The 19th Wife (5 page)

“I’m sorry about my dad,” I said. “I’m sure this is really difficult for you.”

“Go on, the Prophet doesn’t want you here. You’re scaring the kids. Turn around and go.” The windows had started to fill with faces, eight or ten coming to look down at the stranger in the yard. Did any recognize me? Did any wonder how I fit into all the lies? I imagined one child, at least one, whispering,
Take me with you.
I imagined a tiny finger tapping on the glass.

Rita was now standing before me. I could smell the summer peaches on her breath. I’ll try to be nice, but let’s just say she was the complete opposite of sexy in her prairie dress and drooping hair bun. The sun had puckered her skin into a gray hide and the grim line of her mouth suggested she hadn’t had a good laugh, or fuck, in fifty years.

“Jordan, my duty is to protect them. You know that. Now please go.”

“Protect them from what?”

“Please. Before I have to call the police.” And then, “I’m sorry.”

The Mesadale police. You don’t want to run into them. I said good-bye to Rita and Virginia and walked back to the van. Before I got in I looked back to the house. There were two kids in every window now, noses fogging the glass. As I drove down Field Avenue I thought about them. Who were they? Did even Rita know their names? I started thinking about the fate of my siblings: Jamie would be eighteen now, so probably kicked out. Charlotte would be seventeen, most likely married. And Queenie—she’d be twenty. No chance she still lived in the house. It was just a matter of how many sister wives she had by now. And the younger kids? I never got close to them. They were mostly anonymous to me—dozens of girls and boys I passed in the hall, all of them blond and freckled and thin. When you’re one of a hundred, you look up to the older kids because they might offer a bit of love, and you hate the younger kids for taking up room.

I got so lost thinking through the parade of nameless children I didn’t notice the police cruiser tailing me. Suddenly he was in my rearview mirror, dark glasses on top of an eat-you-alive grin. His left palm was flat on the steering wheel, his right arm draped across the seat back. I turned down a side street and he followed. I turned again and he turned too. We passed three women working in a small barnyard. They looked up, hoes in hand, their faces washed in sunshine.

I wanted to visit the post office but it no longer seemed like a good idea. Out here the police are the bad guys. Every member of the Mesadale Police Department is a polygamist. Once one of my stepsisters walked into the police station and said my dad was cuddling her. (Out here, if your dad says he wants to cuddle, get ready to be raped.) The cop at the front desk took some notes, then called my dad. “I’d watch out for this one,” he said. “She came in here hot as a nymph.” He drove her home and my dad took her down to his basement for an hour. I remember waiting for her to come back upstairs. When she did she had a hollow look to her, like her eyes had been replaced with glass.

People say,
Oh come on, it can’t be that bad.

Actually, it’s worse.

People say,
Why don’t the authorities step in and do something?

I don’t know, ask them. But there are a few theories floating around. Some people say the Mormons, who more or less own Utah, are embarrassed by the Firsts because of our connected past. They prefer us tucked away in the desert, where no one can see us. I guess they’re still touchy when it comes to polygamy. Others say the Mormons secretly want to return to polygamy one day, so they let it slide. I don’t know about that one. Another theory: some say it’s a case of religious freedom—you know, people have a right to believe what they want and the authorities need to be careful about trampling on that. Maybe. Then I’ve heard a really good one: it’s actually hard to prove polygamy in court. Think about it: it’s not illegal for a man and a bunch of women to live together. And if the state doesn’t recognize the marriages, how can they be breaking the law?

I have my own theory about why all this has gone down in Mesadale for so long: no one cares. They don’t give a fuck about a bunch of inter-breeders fifty miles from the nearest cell tower. It’s funny, they call us the lost boys when we get kicked out, but really, we were lost the day we were born. When I lived out there I often wondered if anyone other than my mom knew I was alive.

I turned back to the highway. The cruiser stayed behind me just enough to avoid my wake of dust. He escorted me all the way, descending the gradual hill, kicking up his own red cloud. At one point he picked up his radio to call something in. If this were a cop movie, the camera’d cut to the interior of his cruiser. But this wasn’t a cop movie, and I can’t tell you what he was radioing.
All clear? He’s gone? It’s him?

I reached the highway and the van stopped rattling. Behind me, the cruiser idled at the asphalt’s bank as if it were a river too deep to enter. The cop watched me drive off, making sure I was gone. In my rearview he grew smaller and smaller, then made a three-point turn and drove back up the long road into town. At the end of the day he’d file a report, lock up his firearm, and head home to a macaroni supper with his dozen lonesome wives.

THE
19
TH WIFE

CHAPTER ONE

The Convert

Among the many questions I have encountered since my apostasy from the Mormon Church, none arises with more confusion, or mystification, than as to why I ever joined the Latter-day Saints. The American public recognizes the Mormon Missionary devoutly traveling the road, the young man knocking upon well-locked doors, toiling through sun and snow to spread his word. Many people, I now understand, mistake me for the Missionary’s recent convert and wonder why a woman of reason would succumb to such persuasions. Once, at a lecture in Denver, a minister’s wife scolded me, “That’s where you went wrong, Mrs. Young! You should never have let those Missionaries through your door!”

In fact, I was born a Mormon, the daughter of early converts, two devout Saints who reared me on the Book of Mormon and the epic story of the birth of that faith—just as another pair might raise their daughter on the grand stories of the Old Testament. I knew of the angel Moroni before Gabriel; the first and second Books of Nephi before the Gospel of John. As a small child I joined the Saints’ exodus from Nauvoo into Zion, and always understood it to be as miraculous as the Israelites’ brave flight from Egypt.

Even so, the curious public, long wary of the roaming Missionary, often doubts the origins of my parents’ faith, and thus my own. This bewilderment, and a general skepticism over sudden religious conversion, makes it necessary for me to describe my mother’s entry into the Church, and that of my father, too, and how together they first encountered the doctrine of celestial marriage, or polygamy.

My mother was born Elizabeth Churchill in 1817 in Cayuga County, New York; and for the sake of this narrative I shall call her by her given name. When she was four, her mother, a Methodist of wavering conviction, died of cholera. At the time they lived in a one-room cottage of no distinction, the only decoration being a St. Louis fiddle pegged to the wall. The seizures came around midnight. Elizabeth’s mother sat up in bed, cried out once, “My Lord!” and twenty hours later she was dead. Although only four, Elizabeth understood that when her mother had asked for God’s mercy, it failed to come.

Her father, a penniless son of the Enlightenment, a musician by training, and a Doubting Thomas by temperament, found himself incapable of caring for his daughter. Two days after her mother’s death, he deposited Elizabeth behind the iron gate of a house belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Brown, a childless, indifferent couple who took her in as their barn girl. Elizabeth’s father promised he would return for her as soon as he could. She clung to that promise until she was sixteen.

Twelve years later Elizabeth left the Browns with a firm but inexplicable desire to travel to St. Louis. She could not articulate the impulse. True, it was the only city she recalled her father speaking of. Yet she was not so naïve to believe she would find him there. I will venture to say her desire was like that of the pilgrim—he does not expect to find Jesus in the orchards of Gethsemane, but even so he longs to visit Jerusalem.

Having made it as far as Pittsburgh by the grace of a family traveling west, Elizabeth resorted to the sole possession of a young woman with an empty purse. A passenger agent wrote her a ticket for voyage down the Ohio in exchange for an interlude in his booth, the shade drawn. The agent was a gentle man with a chin dimpled like the bottom of a pear. Afterward, he drew up a ticket to St. Louis just as he had promised. The two parted, as clerk and customer part at the end of an exchange.

The following winter in St. Louis, Elizabeth gave birth in the Catholic women’s home to a baby with a chin imprinted like the bottom of an unripe piece of fruit. “The Sisters and I will bring him into the arms of God,” declared the nursemaid. This had been Elizabeth’s intention as well, but once she held tiny, red Gilbert she could not bear to leave him. The next day she tied her bonnet’s pearl ribbon beneath her chin and stepped into the streets of St. Louis with her baby babbling in her arms. She was all of seventeen.

I will not be the first to report there is little work for a girl in such a situation. Elizabeth was quick to recognize her only option. She accepted a position with Mrs. Harmony in her mansarded mansion with an ebony piano in the parlor. Her role could best be described as Girl No. 8.

This is how Elizabeth came to meet Captain Zucker, a trim Slav who wore his ginger mustache waxed to a point. Quickly he adopted her as his favorite among Mrs. Harmony’s harem, visiting her
salle
each time his paddle-wheel, the
Lucy,
called in St. Louis. Eventually he proposed, “Elizabeth, my beauty, why don’t you quit this by-the-dozen work and come live with me?” She moved out of Mrs. Harmony’s house that day. Captain Zucker established Elizabeth and Gilbert in a cabin aboard the
Lucy
with walls flocked in velvet and a palm standing alert in a Cantonese urn. She had never known such luxury.

On the ship Elizabeth encountered a new kind of dignity. The sailors removed their caps when she passed, as if she were the mistress of the vessel, and the musicians liked to show Gilbert their shiny horns. For his part, every day Captain Zucker gave Gilbert a new toy—cloth balls, jackstraws, and a quoits set with a bright red hob. Captain Zucker spoiled Elizabeth with expensive gifts, including a pair of half-boots of Turkish satin and a parasol trimmed in peony, which she has since bequeathed to me.

The lone exception to this kindness emanated from the Reverend Rice, the
Lucy
’s man of cloth. He was a Baptist of a variety I am not familiar with and cannot say for certain still exists. The only greeting he could muster was a curt “Madame.” He refused to acknowledge Gilbert, declining Captain Zucker’s invitation to baptize him. “That damn Reverend wouldn’t know God from a flea,” the Captain would say. He often talked about expelling the Reverend from his ship but never summoned the courage. It left Elizabeth discouraged in many ways, but most especially in God—a distressing feeling for a young woman inclined to believe.

Eventually Captain Zucker paid Reverend Rice a large enough tithing that he agreed to baptize Gilbert. The Sunday before the rite—this was July 1834—they were upriver in Hannibal, Missouri. Captain Zucker sent Elizabeth into town to purchase embroidering cotton for Gilbert’s gown and four buttons at a store with a sheepdog guarding its door. With her purchases and Gilbert in her arms, Elizabeth stepped over the dog into the sunlight, touched by an unfamiliar, open joy.

The
Lucy
was not sailing until nightfall. Curious about this stretch of the Mississippi, Elizabeth followed a path to the flatland between the cliffs and the river. The summer grass was damp and warm, and the sun was hot on the baby’s brow. She walked about a quarter of a mile when she came across a crowd of twenty or twenty-five gathered in the shade of a buttonwood tree. A man of about thirty was speaking from atop a shipping crate, projecting as if two hundred were in his audience, or two thousand. Before this, many times Elizabeth had encountered a man calling out from atop a box, for at this time in our national history, prophet-preachers roamed the backwoods like bears. But this man, she has said a thousand times since, was unlike any of them. “All of you,” he said. “Please come closer. I have a story to tell.”

What first struck Elizabeth was the quality of the man’s voice—the hand-bell clarity and the force it achieved without the spectacle of bulging eyes and throbbing throat. “You won’t believe what I tell you, not because you lack wits, or knowledge, but because it is not easy to believe. But if you can believe this tale, you will know the truth of all things, and your presence in the life after this one will be secure.”

In those days few had heard of Joseph Smith or his Church of Latter-day Saints, which was four years old at the time. To Elizabeth, and the others gathered, he was a stranger without reputation or institution. His only tools for persuasion were his person and his fantastical tale of God’s plan for man. Yet I must note the manner in which Joseph appeared atop the shipping crate that afternoon. He was a good head taller than most men and carried himself like a general or other such commander of a large force. I sometimes wonder if he shared the same physique as General George Washington—they were both taller than six feet, I understand, and strongly built. I often think he had the face a sculptor would use when cutting statues of the Great Men.

“I’m a farmer’s son,” Joseph began. “Originally from Vermont, but we settled in Palmyra—Palmyra, New York. If any of you have been there you’ll know it as a bustling town of four thousand, surrounded by peaceful country, with many farms and brooks, and in the distance the gentle rolling drumlins and other hills. Yet in my youth, and even today, there was little peace in our village. There, at the crossroads, where almost every day I passed, four churches stood off in competition, each claiming to offer the true interpretation of God’s will. I was an average boy in many ways, certainly of no higher intelligence than most, and my physical appearance, well, I’ll leave it to you to judge my form. There was no reason to think that I, Joseph Smith, Junior—heir to a hundred acres and a stand of sugar-maples, and a cake-shop where my mother sold gingerbread and beer—that such a common lad would one day become a Prophet of God.

“But I was a curious boy, doubtful with many questions, most especially—which Church, among the many competing voices, was best for me? Should I become a Catholic, a Baptist, a Methodist, a Shaker, an Episcopal? Was there another sect I was yet to know? Although only fourteen, I had enough of a logical mind to understand that when ten preachers claim to be the rightful interpreter of God, at least nine may be in the wrong.

“Torn by this question, and eager for an answer as only a young man can be, one fine day—it was early spring—I walked into the woodland and fell to my knees. I asked the Heavenly Father to lead me to the door of His preferred Church, for I wanted to worship rightly. The day was clear, and the sun had flooded the woods in its light, and the new, feathery leaves atop the trees were burnished like flakes of gold. For some time I prayed, searching for my answer, when to my great astonishment—and fear! for above all I was afraid—a glorious light, unlike anything I had ever seen, appeared before me. At first I thought it must be the light of the day coming through the trees. But it was not a beam of light but a shell, and inside this shell of light were two people, I saw, two men, Father and Son.

“Now, Friends, I know what you’re thinking—I can see it in your eyes! You’re saying to yourself, Pshaw! This is where the man’s tale becomes fantasy. I can see such thoughts flickering—there!—across your brows. You don’t believe me, but that’s fine, you’re experiencing the same questions I did on that day. For surely what was before me was not before me. Surely I was imagining it, or the sunlight was playing a trick! I was prepared to believe any explanation but the most plain—which was, as it always is, the Truth. Father and Son, God and Christ, had descended from Heaven to bring a message. They said, Do not join any Church, for none is the true Church of God. Since the time of Christ, the men who claim to be His rightful interpreters—the Apostles, the priests, the Popes, the ministers, the reverends, the fathers, all of them, and each—these men have led the world away from the true words and deeds of Jesus Christ. Joseph, they said, you are living in an era of Great Apostasy. Man on Earth has wandered from the Truth. But the time has come for its Restoration, and you will be its messenger.

“With this news, the Heavenly Father and His Son departed, leaving me prone in the mud. Now, what does a boy do with such news? How did I react upon learning I was to be a Prophet? Friends, I assure you I did my best to ignore all that I had heard and seen. You see, I was like yourself here today—my inclination was to disbelieve all that I could not understand. Yet ponder that, will you? If you cannot understand something, does that mean it is not true? Who here speaks French? Or Russian? None of you. Yet, were a man to say the sky is blue and the sun is hot in Russian or French, would that mean his words are not true?

“Three years passed. I was now seventeen. I still pondered the question that had originally taken me into the woods, but I had acted not at all on the knowledge God had provided me. Then one night—it was eleven years ago this September—a second miracle occurred. In my room an angel by the name of Moroni appeared at my bedside. He told me, as I’m here telling you now, that buried in a hill outside Palmyra was a set of golden plates. Yes, plates, and on them was a book written in an ancient language. This angel told me one day I would go to this hill and find the plates in a stone box. It was my duty, the angel said, to deliver this book to Man.

“What did I do? What would you have done? Yes, I think I know. Again, I did not believe it; or I did not want to believe it. Although I knew I had seen this angel, and talked with him, and knew the angel as something real, I did not want to believe the Truth: that I was a Prophet, here to communicate to all of Man. I waited. And a year later the angel returned with the same message. And so it passed each year for four years, until my time had come to dig up the golden plates. With my beloved wife Emma, I journeyed to the Hill Cumorah and dug in the spot as the angel had described it. There, in a stone box, were the golden plates, along with a tool for translating, which looked much like a large pair of spectacles. If any doubt remained in my heart, it was now driven off by the fact of these items. I held them. I knew they existed, as I know now that you exist, and as you know, or at least I hope, that I exist. Carefully I brought the plates home and began the task of translating them, transcribing this miraculous book so all could read it. And here it is, the Book of Mormon, named such because it was brought to you and me by Mormon’s son, the angel Moroni. Here it is. Here it is.” Joseph lifted his personal copy to his heart and closed his eyes.