by Brady Udall
His mother was waiting for them in a room with orange plastic chairs. She wore a blue bathrobe he had never seen before, and then he realized he’d never seen her wearing a bathrobe, not once, which bothered him. At home she would never come out of her room unless she was all-the-way dressed, shoes on her feet, but here she was sitting around right out in the open in a bathrobe and paper slippers surrounded by maniacs with yellow toenails.
Her hair looked grayer than he remembered and she was wearing a paper bracelet with words typed on it. They walked up to her slowly. “Kids,” she said, “oh kids,” and opened her arms.
“Remember the rules,” Aunt Nola said. “Line up. Single file and wait your turn.”
On the drive over Aunt Nola had given them instructions, one of which was they were supposed to wait in line and approach her one at a time. “One of the reasons she’s in the hospital is she can’t take all the stimulation that you little darlings provide, what with everybody coming at her all the time. Believe me, I know how she feels. So you’ll line up and go one at a time and whisper. You start yelling or acting up and it’s outside you go.”
Pauline asked why they all had to go at once, couldn’t they go see their mother one or two at a time? This was the question every plyg kid was always asking: Can’t we ever do anything alone? And Aunt Nola said what the mothers always said. “You think I don’t have anything else to do? You think you’re the center of the universe? You think your life is hard? Well, boo-hoo. Try thinking about somebody other than yourself for once.”
If there’s anything you learned as a plyg kid, it was that you were not the center of the universe. Rusty knew it better than any of them. The monkey net was big and tangled and had no trouble holding them all at once. And the worst thing? The monkey net would never go away, it was forever. That was what they taught you in church. Because they were a special people, because they were living God’s Principle, their families would live together in heaven for all time and eternity, which everybody seemed to think was a wonderfully fantastic idea. Was it wonderfully fantastic, Rusty wondered, to be stuck forever with a bunch of a-holes you didn’t even like? Was it wonderfully fantastic to have to stand in line to talk to your own mother?
Because they went youngest to oldest, Rusty was fifth in line. Ferris gave their mother a pebble that was almost perfectly round and Fig Newton brought her report card which showed all S’s, which meant Fig Newton was fantastically satisfactory. Wayne, who was mad at their mother for having a nervous breakdown and ending up in the loony bin, brought nothing and after giving her a fake hug stood out in the hall with a sour look on his face. Herschel the Butt-kisser brought her favorite pillow, and her mug that she liked for drinking lemon tea, and Rusty quietly shook his fist, because why hadn’t he thought of that? All he had was the picture of his birthday, with him sitting there cross-eyed next to his birthday cake and putting on the biggest, dumbest smile you have ever seen.
When it was his turn he didn’t hug her because she looked like she was not at all interested in being hugged. He gave her the picture and she looked at it. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“I’m wearing the sweater you made me,” he whispered, very carefully. A lot of the blood hadn’t come out of it in the wash, so he’d poured some bleach on it, which hadn’t really helped. If you went to the cemetery in the middle of the night and dug up a grave and opened the coffin and the rotting skeleton inside was wearing a sweater, it would probably look a little better than the one he had on. If his mother noticed there was anything wrong with it, she wasn’t saying. She smiled and patted his hand. He was glad she didn’t ask about the tampon.
He sat down next to her, trying to think of something to talk about, hoping Aunt Nola wouldn’t say, Time’s up! and move him along. He let his shoulder touch hers. He said, really low so no one else could hear, “I’m starting to behave a lot better, I’m not going to get into trouble anymore.” Which was a lie. Rusty understood that when you were talking to somebody in a place like this it was a good idea to lie to them as much as possible.
From down the hall came the kind of scream you hear in a horror movie where someone is being tortured with red-hot pliers in a dungeon. Fig Newton and Ferris looked around for someone to tell them that everything was all right, but no one did.
Before they left, Aunt Nola got them together and they sang their mother a song.
When upon life’s billows you are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
Count your many blessings, see what God has done.
It had to be the dumbest song in the world, if you wanted Rusty’s opinion, but their mother, along with a crazy-eyed coot who’d butted in on the proceedings, smiled and politely clapped, and for about ten seconds they all pretended to be happy.
But when Rusty went home that night he was not happy. Up in the Tower by himself he tried to count his blessings, which was the easiest math problem ever, because the answer was a BIG FAT ZERO. And nobody cared, nobody would help him. He’d started to think he should just kill himself, stick a sharp pencil through his earhole or walk all the way to Iceland and float away on an iceberg. But last night, because his plans were ruined and he didn’t know what to do, he decided to pray. He didn’t like praying, because it never did any good. When they told him to say grace at supper or give the opening prayer in Sunday School, he just mumbled something that sounded like a prayer: HeavenlyFatherthankeethisday thefoodthehandsprepared itinnameaJesaChristamen. But what else was there to do? He couldn’t sleep at night, he was having bad thoughts in his head, so he might as well say a prayer.
When the prophet Joseph Smith was just a kid, not much older than Rusty, he’d given the most famous prayer ever. Joseph Smith was confused, he didn’t know which church to join, so he went out into the forest to pray. Why he didn’t just pray in the kitchen, or on his bed or somewhere comfortable like that, Rusty had no idea. He went out into the forest to pray and Jesus and God came to him in a bright ball of light and told him none of the churches were true, that Joseph Smith, even though he was just a kid, would be the new prophet and start his own church and become the most powerful person in the history of the universe.
Which was just great for Joseph Smith, but what about Rusty? There wasn’t a forest nearby, not even two or three trees close together, so Rusty decided the bushes by the river would have to do. After everyone had gone to sleep he snuck out of the Tower and went down to the river. You were supposed to kneel down when you prayed, so God would know you were serious, but when Rusty knelt in the muddy grass the knees of his pajamas got covered with wet brown stains. What a gyp! He bowed his head and made a steeple with his hands, which looked kind of gay, but nobody was out here to see.
“Dearest Lord above,” Rusty said, which was how he once heard a sexy nun pray in a movie, “hear Thee the desires of my heart.”
He wanted to approach this the right way. That was a good start and the night was kind of beautiful, with a big moon, and the bushes looked sort of like a forest and he was in perfect prayer position, with his head down and doing the steeple-thing with his hands, and he started off by telling God that he was going to do his best to be a good person who wasn’t such a pain in the behind, he was so sorry for all of his sins, and just as he was starting to get this nice holy feeling, everything started going wrong. He was asking God to bless his mother, to make her better, but he could feel an ant crawling up his leg. Effing ant! he thought. Get the heck out of here! which was probably not the holiest thing to be thinking during a prayer. Not to mention his underwear was riding up on him. And then who showed up but Raymond the Ostrich, watching from across the river with his glowing eyes, and Rusty couldn’t concentrate, not with an ostrich staring at him and an ant crawling toward his privates. So he picked up a stick to throw at Raymond, to scare him off so he could have his privacy back and start feeling holy again, but the stick slipped and ended u
p hitting an old piece of tin on this side of the river and the clang! was so loud Rusty had to run like the wind to get back into the house before he was discovered.
Lying on his pad with a sweaty head and muddy knees, he was asking himself why he was such a buttfudge, what was wrong with him that he couldn’t even say a prayer?—when something weird happened. He fell asleep for a little while. And then, even weirder, he had a dream. Normally his dreams were about friendly werewolves or giant chicks in bikinis who breathed molten fire, but this one was different. His mother came to him in a big ball of yellow light, just like God and Jesus came to Joseph Smith. She didn’t say anything, but she was smiling and surrounded by bright sparks and little meteors that circled around her head and there was some kind of choir singing something holy-sounding in the background.
When he woke up this morning, he knew: his mother would be coming home. Rusty had prayed, and even though the prayer had gotten a little messed up, God had answered it. Take that, Joseph Smith! God would bless his mother, because Rusty had gone to a lot of trouble to kneel down in some muddy grass to pray for her and because she was a nice person who was never mean to anyone, and now that she would be getting stronger and thinking clearly she would say, I am Rusty’s true mother, let him come home.
Which was why he was feeling so good riding down the middle of the road on a Big Wheel at midnight. He felt a cool air sensation and looked down and noticed he had forgotten to put on his pants. Oh well! He was silent as the wind, invisible as the Holy Ghost, and he could not be stopped.
Not that Aunt Beverly didn’t try. After he’d crawled out the window at the end of the hall without a screen, he found she had locked up the garage with all the bikes inside. You should have seen it, he didn’t even get mad. He just shook his head and said, Nicely done, nicely done. He looked around and sure enough, there was the Big Wheel at the side of the house, the one with the brake on the back wheel so if you felt like it you could do a cool spin-out when you pulled on the handle. He was too big for it and his knees kept hitting the handlebars, but anything was better than walking.
By the time he made it to Big House his knees felt like somebody had been banging on them with hammers and his feet were raw from the jagged pedals, but he hadn’t seen a single car on the way and the night air was cool on his sweaty neck.
The doors of Big House were never locked. He crept upstairs and stood next to his mother’s door, listening. Any day now, the grown-ups kept saying, she’ll be home any day now, and Rusty was sure that if his mother did come home Aunt Beverly would keep that information to herself. He pictured her in her bed, without her earmuffs, sleeping peacefully in the dark with sparkles of light around her head.
He stepped inside the room and could hear breathing, definite breathing. His heart did a little flip and he snuck closer to the bed. What he found was somebody, but it was not his mother. It was Novella, and a second imposter, Gale, mumbling in her sleep. He looked around and could see they had brought in some of their things, clothes and books and a Lil’ Strawberry Patch Girl lamp. Rusty’s chest filled up with something hot and sour and he wanted to drag them out of the bed by the hair and take the Lord’s name in vain right to their faces, because, what, did they think they could just move into his mother’s room as if she was gone forever and not coming back? As if she’d never even been there at all? What did they think? And what did God think, sending him a dream and playing a trick on him like that?
He stood by the bed, breathing hard, grabbing his hair with both hands and giving it a good yank, telling himself to calm down, calm down.
He gave one big, shuddering snork, and then suddenly all his anger was gone and he was so tired. His knees and his feet and his head hurt and all he wanted to do was lie down in his mother’s bed and smell her pillow. He crawled in next to his sister and she was soft and warm and didn’t push him away.
When he woke up it was just getting light outside and the birds were singing like maniacs.
He got out of the bed and stood over Novella, putting his hand out over her face, and thought about pressing his palm down onto her mouth. Instead, he cocked his middle finger with his thumb, and flicked her across the tip of the nose, hard. Quick as lightning he did the same to Gale and then ducked down below the bed and crawled out the door before they could see anything.
Gale howled and Novella was screeching, “Who did that? Who’s there?” By the time he’d sprinted down the stairs, out the side door, and was on his Big Wheel pedaling down the road, half the house was up and shouting, thrashing around like monkeys caught in a net.
31.
A MINOR PLAGUE
FOR SOME, THE PLAGUE CAME AS NO SURPRISE. SINCE THE CREATION of the world God has visited plagues upon His children for many reasons: to test, to chastise, to invite them to repentance, but mostly to remind them, in a way that leaves little room for confusion, of the error of their ways. And there was no doubt, in the minds of some of the Richards clan, that they were in need of correction. As a family they were adrift, lacking in obedience and low on faith: their father and patriarch was absent in body and spirit and for too long had been of little use to anyone; their mothers feuded and couldn’t properly control their children, who in turn bickered and misbehaved and drove their mothers (and in one recent case almost literally) crazy.
Unlike most plagues, which tend to kick off melodramatically with rivers turning to blood or clouds of locusts boiling over distant mountains to blot out the sun, this one started with…a mild itching. Aunt Beverly, as always, was the first to note something amiss. Alvin, idly digging at the skin of his hips and back, and a few minutes later Martin pausing between bites of a sandwich to scratch at his ankles. When Louise came into the kitchen and displayed the bites on her belly—three tiny inflamed spots like the points of a triangle—Beverly made the instant transition from guarded concern to no-holds-barred crisis control. She shouted the alarm, ushered all of the kids out of the house onto the front porch, counted heads and called Nola to inform her there had been an outbreak of some kind, lice or bedbugs or mites. Nola, of course, found this deliciously hilarious and figured this new development could keep her in a good mood for at least a week. But only a few hours later, after a quick late afternoon nap, she began to itch deep within the rolls of fat under her arms, locations difficult if not impossible to reach, and in a few minutes she was hopping on one foot in a throe of futile scratching, squirming, and swearing in high Aunt Nola fashion, “Dang potlickers! Ack! Little suck-egg sons-of-beekeepers!”
She pulled the sheets back on her bed, and sure enough, two black dots zinged in different directions, one landing in the carpet of the floor, the other on her pillow. Nola had grown up on a farm and was familiar with every class of vermin and pest in this part of the world. No doubt about it: the Richards family had fleas.
“Oh you little so and so’s,” she said. “Just you wait.”
A strategy was formulated, debated, and implemented: everyone would be sent to Big House while Old House was washed, vacuumed, fumigated. At Big House the kids would be defleaed using Nola’s tried and true home remedy, and then moved en masse to Old House so that Big House could be thoroughly cleansed.
Trish arrived from her afternoon visit with Rose to find the operation in full swing. While Beverly and the two oldest girls were cleaning Old House, Nola had been left to deal with the children. Most of the younger ones were aimlessly circling the racetrack, as if by force of habit alone, or standing around in the front room, despondently scratching themselves like bored baboons in a zoo. Trish went into the kitchen to find the rest of them arranged on chairs and stools, their heads hooded in black plastic bags. She thought she’d stumbled onto the scene of an execution. “What’s that smell?” she said.
“Kerosene!” called Nola, tugging a bag around the head of her last victim.
“You’ve soaked them in kerosene?”
“Only their hair.”
“Are you serious? What about the fumes?”
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“The fumes are the whole point, dear.”
Now Trish could only stare at her. “Oh, don’t worry,” Nola said. “I’ve cut everybody a mouth hole.”
“Mama?” Faye called meekly from under one of the black bags. “Please help me.”
Nola explained that kerosene was the most effective flea remedy there was. Showering would only encourage the fleas, who preferred heat and humidity, and the commercial products were spotty at best, not to mention expensive. “Fleas are hearty little scamps, you’ve got to hit ’em hard and fast. Three minutes sucking kerosene fumes, though, they don’t stand a chance. There’s not just the adults but the larvae and the eggs. You’ve got to get ’em all or the next thing you know you’re infested.”
“Aggh,” someone cried from under one of the bags. “I can’t breathe!”
“Oh please,” Nola said.
“I’m getting dizzy,” somebody said.
“I’m seeing spots,” said somebody else.
“Maybe if you guys didn’t live in such a dirty house,” someone who sounded like Helaman shouted, “we wouldn’t have to be doing this!”
“Who said that?” cried Clifton, easily identified by his barking monotone. “It’s you guys who brought the fleas from Old House. It’s you guys who are the dirty fleabag jerks.”
“You guys are the jerks!” somebody shouted.
“Oh no we’re not!” cried somebody else.
“At least we’re not uptight buttholes,” Clifton said.
There was some laughter, presumably from the Big House camp. Parley slipped off his stool and attempted to attack Clifton, but was limited in that his head was in a bag. He ended up bumping against one of the girls, who tipped forward, screaming, “Ahhh! I got some in my eye!” and everybody started shouting and jostling and trying to pull the bags off their heads. Nola went around slapping their hands away and saying, “Hey! Hey! No! Hey! Three minutes! Breathe through your mouth!,” the kids shouted and complained, Darling, the family weeper, began to weep, and Cooter, who had become the scapegoat in this whole affair and been banished to the utility closet after the humiliation of a kerosene bath, put up a woebegone howl.