Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  There were quite a few sailors on the dock. Famke pulled the un-cornered shawl farther over her head; she’d wrapped her few other possessions in her spare blouse, and she held it in front of her body and staggered dramatically. “The sun . . .” She wrinkled her forehead, aping pain.

  “Ah yes, it’s a bit much after so many days belowdeck.” Goodhouse took her arm—ignoring the other Sainted women traveling alone, women who had also spent the trip in their bunks and who were weak from vomiting besides—and guided her solicitously through English customs and into women’s steerage.

  “Thank you,” she said politely, as he lingered on the uncrossable threshold. She pulled the intact end of the shawl across her nose; it would seem that no steerage cabin ever smelled good. “Thank you very much,” she said again, as he seemed disinclined to leave her. “I am sure you have much to do.”

  With visible reluctance, he bowed, and he made his exit just as a stout peasant woman tottered in and retched heartily over the floor.

  To one who did not go on deck, the steamship journey was an endless parade of stenches: seasickness, overcooked stews, underwashed bodies. Perhaps worst were the unemptied privies, for even with the sparkling ocean all around, they made an inexplicable pocket of dirty water and palpable odor. Nonetheless, Famke spent much of her time there: It was the one place she could be alone and unobserved. In steerage, if the sleeping women woke, they tended to use the chamberpot rather than dress and stumble out to what was only a board full of holes propped over a tub anyway. Famke slept in most of her clothes and trained herself to wake shortly before dawn, secure her yellow pocket, and sneak away to privacy. There at least she could wait, alone, until a finger of gray light filtered through the filthy porthole and illuminated her lap.

  For in her lap lay her own face, the face Albert had sketched that first day in Dragør. It was crumpled now from its travels, and the pencil marks—graphite, not charcoal, she thought gratefully, now that she knew more about an artist’s materials—had smeared, but it was still there: the work of his hand, the outline of her face. As the light grew, she pulled it closer to her eyes and imagined she was gazing into a mirror, such as the one she’d given him for Christmas. It was some comfort to think that perhaps that glass was reflecting his face at this very moment.

  Every night, she mourned the loss of the tinderbox; but she told herself to be content with this sketch, which was surely more precious to her than antique silver, no matter how many queens and princesses might have touched that little box. She waited, dreaming, until she heard the first footsteps on the deck—usually a matter of minutes—and then quickly folded the sketch and returned it to her pocket.

  As to her other possessions, they were safe enough on the bunk she shared with another girl; Mormon ladies did not steal from each other, and in their new-convert virtue they even withheld curiosity about each other’s bundles. All bundles were assumed to hold roughly the same contents: a few spare garments, contracts of emigration and repayment, pictures of loved ones never to be seen again in the flesh.

  All day, all night, the Olivia glided over the blue-green, sparkling sea, steaming toward the new life. The polluted air on board made Famke cough; but then, she was not the only one it affected this way. She soothed herself with thoughts of the great clean new country, and occasionally beguiled some hours in the bunk by telling herself stories: This is a mountain in Mæka . . . This is a miner entering the mountain . . . Below her, the other women spun more fairy tales, imagining perfumes and silks they would wear in Utah, pearls they might reach down and pry from the oyster beds now, if only they had nets long enough.

  A few of the women managed not to succumb to sickness at sea. They spent their time in singing what Heber called “glees and catches” and in stitching new sets of underwear: union suits so cleverly constructed that the person wearing one need never be completely naked, even while washing, and tediously embroidered over nipples and Down There with a set of symbols that Famke could not understand but was told were a sort of map, directions that the body could follow to paradise upon its resurrection. She herself was no needlewoman (the yellow pocket twice needed repairs on the journey), and she certainly felt no call for such a garment, which in any event she would not be allowed to wear until after her baptism as a Saint. She was much more interested in the English lessons that Heber Good-house gave in another emigrant’s first-class cabin. She attended those whenever the ship’s passageways were free of sailors.

  Under Goodhouse’s tutelage, Famke learned that English was the language presently spoken by God. The Saints knew this because God—or his angel, which was somehow the same thing to them—had spoken English to their young prophet, Joseph Smith, as the seventeen-year-old-boy dug his father’s field a half-century before. Some years later, God had asked Smith to translate the signs on some golden tablets into the Mormons’ new book of holy history and had given him special eyeglasses, or scryglasses, with which to do it. She imagined joking to Albert that he’d taught her to speak divine language.

  Meanwhile she plied Goodhouse with questions. What did Joseph Smith’s tablets say? What did he mean by “The Miracle of the Seagulls”? How long would the train portion of the journey to Utah take? She made Mormon lore her particular study: Perhaps this could be the mythology that Albert was seeking, the set of stories that would unlock his inspiration and let his artistic gifts flourish. The more she knew about it, the better; it would be her gift to him, as the glass ice had been so many months ago.

  “Is it true,” she asked Heber Goodhouse, “that you believe your God is married?”

  “He is everyone’s God,” the Saint said in a tone of gentle instruction. “He created us in His image and bade us marry; our world reflects His. Even the savages practice a form of marriage.”

  “So it is true, then.”

  “Yes.” He sighed, as if giving up a battle. “God is a husband. He descended to earth and married the woman you were raised to call the Virgin Mary, who is a treasured part of the Holy Family. We recognize her with our prayers in temple.”

  Famke spent a moment imagining the Virgin’s blue veil replaced with the sunbonnet recommended for Saintly immigrants, then dismissed the image as unappealing. “And why,” she asked daringly, “do your people have so many wives?”

  Goodhouse’s eyes remained steady, though they did not quite meet hers; this was the stickiest of all the doctrines and covenants, and the hardest to explain to young women. “It is ordained by God,” he said, conscious of some bravery on his own part: “‘If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified.’ Joseph Smith translated this from ancient papyri—er, scrolls of text—”

  “What is ‘espouse’?” she interrupted.

  “To marry, Sister Ursula.” Heber was somewhat relieved to escape explaining the rest: that Smith had bought the papyri along with four Egyptian mummies, all of which had traveled to Illinois in time to vanish in the Great Chicago Fire. The nuances of his people’s history were always difficult for the unbaptised, who could not accept that they themselves lived in an age of miracles. “Literally, to take a spouse.”

  Chapter 12

  I saw the Mormon women. Then . . . my heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and . . . I said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity . . . and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.

  MARK TWAIN,

  ROUGHING IT

  The boy’s hands had healed over nicely, to a network of scar tissue as pink and white as a well-kept baby’s skin. Those scars stood out dramatically against his slightly darker wrists, but he claimed cheerfully that they did not hurt. Still, even as she explained her dilemma, Birgit had tro
uble looking away. She had scarcely realized, when she summoned him from his village on Amager, that this was indeed the boy from that dreadful day under the elder tree—the tree so thickly green beyond her window. A Viggo, not a Mogens; a boy apprenticed to a mortician without the usual fee, because no good family wanted a son who had touched death. He reeked of the camphor with which he whitened the faces of the dead; but, she noticed, his hands were very clean, even beneath the nails. At the orphanage, she herself had shown him how to wash his first corpse, and he had learned her lessons well.

  She opened the simple wooden box in which she kept her important papers, including the slip that had given Famke her name, and took out a fat packet.

  “It is really two letters,” she said, holding them up so he could see the addresses and postmarks framed on the backs of each page (“To Famke, who lived at the top with Albert Castle”; “To the Mother Superior of Immaculate Heart”), but not the texts inside. “You see, the first one arrived at their old boardinghouse. The landlord sent it onward with a note to the house where Famke—Ursula—was in service, though I can’t say how he had that address. Finally the housekeeper of that place had the ragman deliver it here on his way through town. She would not waste a stamp on it. There is some bitterness from the way Famke left, to join the Mormons.” She said the last word bravely and with such obvious resolution that Viggo knew she considered this to be her own chief failure, to have raised and loved a girl who would renounce the one true faith.

  “What do the letters say?” Viggo asked, sitting up straight as he’d been taught, eyes wide and interested below his carefully oiled hair. He had always enjoyed a good story, whether of saints or of sinners, and this one was turning out fine. He remembered Famke, of course: the red-haired witch who’d beguiled him at her boiling cauldron. That she had forsaken farm life and married a dissolute artist (for such was the impression that Birgit, with painful regard for the boundaries of truth, had labored to convey) did not surprise him in the least. What surprised him was that the man would return to his homeland without Famke; even in memory, Viggo felt a tug toward her, just as a nail might retain its attraction to the magnet that first gave it a charge, or as a body in a coffin might turn toward the fields from which it had dug his living.

  “It is wrong to read another person’s mail—but,” Birgit confessed in a rush most unbecoming to a Mother Superior, even one who was barely thirty-five years old, “I did read both letters, this time, to see . . . The boardinghouse keeper says that in sorting through his aunt’s record books he discovered some money was owed to Famke. He did not want to send it through the mails, but it is there for her to collect.”

  “And what does Famke’s husband say?”

  Struggling to regain her composure, Mother Birgit traced that letter’s original creases, making sure nothing showed but the address in Nyhavn and, on the back, a green blot of sealing wax bearing the imprint “AC” and a date of some two months previous. She was almost certain that she was doing right.

  “He . . . wants her to join him.”

  Viggo was perplexed. “But that is wonderful, is it not? She will have the care of a husband again.”

  Birgit studied her own folded hands. In fact the letter contained no promise of marriage, but she was trusting to God that such a promise would come if she helped reunite the lovers.

  “Yes,” she said miserably, fearing that Viggo would never agree to her modest scheme. “But you see, he is in England with his father, and she has gone to America. Someone must give her the letter, someone must bring her back. Or, that is, deliver her to the address in this letter. Hampstead.” Surely Albert Castle would do the honorable thing if Famke turned up on his doorstep with his letter in her hand, ready to hold him to his half-promise—and with a strapping Danish protector standing behind her. “I thought that if you, perhaps, could collect the money from the boardinghouse, you could use it to go to America . . .”

  “Mæka,” Viggo said excitedly, using the childhood name. Birgit remembered that, for all Viggo’s knowledge of death, he was only eighteen years old. She remembered, too, that he spoke no English; but she had selected him in part because of his ability to learn, if not quickly, then well.

  “Famke will not stay a Mormon if she knows this man is waiting for her. If there is not enough money at the boardinghouse, I could perhaps advance something from our coffers . . .”

  “That will not be necessary—I will work for my passage. The landlord’s money will give me a start in looking for her once I land. And then I will bring her to this husband.”

  Birgit noticed that in his excitement, Viggo’s scarred hands had turned pink. “Yes,” she said, “Famke must be with her husband.”

  When Heber Goodhouse made his proposal, halfway across the Atlantic, it was just as much a surprise to him as it was to Famke. “Marry me, Sister Ursula”—it wasn’t at all what he had meant to say, there in the cabin-cum-office in which she’d presented herself for the study of scripture. He could not even remember how he had fallen to his knees, but there he was.

  What had he done? To have resisted fleshly temptation during these two years abroad, only to yield at the last hour, on his voyage home . . . If his fellow-missionaries could see him now—let alone Sariah, who as his first wife had the right to approve or reject all wives to come—And yet—yet he couldn’t quite retract it.

  The girl had him fixed with her blue eyes, fixed like a moth on two pins. Was she angry? To his horror, Heber realized he was babbling, telling her after all about those papyri, the Lord’s revelation that they were holy records, and the vision he gave Joseph Smith to translate them on the spot (this time without scryglasses) such that the principles of celestial marriage were revealed and recorded in the sacred Doctrine and Covenants—“for the Lord teaches us to increase ourselves—to swell our flock of Saints, the true souls, the sons of Nephi, lest we be destroyed and step into the celestial fire alone . . .”

  “I am afraid of fire,” Famke said, her eyes wide with what he now knew must be confusion as well as modesty.

  “The Lord himself has married, as you know. Marriage is the holy sealing of souls—”

  “I told you in Copenhagen.” She seemed to think he was chastising her in some way. “I am a Mormon. I promise. I have done nothing—”

  “Of course you haven’t,” he hastened to assure her. “In our Church, it is not wrong for one woman to draw the eye of another’s husband. It is lawful and right for a man to have two wives—or more, unto his means—for as it was in the days of Abraham, so it should be in these last days, and when a man is meant to take a wife, God sends a revelation—”

  “Lawful,” the girl repeated. Her face was luminous white.

  Heber clutched his beard. “Yes, yes, I know it is against some earthly laws,” he said; “the laws of Europe and of the United States. For now, we will have to keep the marriage a secret, at least among Gentiles. You will live in the home of my first wife, Sariah. You will call her Aunt. You will share—”

  “I don’t understand,” Famke said, switching to Danish. “Are you really asking me to be your wife?”

  The flood of words came to a sudden halt. “Ja,” Heber said through dry lips.

  “With a wedding? A secret wedding?” Et hemmeligt Bryllup.

  “Yes. One of the other missionaries can do it while we’re still at sea.”

  There was a long silence. Prosaically, Heber felt his hips aching, locked too long in one position. In the corridor, a sailor took the Lord’s name in vain.

  “Why?” she asked at last.

  “Why? Because I—because God—It is meant to be,” he said. “I have had the revelation.”

  She thought that over, too, neither contesting nor confirming his assumption. Heber began to feel a glimmer of hope, and with it, an admiration for her capacity for stillness. She hadn’t moved a hair since they’d begun speaking. She had a marvelous control over her body, a most beautiful propriety. Of course it was right for her to he
sitate—she hadn’t even been baptised yet . . . He should tell her to pray on the question, but an unnamable fear stopped him from suggesting it. Instead he made her a promise.

  “You are a Saint,” he said. “You are blessed of God. And if you accept me, I will bring you to the celestial kingdom.”

  “What about now?” she asked, in a tone he felt was both unromantic and unspiritual. “What about this life, this summer—this voyage to America?”

  He was glad to answer that one, at least part of it. “My scheme of raising silkworms will ensure prosperity to Prophet City. You will be my wife and helpmate—”

  “Will you pay for my passage?” she asked. “May I have my tinderbox back?”

  Again she’d dammed his words. But he did not hesitate: “Yes,” he said.

  “Then, yes,” she said. “I will marry you.”

  As soon as Famke had freed herself of Heber’s joyful embrace, she asked for the tinderbox. He appeared glad to give it back; perhaps he thought she was being properly modest in detaching from him, protecting herself from the dangers of exuberant flesh. He took the box, wrapped in a handkerchief, from his desk and handed it to her with a little homily about the beauty of maternal love and how she would find a new mother in Sariah . . .

  Famke unwrapped the handkerchief and saw with relief that the box was intact; even the twenty-three matches were still rattling inside. She held out Heber’s handkerchief, but—

  “Wrap it up again,” he said, averting his eyes from the naked Graces.

  And, thinking the cloth would protect the ladies from scratches, Famke obeyed. She went back to steerage with a merry, light step and crawled into her bunk, still holding the box. That she would soon be a wife and take a man’s hand in marriage, Famke hardly contemplated. This wouldn’t be a real wedding, as it was illegal in most of the world; and from what she understood of Heber’s confused promises, there would be no consummation until she’d been accepted by the first wife and “bonded” to Heber in the Mormon sanctum in Salt Lake City. Anything could happen before then.