Effigy (26 page)

For nearly two months Ruth descended to her employer’s cramped office at the close of every workday. It wasn’t until his lesson on mulberry trees that she awakened to his true design.

Morus nigra
, the black mulberry, was preferred in England.
Morus alba
, its pale-berried cousin, was the Continental choice. It was here that Mr. Humphrey touched her. On the leg, just where the knee’s hard cap subsides into thigh. He hadn’t the nerve to use his hand. Instead, he drew a hard little stick from his trouser pocket and nudged her with its point, talking all the while.

“Mulberry truncheon, my dear. Cut this very winter.” His voice
had a rattle in it. “Strike it in the ground and
Morus nigra
before you know what you’re about.” He looked her full in the face, and she saw that his eyes were leaking. “It’s yours.”

“Mine, sir?” In her confusion she said just the wrong thing. “But where would I plant it?”

Mr. Humphrey caught his breath. “Oh, my darling girl!”

Ruth leapt to her feet as the old man dropped to his knees before her. She ran from his office as though it were on fire, knocking a bolt of mourning crepe to the floor on her way through the shop. Fumbling at the lock, she found the truncheon still clutched in her hand. The impulse to fling it away was powerful, the urge to shove it down her dress front stronger still.

It had to have been fate. Ruth ran the cobbled half mile home through a filthy spring rain to find every woman and girl in Mrs. Stopes’s house crowded into the parlour. A stranger sat among them, his chair drawn up to the hearth. He was not a young man, nor was he so old as Ruth’s ardent employer—the reddish hair at his chin and temples only salted with grey. While he wasn’t ugly in the full sense of the word, no one—not even a mother—would call him handsome. A man, in short, unremarkable in every way. Or so Ruth thought.

He glanced up when she paused in the doorway, but only for an instant, as though the sight of a wet and breathless female signified little when compared with the elemental vision of the fire. It was odd that he should sit like one who belonged so entirely, addressing himself to the blaze. Odder still was the form of his address. He would speak to them by and by—spinning tales of a New World Zion, a beloved prophet struck down—but as Ruth stood dripping on the hall carpet, he chose instead to sing.

Ruth attended church like anyone. She’d witnessed men in the act of raising up their voices to God every week of her life. As a rule, the male parishioners who filled the pews of a Sunday sang as though they were barking orders to the Lord. Chests came forward, moustaches buckled and flexed. By contrast, the man by the hearth scarcely moved. A parting of the lips was sufficient. The melody was martial, uninspired. The lyrics, too, made little impression.
Come, come, ye Saints, no toil nor labour fear; but with joy wend your way
. It was the man’s faith that moved her, the simple purity of his tone.

The Widow Stopes loved nothing more than to carry tea and cake to a weary man, and so it was that the missionary sat talking past the stroke of ten. There were girls who took to their rooms in a show of Anglican or Methodist fealty, as well as those who retired in the knowledge of shuttles to be taken up come dawn. Ruth was among the core that stayed. She listened carefully to every promise the young religion held—from adventure to renewal to belonging. When the missionary spoke of the packet ship
Thornton
, due to depart Liverpool for New York in a matter of days, she made a mental note of the name. In the end she harboured only a single question, kept to herself until the moment he rose to go.

“Sir, do they manufacture silk in Deseret?”

“Not yet.” He regarded her closely. “But it is a keen desire of President Young’s that his people should.”

Mrs. Stopes kept him talking by the front door, but Ruth heard nothing of their conversation over the groaning of the stairs. Her room was cold, dark as a coal chute and nearly as narrow. To think she’d halved it with her mother for so many years. She closed the thin door behind her and knelt beside the bed. Reaching beneath its iron frame, she wakened spiders, felt one scramble across the
back of her hand. The carpet bag was where her mother had shoved it after unpacking their things.
I know it’s a squeeze, love. We won’t be staying long
.

Ruth beat the dust out of the bag’s drooping flanks. Then stood and began slowly to pack.

Four walls. One with a window, a nothing view. One with a door leading nowhere. The third crowded with wardrobe, dresser and vanity, the fourth blocked by a bed. And what a bed—canopied and grand, twice the width of any Thankful had lain in before she consented to hide herself away from the world. Hammer had it built to her specifications, which were based, for lack of any other example, on the stage bed at the Limelight. The bed Desdemona breathed her last on night after night. Pillars and tassels and satin. Ugly as sin.

Thankful can’t stand her bedchamber. All day long she’s trodden its garish carpet, descending only to take her place at the table beside her husband’s empty chair. She might walk out, at least as far as the privy, but why bother, when Mother Hammer will send the eldest girl up for the pot before long. Thankful bested the first wife in that particular arena early on, letting the horrid thing fill to capacity and beyond. She didn’t marry a wealthy man only to straddle the same hole as a dozen others, breathing the swampy rot of their leavings while wood bugs took refuge in her skirts. Never mind the walk there and back, the yard—mud or dust, depending—doing its level best to destroy her shoes.

All true, yet none of it the reason she rarely leaves the house.

She made an effort in the beginning, badgering Hammer to take her into the city, or what passed for one, sometimes settling
for a ride into Tooele, turning her nose up at every button Brother Rowberry stocked. Sundays offered another chance to show herself. She’d spend hours fussing before the mirror, only to be shunned by every gingham-swaddled female she passed.

At first she no longer asked to come along. Then, after a period of some months, she began to refuse when Hammer offered of his own accord. She was taken up with her lacework. The track made her teeth clatter. She could feel a megrim coming on. How else to explain it? She knew only that thresholds—those marking the passage between indoors and out—had somehow become threatening. The ranch and everything beyond it no longer welcomed her. In fact, it wished her harm.

As do these four walls. She has to get out. A last searching evaluation in the looking glass. Her dress is the fourth she’s tried on since supper, purplish and vaguely regal. Her curls are holding up well. She glazes over the disappointment of her face.

On the stairs she imagines music swelling from the pit.
Lord of lords! O infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from the world’s great snare uncaught?
Not Thankful’s line. She had played Charmian, attendant to the Egyptian queen, and had been lucky to get the part.

She hesitates at the bottom step. Should she go left, to the deserted kitchen, or right, through the dining room to the parlour, where Mother Hammer will be holding court? It’s a terrible weakness, this longing for company, even that of those you despise. All right. She’ll sit in her corner. Take up her sewing and pay them no mind.

Ursula works the pulse of the high-backed rocker, unconsciously drawing it in line with her own. The children flock and settle
about her skirts. She ignores Sister Thankful in the nearby armchair, letting her gaze soften in the glow of their burnished heads. Her angels have heard tonight’s story before—countless utterings, to say truth—but she can be sure they will strain forward as though it’s the first.

In the midst of the preparatory quiet, the third wife stirs, shifting the dark garment in her lap. Ursula drops her eyelids against the distraction, maintaining silence as she wades into the legend’s wash.

The twenty-seventh of June, 1844. A humid day, a spacious second-storey cell. Brother Joseph and his own flesh-and-blood brother, Hyrum, unjustly imprisoned therein. Treason? What means country to a man who is the darling of the Lord?

The mob came with the lengthening of day—faces blacked, the cowards—waving gun barrels, bayonets, knives. They stormed the gate, the faint-hearted guards firing high over their heads. Flooding the stairwell, they rose like bile in the prison’s throat. Brothers Taylor and Richards were present too, visiting the blessed prisoners, bringing hope in the form of smuggled guns. And now the four of them were trapped
.

The mob forced open the door. Brother Hyrum, possessed of a single-barrel pistol, took three balls—head, chest and leg—and promptly gave up his ether unto the Lord. Brother Taylor took four—one that would have stopped his heart if it hadn’t stopped his pocket watch instead—bled terribly and somehow, along with Brother Richards, lived to tell the tale. But enough of the minor players. Brother Joseph, bright star of the world, threw down his spent pistol amid the mayhem and leapt to the window’s ledge. Frame him there. A tall, beautiful man in his shirtsleeves. In his glory
.

Those behind him shot him in the back. Those gathered below fired skyward, as though they would murder the sun. The Prophet
pitched forward, falling twenty feet to land curled like a babe on his side. His last words the only words they could be—“Oh Lord, my God!”

He died among villains, men who, unsatisfied with the end they had dealt him, propped his broken body against the well in the courtyard and fired into it, execution style. Some say even this was insufficient for one among them—a brute who approached with his bowie knife unsheathed and a jagged beheading in mind. They tell, too, of how he scuttled back like the insect he was when a shaft of the Lord’s sorrow illumined that drooping head
.

It is this—the picture of that sudden light rinsing over those boyish, bloodied curls—that calls Ursula back to herself. Or, more precisely, the moan that picture evokes, uttered softly but nonetheless aloud. Her eyes flicker open, glazed with tears. The children sit patiently at her feet. She has only the vaguest notion of how long she has obliged them to wait.

Such obedience. She will reward them, surprising them now with the privilege she normally keeps by until after the story’s end. She hunches forward, the chair’s motion arrested beneath her, and extends her left hand into their midst. The third finger bears the bulk of an unwieldy ring, a great oval of some dull grey stone set in silver. It is so plain as to belie the term jewellery, calling to mind instead skillets and stoneware, hinges on cupboard doors.

Comprehension remakes the children’s faces. One after another they extend their own hands, each folded into a delicate fist from which only the smallest finger protrudes. Ursula fixes each of them with a brief but solemn stare, then fits her fingernail under the lip of the stone and folds open the ring. Inside lies a lock of the Prophet’s hair. She pinches it where it’s bound with a length of black thread, plucks it up from the silver bed. Always
the minute spring as it clears the walls of its setting, then stillness, a lone curl sprouting from between finger and thumb.

The children know to take a single stroke, and do so in order of ascending age, silently waiting their turns. Baby Joe is yearning forward, his pinky a stubby, searching thing, when the third wife clucks her tongue.

“What next.”

Stung, Ursula holds out her hand to halt her youngest, thereby breaking the ritual in two. “Sister?” She strains the word, chill and livid, through her teeth.

“Got any redskin scalps you want to show them?” Thankful gives her brassy curls a shake. “You’ll give them night terrors with that thing.”

Ursula stands in a rush, the chair bucking behind her. She tucks the lock away and takes a step, planting her boot between her two daughters. Another step, and she smiles inwardly to see Thankful’s hands seek cover beneath the work in her lap.

“‘The Lord saith,’” Ursula begins, her pitch low and clear, “‘because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion—’”