The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  2.

  THE POSTCARD

  HOW DOES A SHY, LONELY BOY FROM THE BACKWATERS OF LOUISIANA become an apostle of God, the husband to four wives, the father to twenty-eight children? Easier than you think.

  Golden, it was true, had very little going for him early on. He was born at a rest stop somewhere between Gulfport and New Orleans, and spent the first four years of his life being dragged through a series of jerkwater towns by a father who couldn’t stay put and a mother who was losing the will to go on. Golden’s father was a wildcatter, a man who claimed he could feel oil underground the way certain spiritual types can detect the presence of the Holy Spirit. He spent his days scouting locations, hustling leases from backcountry dirt farmers, driving the caliche roads of Alabama and East Texas in his old paneled Ford, which he had outfitted with a special horn he liked to blow—ah-ooga!—to let the locals know he was on the scene.

  For the first few years Golden’s mother, Malke, dutifully followed; they’d take up at a boardinghouse or rent a room in a bowl-and-pitcher hotel and Royal would head out into the hollows and hill country to chase oil. Malke and Golden spent their days waiting; for a letter from Royal, a telegram, or a phone call, or for that rare, glorious moment when they first heard the truck’s horn before it rattled into view.

  It was in Bernice, Louisiana, that Malke finally dug in her heels. She and three-year-old Golden had spent a full month in a sour-smelling room in the Hidey Hole Tourist Court on the outskirts of Haines Delta, Mississippi, and now that they had a private apartment over a dentist’s office for the reasonable rate of twenty-five dollars a month, she decided she was set. For two weeks, while Royal was down south, sinking a test hole in Jackson County, chatting up lonely, big-busted country women and doing Lord knows what else, Malke painted the apartment’s three rooms a bright blue the color of swimming pool water, sewed curtains for the windows, got rid of the roaches and the nest of mice behind the enormous old Chambers stove, and put a sign on the front door:

  NO VAGRANTS OR SALESMEN, PLEASE AND THANK YOU

  Malke believed her husband would grow tired of life on the road and settle down with them. There were openings at the chicken plant, and Mr. Ottman, who owned the quarry north of town, needed a new driver. When Royal came home from his trip to Valentine County, Malke told him what she had in mind.

  “Malke, baby!” Royal said. “Did you really say chicken plant? Get ahold a yourself.”

  There ensued a round of shouting and threats, little of which could be deciphered from either side. Little Golden, now four years old, wakened from his nap with his hair standing on end as if he’d just witnessed something highly astonishing, watched from the kitchen doorway.

  At some point Royal took his wife by the wrists, said, “Wait a second, wait one goddanged second.”

  He was a short man with creamy skin and an easy smile, in evidence even at this tense moment. He was the kind of charmer who, despite his rough clothes and country ways, glittered. He had pretty violet eyes and wore Brylcreem to the point of overkill.

  He put his arm around his wife’s waist. “Baby,” he cooed huskily, “can I sing you a song? Will you let me sing you a song?”

  She shook her head, tried to twist away, but he held her tight. Royal would never admit to it, but singing was his one and only true talent. Despite what he told people, he had no special aptitude for finding oil—had no training in geology, no education at all beyond the third grade, no sixth sense for detecting it underground—but his singing, along with his looks and his devil-may-care charm, helped him secure leases, got him free drinks and invitations to dinner, had people asking his advice for things he knew nothing about. He could do basso profundo and coloratura, and falsetto, could, as he put it, “yodel it up pretty good,” could imitate him some birdcall. At this moment he figured yodeling or birdcall weren’t going to cut it, so he conjured up a little Perry Como. He cleared his throat and, in his best trembling falsetto, crooned “I Dream of You” into his wife’s ear.

  Within ten seconds he had her dancing. They glided around the room, her head on his shoulder. An hour later they were all having dinner at the highway diner, Royal and Malke stealing kisses and slapping each other playfully, little Golden squinching his toes with delight over the sight of his mother and father together, happy, and in love.

  Two days later his father drove off into the fog-blown Louisiana night to chase down a lead on a gas well in the Black Warrior country. He didn’t come back for six months.

  THE BOY AT THE WINDOW

  Golden grew too fast, his pants at perpetual high water, his shoes pinching his toes. He was a boy at odds with his own body: top-heavy, always stumbling, reeling suddenly like someone on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, breaking things, knocking pictures off the walls and whimpering apologies while his mother shrieked her dismay. He was too big for himself, always—too big to cry, too big to spill his milk. At four he looked six; at six, ten. By the time he was eleven he stood at eye level with his mother. At twelve he could, if he had a mind to, scoop her up in his arms and hustle her around the room.

  Prisoner to the small apartment and his mother’s black moods, Golden would escape to his attic bedroom and sit at the window that looked out over Givens Street and the town square, which was nothing more than a patch of weedy grass with a couple of elms and a bench where old men in hats liked to sit and hawk loogies onto the sidewalk. He was not interested in the old men or the teenagers who crawled into the bank of lilac bushes to put their hands under each other’s clothes, he was watching and waiting for one thing only: his daddy’s old Ford to turn the corner at LeJeune Hardware and come rattling past the old men on the bench, startling them with its call—ah-ooga!—before coming to a stop under the persimmon tree in front of Darkly Dental. Once, back when he was six and still full of hope, his father did drive up one morning, just as Golden had so often imagined it, and he was so shocked that his voice caught in his throat. He tried to shout, Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here! but all he could get out was the sound a choking person makes: ack. He rushed into the kitchen, his face flushed crimson, going, Ack, ack, ack! and his mother, who thought he was choking, panicked and could think of nothing else to do but slap him smartly across the face. He fell backward against the refrigerator, his face burning, but finally able to say it, in a whispery squeak, “Daddy’s home!”

  For the first few years in Bernice, Royal would show up at least once every six weeks, his eyes lit with a wicked and charming light, and would sometimes stay for a week or more, working at his desk, making calls, going on errands into Baton Rouge, taking Malke out to dinner and dancing to get back on her good side. But as the years went on, he would be away for two months, three, without so much as a phone call, a postcard, or a telegraph message.

  Golden’s mother dealt with her husband’s absences the only way she knew how: she suffered. To show him. To get back at him. To find a way, somehow, into that heedless heart of his.

  Like the kin of the deceased at a third world funeral, she suffered openly, demonstratively, without shame. For Malke, every look and gesture was an expression of her despair. Though beautiful, with a head of dark, glossy hair and perfectly cut cheekbones, she did everything she could to make herself unattractive; she used no makeup and kept from her face every expression except fatigue and bitterness. She wore, in spite of the closet full of fine skirts and blouses, the same sleeveless housedress that looked like it had been made from a faded window curtain. Her eyes were remote and hard and she moved with the slow, underwater movements of the drugged and demented.

  She wasn’t shy about her misery. She wept without warning at church meetings, sighed in the aisles of the dry goods store, and turned away every kind word, every offer of companionship or charity. When she gave testimony at the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’ Name, in the converted boathouse down by the mudflats, she would often suggest to the congregation that because of the life of sorrow and loneliness she led, the trials inflicted upon her
by her no-account husband, she had some notion of the agonies Our Christ Lord must have endured while nailed to the cross.

  The day the postcard came was particularly bad. Goldy’s mother spent the entire morning weeping at the kitchen table because old widowed Dr. Darkly from downstairs had asked her, the third time that year, for her hand in marriage. He had offered her a life of comfort and ease, which included his two-story brick home out next to the lake, his cranberry DeSoto, his membership at the Oyster Bay Country Club, and the undying love and devotion of his deepest heart. Already starting to cry, she’d told him, no thanks, Doctor, maybe another time. What she didn’t have to say was that she was still in love with the lousy run-around son-of-a-bitch who didn’t have the decency to write or call or send money for groceries.

  Goldy, twelve years old now, didn’t care about Dr. Darkly or the groceries or his mother’s weeping, the sound of which had become as common as the starlings that screeched like lunatics in the persimmon tree. He was mad because it was the first day of school and, once again, he wasn’t going. From the window of his attic room he watched the old yellow bus grind its way around the town square, full of children looking gleeful and expectant in new clothes and stupid haircuts. He should have been starting sixth grade, but had not once set foot inside the school, because his mother kept him home with her. She was a woman who did not like to suffer alone.

  To make things worse, it had begun raining outside, great gouts of water pouring down so suddenly the old bench-sitters in the square were caught out in the open. They tried to run, which wasn’t a good idea, as the youngest of them was over seventy. Like men caught in quicksand they clawed the air with their arms, making slow progress. They bellowed and cussed each other, trying in vain to keep their cigarettes lit. It was good for a laugh, but that had been two hours ago and the only pleasure now was in imagining how the rain was ruining the first day of school for all those worthless happy children on the bus.

  Then Golden saw the mailman, Mr. Gay. Mr. Gay skipped along with his canvas mailbag as if it were seventy degrees and sunny. Somebody yelled out from the shoe store across the street, “Rain, sleet or snow, Mr. Gay!” and Mr. Gay gave a hearty salute.

  Mr. Gay was as happy as his name, and though Golden had spoken to him only a few times, he thought of him as his best friend. Mr. Gay would make his way around the square, handing out mail to the shopkeepers and business owners, and when he got to Golden’s side of the street he always looked up where Goldy waited at the window. If there was no mail that day, which was almost always the case, he would give a sad little shake of the head, wave, and walk in solemn commiseration for ten feet or so before resuming his sprightly gait. Mr. Gay took the lack of mail personally. But if there was mail, he would point to his bag and make a face like, Oh yes!

  Today Mr. Gay, wearing a yellow slicker and the kind of hat the Gorton’s fisherman wore on the box of fish sticks, looked up at Goldy and gave him the Oh yes! expression. Had he seen it right through all the rain? Had Mr. Gay given him the Oh yes! face on a day like this?

  He bolted from the window, skidded down the attic stairs past his mother, who had finished her bout of extravagant weeping for the day and now looked almost corpselike with her gray skin and sunken sockets, a woman grown ugly with love. She did not even look his way as he frantically unchained the safety lock on the front door and went slipping down the slick outside stairs to meet Mr. Gay under the awning of Darkly Dental. Above the awning hung a sign that read:

  DARKLY DENTAL

  SEDATION EXTRACTION

  MODERN TECHNOLOGY

  IMMEDIATE RELIEF!

  RELATIVELY PAINLESS

  “You’re going to like this one!” Mr. Gay said over the drumming of raindrops on the canvas awning. He handed over the postcard, reached up to pat Golden’s stiff blond hair (by now Golden had a good two inches on him), and marched undaunted out into the squall.

  Golden looked at the picture of the hound dog wearing a hat, and turned it over to see his father’s writing. Though he could read in a rudimentary way—he had taught himself with a stack of grade school primers donated by some old ladies from the church—he could not bear to waste the precious seconds it would take to sound everything out. Racing back up the stairs, holding the postcard under his shirt to keep it dry, he slipped on the wet wood and, unable to extend his arms, fell face-first onto the landing. He got right up, hardly noticing his split upper lip, and burst into the apartment yelling his head off, “Postcard! Picture postcard!”

  As Golden’s mother read the back of the postcard an amazing transformation took place: color washed back into her face. Her eyes softened and then clarified, the hint of a smile edging the corners of her mouth. Even in her faded housedress, with her puffy eyes and wet nose, her beauty returned in an instant.

  Golden watched, mesmerized, waiting for his mother to read the card out loud, but it took her a full minute to notice her sopping, overgrown son who had split his lip wide open and now had blood running down his chin and neck and soaking the front of his shirt. She cried, “Oh God!” and grabbed a dish towel to press against his face. He fought her off, yelling, “No, read it! Read it first!” So she read it out loud, twice, slower and more luxuriously than she meant to, unable to keep herself from smiling just a little, while her boy, who might have bled to death in the time it took her to read those few lines, squinched his toes joyfully inside his wet shoes.

  FOR MY WIFE MALKE AND MY SON GOLDY BOY THIS IS ROYAL HERE I AM CHANGING MY WAYS BELEVE IT OR NOT I AM NO LONGER SIMILER TO THE ANIMAL ON THE FRONT OF THE PITCHER CARD IT WILL BE BETTER I PROMISE I WONT LEAVE YOU NO MORE YOUR TRUE HUSBEND AND DEDDY ROYAL

  That afternoon, after they went downstairs and had Dr. Darkly put a few stitches in Golden’s lip free of charge (he’d nearly swooned at seeing Golden’s mother looking so flushed and beautiful), after Golden had bathed, dressed in clean jeans and button-up shirt, after his mother had herself changed into a red skirt and white cardigan, they sat down to a meal of warm milk and bread and ate their fill while taking turns reading the postcard and then finally propping it up against the sugar bowl so it was like they were having dinner with a hound dog in a straw hat. Golden couldn’t stop looking at his mother, who had become the most beautiful woman in the world, and she couldn’t stop picking up the postcard, looking over it again and again, as if there were something she might have missed. The rain never stopped, and finally his mother said, “I’d like to be alone for a while.” He climbed the stairs to his attic room, sat in his place at the window overlooking the square, and waited.

  GOLDEN’S DADDY

  For three years the postcard hung thumbtacked to the wall above the kitchen table, a place of honor normally reserved for a life-sized tablet-shaped cardboard replica of the Ten Commandments with an inset eight-by-ten photo of the Reverend Marvin J. Peete in his Let’s-all-get-ready-to-cast-out-some-demons! pose. The postcard, a cruel joke, marked the end of Royal as they knew him; it was the last correspondence they had received, the last sign in the world that Golden’s daddy had ever existed.

  For a long time Golden had been trying to work up the courage to tear it off the wall. For him, it represented everything that was bad in his life: his stretched-to-their-limit secondhand clothes, his smelly attic room, his lack of friends, his extravagantly depressed mother. Every time their power was shut off, every time the Ladies’ Aid Society showed up at the door with a box of donated canned goods, singing hymns coming and going so the entire town knew he and his mother were charity cases, he blamed his daddy. He blamed his daddy for their leaky roof, for the hives that attacked his legs and back, for the mice in the walls, for the sleazy men who often showed up at the door asking if his mother wanted to make a little money on the side.

  By the time he was a teenager, he had developed an active imagination, which was devoted almost exclusively to arranging satisfying ways for his father to die: choking on peach pits, toppling off balconies, getting zapped by lightning or torn to tat
ters by wild boars. And it didn’t always happen by accident either; sometimes Golden took him out from a distance with a crossbow or pushed him into the path of an oncoming stampede. When people around town tried to comfort his mother by theorizing that Royal had died under mysterious circumstances (instead of running off on her as everybody, including Golden, assumed), it didn’t bother Golden a bit; if his daddy was already dead, then it wouldn’t hurt him at all if Golden went ahead and ran over him a few times with a loaded cement truck.

  The fall Golden turned sixteen he started both football and school. The new high school coach, Coach Valardi, had seen Golden standing in line at the drugstore and wondered why a boy of such glorious heft and dimension was not on the team. For years, the school board had allowed Golden to stay at home with his mother, had advised the sheriff not to enforce the truancy laws because his mother was a difficult woman with a frail constitution and a mortal case of the nerves and it would serve everyone if her son was allowed to stay home and keep her company. Coach Valardi convinced them that the football team, having won only three games in four years, needed Golden more than his mother did.

  Accompanied by Principal Wiggins, and by Reverend Peete for moral support, Coach Valardi sat on the front room couch and made his case while Golden listened from the top of the attic steps. The coach spoke about the thrill of competition, the character-building aspect of sports, etc. When he started to run out of ideas the reverend stepped in and recited a few Old Testament verses that didn’t have anything to do with anything. Golden’s mother, mostly out of a disinclination to let the reverend down, agreed to let her son go.

  Outside, at the bottom of the stairs inside the yellow mist of a streetlamp, Principal Wiggins pulled Golden aside for a just-us-men conversation.