Читать книгу Tributary - Barbara K. Richardson - Страница 10

CHAPTER 2

Florrie Gradon never guessed my sins. She wouldn’t stand for any differences between us. She had a mother and a father sealed in marriage for time and eternity, seven happy siblings and a green two-story house amid the poplars on Forest Street. Florrie taught me to play piano so we could perform duets, but I wouldn’t play a note outside her house. She swooned over my “pressed flower cards,” and made the Sisters behind the Co-op counter display them and sell them for scrip. She dragged me to church socials, asking this boy or that to dance with me. They tolerated it in good humor, to get closer to Florrie, until one evening at a harvest dance, Tom Dean refused.

Florrie said, “Don’t be log-headed, Tom.”

“I ain’t log-headed,” he said. “And sure as salvation, I ain’t gonna dance with no girl has a face like a brush fire.”

It cut me like a felling axe.

Florrie trembled. Her voice raised up. “Our Heavenly Father does not stop at the skin. He sees us inside out.”

“Well, if God was here, He could dance with her,” Tom said, rocking back on his heels. The pack of girls nearby lit up at the blasphemy. Tom grinned. “He could, I would not stop Him.”

I stood there, dry and wooden about the eyes, suffering their laughter, waiting for the next blow to fall, when a stranger stepped in, asking Florrie to dance. He was tall and lean, serious beyond our years, with pomade in his red hair.

Florrie composed herself and silenced Tom with a stare. She smiled at me. Then she took her suitor’s hand like she’d found gold amidst the dross. Everyone parted to let them pass.

I stepped outside the Wardhouse. The air in the poplars had a fine substance, a powdery slow drift. The cut alfalfa smelled like it trailed to Heaven, but Heaven gave no comfort. Not when the Lord tolerated boys who crowed with stiff-necked, bandy-legged cruelty. It rubbed me to distraction how they did it, how they brutalized and brutalized and never felt a hitch! The stars overhead swelled to white pools. I started toward the side yard to cry in private, but voices from the dark there stopped me.

“I don’t know what my pa would say.” It was a woman’s voice, young and frightened. “He ain’t—”

“He abides by the Celestial Law. Would he keep a daughter of his from the reap of such benefits?” A man spoke, blunt-voiced and sour.

“Well, Pa needs me at home, to tend the children while Mother works the Co-op counter.”

“Your daddy needs a twenty-year-old mouth to feed? God in Heaven knows he don’t.”

The young woman pushed down sobs.

“Fussing only proves it. You need a husband to work you, Sofie, need a hungry child to suck the poison out of your vain heart. You got no suitors, young nor old. Huh. You’d get a room and strong children as my fifth, never want for food. It’d give your tired daddy one less mouth at his table. I seen his crops. He’ll bless your going.”

Sofie answered him with silence.

“Don’t you seek for eternal glory?” He said it with force. “Don’t you know you can’t refuse the Everlasting Covenant once it has been opened unto you? You’ll be damned, sure as the Prophet Joseph spake it, damned to Hell and the buffetings of Satan. That what your folks deserve? Their board burdened with your hungry mouth and their souls burdened with your shame?”

Her voice had shrunk to pearl-size. “No.”

He yanked her a few steps toward the light. I gasped at the sight of Erastus Pratt, stout bellied, shaven clean, with the lines of his mouth drawn unnaturally into a smile. “That’s a good girl,” he said, breathing down into her face. His fingers stroked outward, alongside of her breast. “I’m one to enjoy my privileges, like the Prophet says.” He kissed her as hard as a hand’s slap, then turned and walked toward the dance.

As manager of the Big Field, Erastus Pratt worked us all—men, women, and children—like tools, without the least affection. But to see him bully in love—his chosen one without defenses, and him sharpening the words of God to blade points. He’d bloodied God’s words, and he’d won.

“Courtship’s over, Sofie,” he called back. “I’ll tell your pa when I see him in the field.”

I stayed in the shadow of the church steps. Sofie kept to the side yard, out of sight. The music rang, and the feet upon the boards, but under the noise of the assembled I heard a sobbing, low and steady, that brought bile into my throat.

I rode home that night in Lester Madsen’s fringe-topped buggy. Florrie sat in the middle smiling at him, her suitor, her penny-haired man. A slant moon had risen. The usual chorus of frogs gave welcome, but all I could hear all the way home was Sofie’s weeping.

Mormons do not marry for this life alone. They marry for time and all eternity. A man and his wives and all of his children are bound together forever, and guaranteed a place in the Celestial Kingdom, where they will dwell with God. Other believers might inherit a lesser glory as angels, as “ministering servants,” but without being wed in the Endowment House you can never gain the highest realm: the eternal presence of God. That is the Mormon goal—to dwell with our Father in Heaven. Just where our Mother dwells, no one mentions. No one even feels the need to know. In a decade’s worth of sermons, I had never heard one Saint inquire.

Brother Pratt took Sofie to the Endowment House that November. Florrie and Lester Madsen followed. When Florrie moved to Logan at Christmas to be his bride, I lost my only friend.

February held greater losses. I rang the supper bell one chill night, and waited at table for Brother Lars until the hull corn cooled. I slopped it back on to heat and looked outside, thinking it odd the smithy fire still smoked at the chimney.

The horses waiting to be stabled and fed whinnied as I skirted the corral.

I found him dead in the smithy, crumpled on the floor with an arm flung out and his work tongs out of reach. I’ll get them for you, was my first thought. Dour and indifferent, he was the closest I’d had to a father. I sat in the dirt and cried for him and his.

I knew a few short days of freedom, then. Freedom of the darkest kind, waiting for the Elders to declare the next place I’d be let to fill. Rumor was, at seventeen years of age, I was sure to be made some man’s third or fourth. Erastus Pratt had five wives. I prayed he’d never want a sixth.

I read the only book Lars kept in the barn, listening to the sounds of my household through the night. I studied the thrift of planting living fences, in his almanac. Horses bumped their stalls. Ringdoves purred in the loft. I closed my eyes and gently stroked my right cheek with the back of my hand, then stroked the left. Barely any difference, in the dark—

My teeth ground together. My eyes wrung salt. I’d rather kiss a pig. I’d rather die than be a wife! Motherhood appalled me. Childbearing sickened me to think on, close as it was to the ground of my own misery: my mother, my mark. A sweep of red hair was my only memory of Mother. She’d left me at the boardinghouse without a word, no gift, no way to trace her going. An orphan at four years. Had it been my mark, my temper or my foolishness that had driven her off? Whatever the cause, Mother had left me of her own free will. I never knew my father. No memories there to find. I worked that misery like a field, every day, just to keep a path beaten through.

I prayed to God, that night. I prayed mightily to Jesus Christ to let me have some other calling, any call but a woman’s call. I was not cut for it. My prayer spun like a wheel, like grief come to life. I prayed till there were no more words inside, no want, no request of God at all, just anguish, hard as whitened bone. Anguish and the answering dark.

Walking to town the next morning, I stopped to watch the run-off ponds glitter in the February sun. The two ponds were the endpoint for all of the waters that flowed from the Wasatch Mountains down through the town. Ice circles. They looked like kin, still and cold as my godless heart.

A woman at the Co-operative Mercantile Store caught me unwinding the soaked wool muffler from my cheeks. She was short and blunt and dressed like a range hand, with a head of brown hair that must have been too much for any bun to contain. It lay on her shoulders, wiry and thick. She gestured to a stool near the pot stove. “Don’t mind me. Settle yourself.”

And so I had to undo and unclasp.

“Ada Nuttall,” she said. Her voice slapped words like tacks. “I take it you’re the floral artist. I saddle the right horse?”

“Sister Clair Martin, and yes, ma’am, I dabble with flowers.”

“Dabble, do you? Don’t play modest with me, honey dear. You could sell them pressed flower cards in San Francisco by the packing crate and clamber the heights of Nob Hill. But that would be the Gentile way, now wouldn’t it? You are paid, aren’t you, by the good Co-operative, for your labors?”

Nob Hill, Mob Hill? I hadn’t heard tell of either.

“Honey, do they pay you?”

“With scrip enough to buy the glue and paper. And twenty cents a week for me.”

“Dog in a deer’s eye.”

“Ma’am?”

A Sister backed toward us, dragging a bag of grain from behind the counter. Her hips wigwagged like a horse’s down a chasm. “Sorry for the wait, Aunt Ada. Barley was under the wheat flour.”

“Don’t pop your gussets for me, though if it gave you ease, I’d bless it.” Ada grinned. Then she winked at me and hefted that fifty-pound bag of barley like it was a day-old child and took her leave.

When I asked whose aunt she was, the Sister only sucked her teeth. “Oh, she ain’t anybody’s aunt. Then again, she ain’t no Sister. We only call her kin. Lord bless her, she’ll need it come the final trump. That woman,” she breathed, “has a liquor still. She stews our barley up in a shed behind her mansion. No God-fearing Brother would help her. She pays a Lamanite to chop wood and tend the works. In cash! That filthy redskin. That old buck, Pocatello Jim.”

I knew Pocatello Jim, as well as any Mormon could. He had lived in Brigham City since I could remember. He was the only Indian who’d stayed on after the treaty was signed, when I was ten. The one and only adult who had ever lightened my days. I knew sharp pleasure, felt keen little bursts of revenge seeing the normal folk reflected in his gait, his gestures, his elastic face. Bishop Olsen. Widow Andersen. Erastus Pratt. He aped them, proud and pinched and crafty—until they sensed they’d gained a shadow self. By the time they’d wheeled around, Jim would be leaning back, arms crossed on his chest, admiring the courthouse steeple. The men cursed him. The women looked wounded to the core. Their hatred only deepened as Jim’s laughter closed the game. That loose-hinged laugh was, to me, a tonic.

I didn’t cower from Jim, as the other girls did, or let him trip me up at the heels. I looked him right in the eyes whenever I passed him. His leathery skin, his mashed nose and razor-lipped smile didn’t frighten me. Jim was the only grown-up who had ever required my attention. I paid it to him, in full, and he always paid me back. Now I knew Jim’s other calling—brewing liquor for an apostate in the foothills above town.

That apostate, Aunt Ada Nuttall, occupied the one and only house east of Box Elder Creek. Ada’s pink granite mansion nearly matched the slopes of the Wasatch Range that rose steep and free behind it. Scrub oak and sage were her only neighbors. That suited everyone fine.

The Sister at the Co-op said Ada made a fortune selling liquor by the wagonload in Corinne, the wicked railroad town thirteen miles west of Brigham. Corinne, Corinne, the City of Sin. All of the Gentiles asked for “Nuttall’s Leopard Sweat” by name. And they paid cash money for her labors. Ada paid her tithe in U.S. dollars—the only Latter-Day Saint who did. She was the only woman who dared live alone, and the Elders could not touch her. They needed Ada’s money just as much as they did the irrigating waters of Box Elder Creek. Cash flowed around Ada like a waterwheel, and the Brethren stood just close enough to prosper from the turning.

Three days had passed since Lars’ death when I met Ada Nuttall. I’d barely slept, fearing what the Brethren would choose for me: servitude, or marriage and madness. The night of his funeral, a Tuesday, I dreamt of a cabin, the old herd cabin that stands on a knoll above the cemetery south of town. I had sheltered in its lee at Lars’ funeral for awhile. First the Brethren gathered at graveside, and then all of the city vanished in the light-filled cloud of snow that spun up from Lars’ grave. That drift begat my vision: a solitary place where I could live and work alone.

I pled with Bishop Olsen, the following day, to let me make use of the cabin, to work and do for myself, burdening no one’s stores. The plan had enough frugality in it to catch him off his guard. As steward of the First Ward, he would consider it, he said, he’d take it up with the Elders. Though a girl alone in a cabin in the hills—

I reminded him the Tingeys’ orchards bordered the cemetery, and their house lay just beyond. Homer and his wife and daughters, they would be my neighbors, my helpmates, in times of need.

Then the Bishop cleaned his glasses on his vest and warned me I would have to gain permission from the fearsome woman who owned the cabin. She’d been one of Brigham City’s first settlers and the wife of its first Bishop. A headstrong and intractable apostate. Fallen from the straight and narrow way. He blessed me with his doughy white hands and I hiked up to Ada’s.

I sat in her parlor in a wingback chair looking out over the city. The poplars on Forest Street stood like bound brooms heaped with old snow. They marched from Main Street out to the edge of the Barrens, past the icy run-off ponds and Lars’ livery, in a stark promenade, two by two. Even the trees in Brigham were coupled. What could a girl alone do?

Sister Nuttall served tea in china cups. I kept my hands to myself. Tea broke the Word of Wisdom, as surely as liquor. I waited for her to speak.

She added cream and drifts of sugar to her cup. She stirred. She downed a steaming gulp. Then she looked at me. “Due to a recent death, you have been left without a home. Is that the case?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you aim to occupy the herd house, which is by legal title mine.”

“Yes, ma’am. If the Brethren allow me to, I would bring it no harm.”

She leaned forward. The sleeves of her dress tensed at the seams, her shoulders too ample for the cut. “You are how old?”

“Seventeen. Or, eighteen this month. I can’t be sure exactly. But February, that’s my birth month. I’ll be eighteen.” All of the courage I’d shown in front of Bishop Olsen had deserted me. Here was a greater obstacle, housed in luxury, wearing taffeta and black lace. I smoothed my worn calico skirt into straighter lines and waited.

Ada squinted and crossed her legs. A bright beaded moccasin angled out from under her skirt. “Let’s crimp the formalities, what say? I never did take to the dignified.” She drank her tea down. “Now, in payment for the leasing of my cabin, one-half of your earnings in Corinne will be mine. In cash—”

“But—”

“But what? You think that’s a steep cut, Sister? You don’t like my terms?”

“No, I wouldn’t know, ma’am, I’m sure. But I have no earnings in Corinne, in cash or any other way.”

“You will have. Pack up those cards of yours in half dozens. We’ll get a quarter per pack.” Ada Nuttall didn’t blink. Her eyes were almond-shaped, a dull green like the underbelly of a fish. They stayed dead level, though she spoke of fantastical things.

I pressed my feet to the floor to keep from toppling.

“Unless you’d rather take Erastus Pratt to your bosom or some other good God-fearing Elder, in which case I won’t see a profit from your gain, and the good Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.”

I shook my head no.

“I empathize. Now, hold out your hand.”

She slipped a pistol into my palm. It was small and silver and warm from her pocket.

“Comes with the cabin. Renter’s insurance.”

Refusal was doomed. I doubted this woman had ever been refused anything, so I put the pistol in my pocket and thanked her, saying we would have to see what the Elders thought of our plan.

Ada snorted and said, “It’s done.”

I said, “But the Elders—”

“Mean well, Lord love ’em, though it comes to their advantage, you can bet on it.”

“‘Let the Priesthood handle it.’ That’s what Bishop Olsen said when I asked him about my future.”

“Let a horsefly drive the team?” Ada laughed. “Not while my arms can take a rein!” She stood up. “Now, there’s one last nosy bit. I’ve been in this town since the dawning, and I don’t recall the name Martin. Where are your own folks from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

I swallowed a knot of pure pain. “Martin is my father’s name. I did not know him ever. My mother worked a boardinghouse in Honeyville. I was four when she left, six when they brought me here. I can’t say if she abandoned me, or came to harm, or harmed herself. No one ever told.” I looked up from the floor. “If that’s all your terms, Sister Nuttall, I could make it home by dark.”

“There is another thing, just one,” she said. “No more ‘Sister’ing. You call me Ada.”

We shook hands on it, like men do, and Ada fetched the bullets for my gun.