Saints (45 page)

And suddenly Charlie wondered if in fact Dinah had fallen in love with someone. That would explain her virulence when she commanded him to marry. It would explain why she seemed so upset when Charlie was marrying, and marrying exactly as she had advised. Dinah was still young. She was beautiful and good. It would be surprising if some man had
not
desired her, surprising if she did
not
respond. And yet, because of Matthew, she was forever barred from the very happiness that Charlie would achieve. It made her tragic, made their lives seem poetry to him, like star-crossed lovers in a play of Shakespeare’s, the brother marrying in bliss, the sister grieving in her solitude.

Of course he knew it was probably nonsense. It didn’t take an unrequited love to explain odd behavior in women. Yet he was so pleased with the poetry of it that for days, whenever he saw his sister in a group that included men, he watched, he studied the way she was with them and they with her, hoping to notice some man who seemed unusually eager, around whom Dinah was particularly shy. But there was no such man. Indeed, she was rarely around men at all. Just as she had done in Manchester, she ministered among the women, until Charlie was sure that he had fooled himself, and she had no thought of love at all.

“And of course you’ll come with your father when I sit for him,” Mary Smith said, and though Dinah tried to resist, she could not, in the end, refuse. So here she sat in the home of the Prophet’s brother, reading the Book of Mormon to the Prophet’s sister-in-law as she sat rigidly in the light slanting through the south-facing parlor window.

“You needn’t sit quite so still,” John said.

“I wouldn’t want you to spoil it,” Mary answered.

“It would take more than you twitching now and then to cause me to get you wrong on the canvas. Besides, if I have to listen to one more ‘And it came to pass’ I’m going to burn that book.”

“Brother Kirkham,” Mary said, looking shocked. “That’s the Book of Mormon!”

“That’s it!” John cried. “At last, you have an expression on your face!”

Mary turned to Dinah in surprise. “Didn’t I have an expression before?”

“Like a stump,” Dinah said, and the women laughed.

John was delighted. “You’re good for something after all, Dinah. Keep her laughing and she won’t look like a corpse in the painting.”

So Dinah set aside the book and talked. She did not know Mary well. The hierarchy of women in Nauvoo paralleled the hierarchy of the men; the wives of the Prophet and his counselors were at the pinnacle of society. To such women one did not speak until invited, and Mary simply had not made that invitation until now. Not because Mary was snobbish, Dinah realized, but because she honestly did not know her own social dominance. “I wish you had come before,” Mary said when they had talked for more than an hour, almost forgetting Dinah’s father was even there. “I had heard so much about you from Vilate and Emma and—oh, everyone.”

“Nauvoo must be desperately short of things to talk about.”

“Some of the women call you a prophetess.”

“I’m nothing of the kind.”

“And Vilate calls you a true Saint.”

That opinion
did
mean something to Dinah, though she knew how little she deserved it. “Vilate is too generous.”

“As a matter of fact, Vilate has a way of saying exactly what she thinks. If she says you’re a Saint, it’s pretty likely to be the truth. She’s a hard one to fool.”

“I know,” Dinah said. But I am fooling you all. The Prophet wants me in his bed; I have rejected him; and none of you knows a thing.

“Not like Brother Joseph.” And Mary smiled.

Dinah almost lost her composure. But it was just coincidence, she realized. All conversations in Nauvoo turned to the Prophet sooner or later. Besides, Dinah told herself, she had done nothing to be ashamed of.

“Now
he’s
generous to a fault. If
he
were the only one who spoke well of you, I’d pay no attention.”

So Joseph was speaking of her—at least to his family. A suspicion entered Dinah’s mind. “It wasn’t the Prophet who recommended my father to you, was it?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. How did you know?”

A loan for her brother; a commission for her father. It couldn’t be coincidence. It angered her that he would use his influence as Prophet to try to get a woman in his debt. But I don’t mind, thought Dinah. It will also make it easier to despise him and keep from desiring him. Not that I need help for that, of course.

“What’s wrong?” Mary asked.

“Wrong?”

“You’re so quiet,” Mary said.

John chuckled. “Dinah’s had silent spells since she was a baby. Back then they could last for weeks.”

“I was only wondering,” said Dinah, “how the Prophet could recommend my father when he’s never seen his work.”

To Dinah’s annoyance, John answered. “John Bennett recommended me. He said he would, when I met him in Springfield.”

“That’s right,” said Mary. “Joseph said as much. Hyrum was asking if he knew a painter, and Joseph said—”

At that moment Hyrum Smith leaned into the room. “Good afternoon,” he said.

“Oh, Hyrum, you’re home!” cried Mary.

But he only had eyes for the painting. “May I see?”

Dinah watched him as he examined the canvas. He wasn’t so tall as his brother, nor so open-faced; he was quiet, his face more serious than Joseph’s. The Prophet’s older brother, and yet willingly in his service. Dinah marveled at that—she tried to imagine Robert serving Charlie that way, and almost laughed aloud at the thought. Hyrum was either a weakling or something quite remarkable, to bear taking a place below a brother he once thought of as a child.

“It’s very rough, of course,” John explained. “It takes shape gradually.”

“Oh, I know,” Hyrum said. “But you’ve caught her all the same.”

“Has he?” Mary asked from the window. “And welcome home, my love.”

“Me?” Hyrum asked. “Were you referring to me?”

“Oh, no,” said Mary. “I didn’t mean to call you that. The secret’s out. Now all the world shall know I love my husband.”

“No one heard but these two. If we kill them immediately—or just cut their tongues out—”

“Oh, Hyrum, now you’re getting gruesome.” Mary studied the painting. “It doesn’t look like me at all. Just a spot like a crushed bug for my face.”

“I thought that was the best part,” Hyrum said. Dinah was unnerved by the way he and Mary bantered. Mary was cheerful enough, but Hyrum never so much as tried
not
to smile—from his face and voice you’d never know he was anything but sincere. “You’re treading on my foot, Mary.”

“And I will, until you tell me how you think this ‘captures’ me.”

“Torture me all you like, I’ll still tell you. It’s just the way he has you standing, and the way your hand is held, up like that—you do that when you laugh.”

“I do?”

“He noticed it, that’s all. It’ll make me glad whenever I see that painting.” To John he said, “You’re as good as I had hoped.”

During the conversation, John had gathered up his materials and set them aside, affecting unconcern with the conversation. “Tomorrow?” he said now. “The same time?”

“The house is going to fall to ruin if I lose so many hours a day,” Mary said.

“I’ll divorce you if it does,” Hyrum said. And then he caught Mary by both hands and looked into her eyes. “Mary Fielding, now that you’re rid of that monstrous husband of yours, will you marry
me
?”

“Do you smoke or spit?”

“I’ll give it up for you.”

“Then I’ll go get the children from Vilate’s. Brother Kirkham, will you walk me to Vilate Kimball’s house on your way home?”

“Of course we will,” Dinah said.

Hyrum and Mary were both silent a moment, and glanced at each other before Hyrum spoke. “I had hoped to have a chance to talk to you alone for a moment, Sister Dinah,” Hyrum said.

It all came clear now. Mary’s insistence that Dinah come along for the sitting had been Hyrum’s idea, or rather Joseph’s. Well, I’ll not be strung like a puppet. “I wish I could, but I must get home, actually,” Dinah said. “I’ve taken as much time from my work as I can.”

“Joseph wanted me to talk to you about the school,” Hyrum said.

“Tell Brother Joseph that I’ve decided not to be a schoolteacher.”

“Oh, no!” Mary said. “And there are a dozen of us who’ve been counting on it! Imagine, a woman who can read and write, making over shirts while our children wallow in ignorance! You can’t be so heartless as to refuse us.”

“I’m no scholar,” Dinah said, flustered.

“Talk to Hyrum, please, Dinah,” Mary said. The woman was so genuine; it annoyed Dinah how Joseph was manipulating the friendship of women to bend Dinah to obedience, even in as small a matter as meeting with Hyrum.

“What’s this about a school?” John asked.

“Brother Joseph wants me to teach. He thinks I’m much cleverer than I am.”

“I just want a chance to explain some things to you,” Hyrum said. Dinah looked him in the eye. He knows, yes, there’s no doubt of it, he knows what Joseph wants from me. “Just thirty minutes, Sister Dinah, and you’ll at least know what it is you’re turning down.”

“I already know what I’m turning down, thank you,” Dinah said.

“I assure you that you know nothing of what you’re doing.”

“Hyrum!” Mary said. “She doesn’t know that you’re joking.”

He was not joking. “Of course she knows I’m joking. Don’t you, Sister Dinah?”

“I’ll stay these thirty minutes,” Dinah said, “if you promise me that then I’ll be troubled no more about it.”

Hyrum smiled—for the first time since he had come home. “Sister Dinah, I don’t know how you could have been troubled
less
.”

“Please give him a fair hearing,” Mary said. “We’d love to think our children were in your hands.”

So Dinah stayed with Hyrum, and John and Mary left.

“Convince me to teach school,” Dinah said, knowing that he had no interest in doing so.

“I don’t think I’ll try. You’re too damn proud to let anyone convince you of anything.”

She had got so used to his ironic joking with his wife that it took a moment for her to realize that he meant the rebuke. But once she knew it, she answered in kind. “If I’m so damned proud, Brother Smith, why did you want me to stay?”

“To tell you a story.”

“I think I’ve heard all the stories that I care to hear.”

“It was while we were in Zion’s Camp, a little army of us, traveling to Missouri to try to sustain the Saints of Zion against their persecutors—”

“I know about Zion’s Camp.”

“We found three rattlesnakes, and some was all for killing them when Joseph comes up and says, ‘The animals will never lose their hatred for man until man stops killing animals. You have no business taking a life unless you need the food, and if you kill those rattlers you’re going to eat them!’ And so nobody kills the snakes, and we go on talking about that sort of thing, and then we see this squirrel up a tree, and we’re watching him skitter about on whatever errands he had, when all of a sudden,
boom!
a musket goes off behind us and the bullet whistles over our heads and that little harmless squirrel plunks down dead on the ground, shot right in the head. And when we turned around, who do you think we saw but Joseph, and he doesn’t say a word, he just turns around and walks off.” Hyrum nodded with finality.

Dinah couldn’t figure out why he had told the story. “Are you trying to prove to me that Joseph Smith is a hypocrite?”

“That’s just what some of them thought. I could see it in their faces, they didn’t understand. What kind of prophet is this, who says one thing and does another? I know what’s going on, but I says nothing, mind you, because it isn’t
my
test, it’s theirs, to see what they’ll make of it. And lo and behold, down reaches Brother Parley and picks up the corpse of the squirrel, its head blown clean off, and Parley says, ‘Didn’t you hear the Prophet? When we kill an animal, it had better be for food!’ And so Parley cleans the squirrel on the spot, and we skin it and cook it and by damn we eat the thing for supper. Parley said a blessing over it, and every one of us took a bite.” Hyrum smiled. “We wouldn’t’ve dared to say no, Parley would’ve skinned us, too.”

“What is this story supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why did you tell it?”

“Joseph said to me, ‘Hyrum, would you mind telling Dinah Kirkham the story of that squirrel I shot in Zion’s Camp?’”

“Is there anyone here who does anything without Joseph telling him?”

Hyrum looked at her coldly. “There’s quite a few who do things because Joseph told them
not
to. But they’re made of the stuff I scrape from my boot.”

“Are you telling me that Joseph is just testing me, that if I say yes to him, he’ll tell me it was just a test and I don’t have to go through with it?”

“Parley
ate
the squirrel, Sister Dinah. We all did.”

“And so you pander for him, Brother Hyrum, and he lends money to my brother and gets work for my father and I’m supposed to be so grateful I’ll commit adultery with him?”

Hyrum walked over to a chair and sat, crossed one leg over his knee, and tilted the chair back against the wall like a schoolboy. “I figured you to be a right smart lady, Sister Dinah, but now I reckon you’re as dumb as they come.”

“Thank you, Brother Smith.”

“Aren’t you going to walk out of here and leave the Church and go around telling everybody how Joseph Smith is a fallen prophet and his brother’s no better?”

“I think not.”

“Why not? About three-fourths of the Saints have done that at some time or another. That’s how we harrow in the spring, we just go around planting seeds in the footprints of the apostates.”

“Well, don’t follow
me
in the spring.”

“Do you know why you won’t leave? Because of two children you left behind you in England for the sake of becoming a child of God here. For the sake of visions and prophecies and a light that burns in your own heart. I don’t reckon you’ll change your mind about that.”

I hate you for knowing my heart and using it against me. “No. I don’t imagine that I will.”

“Since Joseph asked you—what he asked you—have you ever let yourself think, even for a minute, that it might be true?”

“That is unthinkable.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but if Joseph is a prophet you ought to give some consideration to the idea that he might not be a lecherous, adulterous son of a bitch. That’s all I’m telling you, Dinah. You’re one of the great ones, you know that; Sister Dinah, the Lord has a great work for you, but not if you won’t become what God means you to become.”

“All I want is to be happy.”

“Funny thing. That’s all God wants for you, too. But you won’t be happy if you refuse the husband the Lord has given you. Would you like me to walk you home?”

“I know the way.”

“Good day, Sister Dinah.”

“Good day, Brother Smith.”

Dinah got no more than a hundred yards on her way home when her father came jogging up a side street and fell into step beside her. Dinah was not in a mood for smiling, and so, to punish herself, she smiled at him. “I thought you were escorting Sister Mary to Vilate’s house.”

“I did. But I didn’t have a thing to say to either lady, and so I took my leave of them and came looking for you. And don’t pretend you’re glad of my company, because you’re not.”