The Lonely Polygamist Part 16

"Maybe more than that. Where've you been?"

The thing was, he had no idea where he'd been. He often wondered if he wasn't suffering from some mental disease characterized by memory loss and intermittent blackouts: whole chunks of his life fallen away into some dark swirling hole in his mind. Sometimes it felt like he was living in an ongoing time warp, the hours collapsing on themselves, days and weeks speeding ahead of him, and he'd have to claw his way forward through the chaos and fatigue just to catch up, and always, without fail, to lose his focus and fall behind again. But Glory slowed things down for him, moved along at a pace that matched his own. He did not miss anything with her: her self-feeding program and color recognition and toilet training, every minor progression in motor skills and range of motion, her first steps with the parallel bars, then the weighted buggy, then the crutches. He spent eight months teaching her to put on and remove her orthopedic shoes. And now, her first word. His daughter was six years old, doomed to a life without language, and he'd been there to hear it: bird bird.

As he loped across the lawn he was feeling so elated, his chest filled with the bubbling ga.s.ses of fatherly pride, that he tried something he'd never so much as considered before: taking the porch steps, all five of them, in one great leaping stride. His big toe caught the top of the last riser and he went down, elbows and knees clapping hard against the wood, but he felt nothing. He scrambled to his feet and yelled, "Bird!"

It did not take him long to gather the whole family and hustle them out through the west pasture and across the river, the children stumbling bewildered and shoeless before him like prisoners on a death march, splas.h.i.+ng through the river, stopping to catch tadpoles and splash-bomb each other with rocks. Beverly came behind, clutching a crying baby against her breast, and, in between shouted promises of bodily harm if the children so much as got their pants cuffs wet, demanded to know what he, Golden, had been thinking thinking leaving Glory outside leaving Glory outside all alone all alone, not twenty feet twenty feet from a from a wild animal widely known for attacking and injuring defenseless young people wild animal widely known for attacking and injuring defenseless young people.

Golden did what he always did when Beverly scolded him: he smiled mildly and did his best to move out of earshot.

Glory was where he'd left her, perfectly safe, in a staring contest with Raymond across the fence, her knees knocking together in delight. The kids, normally forbidden from going near the river, much less crossing it, even when it was only inches deep, called out to the ostrich, offered him pebbles and blades of gra.s.s to eat, tossed dirt clods at him when Beverly wasn't looking. Even the baby had stopped crying, mesmerized by Raymond's unlikely shape and wet, hypnotic eyes.

"All right, now," Golden coached, "be quiet for a minute everybody and listen to this."

He glanced at Glory, who was completely absorbed with Raymond's come-hither stare, and said, "Glory. Come on, Glory, look! Bird!"

She seemed to grin a little, and tilt her head, but said nothing.

"Say it, Glory. Bird! Bird!"

"She can't talk," said Parley, who was nine years old at the time and seemed offended by the very thought. "She's handicapped handicapped!"

"She said it," Golden said, "just a minute ago." He knelt down in front of her and said it right into her face, whispering this time, "Bird."

She c.o.c.ked her eyebrows and opened her mouth. She said, "Ahhhhnk."

The kids laughed and the baby clapped her hands.

"No!" Golden said, almost shouting now. "Bird! Remember? You just said it."

"Maybe she said something that sounded sounded like bird," said Beverly in her carefully cadenced mother's voice, the one she normally employed with grocery cas.h.i.+ers and children under the age of five. "She does that sometimes, Golden." like bird," said Beverly in her carefully cadenced mother's voice, the one she normally employed with grocery cas.h.i.+ers and children under the age of five. "She does that sometimes, Golden."

"One time I heard her say bazooka bazooka," Clifton offered.

"No." Golden stood and pointed at Raymond. "She said it twice. I was standing right here." He positioned his mouth next to her ear. "Bird," he said with a husky emphasis, as if trying to hypnotize her. "Biiirrrd."

Glory turned and looked directly at him now, offered a lopsided smile. She said, "Uhhngg."

The children laughed again-even Beverly grinned-and Alvin grabbed his belly in a pantomime of hilarity and fell backward into the gra.s.s. Raymond himself seemed to shake his head in disbelief and Josephine shouted, "I think she just said, 'Uhhngg'!"

At that moment, the object of high ridicule by an ostrich and nine of the people he loved most in the world, he felt the hot wash of disappointment at the back of his throat, along with a tinge of irritation at Glory for letting him down. Only later, after turning it over in his mind, would he understand the memory in a way that rescued it from his colorful and extensive collection of shameful and embarra.s.sing moments. That day, with the family gathered around and expectation in the air like an audible buzz, he hadn't understood the look in Glory's eyes, the same sly, knowing look he had noticed for the first time on their drives to the clinic. He'd been too addled to see it then, but he was sure of it now: she had set him up, played a little joke at his expense. His own little girl, bless her heart, had pulled one over on him good.

THE RIVER'S EDGE That winter it snowed, it rained, it froze, it blew. The sun came out hot one day, melting the snow off the cliffs and mesas, sending ropes of red water twisting down sandstone walls, and the next day a three-week pocket of cold settled in and killed the locust saplings along the driveway, burst the water pipes on the Old House's north side. For five months he'd made almost no progress on Glory's Doll House, so when he had some downtime in the first warm days of April, he dedicated an entire week to its completion. He built the miniature stairway to the second level, covered the exterior plywood with cedar shakes, trimmed the windows and door. On the second day, with the temperature pus.h.i.+ng into the seventies, he decided that, for the first time all year, it was warm enough for Glory to sit outside and do some Raymond-watching. He situated her in her wheelchair the way she liked it, unbuckled, with a foam pillow and blanket on each side to keep her tucked in place, her feet planted firmly against the canted steel plates, her crutches across her lap.

He told Beverly that he was taking Glory out to work with him, and wheeled her across the muddy pasture to a firm, gravelly spot twenty feet from the river, which was moving deep and fast and quiet with snowmelt, cutting new banks along the far edge of the bow. Most of the other kids had escaped Old House for the outbuildings and willow thickets and muddy yard. They spied on and chased and attacked each other, shooting their rubber band guns and lob-bing mudb.a.l.l.s, pausing to hatch plots and form alliances which were exposed and broken in frantic whispering sessions behind the old chicken pen.

Golden locked Glory's wheels and waited with her until Raymond, taking his time like a star of stage and screen, made his appearance, still s.h.a.ggy with his coat of winter feathers. Glory squealed, clanged her crutches together, called to Raymond in a way that made him strut and puff out his chest a little more.

Golden told her he'd be back in a minute, and because the older boys were avoiding him in an effort to avoid conscription into the Doll House construction crew, he had to go himself to the detached garage for more finis.h.i.+ng nails and his carpenter's square. He couldn't find the square, ended up searching the cab and bed of his work truck, without luck. Back inside the Doll House, he knelt to cut two pieces of oak molding before he looked out the window to check on Glory. From this angle he could only see the back of her chair-a square of black naugahyde and two glinting chrome push-handles-and Raymond, just beyond the chair in his line of sight, standing against the fence now and really putting on a show: bobbing his head wildly, flexing his pygmy wings, as if trying to will them to flight. He had taken up the next length of molding, made two back-and-forth pa.s.ses with the miter saw, when he felt shaken, as if by a large, cold hand. His ears rang, his throat caught, his heart seemed to stop and clench painfully for several beats before starting up again, allowing him to breathe. He struggled to his feet to look out the window. Something was wrong: in Raymond's weird behavior, in the stillness and silence of the chair-it should have been rocking and shaking with Glory's spastic jerks. Even from this distance he should have been able to hear her squeals, the clanking of her crutches.

He threw down the saw and ran. The chair was empty. He stood next to it and turned in place, scanning every horizon for an explanation, trying to make himself believe that maybe the kids had carried her off as a joke, stowed her behind the old chicken coop just to give their old gullible dad a fright, or maybe, in the two or three minutes he'd left her, she'd managed to crutch-walk herself down to the willows, fifty yards south, to hide. Still turning slowly, as if suspended from a wire, he looked down and was met with a sight that would stay lodged in the edge of his vision until the day he himself would go to meet his Maker: Glory's tiny orthopedic shoes, placed side by side, a few feet from the river's edge.

STILL WATERS It took them three days to find her. Though the Mormons in the valley were suspicious, even openly antagonistic toward their polygamist brethren, a child had gone missing; they formed search parties, set up a command center at the chapel in Hurricane, shut down their farms and shops and businesses to comb miles of riverbank, probing the water with poles and grappling hooks, investigating culverts and fis.h.i.+ng holes for any sign of the missing girl. Golden, wandering in a fog of loss, allowed himself a small measure of hope he sipped at greedily, like a secret flask of whiskey, until the second day when a boy found one of her crutches snagged in some tamarisk at the mouth of Dutch Creek. On the third day, the Prophet, who had been fasting and praying in seclusion, had a vision: he saw an angel of G.o.d sitting in a willow tree, presiding over still waters.

The word went out and a flotilla of dusty pickups was dispatched to look for willow trees along the river. Golden rode in an old black Packard that brought up the rear, with Uncle Chick at the wheel and the Prophet dozing in the back seat, his gurgling colostomy bag keeping him company. When the men clambered out of their pickups to search, Golden stayed behind, pacing along the side of the highway, looking up with terror at every shout or unexpected sound, biting the margins of his thumbnails until they bled. It went like this all afternoon, one stop after another until they'd worked all the way down to Martin's Point, where the river descended into a narrow gorge. The light was failing and the men were starting to give each other questioning looks. They had parked next to the old trail bridge, and were picking their way through boulders and wild oak to the river below, when the Prophet made a noise and motioned for Golden to stay in the car.

"Going to bless you," he said. After his strokes years ago, the prophet had regained some of his ability to speak, though the words came out rasping and sideways, as if through a mouthful of sawdust. His face was smooth and colorless, obliterated by the weather, worn pale like an old stamp.

He leaned forward and said, "Your head."

Golden slumped all the way down in the front seat so the old man could place his hands on the sides of his head, just above his ears. The prayer was short, but came out with such a deliberateness, a gulf of one or two seconds between every crackling word, that it took a good minute to deliver: "Dear Father. Give this man comfort. You took his sweet baby from him and he don't understand. Comfort him. Bless him with thy Spirit. Bless him with the strength to keep on."

Inside that old car that smelled like leather and Uncle Chick's chewing tobacco, Golden absorbed every word; a liquid warmth in his scalp washed down his neck and shoulders, unlocking the muscles strung tight with relentless hours of worry and grief, and he slumped deeper into the seat until it felt like the only thing holding him upright were the ten blunt fingertips pressed into the sides of his head. When the Prophet finished his blessing he released Golden and, with his black locust walking cane, reached over the seat and pressed on the b.u.t.ton in the steering wheel to sound the horn. Uncle Chick, sweating and covered in red dust, came up the bank and helped his father out of the car. The Prophet stood at the pa.s.senger-side window and bent down to whisper to Golden, who did not have the strength to open his eyes or acknowledge the old man in any way, "You stay here, son. We'll bring her back to you."

Uncle Chick, getting to be an old man himself but whipcord-strong, hefted his father into his arms, cradling him in the manner of a ventriloquist with his wooden dummy, and they went like that down to the river, heading east, away from the others. By the time the men caught up with him, the Prophet was tottering ankle-deep in the water and shuffling from side to side, investigating the water with his cane. It was a wide spot in the river, a good spot for fis.h.i.+ng carp and catfish, and the water, deep and black in the grainy light of dusk, was speckled white with cottonwood fluff and tufts of foam. Nighthawks chittered, and a few sluggish bats wove invisible patterns in the cooling air. Picking their way upstream, the men whispered: in this part of the river there was no willow in sight, only a single enormous cottonwood split in half by lightning.

Maybe the Prophet had confused a willow with a cottonwood, but to those men, it didn't matter. This old man, standing in the water with his cane, this was why they lived the way they did, this was why they believed in the hard truths of the Principle. The Mormons-who had abandoned the Principle a hundred years ago, and who were at this very minute out conducting their own searches with their well-organized search parties, with their maps and grids and hot meals prepared by their women-had many things the fundamentalists did not: they had their expensive modern chapels, their temples and their worldwide bureaucracy and millions of clean-cut members, they had their Donny and Marie. But they did not have this priesthood authority, the ancient biblical power, borne by men of G.o.d like the Prophet, who spoke the hard truth, who conversed directly with G.o.d and had the ability, like Jesus of old, to release a dead child from her watery grave.

Golden was not there to see it, but they said that the Prophet picked around the bank for a good ten minutes, muttering and bent, searching with his cane. All at once he pushed out into a small hole choked with p.u.s.s.y willow stalks, as if he'd decided to go for a little swim, the water rising to his thighs, his waist, and then he reached down. Some said it was as if the small pale hand rose up through the green murk to grasp the old man's. Some went so far as to say that in the dim light, as the body was pulled to the surface with Uncle Chick on one side and the Prophet on the other, that the dead girl's skin appeared white and unblemished, her left arm straight, her body without handicap or flaw, as perfect as it would be come the morning of the resurrection when she rose from her grave to greet her Savior.

When they brought her back to Golden, wrapped in a wool horse blanket that smelled of dust, she was not perfect anymore. Her hair was knotted with grit and debris, her teeth broken, her nostrils plugged with greenish mud, her skin punctured and abraded from the twelve-mile journey downriver, her china-white body blackened at the edges like the porcelain of an old sink. He would see her like this later, when he carried her into the house to her mother, but for now he slept, his head lodged between the seat and the door, his face still pinched with suffering. The men shushed each other and, like parents of a colicky child who had finally nodded off, tiptoed on the gravel, wincing with every sound, sliding into their pickups and shutting the doors with quiet clicks. Exhausted, they switched on their headlights and in a single procession drove through the lowering darkness to their families to tell of the miracle they'd seen, to hug their own children tight.

RAYMOND THE OSTRICH He stood under a bright full moon, the gra.s.s cold with dew beneath his feet. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd come to be standing out in front of Old House barefoot, the fly of his jeans undone. The last thing he remembered was dozing in the parlor armchair, exhausted after a long day: visitors and mourners streaming through the house for Glory's wake, and Glory in her coffin next to him in her frilly white dress, bows in her hair. Except for his little nap in the car on the way home from Cuttels Bridge, he himself had not slept since she'd gone missing. Tonight he couldn't stand the thought of leaving her there alone in the parlor, of going up to bed as if it were just another ordinary night, as if tomorrow were not her funeral and burial, the last time he would ever see her on this earth.

Beverly had gone to bed hours ago, at ten-thirty sharp, as if it were any ordinary night, and he resented her for it. Resented her for her calmness in the face of this calamity, for her lack of tears, for her allegiance to routine and the maintenance of order at all costs. Most of all, he resented her for not openly blaming him for their daughter's death, for the shocked fury she choked back when he delivered the terrible news, for the three words she whispered as he clutched at her, spoken so quietly he could barely make them out: "How could you."

He was heartsick and tired, his whole body a pulsing ache, but he could not stand the thought of going back and sitting in the chair for the rest of the night. His legs twitched as if they wanted to run, his hands flexed with the desire to break something. He had felt this way all day, jumpy, and since this morning, when he had gone to retrieve Glory at the new funeral home, an old pioneer brick-and-sandstone mansion on the main drag in Hurricane. George Baugh had taken over for Teddy Hornbeck after he sold everything-including his hea.r.s.e to Golden-and moved to Florida. Mr. Baugh, a chubby pink man in an emerald-green suit that made him look like an artichoke, had a pointy head from which a wisp of gray hair rose like a curl of smoke. When Golden had arrived to take Glory, Mr. Baugh, standing next to a desk in the richly appointed parlor busy with fern stands and overstuffed furniture and heavy velvet draperies, explained that his "people" would deliver Glory to Big House, it was part of the services he offered.

Golden told the man that he had come to take his daughter, he had the perfect car to do so, and he needed her home for the wake that was to begin soon. He looked at his shoes so Mr. Baugh could not see his puffy, wept-out eyes. He said, "Just tell me how much I owe, please, and we can settle this now."

Mr. Baugh shuffled his papers. Mr. Baugh sighed. Mr. Baugh explained, with a thick layer of condescension sugaring his voice, that Golden needn't pay right now, that along with the casket, and the embalming and preparing of the body, there was also the delivery of the body to the residence for the wake, the delivery of the body to the funeral site, and finally, of course, the burial.

"It's all one package deal, sir," the man said, smiling with a false charm. "You go on home now, why don't you, be with your family, and let us take care of everything."

Golden s.h.i.+fted his weight, felt both his fists clench. After those initial hours of violent, wracking grief, every muscle and nerve alive with pain, he'd felt numb. All through the hours of last night and this early morning he'd been floating on vapors, his insides gone cold and still, his mind a whistling void; when he walked, he could not feel his own feet touch the ground. But hearing Mr. Baugh talk in his smug way about delivery and package deals, while his daughter lay dead somewhere in the rooms of this house, sparked a flame inside him. All at once his hands itched with the urge to punch Mr. Baugh's smug little face.

"I'm going to take her now, please," Golden said. "Show me where she is and that'll be it."

Mr. Baugh rea.s.sembled a professional smile and, gathering the last of his patience from deep within, repeated his explanation about the embalming, the delivery, the burial, the package deal. Before he could finish, Golden stepped around the desk and started down a hallway toward the back of the house. Mr. Baugh hooted and tried to get in front of him, but Golden gave the little man a slight hip check that sent him pedaling sideways into a potted palm. The first room Golden looked in was full of chairs, the other an office, and then there was the room with four caskets, each of them gleaming in the morning light like sleek automobiles freshly washed and waxed. A thick chemical smell made Golden's eyes water.

From a safe distance, Mr. Baugh shouted that he was calling the police.

"Which one is she?" Golden called, but he already knew. She was in the small one, the one Beverly had picked out, the one that was not a boxy casket, but an actual coffin, shaped to accommodate the human body, built with a rich cherrywood, winged angels carved into the lid. He lifted the casket off its stainless steel bier and was surprised by how light it was: it felt like he was carrying a box of pillows. Out in the parlor, Mr. Baugh barked into the phone and waved a letter opener in Golden's direction to make it clear he was not incapable of defending himself. In the distance, a siren started up-it was the siren the Hurricane fire department set off every day at noon, but Golden didn't know that. He imagined red lights, police cars racing in from every direction, unholstered pistols and bullhorns. He paused for a moment, considering his options and then tucked the coffin under one arm, pushed open the heavy oak door with the other, and sprinted across the lawn to his car.

To arrive home only to find that he'd stolen an empty coffin-Glory's body was back at the funeral home, laid out on a porcelain table in the embalming room, waiting to be transferred to the casket with which Golden had absconded-only made the burn of shame and anger spread inside him like a fever. Beverly had to go back to the funeral home, smooth things out with Mr. Baugh and the responding sheriff's deputy, while Golden stayed home, locked himself in the unfinished Doll House and wept with a hot, incoherent rage.

It had stayed with him all day, that anger, and he didn't know what to do with it. It rose and receded in his throat, smoldered and bunched under the surface of his skin. Now, in the dark hours of morning, he seethed, hot tears leaking down his face like water running over the sides of a boiling pot. He stalked around the west side of the house, past the Doll House, where the moon's reflection stretched and purled on the blue-black surface of the slow-moving river. Something white, hanging suspended in the air on the other side of the river, caught his eye. In a spasm of hope, his mind leapt to the thought that it was an apparition, the spirit of his little girl come back to offer what comfort she could, to let him know that she continued to exist in some peaceful beyond, that she still loved him, that wherever she was, she waited for him there. He moved closer, squinting, his heart turning over in his chest, until he realized what he was looking at was not a spirit presence of any kind, but the white breast feathers of Raymond the Ostrich.

He squeezed his head between his forearms and heard himself make a small choking noise of despair. When he looked up, the big bird was still standing at the fence, lifting one foot into the air, then the other. It stretched its long neck and let out a short, guttural squawk that sounded like a challenge. Golden stumbled forward, his rage returning to him in an instant, and it occurred to him that this bird was the last creature to have seen his girl alive. He found a rock in the mud of the pasture and, with a clumsy three-part motion, heaved it in the general direction of the ostrich. He waited for the sound of its landing, which never came. He moved closer, pitched a jagged hunk of white sandstone that landed with a splash in the middle of the river. Once at the river's bank, with ammunition in the form of round river stones on all sides, he found his range, throwing rock after rock, while Raymond stood at the fence, unperturbed and none the wiser, mocking Golden with a healthy display of feathers, staring him down with his yellow pearl of an eye. "Bird!" Golden growled, his voice broken and raw. "You stupid bird! bird!"

He stepped out into the river, the water cutting against his legs with a cold that burned. He splashed across with the idea of pegging that bird with a rock from point-blank range, just to give him a little dose of pain, to startle him from his privileged position at the fence, to make him consider his own mortality for a moment, but by the time he had struggled out of the cold grip of the river, had felt the full force of its merciless pull, there was only one thought in his head: to kill the animal who had done this to his daughter, to him.

Even as he clambered up the wet bank and struggled to squeeze himself through the strands of barbed wire, Raymond did not budge. Maybe the bird, who had carried on a serene and unmolested existence after his infamous encounter with the teenage gasoline thief, could not believe someone was actually violating his sovereign territory. With something like idle curiosity Raymond watched Golden wrestle with the barbed-wire fence, finally pulling himself free of it by allowing the back of his s.h.i.+rt to tear in half, and only when the huge man turned and lunged at him did he think to run. Just as Raymond pivoted, Golden was on him, throwing an arm over his back and hanging on. With surprising power the ostrich surged suddenly to his left and Golden ran alongside him, the acrid smell of the thing full in his nostrils, his feet paddling wildly underneath him until he tripped over a tin feed trough and went down hard in the dirt, still clutching a handful of gray feathers in each fist. In a panic, the bird fled into the small enclosure behind the feed bin while Golden picked himself up and rushed in behind him, hoping to corner him there, but the bird skirted along the back perimeter of the fence, bobbing and skipping wildly, and when Golden tried to cut him off he turned and delivered a deft kick to the outside of Golden's upper thigh, which felt like a blow from the blunt end of a billy club. Holding his leg, Golden tottered and fell backward against the empty feed bin, which made a hollow gonging noise and prompted several cows out in the pasture to moo in sleepy alarm.

The windows of the Spooner house were already lit and Brother Spooner clopped out onto the back steps in unlaced boots, wearing long underwear and armed with a .30-30, calling, "Who's out here? I'll shoot you, whoever you are!"

Golden kept still, hoping Brother Spooner might miss him there in the shadow of the feed bin, but no such luck. Golden watched Brother Spooner's bald head bob along the fence line until he came around the other side of the bin where Golden lay. Brother Spooner looked down and said, "What...in...the...h.e.l.l?"

Golden knew there was no explanation that made any sense, so he offered none. He allowed himself to be helped to his feet and led to the back porch, where Sister Spooner paced in her white flannel nightgown, meat cleaver at the ready.

"As I live and breathe!" she said, clutching her nightgown at the throat as women in nightgowns tend to do. "Oh, he doesn't look very good, Newell, does he? Check to see if he's hurt."

As was customary, Brother Spooner ignored his wife. To Golden he said, "You want to tell me what you think you're up to tonight?"

Golden was barefoot and wet, covered in dust and ostrich feathers and bits of straw, and shuffled along with a halting double-limp that made him look like someone trying to get by on two wooden legs. He shook his head. "My daughter," was all he could say. Unable to stand any longer, he slumped onto the porch step.

"He get you?" Brother Spooner said. "He got you, didn't he."

"He got me."

"He also got your watch, looks like," Sister Spooner said, peering at Raymond, who was pressed into the far corner of his enclosure, looking back over his shoulder with something silver glinting in his beak.

Golden looked at his wrist, which was bare. Sister Spooner said, "He likes s.h.i.+ny things, old Raymond. Watches are his favorite."

"And I'd forget about getting it back, I was you," Brother Spooner said. "As far as he's concerned that watch is now his personal property."

"He'll probably swallow it soon," said Sister Spooner, "but sometimes he likes to wait awhile."

While Golden waited for the feeling to return to his leg, the Spooners had a brief argument over whether or not Brother Spooner should call the sheriff. Sister Spooner, who gripped the meat cleaver like she knew how to use it, prevailed, arguing that Golden was in a state of shock and couldn't be blamed for wading across the river and attacking their prized ostrich in the middle of the night like some kind of lunatic. Once her husband had gone inside to get dressed and find his keys so he could drive Golden home, Sister Spooner took several mincing sideways steps toward him, to put a comforting hand on his shoulder and pick a few of the larger feathers from his hair. His s.h.i.+rt was slashed all the way down the back, he smelled like a manure pile, and his face was striped with the evidence of tears. Even now, his eyes shone wetly, ready to flow at any moment.

He was thinking that he should get up right now, before Brother Spooner came out. He should walk back home on his own power, preserve whatever sc.r.a.ps of dignity he might have left, but the thought of wading back into the cold grasp of that river a second time was too much for him. Sister Spooner, who had always maintained a soft spot for Golden, for his honest, sad face, his addled sweetness in comparison to her husband's hard ways, let herself go and in a surge of pity took his head in her hands, pressed it firmly into the twin ottomans of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"You poor thing," she said, "you poor, poor man."

SAFETY IN NUMBERS Two hours later, dozing at his post next to Glory's coffin and rousing himself twice to check on the other children sleeping soundly in their beds, he put on his work boots and drove his pickup through the pink dawn to the Virgin City Munic.i.p.al Cemetery, which sat on a broad shelf at the foot of Widow Mountain and overlooked the small town below. Though the sun was not yet up, the ambient light of dawn made the fine red sand that pa.s.sed for soil in these parts seem to burn like bedded coals against the black volcanic rock of the mountain. There was the usual clamor of birds, excited out of their limited wits by the prospect of a new day.

Golden pulled in and drove slowly over the groomed gravel lane to the northeast corner, where his father, in a fit of optimism, had purchased sixteen burial plots a.s.sembled four abreast in a perfect rectangle. He'd bought them only a few months before he died, when he had no reason to doubt he would require these plots, and many more, for all the wives and children who would one day bear his family name.

The sight of his father's grave had always given Golden the oddest feeling; there was something sad and maybe a little funny both about the single polished marker alone in such an expanse of hopeful red dirt.

ROYAL JOSEPH RICHARDS Light of the Lord

The carved image, which everyone took to be a tree, probably the tree of life, was actually an atomic mushroom cloud-Royal had drawn it on a sc.r.a.p of paper in the days before his death, and Golden had delivered the drawing to the stone carver, who had done an admirable job of replicating it. "I want my marker to be one of a kind," father had told son in his last hours of lucid thought. "I want folks to know I went out like I came in, with a big f.u.c.kin' bang."

Golden eased himself delicately out of the pickup and took a shovel out of its bed. Right away he ran into trouble. The earth was porous and sandy but littered with basalt cobbles-some small, some as big as bowling b.a.l.l.s. Time and again his shovel rang out against the stones, sometimes with a flash of sparks. The work was hard and what he'd hoped for: it obliterated all thought. He dug around each stone, probing and sc.r.a.ping with the blade of his shovel, and when one finally was pried loose he felt the relief that comes with pulling a splinter from under a fingernail. He was two feet down, the sun climbing against the mountain, sweat dripping steadily out of his hair, when the sheriff pulled up in his cruiser.

Golden did not stop digging, did not look up while the sheriff took his time getting out of the car. If he noticed Golden's torn s.h.i.+rt, his mud-caked pants and the fact that he was covered in feathers, he didn't mention it.

"Morning," the sheriff called. "Up early, I see."

Golden pulled out a grapefruit-sized cobble and tossed it onto the pile near the sheriff's boots.

"Got a call," the sheriff said, holding his creased face to the sun. "Grave robbery in progress. After the mischief you've been up to these past twenty-four hours, I figured it might be you."

Under the sheriff's gaze, Golden worked harder and faster than he had when alone, tossing up half-shovelfuls of dirt in random directions.

"They got a guy with a backhoe does this," said the sheriff, settling into a stance that suggested he would be content to watch Golden dig for a good long time. "Tellis Blackmore, I think you know him. Highlight of his day, to come out and dig a grave. Squares off the corners, makes a tidy pile a dirt, throws them rocks over the fence so they don't make noises on the casket when he pushes the dirt back in. Hangs around for the burial, sometimes, sheds a tear or two along with the next of kin. You don't plan to put Tellis out of a job, I hope."

Exhausted, Golden let his shovel drop and sat on the edge of the hole. He didn't want to talk to the sheriff, but was glad for the break. He looked at his hands: blisters at the base of every finger. Just as he was entertaining a thought about how thirsty he'd become, the sheriff reached into the front seat of his car and came out with a thermos. He poured something into the lid and handed it to Golden. Orange juice, sweet and cold. Golden downed the cup in one gulp and the sheriff handed over the thermos so he could dispatch what was left of it.

The sheriff was a slight, deeply tanned man with the blown-out face of a dedicated alcoholic. Fifteen years ago he'd lost his wife and two young sons in a car accident and had taken to drink, which cost him his teacher's position at the local high school. With nothing left to lose, he ran for sheriff, made his own pathetic hand-lettered signs, which ended up, after a particularly fierce windstorm, caught in weeds and hedges and plastered against chain-link fences all over the county:

FONTANA FOR SHERIFF A BRAND NEW START!

The standing sheriff's signs were glossy and professionally printed, but not all that more compelling:

ELECT HOUNSh.e.l.l FOR SHERIFF DIFFERENT MOUSTACHE SAME VALUES