Beyond the Mapped Stars

by Rosalyn Eves

  Rachel stares at her bowl, her arms crossed and lips quivering. I slip into place beside her on the bench.

  “Aren’t you hungry, darling?”

  “I don’t want oats.”

  I pick up her spoon and scoop up a bite soaked in sorghum. “But these aren’t regular oats.”

  The lip quiver stops. “They aren’t?” Her brown eyes fix on mine.

  “They’re oats made special for the fairy courts,” I say, raising the spoon to my own mouth. “Fairies eat them at every meal.”

  Rachel snatches the spoon away from me and stuffs it in her mouth.

  “You shouldn’t tell her stories,” Mary says, watching us from the end of the table. “What if she thinks they’re true?”

  I exchange a glance with Emily, sitting on Rachel’s other side, and we both smile. Mary doesn’t know about our stash of dime novels either.

  After three bites, Rachel puts her spoon down. She pats the side of her head, leaving fragments of oats in her honey-brown curls. “What’s in here, ’Lizbeth?”

  “Your brain, with all your thoughts,” I tell her.

  Rachel mulls this over, chewing slowly. Then, “I want to see it.”

  Startled, I share another glance with Emily, who is holding in a laugh with both hands over her mouth.

  “Whatever for?” I ask.

  “So I can see how smart I am.”

  This time we all laugh, even Mary.

  Footsteps sound outside the kitchen and I look up, expecting to see Mama with Albert, or even my older brother, Hyrum, before he goes down to the mill.

  But instead it’s my father, his cheeks rosy above a neatly trimmed ruff of a beard.

  “Far!” John and Henry erupt from the table. Henry’s half-empty bowl falls facedown on the floor, another mess waiting for me to clean. My brothers throw their arms around his waist.

  Far pretends surprise. “But hold there—who are these young rascals attacking me in my own home?”

  John giggles, but Henry protests, “I’m not a rascal, Far. I’m your Henry!”

  Far peers down at Henry’s face and lifts his eyebrows. “Why, so you are! I hardly recognized you, so big you’ve grown.” He returns their hug, his glance flickering over their heads to meet mine. “Where’s your mama?”

  “I don’t—” I begin, but then Mama appears behind Far. He steps aside, and she glides into the room, head high, her gray-brown hair immaculately pinned up beneath her Sunday hat. She doesn’t look at Far.

  “I’ve brought the horses for you,” Far says.

  Mama wipes out one of the boys’ bowls, fills it with oats, and takes a seat at the table, regal as any queen.

  Far tries again. “The wagon is hitched and ready.”

  Mama adds a pinch of salt and sorghum to her oats, then pours milk over the mixture. Beside me, Rachel slips down from the bench and wriggles past Far, escaping into the sitting room. Turning to Mary, Mama says, “Can you pack up the bread and some cheese for our lunch?”

  “Damn it, Hannah,” Far explodes. “I was talking to you!”

  Emily, who has sat frozen at the table, springs up with a tiny eep and hustles the remaining children from the room. Sometimes she reminds me of a fawn, all big eyes and nerves, starting at a sound. She doesn’t like it when Mama and Far argue, so it’s left to me to make the rough edges in our family smooth.

  “Have you eaten yet, Far?” I interrupt, my voice too high and too bright.

  Far ignores me and marches to the table, planting himself across from Mama, his palms thudding against the wood. Mama chews calmly and swallows, then finally looks up at her husband. “I’d thank ye to mind your language before the children.”

  Far lets out a frustrated breath. “Did you hear nothing else I said?” My father, who speaks eight languages with varying degrees of fluency, cannot find the words to reach my mother.

  “I heard ye,” Mama says, still unruffled. “But I imagine ye have work at the mill. Hyrum can drive us. And how did ye find Olena this morning?” she asks sweetly.

  I catch my breath. Olena Nilsson is Far’s wife of three years, but Mama seldom mentions her.

  Contrary to what the eastern newspapers write, not every Mormon man has a harem of a dozen wives. Most of the men I know have one wife, sometimes two, maybe three. Mama loved Aunt Elisa like her own sister and mothered Elisa’s daughter Rebekka after her death. But Aunt Olena—Aunt Olena is Mama’s own age, perhaps older. Far scrupulously divides his time between our two homes, and yet Mama cannot bring herself to speak of Aunt Olena—as if silence might deny Far’s folly in falling in love again, at his age. When Far told Mama he meant to marry Aunt Olena, Mama threatened to walk all night to Richfield, to procure a divorce the next morning. Far wheedled her round, and she stayed. She must have forgiven him somewhat, else we wouldn’t have the baby.

  “My work can keep,” Far says, not answering Mama’s question. “I don’t trust Hyrum to drive you so far and back again. I’ll be outside when you’re ready.” Far nods, shortly, and marches from the room.

  I sag with relief, and my stomach growls, reminding me I’ve not yet eaten. Grabbing a bowl from the table, I reach for the pan on the stove and discover that what little was left of the oats has burned while my parents—what? I could not call that a conversation, nor properly an argument.

  I settle instead for Rachel’s leftover oats and sit at the table beside Mama.

  “Now, Elizabeth,” Mama says, drawing my attention. “When we leave, ye’ll be minding the boys and Rachel. I’ll take Albert with me. Don’t be losing yourself in your books. It’s not right, the way they absorb ye.”

  I smother a sigh. Going to Richfield was always a slim chance, no matter how many things I did right. “There’s nothing evil in my books, Mama.” I close my mouth around my other words: that I’ll need such knowledge if I ever make it to college. But Mama won’t approve of such notions. And besides, I don’t rightly know how one gets to college, or what one does afterward. How one gets from college to being an astronomer, for instance. The gap between what I know and what I want spans away from me, impossibly vast.

  Mama’s lips are tight, pinched. “Fancy ideas will only unfit ye for the life you’re meant to lead.”

  “The glory of God is intelligence,” I murmur, a quiet defiance. The only kind I’m capable of. “Emmeline Wells wrote in the Woman’s Exponent that the better educated a woman is, the better wife and mother she can be.”

  Mama’s expression turns sour like old milk. “Then ye best use that intelligence to do what I ask. I’ve no quarrel with suitable education—but ye want too much. Ye should follow God’s will, not your own.”

  As though my own will were a drumbeat inside me that I could still if I wanted. As though God never planted yearnings in our hearts to drive us to bigger things.

  Sometimes I feel as though there’s an Elizabeth-shaped hole in my life that I’m supposed to fill neatly. But parts of me—ideas, desires—keep spilling out like tentacles of some sea creature. I’m forever stuffing them back in, smashing down ideas I’m not meant to have, shutting my lips on words I’m not meant to say.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  * * *

  * * *

  After lunch, I read a story to Rachel, and she falls asleep against my arm. I carry her to our room, marveling at the way her sturdy legs dangle over my arms, remembering the much smaller child I used to rock to sleep. After settling her into bed, I stand and stretch. The boys are outside, splashing and hollering in the creek. I long to join them: the house is warm in the late-June sun, even with the doors open. The breeze barely stirs Mama’s muslin curtains.

  My fingers itch for a book. I could take Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales from the single shelf of books in the sitting room—Mama does not object to Miss Edgeworth’s stories, so long as I do not steal away to read when
there are children to be watched, food to be cooked. Issues of the Woman’s Exponent, newspapers written by and for Mormon women, lay carefully folded on the shelf. I’ve read these issues over and over, trying to find myself in the pages of news and advice, trying to mimic the speaking and writing of women more educated than I am. Or I could fetch another of my dime novels from beneath my straw tick mattress.

  In truth, I should begin on the bread for dinner.

  But I don’t want any of these things.

  I want ideas, something to launch me heavenward instead of binding me on earth. I tried to explain this to Mama once, the wanting that was like a steady, low hunger constantly gnawing at my soul. She thought, at first, that I had dyspepsia and tried to press some Brigham’s tea on me, made from the dried branches of a spiky plant that grows around here, but I cannot abide the bitter stuff.

  “Ye should spend more time with your Bible, and less time in your books. Turn your thoughts to heaven, put your longing in God,” she told me.

  Mama doesn’t get that wanting to understand the stars does not take away my wanting to understand God. But it does rather spoil my tolerance for domestic chores.

  I stand. Rachel will sleep for an hour or more, most like, and I can be down to town and back in that time. Miss Phoebe Wheeler, who teaches at the Presbyterian school, has a small stash of books she’s willing to lend out. As today is Saturday, I won’t be interrupting her class. Mama won’t ever know I wasn’t strictly obedient.

  Some folks were scandalized when the Presbyterians moved in, building a log cabin for worship services on Sundays and school during the week. They feared the Presbyterians would try to convert us all (they haven’t, yet). But I was thrilled—a real school, with real books. Then Mama wouldn’t let me attend, saying I was too old—never mind that my only schooling was the few years we lived in Fountain Green, and the rest whatever Mama could teach me. Maybe Mama was afraid too. Outsiders haven’t always been kind to Mormons. Though Mama wasn’t present for the massacre at Haun’s mill, where Missouri militiamen killed seventeen Mormons during a time of truce, or the murder of our prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum before the Saints were driven out of Missouri, she’s heard the stories. We all have.

  But it’s hard for me to feel stories of the past as a present danger, and so sometimes, when I haven’t chores and Miss Wheeler hasn’t pupils, Miss Wheeler will sit with me and help me with mathematics. I admit there’s times neither of us can puzzle out the equations, but I love the excitement of successfully working out a formula. Maybe there’s no call for higher math in a farming town—but didn’t God devise math as surely as music? Isn’t He as pleased with a well-wrought formula as a well-sung hymn?

  Before I leave, I convince David Charles to come back to the house to be with Rachel—he is reluctant to leave the water, but I promise him a nickel and so he agrees.

  I rattle down the dirt road that winds between our house and town, my booted toes kicking up dust, the sun hot on my head. Mama will surely scold me for my uncovered head—I am already too brown, with freckles like constellations all over my arms and cheeks, a red-brown nearly of a hue with my hair—but she isn’t here to catch me at it.

  Monroe is quiet in the early afternoon: the men and boys minding the fields or the cows and sheep, the women indoors already at work on supper or canning or mending. A few children are out of doors playing, their happy shouts hanging in the warm air.

  “And where are you off to, Miss Bertelsen?” Samuel Willard’s mellow tenor voice catches me off guard. Samuel’s a few years older than me, with a broad forehead beneath unruly brown hair and a trim beard. He’s whittling a piece of wood in the shade of a big tree before the Willard cabin.

  My cheeks burn, and not just from the sun. I do not know how to talk to Samuel Willard, whose voice teases the hairs upright on my arms, and who makes me feel as though my hands are disconnected appendages that I don’t know where to place.

  “The Presbyterian school,” I say shortly. The minutes of Rachel’s nap tick away in my head.

  “Looking for some schooling, are you? Aren’t you a bit old for that?”

  “I’d rather be too old than too ignorant,” I fire back. “Which are you?”

  Samuel chokes, and without waiting to hear his response, I fairly flee down the road.

  The Presbyterian building is just off the main street, toward the north end of town. Miss Wheeler is not in the schoolroom when I check: the four neat rows of chairs are empty and her desk clear. But I find her in her room at the boardinghouse a block away, reading.

  She looks up at my knock on her open door, her face creasing in mild irritation at the interruption. As she recognizes me, her expression clears and a smile blooms. Miss Wheeler is a woman of what Mama would call “uncertain age,” her blond hair fading but neat, her blue eyes hidden behind spectacles.

  “Miss Elizabeth Bertelsen!” she says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Most teachers wouldn’t greet a pupil so formally, but this is what I like about Miss Wheeler. She treats me as an equal, someone whose ideas deserve respect.

  I clasp my hands behind me. “I’ve come to borrow a book.”

  She laughs. “Of course.” Setting her own book down atop a stack of newspapers, she turns to survey me. “Now, what are you in the mood for? A novel? The account of a world traveler? A history?”

  My cheeks warm. “I’d like a science book, if you please.” I pause a beat, wondering if I am imposing too much, and add, “Do you have any I haven’t read yet?”

  “As it happens, I just got a shipment of books from a cousin, who thought I might be able to use them.” She rummages through a box near her dresser and produces a volume with a maroon cloth cover. Gold lettering embossed across the front reads: On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, by Mary Somerville.

  I feel a curious lifting inside my chest, wiping away my last lingering annoyance from my encounter with the Willard boy. “A science book by a woman?”

  Miss Wheeler smiles. “I thought you’d like it. It was written twenty years ago, but is widely respected. Mrs. Somerville is a scientist in her own right.”

  Scientist. The word dissolves on my tongue, all hard and sharp edges together. It’s a foreign word here, in the dry heat and arid fields and pine mountains around me. It belongs to worlds I’ve only read of in books, to cities and laboratories and libraries.

  How can I want something so much, when I don’t have any real experience of it?

  How can I want something so much, when it might be all wrong for me?

  I wrap my new treasure in a cloth, exchange a few more words with Miss Wheeler, and set off for home, my heart humming, my fingers trembling with eagerness to open the book, to burrow into the new ideas offered there.

  I’m nearly home when I catch sight of a figure racing down the dirt road toward me, arms waving above his head. I recognize the shape before I can see his features. It’s David Charles, and he shouts something at me. A long moment passes before I can disentangle his words.

  “It’s Rachel!” he cries. “She’s gone missing.”

  chapter two

  Saturday, June 29, 1878

  Monroe, Utah

  Thirty days until eclipse

  Though the sun is sweltering overhead, at once I am cold everywhere. Gooseflesh pricks on my arms and legs, and ice leaks through my stomach.

  “Gone?” I picture Rachel, her golden-brown hair in soft ringlets, her warm brown eyes. “Have you checked the barn?”

  David Charles nods. John comes running up behind him and skids to a stop, looking like David Charles’s slightly shorter twin, his cheeks red and eyes wide.

  “The orchard?”

  Another nod.

  God forbid. “The creek?”

  His face clears. “Not yet.”

  “Then go!” I turn
to John. “Go fetch Hyrum from the mill.”

  As both boys turn and race back up the road, I pick up my skirts and run after them, all the while whispering a prayer under my breath.

  I reach the shadowed shallows of the creek just behind David Charles. Rachel is not at the spot where the boys were splashing earlier. I send David Charles to follow the creek up toward our canyon while I trail the stream back toward town.

  Darting between cottonwood trees, I scan the black ripple of water between the stones. The cold inside me seems to deepen. The sun bores down in incongruous yellow beams between the branches.

  A flash of pink catches my eye, and I scramble forward. A jam of leaves and twigs has slowed the creek’s flow, creating a kind of pool. A limp figure rests near the bottom, dress tangled about her legs.

  Rachel.

  The cold inside me turns solid, ice in my veins that makes me sluggish, pins me to the spot. Move, I tell myself.

  Rough hands push me aside, and I stumble, falling to my knees. But I don’t mind the stinging pain, because it’s my older brother, Hyrum, splashing into the stream and catching Rachel up to him, water plastering his white shirt to his arms. He carries her out of the water and crouches, resting Rachel facedown across his knee so that her wet curls dangle past her cheeks. He thumps her back: once, twice, three times. He flips her over and puts his mouth on hers, breathing air into her lungs.

  Paralysis broken, I crawl toward him, tears stinging salt against my tongue.

  My sister’s face is white, some waxen doll with a smudged cheek and gnarled hair. Thump, thump, thump. Hyrum turns Rachel over again.

  John catches up with us, and I take his hand as I stand. He squeezes tight.