OPHELIA’S WAR
RUBIES OF RUIN
OPHELIA’S WAR
THE SECRET STORY OF A MORMON TURNED MADAM
ALISON L. MCLENNAN
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, Cengage Learning
Copyright © 2016 by Alison L. McLennan
Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: McLennan, Alison L., author.
Title: Ophelia’s war : The secret story of a Mormon turned madam Rubies of Ruin #1 / Alison L. McLennan.
Other titles: Mormon turned madam
Description: Waterville, Maine : Five Star Publishing, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047689 (print) | LCCN 2016009176 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432831882 (hardback) | ISBN 1432831887 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781432831868 (ebook) | ISBN 1432831860 (ebook)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3186-8 eISBN-10: 1-43283186-0
Subjects: LCSH: Women—Utah—19th century—Fiction. | Mormon women—Fiction. | Frontier and pioneer life—Utah—Fiction. | Choice (Psychology)—Fiction. | Coming of age—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | GSAFD: Western stories. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C57855 O64 2016 (print) | LCC PS3613.C57855 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047689
First Edition. First Printing: June 2016
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3186-8 ISBN-10: 1-43283186-0
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Printed in the United States of America
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To all the women of the American frontier whose secret wars and stories have gone untold. And to all women everywhere who have ever believed they are damaged goods.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Sterling Watson, Steve Huff, Venise Berry, Randall Kenan, Robert Lopez, James Anderson, and other members of the Solstice MFA community who supported and encouraged this work. And to Alice Duncan and Five Star for publication and editorial support. Also, thanks to my patient family and the broken knee that forced me to begin this story.
PROLOGUE
Palmyra, NewYork, 1820
They felt the Lord in their bodies. During the Second Great Awakening preachers roamed upstate New York, spread across the land like herds of proselytizing buffalo, and erected pulpits in meadows. Thousands of people broke from the toils of frontier life and traveled for days to hear sermons.
In the wilderness of the American frontier, spiritual seekers gathered in open-air cathedrals and sat on benches cut from freshly felled pines. They sang improvised hymns, listened to passionate sermons, and exclaimed “Hallelujah.” The shackles of the old religions couldn’t keep them down. Tired farm wives and their hardened husbands raised their hands to the heavens and praised the Lord. Their bodies shook. They hugged one another and collapsed onto the ground. In a new world, they converted to a new version of God.
A handsome young man walked amongst the preachers’ rickety pulpits. Although not yet fully grown, he towered above all others. His high cheekbones and head of loose, blond curls turned many a gaze upon him. The ladies smiled and he smiled back. Even the men couldn’t help staring. He fingered the seer stones in his pocket. From these he made his living hunting treasure. Folk magic had been passed down through his family for generations. In the evenings by the dim flicker of candlelight, his mother read the Tarot. She knew her son was destined for greatness and a violent end. The Sun and the Hanged Man appeared every time she drew his cards. But they were always accompanied by Death.
He listened for a while. Sometimes he liked what he heard and for a brief moment thought he’d found the one true religion. Then something would irritate him, and he would notice a shadow of avarice or lust fall across the preacher’s face. He moved on to the next one and then the next, until he tired of the camp-town meetings.
He was a mystic. The wind often whispered to him and the stones spoke. Revelations came from the babbling brook. The tall creaking trees were his prophets. The preachers marched to their own tunes of salvation in a competitive discordant jumble. None of their sermons moved him like the ancient stones, or the trees whose leaves were fed by eternal matter—air, water, and sun.
A powerful dark force cast him into despair. He went into the woods to make his peace with the Lord. He prayed to be forgiven for his sins and transgressions: for laying the blacksmith’s daughter, and pleasuring himself while conjuring the miller’s daughter, and brushing the buttocks of several young ladies in camp town while they were listening to sermons.
Blinding light, brighter than sunlit snow, descended from the heavens in a great spiral and saved him. Two beautiful angels appeared and granted him forgiveness. One golden angel called him son. The angel told the handsome young man that he was chosen to bring a lost religion to the world. The angel spoke of ancient tablets and sacred stones.
Later, the young man had a revelation that his love of divination and copulation were also divine, for they had been bestowed upon him as ways to reveal and spread the one true message. His name was Joseph Smith.
ONE
My parents were both followers of Joseph Smith. A long time ago in Vermont, my father and Joseph had been childhood friends. After my father’s first wife and infant died in labor, he was a lost soul. When he caught wind of the news that his childhood companion, Joseph Smith, had been lynched at a jailhouse in Carthage, Illinois, he packed up, and traveled west to join the Saints. They became his brethren in the outrage of injustice and the exaltation of new faith.
Society had cast aside my disgraced, dishonored, and disowned mother. Only the Saints offered to save her from ruin. When she met my father, a bastard swelled her womb. But my father was a brave, practical, smitten man, and he married her despite her condition. Adding insult to injury, my brother, Ezekiel, was born half savage. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t even know if my father knew. It was just one of Mother’s many secrets.
In May of 1858, Father sold our household belongings and bought the necessities for our eleven-hundred-mile pilgrimage to the Promised Land. Among the things he purchased were a covered wagon, a pair of oxen, a tent, bedding, food, and a flat-bottomed iron pot with a tight-fitting lid. We couldn’t bring anything extra, but Mother allowed me to carry my dear ragdoll, Dolly, even though she wasn’t a necessity.
After my father secured our tickets to paradise, we departed Winter Quarters, Nebraska, the jumping-off place, via the O
verland Trail as part of the John S. Brown Company. I was seven years old and the journey was treacherous. We froze during a freak June snowstorm, nearly drowned fording rivers, were constantly hungry, and feared both Indian attacks and the U.S. Cavalry. But I was a Saint, one of the Lord’s chosen people, and I believed he would protect me. Each day I walked beside the wagon until I collapsed from exhaustion. Then my brother, Ezekiel, carried me piggyback. When my small grimy fingers slipped from their clasp around his thin brown neck, he did not have the strength to hold me. The earth beckoned our weary bodies with all the allure of a goose-feather mattress and we collapsed upon it together.
Grafton, Utah, 1867
Not long after we arrived in the Great Salt Lake Territory, we were sent to the desert settlement of Grafton by Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, to grow cotton for the Mormon Church. But while America’s Dixie was green and lush, Utah’s Dixie was dry and barren. My pa had always said, “Trying to grow cotton, or anything for that matter, in the desert, is like trying to put stockings on a chicken.” He had not been a good Mormon because he’d only taken one wife and he questioned everything, including Joseph’s death, which he always referred to as suspicious.
The Saints put up with Pa on account of his skills. He was a blacksmith, a handyman, an inventor—a fixer of all things broken and a lover of all things mechanical. Although he was a skilled hunter, he had neither talent for farming nor patience for the mysterious ways of women. He certainly had no desire to have more than one wife. My mother understood him, and over the years she became a hardened practical woman herself. She had always been shunned by society because of my brother, Ezekiel, and so the desolation of Grafton had matched her inner isolation.
The Virgin River that ran through Grafton could not be tamed. Sometimes she was calm and peaceful. At other times her waters boiled and foamed. Then she would rise up and the reckless abundance of her sudden swelling would destroy our dinner basket gardens. She’d carry away the soil, farm tools, and all manner of things we’d thoughtlessly left on her banks. She’d even carry away the careless cow that, while quenching her thirst, ignored the river’s thunderous roar. Floods came mostly in spring and early summer, when the mountain snow melted. Soil dropped from the banks and the land was transformed in a mad flash. Sometimes I thought the Virgin was laughing at us. Everything we’d worked for, everything she had given life to, she could take away—and she did.
The first houses in Grafton had been constructed of pine and built by the banks of the Virgin. In 1862, a flash flood destroyed them. The dwellings were hastily rebuilt on higher ground. About twenty modest log homes surrounded by split-rail fences were scattered about on the hillsides. Town center consisted of three adobe brick houses, a meeting and dance hall, and a big tent down near the river.
The cemetery was a half mile west of town and occupied the last bit of level ground before the land turned rough and rocky. Sand filled the graveyard and made it easy to bury the dead, of which there were many on account of sickness, Indian attacks, and even starvation. Farther south the earth hardened to salmon-colored clay.
After about a month without rain, even the hardy sagebrush looked withered. I wandered through the small cemetery and admired the large ornate headstone of the Berry brothers, killed by Ute Indians. Then I stopped and hovered over a small, smooth white rock and said a brief prayer for poor Mary York, who had died of consumption.
Shovels full of orange sand flew from a hole. It was probably deep enough by now, but my brother, Ezekiel, kept digging. The morning wind blew grit into my eyes, which were already full of tears. I cried, not only for the wasted body of our father lying in the flimsy pine box, but also because I was afraid.
“How deep does it need to be, Zeke?” I called. The effort burned my throat. I couldn’t dig anymore. I meant no disrespect to Pa, but I hated being in the burial ground and I feared that gaping hole. I wanted to take my shovel, go down to the river, and tend my small garden—focus my hands on life—set them to making things grow in the cantankerous soil of sand and silt.
“Only suitable for growing spiky plants, nothing fit for eatin’.” That’s what Momma always said, but she never gave up trying—until the sickness took her.
The dirt stopped flying. Zeke’s hat was flush with the ground. It looked like his head was growing out of the sand. I didn’t like to see him that way because I feared he would be next. The Saints claimed that Zeke was cursed because his real father was a Lamanite savage. They said his people were a cursed tribe who would never enter the heavenly kingdom unless they repented and converted to our ways. Even so, they had buried the bodies of fallen Indian warriors at the edge of the cemetery.
With the sandy earth crumbling under his hands, Zeke struggled to hoist himself out of the grave.
“Deep enough,” he said and brushed the dirt from his pants. He looked to the sand and rock mesas that bordered the burial ground. “Deep enough so no coyotes or mountain lions will dig him up.”
After we lowered Pa into the ground and filled the hole, Zeke marked his grave with a small wooden cross. We stood back, clasped our hands, and bowed our heads. Two thin crosses—my mother’s and father’s—now lined up perfectly. Wind stirred my skirt. The crosses were so flimsy and insubstantial, they moved with every breeze. The movement unsettled me. How could the souls of our parents rest in peace while something on top of them flapped and fluttered every time the wind blew? They deserved a better headstone.
Zeke wiped tears from my cheeks and patted my head. He bent over and whispered in my ear, “Later this evening when it cools down we’ll go fetch a big stone from the Garden of the Gods. I’ll carve their names real nice, make ’em a right proper headstone.” He glanced around at some of the large, elaborate burial markers.
I wanted to drape the sparkling ruby necklace over Momma’s cross. If she couldn’t wear it in life, let her wear it in death. But the ruby necklace, sewn inside my ragdoll, Dolly, was a secret between us, and could only be sold in the most desperate circumstances. Besides, even if someone from the settlement didn’t steal the rubies from her grave, one of the ravens surely would.
Ma and Pa would be together now in their own heavenly kingdom. But Zeke and I were alone. I leaned my head against his chest and felt his strong arm embrace me. He was filling out, becoming more man than boy. Zeke had known I was thinking about the flimsy grave-markers. We hardly had to speak. It had always been that way with us.
We had set to burying Pa early in the morning for two reasons. First, it was cool, and we knew too well what digging a grave in the heat was like. We’d done it for Ma, on a hot September day in company with a flock of squawking ravens. Flies had buzzed round her coffin, even though Pa had built it out of some of the best oak—the oak he’d been saving to build her a new table before she became afflicted.
The other reason we got up early to bury Pa was marching down the road toward the burial ground. The men slung shovels over their shoulders, and the skirts of the bonnet-clad women swung like bells as they marched toward us. The women carried goods: bread, dried meat, and fruit, to see us through the hard days of grief and toil. I figured they were just well-wishers coming to pay their respects. After all, we were supposed to be a family, a family of Saints, children of God following the divine teachings of Joseph Smith, working together to build a heavenly kingdom on earth in the land we called Zion.
But Zeke didn’t trust them. And they didn’t trust him. He looked different from the rest of us. He had raven hair, and his skin was dark—not the dark, chocolate color of a Negro; he had the dark copper color of a Lamanite. My skin was pale and white, covered with orange freckles the same color as my hair, which matched the color of the giant sandstone cliffs that rose up like cathedrals beyond the Virgin River. But no matter how different we looked from each other, no one could tell me that Zeke was not my blood.
Zeke and I had at least three things in common. One was the way our hair formed a widow’s peak. My hairline and Zek
e’s had the same V that our mother once had. The people who spread rumors that my parents had bought Zeke from the Spanish slave traders had obviously never compared our hairlines.
The second thing was that we both had eyes the color of blueberries. Mine stood out against my pale face, but to see the blue in Zeke’s eyes you had to look real close. From a distance they could appear hard and black like marbles. The third thing was a connection. We were as connected as two people can be without becoming one. Zeke was my brother. And he was definitely my mother’s son.
Zeke looked over his shoulder and saw the Saints coming. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “I’m gonna go on toward home, Little O. See if you can stop them from coming around.” He hoisted his shovel over his shoulder and started toward our place, about a half mile away, up on a little hill, not far from the river.
“Sure thing. I’ll be right along,” I called to his back as he went down the footpath.
The Saints had never been kind to Zeke, but things had become a lot worse since the Ute leader, Black Hawk, started making regular cattle raids. Last year, the Berry boys had been killed about twenty miles from town. Two Saints from Rockville had found them scalped, with their hearts cut out. They recognized them as the Berry brothers and carried their corpses to Grafton. Bishop Marley had made sure anyone who wanted to could have a good look before they were buried. After that, the men met in the council tent and made plans for protection and retaliation.
The sun wasn’t high, but it was already hot. I took off my bonnet, wiped sweat from my brow, and put it back on, as much to hide as to shade myself. I tilted my head back and looked at the sky. A lone vulture had been circling all morning. Five or six dark shapes now made intertwining circles overhead. The Saints kicked up a cloud of dust as they approached. With pursed lips and narrowed eyes, they watched Zeke disappear over the hill. Brother Thompson stepped forward and spoke to me.
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