by Shawn Vestal
“I believe you know this,” Ruth says. She looks into the mirror, into Loretta’s eyes, without changing her expression. Loretta returns the look, mimicking Ruth’s flatness. At first, Loretta thought Ruth’s expression revealed anger or frustration, but she has come to see that Ruth has merely emptied herself and adopted the aspect of duty in all things. Even with her children. Even the night she and Dean had come to the home of Loretta’s parents, and they had all knelt in prayer on the porch. “The Lord has given me a testimony of the righteousness of our choice,” Ruth had said, her face blank. “I know that we will be exalted in the celestial kingdom.” As if she had willed herself out of herself. Dean had blushed, his enormous ears luminous with blood, and though Loretta hardly knew him, and though she was just fifteen, she could see in his rabbity eyes that it wasn’t the celestial kingdom he had on his mind.
The room’s walls are bare and clean, the late morning sun somewhere outside the window’s brightening rectangle. Bed, dresser, carpet of bronze. Loretta has a hard time seeing this as her room, this empty corner of this barnlike house. She has all that is hers packed into a single shoebox in the back of the closet: two Christmas ornaments that were her grandmother’s, a silver star with red piping and a snowflake twinkling with glitter; a diary she wrote in seventeen times when she was eleven, including a page listing the qualities of “The man I will mary”; three photographs with worn, curled edges and hazy yellow orbs shadowing the images—her parents holding her as an infant, Loretta standing in a dress at three or four and squinting somewhere out of frame, and a Border collie they’d had as a child, snout buried in the lawn, digging; a greeting card with a picture of a stork and a silver dollar taped inside; two pewter rings and a set of earrings with tiny emerald cut-glass gems, still in the paper backing; a small leather pouch with arrowheads and rock chips she collected in the desert; and an embroidered handkerchief her mother made that reads Loretta Sara Buckton above her date of birth, May 21, 1959.
Nothing else, anywhere, is hers.
Ruth finishes weaving a braided crown around Loretta’s head, which gathers into a single braid down her back. Ruth runs her hands over Loretta’s hair, over her dress, smelling of heat and borax. She looks Loretta over, everywhere but her eyes. Picks a thread from her shoulder. Ruth wears the same white dress as Loretta, the starched white cotton, boxy bosom, lacelike moth-holed embroidery at the collar, wrists, and ankle-length hem.
Ruth says, “I’ll leave you to pray.”
They stand. She takes Loretta by the shoulders and looks into her eyes like she’s trying to ram something into her brain. How old is Ruth? Forty? Older? She has seven children, and often seems like their grandmother. She is thin, dry skinned, mouth sketched in faint wrinkles. The sisters whisper about her close-cropped hair, call it mannish, rebellious. In this, she is like Dean, who wears a beard though the brothers discourage it. Sister wife, Loretta thinks, and the phrase lands in her mind with a false weight, words she’s heard all her life without recognizing their deep contradictions.
Loretta will never call Ruth “Sister,” but she sees in her the way to do this: be stronger than the thing against you.
“We will raise up a glorious seed unto the Lord,” Ruth says, and encircles Loretta in a fencelike hug, barely touching. Loretta insists to herself that it is not true. I will not raise any seed. She will hold herself inside herself, away from everyone.
“Welcome to our family,” Ruth whispers over Loretta’s shoulder, in a voice that could not possibly be less welcoming. “Our eternal family.”
• • •
They await Uncle Elden, the prophet. The living room is insistently plain, with beige carpet and two long sofas, parallel and facing, and two love seats boxing them in, all upholstered in navy blue cloth patterned with small white flowers. The whole place seems uninhabited, Loretta thinks, though Dean and Ruth and the kids have lived there for going on three years. When the Harders first moved to this huge new house on the north edge of town, about a hundred yards from the Utah border, it had started talk even then that Dean would take a new wife.
Loretta’s father and mother sit on a sofa, deferential to the day’s events. She feels her mother’s eyes seeking hers. Her father does not look at her, she knows. He made all the arrangements without her, including Dean’s promise to wait until she turns sixteen before consummating their union. It sickens her, how far outside of it all she stood.
Loretta, Ruth, and Dean stand between the sofas, in front of the fireplace, and Ruth holds a small pillow at her waist, as if she were preserving a treasure. Loretta knows it is the three-strand ring of silver she will wear on the third finger of her left hand. The children line up tallest to shortest. Samuel, the oldest at thirteen, scowls, a fat boil behind one ear. He wears a black suit and white shirt buttoned to the collar, just as seven-year-old Dean Jr. does down the line. The girls just younger than Samuel, Ruth and Elizabeth, look like miniature sister wives, in floor-length cotton dresses and long braids. Even four-year-old Sarah and five-year-old Janeen wear long white dresses. Only Benjamin, the toddler, is clothed like a child, in knee-length black shorts and a short-sleeved white pullover. He fidgets, but holds his face firm, lips pressed with comical intensity, as though he fears some noise will burst forth. He is her favorite, Benjamin. She catches his eye and smiles, and he returns the briefest furtive grin.
The prophet arrives at last, entering hunched and slow on the arm of his burly son. He aims a gray, murmuring smile toward them. One milky eye wanders. He is a walnut of a man—tiny and parched and failing and skeletal—and his nearness to death only adds to his authority. They assemble, and Uncle Elden stands in front, holding his knotty, trembling hands.
Ruth and Loretta flank Dean, and the prophet rasps about exaltation and salvation and obedience to the Lord’s sacred principle of plural marriage. He speaks in a soft monotone, pausing often as if to rest. “It is there, brothers and sisters,” he says, “in Genesis. Right from the beginning. Lamech and Esau and . . . Moses and Jacob. All living . . . in the Principle.”
The prophet continues, speaking of the forsaken commandments and the world’s abuse of the true Saints. “The government of this United . . . States has persecuted this priesthood. The Mormon Church itself has per—” A fit of quiet coughing stops him. His son hands him a handkerchief, and when Uncle Elden takes it from his mouth a strand of saliva catches the light. “Has persecuted this priesthood,” he whispers.
His voice affects Loretta like a drug, a lulling sense of the sacred that goes deeper than her brain and whispers that she is wrong, that this is divine after all. Uncle Elden talks about the “the raid of ’53,” when Satan sent the federal agents to arrest the men of Short Creek and carry away the women and children, and the constant threat of the next assault from the enemies of righteousness. “No righteous people . . . live without remembering the sacrifices of their fathers.”
In her head, Loretta flies to her worldly future. There, she wears pants with wide bottoms, and colorful blouses with short sleeves—T-shirts, even—and her hair hangs long and loose, and she paints her eyes with mascara. Every whorish thing. She wishes she could show her future self to her father, watch him burn. Her Tussy future, pink and bold. This future could be anywhere else and she will have a car, one of the sleek ones in the magazines, maybe the pink Mustang in the Tussy ad, and she will listen to rock music and watch television, and there is no Dean or Ruth, of course, no Uncle Elden, but there is no Bradshaw, either, or any man. Or rather, there is a man, but he is no man she has ever known. He is a warm, anonymous shape, and he exerts no force.
Uncle Elden makes a rattling sound in his throat, and continues. Loretta thinks that she’ll have to learn the names of cars and which ones she likes so in her future she’ll be able to choose the best one, the car that will show the world that she is free, the car that will announce that she is this kind of person and not that kind of person. The prophet mentio
ns the veil of heaven, and now they all engage in a charade in which Dean and Ruth stand on one side of a curtain held aloft by Loretta’s parents, and Dean reaches through the veil for Loretta and pulls her through, pulls her to them, because this is how she will go to heaven, drawn there by Dean and Ruth.
• • •
Later, Dean comes to Loretta’s room, the anonymous room that never quite warms up against the desert cold. He shuts the door, sits beside her on the bed, holds his knees in his hands. It comes off of him in waves, how badly he wants to move toward her. Thick veins crawl along the backs of his hands, and he squeezes his knees.
“I have promised your father, little sister,” he says, in a quiet voice. “But oh, you are a sore temptation.”
Her breathing stops. A gust fills her lungs. Loretta feels overtaken, though there is nothing surprising here. This has been plummeting toward her, an enormous meteor pulsing down from heaven, a giant, inevitable stone, and she has averted her eyes and pretended it was not there. This must be how life works, she thinks—the lull of boredom and reverence dulling your mind for catastrophe.
Somewhere in the night, two dogs burst into vicious barking and fall quiet.
“I do believe it would be best for us to wait,” Dean says.
He speaks so carefully. As though he were trying to talk her out of something. She takes him in from the corner of her eye: black wool suit, faded along the cuffs and knees, and polished black brogues. A not-unpleasant odor of flesh and cloth. His beard, the combed stubble of brown and red and white, and the tiny chapped areas on his bony cheeks, like dots of rouge on a doll.
She reminds herself: It is not lawful. It counts only if you believe it, and she will not believe it.
“Do you not agree?” he asks.
He places his hand on hers, his nails split and cloudy. Squeezes gently. He is younger than her father, but more worn. Taller. Leaner. Stronger. She wonders where Ruth is now, and what Ruth is thinking. Whether Ruth believes he will honor his promise.
“We are called to raise a righteous seed unto the Lord,” he says. “It is the most sacred principle.”
She wishes she could laugh, because there is something insane in this language, but she might never laugh again. He leans and whispers damply in her ear, a single brittle hair in his mustache tickling her: “You are trembling, little sister.”
He grasps her thigh above the knee and squeezes. His hand is massive. A line of sweat trickles from under Loretta’s hair, streaks down her back.
“I am as well,” he whispers.
His hand gains one inch on her thigh and squeezes again, and she knows now that ignoring the meteor has not made it go away, and that it is worse than she feared, this fate, this stone, because she feels a tingle—a small, repulsive flutter—between her legs. His hand nearly encloses her thigh, and he holds firmly, and though she finds him ugly and repellent, an oaf, she wants to squirm against that tingle, to press against it.
Dean exhales like a stamping horse and removes his hand.
“This is hard, little sister, so very hard,” he says. “But we will wait.”
He speaks as though he were denying her. As though he, through his righteousness and self-control, were saving them from her.
“You will see that it is better this way.”
He stands, and does not bother to hide the sideways prong under his black wool pants. Her eyes sting, and weakness floods her, runs into her veins and bones and pores and hair.
“Welcome to our family, Loretta,” he says. “We are walking in the Lord’s true light.”
He places his hand on her head, and stands there. Showing it. She blinks madly.
Dean takes her by the chin and says, “Your father has told me about your nighttime excursions.”
He must feel her chin shuddering.
“Those will end now, of course.”
She nods.
“I would like to hear you say it.”
She tries three times to get the word out, that word, yes, and when she does everything collapses. Tears scald her face and she gasps and coughs. He strokes her head, hair damp at the roots. She hates to cry.
“Shh, little sister,” he says. “It’s all right.”
He leaves, and she lies there shaking, curled on her side on the unfamiliar bed, on the quilt Ruth made from patches of old denim dotted with tiny rabbit ears of white yarn, and she lies there a long time, an eternity, staring at the wall, thinking, Bradshaw was right, Bradshaw was right, until she gathers herself, becomes herself again, and makes herself a promise that she will do more than simply get away.
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
First thing we jumped was pretty much nothing, a little hillock of dirt out there in the flats around Butte, a weedy little lump. We were tooling along on the old man’s Super Hawk, that four-stroke piece of shit with the brittle fork, when something or someone urged our hand toward the bump. We have thought long on this, America, and believe it is not too much to suggest the presence of the divine.
We flew. Fuckin’-A flew.
Figure between 1.8 and 2.3 seconds airborne—call it 2. Two seconds of flying. Two seconds of everything you thought life could not be. So amazing. So exhilarating. Also, so incredibly fucked up: you live and live and live, and it all comes down to a tiny flash, a speeding moment that is gone so fast you can’t believe it. All you can ever do is remember it and want it back. Still, those two seconds, holy shit: the warm blood of our heart expanded and sped through us in a way it never did again, though we chased it ever since, chased and chased it, all over the planet, from that lowly little bump outside Butte to the massive sea of cunt and worship we swam in for so long.
We dumped the bike, of course. We were fifteen. Our parents were sad and old and gone to other places, Grandpa coughing up black shit all day long, smelling like piss and whiskey, and Grandma ignoring everything, just pretending, pretending, pretending, and we loved to take out that bike of Grandpa’s, God, it was beautiful then, though we think of it now as an utter piece of shit. We’d take it and ride it from the house up in the warren of roads below the mine and the toxic tailing pond where geese died every winter, where they flew to their deaths believing in a safe landing, and we’d roar back down, below the mountains and the statue of Jesus Christ blessing the whole Summit Valley and we would head out into the flats and just roar.
That day, we flew for two seconds, and we found our place—the place we will always leave for. That little dent in the atmosphere that is shaped like us. We landed on the front tire, all wrong, and the bike squirreled out and we dumped it, scraped hell out of a shoulder and a hip, and put a big hairy scuff on the tank. Grandpa saw it that night when he came home stinking from the M&M, and he kicked open the door to our room and starting going off, Bobby this and Bobby that. Bobby, Bobby—the name that never named us. When he took hold of our arm we grabbed him back, by the front of the shirt, like some movie hero of olden day, and shoved him into the wall, and saw the news on his face: we were not who he thought we were at all.
February 17, 1975
SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
Ruth checks the forms while Samuel and Loretta organize the orders, hauling the heavy square buckets from the pallets and stacking them near the garage door, sacks slumped at the bases. It is early—they rise at five, and Ruth returns to Loretta’s door in two minutes if she’s not up—and their breath clouds in the frigid yellow light. It’s a huge garage, big enough for two cars, with a concrete floor and unpainted drywall, and pallets full of wheat, barley, flour, oats, powdered milk.
Samuel heaves a third bucket of brown rice onto a stack, and heads back to the pallet as Loretta comes by with a sack of oats.
Ruth says, “One more milk there.”
Samuel rolls his eyes at Loretta, says, “Another one?” under his breath. Ruth shoots him a stern look.
“It’s
for the nursing home in Cedar,” she says. This is new, Loretta thinks, a customer that isn’t a family with twenty kids, but a big client, a business. Another sign, no doubt, of the blessings that have come their way since they began living in the Principle.
“A nursing home?” she asks.
“A nursing home,” Ruth says, then points her hand-whittled inch of pencil at a sack of oats. “That’s supposed to be a twenty, not a ten.”
Out of everything Loretta had expected and feared about this life, she had not foreseen the way Zion’s Harvest Bulk Foods would dominate every day. It sets the clock of the household—preparing deliveries in the morning, organizing inventory in the afternoon, and leaving the strange, midday slack times when Ruth announces Silent Scripture Hour and assigns a book of the Bible or the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price or the Doctrine and Covenants. The littlest children sit quietly with the Book of Mormon coloring books, but even Elizabeth and Dean Jr.—nine and seven years old—are expected to spend the hour reading scripture, running their index fingers under the tiny text. “And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin.” Loretta finds this the worst part of any day, the clearest reminder that no corner of her life is her own.
The new driver will arrive at seven. The last man quit in January, and Dean says he’s too busy to make the deliveries and collect payments himself, but Loretta can’t see how. He leaves in his big truck after breakfast, and returns right at dinner; Ruth says he’s finding customers, glad-handing, building the business, doing everything important that goes unseen. Maybe it’s working. Sales are up. Dean doubled the amount he donated to the United Order in December over November. Everyone needs their “year’s supply,” their backup against disaster or the last days, but everyone’s supply is being constantly eroded by their huge, ravenous families. Nobody can keep up. The business had always prospered, but once Dean got signed up to accept food stamps, Zion’s Harvest boomed.
