As she went on, I found my gaze spinning upward to the sky, the madly blazing sun as it fell behind the mountains, and in the far distance, a pair of eagles circling lazily over something dead.
It was like that for a year. Up, down, up. On more mornings than I could count, I woke up and thought immediately, before anything else,I should fire her.And on just as many evenings, I lay in the darkness while my husband snored beside me and thought,Why hasn’t she quit?
The only conclusion I could come to was this: that despite all our differences and little tensions—in spite of the little white lies that ran through my farm like intersecting waterways—she genuinely liked me. Or wanted to like me.
And why didn’t I fire her?
Lord.
I wanted her to like me, too.
Our fifth child, Junebug, entered the world on a cool autumn day. It was my first homebirth. I felt unbelievably calm. I was on all fours in an inflatable pool, warm water sloshing around my knees while I swayed and groaned, the children watching me silently from across the room. I reached a hand out, and both the midwife and Caleb rushed toward me. “No,” I moaned lowly, slapping their hands away. “Not you. Shannon. I need Shannon.”
Caleb ran to get Shannon from the barn. She arrived looking terrified. “What? What is it? How can I help?”
Another contraction rolled through me. What did the Bible say on childbirth? Something about women needing to suffer. Something about earning your pain.
“Get the camera,” I said through gritted teeth. “Film it.”
43
It shouldn’t matterthat there are other people in Yesteryear. I know that. I know I shouldn’t care; that I should stay focused on my own chores, on being a dutiful mother and wife and servant of the Lord.
But the thing is: I can’t. They’ve come around another two times since I first saw them, that pair of young men. They’re helping Old Caleb replace some areas of rotting fence.
I wish more than anything that they’d leave. I remind myself that I was sent to this place by the Lord Himself and therefore it’s only the Lord Himself who will retrieve me.
Still. I can’t help but look.
44
The day Doug announcedhis presidential run, the atmosphere at the rally felt less like an official political event and more like a carnival, or maybe one of those costumed Elizabethan fairs. There were vendors walking around shouting their offers of popcorn and hot dogs and crushed ice. A long line of pop-up souvenir shops bisected the parking lot and the event space. Every shop offered a different collectible version of my father-in-law: Christmas ornament Doug, T-shirt Doug, dinner plate Doug, bumper sticker Doug. By the look of it, all the shops had copyrighted the same official photo of Doug, which featured him looking much tanner and younger than he did in real life. Just beyond the souvenir stands, a long line of women and men were waiting for the porta-potties. One woman was wearing plastic sunglasses fashioned to spell outDOUG,her eyes behind theOand theU; another man wore a shirt with a message in big block letters:civil war is coming.
The man’s arms were folded. He was making jovial small talk with theDOUG-sunglasses woman in front of him in line. They both looked across the road at something, and I followed their gaze to see a man with a long beard standing on an overturned plastic milk crate, unfurling a poster with a message in all-caps Sharpie:vote mills to save the soul of america. “Repent!” he shouted to the people who walked past. “For He has set a day when he willjudge the world with justice by the man he has appointed—and that man, ladies and gentleman, is Doug Mills!”
The woman in theDOUGsunglasses whooped. A group of nearby men in matching motorcycle jackets gave a round of cheers, one man adding, “Hell yeah, brother!”
The man on the milk crate began to shout about the coming plague. “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed! Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom … All these are the beginning of birth pains!”
There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see Shannon. “Hey,” she said. “That bathroom line wascrazy.The kids are almost done.” She followed my gaze to the man with the poster, who was now shouting about heroin in the drinking water. “Are Doug’s rallies usually like this?”
“No,” I murmured. “This is new.”
At that moment, a young mother walked past with her teenage daughter, and I caught half of their conversation. “—well, and if you think about what it means to be living in a city overrun with infected rodents …”
Oh.
I cast my gaze across the crowd with renewed awareness. It felt like I was stepping carefully through the small portal of Caleb’s computer screen and into the strange, alternate universe of his chat rooms. So this was who my husband was talking about when he mentioned his online buddies. So these were the things they spoke about: locusts and frogs and rats. A great cleansing plague.
It looked like Doug had finally found messaging that resonated.
Shannon said, “Did you hear what that woman just said about rats?”
I breastfed Junebug in theVIPbathroom, then handed her off to Nanny Louise. The nannies left with the children to mill around outside, and Shannon and I returned to theVIProom, which wasfilled to capacity. Each of Doug’s sons was here, along with their families. Doug had his arms opened to me, and I glided into his embrace. He gave me a tight hug, then clapped me hard on the back, enough to make me cough. I stepped back and looked at him curiously. He’d gotten a facelift, it seemed, and his teeth—had Doug gotten veneers?
“Great to have you,” he said strangely. “All of you, really.” He spun in a low circle. “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.” He pointed at Amelia. “You hungry, sweetheart? Need a water?”
Amelia was sitting in a folding chair in a tangerine-colored pantsuit that looked two sizes too big. She looked like a shriveled-up piece of fruit. Puckered and collapsing inward. “I’m fine,” she rasped. For a moment I saw not a face but a skull, a pile of bones beneath a worn canvas of skin. She looked like she was starving to death; like she was weeks into a hunger strike, but her warden had yet to notice.
