True Sisters (20 page)

The Saints pushed on hard after leaving Fort Laramie. The fort had been a disappointment to the Sullys, as well as to the rest of the Saints, because they’d found no supplies waiting for them. Provisions were on their way from the valley, John promised Anne. After all, he said, the handcart companies that had left early in the summer would have reached their destination and told of those following them—the Willie Company and the Martin Company just days behind it. Besides, John pointed out, the elders who had passed them in buggies and wagons on their way to the valley would have told of the emigrants’ plight. So the prophet would have sent out wagons. Perhaps they had already reached the Willie Company. The first provisions would have gone to those travelers, but others would be on their way to the Martin Company. John thought the Saints would encounter them any day now. Anne was not so sure. She heard people grumbling, complaining that they had been forgotten, that they had been left to perish, and she feared it was so. This was not what John and the others had been promised when they’d agreed to go to Zion.

Anne observed that some of the Saints did more than grumble. Two men who had camped near the Sullys and had pushed a cart together from Iowa with not a word of discontent began to quarrel. One complained so heartily that they were going to die because they had been forsaken by the church officials in the valley that his partner told him, “I’ll stand no more complaints against the authorities. Go and die, then.” The two walked on and made camp without talking. The next morning, the grumbler did not wake. Anne thought the man might feel compassion for his friend or even praise God for having taken a faithful Saint to heaven, but the companion announced, “Let the fire of the Almighty consume the wicked.”

She was not surprised when the leaders declared that all would have to lighten their loads one more time. The limit was now ten pounds for each adult, five for children. The carts were moving too slowly, and the people, suffering from lack of food and the long walk, were too exhausted to push. So John and Anne and the others went through their possessions again, putting aside not only books, photographs, toys, and mementos from home but also quilts and blankets, worn-out clothing, overcoats, even shoes. Anne stuffed her pockets with small items, donned extra clothing, then let the authorities weigh the things she had put aside to keep. Once more, they had to go through their poor belongings for discards to meet the weight limit. John attempted to cheat at the weighing-up and was chastised later at meeting and forced to ask for forgiveness. “I acted foolishly and wickedly by overloading my cart,” he confessed, and Anne hated the Saints for humiliating her husband.

After all the abandoned items had been piled together, the leaders set the lot on fire, so that no one could return to claim a prized possession. Some turned away, but Anne watched as flames consumed the heap, hoping they would not need the blankets and heavy clothing that were turning into ashes.

Not long after that, she and John reached the North Platte River. The air was chill by then. In the distance, the blue-and-purple mountains were covered with snow clouds that swirled and threatened to bring down a storm. Cakes of ice floated in the river, and as the Saints made ready to cross, a sleet storm hit them like a wall of ice. The Sullys had waded the Platte before, since the trail they followed meandered back and forth across the river, but the water had never been icy like this.

John stared into the frigid depths of the river, then returned to the cart, where Anne waited, the infant Samuel bundled up in her shawl. Joe and Lucy sat on top of the cart, wrapped in blankets, and Joe announced suddenly, “Mother, the snow has come.”

John looked to the north and saw the storm closing in. “It bodes no good. This won’t be an easy crossing,” he told his wife. “I’ll take the children on the cart, but you will have to wade across.”

“It won’t be the first time my feet have been wet,” she reassured him.

“The water is icy and deep, maybe up to your waist.”

“Then we’ll build a fire on the other side to dry us off.”

John studied his wife a moment. She was gaunt, her face gray, and she’d lost the roundness of her figure because of childbirth, the long trek, and the meager rations. But she was resolute and no longer complained as she had during the first months of the journey. “It hasn’t been an easy time for you. I wonder now if I should have insisted you come along.”

He had never questioned the rightness of his decision to immigrate to the valley, and Anne studied him. “Is your faith waning?” she asked.

“Oh no,” he replied quickly.

“But your decision to travel to Zion is.”

He turned away and did not reply.

“Perhaps you are only being tested.”

“By whom? Who tests us?” John asked. “God or the leaders? Perhaps we should have stayed in Fort Laramie or in Iowa City and come on in the spring. It was the leaders who insisted we go on this late in the year, not God.”

“How can you say that, you who have been so loyal? You have claimed that God speaks through the leaders of the church and that it is sinful to question them. Do you no longer believe that?”

“Do
you
believe it, Annie?”

Anne looked at the baby, Samuel, who had awakened and begun mewling. He was a tiny thing, smaller than her other infants had been at birth, and he did not feed well. “I don’t know what I believe. I’ve grown fond of these people. I haven’t accepted your religion. I may never do so. But I will no longer close myself off to it.”

“Anne—”

“No, don’t preach at me, John. I will make the decision myself.”

“I wasn’t going to.” He gave a short laugh. “It’s too cold to talk religion. We’ve got to cross the Platte before the storm catches us.”

So John pulled the cart to the Platte while Anne, the baby in one arm, pushed. Six miles back, there had been a toll station on the river with a bridge that the Saints could cross, but none of them had the fee, so they were forced to push their carts through the water. Poised on the bank, Anne looked off in the direction of the station, thinking that if John had not given their money to the church, they could have taken their cart across the river. But she knew that even if they’d had the coins, John would never set himself above the others by using the bridge, while his fellow Saints waded through the water. Nor would she. How could she cross the river in luxury while old women like Maud, who had delivered Samuel, waded through the water?

Other carts were ahead of them on the riverbank, men shoving them off into the cold water and propelling them to the far side while their wives tied up their skirts and waded across, pushing the carts or carrying the children. John and Anne watched as a cart pushed by an old man tipped over in midstream, spilling blankets and clothing and cooking utensils. Men rushed to right the vehicle. Others grabbed for the items as they were swept downstream, but most of the contents of the cart disappeared. The man pulled the vehicle to the far bank and shoved it out of the water, then sank down, his wife beside him, and put his hands over his face.

“At least they were not injured,” John said.

“Yes.” Still, Anne could not help wondering how the couple would go on. It was clear now that there would be snow, and without the things lost in the water, the two old people would be hard-pressed to survive. She thought about the blankets and clothing that had been burned.

“You must look at the carts that are already across. Almost everyone made it safely. Look, people are already building fires,” John told her, as if he understood her fear. “Are you ready?”

Anne smiled a little and replied, “And what if I am not? Is there a choice? Could we go back?” When John looked dejected, his wife added, “I’m only jesting. If we have no choice, we might as well endure with humor.”

John took his wife’s hand and gripped it hard. Then he shoved the cart into the stream and started across. The baby in her arms, Anne stepped into the water behind him and gasped at the icy coldness of it. Although she wore stout shoes, she could feel the chill like needles thrusting their sharp points into her feet, the pricks moving up her legs all the way to her back as she waded into deeper water. By the time she was halfway across, the water was above her waist, and she no longer felt as cold, because it had begun to numb her. She looked over at John, whose face was grim as he struggled with the weight of the cart. Anne walked slowly, feeling each rock on the river bottom with a foot before she took a step. She felt as if she were walking with peas in her shoes. But she was more concerned about John, worried that if the cart tipped, the children would slide into the water.

They were nearly across when the cart hit a rock and lurched. Anne reached out with her free arm as if to right it, although she was too far away even to touch it. Then as she took a step toward the cart, she slipped on the cobblestones of the river bottom. Her free arm flailed, and she tried to regain her balance, but instead, she fell backward, the water closing over her head, and she struggled not to go down. The swirling water whipped Anne’s shawl over her face, smothering her, then wrapped itself around her neck as if to strangle her. As Anne clawed it away, her feet slid all the way out from under her and she fell onto the river bottom. The shawl caught on a branch under the water and yanked the infant Samuel out of her hands. Anne reached for the baby, but she could not grab him, only push him up to the surface. She found purchase and thrust her head above the water, but the baby was not in sight. John had seen her fall, had watched with disbelief as she went down, and then he’d seen Samuel pop to the surface of the water. He pushed through the water toward the baby. But the infant was out of his grasp, and with a feeling of horror, Anne watched as her baby disappeared in a swirl of water. “Samuel!” she called, and then, “Emma Lee!”

*   *   *

At that instant, Catherine Dunford, who was downstream from Anne, spotted the baby. Too stunned to cry out, she grabbed her husband’s arm and pointed. Despite his more than seventy years, Peter Dunford had a back like an oak plank and legs as stout as stone fence posts. He had been hard-worked in the coal mines of Scotland, but through the grace of God, Catherine believed, had not contracted the miner’s puff, the tuberculosis that robbed so many of his companions of their lives.

Catherine had told Anne more than once how they had heard the message that the church was building up an empire in America where men and women would no longer be tied to the drudgery into which they’d been born, where each could find work that suited. “There are no shackles in Zion. There you will breathe the pure air of the mountains and glory in the sunshine of God’s days,” the missionary had said. “You have endured much as the slaves of rich men. God will avenge you, and he will take you to His kingdom.” Catherine had repeated the message to Anne word for word, wonderment in her voice. “Our entire family was converted. Our son is already in the valley and is waiting for us. He has written that none shall go up to Zion except the pure in heart, and no heart is purer than Peter’s,” she’d said fondly.

Peter Dunford’s heart was indeed pure, Anne realized later, for just as Samuel rose to the surface of the water, floating like Moses in ancient Egypt, Peter let go of the shafts of his cart and flailed through the water, thrusting himself forward to where the baby had been tossed by the water and had begun to sink again. Peter dropped into the frigid depths of the river, thrusting his arms about until he felt the infant and grasped the tiny body. Then he surfaced, gasping and coughing, but he held Samuel in his huge hand.

Anne pushed through the water and grasped her son. “You saved his life!” she murmured as the baby sputtered and then began to cry. “It is a miracle.”

John came up beside them and gripped the man’s arm, too emotional to speak, and the two looked at each other for a moment before Peter said, “We’ve got to get out of this water or God and all the angels won’t save us from pneumonia.”

John nodded, and he went back to his cart, pushing it to the far side of the river, where a brother helped him lift it onto the bank. When his family was out of the water, John turned back to help Peter and Catherine and the Saints with them propel their cart onto land. Then they pushed their carts a mile inland to where the main body of the Saints was camped in the falling snow. After they set up their tents, the men went to scrounge sagebrush for fuel to build a fire, and Anne carefully rubbed Samuel to warm him and wrapped him in a dry shirt of John’s. Then she and Catherine wrung out the wet clothing. There was not much hope it would dry, because the sleet was coming fast now, stinging them like broken glass. It was all they could do to keep the children out of the storm.

The men returned and built a fire, and Peter, shivering because his boots and clothing were wet, collapsed onto a damp blanket that Catherine had spread under the shelter. She warmed his hands in her own and quoted fondly from a Robert Burns poem, “‘Your locks are like the snaw.’”

Anne turned aside. The scene was too intimate.

“My poor head is vexed,” Peter muttered.

John, hovering over the old man who had saved his son, said, “He is not well, Anne. I’ll get an elder to lay hands on him.”

Anne felt the old man’s forehead, which was feverish, and she went to the cart for a blanket to cover him, but there was none, because the blankets had been used to form the shelter, and they were soaked by the storm. “We must move him closer to the fire,” she told Catherine, but when Peter tried to sit up, he could not. Catherine took off her cloak and wrapped it around her husband. “You do too much. You are not particular to help others.”

He might have replied, “It is the Lord’s work,” but instead, Peter looked up blankly, his eyes red, and muttered, “Such whiteness.”

“What?”

“So white.” He gazed heavenward.

John returned then with two men, who anointed Peter with consecrated oil, then put their hands on him and prayed. “Lord, look down on thy servant Peter and his good works and rebuke the fever that consumes him. Cast out the Destroyer and return your servant to health,” entreated one. The little group outside the tent prayed silently, but Peter did not seem to be aware of them. He looked heavenward and tried to sit up. “White feathers,” he said.