Fillmore, Utah
JuLy 1860
All that summer, Mama sent me, Peach, and Violet to the Robisons’ house once a week on Wednesdays.
Sixteen-year-old Peach was the only one who got paid for minding the house and caring for Amina, but she was supposed to be teaching me and Violet how to do her chores. She wasn’t likely to be hired help much longer.
Mama suspected that Brother Robison planned to propose to her soon, which meant that Peach wouldn’t get paid for her labor anymore. But I might, if I could learn to “put my shoulder to the wheel,” like Papa always muttered. Violet was even more hopeless than I was, but to be fair, she was barely four. I was nearly eight.
I tried my best, but most of my waking hours felt fuzzy at the edges. The dreams had gotten so bad that I hardly slept at night, for fear of what I’d see. Some days, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. But school started again next month, so there were new things to worry about. Our teacher, Sister Brady, cut a fresh willow branch each morning as a warning to lazy and forgetful children. I was well acquainted with its sting.
I was also terrified to tell Mama that Heavenly Father hadn’t actually answered my prayers. What if it confirmed what I already suspected? That I was a wicked child.
Peach was as pure and good as fresh snow. Quick to act, quick to obey, with a perpetual smile on her pretty face. Even her hair seemed to comply without a fuss when she plaited it. And that was just the outside. Peach’s mind was as soft and sweet as she was. And little, cherubic Violet was her spitting image with bouncy, tawny curls, bright blue eyes, and skin the color of sego lilies.
Me, on the other hand? My dark brown hair was a mess of cowlicks that never lay flat. Mama said I looked like her brother Richard, and by the tone of her voice I could tell it wasn’t a compliment. Instead of a creamy white, my skin was a sallow mess of freckles, and dark circles under my eyes. And my mouth curved down in a perpetual frown, no matter my mood. Smile, I sometimes had to instruct myself. And that was just the outside. I was clumsy, slow, and forgetful, but worst of all, there was a darkness inside me, pressing at the edges of my mind all the time like it wanted to swallow me whole. It came out at night without fail, when my tired body finally lost the battle with sleep. Then it emerged from the shadows to run amok in my dreams.
I could tell by the way Mama and Papa looked at me that they suspected as much. When Mama was particularly flustered with my mistakes, she sometimes thundered, “The devil is surely in you, child.”
She never said that to Peach or Violet.
* * *
The only one who knew that my nightmares hadn’t stopped was Peach.
Soon after Violet and I started coming with her to the Robisons’ house, I broke down in a puddle of tears when I tripped over a loose board on the floor and dropped a whole dustpan of debris.
“It’s ok, Emmy,” Violet told me, while Peach brushed the dirt off my dress and the tears from my cheeks. Amina, who never said a word, patted me with her one hand. I laced her fingers with mine and she smiled up at me.
The kindness in their eyes brought all my fears to the surface in a jumble of words that barely made sense. Eyes on the floor, I rambled on about my downturned mouth and the devil in my dreams. About the blood that dripped from the ceiling and turned Mama, Papa, Peach, Violet, and even my friends from Sunday school into dead bodies.
Peach was silent for a long time after I finished talking, while Violet kept patting the hand I’d scraped on the floor. “You just need some rest,” she told me finally. “You’re a good girl, Emma.”
After that, Peach let me sleep for a few hours each Wednesday, curled up on the floor in the corner of the Robisons’ three-bedroom house while she cleaned the house and then washed laundry outside. Both Violet and Amina could generally be coaxed into cuddling up next to me part of the time, listening to the soothing rhythm of the broom scratching back and forth while Peach swept. The air in the quiet room was still and sticky from the pressing July heat, but it felt so good to get some rest from the overwhelming tiredness that I didn’t care. The dreams never came during the daytime while Peach busied herself with chores I was supposed to be learning.
Most days of the week, Brother Robison, his first wife Lucy, his second wife Kima, and their children worked in their apple orchard. But on Wednesdays, when they opened up the tithing cellar to the poor, Mama and Papa always stopped there first thing, before Papa went to work at the gristmill.
We relied on the donated food and clothing in the cellar of Bishop Brunson’s house as much as anybody in Fillmore, except for maybe the Robisons. I’d heard Mama say that most of the donations in the cellar came from them.
No one wanted to say it, but the harvest would be poor in October. Again.
Elder George A. Smith visited Fillmore once a month, to check in on the gristmill and the sawmill, which both served surrounding cities with flour and lumber. And when he did, he got a report from Papa, who oversaw the whole gristmill. Each time, he came by our house and stayed for Sunday dinner.
The darkest, meanest, most selfish parts of me hated these visits. We ate small rations of beans for days in advance of his arrival, hoarding food so that we could serve him a proper dinner—which he ate with gusto. Sometimes I stared at his jowls, wobbling back and forth while he chewed on a biscuit dripping with butter that might have been mine. I had to keep my mouth clamped shut to hold back a burble of disgust.
He’s an apostle of the Lord, Emma, I reprimanded myself with all the ire Mama would have used if she could read my thoughts. It’s an honor to share your table with a servant of the Almighty. But between my grumbling stomach and my dark and willful mind, I couldn’t help it.
I couldn’t say exactly why, but I deeply despised him.
* * *
All of the families in Fillmore were poor. Especially the mill-working families, like mine. But compared to my family, Vick and Lucy Robison were plenty comfortable. They didn’t pay much for Peach’s chores—fifty cents a week, forty-five cents after tithing—but as Mama liked to say, we’d just be underfoot for free at home once we finished our own chores.
On Wednesday afternoons, Brother Robison came home a little early from his service at the tithing house—to say hello to Peach.
When Peach heard his horse’s hooves clatter on the hard dirt road leading to the farm, she roused me, Amina, and Violet from sleep then set to preparing a supper of camas roots, venison from the larder, and dried beans that she’d started soaking in the morning. Violet and I helped with this part—and wolfed down a small helping of our own before Brother Robison’s boots thumped toward the front door.
Peach ate her meal with Brother Robison. Vick—she was supposed to call him—while Violet and I walked home along the dusty road to start our own pot of beans boiling.
Brother Robison wasn’t courting Peach officially, but he’d made his intentions clear enough. Sometimes Peach returned with a handful of wrapped horehound candy to share, or ribbons for her hair. One time, she even came home wearing a whole new dress—a hooped thing made of crinoline that Brother Robison had purchased on one of his trips to Salt Lake City. It came up to her neck in a crisp white collar and down to her ankles in an elegant, flouncing bell that made Peach look like a woman of substance and status instead of a skinny girl from Utah Territory.
Mama asked for every detail of these dinners, bursting with pride when Peach reported that Brother Robison asked about Apostle Smith’s most recent visit to the gristmill. Brother Robison was the first counselor in the bishopric to Bishop Brunson now, and a longtime friend of Papa’s.
Sweet Peach praised Brother Robison’s spiritual knowledge, his dedication to building up Fillmore, and his affection for his dear wives Lucy and Kima.
During one of these conversations, I learned that the Robisons had spent time in Winter Quarters Nebraska before they made the journey West.
Peach herself had been born in the very same camp. This knowledge sobered me. Still, I sometimes wondered if a small, mean part of Peach watched Brother Robison chew his venison with the same disgust I watched Apostle Smith eat. If she did, she never showed it on her face.
Unlike Apostle Smith, Brother Robison had no trace of jowls. Instead, his pale face was drawn and skinny. He was only forty-five, the same age as Papa, but his thin hair and strange eyes—one pale green, the other nearly black—made him look much older than that.
* * *
I never told Peach, but after a while, Brother Robison started showing up in my dreams.
When he did, all the pale skin on his skinny face was gone, replaced with a bony skull and empty eye holes. Instead of arms, he hefted big black wings that shielded the enormous bed from the dripping blood on the ceiling.
In the dream, his dark eye was gone, replaced by a gaping black socket.
Mama, I screamed. Always Mama. But under the cover of those wings, the blood stopped raining down long enough for me to catch my breath in the nightmare. Like always, her hand clasped mine and pressed that ring into my palm. In this new version of the dream, the ring wasn’t sticky and slimy with blood anymore. It was dry and smooth in my hand. I still couldn’t read the inscription in the dark, but when my fingers traced the letters, I suddenly knew what it said as clearly as if I’d read it on the chalkboard in Sister Brady’s classroom.
It said simply, BELOVED.
For the briefest moment, under Brother Robison’s dark wings with Mama’s hand and that ring pressing into mine, I felt safe and loved. Like maybe I wasn’t a wicked child full of cowlicks and evil thoughts. Like maybe everything would be okay this time.
But the blood kept coming.