LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I got news, Clair. News of your parents, if you’d like to hear. Your ma, especially. I remember her, now. I remember I seen her.”

      The blade in my throat wouldn’t tolerate a breath.

      “I did some scouting through the records, the emigration logs, the Ward ledgers and such.” Ada took the spoon from my hand and sat me in the rocker. Strands of red lined the shore of the Great Salt Lake.

      “Your mother’s name was Marie Claire LeBlanc. She was Louisiana French. Your father, Tucker Martin, worked the Mississippi River. A river man. He converted to the Church while delivering the John Forsgren party of Saints up to Winter Quarters, the first Scandinavian group ever to emigrate West. He was baptized in March of 1853. Died three months later, from the cholera, along with two hundred other Saints making their way upriver by steam.

      “You was likely born in New Orleans. Church records indicate a Marie LeBlanc Martin and child joined the Hans Peter Olsen Company in May of ’fifty-four. The group started West in late June, arrived in Salt Lake 5 October, and here in Brigham City on 11 October.

      “That’s where my memory of your mother comes in, the autumn of 1854. Our burg was barely two years old, and a new party of Saints had just arrived. I paid them little mind. It seemed the end of things, for me—my husband gone, my boy to raise and our fort running over with bedbugs and vermin. What little we settlers had must be divided up with the newcomers, so my future felt half again as safe.

      “News of the Principle had preceded your mother’s arrival by months. Erastus Pratt brung it with him and a second wife from Salt Lake City. Said the Prophet Brigham Young had given her to him to ‘build up the Kingdom,’ and the rest of the Brethren should follow his lead or be damned.

      “We was wrestling with it, each couple in their own way. But where we’d heard rumors of plurality for a decade and more, the newcomers had had no warning. Still the fervor was strong and our spirits high as we sat together in the split willow bower to welcome them and bear testimony. Whatever we lacked, whatever our trials under the Principle, we had escaped the oppression and mob violence of the Gentiles and found a home in Zion. We sat together with one mind, prayed and sang together with one voice—half-starved, ill-clothed, uneducated—the chosen of the Lord!

      “Saint after Saint bore witness at that testimony meeting, until a young red-haired girl stood up, weaving a little on her feet. She was a slight thing with ringlet curls and white skin, clutching a baby to her. ‘You people,’ was all she said. ‘You people!’ A plea or a curse, I could not tell, but it was testimony, and it pierced my heart. Some Brother near her sat her down. The meeting carried on. Days later, when I thought to inquire, I learned your mother was gone.”

      I kept my eyes on Ada. As long as she kept talking I had a history, I had a past.

      “Where did she go, Ada?”

      “I don’t know, honey. There wasn’t anyplace to go. Brigham City was the northernmost Mormon settlement.”

      “Well they found me in Honeyville, she worked in a boardinghouse in Honeyville.”

      “A way station for any Gentiles fool enough to think Brigham Young wouldn’t own this place. Men en route to the mines in Montana, or on their way back broke or crippled up. There’s a hot springs there the Shoshone used, to pass the winters in comfort. I suppose your momma could have found some work in the midst of the miners, washing or cooking or—” Ada didn’t complete her thought.

      “Why was she so serious, Ada? Why do you think?”

      “Well that ain’t hard to figure. She’d lost her husband. Left her home and all her kin. Had a little baby girl.” Ada’s cheeks went slack. “A girl child who was different. She must have grieved for your health, your future. And the Olsen Company, they was swallowed up by cholera—stomach cramps and agony, till vomit or diarrhea or both brought on collapse. One third died. It must have been a terrible migration.

      “It seems to me a widowed mother, young and pretty and in need, arriving at last in the land of Zion to lay her burdens down, just when the Principle had took hold . . . ”

      My mother’s history became my own. “You think—?”

      “Well, like as not, some man would’ve asked.”

      Pratt, or Olsen? Which of the Elders had dared? My mother had trekked eighteen hundred miles only to find herself among lechers and lunatics. I grew ravenous and chilled. I coughed up a sob as Ada said, “That’s all I know, honey dear. Short of a trip to New Orleans, it’s all I could find out.”

      “It’s more than I have ever known!” A furious gratitude made me shake. “They won’t. They’ll never. They will not parcel me out!” Ada embraced me. My sobs worked against her dress, raising the smell of starched cotton. She did not rock, just held on as if her body had been built on the spot. I leaned in, leaned and borrowed her strength, and gradually breathed clear.

      When I looked up, Ada’s lashes were wet.

      “Child,” she said, and kissed my mouth. Her fingers gripped my ribs. Without a thought, I kissed her back, drowning in warm breath and shivers.

      I am Louisiana French. I was not born in Zion, not anywhere in its bounds! Born in New Orleans—

      Joy shook me and Ada held on. She held on and rocked us side to side, and it felt like singing.

      Ada cooked the fritters. I washed dishes, for the first time in my life as my mother’s daughter. Glad to be, then as now, a single bead on a long chain.

      CHAPTER 6

      Since I’d arrived, age six, I had never left the bounds of Brigham City. I had only ever known the communal thrift of the United Order, where every householder contributed his all to the Church stores and received in turn just what he needed to sustain his own. This ensured the survival of the town and gave the Church supremacy. It kept us humble and bound us to our place. Some men were called to farming, to husbandry or carpentry, according to their talents and their means. Bishop Dees was a weaver, the best in town. He’d brought his looms with him from England. I had been called to sew the holy long johns, which I much preferred to wearing them.

      My friend Ada didn’t rail against this holy Mormon communism. She simply said I ought to see the fruits of capitalism firsthand. I asked if their fruits were different than the peaches and apples Homer Tingey grew. She laughed and insisted that we travel to Corinne.

      We left one mid-morning in June, when the valley trembled with heat. Ada’s wagon followed the raised railroad tracks west. I asked her why the Union Pacific had chosen Corinne as their transcontinental link, when Mormon men had laid the rails with their own hands.

      “A snub,” she said. “A snub to the Prophet. They used our labor and they paid Brigham Young handsomely for it. That was all the linking up they cared to do. So Corinne grew up on the banks of Bear River, the Gentile capital of the territory.” She eased her elbow into my side and said, in mock solemnity, “If Brigham Young moved the Wasatch Mountains forty feet west, the Gentiles would erect a monument to continental drift.”

      I swooned as we drove over the bridge that spanned the Bear, the broadest river I’d ever seen. More a table than a river, it held little boats and flocks of birds and cloud patterns on its top. The marvels of Corinne only started there. Red awnings marked the several hotels downtown. Tiny dogs pranced on leashes among the strolling Corinthians. Ada drove right past the dock leading out to an enormous paddlewheel steamer, whose flags shook in the wind. This excursion boat hauled lumber for the railroad and Gentiles for pleasure, up and down the length of the Great Salt Lake.

      Wonders promptly ceased when Ada turned off the main street and parked by the Methodist Church. We’d been warned about the apostate church in Corinne. I kept still, expecting scythes to drop or nets to fall. But the plain clapboard building produced only a small man in shirtsleeves, who carried a fishing pole.

      Ada said, “That’s Pastor McCabe.”

      “He’s the apostate

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