The Sound of Gravel

by Ruth Wariner

  Mom invited him in, but as soon as he saw the multitude of faces behind her, he asked if he could have a word with her in private outside. I watched them through the foggy film of my breath on the living-room window, the two of them leaning up against his green Ford pickup. The man spoke slowly, gestured gently, with long pauses between his sentences. Mom nodded and cast her eyes at something in the distance. She didn’t say a word and never looked directly at the visitor.

  Finally, Mom came back inside. She told me that the church had decided to hold meetings about some gossip they’d heard about Lane. The allegations that he’d been inappropriately touching girls in the colony had made their way to the church elders, and they wanted to separate fact from fiction. Mom, Lane, and all his wives were being summoned to a series of hearings. If the rumors were even partly true, the man said, they would need to take swift action against my stepfather.

  Weeks earlier, Sally and Cynthia had told me that they’d discovered that Lane had abused another of their sisters. Rumors of his abuse—of several of us—had slowly spread throughout the colony. I didn’t know how that had happened, as Mom had been determined to keep our problems within the family, and I was never approached or questioned by a soul. Then again, given that Lane had molested at least four of us, it was a wonder that the news hadn’t spread sooner.

  Thus began a community tribunal about Lane, and one I thought would be much fairer than our family conversations in the Chevette, although neither my stepsisters nor I were ever called to testify. We stayed home and babysat. I spent those nights playing cards with my siblings, doing anything I could to keep my mind off what was being said in the meetings. I’d lie awake in bed, embarrassed at the thought of what Lane might be saying to the church elders, who were also my family. It nauseated me to think that he was telling them that his stepdaughters had enjoyed his advances. I thought about asking to attend a meeting myself to tell the other side of the story, but I doubted anyone would listen to me. What chance did I have of being heard by the leaders of a church who believed its men were training to be gods? Plus, I was too embarrassed and ashamed to discuss the details of what had happened in front of all of them.

  Mom was alone when she returned from the first meeting. In a tired voice, she explained that everyone present had been questioned as in a court. Lane sat in front of twelve judges—all male church leaders—and called witnesses, in this case his wives. She said that the church leaders had read passages from the Book of Mormon and the Bible so that the women could understand what child abuse was and how to handle it. Still, Mom seemed to have been more affected by Lane’s repentance than the church’s warnings. She described his slumped posture, the sad sincerity of his public apology, and of course his tears. Did I have any idea, she wondered, how hard it was for him to cry in front of that group of men, his lifelong friends and fellow church elders?

  The meetings went on for weeks before the elders finally announced that they’d made their decision. The night of the verdict, I had fallen asleep in Mom’s bed when I heard the sound of the kitchen door opening. I heard two sets of shoes on the cement floor. The light in the bedroom suddenly came on, so bright that it hurt my eyes, and I peered over the blanket. Mom’s eyes looked tired, red, and swollen, while Lane’s looked angry. He took his clothes from the pipe where they’d been hanging, folded them, and stuffed them into a black plastic bag. Mom sat on the bed and watched him, her expression forlorn. Neither acknowledged me.

  Lane swiftly exited the bedroom with his bag of clothes, Mom trailing behind him. “Aren’t you going to even say good-bye to me?” she pleaded through her tears. “Lane, why won’t you say good-bye to me?” He silently strolled through the kitchen and out the door. “Good-bye,” she said as he started his truck. “Good-bye,” she called out as he drove away.

  The church leaders had decided to ban Lane from the colony for two years, after which they would reconvene to decide whether he should be allowed to return to his families. Mom sobbed as she recounted the events of the evening. “In the meantime, the wives have to take turns visiting him out of town or in the States, so you’ll have to be here to watch your brothers and sister.” She said it as if she wanted me to respond sympathetically. She buried her face in her palms. “Oh, Ruthie, what am I going to do? God, how am I going to handle all of this? Why couldn’t we just keep this within our own family? Why does the whole town have to know about it?” The weight of her questions felt heavy on me as I sank deeper into the mattress and tried to think of something to say.

  * * *

  OVER THE NEXT few months, Lane’s wives took turns going to care for him. I babysat for days or weeks at a time during Mom’s stints with her husband. I didn’t enjoy all the chores and housework that fell to me, but I was so relieved to have Lane gone that I did everything Mom asked of me without complaint or protest.

  Only a couple of months after he’d left, Mom arrived home from a visit with him carrying a gallon jar of peanut butter. While my siblings fought each other for the chance to make themselves sandwiches on Mom’s stale homemade bread, she took me to her bedroom so we could talk privately.

  Her face was relaxed and smiling, and I felt myself relaxing too. She hadn’t seemed that happy in a long time.

  “Listen, Ruthie”—she put her arm around me as we sat together at the bottom edge of her bed—“before I left for El Paso, my sister wives and I went to the council and asked if they’d let Lane come home.”

  I felt the blood rushing out of my face. I looked down and shook my head.

  “Taking care of the farm is too hard without his help, and we feel like this family needs a man around to lead us and to discipline the kids. They need to see their dad once in a while.” She sounded calm and almost excited as she spoke, as if she hadn’t even considered how I might feel. “And it’s unrealistic to make him stay at all these hotels and make us go out of town to see him. We miss him, and he’s lonely without his families. He needs us as much as we need him.”

  My gaze fell to my bare feet. I tried to focus on them to keep from crying.

  “Also, Susan and I just found out we’re both pregnant.”

  I nodded and rolled my eyes. I felt sick at the thought of their still wanting to have sex with Lane after what he’d done to their daughters.

  “I have to … go.” I stood on my legs weakly. “Is that it?”

  “Well, no.” Mom adjusted her glasses. “The council thinks Lane has suffered enough for what he did—all the public embarrassment and shame. And he has, Ruthie, more than you can imagine.” I pulled my arm away just as she was about to reach for it. “So the council decided to let him come back.”

  I nodded to myself, walked through the door and down the hall, hoping I’d be out of the house before she spoke again, but she called out to me, “I want you to know that you don’t have to see him or be around him anymore. You can leave and spend the night at Sally’s or Maria’s houses whenever it’s his turn to sleep here.”

  By then I was walking out the door of the house. I could still hear Mom, but her voice sounded distant and small, as thin as the promises that fell from her lips.

  “I swear to you, Ruthie, if anything happens again, I’ll be the first to take him to the authorities.”

  32

  Just like that, we were “a family again,” as Mom put it, which in our case meant spending the next two years in a whirlwind of moving from one place to another. Mom would say it was too hard to survive in LeBaron with the newly devalued peso, and suddenly we would head for Albuquerque or El Paso. We’d follow Lane around for months, living in campers and trailers as he failed again and again to make money hauling loads in his semi. I avoided him, and mostly he left me alone. We even lived in San Diego with Matt for a few months. Then, just as predictably, Mom would grow tired of moving around or become preoccupied with Babylon’s bankrupt morality, and she would move us back home to LeBaron.

  In the midst of all this ping-ponging back and forth between two countries,
we added a new member to the family. Leah was born in the summer of 1985, when I was thirteen years old. Mom named her after Grandpa because, she said, the baby was as stubborn as her father, Leo. Leah looked just like Micah had when he was a baby, another snowman child with invisible lashes and brows.

  The following year, we finally settled back in LeBaron “for good,” according to Mom. Matt, then seventeen, was still living in California, but he would come down to visit every now and then. I was fourteen but no longer in school—Mom insisted that it was more important for me to be around to help her take care of the house and the kids.

  Aaron was nine years old and in the third grade. Micah, kind and quiet, followed Aaron around constantly, trying to do everything his older brother did. Elena had grown into an adorable and intelligent three-year-old. At a year old, Leah was the baby in the family. She had started walking before she was even a year old and was a curious child. She’d follow me from room to room, desperate to know what I was doing and wanting to explore everything she could. Even though he was allowed to live in LeBaron again, Lane continued to work odd jobs in the States. With her seven children more or less settled wherever we were—Matt in California, Audrey in the state hospital, and the rest of us on the farm—Mom started accompanying Lane on more of his trips. She’d leave home for a long weekend and put me in charge.

  Luke, at sixteen, was still wandering off and getting lost in the Mexican countryside or going with brothers or cousins to work with them on their farms. Despite his handicaps, he was the strongest and most athletic of all Mom’s children. He became a helpful worker on my relatives’ farms, where he loaded hay or cleaned corrals for a few pesos a day. He couldn’t drive because he’d begun having light seizures that caused his body to tremble and his hands to lose control of whatever they were holding. He also lacked the hand-eye coordination needed to pop a clutch and shift gears, or to brake while keeping the steering wheel straight. But he was gentle and loving. He adored animals, so much so that he refused to eat meat. His eyes would fill with tears whenever anyone talked about butchering cattle or when Mom killed a chicken for supper. Her few attempts at getting Luke to eat meat failed. He would retch and spit it back onto his plate.

  Most days, Luke would find his way home after work, but if I hadn’t seen him by sunset, I’d go looking for him. One Saturday evening in June, when Mom and Leah were in El Paso visiting Lane, and it was late and Luke hadn’t yet come home, I fired up Lane’s Datsun pickup, a beat-up, old truck he left on the farm as its bed was often stacked with bales of hay. I couldn’t drive on the highway—the truck didn’t have a front windshield and I didn’t have a license—but that didn’t stop me from searching every dirt road in the colony. I drove off the farm to go look for my brother. The sky was ablaze in spectacular shades of orange, red, and plum, and the warm wind blew in my face. I spotted Luke on the gravel road that led to our house, and when I stopped to let him in, he wore a goofy smile as if he were the happiest boy on the planet. His messy hair was peppered with dry, yellow hay, he had dirt underneath his fingernails and embedded in his cuticles, and fresh mud was on the bottoms of his tennis shoes. I wanted to tell him to brush himself off before getting in the truck, but then I realized the truck was even filthier than he was.

  The sherbet sky faded into darkness as my tires splashed through the wide, shallow ditch at the foot of our long driveway. The lights in the house were already on, and the door to the kitchen was wide-open, allowing the light from inside to illuminate a nighttime game of marbles outside in the dirt. I parked a few feet from three little figures huddled over a crooked circle with their faces close to the ground. I watched Aaron flick a marble at Micah’s with his thumb. Elena was only three years old and didn’t have any of her own marbles, but she knelt next to four-year-old Micah anyway, not being the sort to let those details stand in the way of her participation. Their eyes followed Aaron’s marble as it struck the last marble and knocked it outside the circle. I turned off my headlights as Micah squeezed his eyes closed and threw his head back. “Oh, mannnnn,” he sighed with a shy smile, “that was my last marble.”

  “Time to get inside,” I said as I shut the rickety truck door. Micah followed Aaron through the kitchen threshold with his head lowered and his hands buried deep inside his empty pockets. Micah was the quietest child in our whole brood, also the most tenderhearted and sensitive, a lot like the way Grandma had described Mom as a little girl. Both were the background figures, the unsqueaky wheels in their families.

  In a family where meekness was discouraged in males, my heart went out to Micah, and I found myself being overprotective of him in a way I hadn’t been with my other siblings. Luke, Audrey, and Meri all had crosses to bear, but Micah seemed fragile in a different way. I would watch him through the window while he rode his little blue bike or wrap him in a towel after his bath to keep him from touching the electrified water pipe. It made me nervous when he and his siblings went swimming in the ditches and springs near our house, even though I knew that his older brothers usually watched out for him.

  But my number one worry was Luke. The other children listened and remembered when I told them not to touch something. He didn’t, and he was always getting shocked, and not just in the shower. Our property was a minefield, with clusters of bare wires visible everywhere, some even sprouting up from the ground like flower stems without blossoms. Once my bare foot was shocked when I was hanging laundry on the clothesline in our side yard, just outside the kitchen door. I stopped walking barefoot outside from that moment forward.

  On those weekends I was left in charge, I’d put dinner on the table and sit with my siblings as they ate. Once I was sure that no one had shocked him- or herself in the shower, I’d sometimes go out for the evening, putting Aaron in charge. I was fourteen years old and wanted nights out with my friends. Like Mom, I often felt the need to escape motherhood’s heavy responsibilities and uncertainties.

  Most of my friends were related to me in some way. I hung out with my half siblings, stepsisters, and cousins, and I even had aunts and uncles who were my age. I had a few local Mexican friends too. Most of us went to church on Sunday mornings, but on weekends, when we didn’t have a wedding or a rodeo to attend, we went dancing at discothèques in Casas. Because we were fundamentalists and had grown up in the church, our parents trusted us. We also had a lot of freedom because our parents were often working or traveling in the States. There were always so many young kids in the colony; by the time we were teenagers, no one was watching us closely.

  Drinking alcohol was a big part of the Mexican culture that surrounded the colony, and it seeped its way into our nightlife. Some members of our church never drank alcohol, but others served it at their weddings and parties. Mom always taught my siblings and me that Dad wasn’t a fanatic. He felt his followers and his children would find joy in making righteous choices the way he always did and thought they should be allowed to make choices for themselves. Mom and Lane never drank, but that didn’t stop me. I was drawn to other teenagers who went out a lot and drank alcohol. It was easy to buy, inexpensive, and I was never carded. Mom would have had a fit if she had known my friends and I were drinking, but it was easy to hide from her.

  On nights I was out with friends, I was always the designated driver, which didn’t mean that I didn’t drink; it just meant that I was the one with the truck. I’d drive all over the colony and pick up friends along the way, as many teens as the cab and bed would hold. We’d listen to Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” on my handheld cassette player while making our way to a dried-up riverbed about a mile outside LeBaron. To most of the colony, the riverbed was a dumping ground, a place to unload garbage, park rusted, broken-down cars, and leave old tires. For my friends and me, it was a place without limitations, where a fourteen-year-old girl could do doughnuts in a pickup truck while she and her friends drank cheap Presidente brandy with Coke and a wedge of lime.

  My friends and I took turns behind the wheel, practicing
peeling out and driving on and off the roads, creating clouds of dust when we spun our wheels. We’d turn our headlights off and speed through the dark under the crescent moonlight, tempting fate on the rugged terrain—once or twice barely escaping serious accidents because of the huge holes in the ground that were big enough to swallow up the small truck.

  Then, we’d park the truck at the riverbed and finish off the bottle of Presidente with lukewarm Cokes. My friends and I would drink and talk late into the night about our crushes and love interests. From there, the conversation often turned to who would get married next—some of my friends were already engaged to their teenage sweethearts and planning weddings—and our opinions on polygamy. We knew that it was a cornerstone of church doctrine, something that our parents believed in fervently, but most of us rejected it. A few young girls happily anticipated their futures as polygamist wives to older men, but they were the exception. Most of my friends thought it repellent that the boys we had crushes on would end up marrying us and someone else. We wanted lives more like those we saw on TV, which had made its way to us despite our parents’ best efforts to shield us from the influence of pop culture. But our rebellion against polygamy came from another source too: nearly all of us had witnessed our mothers’ jealous fits and conflicts with sister wives, which had done nothing to improve our opinion of the practice.

  After an evening of such cathartic discussion, I would drive everyone home and then return to my own house, still half-drunk. My siblings would be in bed, asleep in their clothes, their feet and hands dusty from playing outside all day.

  One night, as my tired, drunken head hit the cold pillow, my brothers and sister breathing slowly, snoring or talking in their sleep in the next room, I heard the roar of thunder in the distance and became consumed by the thought of how vulnerable my siblings were with me in charge; of how vulnerable we all were in a house where bent nails were what protected us from a stranger’s invasion, where, if we experienced any sort of emergency, the nearest telephone was a mile away. I tried to quiet my mind with a silent prayer for protection.