The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  Upstairs, she walked the long hall, keyed in to the house’s audible frequencies, the collective drone of sleeping bodies, the sighing vents, the rasp of skin against sheets. On Golden’s orders the children had been divided randomly among the rooms, separated only by gender. Amazingly, after those first few difficult nights, things had calmed down considerably. Here was Alvin sharing a bed with both Herschel and Clifton, here were sworn enemies Novella and Josephine wrapped in the same blanket, the lion lying down with the lamb if Trish had ever seen it. And here was Faye, one arm thrown over the hip of her sister and new best friend Fig Newton; when Trish had given Faye the option of sleeping with her in the utility closet or braving one of the upstairs bedrooms, she had chosen the latter without so much as an attempt at sparing her mother’s feelings.

  Back in the closet, Trish fished the envelope from the secret pocket inside her suitcase, and for the thirtieth or fortieth time read the letter it contained.

  Dear Trish,

  If only I was brave enough to talk to you in person, but you should know that writing this letter is taking every scrap of courage I have. I can’t tell you how terrible I feel about Rusty. Of course I am largely responsible for what happened and while I would do anything, give anything to make it right, all I can offer is my deepest regret and sorrow.

  I wanted to tell you that I’ve decided to move away. To where, I haven’t really decided yet, but I can’t stay here. (Even though the sheriff’s office has cleared me of wrongdoing, it won’t stop the people here from blaming me, and rightfully so. You’ve probably seen the story in the paper. Whenever I go out now, people point and stare.) So I’ll be leaving in the next couple of weeks after I sell my equipment. Which is why I’m writing. I’d like to invite you to come with me. I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m going to do, and I know how absurd it must sound, especially under the circumstances. You already have a life and a family and you’re probably laughing as you read this, but I can’t get over the idea that I may never see or speak to you again. So I decided, for once in my life, to take a chance. Would it sound like something out of your favorite romance novel if I said that I would do everything I could to give you the happiness you deserve? Yes, it probably would. So I will stop before I embarrass myself anymore. I won’t even pretend to hope that you’ll consider my offer, so I’ll just say that the hours I’ve spent with you are the most precious and happy of my life.

  Your friend always,

  June

  One week ago today that she had found the letter stuck in her screen door. She had pulled up in front of the duplex, intending, after moving her possessions to Big House, to make one final sweep of the place. She had been thinking about how the same drive she had taken hundreds, maybe thousands of times, with the same evening sun dipping behind the same broken mountains, could turn, in the wake of catastrophe, beautifully strange: frogs calling out from some wet ditch, the scent of cooling tar, the violet light of dusk caught in the bowl of a lost hubcap, a troupe of quail sprinting single-file down the middle of the road.

  She was also thinking—marveling, really—about how her life could be so easily picked up and moved, how the collected sum of her shrinking existence could fit into a Volkswagen Rabbit with room to spare.

  June’s pickup had been pulling away just as she arrived. Though she waved, he seemed to turn his head away and hide under the bill of his cap. She’d thought about it many times, but had not found the right time to visit him since the accident; she figured he might have difficulty understanding why she’d sold him out to the sheriff. And then she read the letter, standing in the empty living room of a shabby house for which she was already nostalgic, and hadn’t slept more than an hour at a time since.

  It helped to lose herself in the new routine of her days: a morning and afternoon of babysitting and domestic duty at Big House, her four-hour shift at the hospital, and then back to her utility closet, where she would spend another restless night. Her evenings at the hospital she liked the most: the quiet order of the place, the squeak and clatter of gurneys and carts, the sweet chemical smell of X-ray exposures, the rustle of sensible nurse hosiery, the predictable disturbances quickly and efficiently resolved. They’d installed Rusty at the far end of the old ward—which in a bygone era had served as the region’s only cotton mill—in a room with high ceilings hung with coils of painted ductwork, a single narrow window, and one wall still showing some of its original hand-thrown brick.

  Rose had arranged it so that along with her daily eight-to-four shift, Beverly, Nola, Trish and even Golden would each be responsible for a four-hour block and Rusty would be attended to around the clock. With the blessing of the nursing staff, many of whom had family ties to the Virgin polygamists, she showed them how to keep his tongue and lips moist with ice chips, how to change his diapers and give him his sponge baths and swab his gums with lemon glycerine, the proper way to work his muscles and joints to stave off atrophy, the whole while being sure to speak or sing to him, to hold his hand, as if he could be tied down, by the cords of voice and touch alone, to the world of the living.

  It was quite something to watch Rose care for her son. She worked with a focus Trish had never seen her bring to anything else in her life; to concentrate on one child to the exclusion of everything else, this she could do. Her eyes shone, her neck rigid in constant surveillance, her movements deliberate and sure even as she lifted bandages to check for infection, the body of the boy beneath her administering hands so pale and flawless it seemed to give off a light of its own.

  She did not seem to dwell for a second on the idea, as Trish was inclined to, that Rusty had only a minimal chance of survival, that even if he managed to hold on for weeks or months, he would never again be the boy they had known.

  Though Rose gave him a sponge bath every morning, Trish made it a point to do the same at the beginning of her shift; there was not much they could do for him now, she decided, except keep him company and keep him clean. Nurse Pickless, a wry, thin-as-a-nail ranch widow who had worked battlefield hospitals in Italy and Korea, was there to supervise her first attempt. Trish prepared the soapy solution in a washbasin, removed Rusty’s gown, and by the time she had his diaper undone was finding it hard to ignore the rigid and insistent erection contained therein. “Well, howdy-do,” said Nurse Pickless to the erection. And then, to Trish, “Usually it’ll take quite a bit of advanced sponging to get one worked up as this. The male of the species, my laws. Once in a while we’ll get a comatose ninety-year-old whose body seems to think it’s eighteen again, all pumped and primed for a Saturday night.”

  Having already taken a step back, Trish asked what she should do.

  “Oh, just work around it, dear, it won’t last forever and it ain’t gonna bite.”

  She gave it a wide berth anyway, doing her best to focus on the other extremities. But during the entire process it did not show any intention of retreating, even after she had finished the bath and massaged the straining joints and limbs, which felt held together by wires ratcheted tight, and had settled down in the bedside chair to read out loud from a battered hospital copy of Harrowing Tales of the High Seas. The following afternoon, before she had the diaper off there was already a definite bulging under way, and when Nurse Pickless arrived to get a look at things, she said, “I’ve worked three twelve-hour shifts around this youngster and he’s never once given me a salute like that. Maybe you oughta take it as a compliment.”

  Trish blushed and Nurse Pickless flashed a quick sideways grin. “Dear, if it’ll make you more comfortable I’ll show you an old nurse’s trick. Sometimes we have to resort to certain measures for a catheter insertion or what have you.”

  She tossed the diaper into the rolling hamper and then sized up the erection. It was about the length and width of a man’s thumb, uniformly white with a tinge of pink at the head (unlike the variegated and strangely hued adult penises Trish had laid eyes on) and canted slightly toward the southeast. Nurse Pickless cocked her mi
ddle finger against her thumb, said, “Sometimes you’ve just got to show it who’s boss,” and gave the penis a quick little thump.

  Trish startled and the nurse waved her hand. “No need to worry, he can’t feel a thing. We’re just trying to discourage it a little. Case you’re wondering, this’ll also work on your husband when he gets too enthusiastic.”

  They both kept an eye on the erection for any signs of discouragement, but it was holding firm.

  “My husband,” Trish said, not caring to hide the resentment in her voice, “hasn’t been this enthusiastic for a very long time.”

  The old nurse put her hand on Trish’s shoulder. “Take it from someone who knows, dear, there’ll come a time when you’ll thank the good Lord for small favors.” She was already preparing to give the erection another finger-flick, saying, “Just a titch harder should do the trick,” when Trish stopped her: “It doesn’t bother me, really, please, I’ll be fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “Certain.”

  “Just one more pop and it’ll be down for the count, I promise you.”

  “No, please. Really. Thank you so much.”

  “It’s only the body, remember,” said Nurse Pickless, already heading out the door to continue her rounds. “It comes and it goes. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  For a time, Trish did nothing but study Rusty’s face, or the part of it, at least, that was not covered with bandages: the freckled nose and fuzzy round ears, the single exposed eye that occasionally opened, seeming to focus on something for a moment before swiveling back under its half-drawn lid. All of which, according to the doctors, could sense nothing, were shut down or short-circuited by the boy’s irredeemably damaged brain. As she often had in the past two weeks, to keep herself from crying or otherwise falling into hysterics, she bent down and gave him a light kiss on both smooth cheeks and, imagining he could hear her, told him that she loved him, and always would.

  She stood up, gasping a little at the way the bones of her chest ached. She decided Nurse Pickless had a point: What was there to be afraid of? Why should the body be discouraged—Rusty’s or hers or anyone else’s? She dipped her washcloth in the basin and gave his chest some brisk business with it, moving to his stomach and then his groin, putting a thorough, workmanlike polish on the stiff penis as if it were the hood ornament of an expensive car. Just as she was about to move on to the thighs she sensed a deep rippling under the skin and Rusty’s hips twitched once, twice, and with only that much warning he ejaculated a thin, glistening string across the inside of his leg. Trish made a surprised noise in her throat—something like a laugh—but after the merest pause went right on soaping and rinsing as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, feeling with some pride the tension go out of boy’s legs like the air from a tire, the bones loosening, the muscles going soft, the whole body, with a single grateful exhale, pooling like spilled water in the hollows of the bed.

  DON’T LOOK BACK

  A few days later, she was sitting with Rose in the same hospital room in the late morning sunshine. There had been a lull at Big House, and as had become her custom lately she had driven over to keep Rose company for an hour or two. Sometimes they did nothing but read or do crossword puzzles, but mostly they talked. In the two years since they had become sister-wives they had not talked half as much as they had in the past weeks; with all the recent upheavals they had been released, somehow, to speak about their pasts, their doubts, pretty much anything at all—what did they have to lose? This morning they were discussing the possibility of Golden’s taking another wife, which in different times had never been a topic for open discussion, especially in a public place such as this. Last night he had gathered his current wives around the dining room table to get their approval on the blueprints of the new addition: three new bathrooms, a small kitchen, a large recreation room, and seven new bedrooms, three in the basement, four on the second floor. He explained the room configurations and sleeping arrangements, but by the time he was finished it was clear he had left two bedrooms unaccounted for, an oversight Nola immediately pointed out.

  “This one,” Golden said, resting his fingertip on the smallest bedroom, a tiny ten-by-eleven tucked between a linen closet and Bathroom #3, “this one’s for me, I guess. You know, to have my own place once in a while. Or we could use it for something else, if you don’t think…”

  He searched his wives’ faces for approval. No one, of course, had ever heard of a plural husband having his own bedroom—in theory it was ludicrous, almost sacrilegious; in a house full of clamoring children and demanding wives, how could a godly husband justifiably keep anything—even a night here or there—to himself? But this was a new time; the old rules didn’t apply. The wives looked at each other and seemed to agree: Why not?

  “And this one?” Beverly said, pointing to the last bedroom, the tone in her voice suggesting she already knew the answer, that she herself had scripted it.

  Golden said, “This one is for, you know, future possibilities.”

  It wasn’t hard for the other wives to guess the room’s purpose: in the next few months they would almost certainly be welcoming a new sister-wife to the family. Golden had already been under heavy pressure from Uncle Chick to take a fifth wife, and now that his recent indiscretions had become common knowledge, the pressure had only increased; if he wanted to maintain his standing in the church, prove his faithfulness and good intentions, he would be bringing another wife into the fold as quickly as possible. The only question now was who the lucky lady might be.

  The obvious answer was Maureen Sinkfoyle, mostly because she had been available the longest, and because Beverly favored her. Though something had clearly happened to Beverly around the time of Rusty’s accident, and there were still days when she walked with a slight slump to her shoulders and a pallor to her skin, sometimes retreating to her bedroom to cough herself hoarse, she seemed to be regaining her old form. She had roused herself to begin taking on more responsibilities and dictating tasks, and lately had started to engage in milder sorts of Beverly-style maneuvering: agitating on behalf of her children for better sleeping arrangements, making sure each design element of the new addition met her approval. Until now, she and Nola had been coexisting in Big House under a stay of remarkable calm, but any fool could see that trouble was on its way.

  Maureen Sinkfoyle was not the only candidate in the running. There was the recently widowed LaDonna Ence and the twenty-year-old, scared-of-her-own-shadow Tanya Belieu, who Nola and Rose favored. And now, rather amazingly, a dark horse seemed to have entered the race: the beautifully named Huila, of all people. Not long ago Golden had asked permission from his wives to pay her a visit; she had taken out a restraining order on her husband and was living temporarily in one of the rentals in Mexican Town. He promised there would be no funny business—he was long past that—he simply felt responsible for her plight and wanted only to make sure she was safe. Though Nola made a few comments under her breath and Beverly was clearly less than enthusiastic about it, they all relented. It seemed harmless, but Nola was convinced something was afoot. There’d been a rumor that Uncle Chick had gone out to Mexican Town to see Huila as well, which meant he might be testing her interest in joining the church. This kind of missionary work was an Uncle Chick specialty—bringing in the wayward and lost, extending the hand of fellowship to the last person anyone would expect. It was how Golden’s father had come into the church, and by extension Golden and Beverly as well.

  “Do you think it’s possible?” Trish asked Rose. They had been chatting aimlessly for a half hour, Rose in the easy chair next to Rusty’s bed, skimming the final chapter of A Gentleman in My Bedroom, and Trish making a sorry attempt at knitting some wool booties for Rusty’s cold feet.

  Rose shrugged. “Could be. Crazier things have happened.”

  “I can’t see it, not if Beverly has a say.”

  “Beverly’s not really in charge anymore, is she?”

  “Then who is?”


  Rose glanced up from her book, blinking. “I don’t have any idea.”

  Here was the thing: though Golden was giving it all he had, nobody was really in charge. They were all in separate holding patterns, looking for guidance, waiting for the haze to clear.

  For a while they said nothing. A cart with a squeaky wheel passed in the hall and Rusty’s heart monitor beeped with its stubborn regularity.

  “If you had the chance,” Trish said, trying her best to affect an idle tone, “do you think you could just pick up and go away somewhere new, leave everything behind?” She glanced up to see if Rose had heard her, but Rose murmured something and kept her gaze on the pages of her book.

  Until she’d asked it, Trish hadn’t realized how much she needed to air this question, to let it out into the open, even if nobody would hear it. “I mean, if you had somebody to go with, to be with, do you think you could just leave?”

  Rose looked up at her then; obviously, she had been listening. Her eyes shone and her lips parted slightly to show her teeth. “Do it, Trish. You might never get another chance.”

  “No, see…” Trish shook her head and tried to go back to her knitting, which now seemed like nothing more than a big mess of knots. “I’m just asking hypothetically—”

  “Go,” Rose said. Her eyes were as sharp and clear as Trish had ever seen them, her voice an urgent whisper. “Don’t even think about it. Go, Trish. Go and don’t look back.”

  40.

  THE BOY AT THE WINDOW

  THE BOY WAITS AT THE WINDOW. IT IS WIDE, UNCURTAINED, A SINGLE pane of dusty glass that looks over a parking lot filled with cars. But when the boy’s good eye swivels spastically toward the block of light, a parking lot is not what he sees. On the other side of the glass are small still lifes and huge panoramas, all of them strangely familiar: alleyways and backyards and prehistoric swamps full of long-necked dinosaurs, the contents of a kitchen junk drawer, a wave taking shape on the horizon, a steaming garbage dump, the remains of a rabbit flattened in the middle of the road, a barbed-wire fence made soft with a fur of snow, the bleak red surface of Mars. Every time it has been something different, but lately, as he emerges from the grainy drift of unconsciousness, he is confronted with the same heavenly tableau: clouds stacked into towering ramparts packed with teeming masses of bodies, each one vaguely outlined and imbued with light, clamoring in voices the boy can barely hear, millions of them, billions, rank after rank of nameless souls, terrifying in their numbers, the great family of the dead.