Saints (71 page)

“Are you asking my opinion on a matter of doctrine, Brother Brigham?”

“I never have before, and I don’t aim to start now. What I’m asking is, do you think these women will accept?”

“Is this the will of the Lord, Brother Brigham?”

“I’m not the prophet that Joseph was, Sister Dinah, but I know good sense when I hear it, and good sense is always the will of the Lord.”

“Try to sound a little more definite, and I think that after due consideration almost all of the widows will accept.”

“What about you?” Brigham asked.

“I’ll encourage them to accept. I think it’s sensible myself.”

“That isn’t what I was asking.”

I know what you were asking, Brigham, and I’m saying no. “Brother Brigham, you called me away from the Temple to serve the Saints at Sugar Creek, not to be taken care of by a husband. Am I doing what the Lord wants me to do?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t trouble me with distractions. Send me what supplies you can. Loaves and fishes especially, if you can spare any.” She clucked, and the horse started forward. She caught only a glimpse of Brigham’s face. He was angry. Well, let him be angry. Let him stew over it for a week. I buried a husband a year and a half ago, and fourteen babies just this week, and I’m trying to feed five hundred people with provisions enough for two hundred, while they’re dying of as many diseases as they can think of. It’s a poor time to propose marriage. Brigham never has had much of a sense of proper timing.

Still, she might have been more polite about the way that she turned him down. It
was
a proposal of marriage from a proud man, after all. She was in a bad mood. She planned how to apologize to him. And then just after dark, when she got back to her tent, she forgot all about Brigham Young. For there were two sisters in the tent, preparing her mother’s body for burial. Even though Dinah had long since stopped depending on her mother, still it had never occurred to her that her mother could ever break, that anything would be too much for her. Anna Kirkham had lived through terrible suffering and came out stronger than ever, always stronger than ever. Who would have thought hunger and cold weather in Sugar Creek would take her?

Yet Dinah did not cry. Now of all times she had to serve the people who watched her, looked to her for strength. She led the singing of the hymn at the brief services for those who had died that day, and her voice did not break. She made her full round of visits through the camp, and was still awake when the supply wagon came, so she could see to it the food was distributed according to real need, and not just to those who asked the loudest. It was well after midnight in the bitter cold, with the camp still and no one but a few sentinels about, when Dinah sat alone beside the fire and gave a few tears to her mother, and remembered her as she was the day they put their belongings in the cart and moved to the vile cottage by the River Irk. The way she argued with the carter, the way she cleaned up the filth downstairs and insisted on living as civilized people despite their poverty. She remembered her mother standing on the stairs with a drunken man trying to come up. Dinah and Robert had crept out, terrified, but they knew from their mother what they ought to do. Never surrender. Kill or die if you had to, but never, never give up. She remembered the man crying out as he fell backward down the stairs, his whimpers as he ran away. So much for you, death. So much for you, despair. And Dinah smiled, and her grief was purged enough to bear.

Then she went back into the tent, searched in her mother’s bag, found the box of letters, and emptied it into the flames. Almost at once she snatched one letter out, blew on it until it no longer burned, and then tore off the childish scrawl at the bottom. That part she put back into the box; the rest of the letter joined the others in the fire. All the might-have-beens did not so much as turn the fire blue. Just a minute’s brighter flare, and they were ash.

Dinah did not lie awake afterward. She did not even think about the empty bed beside her, where her mother had slept the night before; where her mother had died today. She had to get what sleep she could, for her work would begin at dawn tomorrow, and she could not afford to be weak in the morning.

Dinah could not help but look ahead. Not that she didn’t have enough to keep her busy in the present—all the way across Iowa she had nursed the sick, dressed the dead for burial, encouraged those whose courage failed—but she knew that things would change here in Winter Quarters. Things were already changing. Now in its second spring, Winter Quarters was becoming a city. A tent city, but much more permanent than the way the Saints had lived out of wagons during the weeks of travel across Iowa. The last of the Saints were out of Nauvoo now. And, miraculously, the living who arrived outnumbered the graves left along the road from Sugar Creek to here. Now the companies of fifty families were becoming stable; people were ordering their lives in new patterns. It was good, Dinah knew that; but she also knew she was a woman alone, and the patterns were growing up without her.

The idea of being alone did not terrify her. She liked it in many ways. Her work was demanding and she had no distractions. More, there was no conceivable way that any other man could take Joseph Smith’s place. The problem was that she could see the end of her work ahead. All the widows of Joseph Smith that she knew about had found other husbands. Not celestial husbands, of course, for they would all belong to Joseph forever. Their husbands took them as plural wives for this mortal life only, to care for them and raise up children to be part of Joseph’s eternal progeny. And Dinah saw that the women who had taken Brother Brigham were already taking ascendancy in the Church. The wife always shared in the station of her husband—that was a law for the whole world. In the Church, it held as much for plural wives, too. It had been the same in Nauvoo, she saw now. She had sustained Joseph, yes, but Joseph had sustained her as well.

She was not ambitious. She examined her own heart and was sure that she was not thinking of marriage only because she wanted to make sure she was at the center of power. In her life she had never thrust herself forward, had been content to minister quietly to those who needed her. Prominence had been a gift of God to her; perhaps also a curse, but still not something she had fought for or even dreamed of. Her only reason for wanting to ensure for herself a position of influence was that without it, she would not be able to keep her promise to Joseph. She had already done her best to make sure the Church was led by a man who would continue the Principle, the only man who was strong enough to hold the Saints together. But that was done now. What else would she live for? How else would she be Joseph’s true wife, if not by being a leader among women, helping to strengthen the Saints and so strengthen the Church from the heart outward? She had no orphaned children to rear, as Hyrum’s widow Mary had. She had only a motherless Church, which had been given to her to nurse, to raise up in place of her own lost children. If she did not have that anymore, she did not know what her life would then be for.

She had not been wrong to reject Brigham Young at Sugar Creek—the man had no sense of proper timing. Now was the right time to accept his proposal, if she was to live the only life she could conceive for herself. It had been almost a year since his proposal, of course, and he might not want her anymore. That, however, was in the hands of God—if God wanted her in the role she chose, Brigham would accept. If not, then she would try to find another path for whatever years she had ahead of her.

There was only one drawback. Much as she respected Brigham Young, she did not like him much. He hadn’t the gentle heart that Heber Kimball had; he seemed much more full of himself, much more certain that if he and God ever disagreed, it was God who would have to go back and think it through again. Keeping her position of preeminence among Mormon women might not be worth it, if being married to Brigham Young was the price she had to pay.

As if Providence were determined to make her choice more difficult, Heber proposed to her before she could get an appointment to talk to Brigham Young. It was the first day of April, and she was walking along the bluff overlooking the miserable mudwash they called the Missouri River, trying to discover if this was what passed for spring in this flat country. To Dinah, spring had always been a certain sort of bird, trees greening up, blossoms surrounding her. Here it was the grass getting some green around the roots, the rodents getting feisty on the prairie, and rain instead of snow when anything came out of the sky at all. Across the river she could see the wooden markers of the cemetery. It was the closest thing to a forest this place could claim. And she knew there were three bodies for every grave that was marked.

So she wasn’t in a cheerful mood when Heber rode up on a horse that danced in the most annoying way.

“You shouldn’t walk out here alone!” he called. “There
are
Indians, you know.”

“Can’t you get your horse to hold still?” she retorted.

“It’s happy. It’s spring.”

“Is that what they call it?”

Heber dismounted and walked beside her, leading the horse. For a few minutes he said nothing at all. She wondered if somehow he had learned to respect other people’s silence. Soon enough she discovered that he was trying to figure out the delicate way to say something difficult.

“Sister Dinah, you ought to marry me, you know.” Apparently he had given up and said it in the way that came naturally.

“Because you’re such a fine strapping young buck?”

“That was Vilate’s reason, but you come too late now. No, you ought to marry me because you know you’re going to have to marry somebody, and I’m the only man I know who isn’t scared to death of you.”

She chose to ignore the last comment. “Why do I have to marry somebody?”

“Who’s going to have time for a widow when we’re breaking virgin ground? You going to go around with a bucket and plead for donations? Or do you plan to do your own plowing?”

“I might.” Of course that was absurd. She was just being defiant and knew it. “I can live with my brother Charlie.”

“A brother’s a brother. A husband’s something else.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Your brother’s first duty is to his wives. You’d be in the way and you know it.”

“I’ve had a shortage of other offers.”

“Like I said. They’re afraid of you. Well, you don’t think it’s because you aren’t pretty, do you! Dammit, woman, you’re still the prettiest girl in the camp, and there are some pretty women here.”

“Brother Heber, I thought you had enough wives by now to keep you cooled off, even in the springtime.”

“I’m just saying I wouldn’t be marrying you out of charity. I can tell you this, too. I’ve loved you dearly ever since I baptized you, and Vilate—to tell you the truth, she brought it up herself. Said it was a damned shame that of all the widows left behind by the martyrdom, you were the only one who was still alone. She said she thought the family that had you would be the luckiest in the Church.”

“Vilate thinks more highly of me than I deserve.”

“That’s what I told her, but she insisted.”

Dinah laughed in spite of herself.

“What I proposed was marriage.”

“There’d be no purpose in it, Heber. I’m barren as a brick.”

“I already knew that. Furthermore and besides, you knew I knew it. So don’t go trying to make up reasons just to get rid of me.”

“I’m sorry, Heber.”

“Is it someone else? Not that I’m jealous, mind you. Just curious.”

“Yes, it is.”

“And Brigham told me he had no intention—”

“Not Brigham. Joseph.”

Heber stopped abruptly, and his horse ran into him. It nearly knocked him down. “Sister Dinah, you can’t tell me you mean to stay single just because—”

“Heber, I just mean to tell you that I’ll marry the man I think that Joseph would want me to marry. I made some promises to him, and I have to marry a man who’ll give me the means to keep them. If I married again for love, or even for good company, I’d have said yes fifteen minutes ago and we could have saved ourselves a lot of breath.”

He stood there nodding, looking thoughtful. Looking a little sad, too. “You know,” he finally said, “I’m just giving you my opinion, but it’s the honest truth. I think it’s a shame that after all you’ve been through, after all you’ve given up or lost or gone without in your life, I think it’s a damned shame that you still have to bend your life to fit other people instead of going straight ahead with what makes you happy.”

It touched her that he cared for her so much; she leaned up and kissed his cheek. “Heber, you’re the best man alive.”

“Nothing I say is going to convince you, is it?”

“Heber, my life is going just right for the kind of person I am. It really is.”

“You’re happy?”

That was an unfair question. Right at the moment, no. Right at the moment she was still grieving for Joseph, still lonely for her mother, still empty in the place where her love of her own children ought to be. But happiness wasn’t a momentary question. Dinah thought back to the path of her life, all its turns, and wondered which of them, even the most painful, she would choose to undo, if it meant losing all that came after. The only one she even paused over was the day that Joseph died—but that was the one thing that wasn’t her own choice, not at all within her power to change. If happiness isn’t looking back and being content with the road you already traveled, she told herself, I don’t know what it is.

“Yes, Heber. I’m happy.”

He studied her face a moment more. Then he smiled. “If you’re lying, you’re too good at it for me to catch.” He walked around to the other side of the horse and scrambled on. Then he reached down a hand to Dinah. “Climb on up and come back to town,” he said.

“Does anyone know you came out here to propose to me?”

“A couple of people.”

“Then I have no intention of riding into camp behind you on a horse. Tongues would wag, Brother Heber.”

“Tongues always wag!”

“I’ll walk, thank you kindly, sir.”

He kicked the horse’s flanks and rode ahead a little way. Then he stopped and shouted back at her. “Madam, if you was my mule I’d shoot you!” She laughed at him, and he laughed back, and they stayed friends. That was what she loved most about Heber. He stayed friends.

Brigham was very busy. He put her off for three days, what with having to get ready, at last, for the first company of pioneers to leave the banks of the Missouri and head west in earnest for the Great Salt Lake Valley. It wasn’t until April fourth that she got a time with him—her birthday, she remembered with sudden pleasure. I’m twenty-seven, going on ninety.

When she got into his tent, there was William Clayton, ready to take notes as with any other meeting.

“You won’t be needed, Brother William,” Dinah said.

William looked startled. “I stay for all the meetings.”

“Not this one,” she answered.

William looked at Brigham, who gave him no answer, not even a gesture. William waited a moment more, then packed up his writing kit and walked out. “I’ll be just outside if you want me,” he said.

“He sounds,” said Brigham, “as if he thought I was entering a lion’s den.”

“While
I
really have. The Lion of the Lord, of course,” she said, with just enough archness that he laughed.

“Let me guess what you came for. If you’re asking for a place in the first company of pioneers, forget it. You’re needed here, and if I had my way, which I seldom do, we wouldn’t have any women in the first company at all.”

“I haven’t the slightest desire to be in the first company.”

“What then? You said it was a matter of urgency. So important that it had to take up an hour of my few precious days before we go.”

“I’m here to accept your proposal of marriage. I want the ceremony to be performed before you go.”

Brigham raised an eyebrow. “Are you confusing me with someone else?”

“At Sugar Creek, in Iowa.”

“That wasn’t a proposal!”

“I know. It was the most cowardly display of hinting around I’ve ever seen. But I’ve decided to forgive that and marry you anyway. Unless you’re going back on your offer.”

“You as much as told me to drop dead!”

“I would never say such a thing to the Lord’s anointed.”

He roared, deliberately, though he must have known it wouldn’t frighten her. “By damn, woman, I have sixteen or so wives already, more or less, and I don’t need more!”

“I haven’t come to plead with you,” she said quietly. “You made me an offer, you never withdrew it, and now I’m accepting it. Come now, take your medicine like a man. Marrying me is not like marrying a rattlesnake, you know.”

“The dissimilarities are only superficial.”

“You consider yourself a good judge of men, I think. How good a judge of women are you?”

“Now, don’t put it on that basis, Sister Dinah. You know that I know there’s no finer woman in this Church for the sorts of things you’re good at.”

“And I’m good at nearly everything that matters.” He was getting there.

“When I proposed to you at Sugar Creek I did it with trepidation. I’m a man who likes domestic peace. Let me war with the nations, but have a quiet home.”

“I rarely speak. I never raise my voice.”

“When you turned me down I breathed the biggest sigh of relief you ever heard! I was facing southwest and damn near blew down every tree in the state of Missouri.”

“Are you sticking by your word or not, sir?”

“I think out west I’ll build a separate house, just for you. Which I’ll lock from the outside, as a public service.”

“Then you’ll marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Before you leave next week?”

“Why such a long engagement?”

Because I want to stay here in Winter Quarters as one of the President’s wives. She did not say it. It was easier to deal with Brigham if he did not know what you wanted. “I’m afraid with so much else on your mind you might just forget to send for me.”

“Tomorrow, then, if you want.”

“Today. Before I leave this tent.”

“All right, today! Call William in here, I’ll have him—”

“Just a moment.”

He stopped. “Having second thoughts?”

“I just have a couple of conditions for you.”