True Sisters (17 page)

Anne wondered what it would be like when cold weather came and she had to sleep inside the tent every night, not just the nights when it rained, as she had done for the past few weeks. She preferred sleeping outdoors, beside the cart. Although some families had individual tents, the Sullys slept in a communal tent, which was crowded, the air close, and the sounds of sleep—the grunts and snores and cries—kept her awake. Not that she slept that well on the prairie. Perhaps it wasn’t just the dirt bed that kept her awake but also her pregnancy and the fear of giving birth in such primitive conditions.

Anne trudged along beside Joe, with two-year-old Lucy on top of the cart, moving slowly, watching the other Saints pass them. Many of the carts were pulled by women, because there had been deaths on the trail, not just among the frail old people and the young children but among healthy men and women, too. Some, such as Addison Gray, had been killed in accidents. Maud’s husband, Robert, had just given out. Others had died from mountain fever or dysentery. Anne recalled one man who had gotten sick with the flux. His wife had begged a piece of beef, which she boiled into a tea and fed to him. Too late, the Saints learned that meat made the disease worse, and he had died. More emigrants will be taken before the trip is over, many more, she thought.

Anne worried for the safety of her children. And just as much, she feared what would happen to them if she were to die. John could not raise Joe and Lucy by himself, especially with the new baby. The Mormon women would help. Anne had seen enough of the women’s kindness to know they would take care of her children. But not forever. John would have to marry again, and quickly, without time to learn much about the woman. Who knew how a new wife would treat Anne’s little ones. She could be a widow with children of her own and ignore Joe and Lucy. Or she might bear John her own children, and she would prefer them to those her husband had had by his first wife. Anne had seen that at home, with the dead mother’s little ones treated like farm animals, forced to do the heavy work, beaten, while the favored children were allowed to attend school. When that happened, the boys ran off as soon as they were able, and the girls married at puberty to get away from their stepmothers, trading one troubled home for another. It was not death that Anne Sully feared, but leaving her children to an unknown fate.

She and Joe stopped often to rest, letting so many carts go by that they were near the end of the train. They would have to hurry if they wanted to reach the camp before dark. Anne scanned the horizon, but there was no sign of John and the others. She had put Lucy on the ground to play while they rested, and now she lifted the little girl and set her on top of the cart again, frowning at the strain on her back. “Ready, son?” she asked as she leaned over to pick up the crosspiece. Anne grimaced at the tremendous heaving in her belly. Then, just as she straightened up, ready to push on, her water broke. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and Joe stared at her, a frightened look on his young face.

“Mama, you walk. I can pull the cart by myself,” he said, not understanding what had happened. As if to prove his point, he started off with the handcart, struggling to pull it a few feet. “You see, Mama. I’m almost as strong as Papa.”

But he could not propel the cart by himself. Anne thought she could push until the pains grew too harsh, and she placed her hands behind the cart and shoved. But the effort was too much, and, exhausted, she dropped down on the roadside.

“I’ll find someone to help us,” Joe said, looking around, but the only man in sight who wasn’t pulling or pushing a cart had his arm tied up in a sling and was leaning on an old woman. As the two came alongside the Sully cart, the woman asked sharply, “Are you needing help?”

“I think I’m having the baby now.”

“Your water’s broke.”

“It has.”

“Can you walk a little farther?”

Anne shook her head. “The pains…” and she shuddered as one gripped her.

“Well, you’ve had a stroke of luck, for here is Sister Maud, who is as good as a physician with borning babies,” said a woman pushing a cart. She stopped beside Maud, then introduced herself as Sister Jessie and the woman beside her as Sister Emeline. “Sister Emeline is knowing of babies, too. Shall we put you on your cart and push you to camp?”

“Dear to goodness, best you let me take a peep so I’ll know how far along she is,” Maud said. So the little company—Maud, Joe, Emeline, Jessie, and her brothers—arranged the two carts to give the woman a bit of shade, and privacy, too.

“My labor’s always been a long one. I do very poorly,” Anne told them. “I should try to make it to camp, since the baby likely won’t be born till morning, maybe later.” Nonetheless, she lay down on the ground and let Maud examine her.

“This one won’t wait that long. It won’t wait at all,” Maud announced. She told Sutter to build a fire and to heat the water they carried with them in a bottle. Then she asked Anne if she had any cloths in which to wrap the little one.

“She better, as I haven’t any petticoat left,” Jessie put in.

Joe took out a slim bundle of baby things and handed them to Maud, who had spread her own patchwork counterpane on the ground. Anne tried to hold back her cries for Joe’s and Lucy’s sake, but a groan escaped her lips. “It wasn’t like this before.”

“Every baby has a different idea,” Maud told her, motioning Emeline to her side. “See here, that’s the baby’s head,” she explained.

“So soon?” Anne asked.

“Now you lie back and look up at the clouds, which are mighty pretty today, and push when the pains come.” Maud poured a tiny amount of the water into her hands and washed them, and Emeline did the same.

Then, to distract the boy, Sutter took him to the Cooper cart and asked him to help scrape mud off the spokes of the wheels. “We have a heavy-enough load without pushing all that dirt,” he said. “When we’re finished, we’ll clean your cart, too.” Ephraim came up then and offered to look after the girl, Lucy, so that Jessie could attend the woman.

“I’ve seen cows and pigs give birth and think that, like as not, women aren’t so different,” Jessie told Maud as she knelt on the ground beside Anne.

“Not so different, but more pain. I’ve wondered about that. Why does the Lord love a cow more than a woman?”

At that, Anne started to laugh, but her face contorted and she bit her lip so hard that a tiny blood bubble broke out. After the pain passed, she twisted her head to look for Joe and Lucy. “I don’t want to frighten them,” she said.

“My brothers are tending them,” Jessie told her. Then she asked, “Where is your husband?”

“He went with the hunting party. He didn’t expect the baby today.”

“Men never do,” Maud told her. “It’s my experience that they don’t want to be around when the little one is born. Conceiving is for men. Birthing is for womenfolks.”

A man and two women pushing a cart reached the little group and stopped, the women glancing at each other as they realized what was going on. One of them was pregnant herself, and she frowned as she approached and studied the woman lying on the ground. “Is it Sister Anne?”

“It is,” Maud replied.

“I’m Ella Buck and this is my sister, Nannie Macintosh. Can we help?”

At that, Anne turned her head to the woman and reached out her hand. Ella took it as she sat down in the dirt beside Anne. “It appears ye don’t hae to wait much longer, Sister,” she said.

Anne smiled a little, then asked, “Do you think the baby will be a Saint or a Gentile?”

The women chuckled. “You’re the one who hasn’t converted, then?” Jessie asked.

“Do you think God is punishing me for it now?”

“Converting won’t help you. The Lord makes childbirth as hard for Mormons as Gentiles—or apostates, for that matter,” Maud said. “Sometimes, His ways are mighty difficult for a woman to understand.” She examined Anne again and said, “Now, on the next pain, you push.”

While the women waited, other carts stopped, the Saints inquiring if they could help. A few of the Mormons, men as well as women, bowed their heads in prayer for Anne. “The Lord be with you, Sister,” they said before they pushed on. A man ripped a piece of wood from a bush, stripped off the bark with a knife, and gave it to Maud, saying Anne could bite down on it when the pain got bad. “That’s what my wife done,” he added.

Two young men offered to wait so that one of them could push Anne’s cart after the baby was born, but Maud told them to go on, that the birth would take time.

With the next pain, Anne pushed, and the delivery began in earnest. The head, the shoulders, and finally the rest of the body emerged, and the baby was born. “A boy! Your brother!” Maud announced, tying off the cord and handing the baby to Joe, who had joined the group attending his mother. The women finished their work; then Maud wrapped the newborn in a cloth and gave him to Anne. “Whether he’s a Mormon or a Gentile, he’s a fine boy,” she said.

Anne smiled weakly as she held her new son. In truth, the birth had been easier than those in England, where the babies had been born on the dining room table and she’d been accompanied by a midwife and a nurse. She looked at the women around her with gratitude. For the first time since she had boarded the ship at Liverpool, she did not view the people as Mormons, but as friends, and she reached out her hand and tried to speak. “I did not think … because I’m not a Mormon…”

“Be still,” Maud said. “We are a people who help one another because we love the Lord. Whether you are a Mormon or not, you are one of us.”

The group broke up then, the men deciding who would pull which cart, the women arranging a bed on top of Anne’s cart for her and the baby. Ella went to her own vehicle and searched through the foodstuffs for a hard candy striped in pink and white and gave it to Anne. “I’ve been saving this for something special. What’s more special than a bairn?”

“But you saved it for yourself,” Anne protested.

“The Lord provides,” Ella said.

Anne put the candy into her mouth and savored the sweetness, the bite of peppermint, the sugar melting on her tongue. It had been months since she had eaten candy—not since she’d left England—and the taste brought her almost to tears. “I hope when your own time comes, the Lord will provide you with a chocolate cake.”

The men lifted Anne onto her cart, and the group started off, someone beginning the strains of a Mormon hymn, which ended with “All is well.” In a minute, all of them were singing along.

That night, John returned exhausted. The hunters had stayed out all day because they did not want to return empty-handed. Nonetheless, they had failed to locate game. When he found Anne lying on a blanket next to the campfire, John knelt down and looked at his wife and newborn son with pride, but he was anxious, too. “I am right glad you are well,” he said.

“We are tolerable fair, I and Samuel, if you will agree to the name. And happy,” Anne replied, because she knew John worried that in her sharp-tongued way, she would criticize him for deserting her. But she did not berate him. Instead, she said, “Your people have taken care of us.”

*   *   *

Louisa Tanner held on to one side of her father, Hall Chetwin, while her sister, Huldah, gripped him on the other, the two supporting the old man as they walked along. Margaret Chetwin was behind her husband, her hand on his back, as if to catch him if he fell backward. Huldah’s two sons, Dick and Jimmy, pushed the cart, and for once, Thales Tanner, Louisa’s husband, was there to pull it. Hall was exhausted but stubborn, and he refused to ride on top of the cart. He would show them that his faith gave him the strength to walk to Zion, Louisa knew. It would have been easier on the women if he had ridden, since pushing him in the cart would have taxed them less than propelling him forward on his frail legs.

“We can all push the cart, Father, if you want to ride. It is of no consequence to us,” Louisa told him.

“I will walk. My faith makes me strong,” he replied as he stumbled. He would have fallen if his daughter had not grasped him tightly.

Margaret patted his back, as if to right him, and said, “There is no shame in riding, my dear.” But, in fact, Margaret herself had seemed to believe that riding instead of walking was weakness. After those first few days of the journey, during which her legs nearly gave out, Margaret found her strength increasing. The family had expected her to be the weak one, had prayed for her health. And as if in answer to those prayers, Margaret’s health had improved, and now she walked the trail beside her daughters, even helping to push the cart.

Instead, it was Hall Chetwin who had deteriorated. At night, he slumped to the ground beside the cart, barely able to stay awake long enough to eat his supper. Sometimes he was so weak that Margaret or one of the girls had to feed him. They encouraged him by promising that the food shortage would end when they reached Fort Laramie and found supplies waiting for them. “Just hold out a few more days, Father, and everything will be fine,” Louisa told him. But despite his faith, the old man grew weaker. He was often too tired to attend the evening meetings or answer the morning call to prayers, something that did not please his son-in-law, Thales Tanner. And he could not take his turn at guard duty.

Louisa pleaded with Thales to encourage her father to ride, but Thales refused, saying, “It is his right.”

“He is doing it only because of the letter you wrote. He believes he must prove to you that he is worthy of Zion.”

“Zion does not care if he walks or rides.”

“Then you must tell him that.”

“Do not advise me, Louisa. A wife should not order her husband. Your father will be all right when we reach Fort Laramie. We will find supplies there, and he will gain back his strength.”

Still, that morning, Thales had told Hall in front of Louisa, “As I will pull the cart today, you may ride if you wish. I would not hold it against you.”

Perhaps thinking this was a test of his faith, Hall had replied, “I thank you, Brother, but I am hardy.”

So now, Louisa all but dragged her father as the two of them followed the Tanner handcart, which Huldah and her sons pulled now. The old man had been silent for a long time. He did not grumble. He never complained. Nor did he ever ask for a bite of bread or a sip of water, although he was weak from the lack of both. So they were all surprised when he announced suddenly, “I would have a lemon pudding.”