Chapter 26
Elijah. Elijah. Elijah.
He etched his name into my skin as we moved together, our bodies climbing with sticky heat.
My hands mussed his hair. His lips roved down my body.
We laid together in a bower of towering prairie grass.
Warm sun blazed overhead, the sky painted azure and with streaks of sugar-white clouds I could taste on my tongue as I gasped.
Elijah’s finger stroked downward, making me moan.
“Say that you’re mine, Hazel,” he whispered into the crook of my neck, his voice thick with longing.
I arched into him, savoring the touch of our skin pressing together. “Elijah—”
“Say it, please. I love you.”
I kissed the edge of his mouth. “I love you.”
The vision shifted around us. I was in my room on the bed alone again, but the core of me continued to burn with unsatisfied want. I rolled my head to the side searching for Elijah, needing his embrace once more.
But instead of finding Elijah, Abby sat at the table staring back at me. I shot up at once, embarrassed by my compromising position. She didn’t say a word, though, only studied me with frantic eyes like she craved something unspoken from me.
A drop hit the top of my head. Tilting my head, I looked up at the ceiling.
Another drip landed on my nose. The blood returned with a storm of force, raining from above.
Abby sat steadfast, her eyes boring holes into me.
Crimson seeped down her face, but she made no move to wipe it away.
The unholy rain pelted my naked skin until I was quickly coated.
I screamed, an animalistic, shattering cry that I didn’t know I was capable of producing.
“Stop screaming, you child,” Flora scolded. “Good wives don’t complain.”
Her words echoed off the walls, though I couldn’t see her. She commanded silence over and over, but the storm never ceased. The blood filled my throat.
I awoke screaming into my pillow, my body drenched in sweat. For days, my dreams had been a torturous mix of Elijah and Abby, a confusing jumble of desire and blood. I tossed and turned all night, praying the nightmares would cease, only to be thrown headfirst into another.
It seemed the last bits of the fabric of my reality were disintegrating—my nightmares, Elijah’s unseen presence in the house, Abby’s specter, and the ever-present threats of hunger and Jacob’s wrathful return.
This morning, in an attempt to regain some semblance of control, I focused on scrubbing the parlor until my fingers turned raw.
I ran my rag, blackened with dirt, along the top shelf of books and it shuddered in reply.
I made my way through the doorway to the dining room.
I’d add these rags into the growing pile of laundry and pretend this was all perfectly normal.
That I wasn’t slowly losing my mind to panics and imagined horrors.
I remained so lost in my own thoughts I didn’t notice Abby lurking in the doorway of Jacob’s study.
“Hazel! Come and help me.”
I startled. “Oh, Abby, I didn’t see you there. Are you—”
The rest of my sentence caught in my throat.
Abby wore only her chemise, the long cream sleeves and high collar of her garments exposed beneath it. She didn’t appear bothered by my intrusion on her state of undress but waved me into the room.
“I was too anxious to get started and didn’t bother to dress. I barely slept anyway,” she said at my staring. “Come, now.”
I set my rags down and followed her in.
“Grab every journal you can find,” she instructed as she reached up onto her toes to pull a slender volume from the top shelf.
“What for?”
“Study.” She gave me an expectant look over her shoulder. “Well?”
I moved forward, running my hands along the lower shelves. We worked in silence for several minutes, stacking the few journals we could find onto the desk. But what was Abby intending to study in Jacob’s private journals?
Seemingly satisfied with our findings, she dropped into the chair, releasing a tiny puff of dust into the air. She grabbed the top journal and flipped it open.
“Is that all you need?” I asked, tentatively.
Abby laughed, ignoring my question. “So many notes on Brother Brigham! You’d have thought he was his scribe. Jacob wrote down every word he heard the man say.”
I shifted between my feet, somehow certain the eyes of Brigham Young’s portrait on the wall bore into me.
“If that’s all, then I’ll—”
“Look at this, Hazel,” she said as I shuffled toward the door. “‘There was never a time when man did not exist, and there will never be a time when he will cease to exist.’ He certainly thinks a lot of men.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked, panic stirring within me.
“‘I could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than any of the young men.’ And he certainly thinks a lot of himself.”
“Sister Abby,” I pleaded.
At last, she looked at me.
“I’m studying the words of the Lord through the prophet, as you suggested on the night of your little sleepwalking excursion.”
I’d never seen Abby so much as pick up a book of scripture, and that night had been days ago.
I wondered what could be driving her to such sudden spirituality.
Though it was simple to say the Holy Spirit had moved her as I’d been taught in church, the way she peered at the words as if she would devour them from desperation unsettled me.
I recalled the fear in her eyes as she told me I saw nothing that night. Perhaps it wasn’t religion at all. Perhaps we both felt unmentionable things in this strange house, things that also kept her up at night.
Abby settled back into the chair, a queen on her throne.
“I simply need to find the answer to end this torment. Have we not been promised the words of God would deliver us?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“Then why are you staring at me so peculiarly? Everything can be made right once more. At last, I’ll have peace, even in this godforsaken house.”
I nodded, stepping back to the door as quickly as I could. If Abby wished to become a gospel scholar suddenly, then so be it. Nothing she did surprised me anymore.
“Here’s an interesting one,” she said. She leaned closer to the journal and flattened out a newspaper clipping. “Sermon, 1857 … ‘this is loving our neighbors as ourselves; if he needs help, help him …’”
I slipped toward the door, ready to leave Abby to her strange education.
“… and if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he might be saved, spill it.’”
Her words were little more than a whisper. A cold shiver ran down my spine. The strange and nearly forgotten doctrine of salvation through sacrificial death—Brigham’s blood atonement. I left as fast as I could from the study.