Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

If so, she had plenty of company. I hadn’t heard such a racket since serving breakfast at Ermaline’s. No wonder the clinic’s top floor had been soundproofed. I hurried down the hall to the room, hoping to find Hanna before either of the women returned.
    When I pulled the door back, I froze on the threshold, stunned at the sight before me. The room, every bit as large as the one across the hall, swarmed with children of all ages, from toddlers to teens. Something terrible was wrong with every one of them.
    Many of the children had been born without eyes. They lay in their beds, their faces lifted, uncomprehending, to the white-tiled ceiling. Others, tethered by leather straps to iron rings set in the reinforced wall, jerked spastically. A few, born with heads too small for their bodies, drooped on the edge of their bunks, their faces as vacant as their microcephalic brains.
    Hanna sat in one of the room’s many rocking chairs, holding a microcephalic boy tenderly in her arms. Like any good mother, she sang to her child.
    Hushabye, don’t you cry,
    Go to sleep you little baby,
    When you wake you will see
    All the pretty little horses.
    This child was no baby, though. He had to be at least ten. No wonder Hanna cried all the time.
    I backed out of the room before I, like the teenager, began sobbing, and as I fled down the stairs, I wondered which child had been hers.
    Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid! Why hadn’t I figured all this out before? With the incest rampant in the compound, the generations of uncle marrying niece, grandfather marrying granddaughter, sister marrying brother, the chances of congenital defects had to be at least double the rate of the rest of the population.
    The people of Purity were genetic train wrecks.

Chapter 20
    As I left the clinic by the same door I had entered, I reassessed my suspicions. No wholesale murder of children was taking place in Purity, just the kind of inbreeding that doomed them to early deaths—if they were fortunate enough to live past infancy.
    I thought back to the blind girl I’d seen at Ermaline’s house. Judy hadn’t been abandoned in this warehouse for the deformed. Why not?
    The answer was obvious. Judy was a girl, and a girl, no matter how serious her congenital defects, could still be bred. All she had to do was lie there while her sixty-year-old husband sowed his seed. Besides, with Purity’s adherence to polygamy, the compound needed more girls than boys. This was probably the main reason the compound had put up with my poorly disguised independence and bad temper. Although I was—according to Purity standards—well on my way to cronehood, I could still pop out a few babies before my ovaries gave up, thus contributing fresh genes to the compound’s badly damaged gene pool.
    But the little boys, ah, they were a different story.
    It hadn’t passed my notice that most of the children in that room had been boys, and I thought I knew why. To take a wife, to breed, to add money to Purity’s coffers, to ascend to Highest Heaven, a man had to be mobile. Because of their complete inability to take up a polygamist man’s duties, those little boys I’d seen with the most serious congenital birth defects—microcephaly, spina bifida, profound retardation and cerebral palsy—were warehoused from birth. While their fathers collected extra government benefits.
    What a life. I leaned against an outbuilding and tried not to throw up.
    Hanna’s son. What would happen to him? Would he, like so many of Purity’s damaged little boys, live out his life in one room?
    I decided to confront Davis. With all his flaws, he wasn’t as bad as the rest of the men in Purity. He had a heart. He’d rescued Cynthia, carried her in his own arms back to her fool of a mother. I knew I could make him see reason, possibly even put a halt to the institutionalized incest that doomed so many children to brief, miserable lives.
    Not wanting to waste another second, I hitched up my skirts and hurried through the rain to his house. I didn’t even bother knocking, just rushed in. “Brother Davis?” I yelled. “I need to see you!”
    Sissy came out of the kitchen. She took one look at me and gasped. Then I remembered my raised skirts. My, my. How easily polygamists became shocked over normal things like a woman’s legs. To spare her blushes, I lowered them. “Sissy, where’s Brother Davis?”
    She shook her head. “I’m afraid he’s in his den counseling someone. He can’t see