For Time and Eternity

by Allison Pittman

  Melissa was immediately intrigued. We’d just built a schoolhouse close enough for her to attend, and she was quite eager to go, as I’d done little more than practice the most rudimentary of reading and arithmetic with her up to now. She reached out. “May I see?”

  “Of course.” I slid the book across the table and allowed her to choose a page to open. She scanned it, scowling.

  “I’ve never seen you write this much before.”

  “It’s not an easy thing for me to do,” I said. “I’m not very good at it. Sometimes it’s much easier to tell stories than to read and write them.”

  “Is that why Papa always reads to us?”

  “Partly.” I allowed my eyes to linger on the journal page while I considered her question. The last thing I wanted to do was discourage my daughter from learning to read and write simply because it was difficult for me. “But since Papa is going to be gone for a while, I guess I’ll have to get back into practice.”

  Interestingly enough, I’d begun my practice of copying verses when I was reading the book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. I had argued with my mother, begging to wait and commence this practice when I started again with Genesis, but she refused. It was a summer evening—just like this very one—and she insisted this was the only way I’d have to practice my penmanship until school started again. In response, I’d chosen the shortest verse in the chapter, and there, living in what had been called the new Zion, the words fell over me like so many stones mined from the quarry. Years and miles away from the first time I touched a pencil to the page, I ran my hand over the words, cleared my throat, and drew up my courage.

  “This is from the book of Revelation, chapter 2, verse 4.” Another deep breath. “‘Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.’” Tears filled my eyes, and I looked up, trying to blink them back, but to no avail.

  “Why are you crying, Mama?” Lottie asked.

  “That’s it?” Melissa said, unmoved. “That doesn’t even mean anything. Why would you write that down?”

  I couldn’t answer. I sat in my chair, eyes lifted to God, and wept. “How could you have known? All those years ago? I was just a child.”

  “Mama?” Lottie sounded concerned. “Why are you crying? Is it sad?”

  “No,” I said finally, wiping my eyes and nose on my sleeve—something I never allowed the girls to do. “And yes, a little. You see, it’s like I’ve found something I thought I’d lost.”

  “Like a treasure?” Lottie asked.

  “Very much like that.” I longed to take my little girl into my arms, but she seemed so content on Kimana’s lap. In fact, Kimana’s eyes looked hungry with more promise of life than I’d ever seen in them before. This, truly, was a moment orchestrated by God, and I would do nothing to disturb it.

  “So what exactly does it mean?” My older daughter’s voice held more than a hint of skepticism.

  “I’m not exactly sure about the details,” I answered honestly. “It’s been so long. . . .” My words trailed as I reached for the Bible and turned to the last book, skimming the verses until I found the second chapter. Fearful of stumbling over the words, I read them to myself first before imparting them to Kimana and the girls. “This is the word of God going to a church in Eph—Ephesus. He tells them that they are good people, and that they have come through many hardships, but they have abandoned their first love. . . .”

  “So who was their first love?”

  “Their God.” Kimana answered Melissa’s question with quiet assurance.

  “Yes,” I said. “You see, it doesn’t matter how good of a person you are or how much you overcome if you don’t know Jesus.”

  “I love Jesus!” Lottie sang out.

  “Of course you do, darling. We all do.” My glance around the table included Kimana. “But it’s important to love Jesus and know who he really is.”

  “He’s our brother.” The girls spoke in unison.

  “No,” I said with an authority that came from a power beyond myself. “He is more than that. He is our Lord. He is our Savior.”

  “But he was born to God just like we all were.”

  Something cold ran through my soul. My little girl, newly six years old, spoke with the same conviction in this teaching as I did in truth. I don’t think I ever had such spiritual poise as a child; indeed, I never had, else I would never have been so easily led away. We’d been taught so differently—I from hours spent dozing in a pew or struggling alone with Scriptures at our table, and she adoring at the feet of her father. Nathan took such delight in teaching his children, and I knew they would never be able to fully separate the doctrine of Joseph Smith from the love they felt for their papa.

  “Listen,” I said, bringing my voice to a soft, warm place. “Just for now, for the summer while Papa’s gone, let’s try to learn some new things about Jesus. Things your papa hasn’t taught you.”

  “Like what the Gentiles believe?” I could hear Nathan’s disdain coming through Melissa’s mouth.

  O Lord, help me walk this bridge. “Like what followers of Christ believe. What Jesus himself said to be true.”

  “But God told Joseph Smith that all of the churches were wrong.”

  I felt myself rising to an argument when Kimana softly interjected. “Melissa, little one, your mother wants to share her heart with us. Not just words from a book.”

  Gratitude washed over me, and I reached out to touch the hand of this woman who, after so many silent years, was becoming my friend.

  “That’s enough for tonight,” I said, closing both the Bible and my journal. “It’s getting late, and we can talk more tomorrow.”

  Lottie, her mood largely unchanged, slid from Kimana’s lap and came over to kiss me good night. “I’m sorry the story made you cry,” she whispered.

  “I’m not.” I held her to me and breathed the scent of her—sweetgrass and milk. “It’s good to cry sometimes. It gives our inside a good washing.”

  Melissa, however, would have no such sentiment; she barely tolerated my embrace.

  “I love you, darling,” I said, holding her stiff little body in my arms. “Say a prayer for Papa.”

  “I do every night.”

  Later, after supervising washups and tucking the girls in, I came back to the table, where Kimana—long past the time when she usually retired to her own little home—sat in the lamplight. She’d brought our Book of Mormon to the table, and it sat alongside the Bible and my old leather journal. Exhausted as I was, I joined her, and for the longest time we sat in silence. I stared at the ribbon of dancing girls painted on the lamp’s globe; she stared at me.

  “Are they so different, these books?”

  I nodded.

  “I never knew.”

  “Did nobody ever try to teach you?” The question burned because I certainly never had.

  “When they first came here, into this valley, they tried to tell my people that your Jesus had been here before. Maybe walking this very ground and teaching our ancestors.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Her face was the softest I’d ever seen it. “Once,” she said, “a long time ago, a little boy went to a stream to water his father’s horse, and he saw the most beautiful girl on the other side, gathering water into a basket. Because he was a boy and did not know what to do with such beauty, he picked up a stone and threw it across the river. The stone hit the girl here—” she tapped her finger to her temple—“and the girl cried, dropped the basket, and ran away.

  “Years later, when he was a man, he went back to the stream to water his own horse, and there she was again. But they did not know each other because they were very much changed. Being a man now, and knowing how to impress a woman, he picked up another stone, this one flat, and skipped it across the river. It bounced straight into her basket. Her laughter made him brave, and he rode his horse to the other side of the stream. When he was closer, he saw the tiny scar where he’d hit her with the sto
ne so many years ago.

  “He touched the scar and said, ‘Could you ever love a boy who would do such a terrible thing?’

  “‘No,’ she said, ‘but I could love a man who will skip a stone into my basket.’

  “That is why young men skip stones along the river—to make up for the mischief they might have done as boys.”

  I listened, puzzled at why she would tell such a story. My confusion must have been evident because she laughed.

  “Do you wonder if that story is true, Mrs. Fox?”

  “No, I’m just wondering why you chose to share it with me.”

  “That tale was told to me by my grandmother, who heard it from her grandmother, who heard it from her grandmother. It is a story that comes from our ancestors from as far back as there have been boys and stones and rivers. Don’t you see? If our people will take such pleasure in handing down the story of a little boy and a stone, don’t you think we would have preserved the story of this great Jesus coming to our land?”

  Somehow, everything I’d been taught about this new religion came to the surface, and I found myself leaping to its defense. “But they teach about the wars—”

  “You think our people have not known war? that we do not fight and kill one another, generation after generation? Yet we carry our past with us. What you know in your heart cannot be destroyed by war, Mrs. Fox. And tonight, you look like your heart has been broken.”

  “It has.”

  “But not destroyed. It cannot be destroyed while it beats inside of you. And I think, for you, it will heal.”

  “It will.”

  “And it will get stronger.”

  God help me. “Yes.”

  “And you will teach my heart to be as strong as yours?”

  “We’ll grow strong together.” I reached for her hand. “Will you pray with me?”

  “My prayer is different from yours,” she said. “I pray to the God who created all—the sky, the earth, and everything that lives.”

  “That’s all right. So do I.”

  “And I do not know exactly who Jesus is.”

  “He’s one and the same,” I said. “Let’s start there.”

  What sweet summer evenings we had, the four of us. Without a man’s schedule to consider, Kimana and I moved our evening meal up earlier and earlier, until we might have the dishes cleared and washed and put away before the hint of sunset. Kimana soaked up every word. I must say I envied her easy understanding, and one evening as we sat with the cabin door wide open to let in the cool breeze, I told her so.

  She spoke, softly measuring her words. “Sometimes I think I hear these words with the very ears of God. I prayed to him and asked his Spirit to take the place of my own, so I could know who he truly is.”

  For the first time I noticed a spark of interest coming from Melissa. All summer she’d been enduring our Bible study with an air of unimpressed indulgence, but this caught her attention.

  “I already know who God is,” she said. “I learned in church.”

  “But you see, little one,” Kimana said, “I have never been told. I know only what God himself says to me. You need to close your ears and let your heart open.”

  And, oh, how our hearts opened. It wasn’t long before my journal served to open the door to the Bible, and though I intended to read only a chapter a night as I had in my youth, often we would lose ourselves in the verses. I would read until Kimana stopped me to ask a question, and we would talk together until we felt we had an answer. Through our readings, we—Kimana and I—came to truly know and love the person Jesus was. He became for us what God intended him to be—divine, yes, but a man, flesh and blood, living the harshness of life that we all know. As we read about his death, the cruelty of crucifixion, the suffering under the bloody whip, we both cried. Kimana’s sweet, peaceful spirit could not abide details of such violence. My tears carried with them an almost unbearable mixture of guilt and gratitude.

  “That’s why Papa doesn’t like to talk about it,” Melissa said, her voice oddly void of emotion. “It’s sad to think that Jesus went through all that and people still didn’t believe. That’s why he had to come again.”

  How to respond? I knew she spoke out of love not for her father’s church, but for her father himself. I used to love the sight of her curled up in Nathan’s lap, listening with rapt attention to Mormon teachings. Maybe that was the magic of it—the bond between the two of them, which she and I seemed destined never to share. A bond I’d never had with my own father. I couldn’t remember a single time I’d ever curled up in his lap—or even at his feet. We’d only ever sat like this, at a kitchen table, Bible open and lifeless. I’d never wept over the death of Jesus with my mother; I’d never waited, breathless with anticipation for the moment when we would read those words: “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.”

  I’d never bounced in my seat like my precious little Lottie, who clapped her little hands and said, “He is alive! He is alive!”

  I knew it was all true, I believed with all my heart the stories and the prophecies and the gospel, but none of it ever touched me until that summer. Finally one night, having finished the Gospel of Luke and wondering what book to begin next, I thumbed through the pages, asking the Holy Spirit to lead me, and I came across these words: The True Christ Described. That night, after a supper of white beans and corn bread, I opened the Bible to the book of Colossians.

  “This is a very old letter,” I said, “written by a man named Paul. He was an apostle.”

  “Our church has apostles,” Melissa said.

  “No, darling. Not really. A true apostle is one who witnessed the risen Christ. Nobody today can truly be called an apostle.”

  She pouted and sat back in her chair, but Kimana was intrigued. “Read the letter.”

  It began with Paul’s greeting, how he gave thanks to God for the people he addressed. For just a moment my heart tightened, thinking of all the unanswered, unopened letters I’d written to my parents. If they could only know how grateful I felt for what they had given me. As I read further, though, all melancholy left, and the power of God’s Word—in fact, that very power within me—came forth as the perfect words of one who truly knew Jesus Christ came out of my lips.

  “‘And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.’”

  “What’s preeminence?” Melissa asked.

  I hesitated, thinking. Oh, my Missy was a bright girl. When I was her age, I never asked what words meant. If I didn’t know, I didn’t know, and I went on to the next one. But hers was such a seeking mind, if not an open heart, so I could not leave her unsatisfied. “Well,” I began, “I think it means he should be first. He should be the first thought in our mind; we should consider him our first authority.”

  She seemed satisfied with my definition.

  “Keep reading,” Kimana said.

  “‘For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.’”

  “Peace through blood,” Kimana whispered. “Never have I seen peace come through blood, and I have seen—my people have seen—so much blood.”

  “What’s reconciled?” Melissa asked.

  “That means an end to a disagreement. When we don’t believe in Jesus—the true Jesus—we are in a disagreement with God. And when we sin, we are in disagreement. But when Jesus died, his blood wiped away that disagreement. Listen: ‘And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight.’”

  By the time I finished that first chapter, Lottie’s good, qu
iet behavior was near an end, and Melissa was not nearly as enthralled as she had been with the stories of Jesus. So, earlier than most evenings, we joined our hands around the table and bowed our heads for prayer. That night, though, it was Kimana who lifted her voice, but my throat burned with tears as if the words were my own.

  “Great Father in heaven,” she prayed, “I did not know your Son, Jesus. But I know him now. I am clean. I am holy. I have peace through his blood. May you never be the enemy of my mind.”

  Never had I heard a petition more beautiful. From that night on, Kimana’s prayer became my own—not only for my own soul, but for the souls of my daughters.

  Chapter 17

  Late in August, the news made its way out to our little village that the new immigrant party would be arriving in Salt Lake City within a week. It was always a cause for celebration—new souls won, new blood, new labor. In years past, I’d been a part of that celebration, finding all the bits and pieces of my own home to contribute to theirs. Food, clothing, whatever I could afford to part with would be bundled into a box and brought to the temple site to be displayed with everybody else’s donation.

  This year, however, I felt no such generosity of spirit. Instead, I packed my best dress and bonnet into a carpet satchel.

  “You are sure you won’t take the horse?” Kimana asked as she buttered bread and placed it in a milk bucket along with a few strips of dried beef and a sealed jar of water. “It is a long walk. Will take you all day.”

  “We don’t have a saddle,” I explained.

  “Saddle,” she said with disdain. “A good horse needs nothing more than a thick blanket and a firm hand.”

  “Well, of all of those, all we have is the blanket. I’ll be fine. I walked across half the country to get here, didn’t I?”

  “But to go alone . . .”

  “Perhaps some fine Saint will take pity on me and give me a ride.” I picked up the satchel to test its weight, imagining how heavy it would feel that evening. “It’s a busy-enough road.”