Saints (40 page)

It was only a matter of seconds since Dinah had said the offending words, and now Vilate was firmly guiding Dinah onto the front porch. It was frightening how quick and irresistible the eviction had been. One moment Dinah was sitting there feeling as if she had found a true sister among the American Saints, and the next moment she felt as if she were being cast down to hell. It wasn’t fair. And so she stopped cold in the doorway and stared Vilate in the face. “Sister Kimball, I think you are being unjust to me.”

Vilate stared right back. “I don’t have to hear a whole hymn to know which one it is, I can recognize it from the first line. You are singing apostasy, and I’ve heard that one too often already.”

“I am as faithful a Latter-day Saint as you are likely to find.”

“Oh, I know. That’s what they all say. ‘I’m the faithful one, it’s the Prophet Joseph who has fallen, the Lord has refused that man because he changed a word in the Book of Commandments, or because he spelled my name wrong in a revelation, or because a prophecy didn’t come true just the way I wanted.’ I’ve heard it so often I near puke whenever it comes again. Excuse me for not talking like a lady, but I say what I think, and I’ll tell you this—if you think you can love the gospel and despise the man who the Lord chose to give it to us, well, you’re as dumb as they come, and that’s a fact.”

This time Vilate’s hand against her back was not to be resisted. Dinah stepped onto the porch and Vilate stepped back into the house. The door began to close. “Wait!” Dinah cried out.

The door stopped a few inches ajar.

“Please. How can I be your friend again?”

She waited for Vilate to say, “You can’t,” or worse, for her just to close the door. Instead, the door opened a few inches and Vilate peered out quizzically. “Now that’s something I never heard an apostate say before,” Vilate said.

“I said it all wrong. I’m not what you think. I’m just trying to find out why I’m
here
.”

Vilate cocked her head and then nodded slightly. “You just go back and meet Brother Joseph again, and this time don’t look at him like a farmer glaring at a stump in his field. When you look at him, just keep thinking, the gospel is true, and the Lord gave it to
him
first.”

“How will that help me understand him?” Dinah asked.

“What do you want to understand him for? Either you love him or you hate him, but I never heard of a soul who understood him. Now you run along and make shirts, and come back to me when you’ve figured out whether Brother Joseph is real or a sham, and whether you love him or hate him. If he’s your friend, then for sure I am, because I must say you’re a likeable woman. Besides, Heber thinks the world of you, and he’s sometimes right about people.”

With that the door closed. Dinah looked at it empty-headedly for a while as the children raced around in the yard. Then she made her way to the road. She wasn’t sure whether she was angry or ashamed, but about one thing she knew Vilate was right. Dinah was a fool if she thought she could separate Mormonism from Joseph Smith. The whole church was like him, wasn’t it? Cocksure of itself, sure that all of history was only prelude to this moment, and unable to understand how anyone could disbelieve. That was the very thing she hated worst about Brigham Young. It was also the very thing she liked best about Heber Kimball. But Brother Joseph—why did he have to stand so large? Everywhere she walked in Nauvoo today, she saw his shadow across it. She’d never know who Dinah Handy was in Nauvoo until she decided who Dinah was to Joseph Smith.

All day she went from door to door, calling at the biggest houses in town. And when she got home she had seven old shirts, a spool of thread, and a headache sharp enough to whittle stone. Instead of eating dinner she ripped seams and cut and patched. Anna found her in the morning, asleep in a chair, holding a nearly finished shirt in one hand. In the other hand she held a needle, and in her sleep her hand had closed a little, enough to drive the point of the needle into her palm. Dinah looked so peaceful in her sleep and her headache had been so bad the night before that Anna could not bear to wake her. And yet the needle could not be left like that. So Anna gently opened Dinah’s fingers, then pulled on the needle. It slipped smoothly out of Dinah’s skin, pulling at it only a little, drawing a thread of blood after it that trailed loosely down Dinah’s palm and onto her apron. Anna winced to see it, but because Dinah slept on with no sign of pain, Anna said nothing and let her sleep.

Dinah was drifting through an unintelligible dream when she felt something passing through her hand as gently as a fish drifting through a pool. It roused her a little, enough that her dream changed, took a shape that she knew. She was opening and closing her hand on emptiness, reaching to find something. She could see it: it was the face of God, the face that she had seen so often in dreams before; he stood just out of reach, holding out his hand to her, reaching for something she held, flowing with light. She reached, but she had nothing to give him. Seeing that, he pulled away, shaking his head. No! she cried in her dream. You can’t go now that I’ve finally seen you! But he turned away. He reached down and drew to him something that hung limp as cloth from his hand. Then, legs and hips and arms and chest, he donned it like a suit, concealing his glory within it so that the dazzling light was gone. It was a man’s body, ordinary flesh, strong and tangible and inglorious, and on his face he wore a man mask, too, and it was the face of Joseph Smith. Now the naked hand reached out to her. Timidly she touched it, and it was there, she could feel it, feel it so sharply that it hurt and she cried out in the joy of it.

“Hush, Dinah. You shouldn’t fall asleep with a needle in your hand. You could get blood poisoning from it.” Anna was daubing vinegar on Dinah’s palm with a rag. “I’m sorry to wake you, but if you leave a wound like that it can fester.”

“It’s all right,” Dinah said.

“Were you dreaming? I thought you were awake, you were humming and nodding, but then you didn’t answer me.”

“Yes. It was a—just a dream.”

“A true one? Or just indigestion?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t eaten.”

“You’ve got to eat. It’s one thing to decide to work for money, but you don’t have to do all these shirts in the same day. You especially shouldn’t stay up all night doing them. The night air isn’t healthy if you breathe it sitting up, it causes the phlegm to fill your lungs.”

“Or an incubus to press you.”

“What?”

“One of Charlie’s books. Incubus, succubus—demons that come to you in your sleep.”

Anna stared at her aghast. “Did a demon come to you?”

“Don’t bind my hand so tightly, Mother. I have to be able to hold a needle.”

“Let it be for a day at least.”

“I haven’t a day. I haven’t an hour. I have work to do.”

“Oh, Dinah, the Lord will provide.”

Dinah looked away from her mother. Anna was getting old, as if coming to America were the end of her life, not the beginning, as if she had died and could rest now.

But perhaps Anna was not wholly wrong. The Lord would provide, yes; not necessarily food for the table, but that was not what Dinah needed most. Things kept happening to her, and only God knew why; God could take the madness of events and give them meaning. Perhaps the dream was a true one, as true as what she felt the night she was converted. Perhaps Joseph Smith was wearing a disguise. He masqueraded as an ordinary man to allow him to touch ordinary people; if he revealed to them who he really was, it would blind them all. The man of brag and bullying was just a role. It was not his nakedness that had disturbed her, it was the fact that even his flesh was a disguise. But when his eyes said, “You are mine,” then it was the light of God that spoke to her. Despite his flesh, he was still as holy as she had so long imagined him to be.

She finished two shirts in two days. Anna grumbled at having to do the housework alone, but Dinah ignored her. The needle leapt through the seams. The pieces clung together almost by themselves, it seemed, and when she was done the iron was hardly needed, for the seams were flat and smooth as if the shirts had been woven whole.

“Back already?” Vilate Kimball asked when she opened the door.

Dinah held out the shirts. “Are they good enough to sell?” she asked.

Vilate pulled one up by the collar, letting the folds fall open. She studied it for a few moments and then looked at Dinah with wide eyes. “Oh, you’re a marvel with a needle, aren’t you? Yes, you can sell these. Though I expect you’d prefer not to offer them door to door. If you like, I can show them to ladies who come by. These’ll sell in a day.” Vilate raised her eyebrows. “Is two bits price enough for them?”

Dinah had no notion what “two bits” meant.

“A quarter,” Vilate said. “Twenty-five cents.”

It was pitiful. “It was a whole day’s work on each.”

“New ones cost much less than a dollar. Yours are so good, though, that I haven’t the heart to sell them for a dime. That’s what used shirts go for, by and large, if they got no holes.” Vilate studied the shirt again. “Keep this up, Sister Dinah. The pay isn’t much but it’ll be steady, and it’s more than a lot of folks is getting anymore. Will you have another done tomorrow?”

“It’ll be done by suppertime tonight.”

“Bring it by tonight, then. I’ll wager these’ll be sold already. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to Sister Cline’s. She just lost her youngest girl, and it’d be a shame if there wasn’t someone there to help her dress the baby for the burial.”

Vilate tossed Dinah’s shirts onto a chair just inside and then was off down the path toward the street, her hoop skirt flouncing over the icy ground. Then she stopped and turned. “Oh, Sister Dinah—Sister Emma mentioned yesterday at the quilting bee that she hoped you’d drop by her house sometime soon.”

“What for?” Dinah asked.

“If she’d wanted to tell me, I reckon she would’ve tole me.” And with that Vilate was into the street and gone.

Twenty-five cents a shirt would be a dollar fifty a week, with Sunday for resting. With the little bit that Charlie earned, it might just be enough to get by. But this wasn’t Sunday, and so she dared not get behind. As for Sister Emma wanting to see her—that could only mean that Vilate had told the Prophet’s wife what Dinah had said. Dinah had no wish to go and be ashamed before that good woman, or to run the risk of meeting Brother Joseph again. Dinah did not know which she feared most: that Joseph would know what she thought of him two days ago, or that he would look at her and see what she thought of him today.

Oblivious as Charlie often was to the world around him, it was three days after he got home from Springfield before he realized that Dinah was remaking shirts and selling them. “Don’t you think I’m doing my best?” Charlie asked.

“Of course you are,” Dinah said.

“I can’t bring in the kind of money I had in Manchester; it isn’t fair for you to expect it!”

“I don’t expect it. Why are you so angry, Charlie? Our savings were getting low, that’s all. I’ve worked before when times were hard.”

“This isn’t Manchester! This is America, and in America decent women don’t work for pay. Not like this, begging shirts from door to door. You might as well walk down the street calling out, ‘Charlie Kirkham can’t provide for his family.’”

“Charlie,” Dinah said impatiently, “no one even knows who Charlie Kirkham
is
.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Charlie jammed his hands into his jacket pockets and turned his back on her.

“Charlie,” Dinah said softly. “Charlie, what harm does it do if I work for money? It’s not as if I had a husband to care for. And what will we do if you get married? We need to be self-sufficient, not always depending on
you
.”

“If I were dependable, you wouldn’t be thinking about that.”

“Charlie, we all do our best.”

“You could have told me, at least. Don Carlos spent ten minutes strutting in his new shirt and teasing me about how he was milking my cow before he finally realized I didn’t know you had sold him the shirt.”

“I don’t know who buys them. Sister Vilate sells them for me.”

“And when he found out I didn’t even know you were doing it, you could hear him laugh clear to Iowa.”

“Charlie, it’s been no secret. You’ve seen me sewing every day since you got back from Springfield.”

“I thought they were my shirts.”

“You don’t own that many shirts.”

“I don’t care! I want you to quit doing it, that’s all!”

“I’m sorry. It’s something I can
do
.”

“Why can’t you be like other women? Why do you have to keep trying to be a man?”

That made Dinah angry, and so she said something cruel. “The last person to say that to me was Robert.” The mention of their older brother’s name stung Charlie into silence. Dinah at once softened her tone. “If it’s going to bother you to see me sewing, Charlie, then I suggest you stay out later at night and leave earlier in the morning.”

“You can bet that I will.”

“And try not to be so quarrelsome. It’s a hard time for everyone, not just for you.”

“Is that
all
, Sister Handy?”

“You’re truly Robert’s brother, after all,” Dinah said.

Charlie glared at her and left the house.

Dinah’s hands were trembling so that she could hardly thread the needle, and she had to unpick the seam she had been working on during the quarrel. She shouldn’t have let it make her so angry. It was absurd to have a quarrel at all. Why was it that whenever a man was failing, that was the one time he couldn’t bear to have a woman help him? What was she supposed to do, starve so that he wouldn’t be embarrassed?

This place has twisted us all. Surely Saints should be most holy when among their fellow Saints; yet when all your neighbors, good and bad, are Mormons, you no longer think of them as precious friends. They can be unmannered, their children can have snotty noses, and you half suspect them of stealing from your garden—and they are the Saints you are supposed to love. In Manchester, being Mormons was itself so unique that they needed no other name to know they were important. Here, they had to struggle for other ways to name themselves. Charlie was working incompetently at odd jobs, dreaming of being the Prophet’s scribe and an industrialist all at once. Father was smelling up the house with his paints. Anna was drifting, waiting for God to make things right.