Desert Wives (9781615952267) (20 page)

“It can't be!”

He gave a hollow laugh. “That house where you're learning how to cook? Well, I didn't know this before, but my attorney says it used to belong to someone else before Solomon took it over and did all those add-ons. The folks that owned it originally, they had a falling out with the Purity Fellowship Foundation over the Social Security check issue, just like I did. They went to court, and they lost everything. They lost the house, their cows, their farm equipment, everything. They even wound up having to leave a bunch of older daughters and grandkids behind when they moved. They're not even allowed to visit them now.”

Saul didn't have any children to leave behind, but losing the house you'd built with your own loving hands had to be tough. Still, he'd walked into the deal with his eyes wide open, the rules laid out before him in black and white on the contract every new member of the compound was ordered to sign.

And he'd signed it.

I sighed. “Maybe you should take the offer and salvage what you can. If you do, how long will you have before you have to be out of the compound?”

“Thirty days.”

Probably enough time for me to do what I needed to do, but my heart ached for Saul. Even if he was a murderer.

“What will you do about Ruby?” I asked.

“That's up to her,” he said morosely.

Ruby served boiled chicken sandwiches again for dinner, and I didn't even attempt to eat them. Instead, I nuked myself some Ramen noodles, and when Saul requested it, nuked some for him, too. Ruby's sandwiches sat congealing on the platter.

After Ruby and I squabbled over who'd do the dishes and I lost, I finished them as quickly as I could. Then I left the house and walked around the compound in the fading light, admiring the flame-colored cliffs, enjoying the cool breeze wafting from Paiute Canyon. Cactus wrens called softly to one another, and in the distance, a coyote howled at the thin rising moon.

The evening radiated peace. Men leaned against the rusting hulks in Prophet's Park, talking softly to one another about the burdens of the day, while on the porches, their white-aproned wives stripped freshly picked green beans and tossed them into large kettles. I knew that in the poorest households, the beans would be boiled for hours with fatback and eaten as a main dish, the sparse meal rounded out by buttered slices of cornbread.

In this dim light I couldn't see the poor quality of the buildings, the drawn faces of the women, the pregnant bellies of girls who should be worrying about nothing more momentous than the latest boy band.

And I heard the voices of the children, hundreds of them, laughing, singing. I was struck by how happy they all sounded. They were untouched by school shootings, random crime, or live broadcasts of terrorists acts. Their families, however peculiar, remained intact, and they had all the playmates they could wish for—most of them well-behaved. While their haphazard education and lack of knowledge of the way the world worked would handicap them on the Outside, they functioned well here. Each child knew exactly what kind of life lay in store for him or her. There was comfort in that, I supposed, but was it enough to offset the abuses I'd seen?

A ball rolled toward my feet and I stooped down to pick it up.

“Is this yours?” I asked a little red-headed girl I'd seen at one of the dining room tables in Ermaline's house. She liked grape jam with her biscuits, no butter.

The girl nodded, but made no move to take the ball from my outstretched hand. The children she'd been playing with suddenly formed themselves into a defensive circle.

I decided that since the mountain obviously wouldn't come to Mohammad, Mohammad would have to go to the mountain. But when I approached the little girl, she stepped away, face apprehensive.

“Don't you want it?”

She shook her head fiercely. Then she moved backward and hid herself inside her circle of friends, leaving me alone with the ball.

Lena Jones, the Untouchable.

Chapter 15

After making breakfast for Saul and Ruby the next morning (instant oatmeal and raisins, I'd given up on biscuits), I hiked down into the canyon, not stopping until I'd climbed out of the dogleg at the eastern end and onto the desert floor beyond. Soon the Purity graveyard came into view, at first appearing as haphazard rows of upright sticks bleached white by the sun. Only when you walked closer did the sticks arrange themselves into the form of crude crosses.

Tony Lomahguahu hadn't arrived yet, so I lowered my skirts, settled myself down on a rock, and enjoyed the scenery.

Above, fat white cumulus clouds wallowed across the clear, hard sky. To the north, the Vermillion Cliffs loomed so close I could almost touch them, their scarlet walls plunging at a ninety-degree angle to the desert floor below. But there the beauty ended. On the flatland, a hundred miles of dirt, scrub and cactus stretched to the east, west and south, marooning Purity on a hostile beachhead. If the compound's fathers had searched for a hundred years, they couldn't have found a more isolated place.

“Miss Jones?”

He had approached from the opposite direction so quietly I hadn't heard him.

I stood and faced Tony Lomahguahu. He had probably been tall once, but age had bowed his back and the lined skin on his mahogany-colored face resembled a dry lake bed. His brown eyes remained alert. Like everyone I'd met in the past few days, he wore a plaid shirt and denims, but unlike the plain folks at Purity, he had spiffed up his outfit with a bola tie and several turquoise rings. He could have been anywhere from seventy to ninety, but he still cared about how he looked. I liked that in a man.

“Yes, Mr. Lomahguahu. I'm Lena Jones.” I didn't extend my hand. I knew little about Paiutes, but most Indians I'd met didn't touch strangers.

He nodded, and said in a softly accented voice, “Hope I can help you, Miss Jones, but I don't know much about these folks. They don't make friends with anybody who isn't as white as they are.”

I gave him a wry grin. “Yes, I've noticed. And they're pretty white, aren't they? But anything you could tell me would help. My client…”

He raised a gnarled hand to stop me. “Jimmy told me about the little girl you're trying to help, and he gave me this message. He said to tell you there's trouble. Somehow that girl's father found out where she was staying.” His face darkened. Apparently he didn't think much of Abel Corbett.

“That man, he told Child Protective Services the girl had been kidnapped by Indians. The family's looking at jail time if they don't turn her over to him.”

I was aghast. “He can't take her from Indian land!”

“White people have taken things from Indians before, Miss Jones.”

He was right, of course. Abel Corbett's house at Purity sat on the Utah side of the state line, but if necessary for his legal standing with CPS, Abel could easily move across the road to the Arizona side of the border. All the trouble Jimmy and I had gone to had only gained her an extra week of safety. Maybe that week would be enough.

“Did Jimmy's relatives tell CPS what Corbett wants to do with Rebecca? Give her to some old man as a plural wife?”

“CPS said they'd investigate, but they've got a case backlog and it'll take awhile. They said to just be patient.”

I wanted to scream in frustration. By the time CPS got around to doing anything, Rebecca would be back in Purity, possibly married. I suspected that CPS's handy “case backlog” excuse was the same old see-no-evil routine that kept American polygamy thriving despite its illegality.

Once again I felt like I had so many times as a child. So many forces arrayed themselves against me that I'd be a fool not to just give up. With surrender would come peace. After all, it was hope that kept you awake at night, hope that kept your hands trembling in the daylight. Hope that if you struggled hard enough, things would somehow, in some way get better. Peace came only to those people who had learned the bitterest lesson of life: acceptance.

“Never accept evil!”

With a shock, I recognized my mother's voice, long lost to memory. Bewildered, I looked around to see, of course, no one other than Lomahguahu and miles of cactus. My mind had merely been playing tricks on me again. Still, it seemed strange to think that the monster who'd almost killed me had said something so moral. Then again, maybe she'd been reading a super heroes comic book aloud.

I pulled myself back to the present to see Tony Lomahguahu watching me.

I flushed. “I thought…I thought I heard a voice.”

He studied me carefully. “These voices, they can tell us important things.”

“Not this voice, Mr. Lomahguahu.” Too well I remembered the gun my mother had aimed at me, the sound of the gunshot, the terrible pain. No, my mother had nothing to tell me that I ever wanted to hear, vagrant memory be damned.

He shifted his eyes to the graveyard. “I hear voices, too. Young voices that cry out when the wind blows strong.”

“Young voices? What do you mean, Mr. Lomahguahu?”

He didn't answer, just motioned for me to follow and set off across the hardscrabble ground toward a row of particularly shabby crosses, most of them smaller than the others.

“This is where the voices come from,” Lomahguahu said. “They tell their stories to anyone who will listen.”

“But I…” I was going to tell him that I didn't talk to ghosts, but then I remembered the time not so long ago when a murderer had abandoned me in the desert to die. For three days I had talked to all sorts of ghosts, the Hohokam, a coyote, even the ghost of a red-headed man who might have been my father. Hallucinations, of course. Nothing else.

“Speak to the dead and they will answer,” Lomahguahu said. He motioned toward one of the small crosses.

I knelt down. The inscription, which appeared to have been carved by a pen knife, then stained with ink, was still readable.

Annabella Royal, Nov. 12, 1991-Nov. 30, 1991, beloved daughter of Solomon and Martha. Next to it were three more small crosses carved by the same hand: Carolina Augusta Royal, Oct. 20, 1992-Oct. 25, 1992, beloved daughter of Solomon and Martha. Stephen Raymond Royal, beloved son of Solomon and Martha, August 31, 1993-August 31, 1993. Elias John Royal, Nov. 15, 1994-Nov. 15, 1994.

I counted the months between births. Martha had hardly time to recover from each one before she'd become pregnant again. So much for the theory that lactation protected women from pregnancy. The graves of the first two babies showed they had died after only a few days of life, but the last two had died the day they'd been born. Remembering Martha's robust appearance, her Valkyrie-like beauty, I was once again reminded that appearances could be deceiving. Not that her obvious health difficulties had made any difference to Solomon. Apparently, he'd just kept shoving those little buns in her overworked oven, leaving it to her to pop them out on schedule.

“The children's voices cry on the wind,” Lomahguahu said. “Can you not hear them?”

I shook my head. “I don't hear a thing. But,
damn,
Mr. Lomahguahu, did you read those birth dates?”

He shrugged, his face betraying none of the outrage I knew mine did. “All the men of Purity believe that the more children they have, the better life they'll have in Highest Heaven. I imagine they think their wives' unhappiness is a fair trade for such riches.”

A fair trade.
I turned away from the tiny graves and faced him. “Are you serious?”

“That's the way they see it.” He shrugged again, as if he had long ago stopped trying to understand the ways of his neighbors. Then he said something I didn't understand. At the time.

“The children will speak when you are ready to listen.”

We stayed at the graveyard for several more minutes as I strolled among the handmade crosses. While I was no expert on the benefits of neonatal care, it was obvious that the women and children of Purity would have benefited from some. Too bad Solomon eschewed the advances of modern medicine and relied upon prayer to treat his flock. Maybe Davis would change all that.

Solomon himself lay buried on the cemetery's highest point, his professionally carved granite slab protected by a low, wrought iron fence.

Prophet Solomon Royal, God's Own Prophet to the Community of Purity. Lifted up into the Highest Heaven.

Highest Heaven, my ass. If an afterlife truly existed, the manipulative old goat was probably warming his toes in the deepest regions of Hell.

Saul sat waiting on the front porch when I got back, a grim expression on his face.

“Lena, I just received a visit from the Circle of Elders. They nullified our marriage an hour ago. They're saying that if you want to stay here, you have to find another husband. You've got twenty-four hours to do it in, because they can't allow two unmarried people to live together. That would be a sin.”

I was so appalled that I forgot to hike up my long skirts as I mounted the porch steps, and caught my heel in the hem. If Saul hadn't reached out and grabbed me, I would have fallen on my face. As it was, he had to help me to the porch swing, where I sat in silence for a few moments, composing myself.

“Can they do that?” I finally managed. “Nullify a legally performed marriage?”

He nodded. “As far as the rules of Purity go, damn right they can. Remember, the Circle doesn't respect anyone's laws but their own, so unless Davis says otherwise, they can do anything they want. Don't get your hopes up there, either. I've seen Davis looking at you, and something tells me he wouldn't mind your being available, you understand me? Besides, I think he's biding his time until the next Circle meeting, where I hear he's really going to kick some ass. Cynthia's situation, well, that was an exception, partially because he doesn't much care for Earl Graff. Earl and Davis are cousins, you know. Had a bad falling out just after Solomon was killed, mainly over the more liberal direction Davis wanted to take the compound in.”

“Cousins? Davis and Earl? The hunk and the pig?”

“Their mothers were sisters. Just about everyone around here is related in some way or another, you know that. Earl looks like his mother, except she was a lot prettier than him. Royal looks like his father.”

I held my head in my hands. “Cousins. Oh, Jesus. It just keeps getting weirder and weirder.” I sat in the swing for a while, letting the breeze whispering down the Vermillion Cliffs cool my hot face. When I felt collected enough, I turned toward him and asked the question I should have asked immediately.

“So tell me, my dear ex-husband, why did the Council of Elders take it upon themselves to nullify our marriage?”

He blushed, and after a few stammering false starts, said, “Um, Ruby, um, you remember that she does the laundry?”

I raised my eyebrows. “And?”

“Well, she, um, Ruby noticed, she noticed…”

He looked so miserable I decided to give him a break and finished for him. “She deducted, my dear Watson, that we weren't having sex because there were no semen stains on the sheets.”

He smiled weakly. “She wasn't going to say anything, but Brother Earl cornered her when she was visiting one of her cousins at his house…”

“At his house?”

“Yeah, Earl's married to Pearl, her cousin. Anyway, Earl started cross-examining her about you and me, and he scared her so bad she broke down and told him. So Earl told the rest of the guys in the Circle.”

Poor Ruby. Although we'd never hit it off, I sympathized with her dilemma. She didn't want to tattle on her husband, but at the same time, Earl could have scared Dracula. I sighed. “So I've got a big twenty-four hours to find a new husband or get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Better start hustling, honey.”

I stared off at the Vermillion Cliffs. Saul joined me and we both sat there miserably for a while. Then he eventually said, “I'm sorry it didn't work out, Lena. I really did try to help.”

I reached over and took his callused hand. It felt cold. “I know you did. It's all been my fault, really. I just couldn't keep my mouth shut.”

He squeezed my hand. “Or your fist out of another man's face.”

“It was the edge of my hand, not my fist. But yeah, you're right. Maybe if I hadn't smashed Earl Graff's nose this wouldn't have happened.”

We fell silent again, and after a while, saw several women carrying babies climb into a van that pulled into Prophet's Park. Among them I recognized Rosalinda, Earl's wife, and a couple of Prophet Solomon's widows. All had given birth since I'd arrived in the compound.

“You don't mean to tell me Earl's making Rosalinda go shopping already, do you? The poor girl just had her baby only a few days ago!”

Saul grunted. “That trip's about more important things than groceries, Lena. Brother Vernon's taking the new mothers to sign up for welfare.”

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not kidding. According to the law, they're unmarried, remember? That makes them eligible for Aid to Dependent Children, or whatever it's called these days. A couple of the older women there, they gave birth to Downs Syndrome babies, and their husbands are all excited. Downs kids bring more money, because not only does the mom get the ADC, she gets extra benefits because of their medical problems. Now that Davis is going to let these folks keep more of their welfare checks, a Downs baby is great news for the dads.”

I felt revolted at this crass commercialization of tragedy, and told him so.

“That's the way it is here, Lena. You know Hanna, the gal with the bad limp? She's one of the Arizona contingent. She had her baby this morning while you were gone, and if it lives, she'll go to the county seat in Plattville next week to apply for her benefits. Her baby will get extra money, too.”

I frowned. “What do you mean, if the baby lives?”