Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

to women.”
    When the woman was right, she was right. In the listening department, men weren’t much different on the Outside.
    I don’t know why I asked the next question, but I did. “By the way, did Saul by any chance have words with the prophet the day he died?”
    She looked out the kitchen window, which she had closed against the dust that covered everything in the compound. The Vermillion Cliffs loomed in the distance and she made a big show of looking at them. “No.”
    “How about you? Surely you didn’t agree with everything Prophet Solomon ever said.”
    The cliffs lost their interest and Ruby returned her gaze to me. When she spoke, her words were frosty. “As I told you, Sister Lena, Prophet Solomon spoke for God.”
    And to disagree with the prophet was to disagree with God. I didn’t want to let her off the hook so easily. “Ruby, if Saul is evicted from Purity, what’ll you do? Will you leave with us or stay here? You know the Circle of Elders will give this house away to someone else. Then what would happen to you?”
    Perhaps Ruby believed that with Solomon dead, Saul would stay in Purity. I knew better. He’d already told me the old prophet’s death had made no difference to the Circle of Elders, that Davis himself wanted to get his hands on the house, if not to live in, to use as a bargaining chip to accrue more wives.
    Ruby didn’t answer my question right away. When she finally did, her voice sounded faint. “Women are never abandoned in Purity. I will always have a home here. Just maybe not in the same house.”
    “But Ruby, think about what’s happening now! If Saul loses his court case and insists that you and I leave with him, don’t we have to do what our husband commands? What with husbands speaking for God, and all that shi…uh, stuff.”
    The confusion on her face was almost comical. “But God… But husbands…” Her voice trailed off.
    A new thought popped into my mind and flew out of my mouth before I could do anything about it. “Sister Ruby, what happened to your first husband?”
    “Gaynell? He died. It was a long time ago.”
    “How did he die?”
    She looked down at the floor, and I couldn’t read her face any more. “He just died.”
    “What did the doctor say?”
    “Doctor?” She looked at me with unease. “Prophet Solomon said the Lord is the only doctor we need. When Gaynell got sick, we took him over to the clinic, where the Circle of Elders prayed for him.” She paused for a few seconds, then added, “In the end, the Lord lifted my husband up to Heaven.”
    No doctor. While I wasn’t surprised that old Solomon and the Circle of Elders believed a women’s ailments could be dealt with by prayer, it hadn’t occurred to me they felt the same way about men’s ailments. At least they were consistent. Then I had another thought. Had an autopsy been performed, a procedure mandated by the state of Utah in the event of sudden death? Before I could figure out how to ask this indelicate question, Ruby scuttled out of the kitchen. Then I heard the door to her room squeak shut.
    Call me suspicious, but I wondered which of Purity’s men had inherited Gaynell’s house. And how Ruby had felt about it.
    I leaned against the broom and looked out the window at the landscape that had so fascinated my sister wife. Red cliffs, blue sky, your typical Utah postcard. But the very intensity of the colors now seemed almost artificial, like a Disney cartoon. And wasn’t that a fitting description of the compound and everyone in it? When you didn’t look too closely, life appeared picture perfect here: happy, God- fearing families revolving around a stern-but-fair patriarch. God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world. But a closer examination of the pretty picture revealed institutionalized child molestation, property seizures, and unexplained deaths. The Disney cartoon was really a Tim Burton grotesquerie.
    I shook the image out of my head and swept some more, but my heart wasn’t in it. Housework and I had never been close friends, which is why back in Scottsdale I’d memorized the phone number of Merry Maids. No doubt Prophet Solomon wouldn’t approve of my sloth, but the prophet wasn’t around anymore, was he? Then I thought of his replacement, Davis Royal. Big hands, broad shoulders, bottomless blue eyes a woman could drown in.
    Damn that dirty-minded Ruby for bringing up sex. For a while I thought of Dusty. Had he returned to the ranch yet? I