Amanda

Part I: The Call

Hearken! A knock in the dark of the year,
  and a woman opened the door.
Snow on his hat and a fire at her back;
  she had never seen him before.
He had walked ten miles. He stood and said:
  “Here is what you must do:
Ask whether miracles have ceased,
  or ask what has ceased in you.”

He warmed his hands at her fire and began:
  “You know what our fathers heard —
a bush in flame, a mountain in smoke,
  Moses who brought down the word.
That was the old world. He has spoken again
  to a boy in a wood, in our land;
an angel showed him a book this spring,
  and I have it here in my hand.”

Amanda of Amherst was twenty-two,
  her Warren shod for trade.
The stranger at the door was Orson Hyde.
  She heard him out. She obeyed.
She took off her shoes in the April cold
  and went down laughing in the creek.
When she came up, the first face she saw
  was her father’s, who chose not to speak.

Seven years at Kirtland went to a wall,
  a wage and wedding glass,
They ground it small in the plaster cast
  and the Temple rose from the grass.
Their savings went to the Safety bank,
  and it failed and ate the rest.
They sold their beautiful home for a song,
  and the wagon tongue swung west.

Part II: The Gathering

Nine wagons left Ohio in April,
  the teams too poor to trot;
Three days they cut a stranger’s hay
  for the meal that went in the pot.
At the crossroads a stranger stopped them
  and said, “They will shoot you dead.”
They took the unbeaten trails and sang,
  and the stars of the Lord, they led.

Far West was going up, they said,
  on that bare prairie sod,
Adam-ondi-Ahman up the Grand,
  the name means valley of God;
a land that flowed with milk and honey,
  where a poor man could begin,
and a stranger come off the road
  to where all would call him kin.

Armed riders came down on the road,
  at the Livingston county line;
They took every gun and ounce of powder,
  and searched the wagons, all nine.
“Deny your faith or die,” they said,
  and held them three days in the cold.
“Is this the boasted land of liberty?”
  she asked, and the wagons rolled.

Two hundred miles off, in Jefferson City,
  on the twenty-seventh, a pen;
no rider, no rifle, no powder, no ball,
  no hurry, no noise, no men.
The Governor had never heard her name,
  he signed, and blotted, and ate:
Amanda of Amherst - exterminated,
  or driven out of the State.

Wagons! a child called from Shoal Creek,
  and the nine came off the hill;
six months and half a continent gone,
  and Amanda at Haun’s Mill.
The houses emptied. Out of her lap
  a woman took her daughter.
She knew no one. The children came
  down both banks of the water.

A grist mill, a saw mill, a blacksmith shop,
  and eight or ten houses begun;
The honey was out of the bees that morning,
  in buckets and pans in the sun.
They cried, “Come eat all you want,”
  Amanda laughed, “A feast!
Three miracles, and it is not yet noon,
  for nothing in us has ceased.”

Part III: The Mill

The sun was three hours down the sky,
  and the men brought in the corn;
Two days back, David Evans had made
  a treaty, signed and sworn;
The guard stood down. The women washed.
  Warren had a tire to set,
his three boys fed the brush fire up,
  and the iron was not red yet.

Thomas McBride stood in his door,
  and he was sixty-two that fall;
He had carried a musket against the King,
  and it hung on the cabin wall;
Merrick and Foutz and the Myers at the saw
  stood in sawdust to their knees;
The children were thick and loud on the bank;
  beyond the water, the trees.

At four o’clock the far bank moved,
  the pond below lay flat;
Two hundred forty, rank on rank,
arrived with vanguard, front and flank,
they cleared the trees and took the bank —
  and Evans swung his hat.
He cried for peace, but was not heard,
  a dozen seconds passed;
a hundred rifles made their smoke,
the far bank stood, the water broke,
the balls went home like axe on oak,
  and the logs let in the blast.

“Quarter! Quarter!” the men cried out,
  and swung their hats, and died.
They found the gaps between the logs
  were just a rifle wide.
Warren’s two crawled under the bellows,
  but his third one never came.
Three times he ran at the shop door,
  But his arms locked on the frame.

Amanda ran with her two girls
  and crossed above the pond;
The balls came hailing in the water.
  She made the wood beyond.
Mary Stedwell fainted on a log,
  her hand was running blood;
They put twenty balls into her skirt
  while Amanda sat in mud.

McBride had handed over his gun,
  that fought against the Crown.
They took his gun and turned it round,
and shot the old man to the ground.
He raised his hands without a sound,
  and Rogers cut them down.
They pulled the boots off Warren, dying;
  the bellows hid his two.
One laid the gun against the head,
and shot the boy of ten stone dead,
and “Nits make lice” was all he said.
He wiped the stock and laughed and spat:
  “Ask what your God can do.”

They went along the ground at dusk,
  and shot the dead where they lay;
They took the teams, and the straw from the beds,
  and howled, and rode away.
Then quiet. She crossed the pond again;
  the mill would never stop.
She walked through the straw in the trodden yard,
  and came to Warren’s shop.

Willard, whose arms had locked the frame,
  the eldest, whole, eleven,
carried his brother out of the shop,
  and Alma, shot, was seven.
She screamed, “Oh, my Alma is dead!”
  and Willard’s arms were filled.
The boy answered plain, “No, mother.
  But father and Sardius are killed.”

There was no man to dig for nineteen,
  and the mob returned at dawn.
Some head first and some feet first,
  down the dry well, gone.
Joseph Young could not put Sardius in,
  and no one asked him why.
His mother put him in the next day,
  the fountain of tears was dry.

Part IV: The Miracle

Six widows and a yard of children,
  and not one husband left.
The dogs howled over their dead masters,
  the cattle too were bereft.
Twice they followed a groan to the shop,
  and over the dead they trod.
They bound the wounds with their own skirts,
  with no physician but God.

Amanda cut the trousers off.
  A hole: no joint, no bone.
It took a quarter yard of linen,
  and Alma lay like stone.
She prayed aloud: “You see the boy.
  I never learned this art.”
The answer came in order, plain,
  and told her where to start.

She raked the hickory ash for lye,
  and soaked a rag that night.
She pushed it in and drew out bone,
  until the hole was white.
She sent Willard out with a torch.
  He dug the elm he knew.
She did not ask if miracles had ceased.
  She asked what she must do.

She spoke low. “Alma, was it God
  that made your hip, my son?”
“Yes, mother,” he said. “Then in that place,
  can God not make you one?”
The boy lay quiet. Then he asked:
  “Do you think He can, mother?”
“I saw it done. Lie on your face,
  and God will make another.”

Five weeks he lay and did not move.
  The poultice came out black.
She drew it, washed it, and filled with elm,
  then put the linen back.
That winter they kept a spelling school;
  the widows swung the blade.
Was Willard frightened? Grown, he said:
  “Of course I was afraid.”

The captain’s word came from the mill:
  the women’s prayers must cease.
He would come down and kill them all.
  And so they held their peace.
She feared the hush but not the guns.
  She crossed the corn and bowed.
One stalk was an altar of the Lord,
  and there she prayed aloud.

The fifty came at dusk with guns,
  to drive her out, or kill.
She filled the door and made them look
  at Alma. They stood still.
They laid a hog across her step
  and left it, for no money.
Comstock, the captain, sent it in:
  with flour, and beef, and honey.

The fifth week found her at the well,
  when she heard the children’s cries.
She let the bucket fall through air.
She thought the fifty men were there.
She ran too fast to say a prayer,
  and stopped, and saw him rise.
A gristle grew where bone had been,
  and she forgot her fears.
He danced upon his own two feet,
he drummed the floor to keep the beat,
and God had made the child complete.
  He danced for fifty years.

Part V: The Trek

February the first, she went,
  and not a coin to spend;
two hundred miles, and four to feed,
  the mob at every bend.
No man to drive: she drove the team,
  her hands were going numb;
she made the Mississippi bank,
  and Illinois to come.

Under oath she claimed fifty dollars,
  of goods, her pocket book;
a gun at ten; a hundred more:
  the team, the time it took.
“Is this the boasted land of liberty?”
  she asked the land of her birth.
She swore, “My damages come to more
  than the State of Missouri is worth.”

Nauvoo stood where the swamp had been,
  and seven years of bricks;
They drove them out of paradise,
the temple burned to light the ice,
ten thousand crossed the river twice.
  The year was forty-six.
The road went on a thousand miles,
  a grave, a year, a board;
The oxen leaned against the chain,
Sweetwater ran beside the train,
the column took the ridge again,
  and down the canyon poured.

In fifty they broke ground and stayed;
  Amanda cast her vote,
she taught in Richmond, and grew old,
  and this is what she wrote:
“A checkered scene of joy and trouble.”
  She added nothing more.
Twice asked if the wonders had ceased,
  and here they laid the floor.

Part VI: The Valley

In Cache Valley, at a mill again,
  her children’s children, clean,
She turned to Alma, fifty-five:
  “But these have never seen.
A living, burning testimony:
  will you let them see your hip?”
They crowded close. He turned his back,
  and let the waistband slip.

A girl of eighteen watched him turn.
  The fire took her whole:
“One electric thrill went through
  my body, bone and soul.
My grandmother had believed a knock,
  a man, a hat of snow.
I saw the handiwork of God.
  She had faith. I know.”

The knock is now at your own door,
  but no one makes a sound.
You will not know the cost tonight.
  Or what in you is found.
You have to answer where you stand
  before the prayer is through.
Ask whether miracles have ceased,
  or what has ceased in you.