Читать книгу Tributary - Barbara K. Richardson - Страница 16

CHAPTER 8

Once in a while, and sometimes twice in a while, I think I’ll leave.” Ada stood at the window. She spread the curtains, and sunlight took the room. “But, honey dear, most times I feel like a spike well struck. Twenty years here, my boy grown in this house, my labor in those fields and my money so tied up in the streets and buildings of this town they verily call my name, though you’ll never see a Nuttall Street or a Nuttall Square or a Park, not in a hundred years, that I know well and good. History falls to those who press their suits—and I don’t mean wives with flat-irons.”

I sipped some tea, the taste pleasing, bitter as cast iron. “But they almost killed Jim! The Prophet Brigham and the Elders regale us with pretty tales from the pulpit—but look behind the scenes and it’s blood and broken bones.”

“Poker knew the horse a danger, and couldn’t resist the ride.”

“Why do you call him Poker, Ada? He good at cards?”

“Jim pokes fun. And you know how good he is at that.”

“The grand master.”

“Well, Clair, most Saints don’t have your appreciation of Jim’s gift. Specially not when helped to laugh at themselves. So, Jim’s a poker, a red hot poker.”

I could still feel the slack weight of Jim’s legs dangling in my arms as Ada hauled him into the house over her shoulder. How many years had I felt as useless as those legs? “How is he?”

“More than some swole up today, but sleeping sound.” Ada sat on the bed, exhausted. She had spent the night doctoring Jim, and still found the strength to fix me breakfast and bring it to me in bed. French toast and jam. Hot tea. A feather mattress and lace pillows. Storybook comforts, yet I had not slept and my mind held no dreaminess. The hope of justice kept me up all night, kept me wondering if it was ghost or real.

Men on earth delivered justice, and meted out punishment. Based on exactly what authority I longed to know, their inscrutable Father in Heaven? Who sent crippled hands and rapists and Indian raids to bless the chosen—

“Do you believe, Ada, that God is a man in the flesh like we are told? That we are made in His image, bone for bone?” It was a bedrock Mormon tenet.

Ada opened her eyes. “You mean is God a male, or is God flesh, which?”

“Both.”

Ada blinked back a yawn. “What’s your experience say?”

“My experience, men and flesh make a woeful combination.”

Ada grinned and struck the quilt. “God is too big for a title, honey, much less a body, manly, fleshly, or of whatever sort.”

“But last night Brigham Young said we could picnic with God. He said we would have a sit-down meal with the Lord and the Prophet Joseph Smith in the flesh.”

“You quoting me the old Empire Builder?”

“The Prophet Brigham?”

“Oh, honey. Sure as there ever was one. Calls for a communal order here in Zion, but won’t pay in himself. Says he’ll throw his gains into the communal pot when he’s met the man can manage his holdings better than himself. Calls polygamous marriage holy so he can take on fifty-some wives. Inspired the Brethren here in Brigham to grade and lay track for the Union Pacific, then the Central Line, now the Utah & Northern—every man hour and felled log and ox team given for free, in loving faith—while Brigham pockets the income from the Gentiles. Acquire and acquire and acquire, for the Lord! I stopped counting once he’d earned a million dollars. That was two years back. And you just watch how long it halts the completion of the Tabernacle. There won’t be a man or a sledgehammer to spare in Brigham City for four years. Maybe five. You seen him, Clair. That man has the spiritual reach of a bent axle—and thinks God was made in his image.” Ada sniffed and smoothed her skirt. “Bully and a businessman, those are Brigham’s strengths.”

She lifted her hair back off of her shoulder. She squinted, then pursed her lips. “You ever seen the layer of sheet ice forms over a puddle, blinding to look at if the sun strikes just right, and torn apart in a second at a child’s footstep or a day’s spring thaw?”

I thought I followed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Reflects the whole sky and crumbles at a touch? God is like that. Divinity is. It’s everywhere. Question is, do we bother to see it or don’t we?”

“So then . . .” I ventured, not sure if that meant man or flesh.

“My God comes and goes.”

“Like sheet ice?”

“Try to round it up or snatch it for your own, it’s gone.” She gave my mind awhile to move around in this. “All the talk the Church has passed of ‘white and delightsome’ like unto the Lord?” Ada snorted, leaning out over the edge of the bed. “We are not white or delightsome, Clair. Not you or me. We’re speckled, like trout. Like spotted ponies. Herd dogs that turn and circle the herd but know that they ain’t sheep.” She laughed into her hand, wiped her mouth dry. “You think God don’t require all of creation? You think God picks and chooses? Herd dog, pinto pony, trout or Indian or Saint, the Shoshone worship God in all of ’em. Jim does. I do too.”

Ada looked almost pretty sitting there, utterly still, balanced on her high thoughts.

“But what’ll Poker Jim do now, Ada? He won’t be welcome here in town.”

“Once he can sit a horse, he aims to join Chief Pocatello’s band. A few ride down from the Fort Hall Reservation to trade skins every autumn. Shoshone keep their horses at a camp on Bear River. Jim can find them, if they come. It’s a sorry remnant of their wide-wandering life. Used to catch small game here in Brigham in spring, then harvest summer camas root in Idaho, meet up with all their friends to play games and knock down pinyon nuts in the autumn over north and west of the Raft River Range, enough to feed the entire tribe. Then Jim’s own band would circle back north of us here, to Honeyville—yes, where you was found as a girl child—camp at the hot springs, rest and play awhile before they headed off to winter in Montana where game’s aplenty, whitetail deer and grouse and sage hens. Sleep in their buffalo robes. It raised a stripe of envy in me, the way Jim told about it.”

“You make it sound rich.”

“It was rich. The Shoshone lived a thousand-mile round.”

“But I heard the Indians eat locusts. That’s what I heard, them digging up larvas from the dirt.”

“Them and John the Baptist,” Ada shot back. “You’re talking Goshutes, not Shoshone, honey. The Goshutes live south of the Lake, south and west, in the desert. In a drought summer, if the jackrabbit and antelope and pocket gophers fail them, if they no longer can gather pinyon from the hills and cast seed at the mouths of the rivers, like the rich mouth of this river here we live at—”

“They’ll eat grubs.”

“Yes, ma’am. We ate a few thousand ourselves, years one and two in this valley. The Goshute women showed us how to make ’em palatable by slow roasting over a fire. And the similarities don’t stop there. The Goshute elders heal by a laying on of hands, just like our Elders do, and gain powers by visionary dreams. The best of their hunters even take on plural wives! Joe Smith and the Goshutes.” Ada chuckled. “Course they’re nomads, where we like to settle. Biggest difference I account, their ways to ours, is that their women own the seed harvest. Flat ownership of what sustains the tribe.”

I pulled my knees up within her borrowed nightdress. The neck lay open and unlaced. After the night’s trouble, I hadn’t wanted to be bound, not even by silk strings. Seeing me stir, Ada invited me to stay on for dinner.

“I have to get on home to Swede, Ada, he’ll be pacing. Those men who beat on Poker last night. Will you try to get justice?”

Ada sagged forward. “Jim’s leaving. No one would step forward. Like as always, the entire mess would be laid to me.”

“Can that be Ada, the fearsome Ada Nuttall talking?”

“That’s preservation talking. My way of thinking, you couldn’t have better neighbors than the Saints to keep a town sleepy and green. But as rulers of the roost, as patriarchs? Lord preserve us, they’re a worrisome lot.”

I slid my feet from the covers to the floor. “I’ll say good-bye to Jim, my way out.”

“Don’t take fright,” Ada said without turning. “Both his eyes are swollen shut.”

Since my arrival in the Second Ward, Homer Tingey had been kind enough to give me a ride to church with his family on Sundays. I walked downhill to their place every Sabbath, and shared the back of his wagon morning and evening with his six children, and shared their bench in church. The Sunday morning after Jim’s ordeal, I went to the Tingeys’ one hour late to leave a note saying that I was ill and wouldn’t be attending evening service. I needed a break from righteousness. I could not stomach the thought of hearing a single word of praise for the Prophet. Let them sing without the organ. Let them walk blindfolded through the brute force of their own survival.

Homer’s middle daughter, Lavina Tingey, saw me through the curtains. Red hair in a tumble and her nightgown on, she stepped out on the porch and read my note. “I am not going either,” she said, smiling. She could hardly have been happier. Lavina was fourteen and freckled, sweet as the cooked meat of a pumpkin. Homer called her Angel Bright. I believed he’d hit the truth.

“You know Brother Wrighton, who teaches my Sunday School class,” she said. I nodded, having survived a year of Wrighton’s unsmiling sermons. “Brother Wrighton laid a trail of breath last week telling us about God’s holy body. Well, I just had to ask, ‘If God has a body of flesh, how come we can’t see Him?’”

“Lavina, you didn’t—”

“He colored some, saying if I prayed for the spirit of submission, understanding would come clear as a photograph that God has a body. ‘Well then, if our Father has a body,’ I said, ‘seems like our Mother would, too. Is she pretty?’” And Brother Wrighton just slung open the door and howled, ‘Leave us, leave this minute! Mother in Heaven can’t be named and you ought not even to think on her, it’s a sacrilege. Leave and don’t come back until you have more faith.’” Lavina stepped off the porch barefooted. She plucked and twirled a morning glory bloom into her hair. “Faith can’t be asked for, Clair. It has to be gained. I aim to spend my Sabbath in the garden, taking the Lord at His best. I feel closest to God in the garden.”

She was so earnest, so silly sweet, I could only ask, “What does your pa say about it, Lavina?”

“Pa says, ‘Hold to the wheel! Hold to the wheel, young lady, and you will be up half the time—’” She gripped the lowest limb of the cherry tree shading their walk, crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. “Do you really think, Clair, do you think that half the time’s enough?”

“Lavina,” I said, “I’ve held to that wheel all my life and only ever ate mud.”

“Well, is there a Mother in Heaven, you think?”

My breath stopped. I’d waited eighteen years to hear

that question. I’d sat beside Lavina in countless Sacrament Meetings and never once suspected she felt the same as me. I quieted my heart. “If there’s a Father, there must be a Mother—”

“She wears maroon laces. And has powder white hair. And she has twelve lovely daughters!”

“Twelve daughters,” I said, caught in Lavina’s tale-spinning. “Each with a virtue all her own.” We named them: Confidence. Love. Endurance. Intelligence. Curiosity. Ability. Wisdom. Truth.

“One daughter creates beauty,” I said, “and sends it off for all to see. She is strong, so strong she never has to prove it.”

“That’s so, Clair. You see it deep. One daughter tends the earth,” she said, wriggling her feet in the brown dirt. “She loves and tends to it like it was her child.”

“There’s a daughter of justice,” I said. “And one who sees far. She sees the dead and tells their stories for them, and we listen and do right.”

“That twelve?” she asked.

“Can’t be. We didn’t say joyous or funny.”

“That’s daughter thirteen!” she shouted, as she slipped an arm around my waist, walking me out to the plank across their irrigation ditch. When we reached the road, I said, “I have enjoyed our Sunday sermon, Sister.”

Lavina answered, in all seriousness, “But there’s one thing more. Would our Heavenly Mother’s daughters ever marry?”

I took her hands. I shook them hard like the reins to an obstreperous horse. “If so, their husbands live in lean-to shacks, eat boardinghouse food, break rocks and wait on their dear wives’ visits like a field awaits a freshening rain.”

Lavina nodded and smiled. “Our Mother makes sure they don’t ill-treat each other. You know how men can be, waiting on a good thing.”