True Sisters (2 page)

“Do ye think he shouldna gather to Zion just because he—ye turned him down?” Andrew asked, repeating the bit of fiction the family had spread to save face for Nannie. “Zion is for the sinners amongst us, too.”

“But I would hae waited until next year rather than cross with him.”

“And done what, pushed a cart by yourself?” Andrew asked, and Nannie knew he was right. Although others had made the journey alone, she did not believe she could do it.

“Besides,” Andrew added with gentleness, “Ella needs ye.” And Nannie knew he was right about that, too.

When Andrew questioned the wisdom of putting the shoes into the cart while so many other things had had to be abandoned, Ella told him to hush. “We’re allowed seventeen pounds each, and if Nannie wants the shoon in her poundage instead of tossed in the midden, who are we to say nay?”

The rigid weight limit was a surprise. The emigrants had known at the outset that there would be little room in the carts for their belongings and had been told to pack only what was necessary. Then when they arrived, they were informed that they could take even less than they had expected, just seventeen pounds for each adult, less for children. And the possessions would be weighed to make sure no one cheated. It was for their own good, the people were told. Once the journey was under way, they would be glad for every pound they didn’t have to push across the prairie.

So the pioneers went through their things, casting aside precious items, selling them to the local people in Iowa City at a fraction of their worth or abandoning them at the campground. The sisters sold their small trunk for fifty cents, a bed quilt for a dime, their extra bonnets for a nickel. One of the missionaries accompanying the group paid Ella a quarter for her mirror, which was framed in gold. Then he put it into the supply wagon for the trip to the valley, and Ella brooded that the weight limit didn’t apply to the church leaders. The mirror had been her prized possession, but she had no need to view herself each day after tramping across the prairie.

The sisters pared down their wardrobes, so that each had just three dresses, two for the journey and the third to wear for the handcart entrance into Great Salt Lake City, where they expected to be met by a brass band.

There was not much demand in Iowa City for the Saints’ belongings, however, so what Ella and Nannie and the others couldn’t sell was abandoned on the ground—clothing, china plates and copper pots, volumes of
Pilgrim’s Progress
and
Robinson Crusoe,
an ear trumpet, a china dog, a warming pan, a birdcage whose tiny door was open, as if the bird had been allowed to fly off; embroidered pillow slips and striped ticks that were already ripped open, their feathers blowing in the breeze. They might have burned the discarded treasure that the Gentiles of Iowa City were too parsimonious to purchase, but waste was not the Saints’ way, and so they left their things in great piles to be scavenged.

*   *   *

Nannie glanced over at her sister, who was straining as they pushed the cart up a hill. Ella’s face was red and wet from the exertion, and the back of her dress was stained with perspiration. The dress stretched across Ella’s stomach, gently rounded now, and Nannie thought her sister’s exhaustion was due more to pregnancy than from pushing the cart. She hoped the baby would not come before they reached Utah. “I’ll push by myself awhile,” Nannie told her sister. “Ye walk alongside.”

“I’ll do my part.”

“Of course ye will. But there’s no reason for both of us to push just now. We’ll take turns. Ye walk for a time. Then we’ll trade places.” She glanced at her brother-in-law, his hands against the crossbar, propelling the cart, and whispered to Ella, “And if Andrew disna notice, we can both stop pushing.” The sisters laughed.

Ella took her hands off the cart, examining a blister that had formed already on one palm. “When we stop tonight, I’ll get out my gloves. My hands will be ruined by the time we reach the valley. And my clothes,” she added, glancing down at the dark cotton of her dress. The sisters had hemmed their skirts to above their boots to keep them from dragging on the ground, but already, the hems were dirty. “I’ll rest for only a minute. I’ll catch up with ye.” Ella sat down on the limb of a fallen tree.

Nannie centered herself in the back of the cart. The vehicle really was not difficult to push, and it rode easily along the rutted road. Other carts passed them, traveling alongside on the prairie grass, but Andrew kept to the trail, where the going was easier. He glanced back at Nannie and said over his shoulder, “That was good of you. The baby moves. Ella disna sleep well.”

“She will tonight.”

“Aye.”

He turned back to the trail, and Nannie studied his narrow back and lean arms, his body as lanky as a coatrack. He had once been a strong lad, but years of working in a mill had weakened him, and she worried about his lungs. Still, she knew her sister’s heart fluttered at the sight of him, for Andrew was blond and blue-eyed, a fine catch for any girl. He worked hard, too. She had to give him that, although he was a little too pompous, a little too self-important, too ready to make clear that he was the head of his household and would make the decisions. Well, what newly married husband wasn’t? Ella asked when Nannie mentioned that Andrew seemed full of himself. Ella was right, of course, and after that, Nannie found Andrew’s attitude more amusing than annoying. He was like a boy playacting his role as master of his home. Besides, Andrew loved her sister. He loved her so much that he’d promised Ella before they married that he would never take another wife.

The three of them knew about polygamy, had known about it before they agreed to go to Utah Territory. In 1853, not long after they joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they learned that Joseph Smith had revealed to his people that the Lord had told Mormon men to take second and third wives. Some might have even more. The Lord Himself commanded it of His people, the prophet had said. After all, the patriarchs of old had been polygamous.

Ella and Nannie had been stunned and then disgusted when the news arrived in Scotland, had even considered leaving the church. “The Lord’s way is never easy,” one of the missionaries said after the young women shared their misgivings. “The Lord does not test us with a life of ease.” So many more women than men had joined the church, and it was unfair to deny them husbands, he continued, and without a husband, Ella and Nannie were told, a woman could not rise to the highest celestial kingdom. Besides, the missionary confided, only a select few of the Saints—mainly church leaders—practiced plural marriage, and most of them did it out of compassion, taking up women who were old and feeble. But Ella was not reassured, and when Andrew asked her to marry him, she hesitated, telling him she feared he might someday enter into celestial marriage.

Andrew was shocked—and then offended. The idea sickened him, too, he said. The two of them had known each other since they were children living in a small town not far from Edinburgh, and he had never imagined taking anyone else for a first wife, let alone a second. He told her, “We can be good Saints without living the principle.” The
principle,
that was what it was called. “Look at the missionaries. They have only a single wife at home,” he added. Still, Ella was fearful and had insisted they wait. Even on the day of the wedding, she was troubled, and so Andrew wrote in their Bible, “My wife is Ella Macintosh. I will take no other.”

Nannie witnessed the declaration, and she knew that Andrew meant what he wrote, and that whatever his faults, he was a man to honor his promise.

He had been the first among them to join the Saints. Like the other villagers, the Macintoshes and the Bucks had attended the Presbyterian church, with its solemn worship and threats of a dour hereafter for the wicked, which included almost everyone. Then two Latter-day Saints missionaries called on Andrew and told him about the new American religion. The church’s founder, the prophet Joseph Smith, had been singled out by the Lord to restore his gospel. In 1823, the angel Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith, a poor farm boy in New York, telling him about the Book of Mormon, the story of an ancient people in America. Jesus had appeared to these believers nearly two thousand years before, but they had descended into wickedness and been destroyed. Four years after he saw the angel, young Smith was shown where the ancient record was hidden. He translated it and had it published in the spring of 1830.

Andrew learned that the prophet Joseph Smith had been martyred. Persecuted by men who coveted the Mormons’ land and belongings, Smith’s people had journeyed to Missouri and Illinois, pursued by
mobocrats,
as the Mormons called them, who beat them and burned their houses and farms. Eventually, these vengeful men murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. The Mormons fled once again, under the leadership of Brigham Young.

Andrew smiled when he heard that part of the story, because he knew that without Young, the Mormons might have dispersed, dooming their new religion. Instead, the Lord Himself directed Young to lead the Saints across the Mississippi River and through Iowa Territory, and across the wide Missouri to a place they called “Winter Quarters.” And then in 1847, Young and a few of his followers journeyed all the way to the Salt Lake Valley, which Young declared would be the new Zion. Now, not quite ten years later, the Saints had a kingdom in Utah Territory and tens of thousands of converts, most of them poor, many from the British Isles and Scandinavia, and, like Andrew, Ella, and Nannie, they were being gathered to Zion to join with the Lord’s chosen.

Andrew had studied the Book of Mormon, had been entranced with the story of the Saints, but even more, he had loved the joy of the new religion, the idea that he was blessed of God, and so he had been baptized. Ella joined the church not long afterward, along with the other members of the Buck and Macintosh families, all excepting Nannie, who worked in a hotel in Edinburgh and knew nothing about the missionaries at work in her town.

In fact, she did not know about the conversions at all until another maid told her that Nannie’s family had joined the Saints. Nannie denied it and wrote her parents to warn them that vicious lies and rumors were being spread about them. “Ye must not come in contact with those vile Mormons for fear people will believe ye are amongst them. I write to warn ye that your reputation is in danger. Beware!”

And then she went home and discovered the truth for herself. “Ye, too, Ella?” she asked her sister, for the two had always been close. “Most of all, I canna stand it that ye are one of them.”

“Ye don’t know the blessedness of it. It’s the pure religion our Lord founded so long ago, before it was fouled by the preachers with all their rules and rituals. Come to a service with us,” Ella replied, and Nannie did so, if only to be better prepared to show her sister the error of her conversion. Ella introduced her to the shopkeeper-missionary Levi Kirkwood, an early British convert, who talked of going to America one day. After Levi told her about the teachings of the church, told her as the two walked the country lanes, Nannie, too, was baptized. The Holy Spirit had entered her, Nannie believed, although she might have been taken in a little by the youth and vibrancy of the missionary, so different from the gray-bearded patriarch of the local kirk.

At first, she was careful not to let anyone in Edinburgh learn of her conversion, but she was filled with such happiness that her friends in service at the hotel immediately knew something about her had changed. They wondered if she had become engaged, and indeed, Nannie had great hopes for a life with the young missionary, who told her he had been taken with her earnestness. She confided her desires to two or three girls, admitting to them that she had become a Mormon. Then a maid at the hotel discovered Nannie’s secret and told on her. Nannie was summoned by the housekeeper, who said she would allow no Saint to work in the hotel, proselytizing and corrupting the other maids. “Renounce the Mormons or ye’ll seek work elsewhere, my girl,” she told Nannie.

Jobs were not easily found, but Nannie would not deny her religion. She saw the demand as the first test of her faith, and all but gloried in being dismissed, telling Levi that she’d starve rather than denounce her religion. He praised her for it, telling her he loved her for her pure and noble nature, and then he asked her to marry him.

Unlike her sister, Nannie did not ask her fiancé to promise in a Bible that he would not take a second wife. She believed he was too honorable to follow the principle. Now that she had found him to be false, Nannie wondered if he might turn out to be one of the polygamous ones after all. Perhaps it was better that he had abandoned her in Scotland instead of taking her to America, where one day, she would have had to share him with other women. Of course, she would not have made the trip with Andrew and Ella if she had known that Levi would be going to the valley with the handcart company. She would have stayed behind and come the following year or the year after that, when the rest of her family hoped to emigrate. But Andrew had wanted her to come, had said that she could help prepare a home in Zion for her parents. Ella, he told her, would need her.

Nannie and Levi had not exchanged a word since she discovered he was in Iowa City. She did not let her eyes linger on him if she spied him in a crowd, and because of that, she did not know if he looked at her. But she thought perhaps he did. At times, she felt someone staring at her, but that was foolishness. And so what if he did? He was married to another, a beautiful girl with golden curls, so very fine and fair, with skin as translucent as a butterfly’s wing, but one who was clingy and childish and who did not appear to be up to the journey. While still in Iowa City, Nannie had heard Patricia whine about the hardships. And the real hardships, everyone knew, hadn’t even begun.

Perhaps Levi was sorry he had married Patricia. And then Nannie had the appalling idea that Levi might be considering her for a second wife. The idea disgusted her, but she also found it amusing. She thought of how curtly she would turn him down if he asked. She would tell him she did not fancy half of a man—and half of a very poor man at that.