Desert Wives (9781615952267)

by Webb, Betty

“Sister Lena, you’d better get out here,” Saul called.

  I dried my hands and walked into the living room. Waiting for me were Davis Royal, looking more blond-on-blond gorgeous than ever, and ugly old Earl Graff. Saul had his fists balled as if ready to take a swing at Earl, but Davis had positioned himself between the two. Smart man. Sister Ruby, who’d emerged from her room, completed the party. She stood watching from the corner, her face blank.

  “I try to get away to do some work on behalf of the compound, and things fall apart,” Royal said, sounding aggrieved. “Sister Lena, Brother Earl has leveled a serious charge against you.”

  “Bitch hit me,” Graff growled, his jowls trembling with rage. Was it my wishful thinking or had his nose already swelled to twice its size?

  I took a step toward him, and he shrank back, a protective hand covering his nose. “Only because you hit me first, Brother Earl.”

  Was it my imagination, or did I see a twitch at the corner of Royal’s gorgeous mouth? “Brother Earl, you didn’t say anything about that. Is it true? Did you hit Sister Lena?”

  Saul gestured toward me. I noticed that his fists were still clenched. “Look at her eye, Brother Davis. She sure didn’t do that to herself.”

  Royal approached me. I’m a tall woman, but he had to stoop while he examined the area around my eye. His handsome face was so close to mine that I could smell mint on his breath. My knees began to buckle. But he gave my cheek a final soft caress and stepped back before I could make a complete fool of myself.

  “Brother Graff, I haven’t heard your answer.”

  Graff shuffled his feet for a few seconds, then finally muttered, “The woman needed correcting.”

  “So you hit her.”

  “Like I said…” Graff sounded like a weasel with laryngitis.

  “I heard what you said the first time, Brother Graff. You don’t need to repeat it.” Royal’s voice was still mild, but his blue eyes had grown cold.

  I tried to explain myself. “Brother Davis, Sheriff Benson brought Sister Cynthia back, but she said she didn’t want to marry Brother Earl, then Brother Earl threatened to punish her, so I said…”

  Royal raised his hand to silence me. To my surprise, I shut up.

  He turned to Graff. “It doesn’t matter how great you felt the provocation was, Brother Earl, I will not have violence in Purity. I will not have violence of any kind, especially not against women.”

  Graff’s jowls trembled as he nodded his head.

  Royal wasn’t through. “Yes, I know that under my father’s leadership, it was sometimes thought necessary to correct our beloved sisters when they stepped out of line, but this is a new day, and there is new revelation. If you have trouble with any of Purity’s women, and you do not feel you can handle that trouble without violence, you are to come to me. You will not strike any of them, not even your wives. Do you understand me, Brother Earl?”

  Graff went white at the change in Royal’s voice, and his own was barely audible when he replied, “Yes, I understand.”

  “One more thing, Brother Earl. Sister Cynthia is not yet sixteen. Do you remember what I said about marrying an underage girl?”

  Graff’s face looked like that of a child who had just lost his bag of candy to a tougher, bigger kid. “She’ll be sixteen in a couple of weeks. What’s the big deal?”

  “The law is the big deal, Brother Earl. The law.” Then he turned to me. “Sister Lena, you say Sister Cynthia does not want to marry Brother Earl?”

  Both Saul and I spoke at the same time. “That’s why she ran off.”

  I added, “She’s terrified of him! And with good reason!”

  Royal shook his head. “I don’t like this at all. Let’s say Sister Cynthia truly was of marriageable age. Granted, a young woman seldom knows her own mind, but when she shows outright fear of her intended husband, well, the situation obviously needs to be examined closely.”

  Did I hear right? Was Davis Royal actually going to help Cynthia? My hopes lifted, so I decided to crawl further out on my limb. “Brother Davis, I must tell you that Cynthia’s mother seems in favor of the marriage.”

  He shrugged. “What Sister Ermaline wants is of no consequence to me. She has her own sins to atone for.”

  What sins? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t dare.

  Deep in thought, Royal stood in the middle of the room, his muscular arms crossed over his broad chest. He looked like something you’d expect to see on the Acropolis. Just before I started to drool, he unfolded his arms and motioned to Earl Graff.

  “Come back to my house with me, Brother Earl. We have much to discuss.” Then he turned, nodded politely toward Saul and me, and ushered Graff out the door.

  Silence gripped the room for a moment, then Saul said, “Lena, don’t ever get yourself in a situation where you’re alone with Earl Graff.”

  I nodded, having seen the look Graff gave me as he left. “Do you think Royal might stop the marriage?”

  “Maybe. He seemed concerned about the situation.” Then he looked over at Ruby, who still sat quietly in the corner. “Sister Ruby, Sister Lena has had a very bad day, and I think it might be nice if you made dinner tonight for a change.”

  “But I’m supposed to do the laundry! And maybe in an emergency, some housework,” Ruby squeaked. “It’s not my job to cook!”

  Saul scowled. “It is today. We’ll eat at five. The instructions are on the side of the Ramen packages.”

  Face livid, Ruby rushed out of the living room and down the hall, stomping every inch of the way. She slammed her bedroom door so hard the photograph of Saul’s naval officer son fell off the wall.

  Rehanging the portrait, Saul said, “We need to talk, Sister Lena. Follow me to the bedroom.”

  Like a dutiful sister wife, Ruby had made his bed. She’d even smoothed out my own night dress and draped it across the bedspread. I was touched by this evidence of thoughtfulness until I realized she probably hoped I’d get pregnant as quickly as possible, and thus be easier to control.

  Saul perched on the bed, leaving the rocking chair to me.

  “Are we going to have another hot night, Brother Saul?” I quipped.

  He frowned. “If you don’t start watching your mouth, we might not have any nights left in Purity at all. Look, Lena, most of the men around here hate me, and now they’re beginning to hate you, too, yet you haven’t even come close to finding out who killed Prophet Solomon, have you?”

  “No, but…”

  He interrupted me. “I wasn’t going to tell you this because I didn’t want to worry you, but you’d better start seeing some action on this case, because both of us may be gone soon. Remember why I drove into town yesterday, before all the offal hit the fan?”

  I thought for a minute. “To see your attorney?”

  He nodded. “Well, he told me I’ll almost certainly lose my case, and even tried to get me to settle out of court.”

  My heart sank. “What kind of settlement?”

  “The compound’s attorneys have offered me ten thousand dollars to drop the case now and just walk away from the house.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “But this house has to be worth ten times that!”

  “Sure is, but the alternative is not only to lose everything, but to have to pay court costs, too. Apparently the agreement I signed with Solomon to hand over all my money in exchange for the ‘protection and friendship of Purity’ is legally binding.” His voice was steady, but his knuckles, as he knotted his hands into fists again, were white.

  “It can’t be!”

  He gave a hollow laugh. “That house where you’re learning how to cook? Well, I didn’t know this before, but my attorney says it used to belong to someone else before Solomon took it over and did all those add-ons. The folks that owned it originally, they had a falling out with the Purity Fellowship Foundation over the Social Security check issue, just like I did. They went to court, and they lost everything. They l
ost the house, their cows, their farm equipment, everything. They even wound up having to leave a bunch of older daughters and grandkids behind when they moved. They’re not even allowed to visit them now.”

  Saul didn’t have any children to leave behind, but losing the house you’d built with your own loving hands had to be tough. Still, he’d walked into the deal with his eyes wide open, the rules laid out before him in black and white on the contract every new member of the compound was ordered to sign.

  And he’d signed it.

  I sighed. “Maybe you should take the offer and salvage what you can. If you do, how long will you have before you have to be out of the compound?”

  “Thirty days.”

  Probably enough time for me to do what I needed to do, but my heart ached for Saul. Even if he was a murderer.

  “What will you do about Ruby?” I asked.

  “That’s up to her,” he said morosely.

  Ruby served boiled chicken sandwiches again for dinner, and I didn’t even attempt to eat them. Instead, I nuked myself some Ramen noodles, and when Saul requested it, nuked some for him, too. Ruby’s sandwiches sat congealing on the platter.

  After Ruby and I squabbled over who’d do the dishes and I lost, I finished them as quickly as I could. Then I left the house and walked around the compound in the fading light, admiring the flame-colored cliffs, enjoying the cool breeze wafting from Paiute Canyon. Cactus wrens called softly to one another, and in the distance, a coyote howled at the thin rising moon.

  The evening radiated peace. Men leaned against the rusting hulks in Prophet’s Park, talking softly to one another about the burdens of the day, while on the porches, their white-aproned wives stripped freshly picked green beans and tossed them into large kettles. I knew that in the poorest households, the beans would be boiled for hours with fatback and eaten as a main dish, the sparse meal rounded out by buttered slices of cornbread.

  In this dim light I couldn’t see the poor quality of the buildings, the drawn faces of the women, the pregnant bellies of girls who should be worrying about nothing more momentous than the latest boy band.

  And I heard the voices of the children, hundreds of them, laughing, singing. I was struck by how happy they all sounded. They were untouched by school shootings, random crime, or live broadcasts of terrorists acts. Their families, however peculiar, remained intact, and they had all the playmates they could wish for—most of them well-behaved. While their haphazard education and lack of knowledge of the way the world worked would handicap them on the Outside, they functioned well here. Each child knew exactly what kind of life lay in store for him or her. There was comfort in that, I supposed, but was it enough to offset the abuses I’d seen?

  A ball rolled toward my feet and I stooped down to pick it up.

  “Is this yours?” I asked a little red-headed girl I’d seen at one of the dining room tables in Ermaline’s house. She liked grape jam with her biscuits, no butter.

  The girl nodded, but made no move to take the ball from my outstretched hand. The children she’d been playing with suddenly formed themselves into a defensive circle.

  I decided that since the mountain obviously wouldn’t come to Mohammad, Mohammad would have to go to the mountain. But when I approached the little girl, she stepped away, face apprehensive.

  “Don’t you want it?”

  She shook her head fiercely. Then she moved backward and hid herself inside her circle of friends, leaving me alone with the ball.

  Lena Jones, the Untouchable.

  Chapter 15

  After making breakfast for Saul and Ruby the next morning (instant oatmeal and raisins, I’d given up on biscuits), I hiked down into the canyon, not stopping until I’d climbed out of the dogleg at the eastern end and onto the desert floor beyond. Soon the Purity graveyard came into view, at first appearing as haphazard rows of upright sticks bleached white by the sun. Only when you walked closer did the sticks arrange themselves into the form of crude crosses.

  Tony Lomahguahu hadn’t arrived yet, so I lowered my skirts, settled myself down on a rock, and enjoyed the scenery.

  Above, fat white cumulus clouds wallowed across the clear, hard sky. To the north, the Vermillion Cliffs loomed so close I could almost touch them, their scarlet walls plunging at a ninety-degree angle to the desert floor below. But there the beauty ended. On the flatland, a hundred miles of dirt, scrub and cactus stretched to the east, west and south, marooning Purity on a hostile beachhead. If the compound’s fathers had searched for a hundred years, they couldn’t have found a more isolated place.

  “Miss Jones?”

  He had approached from the opposite direction so quietly I hadn’t heard him.

  I stood and faced Tony Lomahguahu. He had probably been tall once, but age had bowed his back and the lined skin on his mahogany-colored face resembled a dry lake bed. His brown eyes remained alert. Like everyone I’d met in the past few days, he wore a plaid shirt and denims, but unlike the plain folks at Purity, he had spiffed up his outfit with a bola tie and several turquoise rings. He could have been anywhere from seventy to ninety, but he still cared about how he looked. I liked that in a man.

  “Yes, Mr. Lomahguahu. I’m Lena Jones.” I didn’t extend my hand. I knew little about Paiutes, but most Indians I’d met didn’t touch strangers.

  He nodded, and said in a softly accented voice, “Hope I can help you, Miss Jones, but I don’t know much about these folks. They don’t make friends with anybody who isn’t as white as they are.”

  I gave him a wry grin. “Yes, I’ve noticed. And they’re pretty white, aren’t they? But anything you could tell me would help. My client…”

  He raised a gnarled hand to stop me. “Jimmy told me about the little girl you’re trying to help, and he gave me this message. He said to tell you there’s trouble. Somehow that girl’s father found out where she was staying.” His face darkened. Apparently he didn’t think much of Abel Corbett.

  “That man, he told Child Protective Services the girl had been kidnapped by Indians. The family’s looking at jail time if they don’t turn her over to him.”

  I was aghast. “He can’t take her from Indian land!”

  “White people have taken things from Indians before, Miss Jones.”

  He was right, of course. Abel Corbett’s house at Purity sat on the Utah side of the state line, but if necessary for his legal standing with CPS, Abel could easily move across the road to the Arizona side of the border. All the trouble Jimmy and I had gone to had only gained her an extra week of safety. Maybe that week would be enough.

  “Did Jimmy’s relatives tell CPS what Corbett wants to do with Rebecca? Give her to some old man as a plural wife?”

  “CPS said they’d investigate, but they’ve got a case backlog and it’ll take awhile. They said to just be patient.”

  I wanted to scream in frustration. By the time CPS got around to doing anything, Rebecca would be back in Purity, possibly married. I suspected that CPS’s handy “case backlog” excuse was the same old see-no-evil routine that kept American polygamy thriving despite its illegality.

  Once again I felt like I had so many times as a child. So many forces arrayed themselves against me that I’d be a fool not to just give up. With surrender would come peace. After all, it was hope that kept you awake at night, hope that kept your hands trembling in the daylight. Hope that if you struggled hard enough, things would somehow, in some way get better. Peace came only to those people who had learned the bitterest lesson of life: acceptance.

  “Never accept evil!”

  With a shock, I recognized my mother’s voice, long lost to memory. Bewildered, I looked around to see, of course, no one other than Lomahguahu and miles of cactus. My mind had merely been playing tricks on me again. Still, it seemed strange to think that the monster who’d almost killed me had said something so moral. Then again, maybe she’d been reading a super heroes comic book aloud.

  I pulled my
self back to the present to see Tony Lomahguahu watching me.

  I flushed. “I thought…I thought I heard a voice.”

  He studied me carefully. “These voices, they can tell us important things.”

  “Not this voice, Mr. Lomahguahu.” Too well I remembered the gun my mother had aimed at me, the sound of the gunshot, the terrible pain. No, my mother had nothing to tell me that I ever wanted to hear, vagrant memory be damned.

  He shifted his eyes to the graveyard. “I hear voices, too. Young voices that cry out when the wind blows strong.”

  “Young voices? What do you mean, Mr. Lomahguahu?”

  He didn’t answer, just motioned for me to follow and set off across the hardscrabble ground toward a row of particularly shabby crosses, most of them smaller than the others.

  “This is where the voices come from,” Lomahguahu said. “They tell their stories to anyone who will listen.”

  “But I…” I was going to tell him that I didn’t talk to ghosts, but then I remembered the time not so long ago when a murderer had abandoned me in the desert to die. For three days I had talked to all sorts of ghosts, the Hohokam, a coyote, even the ghost of a red-headed man who might have been my father. Hallucinations, of course. Nothing else.

  “Speak to the dead and they will answer,” Lomahguahu said. He motioned toward one of the small crosses.

  I knelt down. The inscription, which appeared to have been carved by a pen knife, then stained with ink, was still readable.

  Annabella Royal, Nov. 12, 1991-Nov. 30, 1991, beloved daughter of Solomon and Martha. Next to it were three more small crosses carved by the same hand: Carolina Augusta Royal, Oct. 20, 1992-Oct. 25, 1992, beloved daughter of Solomon and Martha. Stephen Raymond Royal, beloved son of Solomon and Martha, August 31, 1993-August 31, 1993. Elias John Royal, Nov. 15, 1994-Nov. 15, 1994.

  I counted the months between births. Martha had hardly time to recover from each one before she’d become pregnant again. So much for the theory that lactation protected women from pregnancy. The graves of the first two babies showed they had died after only a few days of life, but the last two had died the day they’d been born. Remembering Martha’s robust appearance, her Valkyrie-like beauty, I was once again reminded that appearances could be deceiving. Not that her obvious health difficulties had made any difference to Solomon. Apparently, he’d just kept shoving those little buns in her overworked oven, leaving it to her to pop them out on schedule.