by Brady Udall
As the courtship progressed—barbecues and church socials, dinner and a movie in St. George (usually chaperoned by one of the wives), a little chaste nuzzling and kissing in the front seat of the hearse—it became easier and easier to consider living under the protection of this family, to return to the safety of the life she had led as a child, to share her pain with this sweet giant of a man in the hopes that they might find a way to heal each other.
A month before her one-year anniversary in the valley she was baptized and, so quickly it seemed to happen at once, married to Golden and his first three wives, and then pregnant with the child who would make everything right again.
Two days after the midwife stopped by and pronounced her two centimeters dilated, the baby already dropping and loaded for bear, she felt the initial spasm of pain. She was balancing awkwardly on one knee in the corner of the kitchen, searching for the button that had zinged off her overstressed maternity jumper when she’d bent to retrieve a dropped spoon. She winced—her eyes pulled tight at the corners as if someone had grabbed her hair and yanked, making her scalp sing—and then came the hard, torquing jolt, which felt like the baby straightening out all at once and kicking her in the spine. The movement inside her was so violent and sudden she collapsed onto her side and grabbed her belly with both hands as if to keep it from breaking open. She lay on the linoleum, waiting for something else, for a set of aftershocklike contractions, or her water to break, but there was nothing except for a lingering buzz in her nerves.
That night, did she wonder why the baby, such an active little kicker she had nicknamed him Jackhammerin’ Jack, had not so much as stirred the rest of the day? After two more days of perfect stillness, as if the child had withdrawn to a distant corner of the womb to ready himself for his initiation into this bright new dimension, did she think to consult the midwife, or at the very least allow herself a moment or two of concern? No. Her faith in this child, in the joy and completion he would give her, was pure. Whenever a sliver of doubt would creep into her peripheral consciousness she resorted to the old childhood chant that dispersed the ghosts and shadow-men who crept out of the woods at night to scratch and whisper under the steel belly of the boxcar: It’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright.
When her water broke early that Wednesday morning, leaking down her legs in slow fingers as she hung a towel on the line, she took it as a confirmation that everything was occurring in its rightful fashion. She called Beverly, who drove her and Faye back to Old House, where Nola and Rose-of-Sharon and some of the older girls had already gathered to set up the master bedroom for birthing. She lay on the expansive king-sized bed, propped up by a bank of pillows, and when the contractions came for real, the pain was sharp and affirming. The old midwife, Sister Meisner, showed up and unpacked her implements like a mobster readying for a hit. Sister Meisner, whose every word and movement suggested a no-nonsense competence, had arthritic old claws and an exquisitely sour face that expressed nothing but irritation at humankind and its shortcomings.
After an intricate hand-washing ritual that included three different cakes of soap and a towel baked for fifteen minutes in the oven, Sister Meisner checked the cervix, timed her contractions, and placed the bell of her old brass stethoscope on Trish’s exposed belly. She moved the stethoscope around, tilting her head a little, and quickly her expression changed from one of irritation to one of extreme and wholehearted irritation.
“You’ve felt the baby move?” she said. “In the last few days? You’ve felt it kicking?”
Paralyzed, Trish could not so much as open her mouth.
“If you please, young lady, I need your assistance. Maybe you felt a bad pain in the past few days since I last checked you? Like the baby doing a backflip inside you?”
Beverly, who had been undergoing midwife training under Sister Meisner’s tutelage, appeared at the foot of the bed, her face gone a shade pale. “I’ll call the ambulance in from Hurricane. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Sister Meisner said. She shook her head, grimaced, and began to bear down against Trish’s belly with both hands as if she were trying to push the baby out all on her own. She took up the stethoscope again, glared up at the light fixture as if it had challenged her to a fight, and listened. Her expression never changed, she never looked down, but Trish felt that old gnarled hand, hard and cold as a piece of varnished wood, roughly seek out her own and clutch it tight.
“Your little one is gone,” she whispered so that only Trish could hear. “God bless you both.”
Then louder, after a few moments: “That’s all. No heartbeat, nothing. We’ll deliver here, just as planned. Nothing a hospital or ambulance can do. I can feel the cord now. No blood flow. Hasn’t been, looks like, for a day or two.”
Later, Trish would remember little about the delivery itself, except for her own repeated pleas—as if they were made by somebody else in the room—that she be allowed to hold the baby once it was born. Beverly held her hand and said, Yes, of course, and Sister Meisner had nothing to say but, Not yet, not yet, and then, Push, push, push, push. Trish did not open her eyes the entire six hours, just hunkered down in the trough of sheets and welcomed the pain that came as dazzling yellow flashes across her retinas. And then, all at once, it was over. The years of her life, the months of nausea and expectation, the late-night hours of despair and loss, the hours of sweat and suffering, all funneled into this moment of expectation, only to be met with a ringing silence.
“Hup, crimped cord,” said the midwife. “Thirty-eight years and only the third I’ve seen.”
Beverly took the baby and after a few minutes returned with him, cleaned and wrapped in his birthing quilt, which featured bounding lions and frolicking zebras painstakingly hand-stitched in turn by her three sister-wives. Beverly settled the boy into Trish’s arms, and when Trish got her first look at him, felt his small compact form sink against her breasts, she cried, not in grief, but in love. He was chubby, with his eyes closed, and his pink jowls gone slack around his mouth, as if he were enjoying a very satisfying nap. Oh, how she loved him! She squeezed him against her chest and pressed her nose into his damp, red-blond hair. His beauty, his smell, obliterated for the moment the monumental injustice of what had happened. She looked at her baby and smiled, unable to contain her mother’s pride in his strong features, in his solid heft, in the way his fat little fists tucked neatly under his chin.
She asked for Faye, and against Sister Meisner’s protests (“This is not proper,” she said. “A viewing, a funeral, that is proper, this is not”) the girl was brought in and allowed to hold Jack. Faye went right to her mother and, with no sign of distress or reluctance, picked up the baby, expertly tucking his head into the crook of her elbow, and looked into his face. “Jack, you’ve been a bad little boy, haven’t you?”
“Blessed Savior,” Sister Meisner said under her breath.
“Where did you go?” Faye said to the dead baby. “Did you fly away, you bad boy?”
“Heavenly Father forgive us all,” Sister Meisner said.
Next, Beverly ushered Golden in, and Sister Meisner, going through her final checkup, mumbled and groused, wondered to herself what this was, a convention? Who was going to be invited in next, the entire extended family? The next-door neighbors? The mayor of San Francisco?
Golden stepped to the side, hulking and sheepish, looking to Beverly, in his eyes a desperate wish for clarification or instruction. Beverly stood next to the door, her hand on the knob, and thanked Sister Meisner for her service. “We can handle things from here, Mavis. Please don’t forget the cinnamon cake I made for you on the kitchen table.”
Sister Meisner planted her feet in a bowlegged stance, a shoot-this-old-gray-head-if-you-must look in her eye. She glared at Golden as if he were the cause of everything, and he could only nod in apparent agreement. Finally, she took up her satchel and webby shawl and stomped grumb
ling out the door.
After a nod from Beverly, Golden went to Trish, put his hand on hers. Trish took the baby from Faye and smiled at him. She had forgotten, until this moment, that this baby was as much his as hers. “Here he is.” It was all she could say. She knew she was smiling and could hardly understand why. “Look at him.”
He nodded but did not glance at the baby.
“Why don’t you take him for a minute,” Beverly urged.
“No, I don’t—” he said.
“You go ahead and hold him for a minute,” she ordered calmly, “while I attend to a few things with your wife. Sit in the rocker over there and sing him a lullaby. Go on, Goldy. Every child deserves a lullaby.”
Trish had not noticed until now, but outside night had begun to set in. The wind blew and the timbers of the old house shifted and creaked. Golden turned on the bureau lamp and sat down with the baby, cradling it in the manner of someone used to dropping things. He started to rock, blinked hard and swallowed, hummed a few notes. He took his time looking down at the baby, and only when his eyes settled on the child’s face did he begin to cry: a small hiccup of a sob and then tears crowding the inner hollows of his eye sockets and tracking down his nose. He cleared his throat, tried another feeble hum. He didn’t know any lullabies. So he sang the only song he could think of:
I’m a broken-hearted keelman
And I’m o’er head in love
With a young lass from Gateshead
And I call her my dove.
Her name’s Cushie Butterfield
And she sells yella clay
And her cousin’s a muckman
And they call him Tom Grey.
He paused. For a second it seemed to occur to him the song might not be appropriate for the occasion, but then he continued on, his voice filling the room like it was no more than a coat closet. Trish had never heard Golden sing before, had always assumed him to be tone-deaf. She’d sat next to him at church, where he’d always mumbled the hymns, as most of the men did, rolled the words in his mouth like used-up chewing gum they didn’t know how to get rid of. But now, after a whispery first line, his voice grew full and sweet.
She’s a big lass
She’s a bonny lass
And she likes her beer
And I call her Cushie Butterfield
And I wish she was here.
Later, after Golden had gone to make arrangements with the funeral home, Nola and Rose-of-Sharon came in, eyes bright with tears, and they wept as they admired the baby and told Trish how beautiful he was. Beverly led them in a prayer and then all four sister-wives sat together on the bed, holding hands and clutching each other for comfort. Trish loved them then as much as she had ever loved her own kin, her own blood.
Once they were gone, she eased herself into a prone position, wincing at the pain between her legs, and closed her eyes. In the coming weeks and months she would feel the weight of this loss, would sit in her bathtub late at night, her nipples sore, her tender breasts engorged with milk, and wonder how much hurt a person could withstand—but not now. Now the wind scoured the windows with dust, the house creaked, and she settled into sleep, contented, her little boy at her side.
8.
THE BOY AT THE WINDOW
THE BOY WAITS AT THE WINDOW. HE HAS GROWN TIRED OF SCRUTINIZING himself in the mirror and is now back at his post on the old ceramic radiator, stiff-backed and still as if sitting for a portrait, taking in the view: river, fields, road, ostrich, neighbors’ house, crow, water tower, and in the far distance the floating blue mountains so familiar and remote his brain no longer registers their existence.
If you were to ask the boy what he is waiting for, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. He is waiting for a meteor strike, a tornado, a full-scale zombie invasion, anything to rescue him from this room, this house, these people.
He scans the length of the twisting river and, sure enough, there next to the boulder that looks like a giant snail two young mermaids cavort in the shallow water, silver scales glinting and breasts a-bobbing, playfully tugging on each other’s long red hair. “Dear me,” says the boy in an English accent. “Now what do we have here.” The mermaids squeal deliciously and slap their tail fins on the water.
Lately, women of the nude and semi-nude variety have been insinuating themselves into the boy’s consciousness at every opportunity; just about anywhere he looks there are well-oiled bikini chicks winking at him from behind bushes, tall Amazon ladies in leather bustiers making little growling noises at him while they sharpen their spears. If he hears music, even organ music at church, here come the gyrating belly dancers, and if there is water in the vicinity? Bring on the mermaids.
His erection, which was making a nuisance of itself even before the mermaids showed up, is now operating at full capacity, making it hard for him to think. He sighs, shifts his leg around on the radiator. This boy, he doesn’t know what to do with these minute-by-minute bodily assaults, these crazed thoughts: he is at a loss. Even though he has some idea that with a little hands-on manipulation he could achieve temporary relief, he is careful not to touch himself. Which is odd, because if he is known for anything it is his lack of restraint; he is a liar, a loudmouth, a thief, an instigator, a Peeping Tom, a crybaby, a snoop. But in this most private aspect of his life, one that no one will ever see or know about, he shows the self-discipline of an anchorite. He understands what sex is, at least in theoretical terms, and though he is fascinated by its dark and manifold mysteries, it also freaks him out. Which probably has something to do with his growing suspicion that sex is behind everything, that it is what drives adults to act in strange, unpredictable ways, that it lurks in places it should not belong, in church sermons and evening meals and daily family prayer, that it is responsible for the unreasonable number of brothers and sisters he has, and is therefore responsible in some way for the state of his confusing and miserable life.
Or it may just be that he refuses to touch himself because of the possibility that an invisible Jesus Christ, with His mournful eyes and weirdly girlish eyelashes, is somewhere in this room, right now, spying on him.
So how does the boy seek relief? He blurts out swear words and sings dirty song lyrics he has overheard from the bad kids at school. He imagines in fine detail the suffering and total destruction of his enemies. He plays grabass with his siblings in highly inappropriate ways. He tries on his sisters’ underwear.
In church they instruct the youngsters that in order to free themselves from bad thoughts they should recite a scripture or sing a hymn. The boy doesn’t understand scripture, and though he has heard hymns his entire life, he has a hard time remembering them.
Now let us hmm-hmm in the day of salvation, he sings. No longer deranged on the earth need we roam.
This is the best he can do. It doesn’t help at all.
Downstairs somebody yells something and there is a burst of laughter, like when someone delivers a zinger on TV. They are laughing at him, he knows they are. They are calling him a fag and a pervert, which in the boy’s estimation would make them fifty percent correct.
The house is quiet again. The mermaids have gone. He has nothing to do, so he sits at the window. He watches. He waits. For something, anything, to happen.
9.
A NEW FRIEND
ON HIS BIKE NOW, HAULING BUTT DOWN WATER SOCKET ROAD, RUSTY was making a break for it. He had spent all that time looking out the window, distracted by the humping cows and the mermaids and Raymond the Ostrich, and not realizing that escape was at hand: all you had to do was open the window, push off the screen, slide down the old copper gutter, jump down two roof levels, drop ten feet to the top of the detached garage, and from there you were home free. No one had seen him, not even Louise with her great all-seeing bubble-eyes, and in less than a minute he was on his bike, which he had snuck out of the garage, and pedaling down the long driveway thinking, I am in very big trouble.
Even worse, he didn’t have any shoes on. His high tops, whic
h were honestly just as sorry and worn out as his underwear, were with all the other shoes in the box by the front door because Aunt Beverly had a no-shoes-in-the-house policy, which meant if somebody important like Neil Armstrong or Jesus ever decided to stop by they would have to remove their shoes and place them in the shoe box, no exceptions. It wasn’t a big deal for some people who were lucky enough to have regular-smelling feet, but Rusty had been born with foot-odor complications, which caused certain people to gag when he entered the room, or to ask him why his feet smelled like hot garbage.
So because of Aunt Beverly’s shoe policy, here he was pedaling down the street in his tube socks like a retard. Where was he going? He didn’t know. He had thought about going home and asking his mother to allow him to stay there, he would tell her all the terrible things Aunt Beverly and her a-hole kids were perpetrating on him, but he had already tried that twice now and it hadn’t worked. Today, he decided, he would pedal until he got so far out into the desert nobody could ever find him, except for maybe a bunch of illegal Mexican bandits who had got lost on their way to Las Vegas and formed their own civilization by constructing adobe forts and eating lizards and he would surprise them because of his silent-walking ability, and they would look at him suspiciously and say, Cómo estás? and because he had paid attention in Spanish class at school he would say, Bueno, gracias. Cómo estás bien? and they would all start jumping up saying, O mi Dios!, deeply impressed because not only was he a guy with excellent silent-walking ability, he also spoke their difficult language as well, and they would start asking him questions, most of which he couldn’t understand because they spoke even faster than Mrs. Burdick at school, but he would hold up his hand and say, Sí, Sí, mi nombre llamo Rusty, and they would fall down and practically worship him and his BMX racer because they’d never seen a person riding such a technological bike and he would be their king.