Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

for dropping the rolling pin.”
    “I s-sorry, Mother.” Cora’s voice held no more inflection than it had the day before.
    “No, Cora,” Jean said. It’s ‘I’m sorry, Mother Ermaline.’ ”
    With Jean’s coaching, Cora eventually delivered her line correctly. My heart went out to her. The poor little thing was so beautiful. And so damaged.
    Ermaline growled, “What good are apologies when the rolling pin has to be washed again? And what good are apologies when a daughter reads trash instead of doin’ a woman’s rightful work? Sister Jean, on your way to the dump, why don’t you get Cora out of the kitchen before she sets somethin’ on fire and kills us all?”
    “Certainly, Sister Ermaline.” Jean whisked Cora away before she could enrage the older woman again.
    I hoped Ermaline couldn’t hear me grinding my teeth as I attempted to get my mind off the ugly scene by working out the compound’s convoluted family system. The fact that Cynthia had called Ermaline simply “Mother” without the attached honorific “Sister” told me that the elder woman was her biological mother, but I could see no resemblance between the two. Their extreme difference in age probably accounted for that. Some quick math revealed that Ermaline had probably given birth to Cynthia at midlife. Maybe that was why she was so cranky.
    To my discomfort, Ermaline turned her attention to me again. I stepped back. If she raised her hand against me…
    But she didn’t. “Well, Miss. I see Brother Saul picked himself a pretty lily of the field, all right, but you’re one lily who’s gonna learn how to toil and spin.”
    A half hour later, with scant help from me, the first breakfast serving made it to the table. Or rather tables. Since the house had been built to house up to twenty wives and more than a hundred children, it boasted several living areas, dining rooms and kitchens. Sister Ermaline managed the largest kitchen because, as she explained to me, not only was she Prophet Solomon’s first wife, but she had also produced the largest number of children.
    “Fifteen children!” she’d told me proudly, while lifting golden brown biscuits out of the oven. “All perfect, all thrivin’.”
    And all terrified of her, I thought, but at least they ate well. I snatched at one of her biscuits as she slid them off the pan and onto a banquet-size serving dish for the next go-around. The biscuit weighed no more than a snowflake, and it dissolved in my mouth like one, too. Ermaline could instruct me all she wanted, but I doubted that I could ever learn to make a biscuit like that. Good cooking was an art form, and I had no talent.
    As the wives cooked, they ate. They had a bite of egg here, a sausage patty there, and helped themselves to biscuit after biscuit as they emerged from the oven.
    “Feedin’ all these kids don’t leave time for much else,” Sister Ermaline said, pointing out the obvious, as she whipped up another batch of biscuits. “But idle hands are the Devil’s work, and ever since Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, idle women been sinnin’.”
    “That’s what they say,” said Jean, back from her sojourn at the trash heap. Somewhere in her thirties, with her pale red hair and Irish green eyes, she would have been easily the best-looking woman in the room except for the thin lines of discontent around her full-lipped mouth. Perhaps her swollen belly explained that.
    Not that her advanced pregnancy cut her any slack with Ermaline. If anything, the elder woman tended to speak even more harshly to her than she did to anyone else in the kitchen, except for her own daughter. Some old quarrel perhaps?
    Trying to stay out of everyone’s way, I kept folding pea-sized pieces of shortening into the biscuit dough like Ermaline had showed me. Within a few minutes my right hand began to cramp and I looked at it sorrowfully. First I’d banged it up in karate practice, and now this. Hopefully, the tendons would adapt.
    Ermaline’s harsh voice interrupted my thoughts. “We’ll soon knock the idleness out of her, won’t we, Sister Jean?”
    I hoped she spoke metaphorically, but I wasn’t sure.
    Sister Jean’s face revealed nothing. “Oh, I’m sure you will.”
    Had Ermaline also knocked the idleness out of Jean? The older woman could quote Scripture all she wanted, but I recognized a tyrant when I saw one. And I was pretty sure I knew the reason for Ermaline’s harshness. Maybe a woman’s jealousy was