True Sisters by Sandra Dallas Read Free Book Online Page A

were expected to walk thirteen hundred miles, pushing the laden carts, and some could not keep up. Louisa had passed them on the trail. Already, there were those who did not arrive in camp until after evening prayers. Even without Thales telling her so, she suspected that not all of the converts would live to reach Zion.
    Louisa and her father stopped their cart beside Thales, who had paused to help an old man whose conveyance was stuck in the wet sand. “You pull. I’ll push,” Thales told Robert Amos, taking his place with the wife, Maud, and a young couple behind the cart. When the vehicle was free, Robert said, “We asked God for help, and you came along. Truly, He listens to our prayers.”
    Louisa’s heart swelled when Maud took Thales’s hands and asked, “Is it true you knew Joseph?”
    “I did,” Thales said, affecting the attitude of humility he showed whenever he was asked the question. Louisa knew the truth was that her husband had not really known the prophet. He had been only sixteen when Joseph Smith was murdered, but he had seen Joseph in town, in church, had doffed his hat to the prophet and in return had been greeted by name. Well, actually, it was his brother’s name, Thales once admitted to Louisa, but many others got the two mixed up, too.
    Louisa never ceased to be thrilled when her husband told the story of the Tanners’ early conversion, how they had followed Joseph from place to place until they ended up in Nauvoo, Illinois, where Thales’s father was a stonemason working on the temple. After Joseph’s death, Thales’s father and others labored to finish the temple so that the Mormons could use it to perform the sacred rituals they called “endowments,” before they were driven west across the Mississippi. At a meeting to select Joseph’s successor, the elder Tanner spoke up for Brigham Young, and later, the Tanner family had camped with the new leader at Winter Quarters in Iowa, where the Saints waited before the push to the Great Salt Lake. If the elder Tanner was anything like his son, Louisa thought, his voice would have sounded like the prophets of old.
    She was proud to learn that in 1847, Thales, then twenty, had been among those select few chosen to accompany Brother Brigham on that first trip into the Salt Lake Valley. Even the converts in the handcart company knew Thales’s family was Mormon royalty, and Thales himself a crown prince. After all, Brother Brigham had once given him a blessing that foretold Thales would rise to the highest level of the kingdom.
    And Louisa would be beside him!
    When Louisa first heard an English convert ask, “Did you know Joseph?” she observed that her husband was uneasy and said the two had been only acquaintances. But she, like others, believed that Thales was being modest. She had been thrilled to meet someone who had walked with the prophet. That connection gave him an air of authority, and it was natural that the converts, Louisa included, were awed. With gentle eyes and a soft voice, she pleaded to know more. She would have loved Thales if he had never seen Joseph Smith, but his closeness to the church founder raised his esteem among Louisa and her people. He had not expected to take a wife among the converts, he told her when he proposed marriage, but he had been smitten at once by Louisa’s sweet oval face, the bloom of youth still on her, and her manifest faith. Besides, he’d confided, he was twenty-eight years old, and a man, even a man of God, had his needs.
    “It’s true, then. I had heard so,” Maud, the woman at the cart, said. “You did know Joseph.”
    “Bless you, Sister,” Thales replied, turning away before Maud could ask for details, for stories. The questioning could go on for hours.
    Maud reached out a hand, touched his sleeve, but Thales did not stop. He turned back to Louisa, who said, “Father cannot push farther. You must help.” Thales appeared annoyed, but he shoved the older man aside and joined his