Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

would hate to be on the wrong side of either Ermaline
or
the Valkyrie, who wouldn’t have looked out of place strapped into armor and brandishing a sword.
    Saul shook his head. “Maybe they had a falling out over a recipe or something, but so what? Prophet Solomon got murdered, not Martha or Ermaline.”
    And the beautiful Martha was handed over to a particularly unattractive man. Orchestrated by Sister Ermaline? Perhaps I needed to reassess my belief that women had no power in Purity.

Chapter 12
    By the end of the week, thanks to Sister Ermaline’s instruction, my biscuits weren’t quite as lopsided and I’d even begun to master the basics of tuna noodle casseroles. I’d heard some gritty gossip, too, although I wasn’t certain it would lead to Solomon’s murderer.
    Jean, for instance, described in grisly detail Rosalinda’s bloody delivery of a healthy son, conveyed via a friend who worked at the clinic.
    “You’d think Brother Earl would have a nice word for her after all that but all he did was count the baby’s fingers and toes,” Jean said. “The next day, while she was still lying there at the clinic, he told her she had five weeks to recover and then she’d have to resume her wifely duties.”
    I didn’t have to feign my shock. “That’s pretty creepy.”
    “He’s a creepy guy,” Jean said, her green eyes dark with concern. Like most of Solomon’s widows, she obsessed over who her next husband would be, and both Earl Graff and Noah Heaton topped her list of dreads.
    As she spoke, she stood by the stove, flipping sausage patties while Cynthia—who had been transfixed by Jean’s detailed description of the birth process—transferred the cooked patties to a huge platter. Sister Ermaline was elsewhere in the house, probably torturing kittens.
    “If I wind up with Brother Earl, I don’t know what I’ll do,” Jean said.
    “You don’t really think the Circle of Elders will give you to him, do you?” I asked.
    Jean smoothed away a stray wisp of her glorious red hair. Today she was dressed in a bright green dress almost the same color as her eyes. “Sister Ermaline has been talking to them, giving suggestions about who should go where. My name came up in connection with his.”
    Shades of Martha Royal. “I know it’s none of my business, but why doesn’t Ermaline like you?”
    One of the other women vented a short, bitter laugh. “Sister Ermaline doesn’t like anybody!”
    Jean threw her a glance. “Especially not me. When I married the prophet, I was young and stupid, and I bragged about how many times he asked me to visit his bed. He even wanted me after I became pregnant.”
    “Lucky you,” the other wife muttered sarcastically.
    Another thing I’d learned in the week since I’d arrived at the compound was that sex after pregnancy wasn’t considered necessary, although it was not unknown. The men kept charts of their wives’ menstrual cycles and concentrated their sexual activities around fertile times. Once the wives became pregnant, the men usually moved on to the next unpregnant female. Ideally, by the time the last woman in the household had been fertilized, the first woman would have delivered her baby and be ready for action again. But it didn’t always work that way.
    I looked around to make sure Ermaline was still out of the room. “Why, Sister Ermaline was jealous!”
    This time, all the women in the kitchen laughed.
    Then Cynthia spoke up. I’d noticed earlier that her face seemed paler than usual, but at the time I didn’t give it much importance—something I regretted later. “Father Prophet was still having sex with Mother when Sister Jean married him, but soon after that, he stopped asking Mother to visit.”
    Because reproduction was women’s major function at Purity, I’d become used to their matter-of-fact discussions of sexual behavior. Still, I was shocked at this bald piece of information coming from the man’s own daughter. “Your father stopped sleeping with your mother?”
    Cynthia nodded. “She was unlikely to have any more babies, so what would be the point?”
    Love, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I had already learned that love had very little to do with sex in Purity. The women were brood mares, nothing more. And once a brood mare outlived her usefulness…
    At least the men didn’t take their aging wives to the slaughterhouse.
    Later that day Saul told me he had another appointment with his attorney in Zion City, and asked if I