Corn Creek, Utah
August 1857
I took as long as possible pulling up my bulky dress, watching as the yellow rivulets of urine trickled toward a tiny brown grasshopper in the sand beneath my feet.
When the liquid reached him, he hopped skyward, leaving me behind.
I felt a pang of jealousy as I shuffled back through the sagebrush toward Inola, calculating how soon I could reasonably ask to pee again. Unlike Numa and Povi, this was one of the few times Inola let me out of her sight. As Kanosh’s first wife, she seemed to take her responsibility to make sure I didn’t run away a little more seriously.
Even today, when the entire village was a hive of despair and black smoke.
It felt like years had passed between yesterday—baking bread with Lucy Robison—and today.
Inola frowned when I reemerged from the sagebrush but didn’t say anything about how long I’d taken to relieve myself. Maybe she was secretly glad to walk me out here and escape the thick of the chaos, too.
Word had spread fast that three Paiutes had died after eating the bad steer meat.
The same meat that Numa and Povi had been so excited to harvest, they’d let me walk to Lucy’s house to bake bread alone.
“Come on, let’s go,” she said, gesturing toward camp to make sure I understood her.
I followed.
In my mind’s eye, I could still see the sprawling gentile wagon train I’d passed when I walked to Fillmore.
And the little girl I’d found in the scrub oak, crying for her dead papa like her heart would break.
I thought I might regret giving her Tyee’s horse after keeping it so long. But to my surprise, I only felt glad. Tyee had been a kind boy. He would have given the little girl his horse, too.
When I’d returned to the Paiute camp later that evening, arms full of bread, I’d told myself I would try harder to fit in. I’d start speaking more. After all, if I was going to spend the rest of my life here among the Paiutes, I might as well make an effort.
That was when I’d heard more wailing. This time, coming from the Paiute camp.
As the evening wore on, the sounds of suffering had swelled to a boil.
Death came quickly for its victims—less than a day—but not quick enough to be merciful. Dozens more Paiutes got sick, their stomachs bloated, eyes yellow, while fever and chills shook their bodies.
At first, I’d worried that Lucy Robison and the Mormons in Fillmore would blame me. After all, I was a newcomer and I’d barely met the white woman who opened her home to the Paiutes to help bake bread once a month. I was the one who had pointed her son directly to the steer carcasses, thinking she would be grateful.
Off that boy flew, smiling for what would be the last time, while I kneaded dough into loaves with his mother.
That’s what I got for opening my mouth.
But as oily, dark smoke from what remained of the steer carcasses plumed skyward, nobody mentioned me.
“Hurry up,” Inola muttered, breaking into my thoughts. She pointed at my feet, covered again in my husband-approved shoes, an irritated expression on her face. “Maybe you can’t walk any faster,” she grumbled.
I gave her a blank look, and she rolled her eyes. Apparently giving up on being understood, she slowed her steps to match mine and studied me instead. “What useless shoes,” she said under her breath. “And that dress … Kanosh is a fool.”
On these two points, Inola and I agreed. I hid my smile, knowing she was unlikely to appreciate it. The first time Kanosh had tried to crawl into my bedroll in the wickiup I shared with his three other wives, I’d screamed as if a rattlesnake had attempted to join me under the blankets. I couldn’t help it.
Inola had hushed me, then beckoned to Kanosh to join her instead. “Give her some time to adjust. She’s only seventeen,” she’d murmured to him. “And she hardly knows you.”
I’d heard Numa and Povi laughing about it together the following day. “Such a pretty little doll, but he can’t even play with her,” Povi said.
Despite my fears, Kanosh hadn’t touched me again since that night. But from the way I caught him looking now and then, I suspected it was only a matter of time.
When Inola stopped walking at the edge of the Paiute camp, I stopped walking, too. We stood side by side as the wind picked up, rattling the dried-up leaves and stalks in what remained of the parched corn and melon fields.
This is your home now, I told myself firmly.
It was the same thing I’d thought when I was eight and stood quivering, looking up at Brigham Young’s enormous house.
I’d been wrong then, and I was wrong now.
I had no home. No people.
After the first Paiute died from the poisoned meat, the grieving wife had sheared off her long hair. Then the village women—including me—slashed our arms and legs with arrowheads and sharp rocks, sending our own blood back to the earth in a rusty river that pulled our grief to the surface.
When a new mother and her child died next, we did it all over again.
By the end of the following day, some of the Paiute women were weak from loss of blood.
I chose a dull rock to slash shallow lines across my skin. I mourned the ones who had died, but I was Bannock, not Paiute, and I didn’t know those people.
Not really. Not after six weeks.
Their dead were not my dead.
The best I could do was pretend I had room in my heart for their grief.
There was none, though. My heart was already so heavy from missing my family and people and home it might as well have been a stone hung around my neck.
I thought of the words I’d told the little girl from the wagon train: You’re not alone. The dead are never really gone. Where had those words come from? The Youngs? My old tribe? I wanted to believe them, but all I felt was empty as I grasped for memories of my mother, my father, Tyee. But when I tried to hold onto them, wrap myself up in their comfort, they felt thin around the edges. Like an old blanket, faded and full of holes against the cold.
I was alone.
Inola sighed and muttered what sounded like a prayer.
I stared straight ahead, pushing the sounds of suffering down to the bottomless place I’d stored my own pain, imagining that the sound of wailing from the wickiups was the wind.