it, how?”
He spoke so low, I worried for his life.
Ada said, “Punched him in the face, twisted his wrist in a knot. To finish, they kicked his buttocks till he could not walk nor stand.”
I smoothed the hair from off his cheek.
His eyes turned up to me. “Namitse.”
“Will he live?” I asked, frantic.
“He says, ‘Sister.’ Jim called you sister.”
And I cried because at last it sounded right.
“You stay in back, keep his body from rolling. I’ll drive us home and doctor him what I can.”
Jim coughed. “Niyokottsi.”
Ada bent down over him, her voice flat tired. “I know you was playing. Some folk cannot be played with.”
He spoke again, coughing harder, resting his bent hand on my knee.
“‘They do not laugh, the dead.’ That’s what Jim says. What the Shoshone say.”
“He’s going to die?” I was bawling.
“Jim’ll live. He was talking about the dead who walk and preach.”
CHAPTER 8
Once in a while, and sometimes twice in a while, I think I’ll leave.” Ada stood at the window. She spread the curtains, and sunlight took the room. “But, honey dear, most times I feel like a spike well struck. Twenty years here, my boy grown in this house, my labor in those fields and my money so tied up in the streets and buildings of this town they verily call my name, though you’ll never see a Nuttall Street or a Nuttall Square or a Park, not in a hundred years, that I know well and good. History falls to those who press their suits—and I don’t mean wives with flat-irons.”
I sipped some tea, the taste pleasing, bitter as cast iron. “But they almost killed Jim! The Prophet Brigham and the Elders regale us with pretty tales from the pulpit—but look behind the scenes and it’s blood and broken bones.”
“Poker knew the horse a danger, and couldn’t resist the ride.”
“Why do you call him Poker, Ada? He good at cards?”
“Jim pokes fun. And you know how good he is at that.”
“The grand master.”
“Well, Clair, most Saints don’t have your appreciation of Jim’s gift. Specially not when helped to laugh at themselves. So, Jim’s a poker, a red hot poker.”
I could still feel the slack weight of Jim’s legs dangling in my arms as Ada hauled him into the house over her shoulder. How many years had I felt as useless as those legs? “How is he?”
“More than some swole up today, but sleeping sound.” Ada sat on the bed, exhausted. She had spent the night doctoring Jim, and still found the strength to fix me breakfast and bring it to me in bed. French toast and jam. Hot tea. A feather mattress and lace pillows. Storybook comforts, yet I had not slept and my mind held no dreaminess. The hope of justice kept me up all night, kept me wondering if it was ghost or real.
Men on earth delivered justice, and meted out punishment. Based on exactly what authority I longed to know, their inscrutable Father in Heaven? Who sent crippled hands and rapists and Indian raids to bless the chosen—
“Do you believe, Ada, that God is a man in the flesh like we are told? That we are made in His image, bone for bone?” It was a bedrock Mormon tenet.
Ada opened her eyes. “You mean is God a male, or is God flesh, which?”
“Both.”
Ada blinked back a yawn. “What’s your experience say?”
“My experience, men and flesh make a woeful combination.”
Ada grinned and struck the quilt. “God is too big for a title, honey, much less a body, manly, fleshly, or of whatever sort.”
“But last night Brigham Young said we could picnic with God. He said we would have a sit-down meal with the Lord and the Prophet Joseph Smith in the flesh.”
“You quoting me the old Empire Builder?”
“The Prophet Brigham?”
“Oh, honey. Sure as there ever was one. Calls for a communal order here in Zion, but won’t pay in himself. Says he’ll throw his gains into the communal pot when he’s met the man can manage his holdings better than himself. Calls polygamous marriage holy so he can take on fifty-some wives. Inspired the Brethren here in Brigham to grade and lay track for the Union Pacific, then the Central Line, now the Utah & Northern—every man hour and felled log and ox team given for free, in loving faith—while Brigham pockets the income from the Gentiles. Acquire and acquire and acquire, for the Lord! I stopped counting once he’d earned a million dollars. That was two years back. And you just watch how long it halts the completion of the Tabernacle. There won’t be a man or a sledgehammer to spare in Brigham City for four years. Maybe five. You seen him, Clair. That man has the spiritual reach of a bent axle—and thinks God was made in his image.” Ada sniffed and smoothed her skirt. “Bully and a businessman, those are Brigham’s strengths.”
She lifted her hair back off of her shoulder. She squinted, then pursed her lips. “You ever seen the layer of sheet ice forms over a puddle, blinding to look at if the sun strikes just right, and torn apart in a second at a child’s footstep or a day’s spring thaw?”
I thought I followed. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Reflects the whole sky and crumbles at a touch? God is like that. Divinity is. It’s everywhere. Question is, do we bother to see it or don’t we?”
“So then . . .” I ventured, not sure if that meant man or flesh.
“My God comes and goes.”
“Like sheet ice?”
“Try to round it up or snatch it for your own, it’s gone.” She gave my mind awhile to move around in this. “All the talk the Church has passed of ‘white and delightsome’ like unto the Lord?” Ada snorted, leaning out over the edge of the bed. “We are not white or delightsome, Clair. Not you or me. We’re speckled, like trout. Like spotted ponies. Herd dogs that turn and circle the herd but know that they ain’t sheep.” She laughed into her hand, wiped her mouth dry. “You think God don’t require all of creation? You think God picks and chooses? Herd dog, pinto pony, trout or Indian or Saint, the Shoshone worship God in all of ’em. Jim does. I do too.”
Ada looked almost pretty sitting there, utterly still, balanced on her high thoughts.
“But what’ll Poker Jim do now, Ada? He won’t be welcome here in town.”
“Once he can sit a horse, he aims to join Chief Pocatello’s band. A few ride down from the Fort Hall Reservation to trade skins every autumn. Shoshone keep their horses at a camp on Bear River. Jim can find them, if they come. It’s a sorry remnant of their wide-wandering
