The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir

by Ruth Wariner

  “Both of you get up and go look for him right now,” Mom commanded, rushing down the hall to attend to the baby.

  Matt and I didn’t feel the least bit worried about Luke. We just put on our shoes, dragged wet combs through our hair, and headed down the street for Safeway. While Luke was wandering off more and more often, he tended to end up in the same places—the grocery store or the bus-stop bench in front of the Dairy Queen. His face always wore the same blank expression when we found him, his tongue sticking straight out of his mouth while his eyes nervously followed traffic.

  The dark, forbidding skies of the day before had given way to plump, white clouds and a gentle sun, but I walked lazily with my head down and my shoulders slumped inside my purple jacket. Sure enough, as soon as the sliding glass Safeway doors parted, we saw Luke.

  In those days, Luke was obsessed with anything made of paper, especially such things as junk mail, newspapers, and magazines. He carried a stack of papers and colorful pamphlets under his arm and used the hand on his opposite arm to hold up his jeans, hand-me-downs from Matt. They were still too big for his skinny body, and he never remembered to wear a belt.

  Looking at him there, seeing him before he saw me, it struck me how much he looked like a normal boy. He wore his baseball cap a little bit crooked, but then boys sometimes wore crooked caps. At least one of his shoes was always untied, but all boys walked around that way from time to time. He barely showed any signs of his disability.

  “Hey, Lukey,” Matt called across the store. Luke looked up, but not in our direction, as if he’d heard something but didn’t know where it was coming from.

  “Luke,” Matt called out again. This time Luke’s eyes darted toward us. He looked surprised to see us. “Bring your papers and let’s go home.”

  Luke reluctantly shuffled our way, but not before he added one more circular to the pile under his arm. His pants inched farther down past his white Hanes underwear with every step. At last he reached back and pulled up his pants.

  “What are ya doin’ here, Lukey?” Matt asked.

  “Huh?” Luke replied, confused. “Yeah, I’n doin’ fine.” His voice was loud enough for the entire store to hear.

  Matt laughed good-naturedly. “No, why are you all the way over here, buddy?”

  Luke just shrugged. “I’n not sure.” Then he blinked and turned toward the exit.

  “We’ve been lookin’ for ya. How come you didn’t tell Mom where you were goin’? She’s all worried about ya. Let me see those and make sure they’re all free.” Matt pulled the pile of papers out from under Luke’s arm and quickly rifled through them. Luke could never tell which publications were free and which weren’t and had been stopped for shoplifting.

  On that day, Luke had only collected free stuff, so Matt handed the papers back to him and we walked home. Luke went straight to his bedroom to study his new stash and to add it to the pile of periodicals, pamphlets, and hundreds of pieces of junk mail he had already collected.

  As the years passed, it began to seem as if Luke’s mind had been frozen in time. As Matt entered his teens and began teasing us relentlessly, Luke remained the same. As Mom’s voice took on a permanently raspy quality and the creases on her forehead grew deeper, Luke remained the same. He even seemed to stay the course as things went from bad to worse for the rest of us. Strangely, his stagnant mental development became a source of comforting constancy.

  23

  In late November, not long before Micah turned a year old, Mom found out she was pregnant again. No one was surprised, and life went on as usual until 1983 rolled in with a spate of bad weather that brought us thick, dark rain clouds for weeks. The conditions were particularly awful one Friday afternoon in mid-February as my brothers and I walked home from school. Aaron had started the first grade by then, so the four of us braved the lightning, thunder, and slanted rain that day, the four of us arriving home soaked and weather-beaten.

  When we tramped through the door, Mom, with a dazed expression, was on the couch feeding Micah on her lap with a blue plastic baby bottle. I felt like a cold, wet dog and didn’t stop to think about what that expression might mean. Instead, I peeled off my drenched jacket and went straight to my bedroom to change my clothes. I was still snapping my jeans when the phone rang.

  Mom answered it, there was a pause, and she struggled through a little Spanish. It was the same pattern I heard whenever we received a collect call from LeBaron. I walked into the living room to see her head nodding at the operator’s words.

  “Sí,” she finally said.

  I dreaded the phone calls from the colony because they usually portended a visit from Lane. He had already broken the promise he had made during his nonapology, and I never knew when he might appear in my bedroom again. He always came to the edge of my top bunk bed at night before he went to Mom’s room. It was always after she had gone to bed. Lane would come into my room to say good-night, but it always turned into a struggle. I’d push his hands away from my private parts, begging him to stop, which only seemed to make him more aggressive. I’d tell him I was going to call for Mom or report to her what he was doing to me, but Lane would promise to give me money and candy or ice cream if I stayed silent. He said that I would hurt Mom’s feelings again if I told her, the same way that I had the first time. His visits made me physically sick, and he always left me with a feeling of powerlessness, as if I didn’t have a choice. I never knew what to do. I wanted to tell Mom what Lane was doing to me, but what if he was right? What if it made her upset? She was always talking about how much she had to do and how exhausted she was. What if telling her only made everything worse? I felt embarrassed, ashamed, and partly responsible because no matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to stop Lane.

  The line now having connected, Mom was listening to whatever the caller had to report. Suddenly she took a deep breath. “Oh, no. That can’t be true,” she said as if in shock. She cast her eyes around the room until they met mine. She looked like an animal wounded beyond saving. She whispered for me to come and hold Micah, then turned back to the phone. “I just can’t believe it. When? When?” Then she took her glasses off and covered both eyes with one hand.

  “No wonder he hasn’t been coming to see us. He can’t even afford to take care of the wives he’s got.” She drew in an uneven, shaky breath through her nose, and I knew she was stifling a sob. “Why would he go and do that—and not tell us.”

  Micah was unhappy with his bottle, reached out for Mom to pick him up, then started to cry out when she ignored him. As much as I wanted an explanation from Mom, I knew she’d be furious if I let the baby cry, so I took him out of the room and bounced him on Aaron’s bed. Eventually I heard her weak voice utter, “Okay, thanks for letting me know.”

  As soon as she’d hung up, Mom started to sob. Then she walked straight to her bedroom and slammed the metal-framed door behind her. She lay there for the next half an hour, crying loudly enough for all of us to hear. I wanted to check on her, but I knew it wasn’t a good idea until she’d settled down.

  I went into the kitchen to refill Micah’s milk bottle when Mom’s bedroom went silent. An eerie quiet descended upon the house.

  Suddenly Mom flung open her door. “You kids get some clothes packed,” she commanded. “We’re going to LeBaron.”

  “For how long?” Matt yelled from behind his bedroom door.

  “I don’t know. Three or four days. Lane got married again without tellin’ me—a few months ago—and I need to go home and find out what’s goin’ on down there.”

  * * *

  ONCE WE WERE on the road, Mom explained that her sister wife Susan had called to tell her the news. Wife number two did not like hearing that there was now a wife number four, and especially not from wife number three, even though Mom certainly got along better with Susan than she did with Alejandra.

  Apparently, the new bride’s name was Marjory. She was a decade older than Lane and a widow with thirteen children, most of whom were a
lready married with children of their own. I felt Mom would have been more accepting of the marriage if Marjory had been a younger woman, of childbearing age. An older wife who could no longer have kids suggested that Lane had a deeper, more painful motivation for what he did—he must have married for either love or sex. Adding to Mom’s rage, Lane had violated an unwritten law of polygamy: a man who wants a new wife needs the blessings of the wives he already has.

  We stopped at a McDonald’s so we’d have something to do while we waited in the hour-long line to cross into Mexico. Mom ordered us a sack full of hamburgers and a milk shake for Meri. Her health had so declined that the only way to feed her was via a two-foot-long tube that we inserted into her throat, past her esophagus, and down into her stomach. The Microbus periodically lurched forward as I tried to carefully place Meri’s head on my lap and position her so that the milk shake would slowly melt down her throat without choking her or running out her nose. I inserted my straw into the slushy drink, pulled it out with my thumb over the end, dripped a few drops onto Meri’s tongue, and let the rest slide down the tube.

  When at last we got to the checkpoint, Mom pulled our paperwork from the glove compartment and handed it to a patrolman. The men wore camouflage pants stuffed into tall, black army boots and olive-green jackets with bright gold buttons, machine guns clipped closely at their sides. They examined the bus from all angles and then pushed their unsmiling faces up against the windows and ogled every one of us. After a bit more posturing, they waved Mom along.

  Eventually Meri and I fell asleep, until the bumpy dirt roads of LeBaron brought me back to consciousness. Bleary-eyed, I was shocked to discover that the line of peach trees that had run through the middle of the alfalfa field separating our property from Alejandra’s was gone. Now, we could peer straight through to Alejandra’s house, which only added insult to Mom’s injury.

  Mom parked the van and left the headlights on so we could find our way over the rocks and puddles to the front door of our house. The night air felt cool against my arms and neck, and I was comforted by the sound of water in the ditches and the smell of the alfalfa fields and wet earth. I staggered out of the bus with Meri on my shoulder and struggled to balance my heavy sister, whose body now flopped around like a rag doll sewn over a skeleton.

  The smell of alfalfa disappeared as soon as Mom opened the door, replaced by the familiar odor of mice droppings. We hadn’t been home in ages, but it soon became apparent that someone else had been there. The house had been broken into and ransacked. Drawers were overturned on the cement floor, boxes of family pictures were upended, and clothes were everywhere. Break-ins like this were common, and Mom always shrugged them off. “The people who took our stuff probably needed it more than we did,” she said that night, although, on first glance, it appeared that the burglars hadn’t taken anything. Looking around at the chaos, I couldn’t help thinking that the thieves had probably created such a big mess in retaliation for our not having anything worth stealing. Since we were all exhausted, Mom declared that the cleanup could wait until morning.

  The next morning, amid all the clutter, I came across a happy surprise. Lane had finally installed a showerhead in the bathroom. I stared awestruck at the gleaming silver pipe that ran up from the cement floor, gently curved around the ceiling, and descended a few more feet before dead-ending into a beautiful, new showerhead, also silver and gleaming. I wanted to run my finger along its length. But as soon as I touched it, a powerful surge of electricity stunned me. I jerked my finger back. I should have known there would be a catch.

  Lane, whose do-it-yourself skills had just begun to impress me, would later explain that the electric current was necessary for the pipe to heat water on its way up. The shower was something of a mixed blessing. He warned us not to touch that metal tube, “especially if you’re barefoot and wet,” two things that were unavoidable in the shower.

  But before Lane could explain why we needed electricity in the shower pipe, I reported my experience to Mom. She dismissed the danger with the same shrug with which she had dismissed the thieves and immediately searched her purse for a rubber coin holder. “This’ll do till we can find out what’s goin’ on,” she said, wrapping the little blue oval around the shower’s metal spigot. On her way out the door, she noticed the hole where the doorknob was still missing and stuffed a mismatched sock into it for privacy.

  That day I also learned that I was now old enough to handle one of the most dreaded chores in the house—washing out dirty cloth diapers. I cringed at the thought of how unpleasant my task would be. When Mom saw the resistance written on my face, she laughed. “Oh, don’t be so silly, Sis. You have to get used to washing diapers out sometime. You know, for when you have your own kids.”

  As we tidied up and the house slowly returned to what passed for normal, Mom’s preoccupation with Lane’s latest exploits reached a fever pitch. Finally, when she couldn’t take it anymore, she grabbed her purse and rushed out the door.

  “I’m going down to talk to Susan,” she said breathlessly. “Ruthie, you and Matt are in charge.”

  No doubt Mom would rather have gone directly to Lane, but that would have been taboo. Searching for a husband at another sister wife’s home was considered an intrusion on the other woman’s allotted time or, worse, spying.

  I bolted for the shower as soon as Mom pulled out of the driveway, eager to try out the new contraption, in spite of its hazards. The water was frigid at first, but slowly it became warm, or rather lukewarm. It induced goose bumps, but still I reveled in the luxury of showering in primitive LeBaron. Maybe it was my surroundings, but it seemed like the most elegant shower in the world. For a moment, I could live like a princess—as long as I didn’t touch that silver pipe.

  * * *

  MOM RETURNED FROM Susan’s in the early evening but relayed nothing of what she’d learned. She just walked to Lane’s shop silently to grind up wheat kernels. She then made six of her signature cylindrical loaves of bread, whose smell filled the house. She took the leftover dough and made what she called scones by separating the raw, sticky mixture into handful-size pieces, rolling each portion into a ball between her palms, and flattening them one by one with her fingertips. She then fried the pieces, placed them on a platter over a paper towel, and got them ready to serve for dinner by spreading butter and honey on top or sprinkling cinnamon and sugar over them.

  Matt was out milking the brown cow in the corral when the bottom of the kitchen door scraped against the cement floor and Lane’s leather-soled boots stomped inside. Mom appeared to have practiced for this moment. She continued her work without acknowledging him.

  “Hey there,” he said to us, his eyes wide. “Your mom didn’t tell me you were comin’. I’m surprised to see ya.” He tried to put his arm around Mom’s shoulder and kissed her cheek, but she threw it off.

  Micah, still wearing the blue pajamas with the plastic feet that he’d been wearing the night before, shuffled into the kitchen, his bottle in hand. He had started walking at nine months, and Lane smiled widely as he watched his young son’s steady footsteps. Lane took a seat at the table, scooped up the toddler, and bounced him on his knee. The heel of my stepfather’s boot tapped hard against the floor. The sight of Mom, obviously angry but still serving Lane’s dinner first, just as she always did, was something I just couldn’t watch.

  In that moment, seeing him pick up his scone and happily feed a piece to Micah as if nothing were wrong, I found myself hating Lane more than ever. I stormed out of the kitchen. But when Matt brought in his silver bucket of milk, Mom called us all to the table for dinner. Those were the only words she spoke. She doled out the fried scones in silence.

  That night, while I lay on a lumpy mattress on the rickety living-room hide-a-bed, the beams from a full moon streaming through the windows, I heard Mom’s quavering voice. She was crying through tears—but her words were unintelligible. I craned my neck in the direction of her bedroom, deeply curious as to how Lane was exp
laining himself, but the adobe walls were too thick. I fell asleep trying to decipher their muddled argument.

  24

  Mom’s eyes were still swollen the next day. Things with Lane otherwise seemed to have returned to normal. They readied themselves for church and left Matt and me in charge of our siblings. On their way out, Mom told me she needed some alone time with her husband and reminded me that the diapers still needed to be washed.

  I had already learned to put off that chore as long as possible, but by late morning I began to fear Mom would soon be home, so I took the diaper bucket outside and placed it on the damp patch of tall grass next to the faucet just outside the kitchen door. I opened the lid just a crack and quickly turned on the hose, hoping to drown out the smell before it reached my nose. But the stench of day-old dirty diapers whooshed up at me anyway and I gagged.

  I was still a bit woozy when I heard the sound of footsteps sloshing through mud in the distance. I looked up to see a girl in a yellow, long-sleeved dress with white tights and black patent-leather shoes with silver buckles, my stepsister Sally. She was about to jump over the ditch at the edge of our driveway.

  Sally was Susan’s daughter from her marriage prior to Lane. Sally was a year older than me, and she had her mother’s thick, dark brown hair, which always made me jealous. She wore it in barrettes and ponytails or curled and left loose around her shoulders. As she smiled and walked across the long, muddy yard toward me, I noticed her full, light pink lips, and also the red birthmark above her upper lip that I always thought looked like a strawberry stain from heaven.

  Excited to see her, I slammed shut the diaper bucket and silently prayed that the smell would dissipate before she reached me. I stood up, dried my hands on my jeans, and smiled back.