The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  He tried to think of a reasonable number. “Five,” he said, which sounded about right, even though five kids in the back of a car, even a big one, might be pushing it. But then he said something that was not in any way reasonable, that came as a complete surprise to him. “Five, and one who died a few years ago.”

  Even as he said it, he felt himself freeze, felt the blood drain from his face and the tips of his fingers. It was bad enough to mention a dead child to a woman whose own son had just fallen sick, but to bring up his daughter, at a time like this, out of nowhere…Ever since she had died, Glory, for him, was not a subject open to discussion. Ask him about her, and he would turn his eyes elsewhere. Mention the strange story of her death, and he would leave the room.

  Together, they both stared into the pulsing coals, and then Huila stood up and with a slow deliberateness took three short steps and sat down beside him.

  “I’m sorry,” Huila said.

  “It’s okay.” He shrugged, looked off into the darkness.

  “No,” she said, with stern kindness. “Not okay.”

  He wanted to look at her, but couldn’t bring himself to. “It’s not okay, you’re right.” It felt good to be corrected, especially by her.

  “She was six years old.” And then, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, he told her about Glory. He told her everything.

  20.

  ROW OF ANGELS

  ONE SPARKLING WINTER DAY NEARLY TEN YEARS EARLIER HE’D COME home for lunch to find out the good news: number fifteen had been born, and even better, number fifteen was a girl. The excitement at Old House was palpable, as if somebody had won a large cash prize. “A girl!” Nola boomed from down the hall as Golden stomped snow off his boots. “We got a handy-dandy girl!”

  Lately, the Richards family, especially the mothers in particular, had seen just about enough of boys; the family already sported seven of them and had suffered a dispiriting run of four in a row. Though boys were prized for their potential to one day bear the holy Melchizedek priesthood, to be leaders in the church and soldiers for Christ, they had a significant downside: they were boys. Until they turned twelve or so, the mothers agreed, they were as inconvenient and as thoroughly useless as a pack of feral cats. Girls were better in just about every way: more helpful, calmer, more responsible, smarter. A series of distinctions which, unfortunately, didn’t seem to change all that much as girls turned into women and boys to men. Though they discussed it only among themselves, and more often than not treated it as a joking matter, the women of the church considered it one of God’s great mysteries: why He, in all His wisdom, had ever decided to put the boys in charge.

  Little number fifteen, then, was a remedy, a balance-maker, a step in the right direction. She was a healthy, robust baby girl and a cause for celebration.

  Or so it seemed for the first few months, until her mother, Beverly, began to notice things. The way her head lolled; her little hands caught in fists that never seemed to unclench; bouts of crying that would make her go instantly stiff with rage. With the first fourteen the mothers had seen it all—jaundice, colic, pinkeye, chicken pox, mumps, ear infections, chronic flatulence—and they were sure these abnormalities, these minor episodes, were nothing little Glory couldn’t outgrow. There wasn’t so much as a mention of a doctor. Instead, they prayed for her and asked Golden to invite Uncle Chick and some of the priesthood council over to lay their hands on her head and bless her with consecrated oil.

  The very night of the blessing, just as Beverly was putting her to bed, Glory went stiff, her face turning red, then a mottled purple as she stopped breathing altogether. When the paramedics arrived, she was breathing again, but still unconscious. The doctors at the Las Vegas children’s ward delivered the bad news: spastic cerebral palsy. As she grew, her left arm bent and drew up into her chest, her feet extended so that when she learned to walk with forearm braces, at age four, she did so teetering on her tippy-toes like a clumsy ballerina. She had a lopsided face and long, double-jointed fingers that fluttered and nearly hyperextended themselves when she became excited. She could not speak or gesture or make her intentions known except with garbled barks and moans, while her tongue, thick as an overstuffed wallet, probed and punched at her cheeks.

  For the first three years of her life, Golden kept his distance. Something in him was disgusted, even frightened, by this broken little creature, and when he watched her crawl across the floor, using her bent wrists for support like an impaired chimpanzee, or spastically spooning mashed potatoes all over her face with her special utensil with its special orthopedic grip, he felt shame settle on his chest. He knew that somehow or another he was responsible for her condition, and he could do nothing about it. He could do nothing about the bleak future she faced, or the attention she drew in public; he could do nothing about his own juvenile embarrassment when she made wet, lewd noises during the sacrament prayers at church.

  None of this was lost on Beverly: nothing ever was. She made it Golden’s job to feed his daughter, to hold her in church, to massage her legs, exhausted from their daily marathons of flexing and scissoring, and when she turned four, to drive her to her sessions at the clinic in St. George. It was on these long drives that something began to change. She would sit tucked against the pickup door—held tight by the lap belt, a specially made C-shaped cushion around her neck to keep her from sliding and hitting her head—and talk to him. For minutes at a time she would hold him in an unwavering stare and gurgle and coo and squeal insistently and tirelessly, as if trying to communicate with a drooling dullard or someone in a coma. When he didn’t respond with a look or a nod of his head or a word or two of his own, she would bark at him—Ahnk! Ahnk! Ahhhhnk!—until he acknowledged her in a way that met her satisfaction.

  For so long he had been so distracted by her flailing limbs, her restless, predatory tongue, the alien noises broadcast out of her toothy and crooked mouth—and more importantly by his embarrassment and fear of these things—that he’d failed to notice the brightness in her eyes, the sly, satisfied looks she gave when something went her way. At the clinic, he began to help the aides—three cheerful overweight women in matching pink polyester blouses—with her therapy, a slow straightening of her accordioned left arm, a rolling of wrists and ankles, fine motor skills involving wooden rings and beanbags and buttons, and walking practice between two parallel steel bars. Like a great big kid, kneeling on the green carpet amid the rubber balls and pillows and harnesses, he helped to sing the verses that coincided with each stage of her reflex training:

  Gallopy, gallopy, gallopy trot,

  Gallopy trot to the blacksmith shop.

  Shoe the horse, shoe the mare,

  And let the baby colt go bare.

  or

  Up, down, up, down,

  This is the way we go to town.

  What to buy, to buy a fat pig,

  Home again, home again, jig-a-jig-jig.

  At the clinic, for his Glory, he was a different man, one who didn’t think twice about acting out nursery rhymes or pretending to flit around the room like a butterfly. At home, when her legs hurt and she would cry until no one else could console her, he would take her into a dark room and sing her these little songs, kneading her thighs and calves, no one else but him and her, and every time it would do the trick.

  It had taken only a few weeks before the hard knot of revulsion that lodged in his throat at the very sight of her began to unravel itself, giving way to a welling tenderness so abiding and acute that now, three years after her death, he wondered how he managed to withhold any love for his other children. For so long, he had kept his affection in reserve, parceling it out in scraps and carefully broken-off pieces, and usually in secret so others could not see and become jealous. When he hugged one child, or gave out a stick of gum, there had to be hugs and gum for everyone, even if it meant driving to the Shell station on a Saturday night to buy more gum. He had to be cautious with compliments and kisses and gifts of any kind; over t
ime, he developed a noncommittal stone-faced countenance he employed in the presence of his family so he couldn’t be accused of looking differently upon one child or wife, of loving one over another, of harboring favorites. Even the smallest gesture of regard had to be planned out well in advance and executed with the discipline and skill of a jewel thief.

  Not so with afflicted Glory, who was by her condition exempt from all laws of jealousy and preference. He could love her openly and without restraint, as if she were an only child, the one person in the world who mattered to him, his little heart of hearts—and that’s exactly what he did.

  He involved himself in every aspect of her therapy, built ramps for her wheelchair, talked shop with the lady therapists about the newest advancements in treatment. His father’s love, sealed off for so long by his own insecurities and weaknesses, gushed out of him. He took her to his work sites, showed her off to the roofers and the excavating crews. Every time he stopped in at Old House he would stand at the door and call, “Where’s my little chicken?” and wherever she was in the house, his little chicken would respond with a high-pitched squawk. Whenever she caught sight of him, even if he left the room for a minute and returned, her eyes would go wide and she would flap her arms ecstatically, her fingers fluttering and her tongue doing its ardent calisthenics until he picked her up.

  He was her sidekick, her protector, her tireless advocate. He was so dedicated to her he took the drastic step of defying Beverly over where she should sit during church meetings. By the time she turned five, and could sit up well on her own and walk a few steps with the aid of forearm crutches, Beverly decided it was time she sat in the front row at church, the pew designated as the Row of Angels where the damaged innocents sat: the two mongoloid brothers; a mute-and-blind girl with eyes that never stopped blinking; a wilting kinder-gartner who’d been diagnosed with fatal leukemia two years prior but had so far refused to die; a retarded, obese adult named Gordon Thune, who was thirty-eight but had the mind of a five-year-old; the beautiful, ever-smiling teenager, Bettie, who had been born with half a brain.

  Every Sunday they sat up front, angels all, to remind the other members what it was like to have one foot in heaven, to be blameless before God. Sometimes the angels acted up, especially the talkative mongoloid brothers, and Uncle Chick had to cough in their direction to shush them.

  But Golden didn’t want Glory to be an angel, or anything close to it. He didn’t want her sitting up in front, part of a spectacle that often provided distraction to the congregation, and sometimes even laughs, such as when the mongoloid brothers, cued by the opening chords of a certain hymn, began an extemporaneous duet of “La Cucaracha” or when the leukemia boy, in the midst of one of Uncle Chick’s sermons about godly comportment and reverence, fell asleep and dropped his stainless steel vomit bowl.

  Glory would not be part of such a sideshow, he told Beverly, with a ring of authority in his voice that surprised him. He would keep her with him during sacrament meetings, on his lap, safe, as far away from God and heaven as he possibly could.

  In honor of her sixth birthday, he built her a playhouse, with leftovers from his construction projects. It would have ornamented brackets and pilasters to match those of Old House, a wooden walkway connected directly to the front porch, and a window facing west, so she could have a good view of the true love of her life, Raymond the Ostrich.

  Since she was a toddler she had adored Raymond. Every time she caught sight of him, even at the distance of two hundred yards from Old House, she let loose unique ululations of delight, a special language of love reserved for Raymond and no one else. Golden had made it a habit of wheeling her out through the west pasture, in any and every kind of weather, and parking her chair at the banks of the river that divided their property from Brother Spooner’s next door, so she could watch him strut around occasionally pecking at the ground like a chicken, blinking those extravagantly long eyelashes.

  One late fall afternoon, after he’d finished shingling the Doll House roof with expensive Virginia slate skimmed off a trophy home he’d been working on, he hefted her out of her wheelchair and carried her to the river, which was not much of a river at all this time of year, but a trickling stream a few inches deep tracking its way around jutting boulders and rippling swells of coarse red sand. Before crossing, he sat them both down on a flat rock and together they removed his work boots and socks. (The boots were a birthday present from Beverly and had to be treated with the utmost care.) With her twittering fingers, she methodically untied the laces—a skill she’d been working on in therapy—and helped him remove the boots. She peeled off his socks, and tucked them into the boots, which she arranged neatly, side by side, just as she did with her own shoes every night before bed.

  He carried her across the wide riverbed with an exaggerated tiptoeing motion that made her laugh. On the far bank he set her down in some dry grass next to the barbed-wire fence, where she could lean on her crutches and watch the ostrich through the wire. Raymond, though, would not cooperate. He was hiding behind an old Tiplady feed bin, his trembling tailfeathers the only visible part of him.

  “Hey bird!” Golden hollered. “Come here, bird! Lookee here!” He knew that Brother Spooner would not be happy about him trespassing on his property and shouting at his prized bird, but Brother Spooner and his wife were gone for the weekend, off to visit one of their daughters in Tucson, and therefore would be none the wiser. He held out a handful of Cooter’s dog food, the kind Spooner had told him Raymond favored. “Come over here you big stupid bird, get some of this Alpo! Hey bird!”

  Raymond swiveled and poked his head out from behind the bin, blinked his enormous glossy eyes. At this, Glory screeched, and because her arms were locked into her crutches and supporting most of her weight, and she could not clap her wrists together or flap her hands as was her way, her excitement showed in the severe craning of her neck, the swaying of her body over the fulcrum of her crutches, her gaping mouth. Afraid she might topple forward into the barbed wire, Golden put his hand on her humped back to steady her.

  “Come on, bird!” he called to Raymond, who was hesitating again. “Don’t look at me that way. We’ve got prime dog food for you. Get your big bird behind over here. Hey, bird!”

  There was a silence while they both waited for Raymond to make a move, and that was when she said it, “Mmmmbbbbirrrr.”

  He looked down at her. Had he just heard what he thought he’d heard? His daughter, his own little Glory, uttering what sounded very much like a word, something you could look up in a dictionary? Though she could form individual sounds, and had her own special ways of communicating—excited nose-breathing that meant she was hungry, a gurgle at the back of her throat that signified contentment, a siren whine that told you she was in pain—she had never made any sound that, when placed in context with a particular situation, could have been characterized as an actual word. The ladies at the rehabilitation center told him that if she had not learned to talk by the time she turned three or four, she most likely never would.

  He watched her out of the corner of his eye, but her attention was locked on Raymond. “Bird?” he called out experimentally. “Hey bird?”

  She closed her mouth, screwed her face into a mask of almost frightening concentration, and said it, “Mmmbbbiiirrrdddtt.”

  “Yes!” he cried, so loudly a couple of cows that had come over to see what was going on bolted in panic. “Bird!”

  He thought about picking her up and taking her back to Old House so she could show off to the rest of the family, but then he had a better idea. He told her not to worry, he’d be right back, he was going to get the others so they could all see Raymond too. “Bird,” he said to her, and kissed her freckled cheek. “Bird!”

  He skipped through the water and sprinted across the pasture to the house, barefoot and heedless as a hippie maiden. He’d watched his two oldest kids take their first steps, but he couldn’t remember being present to hear any of his children utter their f
irst word; he was always at work, at another house, at church, always somewhere else. Too often he’d come home to find one of the babies who was fluent, as far as he knew, in nothing but standardized infant gibberish, sitting in her high chair and carrying on in simple but very plain English, “Baby drink! Please! Baby drink!”

  “Since when can Sybil talk?” he’d ask.

  “Oh jeez, Goldy, she’s been talking for a good three weeks,” Nola would tell him.

  “Wait. Three weeks?”

  “Maybe more than that. Where’ve you been?”

  The thing was, he had no idea where he’d been. He often wondered if he wasn’t suffering from some mental disease characterized by memory loss and intermittent blackouts: whole chunks of his life fallen away into some dark swirling hole in his mind. Sometimes it felt like he was living in an ongoing time warp, the hours collapsing on themselves, days and weeks speeding ahead of him, and he’d have to claw his way forward through the chaos and fatigue just to catch up, and always, without fail, to lose his focus and fall behind again. But Glory slowed things down for him, moved along at a pace that matched his own. He did not miss anything with her: her self-feeding program and color recognition and toilet training, every minor progression in motor skills and range of motion, her first steps with the parallel bars, then the weighted buggy, then the crutches. He spent eight months teaching her to put on and remove her orthopedic shoes. And now, her first word. His daughter was six years old, doomed to a life without language, and he’d been there to hear it: bird.

  As he loped across the lawn he was feeling so elated, his chest filled with the bubbling gasses of fatherly pride, that he tried something he’d never so much as considered before: taking the porch steps, all five of them, in one great leaping stride. His big toe caught the top of the last riser and he went down, elbows and knees clapping hard against the wood, but he felt nothing. He scrambled to his feet and yelled, “Bird!”