The Lonely Polygamist (17 page)

Golden, drinking water by the gallon and rubbing his sun-stung eyes, worked up and down the valley, framing, rough masonry, ditch work, you name it—anything that required a strong back and no skill. He lived in his daddy’s house, worked for his daddy’s construction company, but saw very little of him; Royal was a busy man. Having burned through most of his uranium profits during his Las Vegas years, he used what was left to buy real estate all over the valley and to start up Big Indian Construction, named after his first uranium claim. He worked all day negotiating contracts and submitting bids, and in the evenings would attend something called School of the Prophets, where the male hierarchy of the church would meet to discuss doctrine, read scripture and debate vital matters such as the exact date of the Second Coming and whose responsibility it was to pump out the church house’s outdoor toilet. Even though Royal had been baptized only a year, he had been ordained a member of the Melchizedek priesthood and, once he began taking wives, would be called to the Council of the Twelve, an order of apostles of which there were currently a grand total of nine.

The only thing Royal and Golden did together, besides an occasional meal and attending church, was bomb-watching. Every few weeks before dawn they would drive up to Royal’s favorite overlook on Egyptian Butte and wait for the great white-green flash to expose in an instant the whole broken desert plain, horizon to horizon. Once the mushroom cloud had gone up, lit from within by extraterrestrial fires, Royal would give his head a slow shake, overcome. “Oh look at her,” he’d say, his voice moist with reverence, as if looking into the sweet face of a long-awaited newborn. “Isn’t she a
beaut
.”

At his own expense, Royal had gutted and renovated the sixty-year-old sandstone church where the group’s meetings were held, and his tithing amounted to more than that of all the other members put together. Unlike the valley’s Mormons who peopled the towns along the river, the members of the Living Church of God, who mostly lived on farms and compounds at the eastern edge of the valley, did not hold positions of power, sat on no boards or councils, had nothing but their little church on the hill and each other. They were generally poor, hardscrabble, and suspicious of outsiders of any stripe—so suspicious there was wide consensus among them that Royal was a spy from the government, somebody sent by Hoover to take notes, write names, and call down an FBI raid that would send the men to prison and the women and children into the care of Social Services. But with Uncle Chick’s assurances, and Royal’s easy southern manners and open wallet, the people came to believe he was exactly what Uncle Chick said he was: an angel, of sorts, sent from on high. There even began a whispering that this strange little man with the bright eyes might be the One Mighty and Strong, come to redeem them all.

Which left Golden at a loss to explain his own presence. Who was the giant with the sunburn, and what did he want? He was obviously no government agent—too big to blend in, with the openmouthed expression of an idiot—and nothing about him suggested he had been sent by a higher power; truly, there was something more disturbing than suspicious about a six-foot-six man whose pants were too short. Shoulders hunched apologetically, strangled by the checkerboard polyester tie his father knotted for him, he would sit in the back of the chapel those first few Sundays with the latecomers and crying babies, and do his best to make sense of Uncle Chick’s sermons, which seemed to be dedicated to a single central theme: that this world, and most of the people in it, were all going to hell in a very large handbasket.

In late July, Golden helped his father and some of the other men erect an old canvas circus tent on the grass field next to the church. Uncle Chick had bought it from a bankrupt Hungarian circus that had washed up in St. George, and while it wasn’t exactly the holy tabernacle of Old Testament times, it served well enough as the main meetinghouse for a few months while the renovations were under way. Now, on Pioneer Day, which celebrated the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley, it would serve to shelter a congregation of double the usual 150: family and friends come from afar to help celebrate, and some of the independent polygamists who lived in the surrounding country: families who lived by their own theologies and rules, but who liked to escape their desert compounds and socialize once in a while.

The circus tent was not an ideal venue for a spiritual meeting; it was almost unbearably stuffy and smelled of moldy hay and ancient elephant farts. The canvas walls, which bore the ink-stamped name of the manufacturer—
Sarasota Tent and Sail
—every ten feet, were mildewed and stained, the fiber ropes frayed and untrustworthy, and in the smallest breeze the whole thing flapped and creaked like a sailboat gone to seed. But on this particular summer Saturday evening, filled to bursting with freshly scrubbed worshipers and lit up with the low sun like a giant Chinese lantern, it seemed almost too exotic and far-fetched a place for the dour fundamentalist proceedings about to take place under its roof.

A low plywood dais had been built, upon which sat the solemn elders of the church and rat-faced Sister Pectol, who played her portable organ with a funereal air. Golden could see the top of his father’s head just behind the row of apostles; he was there to attend to the Prophet, who sat in the place of honor just to the right of the pulpit in his old-fashioned oak and leather wheelchair. The Prophet, an old man made mostly of thin skin and sharp bones, was recovering from what would be the first of many strokes. By grumbling out one side of his mouth he communicated the will of God through his son, Uncle Chick, who had reluctantly taken over leadership of the church, even though the keys of priesthood authority and mantle of true leadership would not be passed down until the Prophet’s death.

When the Prophet drooled, Golden’s father was on the job to tidy up his chin with a white handkerchief folded into a square.

Uncle Chick gave the signal and the organ fell silent. A prayer was offered and Uncle Chick stood, not behind the pulpit as was his normal practice, but next to it, as if to show he had nothing to hide. He cleared his throat violently, “
Hargh-arrhmgh!
” and in his gruff way welcomed all present and began reciting scripture in a gravelly monotone that sent Golden’s mind immediately to wandering. He looked at his hands, pleasantly callused and nicked from the shingling work he’d been doing all month, and at his tanned arms and the new aluminum Timex watch he’d bought with his earnings, and his thoughts turned to Sylvia Anderson, the chubby seventeen-year-old with braided blond hair and a wet, red mouth who was the talk of the church for her open refusal to marry Brother Billet, a grease monkey and part-owner of Virgin Tire and Automotive.

Sylvia Anderson had walked up to Golden after church last Sunday and asked him if he’d give her a ride in his new car. Thinking she had a destination in mind—maybe her family had left for home without her—he asked where she wanted to go. She shrugged and licked her lips in a way that commanded Golden’s full attention.

“How about San Diego?” she said. “You get some of your dad’s money and we’ll drive all the way to California, maybe go to the beach.”

Golden sneezed and nodded agreeably, but found himself unable to form words or even sounds; he just nodded and smiled with his lips pursed—
Don’t let her see your overbite!
—until Sylvia finally turned to leave. Only after she’d gone out the back door of the church was he able to call out after her, “Well, I guess I’d have to get my license first!”

The humiliation of that moment did not stop him from fantasizing all week about the road trip to San Diego and the possibilities it presented, the potential sleeping arrangements in motel rooms, maybe a little motel-pool skinny-dipping, who could say? He liked to imagine Sylvia in the motel shower innocently asking Golden if he might bring her a towel, and the curving form of her body readily apparent behind the semitransparent curtain…“
Argh-argh-harrghk…ahgrrrrrhk!
” Uncle Chick fell into an apocalyptic coughing fit only to surface suddenly and rap the pulpit in a way that dislodged Golden from his reverie. “Who do you think you are?” he called in a near-shout, and at first Golden thought Uncle Chick was speaking directly to him, had divined not only that Golden was an interloper, a faithless imposter who had no business in this place, but also that he had been entertaining questionable thoughts about innocent girls taking showers while all around the Lord’s servants worshiped and prayed. “Have you looked into your own heart? Have you asked yourself:
Am I worthy?
Have you asked yourself:
Am I blameless before God?
”

Maybe Golden had missed something, because this seemed like an altogether different Uncle Chick than the one who started the meeting. Uncle Chick, an old doghole miner and part-time scrubland rancher who’d spent some wild years in the navy before coming back into the fold, had never been much of an orator, but tonight he was actually rocking the pulpit, speaking in cadences vaguely Shakespearean, looking down into the audience as if measuring the faith and conviction of each member in turn, including Golden, who tried to hide behind the bobbing gray-haired head of Sister Comruddy. Uncle Chick declared what all in the audience already knew: that these were the last days, that the Second Coming of the Lord was fast upon us, and when it happened, would we be ready?

Then Uncle Chick paused, shifting gears a little, and in a hushed voice began to tell of those they had gathered to celebrate: the pioneers who had sacrificed everything to leave their comfortable lives in Albany and Liverpool and Oslo, who sold all their belongings to cross the vast plains in wagons and handcarts in search of a place where they could practice their religion without fear of torment or persecution; men, women and children who had suffered and died, who
had
given their lives for the gospel that we, today, took for granted. He told of thirst and disease and women dying in childbirth in the back of jouncing wagons; he told of shallow graves dug next to rutted trails and of starving handcart companies forced to boil and eat their own shoe leather; he told the story of his own great-grandmother, whose youngest boy—nicknamed Penny for his bright brown eyes—died of pneumonia one blizzarding January day in eastern Wyoming, and the terrible howling and snarling, late that night, as wolves dug up the small body and tore it to pieces, the grieved mother in the meager protection of her covered wagon tearing batting out of a quilt and stuffing it in her ears to ward off the sound.

Uncle Chick went still, and in the sudden quiet there were a few sniffles, a stifled sob.

“And what about us?” he demanded, so loudly and suddenly that a child in the front whimpered. “What have
we
sacrificed? What have
we
given? Nothing, that’s what. We complain about our lot. We gripe. Ah, it’s so darn hard, we say, to live this gospel, to bear the burden of the Principle. Well, when you begin to feel sorry for yourself, remember those good saints, hundreds, thousands of them died for you. Died for me. Died for us all. Gave up their lives, just like Christ in Gethsemane, blood coming from His every pore with the agony of the sins of this world, my sins, your sins, each and every one, the agony of a million sins worse than any death could ever be.”

Uncle Chick glanced at Sister Pectol, who began to play “My Saviour’s Love.” And the congregation sang uncertainly, with quavering voices,

There is something wrong with him; Golden tries to sing, but his throat has gone dry and his chest hurts, he can hardly breathe. His head throbs and a strange prickling sensation runs up his legs and hovers at the back of his neck.

Nearly every Sunday of his childhood he had spent hunkered down next to his mother at meetings like this one, with this same talk of hell and damnation, of the sin and sorrow of this life, and even though he’d occasionally felt the urge to stand up and wave his arms over his head like a nutcase and offer his soul up to Jesus, somehow he’d managed to resist what Reverend Peete had called the promptings of the Spirit; he’d decided church was just another opportunity for his mother to flaunt her misery before the world. He realizes that since coming here she has crossed his mind less and less; he has left her behind with barely a passing thought. But tonight, sitting among this throng of strangers in their starched homemade dresses and ostentatious neckties, some of them dabbing furtively at their eyes, some tearing up outright, Golden feels a portion of his mother’s misery, feels her shoulder shaking next to his as she weeps for her own barren life, hears her singing this very hymn as she has a hundred times, and suddenly, his eyes brimming with his own tears, he has a vision of her death, lonely and desperate in some empty room, and though he can’t know it at the time, he is at least partly prescient: five and a half years from now in the middle of a hard January freeze, Dr. Darkly will call with the news that his mother, having suffered lately from some vague medical maladies, has passed away, quietly, in her sleep. There will be no funeral, no service of any kind, according to his mother’s wishes. But he will fly back to Louisiana to do his filial duty, which will entail little more than paying his last respects at the crematorium in Lafayette and hauling his mother’s meager possessions to the local Goodwill. He will spend the next two days comforting a bereft Dr. Darkly and wandering around Bernice in a misty winter rain, trying to connect to something, to some meaningful sorrow, to translate his own history in a way that will make it possible for him to cry for his mother’s passing, but he won’t find what he is looking for and will board the plane feeling nothing but relief.

No, he will not cry after his mother’s death, but he does now, he is a confused boy shamed at his recent betrayal, so sorry for the happiness he could not give her, for the worthless bits and scraps that make up his pitiful existence, his every weakness and sin, and by the time the hymn is over, he knows too—don’t ask him how—that his father will die soon, will leave him again for good, and now he begins to weep in earnest.