Saints (69 page)

John Kirkham was the first of his family to leave Nauvoo. The decision was forced on him early. As it became more and more obvious that the Saints would be forced to leave the city, there began to be less and less money to spend on luxuries like portraits. By the end of 1844, John had no income at all. And as the winter went on, he realized that there would be no income for him as a painter for years to come—if he remained with the Church. Out west it was desert country. Out west everyone would have to scrabble for survival. There’d be a need, not for eyes that saw truth and beauty, but for eyes that saw usefulness and fertility.

In the spring of 1845 he packed.

“Where are you going?” Anna asked him.

“I’ve lived on Charlie’s charity long enough,” John said. “I’ve had two requests for portraits from Chicago. I’m going there. I’ll send for you when I’m making enough money to support us both.”

She did not believe that he would ever send for her. He could see it in the distant expression on her face. To her it was just another abandonment, and this time she was determined not to care. “Do what you like,” she said.

She let him kiss her good-bye.

“You don’t believe me,” John said, “but this time I
will
succeed. And I
will
send for you.”

“But will I come?” she asked softly.

He looked at her face, the way it was getting lined and loose with age, though she was only forty-six years old. All the best years gone, John realized, hers as well as mine. But still, that doesn’t mean there can’t be good years. I’ve learned some lessons. I’m not a child now, at last I’m not a child, and I
can
be a good husband for you. Not here, not with the Church. Maybe in Chicago. If not there, New York or Boston or Washington. I
can
.

“I hope you will,” he said.

He looked out the window of the coach as it rolled through Nauvoo on the way east. He had no regrets about leaving the place. Joseph had forgiven him for his adultery, but it had stood as a barrier between him and everyone else since then. Or maybe it wasn’t the knowledge that he had gone awhoring. Maybe it was just the fact that he was a painter, that his whole life was just making pretty pictures to hang on walls. These practical people just couldn’t understand a grown man spending all his time doing something so useless.

Between the buildings he caught glimpses of the Temple; the walls were now up, and the roof was going on. These people
should
have understood him, for they were much more like him than they knew. The mobs were gathering outside the city again; they meant to drive the Mormons into the river if they could not get them out any other way; that Temple would have to be abandoned, and soon, unless the Saints figured out a way to carry ten thousand tons of limestone with them into the west. Yet there they were, working harder than ever to get it finished. Joseph’s Temple would be built, it would be dedicated, or they would die trying. And they wondered why John Kirkham had to paint. Maybe there was some difference between them, but if there was, John couldn’t figure it out. Soon enough he stopped trying. The Temple was out of sight, and the city at the foot of the lake would soon become his home. People didn’t care so much about God there. John would get along.

Almost as soon as Joseph and Hyrum were buried, Charlie had begun dismantling his factory. Because he acted so quickly, he got good prices for his soap-and candle-making equipment. Within a few months, when everyone in Nauvoo was trying to sell their goods to raise money for the westward trek, people lost everything they owned for a few hundred dollars cash. Charlie had memorized Adam Smith as a child; he could not easily be taken by surprise.

The wheelwright business he kept, and expanded into a full-fledged wagon-making shop. There was good business in Nauvoo for a wagonmaker.

When Father left Nauvoo, Charlie took his mother in. Soon Dinah also moved in, and both their little homes were sold for what cash they could bring. Dinah, Sally, Harriette, and Anna began working constantly on sewing canvas wagon covers. The whole family became a thriving business. Someone looking on might well have thought that Charlie was the consummate profiteer, making a fortune from his people’s distress.

Whoever thought that would have been wrong. Charlie was selling the wagons for barely enough to feed his workmen and his family. He sold wagons on credit to Saints that he knew would never have the money to pay. He watched his account books go deeper and deeper into the red, and cared not at all for the impending ruin, as long as he had cash to buy lumber to make the wagons. The Saints would need his wagons, and so his wagons would be there.

If he had learned one thing from Joseph’s death, it was this: that even a good man who loves his wives and children can die. When the news came from Carthage, Charlie did not even weep. Just spent the day playing with his three one-year-old sons. Early in 1843, Sally had borne him twins, and within a week Harriette had given him another son. Sally’s boys were named Joseph Smith Kirkham and Hyrum Smith Kirkham. Harriette’s son was Nephi Clinton Kirkham. They all walked at nine months, and by the time of the martyrdom they were beginning to talk. The day the news came, Charlie played as if to put a lifetime’s worth of it into one afternoon. They ran around and around in the yard, weaving in and out among the stacks of lumber and of finished wheels. He tossed them up into the air and caught them; let them grab on his coat and pull him down into the dirt and wrestle with him; let them teach him all their fingerplays. Harriette and Sally, weeping in grief at the death of the brothers in Carthage, were far more comforted by Charlie’s frenetic playing than they would have been if he had tried to find words to comfort them.

The change in him was not a fleeting thing. He kept his sons with him as much as possible. They toddled around with him through the shop; he did his books almost always with at least one child on his knee, and never scolded unless they spilled the ink. People got used to seeing him on errands in the town, his shay aswarm with boys climbing in and out while he was inside doing business.

He also changed toward Sally and Harriette. He was more affectionate. He was with them more often. He listened much more seriously to their problems; he sought out their advice for his own. It was as if he no longer felt the need to rule in his home; now he merely wanted to live in it, and live happily, and let them show him how.

In the spring of 1845, he introduced his family to a thirty-four-year-old woman named Maria Jones. She was a widow; her husband and children had been murdered in the persecutions in Missouri. She was frightened; it was happening again. Within days it was clear to Sally and Harriette what Charlie had in mind, and they gave consent. He married her, though she was so much older than the rest of the family; she took her place with a needle, stitching canvas, and the family upheld her as the fear in the city grew. She changed the family almost unobtrusively; with her there it was impossible for anyone in the household to regard their problems as real suffering. And her growing hope in a time when the rest of the city was despairing helped the Kirkhams to run against the grain. They managed to be glad.

By the fall of 1845 the financial situation was getting desperate. No one was giving credit to anyone in Nauvoo. Charlie had to pay cash for any lumber that he got, and now most of the lumbermen were trying to get him to take green wood. Charlie knew that wagons built with wood that hadn’t been properly aged would soon be worthless—he refused the wood. His stockpile diminished. He called together his wives, his sister, his mother and told them the problem.

“What do you want us to do?” Harriette asked.

“We have one stockpile of good lumber that we haven’t touched yet,” Charlie said. “But it’s as much yours as mine.”

“Whatever it takes to make good wagons,” Sally said, “we’ll do.”

So the family moved into the cramped space above the factory, and Charlie’s workmen carefully dismantled Charlie’s house. He still made wheels and axle-trees out of the little good new lumber he could get, but the wagons that rolled away from his factory had boxes floored with floorboards from his house, and the white clapboard sides of his wagonboxes became at first a joke and then a mark of pride among the Saints.

When at last the mobs delivered their ultimatum in the dead of winter in the first months of 1846, Charlie’s family left behind the ruins of a house and an empty factory for his creditors to fight over. Their four wagons were filled with supplies enough to support the families of five of Charlie’s workmen; eventually the supplies were stretched to save the lives of twenty other families. Charlie drove the first of his wagons out onto the Mississippi ice himself. His sons, now almost three years old, shouted with excitement and jumped up and down in the wagonbox behind him. It was the best day of their lives so far. And their father was not far from sharing their opinion.

Brigham Young was standing on the western shore to greet the wagons. He waved to Charlie as he neared the roadway up the bank, and cried out, “Blessed is the man who has a quiver full!” Charlie waved back, his sons cheered, and Charlie’s workmen brought the rest of his wagons up the road behind him.

John’s letter arrived the day that Anna was to leave. She held it in her hands, not even rereading it, just stood there in the middle of the empty factory until Dinah came back into the house to fetch her.

“Mother,” she said, “they say the ice could break up this afternoon. If we’re going to cross at all this week, we have to cross now.”

“Someone dropped the letters by,” Anna said. She held out her husband’s letter. Dinah read it.

“I never thought he’d do it,” Dinah said.

Anna smiled. “Neither did I.” That was the one thing she had counted on—that when John left her this time, he had left for good. There was no room in her plans for this.

“What are you going to do?”

Anna took the letter back and looked at it, hoping to find somehow the answer written in the brief paragraph.

That was all. It seemed not to occur to him that she would not come. He was proud of himself; he signed the letter “your husband John,” and Anna could see in the words “I am ready for you now” a declaration of—of what? Adulthood?

But he had been gone nearly a year, and in that time Anna had become a part of Charlie’s household. She was not like Dinah, following a separate path even while fitting in with Charlie’s wives and children. Anna felt sometimes like another child in the home; she did her work, but never had to make any decisions, and was free to give affection and receive it without any responsibilities at all. She did not regard it as a loss. She regarded it as the first happy year of her life, at least that she could remember. She had been a parent for so long; it was good to leave that duty to her children. Charlie and Dinah were so strong that Anna didn’t need to be.

What was John offering that made it inconceivable to go to him? She was not afraid of struggle or hard times—there would be no lack of those in the journey west. But that struggle would be somehow outside her. She would do her assigned duty, and someone else would make sure that it turned out all right. That was it. After doing her best, someone else would make sure that her best was good enough. It was too late for John and her; she had gone to that well once too often, and she was dry. She thought of him and yes, she still loved him. But she no longer wanted to live with him. She wanted, now, to be carried along in someone else’s current, to drink from someone else’s fountain.

She carefully folded the letter. She opened her bag, which was sitting on the well-swept floor. They had left the factory clean. Pride insisted on that. From the bag she took the wooden box where she kept all the forbidden treasures that were behind her now. She set John’s letter inside.

“What’s in that box, Mother?” Dinah asked.

“Letters.”

“But I thought I saw Robert’s handwriting.”

“Oh, yes. He’s written to me several times.”

“You never told me.”

“Should I have?” Anna wondered if she had done wrong.

Dinah shook her head. “I suppose not. How is he?”

“He stood for Parliament.”

“And?”

“He lost. He makes speeches. He’s very, very rich. He has seven children, and Mary is well and happy. John’s son Corey ran away from home. Robert didn’t seem surprised.”

Anna waited. If Dinah asked, then she would tell her.

Dinah asked. “And Val and Honor?”

Anna reached into the box, shuffled through the letters. Near the bottom she found the letter she was looking for. It was in Matthew’s handwriting. She held it out to Dinah.

Dinah looked at it as if she were afraid to touch it. “What does it say?”

“He will let you attend any Church you want. He wants you to come home to your children. Val wrote a little letter at the end. His father must have told him what to say. Don’t read it.”

Still Dinah did not take the letter. “How long ago did it arrive?”

“Six months or so after the Prophet was killed.”

“Why didn’t you give it to me?”

“Because you were happy.” Again Anna studied her daughter’s face. Did I do wrong? Your life is chosen, it is lying before you—do you want to go backward on the path now? “When John came home,” Anna asked, “was it good for you?”

Dinah took the letter from her, opened it and read. When she got to Val’s childish scrawl tears slipped down her cheeks. Anna noticed how, once a tear had taken a certain route, all the tears afterward went the same way. Curious.

“Should I go to John, do you think?” Anna asked.

Dinah folded up her letter, handed it to her mother. “No, Mother.”

“And I don’t think the celestial wife of Joseph Smith can go to Matthew Handy, and rear his children, and be a quiet wife in a Manchester home.”

“No, Mother.” Dinah took the box, closed it, dropped it back into Anna’s bag. Anna felt her daughter’s arm around her trembling as they walked out of the factory together.