style="font-size:15px;"> Bishop Dees also called for a house-making, that first Sunday. He asked the Ward members to open their bounty to the newest householder, to share whatever they could. All week long, items arrived at the top of the hill. A tin tub and bent ladle, hempen bed cord, tatted couch covers, crockery, three and a half bars of Sister Karen’s oatmeal soap, a bread can, yeast starter, an axe, flour, molasses, an old Dutch oven with two legs, one kerosene lamp and a flax broom.
Homer Tingey hiked up late that first week. He greeted me with a smile so large, his jaw begged rest.
I said, “Brother Tingey, I do not need another thing. I am beyond thankfulness.”
Homer blushed. “Bishop said, ‘Guard and deliver.’” He called down to the boys in his wagon. They shoved a tarp back, and my heart leapt in recognition.
Brother Larsen’s cast iron tub.
It was the only claw foot tub in Brigham. Lars had ordered it by mail. Some said he’d ordered it for Sister Larsen just before she died. A quiet Brother, but his heart was true. He may have meant it for his ailing wife but Lars didn’t blink an eye, changing its purpose. That tub, brimming with water, lay to the belly in muck outside his own black geldings’ stall—the best horse trough in Zion.
Four boys muscled the claw-foot tub to the top of the hill. I knocked snow and dried manure off its sides while Homer’s boys and two of Bishop Olsen’s sons threw off their coats. They tipped the tub and squirmed in the doorway. Four steps, they turned it right and touched it down.
“Don’t take your ease, boys,” Homer said, stepping in. “Sister Martin may not want the tub set there.”
Inger Olsen ran his hands along his sleeves, grimacing. “We ain’t slaves,” he said, “and she sure ain’t no queen.”
But when I looked in—the long white tub aligned with the door, a dumpling set square center of the room—I thanked them, Homer and his sons and the Bishop’s boys. “It’s where I’d have it. It is just right.”
I would find three planks to lay across it for my table, by day. By night, its purpose was clear. Never had I felt so safe or slept so sound, enclosed on all sides by cast iron.
And so it started. I sewed for the Saints and hiked the hills. I read all the books I could borrow. I cooked whatever I wanted. I watched every sunset bury itself in the waters of the Great Salt Lake. I loved my life.
One afternoon, late in March, I hiked to the mouth of Box Elder Creek on a whim. The path ran through a maze of scrub oak trees. Cottonwoods marked where the river emerged from the canyon. The sharp odor of pine led me upstream. I walked boulder to boulder, avoiding the gravel of the bank to spare my boots their leather. The clear water tumbled, forward and down. Grasping a willow branch, I bent for a drink, and leaning there, felt the pull of the fast-moving current. Let me take you under slid from eye to throat to navel like apple cider running through a muslin bag. Oh, to surrender! To relinquish all cares! My wet transit to Heaven would no doubt puzzle the devout, who would find me when the water slowed and banked at Reeder’s Grove. It was not death, it was a joining, the inevitable slide of crosscurrents. I vowed my life would be like that. I would find my own track to follow. Or I would carve it out as this creek did, with the rhythms of work and rest.
About my work, Ada Nuttall had been right. The pressed flower cards sold in Corinne faster than we could ship them. This took me to her house each Monday to renew supplies and transact business. We held court in the kitchen, while Ada cut biscuits from a double batch of dough.
“Tea breaks the Word of Wisdom,” I said, when she offered me another cup of greasy amber tea. It seemed the only way to meet someone so strong, stroke for stroke.
“So I don’t guess you’d like to come out back and see my liquor still?”
Trouble was, Ada could outstroke a drowning dog.
“Do you know, Clair, how I came to take up distilling? The tithing office in Saint George. They took in hundreds of barrels of grapes in tithing each year, and what was they to do with them? Let ’em rot in the heat? No, the Brethren made the best of what God gave them. They stomped those grapes into wine, and used it for feasts and occasions when the Prophet came. Brigham loves a good party. Then they sold all the surplus to the Gentiles passing through.”
This was my first lesson in Mormon history, my introduction to the larger scheme. Ada Nuttall held the jaws of the Church open for me to see, the powerful thing I had grown up with, ward of its care, telling myself that feeds on dew and pollen, that feeds on air. Well, once I’d seen the indent of its teeth, she made me stop to reconsider its maw.
I asked her where her husband was.
“I lost him to plurality.”
“He was Brigham City’s first Bishop?”
“Willie? Yes, he was, indeed. For two years. I threw him out in ’fifty-four.”
“But weren’t you sealed for time and eternity?”
“Oh, we’re still married, honey dear. It’s just that William lives in Ogden, thirty miles south, with his mild-tempered, moon-faced, second-choice wife.” Ada stopped to scrape the dough from her little finger onto her front teeth. “I threatened to wring the neck of any child born to him outside my womb. So he set up house with the Forsgren girl in Ogden and crept home, weekends, to help raise our son Stephen. Willie slept out in the tool shed. A patriarch of shovels!” Ada grinned. “Sheepish toward me, but that was how we’d sliced the pie.”
“So he became Bishop in Ogden?”
“No. Seems Willie had not shown the proper zeal for the new Principle of Plurality. The Brethren said he’d been overled by a headstrong wife. No, they voted against disfellowship, but they took away my husband’s calling. And Erastus Pratt, willing servant of the Lord—who by then had bedded himself three wives—well, Pratt became Brigham City’s second Bishop.”
“Couldn’t your William have said no? Some Brethren don’t choose polygamy, Ada. Florrie Gradon’s father hasn’t.”
Ada cinched her apron and looked right at me. “Brother Gradon is the Stake choirmaster. And that’s all he’ll ever be. Polygamy ain’t demanded of every man, honey. Only those who hope to rise and rule. Willie always was a ruler.”
“And what happened to your son?”
“Stephen?” She flushed with pleasure. “He rides herd north and east of here, but the boy ain’t ever too busy not to visit his mother at Christmastime.”
“He’s your only?”
“He’s all a mother could want.”
I walked home dazed, vibrating in my boots with Ada’s version of Celestial Marriage. A patriarch of shovels! Like most of her translations of the gospel, it struck me as just right. I had no idea where Ada’s view of history would take me, but it felt like a creek of promise, like the tumbling Box Elder that banks at Reeder’s Grove. I confess it, I thrilled at the going.
CHAPTER 4
I bellowed out hymns, ironing my way through my laundry. I had taken to ironing all my clothes—the smell of sizzling cotton pacified me. At each light tug, the folds of my underwear lay open, stiffening at the touch of the iron. Four pair. I searched
