The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir

by Ruth Wariner

  My mother raised her head and leaned back in the chair. “Let’s talk to Lane about it tomorrow. Tomorrow night is my night.”

  “I’m not talkin’ to Lane about nothin’. I don’t care one tiny bit about what that man wants me to do.” Matt stared at Mom and she stared right back. After a few long minutes of silence, it seemed that something had been communicated that I didn’t quite understand. “Loren said they need me right away. I can take a bus to the San Diego border tonight.” Matt lifted his jacket from the back of his chair and headed down the hall to the kids’ room.

  I watched as Mom slowly pulled the cold plate of enchiladas back in front of her. “Take a shower and I’ll give you a haircut before you leave, so you don’t look like an orphan when you get there.”

  The rest of the evening passed in a blur. I remember Mom separating Matt’s wet hair into clumps, the snips of the scissors, and the wavy clips of hair floating to the cement floor. Soon, her mint-green suitcase was packed and standing at Matt’s side in front of the door, and then we were saying good-bye to my brother, encircling him as he stood with his hand on the doorknob.

  “Hey, Matt,” Luke said, big eyed and stoic. “Where ya goin’ this time?”

  The wind blew through the barrel heater’s rusty cylinder chimney and filled the living room with a hollow, ghostly whimper. Matt put his arm around our brother and gave him a sideways hug. “I’m goin’ to San Diego,” Matt said with a close-lipped smile. “California.”

  “That’s where I’ze born, right, Matt? I’ze born there, right?”

  “That’s right, Brother, that’s where you were born.” A proud smile spread across Luke’s face.

  Matt reached down to give me a hug. My throat hardened and my eyelids stung. I so wanted him to take me with him.

  He hugged the others, then lifted up on his soles and embraced Mom tightly. With his head buried in her neck, I heard him promise he’d call and be back at the holidays.

  “Yes,” said Mom when they separated. She put her hands on his shoulders and spoke in a faraway voice. “Make sure you call Maudy’s collect as soon as you get there so we know you made it.”

  Matt adjusted the visor on his hat and just looked at her. They seemed to be having another private exchange. “Well, I better get going or I’ll miss my bus.”

  He gripped Mom’s suitcase and walked out the door. Luke, Aaron, Micah, and I ran to the window and watched as his figure grew smaller and smaller. A steady wind blew over the tall, dry weeds in the yard as Matt walked through them, their tips bent to the muddy ground as if they were bowing. I breathed heavily on the glass and fogged the pane. By the time it had cleared, Matt was gone.

  Later we learned that it had taken all night for his bus to reach Tijuana. Matt walked his fourteen-year-old self to the border crossing alone. But as soon as he entered California, there was Loren, just as promised, waiting to greet him. Our half brother picked Matt up on the side of the road, the two drove straight to a construction site, and Matt started work that very day.

  30

  After Matt left, life became ever more chaotic and crazy, so much so that I found myself wishing that my older brother, who had teased me relentlessly for most of my childhood, were still around to help me deal with the insanity. I barely went to school. We were either traveling with Lane to work in the States, or Mom took Elena and went with him while I stayed home to watch my other siblings. When I did go to class, I was confused by the lessons and completely clueless about what was expected of me. I avoided Lane, and initially he left me alone. Almost every night, I’d dream of Matt’s coming back to take me with him to California. But as day would break, I’d awake and know such dreams were beyond hope. My only options, it seemed, were to get married or convince Mom to leave Lane. The first was unsavory and the second impossible. Still, I had to try.

  The spring I turned twelve, I found myself a passenger in Lane’s truck during one of our many drives from Albuquerque to LeBaron. Lane’s old, white pickup had been replaced by a small, black Datsun with a gash in the driver’s door so deep it made the whole truck look like a crushed tin can. We were driving a load of old items Lane had bought or scavenged—car parts, washing-machine parts, old heaters, used toilet bowls, broken appliances of all kinds. Mom was in the Microbus, just behind us, carrying another load of worn-out miscellany. Lane always planned to resell everything once he’d fixed it up in his shop, but I knew the bulk of it would end up in the growing pile of rusted metal behind our house. Lane had a knack for taking something broken and turning it into junk. The air in the small cab smelled of blackening banana peel and stale automotive grease. I had barely fallen asleep, with my hands folded across my stomach and my knees pressed up against the passenger-side door, when I felt something between my legs. I was trapped. Lane had reached his large, swollen hand over the brake lever and placed the heel of it on the crotch of my jeans. As he began rubbing his hand back and forth, I decided that this time I’d do something different. This time, I didn’t push him away. I had a trap of my own. I pretended to sleep, as angry as it made me, letting him touch me there until my stomach was full of knots and my underwear wet and sticky. I thought that every second he touched me would offer further proof to Mom that Lane was a filthy liar. I thought about showing Mom my soiled underwear, forcing her to see what Lane had done to me. I was sure that she wouldn’t be able to turn away from this fresh evidence. She would have to leave him, and we would have to move our family to San Diego and live with Matt.

  Suffering through this right now is how I’ll get what I want in the long term, I told myself. Mom won’t be able to stay with him if I can prove to her what he’s been doing to me.

  Mom must have flashed her headlights because it wasn’t long before we were pulling over at a rest area. I found Mom in the ladies’ room.

  “Can I ride with you?” I asked.

  My voice was serious, and Mom stopped washing her hands the second she saw my face in the mirror. I hesitated, suddenly afraid of confronting her the way I’d imagined. I wasn’t sure I could talk to her about this one more time; I didn’t want to tell her again that she’d been wrong about her husband.

  “Mom—”

  “You can ride with me.”

  I didn’t have to say anything. She knew.

  * * *

  THAT TRIP BACK to LeBaron was the last we would ever take in the Volkswagen Microbus. Just after we arrived home, it finally broke down for good, and Mom parked it behind the house alongside all the other rusted metal we had accumulated back there. Not long afterward, its mottled-white rooftop began to disintegrate, its tires grew flat, and the van started to look as if it were melting into the tall weed patch around it. We repurposed it as a place to store old clothes.

  The Microbus was replaced by a two-door Chevy Chevette, the first in a long line of battered cars Mom would drive until they were broken beyond repair. A subcompact car wasn’t exactly a substitute for a van, but that didn’t keep us from taking our usual trips to and from the States. The whole family just packed itself into the Chevette, clown-car-style. The tiny vehicle served another purpose: serious, private conversations could be held there away from the noise and ears of a large family—small, serious gatherings I came to call the Chevette Tribunals.

  A few weeks after the Microbus’s last Albuquerque trip, Mom called a meeting in the Chevette to discuss Lane’s actions. Lane and Mom sat in the front seat, while I sat behind them. Mom announced that the subject of the meeting would not be that she and Lane were splitting up—they couldn’t, the children needed a dad—but how we needed to move on from this unfortunate patch as a family.

  “Open and honest communication is the key to healing,” Mom announced over her shoulder as Lane, in the driver’s seat, peered at me through the rearview mirror. I averted my eyes, staring at my stepfather’s plaid cowboy shirt, his belly bulging into the steering wheel of the small car.

  “I really don’t see why you’re making such a big deal out of this,�
�� he said with a smile.

  I couldn’t believe he could be so dismissive. I sighed deeply and rested my head against the back of the seat.

  “It’s not like I went to bed with you, Ruthie. And you know I never put nothin’ inside you. All I did was touch you right here and here once in a while.” I waited for Mom to be outraged for me, for her to feel the way I did, completely betrayed and violated. Instead, she watched as Lane put his hand over his chest and crotch and shrugged his shoulders. “I really do believe all you girls are overreacting. In fact, Ruthie”—out of the corner of my eye I saw his head swivel around in my direction—“you liked me touchin’ you. You enjoyed it.”

  “I did not,” I yelled.

  “Then why’d you act like you did?” Lane said serenely.

  “I didn’t. I hated it. I tried to stop you every time it happened. I hated it!”

  My body sank deeper into the seat with each accusation that my mom—my flesh-and-blood mother sitting not two feet from me—didn’t reject. I felt my chest collapsing in on itself; my breathing became heavy, almost impossible. Please, Mom, I pleaded silently, please say something.

  “Lane,” Mom said, “it doesn’t matter whether or not Ruthie enjoyed you touching her. She’s a child, you’re an adult. You should have known better.”

  I felt as if I’d entered some sort of backward universe. “Mom, he’s lying. I never said I liked it.” I wanted to jump into the front seat and choke the life out of him.

  “Okay.” He shrugged. “I guess I misread ya. If you don’t like it, it won’t happen again.”

  “It won’t because I won’t ever let you near me again! I hate the sight of you!”

  “Well, hey, that kind of negative attitude won’t help this family at all.” He turned back to me. “Ruthie, hatred will eat ya up inside and take ya straight to hell. Read what the Bible says about hateful people and deal with your hatred. Pray about it. Your mom’s gonna stay here and we’re going to try and work things out. So you and I need to learn how to get along.”

  I was furious. How could he be so casual about this? How could he be taking this opportunity to preach to me?

  “Ruthie,” Mom said, also turning around. “Ruthie.”

  I will not look at you, I said to myself. I hate you too.

  “I want you to forgive Lane and I want you to get over what he did. Put it in the past where it belongs. I want to keep the family together. Do you want Aaron and Micah and Elena to grow up without a father, like you? You don’t have to see him. You can stay away. That way you won’t be a temptation anymore.”

  I finally looked at her. “What about Elena, Mom? Have you thought about what might happen to her?”

  Lane whipped around and bared his teeth like an animal, sticking his finger in my face. “Hey! I would never do that to any of my own kids.”

  “But it’s okay to do it to me because I’m not your kid?!”

  “No,” Mom said angrily. “It’s not okay for him to do that to any kids and he knows that, and he’s promised to stop. And he will, Ruthie, especially now that he knows that it bothers you so much. And as for Elena, I really don’t think Lane would be attracted to his own children the way he is to his pretty stepdaughters. That’s not something we have to worry about.”

  I looked up at last, just in time to see Lane shake his head, his lips pursed as if he couldn’t believe he was letting himself be subjected to this.

  “All right?” asked Mom, catching my glance.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said wearily. “Can you let me out?”

  After a tense second I heard the passenger door click open. Mom pulled the seat-back lever, and I pushed the seat forward to crawl out of the Chevette. I couldn’t wiggle my body out from behind her fast enough.

  31

  That was not the last of the awkward Chevette Tribunals. The entire summer before I started sixth grade, I was repeatedly summoned to the backseat of the car and lectured by Mom about how my inability to let bygones be bygones was preventing the family from moving forward. Typically, the conversations started with her sharing a piece of inspirational wisdom or reading a passage she’d found in the Book of Mormon or the Bible. She would talk about how God tests our powers of forgiveness and then call for me to be more Christlike. And at the end of these conversations, I would bolt out of the Chevette, shrugging my shoulders and staring at the ground.

  When Mom wasn’t traveling with Lane—and when I hadn’t been left in charge of my younger siblings—I was free to hang out with my friends and explore the countryside. Sally, Cynthia, and I spent a lot of time hiking over hot rocks on the L, swimming at the giant reservoir in our front yard, going to rodeos, and borrowing our brothers’ horses to go horseback riding. But I still had trouble looking my stepsisters in the eye when I talked to them. Our mothers’ decision to stay with Lane had been heartbreaking. I was sure they felt the same way. We never spoke to one another about Lane again; it was just too painful. Better to pretend it had never happened—that it wasn’t still happening—to any of us.

  I was so angry with Mom that summer that I ran away. We were supposed to take another trip to El Paso with Lane one morning and I did not want to go. The night before we were supposed to leave, I got into the hide-a-bed in the living room fully dressed. I lay awake until I heard everyone in their bedrooms snoring. Then, as quietly as I could and with the slow-motion movements necessary for an undetected escape, I slipped my feet out of the bed and into the pair of shoes I’d placed next to it. I took one soundless step, then another, then a third, until I reached the rickety door. The house remained quiet as I took my first step outside under the dark purple sky. I had told a cousin of mine that I wanted to run away, and without asking why, she said I could sleep at her house until I figured out where I was going to go. My plan was to take the bus to San Diego and to find Matt. I ran from Mom’s house to my cousin’s under the dim light of a half-moon, praying no one from the colony could see me.

  Once I got in bed at my cousin’s house, I lay awake for a few hours imagining what Mom’s face would look like in the morning when she’d wake and find the hide-a-bed empty. Then the thought made me feel guilty. My stomach grew tight with knots. I felt justified in my actions, but I didn’t want Mom to worry. I was angry with her, but also desperate for her approval. I stared at the wooden ceiling until I was finally able to fall asleep.

  After a fitful night, I woke up with a tight neck and shoulders. I lifted my heavy head off the pillow and peered out the bedroom window to a clear blue sky. Then I saw Mom’s Chevette parked on the side of the road outside the barbed-wire fence that surrounded my cousin’s yard. Someone had seen me running the night before and had told Mom where to find me.

  I slowly rose out of bed, turned the knob on the bedroom door with a heavy, reluctant hand, and dragged myself into the living room, where Mom was standing, her navy-blue purse over her shoulder. She glared at me with the angriest pair of eyes I’d ever seen, then spun around and walked off.

  “Bye, Ruthie,” I heard my cousin say as I walked out of the house. I rolled my eyes, nodded, and made my way to the car. I caught up to Mom but she didn’t say a single word until I’d clicked the door closed.

  “What the heck were you thinking?!” she screamed, her voice so loud I thought the windows would shatter. “Is your head in the toilet? I’ve been looking all over the colony for you. What if a criminal had picked you up on the streets last night? What’s wrong with you?!” I slouched forward in the seat and stared at my white tennis shoes, stained permanently from my midnight run. I wanted to crawl into a hole and escape the tirade. I wished she’d said those last four words to Lane instead of me.

  As we sped down the dirt road, I felt Mom’s eyes boring into the side of my head. “What Lane did to you wouldn’t seem so bad if some old Mexican man got ahold of you,” she ranted.

  I couldn’t even muster a reply. We rode the rest of the way without speaking.

  The silence continue
d after we arrived home. Lane had left for El Paso, and my siblings had been deposited at Susan’s house before Mom had gone looking for me. The house was empty. I had followed Mom through the kitchen door. She threw her keys onto the table and walked toward her bedroom.

  Suddenly I heard a tremendous voice screaming. It took me a second to realize that the noise was coming from my own throat.

  “WHY WON’T YOU LEAVE HIM!” I heard myself yell with a burning rage that made my skin hot. Mom turned and faced me with the look of a determined bull staring at a matador’s red flag. The force of it had made me step back through the threshold and into the living room. But I couldn’t stop that part of me that was crying out, that part of me that no one had listened to. “Lane has never done anything for this family! He doesn’t even support us.” I stared right back into Mom’s angry glare. “He hardly ever comes home! Why do you keep having babies with him?! He is nothing but a worthless … asshole!”

  Seeing the look on Mom’s face—the shock, the anger, the humiliation—I immediately wished I could suck the word back inside me. I had to look away and my body began to tremble. I turned back to apologize just in time to see her hand fly at me. She slapped my cheek so hard I had almost lost my balance. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I fell backward, my body cowering and my eyes wild. I looked like an animal on the side of the road that’d barely escaped being flattened by a truck.

  “Don’t you dare speak to me like that.” She looked at me for a long time. “It’s none of your business why I stay with him.” She turned and hurried toward her room. “I am still your mother, and I deserve respect.”

  * * *

  ONE DAY A few weeks later, as the summer began its transition to the cool desert winds of fall, there was a knock at the door. The man behind it wore a white straw cowboy hat, a thick, dark mustache, and glasses with bottle-thick lenses. He greeted us somberly, which is perhaps why I didn’t immediately recognize him as a church elder.