Out of the Cold Dark Sea

by Jeffrey D Briggs

  When she tripped on the Indian rug the third time, firewood thumped across the floor, and she followed it, sprawling on her hands and knees. Cursing aloud, she got to her feet. Red embers still glowed in the hearth from the wood she had added in the middle of the night. She tossed some kindling on, added a couple of logs, and turned the damper back to wide open. As the flames started to flicker yellow and bright, she peeled the rug back and immediately saw the problem—a hatch in the floor that led to a crawlspace under the house. One edge of the panel was raised half an inch. She slid the square section of floor aside and looked through the hole.

  In the growing firelight, she could see that the cabin sat three or four feet off the ground, higher than she thought. Had it been a hideout for Mary and the kids when federal agents scoured the mountains for polygamist families? The dirt floor was packed hard and dry. Time, even a century or more, wouldn’t pack the earth that hard unless something or someone went down there a lot. With no plumbing and no electricity, why would someone need to get down into the crawlspace on a regular basis? Was it a root cellar? She lit a lantern and lowered it through the hatch. Rough-hewn lumber, little more than barked logs, made up the floor joists. They rested on a foundation of interlaced red rocks, held tight with packed mortar. Down the center ran rocks stacked as pillars for the mid-section of the joists. In one direction, the texture of the earthen floor changed to clods of dirt and loose soil. She raised her head and looked behind. The loose dirt was under the kitchen. Doing a one-eighty around the hatch, she stuck her head back down the hole.

  She saw it immediately. A row of crude cabinets hid the rock foundation underneath the fireplace. She dropped through the hole and grabbed the lantern. The crawlspace was empty except for the cabinets. Toward the far end, back under the bedrooms, she saw a break in the red-rock foundation. It took her a moment of squinting in the dim light to realize it was a small door to the outside, hidden outside by snow at the back of the house.

  She crawled toward the cabinet doors, brushing spider webs off her face and hair. Four compartments, each with double doors made from timber planks with wooden toggle latches, lined the wall. On the front of each was a neat piece of masking tape. Martha held the lantern up and read “1830 & Extras,” “1840,” “1850,” and “1860 & 70.”

  Martha undid the latch, and the door for “1830 & Extras” eased open on its own. The cabinet was maybe five feet long and two feet deep, small enough to hide a small child, large enough to hold plenty of potatoes and onions. It went from the dirt floor nearly to the floor joist. A single shelf divided the cabinet into equal parts top and bottom. Whatever its original purpose, now it was being used for storage.

  Sealed Mason jars lined the top shelf in rows, each containing something that wasn’t canned peaches or stewed tomatoes. A gallon jug rested on top of several Ziploc bags. The bottom shelf contained two wooden boxes, one larger than the other, several containers, one of which was ammonia. A mortar and pestle sat off to one side.

  She left the lantern burning and crawled back up into the cabin. Shivering, she dressed in front of the fire, warming her back and then her front as she pulled on wool socks, jeans, and a sweater. She donned her fleece vest and slipped into Hewitt’s oversized slippers. She tugged the wool hat with floppy ears over her head for protection from the spider webs. She added wood to the fire and lit a second lantern.

  A blanket from the sofa and the second lantern went on the floor beside the hatch. She dropped back down in. With the blanket as a ground cover for the frozen earth, she began to explore the cabinets in earnest.

  Two quart-size Mason jars were labeled “1830.” She unscrewed a lid. Her nose told her it was something burned. Her fingers confirmed that they were two nearly full jars of black ashes. Labeled jars sat on the opposite side of the shelf—two jars each of “Tannic Acid,” “Iron Sulfate,” and “Gum Arabic.” Oh, God. The uniqueness of the ingredients jogged a latent memory from one of Hewitt’s lectures. Gum always struck her as an odd ingredient to put in ink to make it flow better. Hewitt had assured the class that one could neither chew Gum Arabic nor stick it under their desks. For centuries, it had been a key ingredient in ink, until they stopped using it around World War II.

  Was Hewitt making ink?

  A creeping fear pricked the periphery of her mind. She sat back, hugging herself. It couldn’t be. There had to be another explanation.

  She found a jar of “Logwood,” another of “Indigo,” which was almost empty. Ink coloring, obviously, at least the indigo. Behind a mortar and pestle was a small scale. Behind that, an old flat iron. She flipped open the lid of a small wooden box. In it were several old iron quill pens.

  She grabbed the gallon milk jug, unscrewed the top, and sniffed: gasoline. The ATV was in the back shed. Trammell had showed it to her. He had even started it up. So why was the gasoline in the crawlspace? She moved the lantern away from the container.

  She screwed the top back on and set the jug aside. The first Ziploc bag contained a fat, leather-bound journal, held shut by a large rubber band. When Martha removed the rubber band, it snapped. On the first page, Hewitt’s tight, backwards scrawl started at the top of the page.

  July 24, 1944

  My dearest Eric,

  Sitting alone in the dark—lights are turned off in the mission at 8 o’clock as part of the war effort—I turn again to you for solace and comfort. I couldn’t live at home after what they did to you, but now, it seems, I cannot live with myself. I am alone and lonely in this strange city. I despair of ever being whole again. I see you in the crowds of young men going off to work in the plane factories. I see you at the market where I trade my labors for a piroghi and an apple. Just a glimpse and I turn and run, only to fumble through an apology to some unsuspecting soul. I cannot sleep. I am haunted by your face—the face I found in the ravine, my dearest, not the beautiful one I remember touching and kissing. I spend my days rememorizing every line and touch and feel of your cheeks, those sky blue eyes, the silken touch of your hair, that wispy attempt to grow a mustache—remember how I called it your “dirty-face look”?—all in hopes that it will be that face that visits me at night. But each night it’s the crushed jaw, the bloody face, the broken teeth, the missing eye. . . “Why?” Why, why, why? Because I loved you? Because some evil men found that love abhorrent and used God as their excuse? Their vengeful God. How men can be so cruel, I do not know, but I promise I will become whole again and I promise I will never forget you and I promise I will do all that I can to make this right.

  The letter continued on, but Martha began to flip through the journal. Daily entries were recorded during most of that first year—Hewitt finding work on the docks in Seattle, making his first friend, lying about his age to join the Navy—all told as if they would soon be read by his lover and confidante. She sensed the easing of Hewitt’s despair, the renewal of hope.

  The entries stopped for a period in the late fall, and when they resumed, Coxswain 4th Grade Hewitt Wilcox had been assigned to the Naval shipyard in Bremerton. He was aboard the USS Idaho when it sailed for the Pacific, a young, frightened coxswain whose job was to drive shore boats into some of the bloodiest battles in the war. Now, the diary entries to Eric the Red read more like prayers to a God he no longer believed in. Protect me, watch over me, soon I will join you.

  With the assault on Okinawa, all entries stopped again for a period, and when they resumed, they had turned Eric into a father confessor, forgive me for I have sinned. His Higgins boat bombed, his commanding officer and most of the crew dead, Hewitt had spent three days hiding in the surf behind the wreckage of his boat, too afraid to move. Sometime later he wrote,

  From the wreckage, I watched the dead float by as if on parade, eyes open and unseeing. Unwittingly, but guilty nonetheless, I had driven these young men into a typhoon of steel, to their deaths, ferrying their souls to the underworld, just as I had you, my love. Just as I had delivered you. Your name for me should not have been Achilles, but Charo
n. In the brief interludes between bombs, I heard the shouts of the wounded, crying for mercy, begging for help. I didn’t have the courage to try to help.

  Martha closed the book and looked away. On the boat, a long time ago, she remembered him saying Achilles had lost his Patroclus. It hadn’t been a throwaway line, but their secret names for each other. She tried to imagine the pure hell of lying in the surf for days, young and afraid, hoping for rescue, waiting without hope. No images or metaphors or words came that would help her understand. Hewitt had never talked about his time in the war. Like her father had never talked about Vietnam. Like how she never talked about Walt Boudreau for years. Some things were too terrible to share even with friends and loved ones. All that we hope to forget is what we most remember. She shivered—from the cold seeping through the frozen earth into her bones, and from how little she knew about the people she loved. But what was the price of silence?

  She skimmed the pages. Hewitt treated 1945 like one long journal entry to his dead lover. Few dates appeared. The pen turned to pencil and back to pen again. References were made to being back in Seattle, being mustered out of the services, taking his first lover since Eric’s death—a hurried, unsatisfying affair.

  Martha adjusted the wick and the lamp glowed bright again. She flipped through the journal pages. The entries became less frequent, and sometime in the early ’60s, the entries had dwindled to once a year, each dated July 12. On the anniversary of his lover’s death, every year since, Hewitt wrote Eric Wain a love letter. She turned to the end of the journal. The notebook full, loose sheets of paper were stuffed in between the last page and back cover. A few months prior, Hewitt had written his last annual letter.

  It was 70 years today—70 years and the memories are as fresh as the day we parted—my arms still warm from your embrace, the sweetness of your lips still lingering on mine, that crooked smile having just graced its blessing on me. Time has not diminished my love for you. Soon, my dearest Eric, I shall have the retribution I have promised you. This year or next, my work will be complete.

  You would be pleased with my new lover. The gentleness of his soul reminds me so much of you . . .

  Retribution. Such a powerful word. But did it mean justice or revenge? She placed the leather journal back in the Ziploc bag and set it aside for further reading by the fireplace. She rubbed her thighs and then her arms, glancing back over the Mason jars, the materials for making ink, the jugs of gasoline.

  In the stack under Hewitt’s journal were sheets of paper, parchment-like, all different sizes, all blank, maybe an inch thick in all. Some had ragged edges, others were neat and perfectly cut. Many had brown edges, as if they had been sitting in Granny’s attic for the past century. The next Ziploc contained a second leather-bound book, its pages blank. The last Ziploc contained a loose-leafed collection of letters and diary entries, all written in different hands, all dated in the 1830s—weather, the state of the crops, someone named Eliza getting married in Springfield, Wilbur breaking his arm in a fall off that damn—excuse my language, Ma—wild mustang he bought from Lone Tree, the drought-damaged crops, fear of reprisal in the border towns for hanging the Lakota horse thief.

  Nothing remotely connected the letters to any secret societies as far as she could tell, no mention of the church, or of illicit activities, or of the Elders or Joseph Smith. Just news, gossip, complaints, and longings. Just families keeping in touch with families.

  So why had Hewitt hidden them away in the crawlspace under a jug of gasoline? She looked at the packet of blank papers, then over at one of the jars of ashes. His lectures on “Fakes and Frauds” came back—one of his most interesting classes—and so did his recounting of the White Salamander letters from Mormon forger Mark Hofmann. Paper from the time period, he’d told the class, was readily available and could be bleached clean and pressed with an old flat iron heated in a fire. Ink was a simple formula that anyone could reproduce in their kitchen sink. A chemical analysis dating the ink could be confounded by including ashes from documents from the proper timeframe. She glanced at the flat iron again, the careful labeling of materials by date, the ingredients for making ink.

  She fought against the evidence in front of her as she rifled through the remaining cupboards: “1830 & Extras,” “1840,” “1850,” and “1860 & 70,” each with much the same items, minus the jars of “Tannic Acid,” “Iron Sulfate,” and “Gum Arabic.” There was another jug of gasoline and two of something else, maybe kerosene or lantern oil.

  Maybe the documents in the safe were the only ones important to his investigation into the Death Angels, and these were just “extras,” saved because they might still be useful if not particularly relevant to his research. But blank papers? Ashes? The ingredients for ink?

  No. No. No. Not Hewitt, not the man she knew and loved. Yet, why else would he have hidden them away in the crawlspace under the cabin? Why no mention of them in his long letter? Not so much as a “By the way, my dear, you’ll find some less valuable documents under the cabin.” He didn’t want her to find them. That’s why. No wonder he wanted her to set the cabin on fire. Burn the cabin, burn the evidence. God. He’d even put the gas and kerosene there to make sure it all exploded in a blaze. He had planned to come back. Must have. Otherwise, why hadn’t he destroyed the cabin himself? One thing for sure, if he couldn’t make it back, he knew she would do it for him. Unwittingly. The lie was hidden under the veil of friendship.

  Thoughts flashed like images juiced on too much caffeine.

  He must have developed a method of aging the documents without the ink cracking, one of the telltale clues that upended Hofmann’s long-running hoax. Or were Povich and Martoni, his resident experts, in on the scam?

  Emma Lee and Nancy Pace Wilcox. Of course. People the church would have no other information on because they weren’t important in the history of the saints and elders. That’s why Hewitt’s documents didn’t include anything from Joseph Smith or Brigham Young. They were too well known, the fraud easier to detect.

  He had already sold documents to the church. If they were forgeries, experts could compare the style and handwriting of the incriminating documents against those. Forgeries confirming forgeries. A carefully laid out plan. A forgery scam to discredit the LDS.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “Mormon Death Squad Confirmed” the front page headline in the Ballard Gazette would declare. And even if they were later discovered as forgeries, retractions and apologies would be forgotten or ignored. Questions would remain. The damage would be done. And it would destroy Trammell’s reputation.

  But Trammell would just be one more in a long list of casualties. So Hewitt could have his retribution. It wasn’t about justice, it was about revenge. It hadn’t been for money or power. Or to reveal the truth. It was revenge, pure and simple. For Eric Wain. For being ostracized, cast out for being gay.

  She slammed a cabinet door. He had lied. Lied to her! Used her. Betrayed her. Nearly gotten her killed. And what about Ralph Hargrove, Povich, Martoni? And Lance? All sacrificed for what? For what? For a lie. A goddamn lie. A goddamn fucking lie!

  First, she had been fucked by Walt Boudreau; now she had been fucked by Hewitt Wilcox Chappell, her closest friend, a man she looked up to like a father.

  She slammed the cabinet doors again and again, cursing him with each breath, cursing him over and over.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Martha sat slumped on the blanket, staring dully at the cabinet door hanging askew on a single hinge. Broken glass from two Mason jars, shattered on the frozen earth, reflected light from the lantern like crystals beside a fire. Each sharp shard pierced her heart anew with Hewitt’s betrayal. How could he? How could he? She rocked on the floor as if she had been punched in the stomach, his betrayal washing over her in waves of nausea.

  Above her, a floorboard creaked, just once, then nothing. There was no purpose in delaying the inevitable. She called out, “Lance, I’m down here.”

  The only re
sponse was a second creak of the floor, then silence. Her first reaction was to panic. Then she went still and quiet. Her senses strained to catch a sound, a shadow, a smell. It came as a hint of cold air wafting down the floor hatch. It meant a door was open. It meant they had company.

  The image of Trammell, stretched out under the autumn quilt, oblivious to the waking world, came to her. She silently grasped two unbroken Mason jars and removed her wool hat and set it on top of the first jar and balanced that jar on the second one. She sidled toward the hole in the floor. As she raised her hat through it, she called out again, “Lance, I’m over here, I’m down—”

  The glass exploded in her hand on the crack of a pistol shot. Martha scrambled backward, slamming her head against a floor joist. The wool hat lay beside her foot covered in ashes, the yarn frayed from the bullet hole. Blood dripped from her hand. She had been cut by a shard of glass. Not painful, all fingers worked. Trammell must have heard the gunshot. He was trapped in the back bedroom.

  She grabbed the larger glass shards, flinging one at the cabinets, then a second, which smacked the wooden doors of “1850.” More followed. Each made a solid thump farther down the wall. Blood beaded her fingertips. She quieted her breath. All she could do was wait. Seconds ticked by like lifetimes. She crouched under the floor joist, back from the hole, poised to spring, ready to kill, not yet ready to die.

  She first saw the shadow creeping forward, falling across the floor joist opposite her. All she had left were a couple of glass shards. They would have to do. She prepared to toss them at the wall. Suddenly the shadow spun and cracked off two more shots.

  Martha propelled herself out of the hole, yelling “NO!” and driving her shoulder through him, as he turned, knocking him back into the fireplace. The gun popped off one last shot. Hot ash lifted in a gray cloud. He screamed as she pushed his head into the flames. His red hair began to blaze. Right before she snapped his neck, she recognized the pimply face of Danny Kimble.