by Lou Cameron
“Damn blast!” Rockwell said in cold anger. “I thought he’d given up on all that. I warned him away from her when he started up when she was fifteen. There can’t be any truth in that killing talk. Abby is an excitable girl and reads more into things than there are. Hickman may be cracked when it comes to women but he’s no . . .”
“He’s a born killer,” I said recklessly. “I saw how he was yesterday. Abby hates him and I think she’s got good reason.”
“You’re mixing in too deep, William. Go easy now, I’m telling you.”
“Abby says Hickman tracked a runaway wife and strangled her a thousand miles from here. Is that true, Port?”
Rockwell got up with such force that he knocked over his chair. His face was red and his pale eyes appeared to blaze. “That’ll do. I want to hear no more of that. Hickman’s my business and he’s going to stay my business. If you can’t understand that, then there’s the door and out you go.”
I turned away from him. “Then out I go,” I said. “I’m going to look for Abby. She’s a nice girl and I think she’s in fearful danger. I know she wasn’t just talking.”
I was in the street when a shout from Rockwell made me stop. I stood looking the other way while he approached me. He might have been going to break my back for all I knew.
“Wait up,” he said quietly. “We’ll look for her together. If she’s not at the hotel, she must be at Old Dan’s. Dan would like her to live there all the time, but there’s always been bad feeling between Abby and the daughters. Come on, let’s go over there.”
The general was napping on a high-backed sofa in the darkened dining room, and he got up rubbing his eyes, hardly knowing who we were. “Come in, men. What can I do for you?”
“You think Abby should be here?” he said when Rockwell explained what we wanted. “Was she here last evening? Yes, she was, the happiest I ever saw her, humming and carrying on fit to drive me crazy. You know how I hate humming. If you’re going to sing, sing—just don’t hum.”
The general was now completely awake. “What’s going on, Port, and why is Mr. Forbes with you? Is there something wrong?”
“Probably not, Dan,” Rockwell answered. “Just one more question before you go back to sleep. What time did she leave here?”
“About nine o’clock I would say. Port, is there something wrong with Abby?”
Quietly, sometimes looking at me, Rockwell explained that I had asked after her and couldn’t find her. “Hmm,” the general said, raising his head to stare in my direction. “This is all craziness,” he snorted. “What could happen to Abby? Everybody likes her. It doesn’t make sense that she’d just wander off without a word.”
“You’re right, Dan,” Rockwell agreed. “Just the same I’ll go and look for her. When I turn her up I’ll let you know.”
“You do that, Port.” The general stretched out on the sofa again.
The guards passed us out and we walked up through the town. A man driving a wagon piled with boxes shouted when he saw Rockwell, who shook his fist at him and yelled back, “What’s been keeping you, Mr. Smithers? I’ve been waiting all day for those rifles. Never mind why, I don’t care why. Get on down to the jail and help my man put those rifles in a cell.”
The wagon rattled away and Rockwell said bluntly, “Did something happen between you and Abby? If you say no, I’ll take your word for it. Let me explain. When I told you to stay away from her, well then you were a stranger to me. Abby’s a lonely girl and a pretty girl and the two together can be dangerous—for the girl.”
I told him as simply as I could.
“Well, there’s nothing ‘specially wrong with that,” he said, frowning just the same. “Men and women get together. There’s no law against Mormon women and Gentile men having a time. They even get married now and then. The church doesn’t like it, but as long as the girl is unmarried or not betrothed, there’s no great harm done. But it wasn’t wise, William.”
I knew why it hadn’t been wise—Hickman. If it had been any other unmarried Mormon girl, I don’t think Rockwell would have thought much about it. All he wanted was for the church to go on; a man and woman in bed together would have been no threat.
We walked the city from one end to the other, and that was plenty of walking in the hot sun. Rockwell told everyone he talked to to be sure to pass on the word about Abby. “Come to me any time of night or day, my friends,” he’d say, leaning forward confidently so they would know how much he wanted to find the missing girl. “I’ll be at the jail. There will be some money in it if you bring me good news. Even bad news.”
I have never seen a man who worked so hard or so well. He didn’t call out his deputies whose principal work appeared to be guarding the Prophet, all his gold plate, all his wives and children. “No point causing a panic,” he told me. “But if she doesn’t turn up by tomorrow I’ll search this town from cellar to attic. I’ll set every farm family and salt digger in the basin looking for her. I recall when she was a child she’d go and hide some place, hoping people would come looking for her. Lonesome kids are like that. Would you believe I was a bit that way years ago back in Massachusetts.”
It was the first time he had mentioned his far-off birthplace. The town of Belcher was simply a name to me then; I could see it, though. And I thought of what Rockwell might have become if the great Yankee migration and his new religion hadn’t driven him so far west to his bloody trade.
“I got over being lonesome as the years went past,” Rockwell continued almost shyly. “I was lucky. I found something solid to belong to. You should think about finding the same thing, William.”
Our last stop after the long days search was the small independent Mormon bank where Abby kept her small store of money. Rockwell knew the bank because Abby had come to him when the manager refused her account because she was under legal age. The bank was closed but clerks and tellers still worked behind half-drawn window shades. Rockwell banged on the door until someone opened it. It was the manager and he looked angry before he saw who it was; not at all fussy as most bankers are said to be, he led us into his office and sent one of the tellers for the account of Abigail Martha Brimmer. He ran his finger down the deposit and withdrawal columns and shook his head. “No withdrawals any time, Port. That little friend of yours is a saver. We need more like her.”
Rockwell was silent as we left the bank and for a long time afterward. I didn’t feel like talking either; the doomsday mood was full upon me. The sinking sun was blood red in the western sky. Blood, I thought sadly that’s the real color of Utah. Walking beside me, his squarish face was set in grim lines and he clenched and unclenched his hands, something I had never seen him do. I sensed the torment going on in his mind. My own mind was all awhirl, but at least it wasn’t filled with old dogmas and conflicting loyalties.
Hardly aware of it, we found ourselves outside the hotel. A clock over the barbershop said it was fifteen minutes to seven. Rockwell saw me looking. “I’m going to get cleaned up for going to Brigham’s,” he announced.
“I don’t feel much like going,” I said. “With Abby missing and ...”
“You won’t get another chance, William. When Brigham summons a man to his house, then he comes that time or he can forget it.”
“You mean he summoned me, he didn’t invite me?”
“Never mind the word, it isn’t important. All you have to remember is that Brigham’s word is law here. Dan Wells stood up for you. So did I. But you do what you like. Not coming to Brigham’s isn’t going to find Abby any faster. What’s Greeley going to say if he hears you got a chance to go and turned it down? You’re getting a chance very few reporters ever got—and none since the war of ’57.”
He started to walk away and now it was my turn to call him back. ‘Wait, Port,” I urged him. “You’re going to the jail before you go?”
“To wash up and clean the dust off my boots.”
“Then wait a minute while I wash up too and get a clean shirt.” What he h
ad said about Mr. Greeley decided me; I’d be out of a job if the story got out about not taking the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview—if that was the word—the Father of All the Mormons. Concern for Abby was replaced by ambition, I suppose.
When I came back to the street, clean shirted and still damp faced, Rockwell was on the sidewalk in front of McSorley’s drinking from a pint bottle of whiskey, oblivious to the guarded stares of passersby, and in his pocket bulged another flat bottle like the one in his hand. But there was no joy in his drinking, I could see; his blue eyes were almost opaque, so far away were they from where he was. Remembering his wild behavior in my hotel room, I hoped there wouldn’t be another demonstration of how wild he was, and how the Prophet would take to all the whiskey I had no way of knowing. Of course the Prophet knew he was a hard drinker, but I had always assumed that Rockwell did his boozing far away from the great man’s manor.
“Port,” I said as diplomatically as I could, “are we going? How long will it take us to get out there?”
“Glad to see you, William,” he remarked as if we hadn’t been together all day. “You want a drink? No, I guess you don’t.” He stamped his foot. “You see this spot where I’m standing? There used to be a big rock here. I know because I sat on it fourteen years ago when we first came to this basin. A fine big rock. I remember how it burned my backside. I think maybe they should have left that rock and a few more like it so we’d remember what it was like then.” He took a great swig of whiskey, enough to get another man half drunk, and his eyes grew unseeing again, turned back toward the past. Rockwell was only forty-nine, but, like a man much older, he seemed to be consumed by the past. I found that hard to understand at the age of twenty-three; now I understand it only too well.
“We’d better be going,” I reminded him.
“Everybody’s in a hurry to go somewhere,” he said, draining the bottle. Then with a whoop he tossed the empty bottle high in the air and drew and fired before it hit the street. He let it get within a few inches of the ground before he broke it with a casually aimed shot. People ran to the door of the saloon when they heard the shot, but one look at Rockwell was enough to send them scurrying for cover.
Rockwell smiled at me and sang a few lines from the Ballad of Porter Rockwell.
“Just to remind them,” he said to me. “Our horses are waiting and so is Brigham.”
At the jail Rockwell put his head in a bucket of water and dried his shoulder length hair with a towel before combing it back and tying it again. No hat, as usual. Then he used the damp towel to clean his boots. This wasn’t like him at all, for he was by nature a tidy man. “Got a clean shirt around here some place,” he said, opening drawers in his desk. Not finding one, he yelled for the jailer. “Where are my clean shirts, turnkey?”
“In the cell where you sleep, Port. I’ll go get one for you.”
Before we mounted our horses Rockwell had uncorked the second bottle and was drinking from it. “Mother’s milk to me,” he said.
~*~
The famed Eagle Gate which led to Brigham Young’s immense ranch was copper plated, topped with a carved eagle with outspread wings measuring about twenty feet, a noble bird indeed. It had been erected two years before and was the only entrance to Rock Creek Canyon. In later years, after the Prophet’s death, it was moved to higher ground because it was blocking traffic; at that time it was new, a monstrosity completely out of place in the bright valley.
I hated the damned thing at first sight; the eagle looked more like a huge vulture, its neck bent as if it were sniffing carrion from afar. Its dreadful talons clung to a yellow beehive; to the Mormons bees were a symbol of industry and all things good. The canyon, broad and fertile, ran away in front of us for miles. I don’t know why they called it a canyon for that suggests rocks and brush; in fact, Rock Creek Canyon was a beautiful valley, obviously the best land in the Great Salt Basin. The Prophet had taken the best for himself.
The gate was really an arch, like something that might have been seen in the great days of Rome. Three Mormons with rifles guarded it by the light of flaring torches. Burly and black-suited, adorned with shaggy, untrimmed beards, they looked formidable enough to stop anything.
‘Who goes there?” one of them growled.
‘Port Rockwell and a guest.”
“Pass, friends,” Mormon called out, then added, “Any sign of the girl yet?”
“Not yet, Mr. Fairlie,” Rockwell answered. “You tell the people to keep on looking.”
After we were through the gate Rockwell said to me, “See what I told you? That man lives miles out in the basin and he knows about it already. I told you we look after our own.”
“Just so someone finds her,” I said.
Past the gate the road was macadamized, smooth, black, and shiny in the half darkness. There was a pale moon and the smell of vines and flowers. Here and there, to light the way, were torches burning in brass holders and off to one side I could hear the murmur of the creek, and it seemed to me that I wasn’t in America at all but some country immensely different and foreign. What was the word?—exotic. I was entering a private kingdom created by a man of monstrous pride, a man who never doubted himself, and as we traveled down the shiny road I felt as if I had gained my first knowledge of Brigham Young, whose idea of his own greatness was so all-consuming that the world might have been created only for him to reshape it.
We rode for a mile and then another. “How far?” I asked Rockwell.
“A long way yet,” was the answer. “But you’ll see the house long before we get to it.”
After three more miles I saw it, tall and bright against the night sky. It was as big as a big hotel, bright as a Christmas tree, with every window in the house lit up. Its size appalled me; did even a multimillionaire have to live in a house so grandiose? But there it was, shining in the night, the reality at the center of the Mormon dream.
We left the fields behind and now we were riding through vast gardens as large, or larger, than many farms in my native New Jersey, then the road became wider and branched out into a circular carriageway lined with cypress?. In the center of the circle a fountain played and Water sparkled in the air before it fell and splashed over white rocks at its base. Closer now, I could see the white columns of the house and realized that they were constructed of real stone rather than the white-painted wood columns you see in the Southern states. The house itself was of cut stone, as solid as a prison, and just as ugly. It was three stories in height, with a yellow tiled roof, and I was startled to see at the apex of the roof a great beehive bigger even than the one at the gate. There should have been a vulturine eagle, too; it would have suited the house perfectly. All I could do was to gape at it.
“Well, William,” Rockwell said. “That’s where Brigham lives.”
What was there to say; indeed, what could truthfully be said in the face of Rockwell’s awe? He might have been a devout Moslem gazing at the Great Mosque of Mecca for the first time, a patriotic schoolboy on a pilgrimage to the White House. Yet for all his admiration, he finished the second bottle of whiskey and rammed the bottle deep in the pocket of his coat.
The stables were built well away from the house in order not to take away from its grandeur. I liked the stables much better. We were heading for the front door when Rockwell said, “You have that pistol on you?”
“You said to carry it.”
“Not to this house. Only a few people can carry a firearm or a knife into this house. You’ll be searched, so give it here and I’ll keep it for you. Brigham’s powerfully concerned about assassins, not that he’s afraid to die, but he doesn’t want to go before his work is done.”
I gave the pocket pistol to Rockwell and he put it away. Two Mormon guards stood at the door, but instead of rifles they carried big revolvers in holsters. These were Rockwell’s men and they greeted him with easy familiarity. Both had black suits, collarless shirts, beards like birds’ nests.
“Most everybody’s h
ere, Port,” one of them declared.
“Now I’m here,” Rockwell said, and his voice sounded tense.
The front door opened into a great hall hung with trophies of the chase, and there were many bad oil paintings, all on the heroic scale. And there were tapestries and flags which I could not identify; the place had the look of a giant’s attic. But I noticed that there were no swords, halberds, Scottish claymores, battle axes or maces; obviously the Prophet wasn’t taking any chances on being battered or hacked to death by a visitor.
We entered a great room with a ceiling two stories high; it was stone floored, its walls of dark polished wood, and at either end of it piles of logs burned in cave-like fireplaces. This gargantuan room could have contained two hundred people; there were only seven. I already knew General Wells, Widger, Hickman—and there was Cynthia Mason walking around with a bemused look on her face. She was losing no time, it seemed. I saw her man, or whatever he was, standing with another man I didn’t know. I guessed him to be either ; Jarrett or Ritter, the other militia commanders.
Cynthia Mason came forward with a smile and said, “This must be Mr. Rockwell. You didn’t say you knew Mr. Rockwell, William.”
Now it was William instead of Mr. Forbes or just plain Forbes. Oh, she had plenty of nerve all right, but I wasn’t at all sure how Rockwell would take her. Women like Cynthia Mason, I felt sure, were outside his experience.
“Mr. Rockwell, this is Miss Mason of Montreal. Miss Mason works for the Montreal Daily Mail.”
“How do you do, Miss Mason?” Rockwell said, very polite.
“Just fine, thank you,” she said.
I hoped she wasn’t going to go on with “I’ve heard so much about you,” and mercifully she didn’t. Rockwell left me talking to her while he took Dan Wells aside. Hickman gave me a cold look before he turned away.
“Where’s the Prophet?” I asked.
Cynthia Mason smiled knowingly. “You’re closer to some of these people than I realized. You didn’t tell me you were a friend of Porter Rockwell’s. That you saved his life. You held back on me, Forbes.”