“So, when you joined the Church you went to Missouri.” She was urging him on rather than questioning him.
“Yes, we moved to Jackson County in ’33.”
“Jackson County!” Millie felt a chill shiver along her backbone. “Then you were driven out of your home by a mob.” Wasn’t that what Verity had called it?
He was clearly curious now. “How do you know this, and why are you asking?”
“I have my reasons. Will you help me or no?”
Perhaps the word help prompted him that there was something at play here which was not apparent to him. Regardless, he continued.
“There isn’t much to tell. The settlers in Missouri are a wild lot. They like their own way and resented the sheer numbers of the Mormons, the way they bought up the land and organized into communities, each man helping his brother. They didn’t like that at all.”
“It can’t be that simple. There must be more—more reason than that to cause people to harm, to destroy, to—”
“You may as well say ‘murder,’ for so they have done.”
“With no cause but jealousy?”
Nicholas shook his head. “Who am I to explain human nature or the forces that move upon the spirits of men?”
“So why do the Mormons stay where they are hated, where they are in danger? It makes no sense at all!”
“It is their promised land. It is the will of God that they be there.”
“The will of God!” The derision in Millie’s voice was as harsh and intent as a blow. “Do you know Joseph Smith?”
“I do not know him personally, but I have been in his presence. He has shaken my hand. I have heard him speak many times to the Saints.”
“How does he impress you? Do you really believe he is what he calls himself—a prophet?”
“Would I be here if I did not? Miss Cooper!” A tender light coming from somewhere inside him lit the young man’s eyes, and Millie realized they were as deep a blue as she had ever seen in the sea of a morning. “Things of the Spirit must be gained through spiritual means; one must seek and learn for oneself. It is possible to experience enough to know of a surety. Tell me, could you describe the ocean, the magnificent range and scope of it, the textures and colors and moods it possesses, to one who is blind, who has never seen water, who has no concept of what a long stretch of anything means? Right now you are unable to judge of such things as Joseph Smith and the work that he does.”
“But he is wicked! I think he delights in taking the lives of ordinary, decent people and making havoc of them for his own will!”
Elder Todd’s face turned ashen, as if he had just sustained a great shock. “Oh, you are wrong, so terribly wrong, Miss Cooper.” He lowered his gaze as though it pained him to look at her. But he said nothing, and the silence between them was palpable.
Millicent was the first to move. “If Mormonism were not so wicked, I might feel sorry for you!” She spoke through gritted teeth, and her words were caught up by the wind blowing in from the water and the pounding of surf on the shore. “I am going. I shall not bother you further.” She turned her back on the young man and walked into the wind, its force making a funnel around her, drawing her hair and clothes, even the lines of her skin, tight and strained.
Nicholas watched after her for a long time, until his eyes burned from staring and a dull ache pounded beneath his temples. Millie dashed a trembling fist against her eyes, angry at the sting of the wind that had caused tears to form there, foolish tears that made her head swim and blinded her as she stumbled along.
Chapter Eight
Summer by the sea, with no one for Millie to answer to but herself and the simple demands of living, with the fragrance of blossoms, redolent of sun, in her nostrils: snow pink, sweet william, phlox, and the tangled white and pale yellow honeysuckle that were her special delight. There was more to Millie’s life than her disturbing encounters with the young Mormon. True, there was no overt excitement, and little beyond the common to break the pattern of days. But it sufficed, at least for the time being. Then one fine August morning, when the fresh wind spanked the white water and the blue sky shone rain-washed and clear, Luther’s boat hove into sight.
The holds were full to overflowing, and the ship rode gaily atop the waves. When the rocks of Cape Ann came into sight they rounded Eastern Point. Now it was in with topsails, down with jibs, lower the anchor, down with foresail, let the mainsail stand. And suddenly there she was, brought to bay, steered into her stall like some graceful, spirited racehorse, spent and panting, neck wet and glistening but held high and gallantly still. A crowd had gathered, but Millie kept to the fringes. She had no real purpose here. It was wives and sweethearts, children and mothers who pressed close, whose faces were too bright, too anxious. This was a triumphant return, safe and profitable, with no flag wilting at half-mast, no heartbreak harbored in the curve of white sails.
Men swaggered off the ship one by one or in small knots. Millie watched the reunions with interest, longing to be part of the terrible intensity of that moment when gaze meets gaze and the very force of life trembles between two loving souls who are united again. She thought of her father’s face, stiff with wrinkles, and each one a story, an etching made by danger and challenge, passion and pain. The men that go down to the sea. The phrase sang in her head, and the words of the verse she had known from childhood:
Gloucester is fair, yes, wondrous fair
For artist’s brush, or poet’s pen,
Yet still its wealth beyond compare
Is in its race of sturdy men.
After a few moments she turned and walked away slowly. It was time, any time now, for her father’s ship to round that fair bend into a safe, well-earned harbor. Pray God it may be so.
It was with surprise that she opened the door to Luther that evening. A black oystercatcher had found its way up the beach and was poking among the rocks on its long legs, as pink in color as the blush in the sunset. “Kervee-kervee-kervee-kervee,” it called, the sharp piping sound ending in a beautiful rippling. Millie smiled at the bird, and at Luther who stood looking at her with dark, serious eyes.
“Heard you were back. Looked for you down by the boats, but I didn’t see you.”
“I was there. Did you have a good voyage, Luther?”
She had nearly forgotten this man: the sound of his voice, deep and almost guttural, the dark brooding of his eyes watching her, ever watching her from the days when she had been only a child, playing with shells and sea creatures along the sand. Luther was seven years older than Millie, so it had been a bit strange when he had set himself up as her protector, fighting anyone who offended or harmed her in any way. It was part of accepted knowledge by all the Gloucester folk that Luther had claims on Millicent. That had been part of the reason she left home and went to Boston. He stifled her with his devotion; he always had. She did not see herself belonging to Luther and living his kind of life. He was too stolid, he lacked imagination, and he belonged to the sea. Yet the men in Boston, the few she had become to any degree acquainted with—what had they been like? Smoother in manner, yes, more educated. But they had been boorish in their own ways, and just as devoted to business and profit as any seaman was to riding the waves. They had not been the answer she was looking for. And now she was back, and here Luther stood watching her, his tarred canvas hat in his hand.
She let him inside. She listened to his tedious recounting of the journey—Luther was sparse with words, and the few he spoke were painfully utilitarian, commonplace. She served him lemon jelly, blackberry scones, and tea. He was content being near her, as he always had been. He asked very few questions of her, enough merely to ascertain that the threat, as he knew it, was past.
“Your fancy Boston friends are gone, then, for good?” he asked her once more as he stood up to go.
Millie nodded. Yes, she thought, but that does not mean what yo
u think it means. I can be gone from this place anytime I choose to, and well I may!
He had caught her hand up and now was pressing it against his lips. She was surprised at the warmth of his touch. “Millie, my dear . . .” He murmured the words against her skin. “You don’t look a day older than you did the last time I saw you, over two years ago.”
His eyes said more. His eyes spoke the sweet, awkward sentiments he had written on countless cards and notes on the countless holidays and special occasions of the past ten years. Why did she feel an impatience with him, rather than the tenderness he looked for?
He walked down the narrow path of stones Millie’s father had laid for her mother. She could remember the day the two of them scoured the high, scruffy sands above the tide line in search of them. Some of the rocks had the sand ground right into them, and some were softly streaked with the grays and blues of the sea that had brought them there.
Recalling something, Luther paused and half-turned. “Your father’s vessel hove into Honolulu a few days afore we left.”
Millie felt a catch at her heart. That meant that they had been successful in hunting the whales and that they had a cargo of oil and whalebone to transfer to commercial ships there.
“Will he come on home, then?” she asked. “Or will he go back with the whalers?”
“I didn’t speak to him myself. But Jim Trollop said the half-dozen Gloucestermen who sailed out of New Bedford with the whalers was comin’ back on the Swallow.” He watched pleasure spread over Millie’s features. “I thought you’d be glad to hear that.”
Millie hugged her arms to her body as she stood watching Luther disappear into the warm evening dusk. A seaman’s life was a grueling one, she knew, and at her father’s age, service on a whaler must be a punishing thing.
The Gloucester vessels, with very few exceptions, were owned by the well-to-do merchant-shipowners, who also kept most of the general stores. Although these owners stood the cost of all supplies, each fisherman was allowed to keep only half of his catch, and could never hope to own even one-sixteenth of his ship, as the Cape Cod sailors could. The average earnings of a Gloucester fisherman for the working year of nine months were roughly $150. But a fair-sized family needed a hundred dollars more than that to carry it through the winter.
Of course, sometimes there were years—what years!—when a banner season could bring in as much as eight hundred dollars. Millie’s father had known a few such years. Thanks to that, the cottage Millie lived in was paid for free and clear, and a modest “nest egg” sat in the Gloucester bank, which dated back to Federalist times and boasted a vault carved out of solid rock. But nothing comes without a price, and Millie thought she understood the price exacted on her father by the winds and the tides and the siren call of the cold mistress who did not reward her lovers in worldly fare. Not to be forgotten was the ever-present gamble between life and death.
The dark curtain of night had lowered while she stood there musing. She walked out into the comfortable obscurity and found her way, more by feel than by sight, to the stretch of shoreline, which was empty save for the voice of the sea and the echoes that moaned ceaselessly beneath the shifting current. Millie heard them only at night. She truly believed they were the murmurs and moans of the countless seamen who had given the sea her toll, and whose spirits wandered restlessly, seeking land, seeking the warm arms of wives and family. Millie gazed out at the expanse of water and thought of the men, seventy-eight of the Cape Cod fleet, who were drowned just last season. She had read of it in the Boston papers, and the tragedy was more than mere statistics to her. She had known some of those men and the families who would see them no more. They were more than names, more than faces, more, even, than flesh and blood. And they were gone, as so many before them, and so many after would be.
Millie shivered. She had no wrap, and the night air seemed to bruise her flesh. But she knew that it was her spirit, not her flesh, that was tender.
She walked back to the house. Her thoughts were in a turmoil that she could not still. The forces of nature could be brutal, but in an unfeeling, impersonal way. For some reason the ugly word mob kept penetrating the morass of her thoughts. What about man’s brutality against man? Was this some omen, that it beat upon her consciousness and would give her no peace?
Millie moved through the rooms, straightening things, getting herself ready for bed, with the sound of the sea in her head and the lonely moans in her heart—and fear, a fear she could not explain, settling like a damp chill over all.
Nicholas Todd handed Millie the piece of paper with a little flourish. She stared at it blankly for a moment, then recognition and annoyance together flooded over her face. It was a poster announcing a Mormon meeting to be held at Winchester Hall, Boston, on the following evening. Listed below the information concerning time and place was a list of “elders” who would be preaching. Nicholas Todd’s name was among them.
“You are an odd one,” he said, watching her. “What is it about the advertisement that surprises you? I am here as a missionary. I have been doing more with my time than helping Jonathan Hammond make the Copley place livable.”
She handed the sheet back to him icily. “And what affair is this of mine?” she demanded. “Why do you bring this information to me?” He did not answer her, and she added irritably, “You know my feelings!”
“Do I?” he asked. “Do you, Millicent? Do you truly know your own feelings?” There was no effrontery in his voice, only the gentlest concern.
“You know nothing about me, and you’ve no right to question me. Leave me alone!”
“I was hoping you would come.”
Millie could not hide her amazement. “Come! Of my own accord! To a Mormon preaching!” She was incensed. “Have you listened to nothing I have said to you? I have good reasons for hating the Mormons, and I need not explain them to you!”
“I have listened more than you know.” He spoke in the same tempered, untroubled voice. “I have heard more than you realize.”
“You are full of nonsense.” She took a step away from him.
“But I am not wicked, and you know it. Nor were the other Mormons you met. The ones you wish to hate.”
He spoke as if he knew—knew all about Boston and Judith and the meetings in the reverend’s house. But, of course, he couldn’t!
“In three days I leave,” he said quietly.
She stared at him stupidly.
“Yes. Elder Howlitt is much improved in health, and we are instructed to take passage on a certain ship. All the arrangements have been made.”
Millicent nodded, feeling awkward. “Well, off to England at last. I wonder what you’ll find there?”
“Success. Our message is being well received among the British.” Again, there was no offense in his voice, though the words themselves held a sting. Millicent chose to ignore that for the time being, in deference to her own dignity, which she was already struggling to maintain.
“Do come, Miss Cooper, for sake of our friendship.”
Millie found she could say nothing in reply, and he did not press her.
“You have such poppies as I have never seen,” he said, turning his attention to her garden, “and hollyhocks—I do remember hollyhocks from my mother’s garden, lining the entire expanse of her fence.”
“How lovely that must have been,” Millie murmured. “Have you flowers in Missouri?”
“Wild prairie flowers in plenty, though I don’t know the names of half of them.”
“Is it such a terribly wild and lonely place?” She had not meant to ask that. She felt the color drain from her face as he turned to regard her.
“Someone you care for deeply must be in Missouri. That must be part of the mystery.” He said the words as if thinking aloud to himself. And, in truth, Millie caught only a portion of them and refused to ask him what it was he had said.
“It is beautiful country!” he told her. “Good soil, gentle hills, plenty of woodlands.”
“But lonely to those who have left homes they love—and hostile to Mormons.”
“Love of God is supposed to be first in our hearts,” he replied. “But it seldom is. True religion teaches a man to be happy. Mormons are the happiest people I know.”
Millicent did not believe him. She thought of the dull suffering in Verity’s eyes when they embraced for the last time. She thought of the sad courage in the words she had written, masking her struggles and fears. Nicholas Todd, watching her, sighed.
“You must experience what I speak of for yourself,” he said, with a degree of resignation in his voice. “And you have not done that yet.”
“No, I have not,” Millie replied, and she may as well have added, I never will!
“I shall hope to see you tomorrow evening, nevertheless,” he responded, with what cheer he could muster.
“You will be disappointed.”
For a moment his eyes met hers and held them, and she could not decipher what she saw there. “I’ve been disappointed before,” he said.
What did he mean by that? He walked away down the stone path. “Fare you well, Miss Cooper,” he called, waving a hand to her, “until we meet next.”
Fare you well. . . . They were ordinary words of parting, but they brought distress to Millie’s heart. Those were the last words her mother had spoken to her father when he went out to sea. He was still gone when she died, and by the time he returned she was under the ground, and the perils and hardships of his long journey never really ended for him. It had been her hand that smoothed out the wrinkles and strained muscles, her heart that coaxed the loneliness out of him and set him to rights with the world. Silent, unheralded work for the woman, but every seaman’s wife knew how essential it was.
The Heart that Truly Loves Page 7