Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(14)
Whack! “Your guilt tells you that you had free will, a choice, and you made the wrong choice.” Whack! “You find your life is tragic”—Whack!—“because you need to choose between good and evil”—Whack!—“and you will pay the price”—Thwack!—“of an arduous, dire life!”
One final sob-inducing wallop with the wooden roller and Allred let out a strangled cry. I cringed inside, not because I was crying from pain, but because I knew he was ejaculating against my hip like some kind of sad mongrel who couldn’t do it any other way. He could have penetrated me, of course, with his bean tosser, but maybe he saw this as a worse punishment for me. His ego was so overwhelming, maybe he didn’t want to bestow on me the gift of his heavenly bologna, or some such shiz.
Sometimes the anger flowed through my lungs almost like a color. That color would be flame red, the color I wore in defiance of Allred’s strictures. I did this on purpose. I didn’t sew my own dresses, being too busy with the Society and Allred, but I always bought red fabric when I went to St. George, and told my sisters how and what to sew for me. That day, I was practically heretically cloaked in a robe of red, like Jesus.
He slammed the roller onto the counter top, almost cracking it as my skirts dropped to my ankles. He panted heavily like some prizefighter while my heart hadn’t accelerated a whit. I was used to this sort of manhandling. At first, it had been traumatic, of course. Slowly, for better or for worse, I was being acclimated to his abuse. Of course it was abuse, although some sister wives claimed to see it as “attention” or “praise.” I’d been married to a man on the outside. I knew better.
Zombie-like, I even started washing the roller in the sink as Allred gathered himself. He didn’t even go to the bathroom to wash up before starting in on me again.
“I have had a revelation,” he orated, “that Vonda shall be sealed to Orson Ream.”
Again, I dropped the roller. In the sink, this time.
And twirled around. “What?”
I had known this day was coming. I’d known my daughter would be shunted off to be sealed to some old, well-respected bastard in the community. Vonda Warrior was fifteen and pretty as a spring shower. She had already told me she wanted to be a fashion designer, not someone’s tenth wife, and I had smiled on that. But I had not expected it to come this soon, and this bluntly. Orson Ream was only about forty and not yet too physically repulsive, the owner of at least two construction concerns. And he only had two of the requisite three wives required to reach the highest level of heaven.
“She will be taken to the Court of the Patriarchs on the mountain, overlooking the Virgin River, and sealed for all eternity to Orson…”
I sort of tuned out his speech after that, maybe because I dared interrupt it. “How could you? Allred, she’s only fifteen! She only barely started liking boys!”
He closed his eyes patiently. “It has been decreed…”
“No!” I whipped off my apron and slung it across the room. “No! It has not been decreed! You just decided because you want to curry favor with Orson Ream and he needs a goddamned third wife! You’re the one who has decreed it because you’ve gotten rid of any boy Vonda or her friends could possibly like, and they have no one left to wed except ugly old men like Orson! I am not going to let my daughter be raffled off in some sleazy, underhanded lottery to the highest bidder! Do you know how akin to slavery this is?”
It was uncanny, his ability to maintain an outer calm no matter what the circumstances. I’d seen it before, when outsiders had come to rant and rave at him for business reasons when he’d tried to call the loans of small businessmen, loans given out at exorbitant interest rates. And of course over the years I’d comforted the sufferings of women in similar shoes as me now, women forced to hand over their daughters to wizened old men, or even to robust younger men who later vanished. Either way, it was a travesty I still wasn’t accustomed to, no matter how long I’d been inside these gates, and Vonda sure as hell wasn’t going to go lightly either.
Allred narrowed his eyes at me. “You will obey the revelation, Mahalia,” he said, and turned on his heel to exit.
I picked up the first thing I saw, which turned out to be a metal flour sifter, and threw it right smack at his head. Lord forgive me, but I did! Sometimes the body just overtakes one’s muscles, one’s nervous system. Has that not happened to everyone? Your body does things unbidden, without forethought? Especially when under siege by a surge of emotion and hormones, the adrenaline shock of sudden bad news.
Well, it was actually my sheer luck—although at the time I was crestfallen—that the sifter didn’t strike his asinine head. He closed the swinging door in time, and the sifter just hit the door in an explosion of flour. The tinny clang as it bashed against the floor was no satisfaction at all, and I turned and pounded my fist on the counter for a long, long time. I hated God, this earth, and everyone on it. I hated every tree, every goddamned fish that leaped, every god damned bird that dared chirp an idiotic song.
“I have to find a way out of this,” I whispered between clenched teeth.
But I had no goddamned way out of it. If I left Cornucopia, Allred would send Parley Pipkin and his henchmen to track me down. I’d known a couple of women who had tried it. Not only had they been tracked down and hauled back in embarrassing fashion—literally paraded around the square in the center of town while wearing nothing but long johns—they had been made to scrub floors like some latter day Cinderella for years and years. True, it was illegal to drag resistant women back to Cornucopia. But who had money for a lawyer? And according to rumor every local law enforcement officer was in Allred’s pocket.