LITMIR.BIZ

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shook hands on it, like men do, and Ada fetched the bullets for my gun.

      CHAPTER 3

      The Saints made such a fuss about their city: pride in the railroad, the telegraph line, the courthouse, and now the stone foundation for a Tabernacle laid right here in the northernmost outpost of the Prophet Brigham Young’s empire. He’d led his people West, from affliction and torment among Gentiles—we’d heard those terrifying tales—to a hard peace in salt desert so sere no one wanted it. No dispute over the Mormon claim to the Utah Territory at all but for the Shoshone, the Bannock, the Ute, the Paiute and the Goshute, Ada said, who’d all tried coexisting, then fighting for their homes. Brigham said, “feed them, don’t fight them,” which lasted a short while. In the end, sheer numbers settled their differences. The Mormons multiplied and replenished and subdued the desert, and the Saints had their promised land. The Great Salt Lake shimmered in its midst. The Wasatch Mountains flanked it to the east—a granite battlement which kept Gentiles out and Mormons in. Not that any of the faithful wished to escape. My mother had. By what means, I cannot say.

      I hope her faith sustained her.

      My own peculiar faith, which I dared not repeat, decreed that a cluster of houses, one knee-high church foundation, a set of shiny tracks and a telegraph wire did not mean much in the grander scheme. To me, these civilizing feats just hunched, small-shouldered, at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. The Wasatch gave us our life, man and animal, temporal and spiritual. They were the source. All the rest came late and after.

      Ada and I were pounding a tiny indent in the shine of Brigham’s shield. Only Ada’s pink mansion and my one-room hut stood above the town of Brigham on a long, sage-covered ledge we called the Bench. It ran the length of the foothills, north to south, marking the sudden ascent of the mountains from the desert floor. All of the houses in Brigham lined the gridwork streets, facing nothing but each other and a cardinal direction. Ada’s house perched on the North Bench at a southwesterly angle, taking in the sunsets and the compass of the town. My cabin, to the south, looked out over the cemetery, the checkered gardens of the Big Field and, beyond, the Promontory Mountains rising from the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Box Elder Creek ran below the cabin, cutting a line between the bare incline of the Bench and the rooftops of Brigham City, separating the settled from the wild.

      On the day I moved from Lars’ stable at the Barrens up into Ada’s cabin on the Bench, I gauged my happiness by this sight: dusted with snow, the Wasatch Mountains seemed to cup the valley like a bread-maker’s palms. I would live on the fleshy pad of their thumb.

      I moved my few possessions in and stood a long while in silence. I set the books Ada had loaned me in the window sill. Then I scrubbed the river rock walls until they gleamed. I would press flowers at the window right of the door, place one crate there. Hang clothes on a cord strung in the back corner. Firewood to the left of the hearth, washtub and kitchen supplies to the right. I hoped to find a large table to place in the center of the room. I had no bed and the door needed mending. Leather strips would do for hinges.

      That night, I watched the lamps on Main get lit, one and two. The copper-faced creek angled north, toward Ada’s windows, which were bright. And a hymn came, with words that filled my breast:

      Oh, Zion! dear Zion! land of the free,

      Now my own mountain home, unto thee I have come—

      All my fond hopes are centered in thee.

      My move across town released me from Bishop Olsen’s so-called care. I now resided within the confines of the Second Ward, and under the eye of a new Bishop. Daniel Dees was tall and strappy, and he presided over the Sunday meetings with mannish ease. I believed I might enjoy this change, until he took me aside that first Sunday and told me my new calling—to sew holy garments for a living, the sacred long johns worn by couples after they’d married in the Endowment House. I objected, panting inwardly Me in close quarters with the holy underwear? But he silenced my concerns with a generous smile, saying married Sisters would attach the holy symbols, marking breast and knee. As if that made it better. As if that made it right.

      His smile lingered in my mind for days. What would it mean to move through life with such assurance? How would it feel to know something, anything at all, beyond a shadow of a doubt? I asked myself, until the questions became riddles I knew I’d never solve.

      Bishop Dees also called for a house-making, that first Sunday. He asked the Ward members to open their bounty to the newest householder, to share whatever they could. All week long, items arrived at the top of the hill. A tin tub and bent ladle, hempen bed cord, tatted couch covers, crockery, three and a half bars of Sister Karen’s oatmeal soap, a bread can, yeast starter, an axe, flour, molasses, an old Dutch oven with two legs, one kerosene lamp and a flax broom.

      Homer Tingey hiked up late that first week. He greeted me with a smile so large, his jaw begged rest.

      I said, “Brother Tingey, I do not need another thing. I am beyond thankfulness.”

      Homer blushed. “Bishop said, ‘Guard and deliver.’” He called down to the boys in his wagon. They shoved a tarp back, and my heart leapt in recognition.

      Brother Larsen’s cast iron tub.

      It was the only claw foot tub in Brigham. Lars had ordered it by mail. Some said he’d ordered it for Sister Larsen just before she died. A quiet Brother, but his heart was true. He may have meant it for his ailing wife but Lars didn’t blink an eye, changing its purpose. That tub, brimming with water, lay to the belly in muck outside his own black geldings’ stall—the best horse trough in Zion.

      Four boys muscled the claw-foot tub to the top of the hill. I knocked snow and dried manure off its sides while Homer’s boys and two of Bishop Olsen’s sons threw off their coats. They tipped the tub and squirmed in the doorway. Four steps, they turned it right and touched it down.

      “Don’t take your ease, boys,” Homer said, stepping in. “Sister Martin may not want the tub set there.”

      Inger Olsen ran his hands along his sleeves, grimacing. “We ain’t slaves,” he said, “and she sure ain’t no queen.”

      But when I looked in—the long white tub aligned with the door, a dumpling set square center of the room—I thanked them, Homer and his sons and the Bishop’s boys. “It’s where I’d have it. It is just right.”

      I would find three planks to lay across it for my table, by day. By night, its purpose was clear. Never had I felt so safe or slept so sound, enclosed on all sides by cast iron.

      And so it started. I sewed for the Saints and hiked the hills. I read all the books I could borrow. I cooked whatever I wanted. I watched every sunset bury itself in the waters of the Great Salt Lake. I loved my life.

      One afternoon, late in March, I hiked to the mouth of Box Elder Creek on a whim. The path ran through a maze of scrub oak trees. Cottonwoods marked where the river emerged from the canyon. The sharp odor of pine led me upstream. I walked boulder to boulder, avoiding the gravel of the bank to spare my boots their leather. The clear water tumbled, forward and down. Grasping a willow branch, I bent for a drink, and leaning there, felt the pull of the fast-moving current. Let me take you under slid from eye to throat to navel like apple cider running through a muslin bag. Oh, to surrender! To relinquish all cares! My wet transit to Heaven would no doubt puzzle the devout, who would find me when the water slowed and banked at Reeder’s Grove. It was not death, it was a joining, the inevitable slide of crosscurrents. I vowed my life would be like that. I would find my own track to follow. Or I would carve it out as this creek did, with the rhythms of work and rest.

      About my work, Ada Nuttall had been right. The pressed flower cards sold in Corinne faster than we could ship them. This took me to her house each Monday to renew supplies and transact business. We held court in the kitchen, while Ada cut biscuits from a double batch of dough.

      “Tea breaks the Word of Wisdom,” I said, when she offered me another cup of greasy amber tea. It seemed the only way to meet someone so strong, stroke for stroke.

      “So I don’t guess you’d like to

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