I couldn’t chance that. With the guide, he wouldn’t get lost. With the guide and during the daylight, it’d take four to five hours. By the time the deputies got here, there’d be no trace of the man.
“The men behind you are ten miles back,” I said. “Eight of those are hard miles. Like you know. We call that stretch of barren land the Wastelands. They won’t come through it in the dark. They might try, but they won’t keep going. No one travels it at night, not even us. They’ll wait for dawn.”
He cocked his head, studying me. He didn’t trust me. Like I didn’t trust him.
“The Wastelands scares them,” I said. “Especially at night. It always does.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“I have your word on that?”
“You have my word.”
His nod was quick, and I didn’t know how to read it. He opened the door. It was snowing. He drew back, hesitating. Then he tucked his chin low and went outside, closing the door behind him.
Snow. There’d be footprints. A man’s. No one would think otherwise. His boots were bigger than mine. Boots worn by a man wanted by the federal government. Someone I’d agreed to help.
Tracks. From my door to the barn.
CHAPTER TWO
DEBORAH – THE DOLLAR BILL
January 11, 1888
By the light of three lamps, I washed the man’s dishes. Getting rid of his presence in my cabin was easy enough. Wiping him from my thoughts was a different matter.
January. Snow. His footprints going from my cabin to the barn.
I wanted Samuel, my husband. I could face this trouble if he were home.
The snow might be a blessing rather than a curse. It might convince the government men to turn back. I scrubbed harder on the cup the man had used. The water in the pan slapped against the sides. The Wastelands trail was faint and hard to follow in good weather. The snow would make it even harder. The deputies might decide to let this man go. Finding him wasn’t worth the risk.
I didn’t believe that. If they had the grit to follow him this far, they’d want to see this through.
Do the same, I told myself. One step at a time. Get rid of the man’s presence in the cabin. That was all I could do at this moment.
The man could already be gone. He could have slipped away behind the barn to keep from having to ride past the cabin where I’d hear him. He might be gone but his tracks wouldn’t be.
I dried the dishes and put them on the shelf. Beside it, my calendar was tacked to the wall. The room was too dark for me to make out the numbers but I knew the date. Wednesday, the eleventh of January. As Samuel had done every year of our marriage, he’d left home on the first of September to mend and make wheels for settlers in outposts in southern Utah and northern Arizona. “Look for me by the first of December,” he told me the day he left.
That was one hundred thirty-three days ago. All that time, and I hadn’t gotten a letter from him. It wasn’t like him. He always wrote even though the letters took weeks to get here.
Samuel was forty-one days late. The ache I carried for him swallowed me whole. Day after day, I told myself Samuel was on his way home. Nels figured Samuel had to backtrack away from the rockslide and come a longer way. It was winter but that wouldn’t stop Samuel. We’d been married nearly eighteen years and he always came home. The weather might slow him. But it wouldn’t stop him.
The weather hadn’t stopped the man who was hiding in my barn. It hadn’t stopped the men who were chasing him. They were only ten miles behind.
I moved one of the lanterns from the counter to the kitchen table. Something was tucked partway under the bread basket. I moved the lamp closer. It was a dollar bill.
Not touching it, I sat down at the table. Most of the men left money. Usually it was dimes and quarters, and once in a while it was a bill like this one. I didn’t see the money as a way to buy my silence. Instead, it let the men hold fast to their pride even though they were forced to hide and accept help from strangers. The money was how they let me know they were accustomed to paying their way. They were honorable men who took care of their families, tended their farms, and saw to their businesses. They came to my door unwashed and hungry but they were men of the church who had plural wives as Abraham and Jacob in the Old Testament had. These men practiced the revelation the Prophet Joseph Smith said the Lord had made known to him. Plural marriage was holy, the Prophet said the Lord told him. It assured those who practiced it a place in the celestial kingdom.
Samuel and I had come to believe that wasn’t so. Our parents believed otherwise. Samuel’s stepfather had two wives. My father had had three wives. The first one was Alice. She died years ago but she stayed a part of our family. My older half sister and two half brothers were her children. My father talked about Alice during my growing-up years so we wouldn’t forget her or her faith in the church. She and my father had been baptized by the Prophet Joseph Smith soon after they wed in Ohio. From there, they followed the Prophet west and when he was murdered in Missouri, my father and Alice followed Brigham Young to the Utah Territory.
“There were over six hundred of us in the Kimball wagon party,” my father told us every anniversary of Alice’s death. His voice was somber but pride underlined his words. He was a big man, barrel-chested, and his arms were strong from his years of tanning leather. He wore his thick, dark beard high on his cheekbones. He’d say, too, that Alice was cheerful during that last and final journey. She was always smiling. She was going to Zion. But in Nebraska, Alice took a fever and died. “I buried her by the Platte River,” he’d say. “Close to Chimney Rock. I marked her grave with a wood cross. Her name’s carved on it.”
My father usually went on to say that Sister Zena, a woman in the wagon party, took his youngest child, Asher. “He wasn’t yet a month old and Sister Zena was able and willing to feed him. Another family, the Bufords, said they’d look after Sarah. She was seven. Someone else said they had room for Paul. He was just a little fellow, newly turned three. Those were all good people but Sarah and Paul? I couldn’t give them up.” Here, he’d shake his head. “I don’t mind saying it was no easy thing driving the wagon while seeing to them. The trail’s a hard place for children. Some got in the way of wagon wheels and were run over. Others were kicked by mules. Two times that I know of, a child wandered off and got lost. But I took that chance. I had to. It was bad enough I couldn’t keep Ash. Alice would understand that. A newborn must be nursed. But she’d expect me to keep Sarah and Paul with me.”
Caring for the children slowed him. His wagon dropped to the back of the party. He hadn’t been forgotten, though. An unmarried young woman, nineteen years old, brought supper every night for seven days, walking from her parents’ wagon back to his. It wasn’t only supper she brought us, my father would say. “She gave us comfort. She held Sarah and Paul when they cried for their mama and sang lullabies until they were asleep.” Once the children were settled for the night, she went back to her wagon. My father got down on his knees and prayed for strength to face the next day. “One night, Alice came to me in a vision,” he’d tell us. “I saw her like she was standing right there before me. “Our children need a mother,” I heard her say. “And you need a wife.”
Eight days after burying Alice, my father married the young woman, Margaret, who sang his children to sleep.
She was my mother.
I was born a year later in Salt Lake City. My father called me his daughter of Zion. I was the first of his many children born in Utah Territory.
“God’s plan,” my father said about the birth of each child. “God’s plan,” he said when Brigham Young directed him to leave Salt Lake and open a tannery in Parowan. “God’s plan,” he said when a revelation from an angel told him to marry another wife.
“A joyful revelation,” my mother said as Sarah and I cleaned the house to prepare for the arrival of the new wife. Sarah was fifteen and I was seven. “Because of this, I’ll have a place in the cele
stial kingdom,” my mother said as we washed the walls in the kitchen. “It’s glorious to think of.”
Her voice was high-pitched. Loose strands of brown hair fell from the knot she wore at the nape of her neck. She worked quickly, down on her hands and knees to wipe dust from the corners. “Girls, God has given us so much,” she said while we washed the windows. “Your father was baptized into the church by the Prophet Joseph Smith and now Brigham Young has sanctioned this holy revelation.”
My father brought Sister Caroline to our house on the day of their wedding. She was yellow-haired and her waist was smaller than my mother’s. Her fingers were smooth. Her knuckles weren’t yet swollen from hard work. Her dress was a pattern of black-and-white plaid with sleeves that flared and then gathered at the cuffs. The lace collar was wide and reached all the way to Sister Caroline’s shoulders. My mother wore her Sunday best but beside Sister Caroline, her dark blue dress looked plain and old-fashioned. The sleeves were too narrow and the crochet collar was heavy and coarse.
My mother planned for Sister Caroline to sit at her end of the long kitchen table. The wives’ end, she had decided to call it. My father shooed away that idea. He had Sister Caroline sit beside him in Paul’s usual place on the opposite end of the table. My father helped her get settled on the bench and as he did, his hand lingered on her shoulder. His thumb stroked the curve of her upper arm.
For a moment, everything went still—my mother at the opposite end, my older half brothers and sister, my two younger brothers sitting on the table benches—all of us startled to see my father touch this woman in this way. Sister Caroline smiled up at him, then glanced toward my mother. My father moved his hand, pulled out his chair, and sat down. He bowed his head. That brought us back to ourselves, and we bowed our heads.
“Heavenly Father,” he prayed. “We thank you for the food on this table and for bringing your daughter Caroline into our home.”
After dinner but before the table was cleared, my father and Sister Caroline left to take a walk. Distress flashed across my mother’s face when they returned and my father whispered something to her. She turned away when he took Sister Caroline into the bedroom he usually shared with my mother. “The promise of the celestial kingdom,” my mother said more to herself than to Sarah and me when she undressed in our bedroom and slept with us.
She slept with us until the house my father built catty corner to ours was finished and Sister Caroline moved there. I thought this would cheer my mother. She would again sing while we baked bread and scrubbed floors. Our family would be like before. It wasn’t. My father spent most of his time at Sister Caroline’s house.
“A blessing,” my mother said when Sister Caroline had her first child. “Your father is favored by God and we have the promise of the celestial kingdom.” Those were her words but with the birth of each of Sister Caroline’s children, my mother turned quieter, a faint echo of who she’d been.
My father spent one or two nights a week in our home. My mother had more children. When he was with us, he asked about our school lessons and scooped up his youngest child to hold on his lap. There was an emptiness, though, to him while he ate dinner at our table and then later joined my mother in the bedroom. I believed his thoughts were elsewhere. When he was with Sister Caroline, he looked to be a younger man. His wide smile parted his graying beard and his laugh came easy.
Suitors began to call on me when I was seventeen. I didn’t have much to say to the young men who claimed they got down on their knees every night and prayed for revelations from God. I wasn’t ready for marriage. I wasn’t ready to follow in my mother’s footsteps. Or to be a second or third wife.
I was eighteen when my father told me it had been revealed to Ed Yardley, a farmer, that he was worthy of a plural wife. “He’s asked permission to speak to you about this,” my father said. “With the intention of marrying soon.”
Soon meant within the month. I ducked my head as if considering Brother Ed’s revelation but panic beat in my chest. There was nothing wrong with him other than he had a wife and one child.
I felt my father waiting for an answer. I couldn’t tell him I didn’t want to be a second wife. I couldn’t say I didn’t want to wound a first wife the way my mother had been.
“Deborah?” my father said.
I raised my head and I met his gaze. “Mother needs me. Zeb’s just a few months old. I can’t leave her now.”
“You’re a fine daughter to your mother. But you just had your eighteenth birthday. It’s time for you to have your own family, and Brother Ed’s a good man. His revelation has been sanctioned.” My father smiled. “You’ll have the promise of the celestial kingdom. And Deborah, he’s agreed to build you your own house.”
“Mother needs me,” I said again. “I can’t leave her. When Zeb is older, I’ll agree to marry.”
My father must have seen the wisdom of this. By then, my mother’s home was a household of nine children. Sarah, my older half sister, had married and moved away years ago. I was the oldest daughter still at home. My mother would struggle without my help. My father must have realized this since nothing more was said about the matter. Within the month, Ed Yardley, my potential husband, married another woman.
Now, years later, a hunted man was in my barn. His dollar bill was on my kitchen table. The risk I took to help him and others like him was far greater than the worth of a dollar. If I was caught, the deputies might burn my orchards. They could arrest me. I took the risk anyway. Not because I believed in plural marriage. I didn’t. I told myself I did it for the men’s children and that was so. It wasn’t just that, though. These men were like my oldest half brother, Paul. He was in the federal prison in Salt Lake. His tannery had been taken from him and his two wives and seven children were dependent on the charity of neighbors and family.
I picked up the dollar bill. It was crinkled as if it had once been clenched in a tight fist. I put it down, left the table, and went to the front window. The night was bright with falling snow. It was quiet. There was no sound of the man.
I strained to see lamplights at my sister’s cabin on the other side of the plum orchard. Her cabin was too far, three quarters of a mile off. Yet I felt the presence of Grace and her husband with their little three boys. I felt, too, the weight of the other six families in Junction.
Tracks in the snow. Lawmen ten miles from here. The man in my barn. If he were still there.
I got Samuel’s rifle and put it by the bed. The dollar bill went into the canning jar that served as my bank. I placed the jar inside my top drawer. I brushed out my hair and braided it, but stayed dressed. Sleeping in my clothes would save time in the morning when I got up before dawn to send the man on. That was what I told myself. In truth, I was uneasy. A man slept in my barn. I was alone.
A chill coursed through me and not just from the winter night. I turned down the quilts, ran my hand over the cold bed linens, and went to the kitchen. The glow of the fire around the rim of the cookstove door guided me to it. Using potholders, I took out the two warming stones I kept heated in the oven. I wrapped them in dish towels and one by one, carried them to the bedroom. I slid them under the quilts at the foot of my bed so their heat could warm the linens.
Samuel gave me the stones when we first came to Junction five and a half years ago. “This one’s sandstone,” he’d said, holding a flat red rock in the palm of his open left hand. His fingers were spread to support it. We were in the kitchen, and the cabin’s hewn logs were so fresh that they still smelled of the earth. Samuel’d been digging irrigation ditches for the plum trees we’d just planted, and he’d come in for noon dinner. Using his free hand, Samuel ran a finger over a band of white that circled the stone. He said, “This part is probably gypsum. Somehow it layered itself into the sandstone.” He nodded toward the kitchen window. “I want to show you something. Come over here in the light.” I stood beside him at the window with my shoulder against his. He held up the stone with both hands and angled it, turning
it. “See that? The gypsum?” I did. It was clear as glass in places and cloudy in others. It shimmered like ice on a frozen lake.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said.
“It puts on a good show. But I’ve got one even better.” He put the first stone on the kitchen table and got another one from his knapsack. It was smaller and rounder than the first one. Its colors went from faded yellow to light brown. To me, it was ordinary in this cliff country that was filled with rocks.
“Found it in the river,” Samuel said. “It was the yellow that caught my eye. It looks to be sandstone but it’s different. It’s harder, stronger, made to last. Like our homestead here, Deborah.”
“And our orchards,” I said. “Trees that show we were once here.”
Samuel looked at the stone he held, then put it in the palm of my hand. “You’re still young,” he said. “There’s time yet.”
For a child, he meant but didn’t say. My yearning for a baby was one of the reasons why I’d agreed to leave our home in Parowan. Coming here was a fresh start. In Parowan, no one knew what to do with me. I was a long-married woman who didn’t have children. People there had come to disapprove of my marriage to Samuel. His way of looking at the world was bigger than the church’s. My inability to bear children was testimony that Samuel was not a firm believer. In Junction, I was far from the whispers and knowing looks. I thought a child might be possible here.
Now with Samuel not yet home, I used the stones to warm our bed.
The Glovemaker Page 3