by The Radical Element- 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes
Everyone wants to cry, but Eliza says we should pray instead. We all fall to our knees together, skirts blooming like daffodil cones around our waists before they settle against the boards. Mam’s on one side of me; Minnie sidles up to the other side and puts her head on my shoulder. Eliza, straight across the circle from me, folds her arms and bows her head, same as Heber Kimball taught Mam and I long ago, but she keeps her eyes open when she prays.
She prays for Emma, left behind without her husband, and her babies, especially the baby she’s not yet born. She prays for Joseph and Hyrum, that they’re now at peace, that they didn’t suffer much, that they weren’t too afraid. She prays for us in Nauvoo, for the people who will be rearranging the pieces of our church now that our prophet is dead. It’s a prayer for survival.
I keep my eyes open, too, staring down at the printer’s ink that lines my fingernails and trying to say a prayer of my own, though the only word that seems to come to me is why.
Dear God, if this church is true, why don’t everyone believe us and let us be? Dear God, why don’t I feel you here with us now?
Dear God, why’d you let our prophet die?
I never did know Brother Joseph. Mam and I saw him ride on his big black horse in the parade with the Nauvoo legion, looking smart in his lieutenant general uniform, and sometimes I’d spot him from afar, when he preached sermons in church or pulled sticks with the men on the lawn of the Seventies Hall. The closest I got was when we saw him walking the grounds of the temple site when I were there with Mam delivering water and grits to the workers. The men liked her soda bread, and her easy smile and her freckles, but Mam were the same as Emma — she would nay take a man who had other wives.
But the plural marriage did nay matter enough to stop her believing in the rest of it, Mam said. She believed in what Brother Joseph taught — about God and Jesus and priesthood and eternity. And when we left Liverpool, I had believed she believed it, and believed that someday I might could, too, when I were grown enough, but now, kneeling on the hard floors of the boardinghouse with Eliza praying for all of us, I can’t feel it. I feel propped up — on Mam’s faith, on Eliza’s, on all the women in this room. But all I feel is hollowed out and empty, like someone’s scraped their fingernails along the inside of my heart.
And afraid, too — nary a day since we was baptized I ent been afraid. Afraid of the way the woolyback girls in America would sneer at my Scouse accent. Afraid of the stories that Mormons were dying for their faith in Missouri. Afraid I’d wish I’d stayed behind in Liverpool as soon as we reached the American coast. Afraid that we had given up kin and country for a church that might all fall apart now that our prophet was dead. As Eliza prayed, I keep waiting for the spirit of God to punch holes through that fear and let the light in, but I feel dark.
Maybe now that Joseph were ashes, he’d blow away on the wind and the Mormons would go with him.
Maybe by spring, we’d be a ghost town.
The wolf hunts began in October.
Men in Carthage met with shovels and rifles and sawed-off shotguns, and when the town constables asked what they were doing, said they was organizing a hunt for the wolves.
But it weren’t wolves they hunted. It were Mormons.
It began with small things — shop windows got broken, phantom gunshots in the night, tar smeared on our windows and front doors while we slept. Men from Warsaw would ride through Nauvoo in tight packs with pistols strapped on and glinting like mirrors when the sunlight struck them.
They were trying to scare us, Eliza tells Mam and me. The night before, we’d gotten a stone thrown through our window while we slept — we’d woken to the crash, both of us in such a dead fright that Mam had herded me under the bed, and we’d lain there all night in our thin cotton nightgowns, shaking and sick and watching the torchlight pass on the street, dead certain the black-faced men would be coming for us next.
“It was just the same in Missouri,” Eliza says as the three of us collect glass fragments from our bedroom floor. Me mam and Eliza pick up the big pieces, chunks worth saving, while I trail them with the straw broom, scraping up the sand into a pile along the boards. None of us has touched the rock that broke it.
Eliza steps on a shard, and it snaps under her boot heel like a breaking bone. She shies, then picks up the slivers with the tips of her fingers and lays them upon her palm. “Fear’s a potent poison,” she says. “And these men know it.”
They would use it like a winch to try to worm us out of Illinois, same as they had in New York and Kirtland and Missouri, before Mam and I crossed the ocean. That’s what Eliza says. Men were the same everywhere, she tells us. They always start by sowing fear, wanting obedience to spring up like cornstalks in long, neat rows.
I let the sparkling remnants of our window settle around my boots, and don’t say that Ohio drove us out, and Missouri ended in a massacre. I don’t say that we got nowhere to go from here. We were near off the edge of the map now. If we leave Illinois, there ent a corner of this country left for us to go. Nothing but wilderness ahead, and I weren’t sure I had enough faith in me for that. I had already crossed an ocean for a boy prophet that were now dead. How much farther could the coattails of my mother’s faith carry me?
Eliza says it’s best to go on like nothing spooked us. Like the cracks aren’t starting to show, like there aren’t Mormon men fighting in the chapel each week about who should step up to fill Brother Joseph’s stead. Mam feels the same way — so we go on like nothing were different. We go to church on Sundays. Build our temple on the hill. Tow our weeds and go to the Red Brick store, though I don’t see much of Emma Smith there. Her baby were ready to pop out and Brother Brigham were giving her grief, shutting down her Benevolent Society because she says she don’t want a husband that takes other wives, and he says that were what God is calling for from us.
We read our Scriptures. We pray. We ignore the torchlight on our windows and the bricks thrown at our houses and go about our lives like we’re unshakable, not a temple with the foundation swept out from under us.
Brother Coulter keeps his press churning, and I go three days of the week. My da were a printer back in Liverpool, turning out books that usually weren’t suitable for the eyes of his three little girls, but sometimes he’d let me help with the typeset, when it weren’t too much of an education for me to be seeing. I’d set the letters in the rack, sentences spelled out backward from the handwritten drafts his authors turned in to him. “Mind those p’s and q’s, Vi,” Da would say, because I mixed them up more than the b’s and the d’s. I weren’t a good reader in school, because I’d been raised on letters back to front. It were Eliza who noticed this in the classroom, and it were Eliza who took me to Brother Coulter and said he might have proper work for me. Then she’d sit with me in the back of the schoolhouse when I needed it, going over letters on the slate and helping me make sense of sentences the right way ’round.
Brother Coulter were happy to have me. He hadn’t had an apprentice since they left Missouri, and he didn’t care I was a girl because I could spell and knew how to look at letters backward, which is more than most of the boys could do. He also said it were nice I didn’t mind getting ink on my hands, so long as my mam didn’t come after him for spoiling my skin. But my mam was used to it — she said it reminded her of Da.
At first my job had been to lay out the names of the dead who succumbed to malaria, and sometimes the headlines, while Brother Coulter ran the press, the ink plate clunking up and down as he shucked each sheet and replaced it with a fresh one. Then he were called by the Brethren to be printing the Book of Commandments, Joseph’s last revelations, but course we hadn’t known it would be the last when we started laying out the type. Now people are clamoring for it like it’s a message he’s sent us from beyond the grave, instructions on how to keep the church from fracturing like a beam of light through a rippled glass windowpane. Me and Brother Coulter both been laying out the type, long rows of letters the size of my
pinkie nail.
It had been chapter 121 I had been spelling out when Min came flying down the street with the news he were shot. Brother Joseph had wrote it when he were in Liberty Jail back in Missouri. Where the Lord told him his suffering would be naught but a small moment if he endured it all. That his friends stood by him — though in the end, not all of them did. Sidney Rigdon and the Prophet hadn’t spoken in ages when he died. James Strang were making claims about Joseph that would have felt daft but for the fact that now he weren’t here for us to see his face and see the kind truth in him. Who knew what Brigham were about to do, and say it were what the Lord wanted for us. Without Joseph, who knew what God wanted anymore?
It had all seemed black-and-white as typeset back in Liverpool. Mam had been certain we’d found the truth when Heber Kimball read us from the Book of Mormon and told us about priesthood and covenants and the truth of Jesus Christ restored. It were all the things Mam said she’d never heard in the cold halls of the Church of England. And Mam had been lit up over it like the bonfires when they burn the brush fields, and standing in the heat of it had left me tanned and shiny, too, even though I was but a wee thing. You can’t stand that close to an oven without coming back polished. But it weren’t new now — the shine had begun to rust.
Because if it were true — all of it — why would there be fighting about who would step up now with Joseph dead? Pieces were starting to fall out of alignment, like Joseph had been a finger in a dike and now the water was starting to spill over and flood us. Perhaps the cracks had been there before he died. Maybe now they’re just splintering aloud.
The men of Illinois are hunting us from the outside.
But we are wolves, too. We are tearing up our own pack.
I’m in the print shop, picking letters out of drawers for the one hundred and thirty-second chapter, when I start to smell the smoke.
Not the normal cooking smell, or the way we catch wafts of the forge when the wind changes just right. It were proper fire, like something big and bright burning too hot. Brother Coulter’s brow furrows, and he sets down the newly inked sheets he’s laying out to dry. “Stay here, Vilatte,” he calls to me, and I press myself against the drawers of typeset, my heart thumping even as I’m thinking it must be nothing, and how unfair it is that we’re so tormented that everything gets us startled lately. Yesterday Brother Talbot’s rifle backfired when he was cleaning it, and Mam pulled me into the house so quick, I nearly left my boots behind.
Brother Coulter crosses the shop and sticks his head out the window, looking up and down the street. I can hear glass shatter down the way. Men shout. Horses scream.
Someone slaps the window at my shoulder, a big, open-fisted hand on glass, and I near jump out of my skin. The letters in my hand fall to the ground with a sound like a sudden gust of rain striking a windowpane.
“Vilatte,” Brother Coulter starts, but he’s cut off by a scream out on the street, then Heber Kingston goes running by, the hobnails on his boots chattering against the road. “They’re coming for you, Ben!” he shouts at Brother Coulter. “They’re coming for the Book of Commandments!”
Right on his heels is a group of men with charcoaled faces and kerchiefs pulled up over their mouths, same as the ones who murdered the prophet. One of them pulls his foaming-mouthed horse up next to Heber and clocks him on the shoulder with his rifle. Heber drops like a stone, a long string of saliva from the horse’s mouth striping his back.
Brother Coulter whips around, and we both stare at the stack of manuscript pages on the table where I’d been sitting all morning, copying out their lines. We only have some of it printed. Most is still just the handwritten pages, shifting between Emma and Hyrum and sometimes Sidney and the other scribes as they took it down from Joseph’s dictation.
The last book of our prophet. The only thing left of him now.
The men charge in — there’s only six, but suddenly the shop seems full of them. The tallest ones start grabbing the newly printed pages, still spicy with the smell of ink, drying on lines above their heads, and crumple them up. They overturn the press, sending paper fanning like a spreading swan’s wing. The letters scatter, Brother Joseph’s words jumbled into nothing. One of the men smashes his boot into them, cracking the chapter heading under his heel. Another slaps Brother Coulter across the face with the butt of his rifle. Blood sprays against the Scripture pages still hanging up to dry.
I’m not certain they’ve seen me yet, all pressed between the bureaus full of type. They ent seen the Book of Commandments manuscript, neither — they’re fixated on the printed pages and the drama of ripping them down.
I wonder for half a moment if they’ll shoot me. If saving the book would be worth it. All things die in their time and maybe there’s no saving our church.
But I remember the cold shock of the water up to my waist when I followed Heber Kimball into the river Ribble to be baptized.
I dart out from between the racks and throw myself at the desk, grabbing the muslin the pages are stacked upon and bundling them against my chest. The men are crowded around the front door, so I spring for the back, throwing my shoulder into the door to the back room with a strength that feels like it might tear it from its hinges. It opens with a crack, and I go tumbling forward, nearly tripping over my own boot laces.
“Hey!” one of the men shouts, and I feel a whistle against the back of my neck as he grabs for me, but he misses. I slam the office door behind me, though it’ll hardly slow them down.
I’m out the back door, my skirts caving around my legs, and I start to tear through the scrub behind the print shop and toward the road. I hear the door slap the side of the shop as the men race after me.
Main Street is a chaos of horses and more black-faced men. They’ve dragged women into the road by their petticoats so their houses can be burned and tossed men into the gutters so they can step on their noses and break their fingers. The streets are muddy, though it ent water that’s tamped down the dust. The city is thick with noise and soot and smoke, and I feel like I’m choking on every gasping, burning breath I take.
I hope I might lose the men in all the mess, but they’re shouting after me, telling their fellows to stop the girl with the muslin-wrapped pages. One of them snatches at me from the top of his horse, but Sister Kimball steps into his path and he grabs her instead. When he tries to shake her off, she clings to his arm, trying to drag him from his horse though he must be twice her size, and stays strapped to him like a millstone. “Run, Vilatte!” she shouts, and I go whipping down Main Street, my lungs screaming.
I sprint until the road runs out beneath my feet and I’m clawing my way through the ditches that run between the cooperative fields. Dry cornstalks taller than me surround me on all sides, stripped of their ears but not yet torn up for the winter. The autumn wind, peppered with the spray from the choppy banks of the Mississippi River and kicking up mud from the marshes, spits at my face.
The stalks rip at me as I tear through them, so loud it feels like they’re shouting about where I am. The men must still be chasing me, ready to kill a girl of fourteen for the words of a prophet who was her same age when he first saw God. Shoving through the corn feels like shoving through a crowd of thick-armed men, and it’s slow and I’m getting tired and I can smell Nauvoo burning behind me. I can hear the broken glass, the mob sounds, the ruckus of a people driven from their home again, again, again.
I roll my ankle on a lump in the soil and crash to the ground, the pages bundled against me breaking my fall, though I still land hard enough that an oof escapes my lips. As soon as I’m still, I can hear the stalks behind me crashing as the men give chase. They’re raising birds from the corn, crows cawing angrily as they tear into the sky.
I shove the pages under me and lay on my back, shivering with fear. Above me, the corn silk whispers in the wind.
I ent good at praying. Sometimes I don’t listen when we say the benediction in our sacrament meetings, and I keep my eyes open and ca
n’t make myself believe the words are going all the way up to God himself, or that he’s listening, or even caring. But in that moment, it feels like all I have — I can either be alone with a mob on my heels, or I can be alone with God.
Please, God, protect me, I pray — but he didn’t protect Joseph Smith in Carthage. He didn’t save the prophet, so why should he care for a girl in a cornfield, alone? It’s a sour thought — it cankers inside me, wraps around my prayer like climbing ivy and chokes it.
I pray anyway.
After a time, I can’t hear the men anymore, but that don’t mean they aren’t waiting. Feels like I been lying on my back for hours, breathing like drowning. The sky turns gunmetal gray with thick smoke. When he baptized us, Brother Kimball never said we’d be hated and cursed at and spit at and driven out of everywhere we lived. Though I think Mam would have gone with him anyway. Not sure if I would have.
I hear the corn start to crack again as someone tramps toward me. I scramble up, sitting on the pages, knees pulled up to my chest. Just a small moment, I think, and I try to be brave. I try to convince myself my faith is worth dying for, but I just ent sure it is.
Then I hear someone calling my name.
“Vilatte! VILATTE!”
“I’m here!” I scream back, because I know that voice, and a few minutes later, Eliza comes trudging through the cornstalks, parting them like a curtain on a stage. She has corn silk in her hair, scratches on her face from the dry leaves, dirt on the elbows and knees of her cotton dress, as if she fell and picked herself back up. She stops and she looks at me — sitting on the Book of Commandments.
“I’m here,” I say quietly.
Eliza doesn’t say anything right away. She comes and sits beside me in the dirt, and I worm the manuscript out from under me and hold it out to her. She don’t take it.