LITMIR.BIZ

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as patriarchs? Lord preserve us, they’re a worrisome lot.”

      I slid my feet from the covers to the floor. “I’ll say good-bye to Jim, my way out.”

      “Don’t take fright,” Ada said without turning. “Both his eyes are swollen shut.”

      Since my arrival in the Second Ward, Homer Tingey had been kind enough to give me a ride to church with his family on Sundays. I walked downhill to their place every Sabbath, and shared the back of his wagon morning and evening with his six children, and shared their bench in church. The Sunday morning after Jim’s ordeal, I went to the Tingeys’ one hour late to leave a note saying that I was ill and wouldn’t be attending evening service. I needed a break from righteousness. I could not stomach the thought of hearing a single word of praise for the Prophet. Let them sing without the organ. Let them walk blindfolded through the brute force of their own survival.

      Homer’s middle daughter, Lavina Tingey, saw me through the curtains. Red hair in a tumble and her nightgown on, she stepped out on the porch and read my note. “I am not going either,” she said, smiling. She could hardly have been happier. Lavina was fourteen and freckled, sweet as the cooked meat of a pumpkin. Homer called her Angel Bright. I believed he’d hit the truth.

      “You know Brother Wrighton, who teaches my Sunday School class,” she said. I nodded, having survived a year of Wrighton’s unsmiling sermons. “Brother Wrighton laid a trail of breath last week telling us about God’s holy body. Well, I just had to ask, ‘If God has a body of flesh, how come we can’t see Him?’”

      “Lavina, you didn’t—”

      “He colored some, saying if I prayed for the spirit of submission, understanding would come clear as a photograph that God has a body. ‘Well then, if our Father has a body,’ I said, ‘seems like our Mother would, too. Is she pretty?’” And Brother Wrighton just slung open the door and howled, ‘Leave us, leave this minute! Mother in Heaven can’t be named and you ought not even to think on her, it’s a sacrilege. Leave and don’t come back until you have more faith.’” Lavina stepped off the porch barefooted. She plucked and twirled a morning glory bloom into her hair. “Faith can’t be asked for, Clair. It has to be gained. I aim to spend my Sabbath in the garden, taking the Lord at His best. I feel closest to God in the garden.”

      She was so earnest, so silly sweet, I could only ask, “What does your pa say about it, Lavina?”

      “Pa says, ‘Hold to the wheel! Hold to the wheel, young lady, and you will be up half the time—’” She gripped the lowest limb of the cherry tree shading their walk, crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. “Do you really think, Clair, do you think that half the time’s enough?”

      “Lavina,” I said, “I’ve held to that wheel all my life and only ever ate mud.”

      “Well, is there a Mother in Heaven, you think?”

      My breath stopped. I’d waited eighteen years to hear

       that question. I’d sat beside Lavina in countless Sacrament Meetings and never once suspected she felt the same as me. I quieted my heart. “If there’s a Father, there must be a Mother—”

      “She wears maroon laces. And has powder white hair. And she has twelve lovely daughters!”

      “Twelve daughters,” I said, caught in Lavina’s tale-spinning. “Each with a virtue all her own.” We named them: Confidence. Love. Endurance. Intelligence. Curiosity. Ability. Wisdom. Truth.

      “One daughter creates beauty,” I said, “and sends it off for all to see. She is strong, so strong she never has to prove it.”

      “That’s so, Clair. You see it deep. One daughter tends the earth,” she said, wriggling her feet in the brown dirt. “She loves and tends to it like it was her child.”

      “There’s a daughter of justice,” I said. “And one who sees far. She sees the dead and tells their stories for them, and we listen and do right.”

      “That twelve?” she asked.

      “Can’t be. We didn’t say joyous or funny.”

      “That’s daughter thirteen!” she shouted, as she slipped an arm around my waist, walking me out to the plank across their irrigation ditch. When we reached the road, I said, “I have enjoyed our Sunday sermon, Sister.”

      Lavina answered, in all seriousness, “But there’s one thing more. Would our Heavenly Mother’s daughters ever marry?”

      I took her hands. I shook them hard like the reins to an obstreperous horse. “If so, their husbands live in lean-to shacks, eat boardinghouse food, break rocks and wait on their dear wives’ visits like a field awaits a freshening rain.”

      Lavina nodded and smiled. “Our Mother makes sure they don’t ill-treat each other. You know how men can be, waiting on a good thing.”

      CHAPTER 9

      Pocatello Jim rode out of our lives as if he’d never existed. No court, no trial, no justice. Only Ada and I grieved the loss. But justice had its chance to shine in Brigham City two weeks later. I overheard the Sisters at the Co-op tell it, how Lavina Tingey had been attacked in her orchard the previous night. Her father heard her cry and shot at the molester. Blood stained the cherry tree where Lavina had sat, dangling her legs, singing at the evening star.

      At the trial, they blamed a young Gentile named Ron Carom, a hungry, bony boy been pushed to the side all of his life. His mother was a prostitute in Corinne. The Elder in charge of his defense couldn’t get more than a whine out of him—the low unearthly whine that comes from a cornered animal.

      His only defender was a girl of fifteen. She stood to testify in a woman’s faded dress. The sleeves were torn. Her nipples poked like snouts at the cloth. “It ain’t the truth, what’s got told! Ron niver. Niver went out nights. I know him and his place. You none of you knows him.” Her voice was thin as a fish knife. She looked at the accused, barked out her love. “He niver left home, niver been here, niver rode no wagon, how he’s gonna get to Brigham and back home, acre miles of dark? That’s the damn joke,” her laugh came out spittle. She turned to Homer Tingey. “I seen you wants and needs it, Mister, your girl so fine, but Ron boy, Ronnie Carom ain’t your kickin’ stool.”

      One of the judges asked if she was related to Ron Carom. She said she was his “neighbor like,” his half-sister. A voice rose from the Brethren. “Boy is trash. Born and lives with trash. Been tried in Corinne for thievery and mischief.” It seemed to win the crowd, like the court had finally stumbled on what mattered.

      Only one man saw it different. Daniel Dees’ line of logic said a boy who lived thirteen miles distant with a history of petty thievery might not have been their culprit. This was a case of female molestation. And no bloody wound, to cinch it. Whose blood had stained that tree?

      Homer Tingey kicked an empty chair. “Chickens, cherry trees or women! It’s all the same. It is a crime, a crime against me and mine,” he blared at Daniel.

      The three judges prayed and conferred and found Ron Carom guilty. They had it on God’s authority that this boy dared to attempt to drag a daughter of the Lord into darkness and foul sin. They had their man. And Homer Tingey had his justice.

      But standing in the crowd of Elders after the verdict was read, Inger Olsen cradled a bandaged hand. When the Brethren started down the center aisle, talking of crop blight and the quick thrift that came from the planting of living fences, Inger slipped from their ranks and headed for the side aisle to take his leave. I never had borne my testimony. Never stood to say what I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. I stood then. I moved to meet him. Mouth to navel like a slow boil of molasses and my bowels set against gale winds, I took that aisle.

      Inger walked toward me with a look that said I never had existed on God’s green earth, and never would.

      “Cut it off,” I said.

      He made to keep right on.

      “Your

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