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stories were about a young woman who needed to win the love and devotion of the young men around her—sometimes two or more at a time—and who would then invariably reject the men and break their hearts. It is tempting to infer facts about Melissa Kerby’s young life from these stories, but I have no way of knowing if such an interpretation would hold. All I know from family legend is that Melissa was supposed to have been attractive when she was young and had several male pursuers and, yes, she reportedly broke a few hearts before she met the man she could not spurn.
    Melissa Kerby found that man in William Brown, a shy and gangling fellow who was six years her junior, and apparently no match for her intelligence. Will’s father, Alma, had lived in Provo all his life, working as a blacksmith and a railroad man. Alma married Mary Ann Duke in 1875 and, in ideal Mormon tradition, they had ten children; Will was the fifth born. In his middle adult years, Alma slipped under the wheels of a moving train at Provo’s train yards and lost a leg. After his accident, he reportedly became a hard, madly authoritarian man. In his worst bouts of rage, Alma Brown would pull off the wooden leg he now wore and would beat his wife Mary Ann with it in front of the children. Sometimes he did it until she would drop unconscious, and at least once or twice he beat her terribly enough to send her to the hospital for a few days. One time, when he was young, Will tried to intervene and stop the beating; he found the wooden leg turned against him, and he ended up in the hospital with his own leg badly injured. The Browns would later tell the story that Will’s horse had fallen on him. Will learned to obey his father without resistance after that, and he learned to keep his feelings quiet.
    By the time Melissa met Will, Alma’s fearful days were past; in fact, the old man would die just a week or two before the young couple’s marriage. When the two met, Melissa was the belle of the local church ward. She directed the ward’s plays, had been named the ward poet and the president of the Young Ladies’ Association, and had even been chosen the local Goddess of Liberty for Provo’s big July 24th pageant (the annual celebration of the day the Saints arrived in the Salt Lake Valley). Will had a part in a play she was directing for the event, and there was something about his shyness, the broken way he tried to speak his lines, that appealed to her. Maybe there was something in his loneliness thatshe identified with. In any event, this was a man’s heart that she could not bring herself to break.
    On December 4, 1907, after a year and a half of courtship, Will Brown and Melissa Kerby were married in Provo. The money side of things ran against them from the start. With his father dead, it had fallen to Will to continue the support of his mother and siblings and the maintenance of their farm, in addition to looking after his own new family. What’s more, Mary Duke Brown insisted that her children stay as close to her as possible. With such obligations, a man couldn’t make much of a living or afford much of a home, and so, after their wedding, Will and Melissa took the only course they saw open: They moved in with Will’s mother and devoted their time to her farm. According to my mother, Mary Brown was a hard taskmaster. It was as if she’d been waiting all those years for Alma Brown to die so she could try on his role for size.
    In 1908, Melissa and Will had their first child, a boy named George. Two years later, they had another baby, a daughter named Patta, but the birth had been hard on Melissa, and she almost died. Will decided that the crowded living conditions at his mother’s farm, plus the strain of looking after two children, would likely be too much for Melissa. He told his mother that the time had come for him and his wife to build then-own home. Mary Brown didn’t like the idea of losing her son entirely to a life of his own, and