The Work and the Glory

by Gerald N. Lund

  Note: Deceased children are not included in the above listing.

  The Smiths

  * Lucy Mack, the mother.

  * Hyrum, Joseph’s elder brother; almost six years older than Joseph.

  * Mary Fielding, Hyrum’s wife.

  * Joseph, age thirty-five as the story opens.

  * Emma Hale, Joseph’s wife; a year and a half older than Joseph.

  * Joseph and Emma’s children: Julia Murdock, Joseph III, Frederick Granger Williams, Alexander Hale, and Don Carlos.

  * Don Carlos, Joseph’s youngest brother; ten years younger than Joseph.

  Note: There are sisters and other brothers to Joseph, but they do not play major roles in the novel.

  Others

  * John C. Bennett, converted to the Church in 1840, elected mayor of Nauvoo in 1841.

  Jean Claude Dubuque, lumberman in Wisconsin.

  * Thomas Ford, governor of the state of Illinois.

  * Robert Foster, member of the Church in Nauvoo.

  Solomon Garrett, supervisor of “common schools” in Ramus, Illinois.

  Peter Ingalls, Derek’s younger brother; seventeen.

  * Heber C. Kimball, friend of Brigham Young’s and a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

  Kathryn Marie McIntire, Jennifer Jo’s sister; four years younger than Jennifer.

  Abigail Pottsworth, a convert to the Church during Heber C. Kimball’s first mission to England in 1837.

  Jenny Pottsworth, English convert; not quite sixteen as the story begins.

  * Willard Richards, member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

  * Orrin Porter Rockwell, close friend and bodyguard of Joseph Smith.

  * George A. Smith, member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

  * John Taylor, member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

  * Wilford Woodruff, member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

  * Brigham Young, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

  Though too numerous to list here, there are many other actual people from the pages of history who are mentioned by name in the novel. Stephen Markham, Israel Barlow, Sidney Rigdon, William and Wilson Law, and many others mentioned in the book were real people who lived and participated in the events described in this work.

  Key to Abbreviations Used in Chapter Notes

  Throughout the chapter notes, abbreviated references are given. The following key gives the full bibliographic data for those references.

  American Moses Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.)

  CHFT Church History in the Fulness of Times (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1989.)

  HC Joseph Smith, History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1932–51.)

  In Old Nauvoo George W. Givens, In Old Nauvoo: Everyday Life in the City of Joseph (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1990.)

  JD Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854–86.)

  LHCK Orson F. Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, Collector’s Edition (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1992.)

  Restoration Ivan J. Barrett, Joseph Smith and the Restoration: A History of the Church to 1846 (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973.)

  Women of Covenant Jill Mulvay Derr, Janath Russell Cannon, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1992.)

  Women of Nauvoo Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and Jeni Broberg Holzapfel, Women of Nauvoo (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1992.)

  Praise to the man who communed with Jehovah!

  Jesus anointed that Prophet and Seer.

  Blessed to open the last dispensation,

  Kings shall extol him, and nations revere.

  Praise to his mem’ry, he died as a martyr;

  Honored and blest be his ever great name!

  Long shall his blood, which was shed by assassins,

  Plead unto heav’n while the earth lauds his fame.

  Hail to the Prophet, ascended to heaven!

  Traitors and tyrants now fight him in vain.

  Mingling with Gods, he can plan for his brethren;

  Death cannot conquer the hero again.

  -William W. Phelps

  Chapter 1

  We’ve got a live one!”

  The man darted away, running hard for the nearest outcropping of rock. Behind him, a length of black fuse ran along the ground, then up the sheer rock face. A tiny, sputtering tongue of fire puffed little clouds of white smoke into the air as it ate its way relentlessly along the cord. Nathan, positioned behind his own rock, watched until the flame reached the point just a foot or so from where the fuse disappeared into a neatly drilled hole in the limestone cliff. He dropped to a crouch, clasping his hands over his ears, his head down near the ground. Benjamin didn’t need that signal to follow suit. He was already hunched over and covering his head.

  For one brief moment, there was an eerie silence over the stone quarry, then whummph! The earth beneath Nathan’s face shook, and just in front of his nose small pebbles momentarily danced on the hard surface. The noise of the explosion was followed almost simultaneously by an earsplitting crack!

  Nathan straightened slowly, then stood up. Benjamin pushed up to stand beside him, brushing off the knees of his trousers. All around the quarry the men were standing, each one looking at where the charges had been planted only minutes before. A cloud of smoke and dust was roiling upward in the sultry morning air. As it cleared, Nathan nodded in satisfaction. It always amazed him how black powder in such small amounts could so completely work its will on virgin stone. Twenty feet of the sheer face of the rock wall had cracked cleanly in nearly straight lines which led from hole to hole. These holes had been drilled by another team the previous day with point drills and eight-pound sledgehammers called double jacks or jack sledges.

  “That should last us most of the day,” Benjamin grunted as the quarry foreman and the black-powder man walked across the floor of the quarry to take a closer look.

  “Yeah,” Nathan mumbled, “maybe longer.” He reached in his pocket for his bandanna and wiped the back of his neck. The cloth came away dark and wet. It was barely nine o’clock in the morning, but already the sky above had a brassiness to it, holding sure promise of another scorching July day. Already the air in the quarry was stifling. He shrugged, and stuffed the bandanna back in his pants. This was his and his father’s “tithing day”—an offering of one day in ten to work on the temple—and you took whatever task the building committee assigned. You also accepted whatever old Mother Nature happened to offer for weather that day too, and complaining about it hadn’t ever changed it much.

  Off to the side, Benjamin watched his son, guessing at the thoughts going through his mind. He smiled inwardly. They were getting to be so much alike, he thought, that he knew what Nathan was thinking. Back in Vermont, when his two sons were growing into manhood, everyone had talked about how much Joshua was like his father and Nathan like his mother. Much of that came from their physical appearance. Nathan wasn’t much more than five feet ten inches tall and was slight of build. Benjamin and Joshua were both about six feet and much stockier through the body. Nathan’s eyes were a pale brown, almost like a dusty road, and his hair was only slightly darker. His features were quite nondescript. He wasn’t really plain, but neither did he have Joshua’s rugged handsomeness that caused women to turn and glance in admiration. Nathan’s beard, when he grew it, was even lighter in color than his hair and grew slowly enough that he could go several days before one noticed he hadn’t shaved. Joshua and Benjamin both had dark hair and heavy whisker growth, though Benjamin’s hair and whiskers were now liberally touched with gray. So with regard to physical appearance, their friends and neighbors had been right. Joshua was the son most like his father.

  But with
regard to temperament, that was something else again. For years Benjamin had told himself that the ongoing battles and the seemingly never-ending clashes between him and Joshua were the result of Joshua’s hotheadedness and a streak of independence that wouldn’t be tamed. But as Mary Ann was wont to frequently remind him, Benjamin Steed had carried a pretty wide stubborn streak of his own back then, and a temper that sometimes seemed bound by nothing stronger than a single strand of a spider’s web.

  He grinned openly now. Fortunately, she always used the past tense when she described him that way. And he knew she was right. How strange—and yet how fitting—that life, and the gospel, and living with a wonderful woman for nigh onto thirty-seven years had brought Benjamin Steed to a point where he was far more like his second son than his first. Since his return to the family circle some years before, Joshua had grown quite close to his father. But Benjamin and Nathan had become almost as one. Like now, he thought. Here they both were, dreading the heat of the day, and yet knowing there was not one thing to be done about it and so you simply pushed it aside and refused to brood about it.

  He decided to test his theory. He stepped over to his son. “Hot enough, isn’t it?”

  Nathan glanced up at the sky, then pulled his hat down a little lower over his eyes. “Not much point in complaining about it, though. It just adds to the supply of hot air.”

  Benjamin chuckled softly, pleased to have his validation. He slapped his son on the shoulder. “Right. Brother Garnett says he wants you and me on the jib crane this morning. May as well get to it.”

  By eleven-thirty, they had the first block of stone down and squared sufficiently to send it up to the stonemasons at the temple site. Benjamin and Nathan were manning the winch on the jib crane. They watched as four men snaked two thick cables underneath the block, using the space between the logs. In a moment, they had the cables secure.

  Nathan pushed on the jib, turning the crane partially around its circular base until the jib, or the boom, of the derrick was over the four men. As he did so, Benjamin spun the winch and let the ropes and the big hook start to lower. With practiced ease the men secured the hook to the cables.

  “All right,” Benjamin said, tightening his grip on the winch handle as Nathan joined him there. “Here we go.”

  Benjamin and Nathan were both grunting now as they leaned into the crank. The stone lifted off the floor of the quarry and began to rise slowly but steadily as father and son kept the winch turning.

  “That’s good!” One of the men by the block was in a crouch, eyeing the height of the waiting wagon to see when the stone was high enough to clear the long bed. Nathan reached out and slapped the ratchet lever with the heel of his hand, making sure it was engaged in the gears, and then he and Benjamin let the winch ease back just a hair until it caught and held. Now both of them leaned against the jib as the four men pulled on the stone. The boom responded slowly, the bull wheel at the base of the mast creaking ominously now with the weight, as they moved the block around a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc until it hung directly over the wagon.

  The nearest man eyed the lineup of stone and wagon, then turned and held up both thumbs. Benjamin and Nathan sprang back into action. Feet planted firmly to prevent them from slipping, straining until the veins in their foreheads stood out like a mole’s burrow across a meadow, they pushed the winch handle forward just enough to take the pressure off the catch. Carefully, they let the winch come back toward them now, and slowly, ever so slowly, the huge limestone block lowered onto the wagon bed, settling as gently as a baby being laid in a crib.

  The teamster, who had been standing back watching the quarry team work, now swung up into his wagon seat. As he took out his whip, he turned to Albert Rockwood, the quarry foreman. “That reminds me. Brother Cutler says he’s shorthanded up at the temple site for unloading. Can you spare a couple of men?”

  Rockwood frowned, but immediately nodded. Alpheus Cutler was a member of the building committee. If he said he needed men, then he needed men.

  “Brother Steed? Nathan? You wanna go up to the temple site and help them out?”

  “Whatever you say,” Benjamin said with a wave.

  “Absolutely,” Nathan chortled. It would be hot up on the bluffs too, but at least there would be the possibility of a breeze from time to time. He turned and hopped up on the wagon, holding out his hand to help his father do the same.

  Carlton Rogers pulled back on the reins gently as they entered the shade of a large oak tree. “Whoa there!” he called.

  The team of horses needed no urging and immediately stopped their forward progress. The animals were pulling nearly a half ton of brick in the big flatbed wagon, brick that was to be laid as the basement floor of the temple. They had come up the hill to the temple site in the afternoon’s worst heat. The horses’ shoulders and withers were dripping sweat, and even the straps of the harnessing were darkened clear through. Carl could see flecks of foam around their nostrils as they raised their heads and shook them, glad to be relieved, even if only for a few moments.

  “Can we get down and play, Pa?”

  Carl turned and looked at his three sons lined up on the wagon bench beside him. Caleb, who, at nearly five, was the youngest, had been the one to ask, but from the excitement in their eyes it was obvious that he spoke for his brothers as well. Then he looked across an open field where a group of boys were playing stickball and rolling metal hoops.

  “All right, but you stay off the road.”

  “Yes, Pa.” It came in a chorus.

  “And keep an eye out. I don’t want to have to come lookin’ for you once I’m unloaded.”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  He let the sternness in his face soften. “Then why are you standing around here?”

  With a whoop they were across the road and gone.

  Taking off his hat and wiping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, Carl looked around. There were plenty of men working at the site today, but he couldn’t see either of the two foremen who usually came out to take the consignment of bricks. But there were three wagons from the quarry ahead of him waiting to unload, so there was no sense getting in a hurry. He put his hat back on and turned to the wagon.

  Carl Rogers was not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In that, he and his brother-in-law Joshua were alike, but there the similarity ended. After years of hostility, Joshua had come to an uneasy truce with the Church. He married Caroline Mendenhall, who wasn’t a member either. But now Caroline wanted to be baptized. Joshua couldn’t accept that, and so a note of tension had crept into their marriage. Melissa Steed had been a Mormon when Carl married her. Carl’s family had been opposed to the Church and Carl had inherited a little of that attitude for a while. So there had been tension between him and Melissa over religion too, but that was completely gone now. He wasn’t interested at all in the Church, but he respected Melissa’s right to worship as she chose. Though he had not openly admitted this to her, he was actually pleased to be living among the Mormons now. They were a good people, and they made for a strong community for him and his family. Unlike Joshua, he had no residual feelings about Mormonism.

  Carl turned to the box beneath the wagon seat and found a large rag and a currycomb. He moved forward and began to rub down his team. He worked slowly and methodically, first drying them off, then taking long strokes with the currycomb, watching the flesh of the horses ripple with pleasure as he worked them over. Carl was donating these bricks to the temple project. It was his third load now. The building committee sent the men down to the kilns to provide the labor, but Carl provided the materials and hauled the bricks up here at no cost. It pleased Melissa greatly that he would do so, and it hadn’t hurt his relationship with her family either.

  He finished, slapping the near horse’s rump affectionately as he moved to put the comb away again. Sure, donating the bricks cost him out-of-pocket money, but his kilns were running two shifts a day now trying to keep up with the demand by
the Mormons for new housing. He could afford to be a little generous. And besides, his relationship with Melissa was as happy as it had ever been in their ten years of marriage.

  His head came up with a jerk. Ten years? They had been married on July twenty-sixth, 1831. Today was July twenty-sixth! He groaned and hit his head with his hand. Today was his tenth wedding anniversary and he had totally forgotten. Then almost instantly he felt relieved. He had remembered now, before it was too late. He would swing past the woodworking shop where Brigham Young and Matthew Steed worked in partnership and buy her that rocking chair. Melissa had admired it openly more than once and now he understood. That was her way of telling him what he should get her.

  “Ho! Carl!”

  Carl turned around. Another wagon from the quarry was approaching. He lifted a hand to shade his eyes, then immediately raised a hand to wave. “Afternoon, Israel.”

  Israel Barlow pulled his team in behind Carl’s wagon, and jumped down. Carl walked to meet him and they shook hands.

  “Another load today, huh?” Barlow commented, eyeing the stacks of bricks in Carl’s wagon.

  “Yes. And one more for you too.” Carl turned and looked at the man’s team. Israel Barlow had one of the finest working teams in Nauvoo—a beautifully matched pair of black mares—and often he was at the quarry whether it was his tithing day or not. Barlow had hauled more than one load of brick for Carl Rogers as a way of supplementing his farm income and they had become good friends.

  “How are the two lovebirds doing?”

  Carl turned. “Lovebirds?”

  “Yes. Didn’t I hear your brother-in-law got married on Saturday?”

  “Oh.” Carl’s mind hadn’t been thinking in terms of Matthew and Jennifer Jo, and the question had caught him off guard. He smiled. “Yes. Well, it’s a little hard to tell. They’re both off in a world of their own.”

  As Barlow nodded and chuckled, Carl squinted into the afternoon sun, looking at Israel’s wagon. As in most wagons, there was a small metal tube fastened to the side of the wagon seat. It was designed to hold the teamster’s whip, easily at hand when needed, but leaving his hands free when it wasn’t. Israel’s wagon had the holder but nothing in it.