Daredevils (10 page)

They eat a late dinner. Dad glumly answers Mom's peppy questions, about the harvest, the yield, the jackrabbits. He nods as she tells him all about her plans for Jason, now that his senior year is beginning—scholarships and grants, college opportunities. She has somehow gotten it into her head that he will study agriculture, become the educated farmer, though he has lately thought he will
study architecture, for no reason other than the impressive sound of it. She considers how he will work his mission around his college. Mom finally stops talking, and Dad sighs, staring at the lump of cheesy hamburger casserole on his plate. It is odd that he has not gulped it down and spooned up more. The plain, heavy silence infects Jason with an unfocused urge. He will definitely buy an eight-track player for the LeBaron. And maybe that New Zappa, too. Who cares if they catch him?

“I guess Dean and Ruth have gotten set up over there,” Dad says at last.

“For good?” Jason asks.

Dad shrugs. “For now.”

Mom puts her hand on his forearm.

“We'll make the best of it,” she says.

“That's right,” he says, but he sounds exhausted.

Mom smiles forcefully at Dad—her way of drawing him out of his gloom, of insisting happily that he not disappear into his own mind. He avoids her eyes. He coughs once, hard, to clear his throat, and says, “They've got a young girl over there with them. Ruth's niece, Dean said.”

Mom stops chewing. And blinking. She stares at Dad, and he looks back, and they seem to forget Jason. It would not be too much to say they look terrified. Soon everyone they know will know this, too. Everyone in church. Everyone in town. Everyone.

Mom says, “No, Lou.”

Very carefully and very slowly, he says, “Dean says she's Ruth's niece, and she has nowhere else to go.”

Nobody speaks for several seconds.

“And I don't know any different,” he says, looking stubbornly at the center of the table.

Jason feels like he might throw up. Like just vomiting, there on the table, among the three of them and this new development, might be what's called for.

“You don't?” he says. “Really?”

Dad exhales sharply, the sound like a sack of grain dropped on its end, and says nothing
more.

D
ean says they have to, so they have to. And so, when the time comes, when the old clock in this musty house makes a single weak reverberating bong, Loretta swings her legs off the bed and stands, brushes her hands down the front of her dress, and takes a deep breath through her nose. She does not know those people, she reminds herself. Doesn't know them and shouldn't care about them. And yet she is flushed with self-consciousness, a constant rose of warmth wrapping her neck and ears and temples now that she is out here, in the world.

She goes downstairs. Ruth herds the kids. They are dressed as if for church, though they will not be attending services here, Dean has informed them. They will be having their own services, led by Dean. He reminds them all, often, how vigilant they must be against the dangers and temptations of the world, where Satan rules. Despite herself, Loretta expected to find demons everywhere; so far, she's been disappointed by how much this place is like home:
the desert here is not as pretty, more like a weed patch with dying grasses and tick-filled sagebrush, but in most ways what she has seen of Gooding and the countryside has been a lot like Short Creek. Farms and fences, barking dogs. Horse trailers on blocks beside mobile homes, spread over with rust. Pole sheds with small weedy junkyards out back. A kind of galaxy circling the town—the farther away you get from the center, the farther apart the houses are, until you get out to Harder land, out to the biggest farms and ranches, and beyond them, all the human structures start coming together again, as Gooding turns into Wendell, the next town over.

The differences, though. There are no other people like them here. No groups of five, eight, eleven children walking along the roadside. No women in long chaste dresses and long braided hair. No young boys in wool pants and long-sleeved shirts.

Dean says he's praying about what to do. About whether they might find a new home here, on his family's land. In his father's house. He tells the family he's praying about this, and he tells Loretta—in these first days since he came to retrieve her—that he's praying about this, but Bradshaw told her that he was already making plans to move the business to Idaho. Dean has even asked Bradshaw if he would help run it.

“He wants to pay me to come up there. Isn't that something?” Bradshaw said, delighted. “Doesn't the Lord work in mysterious ways?”

A demon. She feels sure of it now. How else could this be happening? How else could it be that her husband is bringing Bradshaw into the family? Dean's God, she feels more and more, is a fake. Dean's God is simply Dean's mind. But the world behind the
world is real. Something must operate behind everything—guiding, shaping, directing. She cannot imagine otherwise, and Bradshaw comes from that place.

Dean arrives in the living room dressed in his black suit, his beard darkened and damp. He has lectured them about his brother Louis and his family, who are well meaning but misguided, and whom they should embrace and mistrust in equal measure. The children are aligned perfectly, militarily, descending by age: Samuel, Ruth, Elizabeth, Dean Jr., Janeen, Sarah, Benjamin. And Ruth at their head, like a sergeant. Loretta stands behind them all.

“I expect you all to be on your best behavior,” Dean says. “Good manners at the table. Polite to your aunt and uncle. Do not make your mother and me ashamed. Don't make me go to the belt.”

Dean goes to the belt about once a day. The backs of Samuel's legs, Loretta knows, are chapped with calluses, which he earns for his stubborn, silent rebellions—refusals to complete chores, to finish his bulgur meat loaf. Dean nags him relentlessly, reminding him that he is the eldest, and he is falling short.

“You understand that we have to be less than honest regarding your aunt Loretta,” he says. “We have no choice in this. We are no longer in Short Creek, among the righteous. We are no longer among those who understand the righteousness of the Principle. Satan is in control out here.”

“At Uncle Lou's?” Samuel asks, and Dean gives him a silent look.

“Everywhere. The world over. Your uncle is not an evil man. But neither is he a righteous one. And Satan is ever watchful for opportunities to tempt and persecute the righteous.”

Loretta knows that Dean considers himself a perfectly righteous man, though he would never admit it out loud. A perfectly
righteous man would not be so vain. How do you come to feel that way about yourself? How do you ever feel so fully synchronized with the purpose of the universe? There must be a beauty in that feeling. Sometimes she thinks of the world as Dean versus Bradshaw. And other times she thinks of the world as Dean plus Bradshaw, different expressions of the same confidence.

“Okay, then,” Dean says, and Ruth opens the front door and the children exit in single file, through the screen door and onto the front step, the red paint walked off in the middle, and onto the path worn into the lawn. Then Loretta goes, then Dean, then Ruth, and the children wait for Dean to take the lead. They walk out onto the gravel shoulder of the narrow county road and begin walking the quarter mile toward Uncle Lou and Aunt Becky's. The heat of the past month is cooling, but still Loretta feels too warm in her long dress and wool stockings, a hint of dampness already inside her lace-up shoes, at the tight neck of her dress. They begin walking up the small rise that separates the two homes, the harvested hay fields to their left, and the cow-filled pasture on their right, and a pickup roars over the top, a dirt-caked Ford F-150 with a cracked windshield. The plump, red-faced man inside turns to watch them as he passes, looking mystified and pleased, here on this ordinary road that he must drive all the time without the magic of any surprise.

When Dean came to The Crick to get her and their belongings, to fill the horse trailer with the boxes that Bradshaw helped them load, bantering with Dean, making him laugh and shake his head, when he came for her and had her by his side as he prowled through the house, choosing what would be needed and what could be left behind for now, he had taken her into his office while he compiled certain papers and locked others into his steel filing cabinet. He
had opened the bottom drawer of the cabinet and removed a strongbox that he opened with another small key, and then had shown it to her with wide eyes, with shared amazement: a pile of gold coins, shined carefully, an incoherent pile of one-ounce golden eagles, thousands of dollars' worth of gold. He had removed eight coins, and relocked the box, and placed it back in the cabinet.

“You're leaving that here?” Loretta had asked.

“For now,” Dean said. “For now.”

He looked at her gravely, lips pressed and brown eyes brightened. She could sense in him an assessing mood, an evaluative moment—the kind of seriousness that might come over him in prayer or spiritual leadership, his sense of himself expanding even as he adopted a veil of humility.

“What?” she asked.

“If I show you something,” he said, “you must promise me to hold it as a sacred secret.”

“I promise, Dean.”

He withdrew a leather pouch tied with a cord, sagging as if it held a misshapen grapefruit, and held it toward her, fist tight around the top, his chapped red knuckles as big as walnuts and one black crack running across his thumbnail.

“Take it,” he said. “Feel it.”

She reached out, and he said, “Use both hands,” and he set the pouch in her cupped palms, and said, “Don't drop it, little sister,” smiling, thrilled, looking as he did sometimes in bed, beforehand, ready to climb on, his brown eyes backlit with intensity. She felt the contents of the bag settle and shift as he gave it to her, and it nearly forced her hands to the floor, so great was the distance between its weight and her expectation of its weight.

“What is it?”

“It is gold, little sister.”

He was whispering, inches from her face. She had never felt so intimately connected with him. She set the pouch on the floor and opened the top.

He whispered, “It is gold from the California gold rush. Some of the first ever discovered—by Saints. By Saints, little sister.”

She opened the top of the pouch tremblingly. Inside, the lumps were dark and brownish, but for a few tiny gleaming curves, where the lumps of ore caught the light.

“Discovered by Saints, Loretta, though you will never hear it spoken of by the Gentiles. They say a man named John Sutter discovered the gold, in a place called Coloma in California. They named it Sutter's Mill. You can read all about him in the histories. In the schoolbooks of the Gentiles, his story is well told.”

Loretta reached in and took up a single nugget. It felt almost soft between her finger and thumb, as if she might mash it.

“But you will never hear the Gentiles talk of the Saints in Sutter's Mill, and how the Saints settled California, how the Saints discovered the gold. You will never hear the Gentiles tell the truth about that, little sister, because what if they did? What if they had to accept the righteous history of the nation? That it was the Saints—the ones everyone repudiated, the ones everyone scorned and scorns still, the Saints, abandoned by their own church, ostracized by all—it was the Saints leading from the very first, Loretta. Setting the example.”

Loretta had stopped noticing anything but the small lump of gold. Gold. She hadn't conceived of it like this before—as a substance of the earth, a rock. Dean reached out and took it from her, and placed it back in the pouch as he continued talking about it, telling her it was sacred gold, Mormon gold, and that this
particular
gold had been held in the hands of the true Saints for more than a hundred years. Saints had left Utah and gone to California, and gold had come back to Salt Lake and bolstered the new Zion under Brigham Young.

“And where did you get it?” Loretta asked.

Dean merely shook his head. Never mind. He tightened the pouch and placed it back in the bottom cabinet drawer and locked it.

They left the room and he locked his office door behind them. He explained that they were entering a world full of dangers, of persecution, of enemies. He told her for the ten-millionth time about the Short Creek raid, the agents pouring into the homes of the righteous, driving out mothers and children, locking up their fathers.

“That was not so long ago, little sister,” he says. “Your aunt Ruth was among those children. That is still the world that we live in.”

Those two days had been awful—Dean climbing onto her every half hour, it seemed, until she was so sore she asked him to stop, until she feared that nothing could stop her from getting pregnant now, not with this flood of his seed, and when she used the solution it burned so badly she bit her thumb and cried.

But she took careful note of the ring of keys that Dean carried. Careful mental note of which keys, among the thick ball of them, opened four locks: front door, office door, cabinet, strongbox.

 • • • 

They arrive at the house in single file, crossing the dirt driveway and aiming straight for the side door. Both of these houses, this one and Dean's father's home, are squat, square brick affairs, with front doors and side doors facing their dirt drives, each door fronted by a cube of concrete. Uncle Louis's place has a shed out
back, and a cinder-block milking barn across the driveway, and cow pasture all around. Behind the barn are haystacks and a low row of calf pens. Loretta finds the smell—fresh manure and cut hay—comfortingly familiar.

Dean raps on the screen door, and Aunt Becky sings, “Come in, come in,” and in they come, clustering on the bright yellow linoleum, not leaving Loretta enough room to let the door shut behind her, and so she stands there, framed, as Aunt Becky dries her hands on a towel and fusses, never stops looking about, offering a hand, patting, smiling, moving, nervous. At the counter stands a tall, knobby boy with a rubbed brush of reddish hair, leaning with half a buttered roll in his hand. When Loretta glances at him he looks away quickly. She feels him tracking her in his peripheral vision, shooting quick visual sorties her way, and his appraisal lights up her nerves. She is familiar with this kind of attention, but usually not from boys. The boys in Short Creek tend to leave, or be kicked out, by the time they're in their middle teens. Loretta feels both younger and a thousand years older than this worldly kid in blue jeans and T-shirt, though she knows that he is older, that he is Jason, that he is seventeen, that he is technically her nephew if you drew it up on the family tree—but that he considers her unrelated. Or not very related, anyway.

The children crowd farther in and she lets the screen door close behind her. On the boy's T-shirt is an image of a large red tongue hanging from a set of bright red lips, a lush sexual image, and under it the words “Hot Rocks.” She feels herself blush behind the ears.

The boy says, “Welcome to Idaho,” says it directly to her, but it is Dean who answers, “Don't forget I grew up here.”

 • • • 

Uncle Louis sits at the head of the table, offers Dean the seat at his right hand. Aunt Becky's seat stays open at his left, while she and Ruth shuttle the dishes to the table: roast chickens, mashed potatoes, green beans, hot rolls, jugs of milk. Loretta sits among the children, across the long table from Jason, the two of them volleying looks. He seems to be watching her even when he is not watching her. He is not handsome, particularly—gangly, hips wider than shoulders, a scruff of curly reddish hair cut close, with those big Harder ears and small Harder eyes hidden behind his bulb of a freckled nose. But she finds him awkwardly beautiful, like a calf or colt. He acts like a shy boy, and she finds herself feeling like a shy girl, and it shocks her—it assaults her how simple and nice it is, how childlike, how innocent to be shy and embarrassed and nervous, and how normal that is, how utterly typical it is everywhere and for everyone except her.