Then Annalue would know, would see. I would lay my hands on Annalue’s leg, I would feel the death in its flesh and I would call back the bones and blood and skin from purgatory where the yoke of the Devil could still reach that poor tissue and into the Celestial of a working limb, a body that contained humanness in its essence, humanness without the divine, but pure in soul, which is what my sister was.
I would fix her and she would walk, stand even, and together we would run into the field where God could see and she would kneel, her leg able to bend beneath her for the first time, and I would kneel and she would cry and hold me and say thank you, thank you dear Emma and then she would take my poor child, my poor poor baby born not unto a woman whose life was bound only to motherhood, but to things above the earth we walk, and she would care for it, care well so that I could go.
Go and do my unending work of God, which would begin—I knew, I dreamt, I heard whispered in the estival hum of the air—when I saw some great sign, some great mercurial darkness that filled the sky and was for me and for me alone to surrender myself unto,
so that my hands would unfold and
touch
bless
come apart
the bones gone red
with the culmination of prayer.
Annalue
I dreamt once that I could walk straight and it’s not an easy thing to tell you that I only dreamt this once, and not more. Having a limp is an inconvenience in most ways, and feeling that coldness in one’s own body is something one gets used to till it really does start to creep upward, and the sky goes black, and you wake sweating, free, and able to run, quickly, toward that blue and formidable escarpment that you know suddenly to be the edge of your heart, and the end of your ability to know even where in the body just one bone might fit.
Levi
For days the summer air was still and hung like a sheet on a line that would not dry. No breeze to blow it. Two murders like that callin out to each other ’cross distance like owls in the night. One here, one there. One horse, one Jeremiah. One boy, one girl. Two sinners dead but the crimes echoin in the air, atonin nothin. Emma gone to some high place, and there never was nothin more wrong than that and so I didn’t even bother hidin anymore and Pa and I were waitin together now for Josiah to climb up His steps, knock Him down, and then let God know he’d be the one listenin from here on out.
I waited to show Pa I was man after all, be there to help him, to help Josiah, to wait till we were needed. Maybe soon as the wind kicked up just a little bit.
Emma
I was waiting always then for some great sign, some great billowing darkness that would fill the sky and be for me alone to surrender myself unto.
I waited and whispered Nephi’s words to the summer sky like they are written in my blood I shall show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.
My milk dried up and I knew my body to be wringing itself out of mother heaviness, preparing for the great task ahead, and I told Josiah: I will not come here any longer at all and he finally spoke to me again to say But your child, and I motioned to Tressa and Mary behind her in the corner. Mary, arms folded, glaring, like I had taken something from her person, when it was she who so long ago took from me with her half broken mouth that could still speak truth. I saw Josiah grow angry and I know it’s because he thought it would be himself the Prophet would choose to be under his wing but I did not say that, holy as I had become, but rather told him Sing, oh heavens and be joyful, oh earth, for the feet of those who are on this land, for they shall be smitten no more; for the Lord will have mercy on the afflicted and he waxed of natural covenants and two sons now spurned and false prophecies but his blasphemous storm was not the one I had been awaiting so I stood like a stone eye in the eddy center of it and felt not even the dust kicked up and heard not the unholy words but only sound, as if I was under a soft and timeless current.
I walked down the road, back to the one who understood me.
The one, the Prophet, who knows what it is like to have one ear listening. To have a belly of dreams stemmed with an umbilical cord to the Celestial, fed without eating in the night by a voice that speaks only in images. Overturned tin pail. Coyote pups. Listing fence. Bloody legs of childbirth. Blue dresses.
Light. Light. Light.
The one who grew steadily quieter, who I could see grew tired, old. His long face withering. He was old, and I was young. I could see that as I grew stronger, he weakened. He waited for me to speak, and then one early day he gave me a honeybee sleepy with the morning cold and rolled its bumping body into my hands and told me to cup it carefully.
This, he said. Everything is this. And I knew then what he meant and I could see that he was preparing to depart and that I would continue to grow stronger and more in spirit, if less in body, waiting for the time when I would become the voice itself, the language and the pail, the legs, the fence, the dress and speak with my hands
open before me
walking all the way, even through flames, to the time when
the spirit and the body shall be reunited again in perfect form.
Annalue
Waiting, it seemed, more so than our usual state of waiting always for the end to come to save us, to show as the chosen ones, the state we lived in always heightened to a high note that held like a breath, a heavy storm cloud of sound ready to drop any moment. And then suddenly, after all of that waiting:
smoke smell and a bell ringing and voices shouting.
It was a good fire this time, not one put out so quick. I left the baby sleeping with Mama in ear reach and limped down the road to see what was happening, to check to make sure the house was empty as they said it was. Empty of Emma, who’d been at our house but then had left to wander.
And as I came down the road I saw her. I called her name, but she kept walking toward the fire.
I called her name again before I knew myself to be in another dream where one can scream but no sound is made.
I saw her walk towards the fire like she wasn’t going to stop. But no, I thought, she will turn. She will hear me.
I saw her walk towards the fire and imagined her elsewhere. She was often elsewhere, often not there, where she walked now: foolyouth shining like work on her cheeks, red hair afire with light, moving with the cadence of an old heart.
Oh, Emma. I walked faster. My limp a curse always and now. I knew she would turn around. Emma.
But it became hard to say when she was going to turn around.
Everything was like that then, hard to say, even the taste in the air. Hard to say, to remember. Even the names of the horses in the background were hard to place. Or you could say the names but not which horse they belonged to, and it seemed odd that it had ever been clear.
Bridger, Appleseed, Mary Legs, Star of Celestial.
All words without bodies as the earth underfoot eroded ever so quiet and smoke smudged out the day.
She was too far ahead of me.
And even as she was right close, I knew she would, she would. Turn away from the fire.
Emma.
The sight of the day, the place, was becoming more granular.
I knew she would. I had always known it, I thought. I knew her. A convert. She would convert away before even the heat reached her.
I saw her and I watched her and her white dress through the smoke like a dab of paint, hem stiff to the ground until the sky turned the color of stale blood and then I could not, not any longer.
So I watched the road.
And so here we are, after all this time.
I stopped screaming and I opened my eyes and I was here. So I started all over and I waited and whispered and presided ghostly until I knew what I was waiting for, what I had been waiting for since I circled back to the beginning of this story and it was this:
I saw her, Manti’s mother, black hair maddened, face sm
udged, dark blue nightgown torn, lost husband/lost Manti/lost baby, light a match just where her son had lit his.
I saw the mad woman fan the little flames up under the porch of the Prophet’s house.
I saw Josiah see the smoke and run down the road. I saw him, in his son’s likeness. Josiah.
I saw the flames rise higher. Heard children, everyone, everyone coming out of the house. Someone yelling, Again.
I saw her. Emma. I watched her.
I watched Josiah watch his youngest wife walk slowly towards the flames. I watched him wonder if God was somehow inside her small body. He sucked in his bottom lip.
I watched the age on his face, and the sun of a thousand different days all the same, but all different than this one, rise their heat up to the surface of him.
I watched him watch for the Prophet.
I heard him as he wondered how to stop God’s Voice, the Voice within the man, whether he would have to kill the man, the Prophet, and whether it would stop if He was dead. He wondered if he didn’t have to kill the man, too, if he could just cut out the Voice. Find the part of the throat or stomach or chest which spoke, and he wasn’t sure which it was, where it was. I saw him touch his own body looking for where voice was, his hand on his chest, then his throat, then his mouth.
I watched him watch her also, black hair wild, the remnants of childbirth a paunch, walking up the steps to the Prophet’s house.
His hand stayed on his mouth.
She stayed in the doorway watching her work, her flames, her son’s real funeral. Then she took a step in.
Emma kept walking.
I watched him watch things burn. Fabric burn. Sky and shoe, melt.
I watched him get close to the source of the flames, breathe in smoke, then buckle over himself, straining face to stomach, choking his own throat, pressing his arms and hands into the parts of himself he couldn’t see, couldn’t know, pressing and trying to smother the voice that might be within him, also.
I saw the other, the voice, the Prophet walk out of the back of the house and into a crack in the mesa. A split, a wound for him to infect.
I heard nothing. No sound as Emma kept walking. Up the porch steps.
I saw Emma commit herself to flames on one side of the porch and then I heard Annalue calling her sister’s name and again I heard the sirens on the patio.
Emma. Emma. Emma.
I whispered, shouted, screamed.
Burn it all.
And my voice was the smoke, the sky, and the water sitting useless in the creek.
And then I saw her crippled sister stand frozen and the wild-haired woman, Manti’s mother, Beth, try to do one thing right. To turn and see the girl, a mother herself we know but remember a girl. To run back out of the house, blue nightgown billowing, howling, to grab Emma by the arm and pull her out of the fire and down the steps and extinguish her smoking and blackened dress with the weight of her own body.
She did this and then she sat back as others surrounded them.
Then she saw right through that gathering crowd, and for the second time looked right at me.
She looked right at me, her dark hair nest, her cheek smudged black, her gown smoking. She looked at me and raised her arm to point back at the burning house.
Ashes falling like snow.
I nodded back at her, my shape singing with her gaze.
Annalue
Within minutes the Prophet’s house burned to good, and with it the blue hot center of my shame.
Everything was all smolder now, ember and ash. But no one could say it was all over as grass was still burning to the west, catching a barn and one other house. And Emma was silent in her pain, one arm, one leg burned well, the flames licking her face on one pink cheek, her hair half gone, silent she lay as Sister Beth rolled upon her, as someone came with a pail of water, as I turned to scream to limp to go to find Pa. No one could say it was over even as Pa pulled up his truck and we got out and wrapped her smoking body in a quilt and pushed my moaning mother away and still Emma did not make a sound and I knew it was bad, my sister’s pain, and I was in the colder parts of my own flesh relieved that it was not only half-bad. Half-bad my Pa could pretend she didn’t need their medicine but as it was he did not think on it but swooped her up and drove fast out of town, leaving a red dust swarm, fast to their clinic where they sent them both by ambulance to the city. She, still his child.
No one would say it was over even as our Prophet vanished out of sight. Some say he had walked into the desert while the fire still burned, and our people wandered about with open hands, and even then there was a reluctance to end any of our story. For there was Josiah and there was a tired and dogged hope. We can rebuild in three days, he said, natural leader with twice-dead son and a burnt-up child wife. But even he was tired.
It was hard to say.
The fire sits on the horizon that day, like some hot and brief second sun, spreading into dry brush, a second house, then a barn. It is the brightness in the back of my skull, the pain that makes your eyes see nothing.
The smoke muddies the desert sky into night. People run, buckets of water splashing on their shoes, a pump turned on to wet the road. But no one shouts. All work in silence. No one asks where the Prophet is. What had happened to the girl. The crazy woman is back at home with her daughter, they say.
And I wish I could say to Jeremiah: I never knew. Even when you told me, I never knew.
A man with two hearts, a place with two suns.
To tell him: I understand now.
But it was always too late. Forgiveness was buried long ago in layers of sediment, hardened by time and sealed too deep to be disturbed by water or blood.
But let it all not be for nothing.
Ashes. Ashes.
We all fall down.
Cadence
The fire smoke wrote into the sky everything that would happen next, which was not what I expected but warn’t in any way worse. They did come back, the black cars, the state, the men and women in suits, they come for a week straight. Flagged by murder maybe, or the warning sign of a half-burned mother child, and this time when they come they did not have questions but answers.
My new child was two days old when they come, my brain and body only for him and his gaping gumless mouth. In other words: in no place to leave Josiah. Nor Lizbeth who brought me warm milk to drink as he drank mine, nor even Tressa who quietly showed me a dented tin of udder balm for my raw and wringed parts, nor the bed that kept me and my tiny swaddled safer than I had ever been.
And it seems that finally the Lord see me living here now and done with my sinning ways and He decided to finally change my luck because they did not take Josiah. They had no questions for him, no answers for us.
Not that they left empty-handed. First Crazy Beth and her daughter one day were seen by the Prophet’s bewildered son Daniel to come out of their house with one small potato sack of their belongings and get into one of them black cars and the first thing he did, fatherless since the Prophet ghosted off, was come rushing into our house and even upstairs I could hear the ruckus. Josiah, he yelled, Where’s Josiah and I could hear Lizbeth hushing him, but not what she said. And he got no quieter as he told it: Beth and her girl, gone, gone into a car and what we going to do? I heard the back door open with creak and close with bang and then Josiah’s strong voice smooth like polished wood telling him to calm down. I heard Daniel knock a chair or something scoot across the floor and my boy stirred at my chest and I lifted his mouth to me so he could suckle back to sleep and I could listen. Daniel was still shouting, saying something about a posse, about the need to stop them, about atonement and blood and even whores, which reminded me of my stepfather, that word that I didn’t know anyone used around here. Josiah’s voice continued on slow and deep like old furniture always there to sit down in, telling him that there was nothing to be done. Nothing to be done, now.
Daniel slammed the front screen door on his way out and I sat up in my little mother th
rone and was secretly glad she had got out—spare us her trouble, spare the baby she left with Annalue, and off maybe to somewhere where someone would comb her hair, wash that little girl’s face. I wished her better luck out there than I’d had.
The black cars came back two more times that week and the next week too, and it started to feel like they would come forever and people were getting itchy for a Prophet, a sermon, something Josiah was trying to give but without any guarantee from God. At least not yet. We thought they’d do something more, the cars, and when I was not tired, I was worried. But then came the last day, when they must a got what they wanted, or who they wanted, because they didn’t come back.
Annalue
It was hard to say when things were over for Redfield. No plague came down like in the Book. There was no locusts, no blood on the doors. Just one fire, one missing Prophet and then the dogs came, feeding on garbage, and it just eventually became clear that things had gone all rotten and even as we thought it, the orchards all turned sour and the sick sweet smell of softening and bruising apples hung about everywhere.
But it’s not hard to say when things were over for me. That’s easy to say. It was the day that the black government cars came back that final time. I was limping the road with the baby girl, bouncing her and telling her the sky so as to quit her tired fussing and get her to a place of sleep. It had rained and when the cars came toward the house for the fifth time in a week, they were a ruddy brown with mud. They drove slow so as not to splash, so as to watch, and as they watched me I did not turn away. I did not run. A woman and a man watched me through a windshield, their shapes fragmented by the newly born sunshine on the glass so that I could only see half of the man’s face, half of the woman’s face and as they came to me and I stepped back off the road, the woman signed to the man and they stopped and she rolled her window down and looked up at me and on her mother face I saw worry and saw that she thought I was a child and I was not, had not been for over a year now since that August day but she did not know this so in grace I looked away. She asked me, is that your child? And coughed as she said it. I looked at her lips shiny pink and quietly said Yes, I said Yes and even as I said it I knew it again to be true, especially to her an outsider, and my eyes wetted then without my consent, it all so clear to me—both my child and my love for her and also what was on her face, what we were to her. And she nodded and opened her mouth like to say more but did not and the man said something behind her and she nodded and they drove on towards Josiah’s, towards the blackened chimney of the Prophet’s house standing sentinel, and I watched after them and hummed in the baby’s ear and thought to myself: My, baby My, baby and something that felt like tiny sparrows of relief swooped up and into me as I watched the car slow to a stop down the road and as their lights went off and the door opened I knew it was nigh time to finally give now forever this child and all her perfect limbs a name, time to get some place where no one, no Prophet would take her away from me.
Strange Children Page 25