For Time and All Eternities

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Maybe I should have been more understanding of his reaching his breaking point, but what about me and mine? I was tired of all the patriarchy and the way women were expected to just fall in line.

  I said furiously, “I do listen. I just don’t obey you at every turn, Kurt. God gave me my own mind and I’m capable of making my own decisions about right and wrong.” Kurt didn’t get to tell me what God’s will was, not now and not ever. I loved him and I thought he was a good man, but I wasn’t under his direction.

  “Then why are you always throwing yourself into bad situations?” Kurt demanded. “Do you really believe that’s what God wants from you?”

  I noticed Nephi and Leah had come out of the kitchen and were looking at us. I was embarrassed to meet their gazes, but they exchanged a glance and disappeared down the basement stairs. I wondered if any of the children would tell the adults about this or if they were used to keeping things to themselves.

  “Kurt, let’s go out to the truck and talk, all right?” I said. We could at least have some privacy there.

  “Because you’re embarrassed that Stephen Carter might hear us argue? I don’t care what he thinks about me, Linda!”

  But I didn’t particularly care to be used as a tool for Kurt to show off his machismo, which was what it felt like he was doing.

  “Kurt, think about the children,” I said softly.

  He glanced around, but there weren’t any skulking children staring at us now, which he seemed to take as license to continue. “I’m leaving this house tonight and you’re coming with me!” he declared.

  Oh, really? And how was he going to manage that? Throw me over his shoulder and carry me away kicking and screaming the way Stephen had done with Talitha? I was pretty sure I outweighed Kurt by a few pounds.

  “Calm down, Kurt. Let’s talk about this like reasonable adults,” I said, sure that we could ratchet the level of this argument down somehow. We still loved each other more than we were angry at each other. At least I hoped we did. “Look, all I want to do is stay here tonight. I’ll come home as soon as I can, tomorrow.” I didn’t want to directly state that I was looking for signs that something was wrong with Talitha right out here where anyone could eavesdrop, but Kurt knew exactly what I was saying.

  He sighed and seemed to shrink, as if he’d gotten sadder and smaller. Nonetheless, he went out the front door, waited for me to come out, then closed it behind me. As we walked toward the truck, he said, all anger gone, “I know that you have a mother’s heart and that makes you feel for a little girl like Talitha. But she isn’t your daughter, Linda. She isn’t your responsibility.”

  I knew that! I knew that my own daughter was dead. But I was still a mother first and foremost. That’s what the church kept telling us, that motherhood was an eternal role, that nurturing children and spreading love was what we would do even when we were in the celestial kingdom, that it was what Heavenly Mother did. And that wider identity of motherhood meant that my moral responsibilities didn’t end with my own children, no matter what was convenient to my husband.

  “Kurt, I’m staying here. You can either stay with me or not, it’s up to you,” I said aloud, feeling firm in this decision. “I’m going to finish what I started.”

  We reached the truck and he leaned against the passenger side door, his jaw clenched tight. “Linda, are you sure this isn’t just about you hurting me because you’re angry at me about the policy?”

  I wanted to protest immediately, but I made myself consider what he said. He’d asked me weeks ago if I thought Kenneth was marrying a woman from a polygamous family just to tweak us, and I’d told him that was ridiculous, but maybe this suggestion was less ridiculous.

  I was angry at him. Angry at the way he closed ranks, defending every decision made by the church leaders, whether it made sense or not. I was angry that he hadn’t seemed to feel any fury or sorrow about the new policy, hadn’t tried to see it from the perspective of all the people it affected, hadn’t said one thing about it being wrong or hurtful to Samuel. It felt like he’d left me out to dry, just like he was doing now. Leaving me here because he wanted to be on the side of the right and wasn’t willing to accept that sometimes you had to get a little dirty to help people who were in need.

  “Kurt, it’s complicated,” I said, looking up at him, only able to see him from the porch light of the house, his features strangely distorted by the harsh glow.

  He put out a hand to touch my face. But I turned my head away from him, backing up a couple of steps until I met the wall. I didn’t want him to think that I was giving up and was going to do what he wanted.

  And he seemed to have given up trying to convince me. Instead, he said plaintively as a child, “Linda, what can I do to get back to where we used to be?”

  It hurt to realize that I had no idea and that maybe we could never go back to where we’d been. But . . . “You could start by seeing the policy change the way I do, the way that Kenneth and Naomi do.”

  He spread his hands open wide. “We have to accept that God knows best how to make us become like Him, to be worthy of heaven.”

  And now he was saying exactly what I didn’t want to hear. It wasn’t that I thought I knew everything. I just called out prejudice when I saw it. The church had changed its stance on what was policy and what was doctrine before now, on polygamy, on blacks and the priesthood, and there was no reason for me to think it wouldn’t happen again.

  “What about Samuel? You really think that he’s supposed to be celibate all his life? Watch his brothers get married and have children and never have any of that, even though the church teaches it’s the most important thing in the world for us to do, to have those eternal families?” I asked.

  “Samuel can have those things,” Kurt said. He sounded desperate. Maybe as desperate as I was. “He might have to work harder to get them. He might spend some years finding just the right woman who understands him, but the church’s promise of eternal happiness is available for everyone.”

  Back to this? With some kind of reparative therapy to “cure” his gayness, Samuel could marry a woman in the temple and be just like our other sons? Like I had tried to marry Ben and make everything work between us. So long as I didn’t expect him to have sex with me and enjoy it.

  What part of “gay” wasn’t Kurt understanding?

  I shook my head. “Samuel loves the church so much,” I said. “But it seems to me like the church doesn’t love Samuel back quite as much. Not as he really is. He has to change himself, pretend to be someone else.”

  Kurt put thumb and finger to either side of his nose and took a deep breath. “We all have to change,” he said. “We’re all sinners. We have to give up our sins to get into the celestial kingdom.”

  I was so tired and frustrated by this. Around and around in circles, that’s all that ever happened. “It’s not the same and you know it.” Giving up sins for Kurt didn’t mean never having a satisfying sex life, never truly being in love with his life partner, and never being able to talk about who he was without stigma.

  “Does sex matter so much, in the long run?” Kurt’s eyes were wide and I recalled in that moment that it had been a long time since we’d had sex. For several months after the policy change, I’d been completely uninterested. There had been a couple of furtive, silent couplings after that, and then—nothing for a long time. Was Kurt saying he was fine with that? I wasn’t.

  “Kurt, of course it matters,” I spluttered.

  “Fine.” He flushed. “But I just can’t accept that anyone would throw away everything that is so good in the church because they wanted more sex.”

  And yet here we were, in the house of a polygamist who had been excommunicated for his sex life.

  “You don’t know what it would be like to have sex without sexual attraction,” I told him, trying to speak gently so that he wouldn’t feel battered by the words
that I felt like I was repeating—again. “You don’t know what celibacy for your whole adult life would be. And you certainly don’t know what it would be like to be told that your natural sexual instincts are wrong and that you have to change them in order to be acceptable to your community. Until you do a little more soul searching about that, I don’t think we can talk about this.” Why were we rehashing all of this right now? Because it hadn’t been resolved. Maybe it never would be and we both would have to accept that, but we hadn’t yet.

  “But Linda, we’re not animals,” Kurt said, “We’re not just our most base needs. The natural man is an enemy to God.” He was quoting scripture at me, the surest way to end any real conversation. Play the “bishop” card and remind your wife that you are in every way considered her spiritual superior.

  As I looked at my husband standing there, smelling his unique scent and feeling the warmth leaking from him, it occurred to me to feel some brief pity for Kurt. He hated this compound and all it represented. This wasn’t a good moment for him.

  But even beyond this moment, Kurt was dealing with other, unresolved problems. His world had been rocked when Samuel came out, and now again with Kenneth’s resigning his membership in the church. Maybe somewhere he still held onto the idea that if he was a good father, a good masculine role model, his sons would all turn out heterosexual and perfect, in his own mold. They wouldn’t “choose” the wrong path. But now two of his sons had, in completely different ways. And I was threatening to choose my own wrong path, at least the way Kurt saw it.

  Beneath the anger was sheer terror, I thought. If I had the time and the energy, I would have tried to reassure him that my staying overnight here didn’t mean I was leaving him or the church. It just meant I was changing the terms of my allegiance. A woman promised in the temple to obey her husband as he obeyed God. And in my book, this was where Kurt had stopped obeying the God of love. If only I could get him to see it.

  “I’m not going home right now,” I said firmly. “This is where I’m supposed to be.”

  Kurt let out a sigh, like a punctured balloon. “Well, then, I have to do what I know is right,” he said. He moved around the truck and climbed in the driver’s side, looking across at me through the passenger side window, as if hoping I was still considering getting in.

  That was when I remembered that I hadn’t ever taken my overnight bag out of the truck. I climbed in and got it.

  “I’ll need this,” I said, feeling terrible that this would be the last thing I said to him. When I had closed the door, Kurt started the engine. I stepped away from the truck.

  Then he put his head on the steering wheel and turned the engine off. He climbed out of the truck and walked over to me.

  I had a beautiful moment of relief, believing that he had decided to stay with me, after all, that our relationship mattered more than the new policy and his loyalty to the church.

  But that wasn’t it at all.

  “The gate,” he said.

  I shuddered as I realized what he meant.

  “I have to ask Stephen to open it for me.”

  I tried to think of something I could say that would heal the wound we’d both opened in our marriage. “I love you, Kurt.”

  He looked up at me and I had never seen his face so ragged. He looked a decade older than he had this morning. I worried about him alone in our house. Kurt hated being alone far more than I did.

  “Call me if you want me to come get you. Any time, day or night,” he said. He put out a hand as if he was going to offer me a hug, and then pulled it back. I couldn’t tell if that was because he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to leave if he touched me or if he thought I didn’t deserve his touch in my rebellion.

  He walked inside the house and Nephi came out a few moments later, clutching a key and running down the driveway toward the gate as if he’d much rather be outside on a summer night anyway. Kurt and Stephen came down the steps after him, and Stephen followed Kurt to the door of the truck.

  “I hope to see you again soon, Kurt. I believe you’re a good man,” Stephen said graciously, offering his hand.

  Kurt very pointedly did not take it, and climbed into the driver’s seat. I heard the truck start and listened to it rumble down the driveway as long as I could still hear it.

  After that, I was too tired to make polite conversation and went up to the bunk bedroom, though it was only nine, and changed into pajamas for the night. As I lay there on the bottom bunk, trying to sleep, I thought about Talitha, who had lost her cat and might be heartbroken for a long time about it. I thought about Samuel, who’d had a similarly soft heart, not only for animals, but for everyone.

  Samuel was always the child you could count on to be kind to the new kid, the odd one out, the kid who was being teased or bullied. He circled around them and made them stronger just by being who he was. I missed him more than I missed any of my other sons, though it felt wrong for a mother to admit that. At this moment I wanted to talk to my youngest, dearest son more than I ever had before.

  But he needed to be focused on spiritual work, not his parents’ squabbles. A mission was supposed to be a respite from the problems of the real world, from grades in college, from working a job, from the pressure to date and marry. If it was going as well as he said, it might be a rude awakening when he got home and had to face what he was missing as a gay man in a church that had made heterosexuality divine and eternal.

  I loved Samuel so much, and I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to help him then, not with the new policy in place. He would have to make his own choices, either to leave the church and make his own path as a gay man or to stay and try to make compromises.

  But what kind of compromises could I accept? If Samuel tried to marry a woman as I had tried to marry Ben, what would I say? Could I stand by and let that happen without warning her about the consequences?

  I wished that Mormonism wasn’t synonymous to so many people with prejudice and backwardness and intolerance. I was sick at the idea that my church had turned to hate instead of love. And why?

  Because we weren’t flexible enough. We waited around for a revelation to tell us how to love, instead of just moving forward with it. Joseph Smith had started the church with the insistence that everyone, even a teenage boy, had the right to ask God for an answer to prayer, but in the last decades, it seemed like the church had become very cautious about any personal revelation and had pushed a level of obedience that had never been part of the original church.

  Of course Stephen Carter was the classic example of someone who had gone off the deep end with individual revelation. I wished I could blame him completely for it. But it seemed to me that if Stephen Carter had fallen down some dark tunnel of Mormonism, it was at least partly the fault of a church that was leaving those holes open and trying to ignore they were there rather than trying to fill them up. At this point, there were so many holes in Mormonism I was worried I was about to fall into one myself.

  Chapter 13

  I lay on the lower bunk bed and couldn’t sleep, my heart hurting. The sounds of the house had died down and I spent hours tossing and turning. Finally, I decided to get up and go to the bathroom for some water. This was the solution I had often offered to my sons when they were young and said they couldn’t sleep. I think the main trick in it was to turn off the part of the brain that was circling around the need to sleep and focus it on something else entirely.

  While I was in the bathroom, I heard raised voices downstairs. I checked my watch. It was after midnight. Who was down there? Neither voice was deep enough to be Stephen’s.

  I turned off the light in the bathroom and listened. I should have gone back to bed, I know. I was here for Talitha, not just to be nosy. That’s what I’d told Kurt I was staying for. But I could help Talitha and be nosy, too, couldn’t I? Anything I learned about the family might be relevant. At least, that was my ex
cuse as I tiptoed downstairs.

  Two women were in the hallway by the back door of the front room. Peeking around the corner, I got a quick glimpse of Sarah’s taut back, and Joanna, who must have left her children at home in bed. It was the first time I had seen her without them tugging on her. She looked as overdressed and FLDS as she had earlier, her unbound hair stringy on her back, a worn, long-sleeved flannel nightgown underneath. Sarah was still wearing the dark, modern dress she’d had on when she met us at the door.

  Afraid they’d spot me and I’d miss all the interesting gossip, I tried to be very quiet and listened with all my might.

  “I need to talk to Stephen,” Joanna insisted. Her face was contorted.

  “I told you, Stephen will see you on your regular Monday next week. He had to change the chart this week because of the visitors,” Sarah said.

  There was a chart? Really and truly, a written chart that determined which wife Stephen visited each night?

  “I don’t see why he still has a night with Rebecca when she’s past her years anyway. She can’t give him any more children,” Joanna said.

  My eyebrows rose at this. Was this a rule with polygamists? You didn’t have sex with your husband anymore if you couldn’t have children? Because it was a waste of sperm he could be using elsewhere?

  “Well, he makes the rules here, doesn’t he?” Sarah said. “Not you.”

  “He doesn’t even have seven wives. How will he ever become a god?” Joanna complained.

  Seven wives? I’d never heard there was a specific number of wives that earned you godhood. So if you had only six, then you were out? And if that was true, then why did so many polygamous men have dozens and dozens of wives if they didn’t have to? Maybe because their older wives were out to pasture?

  “All that nonsense is FLDS, you know. Stephen doesn’t believe any of it. And besides, he was punishing you anyway.”