Sound Of Gravel, The (15 page)

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THE SOUND TRACK
to our 968-mile road trip from the center of California to the southwestern tip of Texas was Kenny Rogers’s
Greatest Hits,
a cassette tape that played on an endless loop. Lane seemed to have a special love for “Lucille.” “‘You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,’” Lane wailed. “‘With four hungry children and a crop in the field.’”

But things were worse when he didn’t sing. Lane tried to catch us up on everything we’d missed in LeBaron. He reported that he had three new sons, twin boys with his first wife, Alejandra, and another with his third wife, Susan. “They don’t look anything alike,” he said of the twins with a proud smile, his grease-stained fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. “One of ’em—Alex—you can barely tell he’s mine. He’s got this dark brown hair and skin just like his mother.” Lane let out a quick, jolly laugh. “The other guy is a little version of me, a white boy with blond hair, so we call him Junior.” He looked over to see if he’d impressed us. I tried to smile. “My wives have blessed me with fifteen kids now, and your mom’s new baby will be number sixteen. That’s not including all my stepkids. I see it as a retirement plan. I have lots of people to take care of me when I’m old.” He laughed at his own joke and seemed surprised that we didn’t laugh too.

“Can we turn on John Denver?” I asked.

Lane cleared his throat and the smile vanished from his face. “Look”—he gripped my left thigh—“I know you like livin’ close to your grandma and grandpa, but I think the family’s better off livin’ in El Paso. It’s right at the border.” He patted the top of my leg above my knee.

I glared at his hand until he put it back on the steering wheel.

“Your grandfather LeBaron and your dad set the colony up as a safe place for all of our Heavenly Father’s people to run to when the destructions come.” Lane stared off at the endless expanse of road in front of us. “We have no doubt that it will, we just don’t know exactly when. We gotta at least try and be prepared.” He looked over at Matt and me with a satisfied smile. “Believe me, when that time comes, your grandparents are gonna be sorry they ever left your dad’s church. Our way is a harder way of life, but it’s the Lord’s way.”

Lane continued steering with his left hand on the wheel and swept his right index finger through the air as if he were conducting an orchestra. “They’re gonna be sorry, all these born-againers in the States, only havin’ one or two kids per family.” He made number one and number two signs in the air. “It’s so selfish I can’t believe it. We have to sacrifice lots to have the big families we have, but it’s the right thing to do. There are millions of souls in heaven still waitin’ to come to this earth and prove themselves to the Lord. Our Heavenly Father will take care of us. Our blessings will come in the celestial kingdom.” I hoped this was the end of his sermon, as I had heard it all before. But he was just getting wound up. “All the lazy American men sittin’ around TV sets, drinkin’ beers and smokin’ marijuana, never doin’ anything good with their lives. I know your mom doesn’t want that kind of life for you two.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lane glance at us, but I kept staring straight ahead. “Even the LDS Mormons here in the States don’t have all the kids they should have. They don’t even live polygamy. They wanna say Joseph Smith was the prophet and then wanna forget what he preached, that plural marriage is one of God’s most important commandments. It don’t make no sense.” He shrugged his shoulders.

Lane continued to ramble for the better part of an hour. I did my best to disappear inward, occupying myself with thoughts of the life I’d left behind. I thought about my school and the friends I had made in California. I thought about how sad I was not to be finishing second grade. And I thought about Grandma and Grandpa and how I’d miss Grandma’s freshly baked corn bread and reading stories with Grandpa. At last Lane was winding down.

“Can we turn on John Denver?” I asked again.

This time Lane grunted in response and switched the cassette tapes. Soon he was singing along, belting out “Country Roads.”
Take me home to the place I belong.
Exactly, I thought, if only Lane would turn the truck around.

17

Eventually we pulled off in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We stopped to have lunch at Safeway, the only grocery store we could find. Mom and Lane had carefully apportioned our food stamps so they would last until the end of the trip. Alleviating Matt’s car sickness by rolling down the windows had left my hair in a mass of complete tangles, and as soon as I could, I asked Mom if I could ride with her. She smiled at the rat’s nest on my head and said that would be fine, she needed help with the baby anyway.

Luke didn’t complain when Mom told him to take my place in Lane’s truck. I lay in the back of the van next to Meri, and soon we were back on the highway. We made it to Arizona by nightfall, and the air turned cool. Meri was curled up in a wool blanket next to Aaron, so I crawled up into the passenger’s seat and sat shotgun, a privilege usually granted to my brothers.

The yellow moon that night cast a dim light over the sandy, cactus-covered landscapes. Here and there, mesquite trees and tumbleweeds appeared on the sides of the road and then disappeared. Like the valley of LeBaron, it was a place of desolation but also of beauty. I started thinking about my father. Mom hadn’t talked much about him while we lived in Strathmore. As much as I preferred Strathmore to LeBaron, I knew my father had believed in his visions and wanted his followers and families to live in Mexico, even though it was a harder way of life.

This highway, smooth and wide, was nothing like the ones in Mexico. In the side view-mirror, a quiet, endless line of headlights stretched for miles along the rolling hills behind us like a flowing river of lights. It was serene and exhilarating, exactly what I imagined my life would have been like if my dad were still alive.

I looked over at Mom, drinking water out of an empty yogurt cup, hunching exhausted over the steering wheel, her life like a constant trip with no arrival point.

“I wonder about my dad,” I said.

“Wonder what?” Mom’s mind was obviously somewhere else.

“What happened to him?”

“You know what happened, Ruthie.”

“No, I don’t. Not really.”

“I’ve never told you? I must have told you.”

I shook my head. “I heard in Sunday school that Uncle Ervil shot him, but that’s all. Everyone says Uncle Ervil was a mean man, that’s why his name is so close to
evil
.”

“Well, that’s part right, but Ervil didn’t exactly pull the trigger.” As cars continued to rush past, Mom groped for a bag of sunflower seeds on the dashboard, handing it to me and holding out her palm. I poured a few seeds into it while she kept her eyes on the road. It was a habit of hers on long car trips: cracking sunflower seeds in her mouth and fishing out the center kernel kept her awake and attentive.

“Ervil was the second-in-command of your dad’s church, and—”

“Why was Ervil a part of the church if he was such a bad person?”

“He wasn’t always that way. For most of their lives, Ervil and Joel were the two closest in the whole family. When they were little, people used to think they were twins, they looked and acted so much alike. And they were only eighteen months apart. When Grandfather LeBaron died and left his priesthood to your dad, he and Ervil worked side by side to build the Church of the Firstborn together with your dad as the prophet. Ervil was a missionary too. He was a good man till he and your dad disagreed about how to run the church, and your dad removed him from being patriarch.”

“But if he was good, then why—”

“It wasn’t an easy decision for your dad to make. He let things go on for a lot longer than he would have if Ervil hadn’t been his brother. People in the church started noticin’ that Ervil was spendin’ lots of money on himself, wearin’ nice clothes and drivin’ nice cars even though he had thirteen wives and all his kids to support. There was no way he could afford those things on the money he was makin’. Everyone knew that.”

“He was takin’ money from the church?”

“That’s right, Ruthie, and the church didn’t have much of it to begin with. Heck, my sister wives and I were survivin’ on a gunnysack of pinto beans and some eggs—that was it. I was livin’ in a one-bedroom trailer with three little kids.
And
I was pregnant with you.”

I thought of Mom living off gunnysacks of beans and remembered how Grandma had once said that Luke’s and Audrey’s disabilities were likely the result of poor nutrition. I heard her voice in my mind again:
Makes me sick to think about all those old men bringin’ so many little babies into the world and not takin’ care of ’em.
My grandma seemed smarter than my mom.

I poured some more water into Mom’s yogurt cup, and she chugged it down before continuing.

“Once he was removed from office, Ervil started preachin’ that
he
was the real prophet and that your dad was a
false
one. Your dad was never a fanatic and encouraged his followers to make choices for themselves. Ervil was the opposite. Your uncle started claimin’ that he had the authority to shed the blood of anyone who didn’t do what he told them to do. Your dad told him that there was no way they had the right to start killin’ people. By the time you were born, Ervil and your dad just couldn’t get along anymore. Ervil went and started his own church with those people, and he took a few Firstborners with him.”

“Why did the people believe Ervil if he was a bad man?”

“Well, Sis, people didn’t know that at the time. Ervil was real smart and he was a big talker. He was tall, had these huge hands, and he towered over everyone he talked to. He knew all the scriptures and knew how to twist them to make your dad look bad. Plus, members of the church were gettin’ discouraged because there was never any money, the farms we were plantin’ were young and not producin’ much of anything, and most of the men had to take construction jobs in the States to support their families in Mexico.” Mom opened her mouth wide in a yawn, sucked in the dry air, and covered her mouth with a flat palm. She shifted in her seat and rubbed the side of her forehead with her fingertips as if she had a headache.

“We heard rumors that Ervil had been threatenin’ your dad during his church sermons, tellin’ his followers that your dad needed to be removed so that the church could fulfill its purpose.” Mom took in a deep breath and shook her head. “Your dad knew somethin’ could happen, but of course he had no idea when or where it would take place.”

Mom yawned again and her eyes glistened in the darkness. She inhaled deeply, her belly expanding until it reached the steering wheel. “We were on our way to LeBaron for church conferences. Your dad had been preparin’ for them for weeks. He was drivin’ a big truck with a camper on the back with me and my four kids and my sister wife Lisa and her five kids. The older kids were all piled in the back. Lisa and I both sat up in the front with your dad, and I had a nursin’ baby.”

I did a tally on my fingers—twelve people in one truck. “I was there?”

“You were the one I was nursin’.” Mom laughed. “I was holdin’ you on my lap, sweatin’ like a pig, it was so hot. Your dad told us he’d promised to stop by and help a friend fix his car. But when we got there, it was clear that nobody was livin’ there. The place was completely empty. That was our first clue that somethin’ wasn’t right.”

I sat mesmerized by Mom’s voice while I studied jagged cracks in the black dashboard that looked like lightning bolts.

“An old, broken-down car was in the front yard with two men sittin’ in it, young Mexican boys who belonged to your dad’s church. They nodded their heads hello, smilin’, and tipped their cowboy hats at us. Your dad asked if there was a car here that needed fixin’, and they said, yes, this one here, but they’d accidentally left the keys for it at a house down the road. They asked my sister wife and me to go with one of the young men in his truck and fetch the keys. Your dad told all of us to go with the boy and we did.” She exhaled a long time. “That was the last time I saw your dad alive.”

“What happened?”

“Everybody hopped into the guy’s truck—Lisa, me, and all the older kids, except for Lisa’s son, Ivan. He stayed behind to help your dad. Poor kid. He was only about ten or twelve, I think. We drove around with the Mexican guy for what felt like an hour. Lisa and I looked at each other. We didn’t know what was goin’ on. Finally, the guy said he couldn’t find the house he’d been lookin’ for and asked if we wanted to stop at a little taco stand for lunch. Lisa and I didn’t have the money to buy everyone tacos, so we left the guy there.

“We walked all the way back to the empty house, and all along the way these cars passed us on the road going real quick. When we got back, the place was surrounded with flashin’ lights and police cars, police takin’ pictures and holdin’ back this huge crowd.”

Mom yawned again. Lane was just ahead of us now, and she flashed her headlights off and on to get his attention. She was too tired to drive any farther.

“Ivan ran through the crowd of people cryin’ and said that your daddy was dead, that they shot him and that he was dead.” Mom shook her head and flashed the lights again. Lane hadn’t gotten the message. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it. Lisa talked to the police. She was a lot older than me and she knew how to speak Spanish pretty well. I had to see what happened for myself. I had you in my arms and pushed my way through the crowd. I walked into the front door but he was gone. They’d already taken his body away.

“The house had green walls and all of them were bare. There was nothin’ in the place but a broken chair in the middle of the floor next to a pool of blood. Ivan had been waitin’ in the broken-down car for your dad. He said he heard the two shots that killed him, said that your daddy put up a fight to the very end. And Ivan said he saw three of Ervil’s followers leave through a side window. We later heard that Ervil was sittin’ in an air-conditioned movie theater, watchin’ a movie while his murder plan was carried out.”