The prophet arrives at last, entering hunched and slow on the arm of his burly son. He aims a gray, murmuring smile toward them. One milky eye wanders. He is a walnut of a man — tiny and parched and failing and skeletal — and his nearness to death only adds to his authority. They assemble, and Uncle Elden stands in front, holding his knotty, trembling hands.
Ruth and Loretta flank Dean, and the prophet rasps about exaltation and salvation and obedience to the Lord’s sacred principle of plural marriage. He speaks in a soft monotone, pausing often as if to rest. “It is there, brothers and sisters,” he says, “in Genesis. Right from the beginning. Lamech and Esau and… Moses and Jacob. All living… in the Principle.”
The prophet continues, speaking of the forsaken commandments and the world’s abuse of the true Saints. “The government of this United… States has persecuted this priesthood. The Mormon Church itself has per—” A fit of quiet coughing stops him. His son hands him a handkerchief, and when Uncle Elden takes it from his mouth a strand of saliva catches the light. “Has persecuted this priesthood,” he whispers.
His voice affects Loretta like a drug, a lulling sense of the sacred that goes deeper than her brain and whispers that she is wrong, that this is divine after all. Uncle Elden talks about the “the raid of ’53,” when Satan sent the federal agents to arrest the men of Short Creek and carry away the women and children, and the constant threat of the next assault from the enemies of righteousness. “No righteous people… live without remembering the sacrifices of their fathers.”
In her head, Loretta flies to her worldly future. There, she wears pants with wide bottoms, and colorful blouses with short sleeves — T-shirts, even — and her hair hangs long and loose, and she paints her eyes with mascara. Every whorish thing. She wishes she could show her future self to her father, watch him burn. Her Tussy future, pink and bold. This future could be anywhere else and she will have a car, one of the sleek ones in the magazines, maybe the pink Mustang in the Tussy ad, and she will listen to rock music and watch television, and there is no Dean or Ruth, of course, no Uncle Elden, but there is no Bradshaw, either, or any man. Or rather, there is a man, but he is no man she has ever known. He is a warm, anonymous shape, and he exerts no force.
Uncle Elden makes a rattling sound in his throat, and continues. Loretta thinks that she’ll have to learn the names of cars and which ones she likes so in her future she’ll be able to choose the best one, the car that will show the world that she is free, the car that will announce that she is this kind of person and not that kind of person. The prophet mentions the veil of heaven, and now they all engage in a charade in which Dean and Ruth stand on one side of a curtain held aloft by Loretta’s parents, and Dean reaches through the veil for Loretta and pulls her through, pulls her to them, because this is how she will go to heaven, drawn there by Dean and Ruth.
• • •
Later, Dean comes to Loretta’s room, the anonymous room that never quite warms up against the desert cold. He shuts the door, sits beside her on the bed, holds his knees in his hands. It comes off of him in waves, how badly he wants to move toward her. Thick veins crawl along the backs of his hands, and he squeezes his knees.
“I have promised your father, little sister,” he says, in a quiet voice. “But oh, you are a sore temptation.”
Her breathing stops. A gust fills her lungs. Loretta feels overtaken, though there is nothing surprising here. This has been plummeting toward her, an enormous meteor pulsing down from heaven, a giant, inevitable stone, and she has averted her eyes and pretended it was not there. This must be how life works, she thinks — the lull of boredom and reverence dulling your mind for catastrophe.
Somewhere in the night, two dogs burst into vicious barking and fall quiet.
“I do believe it would be best for us to wait,” Dean says.
He speaks so carefully. As though he were trying to talk her out of something. She takes him in from the corner of her eye: black wool suit, faded along the cuffs and knees, and polished black brogues. A not-unpleasant odor of flesh and cloth. His beard, the combed stubble of brown and red and white, and the tiny chapped areas on his bony cheeks, like dots of rouge on a doll.
She reminds herself: It is not lawful. It counts only if you believe it, and she will not believe it.
“Do you not agree?” he asks.
He places his hand on hers, his nails split and cloudy. Squeezes gently. He is younger than her father, but more worn. Taller. Leaner. Stronger. She wonders where Ruth is now, and what Ruth is thinking. Whether Ruth believes he will honor his promise.
“We are called to raise a righteous seed unto the Lord,” he says. “It is the most sacred principle.”
She wishes she could laugh, because there is something insane in this language, but she might never laugh again. He leans and whispers damply in her ear, a single brittle hair in his mustache tickling her: “You are trembling, little sister.”
He grasps her thigh above the knee and squeezes. His hand is massive. A line of sweat trickles from under Loretta’s hair, streaks down her back.
“I am as well,” he whispers.
His hand gains one inch on her thigh and squeezes again, and she knows now that ignoring the meteor has not made it go away, and that it is worse than she feared, this fate, this stone, because she feels a tingle — a small, repulsive flutter — between her legs. His hand nearly encloses her thigh, and he holds firmly, and though she finds him ugly and repellent, an oaf, she wants to squirm against that tingle, to press against it.
Dean exhales like a stamping horse and removes his hand.
“This is hard, little sister, so very hard,” he says. “But we will wait.”
He speaks as though he were denying her. As though he, through his righteousness and self-control, were saving them from her.
“You will see that it is better this way.”
He stands, and does not bother to hide the sideways prong under his black wool pants. Her eyes sting, and weakness floods her, runs into her veins and bones and pores and hair.
“Welcome to our family, Loretta,” he says. “We are walking in the Lord’s true light.”
He places his hand on her head, and stands there. Showing it. She blinks madly.
Dean takes her by the chin and says, “Your father has told me about your nighttime excursions.”
He must feel her chin shuddering.
“Those will end now, of course.”
She nods.
“I would like to hear you say it.”
She tries three times to get the word out, that word, yes, and when she does everything collapses. Tears scald her face and she gasps and coughs. He strokes her head, hair damp at the roots. She hates to cry.
“Shh, little sister,” he says. “It’s all right.”
He leaves, and she lies there shaking, curled on her side on the unfamiliar bed, on the quilt Ruth made from patches of old denim dotted with tiny rabbit ears of white yarn, and she lies there a long time, an eternity, staring at the wall, thinking, Bradshaw was right, Bradshaw was right, until she gathers herself, becomes herself again, and makes herself a promise that she will do more than simply get away.