The Sound of Gravel

by Ruth Wariner

  The girl had long, straight brown hair pulled back by a barrette, just as I had always wanted, not to mention her straight bangs cut evenly over her green eyes. She had light pink skin with dark brown freckles on her nose. I thought that maybe I’d seen her in church, but I wasn’t sure. I was certain that her yellow dress was brand-new, or almost. It was definitely freshly washed and perfectly ironed.

  The teacher looked back at me, smiled one more time, then continued her walk down the aisle. The little girl in the yellow dress turned to me, grinned, and said hello, in English.

  “My name is Natalia,” she chirped in a quiet, welcoming voice, her English clear and perfect. I felt my body relax into the hard chair beneath me. “The teacher wants me to sit by you so I can help you.” She smiled again. “Is your name Ruthie?”

  “Yeah. How do you know my name?”

  “I saw you at Sunday school, and my mom told me who you were.”

  “You know everything the teacher is saying?”

  “Almost everything. She talks real fast, though.”

  The teacher, back at the front of the room, appeared to be asking for quiet as she began writing with pink chalk on the dark green chalkboard. Natalia turned her attention to the front of the room as she opened her notebook and picked up her pencil, so I did the same.

  Then she whispered something so softly I was sure I had misheard her. “Hey, did you know that we’re sisters?”

  I tilted my head and just looked at her. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so. My mom said that your dad is Joel the prophet.”

  “Yeah. He died, though.”

  “I know. Joel was my dad too,” Natalia said.

  “Really?”

  She pointed to a little girl in the front row. “She’s our sister too. She lives right by me.” My mouth dropped open as I stared at a second sister. Her black hair was shoulder length and curled under at the ends. I was surprised when the girl whipped her head around and smiled under big brown eyes. “Her name is Brenda,” Natalia said. “She can talk in English and Spanish too.”

  The teacher stopped writing, looked at Natalia and me, and shushed us. We both sat up straight and turned our attention back to the front of the classroom. But my mind was a million miles away, too excited and shocked that I had sisters at school, and nice ones at that. Besides, I didn’t understand a word the teacher said.

  I knew I had half siblings all over the colony, but who they were had always been a mystery. Now, in school, it occurred to me that almost every child in LeBaron could be related to me.

  Natalia introduced me to Brenda at recess. She was really nice, but she and Natalia looked so different that I realized they must have different mothers. They showed me how to play hopscotch: how to draw out the squares and the circles in the sand with the tip of my forefinger and the importance of choosing a unique stone.

  When we returned to the classroom, Brenda sat with Natalia and me in the back of the room, and at lunchtime we ate together. Natalia had a whole-wheat sandwich like mine, although hers was square and mine was round. Remembering the fly at the bottom of my bowl that morning, I lifted the bread of my peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich to inspect it.

  The smell of green, spicy peppers filled the air the minute Brenda opened her bean-and-cheese burrito with pickled jalapeños, and when I couldn’t resist trying a bite, the morsel exploded in my mouth and burned all the way down my throat. My eyes watered and my lips burned. The girls giggled at my reaction.

  “Make sure to drink lots of milk when you eat peppers,” Brenda said in a thick accent that convinced me that Spanish was her first language and that her mother was Mexican. “It will take the burn away. Water makes it worse.”

  At the end of my first day at school, I rushed home to tell Mom about my two new friends who were also my sisters. While stirring cheese curds on the stovetop, she explained that Brenda was the daughter of my dad and his first wife, and the youngest of their thirteen children. Natalia was the youngest of three children born to my father and his sixth wife, who was another one of Lane’s sisters. With a laugh, Mom said she felt sorry for the man who tried to draw our family tree.

  It had been a long and confusing first day of school, and I couldn’t wait to go back.

  8

  As the school year progressed, so did I. By December, I was singing the Spanish alphabet, I knew how to pronounce all its exotic vowels, and I could even read books if the words were short. The once rapid-fire sentences began to slow down in my mind, and when I didn’t understand what was being said, I didn’t worry about it too much. Much of this progress I owed to my half sisters. Because of them, I woke up excited for school every morning and walked there as fast as I could with quick, light steps.

  Winter arrived with gloomy gray clouds, and the skies became damp and dim. Getting ready in the morning now meant the smell of burning wood from the barrel heater and mud-caked shoes that had once been white. Going to school meant walking past round-piped chimneys that billowed out smoke like giant steel cigarettes, and air that had grown thick with the scent of burning wood.

  Meanwhile, Mom’s lap became smaller and smaller as her belly grew larger and larger, and in mid-December she gave birth to a baby girl in the same Casas Grandes hospital where I’d been born. Mom’s cheeks were ghostlike when she came home, and her eyes were swollen and red, but she had had fewer complications than with Aaron, and Mom brought Meredith home the day after she was born. Everyone called the new baby Meri, and we all wanted to hold her from the moment our pale-faced mother came through the door.

  Meri was beautiful, with porcelain skin like Snow White and a tiny, molelike birthmark on her upper lip that made her look like a movie star. Her eyes were crystal blue, and she had long, dark eyelashes that curled up just below thin, blond eyebrows. When Mom placed the little bundle that was Meri into my arms, they naturally folded around my sister, who, from that moment forward, always seemed to rest comfortably in my lap. For this reason, Lane decided my Christmas break should start early. I was needed at home to help with the baby while Mom recovered.

  The season’s other new arrival was electricity in our home, at last. Lane took the same black tubing that brought current to the shop and extended it from there along the barbed-wire fence and into our house. The cable carried 220 volts of electricity, too strong for lightbulbs and appliances, so Lane connected it to a transformer, a metal box placed outside the kitchen door next to the cement porch. Next, he strung an electrical cord from the transformer through a corner of the kitchen wall and then tacked it along the beams of the wooden ceiling until it reached a white, ceramic light socket with a bare lightbulb. Cords snaked over the ceilings and walls of our home like plastic veins. But we finally had lights—bare-bulbed and bright—in every spot except the living room, which had an actual lamp with a shade.

  Lane had also fixed the old-fashioned washing machine that had been lying on the floor in his shop for months. Mom said that it was from the 1940s and was older than she was. It certainly looked it, with a metal box that swiveled between two open tubs, one for washing and one for rinsing. I liked helping her push the washed clothes through the rolling pins, and squeezing the rinsed clothes into a basket, but they took a whole day to dry on the clothesline when the weather was wet and cold.

  Once he’d finished the improvements on the house, Lane began going to the States more and more often. He had bought a semitruck so that he could haul loads of various types and sizes throughout the southwestern United States. He was gone for most of Meri’s first months while Mom and Alejandra ran the farm. When spring came, just as the weather was turning beautiful, Lane announced he was taking a third wife, Susan. She was one of Mom’s closest friends in the colony. I was surprised she and Lane were getting married. She already had eight children with a polygamist whom she had recently divorced. The church discouraged divorce, but it was common anyway. It was an easy process because most polygamists’ marriages weren’t legal in the first place. />
  Mom said she had suggested Susan marry Lane. Knowing that Lane would probably take another wife anyway, Mom decided it would be best to find a sister wife she liked. Susan and her children lived a half mile down the road from us, in a small adobe house we passed every day on the way to school. After Susan and Lane got married, she and my mom got together every other afternoon.

  Between his new wife and his new hauling business, Lane had little time for Mom when he was in LeBaron. His repairs and improvements to our house came even more slowly than before, which became more and more embarrassing to us as ours was one of the only homes without hot water. We still used the stove for heating bathwater and everything else.

  We were all excited when we found out that Mom had finally persuaded Lane to install electrical wiring in the bathroom to heat water for a shower and grew even more excited when we saw silver tubing running up the bathroom wall for that very purpose. We counted the days until we could take our first hot showers at home. The only thing we needed was a showerhead.

  One rainy spring weekend, Lane announced that he would be spending a night in Casas Grandes with Alejandra at her parents’ home there. Mom saw this as a chance to have him pick up a showerhead. She dipped into her welfare check and gave Lane the money to buy the fixture while he was in town. It would be shower time by the beginning of the next week. We couldn’t wait.

  The following evening, I found myself in the living room with our oversize children’s Bible lying heavily in my small lap. It was open to a page I didn’t yet know how to read, but because neither Aaron, Luke, nor Audrey knew that, I took the opportunity to perform a melodramatic reading of the Noah’s Ark story. I recited the tale I had heard told many times in Sunday school, waving my arms dramatically as I described the animals boarding the boat in twos while the waters rose around them. As I told my siblings about all the wicked people who had foolishly laughed at Noah only to find themselves drowning in the floods, Lane drove up in his white Ford pickup, a rusty camper mounted on its bed.

  The sun had gone down outside and storm clouds were gathering. The kitchen door scraped open and hard-soled workboot footsteps clomped on the floor on the other side of the wall. Lane said hello to Mom, I heard the light smack of a quick kiss, and then he popped his head into the living room. He wore the same red polo shirt he’d had on the last time I’d seen him, and his hair was wet and combed back behind his ears. His face was freshly shaved except for his sandy-blond sideburns, which looked hard. His mouth was closed and expressionless. I stopped my performance, and we all stared back at him for a moment.

  “So, what’s for dinner tonight?” he asked Mom.

  “I haven’t decided what to make yet. Where’s the showerhead?”

  Silence.

  “Did you buy it when you were in Casas?”

  “Well, yeah, I bought it,” Lane said, perfectly matter-of-fact, “but I decided to give it to Alejandra. She wanted one too.”

  Silence again, then Mom called for me to help get a bottle ready for the baby. Meri was four months old but had had trouble latching onto Mom’s breast, so we’d resorted to feeding her bottles of goat’s milk. I slapped the Bible shut over my lap as thunder roared through the dark, cloudy sky, shaking the whole house. We soon heard rain start to fall on the tar and gravel rooftop. Mom had Meri’s head over her shoulder while she bounced the baby lightly and patted her back. She glared at Lane, who now sat at the kitchen table silently, his arms folded and elbows resting on the table. I could feel the tension between them as I opened the refrigerator, unscrewed the gold lid of a mason jar, and poured the goat’s milk into a small saucepan on the stove.

  “I gave you money to buy me a showerhead—last Thursday. From my welfare check, that I saved so we could finally finish the bathroom.”

  I turned to look at Mom as I reached for the red box of matches. She was biting the corner of her lower lip, looking at Lane as if he were a child, like the mother in Jack and the Beanstalk after she discovers that her son traded the cow for beans.

  Lane sighed. “Hey, Alejandra needs a finished bathroom too,” he said calmly, as if the whole thing might blow over with just a shrug of his shoulders. “Get me a glass of water, would ya?” he asked casually.

  I turned back to the stove and lit the burner. The smell of butane burst out with a soft hissing sound before blue flames erupted under the saucepan. Out of the corner of my eye I could tell that Mom hadn’t stopped looking at Lane. She hadn’t moved to get him a glass of water either. Her mouth was stern and she was patting Meri’s back faster and faster. Rainwater began to drip from an open hole in the wooden ceiling. She took an empty pan from the stovetop and placed it on the floor to catch the water from a hole that had been intended for the round metal chimney of a wood-fired stove, one that had never materialized.

  Matt burst through the kitchen door at that moment carrying a bucket of fresh milk, his hair and clothes soaked from the rain. He paused in the doorway, his eyes wide as if he already knew something was wrong.

  “Close that door, Matt!” Mom snapped, walking the baby into the bedroom and laying her down in the crib. “You’re lettin’ all the cold air in.” In an instant she was back and made a beeline for Lane. She pulled a chair out from under the table and sat across from him.

  “That money was my money,” Mom said seriously, her freckled forearms stretched flat on the table as if half reaching for him, her fingers interlaced. “I saved it so that we could finish my bathroom before the summer. You promised you’d have it done by now.”

  “Well, Alejandra needs a bathroom too,” Lane said, still calm. “She’s my first wife, and she has more kids than you. Do you think it’s fair for you to have your bathroom done first?”

  Mom leaned almost across the table, her eyes squinted in anger. “I gave you my money to buy my family a showerhead.” She threw her arms out and then brought her fingertips back to her chest. When she spoke again, her voice was louder. “How can you even try to excuse using my money to buy something for her?!”

  Now Lane’s voice matched Mom’s. “What makes you think the money was yours? What comes into this family is for everyone to use. I’m the one who decides what to do with our money.”

  They stared at each other, both bodies cantilevered across the table. Suddenly I smelled burnt milk and turned to find it boiling over into the blue flames.

  Mom twisted around in her chair. I turned the stove off and lifted the pan from the burner, but even as I did, I heard the legs of a chair scrape against the floor. Mom tore the long, black handle out of my grasp with one hand and squeezed hard on the thick part of my upper arm with the other. “You stupid kid!” she said through clenched teeth. “Can’t I count on you to do anything right?” I felt a pinch on the inside of my arm where her fingertips pressed together. “Get away. I’ll take care of the bottle.”

  Matt looked at me, his brows raised in sympathy. My eyelids stung with the beginnings of tears and my throat hardened. Mom hardly ever yelled at me. I was shocked.

  She knelt down to the spigot that rose up from the floor, turned over the pot of burnt goat’s milk into the drain underneath it, scrubbed it clean, rinsed it, and refilled it.

  Aaron walked into the kitchen. He stopped, looked at Mom, then took a seat at the table as if he thought it was dinnertime.

  “Why are you making such a big deal about this?” Lane said to her. “We’ll get you a showerhead after I get paid for my last load. You’re gonna get more welfare money. Stop complaining about it!”

  Mom made a sound from somewhere deep inside her, as if she’d been angry a long time.

  “Complain about it?!” Blotches of red began to appear on her neck and upper chest. “That’s not the point. That was my money. Money that I saved.” Mom took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “Did you even stop to consider how I might feel about this?” she asked quietly.

  Lane cocked his head and stood up. “It’s not your money, and you don’t have any reason to feel bad about thi
s. You’re overreacting.” His palms rested on the table, but now he glared at Mom. “Like I already told you, the money that comes into this family is for everyone in this family.” He pressed his grease-stained index finger into the table so hard the entire tabletop shook. “I decide what happens to it.” Now Lane’s teeth were clenched too. “Now you need to shut up about it … or I’m gonna take my belt off to ya.”

  “No! You go get that showerhead from that woman before she puts it up in her bathroom. It’s mine! I paid for it.”

  Droplets of spit flew from her mouth as she screamed, some of them landing on Lane’s face.

  “The shower is already all hooked up and working in her bathroom, and I’m not going over there and taking it out. You can wait your turn.” He jabbed a finger into her collarbone.

  Luke was standing in the kitchen entryway, big eyed with his mouth agape. I could hear Audrey too, still sitting in the living room, now moaning and rocking faster than ever before. The base of the chair slammed against the living-room wall again and again.

  All I heard after that was screaming. Mom was yelling at Lane, and he yelled right back at her. She slapped his finger away from her chest and then, without warning, threw Meri’s warm bottle of milk at him. We all watched it bounce off his shoulder and land on the table, then roll onto the floor, where the nipple exploded, splattering milk all over the entire kitchen, even the stove and the fridge.

  Thunder continued to roar above us, and rain dripped into the pan on the floor next to the table.

  “Who do you think you are?!” Lane bellowed, reaching over and grabbing Mom by the short layers of her hair. He whipped her head toward the floor and twisted her neck sideways. Mom shut her eyes tight and gritted her teeth, desperately reaching for the table so he wouldn’t throw her on the floor. She tried to pull his hand away but he jerked her violently again, pulling her face toward his.

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to talk back to me?!”