Chapter Text
Bukkiah knew he existed before the age of eight, but no memories before then really mattered. Because, at eight years old, on the day of his sister’s wedding to Enos Kendall, Prophet of the New Shiloh Church, some switch flipped in his brain that caused him to question why she was becoming wife number 12 to a man his father grew up with for her sixteenth birthday.
That marriage would only last half a year before Enos, unable to seek outside medical intervention due to divine mandate, passed from a heart attack. His sister, along with the four other wives of child bearing age, were inherited by his son, Doug.
He was relieved when it happened, naive to think a man closer to her age would inherently treat her and her sister-wives better.
The next time he and Magdalene had a moment alone together, she’d been married to Doug for over a year.
They had slipped away from the hustle and bustle of Sunday supper, from the rows upon rows a foldable tables and chairs set up in the sanctuary, from the patres familias discussing their outside businesses whose profits mostly went to the community Helping Pot, from the semicircle of tables onstage that held Doug’s sons from oldest to youngest on his right and wives in a preplanned rotation on his left.
Magdalene had just had her chance to be beside Doug the week before, which meant that she was meant to be on the farthest end of the table that week–she had easily twenty minutes before Doug realized she was missing.
“Feels good to get away from it all,” Magdalene said as she submerged her fingers into her pompadour bun to scratch her scalp. All women wore the style after marrying, but it looked wrong on her, somehow, but Bukkiah was sure that he would grow used to it eventually. “Mama Judith went on and on about how we may have that age difference, but all of Enos’s kids would become my kids. Right as I get used to it–I’m stuck with Doug.”
“That sounds…awkward,” Bukkiah said. He was only nine, but it still unsettled his stomach.
Magdalene sighed and sat down on the grass, ankle length prairie dress twisting around her. She grunted and moved to her knees for a second so she could bunch it all up and sit back down with only the underlayer beneath her.
Bukkiah sat down beside her and followed her gaze to the Heavens.
“I don’t want to be Magdalene anymore,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “I know you’re young and I shouldn’t be putting this on you, but I don’t want to be Magdalene anymore.”
Bukkiah nodded, though his little brain thought it was more about her not liking her name like he did. “I don’t want to be Bukkiah either.”
Magdalene sniffled and gave a watery smile. “Well we can fix that. We’ll call you Bucky, and you’ll never have to be Bukkiah again.”
“Dad will never let that happen. Besides, it’s all cutesy, and I’m a man.”
“Then how’s about the Mighty Buck,” Magdalene wrapped her arms around her brother and pulled him close. “Future Bull of the Woods.”
“Then you can be Magda,” Bukkiah said happily. “I’m sure Doug will let you.”
Magdalene froze at the mention of her husband.
“Or maybe Mags? Or maybe we can even push it to Maggie or Maddie.”
“I don’t know,” Magdalene said, a bit of life leaving her, but Bukkiah couldn’t understand what he did to cause that.
“We don't have to tell him, then. I’ll be Buck to you, and you’ll be Maddie to me.”
The last time it was just the two of them, he was at his brother’s spirit wedding. Daniel would’ve been 18, a suitable age for a man to be sealed. Maddie was 20, and people were wondering why she hadn’t been pregnant yet.
One of his brothers (he didn’t remember the man’s name) was chosen to be Daniel’s earthly proxy, and three girls he’d seen around town were proxies for the deceased girls chosen to be his wives.
They wore aprons with the names of the people they represented stitched on them.
He thought the entire thing was a bit hokey, but spirit marriages could only be officiated by the Prophet.
That meant Doug was too busy to notice a wife or two slip away to the now empty bridal changing room.
Bukkiah gave her a hug the moment the two of them were alone, and it was the first time somebody reciprocated his affection since that night below the Heavens.
“How’ve you been?” He said.
Magdalene shook her head. “How have you been?”
“Good,” he said, and, already done with exchanging half-truths, said. “I’ll get to meet Daniel now. He’ll be there with Grandpa and Granny Mary and Granny Judith and—“
“I know,” she cut him off. “We may not get along together, and we don’t want to spend the entire time listing names. Do we?”
Bukkiah deflated a bit. Magdalene was always the one who would listen to him ramble for hours. What had changed.
Before he could continue his line of thinking, his sister reached into the folds of her prairie dress and pulled out something that looked almost like a plastic pancake with a piece of string coming out of it the string split Into a Y and had two little knobs at the end.
He’d never seen anything like it.
“The son of one of my sister wives snuck it in.” She said. She was the only one she knew that referred to the children under her with all the extra words instead of just saying ‘son.’
“What is it?”
“If the side is right, it’s called a Walkman.” She said “He snuck it in when driving into town for deliveries. He felt too guilty to use it and knew I could get it out of the house without his father knowing.”
“Then why do you have it?” He asked.
“We’re out of the house,” she said with a sly smile. She handed him one of the little buds at the end of the string. “Put this in your ear to hear it.”
He did as he was told, and watched us his sister press a few buttons on the thing.
He flinched as the song began. It was nothing like any of the hymns he’d ever sung. It was just one person, and the sound behind him was almost like a guitar, but more intense, stronger than the voice itself.
We’re gonna get to that place
Where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun
But 'til then, tramps like us
Baby, we were born to run
Bukkiah felt pain in his ear. He shot his hand up to it on instinct to find out the earbud had been ripped out. Before he could process what was going on, Magdalene was being pulled up from the ground.
“My own wife!” He yelled. “Did you think you could hide this from me? From God!”
He twisted her arm, and the sound she made must have been what caused him to do what he did.
“It’s mine!” He yelled, shooting up from the ground and barely reaching Doug’s chest in height. “Don’t hurt her! It’s mine!”
Doug froze and looked at him in disgust.
“What did you say?”
He swallowed. “It’s mine.”
“Oh, child,” he said “You know what the Good Book says about bearing false witness.”
“It’s not hers,” he said, and he could barely hear his words over the pounding in his ears.
“Is that so?” He said, his eyes laying down like God‘s judgment. “Where did you get this, Bukkiah.”
“I found it.” He said, chest puffed out. He was unworthy to touch the Prophet, to pry his fingers from his sister’s arm, but he could do this.
He could lie to him. He could commit blasphemy for his sister.
“Where did it come from?” Doug said.
“I don’t know who brought it here,” he said. It wasn’t untrue. The Prophet had many sons, and he couldn't even think of their names to guess who it was. “I found it in the school.”
Doug clenched his jaw. If it was found at the school, then there was no way of knowing who it could’ve belonged to.
No one would get hurt this way.
Doug did not release his sister’s arm, but he did stop twisting it. “Nonetheless, it was incredibly selfish of you to corrupt your sister with this,” he held up the Walkman and turned his attention to Magdalene. “And you, dear wife,” he released her arm and moved his hand to cup her face mechanically.
Doug slammed the Walkman on the ground. Bukkiah flinched at the sound then again when Doug crushed it under his boot like a cigarette, just to be sure. Never breaking eye contact with his wife.
“You should never have allowed yourself to be corrupted.” He pulled her face close to his and kissed away a tear from her trembling face. “What am I going to do about you?”
He pulled away and turned back to Buck. “It seemsy wife has come down with a headache. Say goodbye to her now.”
Doug moved his hand to her shoulder, and Bukkiah’s heart sank and he realized what kind of goodbye this was.
He threw himself into her arms, making sure his head went against the ear furthest from Doug.
He knew he needed to follow the Prophet’s decisions. To avoid any kind of Heresy that would separate him from God and his family.
But why would God pick a man like Doug to be his spokesman?
“Love you, too, Maddie.”
“I love you, too, Buck,” she whispered back, her words more sacred than any he heard during the ceremony.
With a pull from Doug, his arms were empty. His sister left his life and then his view.
Bukkiah got the switch when he got home that night. He may have walked funny for a few days afterwards, but he was fine.
But he didn’t see Maddie again. He managed to catch a group of her sister wives once, and they gave him the news.
Doug wouldn’t let her anywhere alone anymore. None of them were. Bukkiah’s actions made it clear they needed each other’s help to avoid temptation.
Avoid him.
He cried in bed, afraid of what Doug had done to his sister.
At age 13, Bukkiah was sat down by his father in his study. Father told him that he was not in trouble, but the only time he’d ever been alone with Father was when he injured himself, right before he was told off for his recklessness.
“I have too many responsibilities that need my time and attention,” was what he said when Bukkiah asked him why he never got to spend time alone with him.
(He later realized that meant “I have too many children to spend time and attention on each.”)
But this moment was about Bukkiah alone.
Now that he was becoming a man, temptation could touch him. He could not pursue a girl the church matchmaker had not assigned to him. He could not seek out media from beyond New Shiloh. He could not question the church.
But with that came all the glorious things Bukkiah would one day get to do. All the ways Bukkiah would be rewarded for his obedience. He had always known the celestial rewards for faith and living by the mandates, but he had no idea the earthly rewards that would come. He could attend and one day speak at church tribunals. He could begin to counsel father in preparation for his own family.
And wasn’t that last one the best of all? The Principle. One day, he would be the center of a family who loved and adored him, not a boy on the fringes, loved only by Magdalene best she could before she became part of the Principle of Plural Marriage.
Bukkiah wanted to feel that kind of love. The divine love of knowing that everyone in the house loved him and each other. He knew he could give his full self to a dozen people and still have more to give, and his entire body shook at the life mandated for him.
Two weeks later, with that same thought in mind, he kissed Sampson Jessop in the woods behind New Shiloh. He thought it would be fine. He thought that giddy feeling he felt around him was God’s sign that what he was doing was right, that it was a way to grow his family.
But Sampson was a devout and pure soul. He told the elders the moment he returned home.
Bukkiah searched the crowd of the sanctuary and hoped he would see his father. He knew that Maddie and his mother couldn’t be here in this male only space, but he hoped he could recognize his father among the room of men in identical clothes and identical haircuts.
“You say that Bukkiah attempted to corrupt you?” Doug said calmly from his pulpit, as though this was a normal Sunday and he was giving the weekly announcements. As the Prophet, it was his duty to lead churchly matters such as this.
“Yes, Pastor Doug,” Sampson said.
“And you do not bear false witness when you say that Bukkiah is a homosexual?”
“No, Sir.”
Pastor Doug turned to face Bukkiah and sighed. “He may be my brother in the eyes of God,” Doug said in the low way he did when preaching the corruption of the outside world. “But Cain and Abel were brothers as well. As Prophet, it is my duty to guide New Shiloh, to keep them in the light and cast out any devils who sneak their way into our midst.”
“Doug—“
Doug glared at him, all the false sadness and internal conflict gone from his eyes.
“Seems you were always meant to corrupt. Born with the Mark of Cain right on your face.”
Bukkiah’s blood ran cold. At that moment, he realized Doug had thought this through–planned this–and had simply been waiting for the opportunity to push him away. To separate he and Maddie before one made the other realize that Hell together was better than Heaven apart.
He was being excommunicated. Unsealed from his family. Name made taboo. Cast out into the dragon’s den Man had created outside their sanctuary of New Shiloh.
Condemned to Hell.
He knew straying from the mandate was a sin, but he never thought it was enough to lose everything he knew over it.
No birth certificate. No school records. No proof Bukkiah existed outside the fact he was standing there in the police station—talking to the people he was told were devils in disguise seeking to steal them away with no cause— after being caught ‘shoplifting.’
(Bukkiah didn’t know he was stealing. In New Shiloh, everything was shared.)
“You’re a lost boy, aren’t you?” Officer Winston (‘You can just call me Candice’) said as she wrote another N/A on the police report.
“A what?” Bukkiah said.
“New Shiloh,” Candice said, and Bukkiah could hear something pained in her voice. “I don’t think there’s a single uniform in this building that hasn’t tried to find something that sticks with them, but they live so far out in the country that our jurisdiction ends and the FBI won’t touch it due to religious freedom protections.”
“Did we do something?” Bukkiah said.
Look like she was about to go on a tangent before taking a deep breath and stopping herself. “How many wives did your father have?”
“Just four,” Bukkiah said.
“And what made him decide to marry them?”
“The matchmaker set them up,” Bukkiah said, unsure as to why somebody was questioning something so mundane.
“Out here… we don’t marry multiple people at the same time. When we are with someone, we are with them and only them, and straying from your person is one of the most unforgivable things a person can do.”
“So the woman has to do everything alone?” Bukkiah said “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“You’re right. That’s why people seek partners who will help them in life, support them and treat them as equals, someone they split the duties with.”
Bukkiah nodded. It actually sounded… kinda nice.
“I don’t want you to feel bad about not knowing this stuff,” Candice said, reaching over the desk to touch Bukkiah's shoulder. “We get one or two lost boys a year—polygamy isn’t sustainable unless there’s an excess of women and a scarcity of boys—and we have support groups and other resources to help you adjusting. You’ll even get a mentor who’s been through what you have, we’ll assign you a social worker and place you in a group home for now— I know there’s a group home in Hershey that is run by a former lost boy. I’m going to see if there is a slot open for you tonight.”
Bukkiah nodded. The reality that he was never going home again sinking in now that he was forced to focus on more than just survival.
“Before we can do that, we need to make some decisions about the blanks in the paperwork. Do you know how to read?”
Bukkiah nodded. He needed to know for when they did popcorn reading of the scripture in Sunday school.
“Do you want to do it yourself or do you want my help?”
“Could you help me?” Bukkiah mumbled, eyes fixed on his lap.
Candice smiled. “You said your name was Bukkiah?”
He nodded.
“Do you want that to still be your name?”
Bukkiah thought for a moment. No was his first thought. He always wished he had a more common name like Daniel did, but what would he be called if not Bukkiah?
“What are some names people use out here?”
Candice typed sometime on the computer (something Bukkiah would have to ask her about later) then turned around the screen to reveal ‘Top 100 Baby Names: 1992’ in big bold letters up top.
Bukkiah scanned the list, mumbling each name to himself to see how it sounded.
With each name, Candice became less and less patient.
“Trevor, Luis, Corey,” he sighed. He was over halfway down the list now.
Then it dawned on him. He remembered a little moment between him and his sister.
“Can I be called Buck,” he said.
Candice raised a brow. “I won’t stop you, but I think that may be better as a nickname. Buck could be short for Buchanan, or Buckingham, or Buckley—“
“I like that one,” Buck said.
“That’s a good last name, but I still recommend you pick a first name from this list.”
Buck looked at the name that came next on the list. He had no plans on using it ever, so it wasn’t like he needed to be in love with it. “I’ll be Evan Buckley.”
Georgia, California, Virginia Beach, Peru.
Everywhere he went, he bought a postcard, addressed it to Maddie, and imagined sending it to her. Imagined her pleasantly surprised to hear from her brother. Imagined her in a house in Hershey or Boston or wherever life took her.
Maybe she had a loving husband and family. Maybe it was just the two of them.
There was a strange irony in having his first real relationship be with a woman 16 years his senior. She would’ve been close to the age he is now when he escaped New Shiloh.
Because that’s what happened. Expulsion was synonymous with escape now in his mind. Leaving the place you lived your whole life–the person you’ve been your whole life–was terrifying, but now he understood that the people who deprived him of the world were not people who loved him.
(He wondered if Abby felt like she was escaping him.)
Buck scrubbed harder in hopes that, if the rig was clean enough and his muscles were sore enough, he could maybe forget it all for a moment. He couldn’t make her stay. He would be no better than them if he made her stay, but that didn’t make her leaving hurt any less.
“Do you need help, Ma’am?” Buck absently registered Eddie say nearby. The firehouse was still enough that he could hear his quiet conversation from the walkway across the bay.
“I’m looking for my brother,” the voice said.
“What’s his name?”
“I…he doesn’t use it anymore. But he has two angel kisses right above his eye.”
Buck snapped out of what he was doing and looked over to find a woman in a lavender prairie dress, complete with apron, standing at the mouth of the bay.
“Magdalene?”
The woman’s gaze snapped to meet his own.
It was her. She was here, and it was her.
“Oh my god,” Buck threw the towel he was using to polish aside and rushed over.
She lifted her dress and ran as fast as the layers would let her to meet him in the middle. The moment they crashed into each other, her knees buckled out from under her. Buck helped guide her to the ground, placing his hand on the back of her head when she pushed her face into his shoulder to muffle her wails.
“How did you find me?”
“I saw you on the news,” she said. “Your name may be different, but I will always recognize the boy I half raised.”
Buck pulled away to take her in, hands cupping either side of her face. Tears were soaking her face and coupling with snot, her coif was more knot than bun, and he was sure that at least some of the dirt on her was the same dirt from New Shiloh.
“You never were Bukkiah.” she said.
“You never were Magdalene,” he said, freeing her face but replacing his hands on her shoulders to remind himself she was real. “So who are you now?”
“Maddie,” she said, still sounding foreign on her tongue.
“Maddie,” Buck repeated. “So you remember that night, too?”
Maddie nodded. “Our last moment alone together.”
Buck felt a pang in his chest at that but didn’t let it get to him. This moment was too good to be ruined by the past.
“So what’s it short for? Madilyn? Madison?”
“Just Maddie.”
“Even better.” He said. “I’m the first one to call you Maddie, and the last one to call you Magdalene.” There was a beat of silence as his mind finally caught up enough to form meaningful questions. “How are you here? How’d you snap out of it?”
“I don’t think I did,” Maddie said “I think I realized that the only thing keeping me there was the threat of Hell, but if Heaven had Doug in it, then I had to choose Hell.” she smiled. “The fact that choosing Hell meant potentially seeing you again only made it easier.”
Buck pulled Maddie close to his chest. He remembered the first few months–first few years–after being cast out. Before he learned to accept that everything he had been fed his entire life was meant to control him and not save him, he came to accept that, if he was doomed to eternal torment, then he should live it up until then.
“When I fled, I knew I needed to get as far away as possible. I found a road, started walking, and a trucker woman saw me. Took me all the way to Denver. I didn’t know what to do, so I started watching the news…” Maddie choked up on her words for a moment. “If there’s a God, he put those dots on your face so I could find you.”
“The roller coaster interview,” Buck said quietly. The night that haunted him. The night that may always haunt him. “Of all the things.”
She shook her head. “Don’t focus on how I found you, Buck. Focus on the fact I’m here now.”
“You’re right,” A few stray tears escaped his eyes. “There’s only an hour left on my shift. I’m gonna tell Bobby it’s a family emergency. I’m taking you home and getting you into some clothes from this century.”
Maddie laughed. “I always hated this dress.”
“We can burn it.”
“No,” Maddie said, though it sounded more teasing than anything.
“We can. I’m a firefighter; I know how to do it safely. We can burn it and sit around the fire and make a list of all the things you want to do. Then tomorrow, we find you a social worker. It’ll be a whirlwind, but trust me they make things so much easier.”
“You’d really do that for me?” Maddie said.
Buck’s first instinct was to say ‘Of course I would. We’re family’ before remembering what family meant in New Shiloh.
He would need to teach her what family could be, beyond competition and hierarchy.
“I’ve spent over half my life without you, Maddie. I’m not wasting any more time.”