For Time and Eternity (3 page)

“Follow me!” Nathan Fox made no attempt to lower his voice, and it fascinated me to see he walked with just as much purpose when he walked backward.

I spun on my heel to see Mr. Teague behind me, engaged in conversation with Miss Powers, the pretty lady from Philadelphia who taught the primary grades. Safe, for now.

“You’re stealing!”

He gave a wide shrug. “Shouldn’t those with plenty feed the hungry?”

I thought of the wheels of cheese, the pounds of butter in that pack. And his original joke. “You cannot be that hungry!”

His countenance changed then. Not to anything dour, but a new softness came through, and it seemed more of an effort to keep his smile intact.

“But my people are, Camilla. And you have done the work of Heavenly Father in feeding us. He will bless you for that.”

He lifted his hat and held it over his heart, keeping pace even as he offered me a deep bow, then turned around. I forced my feet to remain planted in the path.

“Miss Deardon?” Mr. Teague’s voice called from behind. I inched myself around, hating the fact that I wouldn’t be able to see Nathan Fox disappear.

“Y-yes, sir?”

He stood, alone now, at the top of the schoolhouse steps. “Would you like to explain what just happened?” He craned his neck, looking well over me at the bundle of charity making its way down the path.

“The cows got into an onion patch,” I said, trudging my way across the yard. “None of it’s any good.”

“What a shame.” He looked down his long, beaked nose. “You’ll have to be more careful next time.”

I squinted into the morning sun and thought of Nathan Fox.

“I know.”

Chapter 3

I looked for him at noon as I sat beneath the shade tree eating my buttered bread before waiting my turn with the other students in line at the little spring well behind my school. I can’t remember a word of what my friends talked about, let alone what Mr. Teague tried to teach throughout the morning. When Mr. Teague finally released us from that endless day, I bade a quick farewell and ran through the school yard. I slowed my steps when I hit the main road, and even more when I got to the turnoff to the path that led to our farm. For a time, I even walked backward, trying to produce that same blind, confident stride he’d had when he backed away from me. But my steps were too unsure, and after one stumble I figured I’d better turn myself around lest he come out from the trees and find me flat on my bottom in the dirt.

When I came to Papa’s rambling rock wall, I set my books and lunch bucket down and climbed up on it. Their camp butted up against the western edge of our property, and though the light of their fires could sometimes be seen through the darkness, I couldn’t see anything from here in the daytime. We’d hear their songs coming on a breeze, and they sounded just like the very songs we sang in our own church. Often the pounding of carpentry and a blacksmith’s hammer reverberated through the stillness of the afternoon. I remembered seeing the men in town, driving away with a wagonload of lumber purchased while the clerk behind them laughed about the price it had fetched. Until this morning, this was all I knew of the Mormons. Never did it occur to me that they could be so handsome. So charming. And hungry.

“Camilla!” Papa’s voice carried from the barn. He held a hoe balanced across his shoulder and a shovel in one hand. “Get out after that onion patch.”

“Yes, Papa.” I picked up my books and lunch bucket and headed for the house. Mama was stirring something in a pot. It didn’t smell delicious yet, but the day was young. I dropped my things on the table and reached for a corn muffin on a plate under a towel.

“Better take some gloves,” Mama said without turning around. “Don’t want to get yourself blistered up.”

We had a little wooden trunk just inside our back door with sundry work clothes. The lid creaked as it opened, and I was faced with a jumbled mess of hats and boots and gloves. All the while I looked for a matching pair, Papa was yelling my name out in the yard, and it seemed a fine thing to risk getting a few blisters compared to what might be waiting for me once his patience wore out. I slammed the trunk shut and ran out the door, pausing just long enough to grab my old calico bonnet. The sun was still up high and strong, and while a girl could hide the roughness of her hands, there’d be no disguising a sunburned face.

Papa was waiting for me in the yard, just where I left him, and he said, “Show me,” when he handed me the shovel. I wondered what kind of man it was who couldn’t find an onion patch, especially when he’d been told real clear that it was on the south side of the property, but I said nothing.

The shovel’s handle set heavy on my shoulder and I set my face toward the south pasture and started walking. I fought my skirt to keep my strides long, knowing Papa was probably frustrated with the shorter steps he had to take to walk behind me. We weren’t even halfway out before I was flat exhausted. The arm holding up the shovel was numb shoulder to elbow, and there was already sweat running down my back. By the time we were out of sight of the house, I could hear Papa getting impatient behind me. He still wasn’t talking, but he had a kind of scuffling to his step, and I felt him coming up on me, then backing off again.

“Should be just over there.” I picked up my step and shifted west. I knew we were close to the spot where I’d found the cows yesterday. There was a trio of stumps from trees Papa had cut but hadn’t dug up yet, and it was just past them where I’d seen the pretty violet-colored blossoms. I should have told Mama and Papa last night what the cows had been into—should have warned them that the milk would be bad, but I honestly didn’t know how much they’d eaten. Or if they’d just nibbled the leaves or dug up the bulbs. Truth be told, I didn’t care, even if it meant I’d spend the rest of this day digging up my mistake.

“Well?” The impatience had left my father’s feet and was full in his voice.

“It was right here, I swear.”

“You what?”

“Sorry.” Stupid to swear. “But they were right over—”

A few more steps and we walked right up on a story. Or a mystery, rather. The earth was littered with the same violet-colored blossoms I’d seen waving in the sunset breeze the day before. But that was the only evidence there’d been any wild onions growing in the southwest corner of our pasture. Instead there was a patch of dug-up earth, about six feet square. Freshly overturned, big, moist clumps of it.

“What’s this?” I turned to my father and lowered my shovel, dropping it down by my side. “Why’d you drag me out here if you already dug it up?”

But I could tell from his face that he didn’t have any more answers than I did. He looked past me, his eyes scanning all across that dug-up field. Seemed right then a cloud crossed over his face, and one might as well have passed over the sun, too, because my body took on a chill that connected with the sweat running down my back and made me shiver.

“It’s them people.” Papa’s voice might have been calm, but he swung that hoe down from his shoulder and shattered a clod of dirt into nothing but crumbs.

Months ago—maybe even yesterday—I might have asked, “What people?” But since that time, I’d seen a smile full of sunshine and mischief, and I knew.

* * *

Nathan Fox appeared there the next morning, at that same little crook where the drive to our family’s dairy farm meets the main road into town.

“Good morning, Camilla.” He touched his hat without tipping it, and I forced a steadying to my stomach.

“I shouldn’t talk to you.” I didn’t even slow my step.

“Then don’t.” Yet his stride matched perfectly to mine.

“I shouldn’t listen to you either.”

“If you don’t listen, how will you ever know just how grateful my people are for your generous donation yesterday?”

“My father would beat me if he knew about that ‘donation.’”

“Why would a good man be angry about feeding the hungry?”

“Because that food was supposed to feed my hungry teachers; that’s why.”

“I’ve seen your teachers. They don’t look hungry.”

I somehow managed to stifle my laugh.

“In fact,” he continued, “I’ll bet it’s been a long time since your teachers wept at the sight of butter. For some of us, it’s been months since we’ve had such luxury. And do you know there were children there—little children—who had their first ever taste of cheese? There they were, thinking it was going to be just another supper of grits and salt pork. Their little faces glowing in the supper circle. But it wasn’t the firelight bringing that glow. No, it was a little white wedge of cheese. A brand-new treasure on their plate. Ah, their faces. I wish you could have been there, Camilla.”

His words brought the warmth of the fire to me. Our paces still matched, but we walked slower now, our feet strolling through his story.

“It was just cheese,” I said, tasting its sweet bitterness.

“But to a hungry people, it’s life.”

“And there wasn’t much. Just one wheel.”

“Our brother once fed many more with far less.”

My mind turned for a moment. “You mean Jesus? with the loaves and the fishes?”

“You know the story!” He spoke with the fun, false enthusiasm a teacher has for a child who has just come upon the most obvious conclusion. I knew that voice, and I hated it. It was the voice that followed utterance after utterance of veiled impatience. I’d heard it all my life.

“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not stupid. He is our Lord.”

“And our brother.”

His response turned my mind once again.
God is my Father in heaven. Jesus is his Son.
I’d never thought of Jesus as a brother before, only as a Savior. But I’d always wanted a brother—someone to share the chores with—and the thought of having a brother like Jesus made me smile.

That’s when I noticed we’d stopped walking. Without the sound of our feet scuffing against the occasional pebble, the world turned silent. It was another damp morning, and I could feel my nose about to run. Faced with the two unladylike options of a sniff or a swipe with my sleeve, I chose the sniff, turning my head away and being as mousy quiet as I could.

“Here.” He held out a folded white square when I turned back around. “Take it. Don’t worry; it’s clean.”

I wondered for just a minute what Mama would have me do. Didn’t seem right, somehow, to have such an intimacy with a boy I barely knew, but I couldn’t very well stand there with a runny nose. Truth be told, Mama hadn’t told me much about boys at all. Papa, either. Until yesterday none had ever even talked to me, save for Michael Bostwick. And all he ever cared about was borrowing my history book because his parents were too poor to buy him his own. So I took that handkerchief and brought it up to my nose. It was warm from his pocket and smelled like strong, clean soap. To that, at least, Mama could not object.

“Thank you.”

“You’re getting a cold. Should you go back home?”

“No,” I said, my voice muffled against the white cloth. “It’s just a sniffle.” I finished wiping and refolded the square, uncertain.

“Keep it. In case you sniffle again.”

Nodding, I slid it into my own pocket and took the first new step toward school. His step joined mine, and we walked for just a little while in silence before I found my courage. “I have a question to ask you.”

“Are you sure you should? I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to me.”

“Did you dig up the onion patch?”

“I wondered when you were going to get around to that.”

“My father was furious.”

“That seems an odd reaction to an act of kindness.”

“I think he sees it more as trespassing. How did you even know?”

The warm smile was back. “We’re neighbors, remember?”

I could tell he believed that answered my question, so I believed it too.

“My father wanted to go into your camp, you know. To find out who was responsible . . .” I didn’t allow myself to speak all the accusations he had.

“Why didn’t he?”

“Mama stopped him. She said that we weren’t going to do anything with those onions except chop them up for mulch. Said you’d done us a good turn by digging them up for us.” Again, I left so much unsaid. How she called Nathan’s people a tribe of thieving, godless savages. And I knew at the heart of my parents’ anger was fear. If only they could join me on this path, stand right here with me in the damp cool of the morning, hear this gentle voice surrounded by the calls of the morning birds, what would they possibly have to fear? “So I guess, in a way, she was glad to be rid of them.”

“Like the town will be glad to be rid of us?”

“I suppose.” Such an honest question deserved an honest answer.

“What about you?”

I shrugged. “I never much thought about it.” Which was true. I hadn’t. All winter and spring they’d been encamped next to us, my life was just one chore after another. School and home. Until yesterday. “I guess I never really understood what everyone’s so upset about.”

“God’s people have always been persecuted. Surely you know that. The Israelites were enslaved. Early Christians sacrificed to the savages of Rome. Shouldn’t be any surprise that the followers of a new prophet would face the same trials. But we can only follow Heavenly Father’s plan.”

“And what is this plan?” Something stirred within me, even then. I don’t know if it was the anticipation of having inside information, something I could share with Papa at the dinner table, where I usually sat in obedient silence, or the first stirring of revelation, or the simple beauty of this beautiful golden boy beside me.

“Zion.” One word, and it felt like I was hearing it for the first time. His voice lifted it out of the pages of the Psalms. I looked up, and his face was poised in a crescent smile, his eyes fixed above him, envisioning this place. A place he knew was real. “When we get word from those who went before us that the journey is safe, we’ll pull up stakes and join our brothers and sisters.”

“And where, exactly, are you going?”

“Utah.”

Zion.

“Imagine it, Camilla. Building a new city on a new hill. Or in our case, a valley. I’ve heard them speak of it. Majestic mountains and fields ready for harvest. Like a piece of creation Heavenly Father reserved specially for us. And we’ll be able to worship freely. Raise our children . . .” He stopped, and to my amazement, he blushed. Bright red splotches on his cheeks, and while he had been speaking to the treetops, he looked now right at me. “That is, of course, if we are lucky enough to have children.”

The call of the mourning dove tempered the silence that followed, and though he did not touch me, something reached inside and nearly scooped my heart right out of me. My feet continued to propel me on the familiar path to school, and I suppose the rest of me followed, though I don’t know how. Sure as on the day I was born when I could only lay helpless in my mother’s arms, that moment a few steps back when Nathan Fox looked into my very soul marked the first breath of a new life, and I wanted to linger in it. His eyes held the very image of Zion, and his step matched to mine seemed a promise to take me there. I didn’t hear another word he said that morning, and if I replied, those words are lost to me too. I know he brought me to the edge of the empty school yard, and I know he touched me. Just one trace of a finger along my cheek before turning away. I remember watching him. The breadth of his shoulders in the already-familiar shirt. The hand that had just touched me tucked into his pocket. The steadiness of his pace now that we were no longer walking together. How quickly he moved. How soon he was out of my sight. The few breaths it took for him to round a corner in the path and disappear. And how I never, ever wanted to step foot inside Mr. Teague’s schoolroom again. How could I, being so newly born?