The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  42.

  A FUNERAL

  THOUGH RUSTY MCCREADY RICHARDS WAS NOBODY SPECIAL, JUST a kid, his funeral drew the largest congregation the Living Church of God had ever seen. Not only had the strange story of his accident, his miraculous five weeks of survival, and eventual death been featured in the Dixie Weekly, but the superintendent of schools had decreed that any student who attended the funeral would be given an excused absence for the day. It was standing room only, then, the multitudes spilling out well into the cinder parking lot.

  After the service, Golden stepped out of the church and was immediately pulled into the gears of the crowd, the mourners and well-wishers and malingerers, eventually finding himself spit out on the other side. He scooted past a local family he vaguely knew, gave quick handshakes, fended off hugs and, desperate for a few moments alone, ducked into the driver’s side of the hearse, pulling the door shut behind him.

  The pallbearers had already placed the casket in the back, and the red velvet curtains were drawn, lending the car’s interior a warm Martian glow. Golden held on to the steering wheel for a while, then gave it a single desultory shake. He had promised himself he wouldn’t cry; for the past month he’d been swallowing tears and now seemed to have a permanent ache in the hinge of his jaw. He had managed to hold himself together for most of the service, even while around him his wives and children sniffled and wept. It was when Uncle Chick gave the final prayer and closed the lid of the casket that he lost himself, just for a moment, and let out a short, breathless shout through his teeth.

  Be strong, he told himself one more time. You’ve got to be strong.

  He remembered the mess he had been at Glory’s funeral more than three years ago, so much weeping and carrying on, as if he alone had lost something. He had insisted on making the drive from the church to the cemetery by himself, just the two of them, and it seemed to him now that all his mistakes as a husband and father could be summed up in that single gesture.

  He rolled down the window and called out to Em, who was being consoled by a clutch of girls doing an admirable job of pretending to be distraught. Em, radiant in a dark navy dress, her hair done up in a duenna’s bun, came right away. She bent down a little so she could look in his eyes, and when she put her hand on his neck and said, “Daddy,” in a soft voice, he had to turn away and clench his jaw to hold back a sob.

  He swallowed, nodding to buy a little time. Then told her to gather up the children, that they would all be riding to the cemetery together.

  “All of us?” she said, and he said, “Everyone.”

  It was five and a half miles from the church to the cemetery. The procession moved slowly, never more than ten miles an hour, with the sheriff and his new deputy taking the lead, lights flashing feebly in the summer sun. Traffic was stopped at the county cutoff, and all along the way cars and pickups and flatbeds with heeler dogs in the back pulled over and waited for the procession, more than a quarter mile long, to pass. Housewives and their youngsters stepped out onto porches, men paused in their work, calling to each other to shut down their machines. A crew of Mexican laborers cutting the first alfalfa of the season gathered in a ragged line, the field green and brilliant beneath them, each one removing his hat to make the sign of the cross.

  If any of those people noticed the long Cadillac hearse was packed floor to ceiling with a seething mass of bodies, feet jutting up at odd angles, arms and faces and whole torsos hanging out the windows, they had the good decency not to gawk or point. The first mile or so was the worst. The kids were heaped all over each other, having dog-piled into the car as if they were going for a joyride. To accommodate the casket, Golden had had to remove the three homemade bench seats, so only the front and rear seats remained, upon which fourteen of them, including Golden with Pet on his lap doing much of the steering, were now haphazardly stacked, while the back bay was crammed full with the other thirteen, including Rusty in his casket. Even before they pulled out of the parking lot the wailing and carping had started. Ferris hollered at no one in particular, Alvin claimed in a muffled voice he was being asphyxiated by someone’s butt, and Darling, because she had lost her shoe, wept louder and longer than she had during the funeral service. Smuggled in from Nola’s station wagon by Clifton and lost somewhere deep within the pile, Cooter howled and whined as if he were being boiled in a pot.

  There were a dozen minor scuffles as they grappled for position, the bass-drum thump of someone’s head landing on the lid of the casket, a shouting match over whose foot was being jammed into whose back. And the heat inside the car was a punishment (though Golden had the AC cranked and all the windows open, the tight knit of bodies stymied any kind of airflow and radiated a sweatshop heat of its own). But eventually they began to sort themselves out. In their badly knotted neckties and wrinkled funeral dresses they negotiated for space, wiggling into niches and voids, the older ones taking the brunt of the weight, stiffening their arms and spines to protect those underneath, bracing their legs against seat backs and door handles, managing a quickly engineered scaffolding of limbs held in a trembling balance, bodies leveraged against one another until they seemed to be holding each other aloft.

  Now the procession crested the cambered incline of Grover’s Hill, filed past the remains of the old rodeo arena, the wooden corrals and chutes silvered with age, and onward to the north past a group of Herefords who could not be bothered to lift their heads.

  “Doing good, kids,” Golden called out to them, his voice thick, “it won’t be long.”

  He let Pet steer the downslope straightaway and swiveled around to make sure no one was suffocating or succumbing to heatstroke. From the dregs of the rear seat came a weakened, desolate whine and from the farthest back somebody—possibly Naomi—said in the most matter-of-fact of voices, “I think my whole body is starting to cramp.”

  “Okay then, all right,” Golden said. “Just hold on, you’re all doing great, all of you, just hold on.”

  For a while there was nothing but the subterranean gurgle of the car’s engine and the children’s collective breathing, a noise like the gentle crash of surf that lulled Golden into a moment of heavy-lidded torpor—which was interrupted when Pet discovered the Cadillac’s horn. She pressed the shiny chrome button at the center of the steering wheel, giving it one short blast and one long, like a medieval call to arms, making everyone jump, causing the sheriff to crane his neck out the window to see what was the matter and Golden to raise both arms in demonstration of his innocence. It was at this moment that Pet gave it one more good blast and from behind there was a wheeze and a giggle and then the children were all laughing at once, a swelling, cackling cheer that was one of the sweetest sounds Golden had ever heard.

  The cemetery in view now, they rattled over the last cattle guard on the way up the hill. There was a full minute of peace before an agitation started in the rear seat, a ripple of an argument that crescendoed in a burst of complaint and backbiting, which triggered a structural collapse in the far back, setting off a general howl of woe, and then the last straw, a sharp, bitter stench that quickly filled the car. Novella, sitting next to Golden with Louise on her lap, covered her mouth with her hand and said, “Oh, dear,” and that was when it hit him. At first he thought it had to be something wrong with the engine, a melted hose or failed radiator, but then he realized that Cooter, spooked by the commotion or moved by simple spite, had relieved himself under the seat. Those who could pressed their noses toward an open window and those who couldn’t cursed the day Cooter was ever born.

  Finally, they rolled through the cemetery gates and everyone, including Cooter, bailed out in a slipstream of tumbling bodies before Golden could bring the hearse to a stop.

  Only Golden took his time getting out. For a few moments he was alone again, just him and the boy, and there under the outstretched arms of an old locust, the other cars filing slowly past, he let himself have his cry.

  ONE MORE CHILD OF GOD

  In the sharp heat o
f noon, the graveside ceremony was mercifully short. Uncle Chick dedicated the grave, said a few final words, and that was all. The mourners offered their condolences and went back to their lives. Soon it was only the Richards family, the funeral director, Mr. Baugh, who sat sulking in his Buick because, once again, he had not been allowed to drive the company hearse to transport the body, which was only customary and proper and part of the comprehensive funeral package, and, of course, Tellis Blackmore, the county grave digger, waiting patiently to finish his job.

  The Richards family plots took up most of the northwest corner of the cemetery. There were sixteen of them, an area of nearly seven hundred square feet bisected by a three-foot-wide walkway. Royal was buried just southwest of the center, Glory three plots over to the east, and Jack’s small headstone stood at the far southeast corner next to a red currant bush. Rusty’s grave, dug with meticulous care by Tellis Blackmore and his backhoe, lay just kitty-corner to his grandfather’s. Golden stood in the expanse of all that pristine red dirt and realized it would never be sufficient, never close to enough.

  Later that afternoon, during the funeral luncheon, he would get a call from a Mr. Edward Pinsker, one half of the snowbird couple who had purchased Old House with the intention of transforming it into the Jewel of the Desert Bed and Breakfast, who, having been back and forth to Minneapolis for the past month and not terribly interested in the local media, would have no idea that Golden had just buried his third child in as many years. For the sixth time, according to his records, Mr. Pinkser would be calling to complain that some of the house’s old outbuildings that were supposed to have been razed, per the purchase agreement, were still very much standing, and he would wonder when he might expect to see them gone. Golden would not respond except to hang up the phone, go out back where the old Case front loader was parked among all the other machines currently being put to use in the Big House renovation and, still in his funeral clothes, the knot of his tie thick as a fist at his throat, drive the mile and a half to Old House, where he would chug up the driveway at full speed, lowering the big bucket as he came, and plow through the old chicken coops, flattening them in a hail of splinters, as if they had never been there at all. He would continue along the side of the house, his necktie slapping him in the face, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Pinsker watching from behind the safety of the screen door, and under a black haze of diesel fumes push Doll House, with a great shrieking of nails and snapping timbers, thirty yards across the grassy banks and into the river.

  (All of this would be reported later by Nephi, who had been enlisted by Beverly to follow Golden in the work truck, to make sure he didn’t do anything extreme; she had heard his end of the phone conversation and had seen the look in his eyes.) Sitting stiffly in the rusted spring seat, the exhaust pipe clattering and belching smoke, Golden would watch the remains of Doll House float out of sight, debris spreading out and disappearing along the big bend in the river, and then would spend a minute or two considering Raymond, loitering near the fence to watch the proceedings. Raymond, of course, had survived the accident that had taken Rusty’s life. His breast feathers had been singed and he’d taken shrapnel to one of his legs, but other than a mild limp was no worse for wear; he stood at the fence with his head held high, blinking his girlish lashes. After a time Golden would back up the loader and pull up next to his work truck in which Nephi sat wondering how, exactly, he was supposed to have stopped his father from doing, as his mother put it, “anything extreme.” Nephi would later report the look on his father’s face as “kind of weird and freaky” as he told Nephi to move aside, casting around under the bench seat and coming up with a strange, old-fashioned long-barreled pistol. Carrying the pistol close to his leg, he would walk down the driveway, across the bridge and up to the ostrich pen, which he would open, letting the gate swing wide. Nephi was sure, he would later say, that his father was going to shoot the thing, the way he brought the gun up at it, but would end up pointing a few feet over its head, the echoing crack sending it charging from the pen, around the house and into the road, where it would pause on the double yellow line, looking around as if wondering how it had managed to end up there. Golden would discharge the gun once more, and with his memory now refreshed, Raymond would sprint through the Pettigrews’ south pasture, scrabble wildly over a sagging barbed-wire fence and strike out across the raw desert, growing smaller and less distinct as he weaved and bobbed through the brush, dissolving and reappearing under the lip of the horizon until he seemed to have vanished into the sky.

  All of this would happen a few hours from now, in a final tide of anger that, after everything, Golden would not have believed he had left in him. But here, surrounded by his wives and children, he was merely exhausted, aching, sapped by the heat of the day. It was all he could do to stand in place in front of the casket mounded with flowers and let Rose lean in to him.

  The other mourners were long gone, the children getting restless, the younger ones beginning to wander out among the stones and monuments, their shoes and pant cuffs powdered with red dust, but Rose showed no signs of being ready to leave; she stared at the casket almost without blinking, as if trying to memorize the pattern of its grain. Mr. Baugh got out of his Buick and started toward them slowly, professionally, both hands clasped behind his back in a way that suggested all things must come to an end, but a cold look from Golden stopped him in his tracks.

  At some point Trish stepped away from the graveside to help Beverly and Em gather wayward children; a few of the girls were collecting beauty-pageant armfuls of dried-out wreaths and bleached plastic flowers, Herschel and the Three Stooges were climbing all over Tellis Blackmore’s backhoe and Ferris already had his pants down and was pressing himself into the cool, polished marker of one MRS. ONEITA TORGERSON, 1901–1959, CHERISHED SISTER AND AUNT.

  After getting Ferris back in his pants and calling the boys away from the machinery, Trish stopped near Jack’s headstone. She was here, of course, to mourn Rusty, to support and comfort Rose, but could not help pausing for a moment, standing a little off to the side as if she were doing nothing more than scanning the cemetery for additional troublemakers. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch the small marker, to pull the weeds growing at its base, to swab with the hem of her dress the dust that had gathered in the carved letters of her son’s name.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Golden look back at her and then he and Rose were stepping forward to gather several bouquets off the casket. With Golden beside her, Beverly laid a mixed wreath at Glory’s grave, and eventually Golden stepped away to rest a bouquet of carnations against his father’s stone. Trish did not know how long they maintained those positions, mourning alone in their separate corners, only Rose comforted by the soft weight of her sister’s arm. Freed of any pretense, Trish bent on one knee to wrestle a few clutches of chickweed from the ground, and when she rose Golden was next to her, holding a bouquet of chrysanthemums. He arranged it carefully on the small grave, and when he stepped back he was so close the buttons of his jacket cuff grazed her arm. He wiped his mouth and whispered, so low she almost couldn’t hear, “He was a beautiful boy.” His hand drifted sideways and, just for a moment, touched hers.

  For some time they stood that way, without moving or speaking, the sun so high they stood perfectly inside their own shadows. Mr. Baugh checked his watch and the younger kids chased each other through the stones, their shouts carrying on the warm air, and Tellis Blackmore sat in his preferred spot under the shade of a gnarled juniper, finishing up his lunch and waiting patiently to lower one more child of God into the earth.

  43.

  A FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH

  THE MONSOONS CAME EARLY THAT YEAR. EVERY AFTERNOON THE clouds would build to the south, darkening the far horizon and throwing down the occasional thunderbolt. The dry grass along the ditches would stir, the cottonwood leaves clatter like loose coins, the clouds swell and fold and spread, blocking the sun and pushing great walls of water-cooled air in front of them
, bending trees and making laundry jump on the line, the temperature dropping fifteen degrees in twenty minutes. During the average monsoon season it didn’t rain every afternoon, but this year it seemed to, storms lining up like causeway traffic, pushing up from Mexico by way of Arizona one after the other, sometimes well into the night.

  Though almost everyone was grateful for the moisture, the relief from the heat, the beauty and distraction of such big weather, for Golden, trying to complete the Big House renovation as quickly as possible, it was a nightmare. Luckily he’d dug out and poured the new walls of the expanded basement before the rains came, but the entire south side of the house had been torn away to accept the new addition, and though the opening was draped with twenty-foot lengths of clear plastic, the rain gusted in, soaking into the subfloors and drywall. Part of every day was lost to channel-making and dam construction to keep the water from flowing into the kitchen and the basement, and everywhere you walked it was mud and slop and branching tributaries of brown water spanned by bridges of plywood scrap or warped two-by-sixes. Even worse, his crews balked at working in the rain, even the Mexican framers and roofers who wouldn’t have thought twice about hammering right through a dust storm or logging a twelve-hour day in one-hundred-degree heat. Some were terrified by lightning and others seemed to believe that a rainstorm was nothing less than a memo from God reminding them to take the day off or risk the consequences.

  Golden worked every day except Sunday, with or without his crew. On a given afternoon you might have found him trying to put up plywood sheeting alone or straddling a high truss in the middle of a squall, pounding away with his oversized framing hammer, soaked through, buck teeth exposed and hair plastered to his head in a way that brought to mind an irritable muskrat. He got so used to slipping in the thick clay gumbo that he would go down on his back or side, smeared all the way to the shoulders, and be right up and moving on to the next thing as if nothing had happened. Some evenings he’d come in for dinner nearly encased in dried mud, his eyes and teeth flashing white like some Aborigine on a vision quest.