Saints (58 page)

“You’re getting politics confused with religion,” Charlie said.

Clay grinned. “I suppose it’s always easier to spot flim-flam in the other man’s argument. You tell Joe Smith he could have been President, if he’d only got himself an education or killed enough Indians, or if he’d kept out of religion. But as for getting the government on his side, he hasn’t got a chance. Pleasure knowing you, Mr. Kirkham.”

Charlie ate his last meal in Washington like a condemned man. He knew he wouldn’t eat so well again once he crossed the Appalachians. The train would be fast, but that would only make the change to frontier living all the more abrupt. Sitting at the table, thumbing through the volumes of Herrick and Pope that he needed to return to Adams before he left, Charlie wondered if he really wanted to go back. Couldn’t he make his report to Joseph by letter? Couldn’t he send for Sally and Alexandra, and set himself up as a permanent, unofficial delegate of the Church in Washington? He could monitor the legislation, try to influence things, and in the meantime pursue a career that might bring him real power.

As he finished the meal, however, with his future mapped a dozen times over, he knew it would not be so simple. Sally would come if he told her to, but she wouldn’t be happy here where the ladies would all despise her. And Joseph—he’d see through Charlie quickly, he wouldn’t be fooled by any talk of being unofficial delegate. It was another temptation from the world, just like the one his firm had offered him in Manchester. It was Nauvoo where his home was, and so he would go back.

He had little time left when he reached Adams’s house; he meant to leave off the books, thank the old man, and be on his way. But Adams wanted to talk a moment. “Tell me, was your stay in Washington a success?”

“My greatest success was in working my way through your library, sir. You were very kind.”

“So your petition has accomplished nothing. Well, neither have mine. But that isn’t all you were here for, was it?”

Adams had been President once, and now was back in the House of Representatives, finishing out his life as a sort of people’s advocate—having once had the highest office, he was the only man in Washington who could say he had no ambition and hope to be believed. And he had been kind to Charlie without any hope of gaining from it. So Charlie told him his main purpose in Washington.

“Ah.” Adams reached up and touched the bushy white fringe around his bald head, as if to make sure some hair still remained. “Like Socrates, searching for a wise man. Did you find one?”

“Many clever ones,” Charlie said.

“Some men come here to this whore of a city, seduced by power or money or fame. But you and I, we are seduced by the undying faith that we alone, of all the men in the world, we will be the ones to accomplish something truly good.”

“Does that make us fools?”

“It makes us unpleasant company. No one will ever meet your standards. Here, Charlie. Keep this collection of Pope. Whenever you start feeling that other men are too wicked or hypocritical to bear, read a little of his rhyming. ‘The glory, jest, and riddle of the world,’ that’s all you are, especially when you’re most certain that you’re right. I’m making you late for your train.”

“No—I have time. Thank you for the book.”

“I hear you were wise enough to turn down all the offers that were made to you.”

Charlie shrugged self-deprecatingly. “They overestimated my abilities.”

“Don’t pretend to be humble, Charles. You’re as vain as anyone, and with much better reason than most. I don’t care what reason you gave yourself for going home—I’m just glad you did it. Because you aren’t strong enough for this place.”

After all the flattery, Charlie was ill-equipped to enjoy this. “No, I suppose not.”

“You don’t like hearing it now, but I’m old enough that I can say it. You’d be a good teacher, but never a good politician or lawyer. Not really a top-flight businessman, either.”

Not that Charlie believed him—but he wanted to know. “Why not?”

“Because you don’t know how to kill, Charles. In the end, that’s what it comes down to. You have to love the kill. It’s life that
you
love. Never change. And never come back here as long as you live.” Adams held out his age-knotted hand. “I like you. I’ll miss having you ransack my shelves.”

“Thank you sir. You’ve been kind.”

Charlie walked to the railroad station through the cold and muddy January streets, feeling as dismal as the weather was now. Like the brief warm spell the week before, all Washington was a lie. Slaves everywhere in the capital of a free country; cowards in almost every office; animals in the streets; bitter old poverty and cruel new wealth competing for attention in the architecture, in the faces of the people. The monuments, the great documents, the rhetoric of democracy and justice—they were only a shared dream, not the truth of the place.

But that’s the way it is in Nauvoo, too, Charlie realized. We call it Zion, the Kingdom of God, but it’s a jealousy-ridden, poverty-stricken shanty town. And yet that wasn’t the truth either. The temple rising on the hill wasn’t hypocrisy, it was hope. The Saints weren’t pretending to be perfect, only intending to be. Like Washington, they just couldn’t catch up to their own dreams. Yet if it weren’t for the dream, neither Nauvoo nor Washington would exist at all.

And me, he thought on the train northward into Pennsylvania. I am no different from these places. I intend to be great, I dream of it, and yet I know that I’m not, and I think that I probably never will be. Is it so terrible, as long as the dream I try for is a good dream, is it so terrible if my life doesn’t bring the dream to pass?

No, not terrible at all, he decided. I’ll be perfectly content, as long as I tried my best.

Liar, whispered something inside him. Liar.

As the apostles had done when they returned from England, Charlie went to Brother Joseph’s house before seeing anyone else in Nauvoo. Joseph wasn’t there. No one was living there at the moment, in fact, for Joseph was in hiding and Emma was staying with Hyrum’s wife while she recovered from the birth of a dead baby a few days before. William Clayton, who used to be their branch president back in Manchester, was caring for the house. Charlie glanced at the writing instruments and papers spread over the desk that used to be Charlie’s. “I’m scribing and clerking for him now,” Clayton said. “Brother Joseph knew you’d want to be with your family at a time like this. He’ll be touched that you came here anyway.”

“A time like this?” The tone of consolation in Clayton’s voice made it plain that something must be wrong at Charlie’s house.

“You mean you haven’t been home yet?”

“I came straight here, to report to Brother Joseph.”

“I wouldn’t have wished to be the one to tell you, Charlie.” Clayton had the look of death in his face.”

“Who is it! Mother? Sally?”

“No, Charlie. It’s your baby. Little Alexandra. They buried her this morning. They couldn’t wait any longer.”

Charlie felt numb inside. Clayton reached out a hand to steady him.

“No, I’ll be all right.”

“There are others besides yours, Charlie. It’s been a hard winter on the little ones.”

“I didn’t even know she was ill.”

“It’s quick, when it takes the babies. That’s a mercy sometimes, Charlie.”

Charlie held out his hands in front of him. All the time in Washington he had thought little of his daughter—women hardly let fathers near the babies the first few months anyway. But he had never so much as touched her; the baby died without even a father’s blessing, without ever hearing her father’s voice. “I hardly knew she was
alive
.”

“I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. They won’t be at the grave anymore by now. I’m sorry. I’ve lost little ones, too. You’re not alone.”

But he felt alone, and that made all the commiseration in the world worthless to him. He did not hurry—there was little point in that. He walked steadily homeward, not caring that his trunk was at the station, that he had left his papers in a box at Joseph’s house. If he had only known. If God had let the baby live even another day. He didn’t even know what the child looked like.

He opened the door. Dinah and Mother and Father were there, and Harriette and Mother Clinton, all red-eyed from crying. All except Sally. She was like still water in the middle of the stream; all the movement, all the grief eddied around her, but somehow she was miraculously calm. They all saw him as soon as the door opened, but no one spoke. Charlie realized that they were wondering whether they had to break the news to him. “I already know,” he said.

Sally stood up and took a step or two toward him. “I spent the money for a tombstone for her,” she said. She was shy, she was uncertain, as if she wanted very much for him to approve what she had done. “It wasn’t that much, and I didn’t want her grave to disappear. So many babies’ graves seem to disappear, as if their lives didn’t matter.”

“Sally,” Mother Clinton said.

“Let her be, Mother,” Harriette whispered.

Sally came another step toward Charlie. “She was a very happy baby. She ate all the time, she was so strong. I didn’t leave her hungry, Charlie.”

“I know you didn’t, Sally.”

“She even smiled when she was sick. Almost to the end, she’d stop crying suddenly and smile. Do you think that little babies can see God?”

Charlie didn’t know.

“I did my best, Charlie, but you just came home too slow.”

He put his arms around her, held her close. He felt her body quake.

“Thank God,” Mother Clinton said. “I thought she’d never cry.”

“Crying’s good,” Anna said. “Took me a week to cry myself out when my Alice died. It’s easier with the later ones. But it isn’t healthy not to cry.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sally said in a thin, high, whining voice, over and over.

“It’s all right,” Charlie said. It’s God’s fault, not yours. “It’s no one’s fault.” It’s my fault.

“She was a good baby,” said Harriette. “You would have loved her.”

John Kirkham stepped away from the wall, where he had been standing when Charlie arrived. He looked awkward, embarrassed, as if he knew Charlie wouldn’t want to hear from
him
at a time like this. “Charlie, I, uh—when it began to look bad for the little one, and we thought you might not come home, I sketched her. Three sketches, so you’d know how she looked. Later, when you want to.”

“They’re beautiful drawings, Charlie,” Dinah said.

Charlie nodded, looking at his father, wondering why he felt so surprised. Ah, yes, now he knew. It was because he didn’t hate his father. Not a shred of hatred left, none at all. Charlie had been away from home for the whole life of his first-born child. That was a match for any of his father’s sins.

“No, Charlie,” Dinah said, as if she could read his thoughts. She came to him and touched his hair the way she had when he was little and afraid, and she had comforted him. “It’s just the way of things.”

Charlie shook his head. Not because he disagreed, but because he didn’t even want to think. He had known just what his homecoming would be like. Caught up at once in the bustle of Nauvoo life. Received back joyfully among his loving family. He wasn’t prepared for this. He led Sally carefully to the bedroom. “Thank you all,” he said to them all from the door, without looking back.

As he closed the door behind him, someone said, “We love you, Charlie.” Either it was that or the closing of the door, or maybe both that made him cry. He and Sally wept together wordlessly for a long time. It was only later that he remembered that it was Harriette who had said it. Cold Harriette who had known what he needed to hear.

Father’s sketches were beautiful. Charlie had them framed and hung them on the wall. He changed the order of the pictures many, many times in the next few months. He wasn’t sure why, except that there had to be some way to arrange them that would give meaning to her story. The smiling child, the girl sleeping, Alexandra in profile, reaching upward. Some way to arrange the pictures that would let her move, let him hear her voice, let her hand reach out to him. He tried every combination of pictures, over and over, but none of them satisfied him longer than a day.

The rumors of polygamy were impossible to quell. People sworn to secrecy had a way of figuring they could tell
one
particular friend or relative; even when they didn’t set out to tell, they often didn’t know how to slip around a direct question without giving something away. Those few who really were discreet still took some pleasure from leaving hints that they knew something that others didn’t know. Pride in having special knowledge is an all-too-common trait. The trouble was, it let the curious know there was a secret lying about. They started searching for it and the facts were findable, if you searched enough. So the rumors spread through Nauvoo, invariably doing harm. Some who heard them didn’t believe that the Prophet would counsel such a law—when they
did
find out the truth, they felt betrayed. Others believed in the Principle as soon as they heard of it, but didn’t understand how rigidly Joseph meant it to be lived, and thought it gave license for promiscuity. Still others believed that Joseph Smith was teaching polygamy, but didn’t believe that God had anything to do with it. And, slowly but surely, the enemies of the Principle became the enemies of the Church and, most particularly, the enemies of Joseph Smith. Polygamy, in the end, was in large part the cause of Joseph’s death.

But the rumors seemed manageable at the time. Joseph Smith was most concerned about the select group of Saints who were commanded to live the Principle. Almost all of them came from a rigidly Puritan background, from old New England families whose ancestors had learned religion from John Winthrop and Increase Mather. They longed to be members of the original Church of Christ, the one they believed Jesus and the apostles formed at Jerusalem, the one revealed as much in the Old Testament as in the New. They had been weaned on the belief that the original church taught the only correct way to worship God. They accepted Joseph Smith’s new church only because they believed it was old—the very gospel God had taught to Adam, to Abraham, to Moses, to Peter. They did not accept polygamy out of lust or sexual repression—that is the obsession of our post-Freudian times, and to interpret pre-Victorians in that light is to blind ourselves to who they really were. They had a deep-seated revulsion to adultery or anything that smacked of it. Brigham Young later said that when he learned the law of plural marriages it was the only time in his life that he ever envied the dead. Most of Joseph’s followers lived polygamy either out of blind obedience or—and for independent-minded Americans this is much more likely—because it fit the pattern. If God had once given plural wives to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to David and Solomon, then at the restoration of all the ancient gospel it only made sense that he would give plural wives to Joseph, Brigham, and Heber. They received the law as a commandment of a demanding God. It is no accident that the women who entered into polygamy were likely to be, not the weakest-willed, but the strongest, most gifted women of the Latter-day Saints.

Emma Smith, however, was slow to accept the Principle, and after Joseph’s death she pretended that he had never taught it, that it had been invented after his death by Brigham Young, whom she detested. Perhaps she was actually able to shut those nightmare years in Nauvoo from her mind and truly believe that her husband never practiced plural marriage. But the fact remains that after years of bitter resistance, Emma Smith did give in, at least momentarily, to the Principle of Celestial Marriage. It is not hard to understand her reluctance. What is hard to understand is why she ever accepted it. It was not a godlike Prophet who taught the law to her, it was her husband. She did not learn it all at once, unfolded as an orderly doctrine—she learned it bit by bit, as rumors kept coming to her of her husband’s apparent philandering. She could not hear another man command her husband to take another wife—she had only her husband’s word that it was God’s law. Besides, even if she believed the law she didn’t think it fair to require her to live it. She had already given up more than most women. She never had a normal home, she and her husband were constantly at the beck and call of the Saints, and even when he was home Joseph was distracted from his family by the concerns of the Church. What little she had of him, she had no wish to share. Surely God had already required enough of her.

But the pressure to live the Principle was more than she could withstand. Joseph supplied most of that insistence himself; it was not proper that, with other men’s wives bending to the law, the Prophet’s wife would not. As more men and women entered the Principle, they too put pressure on Emma, until at last, whatever the particular reasons were, she gave in. Even then, like grass springing back after it is crushed, she rejected the Principle again, then surrendered again; refused once more, and probably would have gone on for some time in this pattern of compliance and resistance if her husband had not died.

If this were Emma’s book, I would chart these vicissitudes, weighing the probable reasons for each change. Instead I must leave that for her biographers. It is Dinah’s life that I’m writing about; Emma’s problems matter to me only because Dinah Kirkham’s life was changed when by chance—if you believe in chance—she was with Emma at the first of the times when the Prophet’s wife bowed, at least for a moment, to the Principle.

—O. Kirkham, Salt Lake City, 1981