teeth ground together. My eyes wrung salt. I’d rather kiss a pig. I’d rather die than be a wife! Motherhood appalled me. Childbearing sickened me to think on, close as it was to the ground of my own misery: my mother, my mark. A sweep of red hair was my only memory of Mother. She’d left me at the boardinghouse without a word, no gift, no way to trace her going. An orphan at four years. Had it been my mark, my temper or my foolishness that had driven her off? Whatever the cause, Mother had left me of her own free will. I never knew my father. No memories there to find. I worked that misery like a field, every day, just to keep a path beaten through.
I prayed to God, that night. I prayed mightily to Jesus Christ to let me have some other calling, any call but a woman’s call. I was not cut for it. My prayer spun like a wheel, like grief come to life. I prayed till there were no more words inside, no want, no request of God at all, just anguish, hard as whitened bone. Anguish and the answering dark.
Walking to town the next morning, I stopped to watch the run-off ponds glitter in the February sun. The two ponds were the endpoint for all of the waters that flowed from the Wasatch Mountains down through the town. Ice circles. They looked like kin, still and cold as my godless heart.
A woman at the Co-operative Mercantile Store caught me unwinding the soaked wool muffler from my cheeks. She was short and blunt and dressed like a range hand, with a head of brown hair that must have been too much for any bun to contain. It lay on her shoulders, wiry and thick. She gestured to a stool near the pot stove. “Don’t mind me. Settle yourself.”
And so I had to undo and unclasp.
“Ada Nuttall,” she said. Her voice slapped words like tacks. “I take it you’re the floral artist. I saddle the right horse?”
“Sister Clair Martin, and yes, ma’am, I dabble with flowers.”
“Dabble, do you? Don’t play modest with me, honey dear. You could sell them pressed flower cards in San Francisco by the packing crate and clamber the heights of Nob Hill. But that would be the Gentile way, now wouldn’t it? You are paid, aren’t you, by the good Co-operative, for your labors?”
Nob Hill, Mob Hill? I hadn’t heard tell of either.
“Honey, do they pay you?”
“With scrip enough to buy the glue and paper. And twenty cents a week for me.”
“Dog in a deer’s eye.”
“Ma’am?”
A Sister backed toward us, dragging a bag of grain from behind the counter. Her hips wigwagged like a horse’s down a chasm. “Sorry for the wait, Aunt Ada. Barley was under the wheat flour.”
“Don’t pop your gussets for me, though if it gave you ease, I’d bless it.” Ada grinned. Then she winked at me and hefted that fifty-pound bag of barley like it was a day-old child and took her leave.
When I asked whose aunt she was, the Sister only sucked her teeth. “Oh, she ain’t anybody’s aunt. Then again, she ain’t no Sister. We only call her kin. Lord bless her, she’ll need it come the final trump. That woman,” she breathed, “has a liquor still. She stews our barley up in a shed behind her mansion. No God-fearing Brother would help her. She pays a Lamanite to chop wood and tend the works. In cash! That filthy redskin. That old buck, Pocatello Jim.”
I knew Pocatello Jim, as well as any Mormon could. He had lived in Brigham City since I could remember. He was the only Indian who’d stayed on after the treaty was signed, when I was ten. The one and only adult who had ever lightened my days. I knew sharp pleasure, felt keen little bursts of revenge seeing the normal folk reflected in his gait, his gestures, his elastic face. Bishop Olsen. Widow Andersen. Erastus Pratt. He aped them, proud and pinched and crafty—until they sensed they’d gained a shadow self. By the time they’d wheeled around, Jim would be leaning back, arms crossed on his chest, admiring the courthouse steeple. The men cursed him. The women looked wounded to the core. Their hatred only deepened as Jim’s laughter closed the game. That loose-hinged laugh was, to me, a tonic.
I didn’t cower from Jim, as the other girls did, or let him trip me up at the heels. I looked him right in the eyes whenever I passed him. His leathery skin, his mashed nose and razor-lipped smile didn’t frighten me. Jim was the only grown-up who had ever required my attention. I paid it to him, in full, and he always paid me back. Now I knew Jim’s other calling—brewing liquor for an apostate in the foothills above town.
That apostate, Aunt Ada Nuttall, occupied the one and only house east of Box Elder Creek. Ada’s pink granite mansion nearly matched the slopes of the Wasatch Range that rose steep and free behind it. Scrub oak and sage were her only neighbors. That suited everyone fine.
The Sister at the Co-op said Ada made a fortune selling liquor by the wagonload in Corinne, the wicked railroad town thirteen miles west of Brigham. Corinne, Corinne, the City of Sin. All of the Gentiles asked for “Nuttall’s Leopard Sweat” by name. And they paid cash money for her labors. Ada paid her tithe in U.S. dollars—the only Latter-Day Saint who did. She was the only woman who dared live alone, and the Elders could not touch her. They needed Ada’s money just as much as they did the irrigating waters of Box Elder Creek. Cash flowed around Ada like a waterwheel, and the Brethren stood just close enough to prosper from the turning.
Three days had passed since Lars’ death when I met Ada Nuttall. I’d barely slept, fearing what the Brethren would choose for me: servitude, or marriage and madness. The night of his funeral, a Tuesday, I dreamt of a cabin, the old herd cabin that stands on a knoll above the cemetery south of town. I had sheltered in its lee at Lars’ funeral for awhile. First the Brethren gathered at graveside, and then all of the city vanished in the light-filled cloud of snow that spun up from Lars’ grave. That drift begat my vision: a solitary place where I could live and work alone.
I pled with Bishop Olsen, the following day, to let me make use of the cabin, to work and do for myself, burdening no one’s stores. The plan had enough frugality in it to catch him off his guard. As steward of the First Ward, he would consider it, he said, he’d take it up with the Elders. Though a girl alone in a cabin in the hills—
I reminded him the Tingeys’ orchards bordered the cemetery, and their house lay just beyond. Homer and his wife and daughters, they would be my neighbors, my helpmates, in times of need.
Then the Bishop cleaned his glasses on his vest and warned me I would have to gain permission from the fearsome woman who owned the cabin. She’d been one of Brigham City’s first settlers and the wife of its first Bishop. A headstrong and intractable apostate. Fallen from the straight and narrow way. He blessed me with his doughy white hands and I hiked up to Ada’s.
I sat in her parlor in a wingback chair looking out over the city. The poplars on Forest Street stood like bound brooms heaped with old snow. They marched from Main Street out to the edge of the Barrens, past the icy run-off ponds and Lars’ livery, in a stark promenade, two by two. Even the trees in Brigham were coupled. What could a girl alone do?
Sister Nuttall served tea in china cups. I kept my hands to myself. Tea broke the Word of Wisdom, as surely as liquor. I waited for her to speak.
She added cream and drifts of sugar to her cup. She stirred. She downed a steaming gulp. Then she looked at me. “Due to a recent death, you have been left without a home. Is that the case?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you aim to occupy the herd house, which is by legal title mine.”
“Yes,
