father’s starched collar. I scowled again, and he retreated at last. In the silence that followed, everything I saw reversed into a photographic negative. The walls of the Wardhouse were burnt black. Small comfort, to refuse blessed bread. I was only doing what the damned must.
Bishop Dees requested a second private meeting, this time at his house. I walked into his parlor that afternoon as God’s forsaken, with every intention of playing my part full on. But he called me a good girl, a “radiant example to us all of industry and unflagging resolve.” I never expected kindness. It drove into my heart, as did the green of his eyes. “You have taken what little your life offered and multiplied it to greatness. Sister, do you know the parable of the talents?”
I nodded, my face hot.
“Christ rewarded the man who used his talents. Christ praised and loved him. Set him as our example down through time.” The Bishop’s breathing was measured. I heard it mark the pause. Then he asked how I could bypass the Sacrament, a girl gifted and blessed as myself.
I said nothing.
“Have you sinned, Sister Martin? I would guess the Lord has already forgiven you. The important question is, will you forgive yourself?”
So sweet, and so unfair. I shook my head. “I am unsuited.”
He considered this. “For what? Can you say it?”
The bristle on his horsehair sofa made my legs crawl. “For a woman’s calling.” I closed my eyes, caught my bitterness up and stuffed it into the space between us. I would not confess, or seek his comfort. I looked right into Bishop Dees’ eyes. “I am marked out different. No man will have me. It is God’s own curse no forgiving will erase.”
“You think your marking means damnation?”
“They’ve told it from the pulpit since I was six—‘the white and delightsome’ are the chosen of the Lord! The evil are marked to stay separate. That and the narrow gate of a woman’s call.”
“It is the truth, what’s been told. It is truth—but not the whole truth. Motherhood is sacred, a divine calling, Clair. And there are other calls. I suggest you stop doubting the Lord and listen for yours. Have faith and let the Lord do the worrying. Will you think on these things?”
He took my hand, his skin as smooth as sand-scoured pine. “The marking on your face may be a test and not a curse, Sister, both for you and those around you. There may yet be a man wants to take you for his wife.”
I felt something pass into me, a strange power, piercing, deep, unpleasant. I put my hand in my pocket and tried to quiet my breathing.
“Don’t toss that pearl before the swine, as yet. None of us know God’s whole truth. None could withstand it,” he said. “I will pray for you.” And that intimacy unsettled me more than all the rest, the thought of Bishop Dees holding me within the circle of his private prayers.
CHAPTER 5
On April 3rd, my dog arrived. I found him tied to the outhouse with a short length of wire, bawling like lost souls and outer darkness, maybe some inner darkness, too.
I smeared a pan with chicken grease and broken corn bread and eased it forward with a stick. He licked it with his blunt pink tongue until the pan spun off into the brush. Then he smiled at me—no other way to say it—and rolled his back in the dirt. I longed to pat him, longed to invite him in and scratch his belly, but my grizzled, half-blind herd dog reeked of campfire and sheep dung.
I cut his hair back to the skin with sewing scissors. He chased the clumps and rolled in them, jumped up and rolled again. I gave him his day to exult. Then I heated a tubful of water and plunged him into the suds. I braced one arm to keep the astounded dog in place, and scoured his back with oatmeal soap.
Once he had suffered immersion at my hands, there was no question who the dog answered to, who he waited for, who he loved. He placed the delicate bodies of chewed rodents at my doorstep. He leaned against my legs, watching the sunsets, till we almost toppled. Dark of night, I heard his sides puff in and out, chasing some good dream at the foot of my bed.
I was glad knowing someone slept, knowing someone still could dream.
Swede’s hair grew in, reddish-brown mottled with gray. Swede the Lionhearted. I brushed him daily, as I had seen Lars do his beloved black horse, Loquacious.
“You still have room in your life for an old acquaintance?” Ada Nuttall filled the doorway. A strip of sky the color of peach flesh showed beyond.
“I’m fixing fritters,” I said. “Pull the rocker over for the sunset. I always do.”
Swede bounded in. Ada raked her fingers down his back and rubbed his ears. “Nice home you got.”
I didn’t trust my face, with Ada. Didn’t know how much it might reveal. I added flour and a dose of salt and said, “You’ve walked its halls. You are patting my life’s companion.”
“He won’t go plural on you,” Ada shot back. “Size and simplicity do not alter the fact: you got a home.”
I turned and thanked her.
She laughed. I smiled. And the month since we had been together melted off.
“I got news, Clair. News of your parents, if you’d like to hear. Your ma, especially. I remember her, now. I remember I seen her.”
The blade in my throat wouldn’t tolerate a breath.
“I did some scouting through the records, the emigration logs, the Ward ledgers and such.” Ada took the spoon from my hand and sat me in the rocker. Strands of red lined the shore of the Great Salt Lake.
“Your mother’s name was Marie Claire LeBlanc. She was Louisiana French. Your father, Tucker Martin, worked the Mississippi River. A river man. He converted to the Church while delivering the John Forsgren party of Saints up to Winter Quarters, the first Scandinavian group ever to emigrate West. He was baptized in March of 1853. Died three months later, from the cholera, along with two hundred other Saints making their way upriver by steam.
“You was likely born in New Orleans. Church records indicate a Marie LeBlanc Martin and child joined the Hans Peter Olsen Company in May of ’fifty-four. The group started West in late June, arrived in Salt Lake 5 October, and here in Brigham City on 11 October.
“That’s where my memory of your mother comes in, the autumn of 1854. Our burg was barely two years old, and a new party of Saints had just arrived. I paid them little mind. It seemed the end of things, for me—my husband gone, my boy to raise and our fort running over with bedbugs and vermin. What little we settlers had must be divided up with the newcomers, so my future felt half again as safe.
“News of the Principle had preceded your mother’s arrival by months. Erastus Pratt brung it with him and a second wife from Salt Lake City. Said the Prophet Brigham Young had given her to him to ‘build up the Kingdom,’ and the rest of the Brethren should follow his lead or be damned.
“We was wrestling with it, each couple in their own way. But where we’d heard rumors of plurality for a decade and more, the newcomers had had no warning. Still the fervor was strong and our spirits high as we sat together in the split willow bower to welcome them and bear testimony. Whatever we lacked, whatever our trials under the Principle, we had escaped
