The 19th Wife (4 page)

SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

J
ULY
21, 1873

HELL HATH NO FURY

The news out of Salt Lake’s seraglio has caught even our attention. At last Mrs. Young—or should we say,
a
Mrs. Young—has told her husband enough is enough. This one—Number 19, if the numbers can be believed—has filed suit against the Prophet, Supreme Leader, etc. etc. of the Saints. All we can say is: It’s about time. While husband and wife ensnare one another in accusation and counteraccusation, we would like to add two observations to the fracas. One, Brigham Young is a Confidence Man in the grand tradition of the hoodwinkers of the West. A message from Heaven has told him he should possess 19 wives? A message from Heaven has told us we should possess a finer house, a larger income, and at least one day each year free from this esteemed publication, but those minor miracles have yet to transpire. As for Mrs. Young, Number 19, we most respectfully inquire: What did she expect? At the gate of the slaughterhouse, even the squealing pig understands his fate. Could she not smell the blood in the air? Under some Divine plan, it seems Destiny intended these two noble creatures to be united in either matrimony or warfare, if there is a difference. As the battle begins, we shall mount our hill with somber hearts to watch out over the carnage.

THE BIG HOUSE

That night I couldn’t sleep. Same with Elektra. She kept shifting on the futon and growling at every sound at the Welcome Center—car doors, motorcycles, eighteen-wheelers gasping in their sleep. At one point a t-ball team dashed from a minivan for the men’s room, a gang of eight-year-olds calling one another pussy and dick. It was one of those nights when I never really shut my eyes.

Around four I started driving. Elektra sat alert in the passenger seat, the fur buckled on her brow. It was like she understood where we were going and didn’t think it was a good idea.

Outside St. George, past the crystal meth dens of Hurricane, there’s a long county highway to nowhere. It rises up, crossing an empty desert plateau with red mesas and stony mountains and stands of piñon in the distance. On the road there’s nothing for fifty miles except a gas station, a lunch counter, and a wire cross marking the site of a fatal crash. If you keep going, eventually you’ll hit the turnoff for Mesadale. Theoretically this highway leads to Kanab, then the Grand Canyon, but there are better routes to both, and there really isn’t any reason to drive down this highway unless you’re headed to Mesadale, or you’re lost. It’s got to be the loneliest road in America. Somewhere along here my mom dumped me that night. I remember there was a dead cottonwood beside the road. I remember wishing it would come to life and hold me in its limbs.

Ten miles before Mesadale I pulled over. With the engine off, everything was quiet, just a few early birds rustling in the sagebrush. After fifteen minutes a semi came along. I could hear it before I saw it, its thunder mounting, consuming the desert. When it passed, the van shook and Elektra barked once. The roar subsided and after a long time everything was silent again and the truck’s taillights were lost to the night.

Finally there was pink in the eastern sky and I let Elektra out to pee. She ran twenty feet into the desert and started barking at a bitterbrush. Probably a jackrabbit or Gila monster. I called her back to the van but she ignored me and I had to drag her in.

I was parked by the sign telling you how far to Mesadale, but buckshot had chewed it up so bad you couldn’t read it. Every time the sign went up the Prophet sent out an apostle to shoot it up. My dad did that once. I remember him boasting about it at breakfast. “Took out Satan’s marker,” he said, stuffing his mouth with fried ham.

I should probably make it clear why the Firsts aren’t Mormon. Not like the Mormons you see on tv singing in the Tabernacle or cheering at a BYU game or the hottie missionaries chatting up strangers on the street. The guys who run the Mormon Church—those old dudes in out-of-date eyeglasses up in Salt Lake—they hate the Prophet almost as much as I do. They call him a heretic, a blasphemer, and a whole bunch of other things like rapist, pedophile, and tax cheat. The point of contention between the Firsts and the Mormons—you probably figured this out—is polygamy. The Prophet says when the Mormon Church gave it up in 1890, they sold out. That’s when the Firsts broke away. It’s why the Prophet—our Prophet, I mean—used to always say on Sundays, Brothers and Sisters,
you
are the first and true Saints. You are the descendants of Joseph and Brigham. You will be first in line at the Restoration when man hopes to be saved.

As you can imagine, the Mormons have another opinion on that. Can you spell
rift
? That book I was reading, the one about the history of God, it says this sort of split happens all the time. The Jews and the Christians. The Catholics and the Protestants. The Mormons and the Firsts. It’s been going on forever and the only thing I know for sure is it messes up a lot of shit for the rest of us.

Over in the foothills I could see Mesadale waking up to the dawn. From here it was a cluster of white and yellow lights beneath the mountain. I knew exactly what was going on at each of those lights. I knew it the way you know a dvd you’ve watched a hundred times. A sister wife was flicking on a lamp to brush out her hair. Another was striking a match to light the stove. A third wife was pulling the string on the pantry bulb, hauling out a large box of corn mush. Ten, fifteen, twenty more lights in a house—each was a sister wife rising to perform her chores.

And the kids. About now the kids would be climbing out of bed, rubbing the sand from their eyes. They’d be forming a line at the sink to wash. The boys would be searching the boxes for a shirt. The girls would be helping one another pin up their hair. You don’t talk much at that hour. You just dress fast so you can get to the kitchen in time for your plop of mush. Sometimes there was toast and canned peaches, but not always. Whatever there was, there was never enough. Only a fool would waste time taking a piss before getting something to eat.

As I drove closer I could see Mesadale had grown. There were a few hundred houses now, warehouses for families of seventy-five. No one knows how many people live out there but I’m going to guess twelve thousand, maybe fifteen. Counting is complicated. The numbers are part of the mystery. The less you know, the less you know.

The turnoff is hidden behind a stand of cottonwoods. It looks like a dry river wash, and even if you’re looking for it, it’s hard to spot. No one stumbles across Mesadale and that’s the point. Roland likes to call the Firsts the Greta Garbo of cults. “Oh honey, that Prophet of yours, he just wants to be left alone.”

As I left the asphalt, the van began to rattle. Elektra sat up and growled. No matter how slowly you drive, the road kicks up a cloud of red dust that can be seen from almost anywhere in town. The journalists who sometimes snoop around don’t realize it alerts the Prophet’s militia. I’m totally serious. You’ll see.

About halfway up the road I passed a pickup headed out. Five wives squeezed into the cab, four across and one perched awkwardly in a lap. They were older, probably barren, which was why the Prophet would let them leave town like this. He never lets the girls out, but women like these, he didn’t care. They stared ahead, their eyes vacant. They looked familiar. It was perfectly possible they were my aunts, cousins, or half-sisters, or all three. Elektra shoved her head out the window to bark at them. The women remained expressionless. It was as if they didn’t see me and we were passing in two parallel worlds.

A couple of miles up the road you see the first houses. Eight, ten, twelve thousand square feet. Often two or three side by side in a compound. They’re not mansions, more like barracks or barns, built cheaply from plywood, plastic sheeting, tar paper, aluminum, and sheetrock. Many are unfinished—an exposed side wall, a wing with a plastic roof, a front door made from pressed wood. When I was a kid my dad told me he couldn’t afford proper siding for our house. That made me feel sad for him—I sensed the shame in his voice. But that wasn’t the reason. It was to avoid property taxes. Some loophole I never understood.

One thing was different since I left: a lot of houses were now surrounded by walls. Or instead of a wall, a ring of trailers, circled like pioneer wagons. I guess the Prophet was getting paranoid. Of what, exactly? It’s not like the government hasn’t had a hundred years to shut this place down.

I turned on Field Avenue and halfway down there it was, our place—three houses and a couple of outbuildings on five acres of useless scrubby land. From the street it looked like nothing had changed. The dozen picnic tables where the kids ate except on the coldest days. The laundry lines with fifty little shirts flapping in the wind. The vegetable garden, the barnyard, the cornfield—all of it parched and pathetic. The property backed up to scrub and when I was little that’s where I’d hide when I was afraid of my dad—of what he might do. The main house was a large rectangle of plywood stained dark green. Twenty bedrooms, a vast kitchen with pots the size of oil drums, and my dad’s basement. The kids weren’t allowed down there, just the wives, one after the next, each getting her piece. You know what’s weird? A week earlier and he would’ve been down there right now, doing who knows what nasty shit online.

Here’s something: I have no idea how many brothers and sisters I have. There isn’t a good way to count. There’s full, half, step, and foster. Who goes into the tally and who doesn’t? I’d like to tell you I loved each of my siblings, but that’s pretty much impossible. And what about the ones you’ve never met—the children a sister wife left behind somewhere to marry your dad? Do you count them? Oh, and your sister who’s now married and no longer allowed to talk to you because you’re a guy and she’s a girl and around here brothers and sisters do it all the time? Do you count her? And what about me—I’ve been gone six years, the Prophet told everyone I was banished to the bleak pits of damnation. Do they count me? I wouldn’t. I’m going to guess I have a hundred siblings, maybe one-ten. That’s about as accurate as I can be. My dad used to say he never went to bed at night without thanking God for his children. And the crazy part is: I believed him. Every word.

Mind if I tell you some more? We slept in triple-decker bunks; or five to a bed, head to foot; or on the couch, four boys elbowing over three cushions; or on the living room floor, on blankets and pillows, twenty kids laid down like tiles. Shirts and sweaters in plastic garbage bins labeled by size. Shoes handed down. Tennis balls and kickballs stolen from one kid to the next. The only thing in that house that was all my own, that I never had to share with anyone, was a drawer in a dresser, twelve inches wide by fifteen inches deep. I measured it a million times. If you’re bad at math, that’s 1.25 square feet, which was really more than I needed because I didn’t have anything to keep inside.

Saturdays were washing days: a pair of sister wives would fill a zinc tub with cold water, throw two boys in at a time, scrub their backsides with a brush on a stick, then fling them out. They changed the water every tenth boy. It would take all morning. But at least I wasn’t a girl. The girls used the bathroom according to a schedule that kept the plumbing on this side of chaos. On Saturdays they washed their hair in special sinks. The Prophet didn’t let them cut it, he said they’d need it when they got to heaven to wash their husbands’ feet. Some of the girls got nosebleeds from the weight of all that hair. A few complained about it hurting their backs or getting headaches, but most said nothing, at least not to me. When the girls washed their hair it sounded like a mop in a bucket. You can imagine the clogs in the drain. It took hours to dry—they’d lie on the picnic tables and spread their hair out around them. I loved to watch them from the window in my mom’s room. The girls looked beautiful like that, their clean hair fanned out like angels’ wings.

Roland once asked if there was anything good about growing up in Mesadale, if I had one fond memory among all the bad. “One thing’s for sure,” I said. “You’re never alone.”

I stood outside the house, looking up at my mom’s window. A roller shade was drawn halfway but I could see the aloe plant she grew on the sill. She used to break open its leaves and massage the clear liquid into her hands and throat. Sometimes I’d sit on her bed and watch her while I told her about school. Sometimes she’d squeeze a drop from the broken leaf into my palm and I’d stay with her until it had dried.

I saw someone in my mom’s window, a dark shape pulling down the shade. They were all in the house, everyone, my brothers and sisters and all the wives, but I guess no one was coming out to say hello. Then Virginia shot out from the barn, running right for me and rolling over at my feet. She was thin and hot under her thick coat. A belly rub was all it took to make her love me.

That’s when someone said, “What do you want?”

I looked up. It was Sister Rita. “I don’t know if you remember me.”

“I remember you. You shouldn’t be here.”

To be perfectly honest, Rita was never one of my favorites. She used her position as first wife to boss everyone around. You can’t marry a new wife without the first wife’s permission. So every time my dad wanted a fresh bride he went groveling back to Rita. I don’t even want to think about what he had to do to get her to say yes.

“I’d like to see my mom’s room.”

“No.”

“Please. Just for a few minutes.”

“No. God sent you away. The Prophet revealed it. I can’t go against his will.”

I know it’s hard to believe people really talk like that, but consider this: if you didn’t know anything else, if your only source of information was the Prophet, if you spent seven hours in church on Sunday listening to a man who claimed to have a direct line to God, who your father and mother swore was a Prophet, and your brothers and sisters, and your teachers, and your friends, and everyone else assured you, promised you, his word was the word of God, and those that he damned were damned for all of eternity, you’d probably believe it too. You wouldn’t know how to form a doubt. The Prophet told us all sorts of shit and we believed it, all of it, just ate it up.

Like once he told us that Europe had been destroyed in a battle of good and evil. He said it didn’t exist anymore. France—no longer on the map. He described the fires of Paris, the bodies in the Seine, the cathedrals reduced to rubble, the wolves that had returned to the Champs-Élysées. I had no reason—no ability—to doubt any of it. Everyone around me said it was true. We didn’t have tv, there was no internet when I was a kid, everything we knew came from the Prophet. The first time I met a Frenchman in Vegas, I was shocked. I actually said, “How did you survive?” That’s the level of brainwashing I’m talking about. When I first told Roland all this, he said, “Oh honey, you’ve
got
to be kidding? You should go on
Oprah
or something.” But I’m not kidding.