by Webb, Betty
The room heaved a collective sigh of relief, not the least of which came from Davis Royal.
“We must pray for Brother Jacob.” Davis’s voice sounded shaky. Then, recovering, he said, “Now let’s get this meeting back on track. Does anyone else have information that they might share about our recent tragedy? Anything we can tell the police in order to expedite the investigation and trial?”
So that we can get the cops and the media off our backs as quickly as possible, went the unspoken message.
“As much as it pains me to say this about a woman, Esther did always have a temper,” Martha Royal offered, her Valkyrie face serene in its condemnation. “She was never a Godly child. Why, once I even saw her strike one of her brothers.”
Davis lifted his eyebrows, aghast, no doubt, at such an unwomanly act. “When was this, Sister Martha?”
“Some years ago. Esther was around ten, I believe.”
Earl Graff called out, “She showed her true colors even as a child!”
Oh, give me a break. What little girl hasn’t hauled off and socked somebody at some point in her life? Maybe her brother had pulled her pigtails.
After Martha’s damning accusation, one by one the other members of the compound offered to testify about Esther’s evil ways at her trial. By the time everyone had spoken, Rebecca’s mother had been accused of breaking each of the Ten Commandments, bedding Satan himself, drinking babies’ blood during Black Masses, and funding abortion clinics. If Esther ever came up for trial, her goose was well and truly cooked. Abel Corbett would regain custody of his daughter and whisk Rebecca back to the compound in a heartbeat.
As I anguished over Rebecca’s possible fate, I heard a groan, then a scraping back of chairs several rows in front of me. The groan was followed by a small shriek.
“Oh, Jesus!” A girl’s voice.
I stood so that I could see over the heads in front of me. The cries had come from Rosalinda, Earl Graff’s very pregnant young wife.
Graff stayed with the other men in the corner, but Davis stepped away from the lectern and hurried to her. Bending over, he said, “Sister Rosalinda? Is it your time? Do you need to go to the clinic?”
She clutched at his arm. “Yes! Yes! Please! Take me to the clinic!”
Davis snapped his fingers and several women rushed to Rosalinda’s side. Between them, they were able to get the girl to her feet and out the door.
Earl Graff never moved.
Chapter 10
Shortly thereafter, the meeting broke up and the group dispersed, the women to their homes and the men back to whatever jobs called them. As Saul and I stood on Davis’s huge front porch briefly enjoying the fresh air, I looked toward the clinic and saw several women hovering outside. A scream drifted through the open door.
“They’re not taking that girl to Zion City Hospital?” I asked.
He grunted. “Old Solomon didn’t think much of modern medicine, that’s why he built the clinic. That girl will deliver her baby right here with the midwives.”
I frowned. Although I was familiar with Arizona’s midwife training program, I knew nothing about Utah’s. Rosalinda seemed much too young to have her first baby away from a modern hospital with all the emergency equipment it could provide, not to mention some industrial strength painkillers.
Another scream rent the air. “Saul, what if there are complications?”
“Yeah, what if?”
When we stepped off the porch, I noticed Meade Royal in the yard, chatting with a girl about his age. A white-blond, like so many others in Purity, she nevertheless stood out because of the sublimity of her features. If she ever ran away from the compound, she could run straight to Hollywood, where casting directors would greet her beauty with open arms.
Meade smiled at me, his morning depression vanished. Ah, the resiliency of youth. “Sister Lena, this is Cora, my sister. My real sister, I mean. Not that the rest of you aren’t, uh…” He trailed off, his face red.
I laughed. “I know exactly what you mean, Brother Meade. Hello, Sister Cora. It’s nice to meet you.”
She said nothing and her eyes appeared oddly blank.
Meade gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “Sister Cora, say, ‘It’s nice to meet you, too, Sister Lena.’”
The girl did as she was told, then turned to him and asked slowly, “Did…did I s-say it right?”
He beamed at her. “You sure did!”
I wasn’t quite as buoyed by Cora’s performance. Her lack of affect made me wonder if she might be mildly retarded.
Saul spoke up, interrupting my thoughts. “I don’t know about you, Sister Lena, but I’m starved. How about we hurry back to the house and get something to eat?”
Now that he mentioned it, I was surprised to discover hunger nibbling at my belly, too. I waved goodbye to Meade and his sister, and followed Saul back to the house, careful to stay three paces behind.
Ruby waited for us on the porch. Ignoring my presence, she spoke directly to Saul. “I’m happy you have returned, Brother Saul. Lunch is on the table.” But she looked more irritated than happy, which make me realize she didn’t like to cook any more than I did.
Well, I couldn’t fault her there. “That’s very kind of you, Sister Ruby.”
She dismissed my compliment and turned a smile upon Saul, making me look down to hide my own grin. If nothing else, my presence in the compound had apparently made Ruby come alive. Nothing like a good case of jealousy to make a woman feel like a woman again.
Lunch sat on the table, all right, but if it was possible to screw up chicken sandwiches, Ruby had discovered how. Rubbery pieces of chicken, skin and fat still attached, lurked between slices of stale, mayonnaise-drenched white bread. Like any true passive-aggressive, Ruby had found an innocent-looking way to punish us for making her “cook.”
As before, Saul didn’t appear to understand what was really going on. I watched with disbelief as he picked up a particularly nasty-looking specimen and gnawed at it. The pained look on his face told me all I needed to know.
I refused to eat the mess. “Um, I really appreciate this, Ruby, but I think I’ll just have a salad. After that big breakfast we had this morning, I’m not all that hungry.”
I scurried to the refrigerator and found a yellowing head of iceberg lettuce and, hiding behind a soured container of milk, a generic bottle of Russian dressing. Yum, yum. Nasty as it was, the goop I organized looked tastier than Ruby’s sandwiches. Still, visions of savory Ramen noodles danced in my head. “You know, Brother Saul, I think a little grocery shopping might be in order,” I said, finally putting down my fork.
“Might not be a bad idea. Tell you what, I’ve got a two o’clock appointment with my attorney in Zion City anyway, so why don’t you just drive in with me?”
The idea of leaving the compound, even for a few hours, was appealing, but the thought of Esther sitting in her jail cell awaiting extradition weighed against it.
“I’ll make up a shopping list.” I began writing. RAMEN CHINESE NOODLES, MICHELINA’S TV DINNERS, BLUE BUNNY BUTTER PECAN ICE CREAM…
A few minutes later, Saul’s truck bumped down the dirt road, leaving me alone with a woman who hated my guts.
“It’s so good to have you in the family, Sister Lena,” Ruby murmured, handing me a broom. “The housework has been such a burden.”
While I glumly swept the kitchen twice in the same day, I wondered how often scenes such as these repeated themselves whenever a polygamist husband dragged home a new wife. A powerless woman was an angry woman, and an angry woman always found a way to exact her revenge.
Ruby wasn’t through giving me a hard time. “Sister Lena, I am a light sleeper, and I noticed that you didn’t visit our husband last night. Chastity after marriage is not God’s will for a woman.”
And here I thought I’d been so clever. I gripped the broom and tried to think of a suitable lie. It didn’t take my devious brain long to find one. With al
l the old Biblical rules and regulations running amok in Purity, surely intercourse during menstruation was verboten as hell.
“It’s the curse, Ruby. My time of month. But I am certainly eager to take up my wifely duties as soon as I can. Uh, speaking of chastity after marriage, though, our husband told me that you two aren’t exactly burning up the sheets, either.”
I thought her eyes would pop from shock.
“I have a, a medical condition,” she stammered. “And anyway, unlike you I am past childbearing age. We in Purity never copulate for mere enjoyment.”
Oh, sure. That’s why thirteen-year-old girls were so popular with sixty-year-old men!
The subject needed changing, and fast. “Um, just how well did you know poor Prophet Solomon?” I asked, enveloping Ruby in a cloud of dust as I swept fiercely toward her. Two could play that old passive-aggressive game.
She coughed, stepping out of my path. “I knew him as well as anyone, I guess. The prophet was a great man.”
“That’s what Saul told me.”
Ruby gave me an strange look. “Really? I thought our husband hated the prophet. You know, don’t you, that Prophet Solomon was the one who originally demanded that Saul leave the compound, not the Circle of Elders.”
I nodded, and to keep her talking, swept a little less briskly. “I’m sure you know that you can admire someone while still disagreeing with them.”
The concept of loyal opposition appeared to be new to Ruby, for her lumpy little face assumed a look of horror. “That’s impossible. To disagree with Solomon was to disagree with God. That’s not admiration, it’s blasphemy! I warned our husband about that many, many times, but you know how men are. They don’t listen to women.”
When the woman was right, she was right. In the listening department, men weren’t much different on the Outside.
I don’t know why I asked the next question, but I did. “By the way, did Saul by any chance have words with the prophet the day he died?”
She looked out the kitchen window, which she had closed against the dust that covered everything in the compound. The Vermillion Cliffs loomed in the distance and she made a big show of looking at them. “No.”
“How about you? Surely you didn’t agree with everything Prophet Solomon ever said.”
The cliffs lost their interest and Ruby returned her gaze to me. When she spoke, her words were frosty. “As I told you, Sister Lena, Prophet Solomon spoke for God.”
And to disagree with the prophet was to disagree with God. I didn’t want to let her off the hook so easily. “Ruby, if Saul is evicted from Purity, what’ll you do? Will you leave with us or stay here? You know the Circle of Elders will give this house away to someone else. Then what would happen to you?”
Perhaps Ruby believed that with Solomon dead, Saul would stay in Purity. I knew better. He’d already told me the old prophet’s death had made no difference to the Circle of Elders, that Davis himself wanted to get his hands on the house, if not to live in, to use as a bargaining chip to accrue more wives.
Ruby didn’t answer my question right away. When she finally did, her voice sounded faint. “Women are never abandoned in Purity. I will always have a home here. Just maybe not in the same house.”
“But Ruby, think about what’s happening now! If Saul loses his court case and insists that you and I leave with him, don’t we have to do what our husband commands? What with husbands speaking for God, and all that shi…uh, stuff.”
The confusion on her face was almost comical. “But God… But husbands…” Her voice trailed off.
A new thought popped into my mind and flew out of my mouth before I could do anything about it. “Sister Ruby, what happened to your first husband?”
“Gaynell? He died. It was a long time ago.”
“How did he die?”
She looked down at the floor, and I couldn’t read her face any more. “He just died.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“Doctor?” She looked at me with unease. “Prophet Solomon said the Lord is the only doctor we need. When Gaynell got sick, we took him over to the clinic, where the Circle of Elders prayed for him.” She paused for a few seconds, then added, “In the end, the Lord lifted my husband up to Heaven.”
No doctor. While I wasn’t surprised that old Solomon and the Circle of Elders believed a women’s ailments could be dealt with by prayer, it hadn’t occurred to me they felt the same way about men’s ailments. At least they were consistent. Then I had another thought. Had an autopsy been performed, a procedure mandated by the state of Utah in the event of sudden death? Before I could figure out how to ask this indelicate question, Ruby scuttled out of the kitchen. Then I heard the door to her room squeak shut.
Call me suspicious, but I wondered which of Purity’s men had inherited Gaynell’s house. And how Ruby had felt about it.
I leaned against the broom and looked out the window at the landscape that had so fascinated my sister wife. Red cliffs, blue sky, your typical Utah postcard. But the very intensity of the colors now seemed almost artificial, like a Disney cartoon. And wasn’t that a fitting description of the compound and everyone in it? When you didn’t look too closely, life appeared picture perfect here: happy, God- fearing families revolving around a stern-but-fair patriarch. God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world. But a closer examination of the pretty picture revealed institutionalized child molestation, property seizures, and unexplained deaths. The Disney cartoon was really a Tim Burton grotesquerie.
I shook the image out of my head and swept some more, but my heart wasn’t in it. Housework and I had never been close friends, which is why back in Scottsdale I’d memorized the phone number of Merry Maids. No doubt Prophet Solomon wouldn’t approve of my sloth, but the prophet wasn’t around anymore, was he? Then I thought of his replacement, Davis Royal. Big hands, broad shoulders, bottomless blue eyes a woman could drown in.
Damn that dirty-minded Ruby for bringing up sex. For a while I thought of Dusty. Had he returned to the ranch yet? I remembered our nights together, the way his hands slid along…
The temperature in the kitchen rose considerably, so I opened the back door to let in a breeze, which worked all too well. The pile of red dust my broom had swept lifted off the floor and dispersed itself once again around the room. In disgust I threw down the broom. Thirty minutes of housework was enough for any woman, and I needed some real exercise. Back in Scottsdale I ran almost every day, but since arriving in Utah I’d been a sloth, and I could feel my muscles atrophying. I called to Ruby that I’d be back shortly, and without waiting for her answer, hurried out the door.
As I crossed the dirt circle of Prophet’s Park into Utah, I noted that the compound seemed almost deserted again. Then I heard children’s voices coming from the school. One of the most decrepit buildings in the settlement, the school looked like it had been patched together with throwaway lumber. The three-story structure didn’t sit quite square on its cracked foundation, but unlike most of the buildings in Purity, the school at least had windows—such as they were. Sheets of clear plastic substituted for glass, and all the windows were open to the heat of the day. I glanced up at the roof and saw a profusion of missing shingles but no air conditioner. Did they close the school when the temperature rose above one hundred? If so, they’d probably close it within minutes. Or maybe the kids would just swelter.
Maybe things would improve at the school when Prophet Davis initiated his reforms. A bitter chuckle at my own foolish hopes slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it. I began to hurry past the building, but as I slipped by one of the open windows, I heard something that stopped me in my tracks.
“The Great Mother is the mother most beloved by our Great Father,” piped a child’s innocent voice. “Because of the Great Mother’s earthly sacrifice for her community, He allows her to ascend to the highest level of Heaven.”
I raised my eyebrows. Religious instruction in a public s
chool? Then I remembered. For the past few years, the polygamists had operated their own school system.
My urge to flee squelched, I stood on tiptoe and peeked in the window. The children, an almost equal mixture of girls and boys, appeared to be seven or eight years old. The teacher, an elderly woman with Coke-bottle bifocals, wore the compound’s de rigueur faded ankle-length dress. It looked a hundred years old, but then again, so did she.
“How does the Great Mother earn her title, Sylvia?” the teacher asked.
“By giving birth to as many souls as possible,” little Sylvia answered. With her blond hair, big blue eyes, and almost albino-pale skin, she could have been the clone of at least ninety percent of her schoolmates.
The teacher’s smile took in the entire room. “Excellent, Sylvia. I am certain all you little girls will grow up to become Great Mother, assuring your places in Highest Heaven. Remember the law of God: no children, no Heaven. And you boys, you must do your part to enable these little ladies to enter Highest Heaven, because without your seed, Satan will find them and carry them away to the Underworld, where they’ll burn forever in the Eternal Fire with all the other sinful, childless women.”
Seed? Eternal Fire? Sinful, childless women? Holy literal shit!
“Boys, will you do your part?” the teacher asked again.
The boys responded enthusiastically. They yelled “Yes, ma’am!” and stomped their feet. Suddenly, the schoolroom full of innocents sounded like a troop ship nearing some sleazy third-world port. My stomach lurched. Those children were too young to truly understand what they were being taught but they weren’t too young to be brainwashed.
My original idea had been to jog along the dirt road that led north through the fields, but after what I’d just heard I wanted cover. So I left the road and headed into the canyon as fast as I could, and didn’t relax until its high walls rose above me, effectively shutting Purity out.
The rough path Rebecca and I had taken during our escape lay to the southeast, paralleling the dirt road to Zion City. When the compound had originally built the road, they had merely dumped the debris of rocks, boulders and dirt down into the canyon. The litter there made running difficult, but the northern branch of the canyon remained relatively smooth. As I walked along, the terrain flattened enough so that I could hitch up my long skirts and break into a slow jog.