Sound Of Gravel, The (28 page)

The sherbet sky faded into darkness as my tires splashed through the wide, shallow ditch at the foot of our long driveway. The lights in the house were already on, and the door to the kitchen was wide-open, allowing the light from inside to illuminate a nighttime game of marbles outside in the dirt. I parked a few feet from three little figures huddled over a crooked circle with their faces close to the ground. I watched Aaron flick a marble at Micah’s with his thumb. Elena was only three years old and didn’t have any of her own marbles, but she knelt next to four-year-old Micah anyway, not being the sort to let those details stand in the way of her participation. Their eyes followed Aaron’s marble as it struck the last marble and knocked it outside the circle. I turned off my headlights as Micah squeezed his eyes closed and threw his head back. “Oh, mannnnn,” he sighed with a shy smile, “that was my last marble.”

“Time to get inside,” I said as I shut the rickety truck door. Micah followed Aaron through the kitchen threshold with his head lowered and his hands buried deep inside his empty pockets. Micah was the quietest child in our whole brood, also the most tenderhearted and sensitive, a lot like the way Grandma had described Mom as a little girl. Both were the background figures, the unsqueaky wheels in their families.

In a family where meekness was discouraged in males, my heart went out to Micah, and I found myself being overprotective of him in a way I hadn’t been with my other siblings. Luke, Audrey, and Meri all had crosses to bear, but Micah seemed fragile in a different way. I would watch him through the window while he rode his little blue bike or wrap him in a towel after his bath to keep him from touching the electrified water pipe. It made me nervous when he and his siblings went swimming in the ditches and springs near our house, even though I knew that his older brothers usually watched out for him.

But my number one worry was Luke. The other children listened and remembered when I told them not to touch something. He didn’t, and he was always getting shocked, and not just in the shower. Our property was a minefield, with clusters of bare wires visible everywhere, some even sprouting up from the ground like flower stems without blossoms. Once my bare foot was shocked when I was hanging laundry on the clothesline in our side yard, just outside the kitchen door. I stopped walking barefoot outside from that moment forward.

On those weekends I was left in charge, I’d put dinner on the table and sit with my siblings as they ate. Once I was sure that no one had shocked him- or herself in the shower, I’d sometimes go out for the evening, putting Aaron in charge. I was fourteen years old and wanted nights out with my friends. Like Mom, I often felt the need to escape motherhood’s heavy responsibilities and uncertainties.

Most of my friends were related to me in some way. I hung out with my half siblings, stepsisters, and cousins, and I even had aunts and uncles who were my age. I had a few local Mexican friends too. Most of us went to church on Sunday mornings, but on weekends, when we didn’t have a wedding or a rodeo to attend, we went dancing at discothèques in Casas. Because we were fundamentalists and had grown up in the church, our parents trusted us. We also had a lot of freedom because our parents were often working or traveling in the States. There were always so many young kids in the colony; by the time we were teenagers, no one was watching us closely.

Drinking alcohol was a big part of the Mexican culture that surrounded the colony, and it seeped its way into our nightlife. Some members of our church never drank alcohol, but others served it at their weddings and parties. Mom always taught my siblings and me that Dad wasn’t a fanatic. He felt his followers and his children would find joy in making righteous choices the way he always did and thought they should be allowed to make choices for themselves. Mom and Lane never drank, but that didn’t stop me. I was drawn to other teenagers who went out a lot and drank alcohol. It was easy to buy, inexpensive, and I was never carded. Mom would have had a fit if she had known my friends and I were drinking, but it was easy to hide from her.

On nights I was out with friends, I was always the designated driver, which didn’t mean that I didn’t drink; it just meant that I was the one with the truck. I’d drive all over the colony and pick up friends along the way, as many teens as the cab and bed would hold. We’d listen to Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” on my handheld cassette player while making our way to a dried-up riverbed about a mile outside LeBaron. To most of the colony, the riverbed was a dumping ground, a place to unload garbage, park rusted, broken-down cars, and leave old tires. For my friends and me, it was a place without limitations, where a fourteen-year-old girl could do doughnuts in a pickup truck while she and her friends drank cheap Presidente brandy with Coke and a wedge of lime.

My friends and I took turns behind the wheel, practicing peeling out and driving on and off the roads, creating clouds of dust when we spun our wheels. We’d turn our headlights off and speed through the dark under the crescent moonlight, tempting fate on the rugged terrain—once or twice barely escaping serious accidents because of the huge holes in the ground that were big enough to swallow up the small truck.

Then, we’d park the truck at the riverbed and finish off the bottle of Presidente with lukewarm Cokes. My friends and I would drink and talk late into the night about our crushes and love interests. From there, the conversation often turned to who would get married next—some of my friends were already engaged to their teenage sweethearts and planning weddings—and our opinions on polygamy. We knew that it was a cornerstone of church doctrine, something that our parents believed in fervently, but most of us rejected it. A few young girls happily anticipated their futures as polygamist wives to older men, but they were the exception. Most of my friends thought it repellent that the boys we had crushes on would end up marrying us
and
someone else. We wanted lives more like those we saw on TV, which had made its way to us despite our parents’ best efforts to shield us from the influence of pop culture. But our rebellion against polygamy came from another source too: nearly all of us had witnessed our mothers’ jealous fits and conflicts with sister wives, which had done nothing to improve our opinion of the practice.

After an evening of such cathartic discussion, I would drive everyone home and then return to my own house, still half-drunk. My siblings would be in bed, asleep in their clothes, their feet and hands dusty from playing outside all day.

One night, as my tired, drunken head hit the cold pillow, my brothers and sister breathing slowly, snoring or talking in their sleep in the next room, I heard the roar of thunder in the distance and became consumed by the thought of how vulnerable my siblings were with me in charge; of how vulnerable we all were in a house where bent nails were what protected us from a stranger’s invasion, where, if we experienced any sort of emergency, the nearest telephone was a mile away. I tried to quiet my mind with a silent prayer for protection.

A lightning bolt lit up the room and I shrieked. Driving rain began to pelt our tar and gravel roof, and I heard the usual dripping sound in the kitchen. A puddle had already developed on the kitchen floor by the time I put the milk bucket under the hole in the ceiling. I felt cold drops land on my arm, then felt my own tears on my cheeks. I stood there a moment, listening to myself whimper, and then I heard something else—the sound of bare feet in the hall. Micah’s face appeared in the doorway. He stared at me wordlessly, shivering.

“What are you doing out of bed?” I asked.

“I-I-I-I…”

“What is it?”

“I-I-I’m scared of the dark,” said the little-boy voice, and not for the first time. Nights like this in the past, stormy nights, had sent Micah running into Mom’s room and climbing into her bed. She always swiftly sent him back to his room. Letting a child sleep with you, she said, would spoil him. Still, whenever Mom said no and Micah appealed to me, I defied her. I couldn’t stand to see him scared, couldn’t bear to see the part of me that was in him seeking comfort.

Thunder roared through the sky again that night and rain dripped from the kitchen ceiling. Micah ran to me, threw his arms around my legs, and almost knocked me down. “P-P-please.”

“Come on.” I scooped Micah up and carried him into Mom’s bed with me. “I’m scared too.”

As I pulled the covers up and let Micah settle in next to me, I heard Mom’s voice in my ears:
Children need to get used to being in the dark
. She’d repeated that countless times throughout my childhood.

No,
I thought,
they don’t.

33

By the end of the summer, Mom was spending more time with us. I wondered if she and Lane had been fighting or, better yet, contemplating a breakup. Susan, Sally and Cynthia’s mom, had decided to divorce him—despite having given birth to three of his children—although he did not let go of the marriage easily. Mom noted that Lane spent more time fixing up Susan’s house and working on her car in the days after their separation than before, as though he was trying to prove his worth.

But Susan had had enough. Not only had he abused her daughters, she said he couldn’t support her family, just as he hadn’t been able to support us. I hoped that Mom might follow Susan’s lead. But in early July, Mom announced she was pregnant again—and I realized she was never going to leave Lane.

Midsummer signaled the return of LeBaron’s social season, which included bridal showers, weddings, and baby showers. It was customary for mothers and daughters to attend these events together, and in spite of our differences Mom and I enjoyed going to celebrate with our friends and family. This festive time was full of family reunions, campouts, and rodeos at ranches on the outskirts of the colony. To my astonishment, Mom made good on her promise to keep Lane at a distance from me, and for a brief period I felt a cloud of darkness clear from my life. I began to relish some of my family duties, such as baking cakes for all the birthdays in our house. I also spent a lot more time with my friends, traveling to dance halls and discothèques in larger towns farther away. We never came home until the first signs of morning light appeared in the sky. Mom was either oblivious to my nocturnal activities or chose not to ask; she and I didn’t ask each other about much of anything anymore.

July 9 was my father’s birthday, and the church held its annual conferences in commemoration. Firstborners made pilgrimages to the colony from all over the United States. For one weekend, the potholed gravel roads of LeBaron would swarm with new-model American trucks and healthy and happy young men who’d driven down to Chihuahua to court girlfriends and visit their families.

As our family grew, so did the others in the colony, and by that summer the colony was crawling with teenagers, which meant more weddings and parties. I found myself more excited than I had been in years past, if only because I was finally old enough to be invited to all of the celebratory events. The weekend of the annual church conference, Mom and I walked to the morning church service together, then attended a barbecue lunch at a home nearby. That night, a dance was held back at the church. The black benches had been pushed against the walls, and a
norteño
band—a drummer, two guitarists, a keyboardist, and an accordionist—set up under the large photo of my father on the wall. As soon as they started playing ranchera music, the whole room began to dance.

On the periphery, I noticed a young man in a brand-new black cowboy hat and tight Wrangler jeans, his leather cowboy boots freshly shined, his shoulders square, and his back straight. He spun around, almost as if he’d realized he was being watched, and motioned for me to come over. It was my brother Matt; he’d come straight to the dance from San Diego without even calling Maudy’s ahead of time. I couldn’t believe the transformation in him. Though he was only seventeen years old, he had established himself as a hardworking kid at construction sites all over Southern California. By all accounts, he seemed poised to become an American success story. I hurried toward him, but then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Matt was standing next to a young woman—and the two of them were holding hands. She wore a tight-fitting red dress and black high heels, a banana comb elegantly sweeping up her hair, and long, thick strands of loose curls fell around her bare shoulders. It was Maria.

I couldn’t help but stare. Why was she holding Matt’s hand? Was my brother courting my stepsister? Was the world passing me by?

Before I could go over and ask Matt what was going on, someone grabbed me by the arm. Anthony, one of my half brothers, who was three months younger than me, was my regular dance partner at these types of events. Anthony had been born just a few days before our dad died. His mother was in the hospital when she heard the news that her husband had been murdered. I wanted to talk to Matt and thought about shrugging Anthony off, but I knew that would be rude. Besides, he was a fun, aggressive dancer who loved being on the floor as much as I did.

Before I could blink, Anthony’s arm was behind my back, my hand was behind his neck, and our free arms were raised straight over our heads. The fast waltz sent us swirling and spinning, knocking into a few annoyed couples and stepping on a multitude of toes. It was like being in your own Tilt-A-Whirl, and just as much fun. When the song ended, I was out of breath and ready for a break. I also needed to adjust my too-tight acid-washed jean skirt.

I stood there a moment, noticing that Mom was sitting alone, watching something intently. I followed her gaze reluctantly, sure she would be peering at Lane, who was present, but mercifully off-limits to her, as it wasn’t Mom’s night. But she was eyeing Matt and Maria. My jaw dropped open. My brother and stepsister were dancing
together
. And not just dancing,
dancing
. I wanted to believe this was something innocent, just a boy having some fun with a girl who sold pine nuts, but the body language said otherwise.