Saints by Orson Scott Card
"Dinah, listen. I've been worrying about you. I kept trying to understand why God was keeping you alive so long after your life's work was over. I was praying about it. And that's when I thought of this. It's not just for Gwen. You've been Aunt Dinah to three generations of the Church. Now here it is: the Lord wants you to have a child. You will be giving a gift to Gwen and to the child and to me. Will you be like Sarah, and laugh at the Lord behind the door?"
Dinah thought of a scrap of paper that she kept in a small wooden box on her bureau at home. She hadn't read the words for years. She only looked at the childish scrawl now and then with a vague yearning that she refused to name. She named it now: Gone. Lost opportunity. The part of life that she had given up for the gospel's sake. God had given her three years of marriage to Joseph Smith, thirty years of service to the Church, and twenty years of wasted time since then. She had kept busy enough, writing reminiscences of Joseph and Brigham and Heber, writing poetry, and talking to the endless stream of pilgrims who found her door and said, You came to my mother; you blessed my brother; you spoke once and changed my life; I wouldn't be so happy today if it hadn't been for you. It was pleasant, but it was wasted time. And under it all had been this small feeling: Gone. The little boy calling out to her on the boat. The little girl crying for her mother. And now a mother wants to give her child to me.
"Do you really think the Lord wants me to do it?"
"You're the Prophetess," Charlie said. "I can't speak for the Lord. But I tell you that I want you to do it. I'll go a lot easier knowing Gwen is free and my child has a good mother."
"For a man who's dying you talk a lot." What would Joseph tell me to do?
"Say yes and leave me alone to be with my wives."
Joseph would say, When the Lord opens a door, a wise man walks through it. "Yes," Dinah said. Then she bent to Charlie and kissed him. "You're a good brother, Charlie. I'll miss you."
"I'll say hello to all your friends for you," he said.
She left him with his family then, and went looking for Gwen. She was not far off; she was only waiting for Dinah to leave before she went back in to be with her husband. Dinah was not halfway down the hall before she emerged from an open door.
"Aunt Dinah?" she said.
Dinah looked at her. She was well along into the pregnancy, plumping at the waist and bosom, but still thin at the face, still frail and hopeful-looking. "Why did you marry him?" Dinah asked, because old people can ask anything they like.
"Because I loved him. I never knew my father. Charlie was the closest thing I had to a father. I grew up next door."
"Yes, I knew that." Charlie had told her once -- it was Charlie, wasn't it? -- that Gwen had proposed to him. Marry me, before the church gives up the Principle. "I told him that I'd take your child, if you wanted to give it to me."
Gwen started to cry, suddenly, without restraint. In surprise Dinah held her, let her sob into her shoulder. Was she crying because she would have to give up her baby? Or in gladness that Dinah would take it?
"Thank you," Gwen said.
Gladness, then. I only wonder -- will I be glad? And the child -- will the child be glad of this?
Charlie died that night, reciting poetry up to the last moment. His last words were a poem by Herrick. Sally declared that he did it because he knew she never liked that poem.
Four months later, Gwen gave birth to a daughter and named the child LaDell. Dinah reared her from infancy. She was a bright and beautiful child, but to Dinah's surprise she learned things that Dinah never meant to teach. She learned to be stubborn; she learned to think of herself as the equal of any person or any problem. When LaDell became a woman, she went to college in New York and became a skeptic and had a love affair that went sour. Every day Dinah prayed for her and worried about her and wrote letters to her -- and one day Dinah realized: For years I did all this for other people's children. This child grieves me, but she is my own, and that makes even the grief into a kind of gladness.
Last Word
Robert Kirkham was one of the richest men in England by the age of forty. He served in Parliament for many years, and it was thought by some that if he had not died before Gladstone he might have been Prime Minister.
John Kirkham did quite well as a painter in Chicago, and eventually had exhibitions in Boston and New York. He was planning a London exhibition when he died in Philadelphia at the age of seventy. His reputation did not long survive him.
Emma Smith eventually married a man named Lewis C. Bidamon, and was very happy. Her son, Joseph III, became president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and Emma claimed until she died that her husband never taught or practiced polygamy.
Heber Kimball, always Brigham's closest friend, served as President Young's First Counselor from 1847 until he died in 1868 at the age of sixty-seven, a year after the death of his first wife, Vilate.
Sally Clinton Kirkham survived her husband by only two years.
According to the Charles Banks Kirkham Family Organization, there are now more than seven thousand living descendants of Charles Kirkham, more than four thousand of whom still bear the Kirkham name.
Matthew Handy was still an executive in Robert Kirkham's railroad organization when he died of pneumonia in 1881.
Valiant Handy became a newspaper publisher in Manchester. He died in a railway accident at the age of fifty.
Honor Handy married a barrister named Hartman and lived in London until her death in 1926. She learned in 1919 that her mother was still alive, but too late to communicate with Dinah before she died.
LaDell Kirkham Richards now lives in Salt Lake City, where she is retired from medical practice. Her husband is professor emeritus at the University of Utah. She is still active in local politics, and has written a children's book.
Dinah Kirkham visited LaDell in New York City in 1919; during their time together they were reconciled, and Dinah was writing an affectionate letter to her surrogate daughter when she died on the train home, about two hours outside of Ogden, Utah. At first the Mormon Church tried to keep notices of her death small -- her first obituary in the Deseret News ran only eight lines. Presumably the authorities were not anxious in 1919 to remind everyone of Dinah Kirkham, who had been such a prominent figure during the polygamy era. But the non-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune ran a full-page article on her, and after that the Deseret News ran four pages of reminiscences of "Aunt Dinah." Though her last official service was forty-three years before, she had not been forgotten. Her funeral was attended by an estimated thirty thousand mourners. According to some observers, most of those who came were far too young ever to have known her. She was one hundred years old when she died.
Acknowledgments
This book would have been impossible without the help of Jared B. Ames, who tracked down the endless details of nineteenth-century life; Steve Knight, who provided insights about the practice of plural marriage; the helpful employees at the LDS Church Archives; the Charles Banks Kirkham Family Organization; an agent and an editor who share the annoying belief that perfection can be improved on; and my wife, who read everything as it came from the typewriter, made me rewrite most of it twice, and in the meantime kept the children alive and taught them that once they had a father, and someday would have a father again. And special thanks to LaDell Richards, who was my only living bridge to the past. Without her hours spent answering questions and telling memories, I could not have come so close to knowing Dinah Kirkham.
HARD TIMES MAKE HARD PEOPLE When ten-year-old Dinah Kirkham saw her father leav- ing in the middle of the night, she asked when he would be back. "Soon," he said. On that night in 1829, John Kirkham built the foundation of his daughter's certainty that the only person she could ever really trust was herself. From that day forward, Dinah worked to support her family, remaining fiercely devoted to their welfare even in the face of despair. --- SAINTS --- An epic of independence and devotion, of hardship and fulfillment ... of a woman so strong that kn
Orson Scott Card, Saints
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