Desert Wives (9781615952267)

by Webb, Betty

  “I thought Sister Jean took it to the dump!”

  Cynthia grinned. “It’s about the hundredth book she promised Mother she’d trash. But she always sneaked them back to me.”

  A happy ending for Cynthia, then.

  We sat and chatted for a while until I finally got around to asking her about the blind child.

  Her face became guarded. “That’s Sister Sharon’s child. She was born blind.”

  “How about the others? While I waiting out there, I counted several children with albinism. Are they getting the proper care?”

  She looked down at Gray’s Anatomy and caressed its cover. “I don’t know.”

  I understood. Ermaline had promised Cynthia she could move to Salt Lake as long as she didn’t discuss Purity with Outsiders. Maybe Cynthia would be more forthcoming later, maybe not. My betting was not. Most of the women and girls who escaped the polygamy communes didn’t want to risk being cut off from their extended families, especially their mothers. Regardless of how badly Ermaline had treated Cynthia, a strong bond remained.

  But I doubted that Cynthia felt as protective about the man who’d raped her.

  “Okay. I can understand your not wanting to talk about the children, so I won’t push that.”

  Her face relaxed.

  “I’m curious about one thing, though, Cynthia. I’ve been racking my brains to figure out why in the world the Circle of Elders forced your mother to give you to a monster like Earl Graff, knowing all the while that his own wives were terrified of him. After all, you’re Prophet Solomon’s daughter, and that should have counted for something.”

  Cynthia looked up from her beloved anatomy book. “I was setting the table one evening and Earl was in the living room with Father Prophet, and, well, I heard an odd conversation. I couldn’t make any sense of it, but at the end, Father Prophet told Brother Earl that if he kept quiet, he could have me.” She stopped.

  “And?”

  She shook her head. “It made me so upset I ran into my room and cried. I didn’t like Brother Earl, not even then. But I can tell you what he told me during our, uh, wedding night.”

  It was pretty much what I’d expected. Earl, after he’d finished raping Cynthia for the first time, completed the humiliation by crowing about his great coup over her father. During one of Earl’s trips to Zion City, he’d run across a business associate of Solomon’s. The man inquired about a particular business deal, one Earl had no knowledge of. Suspicious, he checked around and discovered that Solomon had set up a series of private accounts at various banks, and had been skimming money off Purity’s operating accounts for years. Enraged, Earl confronted Solomon and demanded Cynthia and Saul’s house in payment for his silence.

  “My father sold me to Brother Earl, plain and simple,” she finished, her voice sorrowful.

  Usually, it’s the blackmail victim who kills his blackmailer, not the other way around. But sometimes…

  Brother Earl remained a viable suspect.

  I struck Ermaline off the list, though. Before I’d begun to understand the compound’s power structure, I’d believed she might have killed Solomon out of jealousy when she discovered he planned another marriage. I knew better now. With the prophet dead, Ermaline had lost everything. Sure, the men of Purity held all the power cards, but each polygamist household adhered to a strict pecking order. The first wife ruled the roost, with newly acquired wives falling into the power structure in marriage order behind her. As long as Solomon was alive, Ermaline, the first wife, maintained the highest status. She would not willingly give up that honor, because with it came great power among the wives themselves. Powerless people take their perks wherever they can find them.

  As I sat there musing about the vagaries of fate, Cynthia’s eyes closed and I realized how much my visit tired her. I told her I’d drop by later, then kissed her cheek and tiptoed out.

  In the hall, I ran into Jean. After saying a few hard words about Brother Earl Graff, she invited me into the kitchen for a glass of orange juice and a chat.

  “You’re from the Outside, Sister Lena,” she said, as I settled myself at the table and she poured me a glass of what appeared to be fresh-squeezed juice. “Is it really as wicked as they say? I can’t remember much about it from my days there in public school, before the Circle of Elders voted to pull us all out.”

  I took a sip of my juice. Unsweetened. “Sure. Some parts of it are as almost as wicked as Purity.”

  She looked at me for a moment, her face blank. Then she began to laugh. “You are definitely a refreshing change. Sometimes it’s a bit hard to believe that you thought marrying Brother Saul was a good idea. It seems to me that you’re much too independent to need marriage.”

  Uh oh. Jean was sharp. Those few years in public school, perhaps? Or had she been reading Cynthia’s books? I trotted out my lies again. “Well, I got myself into trouble, did some dumb things. Quite a lot of dumb things, actually.”

  She gave me a mischievous grin. “Dumb things with men, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. Very dumb things.”

  Her grin faded. “Well, at least you were free to make your own mistakes. That’s more than I can say for myself. Ever since I was a little girl, every move I made was dictated by others. I was told what to wear, what to say, how to pray, who to marry. If it’d been up to me, I would never have married Solomon. Never.”

  “But at least you got some wonderful children out of it, didn’t you?”

  She brightened again. “Oh, yes. I’d introduce you to them but they just left for school—or that hive of ignorance they call school around here. There’s Kevin and Kyle, who are eight and nine, and Jennifer, seven. Jennifer’s the bright one. She told me last week that she wants to be an attorney when she grows up.”

  I said nothing to that, and Jean noticed my silence.

  “While I was still in Zion City Public School, we held Career Day, and a woman lawyer from Salt Lake drove down to speak. Her life sounded fascinating, but not long after that, the Circle of Elders built Purity School and we had to go there, instead. Besides, you know how life goes for girls here in Purity. I married my husband when I was only fifteen, that was ten year ago. And then once I started having babies…”

  Ten years of marriage and only three children and her current pregnancy to show for it. I decided to ask her about it. “Why no more children? Or is it none of my business?”

  Her tone was bitter when she answered. “For a while my husband grew, how can I say this politely, uninterested in me. At first I thought it was my fault, but when I asked some of my sister wives, they told me the same thing happened with them. Solomon would come to our beds for the first few years of marriage and then stop.”

  I understood. “He needed new blood, right?”

  “An interesting way of putting it, but yes, that’s about right. It’s pretty true for most of the men in the compound, apparently. They get bored with their old wives and start looking for new ones. But new wives are hard to find nowadays, so they usually come back to our beds every once in a while.”

  That stumped me. “What do you mean, harder to find? Purity’s full of young girls.”

  She gave me an odd look. “Sister Lena, do the math. Every other baby born in Purity is a boy.”

  “So?”

  She laughed. “For a smart woman, you can be pretty dense, you know that? Look, in the Outside, the numbers work out okay. One man, one wife. But that’s not how it works in Purity. The older men, the more powerful men, they all have between ten and fifteen wives. That doesn’t leave much new blood, as you so delicately put it, for the younger men.”

  I frowned. “In other words…”

  “In other words, Sister Lena, there aren’t enough women to go around.”

  Well, duh. I shook my head in exasperation at my stupidity. “I guess it’s obvious once you really think about it.”

  “That’s why the men are so quick to recruit women from Outsi
de. Even women who seem, well, unsuitable.” She winked and I laughed with her. “The problem has always been, though, convincing a woman that moving to Purity was a good idea.”

  “How many Outsiders wind up staying?”

  She shrugged. “It all depends on how quickly they have children. You’ve seen how tough it would be to leave here with kids.”

  “Prophet Solomon didn’t have to recruit. He had access to the cream of the crop.”

  “Oh, yes. But I understand that Rebecca didn’t want to marry him. She’d been raised Outside. There were other young girls, though, who thought it was an honor to marry the living word of God. They’re my sister wives now.”

  “Didn’t you ever feel jealous?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe if I’d ever loved Solomon, but we girls in Purity aren’t raised to fall in love. We’re raised to obey.”

  “How does it work? Do you come in to breakfast one morning and see a new face in the kitchen?”

  She laughed again. “Oh, no! The wives get plenty of warning. When Prophet Solomon decided to marry Rebecca, he sat us all down together and told us what he was planning. He read from all the places in Scripture where it talks about the old prophets’ many wives. Not that he needed to. All us women have heard those Scriptures so often that we know them by heart.”

  Then her face took on a shamed expression. “Lately, though, just before Solomon was killed, he told us he’d decided to take two wives at once. Rebecca and one other girl. He reminded us he was growing old and wanted to make certain he had enough children to insure him the highest level of Heaven. And, uh, he began reading other things to us.”

  I sat up straight. “Like what? His ‘Gospel’? Or pornography?” I meant it as a half-joke, but from her expression, I wondered if I might have been right.

  She shook her head, but the embarrassment didn’t go away. “No, no. He read from the Book of Genesis, about Adam and Eve and their children. He read the same passages every night for a month, right up until the night he died.”

  The Book of Genesis. “That’s the bit about the Garden of Eden, isn’t it? So what was he leading up to? Did he want you to throw away your granny dresses and run around naked?”

  My attempt at humor fell flat again, because she got up and walked to the window. She stood there for a few moments, and when she finally turned back to me, I saw tears in her eyes.

  “You’ve seen Cora, right? She used to help us in the kitchen. She looks a lot like Cynthia.”

  “The little platinum blond girl? Gorgeous little thing, but a bit, ah…”

  “A bit slow. Yeah, her. She’s Ermaline’s daughter. Cynthia’s full sister.”

  I hadn’t known that. Of course, the Byzantine family structures in Purity constantly amazed me.

  “Anyway, Solomon read the Garden of Eden story over and over to us, and then started quizzing us on it.” She stared at me as if expecting me to go, “Aha!”

  But I didn’t go “Aha!” Despite the efforts of one of my more decent foster fathers, a Baptist minister, my knowledge of Scripture remained weak. I shrugged in bafflement.

  Jean sighed. “One of the questions Solomon asked us was, ‘Who did Adam and Eve’s children marry?’”

  “Beats me. Maybe God made more people.”

  She shook her head. “My husband’s answer was that Adam and Eve’s children married each other.”

  “Wait a minute, you mean…”

  “Sister married brother. Not only that, but Solomon said Adam mated with his own daughters.”

  At this stage in the game, nothing surprised me very much, but to see incest trumpeted as a religious tenet appalled me. Somehow managing to keep the disgust out of my voice, I said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, Jean, but are you telling me that Solomon planned to marry Cora, his own daughter? His retarded daughter?” I was even too shocked to be P.C. about it.

  “I’m afraid so. He told us that if it was good enough for the Old Testament, it was good enough for him. Ermaline wasn’t happy and tried to talk him out of it, but she finally had to back down. What else could she do?”

  I knew what else she could do. She could have killed the disgusting old pervert.

  But I didn’t say that. “What about the other people in the compound? What would they think of such an incestuous marriage?”

  Jean sighed. “It’s been done before. Martha Royal was herself the granddaughter of such a marriage. And if you want to know the truth, my own father was Prophet Solomon’s brother. My husband was my uncle.”

  When I left the house a few minutes later, my mouth tasted sour and not from the unsweetened orange juice. Not for the first time did I rejoice that someone killed the perverted old prophet. I just needed to prove the killer wasn’t my client.

  All I wanted to do when I got back to Saul’s was take a bath and wash the sins of Purity away from me, but such comfort wasn’t to be. Davis Royal had dropped by and told Saul to send me over to the school. He wanted me to sit in on a couple of seventh grade classes, see where the curriculum stood, and suggest improvement.

  “Davis came here himself?” I asked Saul, who couldn’t seem to stop rolling his eyes at the prospect of me as a schoolteacher.

  “Yep, his own royal self. I must say, Lena, he really seems to be hot about this upcoming marriage of yours.”

  “And me not even related to him. Just goes to show you, some acorns do fall far from the tree.”

  Saul looked baffled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Ruby entered the room lugging a laundry basket, so I waved his question away. “I’ll talk to you later. Right now I’d better go over to the school. Don’t want to disappoint my fiancé, do I?”

  I didn’t want to lose my temper further, so I avoided the class being taught by the evil old harridan who I’d heard conducting the frightening lesson on “seed.” I wandered the halls until I found the seventh graders, but this class, taught from battered, forty-year-old textbooks, appeared little better. These teens would never learn about Vietnam, Panama, the fall of Communism, or the rise of terrorism. In fact, the only new books in the room were amateurishly bound copies of Solomon Royal’s own religious ramblings. The teacher, a prim, elderly old woman with a skirt that literally dragged the floor, appeared dispirited. She’d apparently abandoned world history and opted for religious history instead.

  As I dutifully took my notes, the teacher called on Meade. She asked him if he remembered the name of Hagar’s son.

  Meade remembered. “Ishmael,” he said, standing up.

  Could have fooled me. I’d always thought Ishmael was the narrator in Moby Dick.

  Surprisingly, Cora sat near Meade, although it was obvious she understood nothing being said. Maybe the teachers just allowed her to wander the school at will, like Mary’s little lamb. Once again I admired her beauty. On her, the compound’s pale looks seemed transformed. Her skin was tinged with pink, her eyes deepened to a cerulean blue. Her glossy blond hair cascaded down to her waist in a white river. Her beauty wasn’t lost on her classmates, either. The boys gazed at her with rapt faces while the girls sulked. Watching this display, Meade scowled.

  What a little prig.

  Rebecca, sitting next to Meade, winked. Like me, she had been less than impressed by the history lesson.

  After class, I returned to Saul’s to find him preparing to leave for his attorney’s office.

  “Court case comes up tomorrow.” His face was stiff, but I could tell from the tone in his voice that he was depressed. “The whole thing’s probably going to be a slam dunk, but I might as well go down fighting. Do you need anything from Zion City?”

  I wanted to talk to Jimmy, and I couldn’t do it here. “I need a ton of stuff, husband,” I brayed, loud enough for Ruby to hear, wherever she lurked. “Can I ride along with you?”

  He took his own turn at yelling. “Sister Ruby? You need anything from Zion? Laundry detergent? Bleach?”

  A d
oor opened, closed. I heard footsteps in the hall. Finally Ruby appeared, looking disheveled. She’d probably been listening in the hall in the first place, then scuttled back to her room to make it sound like she’d just emerged.

  “No, nothing,” she said.

  Saul hooked his arm around mine. “Come along, wife.”

  Ruby grimaced with poorly concealed jealousy as we exited the house.

  Neither Saul nor I said much on the trip to Virginia’s, and the expression on his face when he dropped me off at West Wind Ranch was glum. As I stood watching him drive off, I felt the same way.

  I climbed the steps into the ranch house to find Virginia and Ray holding court with a room full of Germans dressed in leather chaps and expensive cowboy boots. Yahoo, mein herr. Virginia jerked her head toward the stairs, and taking the hint, I hurried up to Number Eight.

  Making the easiest call first, I punched in Tony Lomahguahu’s number. No luck. The Paiute’s daughter told me he was out hunting in the canyon, so I left a message for him to meet me at the graveyard at noon the next day. She assured me she’d tell him so I hung up and made the next call. Jimmy picked up on the first ring.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Guess who just showed up at the compound?”

  “Rebecca.” Jimmy’s concern was obvious. “My cousin tried to talk her out of calling her father but in the end, there was nothing he could do. The kid was convinced she was doing the right thing. I didn’t tell Esther, though. She’s got enough to worry about.”

  So Jimmy had visited her again. I wondered how long it would be before he proposed marriage to yet another damsel in distress.

  “And Lena, we have an even worse problem,” he continued. “Captain Kryzinski called this morning and told me the court’s cleared Esther’s extradition back to Utah. Sheriff Benson’s deputy is on his way down here as we speak. You have to wrap this case.”

  He added that he had tried the online investigative services again, but couldn’t find additional information on anyone at the compound. “I’ve done everything I can, and now it’s up to you.”