His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Why, then, did I feel Carl Ashby? Why would he feel more need to contact me than she did? Or why would I be more receptive to him than I was to her?

  Chapter 7

  Kurt got a phone call Monday night, and I knew as I watched his face that it was about Carl Ashby. He put his hand on the counter in the kitchen, as if to hold himself up. Then he swore under his breath. Kurt does not swear often, and to my memory, he hadn’t ever used that particular word before. Finally, he hung up the phone and turned to me.

  “What is it? What did they find out?”

  “That was President Frost. The coroner’s office just called him.”

  Again, I noticed the odd confluence of spiritual and secular authority here. Why would the coroner’s office call the stake president before the wife of the deceased? Did they think Emma Ashby was too fragile to hear the truth without Kurt being on hand to tell her? Was that ethical? “What did they say?”

  Kurt shook his head. He kept shaking it.

  “Kurt?” I had never seen him like this before, so distraught. He looked like someone had just proven to him that Jesus Christ had never walked the earth, that it was all a myth.

  “He—Carl Ashby—the person we found in the church building—”

  “It wasn’t Carl?” I said, astonished. We had both been so sure it was. And the spirit who had called to me had felt like him as well.

  “The person who was killed wasn’t a man,” Kurt got out at last.

  There was a long silence as I tried to let in what he had said. Not a man. But then—? But what—? But how—?

  “Carl Ashby—he wasn’t Carl. He was born Carla Thompson. They have the birth certificate. They had his fingerprints on file. Some minor arrest in his youth. Her youth,” Kurt said, shaking his head again. “I don’t even know what pronoun to use anymore.”

  What? This was impossible. How could we have been fooled all this time?

  I conjured up an image of Carl Ashby in my head. He had been maybe five foot six or seven, but he had been muscular. He’d had a strong jaw and a wide nose. He’d seemed so masculine, at least to my eye.

  “He never filed any paperwork to change his gender. Which means he couldn’t have legally been married to Emma. I don’t know if he used a false birth certificate or had someone marry them without the proper documentation,” Kurt was saying, gesticulating erratically.

  I felt sick at the idea that Emma had been lied to like this. Had she ever doubted the legality of her marriage? Probably not. How often did I go look at my marriage certificate? Carl had probably told her that everything was fine, and she had believed him. She must have simply trusted him to handle it whenever anything legal came up.

  “He had a hysterectomy some years ago, as well as surgery to remove breasts, and he was taking testosterone regularly, had been for some time. But they think he—she—was pregnant in the past, because there are signs those pelvic bones delivered a child. Somewhere, there is a child out there. Unless it died.” Kurt glanced at me, perhaps to gauge my reaction.

  I would never have guessed Carl Ashby was born a woman. All his posturing, his black-and-white view of gender—had that all been a blind of some sort, a way to keep anyone from suspecting the truth? I found my sympathy shifting from Emma to Carl.

  “Maybe God wanted the truth to come out, and this was the only way it could happen?” said Kurt shakily.

  “God isn’t like that,” I said. I didn’t believe in the punishing God of the Old Testament. I couldn’t. Not when I had so much to be punished for.

  “But how could God look on someone like that with any degree of acceptance? How could He allow Carl to remain in the bishopric? How could He have let me feel that I should ask Carl to serve with me?”

  Because God loves us all, no matter how disgusting we are to others. God looks on the heart, not on the appearance. Surely God would have seen the man Carl was trying to be, not the woman he had been born as.

  “What about Emma?” I asked suddenly. She and Carl had been married twenty years. He’d converted to the church because of her. Or at least that’s what he had always said. I wasn’t sure we could believe anything he’d said now.

  “She has to have known. How could she not know? They adopted children together, though it must not have been through any official agency,” said Kurt. “You can’t hide something like this if anyone had done a proper background check.”

  But there were adoptions done without those checks all the time in Utah, family to family, trying to avoid anything public. It meant that the children might not be legally Emma’s now, either. Would there be any kind of ramifications for that?

  And as for Emma’s not knowing much about male body parts, I thought that Kurt might be underestimating how sheltered some Mormon women are when they marry. With a rush of sympathy, I began to wonder how much Emma had known about Carl when they were sealed.

  There had been so much I hadn’t known going into my first marriage, problems I could have prevented if I hadn’t been taught so little about human sexuality. That failed marriage was one of the darkest times of my life; sometimes I am still violently angry at the social structure of my church for tricking me and my ex-husband into thinking that marriage was a good idea, and that everything would be fine if only we made vows in the temple.

  Some Mormon women from very conservative families come to marriage ignorant of even the basics of sex. One major goal of the Mormon youth program was to prevent premarital sex, even for engaged couples. It is not unheard of, even now, for young girls to be excused from sexual education classes in schools because of parental objection. I’d heard stories of young women getting pregnant without realizing that what they were doing was sex. If a young woman could be tricked into having sex without knowing what it was, could an older woman be tricked into believing she’d had sex when she hadn’t? William’s and Alice’s adoptions might be relevant to the marriage problems as well.

  Kurt pulled at the hair on the top of his head, which made me wonder if that was what had caused it to thin there—he had only picked up the habit since he’d been made bishop. “How could I not have known? He was in the bishopric all this time and I never once suspected. He—I have no idea what to do next. President Frost is incensed. He says that we have to make a list of every ordinance he participated in and have them redone, since Carl’s ordination to the priesthood is void. Which is completely impossible, and he must know it.”

  Only men can have priesthood callings in the Mormon church. But what happens when someone like Carl comes into the mix? An ordinance performed by a woman would be void. It isn’t about whether women have the capacity to communicate with God or to fill leadership positions competently. It’s all about the order God ordained within in the church, and that order is gendered. Women and men have separate roles, and the role of men is presiding with the priesthood; the role of women is to nurture children, just as Carl had said when he’d read from the Family Proclamation.

  “Every ordinance?” I said. In the last year, Carl Ashby could have been involved in a hundred or more ordinances, counting temple ordinance work, and ordaining young men in the ward to the priesthood or baptizing people into the ward. “But surely it doesn’t matter who did the ordinance work. God’s power works through any hands, even if they are unworthy.” Redoing ordinances like this wasn’t done even in excommunication cases for men who were pedophiles or criminals.

  “President Frost kept talking about how this was Satan’s work and how we would all be tainted until there was a cleansing of some kind.”

  “Kurt, are you sure you understood him properly?” This just seemed so outrageous. I had no idea what President Frost might mean by a “cleansing.” A priesthood blessing of the church itself? Some kind of laying on of hands for every member?

  Kurt nodded. “Oh, I understood, all right. He’s going to hold a disciplinary court postmortem of some kind, or t
ry to get permission from the First Presidency for it.” He looked shattered. “So Carl’s records can be removed from the church and his temple sealings to his wife and children canceled.”

  Usually, canceling sealings was reserved for men who betrayed their priesthood power, seminary teachers who had affairs with teenage girls, or Boy Scout leaders who sexually abused young boys. Or church members who directly rebelled against church authorities and created their own new doctrines. But it was rarely done after death. In fact, I couldn’t recall that happening in any case I had ever heard of.

  “An abomination. That’s what President Frost called Carl.” Kurt was shaking now. “The man I thought of as one of my dearest friends. I don’t understand it. How could this have happened? How could I have been so betrayed?”

  Poor Kurt. I was shocked by this news, but it must have been so much worse for him. He came from such a conservative family that something like this would never have even been talked about, let alone tolerated.

  More than that, Kurt and Carl had been as close as brothers this last year, and Mormon men depend on their fellowship with other men for identity. Kurt didn’t have any coworkers at his accounting business, and he didn’t have any hobbies outside of church work and being a father. His deepest friendships had always happened within the church. And to have that taken away like this must have made him feel like he was floundering, unsure of anything anymore. I was still trying to find the right words when he went on, “All that time, he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t,” said Kurt. “I feel so . . . deceived.”

  Kurt hated being fooled. He had never been a man who liked practical jokes. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humor; he simply didn’t like lies, for any reason. He had never allowed a surprise party for any of our children, because he wouldn’t lie to them. He wanted them to always trust him. He wouldn’t let us pretend to them about Santa Claus, either.

  I was no expert on transgender people, but I suspected that deceiving or fooling other people wasn’t the right way to look at it. I tried to think of Carl’s perspective. If he had believed he was meant to be male, then perhaps he hadn’t thought of it as deceit at all. Perhaps that was why he was so adamant about gender roles; he must have been adamant about his own gender identity to have made the change, especially years ago, before transgenderism had become more visible.

  I said, “Just because he never told you all the details of his DNA, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t really the man he said he was. Or at least, the man he was trying to be.” And wasn’t that what all of us were doing? Trying to be the best version of ourselves that we could? Trying to show the parts of ourselves that were good and that we believed were most true?

  “He was—all that time I was with him, alone in a room together—all those moments when I thought I was talking to my brother in the gospel—” Kurt couldn’t finish a single sentence.

  “But if God didn’t tell you anything was wrong, what does that mean? Did you ever feel like Carl was evil or malicious in his intentions?” I decided right then I was going to keep calling him Carl and using a male pronoun. That was what he had chosen in his life. If we respected him at all, we had to respect that choice first and foremost.

  Kurt shook his head. “Never malicious. I never felt a sense of evil around him.” He seemed to be calming down a little now.

  “So you never felt that he was using his power for his own purposes? That he was hurting people with untruths or false doctrine?”

  “No,” Kurt said again. “Maybe all that means is that there’s something wrong with me, too. If I couldn’t see through this, what am I doing as bishop?”

  “Maybe you’re doing everything right. Maybe God meant it to happen this way,” I said. Even if we couldn’t understand how. Maybe it was time for people to start seeing things differently in terms of gender, and our ward had been chosen to lead the way. Could God have decided that Kurt was the kind of man who could be trusted to do something this difficult?

  “President Frost may well decide to have the whole bishopric released in this cleansing,” said Kurt dourly. “We’ve shown we can’t possibly see God’s true will. It’s probably just as well we’re all released. If this gets out, we’ll be a laughingstock.”

  I tried not to feel selfish relief at the thought of having my husband back, as he’d been before he was called as bishop. But I knew that if Kurt was released because of this, he would never recover from it. I didn’t want that. I wanted things to be the way they had been before, but not at that price.

  “Why does anyone have to know?” I asked.

  “Gossip like that? Of course it will come out sooner or later,” said Kurt.

  “Not if the police are careful in their investigation.” If this had something to do with Carl’s murder, they’d want to see who knew and who didn’t, wouldn’t they? That couldn’t happen if they let that information loose. “Look, someone has to talk this through with Emma.” I hoped it could be done without humiliating her further. “She has to be able to prepare in case word starts to get around. Think about how this could affect his children in our strict community.” I didn’t call it closed-minded, though sometimes I thought it was that, too. “Do you really think they should have to carry this burden when they’re teenagers and at their most vulnerable?”

  “You don’t think they have a right to know that he might have used his priesthood wrongly?” he asked.

  “There you go again. His priesthood.” I waved my hands. “It didn’t belong to Carl any more than it belongs to you. God chooses whether or not to grant his power, not us.”

  Kurt pressed his lips tightly together. “This isn’t about protecting children. This is about the truth, and about proper channels of authority. That’s what the whole church was founded on. Joseph Smith couldn’t join any of the other churches because they didn’t have the authority. He had to be confirmed by the resurrected Peter, James, and John, and all authority goes back to them. They had the keys. If they didn’t, then we don’t. If we don’t, then what makes us any different from any other church?”

  I knew that. I had seen Kurt’s line of authority on the wall in his office, a list of names going back to his father, and his grandfather, and so on, until it came from Joseph Smith himself, and from Peter the apostle, who just got it from Christ. Every man who was ordained to the priesthood had a line of authority that went back to Christ Himself.

  Kurt put his head down and I saw his shoulders shaking. I put a hand on his back. I wanted to draw him into my arms, but I didn’t think he would let me. He already felt weak, and that would only make it worse for him.

  “I never guessed,” said Kurt after a long time, his voice still muffled by the countertop.

  I felt like we were getting at the heart of this. It wasn’t as much about betrayal as it was about confidence. “Carl thought of himself as a man. Why shouldn’t you think of him the same way?” I asked.

  Kurt didn’t acknowledge my question. He seemed to be talking to himself at the moment. “I never thought it strange that he wasn’t interested in his own family’s genealogy. He never helped when we had activities about FamilySearch. He said that he had been rejected by his whole family, but he never said why. I assumed it was because he joined the church. He said that he would do the work when his parents were dead and they stopped interfering with him. But all of that was a lie. He must not have wanted us to see his birth certificate and realize the truth. He must not have wanted any of us to talk to his parents.”

  What would I do if one of my sons announced that he thought he had been born into the wrong body? I didn’t think there was an official church policy on those who were transgender, though I’d heard that gender reassignment surgery could lead to excommunication. But that was a generation ago. Was it still the case? If it could lead to excommunication, did it always?

  I also wondered about Carl’s childhood and family. Had his p
arents rejected him as a man? Or had he decided that he couldn’t bear to be with them because they continued to treat him as a woman and use the wrong name for him? I didn’t know if his parents were Mormons or not, but there are bigots everywhere. Did I feel an obligation to find them and tell them about Carl’s death? Would they want to be at the funeral? Would they want to know Emma and the children?

  It seemed like Carl had gone to a good deal of trouble to avoid any connection to them. Would we ignore all that his life had been and send him to the grave as Carla Thompson instead of Carl Ashby? Who was the one betraying a brother in the gospel then?

  “The signs were all there,” Kurt was saying. “He never took his shirt off while swimming at scout camp. I thought he was modest, and maybe a little self-conscious about his height. But I never thought he was concealing surgical scars.”

  I felt a bit voyeuristic, imagining what Carl had looked like without his shirt on.

  “Is our body the truest self we have?” I asked. “Don’t we Mormons believe that the body is often flawed, that it will be made perfect later? Children who have disabilities are told that they will be resurrected into a perfect body. Why shouldn’t Carl have believed the same thing?”

  Kurt stood up, holding his hands rigidly at his sides. “Because that’s not about making something right again. It’s about changing it. It’s like a tattoo. You won’t see those on a perfected body.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “Maybe you’ll be surprised when you get to the celestial kingdom and see who’s there and who isn’t. And what they all look like.”

  Kurt shook his head, his chin jutting out more prominently than ever. “I don’t want to argue with you about this. You have this agenda you press on everything that comes along. This isn’t about the place of women in the church. This is about someone who wanted something and couldn’t have it. So she figured out a way to get it at any cost.”