True Sisters (3 page)

“I’ll push now,” Ella said, coming up behind Nannie, and because Nannie could see that the carts in front of the train had stopped and several of the Saints were already putting up tents, she agreed. “Ye were lost in thought. What were ye thinking?” Ella asked, taking Nannie’s place at the back of the cart.

Nannie gave a bark of a laugh. “I was thinking, What if Levi Kirkwood asks me to be his second wife?”

“Nannie!”

Nannie shrugged. “Well, he might.”

“Och! He might. That one will be amongst the first to live the principle, and, dare I say it, three times or four. Ye were right to leave him at the altar.”

That fantasy about just who had forsaken whom at the altar had been repeated so many times by their family that Nannie wondered if her sister actually believed it. No, she decided, glancing around, her eyes stopping on Levi’s wife’s hair shining in the sun. No one would believe that.

*   *   *

Anne Sully could barely contain her annoyance when she saw that the carts in the front of the train had stopped and the men were putting up the tents. At the rate they were going, they wouldn’t reach the Great Salt Lake until the back end of the year. She had waited for hours for the procession to begin, and now after such a short time, the people were quitting for the night. She and John and the children might just as well have spent the day in the Iowa City camp and caught up with the train in the morning. Now they would need to unpack the cart and build a fire, and she would have to prepare supper and mend Joe’s pants, which the four-year-old had ripped in the first hour of the walk. And she ought to wash out the baby’s dress, which was sour from where Lucy had spit up. The baby, nearly two years old, was blotchy and cranky from the heat and clung to Anne as she tried to go about her chores.

Anne herself, well along in her pregnancy, was tired and cranky, too. She marveled at the other women in her condition who appeared oblivious to the hardships. So many women of child-bearing age seemed to be pregnant, and those who were not had babes at the breast. She was humiliated at having to push the cart like some beast of burden. With every step, she expected someone to cry out “Gee” or “Haw.” Her ankles were swollen and she was afraid she had the beginning of one of the headaches that had plagued her since she was a child. Walking in the dust and heat the next day with the pounding in her temple and the churning in her stomach would be unbearable. On the trail, she had held her handkerchief across her mouth and then a scarf to keep out the dirt that the handcarts and ox-drawn wagons accompanying the Saints threw up, but they had made breathing more difficult. Lucy wouldn’t be the only one to vomit. There were wagons for the sick, but Anne was too proud to ride among the toothless old people, their minds as brittle as the dry prairie grass, who babbled about how blessed they were to be going to the Promised Land. Besides, who knew what she might pick up and give to her children, sicknesses from the dirty urchins whose families had joined the Mormon Church. She had reason enough to fear their illnesses.

“A good day’s start. We travel first-rate,” John said. The obvious excitement he had felt all day now that the handcart migration was under way seemed to have turned into a sense of satisfaction, and he appeared oblivious to his wife’s ill humor. “It wasn’t so hard, was it now, Annie?” He put his arm around his wife’s waist, and despite her annoyance, Anne leaned against him, feeling glad for his strength. He didn’t understand her feelings. He never would understand them.

Now, looking at her husband, Anne sensed that all he felt just then was the joy of going to Zion, just like those other demented Saints. If she complained about the trek, he would tell her she was better off than most, and she was. Many of the women, some with six or eight children or even more, were widows, with no men to help them push their carts. But if she were a widow, she wouldn’t have come to America at all, would she? She would be at home with her children. She wouldn’t be making this ghastly trip across the snuff-colored plains.

Anne put those thoughts from her mind. She and John had argued until she was worn-out, had argued until the day they boarded the ship, and what good had it done? Besides, she had agreed to come on this journey to America, so she must share the blame, although what choice had she had? Only the choice of joining the emigrants or staying home in London with her children—and maybe without them, because John had threatened to take them along. His mind had been made up. He was going to America despite her pleas. Would he really have taken the children? Anne had asked herself that question a hundred times before they left Liverpool and again on the long trip by ship and by train to Iowa City. She didn’t know the answer. Could she have stopped him from leaving with the little ones? No, she knew she couldn’t have. John might have left her with the girls, but he would have taken Joe. John was as stubborn as the missionaries themselves when he made up his mind about a thing. Just look at the way he had defied her to embrace this strange new religion.

Before he met the missionaries, John had never been much for churchgoing. He had attended the Church of England, but that was to please her and especially to please her father. John had been employed in the fashionable gentlemen’s clothing shop in London that Anne’s father owned. At first, he had stitched on the coats and pants and jackets, but he had a way with the patrons, and in time, he’d begun measuring the dukes and earls and even members of the royal family who summoned him to their homes. The clients liked John’s amiable manner, his suggestions for fashions that made them appear a little thinner, a little taller. He convinced Anne’s father to stock accessories and at a huge markup, as well as form an alliance with a boot maker, who paid for referrals. The shop prospered, and so did John, who married his boss’s daughter.

It might have been a marriage of convenience for both of them. The connection certainly was a step up for John and a way to ensure that someday he would take over the shop. For Anne, whose outspokenness and lack of deference to men brought her few suitors, it was a marriage to a temperate and ambitious man and one far handsomer than a plain woman like her deserved. A big man, John had thick black hair brushed back off his broad forehead, a trim mustache, and steel blue eyes, while Anne had a fulsome figure and a placid face that belied her intelligence. Her hair, too light to be brown, too dark to be blond, was so lank that she could only part it in the middle and pull it back into a knot.

But, in fact, the marriage had been a love match between two people who were as complementary to each other as any young couple could be. When the father died, leaving the shop to John, as was proper, the husband told Anne the establishment belonged equally to her. He appreciated her intellect and business acumen and the way she took over the bookkeeping, sending out bills and gentle reminders, ordering materials, haggling with tradesmen and suppliers. Together, they redecorated the shop with dark paneling and gilt embellishments, added a fireplace and comfortable chairs, and offered whiskey and sherry. They set aside a small room where servants and drivers could sit over a cup of tea, instead of waiting outside in the weather. The patrons appreciated the cozy atmosphere, and their attendants, grateful for the rare courtesy the shop offered, took to flattering their employers in their new clothes. Within two years of inheriting the shop, the two had doubled its business. Even after their children came, Anne continued working with her husband, hiring a nurse to care for the little ones upstairs in the rooms they lived in over the shop.

It had been a wonderful eight years, Annie reflected, as she unloaded the cart. At least it had been until the missionaries came into the shop and took advantage of them. One of the men had ripped his coat and stopped to ask for a bit of thread and the loan of a needle. They were so young, so earnest, and the place was deserted that afternoon. So Anne asked John if he would mend the coat himself while she fixed them a tea. And John, good-hearted as he was, agreed. Oh, if only she had given them needle and thread and sent them on their way! Better that a till frisker had entered the shop and taken their money! Anne wondered later if the Mormon had marked John as a potential convert and torn his coat on purpose, because as John stitched, the men devoured her scones and talked about their religion. When they left, they invited John to attend a service.

“Not likely,” Anne retorted as she collected the plates, on which not so much as a crumb was left.

“Oh, I don’t know. I admit to being intrigued with what they said, and they are such likable fellows. What harm is there in going? If you’re right, we can laugh about it later. Won’t you come?”

“I am as I was made. You know right well I do not go in foolishness,” she replied.

So John had attended the meeting without her, for Anne would have none of it. He had gone back a second time and a third, and Anne discovered the Book of Mormon in a drawer in which John kept trimmings. “Surely you’ll not waste your time reading it when there is work to be done,” she said.

“I wish you would come with me and listen to them,” John replied. “I would value your opinion. Their religion throws off the ecclesiastical trappings of the church and lets the Mormons deal directly with God.”

So because she wanted to quash her husband’s interest in the new religion (and because she was easily flattered when her husband mentioned her intelligence, which she knew was her greatest asset), she went with him to the service.

“What did you think?” he asked as they walked home.

“The people are nice enough,” she replied after a time, and held her tongue so that she did not add, “the deceivers.”

“They are. I thought you might like it that the women participate more than they do in the old church,” he said. “But what about the religion?”

“There is naught to it.”

“You didn’t feel the spirit?”

“‘The spirit’? Surely you aren’t serious. If there is a spirit in those people, it is one of fraud.”

“How can you say that?” John stopped under a gaslight and looked Anne in the face.

She could see his disappointment, but she would not be stopped. “You can’t believe their story about God giving a poor American farmer seer stones to read golden plates! It’s a fairy tale. I’ve never heard anything so preposterous.”

“Is it any more preposterous than God giving Moses stone tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them?”

“That’s different.”

“How so?”

“Moses is in the Bible. Mormonism is foolishness, and I want no part of it.” And she refused to have anything more to do with the sect.

But not so John. Despite Anne’s disdain, John continued to attend the services, and one evening he returned elated, saying that he had been baptized in the church. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has complete possession of me,” he announced.

“They have snared your soul? You are a
Mormon
?” Anne cried. “Against my will?”

“It is God’s will.”

“It is demagoguery.” They argued over his decision, John begging Anne to join and save her soul, and Anne ordering John to quit the church for fear of losing his. But after a time, they wore themselves out with the fighting, and they agreed to say no more about Mormonism. John would continue to attend services but would no longer expect Anne to go with him.

That had been an uneasy truce, but one that Anne could live with. Sooner or later, John would see on his own that the religion was rubbish and give it up. But that had not happened. In fact, John began to neglect his duties in the shop to meet with the Saints and even drove away patrons with his proselytizing. She warned him to keep his religion to himself or lose the business. And then one night after supper, after the children were in bed, John sat down with her and took her hands. “I have made an important decision that affects us all,” he told her.

She could not imagine what he was talking about. They had turned the business into a great success, despite John’s recent lack of interest, and the two of them had talked about enlarging the shop, acquiring a new location or perhaps expanding it into their living quarters and moving the family to a new home. Anne wondered if John had found a house for them, hoping that was the case, for she was house-proud and did not want to live forever over the shop. She smiled and waited, thinking that not every husband was as solicitous of his wife and family. This was like the earlier days of their marriage, when John had burst with ideas for their future, telling them to her as they sat in front of the little grate in their parlor. “Well?” she asked when he didn’t continue.

“We are going to America,” John blurted out. “We are going to the Salt Lake Valley. Brigham Young has called the Mormons to gather in Zion.” He trembled with excitement.

“We are
what
?” Anne asked, barely able to comprehend what her husband had said.

“The Lord has called us.”

“Not my Lord. He hasn’t called me.” She could not stop herself from asking, “Are you mad, John?”

He was taken aback. “You’ll like it. Wait and see. It will be a good life, where we won’t be attacked for our beliefs.”

“
You
won’t be attacked. I believe no such thing.”

“You’ll come around after you get to know them. They are holy people.”

“I
won’t
get to know them. I have no use for Mormons. They’re troublemakers. See how they’ve come between us. This is foolish talk. I’ll have none of it.”

“It’s too late. I’ve agreed to go.”

“Tell them you’ve changed your mind.”

“No.”

Anne was stunned and stood up and paced, going to and again over the carpet. That carpet, a good ingrain one, had been installed not long before the missionaries entered the shop, and Anne had thought then that she could want for nothing more. She had a beautiful home filled with treasures, a good husband and children, and they would be adding to the family in the fall. Anne put her hand on her stomach, where the tiny bit of life was growing. “When?” she asked.

“This year. We embark before the end of May.”