LITMIR.BIZ

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to pass by. Though it cost me, touching him, I slapped his bound hand twice. Once for Lavina and once for me. Half a grunt, he pulled it in close, loping down the aisle and out the double doors, as free as his taste for sinning.

      I faced the empty judging table, my body filling with rage. Always the warning that men were beasts, always the words, passed off as truth, that a man had “inborn” animal needs and he would have them filled, women and children take care. Yet these same men were our protectors, men who admitted they were beasts, men ruling over, trying other men for crimes they all expected—who worshipped a God of flesh and claimed His power, then slept satisfied at night, having given fair warning.

      I stayed until the courtroom had emptied and the sun lost its heat. Three Elders had prayed and taken God’s counsel and found the wrong boy guilty. How many mistakes had been sanctified by prayer and passed on as holy Gospel? I gazed straight into the image of this God—cruel, selfish, blind—a Lord who hated Gentiles more than falsehood, and held His daughters in even less regard.

      I never entered a Wardhouse again.

      Bishop Dees wasn’t long in noting my absence. One of his boys came up to deliver the message on Monday. “Seven o’clock would suit.” And so I was called back to his parlor, this time, I knew, for a Bishop’s Court. Chastisement and disfellowship were certain, that or excommunication, my express trip to the damned.

      I showed up on his doorstep at sunset, a sour apology of a woman. Sour and unwashed from wood-splitting, and just starting to feel mean. His first wife, Evelyn, came to the door.

      She paled at sight of me.

      She opened the screen door wide and winced at its creaking. “Father says he’ll fix that hinge one day. It’s a good thing we have the Hereafter.” Her dress was the orange of a summer dusk when the air had been still for days. She’d fastened teardrop lace at the neckline, and thin lace borders at the sleeves.

      I stepped inside.

      A tall, angular woman stood in the foyer. She was someone’s wife, someone’s mother, but the thread of recognition wouldn’t quite pull out and through.

      “Vere, have you met Sister Martin? Clair, this is Vere Dees.” Daniel’s second wife took sharp stock of me—my old work dress unbelted, no apron or sash, the day’s sweat wetting my hair to the scalp—and grinned, thin as a razor strop, her mouth that long and sloping taut.

      “You must have worked beyond your strength, today,”

       Evelyn said. “Would you like to freshen at the basin?”

      “Oh, yes—” I said. Anything, to leave that hallway.

      She offered me a daughter’s room. A small room with a narrow child’s bed, neatly tucked. A row of identical cloth dolls lined the window sill. Knots for eyes. Collars of lace. I could have cried the way their arms dangled down—the hands, the empty hands.

      When I entered the parlor—cool air where the water ran down under my breasts and clung—the family rose, Bishop Dees, with his moustache oiled to blade points, and a wife on either side. I couldn’t believe that my gape-empty soul would be exposed, my faults read out in front of them. I thought to bolt, but Daniel held out the remaining chair for me.

      The table was set with cake and checkers and tumblers of cider. Strange as truth, I could not guess their next move.

      “End of a workday. Company picks,” the Bishop said.

      Two checkers lay in his open hand. I could only stare, red or black, quite lost, till Evelyn Dees spoke up. “Daniel, she may not know the game. Clair and I will play team, to make a start.”

      I managed to sit still as the game progressed. With my fearful thoughts and my hot arms to keep pressed close, it only came clear, middle of game three, that this was the full intent and import of the night, this checkers playing and sipping at drinks, the little jokes slipped quietly in by Daniel Dees or one of his two wives.

      I could see the Sisters had swallowed the pill of sharing him long since, and ridden out its attendant fevers. Still, I sensed great cost. Neither dared to claim her husband for her own more than a moment, in talk, in service to him, or in passing glances. Any other girl, visiting their home, would have admired the domestic ease which played out among the three, best faces forward, through the waning night. I could not. It seemed a house of tight elaborate moves, all propriety and polish. Though I’d never had a family, I didn’t long for this. I longed for what was rough, still partly hewn. I had never shared my heart, but when I did was there a parlor wild enough?

      Daniel’s wives stood and excused themselves to round the children up for bedtime. He smiled. “Shall you be red, or would you like to see if black checks raise your luck?”

      I did not share his ease. I said, “I dare not take the hill full darkness, Bishop. I will also say good night. And thank you.”

      “Wait,” he said, pushing up from the table.

      A match struck in my throat—the eyes of the Bishop, green flecked with gold, dark golden-brown, and his lashes short and thick—it startled me, then fell and lit my thighs: his eyes, his chest, the length of his arms. Burning for him there in his own front room, I wanted to run my wretched self—

      But Daniel had come back. He carried folds of hand-woven wool over his arm, a beautiful blue plaid Tartan cloth. “This is from Evelyn and Vere, a gift. Now, if you’d like, I’ll walk you home.”

      I felt that I might suffocate. I felt my indrawn breath might never let go.

      We walked the dry-packed road together, side by side, my heart starting up at every lighted house we passed. We did not talk, not once, which made the night seem closer, blacker. The shock of the Bishop’s hands almost drowned me, his hands on my face at my cabin door. And the question—only he never framed it into such, but only said, “Think on it. My wives would welcome you.”

      “Your wives!” Seed cones. Burst milkweed spreading on celestial winds. It was a woman’s final glory in Heaven, to spread the seed of God. Daniel kissed my forehead. I leaned into him, dangerously.

      “You said to wait, another call—”

      He shuddered, kissing my hair. “None is as high as this,” and it seemed terrible and true until his hands released me.

      “What if I’ll not marry?” I said, thrusting the cloth toward him.

      “Then you have the makings of a new dress, Sister,” he said, turning to go. “You of all women deserve it.”

      The Prophet Joseph Smith claimed that our Father in Heaven was human, once, a human male who’d learned his lessons. And every male who joined the Mormon Church could be a God and people his own world. But the peopling required a woman. These God-men needed their wives. Their faceless, nameless wives who did no deeds, acted no acts: the brood mares of eternity! I would not stay in a church which spoke for the exaltation of its men, but did not speak for women. I couldn’t lend myself to such oblivion.

      I told all this to Ada when she tried to blow any spark of chance that I might stay into a fire. I said I had no place in Zion.

      She begged me to keep on at her cabin, rent-free.

      “I won’t attend their meetings, won’t sew their silly garments. How long you think I would be let to stay?”

      “I could set you up in Corinne, selling flower cards and playing organ at the Methodist church.”

      I frowned and said I’d consider it.

      Ada smoothed her hands up her sleeves. She looked away. “And though he’s asked for your hand, you will not have the Bishop? Do you love him? Do you love Dan Dees?”

      “I endure a pain in my nether parts whenever I think on him. Is that love?”

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