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 right hand knows what your left hand did, cut it off!”
Evil flashed in his snap-shut sunny countenance. He dipped a shoulder, 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
