“What makes you think it isn’t true?”
“Because Joseph’s dead. And everyone’s fighting and men are trying to kill us and if it were right — if it were really right — wouldn’t everyone else want the truth, too? Maybe we really are outlaws.”
I think Eliza will give a good answer, the way she did at school when the boys would try to be cheeky and she’d shut them up with a few words in her quiet, intense teacher voice. But instead all she says is, “I don’t know, Vilatte.”
“Maybe none of it’s true,” I say. I’m crying without even realizing it, and I take a swipe at my cheek with the back of my hand. “Maybe none of it.”
Eliza rips a fistful of corn silk off a stalk. “Maybe not.”
“Maybe we’re running and dying and suffering for things that ent true.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re saying all the wrong things!”
She looks up at me. “What do you want me to say, Vilatte?”
“You’re my teacher! Be a teacher! Tell me the right answer. Tell me I need to believe and be strong and it’s real and doubt is of the devil and tell me to believe. Tell me my sisters didn’t die for nothing and we didn’t leave Da and Liverpool for nothing and tell me this is worth it.”
“Will it help if I say all that?”
I snuffle, then rub a train of snot off with my sleeve. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Eliza presses one hand flat against her lips. Her nails are worn down and dull, cracked from rubbing up against slate and permanently dry with the chalk from the schoolhouse. “You want me to tell you what I think, Vilatte?” she asks, and I nod. “I think I believe in God, and I believe God is good, and I believe Joseph was a prophet, but I believe he was a human, too. We’re all of us human. You and me and Joseph and the men who are burning our city and the men who are trying to lead it. And at the end of life, I don’t know what’s going to turn out to be the true thing, or which church will be the right one. But I don’t think it really matters.”
“Then what does?” I ask.
“Finding things that give you hope, and make you want to do good things for others. And if Joseph’s words do that” — she pats the Book of Commandments manuscript — “then that seems fine to me. Seems like a thing that people could need.”
“What about those mobs? Why can’t they just let us be?”
“I got no answer for you, Vilatte. I really don’t. Don’t know why some men make it their business to police what others believe.”
“We should fight them.”
“Didn’t get us anywhere in Missouri. Just got more of our men dead.”
I hang my head. Eliza sidles up to me and wraps an arm around my shoulder, and I let myself fall into her, my head against her chest so that I can hear her heartbeat through the thin cotton of her school dress. Above us, the sky burns, speckled tufts of smoke still drifting from Nauvoo.
“There are far, far better things ahead, Vilatte,” she says, “than any that are behind us.”
We abandon Nauvoo in February.
Everything Mam and I own is wrapped and stowed and hauled into the ferries that harbor us across the river. It all fits in two trunks. They put the oxen on the rafts with us as we ride the frigid current like corks, chunks of ice speckled with starlight floating around us so they look shot with gold like we’re Argonauts afloat. The punters have to break the ice in some places, their long poles as graceful and steady as pistons.
I stand with Mam at the ferry’s lip, and we watch the temple get smaller and smaller, the white walls flecked and shining with our shards of smashed china, brighter than the moon. It somehow stays a shining white, even when the fire starts to close its fist around the spire, punching through the windows and tumbling the roof.
“Go west,” Brother Brigham said, so we’re going west.
Emma isn’t coming. Nor Sidney Rigdon, nor the Templetons or the Coulters. Some of the Kimballs are going back to Missouri. The Kingstons to New York. The last thing I heard Mol say was how much she wishes she’d never left home. Never taken up with the Mormons. We’re all splitting up, drifting like chunks of ice on the Mississippi’s current.
At our backs, the temple burns. At our head, the West waits. Open, wide prairie. Who knows what else.
We’ll all be strangers there.
Mormons trace their origins to a vision by their prophet Joseph Smith, in which an angel directed him to a buried book containing the religious history of an ancient people. Smith published a translation of this book as the Book of Mormon. As his followers grew, the Mormons looked for a place to set up a community of their own. They moved to and were then forcibly and often violently driven out of Kirtland, Ohio, and Jackson County, Missouri (where the governor passed an extermination order against the Mormons). Desperate for somewhere to live and worship without the fear of mob violence, the Mormons settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1839.
On June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were murdered in prison in Carthage, Illinois. Their deaths caused a succession crisis within the Mormon Church, as well as much internal strife and division, and the weakness was taken advantage of by many anti-Mormon aggravators in the area. The Mormons were yet again driven from their city by violence, and they left Nauvoo to make the perilous trek west for the largely uninhabited Utah Territory.
Today, outside of the Mormon Church, the persecution suffered by the early members is largely unknown. Though the events in this story are fictional, the circumstances and historical context are not, and many of the characters, including Eliza Snow, were real people.
Hey, Rat, you got a player!” Joe called.
Ray looked up from her meal to see a mousy-haired Yankee standing beside Joe, thumbs hooked in his pockets. Moored just behind them, the General Jesup swayed as muddy water lapped against her hull.
Ray was not a man, nor was she a rat, but she’d arrived in Yuma Crossing around the age of eight, scavenging the shores with a mop of matted hair slung over her bony shoulders, and the name had stuck. So had the assumption that she was a boy. She’d been scrawny as a fence post then, and twice as dirty. It was easy to overlook the truth.
Now that she was fifteen or thereabouts, Ray’s body was betraying her. She kept her hair short and her clothing baggy, but she’d begun wrapping her chest. The smooth state of her jaw would grow suspicious soon, too, but Ray would keep up the act as long as possible. She’d seen how women stuck out in these parts. They were full of curves and garnered attention, and they certainly didn’t work as stevedores, loading and unloading steamboats’ freight.
Ray set aside her can of sardines, brushed some corn bread crumbs from her lap, and signaled the Yankee. “Five hands. That’s all I got time for.”
Joe shouted for his buddies, and Carlos and the Bartlett twins came running to watch. Joe was the leader of the bunch, and everything Ray wanted to be as a stevedore — bigger, stronger, faster. He was charming and well-liked, too. A natural leader. He threw a friendly punch into Carlos’s arm — as brown as her own — and began to debate the margin of Ray’s inevitable win.
Her reputation as an unbeatable poker player had spread along the shores of the Colorado the past year, and while most of her fellow stevedores now hesitated to play her, they took pleasure in watching her whip others. Ray made it worth their while, shuffling with flair, cutting the deck one-handed, and dealing with such precision that the cards looked like blades slicing through the air. Watching Ray play was like listening to a concerto, a continued swelling of flourishes and concentration, until her opponent’s mouth fell open in shocked loss come the finale.
Ray blocked out the boys’ rowdy predictions and sized up the Yankee. Average build, forgettable face. His clothing wasn’t threadbare enough for a copper miner, so she figured he was the owner of one of the woodyards that supplied steamers with fuel along the river. His business in Yuma Crossing didn’t concern her nearly as much as his willingness to lose coins.
The man sat on the opposi
te side of the crate that would serve as their playing table, and Ray drew the deck she always carried from her back pocket. Pinching the stack of cards, she let them spring into her other hand, facedown. They made a satisfying, muted thwiiiiick as they flew through the air.
“I heard you’re good,” the Yankee said, watching the cards dance. “Too good.”
If she was too good, perhaps men should stop challenging her, but it was as if the more a loss might damage their egos, the more intensely they were drawn to her table. Like moths to a flame.
“I’m all right,” Ray said with a shrug.
“Then you won’t mind if we use a fresh deck, I reckon?” He set a pack on the crate.
“Not at all.” Ray pocketed her deck, then slit the tape on the new one. She let the cards fall into her palm and sent them springing from hand to hand, just as gracefully as with her own set.
Behind her, the boys cackled.
Ray made a few artful shuffles. Then she let the Yankee cut the deck for good measure and began the game before he could get cold feet.
Ray took the first hand easily, then let the Yankee win the next three. This was the key: to lose a small sum before winning big; to fan a man’s confidence so he believed himself unbeatable.
Ray dealt the final hand. Bets were made and raised, cards traded.
“Check,” she said, tapping the crate with her knuckle.
The Yankee squinted at his cards, then pushed a dollar forward. A week’s pay in one bet. Combined with the rest of the pot, Ray would win back all she’d lost and then some. Her heart beat with excitement, but she made sure to keep her face as plain and emotionless as the General Jesup’s faded freeboard.
“What the heck,” she said, feigning rashness. “I’ll see ya.” She counted out the coins.
“Sorry, kid.” The Yankee threw down his cards, and Ray savored it a moment — his glibness and pride. Then she spread out her winning hand. Joe whistled, and Carlos slapped a knee. The Yankee swore flagrantly.
“Double or nothing,” he said.
But someone was shouting from the shore. “Rat! Johnson wants a word.”
Ray leaped to her feet and scooped up her winnings. When the owner of the George A. Johnson & Company requested your presence, you obliged. Besides, men could be dangerous when they’d been beaten, and Ray wasn’t particularly keen on lingering around the Yankee longer than necessary.
“But I had a full house!” he went on grousing. “How’d ya beat me?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
The truth was that Ray had stacked the deck in her favor. She’d known the face value of the next dozen cards to be dealt, plus each one that had been in her opponent’s hand, to boot. Some would call it cheating, but Ray figured it was only cheating if you got yourself caught. Until then, it was merely skill and sleight of hand, theatrics and misdirection.
Ray wasn’t a cheat. She was a magician.
Mr. Johnson’s office was little more than a hole in the wall — a tiny shanty along the edge of the river, where a string of similar shacks had been erected by the Company for storage and other business affairs. He’d done his best to make it presentable, but the once-vibrant rug on the floor was now caked with mud, and the whole place smelled musty. All the furniture was stained with water lines from a spring when the river rose beyond its banks.
“Ah, Ray,” Mr. Johnson said, spotting her in the doorway. “Come in, come in.”
She lowered herself into the chair opposite his desk.
“I’m assembling men for an expedition,” he said, getting right to the point. “Escalating tensions with the Mormons have forced the War Department’s hand, and they need to know if bringing troops into Utah by way of the Colorado is possible. Fort Yuma has ordered a detachment to accompany me for a speedy assessment of the upper river. We’ll take the General Jesup and have twenty-five days’ rations, plus a howitzer. I’m working to secure additional men now. If you’re in agreement, we leave tomorrow at dawn.”
Ray worked to keep the surprise from her face. Embarking on the eve of the New Year was downright foolish. The river would be low, starved from the summer heat. Sandbars would choke the passage. Ray did not take Johnson for an idiot, but Utah was more than five hundred winding miles of river north, and little more than three weeks’ provisions did not seem sufficient, even for a steamer as impressive as the General Jesup. Besides, Ray had heard of a similar expedition, also departing on New Year’s Eve.
Joe had mentioned it one mild November morning as they moved freight. “Expedition was Johnson’s idea — he pushed the legislature and everything — but the Secretary of War appointed his in-law for the job.”
“Lieutenant Ives,” Carlos had chimed in. “His steamer is only fifty-four feet long. They tested her on the Delaware and are reassembling her out here, thinking she’ll be strong enough for the Colorado.”
“I heard she draws three feet of water,” Joe scoffed, “leaving barely six inches of freeboard when she’s loaded. Yeah, you heard me right — just six inches between the waterline and the deck. It’s absurd!”
“Sounds like a damn wheelbarrow.” Ray had laughed. “Thing’s gonna sputter and struggle up every inch of the river.”
Now, sitting in Johnson’s office, she wondered if her boss was just as miffed that Ives’s ridiculous-sounding expedition had garnered the full support of the War Department, and if his own quest to navigate the Colorado was little more than a schoolboy’s battle of who could accomplish the feat first. But this was an expedition, not some steamboat race on the Mississippi. If it wasn’t approached seriously, Ray wanted nothing to do with it. Hell, she didn’t have the time to be involved, period. Every day she spent on that steamer was a day she wouldn’t be earning coin in Yuma Crossing. And that was all that mattered these days: coin from work, and coin from cards. A ticket to San Francisco wasn’t going to buy itself.
“I’ll pay, of course,” Mr. Johnson continued. “Fifty dollars, supplied in full as soon as we return to Fort Yuma, whether the river proves navigable or not.”
Ray nearly fell from her seat. With an additional fifty dollars, she could finally leave Yuma Crossing. No more saving dime by dime. No more handing a small portion of her meager earnings to Mr. Lowry every week.
But what Mr. Johnson proposed would be no easy mission. For years, Johnson had been yammering about opening trade with the Mormons, but Ray had figured all his talk to be hot air. Above the fort, rapids made it impossible for pole skiffs to battle the currents, and sand beds and shoals on a constantly shifting riverbed had kept men like Johnson from attempting a journey even by powerful steamboat. Until now.
“Why me?” Ray asked, suddenly suspicious. “We ain’t moving freight, and that’s all I do for you here.”
“You’ve worked hard for the Company, proven yourself reliable. Without woodyards to the north, I need men to gather fuel twice daily. The boiler will need to be cleaned, provisions loaded and moved. You’ll keep busy.”
Ray considered Mr. Johnson. He was a serious man with a serious mustache, and he had a monopoly of business along the river. It was his steamers that brought goods from the estuary to every river settlement, and his steamers that carried ore from the mining establishments back down to Robinson’s Landing to be smelted. He was a proven businessman, and if he was financing this exploration out of his own pocket, he must know what he was doing.
It wasn’t a riskless wager. Steamers could run aground and sink. Boilers could explode, burning and killing crew. But the money was too good to walk away.
Ray reached out and shook Mr. Johnson’s hand.
“Are you mad?” Mrs. Lowry erupted. “Three weeks on the cramped deck of a steamboat, pretending to be a boy? You’ll be found out, Ray.”
“You worry too much.”
“And you worry too little. I’m amazed you’ve kept up the ruse this long.”
“You’re the one who encouraged it!”
Mrs. Lowry let her hands fall from her knitting.
“I was trying to help you, Ray. Same as I am now. The expedition ain’t worth the risk.”
Ray had foreseen this argument. While walking home after work, she’d considered keeping news of the trip to herself. But then she’d pushed open the door, looked Mrs. Lowry in the eye, and the truth had come tumbling out.
Mrs. Lowry was a mess cook at Fort Yuma. Seven years earlier, she’d found Ray picking through garbage outside the kitchen, with nothing but the rags on her back and a newspaper clipping clutched in her fist. The woman had ushered Ray inside and given her a bath, surprised to find a girl beneath all the grime. “You go on letting them think you’re a boy,” she’d said. “Those girl bits will be our secret. Think you can pretend all right?”
Ray had not been pretending — she’d merely been trying to survive — but if being a boy could make life easier . . . Well, that sounded like magic. Ray had smiled and told Mrs. Lowry she could pretend just fine.
She swept floors and washed dishes in the fort kitchen until Mrs. Lowry’s husband said Ray’s help wasn’t enough to offset the inconvenience of housing a child who was not theirs. Then Ray began her work as a stevedore, handing over a portion of her earnings to Mr. Lowry to cover that “inconvenience.” Mrs. Lowry had since left her husband, taking Ray with her, but Mr. Lowry still knew Ray’s secrets, and she still paid him a cut of her wages to guarantee his silence. If he spoke to the wrong person, Ray could lose her job or, at best, see a drastic change in her wages. Women in Yuma Crossing made less than the men, and there weren’t many jobs available to begin with. Mrs. Lowry already had one of the better ones, working at the fort, and unless they were someone’s wife or a painted dove at the brothels, most women in Yuma Crossing were only passing through.
“This is about San Francisco again. Isn’t it?” Mrs. Lowry prodded.
Truth be told, it was always about San Francisco.
It all came back to that newspaper clipping Ray had been clutching when Mrs. Lowry found her. “Inexhaustible Gold Mines in California,” the headline announced, followed by claims of an abundance of gold dust, lumps, and nuggets in the area. A brief handwritten note was scrawled in the margins: