Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

anything, Rebecca would be back in Purity, possibly married. I suspected that CPS’s handy “case backlog” excuse was the same old see-no-evil routine that kept American polygamy thriving despite its illegality.
    Once again I felt like I had so many times as a child. So many forces arrayed themselves against me that I’d be a fool not to just give up. With surrender would come peace. After all, it was hope that kept you awake at night, hope that kept your hands trembling in the daylight. Hope that if you struggled hard enough, things would somehow, in some way get better. Peace came only to those people who had learned the bitterest lesson of life: acceptance.
    “Never accept evil!”
    With a shock, I recognized my mother’s voice, long lost to memory. Bewildered, I looked around to see, of course, no one other than Lomahguahu and miles of cactus. My mind had merely been playing tricks on me again. Still, it seemed strange to think that the monster who’d almost killed me had said something so moral. Then again, maybe she’d been reading a super heroes comic book aloud.
    I pulled myself back to the present to see Tony Lomahguahu watching me.
    I flushed. “I thought…I thought I heard a voice.”
    He studied me carefully. “These voices, they can tell us important things.”
    “Not this voice, Mr. Lomahguahu.” Too well I remembered the gun my mother had aimed at me, the sound of the gunshot, the terrible pain. No, my mother had nothing to tell me that I ever wanted to hear, vagrant memory be damned.
    He shifted his eyes to the graveyard. “I hear voices, too. Young voices that cry out when the wind blows strong.”
    “Young voices? What do you mean, Mr. Lomahguahu?”
    He didn’t answer, just motioned for me to follow and set off across the hardscrabble ground toward a row of particularly shabby crosses, most of them smaller than the others.
    “This is where the voices come from,” Lomahguahu said. “They tell their stories to anyone who will listen.”
    “But I…” I was going to tell him that I didn’t talk to ghosts, but then I remembered the time not so long ago when a murderer had abandoned me in the desert to die. For three days I had talked to all sorts of ghosts, the Hohokam, a coyote, even the ghost of a red-headed man who might have been my father. Hallucinations, of course. Nothing else.
    “Speak to the dead and they will answer,” Lomahguahu said. He motioned toward one of the small crosses.
    I knelt down. The inscription, which appeared to have been carved by a pen knife, then stained with ink, was still readable.
    Annabella Royal, Nov. 12, 1991-Nov. 30, 1991, beloved daughter of Solomon and Martha. Next to it were three more small crosses carved by the same hand: Carolina Augusta Royal, Oct. 20, 1992-Oct. 25, 1992, beloved daughter of Solomon and Martha. Stephen Raymond Royal, beloved son of Solomon and Martha, August 31, 1993-August 31, 1993. Elias John Royal, Nov. 15, 1994-Nov. 15, 1994.
    I counted the months between births. Martha had hardly time to recover from each one before she’d become pregnant again. So much for the theory that lactation protected women from pregnancy. The graves of the first two babies showed they had died after only a few days of life, but the last two had died the day they’d been born. Remembering Martha’s robust appearance, her Valkyrie-like beauty, I was once again reminded that appearances could be deceiving. Not that her obvious health difficulties had made any difference to Solomon. Apparently, he’d just kept shoving those little buns in her overworked oven, leaving it to her to pop them out on schedule.
    “The children’s voices cry on the wind,” Lomahguahu said. “Can you not hear them?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t hear a thing. But,
damn,
Mr. Lomahguahu, did you read those birth dates?”
    He shrugged, his face betraying none of the outrage I knew mine did. “All the men of Purity believe that the more children they have, the better life they’ll have in Highest Heaven. I imagine they think their wives’ unhappiness is a fair trade for such riches.”
    A fair trade.
I turned away from the tiny graves and faced him. “Are you serious?”
    “That’s the way they see it.” He shrugged again, as if he had long ago stopped trying to understand the ways of his neighbors. Then he said something I didn’t understand. At the time.
    “The children will speak when you are ready to listen.”
    We stayed at the graveyard for