The Lonely Polygamist (60 page)

Wisely, Golden did not allow more time for his audience to formulate additional questions or commentary; he excused them all, and they scattered into the warm afternoon with wailing and gnashing of teeth, to face the prospect of an uncertain and very crowded future.

ONLY THE BODY

Another night, and she couldn’t find her way into sleep. Strangely, her insomnia had nothing to do with the fact that she was sleeping on an army surplus cot that squeaked and groaned pitifully every time she moved; or that her new quarters—Big House’s utility closet—smelled of bleach and old mop and something vaguely mineral and sharp that may have been urine; or that at this moment Cooter, who was used to having the room to himself, was now tucked snugly into her ribs, occasionally stretching to dig his hind paws into her sensitive flesh, snoring and sighing his way through a heedless sleep that made her grind her molars with jealousy. No, what was keeping her awake was her own mind—spinning with the possibilities and decisions of her new situation—and her own body, which felt like a piece of fruit left too long on the vine, swollen with the carefully hoarded juices of a hundred sunny days, wanting only to be plucked and eaten, ready to burst.

When, in a fit of insomniac exasperation, she threw off her blanket and planted her feet on the cold concrete floor, Cooter groaned and rolled onto his back, making little growls of annoyance at having his slumber disturbed.

“Keep it to yourself,” she advised, and not for the first time wondered how, after everything, all the strife and sorrow of her life, she had been given this reward: bunking in a utility closet with a flatulent dog.

As had become her nightly habit, she padded out into the hall to make her tour of the house. She was met first, as always, by the strange sight of her husband, stretched out on the Barge at the edge of the dim dining room. In the chaos and rancor that accompanied the mass relocation to Big House, nobody had given much thought to where Golden would sleep. That first night he had the good sense to spend in the cab of his pickup, where he wouldn’t have to listen to the squabbling and backbiting and on-the-hour outbursts caused by twenty-six irritable children crammed into a space barely adequate for half as many. The second night, after coming home to find the house in a free-for-all, the children madly circling the racetrack, trying to burn off the stress of their new circumstance, he stepped into the flow of bodies and shouted for them to stop. He decreed that from that day hence there would be no more running on the racetrack. “No more!” he croaked, and because he had spent the entire day long bargaining with subs and crew bosses and haggling with the boneheads at the county offices, calling in every favor he could think of to get this renovation up and running as soon as possible, his voice had gone hoarse, with a raspy bass undertone. He sounded, Nola commented, a little like Johnny Cash. “No more!” he boomed again in his Johnny Cash voice, and the children, frozen in their tracks, stared at him in wonder.

He gave an order for the older boys to retrieve the Barge from where it had been stashed behind the toolshed after the Todd Freebone episode. He had them place it directly in the entryway to the dining room—where it would serve to block racetrack traffic as well as make the passage from family room to dining room one giant inconvenience—and, after a spartan dinner of cube steak and cold peas, wrapped himself in a scratchy, brightly striped Mexican blanket and fell immediately unconscious in its lumpy embrace.

The ploy worked for a couple of days until the racetrack’s primeval call proved too strong to resist. By Friday of that week the children were already back to their laps, charged with the pure joy that comes with performing a strictly forbidden act in the company of others, bounding off the Barge’s cushions and arms, doing the Flying Dutchman and the Fosbury Flop, the little ones swarming over the back of it like lemmings off a cliff.

Their father would never again make so much as a peep about the racetrack. Some mornings, if he did not vacate the Barge quickly enough, the early risers, usually the young ones in footsie pajamas, would clamber over him as if he were nothing but a part of the furniture, and with an expression of pained tolerance he would submit himself to the abuse of their sharp knees or badly groomed toenails as they hauled themselves up by an ear or a handful of belly fat, occasionally using his big head for a stepping-stone.

Upstairs, she walked the long hall, keyed in to the house’s audible frequencies, the collective drone of sleeping bodies, the sighing vents, the rasp of skin against sheets. On Golden’s orders the children had been divided randomly among the rooms, separated only by gender. Amazingly, after those first few difficult nights, things had calmed down considerably. Here was Alvin sharing a bed with both Herschel and Clifton, here were sworn enemies Novella and Josephine wrapped in the same blanket, the lion lying down with the lamb if Trish had ever seen it. And here was Faye, one arm thrown over the hip of her sister and new best friend Fig Newton; when Trish had given Faye the option of sleeping with her in the utility closet or braving one of the upstairs bedrooms, she had chosen the latter without so much as an attempt at sparing her mother’s feelings.

Back in the closet, Trish fished the envelope from the secret pocket inside her suitcase, and for the thirtieth or fortieth time read the letter it contained.

One week ago today that she had found the letter stuck in her screen door. She had pulled up in front of the duplex, intending, after moving her possessions to Big House, to make one final sweep of the place. She had been thinking about how the same drive she had taken hundreds, maybe thousands of times, with the same evening sun dipping behind the same broken mountains, could turn, in the wake of catastrophe, beautifully strange: frogs calling out from some wet ditch, the scent of cooling tar, the violet light of dusk caught in the bowl of a lost hubcap, a troupe of quail sprinting single-file down the middle of the road.

She was also thinking—marveling, really—about how her life could be so easily picked up and moved, how the collected sum of her shrinking existence could fit into a Volkswagen Rabbit with room to spare.

June’s pickup had been pulling away just as she arrived. Though she waved, he seemed to turn his head away and hide under the bill of his cap. She’d thought about it many times, but had not found the right time to visit him since the accident; she figured he might have difficulty understanding why she’d sold him out to the sheriff. And then she read the letter, standing in the empty living room of a shabby house for which she was already nostalgic, and hadn’t slept more than an hour at a time since.

It helped to lose herself in the new routine of her days: a morning and afternoon of babysitting and domestic duty at Big House, her four-hour shift at the hospital, and then back to her utility closet, where she would spend another restless night. Her evenings at the hospital she liked the most: the quiet order of the place, the squeak and clatter of gurneys and carts, the sweet chemical smell of X-ray exposures, the rustle of sensible nurse hosiery, the predictable disturbances quickly and efficiently resolved. They’d installed Rusty at the far end of the old ward—which in a bygone era had served as the region’s only cotton mill—in a room with high ceilings hung with coils of painted ductwork, a single narrow window, and one wall still showing some of its original hand-thrown brick.

Rose had arranged it so that along with her daily eight-to-four shift, Beverly, Nola, Trish and even Golden would each be responsible for a four-hour block and Rusty would be attended to around the clock. With the blessing of the nursing staff, many of whom had family ties to the Virgin polygamists, she showed them how to keep his tongue and lips moist with ice chips, how to change his diapers and give him his sponge baths and swab his gums with lemon glycerine, the proper way to work his muscles and joints to stave off atrophy, the whole while being sure to speak or sing to him, to hold his hand, as if he could be tied down, by the cords of voice and touch alone, to the world of the living.

It was quite something to watch Rose care for her son. She worked with a focus Trish had never seen her bring to anything else in her life; to concentrate on one child to the exclusion of everything else, this she could do. Her eyes shone, her neck rigid in constant surveillance, her movements deliberate and sure even as she lifted bandages to check for infection, the body of the boy beneath her administering hands so pale and flawless it seemed to give off a light of its own.

She did not seem to dwell for a second on the idea, as Trish was inclined to, that Rusty had only a minimal chance of survival, that even if he managed to hold on for weeks or months, he would never again be the boy they had known.

Though Rose gave him a sponge bath every morning, Trish made it a point to do the same at the beginning of her shift; there was not much they could do for him now, she decided, except keep him company and keep him clean. Nurse Pickless, a wry, thin-as-a-nail ranch widow who had worked battlefield hospitals in Italy and Korea, was there to supervise her first attempt. Trish prepared the soapy solution in a washbasin, removed Rusty’s gown, and by the time she had his diaper undone was finding it hard to ignore the rigid and insistent erection contained therein. “Well, howdy-
do
,” said Nurse Pickless to the erection. And then, to Trish, “Usually it’ll take quite a bit of advanced sponging to get one worked up as this. The male of the species, my laws. Once in a while we’ll get a comatose ninety-year-old whose body seems to think it’s eighteen again, all pumped and primed for a Saturday night.”

Having already taken a step back, Trish asked what she should do.

“Oh, just work around it, dear, it won’t last forever and it ain’t gonna bite.”

She gave it a wide berth anyway, doing her best to focus on the other extremities. But during the entire process it did not show any intention of retreating, even after she had finished the bath and massaged the straining joints and limbs, which felt held together by wires ratcheted tight, and had settled down in the bedside chair to read out loud from a battered hospital copy of
Harrowing Tales of the High Seas
. The following afternoon, before she had the diaper off there was already a definite bulging under way, and when Nurse Pickless arrived to get a look at things, she said, “I’ve worked three twelve-hour shifts around this youngster and he’s never
once
given me a salute like that. Maybe you oughta take it as a compliment.”

Trish blushed and Nurse Pickless flashed a quick sideways grin. “Dear, if it’ll make you more comfortable I’ll show you an old nurse’s trick. Sometimes we have to resort to certain measures for a catheter insertion or what have you.”

She tossed the diaper into the rolling hamper and then sized up the erection. It was about the length and width of a man’s thumb, uniformly white with a tinge of pink at the head (unlike the variegated and strangely hued adult penises Trish had laid eyes on) and canted slightly toward the southeast. Nurse Pickless cocked her middle finger against her thumb, said, “Sometimes you’ve just got to show it who’s boss,” and gave the penis a quick little thump.

Trish startled and the nurse waved her hand. “No need to worry, he can’t feel a thing. We’re just trying to discourage it a little. Case you’re wondering, this’ll also work on your husband when he gets too enthusiastic.”

They both kept an eye on the erection for any signs of discouragement, but it was holding firm.

“My husband,” Trish said, not caring to hide the resentment in her voice, “hasn’t been this enthusiastic for a very long time.”

The old nurse put her hand on Trish’s shoulder. “Take it from someone who knows, dear, there’ll come a time when you’ll thank the good Lord for small favors.” She was already preparing to give the erection another finger-flick, saying, “Just a titch harder should do the trick,” when Trish stopped her: “It doesn’t bother me, really, please, I’ll be fine.”

“Sure?”

“Certain.”

“Just one more pop and it’ll be down for the count, I promise you.”

“No, please. Really. Thank you so much.”

“It’s only the body, remember,” said Nurse Pickless, already heading out the door to continue her rounds. “It comes and it goes. Nothing to be afraid of.”

For a time, Trish did nothing but study Rusty’s face, or the part of it, at least, that was not covered with bandages: the freckled nose and fuzzy round ears, the single exposed eye that occasionally opened, seeming to focus on something for a moment before swiveling back under its half-drawn lid. All of which, according to the doctors, could sense nothing, were shut down or short-circuited by the boy’s irredeemably damaged brain. As she often had in the past two weeks, to keep herself from crying or otherwise falling into hysterics, she bent down and gave him a light kiss on both smooth cheeks and, imagining he could hear her, told him that she loved him, and always would.