north of us here, to Honeyville—yes, where you was found as a girl child—camp at the hot springs, rest and play awhile before they headed off to winter in Montana where game’s aplenty, whitetail deer and grouse and sage hens. Sleep in their buffalo robes. It raised a stripe of envy in me, the way Jim told about it.”
“You make it sound rich.”
“It was rich. The Shoshone lived a thousand-mile round.”
“But I heard the Indians eat locusts. That’s what I heard, them digging up larvas from the dirt.”
“Them and John the Baptist,” Ada shot back. “You’re talking Goshutes, not Shoshone, honey. The Goshutes live south of the Lake, south and west, in the desert. In a drought summer, if the jackrabbit and antelope and pocket gophers fail them, if they no longer can gather pinyon from the hills and cast seed at the mouths of the rivers, like the rich mouth of this river here we live at—”
“They’ll eat grubs.”
“Yes, ma’am. We ate a few thousand ourselves, years one and two in this valley. The Goshute women showed us how to make ’em palatable by slow roasting over a fire. And the similarities don’t stop there. The Goshute elders heal by a laying on of hands, just like our Elders do, and gain powers by visionary dreams. The best of their hunters even take on plural wives! Joe Smith and the Goshutes.” Ada chuckled. “Course they’re nomads, where we like to settle. Biggest difference I account, their ways to ours, is that their women own the seed harvest. Flat ownership of what sustains the tribe.”
I pulled my knees up within her borrowed nightdress. The neck lay open and unlaced. After the night’s trouble, I hadn’t wanted to be bound, not even by silk strings. Seeing me stir, Ada invited me to stay on for dinner.
“I have to get on home to Swede, Ada, he’ll be pacing. Those men who beat on Poker last night. Will you try to get justice?”
Ada sagged forward. “Jim’s leaving. No one would step forward. Like as always, the entire mess would be laid to me.”
“Can that be Ada, the fearsome Ada Nuttall talking?”
“That’s preservation talking. My way of thinking, you couldn’t have better neighbors than the Saints to keep a town sleepy and green. But as rulers of the roost, as patriarchs? Lord preserve us, they’re a worrisome lot.”
I slid my feet from the covers to the floor. “I’ll say good-bye to Jim, my way out.”
“Don’t take fright,” Ada said without turning. “Both his eyes are swollen shut.”
Since my arrival in the Second Ward, Homer Tingey had been kind enough to give me a ride to church with his family on Sundays. I walked downhill to their place every Sabbath, and shared the back of his wagon morning and evening with his six children, and shared their bench in church. The Sunday morning after Jim’s ordeal, I went to the Tingeys’ one hour late to leave a note saying that I was ill and wouldn’t be attending evening service. I needed a break from righteousness. I could not stomach the thought of hearing a single word of praise for the Prophet. Let them sing without the organ. Let them walk blindfolded through the brute force of their own survival.
Homer’s middle daughter, Lavina Tingey, saw me through the curtains. Red hair in a tumble and her nightgown on, she stepped out on the porch and read my note. “I am not going either,” she said, smiling. She could hardly have been happier. Lavina was fourteen and freckled, sweet as the cooked meat of a pumpkin. Homer called her Angel Bright. I believed he’d hit the truth.
“You know Brother Wrighton, who teaches my Sunday School class,” she said. I nodded, having survived a year of Wrighton’s unsmiling sermons. “Brother Wrighton laid a trail of breath last week telling us about God’s holy body. Well, I just had to ask, ‘If God has a body of flesh, how come we can’t see Him?’”
“Lavina, you didn’t—”
“He colored some, saying if I prayed for the spirit of submission, understanding would come clear as a photograph that God has a body. ‘Well then, if our Father has a body,’ I said, ‘seems like our Mother would, too. Is she pretty?’” And Brother Wrighton just slung open the door and howled, ‘Leave us, leave this minute! Mother in Heaven can’t be named and you ought not even to think on her, it’s a sacrilege. Leave and don’t come back until you have more faith.’” Lavina stepped off the porch barefooted. She plucked and twirled a morning glory bloom into her hair. “Faith can’t be asked for, Clair. It has to be gained. I aim to spend my Sabbath in the garden, taking the Lord at His best. I feel closest to God in the garden.”
She was so earnest, so silly sweet, I could only ask, “What does your pa say about it, Lavina?”
“Pa says, ‘Hold to the wheel! Hold to the wheel, young lady, and you will be up half the time—’” She gripped the lowest limb of the cherry tree shading their walk, crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. “Do you really think, Clair, do you think that half the time’s enough?”
“Lavina,” I said, “I’ve held to that wheel all my life and only ever ate mud.”
“Well, is there a Mother in Heaven, you think?”
My breath stopped. I’d waited eighteen years to hear
that question. I’d sat beside Lavina in countless Sacrament Meetings and never once suspected she felt the same as me. I quieted my heart. “If there’s a Father, there must be a Mother—”
“She wears maroon laces. And has powder white hair. And she has twelve lovely daughters!”
“Twelve daughters,” I said, caught in Lavina’s tale-spinning. “Each with a virtue all her own.” We named them: Confidence. Love. Endurance. Intelligence. Curiosity. Ability. Wisdom. Truth.
“One daughter creates beauty,” I said, “and sends it off for all to see. She is strong, so strong she never has to prove it.”
“That’s so, Clair. You see it deep. One daughter tends the earth,” she said, wriggling her feet in the brown dirt. “She loves and tends to it like it was her child.”
“There’s a daughter of justice,” I said. “And one who sees far. She sees the dead and tells their stories for them, and we listen and do right.”
“That twelve?” she asked.
“Can’t be. We didn’t say joyous or funny.”
“That’s daughter thirteen!” she shouted, as she slipped an arm around my waist, walking me out to the plank across their irrigation ditch. When we reached the road, I said, “I have enjoyed our Sunday sermon, Sister.”
Lavina answered, in all seriousness, “But there’s one thing more. Would our Heavenly Mother’s daughters ever marry?”
I took her hands. I shook them hard like the reins to an obstreperous horse. “If so, their husbands live in lean-to shacks, eat boardinghouse food, break rocks and wait on their dear wives’ visits like a field awaits a freshening rain.”
Lavina nodded and smiled. “Our Mother makes sure they don’t ill-treat each other. You know how men can be, waiting on a good thing.”
CHAPTER 9
Pocatello Jim
