She does not relish this life in any sense. She despises it, feels it like a web holding her in place. But she knows it. It is all she knows. And what she tells herself she wants — freedom, a worldly life, music, magazine life, slacks, and makeup — of that world, she knows absolutely nothing. She thinks of the Tussy ad. “Win a Mustang to Match Your Lipstick!” The brazen girl on the hood of the pink, pink car, so colorful and bold and distant. An eternity away from here.
She will not think of herself as afraid.
Seven forty-five. Bradshaw arrives each morning at eight. He knows nothing of what’s gone on here. Dean trusts him. There is an idea in the air — a hint, an undecided notion — that they could all just leave here, escape the problems with the brotherhood, and that Bradshaw could help run the business here while they are away. When Bradshaw understands what is happening, he will want to go. He will want to go, go, go.
• • •
Dean told Loretta his story with a neatness she distrusted — a mosaic of cause and effect dragged into the service of the ideas Dean wanted to convey about himself. That he had been raised in a misshapen faith, in a perverted version of the truth, and that he had found his way to the light.
He grew up in the mainstream church in southern Idaho, the oldest of five. His father held leadership roles in the local ward — a bishop or a member of the bishopric, a high councillor, the stake president — and the family was stalwart, at the wardhouse on Sundays and at the farmers co-op on Mondays and at the livestock auctions on Fridays at the fairgrounds. Though the church and its demands were great, Dean found himself at a young age wanting more rigor. More fire. In prayer, during the sacrament, while reading scripture, he would feel liquefied in the forge of the Lord, and when he emerged, he would see that his fellows were the same earthen lumps. They had not entered the fire. When he accompanied his father to the auctions or the cafés, and he watched him laugh and glad-hand with the worldly men, the farmers telling crude jokes or smoking cigarettes, he resented his father for not turning his back on these men and their ways.
He came to know some of the Reorganized LDS members down in Hagerman. The RLDS was a small sect that had broken away from the mainstream church more than a hundred years ago. Little pockets of the church stayed true, tiny congregations here and there around the country. There was something clandestine about them that fed Dean’s desires. They were polygamists, and as Dean studied the origins of the faith, he began to see that the principle of plural marriage kept returning — godly men building lineages of righteousness. As he read the writings of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, as he read the Old Testament with new eyes, he began to understand that there was a wide range of Mormon believers out there, a variety of little shoots and branches off the main body of the faith, and that one of these might contain the truth that the mainstream church had forsaken, and that the Principle stood at the center of this truth.
He was twenty-three, working the farm with his father while Louis served his mission, when federal agents raided the Saints in Short Creek. The officers tore children from the arms of their mothers and held righteous men at gunpoint, wicked and prideful, while the newspaper whores took photographs. A clarion to awaken the righteous, Dean had whispered to Loretta, telling her this story late into the night. Your aunt Ruth was one of those children.
His devotion grew until the Hagerman congregation could not contain it. Five years later, at the end of the harvest, he traveled to Short Creek. He returned home just once after that, a month later, when he held counsel with his father and his brother, poring over scripture and urging them to reject the mainstream church and join the brethren in Short Creek. When they told him they would not, he knew they were filled not simply with wickedness but with the most dangerous belief on earth — that their wickedness was righteousness.
• • •
She waits for the sound of Bradshaw’s truck in the drive. She is in her nightdress, the thick cotton over the temple garments — the silky two-piece underwear with the markings at the nipples and the belly, the garments she was given upon her marriage and which she is to wear at all times. It occurs to her that she could take them off.
She answers when the knock comes, and when she sees him again, like this, unguarded and not pretending, he is too much. Hungry grin, twittery eyes of ice, almost turquoise. One hand high on the doorjamb, one on his hip, one foot forward and one back, his Wranglers long at the boot heel and the arms of his pearl-button shirt cut short and fraying, and his hat, bill curled tightly and worn through at the front edge, bearing the words “Sandy Excavation” in lariat script.
“Darlin’,” he says. “Sweet Lori,” he says, and he is upon her.
He kisses her face off. He kisses her like he’s trying to eat something. Her lips go raw, her jaw aches. He puts his hands everywhere. She likes it but she doesn’t. It feels half like he’s trying to hurt her. She holds his back, recalls how tightened with muscle it is, compared to Dean’s thick, spongy flesh. She starts to push him away, and says, “Stop, stop, slow down,” and it takes her a long time to wake him from the fever, and when he finally does he looks at her in pain and disbelief, groans and rolls to the corner of the couch, and wails. “Lori,” he says, begging. “Lori.”
Whether she wants it or not seems like the wrong question. Bradshaw is handsomer than Dean, funnier, younger, better in every way, and she would rather do this with him than with Dean. But it is not a choice between Bradshaw and Dean. It is a choice between now or later. Between Bradshaw or Dean or something else entirely. She could do it. Easily. She could do almost anything now. You hide inside yourself, and whatever happens out there still happens, but you’re less there, you’re enough not there that you can keep talking to yourself, telling yourself whatever you’ve decided to tell yourself, until it’s done.
She says, “Not like this, baby. I want it to be right. To be us, somewhere else, living our own life. Not here. Not in Dean’s house.”
Bradshaw groans and holds his head in his hands as though he has been struck in the face. Loretta could not care less about the moment or the place. But she understands that this is a thing he would expect her to care about.
She could just give in. That would make Bradshaw happy. It might even make her happy. But none of that matters — not her desire, not his desire, not this man or that man, not being married or being free, not whether she wants to or not.
It is only about the choosing. Nothing else. The choosing, and that it be hers.
• • •
Later, when he’s got his smile back, he tells her, “Well, hon, I’m sorry but there ain’t any money.”
Dean called in everything before he left town, got all the accounts in order. He had been settling up with Bradshaw once a week, and taking Bradshaw’s word about a couple of “late payments,” and generally had allowed Bradshaw to create pockets of uncertainty in the cash flow. But that was over now, and Bradshaw had to give over all the money he had squirreled away off the top of the payments to Zion’s Harvest.
“Didn’t have no choice. But this thing of Dean’s is exploding. Sales off the freaking charts. When things settle down again, it’ll be nothing to skim off… I don’t know….” He acts like he’s calculating in his head. “A lot, baby. A shitload.”