Jason says, “I don’t know,” and Loretta wants to hit him.
She parks the car and says, “Wait here,” and sets off. As she walks across the parking lot she feels it again — the lift, the joy, the hum — and she enters the front doors, smells cigarette smoke, and hears the tinny bells, the trilling of adrenaline that sings to her from the worldly world.
Inside, the Stockmen’s opens cavernously. Footpaths are worn in the center of the brocade carpet, and the decor suggests a fake barn — all lassos and riverine wood grain. It is lit up like midday, but nearly deserted. The long check-in desk has five stations, though only one person sits there now, a young man with a bolo tie and boils along the temples who glances at Loretta as though she has startled him.
The hum is at full speed when she approaches the desk. She stops, acts confused and embarrassed, and says, as though she doesn’t know where to begin, “I’m in kind of a jam here, and I wonder if you can help me.”
She explains herself, and shows him a blank check.
“I don’t know,” the night clerk says slowly.
He is holding the check between his thumb and forefinger, as if it might be tainted. He looks at the name and information — Dean Harder, d/b/a Zion’s Harvest — and then at Loretta, and then back.
“I swear,” she says. “He’s my father, and he gave me these. For emergencies. It’s completely good, I promise.”
The boy exhales loudly and screws up his face.
“I don’t know,” he says.
She doesn’t have a driver’s license or an ID. She’s got nothing to prove anything. She looks at him beseechingly, and says, “Please?”
“I’ll have to ask my manager,” he says. He leaves and returns with a tall, thin woman, who is made taller by the hair swooped upon her head like an ice cream cone. She has wrinkled skin and golden hair that strikes Loretta as unnatural, almost orange, and she smells strongly of perfume, and she is smoking a long, thin cigarette. She puts her big brown eyes on Loretta and sucks hard on the cigarette, and the wrinkles on her face centralize.
“We might have to give the bank a call Monday,” she says — she pronounces it “Mondee.” Loretta feels certain she will not do this, and says, “Of course. Sure,” and the manager shrugs and says, “Okay,” and hands the check back to the boy and leaves without another word.
And then Loretta — flying again, just flying — asks, “Can I make it for a little over?”
Walking back to the car, she spots the first pale hint of morning along the horizon rim to the east. A mere lightening of the dark. It is approaching four A.M. Back home, she thinks, no one is even awake yet. No one even knows they’re gone.
Becky
She wakes with Lou, as she does every morning, and as Lou leaves to begin milking, she slides to her knees at the side of the bed and prays. She thanks the Lord for this day, this life, for her husband and son, Louis and Jason, their farm here in Gooding, their faith, their friends, their family, even the newly arrived woes and strife of family. She prays and prays, not thinking words — not the way Lou prays, in carefully selected, familiar phrases — so much as images and sensations. She finds herself filled, as always, with a warmth, a reaction in her body that she can only believe is the arrival of a presence, prickling her nerve ends, adding substance to her flesh, joining her. It is the sensory manifestation of the Lord, the weight of Him in the body, and it fills her with the knowledge of God, the knowledge that brought her into this church. It was not belief or faith, she thought. It was physics. Force and mass. It was knowledge. And so she is strong in the face of everyone she left behind — her faithless family in Wyoming, her Catholic friends from college — because she knows that they can’t help what they don’t know.
She had come to Gooding to teach school and met Lou through a fellow teacher, and her conversion was quick: she felt the weight of the Lord the second time she attended sacrament meeting. She knows her family can’t help but tell the tales they have been told, repeat the heresies and bigotries against Mormons, and though they long ago stopped trying to get her to change, she knows it is always there, their sense of having lost her to this thing they call a cult. Now, though, something new has flamed inside her since the arrival of Dean and Ruth and their children and that girl, and she must pray against it, must pray to drive from her body the fear that they prove the doubters right, they illustrate the worst of what the ignorant already believe. Polygamy, her friends and family always said to her. The Mormons are polygamists. And she had insisted they were not. But here the polygamists were. In her own family. She prays against Dean and Ruth, prays not just that they will leave but that they will never have been, that they and what they are will be undone.
It is dark. Five A.M. She puts on her slippers and robe, and descends the stairs. Turns on the kitchen lights, and one bulb in the overhead fixture fritzes out. She changes it standing on a kitchen chair, and washes the dust and bugs out of the frosted glass bowl of the fixture at the sink. Outside, in the paling dark, the lights of the milking barn look supple and thick. The milking machine hums. Cows low. Becky starts a pan of sausage links, and beats together eggs and milk and cinnamon, and slices the last half of a loaf of wheat bread. She pours a splash of apple juice into the pan with the sausage links and covers it, and then goes to wake up Jason. He will grumble and growl, she knows, complain, ask to sleep in, whine that it’s a Sunday, it’s a weekend, just a little longer, just a little longer, and Becky prepares to resist him, because she loves him so, this boy, because she wants him to be happy in every small moment, and it has been her lifelong challenge to fight the desire to satisfy him, to soften him with pleasures. There is nothing that feels more vital to Becky than rising early, earlier than the flesh wishes, to thrust herself into life, and she must teach Jason this, she must force him, over and over, to wake and to go forth, to train the sloth out of him, the way she trained it out of herself, morning after morning.
When she knocks, there is no answer. She knocks again, and again there is no answer — no grumbling, no moaning. She cracks open the door and peeks in, and then she simply stares at the empty bed, the empty room, without understanding, at first, what isn’t there.
Bradshaw
Bradshaw wakes on the cot in the basement, surrounded by the walls of jarred preserves aligned on new wood shelves, some bright with color, peach yellow, beet red, and others gone gray and furred with dusk. Right where Lori was sleeping, until he showed up. It is winter cold down there, concrete and exposed pipe and invisible shuffling in the corners, and each new morning briefly confuses Bradshaw, who must absorb and remember.
Upstairs, he hears footsteps in the kitchen. Ruth’s making her horse food. They will go now any day, he and Lori. He is ready. He tells Lori they don’t need a thing. He tells her he was wrong, down in The Crick, when he said to wait for money, just as he was wrong to let her tell him no. He mutters and whispers to her whenever he gets a chance, and he knows it now, without a doubt, that Ruth has seen. Loretta says wait, wait, soon now, soon. She knows something, she wants something, but they can never talk much.
He was wrong when he said they should wait for money. Everything had already changed, the landscape shifted, by the time he told her that, but he didn’t realize it until their moment had passed. How had it changed? What had she said? No. No. He had never allowed a girl to tell him no. Never. And there had been plenty of them, starting back in Vegas. High school. His dad off on oil rigs for weeks at a time, his mom who knows where, the house his own. And there were plenty of them in Cedar City later, girls who would do what he wanted them to. Like it or not. The Mormon girls — half were as fast as hell, and the others would keep their mouths shut. At a certain point, limbs and mouths entangled, no was not something Bradshaw was willing to accept.