Shards

CHAPTER ONE

My best buddy Taylor was thirteen when I shot him. The moment came as much of a shock to me as to him. I don’t think either of us believed I’d follow through with it, but my sanity was at stake. That, and retribution for what happened to Jacko. His crimes couldn’t go unpunished.

In my defence, I’m unsure what was on my mind at the time. When you’re angry, things just kind of happen. The fact is, Taylor had to go. Talking hadn’t helped, and a firearm is a good way of imposing your wishes upon others, whether or not you pull the trigger. Everyone knows that.

Jacko was still alive when I pulled the ancient revolver from his bedside chest. Sweat dotted his wrinkled brow, and blood seeped through the dressing under his left shoulder. He stirred, eyelids flickering. Something unintelligible passed his cracked lips. He may have been dreaming about hunting. He told me he often did.

Whatever, there were more pressing things on my mind than deciphering a dying old man’s ramblings. I crept out and paused in the living room for a few seconds, taking deep breaths. I really don’t remember why. Perhaps to give myself an opportunity to back out? Or a chance to steady the hand that held the gun?

Yet it’s funny the ridiculous details I do recall. Like the moment my feet hit the cabin’s rickety deck, and the creaking timbers sent a startled pair of squirrels racing to the safety of a nearby pine. Smart critters. Must have sensed my mood.

Not Taylor, though. Lounging in Jacko’s favourite chair, legs outstretched and reading a comic I’d found on one of our foraging trips, he looked like he was going nowhere. The instant he saw me, a smug expression came over his face. He let the comic drop to the deck, eyes never once leaving mine, and started a slow handclap as if he’d choreographed the entire scene.

‘Hey, it’s Dal the slave,’ he said after a while, piling on some corny hick accent that sounded a little creepy since his voice hadn’t yet broken. ‘What’s that ya got there?’ He nodded towards the gun I held loosely at my side.

Truth is, I hadn’t expected that reaction, even from him. Maybe I imagined he’d see the gun and plead for forgiveness? His arrogance pulled me up short, leaving me stuck for words. I felt small, foolish, embarrassed even.

‘Tell you to do this, did he? Thought he’d be dead already, scrawny old fucker.’

He spat to one side, shook his head like a long-suffering parent. I’m sure he expected a hysterical comeback, but I was determined to disappoint him. My mouth remained closed, as dry as the bleached timber under my boots.

‘You gotta lighten up,’ he said. ‘What’s a kid have to do to get you out of this crappy place? You retarded or something?’

The rage I’d kept a lid on for so, so long bubbled up inside me like soda in a shaken bottle. And all I could hear was that handclap replaying in my head, getting louder and louder until it made my eyes screw up.

‘Now gimme the gun before you hurt someone with it,’ he said, his tone laden with sarcasm. He leaned forward and offered an open hand, palm up. To a casual observer – there were none – it may even have appeared a benevolent gesture.

‘You shot him,’ I said.

‘Me? You sure about that?’

His next words broke the spell.

‘It’s T and D, Dal. T and D. We rule.’

My thumb somehow found its way to the hammer. Pulled it back all by itself.

Click.

The lop-sided leer on Taylor’s face disappeared in that moment.

Power.

As my right hand rose, grip tightening, my left came across to brace it. Sixty-eight muscles perfectly coordinated. The gun was heavy, but Jacko had taught me how to use it.

‘Jeez, Dal! Please, I—’

CHAPTER TWO

In the beginning, home was a cave on a high desert plateau of red dirt and blue skies. My father dynamited it out of a lonely sandstone rock he’d purchased, along with a large parcel of land nobody wanted. We were surrounded by so much nothing, even the uranium miners who previously leased it had pulled out, unable to make their claims pay any more. I don’t know what the seller thought Dad would do with it. They probably laughed when he handed over the cheque.

By the time my family moved in, Dad had constructed a timber and adobe fascia over the hole, complete with windows and a door, and partitioned the interior into eight rooms. Then he blasted more caves nearby, fixed them up, and put them up for rental to like-minded families of the Mormon Fundamentalist persuasion.

This was all made possible with a sizeable gift, the origins of which I only discovered recently while digging through a wooden chest of old journals, news cuttings, and family papers.

On the night of their thirtieth wedding anniversary, my paternal grandparents were killed by a drunk driver. Papa George Smith and first wife, Ada, had celebrated at a local restaurant in Colorado City, a small town straddling the Arizona-Utah border. On the five-minute car ride to their Hildale home, a speeding SUV ran a stop sign and T-boned their sedan. George and Ada never made it to the emergency room. The young driver, Ryan Macey from St. George, miraculously survived to have his day in court. He was convicted of a second-degree felony and sentenced to twelve years in prison. When I read the press clipping of the tragedy, I couldn’t help noticing the irony of a teetotal couple in a dry town mown down by a driver under the influence of alcohol. The event apparently shook the townsfolk and left Papa’s immediate family – four sister wives, eighteen children and forty-three grandchildren – without a patriarch. Later, the tragedy would change my dad’s future.

If the family were searching for some kind of silver lining, they would have found it in Papa George’s foresight. A life insurance policy paid out a large sum to the remaining wives. They became wealthy in a dying town where some folks could barely scrape together enough money to eat. A few years before, a new, and some would say fanatical, regime had arrived in the Short Creek area, the geographical centre of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Life changed. Family breakups were common throughout the community, with church members leaving or cast out for some transgression or another.

Dad was one of those casualties, ejected by the new priesthood council for refusing to give up on a relationship with a young girl whose family wasn’t fundamental enough for them. He moved south to the nearby town of Centennial Park where life was more relaxed. For three years, he had no contact with his parents, the other sister wives or his siblings. It was forbidden. A pragmatic man, he wasted no time building his own family, first marrying the girl at the centre of the controversy and then, six months later, taking another wife. She was to be my mother.

When a lawyer’s letter arrived in his post office mailbox, I imagine he assumed it contained bad news – perhaps referring to some minor misdemeanour. Instead, it was an invitation to collect two hundred thousand dollars, a gift I can only presume from his family. It came with an anonymous note I found stapled to the letter. A delicate hand had penned: Dearest Albert, we hope this will help. We pray for you every day.

I’m not sure the rock purchase was what his benefactors had in mind for my dad, but there were likely some powerful motivations behind his decision – the idea of being beholden to no man, the opportunity to live off grid to escape the prying eyes of the federal authorities and the FLDS council. He often complained that the radical council members weren’t real Mormons anymore. In hindsight though, I think he simply found it difficult being bound by a tight set of rules, whoever wrote them – even Joseph Smith, publisher of the Book of Mormon.

I was four years old when we settled in at the rock. I had two moms (but only one real one), and a younger brother and sister. Soon after, Dad took another wife and our family grew. He and each of the moms had their own bedrooms, with us kids all sharing. He used to joke he’d run out of rock to blast more rooms for us all.

The arrival of the Ballard and Jensen families marked the birth of a new community where Dad was the boss, the can-do, go-to man. I took a certain pride in seeing the other adults seek his advice and guidance, ask permissions, and have him lead communal prayer. I’d only just turned five but, despite the influx of newcomers, my status as the oldest kid survived.

Most of my days followed a simple schedule: homeschool, chores, play. The moms took turns overseeing my studies, and their enthusiasm rubbed off on me. Once I’d finished my chores – feeding the chickens, tidying up, laying the table for dinner – the afternoons were free to do as I wished. That usually involved playing outside and being leader of the kids who were old enough to walk. It wasn’t a large gang.

The territory in which we could play was confined only by the wire fencing Dad staked out to mark the property boundaries. A few hundred yards from home, at the southern end of the rock, towered a natural arch, as if Dad had used some leftover dynamite to create an ornamental feature. I’m sure it was something he could have replicated if millions of years of erosion hadn’t beaten him to it. He named it Eye-in-the-Rock.

When we were a little older, we’d scramble up the steep slickrock and stand under the arch, looking down over the scrub for invaders. Mostly we saw only rabbits, chipmunks and lizards, perhaps a porcupine if we were very lucky. In high summer, that rock would be so hot we’d feel it through the soles of our cheap shoes. The local lizard population, despite a lack of footwear, seemed happy to bask there every morning for hours on end before heading off to hunt or seek a morsel of shade to cool down again. For no particular reason, I started a lizard catch-and-release mission one summer, the release part at the behest of my mom who took exception to the boxes of crawling reptiles littering the kitchen counter on the first day. No one in the community ever matched my record of forty-three lizards in a single afternoon.

Every so often, a distant cloud of dust would materialise on one of the criss-crossing old mining roads that slashed through the landscape. On rare occasions, that cloud would advance towards us, and we’d run down from the arch hollering, and a mom or a dad would come over to see what all the fuss was about. Usually, our visitors were lost off-roading tourists, or intrepid travelling salespeople looking to sell something Dad didn’t need.

We kept our faith and ourselves to ourselves, only venturing into the nearest town a few times a year for supplies or, in the early fall, to sell melons on the street if Dad could get his hands on a cheap truckload. A quiet place during the winter months, Moab’s population swelled with tens of thousands of tourists the rest of the year. That made it the least Mormon town in Utah, and a place where my father would be less likely to bump into the kind of folk he wanted to avoid.

The Ballards and the Jensens were equally shy of civilisation. Bob Jensen helped out Jerem[LT1] Ballard with his rustic garden furniture business. They’d spend the summer, fall and winter producing stock in the spare cave and then sell it to a Salt Lake City wholesaler in the spring. Judging by the very basic interiors of their homes, I don’t think they earned too much from it, but it must have paid the rent and given them some time with their families.

Nobody at the rock owned a radio or a TV. Dad said they were full of lies and distractions, and we were better off without them. The internet was unknown to me until I met up with Jacko, not that he held with such things. But we weren’t entirely shut off from the rest of the world. Dad had a ham radio setup in a small shack close by. A huge antenna sat atop the rock. Sometimes if I were passing by, I’d hear a squawk and a crackle, and my dad saying, ‘This is Blaster … This is Blaster’. I once asked him why he didn’t have a cellphone like some other people I’d seen in town. He told me when you use them, people can find out your business. I didn’t understand why they’d be particularly interested in what he did.

For a while, I never questioned our singular lifestyle at all because it hadn’t occurred to me that my life was in any way unusual. That is until the first time I accompanied Dad into town in his beat-up old Chevy truck, the open bed so packed with melons I could scarcely believe we didn’t lose any along the way. He told me I was to be his good-luck charm.

We set up the stall in a corner of a small parking lot beside the main street sidewalk, a perfect location for a young kid to observe the goings-on of a busy town on a Saturday, the busiest of days. Storefronts and signage in every conceivable hue. The rumble of bumper-to-bumper vehicles passing by so close I could read the expiration dates on licence plates. Wafts of herbs and spices from nearby restaurants. If a kid my age passed by, I’d give them a big grin and sometimes they’d smile back. We’d overhear snippets of conversations in foreign tongues, and Dad tried to guess where they were from. Equally unfamiliar was the sight of flesh. Moms and daughters in skirts and dresses at knee height or – shamefully, my dad would have thought – even higher. Fathers and sons in shorts and brightly coloured shirts. That town had my attention.

After the day’s selling, Dad packed up the trestle table, heaved it onto the truck, and said he’d buy me a special treat. You tend not to get many treats when you live in a cave.

‘So what flavour, son?’

We’d entered the ice cream parlour opposite, and my wide eyes scanned the rows of colourful flavours. Fresh territory. The solar back home could only power the lights, a water pump for our well, and a small refrigerator and freezer. My mom told me she didn’t have room for such luxuries as ice cream.

My eyes settled on a vivid green concoction. I looked up at Dad.

‘Can I have that one please, sir?’

But then I heard an older kid behind me in the line ask his mom for a Rocky Road. I liked the sound of that as it reminded me of the bumpy track up to our home, so I changed my mind. Dad picked one the colour of cat vomit. (Did I tell you we had cats? There were so many, only a few had names.) He thrust some greasy bills that looked like they’d been in his pocket for years into the hands of a bored-looking girl. When she handed him back a few coins, he put them into the near-empty tip jar.

‘Hope you were paying attention, Dal,’ he whispered as we were leaving. ‘People who work in places like this don’t make too much, so they rely on customers giving ‘em a little extra. Thing is, some folks are plain mean. You ain’t gonna be mean when you’re all grown up, are you?’

‘No sir, I’ll just ask them how much money they need. Then give it to them.’

He laughed and slapped me on the back, and that made me feel happy and wanted. I’d felt the flat of his hand on my backside a few times, so I was generally anxious to please him.

On the wall of a nearby store, a giant thermometer read ninety-six degrees. My ice cream started melting the moment we walked out. As fast as I could lick, it dribbled down the cone onto my fingers and then my shoes. My face turned redder than one of Jacko’s apples because I was sure passers-by would notice my predicament.

My role as part-time assistant melon salesman was short-lived. I became ill not long afterwards, so my kid sister Ramola took over from me at the stall, and that was the end of my ice cream treats. Her tenure, however, was no longer than mine. Once she reached the age of six, my dad replaced her with Jayden who soon lost out to Dyla. Dad must have thought little kids helped sell more melons.

I didn’t go into town again for five years, and by then it wasn’t the Moab I remembered.

CHAPTER THREE

My illness was serious enough to land me in a room of my own at Moab’s ICU. The doctors diagnosed bacterial meningitis. I remember little of my first week there. Just a flurry of masked medical staff. The one constant was Mom. She wore a mask too, but I could still see her tears. Often, I’d wake up and I could feel her holding my hand. Dad came once. He spent the time hugging Mom. She told me some years later I’d nearly died, and she cried again.

…