Authors: Orson Scott Card
Joseph nodded soberly. “I’ll not rob your children, Sister Dinah. Nor will I force my way into any woman’s bed, even if it is postponing the Lord’s will. But don’t think you’ve fooled the Lord. Your struggle is with him, not with me. We’ll take our vows, we’ll have the seal of heaven, but I won’t know you, woman, until you give yourself to me.”
“You’ll have a long wait before I ask you.”
He smiled wickedly. “Sister Dinah, do you think that the man who sups at Emma’s table needs to go begging afterward to be satisfied?”
The mention of Emma made her shudder. I am doing something terrible even to make a vow to Emma’s husband. How can I fool myself that I’m clean because I deny him my bed?
“Dinah,” Joseph said, “the Lord will bear you up, once you take the step.”
She looked away from him, trying not to cry. “I am the worst traitor I know,” she said.
“Hyrum is waiting in the house.”
They went in the front way. Dinah could hear Emma in the kitchen, giving orders to the girls who were helping her. Dinah wondered if she could face Emma after this, and pretend to be her friend.
“I don’t know you,” she whispered to Joseph.
“You don’t know anything,” he whispered back.
Hyrum waited for them upstairs. Joseph’s eldest son lay asleep in the room. They whispered so as not to wake him. Joseph and Dinah knelt and joined hands, and Hyrum administered a strange oath that spoke of kingdoms; she tried to follow the words but could not. She wasn’t even sure when the oath had ended.
“Now you say yes,” Hyrum prompted.
She turned to Joseph. “If I say yes, then am I truly your wife forever? And my children will belong to me?”
“To us,” Joseph whispered.
“If you have lied to men, may God damn you to hell forever.”
He made no answer, just gazed at her without expression.
Where was the light that she had so relied on? Why was there no witness that she was doing the right thing? She felt frightened, abandoned; Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. What games was God playing with her life?
“Yes,” she said.
Then Hyrum said the words that joined them for time and all eternity, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.
She closed her eyes. What have I done? she asked. And then, in answer, the light erupted within her. It was stronger than it had ever been before. She dared not open her eyes, or it would blind her; she dared not speak, or she would be left mute. At last, when she thought she could bear no more, the light brimmed and flowed over, through her hand where the Prophet held her, rushed into him and left her exhausted and exalted and, for the moment at least, sure.
Now she could open her eyes. Joseph’s eyes were still closed, and tears flowed down his cheeks. How could he contain such power, if she could not? Was he so much more copious than she? She, too, began to weep. In the blur of tears she thought she saw him dead, his eyes stitched shut, his face slack and sagging backward, his lips long in an imitation of a smile. She saw hands take a metal bowl filled with plaster, and press it against the face, and then withdraw, leaving the plaster to harden with the inverse of Joseph Smith contained there. But the deathmask was a lie, she knew—the man was not this face, the mask would show nothing of him. The man was made of light inside. She had passed her test, and God had given her an assurance.
“I know you now,” he whispered. “You had another name, before you were born. Our Savior called you by that name, and touched your head, and ordained you to a great work. He called you Evening Star. He called you Daughter of Light.”
He took his hand away from her. It burned and stung when he pulled away, as if the flesh had been grafted together as the light passed through. He doubled over and buried his face in his hands, elbows resting on his knees, his body shaking. She watched him, wondering why at the moment of their marriage she had been shown a vision of his death. She was certain that the death of his body should mean nothing to her, for he was not this body. He had grown far greater than the borders of his flesh: the whole Church was a part of himself, and anyone who thought
Joseph Smith
was the name of a man and nothing more did not know either him or the Church he had created. The whole shape of Nauvoo, of the Church in the far-off branches of England, that was all a part of him, and when they pressed the plaster on that stiffened face they would not be taking Joseph’s shape. As long as the Church lived, Joseph would live and grow. She was the bride of something stronger and more beautiful and more terrible than a man.
“When you die,” she said, “you’ll get no tears from me.”
And his weeping ended, and he knelt erect, taking his hands from his eyes and looking in her face. He smiled. “Then you know me, too.”
Hyrum stepped to her, took her hand and lifted her from where she knelt upon the floor. “It’s dangerous to stay any longer,” he said. “We must go and plan a school.”
“You don’t need to salary me,” she said. “I’m doing well enough.”
“Dammit, woman,” Hyrum said, “we want you for the school whether you marry him or not.”
“Oh,” she said, and followed him to the door. She glanced back at the man who was now, somehow, her husband; he was not looking at her. Instead he was stroking his son’s forehead where the boy slept. Hyrum pulled her out just when little Joseph awoke. As the door closed, she heard the child asking, “Why are you crying, Papa?”
She and Hyrum went to the sitting room and wrote up the documents establishing the school. She had authority to buy as many as thirty books—a luxurious endowment, and she wondered if there were thirty books to be had here without going to Chicago. She had authority to rent a schoolroom and place an advertisement in the
Times and Seasons
. It was all very calm and businesslike.
At supper she amazed herself by acting and feeling perfectly natural with Emma. She did not feel shame at having taken vows with her friend’s husband. She did not feel the contempt of a mistress toward the deceived wife. The sisterly love she felt before was stronger than ever, if it was changed at all. Hypocrisy was not so difficult an art as she had thought.
That night she wrote again to Val and Honor. I love you, she wrote, again and again. I love you, and it is not a lie. When you grow up you’ll know that sometimes the right thing to do seems like the very worst, and then you’ll forgive me, even if you are too young to forgive me now. You are my only children, and even though I can’t be with you, I know you will be mine forever.
If the day’s vows had accomplished nothing more, they had accomplished that. The children would be hers forever. She had God’s word on it. And wasn’t she his Evening Star, his Daughter of Light? God would not let her believe a lie, surely. After opening so many doors in her life that led nowhere but to other doors, now surely she was home.
In which fields are plowed, seeds are planted, and yet the ground is fallow after all
.
For a woman who wrote and spoke almost continuously for many decades, Dinah Kirkham remains annoyingly elusive. Right at the crucial time between Joseph Smith’s proposal and the consummation of their marriage, she stopped writing daily entries and started putting poetry in her journal. For someone analyzing her role as the foremost Mormon poet in the nineteenth century, all this is very exciting, but I don’t think her poems are all that good and finding page after page of them right when her life was at such crisis infuriated me. It was as if she could see me prying into her confidential writings a hundred-forty years later and said, “Snoop all you like, but you’ll not get this from me.”
So I snooped somewhere else. I’m not a folklorist, but I like reading what the folklorists collect. And in one collection from southern Utah in the 1930s, I found something that may or may not explain anything to you—but it explains a lot to me. There was a peddler story that had several variants in Utah’s Dixie, but the oldest variant was one told by a centenarian who had once been a student in Dinah Kirkham’s school. And he claimed that he was telling the story exactly the way Aunt Dinah told it to him. It’s thick with the accents of Mormon back country, but I had no trouble translating it into Dinah’s crisp Midlands speech. To you, Dear Reader, this all may seem a digression. But then, you’re always free to skip my little “First Word” sections and get on with the book.
I
think her story of a farmwife’s choice is an explanation, at least in part, of the choice Dinah herself made.
Once there was a woman who had five children that she loved with all her heart, and a husband who was kind and strong. Every day her husband would go out and work in the fields, and then he’d come home and cut wood or repair harness or fix the leaky places in the roof. Every day the children would work and play so hard they wore paths in the weeds from running, and they knew every hiding place in two miles square. And that woman began to be afraid that they were too happy, that it would all come to an end. And so she prayed, Please send us eternal happiness, let this joy last forever. Well, the next day along came a mean-faced old peddler, and he spread his wares and they were very plain—rough wool clothing, sturdy pots and pans, all as ugly and practical as old shoes. The woman bought a dress from him because it was cheap and it would last forever, and he was about to go, when suddenly she saw maybe a fire in his eyes, suddenly flashing bright as a star, and she remembered her prayer the night before, and she said, “Sir, you don’t have anything to do with—happiness, do you?”
And the peddler turned and glowered and said, “I can give it to you, if you want it. But let me tell you what it is. It’s your kids growing up and talking sassy, and then moving on out and marrying other children who don’t like you all that much, at least at first. It’s your husband’s strength giving out, and watching the farm go to seed before your eyes, and maybe having to sell it and move into your daughter-in-law’s house because you can’t support yourselves no more. It’s feeling your own legs go stiff, and your fingers not able to tat or knit or even grip the butter churn. And finally it’s dying, lying there feeling your body drop off you, wishing you could just go back and be young with your children small, just for a day. And then—”
“Enough!” cried the woman.
“But there’s more,” said the peddler.
“I’ve heard all I mean to hear,” and she hurried him out of the house.
The next day, along comes a man in a bright painted wagon, with a horse named Carpy Deem that he shouted at all the time. A medicine man from the East, with potions for this and pills for that, and silks and scarves to sell, too, so bright they hurt your eyes just to look at them. Everybody was healthy, so the woman didn’t buy any medicine. All she bought was a silk, even though the price was too high, because it looked so blue in her golden hair. And she said to him, “Sir, do you have anything to do with happiness?”
“Do you have to
ask
?” he said. “Right here, in this jar, is the elixir of happiness—one swallow, and the best day of your life is with you forever.”
“How much does it cost?” she asked, trembling.
“I only sell it to them as have such a day worth keeping, and then I sell it cheap. One lock of your golden hair, that’s all. I give it to your Master, so he’ll know you when the time comes.”
She plucked the hair from her head, and gave it to the peddler, and he poured from the bottle into a little tin cup. When he was gone, she lifted it up, and thought of the happiest day of her life, which was only two days before, the day she prayed. And she drank that swallow.
Well, her husband came home as it was getting dark, and the children came to him all worried. “Something’s wrong with Mother,” they said. “She ain’t making no sense.” The man walked into the house, and tried to talk to his wife, but she gave no answer. Then, suddenly, she said something, speaking to empty air. She was cutting carrots, but there were no carrots; she was cooking a stew, but there was no fire laid. Finally her husband realized that word for word, she was saying what she said only two days ago, when they last had stew, and if he said to her the words he had said then, why, the conversation at least made some sense.
And every day it was the same. They either said that same day’s words over and over again, or they ignored their mother, and let her go on as she did and paid her no mind. The kids got sick of it after a time, and got married and went away, and she never knew it. Her husband stayed with her, and more and more he got caught up in her dream, so that every day he got up and said the same words till they meant nothing and he couldn’t remember what he was living for, and so he died. The neighbors found him two days later, and buried him, and the woman never knew.
Her daughters and daughters-in-law tried to care for her, but if they took her to their homes, she’d just walk around as if she were still in her own little cottage, bumping into walls, cutting those infernal carrots, saying those words till they were all out of their minds. Finally they took her back to her own home and paid a woman to cook and clean for her, and she went on that way, all alone in that cabin, happy as a duck in a puddle until at last the floor of her cabin caved in and she fell in and broke her hip. They figure she never even felt the pain, and when she died she was still laughing and smiling and saying idiotic things, and never even saw one of her grandchildren, never even wept at her husband’s grave, and some folks said she was probably happier, but not a one said they were eager to change places with her.
And it happened that a mean-looking old peddler came by and watched as they let her into her grave, and up rode a medicine man yelling at his horse, and he pulled up next to the peddler.
“So she bought from you,” the peddler said.
And the medicine man said, “If you’d just paint things up a little, add a bit of color here and there, you’d sell more, friend.”
But the peddler only shook his head. “If they’d ever let me finish telling them, they’d not be taken in by you, old liar. But they always send me packing before I’m through. I never get to tell them.”
“If you’d begin with the pleasant things, they’d listen.”
“But if I began with the pleasant things, it wouldn’t be true.”
“Fine with me. You keep me in business.” And the medicine man patted a truck filled with gold and silver and bronze and iron hairs. It was the wealth of all the world, and the medicine man rode off with it, to go back home and count it all, so fine and cold.
And the peddler, he just rode home to his family, his great great great grandchildren, his grey-haired wife who nagged, the children who complained about the way he was always off on business when he should be home, and always hanging about the house when he ought to be away; he rode home to the leaves that turned every year, and the rats that ate the apples in the cellar, and the folks that kept dying on him, and the little ones that kept on being born.
*
Fortunately, Dinah’s stories and poems aren’t the only source we have for this time in her life. She did have a confidante. During the months prior to Charlie’s wedding, Dinah became close to Harriette Clinton, Sally’s forbidding older sister. Dinah had never forgotten that it was Harriette who gave her a book of poems to comfort her in her grief on the
North America:
now the woman who was the strength of so many others turned to Harriette for buttressing. Harriette wrote nothing about it at the time, but years later, when she was writing to a friend in defense of plural marriage in the 1870s, she talked about Dinah’s struggle. Though Harriette’s version of events is colored by the fact that she was trying to defend polygamy, I think she is trustworthy when it comes to her plain recounting of events. That’s where I learned about Dinah’s arrangement with Joseph for a platonic marriage. And from some internal patterns in Harriette’s letter, I feel secure in placing the date of the end of that arrangement at the same time as Charlie’s wedding to Harriette’s sister.
With that I am once again skipping several months in which nothing all that important happened. Charlie finished building his factory, and it made a great deal of smoke and stink and money from the first day. John Kirkham finished the portrait of Mary Fielding Smith, and it was such a great success that he was at once flooded with commissions. Though his Nauvoo clients paid nothing like London society, he made enough to support him and Anna in a little clapboard house on a half-lot on Parley Street just under the brow of Temple Hill. He would have made even more, but there were some portraits he refused to paint: John Bennett’s, for instance, and Joseph Smith’s, the one because he’d do too much justice to the subject, the other because he didn’t understand him well enough.
And Dinah—Dinah systematically prepared herself to be Joseph Smith’s secret wife in more than name. She rented a one-room cabin on Mulholland, four blocks east of the temple, a part of town so new that the streets weren’t even pegged off yet, so isolated that she had no neighbors close enough to see her dooryard through the trees and bushes standing here and there. Even though she probably did not realize her own purpose, she had established herself in a place where even a man as well known as Joseph Smith could secretly come and go in darkness without being seen. In the meantime she prepared her lessons and taught them, becoming a favorite with her students. And she continued her service as a ministering angel among the women, all the while struggling to find an adequate reason to do what she longed to do: invite her illegal eternal husband to her bed.
—O. Kirkham, Salt Lake City, 1981