LITMIR.BIZ

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pop your gussets for me, though if it gave you ease, I’d bless it.” Ada grinned. Then she winked at me and hefted that fifty-pound bag of barley like it was a day-old child and took her leave.

      When I asked whose aunt she was, the Sister only sucked her teeth. “Oh, she ain’t anybody’s aunt. Then again, she ain’t no Sister. We only call her kin. Lord bless her, she’ll need it come the final trump. That woman,” she breathed, “has a liquor still. She stews our barley up in a shed behind her mansion. No God-fearing Brother would help her. She pays a Lamanite to chop wood and tend the works. In cash! That filthy redskin. That old buck, Pocatello Jim.”

      I knew Pocatello Jim, as well as any Mormon could. He had lived in Brigham City since I could remember. He was the only Indian who’d stayed on after the treaty was signed, when I was ten. The one and only adult who had ever lightened my days. I knew sharp pleasure, felt keen little bursts of revenge seeing the normal folk reflected in his gait, his gestures, his elastic face. Bishop Olsen. Widow Andersen. Erastus Pratt. He aped them, proud and pinched and crafty—until they sensed they’d gained a shadow self. By the time they’d wheeled around, Jim would be leaning back, arms crossed on his chest, admiring the courthouse steeple. The men cursed him. The women looked wounded to the core. Their hatred only deepened as Jim’s laughter closed the game. That loose-hinged laugh was, to me, a tonic.

      I didn’t cower from Jim, as the other girls did, or let him trip me up at the heels. I looked him right in the eyes whenever I passed him. His leathery skin, his mashed nose and razor-lipped smile didn’t frighten me. Jim was the only grown-up who had ever required my attention. I paid it to him, in full, and he always paid me back. Now I knew Jim’s other calling—brewing liquor for an apostate in the foothills above town.

      That apostate, Aunt Ada Nuttall, occupied the one and only house east of Box Elder Creek. Ada’s pink granite mansion nearly matched the slopes of the Wasatch Range that rose steep and free behind it. Scrub oak and sage were her only neighbors. That suited everyone fine.

      The Sister at the Co-op said Ada made a fortune selling liquor by the wagonload in Corinne, the wicked railroad town thirteen miles west of Brigham. Corinne, Corinne, the City of Sin. All of the Gentiles asked for “Nuttall’s Leopard Sweat” by name. And they paid cash money for her labors. Ada paid her tithe in U.S. dollars—the only Latter-Day Saint who did. She was the only woman who dared live alone, and the Elders could not touch her. They needed Ada’s money just as much as they did the irrigating waters of Box Elder Creek. Cash flowed around Ada like a waterwheel, and the Brethren stood just close enough to prosper from the turning.

      Three days had passed since Lars’ death when I met Ada Nuttall. I’d barely slept, fearing what the Brethren would choose for me: servitude, or marriage and madness. The night of his funeral, a Tuesday, I dreamt of a cabin, the old herd cabin that stands on a knoll above the cemetery south of town. I had sheltered in its lee at Lars’ funeral for awhile. First the Brethren gathered at graveside, and then all of the city vanished in the light-filled cloud of snow that spun up from Lars’ grave. That drift begat my vision: a solitary place where I could live and work alone.

      I pled with Bishop Olsen, the following day, to let me make use of the cabin, to work and do for myself, burdening no one’s stores. The plan had enough frugality in it to catch him off his guard. As steward of the First Ward, he would consider it, he said, he’d take it up with the Elders. Though a girl alone in a cabin in the hills—

      I reminded him the Tingeys’ orchards bordered the cemetery, and their house lay just beyond. Homer and his wife and daughters, they would be my neighbors, my helpmates, in times of need.

      Then the Bishop cleaned his glasses on his vest and warned me I would have to gain permission from the fearsome woman who owned the cabin. She’d been one of Brigham City’s first settlers and the wife of its first Bishop. A headstrong and intractable apostate. Fallen from the straight and narrow way. He blessed me with his doughy white hands and I hiked up to Ada’s.

      I sat in her parlor in a wingback chair looking out over the city. The poplars on Forest Street stood like bound brooms heaped with old snow. They marched from Main Street out to the edge of the Barrens, past the icy run-off ponds and Lars’ livery, in a stark promenade, two by two. Even the trees in Brigham were coupled. What could a girl alone do?

      Sister Nuttall served tea in china cups. I kept my hands to myself. Tea broke the Word of Wisdom, as surely as liquor. I waited for her to speak.

      She added cream and drifts of sugar to her cup. She stirred. She downed a steaming gulp. Then she looked at me. “Due to a recent death, you have been left without a home. Is that the case?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “And you aim to occupy the herd house, which is by legal title mine.”

      “Yes, ma’am. If the Brethren allow me to, I would bring it no harm.”

      She leaned forward. The sleeves of her dress tensed at the seams, her shoulders too ample for the cut. “You are how old?”

      “Seventeen. Or, eighteen this month. I can’t be sure exactly. But February, that’s my birth month. I’ll be eighteen.” All of the courage I’d shown in front of Bishop Olsen had deserted me. Here was a greater obstacle, housed in luxury, wearing taffeta and black lace. I smoothed my worn calico skirt into straighter lines and waited.

      Ada squinted and crossed her legs. A bright beaded moccasin angled out from under her skirt. “Let’s crimp the formalities, what say? I never did take to the dignified.” She drank her tea down. “Now, in payment for the leasing of my cabin, one-half of your earnings in Corinne will be mine. In cash—”

      “But—”

      “But what? You think that’s a steep cut, Sister? You don’t like my terms?”

      “No, I wouldn’t know, ma’am, I’m sure. But I have no earnings in Corinne, in cash or any other way.”

      “You will have. Pack up those cards of yours in half dozens. We’ll get a quarter per pack.” Ada Nuttall didn’t blink. Her eyes were almond-shaped, a dull green like the underbelly of a fish. They stayed dead level, though she spoke of fantastical things.

      I pressed my feet to the floor to keep from toppling.

      “Unless you’d rather take Erastus Pratt to your bosom or some other good God-fearing Elder, in which case I won’t see a profit from your gain, and the good Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.”

      I shook my head no.

      “I empathize. Now, hold out your hand.”

      She slipped a pistol into my palm. It was small and silver and warm from her pocket.

      “Comes with the cabin. Renter’s insurance.”

      Refusal was doomed. I doubted this woman had ever been refused anything, so I put the pistol in my pocket and thanked her, saying we would have to see what the Elders thought of our plan.

      Ada snorted and said, “It’s done.”

      I said, “But the Elders—”

      “Mean well, Lord love ’em, though it comes to their advantage, you can bet on it.”

      “‘Let the Priesthood handle it.’ That’s what Bishop Olsen said when I asked him about my future.”

      “Let a horsefly drive the team?” Ada laughed. “Not while my arms can take a rein!” She stood up. “Now, there’s one last nosy bit. I’ve been in this town since the dawning, and I don’t recall the name Martin. Where are your own folks from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

      I swallowed a knot of pure pain. “Martin is my father’s name. I did not know him ever. My mother worked a boardinghouse in Honeyville. I was four when she left, six when they brought me here. I can’t say if she abandoned me, or came to harm, or harmed herself. No one ever told.” I looked up from the floor. “If that’s all your terms, Sister Nuttall, I could make it home by dark.”

      “There

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