Breath and Bones (21 page)

Soon, Famke thought, she might give up. She was exhausted: As the weeks ground on, the work grew even more strenuous and unrelenting, and
at seventeen she was not getting any younger. She was trapped under Sariah's virtuously callused thumb with no real news, despite Heber's thoughtful provision of as many papers as he could come across. She thought longingly of the time on ship and train, when she had felt she was accomplishing something, even if it was only motion for motion's sake; when she'd seen the West as a patchwork stitched with clues that would lead directly to Albert.

“
En Pige der bliver hjemme
, a girl who stays at home,” she said out loud in her bedroom, smoothing the old sketch over her wickedly naked knees. It was good to hear someone speaking Danish again, even if that person were only herself. “A girl of good family . . .” She promised the peasant girl in the sketch, whose face was now shadowed with smudges, that soon she would have a good home, a little family of two with Albert; and he would paint beautiful pictures and join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Royal Academy, and she would at last be able to breathe easily in this dusty, hot, tiresome, frightening new land.

Had we but world enough and time
. . .

In Utah, Famke never had enough: enough air, Albert, paintings. She missed the nourishing Danish food, pickled herring and dark rye bread and the salmon that Skatkammer's servants had muttered over four nights a week; here, on a diet of oatmeal, salt pork, and squash, she was growing thin. Even the sliver of ice that a neighbor brought as an unofficial wedding gift—even that disappeared before she could enjoy it fully, nourishing as it was to a Nordic soul trapped in the land of dust and heat. Sariah seemed to consider ice as sinful as good food; she took the slab away from Famke and plunked the whole thing into a vat of the nasty Brigham tea she brewed from mountain rushes, then served it to the family before sending Famke out to the mulberry grove again.

Having stood up to his first wife in the one great matter of taking a third, Heber seemed to be letting Sariah have her way with everything else. She determined Heber's nightly schedule among the women; she decided when Myrtice would hold classes for the children and when Famke would take a nasty draught of Deseret's Elixir for Common Coughing. She burned
The Thrilling Narrative
in the cookstove, for anything thrilling must surely be sinful. She questioned Myrtice delicately about the state of her health, evidently hoping that the girl would be feeling faint or suffering from indigestion.
She told Famke when to feed the straggly chickens and lone pig, when to give public witness to her faith, when to haul water for washing dishes, laundry, and bodies. She, herself, dusted the line of little black coffins marching across the parlor mantelpiece, each box sealed with a pane of glass, and explained tersely that the white manikins inside represented the four babies she had borne and buried, children Heber never mentioned.

The Mormons were a fiercely clean people, and amid all the scouring Famke began to detest the smell of soap that she had once liked so well. But she rather enjoyed standing in the middle of all those well-washed worshippers and making up stories to prove she knew Sainthood was the only true path.

“My faith was first revealed in my native land, in the home of my master, Jørgen Skatkammer . . .” When she grew bored with the simple version, she added little embellishments: “I was dusting his glass sword, an artifact of Venice . . .” The Saints' ears pricked up; they'd never heard of such a thing, and several of the ladies asked her about it afterward. Famke added next time, “The sword hung above a collection of eastern mummies . . .”

Sariah stopped Famke's recitations when it was clear the third wife was drawing too much attention to herself. “Don't create such a fuss,” she said. “Now of all times, my word.”

Sariah would never admit it outright, but Famke had realized that this was a difficult time around the Goodhouse place and in Prophet City generally. When the Goodhouses drove into town, they felt suspicious eyes upon them—not because of the clandestine plural marriage, for many of their fellow citizens had similar arrangements, but because it had been Heber's idea to follow the United Order of Enoch and its principles of complete sharing. He had been gone so long that the most prosperous citizens had forgotten why they'd thought this idea was a good one. There were mutterings, of which Heber remained blissfully unaware, that it would soon be time to dissolve the Order and appoint a new man who would lead the Prophetians to true greatness.

Famke paid no more attention to those rumors than she did to reports of drought, dropping beef prices, crickets in the crops, or a string of explosions in hotels and opera houses that were leading sheriffs and Pinkertons to suspect that a band of outlaws was at work throughout the West. Gossip was just the grinding of so many jaws, or so many priests giving lectures;
she closed her ears, fanned herself, and thought of more pleasant topics. Snow and winter. And Albert.

Alone, as she bent over to slap mud and straw into the molds that would make the adobe bricks for her very own room—that wing of the house in which she was determined never to live—she used one finger to trace his features in the yielding muck: his artfully rumpled curls, his prominent eyes, his dear little soft chin. How refined he looked, how elegant, even sketched with an untrained hand in base clay—imagination created the likeness, and Famke quite melted at the thought of him.

“My dear, are you unwell?” All at once, Heber was at her side. He helped her to sit back, plucking the wig from her head and using it to fan her face. He seemed eager to find her ill, as eager as Sariah was with Myrtice. “Shall I bring you a draught?”

“No”—Famke shuddered—“please, no draughts. Some water.”

While Heber went to fetch it, Famke pressed the heel of her hand into Albert's face, erasing the image that had brought her momentary joy.

The experiment with the wet brick inspired Famke with an idea: All around her lay the materials for making art. She might be starved for the sight of pictures, but she herself possessed the means of making them. What was earth but powdered stone? And Albert had told her that ground stone was the base for those paints he bought in tubes. The powder was mixed with linseed oil, exactly what was stored in the textile house.

That evening, after her chores, a wigless Famke filled a drinking glass with blood-red dust and sneaked into the worm hut, where the sound of vermian chewing was faint but quite pronounced. She set a kerosene lantern beneath the table and poked a knife through the cheap tin of an oil can, and then, kneeling down beneath the worms, she let the oil drip in thin golden drops into her glass. She stirred it with her finger till it was of approximately the right consistency. Then, with nothing else to paint upon, she sat back against a table leg, pulled up her skirt, and stretched the petticoat taut over her knees.

For a moment she actually wished for her black wig; the coarse hairs would have made a good stiff brush. Instead, she unpinned her own hair
and let it tumble. It was certainly long enough that if she separated out a strand and held herself carefully, she might dip the ends in this rough red paint and trace an oval on the petticoat.

But the paint was clotty, the makeshift brush too soft. Famke tried and tried, but she managed nothing that even faintly resembled a face before the door flew open and Myrtice cried, “Ursula! I saw a light in here and—For shame! What on earth can you be about?”

Famke pulled her skirts down hastily, and in their breeze her lantern blew out. Myrtice had her own light, however, and she made Famke display her petticoat.

“I declare I've never seen the like.” Myrtice studied the crude scarlet curves. “Whatever are you doing to yourself?”

“I am painting,” Famke said with all the dignity she could conjure. “In oil.”

“I learned how to watercolor at the normal school,” said Myrtice. “Your posture is all wrong, and you should put on your eyeglasses.”

For a moment Famke was quiet, and the sound of worms growing fat filled the little hut while she thought of all there was still to remember and learn. “But this is oil paint,” she said at last.

“Then it shall be all the more difficult to wash out,” Myrtice said, and tugged at Famke's arm to raise her.

Famke scrubbed for hours, but the red marks never washed away completely, and for this she was stubbornly glad. She was glad, too, that when Sariah started asking after the missing lantern, Myrtice seemed to have forgotten it, and it remained under the table in the textile hut. Famke was pleased to think she was depriving the Goodhouses of light.

The intelligent observer who comes to the United States and takes the opportunity to study American art as it is to-day cannot but be impressed with the value of its present achievement. The high place it is destined to occupy in the future is plainly indicated in the startling rapidity of its progress and the earnestness of purpose of the artists who are each day adding to its renown
.

B
AEDEKER'S
U
NITED
S
TATES

Sariah scolded everyone about the lantern, from the smallest child to Famke and Myrtice; only Heber was exempt. And she had ample chance to scold, for the next day was Sunday and the family rode the wagon to Prophet's ward house.

“How a lantern can go plain missing, and our best lantern at that, I cannot understand,” she said yet again, her words contorted as she swayed and bumped with the road.

“Might could be the savages,” fat little Miriam suggested.

“What would savages want with a lantern? They see in the dark.”

“Sariah, my dear,” said Heber, “I do not quite think . . .”

He began an excursus on the habits and abilities of the Indians, and Famke spun herself into her own thoughts.

Draped now over her lap, dry but limp, was her first painting. It had utterly failed: Not just for lack of technique and materials, but for want of a proper subject as well. Those ovals and squiggles taught her that memory was a poor model and dirt a bad medium. She would not attempt to paint again, or at least not until she had a mirror and some real paint.

Her thoughts jolted away when the wagon came to a halt at the ward house. Myrtice half-stood among the children in the back: “Is that not one of those journalists? Harry Noble, I believe?”

Sariah shuddered. “That dreadful man.” She looked around nonetheless. “I swan, what is that he's sitting in?”

It was indeed Harry Noble. And he was sitting by the ward house, locked in a small square cage made of strap iron.

This was such an unusual sight that a crowd all but hid the cell, and it was clear that the meeting would begin late today. The Goodhouses were no less intrigued than their neighbors. Like seven hungry fleas, Heber and Sariah's children hopped down from the wagon and ran up to get a look. From her vantage point on the now empty backboard, Famke could see that Noble was still in his green suit, though somewhat the worse for wear. He looked to her like one of the exotic stuffed birds in Herr Skatkammer's collection: just as colorful, just as forlorn.

Heber made inquiries of the menfolk as his wives watered the horse. “He insulted one of our sisters,” was the final word; Heber delivered it as Brother Ezekiah Donnelly, the week's spiritual leader, appeared outside to call the loiterers in. “He was preparing one of his features on Mormon life, and he simply would not desist from a most unpleasant line of questions.” For some reason, this made Heber look at Famke, but she was looking neither at him nor at Noble; instead, her eyes were focused on a cricket that she was crushing into the dust.

“I warn't aware we had a hoosegow in town,” said Sariah, nodding to Brother Donnelly. She retied her straw bonnet and started toward the ward house. “And a right odd jail it is, too.”

“The brothers tell me they brought that cell in pieces from Salt Lake last year,” Heber said with a tug at his beard, “but there's been no need for it. And I do wish they felt no need now.”

“Once there is a jail,” Myrtice said with her most schoolmarmy air, “there will be people looking to fill it.”

“Such is the unfortunate nature of humankind,” Heber sighed, “even Saints.”

Myrtice flushed with the pleasure of being right. “Any road,” she said with elaborate humility, “the man did insult a sister.” Famke wanted to kick her.

The crowd around the cell had largely dispersed by now, so the Goodhouses were able to get a solid look at the offender inside. With his green-trousered bottom perched on a crate stamped
Needles and Pins
, he was waving the hat before his face to create a breeze; the balding top of his head
was clearly sunburned and about to crack and peel. Perspiration glittered like diamonds in his hair and side whiskers.

“Ah, the Goodhouse family,” Noble called out, mustering a smile as if to prove he was perfectly comfortable and ready to receive a social visit. “It is a lucky thing indeed to see you. As it happens, I was on my way to pay you a call when this”—he gestured around at the six walls containing him—“occurred. I wanted to bring you my feature on your silk enterprise.”