Saints by Orson Scott Card
"And I don't think the celestial wife of Joseph Smith can go to Matthew Handy, and rear his children, and be a quiet wife in a Manchester home."
"No, Mother." Dinah took the box, closed it, dropped it back into Anna's bag. Anna felt her daughter's arm around her trembling as they walked out of the factory together.
Dinah stopped at the gate in the picket fence in front of where the house had used to be. Anna also looked back at the foundation stones, still crisply arranged in their neat rows, marking off too small an area to have ever been that lovely, lovely place.
"No regrets?" Dinah asked.
For a fleeting moment Anna heard her voice as if she were a little girl. It shouldn't have stirred such memory. Dinah had never asked Anna for advice when she was young; why should it seem familiar now? Yet it was her little girl beside her, and Anna was her wise mother, if only for a moment. She must answer her daughter truthfully. "I treasure my regrets," Anna said. "I worked so hard to earn them. They're all that makes my memories worth keeping."
They looked at the bare ground, the empty factory, the neat piles of scrap wood for only a few moments more. Then they went to Charlie's shay, got in, and Dinah drove south, into the emptying town.
Dinah drove briskly along, despite the ruts in the ice-crusted snow that made the shay bounce murderously. After the day Dan drove her to Warsaw, Dinah had made sure she learned how to handle the vehicle herself. There was no business in the cold winter streets, though it was a business day. All the traffic was riverward, or up and down the hill to the Temple. It was dedicated now. They had decided to call it finished even though a good deal of furnishing and fitting was not done; God would accept as much as the mobs had let them do. Now they were doing the ordinances day and night. Dinah had helped with the endowments at first. She had even thought to stay in the city until the last of the Saints left, months from now, to help with the sacred work. But yesterday Brigham Young had accosted her after a temple session and berated her for thinking she could get out of her responsibilities.
"People are cold and hungry and sick in the camps on the other side," Brigham said. "What are you doing here where it's cozy, when you're the only woman I know who can keep their hope alive?"
In Brigham's backhanded way it was praise; it was a calling; she came back to Anna last night and announced that they were going to join Charlie at the Sugar Creek camp the next day. Mother made no argument. These days she never did. Until half an hour before, Dinah had thought her weak because of it. Now, having read what she had read, having seen the choice that Mother made, Dinah knew better. Anna had not chosen the problems in her life, but she had chosen what she would do with them, and she was not about to reverse her course now. Neither will I, thought Dinah. In the harbor at Liverpool I made my choice; I can't unmake it now.
"Why are we going south?" Mother asked.
Dinah realized for the first time that she was driving the wrong direction. The river crossing was west of their home. She shouldn't have driven south at all. Now she was near Water Street, miles out of their way.
"I think I wanted to drive by the Temple again," Dinah said. But that answer would not do. They were already well past the Temple. Then she knew. Three blocks to the west was Emma's home. She was going to see Emma.
She turned the horse, and the shay moved briskly along. Once in winter the road near Emma's house would have been a sea of mud or a treacherous slick of ice from all the traffic coming and going. Now there had been only a half-dozen visitors since the last snowfall day before yesterday. The Church was going on, and Emma was staying behind. Why have I come here? Dinah asked herself. She stopped the shay, handed the reins to her mother, and got down.
"I don't know how to handle this," Anna said.
"If the horse starts going, pull sharply and say whoa." Dinah walked toward the porch. She tried to step where other visitors had stepped, but her stride was not long enough, and she kept breaking through the crust until her boots were icy cold halfway up her calf. At last she got to the porch, still wondering why she had come.
What do I have to say to Emma? They had hardly spoken since that one quarrel in Emma's house. They had worked together in the Relief Society almost as soon as Dinah had recovered from her fall; Emma had invited Dinah to serve as secretary of the organization, and they had been courteous to each other, for Joseph's sake. For the sake of the sisters of the Church. But since the Prophet's death they had hardly seen each other. There was no conflict. They simply had no reason to be together. There was no work that brought Dinah to Emma's door; Emma had no need that would make her call for Dinah to come. Until this moment Dinah had never wasted much thought on the matter -- she was too busy preparing for the exodus. Now she realized it with a sense of loss. If things had worked out better, she and Emma would have been sisters forever. Now Dinah stood on Emma's porch and was afraid to knock. They had become such strangers that Dinah did not know what to expect from her, or even what to expect from herself.
Ashamed of her own uncertainty, Dinah turned to go. She heard the door open behind her. "Dinah," Emma said.
Dinah turned, slipping a little on the ice and catching herself. "Emma," she said.
"I saw you from the window. You didn't knock."
"I thought -- "
"Will you come in?"
"My mother's waiting in the shay."
"Just for a few minutes."
So Dinah waved to her mother and went inside. Emma's house surprised her. It looked oddly clean, uncluttered, prim. Suddenly Dinah realized that this is how Emma always wanted her home to be, except that Joseph's work made it impossible. Everything was in its place. Everything was under her control. It was small, but it was, triumphantly, her own.
"I see you like my home," Emma said.
"It will be a while before I have a home again."
"Brigham wants me out of this one, too. It seems it belonged to the Church, not Joseph."
Dinah winced with embarrassment. Brigham undid much of his own good work with his insensitivity to what was proper and decent. "I'm sorry," she said.
"Oh, I've given up being sorry about things," Emma said. "I refuse to poison my life with hatred."
Dinah could hear the pain of regret, the poison of hatred behind the words. It was not hypocrisy, though. Emma was merely stating her intention as if she had already accomplished it, that's all. And Dinah had no doubt that Emma would someday succeed in forgiving Brigham Young for having supplanted her son in the leadership of the Church; that she would someday forgive herself for having wasted her last years with Joseph in a futile struggle over polygamy. But Dinah suspected that Emma would never forgive Brigham for trying to evict her from her house; nor would Emma forgive herself for having written to Joseph, bringing him back across the river to his death.
"It's the small things that are unbearable, I think," Dinah said. "The large ones are too hard to hold."
"Yes," Emma said. "Can I give you something to drink?"
"No, thank you. Emma, I don't know why I came. I was heading for the river. This is far from the quickest way there."
"You're leaving today? I thought you were in charge of washings and anointings at the Temple."
"Brigham -- Brigham wants me to go."
That was all the difference between them now. What Brigham wanted, Dinah would do.
"Dinah," Emma said, "do you ever miss him?"
It was a brave thing for Emma to ask. It deserved a truthful answer. "I miss him less now than when he was still here. I used to wait in my cabin, wondering if he would come and see me. I used to save up things to say to him." Now, Dinah thought, now I say everything to him as I think of it. I catch myself talking to him all the time, under my breath, my lips moving. People think I'm losing my mind, talking to myself. I'm just telling Joseph everything. I even joke with him. He laughs, I know he's listening to me; I'm sure of it except when I think about it. That's the way I get by without going mad with missing him. I go a little bit crazy, that's all.
Emma smiled wanly. "It wasn't so much different for us, then. Even when he was here, he wasn't here. I had to take what was left over between meetings. Sometimes I was even jealous of my children. They had more time with him than I had." Emma laughed bitterly. "I might have done things differently, if I had known how little time there was. It might have gone so differently."
"No," Dinah said. "Not if you were still you, and Joseph still Joseph."
Emma looked off toward a side window. Dinah thought she saw a glint of light from her eyes. "I think that was the problem. Joseph needed a better wife than me.
Dinah knew now why she had come. She got up from her chair, walked behind Emma, put her hands on the woman's shoulders, gently touched her, comfortingly. "Emma, in all his life, the one thing Joseph did that he knew he had done exactly right was marrying you."
Emma made a small sound in her throat.
"Joseph loved you more than anyone but the Lord. You bore him all the children that he knew. No one ever moved you from your place in his heart."
Emma was weeping. Dinah tasted the words she had said in her own mouth. What was so sweet to Emma was pure bitterness to her; if the words had not come to her lips from the Lord, Dinah would never have said them, for she didn't want them to be true. Yet they were true, and Dinah did not shrink from it. The Lord had brought her to Emma's house to say it. Now it was said, and Dinah could go.
She stopped at the door, for Emma was speaking to her. "I don't believe," she said with a tremulous voice, "I don't believe that Joseph ever had another wife." The words cut deeply into Dinah; it was the last thing she would have thought that Emma might say, especially after the comfort Dinah had given her. "I was his only wife!" Emma insisted. "He was a true prophet and I was his only wife!"
Dinah walked out and closed the door behind her. She was shaking with rage; it was hard for her to walk. How could Emma dare to say that to her? But by the time she reached the shay, she knew: Emma would not have dared to say anything else. A lie she could live with. What she could not live with was a memory of Dinah as her husband's wife and, at the same time, as her true friend. Emma had chosen to remember Dinah as her friend. So be it, Dinah thought. We all have to find our own way through the world.
She drove north to the road across the ice into Iowa. The ice was groaning, and the men there almost didn't let her across. They only let her go because the shay was so light. Dinah and Anna reached the other side safely, and rode directly to the camp at Sugar Creek. It was the place where Saints who were ill-supplied and unprepared waited until they could move on. The only virtue of Sugar Creek was that it was out of the reach of the mob. It was still well within the reach of fear, of misery, of hunger, sickness, and death. Dinah could see at once why Brigham had wanted her there. And as if to prove to any doubters that the move was irrevocable, that afternoon the ice broke up and the river was uncrossable by any means for many days.
There were twenty burials that week in Sugar Cieek -- twenty that Dinah knew about. The ground was too cold for proper graves; the Saints cut the earth as deep as they could, then covered the bodies with stones to keep out the animals. The hardest thing was burying the babies. Those were the ones that Dinah allowed herself to weep for. The others had all freely chosen their lives. Their deaths were offered up as sacrifices to God. But the babies chose nothing, and now would never choose, and Dinah wept for them.
But it did not break her heart. Nothing broke Dinah's heart. She went through the camp at Sugar Creek, smiling, saying prayers, giving blessings, midwifing births, and especially taking note of who was starving but too proud to ask for help. Brigham had asked her to report such cases directly to him. "I want to make sure that people like that survive," he said. "Otherwise we'll end up with a Church full of complainers and a cemetery full of Saints, and frankly I'd rather see it just the opposite."
After the morning's visits through the camp, Dinah knew of two families that had eaten nothing since two days before. The supply wagon Charlie had left behind for her was nearly empty now; she had to go to Brigham for immediate help, instead of staving off the most urgent need herself.
Anna was in the tent, coughing violently.
"I have to go see Brother Brigham," Dinah said.
Her mother only coughed. She had had a chronic cough since Dinah could remember -- people who lived long in Manchester usually did. But the cough was getting worse. The hard winter in a makeshift camp, on low ground where there was almost always morning fog -- it made everyone who was sick at all get sicker. Dinah worried about Mother sometimes, when she had time to worry. "Are you all right?" Dinah asked.
"Just the cough I got in Manchester. Coal smoke." Anna coughed again.
"If anyone comes, tell them I'll be back before dark, unless they've moved unusually far today."
Anna nodded, and Dinah left.
The shay made good time over the wintry road. In a way it was frustrating that the advance company of the Saints had made so little progress in the last three days that Dinah, in Charlie's one-horse vehicle, could overtake them in only a few hours of urgent driving. But the horses pulled the wagons very slowly, and tired quickly. They were discovering that although oxen pulled slower than horses, they held up better and by day's end were invariably stronger than any horse. Bit by bit the Saints were learning what nomad nations had learned long ago: endurance is speed.
Brigham sent his wagons ahead and sat on horseback to converse with her. She was surprised -- it should have taken only a moment to write the names and get her estimate of what was needed. And in fact they finished with that in the first few minutes. That was not what Brigham meant to talk to her about.
"Several of the Brethren and I have been concerned," he said, "about Joseph's and Hyrum's widows. The plural ones, that no one knows about except us who live the Principle. No one thinks of them as widows, don't you see. There was some opinion that as celestial wives for eternity, they couldn't remarry, seeing as how if they had two husbands it would make a hell of a mess to sort out in heaven -- which wife belongs to which man, that kind of thing. But it occurred to us that if we have the authority to seal a man and woman together in eternity, we certainly have the authority to seal them together in plural marriages for this life only, till death do them part. Even though none of us are exactly prosperous at the moment, we've decided that to give these women proper protection, and to raise up a progeny for Joseph and Hyrum, we're willing to marry their widows during this mortal life. The reason I'm telling you is to see what you think."
"Are you asking my opinion on a matter of doctrine, Brother Brigham?"
"I never have before, and I don't aim to start now. What I'm asking is, do you think these women will accept?"
"Is this the will of the Lord, Brother Brigham?"
"I'm not the prophet that Joseph was, Sister Dinah, but I know good sense when I hear it, and good sense is always the will of the Lord."
"Try to sound a little more definite, and I think that after due consideration almost all of the widows will accept."
"What about you?" Brigham asked.
"I'll encourage them to accept. I think it's sensible myself."
"That isn't what I was asking."
I know what you were asking, Brigham, and I'm saying no. "Brother Brigham, you called me away from the Temple to serve the Saints at Sugar Creek, not to be taken care of by a husband. Am I doing what the Lord wants me to do?"
"Yes."
"Then don't trouble me with distractions. Send me what supplies you can. Loaves and fishes especially, if you can spare any." She clucked, and the horse started forward. She caught only a glimpse of Brigham's face. He was angry. Well, let him be angry. Let him stew over it for a week. I buried a husband a year and a half ago, and fourteen babies just this week, and I'm trying to feed five hundred people with provisions enough for two hundred, while they're dying of as many diseases as they can think of. It's a poor time to propose marriage. Brigham never has had much of a sense of prope
Still, she might have been more polite about the way that she turned him down. It was a proposal of marriage from a proud man, after all. She was in a bad mood. She planned how to apologize to him. And then just after dark, when she got back to her tent, she forgot all about Brigham Young. For there were two sisters in the tent, preparing her mother's body for burial. Even though Dinah had long since stopped depending on her mother, still it had never occurred to her that her mother could ever break, that anything would be too much for her. Anna Kirkham had lived through terrible suffering and came out stronger than ever, always stronger than ever. Who would have thought hunger and cold weather in Sugar Creek would take her?
Yet Dinah did not cry. Now of all times she had to serve the people who watched her, looked to her for strength. She led the singing of the hymn at the brief services for those who had died that day, and her voice did not break. She made her full round of visits through the camp, and was still awake when the supply wagon came, so she could see to it the food was distributed according to real need, and not just to those who asked the loudest. It was well after midnight in the bitter cold, with the camp still and no one but a few sentinels about, when Dinah sat alone beside the fire and gave a few tears to her mother, and remembered her as she was the day they put their belongings in the cart and moved to the vile cottage by the River Irk. The way she argued with the carter, the way she cleaned up the filth downstairs and insisted on living as civilized people despite their poverty. She remembered her mother standing on the stairs with a drunken man trying to come up. Dinah and Robert had crept out, terrified, but they knew from their mother what they ought to do. Never surrender. Kill or die if you had to, but never, never give up. She remembered the man crying out as he fell backward down the stairs, his whimpers as he ran away. So much for you, death. So much for you, despair. And Dinah smiled, and her grief was purged enough to bear.