Fillmore, Utah
September 1857 CHAPTER 12
The first week of school turned the mornings quiet again.
The silence made the hole in my chest ache more than the bustle, so I threw myself into my daily work like a house on fire.
Four-year-old Adelia was my only shadow while I helped Vick with the first-fruits’ apple harvest each morning. Our harvest was nothing compared to the bushels we’d pulled from the sturdy branches back in New York. But it was something. There would be Winesap preserves and fresh fruit to share with our neighbors. And money for new trousers, too.
At first glance, everyone else in Fillmore went about life as usual, too. We went to church, cooked our meals, washed our clothes, and harvested our crops.
But beneath the surface, we were coals hiding live embers, ready to burst into flame the second they were stirred up again. At Brigham Young’s order, we had tucked our belongings—and some of our harvest—into wagons ready to flee into the mountains at a moment’s notice.
“Be always watchful,” we whispered to each other.
“The Army might be here any day,” the older children murmured solemnly as they lay their boots by their beds each night.
“Keep your gunpowder dry,” we bid our neighbors farewell when we crossed paths.
Talk of war was on everyone’s lips. Utah was under siege. Any day, the United States’ Army might breach the standoff with our militia in Salt Lake and finish what they’d started back in New York, Illinois, and Missouri.
They called us traitors for our allegiance to God and our prophet before country. They called us “depraved” for how we chose to worship and marry. And they were terrified of the fact that we had a militia—the Nauvoo Legion—to defend ourselves.
Everyone said that fighting hadn’t really begun yet. For now, both sides were locked in a stalemate in Echo Canyon.
But in my mind, Proctor had been the first shot fired.
Some of the men in Fillmore had gone north to help shore up our defenses. We didn’t have Army-issue guns or shiny epaulets on our uniforms, but we had God—and terror—on our side. Even the poorest among us could turn their scythes into bayonets, and plowshares into swords at a moment’s notice.
We wouldn’t run this time.
We’d fight.
And if we couldn’t last, we’d burn our cities to the ground and scatter into the mountains, leaving a barren wasteland behind with only Indians to greet the wagon trains when they tried to come west.
“Mama, can I have an apple?” Adelia asked, blinking sleepily and rubbing her hands across her red cheeks. The summer heat hadn’t loosened its grip one bit, and the air was already sweltering.
“Yes, my girl. And then it’s time for a nap,” I told her, smiling like I wasn’t about to fall to the ground from exhaustion myself.
When she was sleeping, I stood on the porch in the shade for a few minutes to catch my breath, eyes moving to the horizon.
My heart seized when I imagined what it would look like when the soldiers came for us.
What it would feel like to set fire to my own house. And this orchard we’d worked so hard to coax into harvest. This time, by what would be my own hands.
My eyes moved to Proctor’s grave at the edge of the orchard, strewn with dried yellow flowers Adelia had picked from what was left of the drought-ravaged summer forage. The soldiers would march right over it.
I closed my eyes and put my hand on my chest, searching for the passion that had started all of this.
The testimony of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.
Tears slipped down my cheeks. That well of living water inside me never ran quite dry.
Ten years ago, when Vick and I were newlyweds in Syracuse, New York, our neighbors the Mendons insisted I borrow their copy of the Book of Mormon. I’d only asked about it to be polite, since they displayed the book on their kitchen table like a treasure. But the way Ruth Mendon placed it in my arms, so carefully it might have been a baby, piqued my curiosity to say the least. All books were precious, but I’d never seen someone touch a book like that.
I knew a little about the Mormons even before I read the text that Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the Latter-day Saints, claimed to have translated from gold plates an angel had directed him to find. “I know it sounds strange, but just read the book,” Ruth Mendon had insisted. “You’ll feel a burning in your bosom. A testimony that God called Joseph Smith as His modern prophet to give us more of His words. Because He loves us so much.”
So I’d read the book. And, to my surprise, Ruth Mendon was right. My heart burned while I read about Jesus’s visit to ancient America—my America—where the people touched the scars in his hands and wept at his feet. I loved the Bible, but when I imagined Jesus it had always been in faraway lands. Reading about my Savior blessing little children in my own country brought tears to my eyes.
I didn’t realize Vick was reading the Book of Mormon too—at night, after I went to sleep—until he confessed when he reached the last page.
I couldn’t deny the truth of what I’d read. Each passage, each verse, spoke to me as if God Himself were whispering the words of faith, of hope, of wisdom. Like the Bible I’d loved since I was a girl, I felt the truth of it like sacred balm, soothing all my doubts. And if those words were true, Joseph Smith was exactly who he claimed to be, too.
In some ways, my decision to read the Book of Mormon was the start of my life.
But in other ways, it was the end.
Vick and I studied and prayed for a year, preparing to be baptized. I felt so much peace and joy. But, like the prophet Lehi in the Book of Mormon said, “It must needs be that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, … righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad.”
The opposition came in spades, mere months after I first saw that book on Ruth Mendon’s table.
I still remembered the look on our gentile farmhand’s face when he told us that a mob had tarred and feathered two Mormon men across town. Eyebrows arched halfway up his forehead like he could barely believe it—along with a barely contained smirk.
He said the word Mormon like a curse. He talked about how the men had been tarred and feathered like he deserved it.
He had no idea that Vick and I had committed to be baptized.
I already knew about the attack. I’d helped scrape the cooled tar from Arthur Mendon’s skin that night. The endless black mess peeled off bit by bit in tiny patches, along with a layer of skin. By the time Ruth and I were finished, he looked like he had been skinned.
The farmhand went on, bragging that he would have gladly helped the mob, were it not for the demands of his work on our farm that particular day. “We oughta do what they did in Missouri. Exterminate ’em before they have the chance to reproduce. Mormons breed like rats, and they vote like sheep. They wanna make Joe Smith king.”
Vick had squeezed my hand, warning me to be careful.
Would you like to tar and feather us too? I wanted to scream at the farmhand. Exterminate our children? Instead, I held my tongue and returned the squeeze of Vick’s hand.
Two days later, on a freezing early morning in February, Vick and I were baptized in secret in the icy Oswego River. My skin burned with cold, but it was nothing when I thought of the skin-eating tar and ash.
A week later, a mob set fire to our home.
I never saw the men who did it. We managed to put out the flames before it took the whole house, but the result was the same as if it’d burned to the ground. We left Syracuse that same night with the Mendons, to join the prophet Joseph Smith and the Mormons in Nauvoo, Illinois.
The frenzy of violence from Syracuse had followed us to Nauvoo. Different faces, but the same jeering insults, the same hot tar, and the same death threats. They threw prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum in Carthage Jail just a year after we arrived.
An armed mob stormed the jail a few days later and murdered Joseph Smith and his brother in cold blood. The founder of our faith, the prophet, was dead.
Then, once again, the mob forced us to run from our homes and into the wilderness.
Before the mob drove us out, Brigham Young—now the second prophet of the Restoration—received a revelation from God Himself.
It was an oath to be added to the endowment ceremony. These sacred vows and blessings pointed the way to exaltation. Vick and I had received ours when we were “sealed” to each other for all time and all eternity. We’d been married for years by that point, but as Brigham Young explained, being sealed meant that our marriage and family would last beyond death. Our bond would be eternal.
The endowment had taught us the signs and tokens that God would require for entrance into heaven. They were simple handshakes, simple gestures, but each one symbolized our commitment to our faith. During the holy endowment ceremony, we’d made covenants with God directly to carry out His will as long as we lived. In return, He would bless us.
After Brigham Young’s revelation, we added an oath of vengeance to our endowment vows. Because God would not be mocked. And when the time was right, we would be His hands in delivering justice.
We vowed that this would be the very last time we let a mob drive us anywhere. And we’d never forget the blood the gentiles had spilled. Not in Missouri, not in Nauvoo.
The oath we recited was as stark as the blessings we received were beautiful. Each of you do covenant and promise to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children's children.
Those words had thundered through my head while we fled for our lives across the frigid Mississippi river.
The faces on the other side of the river had all looked the same, twisted in gleeful hate to see us run. Their whoops and gunfire carried on the wind for miles. A verse from the Bible repeated in my head. Vengeance is Mine, and recompense; Their foot shall slip in due time; For the day of their calamity is at hand.
“Lucy? What are you doing?”
Vick’s voice pulled me back to Utah, back to our orchard in Fillmore. I shook off the memories of the mob and the icy Mississippi, realizing I’d grabbed hold of the shovel on the porch and was holding it to my chest like a weapon.
I swallowed the memories but not the rage. “I just put Adelia down for a nap,” I said.
Things hadn’t been the same between me and Vick. Not just because of Proctor’s death, but because we’d just submitted our names for approval for Vick to take another wife.
I thought Brigham Young might overlook the request, given the chaos of war.
Instead, it had been approved almost immediately.