Corn Creek, Utah
August 1857
“Just go, Sally. You know the way. Bake bread,” Numa told me, pointing at the well-worn trail that led to the white Mormons’ settlement in Fillmore.
I glanced east, where the sun hadn’t yet appeared over the distant mountain peaks. The morning air was already buzzing with cicadas and scorching hot. Then I looked back at Numa, confused.
I’d only been to Lucy Robison’s house once, having just arrived at the Paiute tribe in Corn Creek. I was pretty sure I remembered the way. But I was shocked that Numa and Povi, Kanosh’s third and second wives who had been put in charge of watching me for the day, didn’t insist on coming along.
If they were going to let me walk to Fillmore alone, I wasn’t about to complain, though.
I took a step away from the wickiup, where Povi was gathering everything they’d need to butcher two of the four dead steers the wagon train had left behind. Kanosh—my new husband—had forced the group to move on earlier that morning.
“Heavenly Father, thank you for this bounty,” Povi murmured, bowing her head but keeping her eyes open.
“Amen,” Numa added happily.
I stayed silent and kept my gaze toward the mountains. All of the Paiute Indians at Corn Creek—including Chief Kanosh—were Mormon. They’d been converted by missionaries over the past three years. I was Mormon too, technically, anyway. I wasn’t Paiute, though. I was Bannock. Not that anybody had asked. Not that I would answer.
I looked around, but Kanosh’s first wife, Inola, was nowhere to be seen. Of the three wives—four, now that I was here—she was the most diligent in Kanosh’s orders to keep me in sight.
They all thought I might run, if given the chance.
Still, I suspected that they knew, deep down, that I had nowhere to go.
Povi looked at me and smirked, studying my ridiculous outfit. The one Chief Kanosh still insisted I wear around the Paiute camp.
The only thing I liked about the ugly dress was that it had strange, large pockets on the sides that hid the little yucca-spine horses I’d had for as long as I could remember. One horse was mine. One had once belonged to a little boy named Tyee. I couldn’t remember who made the horses for us—someone among my Bannock birth tribe—but I liked to think it was my mother.
I was proud that I’d managed to hide them all these years, tucked away and unseen, like every other tender part of me I’d pushed down deep.
I ran one finger along the rabbit-skin mane of the horse in my left pocket, then the right, feeling instantly calmer.
Povi was staring at me when I met her eyes again. “Brigham’s strange little doll,” she clucked for the hundredth time since I’d arrived five weeks earlier.
I held my tongue and kept my face blank, pretending not to understand.
Numa snickered. “Not much of a doll with that scarred face,” she murmured, and the two women laughed out loud. “Should we let her change into moccasins, at least? Those ridiculous shoes are going to fall apart on the walk to Fillmore.”
Povi put down the knife she’d been sharpening and studied my feet in amusement. “I guess so. Kanosh will be angry if she ruins them.”
I clenched my jaw but took my hands out of my pockets and gratefully accepted the moccasins Numa handed me. I hated my new husband almost as much as I hated the pinchy shoes and scratchy black crinoline dress he insisted I wear instead of the softer, simpler dresses the Paiute women wore.
Even Brigham Young’s wife Clara, who I’d attended as a servant since I was eight, hadn’t made me wear these clothes in the Beehive House except on special occasions, like a baptism. However, Clara had dressed me up like a doll the day Brother Brigham sent me to the Paiute camp to marry their chief, Kanosh.
Kanosh loved how I looked in the high-necked, long-sleeved, lace-collared dress. It was the dress I’d been wearing when he first laid eyes on me in Brigham Young’s meeting room, where he gathered up the local chiefs once a month.
Kanosh also loved that the other women called me “Brigham’s little doll,” thinking they meant it as a compliment.
“Brother Brigham could barely stand to let her go,” my new husband crowed to anyone nearby whenever he saw me wearing the dress and shoes. “Sally was like a daughter to him.”
I couldn’t tell if he believed his own words. But I knew for certain that nobody else did.
Brown on the outside, white on the inside, Numa and Povi said, not even bothering to lower their voices when I passed by.
I kicked at a rock and intentionally scuffed the side of one shoe as I took it off. Like Kanosh himself, the shoes were unyielding, unsightly, and unpleasant to touch. I wanted to fling both away from me, as far as I could. I gladly replaced them with the pair of soft, worn moccasins Numa had given me.
When I put them on, my feet relaxed and my heart caught.
They felt like home, but this wasn’t home.
“When you get to Fillmore, tell Lucy Robison that two of the dead steers are hers. We have no melons, no corn to spare. Two steers,” Numa told me, nearly shouting the last part.
“You know she doesn’t understand you,” Povi grumbled.
I kept my face blank, happy to prove her point.
The Paiutes assumed I spoke only English after having lived in Brigham Young’s household since I was a child. On the other hand, the Youngs had always assumed I spoke only “Indian.”
They were wrong.
Not that I’d ever felt the need to correct anyone.
I’d lived with the Youngs for nine long years. Long enough to learn English. Long enough to scrub plenty of pine floors in what was called “The Beehive House,” a mansion made up of endless hallways and rooms. Long enough to master the preparation of buttermilk donuts, a delicacy served once a year on Brother Brigham’s birthday. Long enough to wash endless trousers and petticoats.
It turned out that even prophets produced their share of dirty laundry.
Sally was what the Youngs always called me, a little louder than necessary. It was the name they’d given me. One they could pronounce. Sally Indian. Sally, here, they’d say. Then they’d gesture wildly, repeating the same words over and over until I nodded and did whatever they asked.
Brother Brigham’s youngest wife Clara—I’d been gifted to her as a servant—never once asked about my native tongue, my childhood among my people far away from Utah, my family. Those were the only things I really wanted to talk about but wasn’t allowed to, so what was the point?
I pretended I’d forgotten about my life before I came to the Young household.
I never did though, even when I put on the stiff shoes and itchy cotton dress, a far cry from my soft deerskin shift and moccasins I’d worn among the Bannock. Even when I was baptized as a Mormon at age ten, as “Sally Indian.”
But today, in the Paiute village, I was desperate for a few hours on my own, even if it meant pretending to have a sudden breakthrough in understanding the Paiute dialect.
“Yes,” I said to Numa, nodding my head vigorously and smiling. “Two steers.”
Numa and Povi looked at each other in surprise.
“Clever little doll,” Numa said, mimicking my pretend smile. “Off you go, then.”
* * *
I’d only been walking for half an hour when I caught sight of the wagons, circled up. There were so many of them, with so many head of cattle, that I knew it was the same wagon train that Kanosh had forced to leave Corn Creek in a rush earlier that morning.
The ones who’d left the dead steers behind.
My heart beat faster, and I slowed my walk. It was strange that they’d made camp again such a short distance away from Corn Creek. Were they angry that Kanosh had insisted they leave? Would they think I was here to steal their cattle?
I might have spent most of my childhood cleaning floors in Brigham Young’s mansion, but I knew that when it came to people like me, the men in the wagon trains liked to shoot first, ask questions later.
I hesitated for a few seconds then started walking again, deciding to cut around the trail of worn wagon ruts and skirt through some scrub oak to stay out of sight.
That was when I heard the crying.
Not soft, quiet, careful tears—like the ones I’d long since learned to cry—but snuffling, loud, hiccupping sobs.
I took a step closer and peered through the brush.
There, sitting in the dust, was a little girl with dark, curly hair. She knelt with her head in her hands, beneath the shade of a dead tree.
I hesitated again, tempted to tiptoe back through the overgrowth and give the crier a wide berth.
I needed to get to Lucy Robison’s house in Fillmore to bake bread. The Paiutes needed the food. There wasn’t time to stop.
“Joy be to you all,” the little girl wailed, half-song half-cry, and my heart thumped so hard against my ribcage that I couldn’t help but move toward the sound.
I remembered crying like that once, just once. When Tyee died.
It had earned me a bloody face and a beating.
For a moment, I felt those old sobs bubble up from the place I’d locked them away. I carefully pushed them down with a practiced resolve and walked a few more feet, staying silent like the doll I was supposed to be.
The little girl whimpered again, and I turned around.
Then, against my better judgment, I moved back toward her.
I studied her face in the seconds before she saw me. It was red, and her eyes were puffy from crying. When I parted the sagebrush, she scrambled to her feet but didn’t run away.
For a few seconds, we stared at each other curiously. And for a moment, it was like I was looking at a mirror of myself. A sad, skinny girl with dark hair and red-rimmed eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Oh,” the little girl said after a few seconds had passed, her brows knitting together in confusion and voice thick with tears as she took in my brown skin paired with my crinoline dress. Then, she added, “My papa is dead.” Her bottom lip trembled when she said it, like she was about to cry all over again. “They dug a hole for him.”
I nodded to show I understood. So this was why the wagons had stopped again so soon.
“I didn’t want them to put him in that hole with the dirt and bugs, so I ran away,” she said, the last part of the sentence coming out as a shaky sob.
“I’m sorry,” I told her quietly, even though I’d promised myself to speak as little English as possible. What good would it do me?
Her big brown eyes widened at my words, and her eyes went back to my ridiculous dress. “Are you a princess?” she asked shyly, wiping her tears and standing up from where she’d been sitting in the dirt. She took a few steps toward me. “Uncle Uri told me that the Indians—”
“No,” I said gently, wishing I’d answered differently the second I saw her face fall. I wasn’t the daughter of a chief. And even if I were, the word “princess” didn’t make sense in my world.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Sally,” I responded automatically.
“I’m Nancy,” she said, wiping her nose with one sleeve. She glanced back in the direction of the wagon train, and her lip began to quiver again. “I want my papa …”
“Here,” I said. And before I could think better of it, I reached into my left pocket and pulled out one of the yucca horses.
Tyee’s horse.
Her eyes went impossibly wide when she saw it. She blinked, and more tears slipped down her dusty cheeks. “Is that for me? I love horses. We have two.”
She took the horse in her little hand and gently stroked the rabbit-skin mane the way I’d done for the past nine years.
“That always makes me feel better, too,” I told her. “The boy who made that horse died a long time ago, but the dead are never really gone.” I touched my hand to the place where I felt the lonely ache in my own chest, only half-believing the words I spoke. “Your papa is still with you.”
She nodded like she was willing to rest on those words for a moment, wiped at her eyes, and touched the horse’s mane again with a fingertip wet with tears.
“Go back to your mama,” I said, feeling my throat close around the words.
And then, before my own tears could breach the part of my chest where I’d walled them off, I turned and walked away.