out of grace I did not go near him. I did not deem speak to Lizbeth but Tressa was suddenly kind and quiet, and I spoke to her when I could summon the words for the mundane. Cadence edged around me like I was a lamp whose light she did not want to come under and this was her, always, with her white hair and scaredy-cat ways and I thought when I saw her that when I knew more about the ways in which God was up in me, I would lay my hands on her head and tell her not to be afraid and make her cry and come to God, really, because while she said that she believed and she wore that arrowhead as a token of her conversion I could see that she did not bend down to His Mercy, and even still the black point of the old thing left a red mark in her pale chest plain as day.
And when I saw Annalue, sweet sister of mine, and spoke to her in the days after these things, she tried to put her hand upon my head, to soothe me as if my faith was a fever and so I would not speak anymore but move her hand and say Leave me Sister. While I was sad she could not see what I could so plainly now about my life and my fate before the eyes of God, I knew that someday I would cure her earthbound limp and then she would see.
She would know and she would thank me, and would no longer tear up when I talked to her again of His grace the Prophet, and of his wisdom, and she would listen, and kneel at my skirt, and I would raise her up again and even that originless child would be blessed and we would be sisters again as we once were.
Her limp, his shame, her stutter, his doubt, her spite, his crushed head, the babe: I would heal them all. I would extinguish the illness that smoldered here and burned the edges of our community so that outward and upward we could grow. We would not be a wayward people out in the desert any longer with no bounty for our sowing, but a prosperous people who carried indelible signs of favor in His eyes.
Strange Children Page 24