Saints (54 page)

Only after Bennett was out of sight did Joseph allow himself to move. Still he talked to no one. He walked to his house. Charlie opened the door and stepped in before him, smoothly closed the door after him when he was inside, so that Joseph did not have to touch the door at all. The scene had gone as well as Joseph could make it go. Bennett had made sure that what was talked about most in Nauvoo was the extremity of his grief. But from this moment on, a picture would remain in everyone’s mind, Joseph Smith standing in judgment while Mayor Bennett was led away weeping. Joseph might want to trust Bennett again, but he wanted to make sure that there was not the slightest confusion in the city of Nauvoo about who was Prophet and who was not.

Emma was waiting for him in the parlor. Her eyes were bright with triumph. “I was right,” she said.

“You were right that he’s a liar,” Joseph said quietly. “But you were wrong to think that’s all he is.”

“I know. He’s an adulterer, too.”

Her point was so telling that Joseph had to laugh. “Yes, he even found a sin to commit that no one had thought to accuse him of. He’s a resourceful fellow, isn’t he?”

Emma had not meant to amuse him. “How could you make a man like that Assistant President of Christ’s church?”

That was not an amusing question. It was still less amusing that she asked it in front of his clerk. Charlie was trustworthy, but he was also naive, and it was cruel of Emma to openly question the Prophet’s authority. “I don’t always know what a man
is
,” Joseph said. “Most times I only know what a man
does
.”

“Why didn’t you ask the Lord?”

“I thought the Lord had already told me. I reckon I misunderstood.” He looked at Emma steadily, as if to say
enough
.

She didn’t think it was enough. “For near a year Hyrum and I and half a dozen others have been trying to tell you that. But you trusted him and not us.”

“Emma,” Joseph said, “I trust you and Hyrum always to be
loyal
. But I’ll never trust anybody to be
right
, because the minute I do that I might as well auction off my brains, I’d have no more use for them. The Lord didn’t call me to be prophet in order to make
your
mistakes. He called me as prophet in order to make
my
mistakes. You were partly right and I was partly wrong. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again, but it’ll never happen on anything the Lord tells me direct. Do you understand that, Emma? Just because Joseph Smith Junior makes a mistake doesn’t mean that God makes mistakes. It just means that I’m not a puppet.”

“Neither am I,” Emma said. “I’ll say what I like.”

“Say it to the walls, then. Come on, Charlie.”

Joseph walked through the house to the back door, Charlie at his heels. Once they were well away from the house, Joseph stopped. “That’s all, Brother Charlie. You might as well go home and tend to your own affairs for the rest of the day.”

Charlie was surprised. “Didn’t you want me to come with you? I had work to do in the house—”

“Charlie, if I left you there in the house you would have had a conversation with Emma. And in the course of that conversation, whether you wanted to or not, you would have had to decide whether you were her friend or mine. Whichever way you decided, your life wouldn’t be very easy in Nauvoo afterward.”

“Thanks, then. But I can go with you wherever you’re going.”

“Where I’m going now, you wouldn’t be useful.”

Charlie looked a little hurt as he went his way, but there was no helping that. Joseph couldn’t very well say to him, Sorry, but I’m going to visit your sister in her cabin and you can’t come along because there’s a good chance we might spend part of the visit in bed.

Joseph saddled up a mare and was leading her out the stable door before Porter Rockwell reached him. “Howdy,” said Port.

“Howdy,” said Joseph.

“You gonna wait for me to saddle up, or are you gonna make me ride bareback?”

“Don’t want you with me, Port.”

Port walked up close to Joseph and in his high, piping voice said, “I know where you’re goin’ whenever you don’t want me with you, Brother Joseph. Furthermore I know that these are not common whores. They are the finest women in the Church, and you are a man of God, and so I put two and two together. Or maybe I put one and about fourteen together, by my present count. With what I know, Brother Joseph, if you couldn’t trust me you’d be readin’ all about it in the Warsaw paper. But you ain’t.”

“No, Port, I ain’t.”

“Now if you’d just let me saddle my horse and ride along with you, I can do a lot to help you get to where you’re goin’ without a troop of people knowin’ right where you’re headed.”

“Saddle up, Port. A man’s a fool if he thinks he can keep a secret from you.”

They rode north toward old Commerce, Illinois, passing through the shanty town where the latest immigrants all lived. A lot of people, mostly children, waved cheerfully from the most miserable homes Joseph had ever seen. We’ve got to get more money in this town before fall, Joseph thought, or we’ll have real suffering from the cold.

At the place where the city plat showed Joseph Street, they rode down into a ravine. The spring rains had near filled it, but now it was just standing water with so many mosquitoes it has hard to breathe without eating them. They rode along the edge of the water, where the ground was firmest, until the ravine opened up to level ground, north and east of the city. Wheatfields and woods. They walked their horses south a ways; then Port stopped with the animals in a grove of trees and Joseph walked on through the trees and underbrush until the last patch of open ground before Dinah’s house. I am a complete fool, thought Joseph. It’s broad daylight, and who knows who might be hunting rabbits. But at least he had sense enough not to skulk. He walked boldly to Dinah’s door and knocked. If anyone was watching, they couldn’t guess he had anything to hide from the way he walked.

She opened the door and let him in. “You are the prince of fools,” she said. “It’s four in the afternoon.”

“I asked all the Saints to look the other way.”

With the door closed and barred, she put her arms around him, and he bent and kissed her.

“That’s what I came for,” Joseph said.

“No it isn’t.”

“Don’t argue with me today.”

Joseph sat down on the chair by Dinah’s writing table. Dinah stood where he had left her. Joseph pulled off his boots. Caked-on mud dropped onto the dirt floor. Still Dinah did not speak. “Emma’s angry with me already.” Still she did not answer.

I played too many scenes today. I walked too far, at far too great a risk. Bennett was a liar and I loved him. I came for refuge, and you are angry, too.

Joseph wearily began to pull on his boots again.

“Going already?”

Dinah’s voice was small and emotional. It only made Joseph wearier. I didn’t come to you for this. And yet he could not leave, because she would be hurt if he left her, and he did not want to hurt anyone else today. How much before it is enough?

“No,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t be the opposite of Emma.”

Joseph bent over and wrapped his arms around his thighs, pressed his face against his knees.

“How can I know what she said before you left? If she was angry, then I have to be happy? If she was cold, then I have to be passionate?”

“No.”

“If John Bennett is found to be a liar, then she can say I told you so and I have to pretend I never heard of the man?”

Joseph looked up at her, surprised.

“Do you think I live in a box? Charlie and Harriette have both been here with the story. It’s been hours, how slowly do you think news spreads? Do you think the world stops when you aren’t watching? Do you think I’m not
alive
when you’re not here?” And then she stopped, and fingered her sleeve. “I’m not,” she said. “But I’m not dead, either. I still listen. I still talk. I still think. Waiting for you.”

Joseph got up from the chair, crossed the room in a single step, and lay down on the bed, his hands behind his head. “Don’t wait for me.”

“Oh, should I come visit you at home?”

“Why have you stopped teaching and talking in the Church? You used to have things to do besides wait for me. You used to be so busy ministering to the women of Nauvoo that I never found you at home unless we planned it.”

He had never seen her so angry as when she answered. “And why don’t you have revelations about how to solve the poverty here? Why isn’t there a miracle to cure all the sick? Why didn’t you know John Bennett was a liar from the start?”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t hate Bennett even now,” he said.

“Everyone thinks you should.”

He laughed bitterly. “Isn’t it funny how neither of us can do what everybody knows we should.”

She laughed, too, and things were as they should be again. Of course he hadn’t come to make Dinah perform for him. It was Dinah herself he came for, because he could say things to her that he had never said before, he could say thoughts that he had used to pretend he didn’t think: the Prophet should say this; Emma’s husband should do that. He wore so many faces and only now after all these years did he discover, not him
self
, but the face that he liked the best. The face that he wore with Dinah, for it never hurt to wear it, though removing all the others,
that
could be painful sometimes.

She knelt beside the bed, gently touching his arm, his face, and thinking carefully about what he said. She always thought about what he said before she spoke, which meant that she never answered from habit, which meant that her answers just might be true.

“How can I hate him?” Joseph asked. “He betrayed his wife with whores and did not keep it secret from her. I betray Emma with wives and lie to her every day. He had only one wife, and he abandoned her. I have many wives, and I abandon them all.”

Dinah played with a fold of her skirt. “Sometimes, Joseph, I love you so much that I feel like an adulteress.”

“Anything that pleases us this much must be a sin, is that it?”

She nodded.

“But when I hear myself thinking of you as my paramour, when I feel that I have been unfaithful to my Emma, I remember this: God gave you to me. And if my Father ever commanded me to leave you, I’d be gone without another word.”

“I know you would.” But she didn’t like it.

“So would you, Dinah.”

“No.”

“If God commanded you, if you knew it was his will—”

“No.”

“You think you wouldn’t, but you
would
obey.”

She put her palms over her eyes and then tipped her face upward, as though she were speaking to God but dared not see his face. “I’d obey Him, but I’d hate Him forever.”

Joseph laughed. “It’s a good thing He isn’t vindictive. That remark would have tempted Him beyond endurance.”

Dinah laughed, too. “So you and I are secretly no better than Bennett.”

“I’m ten times the man he is.”

Dinah began stroking his arm again. “And I’m not like him, either. For instance, I’d never let a friend go into a place where I knew he was in peril of his life, just so I could rescue him spectacularly, for the effect.”

Joseph felt her fingers suddenly grow warm. Or was it his own skin growing cold? “Do you have a story about him, too?”

“Howard Coray brought the news of your arrest at ten. Bennett left Nauvoo at eight to save you. He thought the arrest would happen earlier in the morning, I suppose.”

“John Bennett didn’t plan the whole thing out.” That was too much for Joseph to believe. “He didn’t bring the men from Missouri.
I
chose the judge that I appealed to.
I
kept myself alive until he could pull the political strings to set me free. How could he know that I’d be able to do all that.”

“And if you hadn’t, I wonder who he thought would have succeeded you?”

She had named his fear for him. He trembled. “It’s not enough for my friends to turn on me. They all start thirsting for my blood.”

“But you still don’t want to lose him.”

“John Bennett does not want me dead.”

“John Bennett scares me, Joseph.”

“Who else is there? I can’t govern this city without him. Liar or not, he’s the most brilliant man among us.”

“Then keep him to govern the city. But don’t let him govern the Church.”

“They’re inseparable.”

“Separate them.”

Joseph shook his head again, with such force that he half-rolled back and forth, then rolled over against the wall, his knees drawn up toward his chest, and he shook with the cold. “I finally have the Church together, all in one place, secure from the world for a while, fenced around with laws, and now I have to break us down again, cut us into pieces again.”

“Like the wise virgins and the foolish ones. Let Bennett be mayor of the outward Church, the city, the Nauvoo that everyone sees. And then within the city the True Church. Those who know.”

“Who know what?”

“That I am your wife.”

“I can’t tell that to anyone.”

“There are those who know, Joseph. No one had to tell Harriette—she knows. And your other wives—I’ve found four of them already. We who live this secret life, we know each other’s faces, we know how a woman has to live, finding plausible excuses to be home all the time she can, in hopes her husband will come tonight. Or late one afternoon.”

“Everyone who knows is one more who can betray me.”

“Is the Principle the law of God or not? The more of us who live it, the more of us who can tell the truth to each other, the easier it will be to bear this life. You can have a public life, a public wife, children. Everyone in the Church is your brother or sister. Give me sisters, Joseph.”

She was only asking for what he knew would have to come. The Principle could not be a commandment that only he and his wives obeyed. But he was afraid.

“When the Twelve come home,” he said, “I’ll teach the Principle to them. As soon as they come home.” He felt her climb on the bed behind him; she embraced him, and in the stillness he could hear from her breath that she was crying. Or almost crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked.