Daredevils Read Online Free PDF Page A

stood.
    Loretta, Ruth, and Dean stand between the sofas, in front of the fireplace, and Ruth holds a small pillow at her waist, as if she were preserving a treasure. Loretta knows it is the three-strand ring of silver she will wear on the third finger of her left hand. The children line up tallest to shortest. Samuel, the oldest at thirteen, scowls, a fat boil behind one ear. He wears a black suit and white shirt buttoned to the collar, just as seven-year-old Dean Jr. does down the line. The girls just younger than Samuel, Ruth and Elizabeth, look like miniature sister wives, in floor-length cotton dresses and long braids. Even four-year-old Sarah and five-year-old Janeen wear long white dresses. Only Benjamin, the toddler, is clothed likea child, in knee-length black shorts and a short-sleeved white pullover. He fidgets, but holds his face firm, lips pressed with comical intensity, as though he fears some noise will burst forth. He is her favorite, Benjamin. She catches his eye and smiles, and he returns the briefest furtive grin.
    The prophet arrives at last, entering hunched and slow on the arm of his burly son. He aims a gray, murmuring smile toward them. One milky eye wanders. He is a walnut of a man—tiny and parched and failing and skeletal—and his nearness to death only adds to his authority. They assemble, and Uncle Elden stands in front, holding his knotty, trembling hands.
    Ruth and Loretta flank Dean, and the prophet rasps about exaltation and salvation and obedience to the Lord’s sacred principle of plural marriage. He speaks in a soft monotone, pausing often as if to rest. “It is there, brothers and sisters,” he says, “in Genesis. Right from the beginning. Lamech and Esau and . . . Moses and Jacob. All living . . . in the Principle.”
    The prophet continues, speaking of the forsaken commandments and the world’s abuse of the true Saints. “The government of this United . . . States has persecuted this priesthood. The Mormon Church itself has per—” A fit of quiet coughing stops him. His son hands him a handkerchief, and when Uncle Elden takes it from his mouth a strand of saliva catches the light. “Has persecuted this priesthood,” he whispers.
    His voice affects Loretta like a drug, a lulling sense of the sacred that goes deeper than her brain and whispers that she is wrong, that this is divine after all. Uncle Elden talks about the “the raid of ’53,” when Satan sent the federal agents to arrest the men of Short Creek and carry away the women and children, and the constant threat of the next assault from the enemies of righteousness. “Norighteous people . . . live without remembering the sacrifices of their fathers.”
    In her head, Loretta flies to her worldly future. There, she wears pants with wide bottoms, and colorful blouses with short sleeves—T-shirts, even—and her hair hangs long and loose, and she paints her eyes with mascara. Every whorish thing. She wishes she could show her future self to her father, watch him burn. Her Tussy future, pink and bold. This future could be anywhere else and she will have a car, one of the sleek ones in the magazines, maybe the pink Mustang in the Tussy ad, and she will listen to rock music and watch television, and there is no Dean or Ruth, of course, no Uncle Elden, but there is no Bradshaw, either, or any man. Or rather, there is a man, but he is no man she has ever known. He is a warm, anonymous shape, and he exerts no force.
    Uncle Elden makes a rattling sound in his throat, and continues. Loretta thinks that she’ll have to learn the names of cars and which ones she likes so in her future she’ll be able to choose the best one, the car that will show the world that she is free, the car that will announce that she is this kind of person and not that kind of person. The prophet mentions the veil of heaven, and now they all engage in a