Strange Children

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by Sadie Hoagland


  And this was my end and my beginning.

  And now I can only remember.

  And if I remember it when I am awake, as a place, not a world, but just a piece of earth, then I remember only sand. Pink sand that would stain your hands, your feet, whose ocher mark is still smeared somewhere on the skin of my heart. Sand that turned to stones and then the low mesas that rose up like two hands lightly cupped around our town, keeping us in it. All of us gathered there so close that it was not just our whole world but our whole earth, and the only sign of it not being the whole and only earth was the road. The road ran straight through town like a pious bloodline, red dust for twenty miles to the west and then it turned to pavement and then, only forty miles later, was a town bigger than ours, and beyond that, though I could never have imagined it at the time, was a city bigger than that. And this road didn’t stop as it went through our earth, it cut right through and went to the east, toward another desert or wilderness, and if you could follow it you’d eventually get somewhere. And so even as we knew there was more world and that this world was part of there and here, this other world was made farther away by the road which was so long and straight so as to disappear on either end. And you could watch it and you could see a car coming from a long while away but not very often, sometimes days apart, and so the points where the road disappeared in each direction were stretched longer in space by the length of time that one would have to wait for a car to come and these two kind of distances, miles and days, together uninhabitable, meant that the rest of the world was not for us. It was dry, and hellish, and full of sagebrush and rattlesnakes and had no water for our plants or our beasts or our mouths. And we had irrigation and a crick and green fields but still wildness would creep in with sandstorms and sunburns and cold cold nights and yelping coyotes just to let us know it was there, and that we belonged where we were. A lonely people.

  If I remember the place when I am asleep, it is not just the whole earth but also the whole world again. The world as it was for years and that is this: My hand over Emma’s smaller one, teaching her to milk, squeezing the hot gray teat through her fingers to show her the pressure, the pulling motion, her cry that I am crushing her fingers, the cow stamping away flies, and the milk finally sounding in the pail.

  That’s all it is.

  Epilogue: Emma

  The spirit and the body shall be reunited again in perfect form. My hands are open, my skin apart from itself, but this earthly body matters little and pain matters little though it makes me sharper as I wait. I am home finally again and I wait for the times that are already here, only needing to spill over the edges of their days to start us all anew, and as I wait I listen and I can hear the quiet coming of God, a drop in a bucket counting out the moments, and the hushed footsteps of my Mama bringing broth, and sparrows chirping and ravens grating their throats with sound and the echoing absence of One, and my whole body is twisted upon itself to become an ear. An ear that listens always and—in the night, in the wind, I do hear something. Not an image.

  More like a voice. A voice like mine, light and high. She sings to me. That same song. And I listen and I think of you my sister, and I speak softly back into the inky glass of night’s window. To you, my sister, and I tell you that I know you can’t hear me.

  Though I want you to, I do. And even though now it is only the one thing, the feathery song caressing my ear body, that strange girl’s voice, it will someday be another. More prophecy than just that old song vibrating in my ears, in the back of my throat, humming now, out my mouth in a whisper:

  Ashes, ashes,

  We all fall down!

  Acknowledgments

  It’s hard to know where to begin. This book started as a story, and then four stories in 2009. So many people have helped it along its journey. Thanks to Joe Wenderoth, Yiyun Li, Lauren Kate Morphew, Rachel Thomas, and Christina Thompson for being early cheerleaders of the project: you are the reason this book exists. Thank you to the Tanner Humanities Center for a fellowship which gave me a year to dedicate to this project, and especially Bob Goldberg for his enthusiasm and dedication. Thank you to the University of Utah Taft-Nicholson Center for time to work on this in one of the most spectacular spots on earth. Thank you to Scott Black, Lance Olsen, and Christine Jones for their thoughtful commentary on a draft of this book, and above all their encouragement. Thanks to my colleagues and students at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, especially Jessica Alexander, Skip Fox, John McNally, Henk Rossouw, Dayana Stetco, Charles Richard, Shelley Ingram, and Hannah Chapple. Thanks to Joe Worthen for his careful read at a crucial stage. Thanks to my editor Kate Gale, for knowing this book twice over. Deep gratitude is owed to the entire Red Hen team, for their meticulous editing, dedication, and enthusiasm for this book. Thanks to Julia Borcherts for her help getting the word out, always. Thank you to Rikki Ducornet for her almost magical insights in the final draft of this work. Deep gratitude is owed to Melanie Rae Thon, who read this book and my work and me with such care and energy and investment: my wish for everyone is to have a teacher like her. My agent, Madison Smartt Bell, was instrumental in helping this book reach its full potential, and believing in it at times even more than I did: thank you.

  Thank you to my grandmother, Virginia Lambourne Gibbons, for telling me stories of our own polygamist roots.

  My people: as always you are ever supportive, loving, and interested. Thank you, Mom and Dad, and thank you to my brother Noah. Thank you Lynne, Hillary, Dave, Anne, and Lynne Whitesides. Thank you to all my besties—you know who you are.

  Thank you to Ninah and Emile, my two hearts.

  And nothing would be possible without marc, who has lived with these characters for a decade, read multiple drafts, and never let me give up. Thank you.

  Lastly, thank you to the survivors and investigators of polygamist communities. This book and its setting are completely a work of my imagination but there are real people whose lives are profoundly impacted by polygamy and systemic abuse. I tried never to forget that when I was writing this book.

  Biographical Note

  Sadie Hoagland has a PhD in fiction from the University of Utah and an MA in creative writing/fiction from UC Davis. She is the author of American Grief in Four Stages, a short story collection published by West Virginia University Press that earned a Kirkus star. Her work has also appeared in the Alice Blue Review, The Black Herald, Mikrokosmos Journal, South Dakota Review, Sakura Review, Grist Journal, Oyez Review, Passages North, Five Points, The Fabulist, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Quarterly West and currently teaches fiction at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

 

 

 


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