by Alissa York
Heaven only knows what brought it on this time. Maybe the hog he butchered this morning with Kitty’s help. I watched her out my window clip-clomping across the yard to fetch him bucket after bucket from the well. She will be tending to him now comforting him any way she can.
Dorrie I have told you there are many beginnings. Here is another. Years ago your father did a terrible thing. Ten years to be exact. He did not act alone. Some fifty Saints from hereabouts took part and untold numbers of savages besides. But I run ahead of myself.
In the late summer of 1857 a Gentile wagon train bound for California struck a path through Zion taking the southern trail. The bulk of them hailed from Arkansas where our beloved Apostle Parley Pratt had so lately been cut down in cold blood and McClean his murderer allowed to roam free. What was more they had among their number several rough men of Missouri that state so infamous in the history of our Church. There were stories. At Corn Creek they had poisoned a spring or some dead cattle or both. Several Pahvant Indians and a young Saint had died. They had torn down fences and turned their stock onto our pastures. They had popped the heads off chickens with their whips. The Missouri men had harassed women and uttered threats from town to town. Some had bragged of taking part in the murders at Haun’s Mill. One had even gone so far as to claim he held the gun that shot Brother Joseph at the Carthage jail.
The Saints refused them trade. It was forbidden to provision the train in any way. By the time they had passed through Cedar and were pulling south to Pinto feelings were running high. Do not forget Dorrie at this time Deseret was under threat of invasion by the Americans. Our militia drilled daily. We expected at any moment the arrival of troops from both east and west.
The Gentile train carried on southwest along the California Trail and made camp at Mountain Meadows where lay the last good grass and water before the Mojave’s barren waste. They would rest there or so they thought. They never left. They were dispatched as are so many in this wild land by redskins. But also by Saints. Fifty or thereabouts as I have written the leaders among them men of high rank. I shall not take the chance of recording their names here but I believe in time they will be widely known. Truth will cut its own way. The Prophet’s words Dorrie. I have finally taken them to heart.
Mr. Burr did as he was ordered. As you know Dorrie we Saints are counselled to obey the word of our superiors in the Church. Those who ordered the killing had been placed in power by Brother Brigham and therefore by God. And yet my husband is haunted as no doubt are his fellow murderers. As am I. It is crime enough to have kept the secret but I have done more. I have absolved him. Night after night I quieted his conscience even as I muzzled my own. The Lord only knows how Kitty manages it. I suspect she must smother his guilt with her young flesh. Doubtless she believes him plagued by monsters that live nowhere but in his own slumbering mind. I know better and so my methods were more elaborate by far.
When he would wake from the dream that his mouth was overflowing with blood I would tip a cup of clear water to his lips. And when he had drunk his fill I would sing to him. Not lullabies as you might think but battle hymns.
In thy Mountain retreat God will strengthen thy feet
On the necks of thy foes thou shalt tread.
Or sometimes
Remember the wrongs of Missouri
Forget not the fate of Nauvoo.
When the God-hating foe is before you
Stand firm and be faithful and true.
Often he would fix on one aspect of the thing and make a litany of it. Such as how they made camp on the meadow after the killing and how all night long he could hear a spring close by gurgling like a severed throat. On such nights I would read to him. How I scoured all Scripture for the passages that would suit. Many of them I read out so often as to have them by heart. From Elder John Taylor’s statement recounting the slaying of the Prophet and his brother Hyrum I took this
And their innocent blood with all the innocent
blood of all the martyrs under the altar that
John saw will cry unto the Lord of Hosts till he
avenges that blood on the earth.
Or from the revelation given through Brother Joseph at Fishing River during the troubles in Missouri
Behold the destroyer I have sent forth to
destroy and lay waste mine enemies. And not
many years hence they shall not be left to pollute
mine heritage and to blaspheme my name
upon the lands which I have consecrated for
the gathering together of my Saints.
When he would bemoan having made a savage of himself by siding with the Indian horde I would remind him that our brown brothers are descended of the Twelve Tribes and are destined to rejoin the faithful so that we might rise up together in the final days. The revelation and prophecy on war became another favourite.
And it shall come to pass also that the remnants
who are left of the land will marshal
themselves and shall become exceedingly angry
and shall vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation.
Dorrie you see how I relied upon that which has been written but neither was I shy to invoke words I had heard spoken aloud. While Mr. Burr twisted in his sheets I bid him cast his mind back to the address Brother Haight delivered at Sunday Meeting in Cedar only days before the emigrants met their end. How he harrowed up feeling by recalling Haun’s Mill and all those who perished there. How he swore to feed the Gentiles the same bread they fed to us.
At length Mr. Burr came to know stretches of unbroken sleep. Sometimes for months on end. The thing lay dormant but did not die. It rose up in him when word got round that a schoolteacher in Cedar had been shot dead for asking too many questions about the fate of the train. He woke bellowing night after night. Then again during the winter flood of sixty-one when he imagined the unending rains to be proof of the Lord’s wrath. Remember wading out to the coop with me Dorrie? How the chickens squawked and splashed at least those that hadn’t been fool enough to drown. Remember how Mr. Burr kept his bed while we struggled rising only after the waters began to subside?
Through all of it I ministered to him. Did I believe what I was saying? Did any of it make a difference to what he had done? I did my best not to ask myself such questions. When my husband howled in our bed I did what I could to console him. We never spoke of it during daylight hours. After a time it only ever seemed true in the dark.
Still it troubled him that I knew. The plan was that the killing was to be laid entirely on the Indians. Those Saints present on the ground had been forbidden to speak of what happened. Even to their wives. Even among themselves. To do so would be counted treason against the Church a crime punishable by death. Here I counselled him too. Were not a man and his wife one flesh? Was it not my sworn duty to share his life’s burden? Was not a burden shared a burden halved?
I know now it is not. Not when that burden is knowledge of a great evil committed. I am become a vessel for his guilt. Look how I swell to contain it and still it will out.
Dorrie my hand fails me. I can write no more this night. From the next room come sounds of sobbing or love. I cannot say with certainty which.
All a mother’s love
Helen Burr
— 24 —
THE MEAT IS COLD, left over from last night’s roast. What’s more, there’s not enough of it on Lal’s plate. He cuts his mother a sullen look, but her eyes are fixed on Baby Joe, who’s sawing his own portion like a big boy. Her mouth is soft with pleasure. Lal looks away.
Reeling in his gaze, he lets it snag for a moment on Ruth. Her face, her lovely throat, rises from a great bulk of green fabric. He recognizes the dress as one resurrected from a previous confinement. An ugly, boxy thing, it houses rather than clothes her. He won’t see her again in the shift. Gulping, he glares down at his meagre share.
It was the briefest of looks—a mere flickering—but it hasn’t gone unnoticed. Thankful is staring at him. He ca
n feel her augering twin points in his forehead with her eyes.
“Sister Thankful.”
Lal flinches at the sound of his father’s voice. He glances up to find Thankful’s attention has shifted, husband and wife a closed couple now, alone at a table of twelve.
“Yes, Mr. Hammer?”
“That’s a fetching dress you have on. You are a clever girl.”
Thankful touches a finger to her water glass, catching a bead of its sweat. “Am I?”
“You know you are.”
“And you, husband, are very generous to buy me such fine cloth.”
Lal waits for the inevitable, Thankful twisting on her seat to include another in their talk. “Isn’t that so, Mother Hammer?”
A quiet so cold it tinkles. Then, “Isn’t what so, Sister?”
“Isn’t Mr. Hammer a very giving husband?”
Lal scarcely knows whom to watch. He shifts from mother to stepmother to father—only to find Hammer’s attention is nowhere near the sparking exchange. His gaze is intent upon Ruth.
A hardening comes over Lal’s body. He presses the thumb to his lips, mouths urgently against it, “Do you see?”
Greedy, the thumb observes.
His mother speaks now. “Giving. I suppose you could say that.”
Giving? the thumb whispers. Hardly. Remember Emily Frye?
How could Lal forget? It was less than a year ago, the Memorial Day picnic. The Frye farm lay some distance to the south; the last time Lal had laid eyes on the eldest daughter she’d been a yellow-braided rail. At the picnic she filled her good blue gingham like a jay fills its feathers. She stood closer than need be beside him, watching him over her chicken sandwich, taking sharp little bites.
It took him several minutes to think up something to say. “Blue’s your colour.” It wasn’t much, but the look in her eye told him it would do.
He’d only just gotten the words out when his father caught hold of him by the shoulder from behind. “Here you are. Is he boring you, Emily?”
“Oh no, sir, I—”
But Hammer was already steering Lal away. It turned out there was work to be done, a plank floor to be knocked together for the dancing later on.
By the time Lal got free of his father, his good white shirt was stained with sweat. He searched the crowd for her anyway, spotted her standing before an older man in a dark, well-fitting suit. His grey beard working. Her grey eyes fixed on the ground.
It wasn’t a month before Lal heard the news of their sealing at Sunday Meeting. For time and all eternity. What young man stands a chance? Little wonder he can’t keep his eyes off Ruth.
What does he expect? the thumb breathes.
“What’s the matter with you?” Hammer barks suddenly in his ear.
“Huh?”
“You gonna suck that thumb?”
“I—”
“Eat your supper.”
“I—”
“You want me to eat it for you?”
Lal shakes his head violently. “I’ll eat it.” He grips his knife and fork, starts in on the first of three small medallions of beef. He’ll fill up on spuds and bread as usual. “Pass the potatoes, Joe.”
The boy doesn’t move. No one does. After a long, stupid moment, Lal realizes what he’s done wrong. The word nearly chokes him. “Please.”
They’re all abed. Ursula will go up herself soon, but for now she works the rocking chair like a cradle, wooing sleep. Why should a body so weary refuse rest? Because it’s learned to. Because it’s known far greater exhaustion and remained upright.
She will speak of that grim time, but only when the children press her. Even then it’s up to them to draw out the details. It’s wrong, she knows. The Church didn’t die when Brother Joseph did. Its history—and her own, come to that—went rolling on.
I don’t understand, Mother. Why did the Saints leave Illinois?
The same reason we left Missouri, Joe, and Ohio before that. The Gentiles drove us from our homes.
But wasn’t Nauvoo ours? Didn’t we build it to be our very own?
It was, son. We did.
So saying, she would feel the loss anew. Nauvoo. It was the finest city in the state of Illinois, built in a scant five years on swampland nobody had wanted—that is until, by the sweat of the Lord’s Chosen, it was transformed into hallowed ground. Autumn 1845. The Prophet had been in his grave some fifteen months, Ursula’s heart having chilled along with him despite the hot-skinned man who now shared her bed. She filled her days with preparations for the coming winter, laying strips of squash out to dry, bottling bent cucumbers with warty skins. All of it undone in the fire. The squash would have curled up black, giving off a sugary, stinking smoke. The pickle jars simmering before going off like bombs.
What about you and Father?
What about us? I’ve told you before, they burned us out.
And after that?
After that, an exodus to rival any endured in Old Testament times. They held out until February—still months before President Young had promised the Saints would leave peaceably, but when did a Gentile ever honour his end of a deal? It was a hurried leave-taking. Joseph’s mansion was left standing empty, his body, so rumour had it, interred in the basement of an unfinished hotel. The mob helped themselves to all the Saints couldn’t carry. In time they would go so far as to desecrate the Temple—broken bottles in the yard, vomit in the font, excrement on the steeple stairs.
The riverbank was little better than a mudslide. Ursula can recall lying back on the wagon seat, the rumps of the mules straining before her. The Mississippi boiled with ice chunks. A bone-chilling crossing delivered them to the Poor Camp at Sugar Creek, where Ursula watched a dry-eyed woman split her hope chest with an axe and burn it board by board. Where Joseph’s people gathered and began in earnest to die.
Cold and hunger, croup and ague, black canker and bloody flux. Consumption. Axe wounds. Bad breaks splintering, poisoning the blood. All those who could manage it—the Hammers included—moved westward at the earliest chance.
Iowa was all mud. They wallowed in it, horses mired up to their barrels in evil-smelling sloughs, boots coated until they became black anvils that tortured the legs. Women and children goaded terrified teams while men laid their shoulders to sunken wheels. Some days they were lucky to cover four miles.
When the weather turned fine in mid-April, the grass sprang up high, providing cover for the snakes that came with it. A child’s bare ankle, the soft, seeking nose of a grazing horse. Some only sickened. Others died. Those still walking learned to thrash the path before them with sticks.
In areas where game was abundant, wolves contented themselves with culling old or ailing stock from the margins of the herd. They grew bolder wherever the land turned mean. A great snarling bawl would be heard from among the makeshift pens, men bursting from their camp beds, filling the night with bellows and sparks.
The losses were many. The woman in the screeching wagon in front of theirs packed her dead baby along for weeks in the hope that it might be blessed by a member of the priesthood and properly laid to rest. She kept the tiny corpse wrapped up tight so that it might not lose cohesion, but not tight enough to fool the flies. Ursula watched them day in, day out, a black tail lifting with every jolt of the wagon’s hind end.
It would be a lie, though, to say it was all hardship. Women, herself among them, wandered the grassy slopes, filling their aprons with wild strawberries. One night they gathered under starlight to bathe in the sand shallows of the Sweetwater, the men keeping their distance, having washed themselves earlier in the day. At times the air was so clear it flummoxed the eyes. The seam that held land to sky breached by jackrabbits, or was it Indians—Pawnee? Sioux? Or antelope? Everything made plain in the flash of a snowy behind.
Ursula comes close to dozing. Not all hardship. There were wonders. Things she’s never told the children, and never will.
His knock is unlike any she’s heard on her workshop door—a tr
io of clean, formal raps that play the old barn as though it were the chamber of a drum. She freezes, right hand gripping the saw, left hand braced against the workbench, fingers curled around a length of quarter-inch iron rod. Seconds elapse before it occurs to her that whoever knocked—and there’s only one person it could be—is awaiting a reply.
“Come in.”
The bad hinge gives a whimper. “I saw your light,” Bendy Drown begins, his gaze already drifting right to take in the collective presence there. She says nothing. He turns his back to her to take it all in, but she catches the satisfying drop of his jaw. “Lord,” he breathes, staring up into the motionless ranks. And again, louder now, “Lord.”
She allows herself a tiny smile.
“Did you—” he stammers. “Are these yours?”
She nods, an answer he must turn her way to see. As he does, she tucks the smile away, lowering her eyes.
“How long have you lived here?”
She lays the saw down on its side across the rod. Glancing up, she finds him staring at her hands. She takes a swift step back from the workbench and thrusts them into the pocket of her smock. “Three years.”
“Three years.” He shakes his head, and it is hard to credit, now that she thinks on it—the number of specimens she’s mounted in that time, how far she’s advanced in her craft. She knows a flush of quiet pride.
“But you’re so young,” he says. “You must’ve been—”
And now shame. She lifts her chin against it, the gesture working on him like a warning hand.
“Beg pardon.” It’s his turn to look down, inspect the straw-strewn floor. Abruptly, awkwardly, he wheels on one foot and once again faces the display. Then moves to the bottom tier and stoops over a rattlesnake’s coils. “He looks mean.”