LITMIR.BIZ

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stood there, dry and wooden about the eyes, suffering their laughter, waiting for the next blow to fall, when a stranger stepped in, asking Florrie to dance. He was tall and lean, serious beyond our years, with pomade in his red hair.

      Florrie composed herself and silenced Tom with a stare. She smiled at me. Then she took her suitor’s hand like she’d found gold amidst the dross. Everyone parted to let them pass.

      I stepped outside the Wardhouse. The air in the poplars had a fine substance, a powdery slow drift. The cut alfalfa smelled like it trailed to Heaven, but Heaven gave no comfort. Not when the Lord tolerated boys who crowed with stiff-necked, bandy-legged cruelty. It rubbed me to distraction how they did it, how they brutalized and brutalized and never felt a hitch! The stars overhead swelled to white pools. I started toward the side yard to cry in private, but voices from the dark there stopped me.

      “I don’t know what my pa would say.” It was a woman’s voice, young and frightened. “He ain’t—”

      “He abides by the Celestial Law. Would he keep a daughter of his from the reap of such benefits?” A man spoke, blunt-voiced and sour.

      “Well, Pa needs me at home, to tend the children while Mother works the Co-op counter.”

      “Your daddy needs a twenty-year-old mouth to feed? God in Heaven knows he don’t.”

      The young woman pushed down sobs.

      “Fussing only proves it. You need a husband to work you, Sofie, need a hungry child to suck the poison out of your vain heart. You got no suitors, young nor old. Huh. You’d get a room and strong children as my fifth, never want for food. It’d give your tired daddy one less mouth at his table. I seen his crops. He’ll bless your going.”

      Sofie answered him with silence.

      “Don’t you seek for eternal glory?” He said it with force. “Don’t you know you can’t refuse the Everlasting Covenant once it has been opened unto you? You’ll be damned, sure as the Prophet Joseph spake it, damned to Hell and the buffetings of Satan. That what your folks deserve? Their board burdened with your hungry mouth and their souls burdened with your shame?”

      Her voice had shrunk to pearl-size. “No.”

      He yanked her a few steps toward the light. I gasped at the sight of Erastus Pratt, stout bellied, shaven clean, with the lines of his mouth drawn unnaturally into a smile. “That’s a good girl,” he said, breathing down into her face. His fingers stroked outward, alongside of her breast. “I’m one to enjoy my privileges, like the Prophet says.” He kissed her as hard as a hand’s slap, then turned and walked toward the dance.

      As manager of the Big Field, Erastus Pratt worked us all—men, women, and children—like tools, without the least affection. But to see him bully in love—his chosen one without defenses, and him sharpening the words of God to blade points. He’d bloodied God’s words, and he’d won.

      “Courtship’s over, Sofie,” he called back. “I’ll tell your pa when I see him in the field.”

      I stayed in the shadow of the church steps. Sofie kept to the side yard, out of sight. The music rang, and the feet upon the boards, but under the noise of the assembled I heard a sobbing, low and steady, that brought bile into my throat.

      I rode home that night in Lester Madsen’s fringe-topped buggy. Florrie sat in the middle smiling at him, her suitor, her penny-haired man. A slant moon had risen. The usual chorus of frogs gave welcome, but all I could hear all the way home was Sofie’s weeping.

      Mormons do not marry for this life alone. They marry for time and all eternity. A man and his wives and all of his children are bound together forever, and guaranteed a place in the Celestial Kingdom, where they will dwell with God. Other believers might inherit a lesser glory as angels, as “ministering servants,” but without being wed in the Endowment House you can never gain the highest realm: the eternal presence of God. That is the Mormon goal—to dwell with our Father in Heaven. Just where our Mother dwells, no one mentions. No one even feels the need to know. In a decade’s worth of sermons, I had never heard one Saint inquire.

      Brother Pratt took Sofie to the Endowment House that November. Florrie and Lester Madsen followed. When Florrie moved to Logan at Christmas to be his bride, I lost my only friend.

      February held greater losses. I rang the supper bell one chill night, and waited at table for Brother Lars until the hull corn cooled. I slopped it back on to heat and looked outside, thinking it odd the smithy fire still smoked at the chimney.

      The horses waiting to be stabled and fed whinnied as I skirted the corral.

      I found him dead in the smithy, crumpled on the floor with an arm flung out and his work tongs out of reach. I’ll get them for you, was my first thought. Dour and indifferent, he was the closest I’d had to a father. I sat in the dirt and cried for him and his.

      I knew a few short days of freedom, then. Freedom of the darkest kind, waiting for the Elders to declare the next place I’d be let to fill. Rumor was, at seventeen years of age, I was sure to be made some man’s third or fourth. Erastus Pratt had five wives. I prayed he’d never want a sixth.

      I read the only book Lars kept in the barn, listening to the sounds of my household through the night. I studied the thrift of planting living fences, in his almanac. Horses bumped their stalls. Ringdoves purred in the loft. I closed my eyes and gently stroked my right cheek with the back of my hand, then stroked the left. Barely any difference, in the dark—

      My teeth ground together. My eyes wrung salt. I’d rather kiss a pig. I’d rather die than be a wife! Motherhood appalled me. Childbearing sickened me to think on, close as it was to the ground of my own misery: my mother, my mark. A sweep of red hair was my only memory of Mother. She’d left me at the boardinghouse without a word, no gift, no way to trace her going. An orphan at four years. Had it been my mark, my temper or my foolishness that had driven her off? Whatever the cause, Mother had left me of her own free will. I never knew my father. No memories there to find. I worked that misery like a field, every day, just to keep a path beaten through.

      I prayed to God, that night. I prayed mightily to Jesus Christ to let me have some other calling, any call but a woman’s call. I was not cut for it. My prayer spun like a wheel, like grief come to life. I prayed till there were no more words inside, no want, no request of God at all, just anguish, hard as whitened bone. Anguish and the answering dark.

      Walking to town the next morning, I stopped to watch the run-off ponds glitter in the February sun. The two ponds were the endpoint for all of the waters that flowed from the Wasatch Mountains down through the town. Ice circles. They looked like kin, still and cold as my godless heart.

      A woman at the Co-operative Mercantile Store caught me unwinding the soaked wool muffler from my cheeks. She was short and blunt and dressed like a range hand, with a head of brown hair that must have been too much for any bun to contain. It lay on her shoulders, wiry and thick. She gestured to a stool near the pot stove. “Don’t mind me. Settle yourself.”

      And so I had to undo and unclasp.

      “Ada Nuttall,” she said. Her voice slapped words like tacks. “I take it you’re the floral artist. I saddle the right horse?”

      “Sister Clair Martin, and yes, ma’am, I dabble with flowers.”

      “Dabble, do you? Don’t play modest with me, honey dear. You could sell them pressed flower cards in San Francisco by the packing crate and clamber the heights of Nob Hill. But that would be the Gentile way, now wouldn’t it? You are paid, aren’t you, by the good Co-operative, for your labors?”

      Nob Hill, Mob Hill? I hadn’t heard tell of either.

      “Honey, do they pay you?”

      “With scrip enough to buy the glue and paper. And twenty cents a week for me.”

      “Dog in a deer’s eye.”

      “Ma’am?”

      A Sister

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