The Bishop's Wife

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Her shoulders shook, and the sobs were soundless, as if she was worried Tobias would hear her, but tears dripped down her face. She tried to wipe at the counter, but I put an arm around her and she let herself fall against my chest. I could hear the muffled sounds of her gasping breaths and realized she was terrified. As if a train were coming directly at her and there was no way for her to get out of the way. Was that the way it would feel for me, if Kurt were to die? With my daughter, there had been no chance to feel the anticipation. It had already happened before I realized it and had to take it in.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said, and pulled away from me. She wiped at her face with the same wet dishcloth she’d been using on the counter, then stared at it as if she didn’t know where it had come from.

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. “I’m happy to help in any way I can.”

  She shook her head. “I shouldn’t make you feel sad when you’ve done nothing but be helpful and so kind.”

  But feeling sad was what I was here for, to feel sad with her. “No one expects you to do this alone. Or without showing your real feelings,” I said.

  Anna looked closely at me then, as if seeing me for the first time. “Do you know, I always thought of you as rather emotionless. Controlled. In charge.”

  I had plenty of emotions. I just didn’t let myself show them because they tended to get out of hand. “I’m not in charge,” I said softly. I was the bishop’s wife. I wasn’t in charge of anything but making the bishop dinner, not officially.

  “At church, you always sound so assured when you answer questions. I think the Sunday School teacher quakes in his boots, hoping you don’t correct him. He thinks you have the whole Bible memorized.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said, astonished. I had always thought that I was just on the border of heresy, and she seemed to think I was some sort of icon of Mormon womanhood.

  “I thought you would quote Bruce R. McConkie at me and expect me to accept death with grace and courage. As a relief and a triumph.”

  Bruce R. McConkie, author of multiple volumes of the once-beloved Mormon Doctrine, had spoken at General Conference just days before his death from cancer in the 1980s. He had looked pale and gaunt, and his voice was one of those harsh whispers that made you stop and listen. He had stood on the pulpit and before the audience of millions of Mormons had declared that he knew Christ lived, and that even when he was dead, he would not know any better then than he knew now that Christ was real. No one who had heard the speech live would forget it.

  I said, thinking of that certainty in the face of death, “It’s nice to have grace and courage after the fact. But I’m afraid most of us are all too mortal and only find grace and courage in special moments. The rest of the time we’re alternately angry or fiercely afraid.”

  “You—afraid?” said Anna.

  There was a long moment when I didn’t know if I could be honest enough to tell her the truth. My mouth opened, but the words wouldn’t be pressed out. They were too big to fit through the sieve.

  “I lost a daughter,” I got out finally, the words hardly audible.

  “What? I thought you had five sons.”

  “And one daughter,” I said.

  “But—what happened?” she asked.

  I took a deep breath, and then another. We hadn’t lived here then, so no one in the ward knew. We moved here two years later, after Kenneth was born. Samuel and Zachary were the only children born in our Draper house.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what happened and sometimes that is harder than anything else.” This had nothing to do with Tobias and Anna. This wouldn’t help her deal with her own difficulties. I told myself to be quiet, that she didn’t need to hear the details. But it had been so long since I had spoken about it. I wasn’t sure I ever really had. And so I kept talking.

  “I was scheduled to be induced the next day. She was overdue and the doctor was tired of waiting, I think. He never saw any problems in the ultrasound. She was losing weight, though. He said that babies sometimes did that at the end. He said it was nothing to worry about.”

  I wanted to take the wet dishcloth from her and use it. I wanted to do something with my hands while I spoke, but instead, I just stared down at them.

  “That night, I went to bed and slept well for the first time in months. When I woke up in the morning, I realized it was because she hadn’t moved all night. Kurt came over to touch my belly because he said it looked different. And somehow, that moment, he knew. He started crying. I called the doctor and asked for an appointment. I went down and ate some breakfast. And read one of those pregnancy books, which reassured me that the baby might just be uncomfortable or asleep. I was so sure that the doctor would say everything was fine, and that Kurt was a crybaby for nothing.” I smiled a little at that. Kurt was often more emotional than I was.

  “But he was right. There was no heartbeat. They rushed me to the hospital and induced me right away. Even then, I kept thinking that if I delivered quickly enough, maybe they would be able to revive her.” The sounds of my own breathing were so loud that they embarrassed me.

  “I’m sorry. I never knew,” said Anna.

  I shook my head. I could feel tears falling, but they were cold by the time they landed on my cheeks. It was all so long ago. People talk about how you recover from tragedy. But it’s more like scar tissue. It’s always there; you just find a way to work around it.

  Anna was staring at me.

  I felt suddenly self-conscious. I’d spilled my soul, and now I felt exposed. “I’m sorry. I came here for you, to talk about your problems, not mine. Please forgive me. I must be very tired.”

  “No, don’t apologize. Thank you. Thank you for telling me the truth.”

  Did she realize that she was the only person I’d opened up to about this? My face felt sticky from the tears. A part of me wished I hadn’t said anything about my daughter, maybe a bit like someone who has a hangover and wishes she hadn’t had anything to drink. The aftereffects are brutal, but at the moment, I couldn’t have held back.

  “I think I understand you a little better now. I never had a daughter. I never had sons, actually.” Anna put her hand over mine on the countertop, and I realized she did know how rare this truth of mine was, and she was honoring it with her own painful truth. “Only Tobias’s sons, but they were never fully mine, no matter how much I loved them. There was always a barrier with them. We decided not to have our own children because I needed to focus on Tomas and Liam, make sure they felt my complete love.” Her voice was strained. “But there is a certain pain in not being a mother in your body. I have put that away for a long time, but it is still there.” Her hand let go of mine and brushed against her stomach.

  Yes. She understood. It was strange that a pain that was so different could be so much the same. We had both faced the loss of what we had expected, deserved, and dreamed about. A loss of the imagination, which was worse in some ways from any other loss.

  “At least you are sealed to her, though,” said Anna.

  I could quibble with the point, but I didn’t. She definitely wasn’t sealed to Tobias. “You should talk to him about it,” I said, following her unspoken train of thought. “He might be able to put your mind at rest.”

  “What if Liam and Tomas object? What if they don’t want me sealed to their father?”

  I was a little startled by that possibility. Did she think so badly of her sons? “Trust Kurt,” I said. “He will talk to them. He will make it come right.”

  She took a breath, dropped her eyes for a moment, then nodded. “All right. I’ll speak to him.”

  I hoped that we had not left it too late.

  CHAPTER 15

  I was standing at the door, ready to open it to leave, when I heard two male voices shouting.

  “That’s Tomas and Liam,” said Anna. She swayed a little and I grabbed her arm and pulled her to me for stability.

  Liam thundered downstairs. He didn’
t look much like Tobias; his thinning hair that revealed the shape of his head to be quite square. But in his nose, chin, and hazel eyes, it was easy to see he was Tobias’s son. His lips were trembling, sweat beading up along his crown. “He’s gone,” he said.

  “What?” said Anna. Her eyes widened and I knew she was thinking the same thing that I was, that Tobias had died while she was away from him and she would never be able to ask him about the sealing, let alone say goodbye to him.

  But Liam said, “Out of his bed. We turned around for a moment, talking to the nurse in the bathroom after she had helped him to the toilet. Then he was gone. I thought he would be down here with you. Did you see him?”

  Anna looked at me. We had been so involved in our conversation—could we have missed him if he’d gone right by us quietly enough?

  “He couldn’t have—” Anna said.

  “The back door is open!” shouted Tomas. “He’s out in the garden.”

  Of course he was, out in the garden.

  We all hurried outside to where Tobias knelt in the garden some distance away, on the middle of the three landscaped tiers. The moment felt as holy as being in the temple, the veil between worlds very thin.

  The sun was bright overhead, part of a week-long thaw that had left the ground bare of snow for a while. Tobias’s shoulders were shaking, as Liam’s had been when he came downstairs, but there was nothing angry in Tobias’s bearing. He had a hand to the ground, touching it, caressing it. He brought a finger to his lips and tasted it. I could see the change in his back, that he relaxed, as if suddenly in a familiar environment again.

  Home.

  The garden didn’t look like much now, it was true. There was mulch piled on top of most of it, and old tomato cages stacked together like Boy Scouts on parade. There was a grape arbor over the eastern side of the garden, a dry, bare winter skeleton of twisted brown vines.

  The stepping-stones down to the first level of the garden from the back porch were tufted with natural Utah prairie grasses. I could see the indentations in the ground where the frames for the climbing beans had gone, and there were remnants of last year’s kale and cabbage. The kale was still inky about a foot high, the outer leaves limp and laced with insect damage. There were a few green leaves valiantly trying to grow from the crown, hoping for an early spring.

  When Tobias had come to speak to the Relief Society several years ago about gardening, he had discussed the passage from the book of Moses about all things being created spiritually first, and the fact that every plant, tree, every bit of dirt, every insect, and the earth itself had “living souls.” He treated his own garden as reverently as he did his temple clothes.

  Seeing him out there in his garden right now, I felt a pang for the ward that we would never hear another lesson on gardening from him. We would never stir at his descriptions of a garden in full bloom. I’d never again see him out puttering around in the front yard, not gardening so much as talking to his plants, being one with them. I was struck with the thought that Tobias out in his garden was as godlike as any person I had ever seen. He knew these plants. He knew them better than anyone else. And he loved them, just as they were. He wanted desperately to stay with them. Maybe more than he wanted to stay with his sons or his wife.

  He raised his hands over his head and then knelt down.

  Tomas and Liam were calling at him to come back, but he didn’t seem to hear them.

  He leaned forward, his hands still overhead as if in some strange yoga pose, and he let his face fall to the ground.

  That was when Liam leaped down the porch steps and began running toward him.

  Tobias’s mouth was touching the dirt. I could see when Liam pulled his head up that his lips were black with rich soil. The old man spit out something that flew away on the wind—a leaf or some bit of branch.

  I thought for a moment that he would come willingly, that he was too weak to fight. But as soon as Liam tried to pull his father to his feet, Tobias began to struggle. I could see their mouths moving, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying. Whatever it was, it seemed to be very emotional, because both Liam and Tobias were red faced.

  By then Tomas had caught up and joined them in the garden.

  The hospice nurse came down to stand with me and Anna by the door. “What do they think they are doing?” she said.

  “Bringing him back inside,” I said.

  “They could hurt him. They should leave him be. What is so terrible about him being in his garden?” said the nurse.

  “They are worried he will die out there,” I said. “And that would embarrass them.” Male pride again.

  “Or are they worried he will live out there?” said Anna. She stepped forward, and I held her back.

  “If you get involved, it will only make it more difficult.” As she had said herself, they were not her sons. And this was their father.

  So we watched together as Tomas and Liam struggled with a recalcitrant man. He kept trying to swing his arms at them. Any impact would end up with fragile elderly bones breaking, and Tomas and Liam had to keep ducking, and shouting, and then at last I saw Tobias collapse. It was as sudden as if he were a puppet and the strings had been cut.

  Liam caught his upper body and then Tomas gathered up his legs. They carried him through the dirt, into the house, and back upstairs.

  “Careful, careful!” warned the nurse.

  Tobias was filthy from his feet to his lips. Anna made a face as she saw black mulch falling into the carpet.

  “Tobias always made sure he didn’t get the carpet dirty after he worked in the garden,” she said, more wistful than upset about the dirt.

  “I’ll clean it,” I promised, and followed her upstairs, looking for any sign of a vacuum.

  As soon as Tobias was back on the bed, the hospice nurse began taking his blood pressure and pulse. “He’s very close to the end now,” she said. “He exerted himself too much. I should have seen this coming, but perhaps it is for the best.” She glanced up at Tomas and Liam.

  “For the best,” muttered Anna angrily. Not long before, when Liam had come down the stairs, she had believed that Tobias had died without her at his side. Now she was going to make sure that wasn’t possible. She pushed the nurse aside and held Tobias’s hand. “Get out!” she shouted, the veins in her forehead red and protruding. “All of you, get out. I want to be alone with my husband now!”

  I retreated first, strangely satisfied at her outburst. Shortly afterward, I heard the other three come down the stairs behind me.

  The sons stared at me as we stood facing each other in the front room, but I was used to dealing with grown sons staring. I wasn’t going to say anything contrary to Anna’s request. She deserved this moment alone with her husband, and I was glad she had finally felt able to demand it. It must have been very difficult, having the nurse and her two stepsons in the house, even if she loved those sons as her own.

  I asked about a vacuum and Tomas found it for me. I spent twenty minutes doing my best to erase any sign of garden dirt through the house while the sons talked quietly in the kitchen with the nurse. When I was done, I put the vacuum away and wandered to the back door, where Tobias had so recently been brought in.

  A part of me was waiting because I didn’t know if Anna would want me to be there when she came back down. But as I stood there looking at the garden, I caught a glimpse of something in the soil where Tobias had been, something that wasn’t mulch, and wasn’t dirt or plants.

  I opened the door and stepped outside, thinking about Tobias’s insistence on seeing his wife’s grave. A little wind blew into my face, and I walked down the stepping stones and then up to the second level where Tobias had been.

  In the summer, I would never have been able to see it. It would have been covered in plants. In the winter, it would have been covered in snow. And as soon as spring came, Tobias would have been out there, digging around, putting in wood chips or setting out the tomato cages and the climbing frames for the b
eans. But now, just now, because Tobias had not yet had a chance to go out, I could see the flat off-white stone, glittering with bits of silver like granite did. It was granite, I thought, even if it was uncut. It looked like a stone you might pick out at a stonemason’s for a gravestone. It was flush with the ground here, nearly invisible. But this was where Tobias had come and knelt, his arms stretched out almost as if to cover the stone with his whole body. He had kissed the dirt with his lips. Or was it not the dirt he’d been kissing at all?

  My mind whirled. Tobias said he hadn’t scattered his wife’s ashes anywhere, but what if he had been lying? Or if he had forgotten? Could she be here?

  It might even make sense that he would lie about it to Anna. Clearly, she was sensitive about the topic of her husband’s first wife. It might bother her to think that all that time her husband spent in the garden was time spent with his first wife, in his heart.

  Why wouldn’t he tell his sons? Did he think they might judge him, think him morbid? Or even a little creepy?

  I leaned over and saw there was something long and thin half-buried in the dirt near the stone. I dug at it, curious, and when I pulled it out, I realized it was a hammer, ancient enough that the wood was almost rotted through and the metal head was rusted.

  Tobias had let other tools get rusted and ruined. I had already seen that in the shed. I suppose it was no stretch that he might leave tools out in the garden, as well. Was it an accident that it was here, left outside since the fall? I didn’t know what he would use a hammer for in his garden, but that didn’t mean anything.

  I stood up and carried the hammer back into the shed. I began to wipe at it to get off the dirt, though I knew it made no sense. I should just throw it away. A large chunk of dirt fell off the hammer, and I bent down to pick it up off the floor I had spent so much time cleaning only a week ago. That was when I saw what was underneath the dirt. There was hair, matted together by something brown and flaking.

  Could that be—blood?

  And whose hair was it?