His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Emma continued, her words faint: “But he had never been like that before. Carl had always been slow to anger. It was one of the reasons I always felt safe around him.”

  “Is it possible that someone discovered his secret?” I asked, feeling sick at the idea of someone threatening Carl.

  But Emma again refused to address the question. She simply shook her head and looked away from me.

  “Was he getting any mysterious phone calls? Had any money gone missing from your joint accounts?” I asked bluntly, though Kurt was shaking his head at me. But the questions were surely ones the police would get to as soon as President Frost stopped shielding Emma from interviews.

  “Just think calmly for a moment. I’m sure something will come to you, Emma,” Kurt said, and this time he was the one to lean over and take her hand.

  “There might have been one or two phone calls with numbers I didn’t recognize,” she said. “But I thought they had to do with the church, with the bishopric.”

  “Anything else?” said Kurt.

  Emma shook her head. “You must think I’m useless,” she said. “I was so used to Carl doing so many things. I feel like I’ve been thrown into an ocean and I’m drowning. There’s too much for me to do, to think about. I married Carl when I was very young, and I never thought something like this could happen to me.”

  There was a part of me that was judging her for her weakness now, perhaps too harshly. She was a mother. She had children to take care of. She couldn’t act the part of the damsel in distress. But it seemed that was what Carl had encouraged her to do for most of their life together.

  “I’ll talk to your home teachers,” said Kurt, withdrawing his hand from Emma’s at last. Home teachers are the male version of the visiting teachers. “It’s their responsibility to step into your husband’s shoes in a situation like this. If they’re not up to the task, I’ll see to it you have different ones assigned.”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that, I’m sure,” said Emma, waving a hand. “I don’t want to be trouble to anyone.”

  “It’s no trouble. It’s our privilege to act as God’s hands in this case,” said Kurt. “I’m here to help you, and that’s why I came by. I want to make sure that you’re prepared for what’s ahead with the police.”

  “The police? I don’t know how I could possibly help them,” said Emma. “I know Sheri said it was murder, but it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “If you want Carl’s killer caught, tell the police the full truth about everything, even if it’s embarrassing. As I said, I’ll do my best to make sure the details aren’t tossed about publicly.”

  “Of course. Thank you, Bishop,” said Emma, smiling tremulously.

  Kurt stood up and motioned for me to do the same.

  “About the funeral—” Kurt began, realizing he had one last thing to talk about.

  “Sheri Tate said she would take care of the details for me,” said Emma, seeming eager to relinquish such tasks to others. “Whenever they release the—the—” Her voice broke off.

  In the car after we left, Kurt said he had wanted to warn her that Carl might not be buried in any temple clothes at all, and certainly not in male ones. “I suppose I’ll have to decide on my own, unless President Frost insists.”

  I knew what he thought President Frost would insist on, and it felt like a travesty to me.

  “Have you prayed about what God would want for Carl’s burial dress?” I asked.

  “I’ve tried,” said Kurt. “But the words won’t come out. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Try harder,” I told him.

  Chapter 10

  My friend Anna Torstensen and I went walking three times a week. We usually went in the mornings after breakfast, but on occasion we woke early and walked in the pink dawn, and sometimes we headed out late as the mountains melted into the sunset.

  She called Thursday that week and asked me if I wanted to walk. Anna had radar for when I needed company. I hoped that I did the same for her, but I think I tended to be easier to read. I didn’t hide things. But then again, I hadn’t spent twenty years of a marriage with a man who had kept terrible secrets from his past. Needless to say, Anna was more used to reading people’s nonverbal signals than I was.

  It was a beautiful late summer morning, the sky already bright blue, no clouds in sight. Utah is a desert, and we were in a long drought, so we should probably have been happier to spot a cloud, but I couldn’t help but enjoy the heat as it pricked at me.

  We started off walking through the ward, the main artery with the older, more modest homes, and then turned right into the newer neighborhood with homes so large they didn’t seem to have any yard. You could jump from one house’s window through another without much effort, going right over the pro forma fence. All this opulence squashed together, despite the constant talks we heard repeated from General Conference about the need to keep our finances in order, to live without debt, along with a three-month supply of food.

  “You’re angry with Kurt, aren’t you?” Anna said after we’d settled into a rhythm. Anna wasn’t one to hold back. I think she had gotten tired of being patient with her husband. It hadn’t gotten her anywhere, so she had given it up.

  Despite his apparent softening toward Carl, I was still mad. “I really don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “Maybe not, but unless you want to end your marriage by saying something you can never take back, you need to talk to me before you start yelling at Kurt. So what has he done now?”

  “You heard about Carl Ashby’s death?” I asked, trying to skirt on the edge of what I was allowed to say.

  “Of course,” Anna said.

  “Kurt found something out about Carl that makes him see the man completely differently.”

  “And that’s what made you mad? Carl Ashby? I thought you didn’t like him much anyway.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. How had she guessed that? I had never expressed my feelings about Carl aloud to her, had I?

  “Then what is the point?”

  “The point is that Kurt is sitting in judgment over this other person, and even though it hurts him to think he didn’t know his friend, he doesn’t think the problem is his. He feels justified in pointing a finger.”

  “And you never sit in judgment,” said Anna mildly.

  “I don’t!” I said. I was huffing and puffing on the street’s incline.

  “You are constantly looking at people in the ward who are doing something obviously wrong and you want to lecture them about it, don’t you? Come on, if I asked you to name the five most annoying people in our ward, you could do it easily.”

  She was right. I knew I was judgmental, especially when people were so stupid. And judgmental. I sighed to myself. I had a mental list. They were people I tried to avoid as much as possible at every church activity. I had created routes to get out of sacrament meeting via the south doors so I could avoid meeting them in the parking lot.

  “That’s not the same,” I protested.

  Anna raised her eyebrows. “You think you’re so open-minded, but you absolutely draw lines between right and wrong. They may be in different places, but they’re just as hard and dark a color.’”

  I tried to get out a couple of words to contradict her, but I was breathing too hard. After all these walks with Anna in the past couple of months, you’d think I’d be in better shape. Maybe I should break down and get a gym membership. But a big group of the women I disliked at church were the ones who spent all their time chattering about their latest workout and then complaining about how their bodies weren’t quite perfect enough.

  Anna continued, “It’s why you’re a member of the Mormon church. You want someone to tell you what to do so you can argue with them and have an excuse to articulate for yourself what the real right and wrong are.” Anna handed me a water b
ottle she’d been carrying with a carabiner on her belt loop. This was a habit she’d picked up from her friend Richard Abayo. He always carried water with him when he exercised.

  I drank nearly half of the bottle and handed it back to her. There might have been some spit in there. And some backwash, too.

  Anna stared at the bottle and put it away without taking a drink herself.

  We were stopped at the top of the hill, which gave an incredible view of the valley below. In pioneer times, there would have been farms below us, and cattle. Now there were only houses, roads and freeways, and the carefully combed Kentucky bluegrass brought west to make it look like we still lived in the east, and which required elaborate sprinkling systems to keep alive here. There were few trees except in the oldest parts of town, and very little of the original scrub oak or sagebrush that was authentic to this climate. Anna’s husband Tobias would have had plenty to say about that, but he was gone now, his complaints about bad gardening silenced forever.

  “Let’s talk about a hypothetical situation,” I said, finally able to breathe and talk at the same time. I didn’t feel like it was my place to openly out Carl at this point.

  “Okay,” said Anna.

  “Imagine you felt you were a man, in your deepest heart, in your very soul. How do you think Richard would take that?”

  She stared at me for a long moment. “I don’t think he would like it. At all. He likes me as a woman. I like me as a woman.”

  “Imagine you didn’t. Imagine that the only way for you to be happy is to be treated as a man, to live as a man. And Richard, who loves you most in the world, wants for you to be happy and wants you to be who you feel you truly are.”

  “Then I guess I would start living as a man,” said Anna, clearly confused. “What’s the problem here? Because I don’t believe either you or Kurt want to change genders.”

  “The problem is that everyone else in the ward would be disturbed by the choice. They’d never accept it. They’d act like it was all about cross-dressing. They’d say it was degenerate, a sign of the end of days when Satan has power over the hearts of men. They’d say it was unnatural and somehow it would be all about kinky sex.” Mormons might have finally accepted that gay people existed and didn’t simply choose to feel same-sex attraction because they were evil, but we were still a long way from accepting anything other than sex between straight, married people as normal.

  “Is this really about you and Kurt?” asked Anna. She stared at the Draper temple just north of us, shining brightly in the dim morning light.

  “Yes,” I said. It was, if in a roundabout way.

  “Hmm,” said Anna.

  “For Kurt, it’s all about the rules. You’re born and you spend your life doing what is right and expected of you by God and by the community of the church. Your life is a list of rules and you do them, whether you like it or not, because it’s what the world needs.”

  And really, I had benefited enormously from this, because I had a husband who had always made sure that he worked enough hours that we lived comfortably, that he got repairs done around the house and did yard work regularly. And he’d benefited, too, from having a wife who took care of the children even when she was sick, who ran errands, did household chores, and made sure there was always breakfast, lunch, and dinner waiting when he was hungry.

  “What if being who people expect you to be is killing you? What if you feel that God Himself knows that you are meant to be someone else? What if you feel like you have to be more authentic and put on a role that other people think doesn’t belong to you?” I felt a rush of understanding for Carl Ashby as I spoke.

  “Are you that unhappy with your life?” Anna asked.

  “No. Of course not. I’m not talking about me,” I said quickly.

  “Aren’t you?” said Anna. I sped ahead of her for a few steps. I just didn’t see why people couldn’t accept that Carl had been trying to be more authentic, and make his body show what he must have felt his soul had always been.

  Anna paused for a moment, then said, “Have you considered how threatening the idea of a woman wanting to be a man may be for Kurt?” She turned to me and looked me in the eye.

  “How could that threaten him?” I asked. “It’s not his identity in question.”

  We started walking again, heading back down the hill.

  “Let me tell you a story. When Liam was little, he used to sit and watch me paint my fingernails,” Anna said. “It was this ritual of ours. I redid my nails maybe twice a week; when he smelled the polish, he would run up to my bathroom and sit cross-legged on the floor and just stare at me. Later, I got used to it, so I would call him when I started. It made me feel like I was really connecting with him. And then about six months after I started doing this, Liam asked if I would paint his nails, too.”

  Anna was walking backward in front of me as she talked, quite a trick. “I thought it was so cute that I painted his nails for him. All the same color as mine. He loved it. He was so excited to show his dad when he got home from work.”

  “I’m guessing that Tobias wasn’t thrilled,” I said.

  “No. In fact, he told Liam to go clean his fingernails right away. And then he chastised me for it, too. He wouldn’t sleep in our bedroom for a week, he was so angry with me.” She shrugged. “I still remember we had to get every bit of color off before Tobias was satisfied, and then Liam’s cuticles bled because they’d been so abused. I expected that Tobias would at some point relent and realize that he was being silly, that it was just a little boy who wanted some color on his nails, that he wanted to be like me, and that it was a good thing.”

  “But that never happened,” I said. I could imagine Kurt in the same situation. None of my boys had ever had the opportunity because I didn’t paint my nails.

  “It never did,” said Anna. “What happened was that a couple of years later, I caught Tomas at about the same age Liam had been, in my bathroom, putting nail polish on himself. And everywhere else—the carpet, the cupboards. And when I walked in, Liam was yelling at him. His tone was exactly the same as his father’s had been. So strident and angry, and maybe a little afraid.

  “So I helped Tomas clean himself up, and then while I worked on the rest of the house, I asked Liam if he could have a little compassion for his brother, since he had done the same thing himself. But Liam refused to believe it. He absolutely denied that he had ever put fingernail polish on. He said that I was making things up and he threatened that he would tell Tobias that I was lying about him. He was so vehement that I stopped talking about it. I brought it up once, years later, and Liam was just as adamant that it wasn’t true.”

  “You’re saying boys can’t bear to remember a time when they weren’t masculine?” I asked. What did this have to do with Carl? Or Kurt?

  “I’m saying masculinity is a fragile thing. It can be taken away, do you see? For a woman, it isn’t the same,” said Anna. “We have everything else, all the other interests in the world that aren’t the limited ones marked as masculine.”

  “All the ones that are denigrated,” I complained. “No matter what we choose, we’re always seen as lesser. We’re the ones who are always being abused. We’re the ones without power.”

  “Are we? I had power over Liam and Tomas, both of them.”

  “As their mother, yes,” I said.

  “And I had power over Tobias, too. Do you think that if I had laughed at him, mocked his masculinity, he wouldn’t have been hurt?”

  I thought about that. Was that what I had done to Kurt? Mocked his masculinity? Made him feel insecure because I told him that he should accept Carl Ashby’s masculinity as the same as his own? “You sound like Freud, all that talk about women destroying the phallus. Wasn’t that repudiated decades ago?”

  We had reached the bottom of the hill again. My knees ached from the descent, from all that middle-aged weight comi
ng down on them with every step. “Sometimes I think that you tell me what some part of me has been trying to get me to hear all along,” I said.

  “That’s what a true friend does,” she said. She waved and left me at my door.

  I wondered if I should ask her in for a snack. But I didn’t. I needed to be alone, and she knew me well enough not to be offended by that.

  Verity deRyke stopped by that evening.

  “Linda, how are you holding up?” she asked when I opened the front door.

  I led her into the front room. “I’m fine,” I said as I sat down next to her. “How about you and Tom?”

  “He’s disgusted,” said Verity, shivering a little. “Finding out about that creature. How can you trust anyone after something like that?”

  I tried to be calm about this, and to think about Verity’s age and the generation she had grown up with. Transgenderism was even less talked about then than it was now. I had thought she was more modern with her ideas about women, but apparently I’d assumed too much.

  “I think once they’ve thought about it, Tom and Kurt will see that Carl deserves to be treated as God must have seen him in his soul. After all, we always talk about how important it is for God to look on the heart, and not on the outward appearance.” I put in a little scripture mastery verse in there, something that was quoted fairly often in church.

  “But they all thought he was one of them. He might have seen them when they were—you know,” said Verity, waving a hand and blushing.

  Were we talking about genitalia again? “I’m pretty sure that Mormon bishoprics spend relatively little time staring at each other naked,” I said. Did people really think that was the reason behind transgenderism? Some voyeuristic desire to become intimate with the opposite gender? There were plenty of better ways to do that, surely.

  “He was using the men’s bathroom, at church and everywhere else,” said Verity. “For years. What was he doing in there?”