Delilah curled her mouth into a worried knot. “When will you let me go?” she asked.
“I won’t.” He shook his head. “You belong to me.”
Delilah gulped hard. Her voice thin with fear, she asked, “But I don’t want to be here.”
The man snickered at her, as if she sounded foolish. “What you don’t want? That doesn’t matter. I chose you. That’s a great honor. You’re mine.”
She coughed to clear her throat, trying to dislodge a lump of fear. “What are you going to do to me?”
He sat back in the chair and looked at her. “Nothing right now, little one.”
She thought about that. “Later, will you let me go?”
This time he pursed his lips. When he did, the vein on the side of his neck stood out more. “No.”
Delilah took a long breath. “Please. I want to go home.”
The man examined her, unblinking. “Delilah, you won’t ever leave this house. You will live here until the day you die.” He leaned forward, closer to her, and lowered his mouth until it met hers. She smelled his stagnant breath as he pushed his rough, weather-worn lips against her soft ones. Her eyes flared wide with panic, as his closed and a look of pleasure softened his face.
Terrified to move, she froze and waited. When he finished, he pulled away.
“When I judge it is time, you will become sealed to me forever. We will be man and wife.” He stood and returned the chair to the center of the room, then began to walk away.
“Sir,” she whispered, and the man stopped. He looked back at her. “Please, take the chains off. They hurt.”
“Not until you prove you can be trusted.”
“How do I do that?”
“You do what your parents taught you to do,” he said. “You obey.”
Seventeen
From the Heatons’ trailer, I drove south on the road that traced the cornfield. When we reached the first intersection, Hannah instructed me to turn left. I did, and we drove east, following the road along the cornfield’s southern edge, the sun still low and in our eyes. We passed my family’s double-wide, and I saw my mother and Mother Naomi hanging sheets on ropes suspended from two spindly trees. My mother had on her wide-brimmed straw hat, the one with the flowered sash I remembered from when I was a kid. Behind them young brothers and sisters I didn’t know played. Hannah noticed me watching them.
“Should we stop?”
I’d been considering it. I didn’t see Lily. If I had, I would have answered differently. “No.”
“They might—”
“It will only cause another scene. Mother won’t let them talk to me,” I said. “Since she’s there, the others will follow her orders.”
A dozen or more trailers later, we slowed to pass the tractor pulling the wagon along the edge of the cornfield. The pickers had grown to a small army of women and children; some looked as young as ten or eleven. They worked their way through the rows of corn, snapping off the cobs and throwing them into cloth bags they dragged across the field. A dozen or more men collected the full bags and lugged them to the tractor, dumping them into the wagon. They’d been busy. At least twenty rows had been harvested, but another eighty or more needed to be cleared.
In their wake, a second battalion of men and teenage boys followed, using machetes to cut down the empty stalks. They left behind a carpet of debris, a thick thatch that would be turned into silage.
Hannah motioned. I turned left and drove north, continuing to outline the perimeter of the field, heading toward the mountains. As we approached the road’s end, Samuel’s Peak grew closer, and then loomed nearly overhead. Hannah pointed at not a trailer but a ramshackle cottage. Little of the structure’s last coat of white paint remained, leaving the wood exposed. Over the decades, Utah’s harsh sun had turned it silver.
I pulled over and parked.
The trailers were old and weary, many pockmarked with rust, but they looked like palaces in comparison to the house before us. A substantial branch, twisted and rotting, had fallen off an oak in the front yard, blocking the path to the house. Rather than cut it up and dispose of it, someone had removed a section of fence, making a second way to get into the yard. A large hole in the front wall had been repaired by nailing boards across it, big gaps between the wood letting the elements in. Jagged-edged screens tacked on with staples covered broken windows missing panels of glass. I wondered how the family fared during the winters, when instead of letting in mountain breezes they needed to keep out harsh cold.
“Even before the troubles, the Coombs family was among the poorest in Alber,” Hannah whispered. “But now, with just the wives and children, no husband to work, they have nearly nothing.”
As we had at the Heatons’, I led Hannah around the side of the house toward the back. The yard was covered with refuse, broken toys, rusty sheets of metal and pipes, and piles of boards and logs that struck me as a good place for rattlers to breed. An old outhouse with a hole in the wooden roof that had to let in rain stood to one side, the odor emanating from it nearly overpowering. The cornstalks behind the house had already been mowed down fifteen feet deep. To our left, in the distance, the crew of harvesters worked their way back toward the house. I heard the murmurs of the women and children talking as they snapped off the cobs, the men shouting at each other as they cut the stalks. The sun rising ever higher, the heat had begun to build.
I again motioned for Hannah to follow, and we made our way to the front door.
On the porch, I had to dodge a dinner-plate-size hole to get close enough to knock. I rapped once, twice, then stepped back
