The Lonely Polygamist (10 page)

It was hard, sometimes, for Trish not to ask her what they had to say.

Her decision to leave Billy was not particularly painful or even difficult; one sparkling fall morning she felt a rare bit of clarity and the will to put it to use. She asked Faye how she would feel about their going away for a while. Faye sighed as if she’d been waiting a long time to field this particular question.

“We could go away,” she said, “and if we like it there, we could never come back.”

Trish called her mother, who had taken up with a livestock auctioneer in a trailer park outside Carson City.

“You know I never liked that Billy,” her mother said. “Little banty rooster with his head up his you-know-what. We don’t have room for you here, honey, but I was talking to Daphne the other day—”

“Hold on,” Trish said. “
Aunt
Daphne?” Aunt Daphne had been one of her mother’s sister-wives, wife number three, a thoughtlessly kind, chubby woman who hoarded candy at the bottom of her clothes hamper and once gave Trish a whole Big Hunk candy bar, as generous a gift as she had ever received. Trish and her mother occasionally spoke about the family they had left in Montana, and speculated about what had become of them, but as far as Trish knew her mother had never been in contact with any of them.

“She tracked me down, wanted to catch up. She’s the same old Daph, sweet and happy all the day long. She’s down to Utah, married another plyg there and started to feel lonely once all the kids moved out. That’s why she called. A lonely old lady, and I know for a fact she’s got all kinds of spare room. She’d be happy to take you and Faye, but you have to promise me, honey. One of those men shows up at the front door with his hat in his hand, looking for another heifer to put in his corral, you turn and run for the hills.”

NUMBER THREE: JACK

Eight and a half months along, big as a Volkswagen, she ate heaping portions of kidney beans, pork chops, and spinach greens (all prescribed by her midwife), dutifully took her baby aspirin every morning, after which she would sit on her porch in the sun, dazed with relief. She knew, this time, there would be no tragic replay, no evil doctors casually whispering their horrible news, no nurses absconding with her baby, never to be seen again. She felt this new one, this big baby boy, arch and swim inside her, active as a colt, and she knew that her old life, her old polluted self, was forever gone.

Reno, and everything that had happened there: gone. Billy, the succession of groping teenage boys and rutting men, her vanity and selfishness, her cursed body, her loneliness and hard-packed grief: all gone, cleansed by the sharp hot light of the Virgin River Valley. Reno had been one long detour into a blighted territory, and now she had returned to country in which she belonged, a place filled with women and children and companionship and constant distraction, a place of simple rights and wrongs, a place in which Faye could pray the whole day long and no one think it the slightest bit odd.

She had not heeded her mother’s advice, of course. Within a month of moving to Virgin, where she and Faye lived in one wing of Aunt Daphne’s six-bedroom rambler, she was attending church regularly and meeting with the Women’s Relief Society, an organization that promoted gossip and irreverent female bonding under the cover of quilting bees and seminars on emergency preparedness.

It was on a Saturday afternoon, at something called Service Day, that she first met Golden. Though they worked together only ten minutes or so—he helped her unload flats of tomato sprouts to be planted in the community garden—she was immediately taken by his gentle deference, the sad cast of his eyes. She didn’t know it at the time, but a year earlier he had lost one of his young daughters, and Trish would soon come to realize it was the weight of grief she sensed in him, so much like her own, that first drew her to him.

Of course, none of this got past Beverly; nothing ever did. Within a couple of days Trish was being invited to dinner at Old House, to Big House to help with the funeral luncheon for old Brother Billick. Trish thought nothing of it until she got a call one night from Golden himself, who sheepishly inquired if she might like to take a ride with him to Sister Flett’s nursery to pick out flowers for the upcoming Easter service. On the phone that night, the cord wrapped around her wrist, she felt herself grinning and spinning in place like the gum-smacking high schooler she had once been: she was being asked out on a date! That her suitor was a man with three wives and twenty-six children didn’t bother her nearly as much as it should have.

As the courtship progressed—barbecues and church socials, dinner and a movie in St. George (usually chaperoned by one of the wives), a little chaste nuzzling and kissing in the front seat of the hearse—it became easier and easier to consider living under the protection of this family, to return to the safety of the life she had led as a child, to share her pain with this sweet giant of a man in the hopes that they might find a way to heal each other.

A month before her one-year anniversary in the valley she was baptized and, so quickly it seemed to happen at once, married to Golden and his first three wives, and then pregnant with the child who would make everything right again.

Two days after the midwife stopped by and pronounced her two centimeters dilated, the baby already dropping and loaded for bear, she felt the initial spasm of pain. She was balancing awkwardly on one knee in the corner of the kitchen, searching for the button that had zinged off her overstressed maternity jumper when she’d bent to retrieve a dropped spoon. She winced—her eyes pulled tight at the corners as if someone had grabbed her hair and yanked, making her scalp sing—and then came the hard, torquing jolt, which felt like the baby straightening out all at once and kicking her in the spine. The movement inside her was so violent and sudden she collapsed onto her side and grabbed her belly with both hands as if to keep it from breaking open. She lay on the linoleum, waiting for something else, for a set of aftershocklike contractions, or her water to break, but there was nothing except for a lingering buzz in her nerves.

That night, did she wonder why the baby, such an active little kicker she had nicknamed him Jackhammerin’ Jack, had not so much as stirred the rest of the day? After two more days of perfect stillness, as if the child had withdrawn to a distant corner of the womb to ready himself for his initiation into this bright new dimension, did she think to consult the midwife, or at the very least allow herself a moment or two of concern? No. Her faith in this child, in the joy and completion he would give her, was pure. Whenever a sliver of doubt would creep into her peripheral consciousness she resorted to the old childhood chant that dispersed the ghosts and shadow-men who crept out of the woods at night to scratch and whisper under the steel belly of the boxcar:
It’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright it’llbeallright.

When her water broke early that Wednesday morning, leaking down her legs in slow fingers as she hung a towel on the line, she took it as a confirmation that everything was occurring in its rightful fashion. She called Beverly, who drove her and Faye back to Old House, where Nola and Rose-of-Sharon and some of the older girls had already gathered to set up the master bedroom for birthing. She lay on the expansive king-sized bed, propped up by a bank of pillows, and when the contractions came for real, the pain was sharp and affirming. The old midwife, Sister Meisner, showed up and unpacked her implements like a mobster readying for a hit. Sister Meisner, whose every word and movement suggested a no-nonsense competence, had arthritic old claws and an exquisitely sour face that expressed nothing but irritation at humankind and its shortcomings.

After an intricate hand-washing ritual that included three different cakes of soap and a towel baked for fifteen minutes in the oven, Sister Meisner checked the cervix, timed her contractions, and placed the bell of her old brass stethoscope on Trish’s exposed belly. She moved the stethoscope around, tilting her head a little, and quickly her expression changed from one of irritation to one of extreme and wholehearted irritation.

“You’ve felt the baby move?” she said. “In the last few days? You’ve felt it kicking?”

Paralyzed, Trish could not so much as open her mouth.

“If you please, young lady, I need your assistance. Maybe you felt a bad pain in the past few days since I last checked you? Like the baby doing a backflip inside you?”

Beverly, who had been undergoing midwife training under Sister Meisner’s tutelage, appeared at the foot of the bed, her face gone a shade pale. “I’ll call the ambulance in from Hurricane. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Sister Meisner said. She shook her head, grimaced, and began to bear down against Trish’s belly with both hands as if she were trying to push the baby out all on her own. She took up the stethoscope again, glared up at the light fixture as if it had challenged her to a fight, and listened. Her expression never changed, she never looked down, but Trish felt that old gnarled hand, hard and cold as a piece of varnished wood, roughly seek out her own and clutch it tight.

“Your little one is gone,” she whispered so that only Trish could hear. “God bless you both.”

Then louder, after a few moments: “That’s all. No heartbeat, nothing. We’ll deliver here, just as planned. Nothing a hospital or ambulance can do. I can feel the cord now. No blood flow. Hasn’t been, looks like, for a day or two.”

Later, Trish would remember little about the delivery itself, except for her own repeated pleas—as if they were made by somebody else in the room—that she be allowed to hold the baby once it was born. Beverly held her hand and said,
Yes, of course
, and Sister Meisner had nothing to say but,
Not yet, not yet
, and then,
Push, push, push, push
. Trish did not open her eyes the entire six hours, just hunkered down in the trough of sheets and welcomed the pain that came as dazzling yellow flashes across her retinas. And then, all at once, it was over. The years of her life, the months of nausea and expectation, the late-night hours of despair and loss, the hours of sweat and suffering, all funneled into this moment of expectation, only to be met with a ringing silence.

“Hup, crimped cord,” said the midwife. “Thirty-eight years and only the third I’ve seen.”

Beverly took the baby and after a few minutes returned with him, cleaned and wrapped in his birthing quilt, which featured bounding lions and frolicking zebras painstakingly hand-stitched in turn by her three sister-wives. Beverly settled the boy into Trish’s arms, and when Trish got her first look at him, felt his small compact form sink against her breasts, she cried, not in grief, but in love. He was chubby, with his eyes closed, and his pink jowls gone slack around his mouth, as if he were enjoying a very satisfying nap. Oh, how she loved him! She squeezed him against her chest and pressed her nose into his damp, red-blond hair. His beauty, his smell, obliterated for the moment the monumental injustice of what had happened. She looked at her baby and smiled, unable to contain her mother’s pride in his strong features, in his solid heft, in the way his fat little fists tucked neatly under his chin.

She asked for Faye, and against Sister Meisner’s protests (“This is not proper,” she said. “A viewing, a funeral, that is proper, this is not”) the girl was brought in and allowed to hold Jack. Faye went right to her mother and, with no sign of distress or reluctance, picked up the baby, expertly tucking his head into the crook of her elbow, and looked into his face. “Jack, you’ve been a bad little boy, haven’t you?”

“Blessed Savior,” Sister Meisner said under her breath.

“Where did you go?” Faye said to the dead baby. “Did you fly away, you bad boy?”

“Heavenly Father forgive us all,” Sister Meisner said.

Next, Beverly ushered Golden in, and Sister Meisner, going through her final checkup, mumbled and groused, wondered to herself what this was, a convention? Who was going to be invited in next, the entire extended family? The next-door neighbors? The mayor of San Francisco?

Golden stepped to the side, hulking and sheepish, looking to Beverly, in his eyes a desperate wish for clarification or instruction. Beverly stood next to the door, her hand on the knob, and thanked Sister Meisner for her service. “We can handle things from here, Mavis. Please don’t forget the cinnamon cake I made for you on the kitchen table.”

Sister Meisner planted her feet in a bowlegged stance, a shoot-this-old-gray-head-if-you-must look in her eye. She glared at Golden as if he were the cause of everything, and he could only nod in apparent agreement. Finally, she took up her satchel and webby shawl and stomped grumbling out the door.

After a nod from Beverly, Golden went to Trish, put his hand on hers. Trish took the baby from Faye and smiled at him. She had forgotten, until this moment, that this baby was as much his as hers. “Here he is.” It was all she could say. She knew she was smiling and could hardly understand why. “Look at him.”

He nodded but did not glance at the baby.

“Why don’t you take him for a minute,” Beverly urged.

“No, I don’t—” he said.

“You go ahead and hold him for a minute,” she ordered calmly, “while I attend to a few things with your wife. Sit in the rocker over there and sing him a lullaby. Go on, Goldy. Every child deserves a lullaby.”

Trish had not noticed until now, but outside night had begun to set in. The wind blew and the timbers of the old house shifted and creaked. Golden turned on the bureau lamp and sat down with the baby, cradling it in the manner of someone used to dropping things. He started to rock, blinked hard and swallowed, hummed a few notes. He took his time looking down at the baby, and only when his eyes settled on the child’s face did he begin to cry: a small hiccup of a sob and then tears crowding the inner hollows of his eye sockets and tracking down his nose. He cleared his throat, tried another feeble hum. He didn’t know any lullabies. So he sang the only song he could think of: