Saints (72 page)

“
You
have conditions for
me?
”

“First, that I be free to teach school or hold Church positions.”

“Of course.”

Patience. I’m building up to the big one. “Second, that I be allowed to publish and speak as I have always done, with no husbandly interference.”

“I’m still the President. If I see false doctrine, I’ll stamp it out.”

“You will never see false doctrine from me. And the third condition—”

“Out of how many?” He tapped on the writing table.

“Three. You heard, I am sure, about my accident some years ago, and the service I received at the hands of Dr. Bennett. As far as I am concerned, the only reason for a woman who is eternally married to Joseph Smith to allow another husband into her bed is to raise up children for
him
. That is impossible for me. Also, I am not starved for the pleasures of the marriage bed; I’ve quite had my fill for a lifetime. In short, sir, this is a platonic marriage.”

His eyes narrowed. “Marriage is marriage.”

She couldn’t help being flattered—he had been looking forward to bedding her. “You don’t need me. I’m eternally married to another man. Intimacy for its own sake would be tantamount to adultery.”

“That’s not doctrine.”

“Nevertheless, if you come near me with tender thoughts of conjugal bliss, I warn you, I’ll cut it off.”

“Sister Dinah, if I ever came near you it would shrivel up and fall off of its own accord!” He got up and stormed out of the tent. For a moment she thought she had pushed him too far, that he would not marry her after all. Yet she dared not be any more submissive to him, or she’d never have the freedom to do the work she had to do. Brigham was too strong a man, if once he thought he owned you. She would just have to do the best she could without being married to the President of the Church.

Then the tent door opened again, and Brigham came back with William Clayton and two other elders in tow. The marriage would take place after all. She wondered if she was relieved or disappointed. “Brethren, you are to witness an act of supreme courage. I am marrying this woman under the Principle of Celestial Marriage. However, the marriage will be for our mortal years only, since, to my blessed relief, she will be the responsibility of poor Brother Joseph in the next life. William, make it quick, I have a busy day.”

Clayton fairly raced through the words—but all the words were there, and the marriage would stand. When it was over, Brigham turned to her, took her squarely by the shoulders, and kissed her passionately in full view of the other men. If he had grinned at her when he finally ended the kiss, she would have hit him, witnesses or no. But he wasn’t so much as smiling. In fact, he looked furious, and he shook a finger in her face. “And don’t you forget it!” he said.

He turned to the bewildered witnesses. “I have already taken as much time as I can spare on this matter. Please sign your names in the book as witnesses to this marriage.”

While one signed the book that Clayton offered him, the other looked from Dinah to Brigham and said, “I’m not altogether sure I
witnessed
a marriage.”

“Brother Scoville, you have more sense than I gave you credit for. You will surely rise in the kingdom. Now sign the book.”

He signed, and so did Dinah and Clayton and Brigham himself. Then Brigham ushered her to the door. “I regret that I won’t have a chance to see you before I go,” he said. “But don’t think that I won’t expect a reckoning from you when I get back. I’m leaving Brother Parley in charge of this camp till I return. But I assure you that I’ll be a lot easier in my mind knowing you’re carrying on the work that you’ve been doing all these years. I am the head of this Church right now, Sister Dinah, but you are its heart. And if being married to me will help you accomplish your work, I’m glad to make the sacrifice.”

So in spite of the bluster he knew what she was doing and saw the value of it. That was the first moment that it occurred to her that she might actually enjoy being married to Brigham Young. That it might not be nothing but a sacrifice. And she hoped that it might not be a pure sacrifice for him, either. After all, now and then God allows his servants a little joy on the side—why not in this?

He held out his hand to shake hers. She took it and kissed his palm. “I’ll miss you, Brother Brigham,” she said.

“Oh, will you?”

“Who’ll roar to wake up the roosters in the morning when you’re gone?”

He was still laughing when he closed the door, and she smiled, too, all the way back to her tent. There was a child there waiting for her. Could Sister Dinah come? My sister’s baby’s coming early. Could Sister Dinah give a blessing and help with the delivery?

Sister Dinah could. The baby lived. Cried a lot, but it lived.

So many pages now I have written and you have read, and yet I have barely touched the surface of the information that I have. Twenty-three notebooks are filled with facts about Dinah and Charlie Kirkham; there are nearly a hundred books on my shelves that I could use. For this is exactly the point where the real documentation begins. Till now I have pieced their story together from hints, from scraps of information, from their own journals, from my own unreliable sense of what makes people do the things they do. Now when they arrive in Utah the data suddenly comes in floods. Dinah Kirkham gave more than three thousand speeches in her life—I have every one of them that was written down. I have the minutes of five hundred meetings. I have the pertinent quotations from a thousand newspaper reports and journal entries. There are essays and analyses of her life. As for Charlie, though he was far less public, there are the journals of his children, their reminiscences, his own records of his mission to England, his financial maneuvering to save the Church from bankruptcy in 1888, an endless pile of contracts and deeds and notes and leases.

And yet I look at the page in front of me and I know that I am through. The book is finished. For there are no surprises left. Through the rest of their lives Dinah and Charlie faced an endless series of problems, but they resolved them exactly as you would expect. All the experiences that changed and shaped them are accomplished; from now on they merely continued to be themselves, and either forced the world to change a little to accommodate them, or ignored the world and let it slide on by, unnoticed and unnoticing. It mattered to them, mattered very much. But it did not change them. Their character was set; the rest, to me at least, is just endless application.

In Utah, once she got there, Dinah became preeminent among Mormon women, and something of a legend in the Church. For years Brigham Young refused to reorganize the Relief Society, perhaps afraid of setting up an organization that might compete with the priesthood. If that was his fear, it was partly justified. For when Dinah at last was allowed to reestablish the Relief Society, it at once became the Church’s most effective organization. It has become a joke among the Saints: if you want anything to get done right and on time, assign it to the Relief Society. Never, though, did Dinah say or do anything to set her organization against Brigham’s leadership. She argued with him, true, sometimes even in print. But she always acted for the good of the Church, and the good of the Church, to her at least, always included keeping one man at the head. Whenever it came to a choice between getting her own way and keeping Brigham’s authority intact, Dinah invariably gave in. It was not weakness on her part, I think. It was strength. It was keeping her promise to Joseph. The Relief Society was not all she did, either. She was an active campaigner for temperance and women suffrage; she wrote ardent polemics and gave passionate speeches in favor of the right of Mormon women to live in polygamy if they wanted to; and above all, she remained the Prophetess, giving blessings, speaking in tongues, comforting and encouraging the Saints from Canada to Mexico.

As for Charlie, he settled into happy anonymity. He made money, but never much more than he needed to maintain his family. He married six wives and fathered twenty-nine children, and loved them all devotedly. He served a few missions for the Church, and while the general run of the Church membership never knew his name (“Oh, yes, Aunt Dinah’s brother”) a few of the Church leaders regularly came to him for advice on running the business of the Church. Even for advice on their own business affairs, and in fact he made more money for the Brethren than he ever made for himself. Some more dedicated businessmen couldn’t understand why Charlie Kirkham was so respected—he wasn’t rich and seemed to have no ambition at all. He was simply happy. Not that his life went smoothly. His fourth wife, Verda Pratt, simply could not bear the strain of plural marriage, and after several years of terrible conflict that worried Charlie endlessly and made a shambles of domestic life, she divorced him, left the Church, and took their only child, Raymond, off to San Francisco. Charlie always grieved for that one wife and that one child who were lost. He also grieved for the five children who died before him, and for Harriette, the only one of his wives who was not widowed when he died in 1896. But such griefs were no contradiction to his happiness. The Church has largely forgotten him except for one hymn that he wrote which is still often sung; to me, however, Charlie epitomizes the early Saints at their best.

I am doing what I vowed to myself I would not do when I undertook this book: I am praising instead of telling the tale. I’ve lived with them too long. So I’ll stop my eulogy and tell you instead of the last two changes in Dinah’s life. Not changes in herself, but changes in the role she had to play. They are little chapters, because they are little stories, and then I will be through.

—O. Kirkham, Salt Lake City, 1981

It was the last night away from home—tomorrow they would make the last fifty miles from Provo to Salt Lake City. Brigham would return to his official residence and Dinah to her quite unofficial one, the house that served her as home and general headquarters of the Relief Society. Brigham had taken her along to Utah’s Dixie for the dedication of the St. George Temple, the first one finished in Utah. She had helped teach the sisters working there how to do their part in the ordinances. Even after the dedication, however, the work had gone on; their progress northward through Utah was like a state procession, and Dinah gave more speeches than Brigham did. She was tired. It would be good to get home.

The others rushed inside the house to get out of the dusty wind. It was Dinah’s nephew Joseph’s house—he was stake president and mayor in Provo, and Dinah wasn’t anxious to go in, because the talk would all be Church work and in all honesty she was sick of hearing about quorums and meetings and tithing and buildings and co-ops. Besides, she loved the coming of a thunderstorm. She stood in the yard, letting the hot wind fling dust and sand against her as the clouds rolled in from the southwest. It was so dry here; she could feel how the valley waited in agony for the storm to come. It would bring life in the water that stood and soaked deep; it would bring death in the rain that cut along the surface sharp as harvest knives. She had often stood this way before, feeling the electric air in the lulls of the wind and, as always, she remembered: This is how I waited for Joseph to come to me. In love and dread, I waited for him; and this is how Joseph waited for God.

“Aunt Dinah!” It was Charlie’s boy Joseph, who fancied himself a grown man now at the ridiculously childish age of thirty-four. He was far too young for his responsibilities. A man that age was still trying to figure out how to be a father.

“Aunt Dinah!” So many people called her that, and even though Charlie did his best to fill the territory with her nieces and nephews, most of those who knew her as Aunt Dinah were no more kin to her than to Chief Walker. She didn’t like such overfamiliarity. It wasn’t respectful of her office. But it wasn’t worth quarreling about.

“Aunt Dinah.” Joseph took her by the arm. “President Young is asking where you are.”

“He knows where I am.”

“You shouldn’t be outside. There’s going to be lightning.”

“God has my consent to strike me down if he likes. I’ve been through worse.”

“Were you praying out there? I didn’t mean to interrupt if you were.”

“No. I just move my lips when I think.” They went inside.

The house was already quieting down for the night. Everyone knew that Brigham liked to retire early when he was traveling. Now he was sitting on the davenport, waiting for Joseph’s wife to declare that his room was ready. His was always ready first; everyone knew that Dinah didn’t mind waiting for her room until after Brigham was tucked away in his.

“Sit with me, Aunt Dinah,” Brigham said when he saw that she had come inside. “Sit and speak to me of anything except religion. I already know everything about religion.”

She smiled and sat by him. “You look tired,” she said.

“Heavy lies the mantle of authority upon these weary shoulders. What time is it?”

“You’re the one with the watch,” Dinah answered.

“I’m too tired to lift it out of my pocket.”

Dinah sighed and pulled it out for him. He liked to be babied. “The big hand’s on seven, the little hand’s pretty vague but seems to indicate somewhere between eight and nine.”

“Watch how you tease me, Aunt Dinah.”

“Don’t
you
call me that.”

“Will if I want. Maybe I’ll confine you to five minutes next time I call on you to speak.”

“I’d be grateful.”

“It would break your heart.”

Joseph walked in just then, looking flustered and embarrassed. “One of my children has some miserable disease, Dorcas tells me. We’d send the other children to sleep with a neighbor tonight but they’re already asleep. My wife and I are already going to sleep in the parlor—would you mind terribly if we put you both in the same room tonight?”

Ah, the agony the poor boy was suffering. Dinah couldn’t resist making it just a little worse. “Out of the question. Brigham snores as if it were his duty to rouse the dead for resurrection morning.”

“I sleep the sleep of angels,” he protested.

“You don’t mind, then?” Joseph asked. The boy had some wit—he knew when he was being taken.

“Lay our bodies down anywhere,” Dinah said.

They supped lightly. Brigham hardly ate at all, since he kept up a constant stream of anecdotes about the trip. Dinah watched him in silence. She had judged him right a thousand years ago, when she decided he was the only man to lead the Church after Joseph. He had fought off drought, the U.S. Army, apostasy, the temptation of the gold rush, and a plague of federal officials sent to Utah to enforce the antipolygamy laws, and somehow he was still alive, and so was the Church. Indeed, because of his work it looked as though the Church would live for a long time. But the sagging flesh of his face, the age spots on his hands, the sunken appearance of his eyes all testified that the Church would definitely outlive Brigham Young. Though he might surprise us all, Dinah thought, and live forever.

It occurred to her that, after all these years, she loved him. Not just as a Saint should love the prophet. Not even as the president of the Relief Society should love the President of the Church. She loved him, to her surprise, as a husband. Why haven’t I noticed it before? She really ought to mention it to him before one of them died.

The supper ended. They walked upstairs—slowly, because stairs weren’t easy for either of them. They closed the bedroom door behind them. And discovered that, despite their age, they were shy. The double bed was a challenge. In all their years of marriage they had never shared a bed. Brigham hadn’t even tried—he hardly lacked for company. And Dinah, for her part, had never yearned for him. Until tonight. Until she stood near the door of the room and thought, Is it too late to become Brigham’s wife? Joseph would not begrudge her a wife’s privilege now. She was old enough not to care that it would be inconsistent of her to suggest it. An old woman had a right to be different from the young one she once was.

He noticed her eyeing the bed. “Never fear,” he said. “I shall sleep before my body hits the bed.”

“At least make sure you’re well-aimed, then. I’m not up to lifting you.”

“Turn your back, Dinah, and I’ll turn mine, lest we offend by revealing our carnal secrets to each other.”

Carefully they undressed with eyes averted. Chastely clad in nightgowns, they climbed into bed at the same time. “Can it bear the burden?” Brigham murmured. The bed groaned. “Have faith, little bed.” Then, settled in comfortably, Brigham leaned over to the nightstand and blew out his candle.

Dinah, of course, did not blow out hers. Instead she pulled out her third book of the journey, a humorous thing called
Roughing It
. She had been told the author had some unkind things to say about Mormons. She always made it a point to read unkind mentions by popular writers.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to read!” Brigham said.

“I always do,” she answered in surprise.

“Every night?”

“I can’t sleep unless I read first. It’s when I do my best studying.”

“I have more respect for the cost of candlewax.”

She smiled benignly, then opened the book and turned to the passage she had left off with. In a few moments she heard Brigham begin to snore—far more loudly than nature could possibly allow.

“Deceit is beneath you,” she said.

“It isn’t deceit, it’s retaliation. Can’t sleep with a light on.”

“And I can’t sleep without reading. Your discomfort will end with a little patience. But if you get
your
way I’ll be awake staring at the ceiling all night.”

“I’m President of the Church.”

“I’m a lady. Try to learn some manners.”

“What’s the book?”

She turned so he could see the cover. Of course, the candlelight made it a silhouette to him, perfectly black. “Tell me the title,” he growled.

“
Roughing It
. By Mark Twain. He has a bit about meeting
you
. Do you remember him?”

“Mark Twain? No. Or was he—he couldn’t have been that Missouri fellow?”

“He’s from Missouri.”

“Cocky little runt, if I remember him. Very full of himself. Seemed to think everything was quite amusing. I thought him an ass. What did he think of me?”

“He didn’t like you half so well. No, I won’t read it to you, you’d only get angry and torment me with your torrent of self-defense. What I intend to read you is his hideous lies about Mormon women.”

“Did any of our women speak to him?”

“The Principle seemed to fascinate him. I quote: ‘With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth, I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”’”

She closed the book with an emphatic thump. The bed was shaking. She looked over at Brigham to see his eyes squinted closed as he shook in silent paroxysms of laughter. “It wasn’t
that
funny,” she said.

He only laughed harder, tears squeezing out of his eyes.

“You might think to defend the women of the Church. Or the Principle. He
is
laughing at sacred things.”

“Let him laugh. I’d far rather have the world’s scorn than the world’s pious outrage. No one ever killed for scorn.”

“I’m disappointed in you. Shall I spread the word that Brother Brigham thinks us all an ungainly lot?”

He turned on his side, facing her, and smiled. “Not all. I saw to it that he didn’t ever see our real beauties.”

“Hid the pretty ones away, did you?”

“Kept them all for myself. And farthest away, where none could see, I hid the sacred virgin of Manchester, who was captured away by Heber Kimball and kept untouched in the harem of the grand sultan of Salt Lake City, that vile and reprehensible Brigham Young.”

“I’m hardly a virgin.”

“Madam,” he said, “after thirty years of abstinence, you became an honorary virgin. In another five years you become one in fact.”

Since he brought up the subject, perhaps—

“I never aspired to renew my virginity,” she said.

“You never aspired not to, either.”

“Perhaps we’re old enough to be above such things as adolescent lust.”

“I have always thought that lust, like wine, matures with age.”

“You’re not supposed to know anything about wine,” she said.

He reached and touched her arm. Instead of recoiling, which he plainly expected her to do, she leaned into his arm, bent to him and kissed him.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asked her. “I thought you never changed your mind about anything.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said.

But twenty minutes later, they had to admit defeat. Brigham was dejected. “It’s never happened to me before,” he said.

“My fault,” she said. “I’m just too old.”

“Dinah, I am an expert in what happens to women of middle age when their corsets come off. You are the only one of all my wives who wears a corset for modesty rather than buttressing.”

She chuckled.

“I wasn’t being clever,” he said. “We’re being punished.” He lay on his side and traced patterns on her skin.

“For what sin?”

“For abstinence where God never meant his children to abstain.”

“So it’s my fault after all?”

“You were such a beautiful girl, Dinah. But formidable. I should have braved the fortress long ago, when I still had vigor for it.”

And they began to reminisce about times that had been painful to live, but were good to remember. All the time they talked, he touched her, and she caressed him in return, and after a while he smiled and said, “Miracle of miracles,” and they finished what they set out to do after all.

Afterward she lay in his arms, his breath against her cheek. “If I had known you would be so lovely at fifty-eight, madam,” he whispered, “I would have picked the lock of your door twenty years ago.”

“And if you had come to try it, perhaps I would have let you in.”

“I’ve loved Joseph and admired him and sometimes almost worshiped him, but this is the first time that I’ve envied him. You’ll be his in the next life.”

“You’ve had me as a wife longer in this one.”

He kissed her lovingly. “You don’t know what a crushing blow it would have been, if my failure had been more than temporary. I’ve been compared to Moses in other ways, but I had always hoped to earn his epitaph.”

“Epitaph?”

“Deuteronomy 34:7. ‘And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.’”

“I’ll see to it that it’s engraved on your headstone. If they doubt it, I’ll swear to it. And if I die before you, I’ll leave a deposition.”

“You won’t die before me.”

“My mother died younger than I am now.”

“You’re tougher than she was.”

“I don’t think so.”

“If you plan to die before me, Dinah, you’ll have to hurry.”

She stroked his cheek but did not argue with him. It was true. And he needed no comfort. If any man had little cause to fear death, it was Brigham Young.

“There’s a voice in me, Dinah. It says Hurry hurry hurry. Hurry and get the Temple dedicated. Hurry and get the quorums reorganized. Hurry and set the order of the Twelve so John Taylor will succeed you. Hurry and set things right with your most cantankerous wife. All done now. All finished, or nearly so. And when it’s done, do you know what will happen?”