The Lonely Polygamist (29 page)

Golden knew there was no explanation that made any sense, so he offered none. He allowed himself to be helped to his feet and led to the back porch, where Sister Spooner paced in her white flannel nightgown, meat cleaver at the ready.

“As I live and breathe!” she said, clutching her nightgown at the throat as women in nightgowns tend to do. “Oh, he doesn’t look very good, Newell, does he? Check to see if he’s hurt.”

As was customary, Brother Spooner ignored his wife. To Golden he said, “You want to tell me what you think you’re up to tonight?”

Golden was barefoot and wet, covered in dust and ostrich feathers and bits of straw, and shuffled along with a halting double-limp that made him look like someone trying to get by on two wooden legs. He shook his head. “My daughter,” was all he could say. Unable to stand any longer, he slumped onto the porch step.

“He get you?” Brother Spooner said. “He got you, didn’t he.”

“He got me.”

“He also got your watch, looks like,” Sister Spooner said, peering at Raymond, who was pressed into the far corner of his enclosure, looking back over his shoulder with something silver glinting in his beak.

Golden looked at his wrist, which was bare. Sister Spooner said, “He likes shiny things, old Raymond. Watches are his favorite.”

“And I’d forget about getting it back, I was you,” Brother Spooner said. “As far as he’s concerned that watch is now his personal property.”

“He’ll probably swallow it soon,” said Sister Spooner, “but sometimes he likes to wait awhile.”

While Golden waited for the feeling to return to his leg, the Spooners had a brief argument over whether or not Brother Spooner should call the sheriff. Sister Spooner, who gripped the meat cleaver like she knew how to use it, prevailed, arguing that Golden was in a state of shock and couldn’t be blamed for wading across the river and attacking their prized ostrich in the middle of the night like some kind of lunatic. Once her husband had gone inside to get dressed and find his keys so he could drive Golden home, Sister Spooner took several mincing sideways steps toward him, to put a comforting hand on his shoulder and pick a few of the larger feathers from his hair. His shirt was slashed all the way down the back, he smelled like a manure pile, and his face was striped with the evidence of tears. Even now, his eyes shone wetly, ready to flow at any moment.

He was thinking that he should get up right now, before Brother Spooner came out. He should walk back home on his own power, preserve whatever scraps of dignity he might have left, but the thought of wading back into the cold grasp of that river a second time was too much for him. Sister Spooner, who had always maintained a soft spot for Golden, for his honest, sad face, his addled sweetness in comparison to her husband’s hard ways, let herself go and in a surge of pity took his head in her hands, pressed it firmly into the twin ottomans of her breasts.

“You poor thing,” she said, “you poor, poor man.”

SAFETY IN NUMBERS

Two hours later, dozing at his post next to Glory’s coffin and rousing himself twice to check on the other children sleeping soundly in their beds, he put on his work boots and drove his pickup through the pink dawn to the Virgin City Municipal Cemetery, which sat on a broad shelf at the foot of Widow Mountain and overlooked the small town below. Though the sun was not yet up, the ambient light of dawn made the fine red sand that passed for soil in these parts seem to burn like bedded coals against the black volcanic rock of the mountain. There was the usual clamor of birds, excited out of their limited wits by the prospect of a new day.

Golden pulled in and drove slowly over the groomed gravel lane to the northeast corner, where his father, in a fit of optimism, had purchased sixteen burial plots assembled four abreast in a perfect rectangle. He’d bought them only a few months before he died, when he had no reason to doubt he would require these plots, and many more, for all the wives and children who would one day bear his family name.

The sight of his father’s grave had always given Golden the oddest feeling; there was something sad and maybe a little funny both about the single polished marker alone in such an expanse of hopeful red dirt.

ROYAL JOSEPH RICHARDS

Light of the Lord

The carved image, which everyone took to be a tree, probably the tree of life, was actually an atomic mushroom cloud—Royal had drawn it on a scrap of paper in the days before his death, and Golden had delivered the drawing to the stone carver, who had done an admirable job of replicating it. “I want my marker to be one of a kind,” father had told son in his last hours of lucid thought. “I want folks to know I went out like I came in, with a big fuckin’ bang.”

Golden eased himself delicately out of the pickup and took a shovel out of its bed. Right away he ran into trouble. The earth was porous and sandy but littered with basalt cobbles—some small, some as big as bowling balls. Time and again his shovel rang out against the stones, sometimes with a flash of sparks. The work was hard and what he’d hoped for: it obliterated all thought. He dug around each stone, probing and scraping with the blade of his shovel, and when one finally was pried loose he felt the relief that comes with pulling a splinter from under a fingernail. He was two feet down, the sun climbing against the mountain, sweat dripping steadily out of his hair, when the sheriff pulled up in his cruiser.

Golden did not stop digging, did not look up while the sheriff took his time getting out of the car. If he noticed Golden’s torn shirt, his mud-caked pants and the fact that he was covered in feathers, he didn’t mention it.

“Morning,” the sheriff called. “Up early, I see.”

Golden pulled out a grapefruit-sized cobble and tossed it onto the pile near the sheriff’s boots.

“Got a call,” the sheriff said, holding his creased face to the sun. “Grave robbery in progress. After the mischief you’ve been up to these past twenty-four hours, I figured it might be you.”

Under the sheriff’s gaze, Golden worked harder and faster than he had when alone, tossing up half-shovelfuls of dirt in random directions.

“They got a guy with a backhoe does this,” said the sheriff, settling into a stance that suggested he would be content to watch Golden dig for a good long time. “Tellis Blackmore, I think you know him. Highlight of his day, to come out and dig a grave. Squares off the corners, makes a tidy pile a dirt, throws them rocks over the fence so they don’t make noises on the casket when he pushes the dirt back in. Hangs around for the burial, sometimes, sheds a tear or two along with the next of kin. You don’t plan to put Tellis out of a job, I hope.”

Exhausted, Golden let his shovel drop and sat on the edge of the hole. He didn’t want to talk to the sheriff, but was glad for the break. He looked at his hands: blisters at the base of every finger. Just as he was entertaining a thought about how thirsty he’d become, the sheriff reached into the front seat of his car and came out with a thermos. He poured something into the lid and handed it to Golden. Orange juice, sweet and cold. Golden downed the cup in one gulp and the sheriff handed over the thermos so he could dispatch what was left of it.

The sheriff was a slight, deeply tanned man with the blown-out face of a dedicated alcoholic. Fifteen years ago he’d lost his wife and two young sons in a car accident and had taken to drink, which cost him his teacher’s position at the local high school. With nothing left to lose, he ran for sheriff, made his own pathetic hand-lettered signs, which ended up, after a particularly fierce windstorm, caught in weeds and hedges and plastered against chain-link fences all over the county:

FONTANA FOR SHERIFF

A BRAND NEW START!

The standing sheriff’s signs were glossy and professionally printed, but not all that more compelling:

ELECT HOUNSHELL FOR SHERIFF

DIFFERENT MOUSTACHE

SAME VALUES

Everyone was surprised when Fontana won the election, apparently on sympathy alone. Even more surprising was how he took to the job. He controlled his drinking and, because he had no family left, dedicated his every moment to his work. When a paranoid widow called in to say there were burglars whispering in the bushes outside her bedroom window, he spent the night in his cruiser in front of her house so she’d feel safe. He put every county prisoner on work detail and cleaned up the park, refurbished the rodeo grandstands, and used leftover yellow highway paint to paint several of the decrepit houses in Mexican Town, which now gave off a ghostly mustard-yellow aura in the dark of night. He cracked down on teenage hot-rodders and did not tolerate hippies or drifters or drunks (though he spent an occasional night drinking himself into oblivion) and had become something of a legend for giving Frank Sinatra, who was driving through on his way to Las Vegas, a firm lecture and a two-hundred-dollar ticket for speeding, reckless endangerment and driving without a license.

Now he stood next to Golden and creaked. Golden wasn’t sure if it was the sheriff himself who was creaking, or if it was his leather holster, but the sound never stopped, even though the sheriff was standing absolutely still.

Golden handed back the thermos. He said, “So you going to arrest me?”

“Maybe later,” the sheriff said. “Right now, I’d like you to tell me where I might find an extra spade.”

Golden pointed to his pickup and the sheriff retrieved a rusty number nine shovel from the bed. He removed his jacket, along with his holster and two-tone beige polyester shirt, and started digging. At first the arrangement was awkward, but they discovered that if they stood back to back at an angle and worked in rhythm, the deepening hole could accommodate them both. For the first twenty minutes or so, they worked without speaking, but gradually the sheriff, in his immaculate white T-shirt, started to talk. He told a few bad jokes, let slip a little gossip about the mayor’s wife, Neda Handley, who was caught shoplifting a pair of high-heel shoes. Golden was grateful to him for never mentioning Glory, or the details of her disappearance or the massive search effort the sheriff had helped to organize. Golden knew that this was a man who understood a father’s grief, knew how hard it was to negotiate it in the light of day, to bear it with any dignity at all; not thirty yards from where they were working, near an old black currant bush, were the graves of his wife and two sons.

Later that day at the funeral, sitting on the front pew with his wives, Golden would barely be able to hold himself together, gripping Beverly’s hand in his and swallowing back the sobs rising in his throat. Afterward, he would pilot the old Cadillac hearse the five miles from the church to the cemetery. He would ask Beverly this one favor: to be able to make the last drive with his Glory, nobody but the two of them. The sheriff in front with his lights flashing, the line of mourners behind, headlights on, they would roll along, slow as a Fourth of July parade, down the state highway, then across the county cutoff, passing houses and farms where people stepped out onto their porches, cut off their Rototillers and idled their tractors, removed their hats and head scarves, until the full procession passed. For a moment he would see himself as they saw him: a hulking shadow in the long black car, sagged with grief. As the cemetery came into view, he would forget to breathe, the pain in his chest too much, flashes of yellow and red across his vision, and slowly, almost gently, he would pass out, holding on to the steering wheel for dear life, the big hearse crawling slowly onto the shoulder and down the embankment, snapping through dead brush and scraping along a barbed-wire fence, the noise of which would startle him back into consciousness in time for him to swing back, as if nothing had happened, to take his rightful place in line.

But in the soft air of this early morning, numbed by the labor of digging and the sheriff’s casual talk, he felt blessed with a bit of peace. The sheriff, who liked a good story, was telling Golden about some of the more colorful polygamists he’d met in his time. There was Calvin Eyre, who declared his desert compound its own sovereign nation and asked the sheriff to set up a one-on-one summit with President Johnson. “And then there was ol’ Ross Sudweeks, you remember him, never held a regular job, hardly a dime to his sorry name, but he’s got five wives and four thousand children and they all live on welfare and daily trips to the dump. Happiest herd a potlickers you ever seen. One time I was out there delivering Christmas turkeys for the Kiwanis Club—I took nine of ’em out there and I swear I don’t think it was enough—and come to find out Ross had married him another one, a cross-eyed single lady with three kids. I had to ask. ‘Why do you do it, Ross? What in God’s name you thinkin’?’ You know what he said?” Here the sheriff paused to heave a stone over the lip of the grave. “‘Safety in numbers.’ That’s what he told me, winking like it’s the best secret in the world. I never forgot that. Safety in numbers.”

Another half an hour and they had dug so deep they were having a hard time pitching the dirt out without having it slide right back in. The earth down here was clayey and moist and riddled with pockets of white quartz. “So,” said the sheriff, measuring the top edge of the grave, which was just about even with his eyebrows. “We got an escape plan or what?”