Suitcases and pillows pile up everywhere. Jason and his father set up cots in the living room and office. The day is blazing, near a hundred, and it’s not cooling as the bright evening approaches. Conversations streak into a blur.
“Robbie says you had to hold out that heifer again.”
“Is that sour cream in this?”
“I don’t believe those boys could make a tackle to save their life.”
“Yeah, she takes sick more than the rest.”
“Just a little plain yogurt.”
“Yep. Pinkeye.”
“So she takes off her clothes and runs into the ocean.”
“Glenns Ferry is gonna take ’em apart.”
“Mom! Mooooom!”
“And while she’s out there skinny-dipping, something starts to yank her under the water.”
“You got Pong?”
“Roy! What are you telling those kids?”
“Mom!”
“Pong and four other ones. I got it for Christmas.”
“It’s just a movie, Becky.”
“Sometimes one just is that way.”
“You see old Ford’s speech the other night?”
“Heavens. I wish we had someone better.”
“Better than awful?”
A knocking rattles the screen door. Someone yells, “Come in,” and an entire family clad in denim enters. Three boys in dark dungarees, light denim shirts, and suspenders. Four girls in prairie dresses of pale plain blue. Mother and father the same, like the largest in a set of nesting dolls. The chirping of grasshoppers is suddenly audible. The man holds his hat, squints into the room, as if he has just arrived from 1875 and is waiting for his eyes to adjust. His beard makes a neat berm along his jaw, and his bony Adam’s apple gives him the cast of an Ichabod or an Abe.
“I gather we missed the announcement,” he says to the room.
He has the unmistakable Harder lank and pall.
Dad reddens and comes to the door, says, “My word, Dean, how would we ever know how to reach you?”
It is past eight P.M. Through the screen door, behind the Ingalls Wilders, the sky darkens from pink to purple and orange. Dad and Dean stand at cross angles. Dad nods vacantly at nothing, and Dean’s family clusters as if for warmth. Dean’s wife looks cornered, as Mom blitzes in with the aunts.
“Heaven’s sake, you must all be starving,” she says. “Come get something to eat.”
Dean frowningly hugs his sisters and Jason’s mom, but his wife gives them grim smiles to convey that she will not be hugging anyone. Dean says, “Thank you, but I think we’ll just go over to the house and get settled.”
The house. Grandpa’s house. Dad stops nodding, and Mom starts, very slowly. From the far edge of the room, Roy calls, “Don’t go pocketing the silverware,” and Dad says, “Roy,” but Dean’s expression doesn’t change. He just says, as he herds his kids out, “Hullo, little brother.”
August 26, 1975 SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
Loretta wakes into baffling stillness. Somewhere outside a car accelerates. Bird trill flutters through the window. Has she ever heard a bird before, inside this house? The family squelches all incoming signals, and now that the clamor has departed, the silence is delicate and pure and enormous. A dog barks, a hundred miles away.
She stays in bed, though the sun is up. No one knocks. No one calls her to breakfast or asks her to help with the children or points to a bucket with a floating sponge or kisses her on the top of the head or asks her to get more honey from the pantry. No one tugs at her skirt or tap-tap-taps her on the arm, as Ruth has ordered the children to do when they want a grown-up’s attention, and no one cries when they fall down after jumping off the shed roof or gets their pants caught on the barbed-wire fence or are told, sternly, that they cannot keep the stray cat they lured home only to have Ruth chase it away, whipping stones at it in short, expert strokes. It will not be her night tonight. She will not have to do that, though she ordinarily would, would prepare for it all day, reminding herself it’s just a gesture of the body. She will not have to hear Dean’s questions about whether she has noticed any queasiness in the mornings.
All of that doesn’t happen, and something else. She does not leave. She does not plan to leave. She could not dream of a better chance. She could not dream of a door more open. But she is not going, and she knows she is not going.
Before now, the idea that Dean had parents of his own, that he grew up with brothers and sisters, had not entered Loretta’s mind. Then he received a phone call from a friend in the Reorganized LDS Church in Hagerman, Idaho, who’d seen an obituary for Dean’s father in the Times-News. Dean’s name had not been included among the survivors. The friend thought perhaps his family had failed to notify him.
“It is just the kind of betrayal I would have expected from Louis,” Dean said that night, after the children were asleep, as he and Ruth and Loretta discussed what would happen now. Dean would have something coming up there, surely. Land, money. He would have an inheritance to claim.
“Even if I have to force it,” he said.
“It’s only what’s right, Father,” Ruth said. “You can never be wrong when you stand up for what’s right.”
Dean smiled at her. She did this for him, Loretta saw: confirmed him in his positions. Dean sometimes came to Loretta for the same thing, asking her without directly asking her to support him in his interpretations of scripture, in his decisions about disciplining the children, in the products he would add or remove from the Zion’s Harvest inventory, in his recent battles with the Council of Elders. He was not seeking permission or anything like it; Dean knew what he thought was right. And yet there was something in him that needed support and confirmation.
Dean drank hot Postum with dehydrated milk. Ruth nibbled raisins one at a time, aggressively. She did most of the talking, but Dean gave the final word. Every so often, Dean would look at Loretta, as though remembering to include her. Loretta was hungry, but not hungry enough to eat whatever was available here; before, back with her parents, there had always been a bounty of junk food, sugar cereal and potato chips and store cookies, and now Loretta sometimes feels as if she were starving. When the children complain of hunger, Ruth suggests to them that they chew on kernels of raw wheat, and they do, chewing and chewing until it forms a gum, but Loretta wants nothing to do with Ruth’s food, with raw wheat and carob and one-at-a-time raisins.
“Maybe this can be your way,” Ruth said. “Maybe the Lord is bringing you an opportunity to overcome your obstacles. With the council and such.”
Dean had left the Council of Elders. There had been talk of disfellowship. Excommunication.
Ruth said, “How about this, Father? You and me and the children go to Idaho for the funeral, and Aunt Loretta stays behind here. Minds the house. Takes orders. We can see what the situation is like there. Consider. There’s no need for us to introduce anything just yet that requires extra explanation.”
Dean and Ruth cast cool, appraising looks at Loretta, and Loretta felt as if she were more their child than their spouse. They were wondering, she could see, whether they could trust her.
“You make good sense, Mother,” Dean said at last. “As usual.”
• • •
It is not quite seven thirty. Loretta remembers a time she would have considered this early. She can’t remember the last time she just wallowed around in bed. Every day, she drags herself out, against her will and ahead of the sun.
Why is she not going?
She can make each of the competing arguments to herself: Go now. Go alone. Go with Bradshaw. Wait and plot and gather “provisions,” as Bradshaw calls it in his letters, and leave with Bradshaw. Or without him. Or. Or. Or. Her mind circles the options constantly, but now she realizes that she isn’t waiting for one of those options to clarify — she’s waiting for something else. Another choice. Another way. But all that thinking has nothing to do with why she’s not leaving. She simply feels it. She is not going.