Forsaking All Others (37 page)

I don’t know if I should blame the night’s ride or the morning’s nap while wearing a corset, but every muscle, bone, and sinew in my body ached with movement, and once Lottie was out of the room, I indulged myself in all manner of wincing and groaning like I’d suddenly been transformed into a woman twice my age. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat, taking in the familiar surroundings.

My room.
Never shared with my husband. I remembered well how Nathan had expected it to compensate, somehow, for ousting me from our marriage bed upon Amanda’s arrival. It had its own cozy fireplace and expansive window—everything that, under different circumstances, might have felt luxurious. But I’d taken it as a place to hide away during the long winter nights when the girls were asleep and Nathan and his new bride chatted away beside the front room stove. By the time they were ready to take themselves off to bed, I’d be gazing into my embers or huddled down under my quilts.

Now I could see that nothing had changed since my departure, save for the missing lamp that now adorned Evangeline’s parlor. Everything, including an abandoned knitting project, gave the impression that I’d only gone to the market for the afternoon, rather than across the country and back again, having lost a father and gained a son along the way.

Somebody had thought to remove my boots, and my stockinged feet padded across the thick braided rug as I made my way to the mirror hanging above the bureau. I don’t know what I expected to find, having had no opportunity for close personal scrutiny in several days, but I found myself pleasantly surprised. My hair was, understandably, falling out of its pins, resulting in soft waves framing my face.

“You’re here,” I said to the woman in the glass, though I refrained from a gloat of total victory. My cheeks might have been flushed from new sleep, but there was a lingering fatigue in my eyes.

I plunged my hands into the water in the washbasin below the mirror and brought it up to splash my face. A square washcloth was draped over its edge, and I soaked this too, wrung it out, and patted it along the back of my neck, under my collar. I longed for a bath, remembering evenings with the large, galvanized tub right here next to my fireplace, stepping quickly in and out of my sacred garments long after I’d given any credence to their power. Opening the top drawer of my bureau, I found my bone-backed brush, strands of my hair still wound around its bristles. Despite my hunger—which was by now to the point of nausea—I considered taking out my hairpins, giving myself a good brush, and pinning it all up again. Not so much for vanity’s sake, but as a diversion from what awaited on the other side of the door. Sometime within the next few hours I would be telling my daughters that we were leaving this place—their home—forever.

Still bootless, I walked into our front room in time to see the familiar sight of Kimana pulling a tray of piping-hot biscuits from the oven. A pot of sausage gravy bubbled on the stove, and in less than a minute, a mass of both mingled on a plate in front of me. I restrained myself long enough to thank the Lord for my safe journey and ask for a blessing on this meal, digging in even as I opened my eyes at amen. Lottie and Melissa sat across from me, each with their own biscuit and a dish of jam between them. So much time melted away in that moment, as though God had set back the calendar of my days and it was any other Sabbath, with Nathan just out in his workshop or walking a dinner guest halfway home.

“May we join you?”

Amanda emerged from the front bedroom, having taken the time to rebrush and braid her hair since I’d last seen her. On her hip sat little Nate, happily occupied with a wooden block.

“Of course,” I said through a mouthful. How odd it must be for her to feel she needed to be invited into her own home.

“Look, Natey,” she said, “your auntie Camilla has come to visit.”

She used the boy’s body itself to point in my direction, and the child fixed his eyes on me with the curiosity and expectation of one who hadn’t reached his first year.

“Hello, Nate,” I said as she plopped the child on the table in front of me. My eyes welled with tears for my own little boy, but I whisked them away before anyone could question. Not that they would, as it was immediately obvious that Nathan’s son commanded the full attention of everyone in the room. Kimana’s voice jumped to an octave I’d never heard before as she bustled about the room finding the perfect biscuit for his little hand and pouring milk into what must have been his special tin cup. Lottie and Melissa were about the business of tweaking his toes and offering him new blocks to play with while Amanda looked upon all of this with well-coiffed maternal pride.

A new twist of guilt wedged itself in my gut, and I worked my fork around in the newly unappetizing dish.

“Isn’t he the sweetest thing?” Lottie proclaimed, willingly giving up her place as the baby in the family.

“Auntie Evangeline’s baby is ugly,” Melissa said, causing all of us to gasp in protest, through which my older daughter remained unfazed. “Have you seen her?” she pointedly asked me.

“Just a glimpse,” I said, uncomfortable under her suspicion.

“So you went there first before you came here?”

“I came in a stagecoach.” I tried to lay a groundwork of enthusiasm. “It arrived in Salt Lake City, so I stopped by to visit.”

“You saw Papa?” Lottie’s whole face shone with love for the father she adored. “Was he so very happy to see you?”

“I’ll bet Auntie Evangeline wasn’t,” Melissa said with a womanly cynicism I chose to ignore.

“I did see your papa, and we had a long talk.” I set my fork down entirely, regretting every bite I’d taken as each seemed determined to climb up my throat and choke my words. “Your papa is married to your auntie Amanda, and now your auntie Evangeline, too. And . . . well, when I was gone for such a long time, I decided that maybe I shouldn’t be his wife anymore.”

I don’t know what I expected their reaction to be, but certainly I’d expected something other than the vague, puzzled look on Lottie’s face and the outright contempt in Melissa’s.

“You can’t do that,” Melissa said. “When a man marries a woman, she is his forever, here and in heaven.”

Amanda chose that moment to lift her son from the table and cuddle him in her lap. Lottie, too, sensing something was amiss, climbed up into Kimana’s softness, leaving Melissa and me to face each other over food that might just as well have been little piles of dust.

“In a sense,” I said, venturing into an explanation with all the care of walking on a frozen pond, “but marriage is also a promise, and your papa and I have both broken promises to each other.”

“You’re not supposed to break a promise,” Lottie said, breaking my heart with her disappointment. Kimana looked away.

“You’re the only one who broke a promise when you ran away from all of us.” Melissa’s voice held nothing but cool condescension. “What promise did he break?”

Before I could stop myself, I glanced at Amanda, who hid her face in her child’s thick, black hair.

“Oh,” Melissa said. “You don’t want him to be married to Auntie Amanda.”

My mind went back to the cheeky, brazen woman who’d invaded our home—nothing like the woman sharing this table with me. Now, in contrast to the coldness I’d initially greeted her with, I felt a tug of affection. And while, yes, her arrival had delivered a deadly blow to my marriage, it was hardly the first, and I would not lay blame at her feet.

“Not while he was still married to me.”

“So why did you come back?”

That’s when I knew that, while I’d been sleeping in the next room, Melissa had been building up the story behind my return, and I was about to begin tearing it down bit by bit.

“Because even if I’m not Papa’s wife, I’m still your mother. And I miss you girls so very much.”

“Can you live here if you’re not married to Papa?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you going to live in Kimana’s cabin with her?” Lottie asked. “She’s not married to Papa either.”

At any other time, we might have greeted such an innocent question with the same abandoned laughter that Amanda and I had shared in the shadow of the church house, but all of our hearts were too heavy to go far beyond a flickering, indulgent smile.

“We’re going to live back home. My old home, with my mama. Your grandma. You’ve never had a grandma before, and she can’t wait to meet you.”

I watched as understanding dawned upon Melissa. Whatever truth she’d envisioned disappeared, buried by the weight of new revelation. Her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, and her lips twisted into a sneer stolen straight from her father. “
All
of us?”

“Both of you.”

Little Nate squirmed in his mother’s embrace and was set on a rug near the hearth, where a whole box full of blocks awaited him. Both the girls looked at him with such longing, I took a deep breath and announced, “You have another little brother. He’s waiting for us back home.”

Amanda looked shocked, and Kimana, pleased.

Melissa seemed not to have heard me. “This is our home.”

“Your home is with your mother,” Amanda said, reaching for Melissa’s hand in a gesture of distant affection. “You need yours and she needs hers. Mine died when I was little, like you, and I miss her every day.”

“I don’t want to miss you anymore,” Lottie said, and she crawled from Kimana’s lap and ran around the table to me.

“A wife has to obey her husband,” Melissa said. “Papa won’t let you take us away. He’d never see us.”

“He hardly ever sees us now.” Lottie spoke such quiet, unemotional fact, we all sat in silence, giving her words space to settle.

I prayed silently, begging my Lord to give me the words to say. Bad enough that I had naively thought I’d just slip them away, but never had I anticipated this divide between my daughters. Something told me that if I spoke the whole truth about wanting to shield them from the Mormon teachings, Melissa would dig her little heels in all the more. So long ago, in those first moments of waking after the storm, when Colonel Brandon declared we would have a battle on our hands, I had no idea the hardest fight of all would come between me and my eldest child. I had to give her a grudging respect for having such strength of conviction. Even at her young age, she was prepared for theological debate. Her father had taught her well. Too well, and thus I strengthened my stance.

“The law gives me permission,” I said, then, softer, “and your father must obey.”

“Even if he doesn’t want to?” Her eyes begged for reassurance.

“Even if he doesn’t want to.”

To that, Melissa had nothing to say, and for a while the only sound in the room was the happy banging of wood on wood as Nate played with his blocks. I craned to look at him over Lottie’s head. Perhaps he had his father’s carpentry skill in his blood.

“When will you be leaving?” Amanda’s question sounded almost wistful.

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. This final leg of the journey would be in Mr. Bostwick’s hands. I would not budge from this place without his legal approval and paternal blessing.

“Are we going to walk the whole way?” Lottie asked.

This time her innocence did get a chuckle out of me. No doubt she was thinking of those poor emigrants who came pushing handcarts, having walked the entire journey across the plains.

“Goodness, no. We’re going to take a stagecoach.” I jostled her on my knee, bouncing her until she giggled. “There’ll be a grand team of eight horses, all with great chains jangling, and the ground is just a blur before your eyes.”

She twisted in my lap. “Can Kimana come?”

All eyes turned to the silent woman at the table, each of us with our own personal longing.

“No,” she said before any of us could make our plea. “My family is here, buried in this ground. And little Nate—” she nodded toward the child—“and more little ones someday.”

Sister Amanda blushed and whispered, “Maybe, if Heavenly Father brings my husband home.”

Chapter 32

From that afternoon on, I felt like one of the ten virgins in the parable who waited for the bridegroom to come in the night, only I had no idea exactly what I was waiting for. It is with a begrudging spirit that I admit to seeing a glimpse of Joseph Smith’s vision for his polygamous doctrine. I found my heart opening to Sister Amanda and saw how we might have been friends—just as Evangeline and I once were—had we not been forced to share a husband.

When we had quiet corners of time, I shared the stories of my journey since I was last here. If the girls were listening, I talked about Charlie, imitating his funny little laugh, or about my mother and what a gentle, kind spirit she had. In the evenings after they were asleep, I sat with Sister Amanda and Kimana, reliving my journey—the horror of the amputation, my dreadful sojourn with Evangeline, and the bittersweet reunion with my parents.

“My father’s gone too, you know,” Amanda said, mopping her eyes with the corner of a pristine apron. “These people ran him out when he wouldn’t join their church.”

I didn’t comment on her gaffe—that this was her church too—but I did click my tongue in sympathy. “Where is he now?”

“California, far as I know. That’s where the money is, isn’t it?”

“Just wait.” I leaned close, as if conspiring. “This church has built a great city, and its leader has lost his power. My Mr. Bostwick says this will be the next great city of the West.”

But I shared my deepest fears with Kimana alone.

One morning, when I’d been there more than a week, as Kimana and I worked to hang wash on the line, I told her of the sweet regard I harbored for Colonel Brandon. Sometimes talking with Kimana felt like dropping my thoughts into a deep, soft pool. She said little, merely rearranging my words and offering them back to me as questions to be pondered in a new light.

“He is a good man?” she asked after I’d gone on at length about his faith, his courage, his commitment to bring me home.

“One of the best I’ve ever known. And I think—I know he would marry me.”

“And that is enough for your heart? To marry a good man?”

“You don’t understand, Kimana. I’m going to be a divorced woman. No other man is going to want me.”