The Glovemaker

by Ann Weisgarber

  She leaned forward again. “He’s a marshal, not a deputy,” she said. “Federal marshals don’t come after outlaws, their deputies do that. Until now. Doesn’t this strike you as peculiar?”

  “Some.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s enough.”

  “But you’ve thought about it?”

  “Yes.” Then, “It’s not worth worrying about.”

  Doubt showed in Deborah’s eyes. She ran the fingertips of her right hand along the edge of the table in front of her. “Braden,” she mouthed the word, “told me two or three people were following him. If that’s so, where are they?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did. Something must have slowed them down or maybe they split up for some reason. But they’ll show up. We have to figure on that.”

  “It’s January.”

  That was all she said but I knew what was under those words. Whatever Braden had done, it must have been bad to bring out a marshal in the winter.

  Deborah flicked away some food crumbs from the table. I could tell she had more questions. Any other time, she wouldn’t brush crumbs onto the floor. She was trying to make sense of the scrape we were in. I wished she’d stop.

  She whispered, “I thought Frank Dyer was Utah’s marshal.”

  Deborah was stepping on thin ice. I had to tell more lies. I said, “I thought so too. Looks like he—” I nodded toward the bed—“took over the job.”

  “He’s from Tennessee.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes. When he first got here. Him being from Tennessee made me think of the gentiles that killed Saints at Cane Creek.”

  “That was three years ago. What’s happening now has nothing to do with that.” Other than Tennesseans did their best to run off Saints. Other than Braden and three other elders went back to preach and managed to convert a marshal’s daughter.

  Deborah said, “You think he was at Cane Creek?”

  “It’s not likely.”

  “When he searched my cabin, he brought up Mountain Meadows.”

  I bit back a cuss word.

  “He said he knew what went on there, that we lied about how those people came to be killed. He said lying comes easy to us. He said it’s not his way to hurt women and children. Not like how we did at Mountain Meadows.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with you.” Anger made my voice rise. I glanced at the marshal. If he’d heard me, it didn’t show. His breathing rasped like before. I steadied myself and said, “He was trying to unsettle you, get you to talk.”

  “It went deeper than that. It was how he threw it at me, used it to show I come from bad blood. The way he said it, it was like it happened yesterday. Not thirty years ago.”

  “Gentiles have long memories.”

  “He might have had family there.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s best not to speculate.”

  “I know. But I can’t help but question why he talked about it.”

  “He’s like most gentiles. It’s one more thing against us.” And now his daughter had bound herself to people accused of murdering one hundred and twenty gentiles. It was reason enough for him to track Braden in January. He wanted to get his daughter away from us.

  Deborah said, “I was six when it happened. We lived in Parowan. I remember—”

  “Don’t.” I inclined my head toward the marshal letting her know nothing about Mountain Meadows should be said out loud.

  Deborah bit her lower lip. Then she said, “Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been a hard day.”

  “Tomorrow’s apt to be harder.”

  The truth of her words weighed heavy. We didn’t know how matters would stand this time tomorrow. If I was arrested, I’d be taken from Junction. I might never see her again.

  The thought pierced me. I felt an overpowering need to slide my hand across the table to where Deborah’s right hand rested.

  Her eyes widened. An odd mix of puzzlement and surprise crossed over her face. She gave her head a small shake, then backed her chair away, and stood up. Not looking at me, she cupped her elbows in her hands. Her gold wedding band glinted in the lamplight. She turned away and went to the marshal.

  My face heated with shame. She knew I wanted to touch her.

  Deborah stood over the marshal. There, she patted the wrapped pack of snow pressed to the back of his head. She said something to him. Her voice was too low for me to make out the words.

  Finally, she turned toward me. I couldn’t look at her. Deborah came back to the table. “Your dishes,” she said, breaking the quiet. She picked up my empty plate with the fork on it. The fork rattled. She drew in some air and said, “Bad as tomorrow might be, I won’t have it said that dirty dishes were left on your table.”

  I forced a smile. She hadn’t read my thoughts, I told myself. She was thinking about tomorrow and what might happen. She didn’t know I’d almost taken her hand. I’d covered such yearnings for years. I was good at it.

  Deborah put the dishes in the basin and poured water that had been warming on the cookstove over them. Her back to where I sat, she began to do the washing.

  Water sloshed in the basin. She didn’t know, I said again to myself. And she never would. Some matters were best kept buried. But that didn’t mean they were forgotten. Or that they didn’t lay close to the surface.

  Like Mountain Meadows. Saints didn’t speak about what happened there. People remembered though. The marshal had. Something made him talk about it.

  I fastened my thoughts on that instead of on Deborah. I made myself think about how the marshal was from Tennessee and how the people killed at Mountain Meadows were from Arkansas. I conjured up the image of the map of the United States that hung in the schoolhouse and pieced together the states. Tennessee bordered Arkansas.

  The marshal might have a tie to the people killed. He didn’t look to be much older than me. He’d remember Mountain Meadows and maybe some of the people who had been there.

  I was eleven when it happened. Samuel was twelve. At that time, Brigham Young aimed to populate southern Utah with Saints. Our families were new to the Territory. My father had been married to Samuel’s mother just a handful of days. Brigham Young directed my father to settle in Cedar City far to the south of Salt Lake City. It pleased my father and our mothers to be called to do Saints’ work for the church.

  We’d been in Cedar City a few weeks when we got word about a massacre. A wagon party of gentiles camped not too far away from town had been killed by Indians. A hundred and twenty dead, we heard. Seventeen children were spared. They were all six years old or younger. The mysterious ways of God, people said.

  The children were taken in by families in Cedar City. Not knowing much about Indians, Samuel and I took up going to the houses where these children were kept. At the first house we went to, we told the woman who lived there we wanted to talk to the two little boys she was looking after.

  “How’d they get away from the Indians?” Samuel said to her. She’d cracked open the door just a few inches. I tried to look inside to find the boys but I couldn’t see past her. Samuel said, “That’s what me and Nels here want to ask them. How’d they fight off the Indians?”

  “So we’ll know what to do,” I said. “If Indians come after us.”

  “Boys,” the woman said. Her voice was crisp. “Go home. Let them be. They’ve suffered enough.”

  “Were they scalped?” Samuel said.

  She closed the door. We went to the houses where the other children were. The women didn’t let us inside. They told us to go home.

  That night Samuel and I got a whipping and a warning from my father. “Those children aren’t your business,” he said. “We don’t know nothing about them. Or what happened. Understand? Nothing.”

  The whipping and warning didn’t do much good. We were boys, we had good ears. The first Sunday after the massacre, the Cedar City men congregated b
y the wagons and horses following church services. Samuel and I drifted nearby but not too close. We crouched low and ran our hands over the ground like we were looking for arrowheads.

  “They’re saying white men, Saints, did the killings,” we heard a man said. “Not Indians.”

  “Who’s saying that?” another man said.

  Samuel and I edged a little closer. The first man said, “The survivors. The ones spared.”

  “They’re children,” another man said. “They don’t know what they saw. I’m telling you it was the Paiutes.”

  “Doesn’t much matter who did the killing,” someone else said. “The men in the wagon party were drunk and vile as the devil. They bragged how they helped killed the Prophet Joseph Smith. An eye for an eye, that’s how I see it. They had it coming.”

  Samuel and I looked at each other. His eyebrows were shot high.

  Weeks passed. After Sunday services and Wednesday night wardhouse social gatherings, Samuel and I made ourselves small and strained our ears to listen to the men. We heard that in Arkansas, where the wagon party was from, relatives of the dead demanded to know what happened. So did some Saints. Not able to square their consciences with the church’s account of the massacre, hundreds of Saints turned traitor and left Utah. They spread the word that seventeen children had survived. Relatives of the wagon party clamored to know who the children were and where they were. Saints who wanted to stay in good standing with the church kept their mouths shut.

  The federal government sent the army. They claimed Brigham Young had too much power. Their aim was to invade Salt Lake City. Saints formed their own army. My father didn’t join, he wanted nothing to do with killing. “I have Swedish blood in my veins,” he said. “Never will I join an army. Not even for Brigham Young.” At night, up in the loft where Samuel and I slept, we plotted. “Let’s you and me go to Salt Lake,” Samuel whispered. “Watch the fighting.” Before we could, a blizzard slowed the U.S. army. Tempers simmered down.

  That wasn’t the end of Mountain Meadows. Relatives of the dead wanted the truth. The federal government sent men to investigate. Whenever the men of Cedar City knotted in tight groups, Samuel and I crept close by. Some Saints, we heard, had admitted to investigators they’d been at the massacre. “To stop the Indians,” they said. “To help the wagon party but we were outnumbered by the Paiutes.”

  That answer didn’t sit well with gentiles. Investigators asked, “Then how were you able to claim the cattle and trunks of clothes that belonged to the dead?”

  “We wrestled them away from the Paiutes.”

  “Isn’t it true that Brigham Young ordered the massacre?”

  “No. He didn’t know anything about it.”

  “You’re lying. None of you in Utah Territory, the Indians too, can take a leak without asking his permission.”

  “He didn’t know,” witness after witness said.

  No one was arrested.

  A year and a half after the massacre, the U.S. army rounded up the children and took them back to Arkansas where they’d come from. “That’s the end of it,” my father announced one night at dinner. “They’ll leave us alone now.”

  He was wrong. Those children talked once they were back in Arkansas. White men, they said, killed their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

  There were more investigations. Witness accounts crisscrossed. Like before, no one was arrested.

  “No more talk about Mountain Meadows,” my father ordered. “Not in my house.” Figuring it would put the past behind us, when school let out for the day, my father worked Samuel and me hard, teaching us carpentry. Still, the massacre pestered my mind.

  I was maybe fourteen and Samuel was fifteen when we were alone in my father’s carpentry shed. An old man had died and we were sanding boards for the coffin. Doing that must have stirred up something inside of me. Before I knew it, I was telling Samuel I wanted to believe that Paiutes had done all the killing but couldn’t.

  “It doesn’t stack up,” I said. “Not when you take it piece by piece.”

  “What doesn’t?” Samuel kept sanding the board he was working on. I’d stopped.

  I said, “For starters, the dead were left to rot where they’d been killed. They were gentiles but we’re supposed to be better than them. We should have given them Christian burials.”

  Samuel ran the sandpaper back and forth over a board. The scrape was raw and grinding. The quick look he gave me told me he was listening. I said, “And those children, the ones that survived. Remember how they were shut away from the rest of us? Then when their kin wanted them back, the church elders said the Indians had them. The elders said they had to send out search parties to find them. Once they found them, the elders had to work out deals with the Indians to get them back. That’s a lie. You and I both know it. Those children were brought here right after the massacre.”

  Samuel stopped sanding. He glanced around the shed like somebody might hear.

  I said, “It doesn’t stack up.”

  “Which part doesn’t? The part that maybe some Saints killed women and children? Or that the church is working hard to kick dirt on the truth?”

  It took twenty years to pin the blame on someone. John D. Lee, a Saint, was judged and shot dead by a firing squad for killing the wagon party. That didn’t add up either. It was Samuel who put words to it. He and I were grown men by that time.

  “One man killed a hundred and twenty people?” Samuel had said. “And some of those people armed with rifles? Lee couldn’t be the only one, there were others. There had to be.”

  I’d thought the same. Samuel putting words to it made me feel less alone with my thoughts. I said, “Nothing adds up. John D. Lee was Brigham Young’s adopted son. I can’t see Lee doing anything without Young knowing about it.”

  Samuel nodded his agreement.

  Water under the dam, Samuel’s mother would claim. That was how she talked about the past. The massacre was a long time ago. She, my mother, and my father made like none of it mattered. It could be that if they thought about it too much, they’d have doubts about Brigham Young. They’d followed him to Utah Territory. They looked to him for guidance. If they thought he had a hand in the massacre, they’d be shook to the bone.

  Not talking about it, though, didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. It didn’t mean the relatives of the dead had forgotten. It could make them hate us more than most. Some might still want revenge. The marshal might be one of those.

  Deborah finished washing my dinner dishes. She shook the water from her hands and dried them on her apron. In the lamplight, her brown hair glinted with red. She turned and looked at me. “Brother Nels,” she said.

  Something in her tone made me want to get up and go outside. I didn’t know what she was about to say. Or what I would.

  Deborah sat down at the table. She looked over her shoulder toward the marshal. He was a dark shape in the shadows. His breathing wheezed. She turned back to me and said, “You’re not telling me everything. You know more than you’re saying.”

  I shook my head.

  “It shows on your face. It’s in your eyes. I’m pressing you. I shouldn’t, it’s not how we do but this time I need to know. There’s more to this than polygamy. Isn’t there?”

  “No. There isn’t.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. She didn’t believe me. She kept studying my face. Silence stretched between us. I’d said all I was going to say.

  The marshal coughed. It was watery. He coughed again, harder. He shook from it. “He wants me by him,” Deborah said.

  So did I.

  It wasn’t too long after that when Sally sprang to her feet, barking. There was a commotion outside. It was a man, shouting. Sally, at the door, kept on, her barks deep-throated. Deborah, sitting at the marshal’s bedside, stood. Her eyes were wide with alarm. I went to the door telling Sally to quit her barking. She didn’t pay me any mind.

  More shouting. I glanced at Deborah. I read the l
ook she gave me. The deputies. Then I was thinking it could be Braden. He might have changed his mind. He came back to turn himself in.

  “Brother Nels,” a man called through the door. “Are you there?”

  A neighbor. Braden didn’t know my name.

  In a rush Deborah was beside me. “It’s Michael,” she said, whispering. “Don’t let him in. He can’t see the marshal.”

  “Brother Nels,” Michael shouted from the other side of the door. “Sister Deborah’s missing.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Oh no.”

  Sally kept barking. Michael kept calling through the door. I cussed under my breath. Everything that could go wrong, had.

  Deborah pulled me away from the door. She said, “We can’t let him in. He can’t see the marshal. When the others come, if Michael knows, it’ll show on his face. He’s not good at covering his thoughts.”

  Outside, Michael pounded on the door. The marshal’s breathing shuddered, stopping and starting. His right eye was open.

  I said, “I have to talk to him before he wakes all of Junction looking for you.”

  “Don’t let him in.”

  I took hold of Sally’s collar. “Quiet,” I said to her. Then to Deborah, “I’ll talk to him outside.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NELS – THE NEIGHBORS

  January 12, 1888

  Michael was worked up. He twitched with nerves. We stood with our backs close to the cabin to keep out of the falling snow. “It’s Sister Deborah,” he said. “Something’s wrong, she’s not home.” His words came at me in a fast run. “No lights at the windows, no smoke from the cookstove. I went in. It’s cold as a cave. I looked in the barn. The cow hasn’t been milked. We have to look for her. Something’s happened.”

  “She’s here,” I said. I had to say it. Otherwise, he’d keep looking for her.

  “Here?”

  “There’s been an accident.” I had to say that, too. I couldn’t have him think the worst of her and me. “I went and got Sister Deborah to help.”

  “An accident? What happened? Someone’s hurt? Who?”