CHAPTER 17

TELL ME ABOUT LIFE with Ronnie Hansen,” Monster said over the rumble of the Porsche. 

“What’s to tell?” Melissa said.  “He’s a man with fifteen wives over whom he exercises total dominance—just like he does everyone else.”

“Fifteen?  I thought he had thirteen.”

“He probably has many more than that.  I feel certain that he takes wives in isolated communities and swears them to silence.  Even the Prophet is sensitive to the charge of extravagance.  He travels to meetings of the faithful throughout the West—throughout the whole country, for that matter.  He doesn’t marry them all in the temple, I know that.  He didn’t marry me there although we were sealed there later.  His word is law—or, more correctly, scripture.  He can do anything he wants.”

“Not anything,”  Monster said.

“So you say.”

Monster looked at her.  She was wearing a loose-fitting skirt of light material that showed the outline of her long legs, and a white blouse that now hung slightly open.  Monster did his best to avoid staring.  He was taking her from the hospital to Ginny’s house.  Tonight he would meet with his fellow conspirators and Granny to plan their incursion into the Medicine Wheel camp.

Monster felt slightly uncomfortable around Melissa.  What kind of a woman is this?  Tough, he thought.  Tough, but soft as well.  Nevertheless, he felt a strange foreboding as he talked to her; there was a glaze to her eyes that worried him.  She looked like a girl who had seen too much.  He had seen such women before.  He knew she was in danger, not only from without, but from within.

Monster punched the accelerator and passed a truck ferrying calves to the Worland stockyards.  U.S. Highway 20 was a short, straight four miles from the hospital to Basin.

“Ronnie Hansen, I’ll admit, has been untouchable.  But a day of reckoning is coming, I guarantee.”

Melissa folded her arms across her chest, laying long slender fingers on her shoulders.  “But will that happen before or after he destroys the compound and everyone in it?”

“Would he really do that?”

Melissa laughed softly and shook her head.  “Why are men so gullible?  How long does it take for them to get the picture?  What does Ronald have to do to convince you that he’s on a collision course with destiny that will bring about the end of the world—your world or his?  It’s only a matter of time, I realize, before the great legal power of the United States is brought to bear on him.  I know that.  But what does he do when he is backed into a corner?  Just take a look at me.  I told you what he said to me the last time I refused his…his sexual advances?  He said, ‘Melissa, do you know who I am?’  As I told you before, he had tears in his eyes when he said it.  I knew my life was over at that moment.”

“But why, for heaven’s sake?”

Melissa was silent.  She looked out the window at the alfalfa fields ready for the first cutting.  She thought back on her ten years with Prophet Hansen.

“I was twenty-five when I married him.  I met him in Mexico where I was working in a clinic as a summer volunteer.  I had gone down there from Connecticut with a church group that made the trip every summer with outstanding students who wanted to serve humanity before graduating from college and entering the work force.  I was a senior nursing student at Boston College.

“Ronald was nearly twenty-five years older than I, but he was tall, blonde, and handsome.  So self-assured.  He was visiting the clinic because The Church of the One Mighty and Strong had made a sizeable donation to it.   He threw a lot of money around in those days, still does.  It took me years to realize that everything the Prophet does is calculated to consolidate his power, his authority, his influence, his reputation.  The annual donations to the clinic bought good publicity for C1MS in Mexico.  And there are lots of polygamous Mormons in Mexico.  The Prophet is respected by such groups.

“Of course, in recent years—especially after Jan Kucera’s article ran in the New York Times—his reputation has sunk.  Once he had open doors to the Wyoming governor’s mansion; now he is considered a sort of fringe-lunatic.  When that happened, something seemed to snap inside Ronald.”

“What do you mean?”  Monster pulled the car over to the curb on the north end of Basin.  The guttural engine rumbled quietly.

“I don’t know. Suddenly there was a new urgency about him.  He changed.  I mean, when I met him, he was so charming.  He swept me off my feet in Mexico. He took me to Mexico City on the pretext of showing me another clinic.  I’m embarrassed to say I was terribly honored.  He put me in the then new five-star Camino Real Hotel.  Seven hundred rooms of a luxury I was unaccustomed to, even though my parents in Connecticut are what most people would consider well-off.  For a week he talked to me of his religion—his call to save the world from poverty and degradation.  How could I have been so naïve?

“When he converted me, he bedded me.  Married me under the stars in the courtyard, performing the ceremony himself.  I bought it all.”

“What happened to change all that?”

“Ronald had been good to me—as long as I caused him no trouble.  I was, according to everyone, his favorite wife.  I excited him like no other, he told me.”

“Well…”

Melissa waved him off and continued.

“I believed Ronald.  I not only believed him, I believed in him.  Those early years were good. The entire church treated me with deference.  And, I believed, I gave as much as I got.  I worked hard on behalf of the other women and the children.  I also traveled with Ronald a lot.”

She stopped.  Drew in her breath.  Folded her hands into small fists on her lap.

“But a cloud began to form after the first few years.  I discovered I was barren.  Not only did I suffer the profound disappointment of realizing that my mothering would be lavished only on children not my own, but I also discovered that barrenness is the ultimate stigma for a polygamous wife.  As much as Ronald cared for me, his theology told him that I was damaged goods.  ‘Barren’ equals ‘cursed.’  How I have come to hate that word!  It’s a descriptive you can’t escape.  Some women are ugly, others are fat, and some are stupid.  I am barren.

“Ronald viewed it as a great irony that his favorite wife would never produce Hansen stock.  He viewed my curse as his curse.  From that day his admiration changed to simple lust.  I was no longer his wife, but his property.  It was a subtle change, but it went to the bone.  He never recovered from it and neither did I.

“That was when I began to see that for all his ‘spirituality,’ for all his ‘prophetic insight,’ he was, in some ways, blind.  That knowledge worked into my soul.  From there, the unraveling continued.”

Melissa fell into silence.

Monster interrupted her reverie.

“I guess I just can’t understand what makes him tick, Melissa.  Help me understand.”

Melissa looked out the window at the park and tennis courts.  A father pushed a little girl on the merry-go-round.  Faster and faster it turned, causing her hair to stand out straight from her head.  She was laughing.  So was her father.

“Sheriff…”

“John.”

“John, then.  John, did you ever read The Brothers Karamazov?”

“I’m afraid my cultural attainments wouldn’t fill a 44 cartridge casing.”

Melissa laughed.  “Well, anyway…John, I read the book during my early estrangement from Ronald.  I read a lot then.  I was very alone.  Anyway, there is a scene in that book that gave me a lot of insight.  Jesus Christ has returned to the earth as a peasant in Russia.  He has been arrested and put in prison.  While he is there, a priest—I think it was a priest; it could have been a city father—came to him.  The man says to Jesus something like, ‘We know who you are and we know why you have come here.  But we can’t let you accomplish your mission.’”

“What was his mission?” Monster asked.

“The man tells him ‘You want to give people liberty.  Freedom.  But they can’t handle that.  It will ruin them.  We have to protect them from you.  So, yes, we know who you are and we have to kill you.’”

“Jesus?”

“Yes, they are going to kill Jesus again.  Anyway, John, Ronald also is saving people who can’t take care of themselves.  If he has to manipulate them to do it, so be it.  If he has to kill them to send them to heaven, well…so be that, too.”

Monster was now looking at the figures in the park.  He was quiet for awhile and then asked softly, “What caused you to know Hansen was finished with you and would harm you?”

Melissa looked at him.  “The whole community knew that he and I were estranged.”

“And?”

“No one resists Ronald.  No one.”

“I still don’t understand.  You were his wife.  He loved you.”

She laughed.  She reached over and touched Monster’s arm.  “Oh, Sheriff,” she said.  “You are a throwback, aren’t you?  You are so full of bluster, but underneath you are a romantic. ‘He loved you!’”  She was laughing harder now.  So hard that tears started to form in the corners of her eyes.

Monster looked at her.  She was laughing so hard she was sobbing.  And then she was only sobbing.  Monster reached over and put a beefy hand on her delicate shoulder.  Her body shook as she wept.

He pulled her to himself and cradled her face against his chest.  She continued to shake and weep.  She was moaning.

“There, there,” he was saying.  “There, there, little girl.  It’s OK.”