The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  She delivered him after eight hours of induced labor. They took him away to clean him up and when the young, grimacing nurse brought him back to her, he was not swaddled in a blanket as she’d expected, but laid out on a cold metal pan.

  “The doctor said not to touch him,” the nurse said, looking away, “or his skin might slip off.”

  If she had not been so exhausted, so emptied out with anger and bewilderment ever since the moment the doctor had whispered to her, with his papery hand on her arm, that the baby she carried had no heartbeat, she might have climbed off her bed and throttled the dumb girl with her bare hands. She felt herself shaking. God damn it. Then she said the words out loud, startling herself. “God damn it.”

  Before this moment she never could have imagined the situation that would cause her to say such a thing out loud, but here it was.

  Once the nurse was gone, she cupped him in her hands as if handling an injured bird, and nestled him in the fold of her hospital gown. She could see herself in this boy, tiny and red as a demon though he was: in his prominent forehead and oversized feet. His fingers were tapered—so delicate they were almost translucent—and his miniature lips so cracked and dry that she bent down and pressed her own lips against them as if she might kiss them back into life.

  At some point her husband, Billy, came into the room. He was a block of a man, a high school wrestler with a pink cauliflower ear, a sergeant in the National Guard with a fondness for dirt bikes and weaponry, and he practically cowered in the corner behind a meal cart. She remembered what he’d said four days before, when she’d come home from the doctor’s office to tell him her news. After he allowed her to sob into his chest, after he squeezed her with his thick arms in a most sensitive way, he’d said, in a flat voice she didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for, “It’s a stillbirth, Trish. Happens all the time.”

  A BEAUTIFUL DISCOVERY

  This was back in 1972, four years before she would escape life with Billy and find her way down to Virgin, where she would become what she promised herself she would never be: a plural wife, one of many jewels in her husband’s crown.

  She’d grown up in the Principle, in a Montana polygamist enclave called Pinedale, where her father, sixty-two years old when she was born, presided over his six wives and forty children with the solemn beneficence of a biblical king. They all lived in a single compound in a stand of ponderosas: two log homes and six Western Pacific boxcars that had been converted into bedrooms for the children and a few of the younger wives. They raised their own meat and vegetables, sewed their own clothes, pumped water by hand, and each night gathered, like the inhabitants of some medieval village, in the smoky, bustling great room with its river-rock fireplace and thirty-foot table made from a single massive tamarack cut lengthwise, to sing and eat and thank the Lord for their good fortune.

  When her father died, the family disintegrated instantly. Trish was twelve years old. Four of the wives, along with their children, were absorbed into other church families, while the other two, including Trish’s mother, disappeared into the world of the gentiles. With nothing but eighty dollars to her name—her portion of the inheritance—she put herself and her four children on a bus to Reno, Nevada, where she would find work as a casino hostess.

  In less than a month, Trish had lost her father, five of her mothers (some of whom had fed her, sung her to sleep at night, diapered her, even breast-fed her) and thirty-six of her sisters and brothers, all of whom she missed gravely, reciting their names in a murmuring singsong: “Michael, Deborah, Ivan, Paul, Sheila, Ricky, Mavis, Joan…Timmy, Keith, Caroline…Pearl, Millie, Wyatt, Dale…” Unlike her children, Trish’s mother did not seem to be grieved by these losses. Though nearly forty years old, she had married into the family as the sixth of six wives and managed to bear only four children, which afforded her the status of a hired maid.

  “Really, I don’t know how I did it all those years,” Trish heard her transformed mother explain to an incredulous, pink-haired neighbor in Reno. “I cleaned, I cooked, I scrubbed, I swept, I peeled, I tended, I talked pretty and ate humble pie all the damn day long, and what did I get for my trouble? Living in a boxcar, and sleeping once a week with an old goat and his faulty equipment.”

  Trish’s mother took easily to her new, emancipated lifestyle. She wore heels and skirts, smacked her gum, swore off cooking anything but Swanson tinfoil dinners, and every Saturday night went out dancing with friends from work. But for Trish it wasn’t so easy. She had never seen a TV, listened to a radio, read a book other than the Bible and Book of Mormon, spoken directly to a boy who was not her brother. The first time she flushed a toilet she fled the bathroom in a panic.

  One of her first and most important discoveries was her own beguiling face. In Pinedale she had been invisible to herself and everyone else, noticed only when she spoke out of turn or did not do her chores fast enough. She wore pioneer-style gingham dresses, hand-me-down work boots, and never felt any compulsion at all to study herself in a mirror (every morning her mother would brush her long black hair and tug it into two stiff braids). In Reno, she was constantly being waylaid by her own reflection: in medicine cabinet mirrors, department store windows, freshly waxed limousines, the chrome toaster on the kitchen counter. Amazed, she’d stand in front of the glass trophy case at school and consider her pert little nose and pouty lips and gleaming blackberry eyes. She was stunning!—why hadn’t anyone told her?

  She learned clothes and makeup from her mother’s friend, Carlotta, who had worked six years as a showgirl and knew how to apply complex combinations of mascara, rouge, and base in ways that would, according to Carlotta, “set the boys’ nuts on fire.” Every chance she got, Trish ducked into the nearest bathroom to admire her sooty eyelashes and glowing cheeks, to assure the integrity of her painted lips and penciled eyebrows.

  At school the girls hated her, of course, but the boys never wavered in their attentions—little packs of them vying for the privilege to lean against her locker—even after the girls spread rumors that she was a slut, that she turned tricks on weekends down by the railyard. She didn’t know how to flirt or engage in small talk, and managed to turn down every offer of a date until she was fifteen, which only thickened the ether of mystery that hung around her. It was bullnecked Billy Paddock who first successfully asked her out. Actually, he sat across from her at study hall one afternoon and told her that he was going to take her to the Spring Hop on Saturday night, that he would pick her up at seven sharp, and that he would be bringing a pink peony corsage in case she wanted to wear a dress that matched.

  It’s how she’d been trained for most of her life: she did as she was told.

  After Billy there were other boys. He wanted her for himself but she began to exercise the privilege her looks afforded her: she let other boys tell her what to do. She drew the line at French kissing and petting, but Billy didn’t know that. He’d find out about her date with Marty Craig, wide receiver and star of track and field, and work himself into a purple-faced rage. He went out with other girls, feigned indifference, but was always there, watching, making sure she was his for Homecoming, Harvest Ball, Prom—all the big ones. She lost herself in the thrill of infatuation, in the pleasure of a boy’s cold hand on her breast, but then the guilt would form like a hard bone in her chest and she would feel God watching her, the old God who lived among the tall pines and in the flat pale sky of Montana, and late at night, with the smell of aftershave and cigarette smoke still clinging to her, she would pray, beg His forgiveness and cry until her eyes were aching and dry.

  On the last night of her junior year, she let Billy go all the way; a relief, finally, to relent. She closed her eyes and wept the few minutes that it took.

  Within a month she discovered she was pregnant. By the time she graduated from high school she was a married woman, the mother of a two-month-old baby girl, washing diapers and ironing shirts in a tract house not much bigger than a Western Pacific boxcar.

  N
UMBER TWO: MARTINE

  Not two years after Daniel, a kindly old German doctor, short and stout as a dwarf, delivered the absurd news: after six months of pregnancy she was, once again, carrying a dead baby.

  She was so overcome by what this strange little man in a lab coat was telling her that she laughed out loud. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Nope.” He shook his head. “No kidding.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said again, though this time in a whisper, the words dropping from her mouth like faint echoes.

  “No kidding,” the little doctor insisted.

  They ran tests and discovered a simple explanation: she suffered from a condition that clotted the blood, cutting off the flow of oxygen and nutrients through the umbilical cord, a condition that could be treated by a daily pill of baby aspirin. But too late for tiny red Daniel, and now Martine.

  She asked the doctor why her first daughter, her living daughter, Faye, who was now four years old, had managed to arrive safely into this world at all.

  The doctor shrugged and waved his fat little hand. “I haf delifered over two thousand babies, my dear,” he said, “and it is a miracle each time one off them has come out alife and stayed that way. You haf successfully birthed one child. Now that we understand your condition, I haf no doubt you can do it again.” He raised his eyebrows. “No kidding.”

  On a snowy winter evening she delivered the fetus in a haze of painkillers (to take the edge off, the nurses had told her) and, once the labor was over, fell into a weeping, half-conscious sleep. She woke to a blur of light and voices, asking to see her baby, and the nurse informed her that her husband had authorized them to take the fetus and properly dispose of it.

  “Everything,” the nurse said in a professionally kind voice, “has been taken care of for you.”

  Trish could not speak or move. She imagined her baby with its delicate fingers and nubbed chin, feet tucked together, curled up on top of a pile of medical trash, disposed of. She imagined this pile of trash hauled off in a large truck and dumped in a landfill where rats slithered in and out of sight and seagulls circled and swooped down to snatch whatever they could find.

  She tried to ask a question, but no sound came from her mouth. Billy was nowhere to be seen. She tried to get out of the bed, a hoarse growl rising out of her throat, and when the nurse came to try and calm her she kicked and scratched and shrieked until they had to strap her down and tranquilize her.

  She went home from the hospital the next day and acted as if nothing had happened. Every morning she made Billy his bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins, the way Billy liked it. Each day, while he was at work selling hot tubs, she cleaned the bathroom, sanitized with ammonia and boiling water, vacuumed the rugs, dusted, washed clothes, ironed shirts, balanced the checkbook—all in the exact way that Billy required. She wore her matching outfits, put on her makeup and did her hair, and one day, when she thought she might disintegrate in the clean light and sterile odor of her own house, she went across the street, invited her Peeping Tom neighbor, Mr. Ellis, over for a cup of hot chocolate, and let him fuck her.

  After Mr. Ellis there was Billy’s boss, Ricky Gaines, and then the young man who came to the door asking about donations for the Firemen’s Association. The sex offered her relief, made her feel young and heedless for a little while, and when she told Billy what she’d done, he’d given her no response except to take away her checkbook, sell their second car which she used for errands, and explained to her in an eerie whisper that if she tried to leave the house without permission, or allowed anyone inside who he had not authorized, he would kill her.

  No wonder, she would think later, that her Faye, who had somehow survived her own corrupted womb, was a haunted child. Faye, who rarely spoke, did not like to play with other children, and spent most of her hours kneeling in the spot beside the fireplace she called her “prayer cave”—a kind of improvised grotto constructed of pillows, blankets and dismembered stuffed animals where she carried on intricate conversations with Jesus and the Holy Ghost and other invisible beings. She seemed to have no affection at all for her remote father, who punished her for minor infractions such as bed-wetting by locking her in a closet or throwing cold water on her in the bathtub while Trish stood by and watched, a mute conspirator. The family was not particularly religious, but somewhere along the line, during one of their few visits to the Mormon church down the street, Faye had been infected by God.

  As much as Trish would have liked to, she could not blame Faye’s odd behavior entirely on Billy. Needing to talk to someone besides her flaky mother or stone-faced husband, she had told Faye all about Daniel and Martine, explained in detail how they arrived early into the world and left much too soon, both so perfect in God’s sight they were given a pass on the Test of Life and were now living happily with Jesus and His angels up in heaven. The truth of it was that she felt connected to her two dead children in a way she didn’t with her living daughter. Trish had no remedy for this, no way to bring them all together except to make Faye an accomplice in this sorrow of hers. Faye, a toddler barely out of diapers, listened to her mother talk about her invisible brother and sister and seemed to understand.

  Faye had been carrying on a regular discourse with God and Jesus and several of the Bible prophets since she learned to talk, but gradually she began bringing others into the conversation: the Holy Ghost, Joseph Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Old Yeller, and her two siblings. With Daniel and Martine, she mostly kept them up to date on the news of the Paddock household: the raccoon in the attic, the Fourth of July grass fire on the mountain, the new refrigerator that whistled and moaned when you opened the freezer door. Sometimes she aksed questions, tilting her head and nodding as if receiving answers.

  It was hard, sometimes, for Trish not to ask her what they had to say.

  Her decision to leave Billy was not particularly painful or even difficult; one sparkling fall morning she felt a rare bit of clarity and the will to put it to use. She asked Faye how she would feel about their going away for a while. Faye sighed as if she’d been waiting a long time to field this particular question.

  “We could go away,” she said, “and if we like it there, we could never come back.”

  Trish called her mother, who had taken up with a livestock auctioneer in a trailer park outside Carson City.

  “You know I never liked that Billy,” her mother said. “Little banty rooster with his head up his you-know-what. We don’t have room for you here, honey, but I was talking to Daphne the other day—”

  “Hold on,” Trish said. “Aunt Daphne?” Aunt Daphne had been one of her mother’s sister-wives, wife number three, a thoughtlessly kind, chubby woman who hoarded candy at the bottom of her clothes hamper and once gave Trish a whole Big Hunk candy bar, as generous a gift as she had ever received. Trish and her mother occasionally spoke about the family they had left in Montana, and speculated about what had become of them, but as far as Trish knew her mother had never been in contact with any of them.

  “She tracked me down, wanted to catch up. She’s the same old Daph, sweet and happy all the day long. She’s down to Utah, married another plyg there and started to feel lonely once all the kids moved out. That’s why she called. A lonely old lady, and I know for a fact she’s got all kinds of spare room. She’d be happy to take you and Faye, but you have to promise me, honey. One of those men shows up at the front door with his hat in his hand, looking for another heifer to put in his corral, you turn and run for the hills.”

  NUMBER THREE: JACK

  Eight and a half months along, big as a Volkswagen, she ate heaping portions of kidney beans, pork chops, and spinach greens (all prescribed by her midwife), dutifully took her baby aspirin every morning, after which she would sit on her porch in the sun, dazed with relief. She knew, this time, there would be no tragic replay, no evil doctors casually whispering their horrible news, no nurses absconding with her baby, never to be seen again. She felt this new one, this big baby boy,
arch and swim inside her, active as a colt, and she knew that her old life, her old polluted self, was forever gone.

  Reno, and everything that had happened there: gone. Billy, the succession of groping teenage boys and rutting men, her vanity and selfishness, her cursed body, her loneliness and hard-packed grief: all gone, cleansed by the sharp hot light of the Virgin River Valley. Reno had been one long detour into a blighted territory, and now she had returned to country in which she belonged, a place filled with women and children and companionship and constant distraction, a place of simple rights and wrongs, a place in which Faye could pray the whole day long and no one think it the slightest bit odd.

  She had not heeded her mother’s advice, of course. Within a month of moving to Virgin, where she and Faye lived in one wing of Aunt Daphne’s six-bedroom rambler, she was attending church regularly and meeting with the Women’s Relief Society, an organization that promoted gossip and irreverent female bonding under the cover of quilting bees and seminars on emergency preparedness.

  It was on a Saturday afternoon, at something called Service Day, that she first met Golden. Though they worked together only ten minutes or so—he helped her unload flats of tomato sprouts to be planted in the community garden—she was immediately taken by his gentle deference, the sad cast of his eyes. She didn’t know it at the time, but a year earlier he had lost one of his young daughters, and Trish would soon come to realize it was the weight of grief she sensed in him, so much like her own, that first drew her to him.

  Of course, none of this got past Beverly; nothing ever did. Within a couple of days Trish was being invited to dinner at Old House, to Big House to help with the funeral luncheon for old Brother Billick. Trish thought nothing of it until she got a call one night from Golden himself, who sheepishly inquired if she might like to take a ride with him to Sister Flett’s nursery to pick out flowers for the upcoming Easter service. On the phone that night, the cord wrapped around her wrist, she felt herself grinning and spinning in place like the gum-smacking high schooler she had once been: she was being asked out on a date! That her suitor was a man with three wives and twenty-six children didn’t bother her nearly as much as it should have.