Her Quiet Revolution by Marianne Monson

Author:Marianne Monson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shadow Mountain Publishing

Molecules of gasses have great mobility.

—Martha Hughes Cannon

Three days. Three precious days were all Angus could spare and then, once more, he was off. Needed for business demands, for pressing Church matters, for three other wives and a dozen other children. He bid Mattie goodbye with a lingering kiss, holding their babe as a precious treasure he was loath to part with. Mattie watched his carriage pass down the road in the direction of Salt Lake wondering if she would ever have a right to claim him as her husband openly before the world. He believed they would—believed laws would change, that the government would relent and allow them to practice their religion unmolested. For if not, why had the Saints been driven from their homes time and again to settle in this valley, miles away from the lands of their birth, directed, he believed, by a prophet of God to practice this celestial order of marriage—why, if not to know all would come out right in the end.

Mattie tried to also believe, to trust him and other leaders, to hope that God was in it and eventually she would be able to publicly claim the man she loved. She was proud of him—proud of their family—and grew heartily sick of hiding in corners and slinking in shadows, as if she had reason to be ashamed of all she held dear.

And if things didn’t change? They had touched on other options. Options Mattie hoped would never become necessary.

A handful of weeks had passed since Angus’s departure when Mattie bundled up little Lizzie, as she’d begun calling her, to take her outside to enjoy a rare moment of waning sunshine. She carried her daughter toward town, pausing as children scampered after each other, piling up leaves and jumping into them with abandon, shrieking as they ran in circles through the falling autumn flowers, crimson, yellow, rose.

Thinking of a day when Lizzie could run after them, she whispered, “I will keep you safe,” to the precious bundle in her arms, and began singing a song she could not remember learning, though she could not manage the Welsh as her mother could: “Lovely darling, I will guard you. I will hold you, close enfold you, sleep upon your mother’s breast.”

Basking in the sunshine, Mattie continued down the simple dirt street, past mothers calling their children, past farmers in the fields, harvesting the last of the autumn crops. She turned onto the main street, wondering why it lay oddly quiet. A lonely sign swung on its rusted hinges in a whisper of a breeze.

Wondering where everyone might be, Mattie stopped, gaze fixed in fear, panic mounting. The final homestead before town center belonged to the Judd family, and a clothesline bordered the side of their yard. Persis Judd had strung up her morning wash, all whites, clipped neatly at the edges with wooden pins. Crisp linens and dish towels, sheets and cheesecloths flapped in the wind like ghostly specters darting this way and that.

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