Magdalena

sorry about the weird formatting. My word processor doesn't translate very well to blogger. This is the first few pages of a novel I'm several chapters into rewriting. Any input/ripping apart/bashing repeatedly with a red pencil tip would be very welcome.


Prologue


The line of men stood at attention with muskets tucked up against their bodies. Mud and red paint dripped off of their faces and onto their bare chests like dark blood.

“Ready,” A resonant voice called out.
“Aim!” Suddenly all the men moved in unison. The stocks of their guns foreshortened in Maggie’s vision, and became small blotches against the pale shoulders.
They didn’t wait for the next order. It came unexpectedly—a giant explosion, filling Maggie’s skull with ricochet noises of screeching metal and painful gunpowder.

She yelled and flew into a sitting position. She whipped her head around, confused.
All of a sudden, it was dark. And instead of powdery earth and prickly weeds, she was sitting on a soft, lumpy surface--

Maggie’s heart slowed as she felt the straw poking into the back of her legs. She reached over and found the warm head of her sister on the pillow beside her.

“Maggie,” Giovanna muttered. “It was just a dream. Go to sleep.”


1

It could be said of Magdalena Chabert (and many in Provo did say it) that she was an old woman in a fourteen-year-old’s body. She moved if she had rheumatic limbs and brittle bones. She looked at you as sharply and un-apologetically as a woman who had lived through three or four generations. She didn’t say much and when she did, you got the feeling that she didn’t mean it. Sarcasm, she saved for those she knew well enough, and these chosen few got far more of it than they could have any use for.
On this morning, Maggie did not feel especially sarcastic. She stood in the crowd that spilled over the edges of the carefully-laid block of town square, careful to touch as few people as possible. It was a fine morning; refreshing and cool, though later in the day it would blaze high in the sky and scorch through calicos and flannels. For now, the jagged shape of Squaw Peak loomed above the crowd, hiding the sun and providing welcome shade.
Maggie glanced up at it and thought what it would be like to stand at the tip. She could spread her arms and maybe even lean out over the thousand-foot fall, held back from the edge by wind alone.
“I reckon Brother Brigham’s gotten long-winded over something,” Henry’s twangy voice cut into her awareness.
She turned and squinted at him. “Reckon that’s not unusual.”
Henry chuckled and edged into her space. “Like as not he’s gone on about the proper thickness of bread crusts again.”
Maggie nodded. She rose onto her toes and craned her neck, but it was useless as she had known it would be. She was at least two heads shorter than everyone in front of her.
“You want a lift? I could get you up on my shoulders.”
Maggie offered Henry a freezing smile—the sort that often sent people far older than her away without further comment.
He grinned back at her, unfazed. “Fine, then. Can’t say I didn’t try to be a gentleman.”
Maggie snorted appreciatively. “Very fine manners—hoisting a young lady of fourteen up t’your shoulders so a hundred people can count out the holes in her stockings.”
The crowd around them was growing restless. With the buzz of muttering, Maggie couldn’t even hear a dim echo of what the prophet was saying.
“Where’s Mariah?” Henry asked suddenly.
Maggie shrugged. “Likely had to stay home and mind babes. Her ma likes to come to these.”
Suddenly the whispers increased in volume, all around them, and along with it a sudden intensity. Maggie stood straighter and craned her neck; it was like the air was charged, the feeling of thunderclouds full of rain about to burst.
“What’s he sayin?” She whispered to Henry.
“Back North, then.” It was Cindy Holdaway’s voice, to her right. “Just as you thought, Shedrick.”
Shedrick Holdaway stroked his pointed beard, his face unusually solemn. He didn’t glance at his wife, but squinted through the crowd as if it would make him hear better.
“I admit I’m feeling relief,” Betsy Cluff said, leaning behind Henry and Maggie so that she could see her friend. “It’s been exciting, but it’ll be good to have our east pastures back again for grazing. David’s been worrying lately how to get the sheep fattened with wagons camped out on his best pasture.”
“It’ll be sad to see some go,” Cindy replied.
Shedrick made a hushing noise, and put a hand on his wife’s shoulder.
Maggie felt something like an iron band, tightening around her heart.
Mariah was going home. Likely, that was what kept her this morning. Likely she already knew and was spending the morning packing. There were privileges that came from having the prophet as a stepfather.
The corwd began to break up and disperse, bodies pressing through and against each other as everyone found their direction.
“Brother Brigham says he’s packing up and going today,” Brother Cluff said, coming through the crowd. “Johnston’s got his thousand men across the lake on the other side of the mountains.”
“Doesn’t mean they’ll stay there,” Brother Holdaway remarked.
“Buchanan made it pretty clear he wasn’t to stir up trouble. And Governor Cummings is on our side, President Young is fair certain. I’ve already seen some wagons start down main street toward the canyon way.”
Maggie felt her heart sink still further. She stepped quickly through the crowd, leaving Henry with his mother and father. When she got enough space, she began to run toward town square, but soon had to slow again, waiting for animals and carts to pass. Center Street was already busier than she could ever remember it being; people running and walking, shouting out orders, saddling animals as they stood by the side of the road, loading up wagons.
They’re ready to shake the dust of this place clear off their feet, she thought.
She made her way through the square until she came to one of the long, narrow-lean-tos where the Prophet and his family had lived these last few months. She knocked on the door and immediately it opened.
“Mariah around?” Maggie asked the harried-looking woman who stood in the doorway.
“They’ve cleared their things out already. They were one of the first ones out—likely you’ll find them east of town headed for the benches.”
Maggie turned tail and ran, her heart pounding in her temples. She felt moisture start at the corner of her eyes.
Mariah hadn’t even planned to say goodbye to her?
It hurt.
She thought it had been something special, what she and Mariah had. Or at least, it had been infinitely special to Maggie, who had never had a bosom friend before. Not a girl friend at least.
Henry doesn’t count, Maggie though savagely. He’s a boy. And besides, going fishing for suckers wasn’t the same as talking your heart out until you felt full and sure that someone knew you, and liked you.
It had been odd—threatening, even—at least at first. Maggie had thought that girlish friendships were not meant for her, or that there was something about her that just made it impossible. She thought it was because she wasn’t refined enough, or her funny foreign way of speaking.
In truth, it was Maggie’s solemn countenance and unnerving way of studying people that kept the fourth-ward girls at a distance. Which was why it was such a miracle that Mariah came and sat next to her during Nancy Wall’s quilting party that Saturday in March. And it was also a miracle that, in spite of Maggie’s silence and one-word answers, the girl stayed next to her and continued to talk for three long hours instead of changing seats to go be next to Julia Huntington, for instance. Instead, Mariah weathered the long silences, waiting for Maggie’s answers and talking as if the conversation was proceeding at quite the normal pace.
The third miracle happened the next day, when there was a knock on Maggie’s door. There stood Mariah, with one of her mother’s aprons folded over her bodice and tied around her waist. Her dimples framed her grin like parenthases, and her eyes glittered as if she knew a joke. Maggie couldn’t help but let her in, couldn’t help but offer her a place by the fire, couldn’t help the fact that her emotional dam began to crack and the words started to pour out slowly, like molasses from a pitcher.