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Tributary. Barbara K. Richardson
Читать онлайн.Название Tributary
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781937226121
Автор произведения Barbara K. Richardson
Издательство Ingram
Praise for Tributary
“You’ll love resolute Clair Martin, the equal of any man —or religion. Clair’s strength and survival are the heritage of western women.” —Sandra Dallas, author of True Sisters
“Seldom does a novel come along that is as beautifully written and emotionally honest as Tributary. Barbara K. Richardson captures the grandeur and harshness of the Old West in a young woman’s struggle to find a home and a family without losing herself. A lyrical and haunting story not to be missed.”—Margaret Coel, author of Buffalo Bill’s Dead Now
“Tributary is a novel whose characters and time are so well inhabited, whose landscapes are so lovingly evoked, we wonder if Richardson is not speaking to us directly from the late 19th century, from a high bench above the Great Salt Lake. The language and writing are surefooted and fresh and often startling the way the best poetry can be startling. Richardson is a new American voice worth listening to.” —Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars
“Just when Tributary seemed like a story rich enough for an entire novel—an account of a feisty young Mormon woman in the 1860s—it turned into a story set in the South, and then another in the West. In the end, Barbara Richardson’s deceptively simple book is nothing less than an epic. —Jesse Kornbluth/Headbutler
“Tributary is a remarkable odyssey of the American West, told in one of the most clear-sighted, unjudging, and original voices I’ve come across in years.” — Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses
“This is a gorgeous novel…. Tributary takes the incomplete history and mythos of the West to task, and instead shows us some of the far more interesting and unexplored stories of American West—Mormonism, racism, women who don’t need marriage or men. Beautifully written and engaging, this is a story of one woman and her refusal to cave into societal norms in order to seek her own difficult and inspired path.” —Laura Pritchett, author of Sky Bridge
“From polygamist Mormon desert settlements to the yellow fever-plagued Gulf to an Idaho sheep ranch, Richardson evokes the 19th Century West and the human heart in all their complexity.” —Barbara Wright, author of Plain Language
“I’ve been hungering for a book like this since I finished Lonesome Dove—a tale of the Old West big enough to crawl into completely, full of magnetic characters, unspeakable dangers, and beautiful language…. Tributary is the story of a ragtag group of frontier survivors. There is an exiled Mormon prophet who lives in a cave and a truth-telling black man married to a Shoshone medicine woman. They are constellated around Clair, whose disappeared parents and independent heart lead her from a joyless Mormon childhood to New Orleans and back to Utah’s sheepherding outback…. It’s a big hot fudge sundae of a book—you wolf it down, and then you regret it’s gone. I loved it.” —Lisa Jones, author of Broken: A Love Story
First Torrey House Press Edition, September 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Barbara K. Richardson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
Published by Torrey House Press, LLC
P.O. Box 750196
Torrey, Utah 84775 U.S.A.
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-937226-04-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938793
Cover photographs: pioneer woman by www.recollections.biz;
Desert landscape by amygdala_imagery/iStockphoto.com
Map byT. Ellwood Zell, 1873, provided by Barry Lawrence Ruderman
Antique Maps Inc., www.raremaps.com
Cover by Jeff Fuller, Crescent Moon Communications
for Jeff
who holds fast
Let nothing come between you and your heart.
-Red Hawk
Tributary
by Barbara K. Richardson
Table of Contents
Desert: Brigham City, The Utah Territory 1859-1871
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
Gulf: Mississippi Delta: 1871 - 1877
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
Ranch: Curlew Valley: 1877-1879
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About Torrey House Press
Also Available from Torrey House Press
Desert
Brigham City, The Utah Territory: 1859-1871
CHAPTER 1
My childhood among the Saints was no such thing. In a land built on belonging, I did not. I arrived in Brigham City in 1859. Some Brother who hauled freight had found me in Honeyville, a six-year-old girl living among Gentiles and miners, all of them men. The good Brother couldn’t conscience it. He hauled me from the dusty boardinghouse yard up into his wagon, and the view from such a height—that lordly prospect over my life, the very ground I’d been at home on—struck my heart to tatters. I rode, eyes closed, thirteen miles south, all the way from Honeyville to Brigham City.
It took the Elders less than a week to find me my new home. Marked, shy, motherless, I must have seemed a pitiable creature. But pity never blinded the Widow Anderson to her own good fortune. She was as quick to set me hauling kindling as she was to slap a fly.
Daytimes, I did the work the widow had no zeal for, while she boiled up a fury in the kitchen, cats kneading her skirts, the window glass running with steam—turnips or peaches or tripe. Every evening, we crocheted, and the parlor filled with the spoilt milk smell of the Sister’s breath. “A marked girl needs home skills, above and beyond!” It passed her purse-fold lips like the refrain of a favorite hymn. How I longed to run the crochet hook through the back of my own throat and end my misery.
I scrubbed and chopped