The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  It did not take him long to gather the whole family and hustle them out through the west pasture and across the river, the children stumbling bewildered and shoeless before him like prisoners on a death march, splashing through the river, stopping to catch tadpoles and splash-bomb each other with rocks. Beverly came behind, clutching a crying baby against her breast, and, in between shouted promises of bodily harm if the children so much as got their pants cuffs wet, demanded to know what he, Golden, had been thinking leaving Glory outside all alone, not twenty feet from a wild animal widely known for attacking and injuring defenseless young people.

  Golden did what he always did when Beverly scolded him: he smiled mildly and did his best to move out of earshot.

  Glory was where he’d left her, perfectly safe, in a staring contest with Raymond across the fence, her knees knocking together in delight. The kids, normally forbidden from going near the river, much less crossing it, even when it was only inches deep, called out to the ostrich, offered him pebbles and blades of grass to eat, tossed dirt clods at him when Beverly wasn’t looking. Even the baby had stopped crying, mesmerized by Raymond’s unlikely shape and wet, hypnotic eyes.

  “All right, now,” Golden coached, “be quiet for a minute everybody and listen to this.”

  He glanced at Glory, who was completely absorbed with Raymond’s come-hither stare, and said, “Glory. Come on, Glory, look! Bird!”

  She seemed to grin a little, and tilt her head, but said nothing.

  “Say it, Glory. Bird! Bird!”

  “She can’t talk,” said Parley, who was nine years old at the time and seemed offended by the very thought. “She’s handicapped!”

  “She said it,” Golden said, “just a minute ago.” He knelt down in front of her and said it right into her face, whispering this time, “Bird.”

  She cocked her eyebrows and opened her mouth. She said, “Ahhhhnk.”

  The kids laughed and the baby clapped her hands.

  “No!” Golden said, almost shouting now. “Bird! Remember? You just said it.”

  “Maybe she said something that sounded like bird,” said Beverly in her carefully cadenced mother’s voice, the one she normally employed with grocery cashiers and children under the age of five. “She does that sometimes, Golden.”

  “One time I heard her say bazooka,” Clifton offered.

  “No.” Golden stood and pointed at Raymond. “She said it twice. I was standing right here.” He positioned his mouth next to her ear. “Bird,” he said with a husky emphasis, as if trying to hypnotize her. “Biiirrrd.”

  Glory turned and looked directly at him now, offered a lopsided smile. She said, “Uhhngg.”

  The children laughed again—even Beverly grinned—and Alvin grabbed his belly in a pantomime of hilarity and fell backward into the grass. Raymond himself seemed to shake his head in disbelief and Josephine shouted, “I think she just said, ‘Uhhngg’!”

  At that moment, the object of high ridicule by an ostrich and nine of the people he loved most in the world, he felt the hot wash of disappointment at the back of his throat, along with a tinge of irritation at Glory for letting him down. Only later, after turning it over in his mind, would he understand the memory in a way that rescued it from his colorful and extensive collection of shameful and embarrassing moments. That day, with the family gathered around and expectation in the air like an audible buzz, he hadn’t understood the look in Glory’s eyes, the same sly, knowing look he had noticed for the first time on their drives to the clinic. He’d been too addled to see it then, but he was sure of it now: she had set him up, played a little joke at his expense. His own little girl, bless her heart, had pulled one over on him good.

  THE RIVER’S EDGE

  That winter it snowed, it rained, it froze, it blew. The sun came out hot one day, melting the snow off the cliffs and mesas, sending ropes of red water twisting down sandstone walls, and the next day a three-week pocket of cold settled in and killed the locust saplings along the driveway, burst the water pipes on the Old House’s north side. For five months he’d made almost no progress on Glory’s Doll House, so when he had some downtime in the first warm days of April, he dedicated an entire week to its completion. He built the miniature stairway to the second level, covered the exterior plywood with cedar shakes, trimmed the windows and door. On the second day, with the temperature pushing into the seventies, he decided that, for the first time all year, it was warm enough for Glory to sit outside and do some Raymond-watching. He situated her in her wheelchair the way she liked it, unbuckled, with a foam pillow and blanket on each side to keep her tucked in place, her feet planted firmly against the canted steel plates, her crutches across her lap.

  He told Beverly that he was taking Glory out to work with him, and wheeled her across the muddy pasture to a firm, gravelly spot twenty feet from the river, which was moving deep and fast and quiet with snowmelt, cutting new banks along the far edge of the bow. Most of the other kids had escaped Old House for the outbuildings and willow thickets and muddy yard. They spied on and chased and attacked each other, shooting their rubber band guns and lob-bing mudballs, pausing to hatch plots and form alliances which were exposed and broken in frantic whispering sessions behind the old chicken pen.

  Golden locked Glory’s wheels and waited with her until Raymond, taking his time like a star of stage and screen, made his appearance, still shaggy with his coat of winter feathers. Glory squealed, clanged her crutches together, called to Raymond in a way that made him strut and puff out his chest a little more.

  Golden told her he’d be back in a minute, and because the older boys were avoiding him in an effort to avoid conscription into the Doll House construction crew, he had to go himself to the detached garage for more finishing nails and his carpenter’s square. He couldn’t find the square, ended up searching the cab and bed of his work truck, without luck. Back inside the Doll House, he knelt to cut two pieces of oak molding before he looked out the window to check on Glory. From this angle he could only see the back of her chair—a square of black naugahyde and two glinting chrome push-handles—and Raymond, just beyond the chair in his line of sight, standing against the fence now and really putting on a show: bobbing his head wildly, flexing his pygmy wings, as if trying to will them to flight. He had taken up the next length of molding, made two back-and-forth passes with the miter saw, when he felt shaken, as if by a large, cold hand. His ears rang, his throat caught, his heart seemed to stop and clench painfully for several beats before starting up again, allowing him to breathe. He struggled to his feet to look out the window. Something was wrong: in Raymond’s weird behavior, in the stillness and silence of the chair—it should have been rocking and shaking with Glory’s spastic jerks. Even from this distance he should have been able to hear her squeals, the clanking of her crutches.

  He threw down the saw and ran. The chair was empty. He stood next to it and turned in place, scanning every horizon for an explanation, trying to make himself believe that maybe the kids had carried her off as a joke, stowed her behind the old chicken coop just to give their old gullible dad a fright, or maybe, in the two or three minutes he’d left her, she’d managed to crutch-walk herself down to the willows, fifty yards south, to hide. Still turning slowly, as if suspended from a wire, he looked down and was met with a sight that would stay lodged in the edge of his vision until the day he himself would go to meet his Maker: Glory’s tiny orthopedic shoes, placed side by side, a few feet from the river’s edge.

  STILL WATERS

  It took them three days to find her. Though the Mormons in the valley were suspicious, even openly antagonistic toward their polygamist brethren, a child had gone missing; they formed search parties, set up a command center at the chapel in Hurricane, shut down their farms and shops and businesses to comb miles of riverbank, probing the water with poles and grappling hooks, investigating culverts and fishing holes for any sign of the missing girl. Golden, wandering in a fog of loss, allowed himself a small measu
re of hope he sipped at greedily, like a secret flask of whiskey, until the second day when a boy found one of her crutches snagged in some tamarisk at the mouth of Dutch Creek. On the third day, the Prophet, who had been fasting and praying in seclusion, had a vision: he saw an angel of God sitting in a willow tree, presiding over still waters.

  The word went out and a flotilla of dusty pickups was dispatched to look for willow trees along the river. Golden rode in an old black Packard that brought up the rear, with Uncle Chick at the wheel and the Prophet dozing in the back seat, his gurgling colostomy bag keeping him company. When the men clambered out of their pickups to search, Golden stayed behind, pacing along the side of the highway, looking up with terror at every shout or unexpected sound, biting the margins of his thumbnails until they bled. It went like this all afternoon, one stop after another until they’d worked all the way down to Martin’s Point, where the river descended into a narrow gorge. The light was failing and the men were starting to give each other questioning looks. They had parked next to the old trail bridge, and were picking their way through boulders and wild oak to the river below, when the Prophet made a noise and motioned for Golden to stay in the car.

  “Going to bless you,” he said. After his strokes years ago, the prophet had regained some of his ability to speak, though the words came out rasping and sideways, as if through a mouthful of sawdust. His face was smooth and colorless, obliterated by the weather, worn pale like an old stamp.

  He leaned forward and said, “Your head.”

  Golden slumped all the way down in the front seat so the old man could place his hands on the sides of his head, just above his ears. The prayer was short, but came out with such a deliberateness, a gulf of one or two seconds between every crackling word, that it took a good minute to deliver: “Dear Father. Give this man comfort. You took his sweet baby from him and he don’t understand. Comfort him. Bless him with thy Spirit. Bless him with the strength to keep on.”

  Inside that old car that smelled like leather and Uncle Chick’s chewing tobacco, Golden absorbed every word; a liquid warmth in his scalp washed down his neck and shoulders, unlocking the muscles strung tight with relentless hours of worry and grief, and he slumped deeper into the seat until it felt like the only thing holding him upright were the ten blunt fingertips pressed into the sides of his head. When the Prophet finished his blessing he released Golden and, with his black locust walking cane, reached over the seat and pressed on the button in the steering wheel to sound the horn. Uncle Chick, sweating and covered in red dust, came up the bank and helped his father out of the car. The Prophet stood at the passenger-side window and bent down to whisper to Golden, who did not have the strength to open his eyes or acknowledge the old man in any way, “You stay here, son. We’ll bring her back to you.”

  Uncle Chick, getting to be an old man himself but whipcord-strong, hefted his father into his arms, cradling him in the manner of a ventriloquist with his wooden dummy, and they went like that down to the river, heading east, away from the others. By the time the men caught up with him, the Prophet was tottering ankle-deep in the water and shuffling from side to side, investigating the water with his cane. It was a wide spot in the river, a good spot for fishing carp and catfish, and the water, deep and black in the grainy light of dusk, was speckled white with cottonwood fluff and tufts of foam. Nighthawks chittered, and a few sluggish bats wove invisible patterns in the cooling air. Picking their way upstream, the men whispered: in this part of the river there was no willow in sight, only a single enormous cottonwood split in half by lightning.

  Maybe the Prophet had confused a willow with a cottonwood, but to those men, it didn’t matter. This old man, standing in the water with his cane, this was why they lived the way they did, this was why they believed in the hard truths of the Principle. The Mormons—who had abandoned the Principle a hundred years ago, and who were at this very minute out conducting their own searches with their well-organized search parties, with their maps and grids and hot meals prepared by their women—had many things the fundamentalists did not: they had their expensive modern chapels, their temples and their worldwide bureaucracy and millions of clean-cut members, they had their Donny and Marie. But they did not have this priesthood authority, the ancient biblical power, borne by men of God like the Prophet, who spoke the hard truth, who conversed directly with God and had the ability, like Jesus of old, to release a dead child from her watery grave.

  Golden was not there to see it, but they said that the Prophet picked around the bank for a good ten minutes, muttering and bent, searching with his cane. All at once he pushed out into a small hole choked with pussy willow stalks, as if he’d decided to go for a little swim, the water rising to his thighs, his waist, and then he reached down. Some said it was as if the small pale hand rose up through the green murk to grasp the old man’s. Some went so far as to say that in the dim light, as the body was pulled to the surface with Uncle Chick on one side and the Prophet on the other, that the dead girl’s skin appeared white and unblemished, her left arm straight, her body without handicap or flaw, as perfect as it would be come the morning of the resurrection when she rose from her grave to greet her Savior.

  When they brought her back to Golden, wrapped in a wool horse blanket that smelled of dust, she was not perfect anymore. Her hair was knotted with grit and debris, her teeth broken, her nostrils plugged with greenish mud, her skin punctured and abraded from the twelve-mile journey downriver, her china-white body blackened at the edges like the porcelain of an old sink. He would see her like this later, when he carried her into the house to her mother, but for now he slept, his head lodged between the seat and the door, his face still pinched with suffering. The men shushed each other and, like parents of a colicky child who had finally nodded off, tiptoed on the gravel, wincing with every sound, sliding into their pickups and shutting the doors with quiet clicks. Exhausted, they switched on their headlights and in a single procession drove through the lowering darkness to their families to tell of the miracle they’d seen, to hug their own children tight.

  RAYMOND THE OSTRICH

  He stood under a bright full moon, the grass cold with dew beneath his feet. He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d come to be standing out in front of Old House barefoot, the fly of his jeans undone. The last thing he remembered was dozing in the parlor armchair, exhausted after a long day: visitors and mourners streaming through the house for Glory’s wake, and Glory in her coffin next to him in her frilly white dress, bows in her hair. Except for his little nap in the car on the way home from Cuttels Bridge, he himself had not slept since she’d gone missing. Tonight he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her there alone in the parlor, of going up to bed as if it were just another ordinary night, as if tomorrow were not her funeral and burial, the last time he would ever see her on this earth.

  Beverly had gone to bed hours ago, at ten-thirty sharp, as if it were any ordinary night, and he resented her for it. Resented her for her calmness in the face of this calamity, for her lack of tears, for her allegiance to routine and the maintenance of order at all costs. Most of all, he resented her for not openly blaming him for their daughter’s death, for the shocked fury she choked back when he delivered the terrible news, for the three words she whispered as he clutched at her, spoken so quietly he could barely make them out: “How could you.”

  He was heartsick and tired, his whole body a pulsing ache, but he could not stand the thought of going back and sitting in the chair for the rest of the night. His legs twitched as if they wanted to run, his hands flexed with the desire to break something. He had felt this way all day, jumpy, and since this morning, when he had gone to retrieve Glory at the new funeral home, an old pioneer brick-and-sandstone mansion on the main drag in Hurricane. George Baugh had taken over for Teddy Hornbeck after he sold everything—including his hearse to Golden—and moved to Florida. Mr. Baugh, a chubby pink man in an emerald-green suit that made him look like an artichoke, had a pointy head from w
hich a wisp of gray hair rose like a curl of smoke. When Golden had arrived to take Glory, Mr. Baugh, standing next to a desk in the richly appointed parlor busy with fern stands and overstuffed furniture and heavy velvet draperies, explained that his “people” would deliver Glory to Big House, it was part of the services he offered.

  Golden told the man that he had come to take his daughter, he had the perfect car to do so, and he needed her home for the wake that was to begin soon. He looked at his shoes so Mr. Baugh could not see his puffy, wept-out eyes. He said, “Just tell me how much I owe, please, and we can settle this now.”

  Mr. Baugh shuffled his papers. Mr. Baugh sighed. Mr. Baugh explained, with a thick layer of condescension sugaring his voice, that Golden needn’t pay right now, that along with the casket, and the embalming and preparing of the body, there was also the delivery of the body to the residence for the wake, the delivery of the body to the funeral site, and finally, of course, the burial.

  “It’s all one package deal, sir,” the man said, smiling with a false charm. “You go on home now, why don’t you, be with your family, and let us take care of everything.”

  Golden shifted his weight, felt both his fists clench. After those initial hours of violent, wracking grief, every muscle and nerve alive with pain, he’d felt numb. All through the hours of last night and this early morning he’d been floating on vapors, his insides gone cold and still, his mind a whistling void; when he walked, he could not feel his own feet touch the ground. But hearing Mr. Baugh talk in his smug way about delivery and package deals, while his daughter lay dead somewhere in the rooms of this house, sparked a flame inside him. All at once his hands itched with the urge to punch Mr. Baugh’s smug little face.

  “I’m going to take her now, please,” Golden said. “Show me where she is and that’ll be it.”

  Mr. Baugh reassembled a professional smile and, gathering the last of his patience from deep within, repeated his explanation about the embalming, the delivery, the burial, the package deal. Before he could finish, Golden stepped around the desk and started down a hallway toward the back of the house. Mr. Baugh hooted and tried to get in front of him, but Golden gave the little man a slight hip check that sent him pedaling sideways into a potted palm. The first room Golden looked in was full of chairs, the other an office, and then there was the room with four caskets, each of them gleaming in the morning light like sleek automobiles freshly washed and waxed. A thick chemical smell made Golden’s eyes water.