The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  Then Uncle Chick paused, shifting gears a little, and in a hushed voice began to tell of those they had gathered to celebrate: the pioneers who had sacrificed everything to leave their comfortable lives in Albany and Liverpool and Oslo, who sold all their belongings to cross the vast plains in wagons and handcarts in search of a place where they could practice their religion without fear of torment or persecution; men, women and children who had suffered and died, who had given their lives for the gospel that we, today, took for granted. He told of thirst and disease and women dying in childbirth in the back of jouncing wagons; he told of shallow graves dug next to rutted trails and of starving handcart companies forced to boil and eat their own shoe leather; he told the story of his own great-grandmother, whose youngest boy—nicknamed Penny for his bright brown eyes—died of pneumonia one blizzarding January day in eastern Wyoming, and the terrible howling and snarling, late that night, as wolves dug up the small body and tore it to pieces, the grieved mother in the meager protection of her covered wagon tearing batting out of a quilt and stuffing it in her ears to ward off the sound.

  Uncle Chick went still, and in the sudden quiet there were a few sniffles, a stifled sob.

  “And what about us?” he demanded, so loudly and suddenly that a child in the front whimpered. “What have we sacrificed? What have we given? Nothing, that’s what. We complain about our lot. We gripe. Ah, it’s so darn hard, we say, to live this gospel, to bear the burden of the Principle. Well, when you begin to feel sorry for yourself, remember those good saints, hundreds, thousands of them died for you. Died for me. Died for us all. Gave up their lives, just like Christ in Gethsemane, blood coming from His every pore with the agony of the sins of this world, my sins, your sins, each and every one, the agony of a million sins worse than any death could ever be.”

  Uncle Chick glanced at Sister Pectol, who began to play “My Saviour’s Love.” And the congregation sang uncertainly, with quavering voices,

  He took my sins and sorrows,

  He made them His very own;

  He bore the burden to Calvary,

  And suffered and died alone.

  There is something wrong with him; Golden tries to sing, but his throat has gone dry and his chest hurts, he can hardly breathe. His head throbs and a strange prickling sensation runs up his legs and hovers at the back of his neck.

  Nearly every Sunday of his childhood he had spent hunkered down next to his mother at meetings like this one, with this same talk of hell and damnation, of the sin and sorrow of this life, and even though he’d occasionally felt the urge to stand up and wave his arms over his head like a nutcase and offer his soul up to Jesus, somehow he’d managed to resist what Reverend Peete had called the promptings of the Spirit; he’d decided church was just another opportunity for his mother to flaunt her misery before the world. He realizes that since coming here she has crossed his mind less and less; he has left her behind with barely a passing thought. But tonight, sitting among this throng of strangers in their starched homemade dresses and ostentatious neckties, some of them dabbing furtively at their eyes, some tearing up outright, Golden feels a portion of his mother’s misery, feels her shoulder shaking next to his as she weeps for her own barren life, hears her singing this very hymn as she has a hundred times, and suddenly, his eyes brimming with his own tears, he has a vision of her death, lonely and desperate in some empty room, and though he can’t know it at the time, he is at least partly prescient: five and a half years from now in the middle of a hard January freeze, Dr. Darkly will call with the news that his mother, having suffered lately from some vague medical maladies, has passed away, quietly, in her sleep. There will be no funeral, no service of any kind, according to his mother’s wishes. But he will fly back to Louisiana to do his filial duty, which will entail little more than paying his last respects at the crematorium in Lafayette and hauling his mother’s meager possessions to the local Goodwill. He will spend the next two days comforting a bereft Dr. Darkly and wandering around Bernice in a misty winter rain, trying to connect to something, to some meaningful sorrow, to translate his own history in a way that will make it possible for him to cry for his mother’s passing, but he won’t find what he is looking for and will board the plane feeling nothing but relief.

  No, he will not cry after his mother’s death, but he does now, he is a confused boy shamed at his recent betrayal, so sorry for the happiness he could not give her, for the worthless bits and scraps that make up his pitiful existence, his every weakness and sin, and by the time the hymn is over, he knows too—don’t ask him how—that his father will die soon, will leave him again for good, and now he begins to weep in earnest.

  Golden cannot hear Uncle Chick speaking anymore. The sun has gone down behind the distant mountains and left behind only shadow, everything cast in shades of charcoal, and Uncle Chick goes on with his tales of death and sadness until a few children begin to whimper and even some of the apostles, men who’d rather run naked down Main Street than cry in public, sniffle and rub their eyes.

  Though Golden’s weeping is contained, it seems to him there are gusts of fouled air escaping his mouth and nose, sludge water leaking from his eyes, and only when it is all gone, when he is spent and emptied out enough to be allowed a single thought, does he understand that he is a changed person; his old self, that tattered, shitty thing he never knew he so much despised, has been tossed aside. Now Uncle Chick is finishing his testimony, affirming his faith in the gospel, in the saving Principle they hold so dear, and just before he finishes he smiles, as if apologizing for all the dramatics, and says, “Remember, brothers and sisters, God loves you,” and Golden knows it is true.

  Uncle Chick lets go one last series of hacking coughs and, without missing a beat, comes up for air to remind everyone of the Pioneer Day Dance and Family Social to be held directly after the meeting. “Sister Maxine’s made her famous brownies, the kind with walnuts in ’em. And we’ll brew us up a kettle of homemade root beer.”

  Sister Pectol hits the opening chords to “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” the official church anthem, a hymn sung at every funeral, sacrament meeting, and family gathering, and in showers and gardens all over the Virgin Valley. Though Golden has already heard it enough to last a lifetime, he has never really listened to the words, sung as if by the pioneers themselves trudging their way through the ordeal of their cross-continental trek and keeping hope alive with nothing but their faith and this song.

  The congregation stands, relieved that their own ordeal is over, and sings:

  And should we die, before our journey’s through;

  Happy day! All is well!

  We then are free, from toil and sorrow too;

  With the just we shall dwell!

  But if our lives are spared again

  To see the saints their rest obtain;

  Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell—

  All is well! All is well!

  Afterward, they stand together in the dry grass under a fully colored sky, a few bright planets showing themselves overhead, shaking hands and chatting quietly, the mothers calling for the children to stay close. At the refreshment table Golden steps aside to let the ones behind him pass, filled with affection for all of them, for the smelly old farmers and their red-cheeked sons and daughters and hard-faced women, and for his grinning father, who hams it up a little as he wheels the prophet between rocks and gopher holes, and for the God who has touched him tonight, who has given him new life.

  13.

  THE DUPLEX

  In this house there is silence: dust on the curtains, the smell of stale sunshine, a hush in the rooms like a suspension of breath. Mother #4 gets up from the dining room table and goes into the kitchen for no reason she can think of, maybe to hear the chatter of her shoes on the pine floor. She turns on the tap, shuts it off, pulls out a chair, and sits. She checks the rooster clock on the wall—but this room and its objects refuse to acknowledge her, to bring her comfort or offer the feeling of home. She pull
s the toaster off the counter and looks for her reflection in its polished chrome, knowing she will not like what she sees.

  What does she see? A neglected woman, a woman scorned. A woman with crazy eyes and ridiculous hair.

  You would never know it by the mundane quality of the light in the windows, the stifled, sterile air, but today is a special day: the eighteen-month anniversary of Son X’s birth and death. Though he arrived fully formed, so beautiful and pink-cheeked, because he died before birth (a mere technicality!) he is not included in the family’s tally of children, and therefore does not merit a number. When someone asks, as someone always does, How many children are there? the answer comes, Twenty-eight! at which point Mother #4’s brain cannot help but sing out a correction: Twenty-nine! Twenty-nine!

  Though there is a child here, a living one, she makes almost no noise, only the occasional murmur or cough, the small house hoarding the sound like a just-rung bell.

  When Mother #4 looks at the clock again she is startled to see more than an hour has passed. She calls down the hall to Daughter #10 (lucky enough to be numbered on the family list) that it’s time to go to the cemetery, and Daughter #10 pokes her head out of her bedroom and shouts, Hooray!

  Given the gravity of the occasion, the Mother thinks, she should be bereft and solemn, filled with the dark wine of grief, but all she feels is a buzzing irritation and the beginnings of a headache, maybe a migraine, like a thumbtack pressed into the back of her eye.

  At the cemetery, a soft wind rattles the withered flowers, the dried stalks of baby’s breath. It’s spring, though only the weeds have started to grow in earnest. The Mother comes here once a week, sometimes twice, to tend her son’s grave. Every time, as a matter of principle, she invites the Father to come along and every time, as a matter of principle, he refuses. After Son X’s burial he has expressed his intention more than once never to return to this place again.

  Once, when Mother #4 was a small girl, she asked her own mother what heaven was like. She described a house, a mansion, spacious and ornate beyond imagination. For someone who had been born and raised in a boxcar there could not have been a more compelling description of the place. Even now, when she pictures heaven she sees a house at dusk, a big white midwestern house with deep porches and elaborate gables, wheat fields in the distance pulsing green. The shapes of bodies move across the bright windows and she knows that these shadows are her lost children, watching, waiting for her to come home to them.

  Now she is sad again—it hits her just like that—and she allows herself a short, messy cry. She tries to tell herself it is nothing but a fantasy, this heaven, this house of dreams, but she can’t deny it is more real to her than the small, quiet duplex in which she eats her meals and lies down to sleep every night.

  Sniffling, she pulls up morning glory that has begun to web itself over the grave while Daughter #10 wanders through the stones and monuments like a cruise ship hostess, chatting up the dead. Mother #4 is not comfortable admitting it to anyone, especially herself, but coming out here is, without a doubt, the highlight of the girl’s week.

  Mother #4 removes from her bag a clean cloth and a bottle of Windex and gives the black granite stone a good polish, taking special care to swab out the red dust from the letters of her son’s name and the dates of birth and death, which are the same. She takes great pride in this grave and this marker, beyond the fact that her child is buried here. The day after Son X’s death, Mothers #1–3 sat with Mother #4 on her bed and explained, with great kindness and sisterly forbearance, that there should be no funeral for the boy, no marker or grave. Among the three of them, they said, they had suffered a total of seven miscarriages and two stillbirths and none of those babies were given a name or laid to rest in a cemetery; they were angels, these children, spirit beings too pure for the ugliness and iniquities of this world. They belonged to God and God only, and He would name and consecrate them as He saw fit.

  With nothing remotely close to kindness or sisterly forbearance Mother #4 let Mothers #1–3 know exactly what she thought about such nonsense. In fact, Mother #4 threw something of a tantrum. Tossing her blankets aside and burying a fist in a pillow, wild in her white nightgown, she said she didn’t give a good goddamn what the other Mothers had done or what God thought about the whole thing, she would name her son, just as she had her other two lost ones, and he would be buried with dignity in a place where she could go to visit, to make sure he knew he was remembered and loved.

  If Mothers #1–3 thought this might be some kind of postpartum, trauma-induced dementia, they were mistaken. Driven by a mother’s protective instinct and a hot, gusting grief she could hardly contain, she shrieked, she raved, she made a fool of herself. In the face of the other Mothers’ mild protests and the wary counsel of the Father and the church elders, Mother #4 would not back down. And so, two days later in a quiet ceremony with only the immediate family in attendance, Son X was laid to rest in the oversized family plot in the Virgin City Municipal Cemetery.

  Which goes to show that occasionally, if she throws a big enough fit, even the fourth of four wives can get what she wants.

  It is getting dark now, the spring light thickening into a weak broth. Mother #4 calls out to Daughter #10 that it’s time to go. She stands up, knocks the dust from her knees, and gives the grave one last, proprietary glance. Daughter #10 protests, as she always does, shouting from the far corner of the cemetery, Ten more minutes, just ten more, okay, five, five more!

  On the way back across the valley Daughter #10 sets her chin and pouts bitterly, asks where they’re going. Mothers #2 and #3 might need help with the desserts for the church social, Mother #4 explains, so they’re going to make a stop at Big House. Daughter #10 whines: she’s hungry, she’s tired, and besides, she hates going to Big House. Daughters #6 and #8 tell lies about her, Son #11 likes to pinch her arms and behind, and Daughter #8 calls her Casper the Not-So-Friendly Ghost. They are bad, bad kids, Daughter #10 concludes, and they are all going to hell.

  Mother #4 isn’t listening, doesn’t hear a word of her daughter’s litany. She is thinking of the Duplex, dark and anonymous as a cell, and how she can’t face the idea of going back there, not right now.

  She pulls up into Big House’s driveway and is comforted by the signs of life: most of the windows lit, shouting from the backyard, two bicycles abandoned at the edge of the lawn—no, it isn’t her house of dreams, but for now it will do. To get her daughter to release her grip on the handle of the glove box and exit the car, she has to promise a root beer float afterward at the TommyHawk Drive-in. They step onto the porch together, hand in hand. As she reaches for the knob the door swings open to a swell of voices, and with a sigh she lets herself fall forward into the light.

  14.

  THE FAMILY TERRORIST

  BECAUSE SHE LIKED THE COMPANY, BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO BE OF use, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons Trish gave piano lessons. That she barely knew how to play the instrument herself seemed to bother no one.

  Today was her first day with Rusty, who plinked out “The Volga Boatman,” sweating and blinking, as if someone were holding a gun to his head. He was a wide-faced boy who had inherited his father’s heft and his mother’s dark hair. He had a reputation in the family as a problem child, a troublemaker—Nola had even taken to calling him the “family terrorist” (which to Trish seemed more than a little severe, but Rose, his mother, freely admitted he could be “something of a handful”). Really, though, he hardly seemed remarkable; like some of the other kids in the family he’d decided that negative attention was better than no attention at all. But there was something different about him, she was noticing now. Maybe it had to do with the way he sat so close to her, allowing his thigh to touch hers, or the way he lost interest in the notes on the page and began to play his own sour little song with something like confidence, his fingers producing a series of remorseless sounds. A stranger walking by outside might have heard the noise and imagined a cat stalking a wounded ho
usefly across the keys.

  With a slight bow of his head he launched one last haunted-house chord of his own invention. He looked up at her. “Can we be done n—” Before he could finish the question she was already saying, “Okay then, why don’t we call it quits for today.”

  The boy gave a contented sniff, slapped his lesson book shut, and leaned back a little so he could get a good look around the room. He took in the bookcase on the far wall, the small desk with its small typewriter, the water stain on the ceiling a series of yellow, nearly perfect concentric circles. He wasn’t interested in this stupid house, he just liked sitting here next to Aunt Trish, easily the prettiest of the mothers, who smelled nice, whose leg was touching his in a way that was making some things happen in his pants. He was eleven years old and full of a need so large and overwhelming that he wasn’t sure exactly what it was he needed.

  “I like this house,” he concluded. “It’s quiet.”

  Trish said, “That’s one way to describe it.”

  Together they listened to the house: the groan of the old refrigerator, the kitchen faucet dripping with a dull tap-tap into the sink, Faye murmuring in her prayer cave around the corner. Out the side window the tall red cedar, which had started its existence as a potted plant next to the front porch steps, gently swiped at the window. Rusty sighed. Compared to this, Big House sounded like the prison cafeteria in Escape from Alcatraz, which he had never seen, but had heard about in great detail from the bad kids at school.

  She asked the boy if he liked Kool-Aid, and in what might have been an attempt at a British accent, he said, “I don’t see why not.”

  In the kitchen she was taking the sugar from a cupboard when she turned to see he had followed her, and was now standing in the doorway, staring at her intently with both hands positioned over his groin. His eyes were a cool green, his skin touched with tiny freckles, and he regarded her openly, his face wide and beseeching. He wanted something—that was clear—but what? Did he need to use the bathroom? Was he hungry? Maybe, after being separated from his own mother these last weeks, all he wanted was a kind word, maybe a hug?