“What a lovely surprise! Come in, girls; come in.”
Rachel paused over the threshold to bend and receive a welcoming kiss, and when my turn came, I followed suit. Her lips were dry and rough against my cheek, and I couldn’t ignore a distinctive sourness about her as I bent closer.
We walked into a modest front room, curtains drawn against the winter sunlight. A threadbare sofa and two wooden chairs anchored a worn rug. A small porcelain dog sat on the mantel above a small, dark fireplace.
“Goodness, Eve,” Rachel said, “it’s as cold in here as it is outside.”
“I lit a fire this morning. It’s just burned out.”
“Well, would you light the stove?” She headed into the kitchen. I automatically followed. “I’d like to put some water on.”
“No, Rachel.” Evangeline sounded like a woman on the brink of losing control in her own home. “I need to be frugal—”
“I’ll send Tillman over tomorrow with some wood,” Rachel said over her shoulder. Without missing a step, she strolled into the kitchen and instructed me to set the basket on the table. This room had a little more cheer, with a bright rag rug and a collection of blue glass bottles lining the windowsill. Making herself at home, Rachel began to put away the contents of the basket, placing the loaves of bread on the shelves of the empty pie safe and stacking the jars of pickles and preserves on the shelf above it.
“Thank you so much,” Evangeline said, giving tiny adjustments to each item after Rachel put it away. “I wasn’t sure I’d be up to baking this week.”
I looked around the meager kitchen and wondered if she had the ingredients to make even a single loaf of bread. The hunger in her eyes and the gauntness of her cheeks fueled my doubt, but I said, “How nice, now, that you won’t have to.”
“Oh, Camilla,” Evangeline said, newly noticing that I’d walked into the room. “I haven’t seen you since the baby. How are you?”
She held out open, thin arms to me, and what could I do but walk into her fragile embrace. Her hair scratched at my neck, and her voice rasped words of comfort. As I looked over her shoulder, I saw Rachel rummaging through the basket once more, which puzzled me, because we’d already put away everything we’d packed. Then I saw that she wasn’t going through the basket itself but was reaching under the large square of linen that lined the bottom. From there she pulled a small, flat box I didn’t remember packing.
“What is that?” I asked once I’d been released from Evangeline’s clumsy embrace.
“Evangeline doesn’t approve,” Rachel said, squinching her nose. “And for that matter, neither does my husband or the sister wives or just about anybody in this entire place.”
“Not to mention the prophet,” Evangeline said. “Or Heavenly Father.”
“And I say bother to all of them,” Rachel replied. She lifted a bundle of linen out of the basket and unwrapped it to reveal a small copper kettle, and then I knew what was in the mysterious flat box.
“Tea!”
“Shhh.” Rachel and Evangeline both held their fingers to their lips, though for Rachel, at least, the warning was in jest.
“You know it’s forbidden.” Evangeline crossed her spindly arms.
“Forbidden, pshaw. It’s discouraged, if anything. Looks like somebody needs to go back and read her Word of Wisdom.”
“You know very well I’ve studied the Doctrine and Covenants as much as anybody. I know exactly what it says: ‘Hot drinks are not for the body or belly.’”
“Oh, spare us the sermon, Evangeline.”
Throughout the conversation, Rachel continued her preparations—lighting the stove, pouring water from the pewter jug into the copper pot—a scene both achingly familiar and strange. I hadn’t touched tea or coffee since leaving home. At first I thought it was merely a case of rationing on the trail, but when we arrived, when we had our home and the means to stock a pantry and kitchen, Nathan wouldn’t have it in the house. Now Rachel reached up to the top shelf in the cupboard and took down a single cup. After a brief hesitation, she reached down a second, dangling it by its handle and looking at me questioningly. Without thinking, I nodded, already anticipating the comfort of feeling the warm cup in my hand.
“Disgraceful,” Evangeline said, pulling out a chair and dropping herself into it.
“I brought sugar.” Rachel produced a small paper packet. “But no milk. Can you spare us a little milk, Sister Evangeline?”
“I notice you’re not brazen enough to do this in your own house. You come sneaking into mine.”
“Tillman wouldn’t have it. And those others—”
“Oh! I get so tired of listening to you complain about your life, Rachel. Why, if I had—”
“Stop it, both of you.” The stove was just beginning to warm up the room, and I couldn’t bear the coldness of their snapping. “Can’t we just enjoy an afternoon together? with friends? Don’t you see what a luxury that is?”
Evangeline looked down, pouting, and Rachel continued spooning tea.
I sat in the chair opposite Evangeline and reached across the table to touch her hand. My fingers could have encircled both of her wrists at once. “I remember once, not long before I met both of you, spending an afternoon with my mother, drinking tea and reading the Bible. I remember feeling so grown-up. So much like a lady, I . . .” Words lodged in my throat as I forced down the memory. It seemed cruel to force such an image on Rachel, who had never known a mother, and Evangeline, who had never tasted such a ritual. But most of all, it seemed cruel to me, to think about how I’d walked away from that life and wandered into this one that was beginning to twist my soul.
“When I was in the orphanage,” Rachel said, joining us, “once the girls turned twelve, we would get to have tea with one of our teachers every other Saturday afternoon. My poor brother was already out living on the streets, working where he could, and there I was, sipping hot tea in a parlor. I told him about it once when he came to visit. I cried and cried, feeling so guilty. But do you know what he told me?”
“What?” I asked, curious. By now there was little I didn’t know of Nathan’s childhood.
“He told me that when I grew up, I’d have a china tea set and a parlor and I’d have tea with my lady friends every day.”
“And think how empty that life would be,” Evangeline said.
“Don’t say that.” The lump in my throat dislodged, allowing me to jump to Rachel’s defense.
“I just meant—” she turned to Rachel—“that was before. If you had achieved that, you wouldn’t know the revelations of the prophet. You might have some temporal comfort, but what about your eternity?”
“I refuse to see the connection,” Rachel said, and her tone ended the argument.
By then the water was boiling, and she busied herself getting the tea to steep, working with her back squarely to us. While the little kitchen grew warmer with the heat from the stove, it grew colder with silence. The next sound was that of tea being poured into a cup. And then another. Evangeline remained stony, her thin lips and brow equally furrowed. Rachel picked up her cup and formed her lips into a pretty O to cool the surface. I merely stared at mine for what seemed an eternity, watching the steam rise and dance above the rim. But a longing to taste it consumed me. I wrapped my hands around the cup, comforted by the heat, and bowed my head.
Surely, Lord, my soul means more to you than this.
Finally I lifted the cup to my lips and took a sip. It was hot—wonderfully so—and I did not let it linger on my tongue. Instead, I swallowed quickly, relishing that moment it balanced at the top of my throat before winding its way down, leaving a heated trail of bitterness tinged with sweet.
I must have sighed or made some sound of contentment, because Rachel sent me an indulgent smile and said, “Good, isn’t it?”
“You two make me sick,” Evangeline said, but I could tell her anger had softened.
“Do you know what would be nice?” I asked, overwhelmed with the memory of
the last time I’d had tea with my mother. “Let’s read a little Scripture together.”
Rachel rolled her eyes, but Evangeline declared it a fine idea and started to jump up from the table. I grabbed her hand, refreshed by how cool her skin felt against my palm. “Bring a Bible.”
“All right.” But she didn’t sound happy about it.
Once she’d left the room, I leaned close to Rachel and whispered, “Is this why you brought me here? To sneak a cup of tea?”
“Don’t be silly.” She took another dainty sip. “But it is delicious, isn’t it?”
It was, and I responded by taking another satisfying gulp. “Why are we here?”
“Are you happy with Nathan?”
“Of course I am.” But the question shocked me so, I sloshed my tea and had to set my cup down to slurp what I’d spilled on my hand.
“I want you to think about your home—your cozy little house with Nathan and the girls. Now look around you here.”
I didn’t have to. It struck me today just as it had every time I’d come to visit Evangeline. Her home always seemed so silent and bleak and gray. Bad enough back when her father had lain in the bedroom upstairs, incoherent after his stroke. How much more now that she lived here alone, squirreling away her fuel and waiting for the next charity basket to stock her pantry.
“What are you asking?”
“At least it would be somebody you know. Somebody you already love as a sister.”
The impact of what Rachel was suggesting burned more bitter than the tea. “I—I couldn’t.”
“Nobody’s ever going to marry her.” She spoke quickly, furtively, her eyes darting to the kitchen door.
“Why not? She’s young—”
Rachel snorted.
“What? She’s my age,” I said, though as I thought about having had three children—even with one of them buried—I felt anything but young. “And she’s such a Saint.” With that, I hoisted my cup of tea, making a toast.
“Too much, really. I think most men would consider her a threat to their spiritual authority. Face it—” she scooted closer—“she’s going to live alone, die alone, and then get married by proxy to some old coot trying to increase his eternal family.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Don’t believe what?” My back was to the kitchen door, so I hadn’t seen or heard Evangeline’s approach.
“Same old argument,” Rachel said, surprising me with the ease of her lie. “To tea or not to tea.”
I giggled despite myself and was relieved to see that Evangeline smiled too. She slipped back into her chair and slid a worn leather-covered Bible across the table. “Here, you read, Camilla.”
I tried to block out Rachel’s insinuation, stalling for time as I took one more sip of my drink before setting my cup down and running my fingers across the delicate tooling on the cover. “It’s beautiful.”
“It was my father’s. From before he joined the church.”
I had no idea what to read, where to turn. We read from The Book of Mormon every night in our home—always Nathan, his voice filling our little sitting room, wrapping us up in sacred words. In truth, I must confess, there were nights I wasn’t sure which text he was reading from. Joseph Smith’s words seemed to be so carefully crafted to match those of Paul or Moses or David. But today, I would know.
“This is the Word of God,” I said, more to myself than to the others. “What do you want me to read?”
Rachel merely shrugged, but Evangeline drummed her fingers on the table, deep in thought.
“Shall I just flip open to a page?” I suggested.
“Something from the Psalms,” Evangeline said. “That’s all Papa ever wanted to hear when he was sick, and it would be nice to hear somebody else reading them for a change.”
“No,” Rachel said, pulling the Bible to her. “I’ll read.” She began immediately to thumb through the pages, backward and forward, until finally seeming satisfied. “‘Now it came to pass,’” she read, “‘in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land.’”
At first what she read was little more than a list of unfamiliar names—the very passages that so frustrated me as a child. But then, one came along that I recognized: Ruth.
And she continued on, about the death of Naomi’s husband and sons and these three women left alone. How Orpah returned to her people, but Ruth . . .
“‘. . . whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. . . .’”
The very same words Nathan had said to me one long-ago afternoon; rather, the words he had enticed me to say. At the time they’d seemed so romantic, so full of the promise of a life built together. Hearing them now, though, the romance was stripped away. These were the words spoken from one woman to another. Words of survival. A chill raced across me, and I looked to the nearly empty wood box next to Evangeline’s stove. Then I looked at Evangeline herself, her narrow, catlike eyes now wide as she took in the story of this woman given the chance at a new life with a man willing to take her into his home.
At points during the story, Rachel lifted one perfectly arched brow and looked at me over the book. By the time she came to the final verse, my tea had grown cold, half of it untouched in the cup.
“Such a beautiful story,” Evangeline said.
“Isn’t it?” Rachel closed the Bible carefully and slid it across the table. “What do you think, Camilla?”
I knew what she wanted me to say. Nathan had been her Naomi, arranging her marriage and securing her future. Now she wanted him to play the role of Boaz, giving shelter and a home to our own redheaded Ruth. But I steeled myself against such an appeal.
“Beautiful, indeed.” I gulped the rest of my now-cold tea and wiped a sleeve across my mouth in a most unladylike manner. “I should get back to the girls.”
If Evangeline wanted to have company for the rest of the afternoon, she made no show of it. Within minutes Rachel and I were escorted to her narrow front door, where we repeated the same ritual of hugs and quick, dry kisses with which we had greeted each other. This time, though, Evangeline held me a little tighter, and I, her.
“I’m going to be all right, Camilla,” she whispered in my ear. “There is a plan. We are all in the hands of Heavenly Father.”
“I know,” I said, but I knew then that her plan would never be my plan. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if her God was my God.
Chapter 15
My visit to Salt Lake City lasted three more days, most of which I spent in various charitable pursuits. Several of the families in Rachel’s ward were well-off and mindful of their responsibility to less-fortunate Saints. They put together housewarming kits to be presented to those families who would be arriving at the end of summer; many of their afternoons were spent piecing together quilts, cutting and hemming sheets and towels, or knitting socks and scarves. So many women in so many parlors, sometimes twenty of us in one room. Most of them were sister wives—some literally so, as they were sisters married to the same man. Children climbed in and around us. Daughters as young as twelve years old joined in both the task and the conversation. It occurred to me each day that I felt full and safe. Cushioned on all sides from loneliness and melancholy. Hours would fly by and I wouldn’t give a single thought to anything beyond the next amusing story or bit of gossip.
Rachel didn’t say another word about Evangeline becoming a second wife to Nathan, and neither did I. The matter sat between us like an uneasy, unspoken truce. It occurred to me after spending so much time in Rachel’s world that the subject of one man having multiple wives was hardly a topic worthy of any discussion. It was such common practice, we’d just as well discuss whether or not dogs should bark or birds should fly.
On the last night of my visit, after Tillman leaned through the door to give Rachel a swift peck on the cheek, I asked her if she still loved him.
“As much as I ever did.”
A
nd then another question—one that had been nagging at me since my arrival. “Does it bother you, then? to think of him sharing a bed with another woman?”
“Is that why you’re so reluctant to agree to Nathan taking a second wife? because of what will happen in bed? Tell me, Camilla, is the marriage bed the all-consuming center of your marriage?”
“Of course not.” I was glad of the dark room to hide my blush.
“A marriage is work. Building a home and building a family.”
“But if you knew—right from the start—that Tillman would take several different wives, would you still have married him?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“But if you did.”
“When my brother arranged this marriage for me, he was doing the best he knew to do. He found the strongest man of faith—”
“But if you knew what that faith meant, Rachel—what it would ask of you—would you . . . ?” I couldn’t go on because we both knew that I wasn’t asking about her marriage to Tillman anymore.
“Are you asking whether or not I would join the church?” Her voice dropped to a whisper so low, the sounds barely registered.
I nodded slowly, feeling my own fear spread within me. “I need to know—because lately . . . How do I explain?”
“Like an unsettling in your spirit.” She took my hands and together we knelt before the fire. “Like everything that Joseph Smith said is just—”
“Wrong.”
We finished the sentence together, but Rachel’s voice lilted up, asking a question, while I gave an emphatic statement. If I’d been hoping for a sympathetic ear—and the impromptu tea party the other day surely gave me such hope—I was sorely mistaken. I watched her beautiful face turn to steel before my eyes, her changing nature reminding me of Nathan, in no comforting way.
“No. Do you hear me?”
“But—”
“Do not speak blasphemy against this church, Camilla.”
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