Sound Of Gravel, The (29 page)

I was annoyed and jealous. We had all grown up together; why was Maria getting the sort of attention I craved from boys? And why was the boy who was giving her that attention Matt? Could it be that Matt and Maria were attracted to
each other
? Maria was our stepsister. Why hadn’t I known anything about this before tonight?

Anthony asked me to dance again, but this time I said no thank you, turned, and slowly made my way toward Mom’s bench.

“Matt and Maria sure are dancin’ close to each other,” Mom said, leaning in so I could hear her over the music. “I get the feelin’ they like each other.”

“What do you mean by
like
?” I asked, not wanting to acknowledge what I myself had seen.

“I mean, I think he wants to go out with her,
like on a date
.”

I shrugged. “Maria hasn’t said anything to me about liking Matt.”

“Well, he better be careful. Maria has a jealous streak just like her mother. He can’t marry her, Ruthie.” I shook my head as I wondered how Mom had already made such a mental leap. “Can you imagine what she’ll do when he tries to take another wife? Good luck trying to pull the reins in on Maria.”

I looked at Mom blankly. She put her lips to my ear and cupped her hand over them, leaning in close to say, “Lane’s told me that she’s a hellion at home and won’t do anything her parents tell her to. Never, not even after he whips her.”

Meanwhile, Matt and Maria were oblivious to everyone, including me and Mom. They were still dancing with their arms locked, their heads resting on each other’s shoulder. I just stared in disbelief.

“Hey, Ruthie. Wanna dance?” Anthony asked again.

“No thanks, Anthony. I’m not feeling very good.” I got up and made my way through the crowded church, feeling as if I were in a movie of someone else’s life. Maybe it was Matt and Maria’s movie, I thought, as the song ended and they slowly, lazily awoke from their dream, walking hand in hand off the floor.

Matt nodded at Mom, who was motioning to him from across the room. He had the good sense to leave Maria behind as he strode across the dance floor, the white tile now heavily scuffed with black boot marks.

I could tell from Mom’s expression that she was ready to leave, but before she spoke, the band struck up a Mexican two-step. Matt grabbed Mom’s hand and pulled her to the dance floor. She turned giddy, placing her hand delicately on her grown son’s shoulder while he put his arm around her midback. Her loose-fitting, fuchsia polyester dress swung back and forth just below her knees as Matt guided her across the floor smoothly, expertly. Mom looked delighted. She missed a step from time to time, not having been raised on Mexican music like her children, but in no time Matt had her on track again.

My brother’s skill as a dance partner impressed me—obviously, he’d spent many nights on California dance floors. The entire room seemed to be sighing collectively in appreciation. Mom, feeling the attention, became almost ecstatic. The song grew faster, and so did their twirling. The two of them were soaked in sweat, and Matt, his face now the color of Mom’s dress, looked as if he might collapse. But he didn’t stop. He seemed to know what the moment meant to her, that she was for once getting a taste, however brief, of the attention and adoration she’d always longed for. I hadn’t seen that sort of happy expression on her face in years, and it only added to my melancholy. Would I end up like her, I wondered, shackled to a man who appreciated me so little that the only thing that made me feel loved was attention from my adult son?

The song ended and Mom mopped the sweat from her forehead and said something to Matt, who nodded, pulled his truck keys from his pocket, and handed them to her. He wanted to stay and dance some more with Maria, Mom told me during the drive home. Otherwise, it was a silent trip, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to talk about Matt and Maria’s love affair. How could they have fallen for each other without my knowing? And how come no one seemed interested in me?

My only prospect so far had been one of the church elders, twenty years my senior, who’d asked Mom’s permission to court me. Mom refused, though not because I didn’t like him or because she wanted to protect me from a relationship with an older polygamist, but because he was my first cousin and she thought that such a marriage wouldn’t be advisable in our family, given our history of producing developmentally disabled children. I felt as if I’d dodged a bullet. I thought about the many LeBaron wives I knew, with their blank, expressionless faces, mindlessly watching after crowds of children. People talked about happiness and love, but I witnessed precious little evidence of it.

I knew that my life would never be happy if all it amounted to was having several children by a shared husband. I couldn’t understand how love or adoration could be possible in that kind of arrangement, and I desperately wanted those things. But I also knew that it wasn’t enough to want them. You had to know how to get them. Mom couldn’t teach me that because she didn’t know herself. She couldn’t show me how to be happy, only how to barely survive.

34

I didn’t think it would be Christmas before I saw Matt again, much less a white Christmas. For the first time in my childhood, the colony’s dormant fields were blanketed in a thin layer of snow—as far as the eye could see—and the peaks of the Blue Mountains were capped in white. Mom put up a fake tree that she’d bought at a yard sale the previous summer, one missing so many limbs it looked like something Charlie Brown might have chosen. Still, we dressed up the dilapidated thing as best we could, with Popsicle sticks and yarn, long ropes of popcorn I strung together with needle and thread, and a few strands of tiny lights that blinked in the living-room window. And of course Mom had picked up a few secondhand re-gifts in El Paso the week before.

Though it was another lean Christmas, something was different about it, something besides the snow. The anger I’d harbored toward Mom began to decline with the temperature. I still couldn’t understand how she could remain married to a man such as Lane, but I also began to appreciate and admire her ability to create something out of nothing.

And I worried about her. Just weeks away from delivering her tenth child, the toll of all her previous pregnancies seemed written on her face. She suffered agonizing migraine headaches that would keep her up all night. Some days she stayed in bed until lunchtime and took naps in a feeble attempt to restore her energy. She bore the burden alone, with Lane gone for weeks or even months at a time.

That fall, I had enrolled in secretarial classes offered by a local school, but as the holidays approached, Mom asked me to withdraw. “All Ruthie really needs to know about life she can learn at home and in church,” she told the schoolmaster. “A young girl doesn’t need more than that to find a good man and raise a family.” If that was the case, the schoolmaster replied, then why did you enroll her in the first place? Mom’s face and reaction looked as if she’d just bit into a lemon. “I can’t take care of my family by myself. I need her help at home,” she said as she picked up her purse and left.

I didn’t resent Mom’s decision. I was far behind in my schoolwork, having already missed several days because of Mom’s health, and the shorthand and typing classes were all taught in Spanish by an old lady with a cane who perpetually sneered at me. Even before she realized how little I knew of the language, she would shriek at me,
“Chapucera!”
—cheater—every time I leaned over to ask a classmate what the woman was talking about.

So I returned home to learn more about the domestic arts. Each morning, after telling Aaron to fire up the barrel heater, I prepared the milk for everyone’s breakfast by skimming the cream off the top and adding it to a container until I’d collected enough for butter, which I made in the blender. Our home was well run, it seemed to me, and no homework was required.

“Hey, Ruthie, can we go outside and play in the snow?” Micah asked the day before Christmas in his raspy, early-morning voice.

“You guys need to eat breakfast and get ready for the day first.” I smiled as I cut thick, round slices of bread on an old wooden cutting board. Spreading raw honey over the top, I plopped a slice into each of five plastic bowls and covered them with milk. Micah scraped a chair against the cold cement floor and took a seat, and the others swiftly followed. I turned a ten-quart saucepan over and placed it on one of the chairs for Leah, who was eighteen months old and proving to indeed be just as stubborn as her namesake, Grandpa Leo. She refused to sit in a high chair or do most anything else I asked of her.

The kids ate quickly and dressed themselves for snow play, all except Leah, of course, whose clothes were in Mom’s bedroom. Mom was still asleep, her belly swollen under a wine-red comforter and her head propped crookedly on pillows up against the stucco wall. We tiptoed in.

“Morning,” Mom rasped. She had deep, dark circles under her eyes that made her skin look even paler than usual. “Did the kids all get something to eat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re getting dressed for the snow now.” I laid Leah down on the bed, changed her diaper, and wrestled her into a pair of red corduroy pants, a long-sleeved, pink blouse, lace-trimmed socks, and tiny yellow rain boots covered in rubber ducks. As I carried Leah out of the room, I saw a hint of a smile on Mom’s face.
Maybe she’s feeling better,
I thought.

Back in the kitchen, Micah and Elena were raring to go, having dressed themselves in gloves, jackets, and scarves. “Oh, gosh. Let me wipe your faces,” I said to the pair, who both had honey from ear to ear and sleep still firmly crusted in their eyes. I ran a rag under water and mopped their freckled faces.

“Would you … Please, that’s too hard,” Micah said, pulling my hand away.

In addition to a stutter, Micah had an old soul’s way of speaking. He was formal and articulate without trying to be, and I couldn’t help but laugh when he asked me questions.

“Could we go outside now, please?”

I nodded at them both. A smile spread across their half-clean faces, revealing mouthfuls of corn-kernel-shaped teeth. I ran my fingers through their tangled hair in lieu of combing it, and then they darted past me and out the kitchen door, smiling the whole way. I picked up Leah and followed them outside into the fresh, cold air. The sky was a mass of thick, gray clouds.

The two kids giggled as they crunched happily in the paper-thin layer of snow. With Leah in my arms I watched for a few minutes as Micah explained to Elena how to make a snowball, his voice professorial and authoritative. He then demonstrated by rolling a ball of pebbles and dirt and dried twigs and a few flakes of snow together. Elena seemed impressed, wanted it for herself, and began chasing Micah all over the yard to get it.

In his search for what little snow remained, Micah made his way to the thick piles that rested near one of the fences on the edge of the yard. “Micah, please stay away from the fence,” I warned. Those fences had always been a mystery to me. Originally just a way to keep animals in or out, Lane had had the idea to use them to ferry electricity from one part of his farm to another. So, for several years, miles of black rubber tubes encasing electrical wiring ran along the fences. It was typical Lane: ugly but functional. Recently, Lane had decided to bury the tubes beneath the fences, but he hadn’t done it for appearance’ sake.

“He
had
to bury’em,” Mom said when I asked. “One of the wires got exposed somehow and a horse nicked it with his hoof.” Later, I discovered that the horse had been electrocuted, its lifeless body discovered near the fence. Lane’s electrical skills were so awful, you almost wanted to laugh.

“Matt’s here!” Micah and Elena yelled in unison as they ran excitedly to the driveway. My brother emerged from his truck and hugged both of them at the same time, one under each arm.

“Matt! Matt! W-w-what’s in the bag,” stuttered Micah, seeing the large, black garbage bag his brother was carrying.

“What’s inside, Matt?” Elena chirped in echo.

“Not yet.” He laughed, giving me a sideways hug. “Mom has to help me wrap the presents first.”

“Hello, everybody!” Matt boomed as we entered the quiet house, but a long while passed before we heard the shuffling of house slippers and Mom appeared in the living-room doorway. She looked small and weak, although she was smiling broadly. Matt looked alarmed as he approached her and wrapped her in a tight embrace.

“That tree looks worse than Charlie Brown’s,” Matt said with a chuckle.

“Oh, come on now.” Mom smiled and then winced. Her arm reached for her swollen belly as if she’d felt a sudden stomach pang. “Count your blessin’s. At least we have a tree this year.” She sat on the corner of the couch and let out a long breath.

The sound of Micah and Elena laughing outside caught Matt’s attention, and he pulled out his Kodak 110 camera and went to the window. “Well, look at that,” he said. The two kids had built a couple of snowpeople in the front yard, a larger one that wore Elena’s pink scarf and a smaller one beside it. “It’s Mom with one of her kids.”

“I don’t think so.” She laughed.

“Look, Ruthie,” he said.

I saw two figures covered in mud, twigs, and tiny rocks, snowpeople in name only, a pair of creatures who looked as if they were having one hell of a day. “That’s them all right.”

By dinnertime, Mom had perked up a bit and was ready to hear about Matt’s love life. “How are things going with Maria?”

I stared down at Leah, who was asleep in my lap.

Matt chewed on his thumbnail. “Good. They’re going real good.”

Mom was silent for a moment, as if she was thinking carefully. “Matt,” she finally said, waiting to continue till he looked at her. “If you marry Maria, you’re gonna have a hard time livin’ polygamy. She’s got a jealous streak just like her mother. She’ll give you hell when you try to take another wife.”

Matt pretended he hadn’t heard Mom and reached inside his back pocket to pull out a Velcro wallet with a photo of him and Maria taken at someone’s wedding. “Isn’t she the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen?”