Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  Finally, just a few days from Boston Harbor, a thought crept into Viggo’s mind: If Famke’s painter had not married her, she was still free. She could fall in love with somebody else.

  Chapter 17

  The district was a barren and unpromising desert, but the industrious Mormons set to work at once to plough and plant and began that system of irrigation which has drawn out the latent capabilities of the soil and made the Utah valleys among the most productive regions in the country. [ . . . ] in spite of numerous collisions with the U. S. Government on the question of polygamy, the history of the city and territory has been one of steady progress and development.

  BAEDEKER’S UNITED STATES

  (STATEMENT DRAWN UP IN THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

  OF THE CHURCH OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS)

  The morning after Famke’s second wedding, the silkworms hatched. In the adobe hut that Heber’s sons had built for the textile business, they came crawling out of their tiny blue egg sacs and launched themselves at the mulberry leaves that the three wives hastily chopped and mashed for their infant jaws. With the older children, Famke was allowed inside the hut to marvel at this miracle of transformation and the future of Prophet City, the larvae and their mash laid over wide tables that smelled of the linseed oil (remnant of a previous venture in flax) stored beneath.

  “But hold your breath,” Sariah cautioned Ephraim, Brigham, Anna, and Nephiah. “You can blow a thousand of them away at once, they’re that small. And”—she looked hard at Famke, who was gritty-eyed from lack of sleep—“no coughing.”

  Famke wondered if Sariah might have listened through the night and guessed the secret of the bedsheets; but she put the suspicion out of her mind, deciding that Sariah would never say anything to Heber about such an indelicate matter. She attended, instead, to the worms, which seemed a remarkably frail vehicle for the hopes of a township. They were invisible until she adjusted her expectations and found the yellow-gray wisps, smaller than her own fingernail parings, that lay like a web over the pulped leaves. They seemed to have nothing in common with the sturdy pigs and geese of her Dragør days.

  Heber, however, was enraptured with this increase in his livestock, an advancement in his grand scheme. “This will be something to show the naysayers in town,” he said in a rare moment of boastfulness. “All those who doubted the plan!”

  Sariah laid her hand on her husband’s arm. Her eyes actually appeared to be moist. “‘They that fight against Zion and the covenant people of the Lord shall lick up the dust of their feet; and the people of the Lord shall not be ashamed.’ Nephi 6:13.”

  “Very true, my dear.” Heber patted that bony hand, still gazing at his new pride and joy, his voice containing only the slightest hint of reproof. “And of course if we arouse shame in our neighbors, we hope it may turn them toward respect and industry.”

  Famke suppressed a sound. By her own observations, this was not an industry in which the townspeople wished to share.

  It was, however, an undertaking of significant interest to those who followed Mormon affairs. In the next days, both the Salt Lake City Daily News and the Daily Tribune—one Mormon, one Gentile—sent correspondents to inspect the nursery tables (now prudently covered in thin layers of cheesecloth, to keep the growing worms where they belonged) and to question Heber about his plans. “The future of the Saints is in threads,” Famke heard him say again, and the correspondents nodded and took notes: one focusing on Heber’s early failures with wool, cotton, and linen, the other on his almost certain future success.

  Famke managed to take each man aside for some questions of her own. Neither one had heard of Albert Castle or indeed of any British painter in the region, and under the other women’s steely, speaking eyes, the reporters’ initial gallantry turned to priggish rebuke, as if there were something wrong in Famke’s artistic interests, something that did not fit their notion of a good Mormon maiden.

  Such was not the case with another correspondent, one whom Famke was most surprised to see under Utah’s unforgiving turquoise sky.

  “Harry Noble,” he introduced himself, with one stubby paw shoved toward Heber’s midsection, “also called Hermes. You may have read me in the New York Times or Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Journal. I am presently scribing a series of articles about the Latter-Day Saints for the papers back east, and I’m interested in this silk-spinning venture of yours.”

  With his usual goodwill, Heber took the man’s hand and shook it. “I am afraid I do not recollect your work, but I’m pleased to help you if I can. Ursula!” he called over to the clothesline, where she was hiding behind bedsheets and union suits. “Our housemaid, Ursula. She will ask Sister Goodhouse for the key to the silk house.”

  Ducking her head in obedience, Famke rushed off to find Sariah. She felt vaguely uneasy at seeing the man in green here; it was as if he had followed her. But of course she was being silly—she could scarcely expect him to remember her at all.

  And yet it turned out that, once he saw her full in the face, he did. “We meet again,” he said, grinning and sweeping the hat from his balding head. He held out his hand once more, as if he expected her to shake it as well.

  This was provocative news to Sariah, coming along with her ring of clattering keys and her forearms steaming from the washtub. “Where’n have you two met before?” she asked.

  “In New York, at Castle Garden.” Noble fingered his side whiskers. “Just as the ship—what was she called? The Olive Branch?—arrived with her cargo of new Americans. A most charming scene that was, lending itself to picturesque description. And how are you finding life in Utah, Miss . . . Mrs. . . .”

  “She’s Miss Summerfield,” Myrtice supplied. She, too, appeared most interested in the proceedings, and had left the children at their lessons under the lone oak tree in order to investigate. Arms crossed, she stood beside her aunt and watched.

  “Miss Summerfield?” continued Noble. “Utah and the work of a housemaid, supported by your new faith and a new head of hair—is it the life of which you dreamed?”

  Famke would have liked to slap this Harry Noble. All the Goodhouses were looking at her now—even the children—and there was practically no chance that she could take him aside and ask if he had news of Albert. Indeed, she had to prevent him from mentioning Albert now, for if he did there would surely be questions to follow: Why was she, the virgin whom Heber had espoused on board ship, so interested in an unknown painter traveling the West? Who was Albert Castle to her? How would she feel about being tossed into the streets of Prophet without a penny to her name?

  “Did you not,” said Harry Noble, clearly enjoying himself, “come here with more artistic views in mind?”

  Before Famke could panic entirely, and even before she could answer Noble’s question, Sariah rattled her keys. “I’m afraid we can spare just a few moments for the viewing,” she said. “There have been many journalists of late, and we’ve the work of the farm to do. Ursula, you may return to the laundry. Mr. Noble, if you will follow me . . .”

  “That unpleasant man,” Sariah called him later, in her confidential hours with Heber. “Did you smell the tobacco on him? And he lifted the gauze and took up a handful of leaves with worms. They’ll die sure as I’m born,” she said, and her brow wrinkled; for even without the correspondent’s interference, the little things were shriveling up at an alarming rate.

  “Sariah, my dear,” Heber said, yawning, “you fret entirely too much.”

  Chapter 18

  Unless I am deceived, the younger generation—the children of Utah—show in their forms the bad fruit of this hard life. They seemed to me, as I studied them in the car coming down, and on the streets the next day, under-sized, loosely built, flabby. Certainly the young girls were pale, and had unwholesome, waxy complexions.

  CHARLES NORDHOFF, “SIGHTS BY THE WAY,” IN

  CALIFORNIA: FOR HEALTH, PLEASURE, AND RESIDENCE

  My dear,” Heber said on Famke’s next night with him, “I coul
d not but overhear some part of what that correspondent said to you.” Famke’s fingers went suddenly cold, and she felt the perspiration freezing over her body. She sat up and coughed.

  Heber waited patiently. He was still sticky and hot, but he reached across the space between them and patted her on the back. The Utah dust often affected immigrants this way, and his newest wife would soon learn to live with the tickle in her lungs.

  Famke gathered her wits. “Men who write for papers are prone to lies,” she said, though she did not quite believe it herself. Did not the papers say, just beneath the titles, All the truth that’s fit to print?

  “I can’t think why he might lie about this,” Heber said, patting her again although there was no need. His hand lingered on her shoulder blade and melted the ice there. “Is it true you have an interest in art?”

  How delightful, he was thinking; Famke had that refined European sensibility by which even a housemaid could appreciate the best of culture. He imagined the two of them strolling arm in arm down a long gallery of glass and steel, discussing the sculptures on either side. Tall white figures from mythology, suitably draped; potted palms and, somewhere in the background, a fountain’s song, perhaps a violin. But galleries like that existed only in Europe.

  Famke said cautiously, “I do like to see paintings. Some paintings.”

  Paintings, then—panelled walls with green-brown oils: Romantic landscapes, pastured animals, peasant girls with clean white feet. Heber felt a warm wave pass over him, and his hand moved to the other shoulder blade.

  “There is a small museum in Salt Lake City,” he said, “run by a Professor Barfoot directly across from the Tabernacle. Perhaps the next time I go into the city, you could accompany me.”

  Famke’s skin flushed, the chill fully past. It was perfectly natural to ask, “Could we go soon? I would like it very much.”

  Heber pulled her into his arms, his brown beard tangling with her flame-colored curls. “As soon as I can manage it, my dear. Perhaps after the silkworms pupate; you will not be so needed here then. They are delicate, you see, at this stage in their lives. We must do all we can to provide them with the proper climate . . .”

  While Heber dreamed aloud of his people’s future, Famke sank back onto her pillow among the damp bedclothes, worn out by both the promise of a treat and its deferral. She might learn something about Albert in this museum . . . She went to sleep and began to dream instantly. In that dream, worms were gnawing their way into her lungs.

  The next night, the worms emerged from her mouth and nose, spinning their artful cocoons to smother her, and she woke up clawing at her face. After that, on the nights Heber spent in her bed, she occasionally woke to find her arms shoving him away, as if he were to blame—though, curiously enough, the times she was able to breathe often came at the end of his map-making, when they lay in each other’s arms and sweat glued their underclothes to their skins. At those moments she felt cleansed, and she imagined the dirt of Utah had left her body; then her lungs moved quietly, and she was able to think about how much better still she would feel once it was Albert who took her in his arms, Albert who entered her body and watched the changes in her face and gave her that gorgeous, hungry feel of wanting something . . . the feeling that Heber also gave her, true, but in a much less exquisite way than she knew Albert could. Albert always left her wanting, and the tremblings that Heber effected put an end to want.

  “Could we visit the museum soon?” she asked each time, and each time Heber promised it would indeed be soon—but not immediately.

  Soon, Famke thought, she might give up. She was exhausted: As the weeks ground on, the work grew even more strenuous and unrelenting, and at seventeen she was not getting any younger. She was trapped under Sariah’s virtuously callused thumb with no real news, despite Heber’s thoughtful provision of as many papers as he could come across. She thought longingly of the time on ship and train, when she had felt she was accomplishing something, even if it was only motion for motion’s sake; when she’d seen the West as a patchwork stitched with clues that would lead directly to Albert.

  “En Pige der bliver hjemme, a girl who stays at home,” she said out loud in her bedroom, smoothing the old sketch over her wickedly naked knees. It was good to hear someone speaking Danish again, even if that person were only herself. “A girl of good family . . .” She promised the peasant girl in the sketch, whose face was now shadowed with smudges, that soon she would have a good home, a little family of two with Albert; and he would paint beautiful pictures and join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Royal Academy, and she would at last be able to breathe easily in this dusty, hot, tiresome, frightening new land.

  Had we but world enough and time . . .

  In Utah, Famke never had enough: enough air, Albert, paintings. She missed the nourishing Danish food, pickled herring and dark rye bread and the salmon that Skatkammer’s servants had muttered over four nights a week; here, on a diet of oatmeal, salt pork, and squash, she was growing thin. Even the sliver of ice that a neighbor brought as an unofficial wedding gift—even that disappeared before she could enjoy it fully, nourishing as it was to a Nordic soul trapped in the land of dust and heat. Sariah seemed to consider ice as sinful as good food; she took the slab away from Famke and plunked the whole thing into a vat of the nasty Brigham tea she brewed from mountain rushes, then served it to the family before sending Famke out to the mulberry grove again.

  Having stood up to his first wife in the one great matter of taking a third, Heber seemed to be letting Sariah have her way with everything else. She determined Heber’s nightly schedule among the women; she decided when Myrtice would hold classes for the children and when Famke would take a nasty draught of Deseret’s Elixir for Common Coughing. She burned The Thrilling Narrative in the cookstove, for anything thrilling must surely be sinful. She questioned Myrtice delicately about the state of her health, evidently hoping that the girl would be feeling faint or suffering from indigestion. She told Famke when to feed the straggly chickens and lone pig, when to give public witness to her faith, when to haul water for washing dishes, laundry, and bodies. She, herself, dusted the line of little black coffins marching across the parlor mantelpiece, each box sealed with a pane of glass, and explained tersely that the white manikins inside represented the four babies she had borne and buried, children Heber never mentioned.

  The Mormons were a fiercely clean people, and amid all the scouring Famke began to detest the smell of soap that she had once liked so well. But she rather enjoyed standing in the middle of all those well-washed worshippers and making up stories to prove she knew Sainthood was the only true path.

  “My faith was first revealed in my native land, in the home of my master, Jørgen Skatkammer . . .” When she grew bored with the simple version, she added little embellishments: “I was dusting his glass sword, an artifact of Venice . . .” The Saints’ ears pricked up; they’d never heard of such a thing, and several of the ladies asked her about it afterward. Famke added next time, “The sword hung above a collection of eastern mummies . . .”

  Sariah stopped Famke’s recitations when it was clear the third wife was drawing too much attention to herself. “Don’t create such a fuss,” she said. “Now of all times, my word.”

  Sariah would never admit it outright, but Famke had realized that this was a difficult time around the Goodhouse place and in Prophet City generally. When the Goodhouses drove into town, they felt suspicious eyes upon them—not because of the clandestine plural marriage, for many of their fellow citizens had similar arrangements, but because it had been Heber’s idea to follow the United Order of Enoch and its principles of complete sharing. He had been gone so long that the most prosperous citizens had forgotten why they’d thought this idea was a good one. There were mutterings, of which Heber remained blissfully unaware, that it would soon be time to dissolve the Order and appoint a new man who would lead the Prophetians to true greatness.

  Famke paid no more attention
to those rumors than she did to reports of drought, dropping beef prices, crickets in the crops, or a string of explosions in hotels and opera houses that were leading sheriffs and Pinkertons to suspect that a band of outlaws was at work throughout the West. Gossip was just the grinding of so many jaws, or so many priests giving lectures; she closed her ears, fanned herself, and thought of more pleasant topics. Snow and winter. And Albert.

  Alone, as she bent over to slap mud and straw into the molds that would make the adobe bricks for her very own room—that wing of the house in which she was determined never to live—she used one finger to trace his features in the yielding muck: his artfully rumpled curls, his prominent eyes, his dear little soft chin. How refined he looked, how elegant, even sketched with an untrained hand in base clay—imagination created the likeness, and Famke quite melted at the thought of him.

  “My dear, are you unwell?” All at once, Heber was at her side. He helped her to sit back, plucking the wig from her head and using it to fan her face. He seemed eager to find her ill, as eager as Sariah was with Myrtice. “Shall I bring you a draught?”

  “No”—Famke shuddered—“please, no draughts. Some water.”

  While Heber went to fetch it, Famke pressed the heel of her hand into Albert’s face, erasing the image that had brought her momentary joy.

  The experiment with the wet brick inspired Famke with an idea: All around her lay the materials for making art. She might be starved for the sight of pictures, but she herself possessed the means of making them. What was earth but powdered stone? And Albert had told her that ground stone was the base for those paints he bought in tubes. The powder was mixed with linseed oil, exactly what was stored in the textile house.

  That evening, after her chores, a wigless Famke filled a drinking glass with blood-red dust and sneaked into the worm hut, where the sound of vermian chewing was faint but quite pronounced. She set a kerosene lantern beneath the table and poked a knife through the cheap tin of an oil can, and then, kneeling down beneath the worms, she let the oil drip in thin golden drops into her glass. She stirred it with her finger till it was of approximately the right consistency. Then, with nothing else to paint upon, she sat back against a table leg, pulled up her skirt, and stretched the petticoat taut over her knees.