The Lonely Polygamist (45 page)

When it was his turn he didn’t hug her because she looked like she was not at all interested in being hugged. He gave her the picture and she looked at it. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“I’m wearing the sweater you made me,” he whispered, very carefully. A lot of the blood hadn’t come out of it in the wash, so he’d poured some bleach on it, which hadn’t really helped. If you went to the cemetery in the middle of the night and dug up a grave and opened the coffin and the rotting skeleton inside was wearing a sweater, it would probably look a little better than the one he had on. If his mother noticed there was anything wrong with it, she wasn’t saying. She smiled and patted his hand. He was glad she didn’t ask about the tampon.

He sat down next to her, trying to think of something to talk about, hoping Aunt Nola wouldn’t say,
Time’s up!
and move him along. He let his shoulder touch hers. He said, really low so no one else could hear, “I’m starting to behave a lot better, I’m not going to get into trouble anymore.” Which was a lie. Rusty understood that when you were talking to somebody in a place like this it was a good idea to lie to them as much as possible.

From down the hall came the kind of scream you hear in a horror movie where someone is being tortured with red-hot pliers in a dungeon. Fig Newton and Ferris looked around for someone to tell them that everything was all right, but no one did.

Before they left, Aunt Nola got them together and they sang their mother a song.

It had to be the dumbest song in the world, if you wanted Rusty’s opinion, but their mother, along with a crazy-eyed coot who’d butted in on the proceedings, smiled and politely clapped, and for about ten seconds they all pretended to be happy.

But when Rusty went home that night he was not happy. Up in the Tower by himself he tried to count his blessings, which was the easiest math problem ever, because the answer was a BIG FAT ZERO. And nobody cared, nobody would help him. He’d started to think he should just kill himself, stick a sharp pencil through his earhole or walk all the way to Iceland and float away on an iceberg. But last night, because his plans were ruined and he didn’t know what to do, he decided to pray. He didn’t like praying, because it never did any good. When they told him to say grace at supper or give the opening prayer in Sunday School, he just mumbled something that sounded like a prayer:
HeavenlyFatherthankeethisday thefoodthehandsprepared itinnameaJesaChristamen
. But what else was there to do? He couldn’t sleep at night, he was having bad thoughts in his head, so he might as well say a prayer.

When the prophet Joseph Smith was just a kid, not much older than Rusty, he’d given the most famous prayer ever. Joseph Smith was confused, he didn’t know which church to join, so he went out into the forest to pray. Why he didn’t just pray in the kitchen, or on his bed or somewhere comfortable like that, Rusty had no idea. He went out into the forest to pray and Jesus and God came to him in a bright ball of light and told him none of the churches were true, that Joseph Smith, even though he was just a kid, would be the new prophet and start his own church and become the most powerful person in the history of the universe.

Which was just great for Joseph Smith, but what about Rusty? There wasn’t a forest nearby, not even two or three trees close together, so Rusty decided the bushes by the river would have to do. After everyone had gone to sleep he snuck out of the Tower and went down to the river. You were supposed to kneel down when you prayed, so God would know you were serious, but when Rusty knelt in the muddy grass the knees of his pajamas got covered with wet brown stains. What a gyp! He bowed his head and made a steeple with his hands, which looked kind of gay, but nobody was out here to see.

“Dearest Lord above,” Rusty said, which was how he once heard a sexy nun pray in a movie, “hear Thee the desires of my heart.”

He wanted to approach this the right way. That was a good start and the night was kind of beautiful, with a big moon, and the bushes looked sort of like a forest and he was in perfect prayer position, with his head down and doing the steeple-thing with his hands, and he started off by telling God that he was going to do his best to be a good person who wasn’t such a pain in the behind, he was so sorry for all of his sins, and just as he was starting to get this nice holy feeling, everything started going wrong. He was asking God to bless his mother, to make her better, but he could feel an ant crawling up his leg.
Effing ant!
he thought.
Get the heck out of here!
which was probably not the holiest thing to be thinking during a prayer. Not to mention his underwear was riding up on him. And then who showed up but Raymond the Ostrich, watching from across the river with his glowing eyes, and Rusty couldn’t concentrate, not with an ostrich staring at him and an ant crawling toward his privates. So he picked up a stick to throw at Raymond, to scare him off so he could have his privacy back and start feeling holy again, but the stick slipped and ended up hitting an old piece of tin on this side of the river and the
clang!
was so loud Rusty had to run like the wind to get back into the house before he was discovered.

Lying on his pad with a sweaty head and muddy knees, he was asking himself why he was such a buttfudge, what was wrong with him that he couldn’t even say a prayer?—when something weird happened. He fell asleep for a little while. And then, even weirder, he had a dream. Normally his dreams were about friendly werewolves or giant chicks in bikinis who breathed molten fire, but this one was different. His mother came to him in a big ball of yellow light, just like God and Jesus came to Joseph Smith. She didn’t say anything, but she was smiling and surrounded by bright sparks and little meteors that circled around her head and there was some kind of choir singing something holy-sounding in the background.

When he woke up this morning, he knew: his mother would be coming home. Rusty had prayed, and even though the prayer had gotten a little messed up, God had answered it. Take that, Joseph Smith! God would bless his mother, because Rusty had gone to a lot of trouble to kneel down in some muddy grass to pray for her and because she was a nice person who was never mean to anyone, and now that she would be getting stronger and thinking clearly she would say,
I am Rusty’s true mother, let him come home
.

Which was why he was feeling so good riding down the middle of the road on a Big Wheel at midnight. He felt a cool air sensation and looked down and noticed he had forgotten to put on his pants. Oh well! He was silent as the wind, invisible as the Holy Ghost, and he could not be stopped.

Not that Aunt Beverly didn’t try. After he’d crawled out the window at the end of the hall without a screen, he found she had locked up the garage with all the bikes inside. You should have seen it, he didn’t even get mad. He just shook his head and said,
Nicely done, nicely done
. He looked around and sure enough, there was the Big Wheel at the side of the house, the one with the brake on the back wheel so if you felt like it you could do a cool spin-out when you pulled on the handle. He was too big for it and his knees kept hitting the handlebars, but anything was better than walking.

By the time he made it to Big House his knees felt like somebody had been banging on them with hammers and his feet were raw from the jagged pedals, but he hadn’t seen a single car on the way and the night air was cool on his sweaty neck.

The doors of Big House were never locked. He crept upstairs and stood next to his mother’s door, listening.
Any day now
, the grown-ups kept saying,
she’ll be home any day now
, and Rusty was sure that if his mother did come home Aunt Beverly would keep that information to herself. He pictured her in her bed, without her earmuffs, sleeping peacefully in the dark with sparkles of light around her head.

He stepped inside the room and could hear breathing, definite breathing. His heart did a little flip and he snuck closer to the bed. What he found was
somebody
, but it was not his mother. It was Novella, and a second imposter, Gale, mumbling in her sleep. He looked around and could see they had brought in some of their things, clothes and books and a Lil’ Strawberry Patch Girl lamp. Rusty’s chest filled up with something hot and sour and he wanted to drag them out of the bed by the hair and take the Lord’s name in vain right to their faces, because, what, did they think they could just move into his mother’s room as if she was gone forever and not coming back? As if she’d never even been there at all? What did they think? And what did God think, sending him a dream and playing a trick on him like that?

He stood by the bed, breathing hard, grabbing his hair with both hands and giving it a good yank, telling himself to
calm down, calm down
.

He gave one big, shuddering snork, and then suddenly all his anger was gone and he was so tired. His knees and his feet and his head hurt and all he wanted to do was lie down in his mother’s bed and smell her pillow. He crawled in next to his sister and she was soft and warm and didn’t push him away.

When he woke up it was just getting light outside and the birds were singing like maniacs.

He got out of the bed and stood over Novella, putting his hand out over her face, and thought about pressing his palm down onto her mouth. Instead, he cocked his middle finger with his thumb, and flicked her across the tip of the nose, hard. Quick as lightning he did the same to Gale and then ducked down below the bed and crawled out the door before they could see anything.

Gale howled and Novella was screeching, “Who did that? Who’s
there
?” By the time he’d sprinted down the stairs, out the side door, and was on his Big Wheel pedaling down the road, half the house was up and shouting, thrashing around like monkeys caught in a net.

F
OR SOME, THE PLAGUE CAME AS NO SURPRISE. SINCE THE CREATION
of the world God has visited plagues upon His children for many reasons: to test, to chastise, to invite them to repentance, but mostly to remind them, in a way that leaves little room for confusion, of the error of their ways. And there was no doubt, in the minds of some of the Richards clan, that they were in need of correction. As a family they were adrift, lacking in obedience and low on faith: their father and patriarch was absent in body and spirit and for too long had been of little use to anyone; their mothers feuded and couldn’t properly control their children, who in turn bickered and misbehaved and drove their mothers (and in one recent case almost literally) crazy.

Unlike most plagues, which tend to kick off melodramatically with rivers turning to blood or clouds of locusts boiling over distant mountains to blot out the sun, this one started with…a mild itching. Aunt Beverly, as always, was the first to note something amiss. Alvin, idly digging at the skin of his hips and back, and a few minutes later Martin pausing between bites of a sandwich to scratch at his ankles. When Louise came into the kitchen and displayed the bites on her belly—three tiny inflamed spots like the points of a triangle—Beverly made the instant transition from guarded concern to no-holds-barred crisis control. She shouted the alarm, ushered all of the kids out of the house onto the front porch, counted heads and called Nola to inform her there had been an outbreak of some kind, lice or bedbugs or mites. Nola, of course, found this deliciously hilarious and figured this new development could keep her in a good mood for at least a week. But only a few hours later, after a quick late afternoon nap, she began to itch deep within the rolls of fat under her arms, locations difficult if not impossible to reach, and in a few minutes she was hopping on one foot in a throe of futile scratching, squirming, and swearing in high Aunt Nola fashion, “Dang potlickers! Ack! Little suck-egg sons-of-beekeepers!”

She pulled the sheets back on her bed, and sure enough, two black dots zinged in different directions, one landing in the carpet of the floor, the other on her pillow. Nola had grown up on a farm and was familiar with every class of vermin and pest in this part of the world. No doubt about it: the Richards family had fleas.

“Oh you little so and so’s,” she said. “Just you wait.”

A strategy was formulated, debated, and implemented: everyone would be sent to Big House while Old House was washed, vacuumed, fumigated. At Big House the kids would be defleaed using Nola’s tried and true home remedy, and then moved en masse to Old House so that Big House could be thoroughly cleansed.

Trish arrived from her afternoon visit with Rose to find the operation in full swing. While Beverly and the two oldest girls were cleaning Old House, Nola had been left to deal with the children. Most of the younger ones were aimlessly circling the racetrack, as if by force of habit alone, or standing around in the front room, despondently scratching themselves like bored baboons in a zoo. Trish went into the kitchen to find the rest of them arranged on chairs and stools, their heads hooded in black plastic bags. She thought she’d stumbled onto the scene of an execution. “What’s that
smell
?” she said.

“Kerosene!” called Nola, tugging a bag around the head of her last victim.

“You’ve soaked them in kerosene?”

“Only their hair.”

“Are you
serious
? What about the fumes?”

“The fumes are the whole point, dear.”

Now Trish could only stare at her. “Oh, don’t
worry
,” Nola said. “I’ve cut everybody a mouth hole.”

“Mama?” Faye called meekly from under one of the black bags. “Please help me.”

Nola explained that kerosene was the most effective flea remedy there was. Showering would only encourage the fleas, who preferred heat and humidity, and the commercial products were spotty at best, not to mention expensive. “Fleas are hearty little scamps, you’ve got to hit ’em hard and fast. Three minutes sucking kerosene fumes, though, they don’t stand a chance. There’s not just the adults but the larvae and the eggs. You’ve got to get ’em all or the next thing you know you’re infested.”

“Aggh,” someone cried from under one of the bags. “I can’t breathe!”

“Oh please,” Nola said.

“I’m getting dizzy,” somebody said.

“I’m seeing spots,” said somebody else.

“Maybe if you guys didn’t live in such a dirty house,” someone who sounded like Helaman shouted, “we wouldn’t have to be doing this!”

“Who said that?” cried Clifton, easily identified by his barking monotone. “It’s
you
guys who brought the fleas from Old House. It’s
you
guys who are the dirty fleabag jerks.”

“
You
guys are the jerks!” somebody shouted.

“Oh no we’re not!” cried somebody else.

“At least we’re not uptight buttholes,” Clifton said.

There was some laughter, presumably from the Big House camp. Parley slipped off his stool and attempted to attack Clifton, but was limited in that his head was in a bag. He ended up bumping against one of the girls, who tipped forward, screaming, “Ahhh! I got some
in my eye
!” and everybody started shouting and jostling and trying to pull the bags off their heads. Nola went around slapping their hands away and saying, “Hey! Hey! No! Hey! Three minutes! Breathe through your mouth!,” the kids shouted and complained, Darling, the family weeper, began to weep, and Cooter, who had become the scapegoat in this whole affair and been banished to the utility closet after the humiliation of a kerosene bath, put up a woebegone howl.

Trish spent the rest of the afternoon vacuuming carpets and scrubbing floors and refereeing skirmishes between the respective citizens of Big House and Old House, who seemed intent on teasing and aggravating each other to the point of all-out violence. She oversaw the washing of bed linens and lining up the younger children for their assembly-line baths and applications of calamine lotion. After a soup-kitchen dinner of canned stew and cheese sandwiches, she and Nola went out to sit on the back steps and take in a little fresh air. Trish had been spared the indignity of a plastic bag over her head, but the fumes inside the house were still strong enough to make her feel faint with nausea.

The evening air was warm and the western sky a thin wash of red and gold. Beverly had just called to say they hadn’t gotten Old House thoroughly cleaned, and would it be all right if her children spent the night at Big House, just to be safe?

“She’s got it all figured out, all arranged,” Nola said. “By her way of thinking, these fleas have been sent from God to test us, to bring us closer together. Fleas from heaven, spare us all. I think she has it in her head that if we’re truly faithful and pure of heart our kids are going to see past their differences and wake up tomorrow the best of friends, all of them singing ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ in three-part harmony and making each other breakfast. Let’s just say I have my doubts.”

“But she’s not coming over?”

“Heavens, no! She wouldn’t
dreeeeeeam
of spending a night in this house, not if she can help it.
She’s
not the one who needs to come around to a different way of thinking, the Great Bev knows and understands all, she orchestrates from afar. No, she and Golden are going to spend a nice quiet night alone while I babysit the Revolutionary War.”

“I can stay over and help,” Trish said, trying not to let the surge of jealousy she felt alter her tone of voice, trying very hard not to entertain the idea that Golden had been home for over two days and had not come to see her, had only called her to say that things had changed and he would not be going back to Nevada. “It’s not like one more thrilling night alone is going to make me any more beautiful and happier than I already am.”

“Oh no, you go home and get your beauty rest, gorgeous, really. I think the kids’ll be tired—they’re worn out and most of ’em are loopy on fumes. Give ’em a pillow and they’ll sleep like little drunken hobos. And it’s not like there’s going to be an available bed around here, anyway.”

Inside, another shouting match had started up, this one a swelling and hotly contested debate that addressed the question of who was, and who was not, the boss.

“Here we are,” Nola said, slumping even further so that her stomachs stacked up under her folded hands, pushing her mountainous bust right up under her chin. “Living the life.”

Funny thing was, for Trish this
was
the life, the one she had envisioned when she first agreed to marry Golden. Years ago, when she called her mother to tell her the news, her mother clucked and sighed.

“I never should have sent you down there to stay with Aunt Daphne,” she said, a wavering note of regret in her voice. “I can only blame myself.”

Trish told her mother that for the first time in her adult life she was happy, that she’d found a good man who would treat her well.

“Oh, honey, that’s what we all think, and then comes the truth.”

“I really think I love him, Mom. The other wives, they’re good women, we’re already friends. This is what I need. Believe it or not, I’m happy.”

“I know it won’t do any good, but I won’t be able to live with myself unless I remind you of a few things. Jealousy. Squabbling. Nastiness of every kind—if that sounds like your idea of happy, then by all means. Time to yourself? Out the window. The days will pass and you won’t have any idea where they went. You’ll have nothing to yourself anymore.”

This did not sound at all bad to Trish—anything was better than being trapped in her own grief, bored out of her mind. After the tense emptiness of her life with Billy, this was exactly what appealed to her: a life shot through with conflicting, round-robin emotions and a thousand and one distractions, nights of exhausted sleep, and the clamor of children’s voices upon waking. A life parceled out and surrendered, a life shared.

Even now Trish could not understand how such a life had been denied her. She did not know what was missing in her, where she had gone wrong.

“I’m lost, Nola,” she said, just like that. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

“No,” Nola said, her voice rising, as if scolding a child. “Listen. You’re going to be fine, honey. I know, I know how hard it is. Everything you’ve been through. You just have to stick it out.”

Trish shook her head. “I’m not talking about what’s already happened. I’m talking about what’s going to happen. It’s hopeless for me. Do you know what Golden told me in Nevada? Do you know what I made him tell me?”

“I’d like very much to know,” said Nola.

“I asked him…” The blood began to rise to her face and her eyes burned. “Why he wasn’t
interested
in me. Why he’s been avoiding me, physically.”

“What did he say?”

“He said because he couldn’t. He told me he was impotent, Nola.”

At this, Trish had expected a joke, or one of Nola’s grand, Mephistophelean laughs, the kind that had the power to obliterate anyone or anything unfortunate enough to wander into its path. But she only sat quietly, looking at her hands. “He said that?” Trish nodded.

“I’m surprised he’s never used that excuse with me,” Nola said. Here a laugh did come: a flat, humorless chuckle. “With me, he’s certainly had to make up his fair share.”

The humiliation in Nola’s voice—each word tender with some abiding pain—made Trish regret ever bringing up the subject. But she had come this far. There was only a little way left to go.

She put her hand on Nola’s wrist. “So this is all I want to know. Was he telling me the truth, or was he just making another excuse?”

Nola shrugged, waited, as if hoping her good humor might return. “Hard to say, hard to say. It’s been a long time with me, I can tell you that, but that’s not too far out of the ordinary. Never has been. I’m not a young lady anymore and the Great Bev’s more or less ancient, and Rose, who knows with Rose, really. You—I figured you, my sweet dear, were taking up the slack for the rest of us. I guess if he’s acting that way around you, there’s probably something to it.”

Trish tried to accept this for the simple truth that it was. This was not the first time it had occurred to her that the only way to defeat her grief was with hope, even just a little, and everywhere she looked these days, hope was in short supply. She had survived the past year only because she could find it in herself to look forward to a better future, one in which Golden worked close by and found it within his means to offer the meager affection and commitment she required, one in which he could give her a child, or—hope of hopes!—two or three, children who could redeem (not replace,
never
replace) the children she had lost, the pain she had endured. Children who would give her a place in this big, ridiculous family.

The women looked at each other, both on the brink of tears, and something in this shared look, the self-pity so baldly displayed, made them sputter with sudden laughter.

“And all this time I was thinking you drove all the way out there to talk to him about Maureen Sinkfoyle,” Nola said.

“I did,” Trish said. “And he told me there was nothing to it. He said I was his last.”

Though she tried to disguise it as another laugh, Nola let out a sigh of relief. Then she and her sister-wife shared a look, shaking their heads a little as if to say,
How did we ever get ourselves into something like this?

“Come on,” Nola said. “Right now. Come give this fat old lady a hug.”

Trish leaned in, allowed herself to be taken in by Nola’s immense softness, and immediately upon feeling the warmth of another’s touch the laughter died in her throat and something welled up in her so strongly that, again, she had to fight back a sob.

“I’m a mess,” she said, and gagged in a very unladylike way.

“Join the club, honey,” Nola said. “But you’re going to come out of this. God will provide a way. He always does.”

A MOTHER, A SON

Before driving home, Trish carried the last load of washed bed linens up the stairs and found Rusty in his mother’s bedroom, propped up on the bed, his legs under the covers. The bedside lamp illuminated little more than the circumference of its own shade, and the boy, cast in shadow and yellow light, looked carved out of wax. The skin around his eyes was stained with exhaustion and, though he’d taken a bath like everyone else, he still sported the smudged and tattered bandage, which Sister Sleigh had ordered not to be removed for two weeks, when the stitches would come out. He had a bright red scratch on his cheek and a series of flea bites, like footprints, tracking down his neck along the hairline.