Free Sound Of Gravel, The by Ruth Wariner

lightbulbs and appliances, so Lane connected it to a transformer, a metal box placed outside the kitchen door next to the cement porch. Next, he strung an electrical cord from the transformer through a corner of the kitchen wall and then tacked it along the beams of the wooden ceiling until it reached a white, ceramic light socket with a bare lightbulb. Cords snaked over the ceilings and walls of our home like plastic veins. But we finally had lights—bare-bulbed and bright—in every spot except the living room, which had an actual lamp with a shade.
    Lane had also fixed the old-fashioned washing machine that had been lying on the floor in his shop for months. Mom said that it was from the 1940s and was older than she was. It certainly looked it, with a metal box that swiveled between two open tubs, one for washing and one for rinsing. I liked helping her push the washed clothes through the rolling pins, and squeezing the rinsed clothes into a basket, but they took a whole day to dry on the clothesline when the weather was wet and cold.
    Once he’d finished the improvements on the house, Lane began going to the States more and more often. He had bought a semitruck so that he could haul loads of various types and sizes throughout the southwestern United States. He was gone for most of Meri’s first months while Mom and Alejandra ran the farm. When spring came, just as the weather was turning beautiful, Lane announced he was taking a third wife, Susan. She was one of Mom’s closest friends in the colony. I was surprised she and Lane were getting married. She already had eight children with a polygamist whom she had recently divorced. The church discouraged divorce, but it was common anyway. It was an easy process because most polygamists’ marriages weren’t legal in the first place.
    Mom said she had suggested Susan marry Lane. Knowing that Lane would probably take another wife anyway, Mom decided it would be best to find a sister wife she liked. Susan and her children lived a half mile down the road from us, in a small adobe house we passed every day on the way to school. After Susan and Lane got married, she and my mom got together every other afternoon.
    Between his new wife and his new hauling business, Lane had little time for Mom when he was in LeBaron. His repairs and improvements to our house came even more slowly than before, which became more and more embarrassing to us as ours was one of the only homes without hot water. We still used the stove for heating bathwater and everything else.
    We were all excited when we found out that Mom had finally persuaded Lane to install electrical wiring in the bathroom to heat water for a shower and grew even more excited when we saw silver tubing running up the bathroom wall for that very purpose. We counted the days until we could take our first hot showers at home. The only thing we needed was a showerhead.
    One rainy spring weekend, Lane announced that he would be spending a night in Casas Grandes with Alejandra at her parents’ home there. Mom saw this as a chance to have him pick up a showerhead. She dipped into her welfare check and gave Lane the money to buy the fixture while he was in town. It would be shower time by the beginning of the next week. We couldn’t wait.
    The following evening, I found myself in the living room with our oversize children’s Bible lying heavily in my small lap. It was open to a page I didn’t yet know how to read, but because neither Aaron, Luke, nor Audrey knew that, I took the opportunity to perform a melodramatic reading of the Noah’s Ark story. I recited the tale I had heard told many times in Sunday school, waving my arms dramatically as I described the animals boarding the boat in twos while the waters rose around them. As I told my siblings about all the wicked people who had foolishly laughed at Noah only to find themselves drowning in the floods, Lane drove up in his white Ford pickup, a rusty camper mounted on its