Sound Of Gravel, The (27 page)

“Bye, Ruthie,” I heard my cousin say as I walked out of the house. I rolled my eyes, nodded, and made my way to the car. I caught up to Mom but she didn’t say a single word until I’d clicked the door closed.

“What the heck were you thinking?!”
she screamed, her voice so loud I thought the windows would shatter. “Is your head in the toilet? I’ve been looking all over the colony for you. What if a criminal had picked you up on the streets last night?
What’s wrong with you?!
” I slouched forward in the seat and stared at my white tennis shoes, stained permanently from my midnight run. I wanted to crawl into a hole and escape the tirade. I wished she’d said those last four words to Lane instead of me.

As we sped down the dirt road, I felt Mom’s eyes boring into the side of my head. “What Lane did to you wouldn’t seem so bad if some old Mexican man got ahold of you,” she ranted.

I couldn’t even muster a reply. We rode the rest of the way without speaking.

The silence continued after we arrived home. Lane had left for El Paso, and my siblings had been deposited at Susan’s house before Mom had gone looking for me. The house was empty. I had followed Mom through the kitchen door. She threw her keys onto the table and walked toward her bedroom.

Suddenly I heard a tremendous voice screaming. It took me a second to realize that the noise was coming from my own throat.

“WHY WON’T YOU LEAVE HIM!”
I heard myself yell with a burning rage that made my skin hot. Mom turned and faced me with the look of a determined bull staring at a matador’s red flag. The force of it had made me step back through the threshold and into the living room. But I couldn’t stop that part of me that was crying out, that part of me that no one had listened to. “Lane has never done anything for this family! He doesn’t even support us.” I stared right back into Mom’s angry glare. “He hardly ever comes home! Why do you keep having babies with him?! He is nothing but a worthless …
asshole
!”

Seeing the look on Mom’s face—the shock, the anger, the humiliation—I immediately wished I could suck the word back inside me. I had to look away and my body began to tremble. I turned back to apologize just in time to see her hand fly at me. She slapped my cheek so hard I had almost lost my balance. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I fell backward, my body cowering and my eyes wild. I looked like an animal on the side of the road that’d barely escaped being flattened by a truck.

“Don’t you dare speak to me like that.” She looked at me for a long time. “It’s none of your business why I stay with him.” She turned and hurried toward her room. “I am still your mother, and I deserve respect.”

*   *   *

ONE DAY A
few weeks later, as the summer began its transition to the cool desert winds of fall, there was a knock at the door. The man behind it wore a white straw cowboy hat, a thick, dark mustache, and glasses with bottle-thick lenses. He greeted us somberly, which is perhaps why I didn’t immediately recognize him as a church elder.

Mom invited him in, but as soon as he saw the multitude of faces behind her, he asked if he could have a word with her in private outside. I watched them through the foggy film of my breath on the living-room window, the two of them leaning up against his green Ford pickup. The man spoke slowly, gestured gently, with long pauses between his sentences. Mom nodded and cast her eyes at something in the distance. She didn’t say a word and never looked directly at the visitor.

Finally, Mom came back inside. She told me that the church had decided to hold meetings about some gossip they’d heard about Lane. The allegations that he’d been inappropriately touching girls in the colony had made their way to the church elders, and they wanted to separate fact from fiction. Mom, Lane, and all his wives were being summoned to a series of hearings. If the rumors were even partly true, the man said, they would need to take swift action against my stepfather.

Weeks earlier, Sally and Cynthia had told me that they’d discovered that Lane had abused another of their sisters. Rumors of his abuse—of several of us—had slowly spread throughout the colony. I didn’t know how that had happened, as Mom had been determined to keep our problems within the family, and I was never approached or questioned by a soul. Then again, given that Lane had molested at least four of us, it was a wonder that the news hadn’t spread sooner.

Thus began a community tribunal about Lane, and one I thought would be much fairer than our family conversations in the Chevette, although neither my stepsisters nor I were ever called to testify. We stayed home and babysat. I spent those nights playing cards with my siblings, doing anything I could to keep my mind off what was being said in the meetings. I’d lie awake in bed, embarrassed at the thought of what Lane might be saying to the church elders, who were also my family. It nauseated me to think that he was telling them that his stepdaughters had enjoyed his advances. I thought about asking to attend a meeting myself to tell the other side of the story, but I doubted anyone would listen to me. What chance did I have of being heard by the leaders of a church who believed its men were training to be gods? Plus, I was too embarrassed and ashamed to discuss the details of what had happened in front of all of them.

Mom was alone when she returned from the first meeting. In a tired voice, she explained that everyone present had been questioned as in a court. Lane sat in front of twelve judges—all male church leaders—and called witnesses, in this case his wives. She said that the church leaders had read passages from the Book of Mormon and the Bible so that the women could understand what child abuse was and how to handle it. Still, Mom seemed to have been more affected by Lane’s repentance than the church’s warnings. She described his slumped posture, the sad sincerity of his public apology, and of course his tears. Did I have any idea, she wondered, how hard it was for him to cry in front of that group of men, his lifelong friends and fellow church elders?

The meetings went on for weeks before the elders finally announced that they’d made their decision. The night of the verdict, I had fallen asleep in Mom’s bed when I heard the sound of the kitchen door opening. I heard two sets of shoes on the cement floor. The light in the bedroom suddenly came on, so bright that it hurt my eyes, and I peered over the blanket. Mom’s eyes looked tired, red, and swollen, while Lane’s looked angry. He took his clothes from the pipe where they’d been hanging, folded them, and stuffed them into a black plastic bag. Mom sat on the bed and watched him, her expression forlorn. Neither acknowledged me.

Lane swiftly exited the bedroom with his bag of clothes, Mom trailing behind him. “Aren’t you going to even say good-bye to me?” she pleaded through her tears. “Lane, why won’t you say good-bye to me?” He silently strolled through the kitchen and out the door. “Good-bye,” she said as he started his truck. “Good-bye,” she called out as he drove away.

The church leaders had decided to ban Lane from the colony for two years, after which they would reconvene to decide whether he should be allowed to return to his families. Mom sobbed as she recounted the events of the evening. “In the meantime, the wives have to take turns visiting him out of town or in the States, so you’ll have to be here to watch your brothers and sister.” She said it as if she wanted me to respond sympathetically. She buried her face in her palms. “Oh, Ruthie, what am I going to do? God, how am I going to handle all of this? Why couldn’t we just keep this within our own family? Why does the whole town have to know about it?” The weight of her questions felt heavy on me as I sank deeper into the mattress and tried to think of something to say.

*   *   *

OVER THE NEXT
few months, Lane’s wives took turns going to care for him. I babysat for days or weeks at a time during Mom’s stints with her husband. I didn’t enjoy all the chores and housework that fell to me, but I was so relieved to have Lane gone that I did everything Mom asked of me without complaint or protest.

Only a couple of months after he’d left, Mom arrived home from a visit with him carrying a gallon jar of peanut butter. While my siblings fought each other for the chance to make themselves sandwiches on Mom’s stale homemade bread, she took me to her bedroom so we could talk privately.

Her face was relaxed and smiling, and I felt myself relaxing too. She hadn’t seemed that happy in a long time.

“Listen, Ruthie”—she put her arm around me as we sat together at the bottom edge of her bed—“before I left for El Paso, my sister wives and I went to the council and asked if they’d let Lane come home.”

I felt the blood rushing out of my face. I looked down and shook my head.

“Taking care of the farm is too hard without his help, and we feel like this family needs a man around to lead us and to discipline the kids. They need to see their dad once in a while.” She sounded calm and almost excited as she spoke, as if she hadn’t even considered how I might feel. “And it’s unrealistic to make him stay at all these hotels and make us go out of town to see him. We miss him, and he’s lonely without his families. He needs us as much as we need him.”

My gaze fell to my bare feet. I tried to focus on them to keep from crying.

“Also, Susan and I just found out we’re both pregnant.”

I nodded and rolled my eyes. I felt sick at the thought of their still wanting to have sex with Lane after what he’d done to their daughters.

“I have to … go.” I stood on my legs weakly. “Is that it?”

“Well, no.” Mom adjusted her glasses. “The council thinks Lane has suffered enough for what he did—all the public embarrassment and shame. And he
has,
Ruthie, more than you can imagine.” I pulled my arm away just as she was about to reach for it. “So the council decided to let him come back.”

I nodded to myself, walked through the door and down the hall, hoping I’d be out of the house before she spoke again, but she called out to me, “I want you to know that you don’t have to see him or be around him anymore. You can leave and spend the night at Sally’s or Maria’s houses whenever it’s his turn to sleep here.”

By then I was walking out the door of the house. I could still hear Mom, but her voice sounded distant and small, as thin as the promises that fell from her lips.

“I swear to you, Ruthie, if anything happens again, I’ll be the first to take him to the authorities.”

32

Just like that, we were “a family again,” as Mom put it, which in our case meant spending the next two years in a whirlwind of moving from one place to another. Mom would say it was too hard to survive in LeBaron with the newly devalued peso, and suddenly we would head for Albuquerque or El Paso. We’d follow Lane around for months, living in campers and trailers as he failed again and again to make money hauling loads in his semi. I avoided him, and mostly he left me alone. We even lived in San Diego with Matt for a few months. Then, just as predictably, Mom would grow tired of moving around or become preoccupied with Babylon’s bankrupt morality, and she would move us back home to LeBaron.

In the midst of all this ping-ponging back and forth between two countries, we added a new member to the family. Leah was born in the summer of 1985, when I was thirteen years old. Mom named her after Grandpa because, she said, the baby was as stubborn as her father, Leo. Leah looked just like Micah had when he was a baby, another snowman child with invisible lashes and brows.

The following year, we finally settled back in LeBaron “for good,” according to Mom. Matt, then seventeen, was still living in California, but he would come down to visit every now and then. I was fourteen but no longer in school—Mom insisted that it was more important for me to be around to help her take care of the house and the kids.

Aaron was nine years old and in the third grade. Micah, kind and quiet, followed Aaron around constantly, trying to do everything his older brother did. Elena had grown into an adorable and intelligent three-year-old. At a year old, Leah was the baby in the family. She had started walking before she was even a year old and was a curious child. She’d follow me from room to room, desperate to know what I was doing and wanting to explore everything she could. Even though he was allowed to live in LeBaron again, Lane continued to work odd jobs in the States. With her seven children more or less settled wherever we were—Matt in California, Audrey in the state hospital, and the rest of us on the farm—Mom started accompanying Lane on more of his trips. She’d leave home for a long weekend and put me in charge.

Luke, at sixteen, was still wandering off and getting lost in the Mexican countryside or going with brothers or cousins to work with them on their farms. Despite his handicaps, he was the strongest and most athletic of all Mom’s children. He became a helpful worker on my relatives’ farms, where he loaded hay or cleaned corrals for a few pesos a day. He couldn’t drive because he’d begun having light seizures that caused his body to tremble and his hands to lose control of whatever they were holding. He also lacked the hand-eye coordination needed to pop a clutch and shift gears, or to brake while keeping the steering wheel straight. But he was gentle and loving. He adored animals, so much so that he refused to eat meat. His eyes would fill with tears whenever anyone talked about butchering cattle or when Mom killed a chicken for supper. Her few attempts at getting Luke to eat meat failed. He would retch and spit it back onto his plate.

Most days, Luke would find his way home after work, but if I hadn’t seen him by sunset, I’d go looking for him. One Saturday evening in June, when Mom and Leah were in El Paso visiting Lane, and it was late and Luke hadn’t yet come home, I fired up Lane’s Datsun pickup, a beat-up, old truck he left on the farm as its bed was often stacked with bales of hay. I couldn’t drive on the highway—the truck didn’t have a front windshield and I didn’t have a license—but that didn’t stop me from searching every dirt road in the colony. I drove off the farm to go look for my brother. The sky was ablaze in spectacular shades of orange, red, and plum, and the warm wind blew in my face. I spotted Luke on the gravel road that led to our house, and when I stopped to let him in, he wore a goofy smile as if he were the happiest boy on the planet. His messy hair was peppered with dry, yellow hay, he had dirt underneath his fingernails and embedded in his cuticles, and fresh mud was on the bottoms of his tennis shoes. I wanted to tell him to brush himself off before getting in the truck, but then I realized the truck was even filthier than he was.