• • •
Something pops from the back of the Skycycle. What is it? The chute? A change ripples through the air. A pinprick in the pressure. The rocket slows, slows, and a white parachute drags behind it.
“Oh, my word,” Grandpa says. “For heaven’s sake.”
The rocket noses downward, drifting now toward the bottom of the canyon like a bit of burst cattail above a canal. Jason feels slapped, flattened. People race to the canyon rim, but Grandpa and Jason stay back. An eddy of body odor and cigarette smoke swirls around them. Jason fears he might cry.
Later, they drive in silence for a long time. No stories. The day has reoriented itself earthward, toward the dull and the disappointing. The truck smells like dirt. Gray dust films Jason’s shoes and socks. He stares at the delicate hem of rust lining the heater vents.
As they approach Wendell, Grandpa chuckles.
“That’ll be good for him,” he says. “Starting to believe his own bullshit.”
January 13, 1975 SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
Ruth brushes Loretta’s hair like she’s haltering a horse, yank, yank, hold. Loretta stiffens against each pull. In the dim, round mirror above the dresser, Loretta watches Ruth’s face, the same determined, resigned look as always. Her dough-kneading face. A weak scent of paint lingers, and from downstairs comes the smell of Ruth’s carob-and-date sheet cakes. Loretta’s eyes drift downward, and then her head drifts downward, and Ruth places one palm firmly over each ear and sets Loretta’s head roughly back in position. She divides Loretta’s hair neatly, an ivory line along the scalp, and begins braiding, her mouth tightened into an insistent little fist.
“I think it’s prettier long,” Loretta says, because she cannot help herself.
Ruth turns a braid tightly against Loretta’s scalp.
“It is a joyous day, Aunt Loretta,” she says, “but a sacred one as well. It is important to remain modest before the Lord.”
Something tries to rise from Loretta’s stomach. Aunt Loretta. This is what the children will call her.
“I believe you know this,” Ruth says. She looks into the mirror, into Loretta’s eyes, without changing her expression. Loretta returns the look, mimicking Ruth’s flatness. At first, Loretta thought Ruth’s expression revealed anger or frustration, but she has come to see that Ruth has merely emptied herself and adopted the aspect of duty in all things. Even with her children. Even the night she and Dean had come to the home of Loretta’s parents, and they had all knelt in prayer on the porch. “The Lord has given me a testimony of the righteousness of our choice,” Ruth had said, her face blank. “I know that we will be exalted in the celestial kingdom.” As if she had willed herself out of herself. Dean had blushed, his enormous ears luminous with blood, and though Loretta hardly knew him, and though she was just fifteen, she could see in his rabbity eyes that it wasn’t the celestial kingdom he had on his mind.
The room’s walls are bare and clean, the late morning sun somewhere outside the window’s brightening rectangle. Bed, dresser, carpet of bronze. Loretta has a hard time seeing this as her room, this empty corner of this barnlike house. She has all that is hers packed into a single shoebox in the back of the closet: two Christmas ornaments that were her grandmother’s, a silver star with red piping and a snowflake twinkling with glitter; a diary she wrote in seventeen times when she was eleven, including a page listing the qualities of “The man I will mary”; three photographs with worn, curled edges and hazy yellow orbs shadowing the images — her parents holding her as an infant, Loretta standing in a dress at three or four and squinting somewhere out of frame, and a Border collie they’d had as a child, snout buried in the lawn, digging; a greeting card with a picture of a stork and a silver dollar taped inside; two pewter rings and a set of earrings with tiny emerald cut-glass gems, still in the paper backing; a small leather pouch with arrowheads and rock chips she collected in the desert; and an embroidered handkerchief her mother made that reads Loretta Sara Buckton above her date of birth, May 21, 1959.
Nothing else, anywhere, is hers.
Ruth finishes weaving a braided crown around Loretta’s head, which gathers into a single braid down her back. Ruth runs her hands over Loretta’s hair, over her dress, smelling of heat and borax. She looks Loretta over, everywhere but her eyes. Picks a thread from her shoulder. Ruth wears the same white dress as Loretta, the starched white cotton, boxy bosom, lacelike moth-holed embroidery at the collar, wrists, and ankle-length hem.
Ruth says, “I’ll leave you to pray.”
They stand. She takes Loretta by the shoulders and looks into her eyes like she’s trying to ram something into her brain. How old is Ruth? Forty? Older? She has seven children, and often seems like their grandmother. She is thin, dry skinned, mouth sketched in faint wrinkles. The sisters whisper about her close-cropped hair, call it mannish, rebellious. In this, she is like Dean, who wears a beard though the brothers discourage it. Sister wife, Loretta thinks, and the phrase lands in her mind with a false weight, words she’s heard all her life without recognizing their deep contradictions.
Loretta will never call Ruth “Sister,” but she sees in her the way to do this: be stronger than the thing against you.
“We will raise up a glorious seed unto the Lord,” Ruth says, and encircles Loretta in a fencelike hug, barely touching. Loretta insists to herself that it is not true. I will not raise any seed. She will hold herself inside herself, away from everyone.
“Welcome to our family,” Ruth whispers over Loretta’s shoulder, in a voice that could not possibly be less welcoming. “Our eternal family.”
• • •
They await Uncle Elden, the prophet. The living room is insistently plain, with beige carpet and two long sofas, parallel and facing, and two love seats boxing them in, all upholstered in navy blue cloth patterned with small white flowers. The whole place seems uninhabited, Loretta thinks, though Dean and Ruth and the kids have lived there for going on three years. When the Harders first moved to this huge new house on the north edge of town, about a hundred yards from the Utah border, it had started talk even then that Dean would take a new wife.
Loretta’s father and mother sit on a sofa, deferential to the day’s events. She feels her mother’s eyes seeking hers. Her father does not look at her, she knows. He made all the arrangements without her, including Dean’s promise to wait until she turns sixteen before consummating their union. It sickens her, how far outside of it all she stood.
Loretta, Ruth, and Dean stand between the sofas, in front of the fireplace, and Ruth holds a small pillow at her waist, as if she were preserving a treasure. Loretta knows it is the three-strand ring of silver she will wear on the third finger of her left hand. The children line up tallest to shortest. Samuel, the oldest at thirteen, scowls, a fat boil behind one ear. He wears a black suit and white shirt buttoned to the collar, just as seven-year-old Dean Jr. does down the line. The girls just younger than Samuel, Ruth and Elizabeth, look like miniature sister wives, in floor-length cotton dresses and long braids. Even four-year-old Sarah and five-year-old Janeen wear long white dresses. Only Benjamin, the toddler, is clothed like a child, in knee-length black shorts and a short-sleeved white pullover. He fidgets, but holds his face firm, lips pressed with comical intensity, as though he fears some noise will burst forth. He is her favorite, Benjamin. She catches his eye and smiles, and he returns the briefest furtive grin.