Sound Of Gravel, The (7 page)

Bored, I sat with my elbows on the table while I watched Mom make the bread dough, which seemed to take forever. After several hours of letting the dough rise, kneading it, and letting it rise again, she finally kneaded it one last time, separated it, and placed it into our special bread pans—juice cans shorn of their labels. Mom placed the pans upright in the oven and baked the bread. The smell of it seemed to transform our little house, as did the perfectly round slices of bread it produced. My siblings and I ate a delicious dinner of warm bread, honey, and milk out of cereal bowls that night.

By the end of summer, the peaches had grown ripe on the trees and then overripe, plunging to the damp earth below. Alejandra’s eldest children and Matt climbed silver ladders to pick the fruits that remained on the branches, while Luke and I scooped the rest from the ground. In late summer, we’d devour bowls of peaches smothered in fresh cream and sugar, a welcome change from bland meals of wheat and beans. But fruit was always left over, and all of us had to help preserve what we couldn’t eat.

Learning how to boil peaches in quart jars was the last lesson in my summer of domestic education. As Matt, Luke, and I carried the many, many glass jars to our bedroom, where we’d been instructed to place them on shelves up against the wall, I felt the winds of change begin to blow. I was tired of homemaking and excited about starting school.

*   *   *

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER,
after the limbs of the peach trees had been picked clean and their light green leaves began to turn golden yellow and dark red, I was ready to start first grade. I hated having to sit and watch as Matt and Luke set off each morning for Primaria Miguel Hidalgo, which was just across the highway from the LeBaron bus stop. Mom told me that the school, which taught only grades one through four, was where I would learn to read, write, and do math. I couldn’t wait. I had always been fascinated by how a sound could be suggested, an
A
or a
B,
by a single squiggle on paper. Plus, I wanted to play with new friends and get away from Audrey and her unpredictable tantrums.

On the last Sunday evening before school began, Mom gave us our weekly baths after she cut our hair. Thinking about starting school the next morning, I was especially embarrassed by my bowl cut, which felt shorter and looked even more boyish than usual. I wasn’t allowed to grow my hair long enough for pigtails or a ponytail, no matter how many thousands of times I begged for them. Long hair had too many tangles, Mom insisted, and she had enough work to do without having to fight with my hair every morning.

Even though Lane had put a toilet in our house, we still didn’t have running hot water, so Mom had to place our biggest stainless-steel pot under the faucet that came up from the kitchen floor, fill it, then set it on top of the stove. The tub, which was kept in the almost-finished bathroom, was round, made of galvanized steel, and could only hold one of us at a time. We would wait our turn in the kitchen while Mom traipsed back and forth from the bathroom, her hands protected by red oven mitts as she gingerly transferred the boiling water to the bath.

Audrey went first since her hair was the thickest and took the longest to dry. Next came Aaron, who always fought the bath and threw his head against Mom’s chest, kicking his feet against her round, pregnant belly. After that it was my turn. The warm air smelled like Ivory soap and fogged the window. Our bathroom didn’t yet have a doorknob, but Mom had stuffed a sock in the hole where the knob should have been to give us a little privacy.

I looked at Mom’s face as she helped me into the bath. She looked so tired. I gripped both sides of the small tub to support myself while dipping my body into the murky water. I had to sit upright with my legs crossed to fit in the tub. Mom picked up the pot from the floor, turned the nail away from the door, and went back into the kitchen to heat up more water. My shoulders and upper torso shivered from the cold, but she came right back and filled a tall plastic cup with water, poured it over my head, and massaged pink strawberry shampoo into my hair. I loved the comforting feel of Mom’s fingertips rubbing my head and the luxury of having her undivided attention.

Only at moments like this did I feel a longing for the comfort of other girls. I missed my girl cousins from California. I wished they had stayed in LeBaron so I would have had other little girls to play with. Mom had read Disney’s version of
Cinderella
to us out of an oversize children’s book, and I used to have dreams of pretending to be princesses with my cousins. We’d wear beautiful gowns and dance with princes at formal balls. But then I’d wake up and find I was stuck with a bunch of boys and an older sister who scared me.

“Why don’t my cousins and aunts go to my dad’s church anymore?” I asked as soap suds rolled down the sides of my face.

Mom considered my question for a few seconds. “You know they moved to California after your dad died. They left the church. And, actually, Grandma never believed in your dad’s teachings, not even after Grandpa joined the church and moved us to LeBaron.” Mom paused, searching for the words to explain this to me. “Grandma was a Baptist, and they believe that polygamy is bad. She didn’t have much say when Grandpa decided to move our families down here, but after your dad was killed, they all lost faith in his teachings.”

“Why?”

“Because not all of what your dad said would happen came true. And, well,”—Mom took a deep breath—“Grandpa once told me that he worried about his daughters livin’ polygamy, that they were so poor with so many little kids. Maybe he regretted gettin’ involved with your dad’s church.” She lifted her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders. “But I never have.”

I still didn’t quite understand why they left. Life in LeBaron didn’t seem so bad to me. Mom washed the rest of my body in silence, then held out a damp towel for me with her arms open wide. I fell into them, savoring the warm feeling of her arms squeezed tight around me.

7

A rooster’s crow woke me up the next morning. In the half darkness, I stepped over Audrey’s legs and made my way across the chilly cement floor to a dresser full of musty-smelling, unorganized clothes. I picked out a simple white blouse with a heart-shaped patch that matched its red, short sleeves and a pair of elastic-waist jeans. I headed to the bathroom to dress myself before anyone else needed it. “A freckle-faced boy,” I said aloud to my reflection in the mirror.

Mom shuffled by in her house slippers, and soon the smell of boiling cornmeal wafted my way. I heard the familiar splatter of its bubbles as I entered the kitchen and found Mom smiling, standing over the stove in her navy-blue robe.

“You ready for school, Sis?” Then she gave me a second look. “I like your pretty blouse.”

I looked down at the wrinkled cotton. “I’m ready,” I said, my voice still dry and raspy from sleep. I sat at the table with a nervous stomach and swung my tennis shoes back and forth underneath my seat. My nerves went away when I dipped my teaspoon into the mush, which Mom had made sweet by adding honey and cinnamon. But I felt queasy all over again when I found a tiny black fly lying dead and upside down at the bottom of the bowl. I hated few things on the farm more than finding flies in my food.

The sky was blue and cloudless when Matt, Luke, and I stepped out of the kitchen door, my brothers in their T-shirts and jeans, Luke’s hair standing up in an unruly cowlick. Mom bid us good-bye at the doorway, wished us good luck, and waved us on our way. For almost half an hour we walked along a dirt road in silence, each of us carrying identical woven-plastic schoolbags with rubber handles. My heart began to beat fast when we reached the two-lane highway and the gray, rectangular cinder-block building just on the other side, with its metal-framed windows, slanted tin roof, and four classrooms for each of the four grades that were taught there. Fifth-grade students took a bus to a nearby town.

As we waited to cross the road, a semi pulling a trailer with a crowded load of cows rumbled past us, the cattle squished in together randomly, facing all different directions like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. As the truck rumbled past, it blew dust into our faces and my hair into my eyes. I cleared my forehead, certain that my first day of school had been ruined.

The dry, sun-baked schoolyard was filled with a mix of light- and dark-skinned children playing together. But no one else had skin as light as mine; Casper would not have felt whiter. A basketball bounced with a
hamp-hamp
against a cement court filled with kids. One boy with dark, curly hair threw the ball up, aiming for the hoop—nothing more than a netless, rusted rim. I saw no swings, slides, or any other play equipment, only girls playing hopscotch and jump rope in the dirt, repeating Spanish chants and kicking up dust at their feet.

From behind came the sound of a heavy metal door scraping a cement floor, and all eyes turned to find a Mexican teacher calling students in Spanish through a megaphone. I stood frozen while each child bolted for one of the four classroom doors and got in line. Using the children’s heights as a guide, I found the right line, and soon our teacher stepped out to welcome us. A serious but friendly woman, she had dark hair and large curls that surrounded her face and made her look as if she were wearing a football helmet. She wore a purple dress with nude stockings and gray high heels, dark red lipstick, purple eye shadow that matched her dress, thick, black eyeliner, and mascara. She waved us inside.

The classroom smelled like Pine-Sol and had twenty wooden desks in lines on a cement floor that looked brand-new, smooth and shiny like the film over Mom’s glossy photographs. I scanned the room and chose a desk in a far corner beneath a window, which is when I realized that going to a Mexican school meant being taught in Spanish.

“Buenos días, alumnos. Me llamo Señora,”
the teacher said.

The words blurred together in fast-paced sentences. I never even caught my teacher’s name; it was forever lost in the torrent of her opening speech. My body went stiff and the blood rushed to my face as I looked at my classmates and watched wide-eyed as they reached down into their plastic schoolbags almost in unison. I followed their lead and took out my new spiral notebook, which Mom had given me as a special present for starting school. Meanwhile, the teacher walked the aisles and made marks in her notebook with a sharp, yellow pencil, smiling and greeting each child individually.

When she reached my desk, she stopped, knelt down until we were eye to eye, and smiled. She said something to me in Spanish, and all I could do was stare at her and hold my breath in fear. She smiled again, then called someone over, a little girl on the other side of the classroom who promptly picked up her supplies and moved to the desk next to mine.

The girl had long, straight brown hair pulled back by a barrette, just as I had always wanted, not to mention her straight bangs cut evenly over her green eyes. She had light pink skin with dark brown freckles on her nose. I thought that maybe I’d seen her in church, but I wasn’t sure. I was certain that her yellow dress was brand-new, or almost. It was definitely freshly washed and perfectly ironed.

The teacher looked back at me, smiled one more time, then continued her walk down the aisle. The little girl in the yellow dress turned to me, grinned, and said hello, in English.

“My name is Natalia,” she chirped in a quiet, welcoming voice, her English clear and perfect. I felt my body relax into the hard chair beneath me. “The teacher wants me to sit by you so I can help you.” She smiled again. “Is your name Ruthie?”

“Yeah. How do you know my name?”

“I saw you at Sunday school, and my mom told me who you were.”

“You know everything the teacher is saying?”

“Almost everything. She talks real fast, though.”

The teacher, back at the front of the room, appeared to be asking for quiet as she began writing with pink chalk on the dark green chalkboard. Natalia turned her attention to the front of the room as she opened her notebook and picked up her pencil, so I did the same.

Then she whispered something so softly I was sure I had misheard her. “Hey, did you know that we’re sisters?”

I tilted my head and just looked at her. “Are you sure?”

“I think so. My mom said that your dad is Joel the prophet.”

“Yeah. He died, though.”

“I know. Joel was my dad too,” Natalia said.

“Really?”

She pointed to a little girl in the front row. “She’s our sister too. She lives right by me.” My mouth dropped open as I stared at a second sister. Her black hair was shoulder length and curled under at the ends. I was surprised when the girl whipped her head around and smiled under big brown eyes. “Her name is Brenda,” Natalia said. “She can talk in English and Spanish too.”

The teacher stopped writing, looked at Natalia and me, and shushed us. We both sat up straight and turned our attention back to the front of the classroom. But my mind was a million miles away, too excited and shocked that I had sisters at school, and nice ones at that. Besides, I didn’t understand a word the teacher said.

I knew I had half siblings all over the colony, but who they were had always been a mystery. Now, in school, it occurred to me that almost every child in LeBaron could be related to me.

Natalia introduced me to Brenda at recess. She was really nice, but she and Natalia looked so different that I realized they must have different mothers. They showed me how to play hopscotch: how to draw out the squares and the circles in the sand with the tip of my forefinger and the importance of choosing a unique stone.

When we returned to the classroom, Brenda sat with Natalia and me in the back of the room, and at lunchtime we ate together. Natalia had a whole-wheat sandwich like mine, although hers was square and mine was round. Remembering the fly at the bottom of my bowl that morning, I lifted the bread of my peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich to inspect it.

The smell of green, spicy peppers filled the air the minute Brenda opened her bean-and-cheese burrito with pickled jalapeños, and when I couldn’t resist trying a bite, the morsel exploded in my mouth and burned all the way down my throat. My eyes watered and my lips burned. The girls giggled at my reaction.