his friends roared their assent.
“Therein,” Godbe said, rising to his feet, “therein lies the downfall, the inevitable end of the Law of Celestial Marriage. The disparity of the sexes essential to it forever deprives woman of all but a portion of male society, while men possess a corresponding excess of female society.”
“Together with excess of power, excess of say-so, excess of glory.” Ada almost grinned. “Together with those.”
“Precisely! Woman should be man’s equal in marriage. Equity is the basis of perfect law. But we are left with our dilemma: how do we end this sorry system, this imperfect one-sided order of social life which we endure? It has been weighed in the balance, and found wanting, sadly wanting, in the chief essential of human happiness to both sexes.”
Males and females equal, and happiness for both? I sat wondering at this notion until Ada said, “I chose to marry and I ended that marriage by choice when polygamy came. Each should answer for themselves.”
“But my dear Ada, how many Sisters are as strong as you? Most are bound to their homes by dependence, fearing poverty. Some are bound by the ungodly duty of keeping face. Still more vexing are those wives bound by affection and unselfish love to their extended family, though threat of eternal destruction has wrung their hearts sorely.” William Godbe paced to the window and back. “In the end—in the end, no ties but those of affection and their own free will should continue to unite women to their husbands. Love and free will!” He fixed me with shining eyes. “What, Miss Martin, do you say to that?”
I sucked in breath and stilled my feet. I’d veered from anger to concern to hope, to a dazed sort of anxiety for the welfare of the children while listening, my mind a thimble and his talk a stream. “I believe . . . well, I’d say, Mr. Godbe, that as long as you go about will-ing, you aren’t like to be free.”
It stunned them silent. It stunned me too, unsure I followed my own meaning.
Ada laughed until the ceiling shook. “Ain’t she a pistol?” All of them joined in, and the little knot they’d formed in the room loosened. William opened the parlor door. The breeze smelled of reeds and cattle. I looked out into the tall shade cast by cottonwoods. I stepped outside. And there was Zion.
The peaks of the Wasatch Range looked cut from paper. The mighty Bear River was a strand of green amid miles of uncultivated sage and salt. The land was not a fortress, here. It spread out like a cloak, an opened fan. For the first time in my life, the power of distance came clear to me: the magnitude of distance and its attendant freedom. Freedom being both empty and full. Radiant all. And that was that.
I didn’t want to shake my fist at life like a spoiled child, day in day out, asserting my will or God’s will or anyone else’s. That shaking fist explained most all of the people I’d known. I closed my eyes to absorb the Gentile view of freedom. Not abandonment to evil as I’d been warned. Not a frivolous freedom, either. No one to pity here, no one to scorn, myself included. The warm cloak of afternoon pulled in around me.
That night, visitors came to call. Swede coughed out a string of epithets as two men knocked and identified themselves as Visiting Teachers. I aimed Ada’s pistol at the latch and said if they needed to visit, they’d best do it where they stood. Come hell or the Prophet Joseph in a cloud of glory, I would open my door to no one after dark.
A hand smacked the door, turning Swede all fangs and frenzy. “You will not let us in?”
“I doubt I could contain my dog, Brethren.”
Then their questions started, close as the door frame, and I wondered who was teaching whom.
“Did you travel to Corinne, today, with a Mrs. Ada Nuttall?”
Bear’s ass. A gun couldn’t save me from this.
“And didn’t you and Sister Nuttall take company in the persons of several men?”
“And weren’t those men,” the second voice shrilled, “Godbeites? Weren’t they, out east of town?”
“Godbeites?” I disliked the relation to William’s surname. “What I know, Corinne has just one church, the Methodist. And I’ll admit, Ada insisted we drive out to visit that poor lone cleric Pastor McCabe and his pretty white house and all the cows you’d ever care to look at—”
“You and Sister Nuttall socialized with a Protestant minister, all afternoon?”
“I wish I’d known you were in Corinne today, Brethren, you could have joined us. The pastor makes a fine oyster soup. I assured him that the very next Sunday no worshippers attend his church, he is welcome to come join us at the Second Ward. We would make him feel at home on the Sabbath.”
“You asked—”
“Course, he declined, saying the inside of a Wardhouse put him in mind of a chicken coop, and he would rather clean his vestryments and go fishing.”
A silence followed this, then a voice pressed the door. “You contend and assure us that you and Ada Nuttall did not meet with any Godbeites this very afternoon, out east of Corinne?”
“If there’s a Godbeite minister who needs consoling in Corinne, I would be glad to give him my best welcome. Would you pass that on to Bishop Dees, Brethren? I’d be willing, if I should ever go back. He has my word on it,” I said.
Then I let Swede rush the latch and the Visiting Teachers stopped visiting.
Ada blenched. She smoothed her hair back with both hands and tightened her apron. She seemed smaller when her face wasn’t set to lead the charge. In fact, she stood no taller than me.
“You was questioned?”
“I lied for you. And I want to know, was it worth my lie?”
Ada leaned against her kitchen table, pale as a bowl of lumpy dick.
“Who is William Godbe, that you would take us into harm’s way to visit him? What are Godbeites, and why do the Elders care if we met with them? Why were we spied on? And, just for verity’s sake, does the Methodist pastor live in a pretty white house out east of town?” I smiled.
“Let’s us sit down,” Ada said.
A trace of steam rose from the Ironstone tea pot. I took down a cup and poured Ada some tea.
“If I am damned,” she said, “it’ll be for endangering others. When did they come?”
“Dark of the night. Two Visiting Teachers, though they never did get around to teaching.” I smiled again, Ada the one who usually got to be wry.
But Ada only trembled. “And you told them . . . ”
I spun my tale for her, then said, “Hell’s breakfast, Ada, did you take us to some apostate church?”
“No, honey dear, worse. Apostate church, political rebellion and literary gadflies—all three in one. You genuinely think you’re better off knowing all of this?”
“I am nine-tenths ears.”
Ada sipped her tea. “Well, some folk, much as they love the Church, cannot sit by and be dictated to, dominated like they was children. William—that man has traveled
