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light the stove. A third wife was pulling the string on the pantry bulb, hauling out a large box of corn mush. Ten, fifteen, twenty more lights in a house—each was a sister wife rising to perform her chores.
    And the kids. About now the kids would be climbing out of bed, rubbing the sand from their eyes. They’d be forming a line at the sink to wash. The boys would be searching the boxes for a shirt. The girls would be helping one another pin up their hair. You don’t talk much at that hour. You just dress fast so you can get to the kitchen in time for your plop of mush. Sometimes there was toast and canned peaches, but not always. Whatever there was, there was never enough. Only a fool would waste time taking a piss before getting something to eat.
    As I drove closer I could see Mesadale had grown. There were a few hundred houses now, warehouses for families of seventy-five. No one knows how many people live out there but I’m going to guess twelve thousand, maybe fifteen. Counting is complicated. The numbers are part of the mystery. The less you know, the less you know.
    The turnoff is hidden behind a stand of cottonwoods. It looks like a dry river wash, and even if you’re looking for it, it’s hard to spot. No one stumbles across Mesadale and that’s the point. Roland likes to call the Firsts the Greta Garbo of cults. “Oh honey, that Prophet of yours, he just wants to be left alone.”
    As I left the asphalt, the van began to rattle. Elektra sat up and growled. No matter how slowly you drive, the road kicks up a cloud of red dust that can be seen from almost anywhere in town. The journalists who sometimes snoop around don’t realize it alerts the Prophet’s militia. I’m totally serious. You’ll see.
    About halfway up the road I passed a pickup headed out. Five wives squeezed into the cab, four across and one perched awkwardly in a lap. They were older, probably barren, which was why the Prophet would let them leave town like this. He never lets the girls out, but women like these, he didn’t care. They stared ahead, their eyes vacant. They looked familiar. It was perfectly possible they were my aunts, cousins, or half-sisters, or all three. Elektra shoved her head out the window to bark at them. The women remained expressionless. It was as if they didn’t see me and we were passing in two parallel worlds.
    A couple of miles up the road you see the first houses. Eight, ten, twelve thousand square feet. Often two or three side by side in a compound. They’re not mansions, more like barracks or barns, built cheaply from plywood, plastic sheeting, tar paper, aluminum, and sheetrock. Many are unfinished—an exposed side wall, a wing with a plastic roof, a front door made from pressed wood. When I was a kid my dad told me he couldn’t afford proper siding for our house. That made me feel sad for him—I sensed the shame in his voice. But that wasn’t the reason. It was to avoid property taxes. Some loophole I never understood.
    One thing was different since I left: a lot of houses were now surrounded by walls. Or instead of a wall, a ring of trailers, circled like pioneer wagons. I guess the Prophet was getting paranoid. Of what, exactly? It’s not like the government hasn’t had a hundred years to shut this place down.
    I turned on Field Avenue and halfway down there it was, our place—three houses and a couple of outbuildings on five acres of useless scrubby land. From the street it looked like nothing had changed. The dozen picnic tables where the kids ate except on the coldest days. The laundry lines with fifty little shirts flapping in the wind. The vegetable garden, the barnyard, the cornfield—all of it parched and pathetic. The property backed up to scrub and when I was little that’s where I’d hide when I was afraid of my dad—of what he might do. The main house was a large rectangle of plywood stained dark green. Twenty bedrooms, a vast kitchen with pots the size of oil drums, and my