His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  After Dad turned me down, I tried going to my newly married brother Trent for help. But Trent wouldn’t listen to me at all. He told me that this was a chance for me to learn a lesson, though he didn’t tell me exactly what that lesson was. I didn’t bother going to my second brother Garrett.

  I decided to get a divorce three months after that, and didn’t tell my parents until it was final, when I wrote them a short letter. My father sent me a letter in reply telling me how disappointed he was in my selfishness. My mother never spoke to me about it at all, and acted like it hadn’t happened, going so far as to continue addressing my mail to my married name and asking me if Ben would be coming to a family Christmas party that year.

  I tried to go to a singles ward in our same area, but the bishop told everyone I was divorced and the reaction of everyone at church seemed to be that I had committed a great sin in asking for a divorce from someone who wasn’t a murderer. My home teachers called me to repentance constantly, and I was asked not to attend the Gospel Doctrine class because I was a bad influence. So I stopped attending church completely.

  Eventually, I went back to school at the University of Utah because by then I had become an atheist and could not get back into BYU. I simply couldn’t believe that all of the bad things that happened to me were my fault, no matter how many people told me that I needed to repent to be good with God again. It was the darkest period of my life, up until the death of my only daughter, Georgia.

  I didn’t see any of my family at all for a couple of years, and things were strained between us all the way up until my dad’s death.

  Ben was furious with me, too. Getting a divorce wasn’t what he had wanted, despite the fact that he’d done nothing to keep our marriage together. He started bad-mouthing me to any friends we had in common, but by then I was so depressed that I didn’t care. I felt disconnected from everyone.

  It took me years of living as an atheist and doing all the things I’d been told were wrong before I realized I was unhappy. Psychically lonely, actually. I decided I wanted to believe in God again, and returned to the Mormon church. Almost immediately, I met Kurt and could tell he was seriously interested in me. But I was pretty reluctant to date again, and it took me a long time to learn to trust Kurt. I think I will always love him for the tenderness and patience he showed me then, even before he knew the whole story about Ben.

  Kurt told me over and over again that I shouldn’t blame myself for my failed marriage, because God didn’t. He also made sure to kiss me passionately, though I think he might have preferred to hold back more. I was needy and weepy for a long time while we were engaged, and I broke things off twice. But he waited for me to change my mind both times, gave me the time and space I needed, and insisted that he would always love me, in every way. My past is one of the reasons that Kurt has had a chip on his shoulder about gay men in the church, so perhaps there was a part of him that put transgender people like Carl into the same category.

  It might seem strange to say I sympathized with the plight of Carl, a transgender man, because I had been married to a man I believed was gay. After so much study, I had learned that gay and transgender identities are very different, that sexuality and gender are not the same thing. But the Mormon church is so unaccepting of both groups, along with several others, that it meant in some ways Carl and Ben must have had similar challenges and problems in their attempts to assimilate into Mormon culture. Ben’s secrecy, his insistence that everything was normal, his refusal to talk about his real sexual feelings—it all came back to me now when I thought of Carl Ashby.

  I had been nearly destroyed by Ben Tookey, but I didn’t hate him. My love for him had remained an open wound for a long time, and then it had closed over, leaving an unexpected sweetness behind. A part of me still loved him, and I had tried to expand myself to understand him. After all, he had been hurting, too. He had loved me in his own way, I believe that, though he had not known how to make our marriage work.

  When I wanted to be married to Kurt in the temple, I’d had to get a letter from Ben to send to the First Presidency along with my own letter about why our marriage had ended. I’m pretty sure we sent very different letters, because when I talked to Ben on the phone, he’d insisted any problem in the marriage was mine, and he certainly rejected the label “gay.” But whether or not anyone believed he was gay, there was no decision on a cancellation of sealing made in time for my marriage to Kurt, which was why Kurt and I had ended up being married in the church building instead of the temple. Then we’d had to wait a year for our official sealing.

  Carl’s bombastic tirade about the Family Proclamation should have rung that chime for me last Friday at the bishopric dinner—should have reminded me of Ben and his defensiveness forged by years of pretending to be someone he wasn’t. If I’d made the connection, could I have done something to help him? To help Emma or their family? To help Kurt when he came to the realization that things were not what they seemed to be, even with the man he considered to be his best friend in the ward? I had failed them, and all I was left with was the hope that I could find out who had done this to Carl—and why. Maybe that was all his spirit had been trying to ask me to do, when I felt his presence in the classroom at church. To help not just his family, but the whole ward, maybe even the whole church.

  I will try, I thought to Carl, though I no longer felt his spirit anywhere near me. I swear to all angels listening, I will do my best.

  Chapter 9

  Tuesday morning after school had started for the kids, Kurt and I prepared to go talk to Emma so she had a chance to react before the police came to follow up on the investigation. Sheri Tate had made sure that Emma knew about Carl’s death, but as far as I knew, she still hadn’t seen her husband’s body.

  “Will President Frost start any disciplinary action against Emma if it turns out she did know about Carl being transgender?” I asked. It didn’t seem to me at all likely that she had, given her personality, but I couldn’t know for sure.

  “I don’t know,” said Kurt. “I don’t think so.”

  Because she was a woman? It was true that far more men were excommunicated than women—one of the few bonuses to being born female and Mormon.

  As we pulled into the driveway, Kurt shook his head and hesitated a long moment, bowing into the steering wheel. “I just don’t know how to do this,” he said.

  I stared at my husband and wondered what had happened to him. “I thought being called as bishop cured you of cowardice,” I said.

  “Ha!” Kurt said without any amusement. “I just—I don’t think I’m going to have the words for it. How to tell her about President Frost’s sealing cancellation and everything else. She might not have been legally married. She might not have legal custody of her own children.”

  “Don’t tell her any of that,” I said. “That would be cruel.” I kept to myself the hope that President Frost would be set down by higher levels of authority once they knew what he was doing. And if no one came to demand the adopted children back, there was no reason that would be a problem, either. As for the marriage being legal, I hoped that the life insurance company would have to give the money to Emma because she had been specified by name, not because she was legally Carl’s wife. She had thought she was, in any case.

  “But she’ll want me to counsel her about Carl’s eternal salvation. She’ll want to feel secure about her children being hers forever.”

  And was that possible if her marriage was void and they had no father? As far as I knew, she wasn’t the first woman whose husband was excommunicated. The temple sealing was still valid on her side, if she remained worthy. Whether she would be expected to find another husband in this life or the next, I didn’t know.

  “Just tell her that you don’t know.”

  “Over and over again?” asked Kurt.

  “Yes.” I was surprised he was so uncomfortable with that answer. I had been sayi
ng “I don’t know” for a long time, to a lot of things. In my experience, as soon as you find one answer, a thousand new questions spring up. It’s like a hydra. Whatever you do, don’t answer questions. You just make more of them.

  Kurt finally opened the truck door and we headed inside.

  Sheri Tate passed us on the way out the door, since she was apparently still staying over at night. “She’s doing better. A lot better,” she said.

  Well, Kurt and I were about to change all that.

  Emma Ashby had us sit down in her front room, side by side on one of two small couches that faced each other. Emma was an expert quilter, both hand quilting and machine quilting. She’d led group lessons for Relief Society weekday meetings, and I’d seen her handiwork before.

  There were three beautiful pieces hanging on the walls of the living room—a tree of life, a Noah’s Ark, and an empty tomb. As we sat with her, she worked on one that had Adam and Eve (in abstract geometric cutouts) with a tree of apples between them and a snake that twisted up the trunk. The colors were jewel-like and amazing. It was detailed work, though, and I was surprised she had the attention span for it.

  “How are your children?” I asked, trying to begin with a safe, or at least expected, topic.

  “Alice is very upset, but somehow I worry more about William.” Emma glanced at the empty spot on the couch next to her, as if consulting with the absent Carl, who would never again sit beside her there. “He won’t say a word about his father and I think he’s holding it all inside. I was hoping that you might talk to him, Kurt. I think he feels lost.”

  She was looking at Kurt with a beseeching face that made me a little nervous. I had seen plenty of women gravitate to Kurt after he became bishop. It was easy to let him take over the part of the male authority figure in their lives, and divorced or widowed women calling on Kurt for help with car repairs or home maintenance had become normal. I was sharing my husband with other women all the time. But the way Emma Ashby looked at Kurt made me tense up and want to sit beside him, an arm wrapped around him to mark him my territory.

  Which was ridiculous, of course. Emma was no threat to my relationship to Kurt. She was just needy at a time like this, and that was perfectly normal.

  “Of course, I’ll do whatever I can for William,” said Kurt. “I was blessed to serve with—” Kurt hesitated. “Carl,” he finally said, leaving out any pronoun.

  Emma’s tears dripped into the quilting piece and she put it aside with a sigh of exasperation. “I feel so helpless. I just need to know what happened to Carl to move on, I think. I need to know there will be justice, and the world will make sense again soon. You understand, don’t you, Bishop?” asked Emma.

  “Of course,” said Kurt.

  “Do you know anything about the investigation by the police?” Emma asked, leaning forward. “Do they have any leads? Is that why you’re here right now?”

  Her hand brushed Kurt’s knee, and he subtly moved away from her. I wondered how often he had to do that with other women. I had never seen him do it before, but maybe I just hadn’t noticed.

  “No,” he said. There was a long pause.

  “Kurt had some troubling news about Carl himself,” I said finally.

  But Emma acted as if Kurt was the one who had spoken. Her eyes were riveted to him. “What is it?” she asked. She seemed very tense, her head upright, the tendons of her neck so tight I thought they might snap. “I had begun to wonder if something was wrong, because he was acting strangely the last few weeks.”

  That was something I wanted to hear more about. Was the scene at the restaurant one example of his change in behavior? But I bit my tongue, hoping Kurt would speak up.

  “I have some information from the coroner’s office that I’m afraid will be very upsetting to you,” said Kurt at last.

  “Oh, please tell me. I’m sure if you’re here with me, it won’t be too bad,” said Emma.

  Kurt glanced at me, took a deep breath. “I can’t think of any way to put this delicately, Emma. The coroner has revealed that Carl was—well, he was not biologically male,” he got out at last.

  Emma’s eyes went wide. “What do you mean?”

  I could see Kurt’s face go dark with color. “He was born a female. But he had some surgery done to—uh—look outwardly male, at least. And he had been taking hormone injections fairly regularly. Do you know anything about that?”

  She didn’t answer. She just stared at Kurt.

  Kurt continued. “There is a birth certificate. He—she—was born Carla Thompson.” He was making a mess of this, I thought.

  “But that—that’s impossible,” Emma croaked. Her face had gone very pale. I thought again of how fragile and small she was.

  One thing I was fairly sure of was that this was an authentic reaction. Somehow, even after twenty years of marriage, she had truly been that innocent, that naïve.

  “I’m afraid there’s no question about it,” Kurt said. “Carla even had an old arrest record, from the time before you knew her. Him.” Kurt was confusing us all now with his pronouns. “He graduated from high school as Carla. It wasn’t until later that she changed her name, and uh—her persona. Around the time he—she—he met you and joined the church.”

  Kurt didn’t mention anything about the possibility that Carl had delivered a child before he transitioned to being a man. Where was the child? Dead? Stillborn, as Georgia had been? Given up for adoption? Did this child know anything about Carl at all? I couldn’t help but spin off a dozen questions in my mind. But it wasn’t our business, really, what Carl had done before we knew him. Whatever had happened to that child, Carl’s family was Emma and Alice and William.

  “But he—we—” said Emma. Tears were spilling down her face as she reached for Kurt’s hand.

  I moved to sit by her and took her hands in mine. I hoped she would think of it as a kind gesture, though I knew very well it was a territorial one on my part. I found myself making all sorts of guesses about what kind of sex she and Carl had had, things that were none of my business.

  “Can you tell me how you two met?” I asked, trying to distract us both from the details of her married sex life. “You and Carl?”

  There was no wedding photograph in the front room, I had noticed. Not every couple had one, of course, but I didn’t see any photos of Carl at all. There were some of the children with Emma. She hadn’t already taken down the ones with Carl, had she? Had he simply been camera shy?

  “Oh, nothing special about that, really,” said Emma, her voice unsteady. “Carl was in one of my classes in college at the University of Utah. A ballroom dance class. He was so commanding on the dance floor, so smooth in all his movements.” She lifted her hand as if she was about to dance with him again, then dropped it. “I don’t know why he picked me as his partner. He could have had anyone. I’d taken high school dance classes, but I felt so intimidated there. Until he came along, that is.”

  I thought about Carl’s quotes about a woman’s place. Had Emma at one point in the past found comfort in his commanding presence? It was hard for me to fathom, since my relationship with Kurt was so different.

  Emma went on, “He asked me to marry him before the end of that semester. It was very romantic. He took me on a balloon ride and proposed before we landed. I was clinging to him the whole time, terrified.” She was half smiling.

  After a moment of silence, Kurt brought the conversation back to the topic at hand. “If you would prefer that the truth about Carl not be made public, I can speak to the police on your behalf. I don’t know what their response would be, but sometimes they take the well-being of the family into consideration when drafting press releases.”

  “Please—” said Emma, bowing her head.

  I thought of President Frost and his need to redo all of Carl’s ordinances. Would he be able to keep the truth from people if he insisted on that
? Did he want to make our whole stake hit the national newspapers? Again? Surely not.

  “I can talk to William, if you’d like. Try to explain it,” said Kurt.

  “No, no,” said Emma. “He misses his father so much. He can’t deal with anything else.” Was it William who couldn’t handle the truth, or Emma herself?

  “But if Carl was killed because of his other life, the police might need to ask rather pointed questions to find leads to his murderer,” Kurt said, trying to reason with her.

  “His other life? What other life?” asked Emma, bewildered.

  “His previous life as a woman might have bled into the present. Was he frequently gone without explaining where he was?”

  “He did a lot of business with the bishopric,” Emma said. “Or at least he said that’s what he was doing. I don’t know how I would know for certain if he was or wasn’t anymore. I trusted him. I always trusted him. He was my everything.” And for her, that seemed to mean that she couldn’t accept that he had ever been a woman. It would simply destroy her worldview too completely.

  “Of course. Carl was a good man,” said Kurt softly.

  I stared at him as he said this, and realized that he believed it finally. If the only thing that came out of this conversation was Kurt seeing that, it was a good use of time, I thought.

  “But you said that he had changed recently. Can you say in what way?” asked Kurt.

  “Oh, that. Well, he and William fought a lot the last few weeks, and about nothing that seemed important to me. I felt that Carl was almost picking the fights. It was the same with Grant Rhodes.”

  I perked up at this. I hadn’t heard about any problems between Carl and Grant Rhodes, the rogue Mormon who had been kicked out of his previous ward and had asked Kurt’s permission to attend ours. Considering Grant’s refusal to let certain perfect depictions of church history to go unchallenged in Gospel Doctrine class, though, it made sense. That had to have bothered Carl. But why more recently?