Mr. Splitfoot Page 13

  Nat has eleven ten-dollar bills neatly folded in his front pocket. They raise opposite arms, a Rorschach blot saying goodbye to Mr. Bell. The car pulls away.

  “Shackles!” the Father calls out, as if landing the answer to a crossword clue.

  Nat and Ruth stick to the dark, creeping their way past him.

  The Father allows the broken chair to dump him on the ground. Nat passes by, but Ruth hesitates. The Father’s lying on his side, one cheek in the dirt. “Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established. God’s Grace. God’s Grace.”

  Ruth goes to him. “Here.” She gives him her hand to pull him up.

  “I don’t want your help.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  From the ground, drunk and spitting, he says, “No matter how much I pray for you Ruth, you’re going to die.”

  She crouches beside him. “That’s OK.”

  “No. It’s not OK to die until you’ve been forgiven.”

  “For what?” She catches up with Nat. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The Father’s laugh is scary, and when they reach the front door, they understand why. Nat tries the handle but the door is locked.

  “Animals,” Father Arthur tells them, “sleep in the animal barn.”

  Nat climbs into the boxwood hedge to bang on the living room window. Raffaella and Vladimir are watching TV. Raffaella shakes her head no. Vladimir switches off the set, and they disappear into the back of the house, scared sheep.

  “Fuck,” Nat says. “Come on.” He takes Ruth’s hand.

  “You’re really going to lock us out of the house, Father? It’s freezing.”

  “Rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.”

  Nat grabs Ruth. “Come on.” The mud of the yard is crusted with ice. He leads her into the barn, a small improvement. Nat collects a burlap sheet and a saddle blanket. He pitches fresh hay into the largest of the stalls, leading all four of the goats into the pen. Ruth constructs pillows. “Wish we could call Mr. Bell.”

  “We’re going to be fine. Same as always.” Nat spreads the burlap then the blanket. He lifts one corner. “Come on,” he says. “Get close.” The goats sniff and nibble the new hay. Nat leans back, opening his arm so she can find a warm place beside him. Her breath is still visible, and the tops of her ears sting with blood, but in a few minutes beside him, she sees he is right. Ruth is warm enough. They are going to be OK.

  Nat rests his chin on the top of her head. “Mrs. Bell.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “Yes.” The stall smells of goat urine. “I don’t like people besides you.”

  “And you don’t even like me. I mean in that way. The marrying way.”

  His eyes are gray and shining, light leaking in from the flood. “No, I don’t.” Nat’s voice is a low whisper. “Nothing’s grown back since my mom.” He puts a hand over his throat. “I don’t feel anything. I love you, but I don’t feel anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  Ruth lifts her chin, looking up to the rafters. “I’m going to get us out of here.”

  “But Mr. Bell doesn’t have a birth certificate.”

  “There are others.”

  “Other people who’ll marry you? Who?”

  “Is that so unbelievable? That a person would want to marry me?”

  Nat shrugs. “Yeah. To me it is.”

  At breakfast the next morning, one of the kids asks, “Do you know how to multiply a fraction?”

  After chores Ruth returns to their room alone. The door is already open. Ceph, in a sweatsuit, sits on their bed. He broke in during their exile. He’s found some of the money and has it spread out on their blanket. “This you?”

  Ruth nods. She approaches the bed and puts her hand on the crumpled bills.

  “I need it,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “I’m getting extradited.”

  “Emancipated?”

  “Fuck.”

  “How?”

  “I’m turning eighteen.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “It’s almost winter.”

  “I know. I need money.”

  She thinks a moment. “You’ll be eighteen. What about a wife?”

  “What about it?”

  “You could take me with you. We could get married.”

  “You?”

  “I need to get out of here. Then you won’t be alone.”

  Ceph looks at the bills, considers his options. “You know how to do it?”

  “Leave the Father?”

  “No. Fuck.”

  She thinks of the question about fractions. She thinks about intact. “No.”

  Ceph winces. “Pay me, let me do it with you, and maybe I’ll take you when I go.”

  She doesn’t think long. It doesn’t mean anything to her. It’s her body and she’ll use it. She grabs some of the money and puts it in Ceph’s hand. “Fine.” She shuts the door, trying to think of Ceph as an opportunity, like government-provided job training.

  “Take off your panties,” Ceph tells her.

  She moves slowly, folding her underwear before depositing them in a laundry bag hung on the back of her door. Ruth keeps her dress on. Ceph lifts it up, uses it to cover her scar. He tucks his head into her neck, carefully opening her left leg and then her right. “Hold steady,” as if he is performing a precise surgical maneuver.

  With Ceph moving on top of her, one thought fully jams her mind. “This is it?” It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s nothing, she says to herself, and moments later it’s over. She can’t reconstruct how it felt or what happened or what the big deal is. Words from the Father present themselves as still unsolved mysteries: membranes, fluids, cavities. “Can you do it again?” she asks, still under cover.

  “Hold on.” He kneads her boobs for a minute or two.

  The gray world. From under her dress, Ceph could be almost anyone.

  “OK.”

  This time Ruth pays attention. She peeks, watching Ceph’s chest and hips. She sees the shadow of someone’s feet arrive just outside the door, a person listening from the hall. She presses her lips to Ceph’s ear. She lets her breath come heavy, and Ceph responds in kind, grunting loudly.

  When Ceph’s done, he sees three drops of blood on the blanket. He looks from the door to the blood, from the door to the blood. All the years Nat and Ruth slept in this bed not doing anything. Ceph feels strong as a criminal. “You’re mine.”

  She tilts her head quickly, once. “You’re eighteen soon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m yours if you get Nat and me out of here.”

  Ruth sits on the edge of the bed, her legs still open to the room. Ceph slides the lock back, opens the door. “Mine,” Ceph says, marking his claim in front of Nat.

  Nat looks in, past Ruth’s dark hair.

  This is a test. She keeps her legs open, asking, Do you really feel nothing?

  No.

  Thought so.

  “Get your coat on,” Nat tells her. “Mr. Bell’s here.”

  THE OBESE WOMAN is no longer on her porch. I bang once on her door, but Ruth doesn’t wait for permission to enter. We step into the foyer of the woman’s house uninvited and out of breath.

  All manner of thrift store furniture clutters the space, chintzes and striped velvets. It’s as if the ocean rose and receded, rose and receded, a flood of unloved junk right here in this drowning woman’s living room. The walls are crowded with paintings of children and animals, photos of the mountains at sunset, posters advertising California vineyards, international craft festivals, tulip parades in Holland. One couch is given over to an arc of stuffed animals arrayed for a tea party. A patio lounger is covered with pillows printed with dogs, pillows made from madras, pillows with cross-stitched Christmas wreaths on their fronts. There are shelves of jigsaw puzzles. The room’
s as fattened as her body.

  Ruth’s strange book is still in my hand. I lift it to my face, my only shield. I enter the parlor as though preparing to swat a fly. “Hello?” Our other option, being chased by a man with a cane who scares Ruth, seems a worse choice.

  The woman’s voice is high, squeaky. “I’m here,” she says. Not the bassoon I anticipated from that rain barrel. She’s crammed into a double-wide wheelchair. “What’s your question today?” Like a tinkling bell. “Or more insults?”

  “I’m sorry. Those children were very rude.” The book is still raised. “I’m sorry to bust into your house, but there was a man,” I explain.

  The woman sees the book in my hand. Her eyes squint as if the book is a too bright light, shining in her eyes. “Oh. Him.” She belches as if she’s just gulped a large swallow of water.

  I check behind us. Who?

  “Are you with him?”

  “Who? There’s just us. Cora and Ruth.”

  She braces for battle. “Where’d you get that ugly little book?”

  I lower the volume to read the cover again. “The Book of Ether?” I shake my head.

  Upping the helium in her voice. “‘127 Woe unto them which are with child, for they shall be heavy and cannot flee.’ Right?” She smiles, wicked. “Right? ‘Therefore, they shall be trodden down and left to perish.’ He wrote that one about me. I’m his real wife, the legal one, and when he’s gone, that house’ll be mine.”

  “What house? What?”

  “You’re one of the new wives? That his kid?”

  I look to Ruth. “I’m nobody’s wife.”

  “But you came to hear about Mardellion?”

  “No.” I’m ready to take our chances with the man and his cane, but there’s Ruth beside me, nodding crazy, yes, yes, yes.

  “She did.” The woman’s wheelchair engages, its engine chugging under the load. “I try not to think about him anymore.”

  “What’s a Mardalon?”

  “Mardellion is a man. A bad man. My husband. Head of the Etherists.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Cult.” She gestures outside, swirling her hands, scissoring her sausage fingers, ticking off qualities. “Same old story. Charismatic leader collects damaged souls, tithes all their money, shares their kids, promises a better life.” Her wrists twist like a flamenco dancer’s. “But power poisons his mind. He isolates his followers, sticks it in as many holes as he can, then realizes he’s collected a bunch of fuckups he can’t take care of. His only way out is to distract them with an apocalypse while he scoots off with cash. The End. It’s an old story.”

  “What?”

  “Sit. Down,” she tells us, equal emphasis on each word.

  I inspect the stuffed-animal couch. Elephants, hedgehogs, zebras, bears. Ruth parts the front curtain a sliver, looking out to the street. She locks the door and joins me on the couch. The woman lowers her arms. Her chair cruises toward the hi-fi. Jan and Dean spin a song about a car crash. “Mardellion, or whatever his real name was, grew up in Utah. Mormon.” The woman opens her hands on her lap, tuning a receiver in her palms for the whole story. “The twisted, back-desert, Fundamentalist kind of Mormon. Where one man, a prophet, controlled everything by sowing ignorance and fear. Right?” She powers her wheelchair closer to me, nearly running over an empty, unlatched box, made for storing 45s. “It’s easy to be scared.”

  I look to the door.

  “Once that baby’s born, you’re going to have a million more reasons to be terrified.” She eyes my stomach, but Ruth pats the woman’s knee with impatience. She doesn’t want to talk about the baby just now. Ruth’s never impatient.

  “Mardellion. All right, girleen. Utah. So no contact with the outside world. No education. The prophet ran the place like a ranch. Only guess what animal they were breeding?”

  I know by her look I won’t like the answer.

  “Adolescent girls. A steady crop of teen breeders to keep the old men flush with young pussy. Each old guy had twenty, thirty wives. So consider what happens to the boy babies on such a ranch. Take lambs as your example.”

  “Meat.”

  “Indeed, girleen. Indeed. Mardellion didn’t get eaten, but he did get run off that place soon as he turned thirteen. Too handsome to keep around those fertile young things. He was taken out of his home, snatched from his seventeen moms, and dropped off in Provo. He had nothing except what his prophet told him. ‘You,’ the guy had said.” She draws it out. “‘Look like a young Joseph Smith.’”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Smith started the Mormon church. He was a treasure hunter. Murdered by forty.”

  “A pirate?”

  The room and all she says are starting to swirl, a flood of hoarded words along with the other junk. Open the floodgates.

  “No. A real treasure hunter. He dug in the dirt, looking for buried stuff.” The woman’s face doesn’t move much when she speaks, hidden in her jowls. “Smith’s from around here. He found golden tablets in the ground in Palmyra. You know Palmyra?”

  “No.”

  “Lock on the old canal, up by the holy land of Rochester. Kodachrome. Silver plates.” She smiles. “But Smith’s golden plates told a history of ancient American people. Smith couldn’t read the language printed on the damn things, so he tossed a couple rocks in the bottom of a stovepipe hat.” The woman pantomimes his actions with her chubby hands. “Put the hat over his face.” She frames her cheeks. “That cleared things up just fine. He translated The Book of Mormon by staring into the bottom of a dark hat. Took thirty brides.”

  “I heard about that. Where are the golden plates now?”

  “Oh.” She smiles. “I think I have them somewhere.” She looks around briefly, picking up a quilt, checking underneath it. “Oh, wait. No. Smith had to give them back to the angel Moroni. Shame.” She slaps her hands on her mighty thighs, laughing. “But you want Mardellion, not his prophet, not Smith.”

  Ruth nods.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. A hundred-odd years after Smith, in the seventies, Mardellion’s thirteen years old and on the streets. All he’s got is this idea that he looks like Smith. He receives some social services back in Utah among actual Mormons. They help him enroll him in high school. He lives in a house with other boys who’d been cast off by Fundamentalist sects. He learns to play football. They even send him on a mission to Mexico, but then his twenties roll in and he’s misfiring. He’s got no family to steer him. He’s working as a cashier in a pharmacy. He’s unmarried. Not much of much and he wants it all. So again his prophet’s words come to him, ‘spitting image of Smith.’ And Mardellion gets an idea.

  “Every summer in Palmyra, the Mormons put on a big show up on the hill where Smith found those golden plates. People from all over the world travel to perform. Mardellion decides he’s going to play Joseph Smith, a stop on his sure way to Hollywood. Riches, fame, power, et cetera, revenge on all his parents.” She motors closer to our stuffed-animal couch. Ruth listens hard, a living room jam-packed with stories.

  “His car makes it from Utah to Palmyra but barely. Mardellion’s convinced that it’s running on faith, so toward the end he tries not to blink or breathe too much. He’s chugging with this idea of himself as Smith, imagining a steed, brushing back his hair, triumphant. Despite other shortcomings, Mardellion’s a fine-looking man.” The woman levitates some thinking about his looks. From the stack of 45s piled high on the center post, the record player drops the next one, starts its spinning. “‘I Want My Baby Back.’ By Jimmy Cross. Know it?”

  Never heard of it.

  “Guy digs up the grave of his dead girl in doo-wop. One of my favorites.”

  Ruth pats the woman’s leg.

  “Right. So Mardellion’s driving east, imagining everyone will love him.” She brushes her broad belly. “Case in point. He cut my heart out. Cut it out, killed me dead.”

  “How?”

  She freezes momentarily, a hand on her neck, a
hand on her sternum. “I’m getting ahead of myself.” She digs into a box of Nilla Wafers and pops one in her mouth. “Cookie?” she offers.

  I grab a handful from the wax-lined box.

  “So Mardellion gets to Palmyra and tells them he’s going to play Smith in the pageant, and while the directors acknowledge a real likeness, they say the cast’s been in place and practicing since December, and anyway it’s a ten-story stage, so no one can see what your face looks like. Probably they sniff out the Fundamentalist on him. It sticks with a person, odor of death. You know that, right, dear? ‘Please,’ Mardellion begs. ‘You can be a Lamanite,’ they tell him. He’s too late for greatness, and he can’t even get that mad because he’s dealing with Mormons. Christians.” Words rushing out of her now, a heavy tide. “But he is mad.” She smiles to say it. “He’s never been so mad, and with all that blood in his head, he gets another idea. A better one. He never wanted to play Smith in some dumb show. He wants to be Smith, wants people to believe him, follow him to extreme lengths. He’s going to start his own religion. Get the wives and worshippers.”

  “He starts a religion?”

  “Just like that.” She braces her chin with one hand. “Frankly, though, Mardellion’s a little late again. Smith was brewing up his religion back when people thought solar eclipses were signs from an angry god. Back when people’d believe anything to stave off the grave. In Smith’s time, in New York State alone, you had the Mormons, the Spiritualists, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. There were Bible Communists in the Oneida Community, post-menopausal women mixing it up with teenage boys and vice versa. There were Millerites, on and on. It was easy to find believers then because people were terrified. I heard of one religion based on wearing overalls. And Jemima Wilkinson, who woke up from a fever, announcing that her body was inhabited by something called the Publik Universal Friend.” The woman tilts her head. “Hello, friend.”

  I’m having trouble following so many different names and stories swirling in an eddy.

  “But in Mardellion’s time? There’re TVs and billboards advertising Fresca, babies born from test tubes, and Mardellion’s thinking, I’m never going to get anyone to believe me, but he’s driving around upstate. All those mountains and rivers and lakes. He’s thinking, he’s thinking, he’s thinking. Mardellion the honeybee.” The woman’s eyes follow some unseen movement through the parlor. “He thinks, I need a book. Yes, I need a book, something to give people, teach them of my righteousness. He’s not smart enough to write his own book, so he steals from Smith again. Takes a little bit of this, a little of that, adds some free love, some communal living, a little polygamy ’cause that felt right, home-like to him.” She lifts her eyebrows. “Then some Jesus stuff, sandals. The Bible. He throws it together with some rock-and-roll songs he’d heard on his cross-country drive and comes up with the Etherists. That little book you’ve got there.”