The Invisible Wife
*This is a photo of my great-great-grandfather, Charles Shumway, and one of his favorite wives. I have no photos of my great-grandmother. Poor thing had a mind and she knew it, so she was invisible. She was Charles' shame, although he impregnated her 14 times.
I was given the story that follows when I was about twelve. It had been typed up and you could see the shine of liquid ink. I've carried it around since Jr. High, not wanting her story and her life to disappear completely, but I never knew what to do about it. Since I'm currently editing my dad's biography, I'm including this story. I've always been a history buff, I looked into the details with older family members and it all checks out. I find it so inspiring and I hope others do as well.-TM
I was given the story that follows when I was about twelve. It had been typed up and you could see the shine of liquid ink. I've carried it around since Jr. High, not wanting her story and her life to disappear completely, but I never knew what to do about it. Since I'm currently editing my dad's biography, I'm including this story. I've always been a history buff, I looked into the details with older family members and it all checks out. I find it so inspiring and I hope others do as well.-TM
Henrietta
Bird Shumway—1833-1907. Born in Newton, New York.
It is from the green years of life that biographers
draw their riches metrical with which to portray a character. But if Henrietta
Bird, Charles Shumway’s third wife, ever lived through the droll antics of
childhood or knew the tragi-comic sorrow of growing pains, there is no record
of it. In fact, she never seems to have been young—just a small person who
became a larger one.
Our first knowledge of her comes from Nauvoo,
Illinois. She was a 12-year-old ‘hired girl,’ which in those days meant
slavery. At seventeen, she crossed the plains, and since she came from an
impoverished family, that meant she walked the brutal 932 miles from Council
Bluffs to Salt Lake City. One year after she arrived, she began working in the
home of Louisa Minnerly, Charles’ oldest living wife.
Henrietta was a little thing, undoubtedly stunted in
childhood from malnutrition and overwork. Her hair was straight, thin and of
the palest red. Her small eyes were so light a blue that they were all but
colorless between her blonde lashes. She had ‘good skin,’ however, for all her
sons are supposed to have inherited her rosy cheeks.
Since her looks didn’t recommend her, there must have
been something that won Charles to take her for his third wife. And that
something was elbow grease! In later years, at the height of his ridicule and
complains, he would always add (as though giving a dog a bone), “But there was
never such a worker as Hett!”
And why would this slip of a girl marry him?
With her plain looks, men were not apt to be plentiful
and since being an old maid in the Nineteenth Century was quite an unbearable
life, she really had no choice. Besides, she would much rather work for herself
than to be a drudge in some other woman’s home. She was accustomed to
polygamists—her father was one. She might have felt that sharing a man might be
less bother than having to put up with the antics of an individual.
Since she had been delivering children while still a
child herself, the ‘miracle’ of conception and birth were robbed of all
romance. Luckily, she kept this realistic approach for when she was scarcely
nineteen, she delivered her own first baby in a covered wagon somewhere near
Payson—and her husband didn’t show up for days.
At least she was spared the pain of loving him.
Charles was something of a big-wig in the Mormon
Church. He was elected to the church’s governing council and appointed to serve
as a member of the first Territorial Legislature for the Utah Territory.
Brigham Young had nothing but praise for Charles, saying, “There was never a
more faithful man in the Church. He was a man who was not wed to his gold. He
would give everything he had to the Church, to the building of the Kingdom of
God.”
All of Charles’ pioneering spirit and his attachment
to the church did not make him a good husband to Henrietta, however.
He was a man of his time, but Henrietta, with her
stubborn insistence on her own path, was a hundred years before hers. She was a
Twentieth Century woman struggling desperately within the iron-bound
restrictions of a Mormon community during the Victorian Era. She was a feminist
without ever having heard the word. As for Charles, an Old Testament prophet
could not have been more authoritative in his demands. And Henrietta’s refusal
to kowtow either to the church or to him was an affront to both his faith and
masculinity.
It was probably this frustration which caused him to
make Henri the butt of bawdy jokes. Like many in his time, Charles considered a
wife as his property, just the same as his land and stock. So how did their
eleven children spring from such a battleground? Henrietta had little to say
about the matter. Not until after World War I was a wife’s body legally her own
to give.
During the first few years of her marriage, Henrietta
lived here, there and everywhere. In covered wagons, sheds and shacks. Later,
when her sons would ask her to recall those hungry, threadbare years, she would
only shake her head. She had more of a servant-master relationship with Charles.
She couldn’t help but stammer whenever she had to respond to him.
On an autumn day in the early 1860s, Charles relocated
Henrietta to Mendon—a one room cabin that was, to her, a palace. There, in a
small clearing, Charles set her down with five children, the oldest of whom was
not quite seven. He left her with a cow, a few pigs and some chickens. He told
her that if she needed any supplies before spring, she could get them from the
local Mormon Bishop and he went on his merry way.
Henrietta was determined to do
no such thing. She went to the local Indians instead. While out hunting for
rabbits she ran into a young Indian boy with a broken leg and took him back to
her cabin to set it. That was the perfect introduction for these new neighbors.
The Indians shared their game with her. They taught her to scrabble along the
creek bed and in the woods for any growing thing that wasn’t poisonous. She did
washing for her Indian neighbors and delivered a few babies in her little
one-room cabin. They repaid her by keeping her stock supplied—sometimes even
better fed than her family.
Though it was a long, hard winter, she and her little
family made it through to the spring, when she could plant a vegetable garden,
as well as some hay and wheat. Later in her life, when she looked back at that
time she recalled how painful it was to withhold seed potatoes from her hungry
little ones.
In very short time, Henrietta could do anything on the
farm that an experienced man could do, be it butchering hogs, sheeting sheep,
sticking a bloated cow, shoeing horses or helping the animals birth their
young. Ever practical, she recognized the usefulness of the local Indian
mother’s back-cradle and made a papoose for herself. Thus, with a
baby strapped to her back and her hands free for work, she threw her body into
tending her stock and fields.
When winter fell again, the fever came with it. Too
far away to get a diagnosis from a doctor, she never knew what it was, but the
illness struck every member of the family. Baby Brigham died and then the fever
struck Henrietta, already big with child. Despite being desperately ill, she
had to tend to the stock and her other children. There was simply no one else
for it. She was out in the snow when her only daughter, Isabelle, was born, and
quickly died. If a neighbor had not come by to check on the laundry Henrietta
had taken in for them, there may have been many more deaths in her little
cabin.
The loss of these children was a sore spot for
Henrietta for the rest of her life. When Charles finally showed up again in the
spring, she railed at him and the needless deaths of her children, if only she
hadn’t been banished to such an isolated spot.
During her fight for survival in those early years,
there was always a baby at her breast and sometimes two, for she lacked the
heart to push away a sobbing infant due to a new arrival. Charles once caught
her sitting on a log near the creek bed, an infant at each breast, and made
much of it while gathering with some other men around the corral that night.
Inspired by the guffaws of his avid listeners, Charles
enlarged the tale and treated them to the verbal sight of Henrietta, stretched
out on the earth like a mother pig, with all her offspring scrabbling for a
mouth hold. Word got back to Henrietta of this tale, and others where Charles
used her as the butt of one of his jokes. She was deeply embarrassed that this
story was getting around and understandably very wary of townsfolk because of
it.
In addition, Henrietta wore pants in a time when women
simply didn’t do such a thing. For her it was a matter of practicality. She was
on horseback often, searching for her milk cows or hunting game. It was easier
to just wear pants.
She also desperately needed a saddle. She solved this
problem by stealing one from Charles during one of his rare visits. Charles
went berserk and threatened to beat each child until one confessed, so
Henrietta ended up riding bareback after all.
It was about this time that Henrietta came in from the
fields to find a bear inside her cabin. She finished him off with the weapons
she had at hand—a flat iron to stun the beast and a poker to finish him off. After
word of the bear incident got around, the brood-sow image that Charles had
cultivated began to fade.
This pants-wearing, saddle-stealing woman continued,
however, to be at odds with her church. Though she had never read Voltaire,
like him, she considered that faith unsupported by facts was valueless. Anything
that she could not see, hear, feel, taste or smell was what she called
“botheration.” All she wanted was her
sons, her beasts and her fields. And to be let be.
But that was something her good neighbors could not
do. Just as the Puritan fathers persecuted Quakers, though they themselves had
just escaped persecution, so the LDS church harassed Henrietta. But as much as
Charles might rage and the bishop scold, she refused to wear her uncomfortable
temple garments or attend church.
When Louise and Elizabeth, Charles’ other wives, tried
to remonstrate with Henrietta, she set them about their own business so rudely
that they never tried it again. She knew all too well that it was Charles who
was sending the ward teachers her way. He knew how their interruptions and
pious attitudes would infuriate her in his absence.
And so they would come—the elders—one usually an older
man who hammered down doctrine to her by the hour, the other was a pimply-faced
youth, staring at her wide-eyed as though he must be on his guard against such
a wicked female. Henrietta was a clever one, and learned to free herself from
being this captive audience. She simply lighted her pipe and they scurried
away.
As a mother, she was never mean. In a flash of
irritation, she might cuff a child as a she-bear cuffs her cubs, but there was
never any planned punishment. Charles, on the other hand, whipped his horses
with a wire whip and his sons with a belt buckle. Once, when he was whipping
one of his sons in such a manner, Henrietta broke a stool over his back,
effectively ending his lesson.
Henrietta’s only friend was Mr. Finklestein, who came
twice a year in his peddler’s wagon. He was the one to introduce her to books.
Heretofore, her reading had been by guess and consisted of the Bible, the Book
of Mormon, the almanac and an occasional newspaper. Mr. Finklestein changed all
that by giving her a dictionary. It was the Rosetta Stone which unlocked the
door to her being. Words! Words! Words! They were weapons! She could fight with
them. No longer would she have to sit dumbly while others blasted her with
words. Now she had some of her own. Now she could respond. She would never be
fluent. Her tongue would never keep pace with her brain, but neither would it
be halting.
Though the children would scatter like scared rabbits
through the tall sage when their father approached, they adored their friend
Mr. Finklestein. There was always candy in his pockets and his mouth was full
of riddles and jokes. He taught the boys how to make kites and stilts. Henrietta
always said they learned more from Mr. Finklestein’s tales than they ever
learned from the Mendon school.
And even when Mr. Finklestein wasn’t there, he seemed
to be, for he left books—glorious books—behind.
It was plain to Henrietta that Mr. Finklestein had
been a father as well. He taught her sons to play a game that would go on
through generations. “When you don’t have a book,” he said, “then you make
one.” Then he’d tell a tale, making it up as he went along. As soon as he’d
reach a nail-chewing crisis, he would pause and one of the boys would have to
continue. At first they had to borrow stories, from the Bible and the Book of
Mormon, and later from Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe. After a time, their
young minds were able to soar on their own.
Meanwhile, the babies kept on coming. By the time she
was 36, she’d given birth to 11 children and suffered 3 miscarriages. It was
then that her sons did what she had so longed to do: they gave Charles his
walking papers.
The decision had been brought about by her four oldest
children who had overheard their father while out at the corral one day.
Charles, unaware that the boys were near, was at his bawdy best. Henrietta was
the butt of his jokes, again.
“All I have to do is hang my pants on Hett’s bedpost
and she’s in the family way,” Charles said, to the men’s amusement.
Instantly, Charles was surrounded by four boys ranging
in age from 13 to 17, and all taller than himself.
“You shut up about Mama and don’t you ever come near
her again,” said George, the eldest.
Though Henrietta was proud of her sons, she was also
appalled. And for good reason. First, the best milker in her dairy herd went
missing and turned up in the pasture of one of Charles’ other wives. The boys
were on fire to reclaim it and Henrietta had a hard time holding them back. But
when their only good riding horse disappeared from the corral one morning,
without a word to her tinder-box sons, she grabbed a bridle and set off on foot
for Charles’ place.
She was striding into Charles’ yard when he confronted
her. Henrietta lifted her chin. “Either I will bring Cellem back or I will
loose my boys on you.”
My sons. Not
his. Never his.
This was the first time in her life that she’d spoken
to Charles without a hint of a stammer.
Without waiting for a reply, she clumped out to the
barn and reclaimed her horse.
Cutting Charles out of her life (or so she thought at
the time) was the beginning of Chapter 2 of her life. Free to be herself, she
poured herself into her boys and often told them how fortunate she felt to have
them. She felt horribly guilty about the hard life they’d had. Due to their
circumstances, she’d been forced to thrust tools into hands too small to hold
them, set them to care for beasts which terrified them and demanded attention
from minds too young to give it. Despite all of that and regardless of her
face, which she said ‘would scare crows,’ they loved her all the same.
Henrietta had always filled her little cabin with
song, but after the showdown with Charles, the music overflowed. She always
whistled or hummed—too busy to bother with learning the words. Summer evenings
she would sit on the stone steps of her cabin, surrounded by her boys, her
humming an organ holding them to the melody.
During these times, all of Cache Valley seemed to
float in a sea of sounds. It was Henrietta’s holy hour, her Sabbath, when all
her problems were simplified and the hurts of the world healed a little. And
her children were safe and close. Those sunset moments were so poignant with
pain and beauty that her son, Hyte, could never see a summer sun go down
without remembering his mother.
The hard times were behind them now. The older boys
could do a man’s work on the farm, and year by year they had pushed the fields
further back against the wooded area, doubling their acreage. They improved on
the little one-room cabin, as well—adding two rooms and sleeping loft.
The boys pulled the axe and pitchfork from her hands,
and they also hid her pants.
“Don’t you want to be a woman, Mama?” Hyte asked.
“I’m fine the way I am,” Henrietta said. But the boys
wouldn’t budge.
Deciding that the boys were crying out for a more
womanly touch, Henrietta got to work sewing blue calico curtains for the
windows, making patchwork cushions for the chairs and braiding rugs for their
plain, plank floors. She even bought a blue, checkered tablecloth and asked the
boys to make window boxes and some bookshelves for her precious books.
It was about this time that Mr. Finklestein bought her
a cookbook. It was another Rosetta Stone for Henrietta. She devoured the book
and sent the boys into Logan to buy cooking supplies. That night she baked her
first cake. When it turned out just as the recipe implied, she felt like she’d
just accomplished a miracle!
Cheered on by her sons, she tried more magic and soon
each day became an adventure in food. Only those who have endured the trial of
poverty can really appreciate the difference between eating for pleasure and
eating to satisfy hunger.
Before Mr. Finklestein left again, the boys huddled
with him speaking in whispers and hushing up whenever Henrietta got too close.
When he returned in the fall, the reason became clear. He brought with him
several dresses and a riding habit—her first store-bought clothes! She was like
a little girl, excitedly trying them all on. The years of peace and prosperity
brought much-needed flesh to her bones and in the well-chosen clothes, she came
close to being pretty.
It was the riding habit that she cherished the most,
especially now that she could mount a horse without either being big with child
or having tender, milk-filled breasts. But being the sole provider for her huge
family left her with no options. Only someone who has been through her
experience could understand the ecstasy she felt at having a body that belonged
to only her.
She would ride out early in the dawn, when the boys
and livestock were still sleeping—so she need not share the world with anyone
but the birds. She talked of watching the clouds on these rides, enjoying the
ting in the air rising off the dew-drenched alfalfa. When she returned to make
breakfast, rosy-cheeked and glowing, her boys would exclaim, “Why, Mama, how
pretty you are!”
She?
Henrietta? The idea!
By that time, Henrietta and Mr. Finklestein were
friends of long standing, and as close as two people could be. Both outsiders,
both held at bay by the world. He was always begging her to relax and stop
fighting.
“You’re lucky to live in this century,” he said. “Two
hundred years ago and they’d have hung you for a witch in Salem. You were born
with that most precious and perilous of all gifts—doubt. And men will never let
an avowed doubter live in peace, so hold your tongue. You’re too outnumbered to
fight. Give a little, listen and smile.”
Mr. Finklestein was almost as interested in the boys
as she was—marveling at their differences and thrilled by the beauty of their
singing. They spoke to Mr. Finklestein of the future, of schools beyond Mendon,
of college. College. Henrietta spoke the word as if it was sacred.
For the past few years, Charles had rarely come to
Mendon. He went up and down the territory, building saw and grist mills and
even establishing a bank in Idaho. Now, the church and or perhaps his own
wanderlust called him to southern Utah. It made more practical sense to have
all his households under one roof, so without a word to Henrietta and her boys,
he sold their farm.
Henrietta was so heartbroken she could barely speak of
it.
Then, it got worse. Charles began to woo her sons,
promising them a much brighter future and better farm in the Kanab area. At
long last, Charles acted like the father they’d always longed for—gifting the
boys with saddles, guns and knives and giving watches to the older ones. Henrietta
was given a tent for the four hundred mile trek.
During her fifteen years in Mendon, Henrietta had
changed from a terrified young woman into a self-possessed matron of property,
whose opinions on crops and cattle were of value to her neighbors and whose
fields and stock were held up as a model of industry to the countryside. This
hard-earned position had given her a sliver of confidence, at long last, and
even a sort of faith that each year would be better than the last. Now, not
only had Charles sold the farm she’d worked so hard to build, he destroyed her
cherished belief in the growing goodness of life.
How could she
bear it?
That was a foolish question, she told herself grimly.
Foolish for one who had borne babies in a one-room cabin in the dead of winter,
with only some strung-up quilts to separate her from the children and with a
slide of board in her mouth to bite on so that she wouldn’t cry out and
frighten them. She could bear this. She learned long ago that she could bear
anything.
Though her son’s siding against her wishes was
unexpected and hurtful, she understood their hunger for their father’s
approval. For them, it was as though God had suddenly noticed them. And so they
headed south, with Henrietta looking backward.
Lot’s wife
was lucky. She was turned to stone.
By the next morning, the green of Cache Valley had
vanished and in a few days they were in Salt Lake City. She felt no joy at
being back in the city and refused the boy’s invitation to go sightseeing She
was mourning the loss of her home and her truest friend—for she knew she would
never see Mr. Finklestein again.
They continued their journey south, passing through
little Mormon villages with outlandish names. Then the scenery gave way to
desert, which matched her mood quite well. The boys knew the depths of her
grief and tried to point out objects of interest as they traveled. They even
sang to her each night.
Charles behaved kindly toward her as well,
complimenting her on how much better she looked now that she’d put on a little
weight. Then, one night, his reason for gifting her with a tent became evident.
After the singing, he ordered the boys to leave. They took one look at their
stricken mother and refused.
Charles was enraged, but the odds were not in his
favor. He had to abandon his plan to bed Henrietta.
For the remainder of the journey, Charles resumed his
old attitude with his sons—finding every imaginable fault with the boys’
handling of the team and herding of the stock. When Jed, the 10-year-old,
accidently knocked over his father’s liquor jug, Charles dealt the boy a blow
that sent him sprawling. Long before they reached their destination, the boys
had grown more than a little disenchanted with their father.
Kanab, Utah was a village of about four hundred
settlers at the time. It was a sunken canyon on the desert floor, rimmed by
red, sandstone cliffs. Johnson, about seven miles away, was another sinkhole in
the earth, encircles by the same red sandstone barriers, with only three of
four families there ahead of them.
The sluggish creek that meandered through town was
marked by scraggly cottonwoods and willows. The farm, unfenced and uncleared,
had never known a plow.
The only shelter was a deserted trapper’s cabin, so
small that when all the beds were made, Henrietta could scarcely walk between
them(.) But in the midst of this desolation, the boys had the grit to tell
their father that they had no further need of him.
It was dangerously late in the year to be putting in
crops, but they had to try if they were going to survive the winter unaided. It
was another year of root-hog-or-die. Even the young boys toiled like
men—digging out the rocks and lugging them away, building fences. The older
boys tore out trees and brush, scrub and sage. Someone was always at the plow.
They couldn’t afford to stop turning the soil from dawn to dusk, until the
crops were in.
Their neighbors in Johnson were few, but kind. When
they saw the new family’s plight, they came together and dug an irrigation
ditch to the creek and the young ones even helped with the planting.
Meanwhile, Henrietta had been busy making adobes for
the new home, but it was August before the boys could help. Her sons copied
their home in Mendon—three rooms and a sleeping loft—hoping to please her. But
adobe couldn’t take the place of logs. With earth on all sides, she felt like
she was already in her grave.
Once the crops were harvested, the three older boys,
George, Morm and Spence, left home in search of work, as the farm was too small
to feed so many mouths. This left Hyte, a great lad of twenty, as man of the
house.
It was not that she loved Hyte more than the other
children. It was only that he reminded her so much of … well, herself. He’d
inherited her ginger hair, had that same hesitancy when he spoke and the way he
hurled himself, headlong, into any task that came his way, just as she’d always
done. Of all the creatures on earth, Hyte was truly flesh of her flesh. What a
miracle.
When the older three left, they never really came home
again. They had to depend on their father for work and this caused a
metamorphosis which turned them into strangers. Something too subtle to
analyze, too intangible to grasp, was separating them now. Across this chasm,
she could see herself becoming small in their estimations. Daughters-in-law too became a problem. Henrietta’s life hadn’t exposed her to women and these
girls seemed like such helpless ninnies! But if she tried to give them advice,
they’d complain to their husbands. She could see Charles’ caricatured image of
her reflected in the eyes of these women.
Church teaching did not help. The girls evaluated her
character with the Word of Wisdom. As was natural, the wives’ opinion affected
the husbands and soon Henrietta’s own flesh and blood was admitting, “Well,
mama was always contrary and heedless to council.”
These wounds hurt her more than anything Charles had
ever done to her.
More sons left home for marriage and they too
underwent the cruel transformation. Instead of sons, they became judges.
But not Hyte.
Despite all his fervor, bond between mother and son remained
strong. Hyte took on the world with wide open arms. To him, religion was high
romance, not dismal doctrine or persnickety rules. And when Annie Johnson
married Hyte, their bond only strengthened.
Like everyone in the Johnson family, Annie saw the world
through a glint of laughter. She reminded Henrietta of the little daughter
she’d lost so long ago on that winter night.
Annie was clever, too. Henrietta knew when she was
being managed and outmaneuvered, but she didn’t mind. When Henrietta complained
to Annie that she spent too much time babying her children and prettying up her
home instead of being out in the fields, helping Hyte, Annie hadn’t bridled
like her other daughters-in-law.
Remembering all that Hyte had told her about his
mother, Annie only laughed and caught her mother-in-law in her arms. “Do you
know why that is? Hyte recalls how you slaved and that, Granny, is why he takes
such good care of me. It’s you I have to thank for it all. And I only hope when
your children are grown that they will love and respect me as much as Hyte does
you.”
If they had not been friends at that point, that
conversation sealed the deal. Henrietta stood—a little awkwardly, a little too
stiffly. “You’re a good girl, Annie. It’s no wonder Hyte treats you like a queen.”
By now, Henrietta’s sight had deteriorated to the
point that she couldn’t read without getting leaden headaches, so she gave
Annie all the books that Mr. Finklestein had given them and which she had
treasured like the Ark of the Covenant all those years.
Hyte was finally able to purchase the farmland he’d
been renting. Since the land joined Henrietta’s, they only had to cross the
creek to each other’s cabins. Many nights, Henrietta would quietly knit
clothing for the children while their mother read aloud to them.
Now that Henrietta had, at long last, another woman to
talk to, it was as though her once-halting tongue would never cease. Annie, who
in her girlhood had wanted to be a writer, had the sense to know that she was
not only listening to the tide of history, but also to a long pent-up woman
stripping herself bare. Annie felt these stories so deeply and for the rest of
her life was able to keep Henrietta’s memory green for their children and
grandchildren.
The years in Johnson slowly turned Henrietta from an
agile, plump, middle-aged woman into a clumsy, fat, old one—and oh, how she
hated it. For a woman who had single-handedly run a farm, it was hell. Then,
one day, while she was scything lucerne (alfalfa), she tripped over a tangle of
roots and tore the ligaments of her knee, maiming her for the rest of her life.
Even stumping about with a heavy cane, she still managed to direct the working
of her farm.
When her husband, Charles, came by, after many years,
he didn’t recognize her at first. When he did, he gave a hoot of laughter. “One
of you was far too much, Hett. But two?”
He’d shown up in his fancy, new buggy—trimmed in black
patent-leather with dangling fringes and brassbound lamps. Never had Henrietta
seen such an intimidating contraption. His two wives were sitting with him,
looking thin, cool and neat, despite driving through miles of dust.
The visitors likely never intended on dismounting from
their resplendent rig, but Annie had rushed out of the house, dimples flashing
in her winsome face and completely captivated Charles. They must stay to
dinner! And Charles agreed, much to Henrietta’s discomfort.
At the heavy, noonday meal, Henrietta was her old
silent, awkward self—much aware of her faded, brown calico in contrast to the
pastel shades of the other two wives’ clothing. As for Hyte, he was even more
ill-at-ease than his mother. The two men all but glowered at one another.
Charles’ dislike of this big, fair son undoubtedly hinged on his resemblance to
Henrietta, but even more so was the fact that Hyte had been the youngest of the
four brothers who had given Charles his walking papers at that memorable corral
fence gathering. Though only thirteen at the time, he’d called his father a
“wicked, wicked man.” Later, when
Charles had been able to win over his other sons with jobs and land, Hyte had
remained aloof.
As the group was loading back into their fancy buggy,
Charles revealed the true reason for his visit. He was moving to Arizona with
his other wives. Did Hett want to come along? He looked so relieved when she
refused that Henrietta laughed heartily. At last, something truly
amusing on a very dismal day!
Arizona was a lucky move for Charles, as only a year
after his departure the polygamist hunters came to Utah. They swarmed over the
land, ferretting out plural marriages. Most wives were eager to save their
husbands from prison, so they swore to the federal government that they were
not only unmarried, but they had no idea who had fathered their children. Being
thought of as a ‘loose woman’ and having her children perceived as bastards was
not the path that Henrietta chose. She simply told the truth. What allegiance
did she owe to Charles at this point? She named him, much to the shock of all
who knew him. Not for Charles would she turn her sons into bastards. She was
quickly ostracized by all in Cane County. Her boys backed her. They were all
she ever needed anyway.
Charles was safe, anyway. No one in Arizona was
searching for polygamists. However, Henrietta’s declaration had made it risky
for him to visit Kanab, unless he snuck in. Oh, how he was enraged. He wrote
her letters of hellfire and damnation that sounded straight out of the Old
Testament. All he could think about was vengeance. Henrietta would pay!
Meanwhile, the government agents were making such poor
headway rounding up polygamists that they called off the program. Charles was
able to return, after what had turned out to be nothing more than a slight
inconvenience. His first priority was to see to the humbling of Henrietta. Who
he found was a white-haired, obese, lame woman who was nearly blind. Though he
was old enough to be her father, she looked years older than him. The sight of
her did not stir his compassion in the least.
No woman could do what she did and get away with it.
There were just three of her boys left on the farm
now: Jed, Brad and Bill. They were in the hayfield when Charles arrived with
his hired hand. They burst into the cabin as Henrietta prepared the noonday
meal. Without a word to her, they began moving her furniture into the yard.
When the boys heard their mother’s cries, they came running to see what the
ruckus was about only to find all their possessions piled up in front of the
cabin. Too young to buck Charles’ parental authority, all they could think to
do was to run for their big brothers, Hyte and Charles Bird, who were running a
sawmill in the mountains.
By the next afternoon, when the older boys arrived,
they found their mother crowded into the old trapper’s hut they’d been crammed
into when they first arrived. Their father and the hired man had taken over
Henrietta’s home. Charles plan was to sell the place and leave Henrietta
homeless. The argument that broke out between father and sons was fierce and
ugly. Hyte parted with his father as an enemy and never spoke to him again.
At the time Trek Fever was stirring through Kane
County. It was 1901 and, especially among the young folk, there was an urging
to head north—to Big Horn County, Wyoming. There was plenty of land there and terrific
growing conditions for crops. At first Hyte and Annie were determined to stay
put, but their three children wore them down.
Hyte was not the only son that Henrietta was losing to
the Big Horns, for wherever Hyte went, Charles Bird was sure to follow. It had
always been so. They had even married sisters, which strengthened their bond.
Charles and Hyte were an odd pair, because they were the least alike of all her
boys. Hyte was like his mother. Charlie resembled his father in his lean, wiry
body and his beaked nose. He also had Charles’ wit and clever tongue, only in
Charlie Bird these qualities were only mischievous and devoid of malice.
The boys insisted that Henrietta accompany them on
this journey to Wyoming. When she protested, a smiling Charlie Bird told her
that he would hold her on his lap for the whole trip. How Mr. Finklestein would
have approved of that! But she knew she was too old for such a journey. Five
hundred miles in a covered wagon! It was foolishness to even consider such a
thing.
The night before the boys embarked on their journey,
they had a big party at Henrietta’s, for they all knew the odds were great
against ever seeing Hyte or Charlie Bird again. They gathered in the yard,
beneath the red sandstone cliffs and sang, as they always did when they came
together. Henrietta sat in her rocker and Hyte sat on the ground at her feed,
just as he used to as a little boy whenever she was ill or bowed with worry.
“Mom, be our organ, as you used to,” Hyte urged.
She was afraid to hum. Any sound she might make would
come out as a croak of grief.
The boys and their families sang the sun down. Then,
as the moon moved across the sky, they just kept singing. Whenever the mood
turned too sad, Charlie would tease his brothers, challenging their masculinity
for remaining behind. This resulted in several good-hearted wrestling matches.
When the boys were distracted with Charlie’s teasing,
Hyte drew close to his mom.
“It’s still not too late, Mom,” he said. “We could all
pitch in and get you ready for tomorrow.”
She even agreed, only to quickly change her mind.
“Wait until you and Charlie Bird are settled. By then I should be able to
come most of the way by train.” But she knew, deep in her bones, she would
never see him again.
All night she’d lain awake, dreading what would be the
worst of days for her. Hyte had been her mainstay, yet she had to force her
hand to let him go. Nick, her big red dog that had been her comfort for years,
had recently been poisoned with coyote bait. As a going-away present, Hyte had
given her another dog like Nick—only the new dog was slow to make friends. He
growled and showed his teeth whenever she approached him.
It was then that she spoke words so devastating that
if Hyte had not already sold his farm and sawmill, he would have cancelled the
Big Horn venture. “I must really be the ugly witch your father always claimed,”
she said, “for children and dogs are afraid of me.”
Now that farm that had begun with nine boys was down
to one: Brad. Jed, and even her baby, Bill, were now married. Brad was a good
boy, earnest and willing, but he didn’t have a head that could make plans or
decisions. She wore herself out plodding after him, telling him what to do. So,
it was much better that Jed would take over the farm so that Henrietta and Brad
could move into Kanab where he could work in the mills.
They settled down, just the two of them, in a little
log cabin that had a few fruit trees and room enough for a vegetable garden. But
it was a lonely existence and a boring one for a woman who was used to
directing all the activity on a busy farm.
Brad was a shy, backwards boy, who was always worried
about other’s opinions of him. He was hopeless around females and Henrietta
only hoped his brothers could find a wife for him, as he’d never manage it on
his own.
She seldom saw her other sons. With the passage of
years, they all seemed to have the same face, all formed in the Mormon mold. To
think she’d once rejoiced in each son’s uniqueness. Now they came and sat,
stiff and awkward in her parlor, while they bore their parrot-like testimonies.
Even in her old age, she wasn’t free from ‘botheration.’ And, worse, they
always came alone—as though she was unworthy of knowing their children. That
she might contaminate them. She couldn’t beg. She had her pride. But it was
galling to see her boys turn into bigots.
At first, cheerful letters came from Hyte’s wife,
Annie, who wrote of comic incidents and told about their favorite activity
around the campfire—making books. But after they reached the Big Horns, the
letters grew fewer and shorter. All the fun and gusto was gone. Then, even
cheerful Annie, made a bitter confession. “Oh Granny, how we wish we were back
in Johnson with you.”
She should have gone with them. She could have shown
Hyte and Charlie how to scratch out a living in any land. No matter what they
were living through in the Big Horns, she’d lived through it twice over in her
life. She’d be useful again!
Henrietta couldn’t turn toward her beloved books. Her
eyesight was far too gone for that. Sometimes she would stare at an open book
with determined concentration, trying to force some meaning from the blurred
pages. How she missed her friend, Mr. Finklestein, that kindly skeptic who had
lived through even more hell than her.
Since the present was unbearable, her mind fled to the
past. She spent her days wrapped in her memories.
She thought things couldn’t get worse, but she was
wrong. Her son Brad died suddenly. The circumstances of his death were
puzzling. He’d been found dead at the foot of the red sandstone cliffs. The
‘joke’ around town was that Brad was so absent-minded that while out looking
for firewood, he’d climbed on the limb of a tree that was stretched over the
bluff and hacked himself off. He may have been climbing and slipped or—perish
the thought—he may have jumped. Whichever it was, her Brad was dead and she was
alone.
The boys decided amongst themselves that their mother
could no longer live by herself and the lot of giving her shelter fell to Bill.
Henrietta balked. She just wanted to be in her place, surrounded by her things.
She told her boys that she wasn’t afraid to die alone; the dog would let them
know of her passing soon enough. Her boys didn’t listen.
She moved into Bill’s small house, which wasn’t even
large enough for his growing family. She was constantly in the way, looming
vast at the kitchen table, her rocking chair tripping children in the parlor.
There was no room for her and, most resentfully, she knew it.
Lily, the wife, was neat and nervous and heroically
noble—valiantly telling all that she didn’t mind giving up her bedroom to her
grossly overweight, lame and almost blind mother-in-law. Lily lived in dire
apprehension that Henrietta’s blackened old coffee pot on the polished kitchen
range might be glimpsed by a Mormon neighbor. Worse was the pipe which
Henrietta clenched between her teeth, even when she wasn’t smoking. Oh, to
think what the Word of Wisdom would say of this. Lily hoped that God knew she
was doing her best.
The children, fresh from Sunday School chants of “tea
and coffee and tobacco we despise,” looked at Henrietta as a monster of
iniquity. It wasn’t that they didn’t care for her as much as they saw her as
evil personified.
The idea that her ‘bad habits’ could cause shame to
children tickled Henrietta. It was her sole amusement. Even if coffee and
tobacco hadn’t been her chief comforts, she wouldn’t have stopped using them.
They were her battle flags—which she’d unfurled in many skirmishes. They proved
that she hadn’t conformed, hadn’t given up and that two and two still made
four. That had been her biggest contention with her husband. He could make two
and two make five or even a dozen where Mormonism was concerned.
One day it came to light that Henrietta was not wearing
her temple garments. A family conference was called and all the
daughters-in-law were of one mind. Since Henrietta was obviously not right in
the head, Heavenly Father would want them to clothe Henrietta in the garments
themselves. Then, without so much as a by-your-leave, they proceeded to do so.
Henrietta fought. With her last bit of strength, she
swung and kicked against this final indignity, but there were too many hands
holding her down. After this wrestling match, she faded quickly. As she grew
more helpless, her well-meaning sons brought in the Priesthood to bless her and
pray over her. She protested, and loudly. Her boys assured the elders that she
was ‘out of her mind.’ It was much easier on their consciences to take their
mom’s panicked protests for delirium. They knew better. They’d known her all
their lives and knew she’d always fought against this.
Nothing in life had ever come easy for Henrietta and
death was no exception.
Henrietta
Bird Shumway remained unbowed and unbroken. She never compromised what she knew
to be true. May we all learn by her example.