by Webb, Betty
“Let’s wait and see.” Leaving Ruby fuming into the dishwater, Saul ushered me to into the living room. “It’s just more bullshit,” he said, as we sat down on the sofa. “These damned polygamy prophets are always having what they call ‘revelations,’ so who knows what crack-brained stuff we’ll hear this time. The ‘revelation’ will probably turn out to be more about money than anything else. They like to talk God around here, but it’s money and sex that really get their knickers in a twist.”
He looked at his watch. “Tell you what. The meeting won’t start until ten, so why don’t you take a walk around the compound and familiarize yourself with things. But don’t challenge anybody like you just did Ruby, okay?”
I bit my lip. “Yes, sir, Brother Saul.”
He cackled, then slapped me on the rump. “Attagirl.”
I left the house with a feeling of relief, swearing that when I got back, I’d have a little talk with hubby and remind him to keep his hands to himself. For now I relished the chance to explore the compound in broad daylight, something I hadn’t been able to do during my days in the canyon.
There were fewer people abroad than I expected. Judging from the dearth of pickup trucks, some of the men had probably been working in the distant fields since sunup. Most of the children were in school. Just about the only sign of life I saw, other than the odd skinny dog or two, was a straggly line of people winding their way along the dirt pathway toward the kitchen gardens. Some carried baskets, some hoes. When I grew closer, I made out at least a dozen pregnant teenagers and a smattering of elderly men and women.
Suddenly the front door of one of the trailers located near the chicken runs slammed open. A man and four women, all dressed in Purity’s turn-of-the-century garb, emerged to hurry after the gardeners. The man, heavy to the point of obesity, looked at least seventy. Three of the women with him were elderly, too. But the last woman!
Not yet forty, and although her waist had thickened, probably with repeated childbirth, she dazzled like a Nordic goddess. Platinum hair and sky-blue eyes intensified this Valkyrie image, while a rosebud mouth and small, straight nose lent softness to what might have otherwise been an almost masculine physicality. The old man’s daughter?
As I watched, the man stopped, reached around her waist and drew her to him. While the other women pursed their lips with disapproval, he gave her a slobbering kiss she didn’t return.
I shuddered in sympathy. In any other setting, Beauty would probably have been covered in diamonds instead of faded calico, but here in Purity she’d wound up in the rustiest trailer in the compound. Hers was hardly a love match, either. Judging from the way Beauty cringed away from Beast’s kiss, she detested him. Not that Beast noticed—or cared. When he finally came up for air, I saw a look of utter self-satisfaction on his face.
The romantic interlude over (was Beast trying to make his other wives jealous?), the group resumed their hurried pace toward the garden. For a minute I thought about following them, then decided not to. The whole scene was too depressing.
Instead, I walked behind the group of trailers to the livestock pens, clucking at the chickens, mooing at the cows. Still calling sweet nothings to the baffled livestock, I rounded the corner of a shed and saw a boy of about fourteen throwing flakes of hay into a goat pen.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I asked, before I remembered that Saul had told me not to speak to anyone until I’d been spoken to, and definitely not to challenge any male, however young.
The boy jerked, dropping the hay outside the pen, which made the two goats inside bleat in irritation. Then he caught himself, scooped up the hay and threw it into the pen.
“Sister, you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.” His voice began as a baritone but finished as a soprano.
I would have smiled, but the expression on his face was a study in despair. “Sorry about that. I’m Lena, Brother Saul’s new wife.”
His voice rocked and rolled for a moment, then settled down in the alto range. “I’m Brother Meade Royal. Pleased to meet you, Sister Lena. And not that it’s any concern of yours, but I’m taking a little time off school this week.” With his pale blond hair and vivid blue eyes, he was a younger version of the Valkyrie I’d seen being so unpleasantly mauled.
I pointed toward the rusty trailer. “You live there?”
He nodded. “Me and my mom, we just moved in. My father’s…” A sniffle.
Boys his age never want you to see them cry, so I studied a ground squirrel scampering in a zigzag pattern across the ground.
After a few noisy gulps, Meade regained control. “My father died and Mother had to get married again. Brother Vern had a spare trailer so the Circle of Elders gave her to him.”
Royal. “Was your father Prophet Solomon, by any chance?”
“Yeah. He was murdered. The police caught the woman who did it.” He looked ready to howl with grief.
What a life. “I’m sorry, Brother Meade.”
He thrust out his chin. “Why be sorry? Father Prophet attained the highest level of Heaven and we should be jubilant.” However, reciting the party line didn’t keep a tear from slipping down his cheek.
I wanted to hug the poor child, but since he was trying so desperately to act manful, I restrained myself. No wonder he wasn’t in school. His mother probably thought goat-tending would be more therapeutic than algebra, a pretty good judgment call in my estimation.
His mother’s hasty remarriage didn’t seem like such a good judgment call, however. Saul said the Circle of Elders encouraged widows to remarry as soon as possible, but this was overdoing it. Solomon had been dead, what, a little over a week? For that matter, why did a woman as beautiful as Meade’s mother plummet from being the wife of a wealthy prophet to the wife of a trailer dweller?
I had started to question him further when the crack of a rifle shot echoed across the compound and made me jump half out of my Reeboks.
Brother Meade walked over and patted my arm. “Don’t be scared, Sister Lena. It’s all right. That’s just the men hunting down in the canyon. Fried rabbit’s delicious. If you’ve never had any, you ought to try it.”
I like a nice steak, but the thought of nibbling on some cute little bunny depressed me. “I think I’ll give it a pass. Well, Brother Meade, it was nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll see you later at the community meeting. I’ll be at the first session, how about you?”
“Yeah, first session.” I returned to my walk, leaving him with his goats. The warming day made me long for Paiute Canyon’s deep shade. Purity’s flat terrain, bordered by the glaring Vermillion Cliffs, served as little more than a heat sink for the sun’s rays, and by the time I wandered back to the central dirt circle, sweat stained the underarms of my long-sleeved dress.
Apparently the day wasn’t too hot for the few tow-headed toddlers who began filtering from their hotel-sized homes to play with the battered toys littering the grounds.
Threading my way through them, I noticed that the least rundown houses were situated on the Utah side of the border, the poorest houses in Arizona. Also in Utah stood the large schoolhouse and next to it, a two-story, warehouse-sized building whose wooden sign bragged “Purity Health Clinic.” Fifty miles was too far to drive when a child needed immediate care, so this made sense. Still, what kind of medical care could the clinic really offer? I doubted the compound had its own doctor.
While I stared at the clinic, which was really no more elegant than the usual Purity Garbage Dump Modern, a man exited and walked briskly toward a gabled house that peeked through a stand of cottonwood and mesquite on the edge of the canyon. What I could see of the house looked almost elegant, but then so did the man. In his prime, the man stood well over six feet tall and had the broad shoulders of a movie idol. His pale blond hair, glossy as corn silk, revealed the same Nordic ancestors as the Valkyrie’s, as did his eyes, which were the color of sky-reflecting fjords. His blue eyes perfectly matched his bright, high-ne
ck shirt, making me suspect there might be a touch of vanity there. If so, he came by it honestly, because I’d never seen such a good-looking man, and I’d seen plenty in my time.
“That’s Prophet Davis,” a girl’s voice said. “Handsome, isn’t he?”
I turned to see a girl of around fifteen, her own considerable looks undiminished by her red-rimmed eyes and stained apron. Like other teenaged girls who’d drifted into Prophet’s Park, she held a struggling toddler by the hand.
“He’s a hunk!” I blurted, then slapped my hand over my mouth. Busted again.
The girl just smiled. “We’re not supposed to notice a man’s appearance. The body is just the physical casing for the soul. That’s what the Gospel According to Solomon says, anyway. But the girls still stare.” As she bent to pick up the toddler, a book fell out of her apron.
Since her arms were full of wriggling two-year-old, I reached down and retrieved it. A new paperback copy of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.
“You’re studying this in school?” I asked, surprised. Wait a minute. She wasn’t in school. Neither were any of the other teenagers in the park. Then I remembered Saul telling me the compound’s girls weren’t expected to attend school after the age of fourteen because they were needed as babysitters or wives. Sometimes they received their G.E.D., but usually not.
She grabbed the book and stuffed it back into her apron pocket. “Please don’t tell anyone you saw this, okay? Brother Saul picks these up when he’s in town, but we have to keep it a secret. Mom would have a fit if she knew I read such nasty books.”
Nasty books? Doctorow? Well, of course. A community which didn’t let its women and children watch television certainly wouldn’t allow free access to literature. But I simply said, “Doctorow’s not that all that racy.”
Her eyes lit up. “You’ve actually read Doctorow?”
“Sure. We studied him in my American Lit class. My favorite was The Book of Daniel, but I liked Ragtime, too, even though the lack of dialogue just about drove me crazy. By the way, I’m Lena…uh, Sister Lena. And you are…?”
Her face, rapt while listening to my discussion of Doctorow, flushed. “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. I’m Sister Cynthia. Brother Davis is my brother, my blood brother. Half-brother, anyway. We have the same father.”
That explained her red eyes. “Then you’re Prophet Solomon’s daughter.”
More gunfire, followed by a shout. Some poor bunny rabbit just bought the farm. But this time I was ready for the noise and hardly reacted.
“One of his daughters,” Cynthia said. “I have forty-eight sisters and fifty-four brothers.”
Somehow I kept my eyes from popping out of my head. The dead Prophet had been a randy old sod, but judging from the three offspring I’d seen, he’d either been a good-looking man himself or married the most beautiful women in the compound. Probably the latter, I decided. Like rock stars, prophets attracted the prettiest groupies.
“I’m very sorry about your father.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
“I met your other brother a few minutes ago, and he’s taking it pretty rough.” Then I remembered her dozens of brothers. “I’m talking about Meade.”
Her eyes looked away from mine, and she plucked at the plastic buttons on the bodice of her pale pink granny dress. “We have different mothers. Meade was close to Father Prophet, closer than I was, ’cause I’m just a girl.”
Just a girl. Just a girl who had E. L. Doctorow smuggled into a polygamy compound. I wondered how many other bright young women were leading lives of quiet desperation. But there was nothing I could do about that now.
“Ah, I heard that your father was found in the canyon,” I said. “Do you think it was a hunting accident?”
She murmured a few words to the toddler, then set him down. “They say it was murder, that a woman killed him, but I don’t know. He liked to hunt for rabbits and stuff, so when he didn’t come home for dinner, most of us thought that was what he was doing. But the men say he’d already started back home when that woman, when she…”
“When she killed him?” I finished for her. “But why…”
Before I could finish, a nearby child screamed and we both turned around. A little girl had tripped over an abandoned tire and lay struggling in the dirt. Cynthia ran forward and picked her up.
“Hush, sweetie,” she murmured, as she tended to her scraped knee. “I’ll kiss it and make it well.”
The girl sobbed into Cynthia’s apron for a few minutes, then finally ran off to rejoin her playmates, giving the tire she’d tripped over a wide berth.
“You’d think the men would haul this junk away,” I said, gesturing to the tire, the junked cars, the other litter. “It’s not safe.”
“You’d think.” For the first time her voice sounded bitter. “Last week one of the little boys slashed his leg on that old car over there.” She pointed to a rusting sedan which looked ancient enough to have been driven by Henry Ford himself. “I carried him over to the clinic and it took fifteen stitches to close the wound.”
“The clinic has a doctor?”
“No, but Sister Lovey and Sister Judith can both sew up cuts. They’re teaching me, too. I’d really like to be a doctor, but only boys get to go to college, and they study law. You know, to help out with Purity’s legal stuff. I wish…” Her voice trailed off.
I would have followed up, but my job here was to find out who killed Prophet Solomon, not investigate the level of Purity’s medical care. Changing the subject, I said, “I’ve heard so many wonderful things about the prophet, so why would that woman want to kill such a great man?”
Her pretty face, which had momentarily lightened as she tended to the child, darkened again. “From what I heard, he wanted to marry Esther’s daughter. Esther’s the woman they think killed him. Anyway, she didn’t want that. She’d moved to Phoenix and they say she grew away from the church.”
I played dumb. “If Esther didn’t live here, why was her daughter here?”
“Abel, Esther’s husband, returned to the church. Leaving Purity, coming back, it’s not that unusual for the young men. They have trouble finding wives, so they try other places. Father Prophet did the same thing when he was younger, but he came back, too. His parents called him the Prodigal Son, just like in the Bible.”
I tried to hurry her along. “If Abel returned, why didn’t his wife come back, too?”
“She divorced him. She’d been infected by the Outside. That made him pretty mad so he drove to Scottsdale, that’s somewhere near Phoenix, and got his daughter.”
“You mean he kidnapped her?”
She blinked at my question. “Oh, no! You can’t kidnap your own child.”
I could have disabused her of that idea, but decided instead to take the conversation as far as possible. Unlike most teenagers I’d known back in Scottsdale, she was amazingly pliable. A sign of innocence? Or had she been taught to respect her elders no matter what goofy things they said or did?
“You know, Cynthia, I think I remember reading something about this in the papers! That girl your father wanted to marry, wasn’t she only thirteen?”
She looked at the Vermillion Cliffs, so red this morning they appeared to be on fire. “When a girl is old enough to have babies, she’s supposed to get married. I’ll have to get married soon, too. My mother’s been nagging me about it for a long time now.”
So no medical school. “How old are you?”
“I’ll be sixteen in a couple of months. That’s pretty late to get married around here.”
“Sure seems young to me.”
When she faced me, her face was as troubled as her voice. “Solomon’s Gospel says women must be fruitful if they want to attain Highest Heaven.” But she didn’t sound convinced. Maybe she’d discovered other interpretations of life’s purpose in all those nasty Doctorow novels.
“Sister Cynthia, don’t you think…”
A woman screa
med. Both Cynthia and I looked toward the mesquite grove where the sound seemed to have originated.
The woman screamed again. Then a man shouted, “It’s Prophet Davis! He’s been shot!”
After a quick glance toward the toddlers, who had already fled for the safety of closer girls, Cynthia, as pale as her apron, picked up her skirts and ran toward the canyon. I followed, soon passing her, even though my hip had stiffened through lack of exercise. When we reached the mesquite grove, we found a crowd gathered around an irate Prophet Davis, who, as it turned out, was fine. But his bright blue shirt hadn’t been so lucky.
“This is inexcusable!” he snapped, fingering a bullet hole in his shirt sleeve. “I could have been killed! Who’s responsible for this?”
No one came forward to admit culpability.
“Come on, out with it! Which one of you was stupid enough to shoot up from the canyon, rather than along it?”
The women stopped their twittering, the men their grumbling. Some, relieved that no blood had spilled, drifted away. I heard one hunter say to his companion, “Well, you gotta expect a bullet hole or two when you build your house so close to the brush. He’s the stupid one, if you ask me.”
One of the women, yet another pretty blond, pulled at him. “Let me get you inside, make sure you’re okay.”
He brushed her hand away, though not unkindly. “I’m fine, Sissy, but I’d better change my shirt. No point in showing up at the meeting looking like something left over from target practice.”
Giving one last furious glance at the remaining crowd, he called out, “If I catch whoever did this, I’ll make sure his gun privileges are revoked for a month!”
Cynthia shook her head. “He’s fine, so let’s get back to the park. I’ve already been away from those kids too long. Who knows what they’ve managed to do to themselves by now.”
When we arrived back at Prophet’s Park, the other teenagers, less curious about Prophet Davis’s narrow escape, had taken up the slack. None of the children had sustained any more bumps or cuts.