The Lonely Polygamist (28 page)

Uncle Chick, getting to be an old man himself but whipcord-strong, hefted his father into his arms, cradling him in the manner of a ventriloquist with his wooden dummy, and they went like that down to the river, heading east, away from the others. By the time the men caught up with him, the Prophet was tottering ankle-deep in the water and shuffling from side to side, investigating the water with his cane. It was a wide spot in the river, a good spot for fishing carp and catfish, and the water, deep and black in the grainy light of dusk, was speckled white with cottonwood fluff and tufts of foam. Nighthawks chittered, and a few sluggish bats wove invisible patterns in the cooling air. Picking their way upstream, the men whispered: in this part of the river there was no willow in sight, only a single enormous cottonwood split in half by lightning.

Maybe the Prophet had confused a willow with a cottonwood, but to those men, it didn’t matter. This old man, standing in the water with his cane, this was why they lived the way they did, this was why they believed in the hard truths of the Principle. The Mormons—who had abandoned the Principle a hundred years ago, and who were at this very minute out conducting their own searches with their well-organized search parties, with their maps and grids and hot meals prepared by their women—had many things the fundamentalists did not: they had their expensive modern chapels, their temples and their worldwide bureaucracy and millions of clean-cut members, they had their Donny and Marie. But they did not have this priesthood authority, the ancient biblical power, borne by men of God like the Prophet, who spoke the hard truth, who conversed directly with God and had the ability, like Jesus of old, to release a dead child from her watery grave.

Golden was not there to see it, but they said that the Prophet picked around the bank for a good ten minutes, muttering and bent, searching with his cane. All at once he pushed out into a small hole choked with pussy willow stalks, as if he’d decided to go for a little swim, the water rising to his thighs, his waist, and then he reached down. Some said it was as if the small pale hand rose up through the green murk to grasp the old man’s. Some went so far as to say that in the dim light, as the body was pulled to the surface with Uncle Chick on one side and the Prophet on the other, that the dead girl’s skin appeared white and unblemished, her left arm straight, her body without handicap or flaw, as perfect as it would be come the morning of the resurrection when she rose from her grave to greet her Savior.

When they brought her back to Golden, wrapped in a wool horse blanket that smelled of dust, she was not perfect anymore. Her hair was knotted with grit and debris, her teeth broken, her nostrils plugged with greenish mud, her skin punctured and abraded from the twelve-mile journey downriver, her china-white body blackened at the edges like the porcelain of an old sink. He would see her like this later, when he carried her into the house to her mother, but for now he slept, his head lodged between the seat and the door, his face still pinched with suffering. The men shushed each other and, like parents of a colicky child who had finally nodded off, tiptoed on the gravel, wincing with every sound, sliding into their pickups and shutting the doors with quiet clicks. Exhausted, they switched on their headlights and in a single procession drove through the lowering darkness to their families to tell of the miracle they’d seen, to hug their own children tight.

RAYMOND THE OSTRICH

He stood under a bright full moon, the grass cold with dew beneath his feet. He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d come to be standing out in front of Old House barefoot, the fly of his jeans undone. The last thing he remembered was dozing in the parlor armchair, exhausted after a long day: visitors and mourners streaming through the house for Glory’s wake, and Glory in her coffin next to him in her frilly white dress, bows in her hair. Except for his little nap in the car on the way home from Cuttels Bridge, he himself had not slept since she’d gone missing. Tonight he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her there alone in the parlor, of going up to bed as if it were just another ordinary night, as if tomorrow were not her funeral and burial, the last time he would ever see her on this earth.

Beverly had gone to bed hours ago, at ten-thirty sharp, as if it were any ordinary night, and he resented her for it. Resented her for her calmness in the face of this calamity, for her lack of tears, for her allegiance to routine and the maintenance of order at all costs. Most of all, he resented her for not openly blaming him for their daughter’s death, for the shocked fury she choked back when he delivered the terrible news, for the three words she whispered as he clutched at her, spoken so quietly he could barely make them out: “How could you.”

He was heartsick and tired, his whole body a pulsing ache, but he could not stand the thought of going back and sitting in the chair for the rest of the night. His legs twitched as if they wanted to run, his hands flexed with the desire to break something. He had felt this way all day, jumpy, and since this morning, when he had gone to retrieve Glory at the new funeral home, an old pioneer brick-and-sandstone mansion on the main drag in Hurricane. George Baugh had taken over for Teddy Hornbeck after he sold everything—including his hearse to Golden—and moved to Florida. Mr. Baugh, a chubby pink man in an emerald-green suit that made him look like an artichoke, had a pointy head from which a wisp of gray hair rose like a curl of smoke. When Golden had arrived to take Glory, Mr. Baugh, standing next to a desk in the richly appointed parlor busy with fern stands and overstuffed furniture and heavy velvet draperies, explained that his “people” would deliver Glory to Big House, it was part of the services he offered.

Golden told the man that he had come to take his daughter, he had the perfect car to do so, and he needed her home for the wake that was to begin soon. He looked at his shoes so Mr. Baugh could not see his puffy, wept-out eyes. He said, “Just tell me how much I owe, please, and we can settle this now.”

Mr. Baugh shuffled his papers. Mr. Baugh sighed. Mr. Baugh explained, with a thick layer of condescension sugaring his voice, that Golden needn’t pay right now, that along with the casket, and the embalming and preparing of the body, there was also the delivery of the body to the residence for the wake, the delivery of the body to the funeral site, and finally, of course, the burial.

“It’s all one package deal, sir,” the man said, smiling with a false charm. “You go on home now, why don’t you, be with your family, and let us take care of everything.”

Golden shifted his weight, felt both his fists clench. After those initial hours of violent, wracking grief, every muscle and nerve alive with pain, he’d felt numb. All through the hours of last night and this early morning he’d been floating on vapors, his insides gone cold and still, his mind a whistling void; when he walked, he could not feel his own feet touch the ground. But hearing Mr. Baugh talk in his smug way about delivery and package deals, while his daughter lay dead somewhere in the rooms of this house, sparked a flame inside him. All at once his hands itched with the urge to punch Mr. Baugh’s smug little face.

“I’m going to take her now, please,” Golden said. “Show me where she is and that’ll be it.”

Mr. Baugh reassembled a professional smile and, gathering the last of his patience from deep within, repeated his explanation about the embalming, the delivery, the burial, the package deal. Before he could finish, Golden stepped around the desk and started down a hallway toward the back of the house. Mr. Baugh hooted and tried to get in front of him, but Golden gave the little man a slight hip check that sent him pedaling sideways into a potted palm. The first room Golden looked in was full of chairs, the other an office, and then there was the room with four caskets, each of them gleaming in the morning light like sleek automobiles freshly washed and waxed. A thick chemical smell made Golden’s eyes water.

From a safe distance, Mr. Baugh shouted that he was calling the police.

“Which one is she?” Golden called, but he already knew. She was in the small one, the one Beverly had picked out, the one that was not a boxy casket, but an actual coffin, shaped to accommodate the human body, built with a rich cherrywood, winged angels carved into the lid. He lifted the casket off its stainless steel bier and was surprised by how light it was: it felt like he was carrying a box of pillows. Out in the parlor, Mr. Baugh barked into the phone and waved a letter opener in Golden’s direction to make it clear he was not incapable of defending himself. In the distance, a siren started up—it was the siren the Hurricane fire department set off every day at noon, but Golden didn’t know that. He imagined red lights, police cars racing in from every direction, unholstered pistols and bullhorns. He paused for a moment, considering his options and then tucked the coffin under one arm, pushed open the heavy oak door with the other, and sprinted across the lawn to his car.

To arrive home only to find that he’d stolen an empty coffin—Glory’s body was back at the funeral home, laid out on a porcelain table in the embalming room, waiting to be transferred to the casket with which Golden had absconded—only made the burn of shame and anger spread inside him like a fever. Beverly had to go back to the funeral home, smooth things out with Mr. Baugh and the responding sheriff’s deputy, while Golden stayed home, locked himself in the unfinished Doll House and wept with a hot, incoherent rage.

It had stayed with him all day, that anger, and he didn’t know what to do with it. It rose and receded in his throat, smoldered and bunched under the surface of his skin. Now, in the dark hours of morning, he seethed, hot tears leaking down his face like water running over the sides of a boiling pot. He stalked around the west side of the house, past the Doll House, where the moon’s reflection stretched and purled on the blue-black surface of the slow-moving river. Something white, hanging suspended in the air on the other side of the river, caught his eye. In a spasm of hope, his mind leapt to the thought that it was an apparition, the spirit of his little girl come back to offer what comfort she could, to let him know that she continued to exist in some peaceful beyond, that she still loved him, that wherever she was, she waited for him there. He moved closer, squinting, his heart turning over in his chest, until he realized what he was looking at was not a spirit presence of any kind, but the white breast feathers of Raymond the Ostrich.

He squeezed his head between his forearms and heard himself make a small choking noise of despair. When he looked up, the big bird was still standing at the fence, lifting one foot into the air, then the other. It stretched its long neck and let out a short, guttural squawk that sounded like a challenge. Golden stumbled forward, his rage returning to him in an instant, and it occurred to him that this bird was the last creature to have seen his girl alive. He found a rock in the mud of the pasture and, with a clumsy three-part motion, heaved it in the general direction of the ostrich. He waited for the sound of its landing, which never came. He moved closer, pitched a jagged hunk of white sandstone that landed with a splash in the middle of the river. Once at the river’s bank, with ammunition in the form of round river stones on all sides, he found his range, throwing rock after rock, while Raymond stood at the fence, unperturbed and none the wiser, mocking Golden with a healthy display of feathers, staring him down with his yellow pearl of an eye. “
Bird!
” Golden growled, his voice broken and raw. “You stupid
bird!
”

He stepped out into the river, the water cutting against his legs with a cold that burned. He splashed across with the idea of pegging that bird with a rock from point-blank range, just to give him a little dose of pain, to startle him from his privileged position at the fence, to make him consider his own mortality for a moment, but by the time he had struggled out of the cold grip of the river, had felt the full force of its merciless pull, there was only one thought in his head: to kill the animal who had done this to his daughter, to him.

Even as he clambered up the wet bank and struggled to squeeze himself through the strands of barbed wire, Raymond did not budge. Maybe the bird, who had carried on a serene and unmolested existence after his infamous encounter with the teenage gasoline thief, could not believe someone was actually violating his sovereign territory. With something like idle curiosity Raymond watched Golden wrestle with the barbed-wire fence, finally pulling himself free of it by allowing the back of his shirt to tear in half, and only when the huge man turned and lunged at him did he think to run. Just as Raymond pivoted, Golden was on him, throwing an arm over his back and hanging on. With surprising power the ostrich surged suddenly to his left and Golden ran alongside him, the acrid smell of the thing full in his nostrils, his feet paddling wildly underneath him until he tripped over a tin feed trough and went down hard in the dirt, still clutching a handful of gray feathers in each fist. In a panic, the bird fled into the small enclosure behind the feed bin while Golden picked himself up and rushed in behind him, hoping to corner him there, but the bird skirted along the back perimeter of the fence, bobbing and skipping wildly, and when Golden tried to cut him off he turned and delivered a deft kick to the outside of Golden’s upper thigh, which felt like a blow from the blunt end of a billy club. Holding his leg, Golden tottered and fell backward against the empty feed bin, which made a hollow gonging noise and prompted several cows out in the pasture to moo in sleepy alarm.

The windows of the Spooner house were already lit and Brother Spooner clopped out onto the back steps in unlaced boots, wearing long underwear and armed with a .30-30, calling, “Who’s out here? I’ll shoot you, whoever you are!”

Golden kept still, hoping Brother Spooner might miss him there in the shadow of the feed bin, but no such luck. Golden watched Brother Spooner’s bald head bob along the fence line until he came around the other side of the bin where Golden lay. Brother Spooner looked down and said, “What…in…the…
hell
?”