The Price of Liberty
Sophie struggled to breathe at Clark's Mill. The air was thick with sawdust and the sharp smell of metal from men sharpening axes. She stood apart from the others and watched Elder Willie rub his temples, trying to bring some order to the confusion around him.
They kept repeating that there were five hundred people to prepare, feed, and move west before winter. Sophie noticed that the men were more concerned about their place in line than about how to keep everyone safe. She did not know Elder Willie well, but he looked tired and worried. The hickory behind him was still green and not ready to use. Nothing here was ready—not the wood, not the men, not the plan that had sounded so sure back in Liverpool.
Sophie thought about her husband, Peter. He would have stood quietly with the men, waiting to help. He was patient. She was not. As the men argued, Sophie wondered if anyone had asked God if five hundred was the right number, or if it was just what the elders had decided.
Peder Mortenson spoke quietly to her. "They are arguing about where to put the supply wagons again," he said, leaning against a handcart that looked barely strong enough to use. Sophie did not turn. There were too many voices now, too many people needing her help.
"The wood is still wet," Peder said. "It is green and not ready. It will break when we need it most."
She looked at the horizon, where clouds were gathering. "The wagons do not matter if we lack shelter," she said. "The carts are for travel. The tents are essential for survival. My children are already coughing."
She did not say that she no longer knew how to pray for her children. She did not say that Peter would have known what to do. Some things were too hard to share with someone she barely knew. But she thought Peder might understand. He paid attention to the wood, and she was learning that the wood told the truth about this place before the people did.
Sophie knew that a cart without a shelter was useless. She walked toward the canvas, already thinking about how much work it would take to sew enough tents for everyone.
"We are to make them circular," Marianne whispered, appearing like a thought Sophie had not finished thinking. She held a spool of thread so thin it seemed an act of faith to trust it. "Twenty people to a tent, they say. Twenty people around a single center pole, like spokes on a broken wheel."
Sophie looked at the thread, then at Marianne, who looked tired and worried. She wanted to comfort her, but all she could think about was her sick children. Twenty people in one tent did not feel like a community. It felt like a struggle to survive.
She picked up a piece of canvas. "It is better than being out in the rain, Marianne. We will sew as long as we have to so the children can sleep dry. We have to take care of ourselves now."
Sophie worked with the other women, sewing the tents together. They worked quietly, each focused on the task. The tents went up one by one, a small hope that God would help them through.
That night, heavy rain fell, flooding the camp. Sophie lay in the tent with her children, packed closely with the others. The water came in fast, and no one could keep dry.
The air inside the tent was damp and close. The canvas leaked, and soon the blankets were wet and cold. Sophie thought of Peter and how he would have tried to fix the leak or make her laugh about it.
But Peter was gone. Only the rain, the twenty people, and the sagging tent remained.
"Mother, the floor is melting," Emma whispered. She curled up, trying to keep her dress out of the mud that was coming in under the tent. Sophie pulled her close, trying to keep her warm.
"It is just the ground, Emma," Sophie said. "The sun will come in the morning. For now, we must stay together and hold on."
In the morning, the sun did come out. The people came out of their tents, tired and muddy, but they gathered together. As the sun dried their clothes, they sang hymns and listened to the word of God.
Sophie felt her spirits lift as she sang with the others. For a moment, the problems with the wood and the leaking tent did not seem so important.
After the meeting, the sun rose higher, and the mud began to dry. Sophie stood with the others, grateful for the warmth and the dry air.
The next day was the Fourth of July. Elder Willie told everyone to rest from their work in honor of Independence Day. In the center of the camp, a makeshift platform was erected, with an American flag flying from a thin pole.
Sophie and her children stood near the platform as several of the brethren spoke about liberty, about freedom, about a nation that had fought for what it believed.
The flag waved in the breeze as Elder Willie stepped to the edge of the platform. He removed his hat, revealing a forehead pale against his wind-burned face, and looked out over the sea of sun-scorched bonnets and waistcoats.
"Today, the air of this land rings with the sound of bells and cannons," Willie began, his raspy baritone carrying across the hushed clearing. "They celebrate a liberty won with blood and steel. But we—we gather to celebrate a higher independence. You have already declared your freedom from the kings of Europe and the traditions of your fathers. You have traded the comforts of Egypt for the promise of the wilderness." He gestured toward the snapping flag, then to the half-finished carts. "Liberty is not a gift that is given; it is a weight that is carried. To reach the mountain of the Lord, we must be light of foot and pure of heart. We are called to sacrifice the heavy things of this world—not as a punishment, but as the price of a kingdom. Remember this day: for in the shedding of what we once were, we find the strength for what we must become."
Sophie listened with her children. She was not used to hearing about American patriotism, but she saw that it mattered a lot to the men. They believed in a promised land, and she understood that it came with a price.
"They speak of liberty," Peder said beside her, arms crossed, his eyes on the frayed edge of the flag where the fabric had already begun to surrender to the weather. "But liberty has a price, Sophie. Seventeen pounds per person. That is all we are allowed to take from here. That is the price of our freedom. Seventeen pounds to carry your life across a continent."
She looked at him, then at her children, and then at the flag above them. Seventeen pounds. She remembered her mother's china, already sold, and the books she had left behind in Gentofte.
Seventeen pounds. Sophie thought about how little that was. It meant they were no longer settlers but survivors who had to leave things behind.
She stood in the Iowa heat, watching the flag in the wind, and knew that what she carried would have to be enough to start over.
"Seventeen pounds?" Marianne's voice rose, bordering on a frantic pitch, drawing glances from nearby families. "Sophie, my china tea set... the linens my mother gave me. I cannot. I have already lost so much. To leave the rest in this mud... it is too much to ask."
Sophie looked at her friend's trembling hands and then down at her own children. "We will manage, Marianne. We will take what can keep us alive and leave the rest to the Lord. We cannot pull our memories to the valley. The carts will not hold them."
The camp turned into a marketplace. Families laid out their belongings on blankets, and the locals came to buy what they could. Sophie stood by her handcart with her extra things: her mother's wool shawl, the silver spoons from her wedding, and the brass candlestick that had made it across the ocean.
A man approached, his face like leather left too long in the sun. His eyes found the spoons and stayed there, calculating. "Dollar for the lot," he said. No question in it, no room for her to answer. "Take it or leave it in the dirt."
Sophie looked at the spoons. They were worth much more than a dollar, and both she and the man knew it. She felt anger rise in her.
"They are worth more than a dollar, sir,” she said. “I would sooner bury them in the woods than see them taken for nothing."
"Bury 'em then." He turned, spitting the words over his shoulder like seeds onto stone. "The dirt won't give you a dollar. And the dirt won't feed your kids when the flour runs out."
Sophie stood, holding the spoons, and wondered whether it was better to leave them in the ground than to sell them for so little.
She knelt in the mud and began to pack. Blankets, clothes, a cooking pot. Seventeen pounds. She weighed each item, thinking of the memories attached to them. What she could not take, she wrapped in the wool shawl and left at the edge of the clearing, where others had left their things too.
She held the wool shawl for a moment and remembered her mother's hands the last time they touched.
"You did not sell it?" Peder stood with a kettle in his hands, weighing it the way she had weighed everything, utility against mass, memory against miles.
"I will not be robbed by men who see our faith as a bargain." The words came out bold, though she did not feel bold.
The sun dropped below the horizon, ending the Independence Day celebration. The flag hung from its pole like a wet shirt, too tired to move. Sophie sat on the frame of her cart and remembered Atwood's warning: thirteen hundred miles of prairie and mountain, with winter bearing down on her like a debt she could not pay. She was a widow with four children and seventeen pounds of hope. Either it would be enough or it would not, and she would not know which until she had walked far enough to learn the answer.
She did not look back at the pile of discarded items. She looked west, where the horizon lay in wait, and thought, “So this is the price of liberty.”
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