The Glovemaker

by Ann Weisgarber

  “Doing well, I’d say,” Samuel said. He spread a sliver of butter on his slice of bread. “Three farmers had new wagons built and I take that as a spritely sign. They’re talking about last year’s wheat crop and how it was a good one. This year’s might do the same. That is, if the rainfall isn’t too much or too little. If the sun isn’t too bright or it’s too cloudy.” He smiled, bringing out a dimple in his left cheek. “You know how farmers are. Always on one side or the other of worry.”

  My father’s laugh was a deep rumble. “How well I know, Brother Samuel. My father farmed and there was never a moment’s peace about the weather. It’s why I’m a tanner. Rain or shine, there’s work.”

  My mother eased back into her chair. The corners of her mouth hinted at a smile. My father was enjoying himself, I could almost hear her think. He was content to be with us. The boys were all behaving themselves. They chewed with their mouths closed and their gazes fixed on Samuel, a stranger to our table. Even Zeb had settled down, busy with the mashed bites of boiled potatoes I fed him. My father went on to tell Samuel about the hides he’d gotten from a trader in Panguitch. After that Ash, my older half brother, laid out his plans to move to Springdale in a month’s time. “Brother Brigham called upon me to start a tannery there,” Ash said. Above his beard, his cheeks flushed red, showing his pleasure at being chosen by the Prophet Young.

  “The people there will be glad to have you,” Samuel said. “Springdale’s a fine settlement and the Virgin River runs fast even during the summer. You’ll do well there.”

  “He surely will,” my father said. “He’s a fine tanner like Paul. That’s my oldest son. His tannery’s up in Provo. Brother Brigham called him there a year back.” My father’s eyes were bright with pride. “What about you?” he said to Samuel. “Have the apostles called upon you to settle down and set up a wheelwright shop? Help build a new town for the Saints?”

  For a moment, Samuel’s gray eyes darkened. Then he shook his head and his eyes cleared. “I’m not sure that’s in me, Brother Daniel, staying in one place.”

  My father’s eyebrows raised. A restless man, I could almost hear him thinking about Samuel.

  Samuel said, “I like seeing how the land can change in a day’s travel, how in the morning I can be in the mountains but by the end of the day I’m in the desert. But it’s the in-between places I like seeing most of all.”

  “In-between places?” my father said.

  “Sounds foolish, I know. But it’s where junipers give way to aspens, or where the rocky ground shifts into black soil. I’m always on the lookout for the exact place where the mountains ease into hills and where those hills slide into low swells.” He paused, then said, “In-between places.”

  This was when I knew Samuel was different. He hadn’t answered my father’s question about being called by the church but had talked around it. My father might have noticed but didn’t ask again. The talk went back to Ash’s move to Springdale and how he planned to help build a wardhouse as soon as the four walls of his tannery were in place. Samuel nodded and said that was a solid plan. Not once, though, did he say anything about doing work for the church. Neither did he say anything against church work.

  Supper ended. While Samuel thanked my mother and father for the good cooking and fellowship, I put Zeb on the floor and told Grace to mind him so I could get Samuel’s coat. He shook Ash’s hand, and he shook all the boys’ hands. This made the older boys stand tall while the younger ones’ mouths formed small circles. It pleased them that Samuel treated them like grown men. I held out Samuel’s coat to him and by then there was a clamor around us. Seventeen-year-old Saul said he wanted to show Samuel a fishing hole at the creek. The younger boys said they wanted to go too, even if there was still snow on the ground. Their voices climbed over each others’, loud and some of them high-pitched. Through it all, Samuel grinned. Still holding his coat, I stepped closer to him and in a low voice said, “You’ve caused a stir.”

  “The notion of fishing can do that.” His voice was as low as mine.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s what you said about in-between places. You’ve given me something to think about.”

  “I have?”

  “You have.”

  Samuel looked at me like he’d not really noticed me before.

  My mother clapped her hands once and told the boys to hush, they’d forgotten their manners. The clamor around us settled but the younger boys gave each other little pushes, the floorboards squeaking as they jostled. Samuel nodded at me, his eyes steady, and when he took his coat from me, our hands touched. In that moment, there was no one else in the room but Samuel.

  The next day he asked my father for permission to call on me. My father approved. He told me Samuel was a good man and it was time for him to settle down. “He’ll make a fine church elder. All he needs is a steady hand to guide him.”

  Samuel lingered in Parowan and during our four-week courtship, spring overtook winter. The sun’s gathering warmth melted the snow, the frozen ground turned muddy, and the linden trees budded. Samuel walked me home after Sunday church services and called on me two evenings a week. I was light with happiness when I was with him. We sat on the parlor love seat, our knees turned toward one another but with Grace usually sitting between us. If she wasn’t there, I’d put my left hand flat on the love-seat cushion and he’d put his right hand beside mine, the sides of our hands touching until my brothers came into the parlor. They had fossils to show Samuel. Samuel obliged them by running his forefinger over the creatures outlined in the rocks. “From ancient times,” he’d tell the boys. “Don’t you wonder what color they were when they were alive? And what they ate and where they nested?” That’d set the boys off, guessing about such things. Grace did, too, if my mother hadn’t already called her to bed. Just when I thought I’d been forgotten, he’d turn to me and wink as if we shared a great secret.

  Those winks made me laugh.

  “I like shaping wood into spokes,” Samuel once said while we walked the three blocks home from church. My family was on all sides of us, Sister Caroline and her four children, too. “There’s something about working with wood, it’s hard to explain. It’s the grain, I guess you could say. It tells me the wood knew another life before it was cut.”

  “Like the leather I use to make gloves,” I said.

  “You’re a glovemaker?”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I’d call myself that.” I paused and considered the word. “But I suppose I am. My gloves are sold in the store here in town. Paul, my brother who’s in Provo now, he taught me how to measure hands and stitch leather. I like the work. It quiets my mind.”

  Samuel stopped walking, I did, too. We turned toward each other, an arm’s length between us. Saul and another one of my brothers, Jothan, weren’t far behind us. Samuel said, “And that matters to you, a quiet mind?”

  I smiled. “I live with seven brothers.”

  “And you’re still standing to tell the tale.”

  That made me laugh, too.

  Now, alone in our bedroom, I held the black rock that Samuel called a wonderment. I studied the map that I had asked Nels to draw for me so I could trace Samuel’s path home. I wanted to hear Samuel’s voice. I wanted his embrace. I wanted to stop waiting.

  Carrying the rock, I left the bedroom and stood before the parlor clock. The pendulum swung from side to side. It was a few minutes before ten.

  Nels and the man might be at Floral Ranch by now. Or almost there. The deputies could still be on the far side of the Wastelands, unable to find the snow-covered trail.

  I placed the rock back on the dresser, put my shawl on, and went outside. I wrapped my arms around myself and breathed in the cold. It had started to spit snow. I studied the land, looking for the fox but not seeing it. Maybe I’d imagined it earlier. Nerves were known to do such things. I pulled my shawl tighter around me. No signs of the deputies. Not yet.

  On the other side of the plum orchard, Grace was ho
me with three-year-old Hyrum. Michael and the two older boys were at the schoolhouse. Today was Thursday and like always on Thursdays, Grace would be baking. I should do the same.

  I went inside and hung up my shawl. The minute hand on the clock had barely moved. Once Nels delivered the man to the family at Floral Ranch, I believed he’d stay long enough only to water his horse. He’d want to get back before the deputies got here. We all needed to be going about our business as if this were an ordinary day. The family who owned the ranch—I didn’t know their names and didn’t want to—would surely want Nels gone, too. They’d want to get the man hidden. It wouldn’t go easy for them if they were caught hiding a man charged with a felony.

  A thin layer of frost covered the inside lower half of the kitchen windowpane. I scraped the pane clean with my thumbnail. Snow was coming down harder. Good, I thought. It’d slow the lawmen. It’d slow Nels too but he knew the landmarks and the shape of the land.

  Jacob, Grace’s oldest, was in sore need of new gloves and if I could, I’d sit myself down and make him a new pair. Doing so would settle my mind but I’d run out of leather and dark-colored thread a month ago. All of us in Junction were running low on supplies. When Samuel left in September, we’d given him our lists of what we needed him to buy: bolts of fabric, buttons, shoelaces, metal nails, a new map for the schoolhouse, kerosene, sacks of flour, and bottles of molasses. As he did every year, he’d bargain for the best prices as he traveled from town to town.

  I left the window and went to the parlor. A quarter past ten. Surely Nels had delivered the man to Floral Ranch and was on his way home.

  Stay busy, I told myself. Do something. It was Thursday. Baking day. In the kitchen, I heated water on the stove and got my large bowl from the shelf, then the jars of yeast and salt, the bottle of molasses, and the small sack of flour.

  I measured each ingredient with care. The closest town on the far side of the Wastelands was Thurber and prices were dear at the small general store there. Eight days after Samuel was due to return but hadn’t, a neighbor, Len Hall, told me he’d make the twenty-five-mile trip to Thurber for supplies the families of Junction could not do without.

  “There’s no need,” I’d told Len. “Samuel’ll be home any time.”

  This was before I knew about the rockslide.

  It was the flour and salt that Len bought in Thurber that I used now. My hands did the work, heating water, measuring the yeast and adding the molasses, then the flour and salt. Kneading the dough over and over, I watched the snow out my window slacken, then start up again. January, I thought, my back aching from the work and from pulling the sled earlier. What had the man done that the deputies couldn’t wait until spring?

  Maybe it wasn’t what the man had done. The government might have come up with a new reason to go after Saints. That was what gentiles did. Before Saints came to the Great Salt Lake, we settled in Illinois and Missouri. The gentiles there thought Joseph Smith was a madman, and the Book of Mormon was the work of a false prophet. They said we were like swarms of locusts. They burned our churches and they burned our crops and homes. Then, thinking it would put an end to us, they killed Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum.

  I patted the dough in a bowl to let it rise, covered it with ­cheesecloth, and rinsed my hands. The clock’s tick drummed a slow but steady beat. Twenty minutes past eleven. The deputies couldn’t get here before late afternoon. Surely Nels was on his way home.

  Unless the snow was deeper at Floral Ranch than it was here.

  Snow was what held Samuel back, I told myself. The rockslide forced him to come through the mountains so high the air was said to be thin. The snow was bound to be far deeper than here on the floor of a canyon.

  I dried my hands on my apron and studied the map that Nels had drawn for me. I traced the trail through the mountain pass in the Fish Lakes with my forefinger. Heavenly Father, I prayed. Watch over Samuel. Deliver him home.

  Today was the twelfth. Nels said Samuel would be here by the second week of January. That was this week. But it was only Thursday. He could come home today. Or tomorrow. Or Saturday or Sunday.

  I put my shawl and gloves on, and went outside to get firewood that I kept stacked against the front of the cabin. I looked through the falling snow for the fox. There weren’t any signs it had ever been here.

  On the other side of the orchard, more than likely Grace was in her corner kitchen. A woman with a husband and three boys was never far from the kitchen. Although her belly had begun to swell with the baby she expected in April, Grace was so thin her shoulder blades showed through the back of the dress. Her sleeves might be rolled to her elbows as she scrubbed bread pans, her yellow hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. Hyrum might be on the floor building a fort with his wood blocks.

  At the schoolhouse, Jacob, Joe, and their classmates could be fidgeting at their desks. Their bellies might rumble as they wait for Michael to take his pocket watch from his vest, tell them they may put their lessons away, it was time to go home for the noon meal. The children who lived too far stayed at the school and ate the food their mothers packed for them this morning. The mothers, my neighbors, were probably in their cabins cooking, stirring pots of stew or warming slices of ham. Their faces were red from the heat of the cookstoves and small children might clutch and pull at their skirts. Husbands and older sons would soon stop their chores and go home to noon dinner.

  None of them knew trouble was coming.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DEBORAH – THE ARRIVAL

  January 12, 1888

  One o’clock. Nels should be back by four. At the latest. In the distance, the school bell rang. The noon meal was over and it was time for the pupils to return to school. It was a call to me, too. Since Grace and Michael’s move to Junction last October, it was my custom to go to their cabin at this time. Hyrum was the only child home during school hours and that made for less commotion. It usually didn’t take much for me to convince Grace to get off her feet while I washed the dishes and tidied the cabin.

  Today, I wanted to stay home and keep watch for the deputies. Grace, though, would find it peculiar if I didn’t visit her.

  The deputies were hours away, I told myself. It might even be tomorrow. There was plenty of time. I left home and walked through the plum orchard toward Grace’s cabin. It was still snowing and had already filled the irrigation ditches that ran along the rows of trees. In places where the ground wasn’t sheltered by the dense bare branches of the trees, it looked to be some eight inches deep.

  The tracks I’d shuffled over this morning were filling in. Just like the tracks made by Nels and the man would be. This snow would slow them getting to Floral Ranch but the deputies weren’t traveling any faster. Nels would get back home long before the deputies arrived.

  Close to Grace’s now, I looked across the creek toward Nels’. No smoke. The fire I’d made this morning in his cookstove had gone out. I looked behind me and toward the Wastelands like I might see the deputies coming. No one was there.

  Put it out of your mind, I told myself. Don’t let Grace see that anything was wrong.

  At her cabin, I knocked on the door. “It’s me,” I called.

  “Sister,” Grace said when she opened the door. I was barely inside when three-year-old Hyrum flung his arms around my legs. He buried his face into my coat that was cold and damp with snow.

  “Who’s this?” I said, my gloved hands patting the top of his head. It took all I had to work up a smile and make my voice normal. I looked at Grace. My smile faded. She was pale and the circles under her eyes were darker than they’d been yesterday.

  Hyrum burrowed against me. I said, “This can’t be Hyrum. Why, this boy’s too big. It must be Joe. Or now that I think about it, this must be Billy Cookson.”

  This was one of the games he and I played. I’d mistake him for one of his brothers or for one of the older neighbor boys. Like he always did, Hyrum let go of me, put his head back and looked up at me. His smi
le was stretched wide across his freckled face. His blue eyes sparkled.

  “It’s me,” he said, his voice pitched high with excitement. “I’m Hyrum!”

  I studied his face like I wasn’t sure. After a moment, I shook my head with wonder. “So it is.”

  It could be any other day. Grace fussed at Hyrum telling him to give me room while I took off my coat. As usual, the dishes from noon dinner were still on the kitchen table. Dirty pots and pans were on the cookstove and counter. The cabin, only a few feet wider than mine, smelled of bread. Two loaves cooled on the kitchen counter.

  I hung up my coat and when I turned around, Grace surprised me by pulling me to her. “Deborah,” she said, close to my ear.

  What’s this? I thought but didn’t say. I put my arms around her like I’d done so many times when she was a little girl. I was twelve when she was born and our mother looked to me to help raise her. Now, as Grace leaned in to me, I felt her swollen belly. Her fourth child in seven years. Her arms still around me, I rubbed Grace’s back. The points of her backbone were sharp beneath my fingertips.

  “Deborah,” she said, the word now sounding like a plea. Her arms tightened around me.

  She knew about the man, I thought. She’d seen him. Or she’d seen me pulling the toboggan to and from Nels’.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. I had to ask. We both expected me to even though I dreaded the answer.

  “Nothing,” she said. Grace let go of me and began to clear the table. She turned her face away but not before I saw the weariness in her eyes. Even her yellow hair looked worn out. Strands had come loose from the knot tied at the nape of her neck and fell around the sides of her face.

  She knew, I thought.

  “Hyrum,” I said, forcing my voice to be cheerful. “You ready to go outside for a spell?”

  He gave a little jump. “I’m going to build a fort. A big one.”

  “Well then, let’s get you ready. Grace, don’t touch those dishes. Those are mine to do. Now, get off your feet. You hear me?”