Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

Sometimes at night, unable to sleep, Loretta goes through her box of things. Everything that is hers — everything that is her — is tiny and fading. It is all she brought from home, apart from clothes and a set of art paper and charcoal pencils, a birthday gift from her father. Only once has she ever tried to draw something: half a cat, so misshapen that she gave up. The last thing she does when she inventories the items in the box — the photographs of her infant self and long-dead dog, the Christmas ornaments, the arrowheads — is read her diary, and the last entry in the diary, the last of seventeen for reasons she can no longer remember, is her listing of the qualities she wanted in “the man I mary: rigteous, kind, handsome, strong, good singer, hero, all to myself!!!!”

• • •

Bradshaw grins, cocks his jaw, says, “Hidy, folks. I’m Rex Baker. Guess I’m your new driver.”

Loretta’s legs ripple. Her mind fills with chaotic flutter. Rex Baker? Ruth nods, and calls the children to help, and they all come, even Benjamin, toddling underfoot. Ruth looks over the piles of food, doing calculations in her mind. Bradshaw shoots Loretta a wink. She feels as if she will collapse.

Taking down the tailgate on the truck, Bradshaw asks, “What’s your-alls’ names?”

Ruth says, “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Baker.”

“All right, okay, all right.” He holds up his hands like he’s under arrest. “Sorry, ma’am. Just trying to be sociable.”

“That’s fine.”

“I got family down with the LeBarons, you know. Down Mexico. I’m friendly.”

Ruth nods, rebuffs his attempt at conspiracy, but Loretta knows he won’t stop trying. She knows what he’s saying is false, at least if what he told her before is true, that he grew up in Cedar City, always near but never part of this world in Short Creek, let alone Ervil LeBaron’s followers down in Mexico. They were the guns and Revelation gang, the truest of the true believers, hungry for apocalypse.

“I’m not some outsider,” he says. Loretta has a sudden image of him standing outside a window, a lighted window on the darkest night, looking in. Rex Baker . She will have to remember to call him Baker.

• • •

It is her night. Dean comes in around eight while she pretends to read the Book of Mormon. His feet are bare and white, sleeves rolled to the biceps. She knows he has washed his feet and hands, soaped his forearms, and washed his face and neck. He smiles wearily at her, head bowed, and sinks into the rocking chair. His knees angle outward like elbows, and he takes his jaw in one hand and presses anxiously.

“The new man seems acceptable,” he says in his slow baritone. “Managed the deliveries. Very acceptable.”

“Oh?” she answers, pretending to be drawn back toward a scripture she is not yet finished absorbing. “Good.”

“Yes, he’s fine.”

Since the night of their wedding, Dean has not touched her when he visits her room two nights a week. “We are partners now, you and I,” he sometimes says. “Partners in all ways.” He hasn’t touched her or made any mention of his promise, or any suggestion about his desire. He has sat in the rocking chair and rubbed his knuckles methodically, moving from knuckle to knuckle, finger to finger, and talked about whatever is on his mind or made simple, vacant observations. Though he asks for her opinions, she says little, provides the kind of agreement he is seeking and hides inside herself. She can tell he is proud of his self-restraint and imagines it will be rewarded.

He stretches his legs and yawns.

“I’m afraid I have stumbled into some hardship with the Elders,” he says. “A kind of a bind.”

He waits. Loretta closes her book, asks, “What is it?”

“They are asking more from me than I feel is proper. They are asking more from me than I believe the Law of Consecration requires.”

The Law of Consecration. Uncle Elden speaks of it constantly from the pulpit, as he does the Law of Chastity, which governs times of sexual relations, and the Law of Sarah, which allows wives the right to refuse sister wives. The Law of Consecration is fundamental to their view that they are different here, better here, more righteous here — everyone shares all of their wealth with the Elders, who divide and return it to families as needed. We are a community of God, Uncle Elden says, and not a community of man’s desires.

“They are asking me to turn over everything from Zion’s Harvest,” Dean says, a thin note of complaint in his voice. “They are demanding to see my accounts.”

Loretta stumbles in her mind: Isn’t that the law of the community? Isn’t Dean an elder of the community?

“I am now turning over twice the tithe I was before you and I were joined,” he said. “I am struggling in my soul, little sister, to understand what more I am required to give.”

“Aren’t you to give all?”

“They say I am.” He works at a back tooth with his tongue, and then says in a rising, rapid voice, “Is it only avarice that might make me ask why that is? Is there no point at which I have contributed my share, more than my share, far more than my share, even, and might keep the remainder without being accused of a lack of righteousness?”

He stops as though embarrassed to have revealed himself so. Loretta doesn’t know what to say. She had not expected this. Dean’s expanding prosperity — his marriage to her, the growth of Zion’s Harvest, his selection to the Council of Elders — had seemed, in and of itself, a time of great fortune for him. A windfall of esteem and authority. And yet he seems now, rubbing his temples and breathing deeply through his nose, like a man sunk in trouble and misunderstanding. He has been buying gold, she knows, because he distrusts paper money. He buys only one-ounce golden eagles, and he’s particular about this, quoting Old Testament verses about not having “diverse weights” in your bag, about having a “perfect and just weight.” He is not turning the gold over to the brethren. Not tithing it. He’s keeping it.

“It seems like,” she says slowly, “there should be a reward,” and Dean sits up in his chair.

“It seems so to me as well,” he says. “Very much so. It is not that I do not want to provide to the community, or share the wealth. It is not, I hope, out of mere vanity or love of filthy lucre that I wonder this. I have struggled in my soul, Loretta, and prayed long over this. I do not wish to have anything the Lord does not intend for me to have.”

He leans forward in the rocking chair, plants his elbows on his knees. Narrows his eyes, lowers his voice, and looks at her with an intensity he saves for times of greatest spiritual import — those moments when he believes he is being heeded, at the pulpit or in prayer, and a look of such gravity comes over him, such self-seriousness, such consciousness of demeanor, that it betrays his greatest vulnerability: his sense of himself as a righteous man.

He says, “I believe the Lord wants me to retain some of the fruits of my prosperity for my family.”

Loretta nods. Of course He does. The only question was how Dean would work his mind around it. She thinks of his office, with the locked drawers and file cabinets. She thinks of how he hides away the keys to the truck and the van and the station wagon, as if they were precious treasure. She thinks of how he doles out money to Loretta or the kids — not Ruth, Ruth is trusted — by going into his office and shutting the door, and returning with cash folded in his hand. She thinks of the thick dowel that had been lodged against the sliding window in her bedroom. Dean had cut the wood to size, and climbed a ladder to her second-story window and put it there, so even on the hottest days she cannot slide it open. She thinks of the gold. A bag of gold like in a fairy tale. She thinks of taking that gold away from him, and keeping it for herself.