The Fugitive Son Read Free

escape of sleep. Lying on his bed – a pile of sagebrush covered with a counterpane of old newspapers – he relived the day’s events. How could such a killing be the will of God? But if Brigham Young were really the mouthpiece of the Lord, how could Andy doubt his teachings? Over and over, his mind played over everything he knew about the Danites. Tales of the bravado of Danites like Bill Hickman and Porter Rockwell flashed through his memory. Back in Nauvoo, those men had been the stuff legends were made of, the heroes of every young Mormon boy.
    He shuddered. Tales and legends were a far cry from actually watching a man’s throat slit and hearing the last breath gurgle from his body. And for what? Simply because he’d had a belly full of troubles and the audacity to complain about it? If the truth were told, probably most of the men who wintered at Devil’s Gate secretly harbored some of the same complaints and doubts.
    Thinking back over the ill-conceived handcart journey, Andy remembered how time after time he had urged the leaders to wait until spring, how he and others had tried to persuade them that the flimsy handcarts would break down, that many of the Danish and English immigrants were too old or feeble to walk across the Plains pulling their duffel in the carts. But no one had listened. The path of graves across the Mormon Trail and now the trench outside the mail cabin with its fill of frozen bodies were mute evidence that the leaders should have heeded him.
    “We don’t question our leaders.” Pa’s voice came to him in the darkness. Pa had drilled that into him from the time he was a young’un. “When the leaders speak, the thinking has been done,” Pa always said. But what thinking? How much thought had gone into this terrible tragedy that sent hundreds to an early grave? That had taken Anne Marie’s precious life from him?
    Andy turned over on his pallet. “I will not doubt. Joseph Smith was a prophet of the Lord, and Brigham Young is the voice of God.” Startled, Andy sat up in bed to hear who had spoken, only to realize he had said the words aloud.
    Lying back down, Andy muttered the words of his testimony over and over, trying to feel the assurance they usually gave him. Tonight, however, the testimony failed to give him the “burning in his bosom” he had come to recognize as the spirit of God. Instead, each time he repeated, “I know Joseph Smith was a prophet of the Lord,” a small inner voice challenged,
How do you know? What proof, if any, do you have?
    Where were these doubts coming from? Had God deserted him because he had promised Anne Marie he would let Ingrid take her baby away from the Saints? Was this awful torture of mind and spirit his punishment?
    Failing all else, Andy tried to bargain with God. “If you’ll give me peace of mind, I promise I’ll make sure Ingrid and Ammie return to the fold. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I give you my solemn promise that I will.”
    Thus resolved, Andy finally fell asleep, just as the first gray streaks of dawn pierced the cracks in the cabin walls.

    River Bend Plantation
    Elsie stood at the window gazing out over the broad rolling lawn, the stables and white-fenced corrals, the patchwork of fields and distant woodlands that made up her family plantation. How could she leave this, the only home she had known? The home her ancestors had carved out of the Kentucky wilderness so many years ago? She felt almost a traitor to their memory, a memory that echoed in the now empty rooms of the plantation house.
    As she turned away from the window, her eyes swept over the room, settling on a mural painted on the far wall. She could barely make out the edge of a door hidden in the lines of the painting. She smiled, proudly remembering all the times Papa and Isaac had brought runaway slaves to the safety of the small chamber tucked behind that door. Again, she wondered if she had done the right thing in responding to her brothers’