Saints (33 page)

As the Saints were drifting away, Charlie saw Harriette and Sally well to the back, and Sally waved at him. He smiled at her, wishing insanely that he could go with her wherever she was going tonight. That lustful desire passed quickly, though, when he saw Harriette also lift her hand to him. Charlie touched his brow to salute her and smiled, in thanks for her gift to Dinah. Harriette actually smiled in return. Then, to Charlie’s delight, Sally quickly drew her sister away. I earned a smile from Harriette, and Sally’s jealous of her sister. I’m not the only one mad with love.

A bit later the first mate clumped into steerage and loudly announced, “Storm comin’ up, and captain says all’s to be tied down fast. We’re in for a good rocking tonight.” There was an hour of bustle as the unprepared borrowed rope from those who could spare it, and then supper was cold bread and little of that, because fires were forbidden and many of the Saints had forgotten and tied down their food boxes. Charlie didn’t mind. Hunger now and then was a sort of pleasure, and the prospect of a storm was exciting. He came alive in wind, and had long suspected that the pagans might have been right about God dwelling in sheets of rain and lightning. Snug inside the ship, the rainstorm should be invigorating.

Soon enough, however, he and all the company discovered that a good rocking was not the same as sitting indoors a tight little house listening to the howl of the wind outside. The ship did not sway, now it lurched from side to side, and you could never be sure which way it would move next in its incredible wandering through pitch, roll, and yaw. Being two decks down, they could not hear any rain or wind, just the agonized shrieking of the timbers and the whine of the rigging like a dream of hell. For Charlie, it was more excitement than he would have wished, and now for the first time he felt a touch of queasiness. However, many others who had already been ill were now violently sick, and soon the stench of vomit had Charlie cursing the first mate for not warning the Saints not to eat any supper at all.

Anna and John were sick enough that they had to lie down, but Charlie and Dinah were both much better off, and soon they were moving among the Saints, mopping up vomit, soothing the panicky, and carrying water for washing and drinking. The children had it worst—there was not a one under the age of five who wasn’t sick, and in their fear they had no patience. They screamed in terror until they vomited, then choked on it until they were able to start screaming again. There would be little sleep in steerage that night. It was not until well toward morning that the storm eased off enough that the exhausted, fevered children could sleep, and then the groaning adults began to doze. Charlie made Dinah lie down then, while he and Elder Turley and William Clayton drew seawater and brought it down into steerage and washed the vomit from the deck.

At dawn, Elder Turley ordered the whole company on deck to wash. If they were to survive the voyage, they would have to stay clean, and it was all the more vital when many of them were ill. The sky was still lowering, but the sea was calmer in the grey light. They washed in seawater, of course, since fresh water was for drinking. The men stripped down and bathed entire, but the women soon realized there was no preventing the sailors in the rigging from having a look at anything they did, so the women had to content themselves with washing face and hands and mopping at their dresses. The seawater took care of the sweat and oil and dirt, but it left behind its own residue of salt, which so itched and irritated that some of the Saints had to use some of their precious rations of fresh water to dab it off their faces. Then the men regretted that they hadn’t followed the women’s practice, for they hadn’t fresh water enough to rinse their whole bodies.

By noon, however, the storm came up again and no one cared much whether they itched or not. The first mate brought them the dismal news that they were pretty much pacing the gale—it would be with them for some days. Elder Turley led them in prayers for the health and strength of the company and the protection of the ship, and they went below again.

The second night was worse than the first. And now the condition of some of the children became serious. The Corbridges’ infant son John, in the berth right across from Dinah and Anna, cried without ceasing all day and all night. He couldn’t even keep water in his stomach, and retched in dry agony when there was nothing left in him. He had a high fever by evening. Dinah stayed with the Corbridges most of the night, trying to give the child water from her own ration—and Anna’s and John’s and Charlie’s as well. Charlie even had a turn standing in the aisle holding the boy, trying to outguess the movement of the ship to give the child something close to a steady berth. Little John did not sleep, did not drink, did not eat, and his fever did not break.

It was not just steerage that suffered. They heard at dawn that a little girl in second-class had gone insane from fear, screaming constantly; she died before morning, though whether from fear or the extreme vomiting could not be determined. The storm abated the next day, and the girl was quickly buried at sea. But now several children were very ill, despite the calmer waters, and Charlie watched as Dinah became something of an angel, always at the berth of a crying child, comforting the parents, who knew that some children were bound to die on the voyage and were terrified that their own would be among that number. And when in calmer moments the children had some peace, Dinah still did not rest, but brought water and thin broth to the many adults who lay helpless and groaning in their stinking berths. Some of the adults could not bring themselves to leave their berths even to make water or move their bowels, and so new stenches were added to the smell of puke. And pouring seawater across the floor would not be enough now—some had defecated in their clothing, and many had left night soil in their berths.

The worst of it, to Charlie’s mind, was that many of the Saints were not behaving like Saints at all—there was a good deal of grumbling, and some who even said quite openly that they doubted God would have commanded them to bring their children out to die. Elder Turley called the Saints together and tried to smoothe things over, but some refused to cooperate. One man said right out that he expected the Corbridges’ son to die. Sister Corbridge began to cry; it was a dreadful night, and Charlie was hard-pressed to find anything uplifting to write in the journal. So he wrote about Dinah, who, despite near sleeplessness night after night, still held little John Corbridge until at last, fevered and frantic and utterly worn out, he finally cried himself to sleep. Then she laid the infant in Sister Corbridge’s arms and all were asleep in a few minutes.

The child died in his sleep before morning. At dawn Sister Corbridge held the little body while Anna and the child’s father sewed a length of sail cloth to hold him. The captain ordered that all dead were to be put into the sea within the hour—it would do no good to have corpses around to cause worse gloom, and perhaps spread disease. It was very wise of him, but the hurry of it made the poor Corbridges frantic with grief.

Dinah embraced Sister Corbridge as they watched the child being committed to the deep, as Captain Lower called it. The sea was so rough that they couldn’t even hear the splash. Sister Corbridge wept bitterly, and Dinah held her as her husband looked helplessly on. Charlie went to the man, if only because no one else did. “I’m sorry,” he said.

James Corbridge managed a little smile in return. “I have no lack of faith,” he said. “And it says in the Book of Mormon, doesn’t it, that little children who die unbaptized are taken straight to the arms of Christ?” Charlie nodded, marveling that the man could take such comfort from words in a book, even if the book
was
true.

After the burial, going down into steerage again was a shock. They had known it smelled bad before, but not
how
bad until now, when they came from the fresh air of the deck. “It’s unliveable,” Elder Turley said to William Clayton and Charlie. “They’ve been shitting in the berths.”

“Well,” said William Clayton, “if they won’t take care of themselves,
we’ve
got to take care of them.”

Turley pondered for a moment, and then said, “All right, William. Boil some seawater. Some folks will have a bath this morning on deck, and while they’re up here, we’ll have their berths scrubbed down. We won’t become animals, and that’s final.”

Charlie and Elder Turley went down to steerage and began following their noses, an infallible guide to those who needed washing. There were protests, of course, as they carried grown men and women onto the deck, where others stripped them and washed them. But those too weak to get up and put their night soil where it belonged were generally too weak to struggle much. Clothes were washed, berths were scrubbed out, and by nightfall, though the storm was still with them, it became clear that the worst was over. The sheer activity had helped those who did the work, and the cleaner air helped all the rest. Sailors came through steerage burning oil to clear the last of the odors, and then Elder Turley insisted that they have a prayer meeting and sing all the cheerfulest hymns they could find.

There wasn’t much to be happy about—two children had already died, and others were deathly ill—but the singing perked their spirits and reminded them that they were on God’s errand. And in the prayer meeting, Brother Corbridge got to his feet and bravely told the company that he regretted nothing about the voyage, and never would. “I chose to follow the Lord, and the devil can rock the boat all he likes, he won’t break
me
.” There was anger in Corbridge’s voice, and tears in his eyes, but he had drawn the battle lines properly: This wasn’t a struggle of men against a cruel God, it was a struggle of Saints against the forces of sin. They saw their afflictions in a different light, then. Those who died were martyrs, not victims of fate, and God was accepting their suffering as sacrifice, for which they would be rewarded in time to come.

That night, Charlie and Dinah took a moment’s rest together on the ladderway leading up to the second deck. There were some groans, but things were quieter than they had been in some time.

“The Lord’s a harsh teacher,” Dinah said.

“With sometimes a vague lesson at best.”

“For me it isn’t vague,” Dinah said. “Tonight my children are alive and warm and safe. They have all their lives ahead of them, while little John Corbridge lies at the bottom of the sea. I have nothing to complain of.”

Charlie wondered if she really believed that. But he would not argue. Whatever comfort could be taken in a difficult time was welcome. And sometimes it did not matter if the comfort was a lie or an illusion—it was true because it had to be true, and to hell with anyone who insisted on facts or logic.

“Charlie,” Dinah said, closing her eyes and leaning back on the ladder, “do you remember the Tennyson? ‘The Lotus-Eaters’?”

He did.

“The very beginning, before the choric song.”

He began to recite, from memory, with few hesitations—he had lost none of that gift. And finally he came to the end of the part she had asked for, and realized why she had wanted to hear it.

Dinah sighed deeply when he finished. “Have no doubt of it, Charlie. We’re going home now. And no one will ever bar the door and turn us away.”

“Zion,” Charlie said, and it was a question.

“Worth every cost,” Dinah said, and it was the answer.

People get used to things. Good or bad, if they go on long enough, people just don’t notice them anymore. I don’t mean that they forget. Nobody on the
North America
said, “Hey, you know? This isn’t so bad after all.” They knew it was terrible. They just stopped being surprised about it.

It was the same thing when they got to Nauvoo. Charlie had heard all the glowing reports of Zion being built, the city of God, Nauvoo the beautiful. So what was he to think of row after row of miserable mud-chinked cabins? Weeds wherever there weren’t wheel tracks? He wasn’t used to so much sunlight all in the same day, especially getting on into fall. The first day there his eyes were full of tears all day, usually because of the dust in the air. A horse riding by would raise more of a cloud than a steam locomotive. And then next day it rained. No dignified shower, either, it was what the old-time Mormons were calling a frog-strangler. Main Street was so wet that you could have got to the end of it and walked right on into the Mississippi and never known the difference. And everybody dressed poorer than even the poorest people of Manchester. Even men who should have known better would come out in public in shirt-sleeves, like factory hands; he even saw a few men stripped right to the waist, chopping wood or wrestling stumps, and people would talk to them like normal. He didn’t know that here in the West people weren’t so picky about wearing coats all the time.

But it was only the surprise of it, really, that had him worried. Within a week he stopped caring that the four of them had to live in a mud hut. After all,
everyone
lived in mud huts, or almost everyone, or at least all the newcomers, of whom there were plenty. He still noticed the weather was disgusting and the air was as wet as fog even when the sun shone, and he even complained about it, but he complained like a native, not like a stranger. He stopped comparing. He made friends, even if they had accents like slow-witted Yorkshiremen. Heber Kimball had talked that way, after all; it was part of his charm. He found some people who could read, and had a taste for his kind of humor. And one close friend: the prophet’s own brother, Don Carlos Smith.

It began with Charlie stopping by the editorial office of the
Times and Seasons
to offer to correct spelling errors for them. Young Don Carlos was the editor, and he laughingly confessed that the spelling errors were his own. “I think of my spelling as an interesting reorganization of the English language.” There would be no income in working for the Nauvoo newspaper—it barely supported Don Carlos. But the two young men liked each other immediately, and Don Carlos saw to it that they were together often after that. He made Charlie teach him stanza after stanza of Wordsworth while Don Carlos taught Charlie how to milk a cow, how to watch for chuckholes in meadows because the horses were too dumb to notice, and how to chop efficiently through a thick log without losing a foot. Charlie would get along fine in this frontier town. He decided, in fact, to forgive Nauvoo’s shortcomings. As he told Anna and John, it was a new city, wasn’t it? Just springing up out of nothing. They shouldn’t expect too much of it. Things would be fine.

But Dinah—hers was a different story. She hadn’t been so starry-eyed as Charlie. Dinah had listened closely to the Brethren, noticed that they talked a bit vaguely whenever they described what Nauvoo was actually like
now
rather than what it would be in ten, twenty years. The mud huts, the vile roads, the mosquitoes, the filth—that didn’t faze her. She settled down to her work, and in the process helped all her fellow immigrants cope with the shock of it all. Of course the houses are only huts, she said, of course the fields are rough and weedy. What did you think we were coming for, if it wasn’t to build Zion? And why would God need you to build Zion, if it was already done up in brick and clapboard with cobbled roads? She was a great comfort to them all, without particularly noticing herself doing it. But it wasn’t that she had no expectations. It’s just that all her expectations were tied up in the Prophet, in Joseph Smith, and it took a while before she got to know him. Took a while before she could be disappointed.

Which is why I’m not going to tell you any more about the voyage and the overland trip and the first few weeks at Nauvoo than I already have. A better writer would have made you feel every roll of the ship, every miserable moment of rail and lake steamer and log raft getting across America, and probably would have broken your heart with disappointment over Nauvoo. But I can’t bring it off. I tried. There are a hundred pages of Getting To Nauvoo that you’ll never see—because it bored me. It was dull. Frightening things happened, there was enough angst for Henry James to write a thousand commas—but everybody took it in stride. It didn’t change anybody. So I’m telling you it happened and then skipping it. And picking up where life gets interesting again. And, as many people found out in Nauvoo, everything interesting happened near Joseph Smith, or because of Joseph Smith, or whenever his back was turned.

—O. Kirkham, Salt Lake City, 1981