Forsaking All Others

by Allison Pittman

  “Not while he was still married to me.”

  “So why did you come back?”

  That’s when I knew that, while I’d been sleeping in the next room, Melissa had been building up the story behind my return, and I was about to begin tearing it down bit by bit.

  “Because even if I’m not Papa’s wife, I’m still your mother. And I miss you girls so very much.”

  “Can you live here if you’re not married to Papa?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you going to live in Kimana’s cabin with her?” Lottie asked. “She’s not married to Papa either.”

  At any other time, we might have greeted such an innocent question with the same abandoned laughter that Amanda and I had shared in the shadow of the church house, but all of our hearts were too heavy to go far beyond a flickering, indulgent smile.

  “We’re going to live back home. My old home, with my mama. Your grandma. You’ve never had a grandma before, and she can’t wait to meet you.”

  I watched as understanding dawned upon Melissa. Whatever truth she’d envisioned disappeared, buried by the weight of new revelation. Her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, and her lips twisted into a sneer stolen straight from her father. “All of us?”

  “Both of you.”

  Little Nate squirmed in his mother’s embrace and was set on a rug near the hearth, where a whole box full of blocks awaited him. Both the girls looked at him with such longing, I took a deep breath and announced, “You have another little brother. He’s waiting for us back home.”

  Amanda looked shocked, and Kimana, pleased.

  Melissa seemed not to have heard me. “This is our home.”

  “Your home is with your mother,” Amanda said, reaching for Melissa’s hand in a gesture of distant affection. “You need yours and she needs hers. Mine died when I was little, like you, and I miss her every day.”

  “I don’t want to miss you anymore,” Lottie said, and she crawled from Kimana’s lap and ran around the table to me.

  “A wife has to obey her husband,” Melissa said. “Papa won’t let you take us away. He’d never see us.”

  “He hardly ever sees us now.” Lottie spoke such quiet, unemotional fact, we all sat in silence, giving her words space to settle.

  I prayed silently, begging my Lord to give me the words to say. Bad enough that I had naively thought I’d just slip them away, but never had I anticipated this divide between my daughters. Something told me that if I spoke the whole truth about wanting to shield them from the Mormon teachings, Melissa would dig her little heels in all the more. So long ago, in those first moments of waking after the storm, when Colonel Brandon declared we would have a battle on our hands, I had no idea the hardest fight of all would come between me and my eldest child. I had to give her a grudging respect for having such strength of conviction. Even at her young age, she was prepared for theological debate. Her father had taught her well. Too well, and thus I strengthened my stance.

  “The law gives me permission,” I said, then, softer, “and your father must obey.”

  “Even if he doesn’t want to?” Her eyes begged for reassurance.

  “Even if he doesn’t want to.”

  To that, Melissa had nothing to say, and for a while the only sound in the room was the happy banging of wood on wood as Nate played with his blocks. I craned to look at him over Lottie’s head. Perhaps he had his father’s carpentry skill in his blood.

  “When will you be leaving?” Amanda’s question sounded almost wistful.

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. This final leg of the journey would be in Mr. Bostwick’s hands. I would not budge from this place without his legal approval and paternal blessing.

  “Are we going to walk the whole way?” Lottie asked.

  This time her innocence did get a chuckle out of me. No doubt she was thinking of those poor emigrants who came pushing handcarts, having walked the entire journey across the plains.

  “Goodness, no. We’re going to take a stagecoach.” I jostled her on my knee, bouncing her until she giggled. “There’ll be a grand team of eight horses, all with great chains jangling, and the ground is just a blur before your eyes.”

  She twisted in my lap. “Can Kimana come?”

  All eyes turned to the silent woman at the table, each of us with our own personal longing.

  “No,” she said before any of us could make our plea. “My family is here, buried in this ground. And little Nate—” she nodded toward the child—“and more little ones someday.”

  Sister Amanda blushed and whispered, “Maybe, if Heavenly Father brings my husband home.”

  Chapter 32

  From that afternoon on, I felt like one of the ten virgins in the parable who waited for the bridegroom to come in the night, only I had no idea exactly what I was waiting for. It is with a begrudging spirit that I admit to seeing a glimpse of Joseph Smith’s vision for his polygamous doctrine. I found my heart opening to Sister Amanda and saw how we might have been friends—just as Evangeline and I once were—had we not been forced to share a husband.

  When we had quiet corners of time, I shared the stories of my journey since I was last here. If the girls were listening, I talked about Charlie, imitating his funny little laugh, or about my mother and what a gentle, kind spirit she had. In the evenings after they were asleep, I sat with Sister Amanda and Kimana, reliving my journey—the horror of the amputation, my dreadful sojourn with Evangeline, and the bittersweet reunion with my parents.

  “My father’s gone too, you know,” Amanda said, mopping her eyes with the corner of a pristine apron. “These people ran him out when he wouldn’t join their church.”

  I didn’t comment on her gaffe—that this was her church too—but I did click my tongue in sympathy. “Where is he now?”

  “California, far as I know. That’s where the money is, isn’t it?”

  “Just wait.” I leaned close, as if conspiring. “This church has built a great city, and its leader has lost his power. My Mr. Bostwick says this will be the next great city of the West.”

  But I shared my deepest fears with Kimana alone.

  One morning, when I’d been there more than a week, as Kimana and I worked to hang wash on the line, I told her of the sweet regard I harbored for Colonel Brandon. Sometimes talking with Kimana felt like dropping my thoughts into a deep, soft pool. She said little, merely rearranging my words and offering them back to me as questions to be pondered in a new light.

  “He is a good man?” she asked after I’d gone on at length about his faith, his courage, his commitment to bring me home.

  “One of the best I’ve ever known. And I think—I know he would marry me.”

  “And that is enough for your heart? To marry a good man?”

  “You don’t understand, Kimana. I’m going to be a divorced woman. No other man is going to want me.”

  “Here.” She handed me one of Sister Amanda’s nightgowns, soft white cotton trimmed in silk and lace. This was a change in our working pace, as I’d been handing the garments to Kimana to pin. Still, I took hold of the garment, shook it out, and draped it over the line. I waited for her to hand me the pins to secure it, as I would have, but she simply stood, arms crossed against her ample bosom, until I reached into the bag hanging from the line and retrieved them myself.

  Hanging wash had never been my favorite chore, but I’d disliked it all the more since suffering the handiwork of Captain Buckley. With the loss of my fingers, I’d lost the ability to deftly pass the pin from one hand to another while clutching the cloth to the line. These days I held both pins in my right hand, folding my left wrist over the garment to hold it in place until it was secured. Frustrating work, even on mild, windless days like this one. Kimana witnessed my struggle in silence, simply taking a step away from the basket of wash on the ground, and waited for me to bend, lift out a petticoat, and start the process again. At this pace, my hands would be red and chapped, and the particularly shar
p, chilling pain was already taking form at the place of my amputation. As I bent to the basket again, however, Kimana stopped me and said, “Hold up your hands.”

  I did, my fingers splayed against the clean white fabric.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Fox, what do you see?”

  “My hands.” A simple answer, yes, but all I could think to say.

  “How do they appear?”

  Kimana never asked idle questions, so I studied the image in front of me, searching for the understanding she wanted me to find. “They look . . . incomplete.”

  “But is there anything you cannot do now that you could do before?”

  “Wear a wedding ring.” A small joke, more for my benefit than hers. Still, she granted me a rare, small smile and took my left hand in her coarse, but gentle, work-worn grip.

  “You have learned to work through the emptiness. Here—” she traced her finger across the scarred flesh—“is mark of healing. Sealed up. When a woman loses her man, it is like the flesh being torn away. You need time to heal, to let that wound seal itself.”

  “But what if I never have another chance?”

  Again she looked to my hand. “Do you hate the fingers that remain?”

  “Of course not.”

  “A woman’s hands are never idle. This hand is your womanhood. Your childhood is gone. Your husband, now, is gone. But your children remain. Do you call this hand worthless next to the other one?”

  Slowly the picture took shape in my mind. God had given me these children. He kept my son safe in my womb through a perilous time and brought me safely back to my daughters. The home I would bring them to had its beginnings in my own childhood. All of this grace in the light of my own willful disobedience and ill-conceived actions. Why, then, should I fret over another man’s affections? Why should I doubt that everything God had given me would forever be enough? This was the woman to whom I’d entrusted the lives of my children. I knew I could trust her words of wisdom for my own.

  Just then I heard the girls’ voices raised in a fresh, gleeful shout. Indecipherable at first, but then the words “Papa! Papa!” rang clear as morning. I moved the petticoat to the side and saw a wagon coming over the crest.

  It was a moment I’d lived so many times before—Nathan coming home. For a moment, the past two years disappeared, and joy gathered in my knees and soared through my heart, taking my breath with it. My first instinct was to run and wait at the place where the hill meets the meadow, and I might have if Kimana had not held me.

  “Do you see?” she said. “New skin can fool us into thinking a wound is healed when it is not.”

  I swallowed and dug my heels into the earth, watching my girls run to meet their father. But Nathan was not alone in the wagon. The reins were in the hands of my Mr. Bostwick, and between them, looking more diminutive than ever, sat Evangeline, clutching her swaddled Sophie.

  At the bottom of the hill, Nathan hopped down. Melissa and Lottie ran into his arms. He swung Lottie up on his shoulders and held Melissa’s hand for the rest of the way, arriving at our little fence just behind the wagon. I stayed at the clothesline as Amanda, with her son balanced on her hip, waited at the gate. There, depositing Lottie on the ground, Nathan greeted both with a kiss. If he even saw me, he gave no indication.

  I looked to Mr. Bostwick, who pulled the horses to a stop outside our yard, greeting me with a tip of his hat and a reassuring nod.

  Leaving the toddler in his older sisters’ care, Nathan and Amanda made their way to the wagon, where Amanda took the baby as Nathan helped Evangeline from her seat. The child might have been Amanda’s own, given how her face lit up. Anxious at the separation, little Nate ran through the open gate and straight for his mother’s skirts. Soon after, I felt little hands clutching at my own, and I looked down to see my Lottie, her arms wrapped tight around me.

  Still at the gate, Melissa. She looked on the gathering at the wagon with a longing I felt in my own heart. When she turned her eyes to me, I knew that my daughters and I would forever share the same wound of my divorce from their father, and hers would run especially deep. At some point, Kimana had melted away, and I held my hand out to my elder daughter. Finally, with slow, purposeful steps, her head cast to the ground, she came to me. She stiffened under my touch, but I would not take it away. I knew we would need to heal together.

  Mr. Bostwick climbed down from the wagon and walked through the front gate with all the confidence he showed in everything he did. Nathan barely afforded him a glance as he walked by.

  “These are your lovely daughters, I presume?” Mr. Bostwick said as he approached.

  “They are.” I introduced each one, but Lottie only clung tighter, and Melissa stared at his spit-shined shoes.

  “Well, well. What a lovely family.”

  I thanked him, then shooed the girls off so we could talk alone.

  Mr. Bostwick changed his stance, forcing me to turn my back to Nathan and the others, and said, “There’s a stage leaving first thing tomorrow morning. I think it’s best you and the girls be on it.”

  “Already?”

  “What did you expect?”

  I had no answer, only that the familiar peace of these few days made everything else seem almost dreamlike.

  “The divorce?”

  He puffed out his big barrel chest, hooking his thumbs in his vest pockets. “You can imagine my surprise when I was given only a few scribbled words to explain such a perilous decision.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else—”

  “You should have waited for me, Camilla. It was bad form to come out here.”

  “I had to.”

  “And stealing the man’s horse?”

  “Legally, she is still my horse too.”

  Mr. Bostwick rocked back on his heels, looking like he almost admired me on that point. “Well, not any longer. Mr. Fox has agreed not to contest the divorce. He has signed, and I need only file the papers in court. You are, for all intents and purposes, a free woman.” I don’t know what I expected to feel at that moment. When I was first declared Nathan’s wife, I had such spinning joy I feared I would fall over if it ever stopped. Later, when we were sealed together according to the Mormon teachings, I’d given way to a more solemn contentment. Perhaps, at our dissolution, I should have experienced direct opposites of both. Swallowing despair, giddy fear. In truth, both would visit me frequently, but at that moment, I felt only a peculiar void of emotion.

  “And our girls?”

  Mr. Bostwick leaned closer. “You have full legal custody of all three children.”

  Suddenly the boarding of the early-morning stage couldn’t come soon enough. Throwing all propriety aside, I flung my arms around Mr. Bostwick, an embrace he endured with good humor before gingerly disengaging himself. “You and your daughters need to gather your things. I told young Seth I’d have the rig back this evening.”

  “How long?”

  Mr. Bostwick checked both the sun and his timepiece. “Within the hour.”

  Within the hour.

  There have been moments in my life I would trade all those remaining to live again, and others which there is no grave deep enough to bury. The moments that followed live in both camps. Somehow, one of Sister Amanda’s pretty carpetbags was filled with nightgowns and favorite blankets, stockings and knit caps and Sunday best dresses. Never mind that trunks of new clothes and things were waiting for them. How could I have thought that such things could ever replace what they’d known all their lives?

  All of us moved as if through molasses, except for Kimana, who maintained her reliable, steady pace as she sliced two loaves of bread to make butter-and-cheese sandwiches and wrapped a jar of pickles in a clean, white cloth. The house was crowded with wives and babies, though Amanda and Evangeline largely stayed at the table taking turns trying to soothe the increasingly inconsolable Sophie. The girls inspected every corner of the house, looking for any treasure they might want to take, and I was at their heels, reminding them th
at there would still be children growing up in this home. Mr. Bostwick remained in the wagon seat, his lap littered with papers, and Nathan had secluded himself in the workshop in the barn, presumably to gather materials to take to the temple upon his return.

  That was where I found him when all had been loaded into the wagon bed. Never again would I smell fresh lumber and not think of this place, this moment. It was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon, and dust motes danced in the beams of light pouring through the narrow windows. Nathan sat upon his workbench, his broad back to me, head bowed low over hands clasped between his knees. He did not hear me come in, and I took a last look at him. Undoubtedly he was in prayer, and I joined him.

  Father God, here is a man who so desperately wants to please you. He is a good man—as good a man as he’s been taught to be.

  When I opened my eyes, he was looking at me, and I dared not take one step, lest I be turned to salt on that very spot.

  “It’s time for us to go,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Then go.”

  “Won’t you come out and say good-bye?”

  “Good-bye.”

  “To the girls?”

  “And just how am I supposed to do that? Tell me how I can look my little girls in the eye and say I’m never going to see them again.”

  “Just tell them that you love them. And that you’ll miss them. Who are we to say that God won’t cause our paths to cross again?”

  He took one step toward me, then had the grace to stop. “Are you sorry they crossed in the first place?”

  “No. Otherwise we wouldn’t have our children.”

  He looked like he wanted to speak but again showed grace with silence.

  “Do you remember where you first met me?”

  “Like it was yesterday,” he said, and I believed him.

  “At my house, where we’re going to live now, if you go to the edge of my property, there’s a large rock, and if you stand on top of it, you can see that very spot.”