by Peggy Riley
‘Fifty? Fifty wives?’
‘So if you’re picturing him alone somewhere, missing us, abandoned, I – I know he’s not alone. He deserves no sympathy.’
‘Fifty wives! That’s why you won’t go to the police. What you’re doin’ is illegal.’
‘It isn’t illegal. It’s immoral to some. This isn’t bigamy, it’s polygamy. It’s consensual. There are no laws against living with people or bearing their children.’
‘How ’bout settin’ ’em on fire? You’re damn right your daughter set my truck on fire. She’s learned from the master. Jesus.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’
‘What?’
‘Use His name like that.’
‘I can’t see your religion doin’ much for you here. Can you?’
She shuts her eyes. She wonders how to help him see what it was, not how it ended. How it began, who she was before it started, and who she became because of it. How each wife was brought back to life and given hope, the God-shaped want in them filled in a spinning circle, by the family she chose. ‘I have known such rare love,’ she tells him, cautiously. ‘An ecstasy in worship I did not think I had the right to feel. I don’t want you to think it was dirty. Or shameful.’ He bends to one of his plants and she knows she’s shamed him then. ‘I don’t want you to think that’s how I am, somehow frivolous or changeable. I loved him and I loved hard and I made some hard choices out of that love, because I thought we were building something. A new faith. Jerusalem. Utopia.’ She looks up at him. ‘Standing here, it sounds foolish.’
‘’Cause it wasn’t. Ain’t no utopia. Don’t I know it?’ He checks the underside of a floppy leaf and sighs. ‘It okay with you?’
‘What?’ she asks.
‘Being one of fifty?’
A lump clogs her throat. No one has ever asked her. Not even her husband, really. She tells him what her husband told her. ‘It is a good practice, in theory. It means that labor is shared. There’s never a shortage of child care or companionship. Historically, it meant that there would be a home for surplus women, on the prairies and whatnot, that everyone would be able to be a part of a family, not just the ones who were lucky or pretty or wealthy. There are so many women with no one.’
He nods. ‘And it’s okay with you?’
She shakes her head at that. It’s not okay. None of it is okay and it hasn’t been for a long, long time. She thought she had run to save her children. She now wonders if, perhaps, she has run to save herself from the husband who, long ago, had saved her. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Fifty wives,’ he clucks, shuffling down the row to bob leaves along his hands. ‘Fifty wives and I couldn’t keep one.’
She watches him go. She looks down at the stick at her feet and the hard cracks in the ground, running beneath her.
BEFORE:
The Wife Who Wasn’t
When the wife who wasn’t to be a wife came, Amaranth thought she knew her husband’s history from his pioneering, polygamous ancestors who stitched their names across a sheet. But she didn’t know how many polygamous generations there had been since then, or that he had family, living among them still.
They were a family with twenty wives when Rebekah came, arriving on foot up their gravel path, carrying a cardboard suitcase tied with rope. It was midsummer and the wives were amazed. No new wife had ever arrived before autumn, before their husband did. He would still be months away, preaching.
She wore a pale pink gingham dress, full-skirted and puffy-sleeved, embellished with lace and rickrack trim. She looked like a frilly sweet pea against the dark shrubs of wives, their utilitarian work clothes all denim and black so as not to show dirt. More extraordinary was her hair – elaborately braided down her back; swooped, sprayed, and sculpted into arching wings around her face. Wives had taken to wearing bandannas and head scarves, as it was hard to make enough hot water to keep twenty heads of hair clean.
The girl said she had been sent up from Mexico to live with them, for she was Zachariah’s niece. She told Amaranth, over chicory and oatmeal squares, that she had come up the length of the country by bus then hitched to their road, told to look for their gravel path and mountain. She had been shown pictures of them, she said.
‘Pictures?’ Amaranth asked. ‘Like the tithing envelope?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘A photograph.’ And she pulled one out of her gingham pocket. There it was, their mountain and their woods, but from a long time ago, back before the temple was built or any of the outbuildings, back before the trees had been thinned. The only car in the photo was her husband’s van and none of the raised beds were there, not to mention the wives or their numerous cars. She wondered how old the picture was and how it had traveled to Mexico.
Amaranth found Rebekah a bed among the children in the attic, but she was alarmed. None of the girl’s story rang true. How had her husband come by a niece, when she knew he had no family?
Rebekah fit into their family immediately. She shared in the chores with a glad heart and taught the children to sing, ‘Come, come ye saints, no toil or labor fear.’ When women complimented her dress, Rebekah told them it was how they all dressed back home, and she ran circle skirts up from bedsheets on the sewing machine to show them how easily they were made. Amaranth drew out stories of her community over foaming mugs of goat’s milk, learning how each wife had her own house built for her and how a husband would never take more wives than he could care for himself.
When Zachariah returned in the fall, he was introduced to Rebekah. He was hot and rumpled from the journey, impatient, and Amaranth could see he did not recognize the girl. Her name and costume meant nothing to him. But when Rebekah told him her father’s name was Lehi, something shifted in his face, as if a thing long buried was being unearthed. ‘We’ll see you home, girl,’ was all he would say. He stomped into his house, past wives and children who proffered lips of welcome.
Amaranth followed, pestering him. ‘Who is she? Who is Lehi? Where are her people? Why is she here?’
‘Leave me be!’ he said.
Outside, Rebekah was surprised to see that two young women had arrived with her uncle, dressed in skintight T-shirts with short, short skirts. They studied each other with wonder and judgment as wives crowded around to watch.
After prayer and over dinner, Zachariah pronounced that the girl would be sent home. The fourth and fifth wives stood immediately, said they would take her all the way to Mexico if they had to.
Rebekah began to cry, ‘Don’t take me back. They’ll marry me to the prophet. He’s about a hundred years old.’ She laid her head on the table and sobbed like a child. ‘I’m supposed to stay and marry you. You can’t send me back!’ But she was bundled into his car and driven away, the two girls, not yet wives, watching in stunned silence.
In Amaranth’s bed, he got no peace until he told her what he knew. ‘You said we would have no secrets, husband,’ she reminded him. In the dark of her room, he told her about the Short Creek raid when he was a child, when the government burst into their chapel during worship to arrest four hundred fundamentalists, pulling babies and children from parents’ arms to put them into foster care. ‘They took me and they took Lehi,’ he whispered. ‘And by the time they sent us back, I didn’t recognize my own family. They could’ve been anybody.’
‘But they were your family?’ she pressed. ‘You did have family?’
‘They were changed and I was changed. I left before they could send me away.’
‘Why would they send you away? What had you done?’
‘Me?’ he said. He sat up and the bed jostled. ‘They let the government take us – they just handed us over, like we meant nothing to them. Like I meant nothing.’
‘That can’t be so,’ she told him. She couldn’t picture it. She couldn’t imagine the government wanting to separate families unless there was serious cause for it. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘We were polygamous. It was illegal and the government thou
ght it was abuse – that we were being abused by it. You can’t make laws about how people live or love – no government should – and you can’t let them take your children, no matter what.’
She shook her head. She didn’t understand any of it. Here, she thought they had been making their own rules for their community, out of faith, charity, and love. Now she felt they were following some blueprint she didn’t know existed and it hurt her. ‘Why did you tell me you had no family? Was it because you knew I didn’t?’
‘No,’ he vowed. ‘You are my family. This is my family. I left Short Creek and I left that faith and I never looked back. It’s Lehi looking back, trying to be some kind of family to me, but I want nothing to do with them, not how they are. I’ve made a new faith here. A new family. We’re nothing like them and we never will be.’
‘We’re polygamous,’ she spat.
He lay back again on her bed with a sigh. ‘I’m tired.’ His hand reached for her and she took it, thinking of the girl and her strange hair and dress, the black-and-white photo she had clutched in her hand. She tried to put the girl out of her mind, but her influence remained.
Wives were caught fussing their hair into her shapes when they thought no one was looking. They sewed skirts in circles and piled them up, to wear in layers, full as hers, then fuller. With their abundance of skirts, wives took to spinning on the hard, smooth temple floor, in prayer.
Amaranth watched him watch them during worship, the wide skirts of women spinning before him, and wondered if it felt like a memory to him, this family the women felt they were creating, inventing for themselves out of raw materials and sheer hard work. Was this a new world for him, as it was for them, or did it only remind him of something older, something he swore he had forgotten? Something he swore he didn’t want?
18
The Sacrifice
Amity and Sorrow kneel, wrist to wrist, by the bathroom door. The bucket is empty. The china shard sits, dry, in its bottom. It cannot show Sorrow what she wants to see. It cannot take her home.
They crouch until their knees are numb. They stare at the bathroom door and each other until Dust comes, holding up a screwdriver.
‘Outta the way,’ he tells them.
But Sorrow won’t move, and Amity has to tug her away by the strap.
Dust opens the bathroom door and looks inside. ‘Jeez,’ he says. ‘What are you two getting up to in here? Do you gotta make a mess of everything?’
Amity leans in to Sorrow. ‘What have you done?’
Sorrow slowly closes her eyes.
‘Is it critters making mess in here? Because it better not be you. And I’m not cleaning it up, either, I can tell you that.’
Sorrow won’t look at him and Amity can only look down, in Sorrow’s shame.
Dust screws a metal eye to the door frame and a swinging hook to the door. ‘We’ll keep this locked, to keep the critters out, whatever they are. Prairie dogs. Or rats.’ He pulls the door shut and hooks the eye.
‘We’re sorry,’ Amity tells him. ‘I’m sorry.’
But Dust only flicks the screwdriver around in his hand then jams it in his pocket. As Sorrow is investigating the hook and the door, he goes, not looking back.
Once he’s gone, Sorrow yanks Amity inside. And she kicks the door shut.
And then it is dark and cool and close. She can feel Sorrow spool her in, in the silence. ‘I’m sorry for what I did,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry Mother hit you. I’m sorry I ran and I’m sorry I told, only I thought you were in trouble. I thought you needed help.’
‘Who are you to help the Oracle?’
‘You can’t just set everything on fire.’
‘Can’t I?’
Sorrow lights a match that flames her face. She holds the match at the tip of Amity’s nose. Amity pants and the flame flickers. ‘We must make the Father see us,’ Sorrow says. ‘We must catch His eye and ear.’
‘How?’ Amity huffs, hoping to blow the match out.
‘A sacrifice.’ Sorrow drops the match on the tiles and stomps it. And it is dark again. ‘Put your hand out,’ she says.
Amity sees spots before her eyes, bright from the match’s flame. She stretches her strapped hand for Sorrow and it bumps into something hard.
Sorrow lights another match. ‘Hold still.’
Amity’s hand shakes, palm upward and strapped. She watches as Sorrow pulls from her apron pocket a bone-handled paring knife. She raises it and holds the point over Amity’s palm. Then Sorrow drops the match and as it falls she lowers the knife, to slit the star of Amity’s hand. Amity cries out and Sorrow pulls her by the strap. She puts Amity’s cut straight onto the tiles and smears it across them, side to side, up and down. She lights another match then and shows Amity the red cross she has made, there on the tiles like some holy sign. Amity can see other dirty marks and signs around it, made by Sorrow, red and brown.
‘I’m sorry!’ Amity says.
Sorrow takes her end of the strap off and lets it drop. She opens the bathroom door and holds the match up to the sun as light pours in. Amity’s eyes flame and flood as she moves toward it. And then Sorrow is slamming the door on Amity, plunging her back into darkness. ‘Don’t leave me in here!’
She hears the hook scrape into the metal eye and catch. She bangs on the door and calls to Sorrow. She thrusts herself into the door, but it is firm on its hook. She lurches, crashes into the sink she cannot see. She follows a pipe across the wall and into a corner, finds the cistern, one solid, cold thing she can wrap herself around. She crouches beside it and puts her cut hand to her mouth. She tastes dirt, Sorrow, and her own hot blood. She tries to rock herself calm.
It is as dark as the room below the temple. She feels as if she is back inside it, back beneath it, hiding in the dark. But even that room had its spiracles, three breathing holes that let down three pinhole shafts of light, like the fingers of God. In the room below she hid herself in the far corner, between the metal shelves of food that no one could eat. There was so much food down there that when the world ended, it would feel like a party. There would be second and third helpings and everyone would smile as they used to. That’s what she thought then.
Here, in this darkness, Amity can hear things. Mice nails or bird claws, the sound of some hook-faced roach, jaws snapping. She can feel things reaching out for her. Dark hulking shapes that rub themselves against her, rats or kittens, crawling babes, nudging and nestling as if they want something from her, as if they wait to be born. As she could in the room below the temple, she can hear and feel the soil shifting beneath her, something scratching up through the dirt, like plants growing too fast and things reaching upward, pale asparagus or finger bones or the dead all rising up from their dirty holes at Rapture, all winding sheets and skeletons.
She hid herself in the room below because Sorrow told her to. Sorrow told her to watch and to wait.
She heard the altar table slide, wooden legs on the wooden floor, and saw the hatch door open, pouring light down onto the pile of quilts. Two stocking legs dropped down with the squish and plop of skirts. Sorrow. And then there were more legs, white linen, long and lean. Adam, she thought, and she waited for Justice. But Justice never came and the hatch was pulled shut, and then it was dark again. Three slivers of light from the spiracles fell onto Sorrow.
Amity saw someone put his arms around her and pull her down. Adam, she thought. Someone pulled Sorrow onto the blankets and did not let her up, did not let her go. They weren’t supposed to play down there, any of them anymore, but rules had made their land small and the children only got bigger.
Sorrow was flat on the ground and her skirts rose, up to her waist, her legs in the air. Amity didn’t know this game. She could hear Sorrow, and it didn’t sound like her playing, but what could Amity do? She was told to watch and wait. She wasn’t told to spring out and announce herself or ask questions when she was meant to hide. And besides, everyone there was family. Family couldn’t hurt you, no matter what they did.
When Father left the room and pulled himself back up through the floor, he left the hatch open and the altar pushed away. Sorrow lay in a pool of gold, light and pale on the blankets. Amity called to her. She waited for Sorrow to rise and shake her skirts down, chatter away as she always did. But Sorrow stayed flat on her back, flat as the stitches, flat as the sheet.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Sorrow said quietly.
‘You wanted me to hear,’ Amity told her. ‘You told me.’
‘Why didn’t you come?’
‘You told me to watch and wait.’
‘Oh, what use are you?’
Amity crept to her sister. ‘I did what you told me. What did I do wrong?’
‘Nothing.’ Sorrow sighed.
‘Is that how you pray with Father? Is that your prayer?’
Sorrow turned her head away from her then and Amity could see the light pour into her sister’s tiny ear. ‘Sure, that’s how we pray. He turns into God – didn’t you see him? Just like he did when he made the Virgin pregnant, when he made her have Jesus. Didn’t you see?’
‘I did see him,’ Amity said. ‘I didn’t see God.’
‘Maybe you can’t see God because you’re too stupid.’
Amity wanted to lie beside her, to feel what she felt, to look up into the light and pray. ‘Are you the Virgin Mary now?’
Sorrow pulled herself up into a ball, tidy as a knot.
And now Amity is here, in the darkness, wondering which of the sounds she hears are here and which are only holy ghosts.
For there are ghosts here. Anyone could tell.
19
Seedbed