The 19th Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

their sleep. At one point a t-ball team dashed from a minivan for the men’s room, a gang of eight-year-olds calling one another pussy and dick. It was one of those nights when I never really shut my eyes.
    Around four I started driving. Elektra sat alert in the passenger seat, the fur buckled on her brow. It was like she understood where we were going and didn’t think it was a good idea.
    Outside St. George, past the crystal meth dens of Hurricane, there’s a long county highway to nowhere. It rises up, crossing an empty desert plateau with red mesas and stony mountains and stands of piñon in the distance. On the road there’s nothing for fifty miles except a gas station, a lunch counter, and a wire cross marking the site of a fatal crash. If you keep going, eventually you’ll hit the turnoff for Mesadale. Theoretically this highway leads to Kanab, then the Grand Canyon, but there are better routes to both, and there really isn’t any reason to drive down this highway unless you’re headed to Mesadale, or you’re lost. It’s got to be the loneliest road in America. Somewhere along here my mom dumped me that night. I remember there was a dead cottonwood beside the road. I remember wishing it would come to life and hold me in its limbs.
    Ten miles before Mesadale I pulled over. With the engine off, everything was quiet, just a few early birds rustling in the sagebrush. After fifteen minutes a semi came along. I could hear it before I saw it, its thunder mounting, consuming the desert. When it passed, the van shook and Elektra barked once. The roar subsided and after a long time everything was silent again and the truck’s taillights were lost to the night.
    Finally there was pink in the eastern sky and I let Elektra out to pee. She ran twenty feet into the desert and started barking at a bitterbrush. Probably a jackrabbit or Gila monster. I called her back to the van but she ignored me and I had to drag her in.
    I was parked by the sign telling you how far to Mesadale, but buckshot had chewed it up so bad you couldn’t read it. Every time the sign went up the Prophet sent out an apostle to shoot it up. My dad did that once. I remember him boasting about it at breakfast. “Took out Satan’s marker,” he said, stuffing his mouth with fried ham.
    I should probably make it clear why the Firsts aren’t Mormon. Not like the Mormons you see on tv singing in the Tabernacle or cheering at a BYU game or the hottie missionaries chatting up strangers on the street. The guys who run the Mormon Church—those old dudes in out-of-date eyeglasses up in Salt Lake—they hate the Prophet almost as much as I do. They call him a heretic, a blasphemer, and a whole bunch of other things like rapist, pedophile, and tax cheat. The point of contention between the Firsts and the Mormons—you probably figured this out—is polygamy. The Prophet says when the Mormon Church gave it up in 1890, they sold out. That’s when the Firsts broke away. It’s why the Prophet—our Prophet, I mean—used to always say on Sundays, Brothers and Sisters,
you
are the first and true Saints. You are the descendants of Joseph and Brigham. You will be first in line at the Restoration when man hopes to be saved.
    As you can imagine, the Mormons have another opinion on that. Can you spell
rift
? That book I was reading, the one about the history of God, it says this sort of split happens all the time. The Jews and the Christians. The Catholics and the Protestants. The Mormons and the Firsts. It’s been going on forever and the only thing I know for sure is it messes up a lot of shit for the rest of us.
    Over in the foothills I could see Mesadale waking up to the dawn. From here it was a cluster of white and yellow lights beneath the mountain. I knew exactly what was going on at each of those lights. I knew it the way you know a dvd you’ve watched a hundred times. A sister wife was flicking on a lamp to brush out her hair. Another was striking a match to