Daredevils

by Shawn Vestal

  A few weeks earlier, at dinner, when Dean mentioned that the driver had left, Loretta had volunteered to make the deliveries herself. Ruth frowned at her over the table. The children stopped eating.

  “What?” Loretta asked, feeling that she had smacked into another taboo though she wasn’t certain what it was. They were everywhere.

  Dean paused, a paste of half-chewed food in his mouth.

  “We need you here,” he said at last.

  They finish the stacks, Samuel and Loretta teaming up on the last of the sixty-pounders while Ruth scans her list. When she’s satisfied, she tapes an invoice to each tower of food. Inside, the girls make oatmeal, the same bland gruel that opens every bland day, with only honey and powdered milk because Ruth says processed sugar is how Lucifer gives you cancer. She is obsessed with cancer and the things that she believes causes it: sugar, too much meat, sin. Dean is upstairs, praying and studying scripture. He is on the Council of Elders now, as he frequently mentions.

  Today there are eight orders: the Jordan Seniors get wheat, rice, oats, powdered milk, brown sugar, the deluxe spice mix; the Johnsons get puffed-rice cereal, powdered milk, dried onion seasoning, and the soup sampler; the Hales get one of everything and two of some, what with Brother Hale’s four wives and thirty-four children; the Millers are trying the meatless bulgur mix; the wardhouse will get the weekly complete batch that Ruth has labeled “Manna”—every item on the inventory. And then there are the smaller orders, the odds and ends.

  Later today and tomorrow morning, they’ll prepare the largest order yet: three Mannas for the county jail. A new annual contract. Sometimes Dean thanks the Lord for the contract when he prays.

  Loretta, Samuel, and Ruth go in and eat that horse food. In her mind, Loretta flees to her future, where breakfast will be a delicious indulgence, a feast of fruits and jams and sugar, spoonfuls of cancery sweetness. Then they hear car wheels on gravel, the new driver, and they go into the garage and Ruth rolls up the door and Loretta looks outside and stops breathing because there he is, leaning against the truck, foot crossed at the ankle, thumb in his belt loop. That bursting, vicious smile. Those pale eyes. Bradshaw.

  • • •

  When Loretta was eleven, her mother gave her a journal for her birthday. That girl wrote, “I love the Lord more than anything, except for Momma and Dad, and maybe it’s the same for all three of them, and after that my brothers and sisters, Tommy first.” Tommy, the oldest, who left and never contacts the family anymore. Did she love the Lord that much? Or did she just know to say the words? “When I sing the hims at church I feel the spirit inside me. My favorite is Onward Christian Soljer and Til We Meet Again.” She would hum the hymns to herself throughout the day, that girl would. Now she finds them gloomy.

  Sometimes at night, unable to sleep, Loretta goes through her box of things. Everything that is hers—everything that is her—is tiny and fading. It is all she brought from home, apart from clothes and a set of art paper and charcoal pencils, a birthday gift from her father. Only once has she ever tried to draw something: half a cat, so misshapen that she gave up. The last thing she does when she inventories the items in the box—the photographs of her infant self and long-dead dog, the Christmas ornaments, the arrowheads—is read her diary, and the last entry in the diary, the last of seventeen for reasons she can no longer remember, is her listing of the qualities she wanted in “the man I mary: rigteous, kind, handsome, strong, good singer, hero, all to myself!!!!”

  • • •

  Bradshaw grins, cocks his jaw, says, “Hidy, folks. I’m Rex Baker. Guess I’m your new driver.”

  Loretta’s legs ripple. Her mind fills with chaotic flutter. Rex Baker? Ruth nods, and calls the children to help, and they all come, even Benjamin, toddling underfoot. Ruth looks over the piles of food, doing calculations in her mind. Bradshaw shoots Loretta a wink. She feels as if she will collapse.

  Taking down the tailgate on the truck, Bradshaw asks, “What’s your-alls’ names?”

  Ruth says, “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Baker.”

  “All right, okay, all right.” He holds up his hands like he’s under arrest. “Sorry, ma’am. Just trying to be sociable.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I got family down with the LeBarons, you know. Down Mexico. I’m friendly.”

  Ruth nods, rebuffs his attempt at conspiracy, but Loretta knows he won’t stop trying. She knows what he’s saying is false, at least if what he told her before is true, that he grew up in Cedar City, always near but never part of this world in Short Creek, let alone Ervil LeBaron’s followers down in Mexico. They were the guns and Revelation gang, the truest of the true believers, hungry for apocalypse.

  “I’m not some outsider,” he says. Loretta has a sudden image of him standing outside a window, a lighted window on the darkest night, looking in. Rex Baker. She will have to remember to call him Baker.

  • • •

  It is her night. Dean comes in around eight while she pretends to read the Book of Mormon. His feet are bare and white, sleeves rolled to the biceps. She knows he has washed his feet and hands, soaped his forearms, and washed his face and neck. He smiles wearily at her, head bowed, and sinks into the rocking chair. His knees angle outward like elbows, and he takes his jaw in one hand and presses anxiously.

  “The new man seems acceptable,” he says in his slow baritone. “Managed the deliveries. Very acceptable.”

  “Oh?” she answers, pretending to be drawn back toward a scripture she is not yet finished absorbing. “Good.”

  “Yes, he’s fine.”

  Since the night of their wedding, Dean has not touched her when he visits her room two nights a week. “We are partners now, you and I,” he sometimes says. “Partners in all ways.” He hasn’t touched her or made any mention of his promise, or any suggestion about his desire. He has sat in the rocking chair and rubbed his knuckles methodically, moving from knuckle to knuckle, finger to finger, and talked about whatever is on his mind or made simple, vacant observations. Though he asks for her opinions, she says little, provides the kind of agreement he is seeking and hides inside herself. She can tell he is proud of his self-restraint and imagines it will be rewarded.

  He stretches his legs and yawns.

  “I’m afraid I have stumbled into some hardship with the Elders,” he says. “A kind of a bind.”

  He waits. Loretta closes her book, asks, “What is it?”

  “They are asking more from me than I feel is proper. They are asking more from me than I believe the Law of Consecration requires.”

  The Law of Consecration. Uncle Elden speaks of it constantly from the pulpit, as he does the Law of Chastity, which governs times of sexual relations, and the Law of Sarah, which allows wives the right to refuse sister wives. The Law of Consecration is fundamental to their view that they are different here, better here, more righteous here—everyone shares all of their wealth with the Elders, who divide and return it to families as needed. We are a community of God, Uncle Elden says, and not a community of man’s desires.

  “They are asking me to turn over everything from Zion’s Harvest,” Dean says, a thin note of complaint in his voice. “They are demanding to see my accounts.”

  Loretta stumbles in her mind: Isn’t that the law of the community? Isn’t Dean an elder of the community?

  “I am now turning over twice the tithe I was before you and I were joined,” he said. “I am struggling in my soul, little sister, to understand what more I am required to give.”

  “Aren’t you to give all?”

  “They say I am.” He works at a back tooth with his tongue, and then says in a rising, rapid voice, “Is it only avarice that might make me ask why that is? Is there no point at which I have contributed my share, more than my share, far more than my share, even, and might keep the remainder without being accused of a lack of righteousness?”


  He stops as though embarrassed to have revealed himself so. Loretta doesn’t know what to say. She had not expected this. Dean’s expanding prosperity—his marriage to her, the growth of Zion’s Harvest, his selection to the Council of Elders—had seemed, in and of itself, a time of great fortune for him. A windfall of esteem and authority. And yet he seems now, rubbing his temples and breathing deeply through his nose, like a man sunk in trouble and misunderstanding. He has been buying gold, she knows, because he distrusts paper money. He buys only one-ounce golden eagles, and he’s particular about this, quoting Old Testament verses about not having “diverse weights” in your bag, about having a “perfect and just weight.” He is not turning the gold over to the brethren. Not tithing it. He’s keeping it.

  “It seems like,” she says slowly, “there should be a reward,” and Dean sits up in his chair.

  “It seems so to me as well,” he says. “Very much so. It is not that I do not want to provide to the community, or share the wealth. It is not, I hope, out of mere vanity or love of filthy lucre that I wonder this. I have struggled in my soul, Loretta, and prayed long over this. I do not wish to have anything the Lord does not intend for me to have.”

  He leans forward in the rocking chair, plants his elbows on his knees. Narrows his eyes, lowers his voice, and looks at her with an intensity he saves for times of greatest spiritual import—those moments when he believes he is being heeded, at the pulpit or in prayer, and a look of such gravity comes over him, such self-seriousness, such consciousness of demeanor, that it betrays his greatest vulnerability: his sense of himself as a righteous man.

  He says, “I believe the Lord wants me to retain some of the fruits of my prosperity for my family.”

  Loretta nods. Of course He does. The only question was how Dean would work his mind around it. She thinks of his office, with the locked drawers and file cabinets. She thinks of how he hides away the keys to the truck and the van and the station wagon, as if they were precious treasure. She thinks of how he doles out money to Loretta or the kids—not Ruth, Ruth is trusted—by going into his office and shutting the door, and returning with cash folded in his hand. She thinks of the thick dowel that had been lodged against the sliding window in her bedroom. Dean had cut the wood to size, and climbed a ladder to her second-story window and put it there, so even on the hottest days she cannot slide it open. She thinks of the gold. A bag of gold like in a fairy tale. She thinks of taking that gold away from him, and keeping it for herself.

  “Would the Lord not want to bless me for this? To bless us?” Dean says.

  “He would, Dean. Yes. He would want us all to be blessed.”

  March 22, 1975

  GOODING, IDAHO

  Jason and his friend Boyd sift strychnine powder into the rolled barley, wearing gloves and paper masks. Like surgeons on TV, Jason thinks. The odors of dust and oil, wood and machine, hang thickly in the shed. Outside it is as hot as August, and the jackrabbits are spreading across the desert like insects. They’ve been out for weeks now, bounding and skimming through the sage, chasing, stopping, and popping one another with their forepaws like boxers, the females fighting off the males, the males insane with lust.

  “Mad as hares,” Jason’s mom told him a few weeks earlier as they watched them zipping about the haystack by the dairy barn. “That’s where that comes from.”

  Jason said, sarcastically, “That’s where what comes from?” His parents were so ridiculous. He thought he was going to choke on it—his ridiculous parents, and their ridiculous church, and this ridiculous farm, and this ridiculous town.

  “Rabbit murder,” Jason says now as he hefts the final sack onto the trailer. “Raise this stupid animal, kill that stupid animal, milk the other stupid animal, poison this stupid animal.”

  He hacks a dusty loogie and spits it into the dirt, where it coils and darkens like a worm. He thinks the jacks are kind of cool.

  “I love rabbit murder,” Boyd says. He wants to argue about every single thing lately. “I wish I could murder rabbits all the time.”

  It is late Saturday afternoon. Jason had hoped to take the LeBaron to Twin Falls, maybe stay and see Jaws, but instead his father gave him this to do. Extra chores every weekend. His punishment for spending his mission money on eight-track tapes and hamburgers at the Oh-So-Good Inn and gas for dragging Main. It’s been more than a month since his mom found the stack of eight-tracks in his closet—Bowie and BTO, Sweet and the Doobie Brothers—and then, one question leading to another, discovering that he had spent most of the money in his passbook account. Money he’d earned raising and selling livestock at the FFA sales at the county fair. He was supposed to be saving for his two-year mission, the mission to convert the heathens that all Mormon boys were assigned to at age nineteen. Jason already knew he was not going on a mission, but his parents didn’t, not yet, and they flipped out when they found out about the money. Now every time he asks if he can go somewhere, his father assigns him a chore instead. Like poisoning jackrabbits.

  “Those little fuckers are gonna get it good,” Boyd says, grinning behind his mask.

  Jason’s father says they’ll try the poison first, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll move on to other methods—traps, arsenic, hunting parties. “This works best,” his father had said, “but it works better on everything else, too. Dogs. Birds. Pretty soon you’re killing everything just to kill one thing.”

  Everyone is trying to keep the jacks out of gardens and crops, and no one is succeeding. Fences. Blood meal in the gardens. Heading out to the desert at night with flashlights and rifles: spotlighting. The rabbits just keep coming.

  Boyd swings his heavy black bangs out of his eyes and says, “Bleed to death right out their little rabbity asses.”

  “Nice,” Jason says. “Nature boy.”

  Boyd is half Shoshone, and he’s gotten political. “I am waking up to my heritage,” he sometimes says, in a mock-serious tone that does not mean he isn’t serious. Every day, it seems, he is incensed about some new cause: the American Indian Movement, My Lai, Pine Ridge, the Watergate trials. Boyd wants to free Leonard Peltier. He rails about The Man, and the conspiracy to move the Negroes out of the inner city. Jason has never heard anything like it. His upbringing has been a warm, constant bath of family, faith, and the GOP. He loves to listen to Boyd, as baffling as it is. It makes him feel like an outlaw.

  They hitch the trailer to the tractor. Jason drives out onto the county road, Boyd sitting on the wheel well, and down the quarter mile to Grandpa’s place, the small brick square in the middle of a weedy lawn that peters out at the edges. A truck passes and honks. Jason turns in and follows the dirt road out into the fields. They bump along for fifteen minutes until they reach the southern border of the 2,345 Harder acres, where they begin to trace the outline of the family’s land with poison.

  Jason drives slowly while Boyd shakes out a trail of barley, marking the black soil like chalk on a baseball field. The tractor grinds and vibrates, stinking of burning oil. Only winter wheat is planted this early, but Grandpa said if they start now, maybe they can kill enough jacks to scare away the rest before everything starts growing. They stop at sunset and look out over the desert running west. The fat sun touches the serrated horizon, shadows veer toward them, and dark smudges scoot across the desert.

  “Here, bunny, bunny, bunny,” Boyd says.

  By the time they return to Grandpa’s, empty trailer banging, the night glows with spectral pale dust. Boyd is whistling Zeppelin—“Going to California,” far out of tune—and Jason hears a sound he can’t quite identify. A wheezing or hacking. And then he sees his grandfather on all fours on the lawn.

  “Holy shit,” Boyd says, and hops off the wheel well. As Jason kills the tractor motor, he hears his grandfather heaving, choking, and when he turns toward them, Jason is stunned at the fear on Grandpa’s face: taut, white eyed. It roots him to his seat until Boyd barks:
“Hey!”

  They get Grandpa into his truck, propped between them, and Jason drives. Grandpa’s breathing slows, becomes less frantic.

  Boyd says, “You doing okay there, Mr. Harder?”

  He nods.

  “Can’t,” he whispers, “catch my breath.”

  “No kidding,” Boyd says, and Jason says, “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

  Grandpa chuckles. Coughs and coughs.

  “Sorry,” Boyd says, and he does actually sound sorry for once.

  Grandpa whispers, “No, no. Do be a smart-ass.” Chuckles and coughs.

  They come to the edge of town. On a small rise to the right is the abandoned tuberculosis hospital, like a decrepit castle. Highway 10 becomes Main Street, and Jason barely slows as they pass the Bowl-A-Rama’s neon sign, the bright island of fluorescence at the Oh-So-Good Inn, the Safeway and the Mormon church, the farm implement dealership and the state school for the deaf and blind. They turn east, drive four blocks, and stop at the small one-story brick hospital. Gooding Memorial.

  They help him in and he is taken away, and they are left to sit in the plastic chairs under buzzing tubes of light. Jason feels like there must be many things for him to do or say, but he can’t imagine what the first one should be.

  Boyd says, “Don’t call your folks or anything.”

  • • •

  Jason has never seen his grandfather in a position of submission or need. Everywhere they go, his grandfather is greeted as a leader, a patriarch, a man to be depended on. A lot of people seem to think he’s kinder than he is, but even this contributes to Jason’s sense of his authority. He’d kick a dog in a second, scold someone else’s child. Jason once saw him fire a hired man for taking jars of milk. Everyone knew he took milk. It was expected, even. But one day, Grandpa saw Bart bring an empty jug from his pickup truck, fill it from the tank in the barn, and carry it back out again. Grandpa cleared his throat and scratched angrily at the back of his hand. He walked over to Bart and barked, “What’s my son owe ya?”