The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir

by Ruth Wariner

  Somehow we all fell asleep on that tiny mattress. A screech of tires woke me up. Then, the truck began to fishtail, throwing me first against Aaron and then the wall. I had almost pulled myself to a seated position when the truck hit something large that generated a tremendous thud. The tires squealed again and I crashed forward into the window. It didn’t break, but we heard the sound of something shattering underneath us, then the truck came to a sudden stop.

  In the eerie silence that followed, I looked up to see my brothers piled together against a window. Below, I watched one of the Mexicans jump out of the camper door onto the highway and the other two quickly follow. My brothers and I jumped out next and ran toward the passenger’s side of the truck, finding Mom standing outside and leaning through the passenger window with a crying Elena in one arm. With the other, Mom scooped up Micah, and I was relieved to discover that all three were fine.

  “What happened?” I yelled.

  “I think we hit a horse,” Mom replied quietly and calmly. She sat Micah on the ground and shook glass from the plastic feet of his pajamas.

  I stepped back to see that the truck was parked sideways in the middle of the two-lane road, its windshield completely shattered. A huge gash was in the left front fender, and a headlight had been torn from its casing. Lane’s boots crunched over broken glass as he came into view. In the beam of the one good headlight, the road ahead looked completely red, covered in blood. I saw Mom’s jaw drop open and then followed her gaze to the road and the headless body of a white horse, its hooves black and legs lifeless. The horse’s head lay on the other side of the highway, its eyes still wide with a look of shock.

  It took Lane and all three of the Mexicans to drag the horse by its legs to the side of the road. Then one of the men lifted the head and placed it next to the body. Lane wiped blood from his hands with a greasy towel he found behind his truck seat, brushed glass out of the seats, and told everyone to get back in the truck.

  Eventually, we made it to an auto parts store in Juárez, slept in the camper until the establishment opened the next morning, and then stood around most of the day waiting for the new windshield to be installed. By nighttime, we were in line for the border crossing.

  Predictably, the line moved slowly, and with every inch we crawled forward, the breathing of the men below me grew heavier, and the smell of their sweat stronger. I could tell that what we were doing was serious business and that the whole family would be in trouble if we were caught. I didn’t know exactly what would happen if the border police found the men at the bottom of the truck, but I was sure my siblings and I would be taken away from Mom.

  I felt confused. Through the camper window, I stared at the back of Mom’s head in the front seat, watching it come in and out of the light as we inched forward, and I remembered her promise not to get us all in trouble again. I realized then that I couldn’t count on her promises and began to wonder why she didn’t seem able to protect my siblings and me. I just couldn’t understand it.

  A cold fluorescent light shone through our camper’s dark windows when we reached the border. Faces of patrol officers appeared, and I felt my heart race and my body shake. The border men circled the camper and approached from behind. A few seconds later, they flung open the camper door, and their voices went silent as they peered inside. I watched the beam of a flashlight dance from Matt’s face to Aaron’s, to Luke’s. I closed my eyes tightly just before the beam reached my own face.

  “What nationality are all these kids?” said a deep, thickly accented voice.

  “American,” replied Lane.

  “Are you carrying any goods with you purchased in Mexico?” the deep voice continued.

  “We only bought a few souvenirs for some family, that’s all.”

  There was an interminable pause.

  “All right. Looks good,” said the voice, and he shut the camper door.

  After a few more exchanges between Lane and the patrolmen, I heard the engine rev and felt the camper accelerate, and soon we were in El Paso. That next morning we dropped off Lane and three exhausted and dazed Mexicans at a job site, and then Mom drove us to meet up with her sister wives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  27

  “This can be your contribution to the family income,” Lane said to my stepsister and me. Maria and I looked down at the table filled with pine nuts, our eyes barely disguising our contempt. I don’t know what I had expected when I’d overheard Lane say “the kids can work too,” but it definitely wasn’t selling pine nuts on the side of the road in Albuquerque.

  Polygamists from LeBaron had a long history with pine nuts. Each fall, families would pack up their kids, make their way to the border, pick up a few Mexicans, and drive to one of the dense mountain forests in New Mexico, Nevada, or California. There, they would pick pinecones, separate the piñones from the cones, then sell the piñones to stores or to restaurants in the area. The money they made from this was usually enough for a family to pay for a year in Mexico. Now Lane had decided we would be doing it too.

  Lane unloaded the camper onto a cement slab that sat next to a mobile home he had rented. With one bedroom and one bathroom, the single-wide was roughly half the size of the one we’d had in El Paso. Still, this one was newer looking and hadn’t been in a fire, so I was satisfied—until I realized that Alejandra’s family, not mine, would live there. Polygamy protocol dictated that first wives always had first pick of living quarters, and Alejandra had reasonably chosen the single-wide. Mom and the six of us would be staying in the camper for the rest of the summer.

  I slept with Mom and Elena on the top bed that jutted over the cab of the truck, except every third night, when it was Mom’s turn with Lane. On those nights, I was demoted to the mattress in the camper’s lower level and a restless night with four brothers in one bed. I was eleven years old, old enough to realize that our situation was ridiculous and humiliating. I also realized that things could have been worse: Susan and her family were staying in an even smaller dwelling nearby. The conditions there were so cramped—Susan and all her children slept on a single foam mattress surrounded by enormous brown bags of piñones—I actually found myself grateful that Lane had married Mom second.

  Marjory, Lane’s new fourth wife, didn’t come to New Mexico with us. Lane had been spending less and less time with her, which seemed to make Mom happy. Mom said Marjory was busy visiting her adult children who lived in California. Of the three families living in Albuquerque, Alejandra’s had the nicest living situation, but I quickly realized that her privilege was a mixed blessing. Yes, she had a bathroom and shower, but she had to share both with two other families, who could use her facilities at any time. And hers was the only full size kitchen too. The atmosphere while the three women tried to prepare meals for all their families in that tiny space at the same time was always tense. Waiting for dinner meant huddling among three sets of siblings, suffocating and sweltering, in front of a TV, especially with three women cooking in a hot kitchen.

  One of the worst aspects of the pine-nuts experience was the food. We could rarely afford meat and certainly weren’t allowed to eat the nuts we were selling. So we ate beans and rice, always, at every meal. Anything seemed preferable to sitting in a crowded camper and eating a bowl of beans and rice—even selling pine nuts on the side of the road.

  I came to see something liberating in Maria’s and my pine-nut stand at the far corner of the Safeway parking lot, a spot we had chosen for its being near a busy intersection. People coming from any direction could see our card table, as well as our signs, the words PINE NUTS written large enough that drivers wouldn’t confuse us with a lemonade stand. We sat for hours on end under a tattered green umbrella waiting for cars or the odd Safeway shopper to stop by. Sometimes, when the boredom overwhelmed us, Maria and I would fill plastic bags with pine nuts, one pound in each, measuring them out with the help of an old, rusty, white scale from a grocery store. We also poured pine nuts into Dixie cups, which we sold for fifty cen
ts apiece. We never had many customers, although people often stopped by to ask what those odd-shaped, little nuggets were, as if they’d never seen them in their lives. I would launch into a long and detailed description of what pine nuts were, where they came from, and how they were picked and sorted. Anyone who stood there and patiently waited through my pitch was rewarded with a single nut as a free sample.

  Lane dropped us off with our card table each morning, and he drove by to check on us once a day too. And at the end of every day, Lane collected what little money we had made from our sales. He continually reminded us to give him each and every penny of our proceeds, but soon enough Maria and I learned to skim off the top. We were just pocketing what we felt we were due, nothing more than the allowances other kids would get, or so we told ourselves. As soon as we were sure Lane was gone, we would slip off to a nearby McDonald’s and blow a few dollars on cheeseburgers, ice-cold Cokes, and ice-cream sundaes.

  One day, I noticed Maria hiding more money than she usually spent on lunch and asked her about it.

  “You can cut open old Polaroids, put the money behind the picture, and then tape it up so no one will notice.” She smiled proudly.

  “What are you doing that for?”

  “I’m saving up money.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can run away from home.”

  This took me by surprise. Maria hadn’t complained about her home life before. I wondered if she wanted to run away because Lane was abusing her the way he’d been abusing me. Maria was thirteen and had already developed a woman’s body. She wore her long, dark brown hair in two braids that went down the length of her back. Her flirtatious, almond-shaped, brown eyes were already earning her a great deal of attention, as were her full, perfectly shaped breasts that bounced under tight cotton T-shirts, and her pear-shaped bottom. Whenever she walked across the street to McDonald’s or walked anywhere in public, men whistled and called out to her.

  Like Maria’s, my breasts were growing and my body was changing. Over the past several months—ever since Elena had been born—it seemed as if Lane had been seeking me out more and more. I tried to avoid all contact with him, but he was always asking me to accompany him on errands or to help him with tasks around town. Then he’d take me for a ride to a place where no one could find us: a barren parking lot, under a bridge, or into a dark alley that reeked of garbage.

  “What are you doing all the way over there?” he’d ask in his high-pitched, nice-man voice, a voice I never heard him use with anyone else or in any other situation. “Come sit closer to me. I’m not gonna hurt ya.” He’d pull me onto his lap, his grimy hands reaching under my blouse for my developing breasts, which felt so tender and painful in his hands that I wanted to scream. I’d feel his penis stiffen beneath me, and then he’d grind his lap violently against the seat of my jeans. I felt so humiliated and powerless that I couldn’t even recognize how much worse it would have been if Lane had unzipped his pants.

  Hearing that Maria wanted to run away, and thinking it was because of Lane, I began to feel disgusted. I started thinking about what he might be doing to my beautiful stepsister. What awful experiences would lead a thirteen-year-old girl to stuff dollar bills behind family photos and run away into a world of strangers?

  “Why … do you want to run away?” I asked Maria reluctantly.

  Maria noticed my serious tone, looked at me with concern, then smiled.

  “If I stay here or in LeBaron, I’ll never get to do what I want to do.” She sighed. “I’ll just do what every other girl does: get married at fifteen. I don’t want to do that, and I don’t want to be somebody’s third wife. I’d be too jealous to share like that. You know?”

  I nodded silently.

  “I don’t want to suffer the way my mom did when my dad took his other wives. Does your mom like it?”

  “No,” I said quietly. “She cries all the time.”

  “Mine does too. I don’t want that!”

  I watched her stuff the last of the dollar bills in her jeans and worked up the courage to ask her the question that had been plaguing me. “Maria, does your dad ever kiss you on the mouth when you’re alone with him?”

  She looked up at me alarmed, as if she thought I was crazy. “He’s my dad! Why would he ever do something like that?”

  “I dunno,” I replied as quickly as possible.

  “Well, does he ever kiss you?”

  “No,” I replied without a moment’s hesitation. “Of course not.”

  “Then why’d you ask me?”

  “I dunno.”

  As much as it would have hurt to hear that Lane had been subjecting Maria to the same indignities he’d been inflicting on me, it hurt more to know that he hadn’t. Why had he only chosen me? I was consumed with a new and powerful desire: I wanted to run away too. But first I’d have to save up my money.

  28

  We lived in Albuquerque selling pine nuts for two months. Lane didn’t have many jobs hauling loads during that time, and he pursued me as if he had missed me. He found every excuse possible to take me on errands: to sell pine nuts to local markets, to pick up additional loads of nuts, to look for parts to fix his truck or the single-wide, and to find more supplies for our stand. I did everything I could to avoid him, but in our three families’ cramped space, there was no place to hide. Mom was distracted with the baby and my younger siblings and didn’t even notice the extra attention our stepfather paid to me. Each morning I’d wake up and vow that today would be the day I’d tell Mom what Lane was doing to me, but each day I’d find a reason why I couldn’t share my secret: Mom was too tired, the babies had been up all night. Every time I came close to saying something, a small voice in my head would tell me to keep silent, that it would only make things worse if I told the truth, and what if Mom didn’t believe me?

  But I was starting to feel desperate. Whenever Lane touched me, I felt he left fingerprints that stained my skin. His marks were everywhere, on my arms and chest and legs and private parts, and to see myself naked was to see a body covered from head to toe with these welts. I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, even when I was fully clothed, a strategy that helped me live with my shame, for a while at least. When the mirror was unavoidable, I would become so nauseated I had to look away. I could hardly keep from retching every time I combed my hair, so vivid were the stains of my stepfather’s desire.

  As I hid from mirrors, I hid from Lane too. I slept with the covers over my head and hoped against hope that a blanket could protect me. I thanked God for my brothers, who had been forced by circumstance to sleep sandwiched next to me in the same bed, which made Lane’s nighttime advances impossible.

  I began to take refuge in a world of fantasies. I imagined slicing my wrists open and watching my soul escape through my wounds, floating up to heaven as my arms were bathed in blood. When I was seven years old, a half brother of mine—one of my father’s sons with one of his other wives—had committed suicide. I had vivid memories of attending the funeral and watching so many people mourn the death of such a young, troubled soul. A few months after that half brother died, another of my father’s children followed suit, hanging herself with her husband’s belt. It came to seem that suicide ran in my family, and by the time we were living in New Mexico, I had become fixated on how I might be able to follow in my half siblings’ footsteps. I fantasized about slicing up my skin, cutting myself in all the places where Lane had touched me.

  I felt that my skin had betrayed me. Something on it must have been different that invited Lane’s touches, something that indicated I wanted him, regardless of whatever I said otherwise. I had goodness and virtue in me, but it was wrapped in a skin that was evil. Because my skin was all the world knew of me, it gained the upper hand. The tug of suicide grew stronger each day, and as it did, I started thinking about what might be waiting for me in the afterlife.

  The afterlife, as had been explained to me in Sunday school and by my mother, was run by men who had been p
olygamous on earth, men like my father and Lane. “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become,” the church elders would remind us. Women who had been faithful and loyal wives would become goddesses—heavenly servants to the men who ruled over them. But no one had ever explained what would become of girls like me. When I asked Mom what would happen to dead girls who hadn’t been anyone’s wife, she said my soul was sealed to my father, and if I died before I married, I would go to my dad’s kingdom, not Lane’s.

  This should have been comforting, and for a while it was, though gradually I began to doubt Mom’s certitude. After all, I had already been born into my dad’s kingdom, but that hadn’t protected me from slipping into another one. How did I know that the same thing wouldn’t happen in heaven? That I wouldn’t slip into Lane’s kingdom again and be stuck there for all of eternity? Or perhaps I would end up in hell. The thought of spending all eternity with Satan terrified me almost as much as the prospect of spending it with my stepfather.

  The more I thought about all this, the more terrifying Lane seemed. One afternoon, as I sat in the back of his pickup with Susan’s daughters Sally and Cynthia, I watched as Lane parked the truck and walked into a convenience store with his crooked step. From behind, I could see dirty pink hands at the end of forearms filthy from grease stains. When he got to the door and turned briefly to smile back at me, deep crow’s-feet stretched from his eyes, intersecting the wrinkles etched across his brows and cheeks, making his face look as if it were formed of globs of clay. I met his smile with an angry glare.

  Once Lane was gone, I wrapped my lightly freckled arms around my legs, pulled my knees up close to my chest, and moved away from the gunnysack of pine nuts I’d been sitting up against.

  “Are you okay, Ruthie?” Sally asked.

  I slowly turned to face her. She wore her hair in short bangs that lay flat over her dark eyebrows and milky-white forehead, with a straight part down the middle and brown barrettes on either side. Then I glanced at Cynthia, who, despite being my age, wore her hair in exactly the same style as her sister, right down to the brown barrettes. From there, my gaze floated down to Cynthia’s face. She stared at me with a frightened look in her eyes. For a moment I thought that the angry look I’d given Lane had scared her. But it wasn’t a face of fear, I realized; it was a face beyond fear, a face like mine.