Celestial Wife

by Leslie Howard

Genres: Coming of Age; Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A young fundamentalist Mormon girl facing a forced marriage escapes her strict, polygamist community and comes of age in the tumultuous 1960s in this captivating novel inspired by shockingly true events.

Keep sweet no matter what, for this is the way to be lifted up
Keep sweet with every breath, for it is a matter of life or death

1964. Fifteen-year-old Daisy Shoemaker dreams of life beyond her small, isolated fundamentalist Mormon community of Redemption on the Canada—US border—despite Bishop Thorsen’s warning that the outside world is full of sin. According to the Principle, the only way to enter the celestial kingdom is through plural marriage. While the boys are taught to work in the lucrative sawmill that supports their enclave, Daisy and her best friend, Brighten, are instructed to keep sweet and wait for Placement—the day the bishop will choose a husband for them. But Daisy wants to be more than a sister-wife and a mother. So when she is placed with a man forty years her senior, she makes the daring decision to flee Redemption.

Years later, Daisy has a job and a group of trustworthy friends. Emboldened by the ideas of the feminist and counterculture movements, she is freer than she has ever been…until Brighten reaches out with a cry for help and Daisy’s past comes hurtling back. But to save the women she left behind, Daisy must risk her newfound independence and return to Redemption, where hellfire surely awaits.

For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Ami McKay’s The Virgin Cure comes an arresting coming-of-age novel about a fearless young girl’s fight for freedom at a time of great historic change.

Release date: April 9, 2024

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter One

Chapter One

No one else wanted the job, so they gave it to me. Up at five to relay the morning road reports, and back again late in the evening to call in the weather forecast to the off-road truck loggers. It was vital information for the men who hauled raw logs through the treacherous Rocky Mountains to our sawmills in southern BC and across the border in Montana and Idaho. My work was lonely and isolating, but it was my daily pass to the outside world.

I flicked a switch and watched the ancient shortwave radio snort and rumble to life, like an old man’s struggle to wake from his nap. I spoke into the mic and heard the eerie echo of my own voice. “Hey, Stan. Daisy here. No snow on the Kicking Horse, but six inches expected on the Crowsnest, if you’re heading up that way. Back roads on logging section twelve are clear. Some ice by the river, though.”

I stood up to face the large map of western Canada and the northern United States thumbtacked to the wood-paneled wall. Its edges were curled and the print faded, making it hard to see in the early evening light. I ran my forefinger along the route I guessed Stan was taking and thought about the weirdness of snowstorms in June. While it wasn’t summer here yet, I could feel its warmth just around the corner. Butter-coloured black-eyed Susans were bursting out in the meadows and ditches.

Static filled the tin-roofed hut and then the words, “Ten-four.”

I was supposed to finish up, hurry back to my assigned family, and help the mothers put all the toddlers to bed, but instead I dimmed the lights so no one would know I lingered there, slipped on my headphones, and turned the dial to FM radio. I watched the needle dance until it landed on the station I was looking for: KREM FM out of Spokane, Washington.

“This is Wolfman Jack coming to you live, and who’s this on the Wolfman telephone?”

“Cindy in Portland.”

“Cindy in Portland, tell me who you’re lovin’.”

Cindy giggled. “Hi, Wolfman, I’m lovin’ that new group from England, the Beatles, and I want to hear ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’?”

Wolfman howled his trademark as the song came on. The golden glow of radioland wrapped around me, and I sank deeper into my chair—and another dimension. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let the magic sweep me away.

My mind, dancing with the melody, filled with the image of a boy with dimples and rumpled dark curls reaching for my hand as I looked longingly into his warm, caring eyes.…

Lost in a forbidden world, I didn’t hear or see the door to the hut open, didn’t sense the movement across the old plank floor, didn’t feel the warm body beside me until a hand touched my shoulder.

I gasped. And my chair dropped forward with a bone-jangling jolt. I yanked off my headphones and blinked up at the person standing beside me. Relief poured through me at the sight of my friend.

“Brighten! You scared me so much I thought I’d have kittens.”

Brighten’s eyes were big, round, and a little worried. “Keep your hair on, Dais. I didn’t mean to. I just need to talk.”

Brighten was my absolute best friend—my only friend, really. Together, we were the daughters of the undeserving: men and women who did not hold the Bishop’s favour, either because they didn’t give enough money to the church or because they disobeyed the Bishop’s teachings. When I was a toddler, my father stopped believing in the Bishop—stopped believing that he was the True Prophet and received messages directly from God—and he quit the church. There is no greater sin, so he was excommunicated. My father lost everything when he left, including my mother and me.

Brighten’s situation was different. For some reason we didn’t understand, her father had never been asked to join the priesthood. She lived with her mother and father—and three other mothers and their children—in a two-bedroom house down by the creek. It was small and run-down with a chicken coop out back and rusted old cars in the driveway. All the other kids had bunk beds in the basement, but as the oldest, Brighten had to sleep on the second-hand couch in the living room.

We found each other at recess on our first day of grade one, the only two girls standing alone in the playground while the others cut us out of their games. But our similarities ended at our unpopularity. Whereas Brighten was tall and beautiful with auburn hair and amber eyes, I was small, thin, and blonde. Completely unremarkable. The good news, though, was that I had actually grown quite a lot lately and had put on some weight in the right places. Boys noticed me now. Even though it was a sin.

I switched off the radio and gestured for Brighten to sit on the only other chair. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m freaking out about the Placement. I’m starting to have doubts.”

I shook my head. “Don’t. You’ll be chosen as the new celestial sister, I know it. Bishop Thorsen practically promised you.”

The Bishop’s older sister, Charity, had been the first celestial sister years ago. When mothers started having babies at age fifteen and went on to have ten kids or more, our community grew like crazy, and we needed someone to organize it properly. Managing all the businesses the men owned and procuring and distributing food and supplies to all the families was a full-time job. Charity had been unable to have children, so she had what no other woman in Redemption had: spare time and energy.

She did a great job running things. Not long after she started, the Bishop had a revelation: that all scheduling, ordering, payroll, and accounting was now women’s work, and would henceforth be the domain of celestial sisters.

When it all became too much for Charity, the Bishop had another revelation: that there would be a total of four celestial sisters at any one time. The sisters would remain chaste before God, but once a sister reached the age of twenty-five, she would train her replacement and then be married and have children. She would heed womankind’s highest calling and become a mother of Zion.

Because celestial sisters handled the money and doled out the groceries and pretty much everything else, they were powerful. Girls competed for the jobs, but only the smartest and most capable were chosen. Brighten wanted it bad.

“I was so sure before, but now? I don’t know. I don’t like the way Brother Earl looks at me. He makes my skin crawl. He watches me when he thinks I’m not looking. Others have noticed too, so it’s not just me being vain or proud. Blossom told me that being married to an old fart like him would serve me right for being ‘Little Miss Perfect.’?”

I smiled as I looked at my lovely friend with her long thick lashes and flawless skin. “Blossom’s just jealous. You’re prettier and smarter than she is. She doesn’t mind not being the prettiest, but it kills her that you’re smarter. So there’s always going to be bad blood. Don’t worry, you’re a shoo-in for celestial sister.”

Blossom, on the other hand, was awful. She was the twentieth daughter of Brother Fred and the first daughter of his seventh wife, Flora, and because her father was a senior man in the priesthood, she had loads of status. She had curly brown hair, a turned-up nose, and her father’s build. He was a big burly man who liked to throw his weight around whenever he got the chance, but especially each year at the Placement. People said that Blossom was a chip off the old block. If she became a celestial sister in charge of food distribution, Brighten and I would starve to death.

Brighten pulled a piece of her hair from her long braid and began twisting it into tighter and tighter coils. “It’s just that Brother Earl always seems to get what he wants, and I’m scared he wants me. As one of the deserving, he does everything that the Bishop demands and gets rewarded for it.”

“Yes. But Bishop Thorsen gets his revelations directly from God, so he’ll do His bidding. Right? Not just what Brother Earl wants. God sees how good your heart is.” I reached over and gave her hand a little pat.

“I’ve worked so hard for this, Daisy. Fifteen is too young to be a wife and mother. I want a chance to have a job first. If I get placed with an old man, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Brighten dropped her hair and began to stroke the wrinkles out of her skirt. “I don’t like what it’s done to my mother—the in-fighting, the bullying. Mom’s always so down and worried. I don’t want that life.”

It was true. Brighten’s mom seemed overwhelmingly sad whenever I saw her, which wasn’t often. She didn’t leave the house much. Brighten admitted that her mom was unable to help care for her large family. She slept a lot, and the other mothers couldn’t trust her to look after their children. The Bishop explained that there was something in Brighten’s mom that prevented her from feeling the glory of God’s blessings. Though she struggled and prayed for guidance, she was not the recipient of God’s heaven-sent light. She was undeserving.

I tried to console Brighten. “You’ve got nothing to be worried about. Celestial sister is all yours.”

“Maybe. But what about you? Are you worried the Bishop will marry you to someone you’ll find hard to love? Are you hoping to become a celestial wife?”

My heart beat an unsteady rhythm. For girls like Brighten, girls with intelligence and ambition, becoming a celestial sister was the only way to avoid early marriage and motherhood until their twenties. For girls like me, adventurous and romantic—or so I liked to think—becoming first wife to a young man I admired was more important.

But the position of celestial wife had not even occurred to me, so focused was I on becoming one young man’s first. A celestial wife, the Bishop taught, was a man’s third, the one who ensured he would get into the highest kingdom of heaven. But I wasn’t as interested in the afterlife as I was finding heaven on earth with the boy who’d arrived from Utah last year. “I’m hoping for first wife. I hope the Bishop will place me with one of the new priesthood men. Someone young I can relate to. Someone I can love.”

Brighten’s eyebrows shot up. “Okay, Daisy. Spill it. Who’s the guy you’ve got a crush on?”

I thought again of the boy with the dark curls and big brown eyes and the way his cheeks dimpled when he smiled. I’d first noticed him in church, but I got to know him—despite the rules against fraternizing—when he was assigned to fix up the derelict “new” cottage where my mom lived.

Correction: the cottage the Bishop banished her to.

I guess I should explain. After my father left, Mom and I lived alone until two years ago when my mother turned down the Bishop’s marriage proposal. Apparently, he’d asked her many times before, but she always refused him. After the last time, he forced Mom to move to an isolated cottage on the far edge of Redemption, where “her sin wouldn’t infect others,” and he put me with my assigned family where I’d learn about God’s plan for me.

Plural marriage, hard work, and motherhood are a woman’s greatest glory.

Remembering the new guy’s shy smiles, his kindness to my mom, our very first conversation, and that time we walked in the woods together—my whole face suddenly felt damp and hot. I looked down to try to cover my lie. I wasn’t ready to tell Brighten yet, not until I knew for sure that he felt the same way as I did. “No one. It’s a sin to have feelings for a boy. You know that.”

She gave me a look that demanded more, but I wanted to change the subject. I had a deeper, darker secret that I needed to get out in the open before it drove me crazy. I fingered the locket that lay hidden under the bodice of my long dress, dropped my voice to a whisper, and slowly raised my eyes to meet hers.

The idea had popped into my head when I was talking with my assigned father’s newest wife. Lavender was only two years older than me, and we had become fast friends. She admitted that she cowered under the covers every time Brother Henry—Father Henry to me—knocked on her door at night. And cried herself to sleep when he left her. She hated him and just wanted to go home to her mother.

That was hard to hear, and her story frightened me.

Over time the idea just kept pushing its way into my consciousness. I wasn’t sure where it had come from. It terrified me. I was playing with fire, and I knew I could get badly burnt, but at the same time I was drawn to it. I couldn’t turn away from its warmth.

It really took hold last year when they gave me this radio job. I learned it quickly and, once they left me alone, I explored stations up and down the dial to see what was out there in radioland. There was a lot. My favourites were the comedy shows; Jack Benny and Art Linkletter, and especially Red Skelton. But sometimes I caught Walter Cronkite and the evening news. Apparently, there was a war going on in some place called Vietnam, and folks were upset about it. When that got me down, I tuned in to Dear Abby and listened to other people pour out their hearts to her. I wished I had someone like her to tell my troubles to, someone who could tell me what to do. Because Abby was wise. Wiser than anyone I knew, including the Bishop, because his wisdom wasn’t his own. Brighten was smart and sweet and deeply sympathetic, but she had about as much experience as me.

And I wanted more.

“Brighten, if things don’t work out for us at the Placement, have you ever considered leaving Redemption?”

Brighten looked at me sharply, alarm in her face.

“Of course not! I haven’t ever thought of leaving,” she exclaimed. “That’s nuts. Those people who’ve left, no one ever speaks to them again. All their friends and relatives—even their own mothers. It’s like they died! Not to mention they’re excommunicated and banished from the Celestial Kingdom!” Her eyes widened and she slapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, Dais! I forgot about your dad. I didn’t mean it.”

I put my finger to my lips and dropped my voice even lower. “Don’t worry about it. So, you truly believe everything we’ve been told, no question? That the Principle is the only way to heaven?”

Brighten looked puzzled, then taken aback, like I’d just said that up was down, and down was up. “I dunno. I guess,” she said. “I haven’t thought a lot about it. It’s all about eternal salvation in return for obedience, right? God wants us, His Chosen, to be fruitful and multiply, and plural marriage was His instruction. The Bishop says—”

“Never question. It makes us unhappy,” I said, interrupting her. “His sayings are always in our brains. It’s hard to ever think for ourselves and to know what makes us truly happy, isn’t it?”

Brighten’s face dropped, like she had no energy left to keep sweet. “Sometimes I wonder if my mom would be better if she didn’t have to compete with her sister-wives and always come up short. She might feel more at home here, like she belonged.”

I knew what Brighten was talking about. Everyone wanted to be their husband’s favourite wife. They wanted to feel special, to feel loved. So they were always looking for proof of his feelings, and were often disappointed. Their anger and frustration at their husband were redirected to their sister-wives, and there was always one who became the scapegoat for the others.

At my new house, it was Lavender.

I got up and checked the window. I didn’t expect to see anyone, but I was always careful. I didn’t want to get caught lingering and lose my supper. Last time, Mother Rose punished me with no supper for a whole week.

I settled back in my chair. “What about the outside?” I persisted. “Aren’t you dying to see what the world is really like? You could pick your own clothes, go to the movies, listen to music, eat hamburgers and chips.”

Brighten’s face lit up despite her fear moments ago. “Mmm. You’re making me hungry. I haven’t had a hamburger since the Bishop banned them. A temptation sent by Satan? I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

I glanced at the floorboard in the corner of the room, the one that wasn’t nailed down.

“Dad sent me a Seventeen magazine for an early birthday present this year. The clothes in it are un-be-lievable.” I saw Brighten’s eyes widen. “Tucked inside my magazine was a library card with my name on it. Did you know that there is a library in town where you can borrow all kinds of books to read—for free?” I smiled, lost in a happy daydream. “I’d sure like to visit it, but don’t think I could pull it off without getting caught.”

Brighten sighed, leaned back in her chair, and crossed her arms over her chest. “Your mom’s taking a big risk letting you have the stuff that your dad sends you. If she were caught, it would be bad. For her and you. You’d think she’d have learned by now.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I know. I worry about her. She doesn’t seem to care anymore. Does some weird stuff: she says hello to people even though she knows they won’t talk to her, and she doesn’t even try to hide the library books she carries home from town.”

“Town” was Stewart’s Landing, population two thousand, easy walking distance from Redemption.

“Maybe you should get her some Valium. My mom takes it, like lots of the mothers. There’s a doctor in town. He gives Bishop Thorsen prescriptions, no questions asked.”

I shrugged. “Knowing Mom, there’s no way she’d take it.” I got up and switched off the generator. The moon had risen and there was enough light for us to see each other. No one would look at the hut and guess we were there.

I inclined my head towards the radio. “Last night I picked up a signal all the way from Dallas, Texas.”

“Where’s that?”

“In the States. South, I think. They talk like they have marbles in their mouths. Couldn’t understand half of what they said, but the music was boss.” I smiled, trying out the language I’d picked up from the station. “There was a prerecorded talent show called Folksongs. A singer named Janis Joplin. What a voice! All raspy and shivery. They said she was a real up-and-comer. My point is, she was a girl, just a little older than us when she started, and she was allowed to do things like start a career. Maybe she’ll even become famous one day.”

It was Brighten’s turn to get up and check out the window. Then she turned to look at me, her face stern. “I wish we could go to the States and see her—or go anywhere for that matter. But we will never do that because we can’t ever leave. If we tried, we wouldn’t survive without money or a place to live. We don’t even have any government identification.” She paused. “And the punishment would be awful if we were caught. Beatings would be the least of our worries. I don’t think I’d survive re-education in isolation.”

It was the Bishop’s favourite punishment. He locked up the worst sinners in a broken-down trailer where they were forced to study the covenants for weeks with hardly any food. When they emerged, they weren’t the same. They claimed that their belief had been restored, but the light in their eyes was gone.

I didn’t say anything, just pulled myself to my feet and walked over to the radio, checked that everything was off, and tidied my pen and papers on the desk.

“The Bishop says you can’t trust anyone on the outside,” Brighten insisted. “They’re all evil and live like Satan. We’re much better off here.”

My face felt prickly hot again and I threw down my pen. “Are we? Even if you’re named the new celestial sister, you’ll be married eventually. What if we end up as junior wives with a dozen sister-wives? What if we are tied to old men, for time and all eternity, men we can’t grow to love? What if I’m always the runt and never get any respect?”

My challenge seemed to make Brighten slough off her early doubts. “That won’t happen. You’ll be placed with a new member of the priesthood, one who loves you and treats you well. You’ll be his first wife, so you’ll have status. And I’ll be the new celestial sister. We’ll both be very happy, you’ll see.”

As we walked home together—for where else would we go?—I glanced up at the large houses we passed by. Warm yellow lights shone through open front doors as mothers called children to come in for bedtime. While crickets chirped in the deepening shadows, I thought about what Brighten had said. Despite all my insecurities, I knew she was right. I had just needed to air my innermost doubts and fears.

It was true. We were better off here in Redemption. I was going to be the first wife of a young man of the priesthood, and not just any young man.

Tobias, the dark-haired, dimpled boy of my dreams.