When Dean came to The Crick to get her and their belongings, to fill the horse trailer with the boxes that Bradshaw helped them load, bantering with Dean, making him laugh and shake his head, when he came for her and had her by his side as he prowled through the house, choosing what would be needed and what could be left behind for now, he had taken her into his office while he compiled certain papers and locked others into his steel filing cabinet. He had opened the bottom drawer of the cabinet and removed a strongbox that he opened with another small key, and then had shown it to her with wide eyes, with shared amazement: a pile of gold coins, shined carefully, an incoherent pile of one-ounce golden eagles, thousands of dollars’ worth of gold. He had removed eight coins, and relocked the box, and placed it back in the cabinet.
“You’re leaving that here?” Loretta had asked.
“For now,” Dean said. “For now.”
He looked at her gravely, lips pressed and brown eyes brightened. She could sense in him an assessing mood, an evaluative moment — the kind of seriousness that might come over him in prayer or spiritual leadership, his sense of himself expanding even as he adopted a veil of humility.
“What?” she asked.
“If I show you something,” he said, “you must promise me to hold it as a sacred secret.”
“I promise, Dean.”
He withdrew a leather pouch tied with a cord, sagging as if it held a misshapen grapefruit, and held it toward her, fist tight around the top, his chapped red knuckles as big as walnuts and one black crack running across his thumbnail.
“Take it,” he said. “Feel it.”
She reached out, and he said, “Use both hands,” and he set the pouch in her cupped palms, and said, “Don’t drop it, little sister,” smiling, thrilled, looking as he did sometimes in bed, beforehand, ready to climb on, his brown eyes backlit with intensity. She felt the contents of the bag settle and shift as he gave it to her, and it nearly forced her hands to the floor, so great was the distance between its weight and her expectation of its weight.
“What is it?”
“It is gold, little sister.”
He was whispering, inches from her face. She had never felt so intimately connected with him. She set the pouch on the floor and opened the top.
He whispered, “It is gold from the California gold rush. Some of the first ever discovered — by Saints. By Saints, little sister.”
She opened the top of the pouch tremblingly. Inside, the lumps were dark and brownish, but for a few tiny gleaming curves, where the lumps of ore caught the light.
“Discovered by Saints, Loretta, though you will never hear it spoken of by the Gentiles. They say a man named John Sutter discovered the gold, in a place called Coloma in California. They named it Sutter’s Mill. You can read all about him in the histories. In the schoolbooks of the Gentiles, his story is well told.”
Loretta reached in and took up a single nugget. It felt almost soft between her finger and thumb, as if she might mash it.
“But you will never hear the Gentiles talk of the Saints in Sutter’s Mill, and how the Saints settled California, how the Saints discovered the gold. You will never hear the Gentiles tell the truth about that, little sister, because what if they did? What if they had to accept the righteous history of the nation? That it was the Saints — the ones everyone repudiated, the ones everyone scorned and scorns still, the Saints, abandoned by their own church, ostracized by all — it was the Saints leading from the very first, Loretta. Setting the example.”
Loretta had stopped noticing anything but the small lump of gold. Gold. She hadn’t conceived of it like this before — as a substance of the earth, a rock. Dean reached out and took it from her, and placed it back in the pouch as he continued talking about it, telling her it was sacred gold, Mormon gold, and that this particular gold had been held in the hands of the true Saints for more than a hundred years. Saints had left Utah and gone to California, and gold had come back to Salt Lake and bolstered the new Zion under Brigham Young.
“And where did you get it?” Loretta asked.
Dean merely shook his head. Never mind. He tightened the pouch and placed it back in the bottom cabinet drawer and locked it.
They left the room and he locked his office door behind them. He explained that they were entering a world full of dangers, of persecution, of enemies. He told her for the ten-millionth time about the Short Creek raid, the agents pouring into the homes of the righteous, driving out mothers and children, locking up their fathers.
“That was not so long ago, little sister,” he says. “Your aunt Ruth was among those children. That is still the world that we live in.”
Those two days had been awful — Dean climbing onto her every half hour, it seemed, until she was so sore she asked him to stop, until she feared that nothing could stop her from getting pregnant now, not with this flood of his seed, and when she used the solution it burned so badly she bit her thumb and cried.
But she took careful note of the ring of keys that Dean carried. Careful mental note of which keys, among the thick ball of them, opened four locks: front door, office door, cabinet, strongbox.
• • •
They arrive at the house in single file, crossing the dirt driveway and aiming straight for the side door. Both of these houses, this one and Dean’s father’s home, are squat, square brick affairs, with front doors and side doors facing their dirt drives, each door fronted by a cube of concrete. Uncle Louis’s place has a shed out back, and a cinder-block milking barn across the driveway, and cow pasture all around. Behind the barn are haystacks and a low row of calf pens. Loretta finds the smell — fresh manure and cut hay — comfortingly familiar.
Dean raps on the screen door, and Aunt Becky sings, “Come in, come in,” and in they come, clustering on the bright yellow linoleum, not leaving Loretta enough room to let the door shut behind her, and so she stands there, framed, as Aunt Becky dries her hands on a towel and fusses, never stops looking about, offering a hand, patting, smiling, moving, nervous. At the counter stands a tall, knobby boy with a rubbed brush of reddish hair, leaning with half a buttered roll in his hand. When Loretta glances at him he looks away quickly. She feels him tracking her in his peripheral vision, shooting quick visual sorties her way, and his appraisal lights up her nerves. She is familiar with this kind of attention, but usually not from boys. The boys in Short Creek tend to leave, or be kicked out, by the time they’re in their middle teens. Loretta feels both younger and a thousand years older than this worldly kid in blue jeans and T-shirt, though she knows that he is older, that he is Jason, that he is seventeen, that he is technically her nephew if you drew it up on the family tree — but that he considers her unrelated. Or not very related, anyway.
The children crowd farther in and she lets the screen door close behind her. On the boy’s T-shirt is an image of a large red tongue hanging from a set of bright red lips, a lush sexual image, and under it the words “Hot Rocks.” She feels herself blush behind the ears.
The boy says, “Welcome to Idaho,” says it directly to her, but it is Dean who answers, “Don’t forget I grew up here.”
• • •
Uncle Louis sits at the head of the table, offers Dean the seat at his right hand. Aunt Becky’s seat stays open at his left, while she and Ruth shuttle the dishes to the table: roast chickens, mashed potatoes, green beans, hot rolls, jugs of milk. Loretta sits among the children, across the long table from Jason, the two of them volleying looks. He seems to be watching her even when he is not watching her. He is not handsome, particularly — gangly, hips wider than shoulders, a scruff of curly reddish hair cut close, with those big Harder ears and small Harder eyes hidden behind his bulb of a freckled nose. But she finds him awkwardly beautiful, like a calf or colt. He acts like a shy boy, and she finds herself feeling like a shy girl, and it shocks her — it assaults her how simple and nice it is, how childlike, how innocent to be shy and embarrassed and nervous, and how normal that is, how utterly typical it is everywhere and for everyone except her.