Sarah Canary

by Karen Joy Fowler

  ‘Tom,’ he said. ‘Tom?’ Followed by words she didn’t understand. Bright, maybe. And moon, definitely. And something that sounded like striped horses but was probably Chinese instead. He spoke slowly, like a man who has been dosed with laudanum.

  Adelaide really wasn’t interested. She raised her voice. ‘I don’t see that a doctor could do anything here either. I don’t see any reason not to press on to Tacoma. I’m not saying his condition isn’t bad. He’s in the hands of God now. We can keep him warm. Watch him for convulsions or signs of fever. God’s will be done.’ She looked back down at the Chinese man’s face. Beneath his eyelids, his eyes darted about nightmarishly. Adelaide softened. ‘I am concerned about his hands and his feet. Can we adjust him so that his feet are closer to the fire?’ Pity was a trap. Adelaide knew this and she cursed herself for continuing to fall into it. She stood up, finished with the man.

  ‘Of course,’ said Captain Wescott. ‘One of the prettiest steamers I ever served on was made in China. The Diana. She murdered her engineer and her fireman in San Francisco with an exploding boiler, but she was always a perfect lady to me.’ He adjusted the Chinese man’s body by pulling on the blanket until the Chinese man started to unwrap. Then the captain grasped him by the shoulders. B.J. slithered out of their way, tightly sheathed in his own blanket.

  ‘He will be all right?’ B.J., asked Adelaide. ‘I mean, of course he will be. Won’t he?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Adelaide. B.J. had high cheekbones and hair like hay. Scandinavian heritage, she guessed. Vikings. Pillagers. Rapists.

  Two crewmen appeared in the doorway to the boiler room. ‘Captain,’ the taller of the two said with obsequious urgency. ‘You’re needed on deck.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Captain Wescott told Adelaide. She watched the back of his white and gold suit as he left her. Something else white and gold approached, something smaller, which stopped opposite Captain Wescott and then continued toward Adelaide. The approaching white and gold turned into the child, Emmaline. Emmaline’s hair had been gathered together into an enormous blue bow, but still reached halfway down her back. Adelaide imagined the battles there must be, brushing out that hair, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, sit still or I’ll smack your hand with the hairbrush. Emmaline’s mother entered the boiler room behind her, tall but still girlish, a brown-haired version of Emmaline, only with her hair twisted up in a respectable Psyche knot.

  ‘May we join you?’ Emmaline’s mother asked. ‘Poor Emmaline was cold.’

  ‘I wanted to see the shipwrecked men,’ Emmaline said. ‘Is this them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adelaide, thinking that she really must get back to Lydia soon and that this was lucky, that perhaps Emmaline’s mother could be persuaded to watch the men until Captain Wescott returned. ‘Were they worth the trip?’

  Emmaline looked at both men. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. Her voice was delighted, clear as a chime. ‘One of them is Chinese! The sailors were just raising their canoe as we came down the stairs. It had a big face carved on it like a mask. And Mr Wellman, up in the passenger cabin, he said you’d have to be some sort of lunatic to go out in a canoe in this kind of storm. He said he wouldn’t have even stopped to rescue such a lunatic. He said it would be no great loss.’

  ‘Of course, he didn’t mean that, Emmaline,’ Emmaline’s mother added quickly, glancing at B.J. ‘I told you so.’

  ‘It’s just like Mr Lear’s poem. Remember, Marmy?’ said Emmaline. ‘The Jumblies went to sea in a storm and a sieve? Only their heads were blue and their hands were green. And they wrapped their feet in a pinky paper fastened with a pin.’

  ‘Emmaline has a wonderfully retentive memory,’ Emmaline’s mother told them.

  ‘I can see that,’ B.J. answered. He seemed to admire it.

  ‘I suppose you’ve lost everything you own now,’ Emmaline suggested to B.J. ‘All your worldly possessions lying on the ocean floor. I suppose you are as poor as a church mouse.’

  ‘She’s such a comfort to me.’ Emmaline’s mother’s smile hardened and broke. She sniffled twice. Her face turned red in the dim, red firelight, blotched over suddenly like a case of hives. She began to cry.

  This made it awkward to ask her to sit with B.J. and the Chinese man. Adelaide would have to wait until Emmaline’s mother had pulled herself together. Adelaide felt in the bosom of her dress for her handkerchief, which was warm from her skin, limp and perfumed. She offered it to Emmaline’s mother. ‘I’m Mrs Byrd. Sea voyages can be so unsettling,’ she said, rather lamely. ‘I myself cry frequently when I’m at sea.’

  ‘How very peculiar,’ Emmaline said, staring at her. The wings of her blue bow poked up from behind the curve of her head like a cat’s ears.

  viii

  In 1873, Anna H. Leonowens, tutor to the king of Siam’s sixty-seven children, published her second book. This was a work of nonfiction based on her own observations of the lives of King Mongut’s nine thousand wives and concubines. Around the World in Eighty Days, with its nod toward the problem of sati, was the current best-seller, but The Romance of the Harem had its own fascinated audience. Its publication coincided nicely with the escape from Utah of Ann Eliza Young, the seventeeth or nineteenth or twenty-seventh wife, depending on how many of the others you counted, of Brigham Young.

  In 1859, in a political climate of virulent anti-Mormonism, Horace Greeley had traveled to Salt Lake City to study the religion and to look at some of those households wealthy enough to be polygamous. He reported that, while the husbands were, without exception, fanatic in their support of the system of polygamy, the wives ‘seemed lifeless, inert, inactive.’ He concluded that the system was a degradation of women. A year later, Captain Richard Burton, the English explorer and adventurer, made his own visit and gave a more favorable report. He granted that polygamy had removed much of the romance between men and women but felt this might be an improvement. As opposed to the Eastern states where womanhood was petted and spoiled, the Mormon system had ‘rather placed her below par, where,’ Burton said, ‘I believe her to be happier than when set upon an uncomfortable and unnatural eminence.’

  ‘The more the merrier,’ was Burton’s final word on the subject of multiple wives. He returned to England to deliver a lecture to the London Anthropological Society on the Native American custom of taking scalps.

  Ann Eliza Young began lecturing to Gentiles on the subject of Brigham Young’s love life. The career choice was suggested to her by P. T. Barnum, who, three years earlier, had offered to exhibit Brigham Young himself for $100,000 a year. Ann Eliza took Barnum’s advice but refused his management. She was in the process of suing Brigham Young for divorce. He had filed a countersuit charging adultery. The audience for her lectures was enormous and avid.

  Ann Eliza’s main difficulties arose from the ambiguity the Gentiles felt toward Mormon women. If the Mormon women were victims of polygamy, then the Gentiles were sympathetic. If they were participants, however, then the Mormon women were whores. Ann Eliza was a key activist in the campaign to force the federal government to outlaw polygamy. Her political effectiveness and her own personal success on the lecture circuit would be compromised if anyone believed she was a whore. Her attire and her manner were accordingly genteel and chaste. Her topics were sexual, but the context was religious. She told the Gentiles what they had long suspected, that Mormon men were stealing Gentile wives. She was a great success.

  In 1874, the Chicago Times accused her of sleeping with Major James Pond, her business manager. A Salt Lake City paper repeated the charges under a headline that said Ann Eliza was ‘reveling in a “Pond” of illicit love.’ The scandal was immediately confirmed by Victoria Woodhull, who told the press that she had seen the amorous couple in Illinois, although it turned out later that Woodhull herself had actually been in Nebraska at the time of the alleged sighting. Women should sleep with whomever they pleased, Woodhull said. She always did.

  Further investigations and her own demure bearing worked to clear Ann Eliza
’s name. Later in 1874, she spoke for two hours to Congress, detailing the miseries endured by plural wives. The next night, she gave a public lecture entitled ‘My Life in Mormon Bondage,’ to an audience consisting largely of congressmen and their families. President and Julia Grant attended her second lecture, ‘Polygamy as It Is,’ and congratulated her personally afterward. Within a few weeks, Congressman Poland’s bill against polygamy had been passed and signed into law.

  In 1883, Ann Eliza married a Gentile banker who had hastily divorced his first wife just after their silver wedding anniversary to make this possible.

  In 1890, the adulterous Grover Cleveland offered the Mormons amnesty for polygamists, legitimization of the children born of polygamous households, and statehood for Utah in return for their submission to the laws opposing polygamy. The Mormon elders finally agreed.

  By 1891, Ann Eliza had grown tired of finding her husband in the beds of their maids and servants. Her husband said that she had driven him to this. He said that she was frigid. She said that his inhuman sexual needs had damaged her health. He said that she was a whore. He began to openly patronize prostitutes. Ann Eliza divorced him in 1893. She never married again.

  15

  The Capture Of Lydia Palmer

  Only lest she be lonely

  In thy beautiful House

  Give her for her Transgression

  License to think of us—

  Emily Dickinson, 1871

  Emmaline’s mother wiped her face with Adelaide’s handkerchief and blew her nose delicately. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re very kind. I’m Mrs Maynard. No matter what anyone else may tell you.’ Tears spilled out of her eyes again, running down the length of her nose. She held the handkerchief over her face and took several quick, audible breaths through her mouth.

  ‘We came all the way from Boston,’ Emmaline told Adelaide with maximum drama, ‘to be with Papa again. He said he would send for us, but Marmy wanted to surprise him.’ Mrs Maynard’s sobbing grew in volume. ‘All the way from Boston on trains and in nasty, bumpy little carriages with fleas and on boats. And then when we got here, Papa had another wife.’

  ‘That woman is not his wife,’ Mrs Maynard said sternly. She sniffled and blew her nose. ‘There is a word for what she is, but it’s not a word I would permit myself to use.’

  ‘Trollop,’ Emmaline told them.

  ‘Emmaline!’

  The Pumpkin’s whistle sounded three sharp blasts. The fireman looked up for a moment, then set his shovel aside and left the boiler room. ‘Well, that’s the word you used before,’ Emmaline said.

  ‘The Territorial Legislature gave him a divorce,’ Mrs Maynard told Adelaide. ‘No one bothered to inform me. And I said it didn’t matter anyway. It wasn’t legal. God knew who his wife was. Do you know what the Methodist minister said to me then? The minister? He said that nothing in the Bible forbids a man to have more than one wife.’ Mrs Maynard took a sodden look at her daughter and covered her eyes again. ‘My poor Emmaline. My poor little girl.’

  ‘He doesn’t have another daughter,’ Emmaline said. She located the blue satin tail of her bow and stuck it in her mouth. ‘And I wouldn’t care if he did.’

  ‘The other women said it was my own fault for leaving him alone too long. What could I expect, they said. I would have come the moment he sent for me. I came before he sent for me.’

  Adelaide shook her head. ‘Someday,’ she said, ‘someday we will learn that when one woman is wronged, we are all wronged.’

  ‘Someday,’ said B.J. pointedly and then didn’t finish the sentence, flinching away from the look Adelaide sent him. There he lay, she thought, with his mouth open, naked and snug as an oyster inside his blanket. Lying there just expecting to be nursed. ‘How many wives do you have?’ she asked him, her voice edged like broken glass.

  His pallid complexion paled even more. ‘None,’ he said, losing his pitch so that the word slid out of control from a lower register into a higher. He reached over and shook the Chinese man’s shoulder. ‘Chin,’ he whispered. ‘Chin,’ he pleaded. The Chinese man was a dark hill in his blanket, its contours outlined from behind in red by the light of the coal fire. The Chinese man sighed and muttered something in a language Adelaide supposed was his own but might almost have been German. What was passing for art in Germany now was really the most virulently misogynist poison Adelaide had ever seen. Still-lifes of dead women. Garroted women with stab wounds and fruit. B.J. turned back to Adelaide, looked at her face, licked his lips nervously with the tip of his tongue. ‘Not even one. But I can’t marry her. All my worldly possessions are lying on the ocean floor.’

  ‘I am already married,’ Mrs Maynard sobbed.

  ‘See? There’s another reason,’ said B.J.

  Adelaide looked at him in disbelief. ‘And if she were not, do you imagine for one moment that this poor woman would want you? Or any other man? After what she’s been through? We assume that the men who come out here, left alone too long, will seek female companions. But what about the women abandoned in Boston? Are they marrying multiple husbands? Do you ever wonder why not?’ She had been using her hands, her angry public voice. She had been making a speech. She tried to stop, turning back to Mrs Maynard, cutting off B.J.’s answer, because she really couldn’t have been less interested in anything he had to say. Mrs Maynard held the handkerchief over her face while her shoulders shook with sobs. ‘And just when do you suppose he was planning to tell you about the other woman?’ Adelaide asked.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about the other man, B.J.?’ Captain Wescott reappeared suddenly. His voice was just as angry as Adelaide’s and even louder. The Pumpkin’s fireman followed Captain Wescott into the boiler room, returning to his station, checking the fire. He loaded in another shovel of coal. The fire spit and reddened.

  ‘Chin!’ said B.J. He shook the Chinese man desperately. ‘Wake up, Chin. Please wake up.’ No response. B.J. withdrew his hand and glanced unhappily around the room from face to face. His eyes stopped on Mrs Maynard, who was crying quietly. ‘I didn’t know it was important,’ he offered. She sobbed. He looked at Adelaide. ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested?’ He slumped closer to the floor and turned his face to Captain Wescott. ‘I thought Chin had already told you?’ He pulled the blanket up about his neck. ‘What other man?’ he asked Emmaline piteously. He pulled the blanket over his face. ‘I’m not feeling very well right now.’ His voice was muffled. ‘Could we discuss this later?’

  ‘What other man?’ Emmaline asked the captain. Her mother reached over and removed the end of her ribbon from her mouth.

  ‘When we succeeded in raising the canoe, there was a third man clinging to the gunwales underneath. He escaped from the crew, who were only trying to help him, and ran like a madman into the ship. The Lotta White is not a big boat and we have not searched her thoroughly, but we have not yet been able to locate him. He is a passenger now, B.J. I would like to know who he is.’

  ‘He’s a stowaway!’ said Emmaline. ‘He’s a shipwreck and a stowaway.’

  Adelaide felt that Captain Wescott’s approach was too threatening. She knelt beside B.J., making herself smaller, although B.J. wouldn’t see this unless he came out from beneath his blanket. ‘Who else was on the canoe with you, B.J.?’ she asked gently. Emmaline came to stand beside her, her white dress flickering red, reflecting the coal fire.

  ‘Two Indians and a postman.’

  ‘A postman?’

  ‘From Seabeck.’ The blanket moved. ‘Will Purdy. You remember. You held a gun on him, too. They all swam into shore, though. They were going to make a fire and eat clams and oysters.’

  ‘Like Mr Carroll’s poem,’ said Emmaline. ‘“The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Remember how the Walrus held “his pocket handkerchief before his streaming eyes”? Like Marmy.’ She was sucking on her ribbon again, covertly using the side of her mouth farthest from her mother. Mrs Maynard sniffled.

  ‘I know Purdy,’ said Captain Wescott. ‘Th
is man was not Will Purdy. Who else?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Who else?’ Captain Wescott demanded. ‘A very short man with a large mustache.’

  B.J. lowered the blanket to just below his eyes. ‘Dark hair?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Light eyes?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Oh,’ said B.J. ‘Oh. Well, that must have been Harold. His canoe tipped over, too.’

  ‘Tom,’ said Chin. He tossed restlessly about in his blanket, exposing his naked chest.

  ‘Or Tom,’ said B.J. ‘Might be Tom,’ He moved himself and his blanket closer to the Chinese man, covered him up again. More coal went into the fire. The red light flickered across the gold of Emmaline’s hair like some unnatural dawn.

  As soon as Adelaide understood who Harold was, she returned to the captain’s cabin. To her relief, the door remained locked. Inside, Lydia lay on the bed sleeping, curled up like a cat, her knees at her chest, her full skirts mounded over her legs. Adelaide’s coat lay kicked to the side, by Lydia’s feet. Adelaide remembered suddenly that she had left the gun and the knife in the coat’s pocket. She sat on the foot of the bed to retrieve them. Careless, careless. The cabin felt especially chilly after the warmth of the boiler room. She covered Lydia with the coat.