A Pearl of Great Price
MARCH, 1871
KATE AND JOHN Junior mounted the wagon before dawn. There was a coating of frost on the seat, which Kate swept away with her gloved hand before sitting. Her backside was insulated by her flannel drawers, petticoat, skirt, and heavy wool overcoat, but it was only moments before the frigidity penetrated all those layers. For months she had been so cold that she thought with a proper shake her bones might shatter. It was an affliction on everyone in that season—a dull, constant body-cold that never seemed to go away, even in heated rooms—that wore on every soul, like a collective, untreated toothache. As they began their trip to Cherryvale that morning, and the sun seemed to drag itself reluctantly over the far hills, Kate looked into her glove. The frost, which had temporarily melted when she wiped the seat, had frozen again in her palm.
Being new to the territory, they had only the haziest notion how long winter might last in southeast Kansas. Some ladies at Harmony Grove told her to expect the warm-up when the first shoots of green appeared on the horse apple tree. Others dismissed that as unscientific superstition and swore by the date of the first appearance of the spring peepers: after their songs began, there would be exactly three more killing frosts before the beginning of spring proper. Rudolph Brockman said it could happen anytime between March and May—there was no sure way to tell year-to-year—but in his experience when the turkey buzzards appeared there would be no more frosts. The question was of more than academic interest to the Benders: in winter, traffic on the Osage slowed to a trickle, and that was bad for the family business.
They had an appointment with the neighbors that morning. After rolling and jerking through frozen ruts for twenty minutes, they neared the Brockman place in its little hollow out of the wind. Rudolph, as usual, hailed them straightaway. His partner Ern rarely came out, and when he did he stayed away, watching from a distance as he leaned and smoked a cigarette.
“Morgen, Kate,” Rudolph said, eyes twinkling, and then to John Junior, as an afterthought, “And ye too, Johnny.”
“Good morning to you, Rudolph,” she replied, with the merest smile necessary to charm him. Junior, for his part, was never insulted by his invisibility. It was only reasonable that men would pay tribute to Kate.
“And this is it?” Brockman nodded at their latest delivery. It was a saddle, all but new, finely tooled and oiled. Pulling it toward him, he noted its quality, as well as its only flaw: the roughed-up spot on the fender where Johnny had wrenched off the plate inscribed with the name of its owner. The silver stirrups on their leathers scrapped along the boards of the wagon as Brockman lifted the rig to examine the underside.
“A pretty thing for a customer to leave behind.”
“Presented in lieu of payment. You would be surprised to know how few of them will part with cash.”
“Ja, we find that,” said the other as he finished his inspection. Then he pronounced, “There’s a man in Thayer who might take it. But best not rip the plate off next time—it can be engraved again.”
“We’re off to Cherryvale,” Kate said brightly. “Can you guess why?”
“No. But I’d be delighted for ye to tell me.”
“I have a job!”
“Is that a fact?”
“There’s a situation at the Cherryvale Hotel that might suit her,” said John Junior.
“Oh pshaw on ‘might’ . . . it will suit, and it will be gay!”
“That will be as temporary as the job, I think.”
Kate put forth a hand to give his cheek a playful shove. And Brockman, smoldering with lust for her girlish vivacity, wished it were his cheek that was being shoved instead.
“Well, it’s a good bet they pay ye in coin instead of tack,” he declared.
Bidding Rudolph Brockman a good day, they struck out for Cherryvale, six and a half miles to the southwest. Out on open range the cold deepened and the breath of their horse was like the snort of a locomotive, vaporous plumes spraying forth as the wagon humped and tipped and its occupants huddled, not speaking. Over their left shoulders there was a glow beyond the overcast that hinted of a cheery, warm yellowness. But it was only a promise, and by the time they reached the outskirts of town it had not been redeemed.
Before the railroad, Cherryvale was a one-lane settlement with a well, a livery, and a general store. On the claim of Mr. Thomas Whelan, the LL&G had kept a tented work camp where supplies were stored and prepared for the extension of the railroad into Montgomery County. Through the early part of ’71 the railroad’s surveyors were seen all over the area, laying out an extensive network of streets. But to any of the one dozen or so permanent residents of the area, there never seemed to be anybody in the camp. Instead, the workmen were all at the town’s four saloons, situated along the thoroughfare in easy staggering distance from each other. Between them sprung up buildings that were one step up from the rude temporary structures that bloomed first on virgin ground—each two or three stories, carpentered just enough to assure they would last more than a few seasons. Their slab frontages had none of the decorative elements, the architraves and wooden-hewn scrollwork and dentils, that lent an air of permanence. Instead, they seemed to regard each other across the street half embarrassed by their ongoing existence, as if fully expecting to be demolished and improved at any moment.
The avenue was mud. The freeze had at least turned its grotesque rills and craters rock hard, precluding the boards that usually stretched across it and were now piled loosely along the covered sidewalks. Junior had Kate’s arm as they stepped across them and through the hotel’s doors, scuffed with the marks of steel-toed boots as years of travelers kicked their way onto the premises. Junior led the way until they gained the planked, unvarnished lobby, but Kate shot ahead of him to greet the proprietor, Mr. Jeremiah Babcock Moore. The latter seemed to know she was there even before he looked up. Junior had the uncomfortable impression Moore had been spying on their approach while they were still in the street.
“My dear,” he pronounced as he put down the pen. Mr. Moore’s bare pate, which was like a pale bull’s-eye encircled by a very long, waxed bolt of hair, flashed red as Kate laid hands on it, searching the contours.
“Truly an expressive cranium!” she exclaimed, “Such a testament of character to one trained in the proper art!”
Blushing to the roots of his lashes, Moore looked through them at Junior.
“And this must be the celebrated brother.”
“He is indeed,” he replied with artificial jocularity. “Here to serve the mistress.”
“As you all must,” she declared.
“Well, we thank you for delivering her fresh. And if I might steal her now . . . ?”
“Gladly purloined,” said Junior with a sort of gallant presentation, mispronouncing the word and leaving thinly lettered Mr. Moore to wonder if it really should sound like “pure loined.”
With nothing much else to do, Junior stayed to watch Kate work her first day as a waitress in the Cherryvale Hotel dining room. She was coached in the trade not by the smitten Mr. Moore but by Alice Acres, a tall, plain woman who needed spectacles only when she read yet squinted at all other times. She seemed to size Kate up at a glance, saying, “A small thing, aren’t you? I doubt we have an apron for your kind of little . . .”
To which Kate dropped her facade of girlish haplessness and returned to the steely determination of her road days. Emulating Alice Acres to the very nuance, she learned how to take and remember orders; she learned how to communicate orders to the cook, who tended to deafness if the proper jargon was not used; she learned how to loft trays full of china brimming with meats and boiled potatoes and gravies, and deliver them with the minimum of steps to the table. She also learned how to dodge wandering hands that made for her ankles and bottom.
As Brockman had predicted, the buzzards returned early that year and brought spring with them. There were more travelers from the East, and as they came into the hotel from streets of boot-sucking muck, they were pleased to be attended by Kate the serving girl. Men would rush to claim a seat at one of her tables; the few women who came through also found her fine features a relief from the menagerie of hairy masculine mugs to which they were daily exposed.
For all her bloody-mindedness, Kate was pragmatic. She disliked the drudgery but valued the freedom to move among her neighbors in a context less guarded than the church at Harmony Grove. After those initial stares and gropes, she became all but invisible as she did her rounds. Moving among her customers, she overheard their problems, hopes, fears, and regrets. She learned all about the parents worried about the marriages of their daughters, or the lack of marriages, and the farmer who thought he bought a healthy cow but got one with foot rot, and the hilltop claim near Independence that turned out to be bottomland prone to flooding, and the lack of tooth powder at the dry goods store. There were ample rumors about the direction the railroad would be built, and sometimes mutually exclusive ones at neighboring tables at the same moment.
But for all the flavors of their small concerns, underneath there was the same groan of offended pride. She had lived on the frontier all her life, but it was only here, amid the tinkling glassware and dusty bison heads of this minor hotel well beyond the main line, that she glimpsed the hidden truth. Behind the eyes of all of them, from the hardest gambler to the most cloistered frontier wife, lurked the identical plaint—that their neighbors, the seed companies, the railroads, the banks, and especially the government, were together and severally out to get them. Everyone saw himself as an underdog; all shared the conviction the cosmos owed them a debt of decent luck. Meanwhile, all the other louts who also saw themselves as underdogs were really just fakes—fat cats and bullies, scheming the ruin of the ordinary, honest folk. Everyone imagined he was his own master, and was proud of it. But with the freedom there came terror that it was just one short step above slavery. And the joy of the one never seemed to temper fear of the other.
She would smile as she noted these things. Smile and serve, and smile some more, the comely one with the spotless apron and empty head, bringing the bowl of salt and a whiff of rosewater and “May she please bring a new napkin for the gentleman’s shirtfront?” She served until her feet throbbed and smiled until her cheeks ached.
For her own part, for all the pip cards life had dealt her, she felt no injury. To perceive oneself as cheated one needed to have expectations of her fellow men, of which she had none. Instead, she was conscious only of opportunities ripening and the urgency of her need to exploit them. For somewhere out there, probably in a better place than Kansas, her father was still searching for her. Not always actively, of course—a player has to pause and replenish his bankroll from time to time. But just as she never forgot him, so must he never have forgotten about her. Now that she was grown, the search must succeed because they could find each other. Every dollar she earned, by hook or by crook, must bring them closer.
And so one day, a couple of months after hiring her, Mr. Moore looked up and saw Kate handing a lady customer a handbill. Later, she handed out another, and still another from a stash she kept folded in her apron. Curious, he waited until she had gone to the kitchen, then retrieved one that had been left behind on a table. Lips rounded to a pensive pout, he read:
Prof. Miss KATIE BENDER
Can heal all sorts of diseases; can cure blindness, fits,
palsies and all such diseases.
Also dumbness and sickness of spirit.
Residence, 14 miles east of Independence, on the road
from Independence to Osage Mission, one and a half
miles South East of Norahead Station
KATE’S SHIFT ENDED around four o’clock, after the family dinner crowd was gone but before the poker and faro players showed up. John Junior waited for her in the lobby, rocking on his feet, turning the brim of his hat around in his fingers. She did not greet him but gave only the merest gesture, an arching of an eyebrow as she passed. He followed her out to the army wagon parked in the street. Like a proper boulevardier, he lifted her skirts for her as she stepped through the mire.
Almira didn’t like Kate’s new job. When she was informed of it, after the fact, she remained silent in such a manner as to express she had much to say on the matter. Kate waited for the inevitable outburst.
“You put us in danger, with these comings and goings about! You think you are the smart one, but one day will prove you wrong! I’ve seen it and it will come!”
“You should see her there,” said Junior from the window, where he monitored the trail. “She’s some pumpkins, I tell you. She reigns over all of them.”
“Acht, you are a fool. She will say something, in her pride. You don’t know her like I do.”
“You don’t understand,” sighed Kate, the frustrated pedant. “It’s the opposite of what you say. We must be out there, being seen, lest suspicion fall on us sooner. It is easy to accuse what you don’t know.”
“The wisdom of all your years?” Almira sneered. “Don’t listen to me, then, with all the time I’ve had at this. Sie!” she shouted at Pa. “What is it you say?”
John Senior was smoking in the corner with his Bible in his lap, ensnared in a knot of smoky blue tendrils. He took the pipe stem from his mouth as if about to say something—but then he smacked his lips and put it back.
“Worthless!” Almira threw up her hands. “I am beset by fools and fools of fools, and it will end in blood, I tell you!”
“Theirs, I’d wager,” remarked Kate.
“Yours, I swear to you, if you give us away!”
Thrown by so bald a threat, it took a moment for Kate to respond. But Junior preempted her:
“Rider!” he cried, pulling back from the curtain. And at the word, with the automatic efficiency of a well-drilled army unit, the Benders scrambled to their assigned places—John Senior and Almira behind the canvas, Junior at the counter, hunching over as if hoping he might seem invisible. Kate stood front and center, hands at her waist, palming down the creases in her skirts. Like an actress at her makeup, but without a mirror, she precisely wetted an auburn strand with her spit and guided it over her brow to its station above her eye.
They heard footsteps crunching on the icy stubble and a pregnant silence as their visitor paused beyond the door—perhaps to straighten his hat, perhaps to pry manure from a boot. Then, after what seemed like cruel delay, the knock came.
“Evening, traveler,” Kate said as she opened up and the lamplight fell across his face. This one was older than the last—not a boy, but a man of some years, perhaps twenty-five. He wore a billycock with an oilskin cover, the brim bent down over his eyes. The suit peeking from beneath his wet duster was assembled from madly clashing patterns—pinstripes on his trousers, spinning paisleys on his vest. When he lifted his chin to answer, he revealed gray eyes, smoky but moist from the evening chill.
“Sorry to come at your shutting in,” he said. “Must have misjudged the distance from St. Paul. Mought I trouble you?”
“It is impossible for you do so, sir, because it is our pleasure.”
Stepping inside, he stood back on his heels and took in what they presented: a spare interior somewhat overwarmed by the stove, Junior staring at him from before a wall of dusty patent medicine boxes, and Kate in her muslin apron, arms crossed behind her back as if concealing a gift.
“If you’d set at the table, we’ll show you why we’re famous in these parts.”
Unbuttoning, he sat. The act released Junior to go out and see to his horse.
Upon Kate’s gentle questioning, he disclosed his name was Hiram; he was traveling east, to his family in Missouri, where he was to be married.
“Are there no girls of Kansas you fancy?” she asked.
“I am to be sealed to the godly Constance Adare of Jackson County, that we may be together through eternity, as is provided by Heavenly Father.”
“I see.”
Kate cast down her eyes, perceiving the situation and making an inward adjustment. She had read of Hiram’s faith—at first instance, when someone had deposited The Pearl of Great Price in a hotel lobby in Casper, Wyoming. And there were other occasions later, such as in newspaper accounts of their tribulations and triumphs in settling in Utah, though these were not always sympathetic. It was no more or less a matter of indifference to her—the hypocrisy of such clerics, no matter what doctrine stuffed their wooly heads, was equally deplorable. But they could be useful in keeping a body preoccupied:
“Were not those of your stripe roused out of Jackson County, years ago?”
“Not all of us,” he replied, smiling.
“What do you mean, ‘sealed’?”
“It is the belief of the true heirs of Christ that men and women are meant to dwell together not only in this life, but abide all the phases of our Father’s plan through all eternity. ‘I give unto you power, that whatsoever ye shall seal on earth shall be sealed in Heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven; and thus shall ye have power among this people.’ Helaman 10:7. But only if they are sealed according to ordinance.”
“His plan?”
“The Scripture says: ‘I rejoice in the day when my mortal shall put on immortality, and shall stand before him; then shall I see his face with pleasure, and he will say unto me: “Come unto me, ye blessed, there is a place prepared for you in the mansions of my Father.” ’ Enos 1:27. It is our fate to be judged for our choices, which will tell our path through Heaven, or Spirit Prison, as the case may be, to our proper station among the Three Spheres . . .”
There was trail-weariness in his voice that belied the Good News. She joined him at the table, elbow resting and chin in hand, attentiveness shining on her face.
“But do you really want to talk about this?” he asked, developing a smile to mirror hers.
“I find nothing more fascinating.”
“ ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that publisheth salvation,’ Isaiah 52:7.”
With that, he unfolded his duster, which he had draped neatly upon the table, and extracted a book that was tucked in a pocket.
“I see you have yours . . .” he said, gesturing at John Senior’s German Bible resting on a chair. “But have you seen mine?”
His Book of Mormon was leather-bound and ribboned, its spine limber from a thousand openings and closings. He cracked it, and in her mind she imagined the long and strenuous hours of his reciting and committing the passages to memory, all for an opportunity like this—to present his benefaction, his pearl of great price, to a fair and receptive stranger. In her current state it seemed to her such a pleasant preoccupation that she allowed herself to be swept up in it, to momentarily see the world through the pleasant mist of his enthusiasm. He was turning the pages for her, running his fingers down the serried lines, as deliberate as a salesman showing off his traveling case full of jewels. The gracefulness of his fingertips hypnotized her, and for that minute she wanted to be what he perceived, a high plains bumpkin who had rarely glimpsed the orderly intricacies of the printed page.
“I cannot help but believe I am called to some great labor in this land,” she heard him say, distantly.
“What does it say about prophecy?” she asked, voice slowed to a contented purr.
“The one from Tarsus said it best: ‘Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.’ ”
“I don’t like that.”
Silenced by this response, he moved aside for Almira, who was standing with the bowl of stew and a spoon, towel draped over her arm. She laid the meal before the spot on the canvas still stained with John Jesperson’s blood. Hiram obliged by sliding to the bowl, laying the book next to him as if it deserved a place setting. Kate, looking up, perceived the impatient glare in Almira’s eyes: Get on with it.
“You say you have a mission. What are your plans after you are married?”
“After the sealing I will bring my family west. There we will instruct by example the ways of a godly life.”
“Do you have any friends or relations near-abouts, who might help you?”
He swallowed, and with the light of his certainty shining through his eyes like an oncoming train, said, “I am but a stranger in Egypt.”
John Junior had returned from quartering Hiram’s horse. He nodded, cleared his throat significantly. The guttural noise irritated Kate, for without turning around she could somehow hear him nodding behind her, could sense the vector of this man’s fate without the need for its utterance. The knowledge of it filled her with unspeakable awe, is if she were some angel winging high above the earth, looking down and seeing not only the trails mortal men had laid down in their lives, but the paths ahead of them. The path of the man before her, the one attending so closely to the stew before his nose, would dead-end right here, in the next moment. She was sure the terrible power of this could be read in her eyes. Averting them, she began to tremble.
She startled at a sudden scratching noise behind the canvas, as if a boot heel were dragged along the boards.
“Are you all right?” Hiram asked.
She could not summon an answer, and in the clumsy silence the moment seemed to telescope, yawning before and disheartening her because she had run out of words for this man. Why does he not strike? she thought as she covered her eyes and felt a pinpricking warmth as she flushed from brow to breast. She had heard John Senior back there, heaving his clumsy bulk. Let it be done! she screamed inwardly, and again, Do it now! Still the man across from her sat alive, picking idly with his spoon for strands of meat in his bowl, and looking up at her with his decency, his indiscriminate Christianity. Lips shaping fulsome pieties, teeth stuck with inches of pork tendon, he poured forth hypocrisies syrupy and ancient, appalling and aggrieving her. And now her face was naked too, and she could stand it no longer.
“Töte ihn! Mach‘ schon!” someone cried.
“Pardon?”
Like a carpenter measuring twice to cut once, John Senior took his time. At last he swung, plunging the head of the Alsatian hammer through the screen at the round shadow beyond. And again his aim was off—the blow struck the man not on the crown of the head but glanced off his right temple.
Hiram pitched forward, his jaw striking the rim of his bowl and upending it. Then he straightened, an expression on his face like a man who had been bothered by an untoward fly. There was no blood yet, and apparently no pain, until the rip in his skin parted under the weight of torn flesh. Kate watched as a great fold of skin, including the man’s entire ear, slowly pulled free, flopping down like the page of a book left open in a breeze.