The Work and the Glory (561 page)

There was a smile mingled with just a touch of sadness. “Most of the companies are covering that same distance in about three weeks.”

Nathan’s mouth fell open. “Three weeks?”

“Yes. I’m really not trying to gloat. We have been traveling with a light wagon and carriage, but we have come from Nauvoo in about two weeks. I tell you this because those thousands of people behind us are going to be here much sooner than you think.”

Nathan let out his breath slowly. Three weeks! And yet, strangely, he felt no regrets, no envy. Those coming now would never know what they had endured. But they had been the first, and they had paid the price. If it smoothed the way for those to follow, then there was a deep satisfaction in that. He looked at his old friend. “President Young will need to know all of this, Elder Taylor. He is going to be very glad to see you.”

“Yes. I am anxious to see him again. Also Leonora came on with others when I returned to Nauvoo. I am most anxious to see her again too.”

Joshua lay on his back, staring up at the interwoven latticework of willows that made up the roof of their simple lean-to shelter. He slapped at a mosquito that buzzed near his ear, then rolled over onto his stomach. Directly in front of his nose lay Lydia’s Book of Mormon. It was closed. It had been closed since Nathan had left to have supper with Parley Pratt and the Taylors. Once he had left, Joshua had fished the book out of his saddlebags and tossed it on the bed, and there it had lain ever since.

It was a perfect time for reading. He and Nathan had chosen to make their shelter out away from the main encampment so that they would be close to the trees where they were splitting rails. It was not likely that someone would happen by unexpectedly. There was at least another three-quarters of an hour during which there would be sufficient light to read by. But still the book lay there, closed and silent.

“Keep the book, Joshua. Read it until you’re done.”

“You need to tell Caroline, Joshua. Of all people, she should know.”

“It’s your life that is raising the questions, Joshua. The Book of Mormon has only helped give voice to those questions.”

He sat up abruptly, wanting the voices in his mind stilled. He was reading. Not as much as before. The man-killing schedule Brigham had put them on greatly restricted that, but he was more than two-thirds through the book now. And he was no closer to an answer or to a resolution of his questions than he was when he and Nathan set out from Garden Grove eleven days ago now. He had not gone back to Nathan with further questions since that day they talked while splitting rails. He could tell it was costing Nathan dearly, not to be able to prod him a little, but thus far he had been completely true to his promise. It was Joshua’s lead, and Nathan would not push him. That was not without its drawbacks. Sometimes he would not have resented a little push. It was hard to jump in just out of the blue and start asking questions.

“It’s not enough to just read, Joshua. You have to ask.”

Well, he retorted to himself, that was not without its own problems. Three times now he had determined that he would try to pray, and specifically that he would pray about the Book of Mormon, as both his mother and Lydia had strongly suggested. But each time, when he actually started to open his mouth, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Once he had even found a place behind a clump of brush and knelt down. Before he could actually pray, he ended up feeling so ridiculous that he jumped up and stalked away. He had sworn aloud, at himself and at his family, and vowed he wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Abruptly he grabbed the book, rolled over, and shoved it back inside his saddlebags. He retrieved the rifle from its scabbard and sighted down its barrel. Now there was a thought to solve this malaise he was in. He looked up at the sky. The sun was just going down. That gave him another thirty or forty minutes of daylight. The perfect time for hunting. Cheered by the thoughts of occupying his mind with something besides religion, he turned back to the saddlebags and began rummaging for his powder and the bag of lead balls. As he did so, he began to whistle to himself some unknown tune.

He found three does and a yearling—probably a young spike—stripping buds off the willows right at the river’s edge. They were no more than twenty or thirty yards from where he was. Perhaps they heard the scrape of the branches against his shirt. Maybe it was their incredible sixth sense of danger. Through a screen of underbrush, he saw their heads come up with a frightened jerk, ears cocked forward, their bodies frozen, poised for flight. So perfectly did they blend into the deepening shadows, that had it not been for that sudden movement, he wouldn’t have seen them at all. Then he would have stepped out into the open and spooked them for sure. As it was, he was still mostly hidden from them. He stood there, as motionless as they, poised on the balls of his feet, barely breathing. After almost a full minute of staring in his direction, they finally decided that whatever it was they heard was not a threat and they turned back to the willows.

He relaxed, letting himself sink slowly down into a crouch. Slowly, ever so slowly, he slid the muzzle of his rifle through the screen of underbrush. Then he sat back on his heels, letting his eyes scan the trees behind them. Where there was a group of does, there was a good possibility that they would be escorted by something more than this young male. He was sure of the sex of the yearling now, seeing the stubby little knobs that marked the beginning of his antlers. He was too young to qualify as the protector of this group. But if there was an old mossy-back buck, he would be far more cautious than his womenfolk. That’s how they got to be old enough to carry those magnificent racks of antlers. And for that, he would wait.

He was close enough that he could see their fur—light brown now, with summer coming—ripple as they tried to ward off the swarms of mosquitoes that were thickening as the air cooled. Their white tails flipped up and down, flashing like naval semaphores when they turned their rumps toward him. Every few seconds they would stop. Their ears would come forward, and they would stare at some spot along the river before returning to their eating.

He waited almost five minutes before he saw it. There was a movement in the trees that lay beyond the flat meadows along the river. It was so nearly imperceptible he wasn’t even sure but what it was the flash of a bird’s wing. Another full minute went by. The gloom was deepening rapidly, and he knew that if he waited much longer, he would have to be content with taking one of the others, or go home empty-handed.

Then, just like that, it was there. Again there was a brief movement, and then another deer stepped out from between two trees and into the clearing, moving ever so slowly. If the other four saw it, they gave no sign. Neither did he seem the least interested in them. When the new deer turned his head, Joshua gave a satisfied grunt.

A deer’s antlers begin to grow in the spring, usually in April or early May. They start as stubby knobs on the top of the animal’s head and then, for the next several weeks, grow rapidly. By August they are fully grown, though still in the “velvet stage,” semi-soft and covered with a fuzzy sheath. But as fall approaches, the velvet covering is quickly rubbed off, and the antlers become the bone-hard racks that are worn through the winter before they fall off and the whole process starts over again. Since this was late in May, the buck’s antlers were still in the first stages of growth. Nevertheless they were far enough along that Joshua could see that this animal had significantly more than the stubby knobs on the yearling. They were already four inches long and very thick at the base. Judging from that, he guessed this one was eight, or maybe nine, years old, well into his prime.

Carefully, moving so slowly as to make no sound or move the brush in any unnatural way, Joshua lifted the rifle. He aimed the front sight so it pointed at the neck, just ahead of the front quarters. He took a breath, let it out slowly, breathed again, let it out halfway, then squeezed slowly.

The crack of the rifle was like the explosion of a cannon in the evening quiet. The buck jerked around violently, leaped once into the air, then crumpled as his forelegs buckled beneath him. The other four deer shot away in great bounding leaps, tails flashing white. Three crows burst into the air from a dead cottonwood, cawing angrily at this intrusion on their privacy.

Joshua straightened and pushed out from his blind. The buck was down now, legs shaking in its final death throes. He nodded in satisfaction. A clean shot. No suffering. No having to track the blood stains, then losing them in the darkness.

He thought about going for Nathan. He didn’t dare leave the carcass out for the whole night. Wolf sightings had not been uncommon. This would be too tempting to leave unattended. But then he decided it was not likely that Nathan had returned from dinner yet, so he set to work on his own. He would clean it out, get it propped open so that the meat would cool, and then he would find Nathan to help him drag it back to camp. Glad that he had sharpened his knife that morning on Heber Kimball’s grindstone, he bled the deer carefully, then opened up the stomach. Once it was cleaned, he dragged the body a short distance from the entrails, then propped open the body cavity with two sticks so that it could cool. Leave an animal too long in its own body heat and the meat could turn pretty “gamey.”

He was whistling again now as he worked, finding a deep satisfaction in the evening’s success. When he finished, he moved the few yards to the creek and washed the blood off his hands and knife. As he stood, wiping the blade of his knife against his trouser leg, he turned and looked at the deer. In the dragging of the body away from where he had cleaned it, he had left the neck twisted a little, so it was looking at him. For a moment it looked as though it were simply lying down, resting.

And then, a strange thing happened. The song he was whistling died on his lips. He moved slowly back to the slain deer, staring down at it in sudden morbid fascination. A quarter of an hour ago this had been a living thing. It had stepped out of the forest, a thing of beauty and magnificence. Now it was dead.

Slowly he put the knife back in its case. He squatted down again, directly in front of the animal. The large brown eyes had not closed in death but stared sightlessly back at him, locked forever open by that shattering blow from the ball. He reached out and touched the brown fur. It felt stiff, and beneath it he could feel the flesh already cooling. What was it that was gone now? When the buck had stepped out of the trees it had life. It had intelligence. It sniffed the air for danger. It scanned the forest for any threat. It had done so for years now, pitting its natural caution against the cunning of the wolves and the threat of winter storms and the predator known as man. Then Joshua’s shot had taken him down. In seconds the life—whatever it was—was gone. What was it that was different now? Outwardly there was little difference—if you ignored the fact that Joshua had cleaned the animal. The head was the same shape, the velvet antlers still there, but the eyes were as dead as though made from glass. The fur was the same color and texture, but it was no longer alive and shimmering with movement.

He knew what Nathan would say if he were to ask these questions of him. He would talk about the spirit. Did a deer have a spirit? Or did it just have life? Just life? His brow furrowed. Life was a miracle whether it was spirit or not. And he had just ended that miracle. He felt no guilt. That wasn’t it at all. Food was a constant problem for the Saints. Tomorrow they would cut up the meat and distribute it among the men working at Mount Pisgah. The fat around the deer’s stomach was thick, and Joshua knew that the steaks and roasts cut from its flanks would be marbled with veins of fat as well. Working men needed that for strength and endurance. So what he was feeling wasn’t guilt. Rather it was a sudden, strange fascination.

Then Joshua visibly started. With a jolt he realized what it was that he had been whistling to himself for the past half an hour or more. It was the song that Savannah had been playing that last day back in Nauvoo. It was “Olivia’s song.”

A great sadness washed over him. Olivia too had once been filled with laughter, love, intelligence, vibrancy. Wasn’t that what was meant by life? Nathan had once said that the body was just an outward shell, the house in which the spirit lived. It wasn’t the “house” that was Olivia. It was whatever it was inside her. That’s what made her what she was, what he had come to love.

And then, with the same blinding swiftness that had cut down this beautiful animal, her life too was gone. But gone where? Was she still out there somewhere, as Caroline so firmly believed? He wanted to believe that, but . . . He shook his head. Wasn’t that, in a way, the ultimate demand on God? Wasn’t that the ultimate request? that his daughter still be allowed to live on somewhere after death?

Then, unbidden, his thoughts turned to his father. Just before the funeral, as hundreds streamed past the open coffin to pay one last tribute to Benjamin Steed, several people, including his own mother, had made a comment something like this. “That’s not Benjamin.” It had irritated him at the time. Of course it was Benjamin. Of course it was the man who had lived such a rich life, then given it without a moment’s hesitation for his granddaughter. But now Joshua understood. What lay before him now was no longer the beautiful white-tailed deer that had come out of the trees. It was just a body. The deer was gone.

For a long time he sat there, letting the darkness slowly envelop him. Finally, with a sigh from deep within, he got to his feet. He looked around. There was no moon as yet, and only the last vestiges of twilight gave him any sight at all. There was no sound of voices or laughter. He was too far away for that.

He walked away from the deer a few steps, moving back to the river’s edge. He stood there for almost a minute, staring down at the water; then finally, slowly, he sank to his knees. For a long moment, there was nothing, no movement, no sound. Then at last his lips began to move, and in a murmur so low that the sounds of the river’s current overrode it, Joshua began to speak.