The Lonely Polygamist (4 page)

With the couch loaded up and the boys inside, he counted heads; if he didn’t have every boy in the proclaimed age range there would be hell to pay later. To make sure he had them all, he resorted to his habit of singing the names of the children, under his breath, to the tune of “The Old Gray Mare”—
EmNephiHelamanPauline NaomiJosephineParley NovellaGaleSybilDeeanne…
—it was the only way he could come close to remembering them all. After sorting out the girls and younger boys, he discovered that the Three Stooges were missing. Golden asked if anyone knew where they were and noticed Clifton sliding down in his seat.

“Speak up, Clifton,” Golden said.

“Why are you asking me? I don’t know anything!”

“No need to shout. You tell me right now or you’re staying home with the girls and the babies.” On cue, Pet had come out on the porch and, with her head thrown back, started up an operatic wail of anguish at being left behind.

Clifton punched the seat in disgust. “In the closet.”

“Closet? What are they doing in the closet?”

The boy pulled himself up, put his mouth next to Golden’s ear. “The
bucket
.”

Sure enough, they were in the closet, all three of them, pants down, jostling for position, trying to fill the bucket at the same time. Little Ferris was there too, still nude below the waist, patiently waiting his turn. For Golden it was hard not to think that there might be something wrong about a household in which the dog was wearing underwear and the children weren’t. “
Boys
,” Golden said when he stuck his head in the closet. “What do you think you’re doing?”

They must have sensed their father’s good mood because the boys merely looked up at him, grinned, and continued tinkling. Golden swore them to secrecy before herding them all out into the hall, including Cooter, who he smuggled out underneath his shirt. They snuck past the all-purpose room, where Beverly was back at work on her sewing, and just as they were about to slip outside, Golden felt a tug on his shirt from behind, which startled him so badly he squeezed Cooter under his arm like the bellows of a bagpipe.

It was not Beverly behind him, but Trish. “Are you going somewhere?” she whispered.

“Going to exchange that couch,” he whispered back. “Taking the boys here. We won’t be too long.”

She took a step closer to him so that he could smell the citrus shampoo she favored. “Do you know who you’re with tonight?” she said.

The truth was he never knew who he was supposed to be with on any given night. Every weekend the girls convened, and according to some arcane algebraic formula decided in whose bed he would be sleeping on which night of the week. He was always grateful when somebody was thoughtful enough to tell him outright instead of making him guess.

“Let me see,” he said. “With you?” He shifted uncomfortably, and she gave a curious look at the lump under his shirt, which was Cooter licking his armpit.

“Good guess, Charlie Chan,” she said, taking a step closer. She wore a blue dress he’d never seen before, and had her hair up in a ponytail.

“Boys,” Golden said, “you go out to the Cadillac and I’ll be there shortly. Go on now.” Jostling each other with their elbows, they zigzagged out onto the lawn, bending at their waists and doing furtive head bobs and kung-fu poses.

Looking over her shoulder, Trish slipped an arm around his waist and seemed to be moving in to attempt a kiss when Herschel came bounding down the hall, shouting, “Hubba-hubba!” A moment later Cooter gave Golden’s armpit another lick and he grunted, stifling a laugh.

“Okay,” she said, releasing him, looking confused now. “Don’t take too long.”

He groaned, suppressing the laugh that was like a bubble about to pop in his throat, and turned to follow his boys. From the stable where the hearse was parked he waved and called out, “Back in a flash!”

Once everybody was loaded, Golden pulled onto the highway and aimed the Cadillac in the direction of town. His plan was simple: he would trade the couch in the small waiting room of his real estate and construction office for Beverly’s plaid monstrosity. He would return the new couch to Big House and everything to its rightful order. Sister Barbara, the old lady from church who performed the occasional bookkeeping and receptionist duties, was not going to be happy about losing her new couch to a domestic dispute within the Richards clan, but the simple fact was that Golden did not sleep with Sister Barbara on a regular basis.

The moon was now hidden behind a low bank of clouds and the light of the stars overhead seemed to thicken and gather like smoke. Golden drove slowly past the darkened forms of water tanks and outbuildings and sandstone bluffs, piloting the car easily around potholes and darting jackrabbits caught in the triangle of his headlights. With the heater blowing gusts of hot wind and Cooter dozing in his lap and the boys talking drowsily in the back, Golden held his foot steady on the gas pedal and for the first time tonight felt relaxed enough to fully exhale and settle his sore butt into the plush seat. Then he heard whispers and snickering from the back.

“Rusty’s acting like a dead man,” someone said.

Golden turned to see Rusty laid out on the couch, his eyes closed, his hands crossed over his chest in the official posture of death. Some of the boys were giggling and Rusty himself was working hard not to smile.

Golden stomped on the brakes and the car ground to a hard stop, the back end fishtailing as the tires bit into the road. His teeth ground hard against each other and his voice was raw with sudden anger. “You stop that. Don’t you
ever
play like that.
Never
.”

Rusty, the weird one, the troublemaker, the one always doing the wrong thing, rolled off the couch and crawled to the very back of the car, whimpering that he was sorry. Golden had hit the brakes harder than he intended, sending Cooter onto the floor and pitching several of the boys on top of each other. They all looked up at him now, frightened, their eyes round as dimes.

Golden turned and gathered Cooter back onto his lap. He sat for a while looking out the windshield, his hands on the steering wheel, until his breathing slowed. The smell of exhaust had entered the car and the only sound was the deep underwater gurgle of the engine. “I shouldn’t’ve—” he said, and shook his head. It was the second time tonight he’d yelled at them, the second time he’d given them a scare. He turned around to face them. “I’m sorry,” he said, and for one generous moment allowed himself to feel that he was apologizing not only to these boys, but to their mothers and the rest of the family, for the lies he’d been telling them, for his absences in body and spirit, for the joke of a husband and father he’d become.

And just as he’d hoped, they absolved him. Of course they did; they were boys. “No problemo,” one of them said, and the others sighed with relief, nodding their sweaty heads.

He put the hearse into gear and gradually opened her up, let the big car fly over the old blacktop with its tarred creases and sudden dips, the headlights cutting through the darkness like the point of a hurtling plow, tossing the black outlines of windmills and hay sheds and road signs to either side. The boys, their faces pressed to the windows, murmured and hummed their approval. Only when they reached the outskirts of town did Golden tap the brakes. The old hearse slowed reluctantly and as it glided under the still-lit Christmas lights of a quiet main street, the words
PEACE
and
LOVE
and
JOY
spelled out in glowing red and green bulbs overhead, Golden felt, for the first time in what seemed like months, something akin to hope: maybe, just maybe, everything would be all right.

H
OW DOES A SHY, LONELY BOY FROM THE BACKWATERS OF LOUISIANA
become an apostle of God, the husband to four wives, the father to twenty-eight children? Easier than you think.

Golden, it was true, had very little going for him early on. He was born at a rest stop somewhere between Gulfport and New Orleans, and spent the first four years of his life being dragged through a series of jerkwater towns by a father who couldn’t stay put and a mother who was losing the will to go on. Golden’s father was a wildcatter, a man who claimed he could
feel
oil underground the way certain spiritual types can detect the presence of the Holy Spirit. He spent his days scouting locations, hustling leases from backcountry dirt farmers, driving the caliche roads of Alabama and East Texas in his old paneled Ford, which he had outfitted with a special horn he liked to blow—
ah-ooga!
—to let the locals know he was on the scene.

For the first few years Golden’s mother, Malke, dutifully followed; they’d take up at a boardinghouse or rent a room in a bowl-and-pitcher hotel and Royal would head out into the hollows and hill country to chase oil. Malke and Golden spent their days waiting; for a letter from Royal, a telegram, or a phone call, or for that rare, glorious moment when they first heard the truck’s horn before it rattled into view.

It was in Bernice, Louisiana, that Malke finally dug in her heels. She and three-year-old Golden had spent a full month in a sour-smelling room in the Hidey Hole Tourist Court on the outskirts of Haines Delta, Mississippi, and now that they had a private apartment over a dentist’s office for the reasonable rate of twenty-five dollars a month, she decided she was set. For two weeks, while Royal was down south, sinking a test hole in Jackson County, chatting up lonely, big-busted country women and doing Lord knows what else, Malke painted the apartment’s three rooms a bright blue the color of swimming pool water, sewed curtains for the windows, got rid of the roaches and the nest of mice behind the enormous old Chambers stove, and put a sign on the front door:

N
O
V
AGRANTS OR
S
ALESMEN,
P
LEASE AND
T
HANK
Y
OU

Malke believed her husband would grow tired of life on the road and settle down with them. There were openings at the chicken plant, and Mr. Ottman, who owned the quarry north of town, needed a new driver. When Royal came home from his trip to Valentine County, Malke told him what she had in mind.

“Malke, baby!” Royal said. “Did you really say chicken plant? Get ahold a yourself.”

There ensued a round of shouting and threats, little of which could be deciphered from either side. Little Golden, now four years old, wakened from his nap with his hair standing on end as if he’d just witnessed something highly astonishing, watched from the kitchen doorway.

At some point Royal took his wife by the wrists, said, “Wait a second, wait one goddanged second.”

He was a short man with creamy skin and an easy smile, in evidence even at this tense moment. He was the kind of charmer who, despite his rough clothes and country ways, glittered. He had pretty violet eyes and wore Brylcreem to the point of overkill.

He put his arm around his wife’s waist. “Baby,” he cooed huskily, “can I sing you a song? Will you let me sing you a song?”

She shook her head, tried to twist away, but he held her tight. Royal would never admit to it, but singing was his one and only true talent. Despite what he told people, he had no special aptitude for finding oil—had no training in geology, no education at all beyond the third grade, no sixth sense for detecting it underground—but his singing, along with his looks and his devil-may-care charm, helped him secure leases, got him free drinks and invitations to dinner, had people asking his advice for things he knew nothing about. He could do basso profundo and coloratura, and falsetto, could, as he put it, “yodel it up pretty good,” could imitate him some birdcall. At this moment he figured yodeling or birdcall weren’t going to cut it, so he conjured up a little Perry Como. He cleared his throat and, in his best trembling falsetto, crooned “I Dream of You” into his wife’s ear.

Within ten seconds he had her dancing. They glided around the room, her head on his shoulder. An hour later they were all having dinner at the highway diner, Royal and Malke stealing kisses and slapping each other playfully, little Golden squinching his toes with delight over the sight of his mother and father together, happy, and in love.

Two days later his father drove off into the fog-blown Louisiana night to chase down a lead on a gas well in the Black Warrior country. He didn’t come back for six months.

THE BOY AT THE WINDOW

Golden grew too fast, his pants at perpetual high water, his shoes pinching his toes. He was a boy at odds with his own body: top-heavy, always stumbling, reeling suddenly like someone on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, breaking things, knocking pictures off the walls and whimpering apologies while his mother shrieked her dismay. He was too big for himself, always—too big to cry, too big to spill his milk. At four he looked six; at six, ten. By the time he was eleven he stood at eye level with his mother. At twelve he could, if he had a mind to, scoop her up in his arms and hustle her around the room.

Prisoner to the small apartment and his mother’s black moods, Golden would escape to his attic bedroom and sit at the window that looked out over Givens Street and the town square, which was nothing more than a patch of weedy grass with a couple of elms and a bench where old men in hats liked to sit and hawk loogies onto the sidewalk. He was not interested in the old men or the teenagers who crawled into the bank of lilac bushes to put their hands under each other’s clothes, he was watching and waiting for one thing only: his daddy’s old Ford to turn the corner at LeJeune Hardware and come rattling past the old men on the bench, startling them with its call—
ah-ooga!
—before coming to a stop under the persimmon tree in front of Darkly Dental. Once, back when he was six and still full of hope, his father did drive up one morning, just as Golden had so often imagined it, and he was so shocked that his voice caught in his throat. He tried to shout,
Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!
but all he could get out was the sound a choking person makes:
ack
. He rushed into the kitchen, his face flushed crimson, going,
Ack, ack, ack!
and his mother, who thought he was choking, panicked and could think of nothing else to do but slap him smartly across the face. He fell backward against the refrigerator, his face burning, but finally able to say it, in a whispery squeak, “Daddy’s home!”

For the first few years in Bernice, Royal would show up at least once every six weeks, his eyes lit with a wicked and charming light, and would sometimes stay for a week or more, working at his desk, making calls, going on errands into Baton Rouge, taking Malke out to dinner and dancing to get back on her good side. But as the years went on, he would be away for two months, three, without so much as a phone call, a postcard, or a telegraph message.

Golden’s mother dealt with her husband’s absences the only way she knew how: she suffered. To show him. To get back at him. To find a way, somehow, into that heedless heart of his.

Like the kin of the deceased at a third world funeral, she suffered openly, demonstratively, without shame. For Malke, every look and gesture was an expression of her despair. Though beautiful, with a head of dark, glossy hair and perfectly cut cheekbones, she did everything she could to make herself unattractive; she used no makeup and kept from her face every expression except fatigue and bitterness. She wore, in spite of the closet full of fine skirts and blouses, the same sleeveless housedress that looked like it had been made from a faded window curtain. Her eyes were remote and hard and she moved with the slow, underwater movements of the drugged and demented.

She wasn’t shy about her misery. She wept without warning at church meetings, sighed in the aisles of the dry goods store, and turned away every kind word, every offer of companionship or charity. When she gave testimony at the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’ Name, in the converted boathouse down by the mudflats, she would often suggest to the congregation that because of the life of sorrow and loneliness she led, the trials inflicted upon her by her no-account husband, she had some notion of the agonies Our Christ Lord must have endured while nailed to the cross.

The day the postcard came was particularly bad. Goldy’s mother spent the entire morning weeping at the kitchen table because old widowed Dr. Darkly from downstairs had asked her, the third time that year, for her hand in marriage. He had offered her a life of comfort and ease, which included his two-story brick home out next to the lake, his cranberry DeSoto, his membership at the Oyster Bay Country Club, and the undying love and devotion of his deepest heart. Already starting to cry, she’d told him,
no thanks, Doctor, maybe another time.
What she didn’t have to say was that she was still in love with the lousy run-around son-of-a-bitch who didn’t have the decency to write or call or send money for groceries.

Goldy, twelve years old now, didn’t care about Dr. Darkly or the groceries or his mother’s weeping, the sound of which had become as common as the starlings that screeched like lunatics in the persimmon tree. He was mad because it was the first day of school and, once again, he wasn’t going. From the window of his attic room he watched the old yellow bus grind its way around the town square, full of children looking gleeful and expectant in new clothes and stupid haircuts. He should have been starting sixth grade, but had not once set foot inside the school, because his mother kept him home with her. She was a woman who did not like to suffer alone.

To make things worse, it had begun raining outside, great gouts of water pouring down so suddenly the old bench-sitters in the square were caught out in the open. They tried to run, which wasn’t a good idea, as the youngest of them was over seventy. Like men caught in quicksand they clawed the air with their arms, making slow progress. They bellowed and cussed each other, trying in vain to keep their cigarettes lit. It was good for a laugh, but that had been two hours ago and the only pleasure now was in imagining how the rain was ruining the first day of school for all those worthless happy children on the bus.

Then Golden saw the mailman, Mr. Gay. Mr. Gay skipped along with his canvas mailbag as if it were seventy degrees and sunny. Somebody yelled out from the shoe store across the street, “Rain, sleet or snow, Mr. Gay!” and Mr. Gay gave a hearty salute.

Mr. Gay was as happy as his name, and though Golden had spoken to him only a few times, he thought of him as his best friend. Mr. Gay would make his way around the square, handing out mail to the shopkeepers and business owners, and when he got to Golden’s side of the street he always looked up where Goldy waited at the window. If there was no mail that day, which was almost always the case, he would give a sad little shake of the head, wave, and walk in solemn commiseration for ten feet or so before resuming his sprightly gait. Mr. Gay took the lack of mail personally. But if there was mail, he would point to his bag and make a face like,
Oh yes!

Today Mr. Gay, wearing a yellow slicker and the kind of hat the Gorton’s fisherman wore on the box of fish sticks, looked up at Goldy and gave him the
Oh yes!
expression. Had he seen it right through all the rain? Had Mr. Gay given him the
Oh yes!
face on a day like this?

He bolted from the window, skidded down the attic stairs past his mother, who had finished her bout of extravagant weeping for the day and now looked almost corpselike with her gray skin and sunken sockets, a woman grown ugly with love. She did not even look his way as he frantically unchained the safety lock on the front door and went slipping down the slick outside stairs to meet Mr. Gay under the awning of Darkly Dental. Above the awning hung a sign that read:

DARKLY DENTAL

SEDATION EXTRACTION

MODERN TECHNOLOGY

IMMEDIATE RELIEF!

RELATIVELY PAINLESS

“You’re going to like this one!” Mr. Gay said over the drumming of raindrops on the canvas awning. He handed over the postcard, reached up to pat Golden’s stiff blond hair (by now Golden had a good two inches on him), and marched undaunted out into the squall.

Golden looked at the picture of the hound dog wearing a hat, and turned it over to see his father’s writing. Though he could read in a rudimentary way—he had taught himself with a stack of grade school primers donated by some old ladies from the church—he could not bear to waste the precious seconds it would take to sound everything out. Racing back up the stairs, holding the postcard under his shirt to keep it dry, he slipped on the wet wood and, unable to extend his arms, fell face-first onto the landing. He got right up, hardly noticing his split upper lip, and burst into the apartment yelling his head off, “Postcard! Picture postcard!”

As Golden’s mother read the back of the postcard an amazing transformation took place: color washed back into her face. Her eyes softened and then clarified, the hint of a smile edging the corners of her mouth. Even in her faded housedress, with her puffy eyes and wet nose, her beauty returned in an instant.

Golden watched, mesmerized, waiting for his mother to read the card out loud, but it took her a full minute to notice her sopping, overgrown son who had split his lip wide open and now had blood running down his chin and neck and soaking the front of his shirt. She cried, “Oh God!” and grabbed a dish towel to press against his face. He fought her off, yelling, “No, read it! Read it first!” So she read it out loud, twice, slower and more luxuriously than she meant to, unable to keep herself from smiling just a little, while her boy, who might have bled to death in the time it took her to read those few lines, squinched his toes joyfully inside his wet shoes.