“I guess Dean and Ruth have gotten set up over there,” Dad says at last.
“For good?” Jason asks.
Dad shrugs. “For now.”
Mom puts her hand on his forearm.
“We’ll make the best of it,” she says.
“That’s right,” he says, but he sounds exhausted.
Mom smiles forcefully at Dad — her way of drawing him out of his gloom, of insisting happily that he not disappear into his own mind. He avoids her eyes. He coughs once, hard, to clear his throat, and says, “They’ve got a young girl over there with them. Ruth’s niece, Dean said.”
Mom stops chewing. And blinking. She stares at Dad, and he looks back, and they seem to forget Jason. It would not be too much to say they look terrified. Soon everyone they know will know this, too. Everyone in church. Everyone in town. Everyone.
Mom says, “No, Lou.”
Very carefully and very slowly, he says, “Dean says she’s Ruth’s niece, and she has nowhere else to go.”
Nobody speaks for several seconds.
“And I don’t know any different,” he says, looking stubbornly at the center of the table.
Jason feels like he might throw up. Like just vomiting, there on the table, among the three of them and this new development, might be what’s called for.
“You don’t?” he says. “Really?”
Dad exhales sharply, the sound like a sack of grain dropped on its end, and says nothing more.
September 7, 1975 GOODING, IDAHO
Dean says they have to, so they have to. And so, when the time comes, when the old clock in this musty house makes a single weak reverberating bong, Loretta swings her legs off the bed and stands, brushes her hands down the front of her dress, and takes a deep breath through her nose. She does not know those people, she reminds herself. Doesn’t know them and shouldn’t care about them. And yet she is flushed with self-consciousness, a constant rose of warmth wrapping her neck and ears and temples now that she is out here, in the world.
She goes downstairs. Ruth herds the kids. They are dressed as if for church, though they will not be attending services here, Dean has informed them. They will be having their own services, led by Dean. He reminds them all, often, how vigilant they must be against the dangers and temptations of the world, where Satan rules. Despite herself, Loretta expected to find demons everywhere; so far, she’s been disappointed by how much this place is like home: the desert here is not as pretty, more like a weed patch with dying grasses and tick-filled sagebrush, but in most ways what she has seen of Gooding and the countryside has been a lot like Short Creek. Farms and fences, barking dogs. Horse trailers on blocks beside mobile homes, spread over with rust. Pole sheds with small weedy junkyards out back. A kind of galaxy circling the town — the farther away you get from the center, the farther apart the houses are, until you get out to Harder land, out to the biggest farms and ranches, and beyond them, all the human structures start coming together again, as Gooding turns into Wendell, the next town over.
The differences, though. There are no other people like them here. No groups of five, eight, eleven children walking along the roadside. No women in long chaste dresses and long braided hair. No young boys in wool pants and long-sleeved shirts.
Dean says he’s praying about what to do. About whether they might find a new home here, on his family’s land. In his father’s house. He tells the family he’s praying about this, and he tells Loretta — in these first days since he came to retrieve her — that he’s praying about this, but Bradshaw told her that he was already making plans to move the business to Idaho. Dean has even asked Bradshaw if he would help run it.
“He wants to pay me to come up there. Isn’t that something?” Bradshaw said, delighted. “Doesn’t the Lord work in mysterious ways?”
A demon. She feels sure of it now. How else could this be happening? How else could it be that her husband is bringing Bradshaw into the family? Dean’s God, she feels more and more, is a fake. Dean’s God is simply Dean’s mind. But the world behind the world is real. Something must operate behind everything — guiding, shaping, directing. She cannot imagine otherwise, and Bradshaw comes from that place.
Dean arrives in the living room dressed in his black suit, his beard darkened and damp. He has lectured them about his brother Louis and his family, who are well meaning but misguided, and whom they should embrace and mistrust in equal measure. The children are aligned perfectly, militarily, descending by age: Samuel, Ruth, Elizabeth, Dean Jr., Janeen, Sarah, Benjamin. And Ruth at their head, like a sergeant. Loretta stands behind them all.
“I expect you all to be on your best behavior,” Dean says. “Good manners at the table. Polite to your aunt and uncle. Do not make your mother and me ashamed. Don’t make me go to the belt.”
Dean goes to the belt about once a day. The backs of Samuel’s legs, Loretta knows, are chapped with calluses, which he earns for his stubborn, silent rebellions — refusals to complete chores, to finish his bulgur meat loaf. Dean nags him relentlessly, reminding him that he is the eldest, and he is falling short.
“You understand that we have to be less than honest regarding your aunt Loretta,” he says. “We have no choice in this. We are no longer in Short Creek, among the righteous. We are no longer among those who understand the righteousness of the Principle. Satan is in control out here.”
“At Uncle Lou’s?” Samuel asks, and Dean gives him a silent look.
“Everywhere. The world over. Your uncle is not an evil man. But neither is he a righteous one. And Satan is ever watchful for opportunities to tempt and persecute the righteous.”
Loretta knows that Dean considers himself a perfectly righteous man, though he would never admit it out loud. A perfectly righteous man would not be so vain. How do you come to feel that way about yourself? How do you ever feel so fully synchronized with the purpose of the universe? There must be a beauty in that feeling. Sometimes she thinks of the world as Dean versus Bradshaw. And other times she thinks of the world as Dean plus Bradshaw, different expressions of the same confidence.
“Okay, then,” Dean says, and Ruth opens the front door and the children exit in single file, through the screen door and onto the front step, the red paint walked off in the middle, and onto the path worn into the lawn. Then Loretta goes, then Dean, then Ruth, and the children wait for Dean to take the lead. They walk out onto the gravel shoulder of the narrow county road and begin walking the quarter mile toward Uncle Lou and Aunt Becky’s. The heat of the past month is cooling, but still Loretta feels too warm in her long dress and wool stockings, a hint of dampness already inside her lace-up shoes, at the tight neck of her dress. They begin walking up the small rise that separates the two homes, the harvested hay fields to their left, and the cow-filled pasture on their right, and a pickup roars over the top, a dirt-caked Ford F-150 with a cracked windshield. The plump, red-faced man inside turns to watch them as he passes, looking mystified and pleased, here on this ordinary road that he must drive all the time without the magic of any surprise.