Saints (42 page)

“Let me try it on,” he said. He began unbuttoning his shirt. “Did Emma give you my measurements? I don’t know how she could. She hasn’t made me a shirt in years. I keep her too busy at the domestic slavery here.”

Dinah didn’t answer. She was too busy studying the sky framed by lace curtains. She was afraid that if she saw his body again she would discover things about herself that she did not want to know.

“It fits,” Joseph said.

She turned and looked. The linen flowed over his body, smoothly across the woodchopper’s chest, slackly down the wrestler’s belly, to where it bloused at the waist. Yes, it was right, it was a good fit.

“Tailors always manage to get the arms too small.”

She had known to lengthen the sleeves. And make the shoulders more copious than the pattern. And the breast of the shirt broad enough for a man who could crack a man’s ribs with a flex of his arms.

“You didn’t have my measurements, did you?” Joseph said.

She shook her head.

“You only saw me once.”

“You stood close,” she said. “I could remember.”

“Charlie didn’t tell me that you were a seamstress. Still less one who works miracles.”

“It’s not a miracle,” Dinah said. “I—have an eye for that sort of thing.”

“Charlie’s a marvel for ciphering, adds up the columns faster than I can read the numbers. He says you’re the smarter one. Is it true?”

“It isn’t.”

“Charlie’s a liar, then?”

“Will the shirts do?”

“Haven’t I made it plain? They’re the best shirts I’ve ever owned.”

“I’m glad.” She got up from the chair and handed him the other shirt. “I should leave now. I’ve interrupted your rest long enough.”

“Don’t go,” he said.

“It’s snowing. I should go home.”

“When Emma gets back I’ll send you in the carriage.”

“I can’t.”

“Sister Dinah, I want to talk to you.”

But Dinah was afraid to talk to him. Afraid because the shirts had fit; afraid because by chance he was home alone, which never happened; afraid because his eyes still looked at her and said, Mine, and because somewhere in her was something that answered, impossibly, Yours.

“I’m looking for a schoolteacher,” Joseph said.

“Oh,” Dinah said. It was so anticlimactic that she almost laughed. That was what he saw when he looked at her—a schoolteacher!

“For my children. I’m starting up a school. The children are learning nothing right now, they don’t like their master, I thought a clever woman rather than a man—men always get too impressed with themselves for teaching the Prophet’s children. They start trying to make friends with me so I’ll give them a
good
position. I don’t suppose you want to do it, though. Cooped up like a hen in a cockfight, the little demons’d have you up the walls in half an hour.”

Suddenly her fears seemed absurd. He wanted her to teach school. She had to laugh. “Brother Joseph, I never went to school. Not beyond the first few years.”

“You read and write, don’t you? You spell, don’t you?”

“I don’t know the American system. Your Mr. Webster seems to have forgotten how to make a ‘u’.”

“Then teach them the English spelling, do you think I care for that? Just so the children don’t spell like
me
, that’s all.” As an afterthought he added, “Emma was a schoolteacher once. She wasn’t very patient, though. I think that you’d be patient if they don’t learn quickly.”

She wasn’t sure how to answer. She had lived for years for the sake of Val and Honor, but she had left them. It seemed somehow indecent to abandon her own and then take on someone else’s children for money. And yet she was hungry for the sound of small young voices, eager to answer again those impossible questions, those unreasonable demands.

“Or are you too much in love with stitchery to change your line of work?”

“Stitchery!” Dinah said. “No, I’m not in love with it.”

“The pay can’t be much. A tuition of fifty dollars a year, fifteen or twenty students—rent shouldn’t be more than twenty dollars a month—could you live on that?”

Dinah instinctively performed the calculations as he gave the numbers. It might be a thousand dollars a year, with expenses of at least four hundred, counting books and slates and chalk and—

“What about tables and chairs?” Dinah asked.

“Well, to start with we could split a few logs and varnish the smooth face. A few splinters don’t do any great harm to little backsides. You’ll do it, then?”

“I need the money.”

Joseph shook his head. “I don’t want a teacher who does it for the money.”

“I’m afraid.” She had not meant to say it. But he waited for her to go on, and so she did. “That I might come to love them too much.”

“Sister Dinah,” he said softly. “You can never love children too much. Even the ones who are gone.”

The tenderness in his voice spoke of remembered pain. There was no brashness now. The light was bright behind his eyes, and she felt a fire leap in her heart. He knows my sorrow, she told herself.

“I know your sorrow,” he said. “And I promise you, Sister Dinah, that your children will forgive you.”

It was a promise she had never dared to ask for. And yet coming as it did so close behind her hope, she had no way to refuse it; she believed the promise and wept for joy. He stood there, watching her, but she did not care. He had seen her greatest need and answered it truly.

He brought her a handkerchief and she daubed at her eyes.

“Blow your nose, too,” Joseph commanded. “Ladies always pretend their noses never need blowing, as if God made them dry.”

She blew her nose, and then laughed at herself for crying when she was so happy. “Thank you,” she said. For the handkerchief. For the promise.

“Oh, don’t thank
me
for the job. If you can keep my children from growing up fools I’ll be thanking
you
. And so will the parents of the other children. We may all be ignorant Americans, ma’am, but we know the value of education. We aim to have our children smarter than we are.”

“I don’t know how they could,” Dinah said. “You are—very wise.”

“Like Solomon?” asked Joseph.

“No, not Solomon. For terrifying a woman by threatening to kill her child? For marrying a thousand women and forsaking the Lord for their sake? If you ask me, Solomon is one of the classic fools of the Old Testament.”

She had said too much. He was silent, just as Vilate had been the other day when she had burst out with ill-considered words. She was always better off when she said nothing.

But Joseph wasn’t angry. Just thoughtful. As if he were somehow measuring her before he spoke. She held her tongue, though, until he decided to speak. “Do you think,” he asked, “that Solomon had all those wives for venery?”

“I never heard that he was celibate.”

“No, no,” Joseph said, shaking his head. “But those wives were given to him by the Lord. And so were David’s wives, except Bathsheba. That was his sin, that he took a wife given to another man, and that he killed to get her. But there was no sin in the plurality of wives.”

Dinah could not understand why he was telling her this. And yet he said it carefully, as if it were very, very important.

“I want you to understand Solomon,” Joseph said.

“I never think of him at all,” Dinah said. “I was just babbling.”

“No, no, you weren’t,” Joseph said. “I used to think as you did. I’ve always had a hard enough time being a decent husband to one good woman. I couldn’t understand why a man could want a thousand wives.”

Dinah thought of Mr. Uray and shuddered. “I’ve known men who probably wouldn’t be satisfied even with that many.”

“But not men who were chosen of God,” Joseph said. “Not the man that God chose to build his temple.”

“No,” Dinah said. And then she realized that Joseph, too, was a temple builder, and that when he spoke of Solomon he was also, somehow, speaking of himself.

“It was when I was translating the Old Testament,” Joseph said. “There was so much I didn’t understand. David and Solomon—I didn’t understand why God kept blessing them when they were bigamists a hundred times over. And Abraham, and Jacob, wives and wives and wives.”

“Maybe God didn’t mind then.”

Joseph ignored her. “It was in thirty-one. I remember asking Sidney Rigdon about it. Sidney was so wise, I thought. But he hemmed and hawed a little and said a few things that boiled down to the fact that he hadn’t the faintest idea. So I figured I should ask God.”

“Did he answer you?”

“He sent an angel.”

His tone was too bright, too cheerful. A man should be solemn, talking about such things. And yet couldn’t it be such a commonplace to him that he felt no need to get solemn? Or was it something else? He seemed—yes, timid. He was acting the way Charlie did as a child, when he was trying to get away with doing something he knew he shouldn’t have done. Too cheerful, as if to forestall anger. “What did the angel say?”

“That it was the order of marriage in heaven.”

Dinah thought he was joking, his tone was so light. “I thought that in the next life there was neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”

“Those whose marriages have been sealed by the power of God will be married forever, and they’ll have posterity and create kingdoms, worlds without end. In fact, it’s impossible for a man to be exalted without a marriage sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise, and the same for a woman. When Paul said the man is not without the woman, nor the woman without the man, he was speaking in the eternal sense.”

She thought of being in heaven forever with Matthew. It seemed like a better description of hell.

“When your husband refused the gospel, he became unworthy of you. The Lord won’t bind a woman to a swine, Sister Dinah.”

“Then I will be a woman without a man, Brother Joseph. He’ll never divorce me.”

“Don’t you know that a wicked man can never stop the Lord from doing righteousness? That man is
not
your husband. He divorced himself from you in the eyes of God the day he forced you to choose between your children and the gospel.”

She looked to him with hope. “He is not my husband?”

“In the eyes of God. In the next life,
you
will have the children. Mr. Handy was unworthy. His wife and children will be taken from him and given to another.”

This was no jest. The cheerful tone was gone, and he stood now in the middle of the room. She looked in his eyes and the light was now ablaze there. She knew now where his promises were leading, and yet she could not put it into words. Wanted it, but could not name it. And so she answered him with questions. “Given to another! Who? And when?”

“You have been given to me, Sister Dinah.”

She could not move, could not speak. Suddenly all she could see was the perfect stretch of white linen across his chest, knowing what lay under the shirt. He had named it, and it was exactly what she had wanted the moment she first saw him, exactly what she had so feared from that moment on. It was not the light of God in his eyes, it was the light of desire, and it was a perverse, criminal desire. It was her own desire, too. The very shirt he wore was proof of that. Her dream was a lie. It was not the light of God disguised in flesh that she desired. It was flesh pretending to contain the light of God. “I must leave,” she said.

“Please stay.” Stay? She had played this scene before, with Mr. Uray. Then she had been innocent, but now if she stayed it would be consent. Even to hesitate would be a betrayal of Emma, and worse, a betrayal of Val and Honor, who might forgive their mother if she left them for God, but could never forgive her if she left them for adultery. He could not be a prophet and ask for this, she had nothing to gain by staying, she had nothing to lose by going that was not already lost, and yet her feet did not move. She could not understand why she wasn’t already at the door, why she was still listening to him.

“Sister Dinah, I will do you no harm. You’re as safe with me as with your mother. It’s as a wife I want you, honorably, not like a whore.”

“You have a wife,” Dinah said.

“If you were the sort of woman who would accept this eagerly, you wouldn’t be worthy to be asked.”

“You wife is my friend.”

“My aim is not to corrupt the weak, but to exalt the strong.”

She should not have looked at his face again. For he, his voice, though quiet, had power, and the light burned too fiercely in his eyes to be denied; it held her; she could not go. It was not lust: she had seen that in Mr. Uray’s dead, inhuman face.

“Sister Dinah,” Joseph whispered, “when the Lord first told me that I must do this, I felt as you do now. My wife had sacrificed for me, had lived in wretched poverty, had borne me children. I love her dearly and would never hurt her. I had no desire for any other woman. But the angel of the Lord came to me and told me that all things must be restored or my work would not be complete. If I refused this, the mantle would be taken from me and given to another, and I would be cast out of the Kingdom of God.”

She had to answer him, or she would be swept away. And she dared not say the terrible things that she desired. So she put as much contempt in her voice as she could manage. “Does your wife know you do this sort of thing?”

“When I saw you a few days ago, the Spirit whispered to me, This woman will be your wife. When that Spirit speaks, I have learned to obey. Don’t you see how the Lord has brought you here today? Don’t you see how the Lord has already bound you to me?”

Desperate to end the conversation, desperate to leave, she challenged him on the very ground where she herself was weakest. Witheringly she said, “And of course you had no lust for me at all.”

She waited for him to deny it, for him to protest that he was just doing his duty. But instead his face went pale and his gaze went distant, and he whispered, “I could have answered any other woman truthfully. But I can’t think of any answer now that wouldn’t be a lie.” He looked at his hands. They were trembling. “Emma is my wife and she will be forever. If I have to go to hell to fetch her I’ll have her with me. I don’t want you to take her place. You couldn’t do it if you tried.”