Saints (23 page)

“Watch your tongue, you little bastard!” Matthew shouted. “No one had to force a girl to marry
me!
”

Charlie immediately realized what he had done, that this was a point of pride with Matt, but he was too angry and felt much too righteous to back down now. “May God strike me if I’ve said anything that isn’t true tonight!”

“I’ve half a mind not to wait for God!” Matthew bellowed, leaping to his feet. “Let’s see if your Mormon God will save your head from breaking open!”

Charlie immediately stood up from his chair, though he knew that a fight with Matt was not much different from walking into a den of lions. It was an apt occasion for a martyrdom, and Charlie was ready and willing for the matter to come to blows. Dinah, without thinking, acted at once to prevent unforgivable violence between her brother and her husband.

“Matt,” she said, “you’d be wise not to speak about things you know nothing of.”

It worked this far—it drew Matthew’s wrath from Charlie to Dinah. “I see that you’re determined to make your husband out a fool for your brother’s benefit.”

“Angels,” Robert said coldly. “Golden Bibles. It’s not worth hitting the boy, Matt. He’s never had any sense at all.”

The fire of faith was in Charlie’s eyes. “It’s not a matter of sense, Robert—you’re right that far. But I swear to you in the name of Christ that every word of the Mormon religion is true. And now that Mother and Dinah are with me, I’d gladly die for it.”

“No doubt of that, Charlie,” Robert answered him. “You’ve always had to borrow your courage from women.”

It was a vicious remark, and Anna gasped.

“Never mind, Mother,” Charlie said. “I’ll freely admit that I’ve learned courage from Dinah and you. God only knows where else I would have learned it.”

Stiffly Robert got up from the table and reached for Mary’s hand. “Come, Mary, we’re going home.”

Mary, who had looked on in horror through the entire quarrel, made a few feeble efforts to patch things up. Robert would have none of it. He gathered up his sons, gave the baby to Mary, and was out the door without another word to anyone. The children sensed something of what was going on; they were all silent, watching the adults, and when Robert’s children were gone, Val and Honor retreated to a far corner of the parlor, out of sight, their eyes wide and watching. Matthew stood near the wall, looking at the door that had just closed behind Robert.

“I think,” Anna said quietly, “that it would be best if we went home now, Charlie.”

Charlie glanced at Matthew, whose face showed less than nothing. Dinah whispered, “Please, Charlie.”

Charlie walked around the table and took Dinah by the shoulders. “It’s all bearable, knowing we’re together in it. I’m glad, I am, with no regrets.” When he said it, he meant it. Yet under his anger at Robert there was a part of him shouting that he had made a terrible mistake, that he had traded a sure and marvelous future for an uncertainty, and all just to make sure he was in the opposite camp from his brother. Was it worth it, to give up all this, just to shut Robert from the family? But the answer was, and always would be, Yes. Robert stood forever between Charlie and manhood. And with this day’s work, Charlie had shunted him aside.

Anna kissed her daughter. Her good-bye to Matthew was unanswered: Dinah’s husband just stood by the wall, his fists clenched, staring at nothing.

“Is he going to be all right?” Anna whispered.

Dinah nodded. It was just the surprise. He was angry, but given time it would all smooth over, it would be all right.

The latch clicked; they were gone; only Matthew and Dinah remained, with the children quietly watching from the corner, invisible. Dinah turned to face her husband. Now he moved, coming away from the wall toward her, his face dark, his fists clenched. She steeled herself for the flood of abuse, for the accusations, for the recriminations. She was not prepared for him to raise his fist and swing it furiously at her face. She saw what he was doing, but she could not believe it, she could not respond to it, she could only watch the fist coming until it came.

The pain exploded in her head, and she found herself on the floor, leaning against the wall. She lay stunned for a moment; then the pain in her jaw struck her, and she felt her mouth filling up with blood, tasted it; she tried to spit it out, but she hadn’t the strength to spit. She could only open her mouth and let the blood flow out. With it came something hard. She could only think, thank heaven it wasn’t a front tooth, no one has to know my husband knocked my tooth out. No one has to know what we’ve sunk to.

She became aware that Matthew was screaming at her. His voice was very distant, and she could only make it out now and then, but it was full of fury, and it frightened her. Make a bloody ass of me in front of your family, will you? Leave your husband to go off chasing after some American bastard! On and on, until the accusations became monstrous. How often has he had you? Answer me! You’ve had the American preacher here in my own bed, haven’t you! Answer me!

She would have liked to answer him, but she knew her body could not make the shout she needed, knew her lips could not form words strong enough to express her loathing for his filthy mind.

He grabbed her by the jaw and throat and yanked her forward. She gagged. “Answer me, you filthy bitch! Pretending to be my wife and running around behind my back, I want words from you!”

To her surprise her mouth would open after all. She did not know what she was going to say until she heard herself saying it, and even then her mouth was so clumsy, her tongue so sluggish that she could barely understand herself. “Compared to you, Mr. Uray was a gentleman.”

But Matthew understood her, understood that she regarded him, not with anger, not with fear, but with contempt. He roared with anger; it was more provocation than he could bear. She saw his boot coming at her body. There was nowhere to move, no way to hide or protect or cushion and the blow came, yes, there, and it drove out even that slight self-control that had let her hold still to try to minimize the pain. She screamed, and her jaw popped out of joint with a hideous crack; the boot hit her again, this time in the belly, and she vomited instantly.

She lay in the pool of vomit wondering when she would die. But she didn’t die. And vaguely she was aware that the door had opened and someone had come in, it was little Val leading someone in, saying, “Uncle Robert, stop him, please.” Oh yes. It was Robert. He had come back, Val had brought him back, Robert would take care of things, Robert would make everything all right. Mr. Uray won’t dare hit me again, because I have a brother. I don’t have a thing to worry about, nothing to worry about at all.

It took three weeks for the bruises on Dinah’s face to heal enough for her to go out; Matthew’s bruises took even longer to heal, but he hadn’t the luxury of being able to stay indoors as Dinah could. He had to go to work every day with Robert, who had, with only a few well-placed blows, blacked both his eyes, bruised his ribs, and broken his nose. For the first time Dinah believed that Robert might have been sincere when he threatened to kill Mr. Uray—she had never known Robert had such a capacity for violence.

Nor did she suspect her own capacity for forgiveness. Certainly she had feared and hated him at first, as she tossed and turned in an impossible effort to escape from the pain. Her mother nursed her for three days before she was able to get up and care for herself, and even then speech came only with difficulty through her aching jaw. Her tooth had only been broken off—a dentist had to come and pull the rest of it, and during the agony of his wrenching and tearing she hated Matthew again. But that, too, passed, and Val and Honor looked up at her from faces that were as much Matthew’s as her own, and she began to remember all the pressures that had pulled at him that day; her pain faded, and so did her fear and anger, and when he came to her abject and sincerely ashamed of his brutality, she did not feel the loathing she expected. She found, to her surprise, that she wanted to go home again, out of her mother’s house, back to the routines that she had so detested before, but now missed.

Dinah had no fear of the incident happening again. Matthew was not habitually violent, and now they lived in an uneasy truce. Robert had been plain about it: If Matthew ever raised a hand against his sister for any reason, Robert would take it upon himself to provide for Dinah, Val, and Honor, for he’d see to it that if Matthew lived he’d be divorced and disgraced and discharged from his job. Dinah could not help suspecting that it was the job that held Matthew under control better than the threat of disgrace or divorce. Robert held Matthew’s pursestrings, and Matt was too used to living well now. He would not do anything that would force him back to a common engineer’s wage.

Yet the humiliation of obeying Robert’s orders told on Matthew, hurt him deeply, and Dinah grieved for him. Glumly he would come into the house after work, and speak, when he spoke at all, only of common household matters. He ate, he thanked her graciously for the meal, and then off he went to Chartist meetings or the pub. The political meetings were his one gesture of independence, yet it was feeble enough: Charlie had already refused his firm’s offer and was going to Mormon meetings regularly, so the need for Matthew to avoid indiscretion was gone.

He found small ways to punish Dinah, however. He gave her money of her own now, for the first time, but in a way calculated to offend. He never made love to her anymore except on the nights when he got paid, and after he satisfied himself he would get up and take ten shillings from the pocket of his pants and put it on her dresser. She knew he meant to make her feel like a whore; oddly enough, however, now for the first time she didn’t. She could not forget what had happened the night of her conversion, and she took more pleasure from his body now than she ever had before. If he sensed the difference, he probably attributed it to the money, and despised her for it. He would never believe it if she told him that her new faith had healed the scars in her that had kept her from the pleasures of the bed. He would more easily believe that it was the beating that had taught her to be less cold during the act of love.

The beating did still loom between them. It had left no permanent disfigurement on her, and Dinah, understanding how provoking that night had been, allowed the memory of fear and pain to recede, almost to be forgotten. Forgiving him was easier than she had expected—for her. It was the children who kept the memory of that night alive. Val would wake up screaming in the night, “Father, don’t! Uncle Robert, help me, help me!” Dinah would get up and take him from his bed and walk up and down the hall, holding him and singing softly to him that it was all right, that no one was hurting anyone now. At such times Matthew would pretend to be asleep, but she knew it was a lie: more than once she came back to bed after getting Val to sleep again and saw tears reflecting candlelight at the corners of Matt’s eyes. Matthew grieved to hear the terror of his son; Matthew was ashamed. It was that more than anything that led Dinah to forgive him, and yet it was also that which kept Matthew from letting the wounds heal. He was so sure that she hated him as she walked the floor with their crying child that he could not admit the possibility that now, for the first time in their marriage, she might be willing actually to love him, not
because
he had been cruel to her, but because he was so ashamed of it.

When her face no longer showed the visible signs of the beating, Dinah began attending the Mormon meetings. That was part of the settlement Robert had imposed. His family may have gone mad for this foolish religion, but by God if she wanted to take her children to these meetings Matthew had better not try to stop her. Dinah suspected that if Matthew had
not
beaten her, but merely forbidden her to attend the meetings, Robert would have gone right along—it was his rage at Matthew’s violence that made Robert so solicitous of her religious freedom.

Life at home was so tense and bleak that Dinah began to live for those hours with the Saints. She was not the only one who had suffered for the sake of the Church, she knew, and more than one of the sisters sneaked into the meetings after they had begun and left early, obviously stealing precious moments of fellowship against the will of their husbands. Dinah made a point of sitting with these women and whispering to them now and then; she was one of them, and hoped to give them the strength that would come from knowing they were not alone in their sufferings. It began with Dinah squeezing a hand, whispering a word, smiling at a face worn grim with discouragement. After a very short time, Dinah found herself always surrounded by sisters. One of them even spoke to her about it. “Sister Dinah, I thank God for you every night.”

“Why?” Dinah asked in genuine surprise.

“The Brethren are all good men, but
you
understand.”

Understand what? I understand the need of a woman to know that she is not utterly alone in the world her husband creates for her. I understand that side by side with the brotherhood that Brigham and Heber and Parley sermonize about, there is a sisterhood also. Of course the apostles give no comfort to these lonely women—how can
they
, who are husbands, really sympathize with disobedient wives?

She began to feel that this sisterhood was what the Lord wanted of her. As she came to care more and more for them, Dinah felt the light within her growing, so that although it never was as intense as that first night, she often felt life and power just under the surface of her skin; she often felt that God was honing her like a fine and sturdy knife to cut through the veil that hid his face from the world.

On a Sunday in June, at Carpenters Hall, Brigham Young announced to a conference of all the Saints in England that the Lord commanded the faithful to come to America and help build Nauvoo, the city of God. Many of the Saints were filled with fear at the idea of crossing the ocean, but Dinah heard it with joy. It was what she had wanted from the start. The place where there would be no poor, for the Saints would all uphold each other plenty and in want. The place where God walked among living men.

But cheap as the voyage to America was, it was far too expensive for most of the Saints. Brigham was pretty plain about that—the rich Saints would be forbidden to go to Nauvoo unless they had helped as many of the poor Saints make the voyage as they could. Charlie was the next speaker. He set aside his prepared text and spoke from the heart. “I’m not rich by any measure, but I know what real poverty is, and I think I can speak for my mother, too, when I say that we’ll gladly live as we lived when we were poor in order to save the money for our own passage—and for the passage of five other people before the summer’s out!”

There were cheers at that, and before Charlie could go on talking and weaken the effect, Brigham came to the pulpit and put his arm around Charlie and said, his voice breaking with emotion, “If every Saint in the Church had as much faith as Charlie Kirkham, Zion would already be standing, and the Savior would already have returned to the earth!”

Perversely, while the rest of the congregation was encouraged by Charlie’s words, Dinah worried. Gathering to Zion posed a greater difficulty for her than mere money. There was the matter of Matthew. He would never go with her to America, still less to the city of the Mormons. Did that mean, then, that to fulfill her vows to her husband, she had to disobey God’s commandment to gather with the Saints?

“We can’t go,” Anna said bluntly as they walked home from the conference.

Dinah said nothing, only hefted Honor higher on her shoulder. Val had stayed home with Matt this morning; the conference would only have bored him, and Sundays
were
the only days Matt had to be with his son.

Anna took her silence as argument. “I know that we’re supposed to obey the Lord’s commandments, but you have a husband, Dinah! And so have I.”

“Do we?” Dinah asked.

“Yes we do,” Anna said vehemently. “Till death do us part, if you recall.”

“A marriage can die while both its members are still breathing.”

“Do you mean that you’ll
run off
from your husband?” It sounded ugly; Anna meant it to.

“I would never leave my husband for another man,” Dinah said quietly. “I would never leave my husband, even if he beat me, even if he falsely accused me of terrible sins, even if he hated me. But if God commanded me to go to Zion, and my husband wouldn’t come, then yes, Mother, I would take my children and
run off
.”

“You’ve never reared children without their father. I have.”

“You survived.”

“There were many days when I prayed that I wouldn’t.”

They walked in silence for a few moments, watching a desultory game of ball going on in a square, the workman far too tired to put much vigor into the competition. What an empty land this England is, Dinah thought. “We’re foreigners here, Mother,” she said at last. “I want to go home.”

“So do I,” Anna said softly. “But
I
won’t go without my husband.”

Dinah sighed. Anna still believed that John Kirkham would come home. How could she even
want
him? Mother had loved her husband; Dinah had no experience in that.

Charlie caught up with them, calling out to them from a hundred yards behind. They stopped and waited. Dinah watched him running toward them. Seventeen years old. What was it that drove him to seem so much older?

“You were there, weren’t you? You heard what Brother Brigham said, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and we’re proud of you,” said Anna.

“Not proud of
me
,” he said. “What do
I
matter? America! Zion! Of course, Dinah, I know you won’t be able to go at once. But someday soon we’ll bring Matthew round to see the truth. And in the meantime Mother and I will be there, and we’ll write to you and tell you all about it. I’ll write you hundreds of pages, a book’s worth—who knows! Maybe I’ll really
write
a book! And I’ll meet the Prophet. Brother Heber prophesied, or at least he had a dream—but you know about the dream, don’t you, I already told you.”

A dozen times. “I’m glad for you,” Dinah said. “But of course Mother isn’t coming with us.”

“Dinah,” Anna said.

“Mother won’t leave unless Father comes with her.”

Charlie looked at his mother oddly. “What would you even want him for? Bloody lot of a husband he’s been to you. And I might as well have been an orphan for all I ever knew of him.”

“Mind your language, Charlie,” Anna said. Angrily she took Honor out of Dinah’s arms and strode on ahead of them.

“I didn’t mean to make her angry,” Charlie said. “But has she lost her mind?”

“Now she’s been baptized, she thinks God will bring her husband home.”

“If we’re lucky, he’ll never come back. If I didn’t kill him, Robert would.”

“You don’t sound like much of a Saint when you talk like that.”

Charlie immediately sobered. “No, I don’t, do I? I’m sorry. Of course I’d forgive him. Seven times seventy, the Savior said.” He didn’t sound too happy about the prospect. They walked in silence for a while, and then Charlie suddenly brightened. “I haven’t told you yet, have I!”

“Told me what?”

“I’m to be ordained an elder.”

“At your age!”

“Oh, don’t give me that nonsense, Dinah! At my age.” He playfully elbowed her and laughed, looking for a moment even younger than seventeen. “The Prophet was my age when he saw an angel.”

It startled Dinah to think of that. To Brother Joseph’s own family, he was just a boy like Charlie. Would I follow Charlie if he started his own church?

When she got home she served Matthew his dinner, and was so determinedly cheerful that he also smiled, though she knew he resented her having gone to church even if she had left Val with him. Could I leave you? she wondered as she dished him more potatoes. Could I take your children from you, could I take your son and go off to America where you’d never see them again?

Yes, I could.

That realization filled her with a cold hard light that was at once frightening and exhilarating. Have I no heart? Or too much spirit to be bound by old and already-broken oaths? Love, honor, and cherish, he had promised, and then beaten her for following her conscience. Surely that released her from
her
oath, didn’t it?

No, it didn’t. The oath was not conditional, it didn’t say love, honor, and obey until you decide to go to America or until you get angry. I can’t leave him, I can’t steal his family from him, I’m lying if I say I can.

After dinner he groaned and lay on the floor and tussled with Val, who didn’t believe that his father could really want to rest. Dinah held Honor on her lap and told her a story while they watched their menfolk at play. For a while she believed that she really had a family after all, that one reason she couldn’t leave Matt was because she loved him. That was possible, wasn’t it? God had changed her heart in so many other ways, mightn’t he also have changed it in that? And when the hour came to go back for the testimony meeting in the afternoon, she kissed her husband with real affection, carried Honor and took Val by the hand, and set off fairly dancing with joy.