His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  “I heard from William that you and his father had frequent—discussions—about the gospel and its history.”

  Grant stared out the window and his hands rubbed down the sides of his pants. “I called Carl the day he died,” he said, surprising me. “But it wasn’t anything important, no matter what the police think. It was just about a reference for a lesson he was teaching.”

  The police had talked to Grant Rhodes about a phone call on the day Carl Ashby had died? “Then you know how difficult it is to deal with the police,” I said. “And you’re a grown man, not a young boy.”

  Grant Rhodes looked at me with a wry, knowing look. “It sounds like you’re trying to make sure that I don’t name William as the driver during the accident,” he said, making air quotes around the word “accident.”

  I put up my hands. “Well, I would never tell you to do anything contrary to your own conscience. I’m sure you would pray about it and consider seriously what a boy like William Ashby would most be helped by, after the devastation of his father’s murder. And perhaps if you had compensation for the damages, that would make it easier to be compassionate?”

  “How can you compensate me for fifteen years of my life?” he demanded.

  I held out my hands in a submissive gesture. “Not for your time, but for materials. And if you need to hire help in the future, for repairs.”

  “I don’t need help to repair my own car. I know every inch of its engine and chassis, inside and out. I put every piece of it together with my own hands.”

  “But there must be something that could be done to help you,” I said. “Perhaps thirty thousand dollars to defray the cost of any new parts you have to buy? Or new tools?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars?” he asked, his head tilted to the side. “And no guarantee that I not press charges?”

  “Of course not. That’s between you and God. Though I’m sure that you aren’t a vengeful person. No true Mormon could say that he was.” No lightning struck me where I stood, which meant something, I hoped.

  “And what about justice? I knew Carl Ashby well enough to know that he wouldn’t want his children raised to ignore justice.” I heard tenderness in his voice. I had no idea what it meant, but I figured I should exploit it.

  “What is justice without mercy?” I asked, putting a hand on his arm.

  There was a long moment of silence. As it drew on, I decided I would make Brother Rhodes’s decision for him. I stood up. “Thank you so much for agreeing with me about William. I am going to go straight to Sister Ashby and tell her that you accept her offer for money and a sincere apology. I will leave it to William himself to show his humility and repentance, but I am sure that you will be satisfied.” I turned and took a step toward the front door.

  “Wait! I didn’t say anything about not pressing charges,” he said.

  I turned back around. “I know that. But I also know that you are a worldly man. None of this is about money, is it? It’s about all of us working together as a ward family to make it back to God, isn’t it?”

  Grant Rhodes sighed. “Emma needs to get that boy therapy. Or medication. Or something.”

  I smiled warmly. “I knew you would be like this, Brother Rhodes. Concerned for William’s welfare rather than your car’s damage. I’ve always admired you as a scholar, but I’ve never seen before how much you live your life as a true Christian.” I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  He reddened like a little boy who had been kissed in kindergarten by his first girlfriend. I had played the right part here, but I still had other parts to play.

  As I left, I felt I had made progress. I had, I hoped, prevented William Ashby from facing police charges, and had done so without squandering Emma’s entire nest egg. I’d also learned that Grant Rhodes was hiding something about that phone call with Carl.

  Chapter 18

  Kurt invited Tom deRyke over on Thursday night after temple-recommend interviews at the church, and they spent a couple of hours closeted in Kurt’s office. They were probably discussing who to put into the second counselor position, but I suspected they wouldn’t be able to avoid talking about the fallout of Carl’s gender revelation. I wondered if Kurt would confide in Tom about Samuel. I figured that might be a good thing, since he and I certainly weren’t talking about it.

  I came downstairs to say goodbye to Tom when I heard him step out into the foyer. “How is Verity?” I asked.

  “Sad about all of this,” said Tom, rubbing his chin.

  “And how are you holding up?” I asked.

  “Well enough,” said Tom, and headed out.

  “How about you?” I asked, turning to Kurt after I closed the front door.

  Kurt let out a long sigh. “Tom deRyke and I have made a list of the ordinances we may have to redo. It could be more than thirty. I don’t know how we’re going to find time to do it unless I take a good week off work. But that’s assuming that people will be willing to take their own time off work or school to have it done. And I don’t know how to explain to them why we’re doing it without telling them all far too much about Carl and Emma’s private life.”

  The whole undertaking seemed so ridiculous to me. “I’m sorry,” I said, as sympathetically as I could.

  “It may well take a month of trying to catch people on Sundays and evenings before it’s all finished.”

  And of course Kurt would have to stop all the other work he was doing: counseling members in need, thinking about new callings and how to fill them, working with the youth. The ward would notice that, too. It would hurt us all. Did President Frost really think it would be worth the cost?

  “I feel so spent, so useless,” said Kurt. “And underneath it all is just this sadness that Carl is gone. After all that I could blame him for, I guess I’m surprised that it’s the only thing that I really feel.”

  I felt a rising swell of love for Kurt. “Do you really think this is necessary? Can’t you tell President Frost that he’s wrong and that you know what’s best for your own ward? Aren’t you supposed to be the only person who gets revelation for us all?”

  Kurt shook his head. “You know that’s not the way it works. First of all, he’s the stake president. That means he’s authorized to make decisions regarding any wards in the stake. And he’s in authority above me. If I tried to tell him what to do, he’d rebuke me heartily—at the very least.”

  The unspoken threat here was that he would release Kurt.

  “What about your Area Authority? Can’t you appeal to him? Or to the Quorum of the Seventy? Or someone?”

  “I’m not going to go over President Frost’s head. And he said that he was writing to the First Presidency anyway,” said Kurt.

  He said? Did that mean Kurt doubted whether he had done it? Even if he had, it might be months before we heard back, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore. Sometimes it was frustrating that the Mormon church had gotten so large and unwieldy. In the days of Joseph Smith, you’d just walk over and ask the prophet his opinion directly.

  “And what about Carl’s records? His marriage? His sealing to his children?” I asked.

  “That really does have to go through the First Presidency,” said Kurt. “So nothing’s going to happen right now.”

  “What about the burial?” I asked, wondering if Carl would be allowed to wear temple clothing.

  “We’re not making a decision on that. President Frost says the police aren’t going to release the body until the murderer is charged, so we have some time,” said Kurt.

  I squinted at him. “Seriously? I’ve never heard of anything like that before in a murder case.” I wasn’t an expert, but I’d read lots of mysteries and seen plenty of crime shows. The body was always released to the family after the autopsy was complete. I had been so busy thinking about other things that it hadn’t occurred to me how odd it was that we weren’t already
talking about the funeral plans.

  “You think President Frost is stepping in there, too?” Kurt asked.

  I just looked at him.

  “Right,” he said, and nodded. But he didn’t suggest that he was ready to call the First Presidency himself. I guess I should give him a break. I didn’t know everything that he’d been given when he became bishop, but I was pretty sure there was no Bat Signal to the First Presidency and no red telephone in the Church Office Building or in the top rooms of the Salt Lake Temple where the First Presidency met every week.

  “This is just prejudice,” I said. “President Frost is sticking himself in where he doesn’t belong because he’s angry about Carl being transgender.” The man was clearly transphobic, and it made me wonder what other phobias were lurking in his psyche. I was glad that Samuel was going to be interviewing with a different bishop and stake president rather than the ones here in his current ward. Leadership roulette was a real problem when it came to discipline. The prophet and apostles left most decisions up to the local leaders, and there was no clear doctrine on transgenderism.

  “You’re talking about a man I admire and believe is inspired by God,” said Kurt defensively.

  “And what about Carl? Do you now think that all those times you felt God speaking to you or to him, you were wrong?”

  Kurt was silent for a long moment, then shook his head. I decided that it was time to talk to him about Samuel, now that he’d finally gotten around to admitting he was wrong.

  “You know that Samuel will end up meeting more people like President Frost. His own mission president might think that he doesn’t belong in the church at all, at least not if he’s openly gay. How do you expect him to deal with all the prejudice he’s already about to face, even before going out on a mission?”

  “It might not be that bad,” said Kurt softly.

  “But it probably will be.” I had no reason to believe there were fewer bigots in the Mormon church than anywhere else; there were plenty right in our own ward.

  “I think it would be a difficult journey, but he could do a lot of good by showing people the courage it takes to admit to a problem and carry on with the best life possible even so,” said Kurt.

  I tensed at the word “problem.” Did that mean Kurt thought there was a “solution”?

  “Linda, you know that I love him,” Kurt added. “I would do anything for him, just as I would for any of our sons.”

  Yes, I did know that. If Samuel were in danger, Kurt would stand in front of a train to protect him. If Samuel needed money, Kurt would give him every last cent we had. If Samuel were hungry, Kurt would starve to feed him. Wasn’t that love? Hadn’t he always wanted what was best for him? I sagged into Kurt and could feel him press a kiss into the hair at the top of my head.

  “Samuel is a great kid. He’s going to have a wonderful life,” I said. Somehow.

  As we headed to bed, I thought about Carl Ashby and his decision to become a man twenty some-odd years ago. He had said that he was a convert, and that his parents rejected him when he joined the Mormon church. But I now suspected that was all part of the lie, an attempt to reinvent himself. What he must have given up to become a man—I could hardly imagine it. And yet, it must have been necessary, or he wouldn’t have done it. What was it like to feel so rejected that you were compelled to walk away from every part of your life and begin entirely anew? Samuel would never have to face that, I vowed to myself. No matter what I had to do to get Kurt to move past this.

  On Friday, Emma Ashby called me around midday. “I need you to come over, Linda. As soon as possible. Before the children are home from school.”

  “Is it about the car accident? Did Grant Rhodes contact you?” I asked, sure that I had fixed everything there.

  “No, nothing about that,” she said dismissively. “This is important. This is about Carl’s murder.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

  I hung up the phone and realized that I wasn’t leaving anything at home that needed me. All my life, being needed had made me feel important. Having children who relied on me had made me feel important. Would the rest of my life be answering calls from neighbors who needed me as desperately as my children had? Because that would make me feel important?

  I drove over to the house, and didn’t have to knock. Emma was waiting for me and ushered me inside. “Upstairs,” she said, and led me to the master bedroom. There were envelopes and unfolded papers scattered all over the unmade bed and the floor. It was a cluttered space to begin with, too much furniture, the closets bulging, shoe racks stacked knee-high.

  “I found these today when I was searching through Carl’s drawers.” Emma’s face was pinched; I sensed that her self-control was crumbling.

  “What are they?”

  “Love letters,” Emma squeaked.

  From her? No, obviously not. “From an old girlfriend?”

  “Just look at them!” She pushed me forward.

  I was reluctant for some reason, but I picked up one of the letters. There was no name listed at the top, just a term of endearment: Darling.

  I didn’t read much of it. It contained some rather explicit descriptions of sexual acts. I was no prude, and Kurt and I had consulted a few books over the years to help enliven our sex life, but we hadn’t used language like this to describe things.

  I looked up at Emma. “This must be very upsetting to you,” I said. Had the police found these letters? If they had, why hadn’t they taken them? Was it because they already knew who was guilty and these letters had nothing to do with it?

  “What if the children had found these?” Emma asked. “I could never have believed this of Carl. He was such a strict man. That he could do this . . .”

  I flipped through several letters, resisting reading too closely. They weren’t dated, but the paper was yellowing, so they were clearly quite old. All of the letters were from a woman about what she wanted done to her, and what she wanted to do to a man’s body. They were all signed Your lover or Your soul mate. Could Carl have written them before he transitioned? Could this be a clue to the child he’d given birth to?

  The best hope of information was surely from Emma herself. “Do you have any idea who might have written them?”

  “Of course I don’t know!” Emma’s face had gone from pinched and pale to bright red.

  I thought about the argument the night of the bishopric dinner. “Do you think that Carl might have been—dissatisfied in your marriage?” I asked, as delicately as possible.

  Emma collapsed onto the floor and began moaning. She thrashed this way and that until I caught her and held her in my arms, trying to calm her down. “It’s all right,” I kept saying, though I wasn’t at all sure that it was. She was still grieving the loss of her husband, I knew that. But her reaction wasn’t merely sad. It seemed unhinged somehow. Her world had crashed in on her, and now that she was no longer able to moor herself against it, she seemed to be drowning.

  “I told him that night. I told him, and he said he understood. He said that he would love me no matter what. He always said that.”

  “Of course he did,” I said, unsure of what she was driving at.

  “But he didn’t. I know he didn’t. Men don’t love women who don’t—who can’t—”

  I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck. What was she trying to say?

  “He must have thought he would change my mind, but he didn’t ever ask me or pressure me after the first night.” She was sobbing the words. “He would lie next to me at night sometimes. I could feel his breath in my ear. But he never did more than that. He said that he would wait forever, if that was what it took. Until we were both perfected in our resurrected bodies. He said his love for me was eternal, and that it didn’t matter what we did here, because we were bound forever.”

  I had never wanted to k
now the details of her sex life with Carl, but was she telling me that she had forbidden Carl from touching her sexually on her wedding night? And that she had never changed her mind?

  I’d heard the word “frigid” thrown around before to describe women who had some sexual abhorrence or malfunction, sometimes because they had been abused. I’d wondered if “frigid” could refer to women who were merely ignorant of sex and what it entailed. I wasn’t sure which category Emma Ashby would fit into.

  “Were you ever abused?” I asked, unable to think of another way to put it.

  “No! No!” shouted Emma, pushing me away from her and getting to her feet. She seemed steadier now, but her face was a fiery red and her eyes were blazing with anger. “I am pure. I was always pure! That’s what women are supposed to be. That’s what I wanted to be.”

  Was she saying she had never had any sexual contact, after twenty years of marriage? If that was the case, the wedding night itself might have seemed a godsend to Carl. He wouldn’t have had to explain anything to Emma about his body. But for the next twenty years, he must have gone over that decision again and again, trying to decide if he should reopen it or let it lie. How could he live for so long in a marriage with no sexual intimacy? Had he felt forced to go outside of his marriage for that? Was that safer than wrecking it by telling the truth and having to deal with the consequences?

  “Emma—” I felt horrible even thinking about the intimate details of her relationship with Carl.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” She glared at me as if I had accused her of something. The tears had evaporated and now there was only defensive anger. “We were happy. Just the way we were. There was nothing wrong. Except that Carl had these urges. Some people have them, and they don’t know what to do with them. Even women.”

  Did she mean sexual urges? Did she think only some people had those? Or was she talking about affairs? Prostitutes? Pornography, masturbation? It would probably be impossible to get her to distinguish between them, with her level of ignorance combined with my attempts at delicacy.