Breath and Bones (18 page)

The train made stops in towns of varying size and prosperity, and many people got off; just as many climbed on. The boys Famke had seen in the station were unloaded at a place called Buffalo, where the last drops of sunshine vanished in the black shadows of the rail barn. The boys ran after the man in the suit, who looked remarkably placid as his young charges shouted above the engines and stole each other's caps. Seeing Famke at the window, one of them blew her a kiss. Another grabbed at his pants in a gesture she'd seen before.

There was a loud
snap
. Myrtice had pulled down the tattered shade and settled back into her place, glaring at Famke as if she were to blame. After a moment Myrtice dug around in the satchel at her feet.

“Here,” she said, “read this.” And she tossed a small paperbound book into Famke's lap—not the Book of Mormon, Famke was glad to see, but something much more intriguing:
The Thrilling Narrative of an Indian Captivity
.

“My teachers gave it to me,” Myrtice said. “It might could learn you something about life out West and what happens to ladies who don't tend to their persons.”

Famke opened the book politely and began, though the car was now rather dark and the print very fine and fuzzy. Myrtice watched her for a few minutes, then pulled the spectacles off her face and handed them to Famke. “You're obviously far-sighted,” she said, using a term Famke had never heard before. “See if these help. I have two pair.” She closed her eyes and leaned against the seatback, feigning sleep.

Famke slipped the gold-wire curves over her ears and let the small weight settle on her nose. She wondered if they made her ugly. But any such question fled her mind when she looked down at the page: The print was much clearer now, and she quickly discovered that the book was about a woman who'd been known to walk provocatively through the streets of her small town. This woman was captured by savages during a massacre and had to live with them for some years.

Thrilling indeed—fearful and fascinating. She hardly noticed when the train pulled out of the station.

Nothing can give such a vivid impression of the greatness of our country, and the adventurous character of our people, as the sight of these boundless prairies and the habitations of the hardy pioneers who are rapidly turning the buffalo sod and exposing the rich black soil to the fertilizing action of the sun and air, and substituting for nature's scant forage, abundant harvests of corn and wheat
.

S
TANLEY
W
OOD
,
O
VER THE
R
ANGE TO THE
G
OLDEN
G
ATE

Rail life rolled on with a clackety-clack. The farther they traveled, the longer were the stretches passed without seeing another train, and Famke's boredom was relieved only by the book and a few isolated incidents. Once, in Michigan, they stopped because of an accident on the rails: Another engine had hit a cow and derailed. Most passengers bewailed the delay, but Famke peered with interest through the window, trying to get a glimpse of the carnage. She saw nothing.

Other events posed more serious threats. The Mormon Saints, and especially their women, were the object of insatiable interest to Gentiles; and in pursuing that interest, Gentile men occasionally grew violent. After the Saints switched trains in Chicago, a posse of reporters stormed the women's car, and the station guards had to help the Brothers beat them away. Thereafter, Myrtice kept the doors locked. In Des Moines, Iowa, a man actually broke one of the narrow windows in the front of the car; Myrtice jabbed him calmly with her umbrella until he fell.

Even in the face of violence and chaos, Myrtice was never less than calm. Despite the wilderness through which they were passing, she insisted on conducting English lessons for the immigrants, though she excused Famke with a grudging admission of her proficiency. She was even calm when Heber stopped in to say a few encouraging words, though Famke noticed they didn't actually speak to each other. She wondered if that were some particular Mormon custom: a man was not allowed to speak to his wife's niece.

“Is this the West?” she asked in Omaha, and Heber said it was. At her request, he bought a newspaper in the next station, and she opened it with a pleasant surge of excitement. There was nothing about Albert—but perhaps she simply had not come far enough yet.

Thereafter she surrendered herself to the journey, and hills and mountains, forests and prairies swept by the grimy window in a blur. The wooden seats made for sleepless nights, and Famke soon felt as if all life were passing in a daze. Sudden shifts in altitude made her dizzy, and everything smelled like coal dust. Other immigrants were still ill enough to vomit, and many of them coughed all day (though without reproof from Myrtice). Decomposing cows and their shaggy buffalo cousins became commonplace sights; naked bones gleamed whitely in the moonlight. She read
The Thrilling Narrative
several times, until it, too, became dull. She put her ear to the boxes of sleeping silkworms, but the crates were silent as coffins; when she opened them, on the sly, the eggs were so tiny and round and blue-white that she nearly didn't see them and might have squashed them by mistake. She almost wished for lessons, so as to have something to do.

And then at last, just as she was beginning to forget any other life, they were in Utah, in Salt Lake City. Down on the ground, the yardmaster swung his red lantern side to side, and the train braked, blowing sparks and steam from the wheels. The hot brick station into which they pulled looked just like all the other buildings in the West; the lone difference was that here the new Saints were herded out—in rapid time, as a Gentile conductor studied his watch and threatened all manner of consequences if they delayed.

An excited Heber left Famke and Myrtice with their baggage in order to bring the other new Saints to headquarters downtown, and to hire a wagon for his family's trip out to Profit. They wouldn't waste any time in the capital; Heber said they would return anyway in a few days, and Famke knew he was thinking of their official sealing and her baptism in the Endowment House.

She put those events out of her mind and asked for a newspaper. Myrtice bought one at the depot office, then handed it over with the sort of severe look usually reserved for an importunate child. She also passed Famke a bottle of brown liquid proclaiming itself “Deseret's Elixir for Common Coughing, completely free of alcohol and other stimulants.”

“You see,” said Myrtice, “no one really needs to cough anymore.” She sat down on the trunk of silk eggs.

Famke obediently uncorked the bottle and swallowed. What followed was the worst taste she'd ever known—something like the smell of burnt hair, in liquid form. She coughed, and then there was the faint tang of blood.

Myrtice pressed her lips together and glared as though Famke were trying to spite her. Now Famke felt unable to open the precious newspaper. She used it to fan herself, for Utah was hot, and the sheltering bricks didn't stop the station from feeling like an oven. Even the stationmaster gleamed with perspiration, and Famke could have sworn she smelled roasting meat coming from his window.

She thought she might be ill. “Where is the privy?” she asked, too loudly, and Myrtice hushed her with a gesture that managed to communicate that even out West, ladies did not ask for such things.

“We call it the
convenience
,” she said. “But follow me.” They crossed the depot and Myrtice briskly opened a double set of doors, shutting the last one on Famke so hard that the china knob rattled halfway out of its groove.

For the first time in days, Famke was alone. She locked the door, gathered up her skirts, and squatted down carefully, pondering. All trace of illness left her as she realized that once again she had a choice: She was in the West at last, and she could simply walk out of this station and set off to find Albert. Why waste her time riding all the way to Profit City? Somewhere in this newspaper, or in some other she might buy soon, there would be a clue that would lead her to him.

But there was all the trouble: buying. She would have to pay for newspapers and trains and countless sundry other items, unimaginable now but adding up and surely expensive in the end. Her only earthly asset was the tinderbox, and she did not want to part with it again. No, for once in her life, she would be prudent. She would bide her time, wait for the right moment, the proper clue.

Just as she reached this conclusion, the door was flung open again, and Myrtice filled the doorway. “You listen to me, Ursula”—she looked at Famke the only way she seemed to know how, with a glower—“because this might could be our one chance to talk. I want to say that you may not be married all the way to Mr. Goodhouse, but you're married partway, and
you had best be righteous and stand by him or I'll know the reason why! If you can't do that, you might just as well leave us right now.”

I'll know the reason why:
It was only an American expression, but it struck cold fear into Famke. She was overcome with the unpleasant feeling that Myrtice, like a saint of the early days, possessed the power to read people's thoughts. Once again Famke felt ill.

“Of course I will be right,” she said. “Righteous. I am going to Profit City. But how did you open the door?”

“Hairpin.” Myrtice held up a metal object, its prongs tangled from having worked through the lock. “Well, any road, I thought you should know where
I
stand.”

“Thank you,” Famke said, for she could think of nothing that would get Myrtice out of the doorway faster.

Alone again, Famke took her time in the convenience, making herself as comfortable as she could for the wagon ride to what she must now think of as her home. She washed her face and spit vigorously into the basin, ridding her throat of that awful taste of Deseret's Elixir, then wiped her lips on a handful of the old newspaper squares provided by the depot.

She had to hold her own paper over her head on the jolting ride overland. She had never encountered a sun like this one, not even on the ocean; within minutes she'd soaked through her new underclothes. And yet the sun was no worse than the powdery dust, which caked in her throat and dried it till she knew coughing would be useless. Even the few stray cows they passed on the range looked parched and as if the very blood had left them to blow in the relentless breeze. In fact some patches of dust were not an ordinary brown or black but a sickly red.

Eventually the dust gave way to a huddle of brown buildings that seemed themselves to be made of the dust. The road cut right between them, leaving about a dozen shabby structures on each side. There were no wires overhead, thus no telegraph or electricity; the place was like Dragør, only smaller and much uglier. Heber stopped at a watering trough and let the horses drink. Famke would have liked to join them, but there was no refreshment for people here, and Myrtice's steely gray eye kept her in her place.

“Prophet City,” said Myrtice, and somehow Famke knew she had misunderstood the name all along.

“Where are the people?” asked Famke, but she already knew the answer: working, like bees in a hive, chasing an elusive profit promised by an invisible prophet. She stared at the windows around, all curtained against the sun, until she thought she saw a twitch. It was some small comfort to think that there might be someone with the idle time to watch a new arrival.

“You will meet them on Sunday,” Heber promised cheerfully. His collar was dark with moisture, and his hat had turned black with it—but he was becoming almost unbearably jolly in his native land, Famke thought. She didn't see why he should feel this way; America was not at all what
she
had imagined.

But when she felt him watching her, she smiled bravely. At that, his eyes grew wide and affectionate, and she saw with some dread where his mind was directed.

Famke looked down at her lap, and Heber pulled at the horses' heads and got the wagon creaking again. “Once our business is established,” he dreamed aloud, “we'll have a branch of the railway put through here. It will reduce the price of transport by at least a half, and bring even grander prosperity to the city . . .”

Famke tried to imagine the word
prosperity
applying to this clump of crumbling houses, much less to the disproportionately vast cemetery with its beehive headstones. She did not look back as the wagon left the town behind.

The sun beat down. The dust clouded upward. The Goodhouses entered a field of red dirt and yellow vegetation and traveled down it about a mile before Heber said to Famke, with a touch of pride, “This begins our farm.”

She did not know what to say. This patch of earth didn't look like any farm she'd ever seen; there were no crops, only that yellow straw and a stand of yellowish-green trees in a little valley. She couldn't see a stream anywhere.

But Heber was slapping his knee in delight. “Now that I'm back,” he vowed, “we will put every one of these acres under cultivation.”

Myrtice murmured, “It will be a fine farm,” and looked sideways at Famke, who was coughing again.

They pulled up at a dirt-colored farmhouse next to a dirt-colored barn, and there Famke met her new aunt, Sariah. She was as big-boned as Myrtice, though thin and swarthy where Myrtice was stout and fair; and while her
brood of small children—the older ones were presumably in the fields—hung shyly on her skirts, she stared at Famke with the same obvious disapproval. One look had shown her everything that had led to Famke's arrival on this doorstep, and she kept her raisin eyes on the new girl even as she hugged Myrtice and delivered a dry auntly kiss.

Heber greeted his first wife with an embrace, too, but his was slightly stiff. He seemed to expect trouble. “Ursula has come to join us,” he said, straightening his dark jacket. Famke noticed moons of perspiration under his arms. “Ursula Sommerfugl.” He pronounced it perfectly, and the name Famke vanished into the desert air.