By Sadie Hoagland
Cadence
When that first baby died inside me and I had to give birth to its rabbit corpse anyhow, I tell you it warn’t the only thing that died inside me. And I don’t mean I got bloated with some grief. I mean I felt relieved. Same as I felt that day I first left home, running off the porch with no shoes on, my thighs smarting with wind, my stepfather yelling behind me to get my ass back there. He spoke like that, ’cause he was vulgar and ungodly. And I would talk like that too now probably, but I met Josiah Pratt, and fell in love with him and come to God. And then I became his third wife.
No use saying all that happened between when I left that run-down mobile home in Cedar City, and when I found myself here among all these sisterwives and milk fed children who know more about God than I do still I think, but here’s to say it warn’t pretty: There were nights in cow barns and there were nights in sweaty sheets and nights I don’t remember. And then there was the 67 days that I was married to one of the most rotten men on earth whose very soul smelled of death long before he’s below ground ’cause when I left him he’d just beaten me until I could hardly walk, and all I remember thinking was that man smells like molding cantaloupe. Later, when I first heard the Prophet speak in House, I thought about that smell and decided it was the smell of a soul damned to rot in its own body, getting itself ready for the sulfur-colored fires of hell that the Prophet talked ’bout.
And when I met Josiah he smelt like cinnamon and soap. He stepped out of the Hurry-Up Market in Broadview and was chewing a little on the wood end of a match. I was just sitting there, runaway, watching cars come and go and thinking what the hell am I going do now. Well, the way I figure it, God must a sent Josiah in there just so he could walk out and see me, getting dusty as I was, still a little beat up and bruised, some of my skin looking like chewed meat, and wanting a cigarette or something else so bad the bottoms of my feet were itching. He stopped and looked down at me and moved his jaw sideways and back for a while until I looked up and met his eye mean-like. I didn’t want no more trouble from men and even though this one was a looker, blonde hair and blue eyes like gems, I sure as heck didn’t trust myself to know the difference between which ones you marry for 67 days, and which ones look to last longer. But he didn’t look away and we stared at each other until I turned away and looked up the road like I didn’t care. Which was when Josiah said. Listen Now, you okay? And I had to look back to make sure he was talking to me.
I nodded, and then shrugged, and then felt suddenly like crying, ‘cause I was not at all okay. I had no place to go where someone or myself wouldn’t hurt me in one way or other. And he pointed to an old Ford, and he says, Come on, you come back and eat with my wife and me tonight, and get a good night sleep. And I’ve always wondered, which wife he meant that day when he said my wife, whether he met Lizbeth his first wife or Tressa his second. And if he said it now to some other sad woman, if he might mean me. ‘Cause you don’t go around saying the word “wives” all over the place when you live a life like ours. It just ain’t safe.
I’ve also always wanted to know why I went, and I think it was maybe God. But also I think I was too tired to care if he killed me or beat me or took me home to his wife and loved me. So I got in the Ford and the blue seat was hot with sun but I was so hungry that even the burn felt good against my white legs. And we drove out for two hours on dirt roads. And I thought of all the ways this man might murder me, but I couldn’t see nothing in the car with which he might do it. I even checked the glove box and there was nothing but an old wrench which I thought would be quick and painless. Josiah saw me fidgeting and told me Don’t worry I ain’t a bad man, I’m one of God’s people and I’m taking you to meet the rest of them. So I had a pretty good idea as to where we were going then. And when we pulled into Redfield, I knew right then for sure where we were because the women had those long dresses on from pioneer times and that braided hair that floats up in front. Josiah told me you best wait here a second while I tell the women folk you’ll be staying here until you see fit to go. And I sat in the car and watched a little girl washing shirts against a board like it was a hundred years ago. She staring at me with some hard blue eyes in the meantime.
That first night I spent here, the children weren’t allowed to talk to me and Tressa made it clear she could talk to me but wouldn’t. Josiah told her to behave herself and we ate biscuits and canned fruit and boiled chicken at a table with more people than are in my own family times four. Lizbeth was the only one beside Josiah that was kind, and I saw already the way they were taking me in. The way they wanted to show me something about God and fatten me up, too. Lizbeth gave me three servings and even though I knew it was rude to eat so much, I did. And Tressa spoke finally to let me know that there were in fact seven children to feed, and three of them were her own, and she wasn’t about to let them go hungry for some stray.
I stayed there for two weeks, helping Lizbeth’s little Mary with her washing and trying to figure out what the heck she was saying to me most of the time. I slept in a makeshift bed in the barn, but it warn’t like other times I slept in barns because I had blankets and I warn’t afraid. I would sit up and listen to the horses below me snorting, and sometimes a pig would grunt from right outside and their noises seemed so peaceful to me cause they were animals that got fed and did not really get beat much.
Then I started thinking I can’t stay here forever. Cause Tressa had been reminding me of that very fact more than once every day. And cause I knew they weren’t having me do enough work for all I was eating, but mostly because there was no forever for me, not like for them.
Their forever was something that seemed like the fairytales my grandmother would tell me. And I didn’t know if this was cause in my bones I was a faithless sinner, or if because I knew that in Broadview people talked about Redfield as something to destroy, and talked about when the State would ‘put a stop to it all.’ Though at the time it did feel more and more every day like their forever might be worth looking into. Not something I could have, but real. But not something for me. So that made me think it was time for me to leave even though I was too tired to think about what I might do next. But then one night, when the moon was low and the barn was quiet save one merciless cricket trapped in the hay somewhere, I figured I would ask Josiah the next day to drive me back into town so I could start something.
About that time Josiah came in the barn and said my name in a soft voice. Cadence he said. And I think of that night a lot now, the sound of his voice, me thinking right away that he wanted me to leave right then but instead him climbing the ladder to the loft where I slept. Sitting next to me and clearing my hair from my face and kissing me. I kissed him back but was confused and thinking of Lizbeth. So I asked him and he was saying, they know they know, as he touched me. I warn’t thinking I wanted it, but certainly warn’t thinking I didn’t. Also somewhere in the back of my head was my mother’s husky voice sayin’ ain’t nuttin in this world for free Cadence, and ain’t no one nice for no reason. And so I thought I be owing something, and this was something I had given before for worse reasons and given it without wanting to give it to bad men like my stepfather. So I let him touch me and hold me and I felt how gentle he was and I even wondered if there was some way I might enjoy this if I was not so surprised.
When it was done we lay there half-naked and the moon was coming up higher. And he said, Cadence, I’ve had a revelation and the Prophet has confirmed it. I’d like you to stay here and become acquainted with God, and when you do that, I’d like you to become my third wife and help me to fulfill our duty to God by giving him a multiplicity of children.
Now this was such a mouthful I couldn’t help but giggle but I could almost hear the way Josiah’s handsome face was falling when I did. And so I asked him if he meant what he said.
And he said yes, and told me I would have my own room and maybe someday my own house, and I’d have to work but I’d always have food and a family and so I told him: Josiah I been a bad woman. Drugs, sex, you name it, and for some reason I tell him a story about when I was twelve years old and I stole a pack of cigarettes and some Big League chew. Josiah asked me What is Big League chew, and I said Bubble gum. He laughed then and told me that he and God and his other wives would forgive me my past if only I could forgive myself. And let God and his Prophet into my heart.
And then I cried and said yes I could. And I knew this was the nicest thing that had happened in my life. And I wouldn’t have no trouble forgiving myself cause really everything I’d done was things that happened to me, not things I wanted to happen,
but things I didn’t have a say about. But this I had a say about, even though much later down the road would be the first time I would ask myself what Josiah would have done had I said No that night, and how much a say was really a say. But for the time, I was all giddy and light and wanted to make love again to Josiah as his fiancée but he said he had to go and talk to Lizbeth right away. But first he took out of his pocket a black arrowhead on a lanyard. He told me he found it tilling the western field the day before he found me, so he had made it for me. And he put it around my neck and kissed my head and then he left. So I spent the rest of the night alone in the barn, fingering the smooth edges of the obsidian and listening to that single cricket and thinking how my life would be easier. And that I would be better than I ever had before because now I had a husband who was upstanding and sober and also his God I had to answer to.
And it was better in most ways, though Tressa liked to make my life hard, and even Lizbeth got tired of teaching me how to do everything. And I did hear her tell Josiah that this is why we don’t marry outsiders because for goodness sakes I could not even sew, let alone kill and pluck a chicken. And I hoped they’d see how hard I was trying, but the thing was, I couldn’t try as hard as I wanted to because the first month there I didn’t get my period and was slow moving like I’d been drunk for three days. But I warn’t, I was stone cold sober.
And when I finally figured oh heck I must be pregnant, I had not the heart to tell Josiah there was a chance it was the child of my husband of 67 days that I had not told him about at all, and also that this husband was not all white. And so I carried this secret for four months and smiled all the while, trying to keep so quiet about it until I couldn’t.
Then I felt the pain of what turned out to be the baby dying. And then I buried that secret with a small shovel out back behind the barn with no crickets to sing and felt lighter in my womb and in my heart. But still I cried over that small shriveled child and its black fuzz for hair so unlike my own white blonde and even though I left it unnamed and moved on into today, where I can make rows and rows of mostly clean stitches, still I go sometimes and talk to that dark patch of crumbled earth underneath which lay my first child turning slowly into the ash of everything I was before.
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STRANGE CHILDREN: In a polygamist commune in the desert, a fourteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father’s child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away—a crime that will slowly unravel the community. Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these “strange children” shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.
Sadie Hoagland is the author of Strange Children (May 18, 2021; Red Hen Press) and American Grief in Four Stages (November 1, 2019; West Virginia University Press), which earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the former editor of Quarterly West. She is the recipient of several fellowships and her work has earned extensive recognition, including four Pushcart Prize nominations from 2015-2018. You can visit her online at sadiehoagland.com