The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  From a safe distance, Mr. Baugh shouted that he was calling the police.

  “Which one is she?” Golden called, but he already knew. She was in the small one, the one Beverly had picked out, the one that was not a boxy casket, but an actual coffin, shaped to accommodate the human body, built with a rich cherrywood, winged angels carved into the lid. He lifted the casket off its stainless steel bier and was surprised by how light it was: it felt like he was carrying a box of pillows. Out in the parlor, Mr. Baugh barked into the phone and waved a letter opener in Golden’s direction to make it clear he was not incapable of defending himself. In the distance, a siren started up—it was the siren the Hurricane fire department set off every day at noon, but Golden didn’t know that. He imagined red lights, police cars racing in from every direction, unholstered pistols and bullhorns. He paused for a moment, considering his options and then tucked the coffin under one arm, pushed open the heavy oak door with the other, and sprinted across the lawn to his car.

  To arrive home only to find that he’d stolen an empty coffin—Glory’s body was back at the funeral home, laid out on a porcelain table in the embalming room, waiting to be transferred to the casket with which Golden had absconded—only made the burn of shame and anger spread inside him like a fever. Beverly had to go back to the funeral home, smooth things out with Mr. Baugh and the responding sheriff’s deputy, while Golden stayed home, locked himself in the unfinished Doll House and wept with a hot, incoherent rage.

  It had stayed with him all day, that anger, and he didn’t know what to do with it. It rose and receded in his throat, smoldered and bunched under the surface of his skin. Now, in the dark hours of morning, he seethed, hot tears leaking down his face like water running over the sides of a boiling pot. He stalked around the west side of the house, past the Doll House, where the moon’s reflection stretched and purled on the blue-black surface of the slow-moving river. Something white, hanging suspended in the air on the other side of the river, caught his eye. In a spasm of hope, his mind leapt to the thought that it was an apparition, the spirit of his little girl come back to offer what comfort she could, to let him know that she continued to exist in some peaceful beyond, that she still loved him, that wherever she was, she waited for him there. He moved closer, squinting, his heart turning over in his chest, until he realized what he was looking at was not a spirit presence of any kind, but the white breast feathers of Raymond the Ostrich.

  He squeezed his head between his forearms and heard himself make a small choking noise of despair. When he looked up, the big bird was still standing at the fence, lifting one foot into the air, then the other. It stretched its long neck and let out a short, guttural squawk that sounded like a challenge. Golden stumbled forward, his rage returning to him in an instant, and it occurred to him that this bird was the last creature to have seen his girl alive. He found a rock in the mud of the pasture and, with a clumsy three-part motion, heaved it in the general direction of the ostrich. He waited for the sound of its landing, which never came. He moved closer, pitched a jagged hunk of white sandstone that landed with a splash in the middle of the river. Once at the river’s bank, with ammunition in the form of round river stones on all sides, he found his range, throwing rock after rock, while Raymond stood at the fence, unperturbed and none the wiser, mocking Golden with a healthy display of feathers, staring him down with his yellow pearl of an eye. “Bird!” Golden growled, his voice broken and raw. “You stupid bird!”

  He stepped out into the river, the water cutting against his legs with a cold that burned. He splashed across with the idea of pegging that bird with a rock from point-blank range, just to give him a little dose of pain, to startle him from his privileged position at the fence, to make him consider his own mortality for a moment, but by the time he had struggled out of the cold grip of the river, had felt the full force of its merciless pull, there was only one thought in his head: to kill the animal who had done this to his daughter, to him.

  Even as he clambered up the wet bank and struggled to squeeze himself through the strands of barbed wire, Raymond did not budge. Maybe the bird, who had carried on a serene and unmolested existence after his infamous encounter with the teenage gasoline thief, could not believe someone was actually violating his sovereign territory. With something like idle curiosity Raymond watched Golden wrestle with the barbed-wire fence, finally pulling himself free of it by allowing the back of his shirt to tear in half, and only when the huge man turned and lunged at him did he think to run. Just as Raymond pivoted, Golden was on him, throwing an arm over his back and hanging on. With surprising power the ostrich surged suddenly to his left and Golden ran alongside him, the acrid smell of the thing full in his nostrils, his feet paddling wildly underneath him until he tripped over a tin feed trough and went down hard in the dirt, still clutching a handful of gray feathers in each fist. In a panic, the bird fled into the small enclosure behind the feed bin while Golden picked himself up and rushed in behind him, hoping to corner him there, but the bird skirted along the back perimeter of the fence, bobbing and skipping wildly, and when Golden tried to cut him off he turned and delivered a deft kick to the outside of Golden’s upper thigh, which felt like a blow from the blunt end of a billy club. Holding his leg, Golden tottered and fell backward against the empty feed bin, which made a hollow gonging noise and prompted several cows out in the pasture to moo in sleepy alarm.

  The windows of the Spooner house were already lit and Brother Spooner clopped out onto the back steps in unlaced boots, wearing long underwear and armed with a .30-30, calling, “Who’s out here? I’ll shoot you, whoever you are!”

  Golden kept still, hoping Brother Spooner might miss him there in the shadow of the feed bin, but no such luck. Golden watched Brother Spooner’s bald head bob along the fence line until he came around the other side of the bin where Golden lay. Brother Spooner looked down and said, “What…in…the…hell?”

  Golden knew there was no explanation that made any sense, so he offered none. He allowed himself to be helped to his feet and led to the back porch, where Sister Spooner paced in her white flannel nightgown, meat cleaver at the ready.

  “As I live and breathe!” she said, clutching her nightgown at the throat as women in nightgowns tend to do. “Oh, he doesn’t look very good, Newell, does he? Check to see if he’s hurt.”

  As was customary, Brother Spooner ignored his wife. To Golden he said, “You want to tell me what you think you’re up to tonight?”

  Golden was barefoot and wet, covered in dust and ostrich feathers and bits of straw, and shuffled along with a halting double-limp that made him look like someone trying to get by on two wooden legs. He shook his head. “My daughter,” was all he could say. Unable to stand any longer, he slumped onto the porch step.

  “He get you?” Brother Spooner said. “He got you, didn’t he.”

  “He got me.”

  “He also got your watch, looks like,” Sister Spooner said, peering at Raymond, who was pressed into the far corner of his enclosure, looking back over his shoulder with something silver glinting in his beak.

  Golden looked at his wrist, which was bare. Sister Spooner said, “He likes shiny things, old Raymond. Watches are his favorite.”

  “And I’d forget about getting it back, I was you,” Brother Spooner said. “As far as he’s concerned that watch is now his personal property.”

  “He’ll probably swallow it soon,” said Sister Spooner, “but sometimes he likes to wait awhile.”

  While Golden waited for the feeling to return to his leg, the Spooners had a brief argument over whether or not Brother Spooner should call the sheriff. Sister Spooner, who gripped the meat cleaver like she knew how to use it, prevailed, arguing that Golden was in a state of shock and couldn’t be blamed for wading across the river and attacking their prized ostrich in the middle of the night like some kind of lunatic. Once her husband had gone inside to get dressed and find his keys so he could drive Golden home, Sister Spooner took
several mincing sideways steps toward him, to put a comforting hand on his shoulder and pick a few of the larger feathers from his hair. His shirt was slashed all the way down the back, he smelled like a manure pile, and his face was striped with the evidence of tears. Even now, his eyes shone wetly, ready to flow at any moment.

  He was thinking that he should get up right now, before Brother Spooner came out. He should walk back home on his own power, preserve whatever scraps of dignity he might have left, but the thought of wading back into the cold grasp of that river a second time was too much for him. Sister Spooner, who had always maintained a soft spot for Golden, for his honest, sad face, his addled sweetness in comparison to her husband’s hard ways, let herself go and in a surge of pity took his head in her hands, pressed it firmly into the twin ottomans of her breasts.

  “You poor thing,” she said, “you poor, poor man.”

  SAFETY IN NUMBERS

  Two hours later, dozing at his post next to Glory’s coffin and rousing himself twice to check on the other children sleeping soundly in their beds, he put on his work boots and drove his pickup through the pink dawn to the Virgin City Municipal Cemetery, which sat on a broad shelf at the foot of Widow Mountain and overlooked the small town below. Though the sun was not yet up, the ambient light of dawn made the fine red sand that passed for soil in these parts seem to burn like bedded coals against the black volcanic rock of the mountain. There was the usual clamor of birds, excited out of their limited wits by the prospect of a new day.

  Golden pulled in and drove slowly over the groomed gravel lane to the northeast corner, where his father, in a fit of optimism, had purchased sixteen burial plots assembled four abreast in a perfect rectangle. He’d bought them only a few months before he died, when he had no reason to doubt he would require these plots, and many more, for all the wives and children who would one day bear his family name.

  The sight of his father’s grave had always given Golden the oddest feeling; there was something sad and maybe a little funny both about the single polished marker alone in such an expanse of hopeful red dirt.

  ROYAL JOSEPH RICHARDS

  Light of the Lord

  The carved image, which everyone took to be a tree, probably the tree of life, was actually an atomic mushroom cloud—Royal had drawn it on a scrap of paper in the days before his death, and Golden had delivered the drawing to the stone carver, who had done an admirable job of replicating it. “I want my marker to be one of a kind,” father had told son in his last hours of lucid thought. “I want folks to know I went out like I came in, with a big fuckin’ bang.”

  Golden eased himself delicately out of the pickup and took a shovel out of its bed. Right away he ran into trouble. The earth was porous and sandy but littered with basalt cobbles—some small, some as big as bowling balls. Time and again his shovel rang out against the stones, sometimes with a flash of sparks. The work was hard and what he’d hoped for: it obliterated all thought. He dug around each stone, probing and scraping with the blade of his shovel, and when one finally was pried loose he felt the relief that comes with pulling a splinter from under a fingernail. He was two feet down, the sun climbing against the mountain, sweat dripping steadily out of his hair, when the sheriff pulled up in his cruiser.

  Golden did not stop digging, did not look up while the sheriff took his time getting out of the car. If he noticed Golden’s torn shirt, his mud-caked pants and the fact that he was covered in feathers, he didn’t mention it.

  “Morning,” the sheriff called. “Up early, I see.”

  Golden pulled out a grapefruit-sized cobble and tossed it onto the pile near the sheriff’s boots.

  “Got a call,” the sheriff said, holding his creased face to the sun. “Grave robbery in progress. After the mischief you’ve been up to these past twenty-four hours, I figured it might be you.”

  Under the sheriff’s gaze, Golden worked harder and faster than he had when alone, tossing up half-shovelfuls of dirt in random directions.

  “They got a guy with a backhoe does this,” said the sheriff, settling into a stance that suggested he would be content to watch Golden dig for a good long time. “Tellis Blackmore, I think you know him. Highlight of his day, to come out and dig a grave. Squares off the corners, makes a tidy pile a dirt, throws them rocks over the fence so they don’t make noises on the casket when he pushes the dirt back in. Hangs around for the burial, sometimes, sheds a tear or two along with the next of kin. You don’t plan to put Tellis out of a job, I hope.”

  Exhausted, Golden let his shovel drop and sat on the edge of the hole. He didn’t want to talk to the sheriff, but was glad for the break. He looked at his hands: blisters at the base of every finger. Just as he was entertaining a thought about how thirsty he’d become, the sheriff reached into the front seat of his car and came out with a thermos. He poured something into the lid and handed it to Golden. Orange juice, sweet and cold. Golden downed the cup in one gulp and the sheriff handed over the thermos so he could dispatch what was left of it.

  The sheriff was a slight, deeply tanned man with the blown-out face of a dedicated alcoholic. Fifteen years ago he’d lost his wife and two young sons in a car accident and had taken to drink, which cost him his teacher’s position at the local high school. With nothing left to lose, he ran for sheriff, made his own pathetic hand-lettered signs, which ended up, after a particularly fierce windstorm, caught in weeds and hedges and plastered against chain-link fences all over the county:

  FONTANA FOR SHERIFF

  A BRAND NEW START!

  The standing sheriff’s signs were glossy and professionally printed, but not all that more compelling:

  ELECT HOUNSHELL FOR SHERIFF

  DIFFERENT MOUSTACHE

  SAME VALUES

  Everyone was surprised when Fontana won the election, apparently on sympathy alone. Even more surprising was how he took to the job. He controlled his drinking and, because he had no family left, dedicated his every moment to his work. When a paranoid widow called in to say there were burglars whispering in the bushes outside her bedroom window, he spent the night in his cruiser in front of her house so she’d feel safe. He put every county prisoner on work detail and cleaned up the park, refurbished the rodeo grandstands, and used leftover yellow highway paint to paint several of the decrepit houses in Mexican Town, which now gave off a ghostly mustard-yellow aura in the dark of night. He cracked down on teenage hot-rodders and did not tolerate hippies or drifters or drunks (though he spent an occasional night drinking himself into oblivion) and had become something of a legend for giving Frank Sinatra, who was driving through on his way to Las Vegas, a firm lecture and a two-hundred-dollar ticket for speeding, reckless endangerment and driving without a license.

  Now he stood next to Golden and creaked. Golden wasn’t sure if it was the sheriff himself who was creaking, or if it was his leather holster, but the sound never stopped, even though the sheriff was standing absolutely still.

  Golden handed back the thermos. He said, “So you going to arrest me?”

  “Maybe later,” the sheriff said. “Right now, I’d like you to tell me where I might find an extra spade.”

  Golden pointed to his pickup and the sheriff retrieved a rusty number nine shovel from the bed. He removed his jacket, along with his holster and two-tone beige polyester shirt, and started digging. At first the arrangement was awkward, but they discovered that if they stood back to back at an angle and worked in rhythm, the deepening hole could accommodate them both. For the first twenty minutes or so, they worked without speaking, but gradually the sheriff, in his immaculate white T-shirt, started to talk. He told a few bad jokes, let slip a little gossip about the mayor’s wife, Neda Handley, who was caught shoplifting a pair of high-heel shoes. Golden was grateful to him for never mentioning Glory, or the details of her disappearance or the massive search effort the sheriff had helped to organize. Golden knew that this was a man who understood a father’s grief, knew how hard it was to negotiate it in the li
ght of day, to bear it with any dignity at all; not thirty yards from where they were working, near an old black currant bush, were the graves of his wife and two sons.

  Later that day at the funeral, sitting on the front pew with his wives, Golden would barely be able to hold himself together, gripping Beverly’s hand in his and swallowing back the sobs rising in his throat. Afterward, he would pilot the old Cadillac hearse the five miles from the church to the cemetery. He would ask Beverly this one favor: to be able to make the last drive with his Glory, nobody but the two of them. The sheriff in front with his lights flashing, the line of mourners behind, headlights on, they would roll along, slow as a Fourth of July parade, down the state highway, then across the county cutoff, passing houses and farms where people stepped out onto their porches, cut off their Rototillers and idled their tractors, removed their hats and head scarves, until the full procession passed. For a moment he would see himself as they saw him: a hulking shadow in the long black car, sagged with grief. As the cemetery came into view, he would forget to breathe, the pain in his chest too much, flashes of yellow and red across his vision, and slowly, almost gently, he would pass out, holding on to the steering wheel for dear life, the big hearse crawling slowly onto the shoulder and down the embankment, snapping through dead brush and scraping along a barbed-wire fence, the noise of which would startle him back into consciousness in time for him to swing back, as if nothing had happened, to take his rightful place in line.