Saints

  And I, Dinah thought. What am I doing? She didn't know. When she tried to name herself all she could think of was the Prophet clothed in disguising flesh. She wondered if she, too, were in disguise, What would I be, if I could shed this veil of flesh?

  A knock on the door. Anna answered -- she loved the chat of neighbors who had likewise given up on improving themselves. Dinah plied her needle without looking up, but soon became aware of a woman coming to her, standing before her. She realized, to her surprise, that the visitor had come for her.

  It was Emma Smith. "Good day," she said.

  Dinah got up, letting pieces of the shirt she was assembling fall to the floor. "Sister Emma! Sit down! If I had known you were coming -- "

  "You would have found some way to avoid me."

  "No," Dinah protested. "How could you think it?" But it was true, though Dinah could not understand why she felt so ashamed of herself before this good woman.

  "I asked Vilate to invite you to my home, and you didn't come."

  "I thought your invitation was only -- courtesy."

  "Even if it were, does that make it less of an invitation? May I sit down?"

  "I'm forgetting all my manners -- please, yes." Of course she was embarrassed to have the Prophet's wife visit after what she said about Joseph. That explained Dinah's confusion. "Forgive the clutter, I'm sewing -- "

  "That's what I came about, Sister Dinah. I brought a snatch of linen. I wondered if you could make my husband a couple of shirts." Emma pulled a good length of cloth from the basket she carried. "Is it enough?"

  "Oh, of course. But I'm not really a seamstress, I just remake old shirts."

  "Your work is meticulous and you are grossly underpaid. I offer you sixty cents for each."

  "I would do them for free -- "

  "Nonsense. Everyone in town is Mormon. So if we all did favors for fellow Saints, we'd starve in perfect harmony."

  Dinah did not know what to say. Emma sat upright in her chair. Her cold way of speaking had good feeling in it -- unlike some people, Dinah had known that from the first. Yet today her coldness masked even more coldness. Dinah knew what was coming, and dreaded it. Well, she would face it squarely and soon.

  "Sister Vilate told me that you wanted to see me -- even before I had sold a single shirt."

  "Yes," Emma said. "Yes." She looked toward the window, as if her next words were inscribed in the sky. "You are a well-beloved woman, Dinah. There are hundreds of Englishwomen who look up to you. One of them told me the other day that you were -- a sort of prophetess, she said."

  "She did me no kindness to say so."

  "She loves you, Sister Dinah." Emma stood suddenly and walked to the window. "Whether you know it or not, you have influence among a large number of the Saints." Then she turned back, and Dinah was shocked to see that in those few short moments she had wept enough that her cheeks were shiny with tears, her face somewhat reddened and twisted with grief.

  "Sister Emma," Dinah said, rising.

  "Do you know how many people there are who want my husband dead? Six months he was in jail under sentence of death, and do you know who delivered him up to his enemies? Saints. Good, loyal Saints, who thought they knew better than he did. They've turned on him so often, the ones he loved and trusted best. He loved no one better than Oliver Cowdery, and he's gone. David Whitmer, and he's quit us. Thomas Marsh and Orson Hyde as much as called for his death. Time after time, the people who have done him the most harm are Saints who found he did not measure up to what they thought he ought to be."

  As suddenly as the crying had begun, Emma visibly got herself under control. She sat again in her chair. Immediately her voice was steady. Immediately her face set back into its icy repose. Only the glistening tears remembered her emotion. "I thought when we met that you were a woman of understanding, that you would be such a help. The problems are so great, and you have such promise. But how can I depend on you, if you turn against Joseph like the others?"

  So Vilate had reported the whole conversation. Well, what else could Dinah expect? If they saw her as a woman of influence, it mattered if she seemed to have spoken against Emma's husband. Dinah would bear the burden of her own mistakes. "I said something other than what I truly meant. I am not good at choosing words."

  Emma almost smiled. "On the contrary. Joseph said you have a gift for saying exactly what ought to be said. Which always means, he said, exactly what people least want to hear." Emma looked out the window again. "And perhaps your words were justified. There are times when Joseph gets in an odd humor and he must grapple with someone and take him down, he must joke and brag and have the Saints adore him. Perhaps it's even a fault in him, though I love him for it. But speaking against him, Dinah -- that's no little thing. Someday it will cost him his life, when enough people have said enough little things. Perhaps you don't know how a wife lives in her husband -- you didn't love yours."

  It was a terrible accusation for one woman to make against another. And yet Dinah realized that now in the middle of what should have been a painful conversation, she was filled with relief. It was not her words about Joseph or her problems with Matthew that Dinah had been afraid to discuss. This she could handle with trite phrases and easy poses. "I think," Dinah said. "that I am not glad to learn that my miserable marriage is such common knowledge."

  "Oh, no, not at all. I had it from Joseph, and he had it in a letter from Brigham Young. Brigham is something of a gossip -- he wrote to warn Joseph that you were headstrong and spiritual."

  Dinah could tell from her tone of voice that Emma wasted little love on the senior Apostle.

  "But don't fear that it's common knowledge," Emma said, "because it isn't. I only mention it because you cannot possibly know how I fear you."

  Now Dinah was faced with what she really dreaded: that Emma had discovered what Dinah really felt about -- about -- what she could not name. "Fear me !"

  "You're one more person who will have the power to harm him. Because he'll trust you -- he's never learned to be suspicious. And if you, too, turn on him, then you have done nothing good, Dinah, because he is the heart and mind of this Church. and if you undo him you have undone God's work."

  "Then let me assure you, Sister Emma, that I will never lift a hand or speak a word that will harm either him or you."

  Emma searched Dinah's face for truth. Her gaze was so piercing that Dinah wondered if Emma's eyes had found the secret that Dinah herself could not name. But no. What Emma saw made her eyes soften. "Then you are my friend, as I thought the night I met you?"

  It was a moment when with other women Dinah would have felt a need for an embrace. With Emma, though, embracing wouldn't have felt right. They leaned forward in their chairs, clasped each other's hands, looked into each other's faces and read the love there. Distance remained between them -- but then, without some distance you cannot see. And yet even as they touched, Dinah felt herself trembling with shame. I am doing you an injury that even I have not discovered yet. I am lying when I promise friendship, and yet I cannot understand why it's a lie.

  It is not a lie, Dinah told herself. I love this woman, and if I can help it she'll have no truer friend than I. And to make sure of it, Dinah said it aloud. "Sister Emma, I love you. And you can trust me as much as any other woman."

  Emma bowed over their clasped hands a moment before arising to leave. She made an appointment four days off for Dinah to come and measure the Prophet for the shirts. Then she left. Afterward, Dinah tried to go back to work on the shirt she had been sewing, but she couldn't keep her mind on it. First Charlie came home, wanting to talk about how he would raise money to build a factory. She nodded and agreed without listening, until Charlie went away and told it all to Mother, and then again to Father.

  "What do you mean you'll build it here?" Anna's voice was angry and too near; Dinah found that the hem had slipped. She started picking it out. "I thought when you said a chandler's shop you meant you were buying one that already stood somewhere e
lse -- "

  "This is the only land I have," Charlie said. "I didn't borrow enough to lease land, only enough to get up a decent shed to do the work."

  "Charlie, have you ever smelled a chandler's shop?"

  "It won't smell half as bad as when I start in making soap."

  "Why do you want us to live in foul smells and filth?" Mother was starting to cry. Dinah thought it was a terrible sound -- she was too old for this petulance. "Didn't we work hard enough to escape the factories, and now you have to bring them right back in our own garden?"

  "Haven't you heard of money, Mother? It's what people live on. And you don't get more than a damned scant trickle of it if you work for someone else. Well, I'll have them working for me. Dinah's not going to have to go out and solicit work like a street peddler." Of course, thought Dinah. It's because of me, never because he wants to be rich. Yet she said nothing as she sat and undid her work.

  "What do you know of making soap?" Father asked.

  "I know how money works, and how you use it to get more. What do I care for soap? Or candles? It's going to be done, and that's it. I'm doing it all for you, aren't I? And after a few months of stinks and smells we'll be able to build a decent house and move away from here. A house of our own, down closer to the rest of town." Charlie saw that his promise of a rosy future was not convincing them. "What is it that's making you so angry? Would you be happier starving?"

  And on and on and on. Dinah tried not to hear it, pretended that she was not listening, until she discovered she had unpicked the entire hem, not just the part that was badly done. Her mind was not on this work. She picked up her sewing to take it to the other room, where it would be quieter. She stopped when she found herself reaching for the linen Emma had brought. Suddenly that linen was hot as fire; she dared not touch it. Don't be a fool. She picked it up and took it into her room.

  Even with the argument muffled by a door, she could not concentrate on remaking the old shirt. The needle was rebellious in its track; it did not want to stitch this shirt. And so she laid the shirt aside, and took up the linen.

  She laid it on the table and began to draw. She took the pattern from the shirts she had remade the last few days. She took the size from her memory of him standing just so far away, his shoulders this wide, his chest this broad and deep, his waist so narrow, his back so long when it bent over the man, his arms hanging easy this long, his arms extended that long. She knew her memory of him was so true that she did not hesitate when it came time to cut; the shears bit into the linen in great swooping lines. She finished one, she finished the other, her needle flying through the work, until in two days they both were done.

  Only then did she lay out the shirts across her bed and think, God in heaven, what have I done? She was not afraid that the shirts would not fit. She was afraid because she hadn't the slightest doubt that they would. How could she know his body so perfectly from that quarter-hour in the late afternoon sun? Why had she held the memory so well, when already she had trouble picturing Honor in her mind, or remembering Val when she wanted to? Who am I, that I know the Prophet's body better than I know that faces of my daughter and my son?

  And when she had carefully folded the shirts and put them in a basket to deliver them, she realized that she could not possibly bring them now. She had never measured him. If she brought the shirts now, Emma would surely know.

  Know what? Dinah rebuked herself. I have no terrible secret. I happened to see the Prophet wrestling shirtless in the mud. I have a keen eye, he stood right in front of me and so of course I can measure him against myself. It means nothing. I have nothing to conceal. She carried the basket out the door and into the windy street.

  She knocked at the door of the Smith house. There was no answer. She knocked again, and it fell open a little before her. Remembering how Vilate Kimball had told her just to come in, Dinah wondered if she could at least look inside, in case the wind had been so loud that she simply hadn't heard someone bid her enter.

  The hall was empty, and there wasn't a sound within. Perhaps Emma was back in the kitchen. Bringing the door just up to the jamb, Dinah went around back. Again no one answered to her knock. All out somewhere, of course. Her measuring appointment was tomorrow -- she should have waited till then anyway. Yet she did not go home. Instead she went into the parlor and sat on a chair. Emma would not mind if she came in and sat awhile. And Dinah needed the money.

  She held the basket on her lap, and because there was nothing else to do, she opened it and took out the top shirt. Laying it across the basket, she toyed with the button at the neck, examined the tiny seam that she had done so perfectly, even though it would be hidden by the collar and no one would ever see.

  "It's a sin to love what your own hands have made."

  The Prophet stood in the parlor doorway. His hair was disheveled, and he wasn't wearing his coat or even a waistcoat -- just his shirt and trousers.

  "You were asleep," Dinah said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

  "I heard the door open. I came down to see what the burglars had taken."

  Dinah blushed. "I did knock, and when I thought no one was home, I came in to wait."

  "I thought your appointment was tomorrow. Did you come to show me samples of your work? Don Carlos already did."

  "Don Carlos advertises too well for me already."

  "Let me see it." He reached out, and she handed it to him. "Who is this for? This is new linen."

  "Yes," Dinah said.

  "And the size of it. There aren't three men in the city besides me who could wear it."

  She was afraid to tell him the obvious. He did not need to be told.

  "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 know 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?"