True Sisters (4 page)

“May! That’s only a month hence!” Anne put her hands over her face and thought, and after a moment, she realized there was a way out. “Surely we can’t leave when I am in this condition, John. You know how hard it goes for me. We must wait until next year.”

“Other women in your state have made the journey. America is a healthy place. And we will be in the Salt Lake Valley before your time. Think of it, Anne. This child will be born in Zion.”

“You would force me to go when I am like this?” She was incredulous that her husband would not take her fears into consideration, would make such a decision without consulting her, without accounting for her feelings. It galled her, too, that he believed she would embrace the religion once they got to America.

John looked down and studied the coals that glowed in the little grate. “No, Anne. I would not force you to go. You can stay here if you like. But I will go.”

“You would desert me?”

“I’d go on ahead to prepare our home. You could come later.”

“By myself? But why must you leave so soon? Stay here one year, and if you are still of a mind to go, I’ll give in to you.” A year, she thought, would be time enough for her to convince him that the new religion was a humbug.

“I cannot stay.” He took a breath, and without looking at his wife, he added, “I have sold the shop.”

Anne’s face went white, and she sank onto a stool, because her legs were too weak for her to stand. “No, you would not have done that. You are just threatening me.”

“I’ve signed the papers.”

“But you can’t have done so. The shop is half mine.”

“It was mine alone. Your father left it to me.”

“Left it to you so that you could take care of me. You said it yourself, that we owned it equally.”

“It was in my name,” he said stubbornly.

The truth of that stung Anne, and she doubled over, putting her face in her hands, but she did not weep. She never wept. Instead, she rocked back and forth, until John knelt on the floor beside her. “Give it a try, Annie. If you don’t like it after a year, I’ll bring you back here. It won’t be so bad, I promise. There is enough money to buy a good wagon and teams of oxen. You’ll be able to take your things—your silver and china, your dresses, the dresser that was your mother’s, the Persian carpets. We’ll be as comfortable as if we were riding in a railway car, and they say the Salt Lake Valley is as beautiful as the Alps. The children will grow up in sunlight and fresh air instead of in a city filled with smoke and rubbish.”

She looked up at John but didn’t speak, and he continued: “The people are the best I’ve ever known. In time, you’ll see for yourself. You don’t have to join the church. I won’t insist on it. There may be others going who aren’t Mormons.”

For days, they talked of nothing else, sometimes pleading with each other, sometimes threatening. They argued over whether the children would go, how much money John would give Anne if she stayed in London. Anne asked how he would drive a team of oxen when he had never even saddled a horse, how he would earn his living once they reached the valley, for surely there was little need for tailors there. John countered each objection by replying that God would help him.

At last, Anne grew too weary to argue. With the shop gone, there was no way she could support herself and the children. And with a baby on the way, she would not be able to find employment, even if she had the skills to work, which she did not. Few tailoring shops needed a woman to manage them. So she gave in. “Not willingly, John, not willingly,” she told him.

He had been grateful, solicitous, had told her he would do everything to ensure her comfort. She could pack her feather bed, her pillows, her blankets and shawls, the carpets, the trunks. He would buy her a sewing machine to take with them, for surely America did not have them, and he would fit up a bed for her in the wagon so that she could ride whenever she was tired. But nothing could assuage her dread.

*   *   *

They embarked on May 25 from Liverpool, sailing on the packet ship
Horizon
with a horde of poor converts from the factories and mines, their belongings tied up in bundles. The passengers crowded onto the ship, waving their ragged handkerchiefs at friends onshore who had come to see them off. During the voyage, Anne kept her three children close to her, but at times, Emma Lee, who was six, and sometimes Joe slipped off to play. When Anne complained to John that the children were liable to catch some disease, he soothed her. “It’s no more dangerous for them than if they were at home. Besides, they have the sea air to breathe.” But Anne was not convinced.

The ship was crowded. The five of them slept in a bunk no larger than a small bed at home. To her surprise, Anne found the expedition was well organized. The elders scheduled times for the women to prepare meals of salt pork and boiled beef, hard sea biscuit, oatmeal, peas, beans, rice, and tea, so there was no jostling or arguing over space in the tiny galley. In fact, there was little arguing at all, and that surprised Anne even more. The people were sharing, joyful. They felt blessed that the Lord was sending them to America, away from the filth and decay, the disease and starvation of their homelands, and they did not complain about the cramped accommodations, the rolling ship that kept many in their beds with seasickness. Each morning and evening, they gathered to praise the Lord and sing. The ship’s captain told them he had never sailed with a finer group, that he would always be happy to transport Mormons. Anne had to admit that the Saints were good people, and kind—the women, especially.

“I had my doubts, too,” Catherine Dunford, a convert from Glasgow, said after discovering that Anne had not accepted the doctrine. Catherine had befriended Anne, offering to loan her a tiny volume of poems she’d brought along, a book that Anne later saw lying in a pile of discarded items in Iowa City. “I thought it was nonsense, all that talk about Jesus preaching to the Indians. But the spirit came over me and told me it was the true religion, the one Jesus Himself started. I pray the spirit will move ye, too.”

Anne murmured something unintelligible, hoping the woman would stop, because she did not care to be preached at, but Catherine would not be stilled. “Myself, I thought it was all the strangest thing ever I heard. I don’t question that ye doubt. For the longest time, I wanted to embrace the faith, for my husband had, and he’s a brilliant man. I thought maybe there was something wrong with me. It was only after I stopped trying to believe that the Lord called to me. He did indeed reach out for me. The faith isnae something you accept with your head, but with your heart.”

“It is idiotic. I despise it,” Anne blurted out.

The words did not shock the woman. “I am not surprised at your remarks, Sister Sully. You and your little ones have been taken from your home and are going to a country filled with savages. Since ye are not a believer, ye must hate your husband for it. I advise ye to rest your mind for a while. Do not grieve over your loss, but look on it as an adventure. And do not worry over your lack of faith. If God intends to make ye a Mormon, He will find a way. I won’t speak of it further.”

“You will be the only one.”

Catherine laughed. “Yes, we do preach, don’t we? It is because we find such happiness in our religion that we want to share it with others.”

“But I don’t understand why you can’t be happy with it in Scotland.”

“Because the millennium is near upon us. It is in us to want to be collected to Zion. Every loyal Saint wants to go to the Salt Lake Valley.”

Later, when John pressed her, as he had repeatedly since they boarded the ship, to consider joining the church, Anne repeated the woman’s words: “If God wants me to become a Mormon, He, not you, will tell me.”

The voyage was not a difficult one, with only a little rough weather, and Anne was entranced with the endless sea rolling around her, with the solitude of it, even though she was surrounded by noisy converts. When her children played or napped, she stood at the railing of the ship, watching the waves break around her, marveling at their power to move the ship. She liked staying on deck even when it rained, feeling the drops of water roll over her. Once during a storm, after she had taken cover and was watching the foam that was tossed about in the waves, she saw the sailors raise a sail and listened as one yelled, “Hoist higher.”

“Higher,” the men called to one another across the noise of the wind, “higher.”

An old woman who was nearly deaf heard the shout and cried out, “Fire! Fire!”

A fire was what passengers feared most on a ship, and the Mormons ran out onto the deck, crying out to one another, looking for water buckets, only to learn there was no fire at all, only an order to hoist higher. Despite the panic, Anne found the situation comical, and she could not help thinking what fools the Mormons were.

One night midway through the voyage, she was awakened by Emma Lee, who slept beside her on the cramped bunk, as the girl tossed about and whimpered in her sleep. Anne reached over to still the child and discovered Emma Lee’s forehead was as hot as a stovetop. She picked up the sleeping child and carried her out onto the deck, thinking the sea air would cool her. But the child began to cough and cry a little. “Wake up, Emma Lee,” Anne said to the six-year-old, thinking the girl might have had a bad dream. But the child would not wake.

Anne found water and, using the hem of her nightdress, rubbed it on the child’s forehead, but that did nothing to cool her. “Precious girl, wake for Mama,” Anne whispered. She shook the child a little, but Emma Lee did not respond. Frightened now, Anne asked a man who was standing on the deck, looking out at the ocean, to stay with her daughter while she fetched her husband, then slipped back into the bowels of the ship to find John. He followed her to the deck and picked up the stricken girl, calling, “Emma Lee! Emma Lee!”

The man on deck disappeared and returned a few moments later with two elders. One of them, a physician, reached out and took the child, looked into her eyes and mouth, examined her chest. “We must bring down the fever. My wife will help.” He nodded at a woman who had joined them. Without being told what to do, the woman fetched a pail of water and some cloths and began to sponge Emma Lee.

“I’ll do it,” Anne said.

“Then I’ll pray,” the woman told her, kneeling on the deck. The men, along with John, got down on their knees beside the woman, and although she felt the prayers of Mormons carried no special weight with God, Anne nonetheless was touched by the earnestness of these strangers. In a few minutes, a dozen of the Saints, some in their nightclothes, were kneeling beside Emma Lee, asking the Lord to spare her.

One told Anne that she had saved an apple, which was stored in her trunk. “It might cool her throat. Would she eat it?” Anne shook her head, replying that the child was not conscious. Another brought a bottle of cologne and poured it onto the girl’s wrists, hoping to soothe her. Someone pushed Anne aside and told her to rest while she sponged the child.

Catherine came on deck and gave Anne a cup of water, and when Anne said she must check on Joe and Lucy, her friend told her that someone was already caring for the two children. “Has she been anointed?” Catherine asked. Anne looked dumbly at the woman, not understanding. “Anointed with oil. ’Tis our way. The elders must administer the ordinances.”

Anne looked up at John, who nodded solemnly. “We must do it.”

“Does that mean she’s going to die?”

“Her life is in the Lord’s hands.”

Anne had never participated in such a ceremony before, and she watched dumbly as an elder took out a vial of oil, dipped his fingers into it, then touched them to Emma Lee’s forehead. On board the ship, Anne had heard elders prophesy, knew they told those who were sick that they would not die but would live to reach the valley, and she prayed that someone would tell her that Emma Lee would be all right, but no one spoke. When the elders were finished, Anne sat down on the deck beside her daughter, taking Emma Lee’s hand, and promised the Lord that if He let the child live, Anne would join the Mormon Church. If God would perform such a miracle, then surely that was the sign she needed to embrace the faith.

But there was no miracle. Emma Lee did not regain consciousness. She lay on a pallet on the deck all day while Anne and John fanned her and others took turns washing the girl with cool water. At dusk, Emma Lee died. She did not take a deep breath and expire. There was no rattling in her throat. She simply breathed her last and was still. At first, Anne was not aware that the girl was gone. The breathing had been so weak that she did not realize Emma Lee no longer took a breath. She did not know until John said softly, “It is over,” and tried to raise Anne to her feet.

But Anne would not get up. Instead, she moaned and fell across the child’s body, calling to Emma Lee to awaken, calling God to bring back her daughter. John tried to raise her, but Anne was deadweight in his arms, so he let her lie beside the girl, standing over her, tears streaming down his face. The other women attempted to comfort her, saying that Emma Lee’s death was God’s will and that the girl had gone to a better place. Anne did not reply, only thought that her daughter’s death was not God’s will at all but John’s and that if they had stayed in London, Emma Lee would indeed be in a better place.

At last, Catherine sat down beside her and took Anne’s hand in her own. “We must prepare the body,” she said. And then as if she understood what Anne was thinking, Catherine added, “Ye must not blame him. He is fast bound in misery like ye. His heart bleeds, too. Let him comfort ye.”

So Anne stood up and let John put his arms around her. She reached up and wiped his tears with her fingers and nodded when he said, “I am sorry.” His grief must be even greater than hers, she realized, because he would blame himself for the decision to go to America. But that thought did not comfort her.

There was a ceremony, with the Saints crowded around them, murmuring words of sorrow, and then the child was wrapped in sacking and placed on a board. The board was propped against the railing, and the little body slid into the dark sea. At first, Anne thought the little girl would float in the water, would bump against the ship and maybe even follow in its wake, but weights had been tied to her feet, and the body slipped under the waves.