Sanctuary. Brenda Novak

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СКАЧАТЬ down the street, carrying bowls and baskets and sacks of food. They entered the park near the jungle gym in the far corner, and the children immediately scattered, laughing and calling to one another as the women made their way over to the picnic tables. Dressed in plain, home-sewn dresses that fell to the ankles and wrists—somewhat reminiscent of pioneer women—they wore their hair high off their foreheads and braided down their backs, and no makeup.

      The Brethren frowned on any show of vanity or immodesty, just as they opposed modern influences that might entice their women and children away from the church, influences such as education or television. Consequently, few if any of these women had a college degree. Most hadn’t graduated from high school. To outsiders, they pretended to be sisters or cousins to the men they’d married while living cloistered lives with very defined roles. Men worked and gave what they earned to the church, had the ultimate say in everything and took as many wives as they pleased. Women, on the other hand, were relegated to cooking, cleaning and bearing and raising children; they were threatened with eternal damnation if they were too “selfish” or “unfaithful” to share their husbands.

      Hope was one of the rebellious. She hadn’t been able to make herself comply with her father’s dictates, hadn’t been able to live the “principle.” Not for God. Not for her beloved mother. And certainly not for her father. In the minds of her family, her soul was lost. And maybe it was. Hope wasn’t sure if she was going to hell. But she felt pretty sure she’d already been there.

      She crept closer, staying among the trees as she began to recognize people. A thick-set woman in a blue floral dress looked vaguely like the first Sister Cannon, while the tall crone was probably one of Garth Huntington’s wives. Raylynn Pugh Tanner, the youngest of her own father’s wives—at least when Hope was around eleven years ago—stood in the middle of the chaos, as plain as ever with her wire-rimmed glasses and thin brown hair pulled into a tight braid. She wore a dress loose enough to make Hope believe she was either pregnant or had just delivered a baby, and was busy pointing to a willowy girl that Hope, at first, didn’t recognize. “Don’t put the desserts on that table, Melanie,” she called. “Can’t you see we don’t have it covered yet?”

      Melanie? Hope’s fingers dug into the trunk of the tree she was using both for support and for cover. Melanie had been a baby when she’d left. Look at her now! How many more children had her father had? How many more women had he married?

      The last Hope knew, Jedidiah Tanner had six wives. Sister Joceline—Hope had always been required to call her father’s wives “Sister” because they were all daughters of God and sisters in His kingdom—was his first wife and had given him four boys and five girls. Sister Celia had followed Joceline, even though she was a few years older. Hope had once heard that Celia had difficulty conceiving. Or it was possible that after the initial newness of the marriage wore off, her father had simply refused to visit her bed. They’d never seemed particularly compatible, which made plural wives quite a convenience for a man. Jedidiah could simply go to the other side of the dilapidated duplex Celia lived in or to the trailer across the street and bed down with another of his wives. In any case, Celia only had two children, both girls. Sister Florence, her father’s third wife, had six boys and two girls. Marianne, Hope’s mother, had born five girls and, to her father’s tacit disappointment, no sons.

      Sister Helena had four boys and one girl, and Raylynn, the sixth and final wife—at the time Hope left, anyway—just had Melanie. Although they were separated by only two years, Hope had never liked Raylynn. From the beginning, she’d been bossy and outspoken, and had all but taken over the running of Marianne’s household, at least when Jed wasn’t around. A woman rarely had an entire house—or even mobile home—to herself, so Raylynn had come to live with Marianne, which had given Hope plenty of opportunity to get to know her.

      The composed, ethereal Helena, however, who’d lived down the block in an old brick house built when the town was first founded in the early 1900s, was different. Hope had loved her. Unfortunately, Helena had always been Jed’s favorite, too, which made her a pariah among his other wives and children. Hope and her mother had never been able to hold Jedidiah’s partiality to Helena against her. Helena was too sweet, too withdrawn, as though she’d rather not be noticed at all. Even now, Hope saw her standing off to the side, staring into the distance, and wondered, as she often had as a young teen, what was going on behind the serenity of Sister Helena’s face.

      Hope forgot all about Sister Helena and the others the moment she spotted her own mother. Marianne was late joining the party and was trudging across the uneven ground in a dress so similar to one she’d owned eleven years ago Hope couldn’t be certain it wasn’t the exact same. Two girls, one about twelve and the other fourteen, tagged along behind her, bearing rolls and a ham, and Hope immediately realized they had to be her youngest sisters.

      They’d grown so tall; she doubted she would have recognized them had they not been with her mother. Even Marianne had changed. Her clothes now hung on her like garments on an old wire hanger, and her hair was completely gray. She looked at least twenty years older, instead of only a decade.

      Bitterness toward her father and guilt for abandoning her mother swelled inside Hope. She’d always been her mother’s right arm and her only confidante.

      Of all the places in the world, her family had to be from here, Hope thought, watching her sisters deposit the ham and rolls on the table closest to them. By some counts, there were 60,000 practicing polygamists living in Utah, northern Arizona, Idaho, Montana and parts of Mexico and Canada. So Superior wasn’t the only place where people practiced plural marriage. Most polygamists existed in relatively small communities made of up several families that espoused the same doctrines. But those doctrines weren’t necessarily the same from group to group and had ventured far from the original Mormon beliefs that had spawned so many breakaway sects. The most conservative insisted sex was only for purposes of procreation. Others, like her family’s church, believed a man could have sex with a woman at any time as long as she “belonged” to him.

      Still, there were 1,517 souls in Superior, and only half of those were members of the Everlasting Apostolic Church. The chances of being born here, in this small community, had to be a billion to one.

      Unfortunately, the chances of getting out were about the same.

      The weight of her purpose finally propelled Hope back to the car, where she retrieved the flowers she’d cut from her yard for her mother. She had to make her presence known as soon as possible. She’d have a much better chance of an honest conversation with her mother and sisters while her father wasn’t around. Considering the years that had passed since she’d last had contact and the way she’d left, it wasn’t going to be easy to reach them, even without her father’s interference. Her mother believed that God’s acceptance required her to submit to her husband’s will, which made it almost impossible to get her to listen to anything that didn’t come directly from him or the pulpit.

      Taking a deep breath, Hope walked resolutely toward the picnic area.

      Sister Raylynn, with her eagle eye, noticed her first and used her hand for shade so she could see better. Her jaw sagged, and, for an interminable moment, Hope felt the old fear and confusion return. The strictness of her upbringing, the emotional blackmail her parents and the leaders of the church had used to control her actions, the overwhelming competition she’d always felt for any crumb of her father’s attention and the sermons railing about the fiery fate of the wicked—all those feelings and memories closed in, threatening to suffocate her. She could almost feel the flames licking at her ankles….

      But then she saw her closest sisters. Charity, five years younger than Hope at twenty-two, had a child propped on one hip and a toddler at her feet. Faith, now almost nineteen, was pregnant.

      Raylynn said something and pointed. Her mother stopped wiping СКАЧАТЬ