by R. R. Irvine
“I’d come with you, but one of us has to be a graveside witness. We don’t want any cover-ups.”
36
COWDERY JUNCTION’S whitewashed oolite ward house took up an entire block in the center of town, bounded by Brigham Street and Broadbent Avenue, running north and south, and Parawon and Uintah avenues crossing east to west. A plaque near the front door said the church had been rebuilt in 1871 following the Black Hawk War.
While hymns were being sung inside, Traveler circled the building on foot, admiring its simple Greek Revival lines. By the time he’d reappeared from behind the building, Clawson’s Cadillac was parked across the street. One of his men was watching from the driver’s seat.
When the church doors opened a few minutes later, Owen Broadbent came out first as if he’d been expecting to find Traveler waiting. His sons emerged right behind him. But it was Broadbent who came down the walk alone, while Lowell and Hubert stayed behind, blocking the doorway and bottling up everyone else inside.
“Why don’t we walk together,” Broadbent said. “Just the two of us.” Without waiting for an answer, he started west on Parawon.
As soon as Traveler fell into step beside him, the old man’s sons left the church steps to follow at a discreet distance. Only then did the rest of the congregation begin spilling out. The Cadillac drove off in the direction of the cemetery.
“I’ll be eighty in a couple more years,” Broadbent said. “That was the age my father died. At the time, I remember thinking that eighty was ancient. Now that I’m nearly there, I don’t feel much different than I ever did. How old do you feel, Traveler?”
Traveler shrugged.
“How old do you want to be?” Broadbent said.
“I always looked forward to being twenty-one.”
Broadbent sighed, his shoulders slouched. “It’s not right, a man outlasting his son. From father to son, that’s the way it should be.”
“My father says the same thing.”
“They tell me his name is Moroni, too, but he doesn’t use it.”
“He goes by Martin.”
“And you?”
“I was bigger than my father. The other kids soon stopped teasing me about my name.”
Broadbent stopped walking to look Traveler in the face. “You’re not a Saint, I know, but are you a believer?”
“The prophet told me once that all Moronis belong to him.”
Broadbent smiled and started walking again. At the corner, he turned right on Main Street but immediately stopped to weigh himself on the scale in front of Higbee’s Drug Store. The weight came with a fortune.
He read it out loud. “ ‘Today is a good day for investments. Act accordingly, but with caution.’ What do you say to that, Moroni?”
“Caution is always a good idea.”
Broadbent stepped off the scale and continued up Main, past the Rainbow Cafe, Tuttle’s Dry Goods, Escalante Auto Supply, and Fishlake Hardware. At the corner of Main and Box Elder Avenue, he paused in front of the Cowdery Theater. The doors were boarded up, as was the box office. Black plastic lettering on the marquee said CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.
“We haven’t had our own movie show in town for years,” Broadbent said. “These days you have to drive to a big city like Richfield to see one. Not that I’ve had the inclination. But it’s a sign of the times, that’s for sure.”
He shook his head sadly. “Like I said, I don’t think of myself as seventy-eight, but sometimes I get the feeling I’ve been working all my life just to reach old age.”
He started walking again, more slowly this time. His sons stayed half a block back.
“Seventy years ago I lost two brothers to pneumonia. That left me alone to run the farm and take care of my parents when they got old. Then came Depression times. Hard, cruel times. I longed to get out of here and go to Salt Lake, but I knew my parents wouldn’t be able to survive by themselves. So I stayed on. I married Helen. Together we took care of both our parents until they died. We never had enough money. We doctored them at home. We couldn’t afford a hospital. Until the war started, we were land poor.”
He stopped in front of the Cowdery Hotel, an abandoned two-story brick building whose south wall was covered with a fading painted advertisement: STUDEBAKER BUGGIES AND WAGONS.
“Try to understand, Moroni. I swore the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. ‘We’ll have boys,’ I told my wife. ‘Enough to share the burden when we get old.’ After we had Mahlon, twenty years went by until Lowell and Hubert came along. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have any sons now.”
Broadbent nodded, then looked both ways before stepping out into the street. With Traveler at his side, he moved to the center of the intersection.
“Look at this town.” Broadbent pointed down Main Street. “Do you know why things have changed? Why half our stores are boarded up? I’ll tell you. It’s because our children have moved away. They all want to get rich instead of carrying on family traditions that were good enough for their parents and grandparents. Getting by isn’t good enough anymore. Everyone wants to live like they do on television.”
He closed his eyes. After a moment he grew unsteady and reached out with one hand. Traveler caught him.
“You should have seen Cowdery Junction during the war,” Broadbent went on. “We were a boom town. The government was buying our crops, everything we could raise. The only trouble was, we couldn’t get farmhands. They were all off fighting the war. So we mobilized everybody we could, old men, women, schoolchildren. We even recruited from the Indian reservations. When we finally got prisoners of war, we thought it was a godsend.
“They were good workers, too, especially the Germans. Toward the end, though, they weren’t getting enough food, what with the government reacting to the atrocities overseas. Without proper food, their work fell off, so us farmers took it upon ourselves to supplement their rations. My prisoners knew when they were well off. They didn’t want to run off, despite it being a soldier’s duty to escape.”
Traveler looked for the man’s sons and found them leaning against the aluminum siding that had been used to board up Prata’s Lending Library. He was about to wave them over when he spotted a stone bench in front of the Cowdery National Bank across the street.
“Come on,” Traveler said. “I need to sit down.”
“City living ruins your stamina,” Broadbent said before allowing himself to be helped across Main Street.
When they were seated and leaning against the bank’s granite wall, Traveler said, “Tell me about the six Germans who died.”
“I guess you know they were working for me, doing the milking and swamping out after the cows in Morag’s field. When those boys took sick and died, my wife said, ‘That land’s cursed.’ ‘You’re being a foolish woman,’ I told her, but I let it go fallow just the same.”
“What happened?”
“A farmer’s a fool to get attached to his animals. That’s why I should have known better about Morag, but we raised her, me and my Helen, when the calf’s mother died. We hand-fed her with a baby bottle. My wife named her Morag and kept her in a pen outside the back door until she was old enough to take care of herself. These days, of course, it’s easier to buy milk at the store than keep cows.”
“Would you have any objection if we dug up Morag’s field?”
“City people,” Broadbent said with a snort. “Why the hell you’d want to do something like that, I don’t know. But you’re welcome to it. Maybe you’ll dig out the devil and rid me of him once and for all.”
Traveler studied the man. His face looked placid enough.
“We’re already digging out in the cemetery,” Traveler said.
The old man’s jaw dropped open.
“We’ve got archaeologists from BYU looking for artifacts from the Black Hawk War,” Traveler added.
Broadbent jerked to his feet. “Is that why the sheriff called me about old Ethan’s grave?”
Traveler nodded.
Broadbent s
hook his fist at Traveler. His sons came running. Traveler turned to face them, keeping his back to the granite wall.
“They’re digging up old Ethan,” Broadbent shouted at them.
Lowell and Hubert skidded to a stop and looked bewildered.
“In our cemetery, you idiots. Now go get the car and come back here for me before they destroy our family.”
37
THE GRAVE was open by the time Traveler returned to the cemetery. Owen Broadbent and his sons were there ahead of him. So was the Cadillac and its two church security men, who were busy roping off the area against a growing crowd of locals.
Gathered around the grave itself were Evans and Russell, the archaeologists, Walter Clawson representing the church, and Broadbent and his sons, along with Martin. Sheriff Woodruff was doing his best to disperse the crowd.
The body, what remained of it, hadn’t been buried in a coffin but merely dumped into the ground.
“We’re lucky the skull’s intact,” Russell said, kneeling in the grave.
“There’s no sign of clothes,” his partner added. “No matter how bad the soil conditions, there should be a belt buckle at least.”
“How old is he?” Traveler asked.
“It’s not a pioneer burial, if that’s what you mean,” Russell answered. “He would have been dressed. There would have been a coffin, something.”
“They were fighting Indians,” Evans said. “There might not have been time.”
“Maybe the Indians took his clothes,” Martin said.
The archaeologists exchanged looks. Russell said, “We don’t think it’s old enough to be a pioneer burial.”
“You’re wrong,” Broadbent snapped. “That’s Ethan Broadbent, right where he ought to be, next to my uncle Brigham.”
Traveler nudged his father, who raised an eyebrow in return. They both knew that the archaeologists, deliberately or otherwise, were avoiding the obvious. The body was buried with its head to the east, its feet pointing west.
“A German prisoner went missing around here in 1945,” Martin said. “If that’s him, someone dug a hole for him.”
The archaeologists perked up at the news.
“Didn’t you hear my father?” Lowell Broadbent said.
“This is private property you’re digging up,” his brother, Hubert, added.
Clawson intervened. “If it means raising a soul, the church must give its blessing to this project.”
Russell rose from the grave to face Martin. “You wouldn’t have a picture of the missing man, would you?”
Martin handed him a copy of the prisoner identification card. “We can get you the original if you need it.”
“Front and side views,” he said for his partner’s benefit. “Excellent.”
Evans nodded. “We’ve been working with a new videotape technique, superimposing skull images over actual photographs. It’s helped identify war criminals like Josef Mengele. If need be, we can also have a sculptor reconstruct a face from the skull itself. That’s expensive, though, and we haven’t been authorized to pay for a sculptor.”
Broadbent appealed to Clawson. “Check the temple records, Bishop. You’ll find I arranged to have Ethan Broadbent raised myself. A full baptism for the dead.”
Clawson glanced at the corpse and shook his head. “ ‘The trump of God shall sound both long and loud, and shall say to the sleeping nations: Ye saints arise and live; ye sinners stay and sleep until I shall call again.’ ”
“Now that you mention it,” Evans said. “He’s ass backwards.”
Clawson glared at the archaeologist. “The grave is a holy place.”
“Sorry. I only meant to point out that he’s facing west.”
Mormons were buried the other way around, so that they’d rise facing east when the final trumpet sounded.
“The Indians could have been playing tricks with our dead,” the archaeologist added. “Look at his spine, for instance. It’s been crushed. That could have been done by a tomahawk.”
“Could it have happened during burial?” Clawson asked.
The archaeologists conferred with their eyes again. “It’s possible,” Evans said, “but only if they dropped him on a sharp rock, and I don’t see one, do you?”
“Are you saying he was killed?” the church man asked.
“We deal in probabilities, and then only after our examination is complete. One thing’s for sure. A man can’t live with a spine crushed like that.”
Broadbent whispered to his sons, who each took an arm and led him away from the excavation. Traveler watched them as far as Mahlon’s grave, where Broadbent needed help to kneel on the fresh earth.
Clawson pointed a finger at the open grave. “I want this man identified as soon as possible. I’ll authorize the hiring of a sculptor right now.”
“If we’re left alone to do our work,” Evans replied, “we can get him out of here quickly and back to the lab.”
“I’ve been ordered to pass on your findings to the prophet’s office as soon as possible.”
“We’ll have something tomorrow morning.”
Clawson turned his back on the archaeologists and shook Traveler’s hand. “When you see Willis Tanner, tell him I’ll be in touch.”
With that, Clawson told his security men to stay with the body and then drove the Cadillac away himself. As he was leaving, Laverla arrived in a pickup truck. When she got out, she was carrying two shotguns, which she gave to her brothers who were standing beside their prostrate father.
She glared at the Travelers. “I had to fight my way through a crowd to get here. Everybody knows what you’ve done to our family.”
One after the other, Lowell and Hubert jacked shells into the chambers of their shotguns. The sound made Traveler clench his teeth.
“Wait!” Broadbent shouted.
He held out an arm toward Laverla. As soon as she’d helped him to his feet, the old man pointed a shaky finger first at Traveler and then his sons. “You stay away from this man. Do you understand me? His name is Moroni and he’s a messenger from God.”
38
LAEL’S BMW, accompanied as always by a gray sedan, was parked in front of the Cowdery Cottages Motel. She was tidying up the room when Traveler and Martin walked in. Willis Tanner was with her; he was standing in the bathroom doorway as if to stay out of harm’s way.
The spreads on the twin beds had been tucked and tightened to military standards. Martin started to sit down on one of them, then veered away at the last moment, winked at his son, and settled into the room’s only chair.
Smiling, Lael folded the towel she’d been using as a dust-cloth and handed it to Tanner. He accepted it without comment and without moving. Until that moment, Traveler hadn’t noticed Tanner’s bad eye. For once it was wide open and almost twinkling.
Lael had traded her usual jeans and sweatshirt for a blouse and slit skirt. She eased onto the bed nearest the door and patted the bedspread to indicate that Traveler was to sit beside her.
He stayed where he was.
She turned toward Tanner. The movement opened her skirt, revealing a much fuller thigh than Traveler had expected. The rest of her looked full and lush, too, as if she’d made the transition from child to woman in the two days since Traveler had seen her.
“Maybe you should wait in the car,” she said to Willis. “Please.”
Smiling, he tossed the towel into the bathroom and left without a word.
Lael stared at Traveler while her hand stroked the bedspread beside her.
“Do you want me to leave, too?” Martin asked.
Without taking her eyes from Traveler, she nodded.
“I’ll show Willis the sights.” Martin carried his chair over between the beds, placed it facing Lael, and left the room.
“You’ll have to sit by me now, Moroni.”
Her perfume, Traveler noticed as soon as he got near her, was almond extract. He’d told her once it was his favorite.
When he sat on the chair, h
is knees touched hers. He tried to give himself more room but the bed behind him kept the back of the chair from budging. The effort started his shoulder aching.
She smiled at his discomfort. “What I have to say, Moroni, is so important I’ve already discussed it with the prophet.”
“And Willis?”
“He knows about it.”
“I’m listening.”
“Did you and Martin look for the boy?”
The question surprised Traveler. “We have a client who’s gravely ill. We couldn’t take the time.”
“I was telling you the truth, exactly what that Breen woman told me. Your son is in Milburn.”
Rather than waste time denying kinship, he said, “We’ll go after him as soon as we can.”
“You’ll need a wife when you find him.”
“We’ll need help, that’s for sure.”
“You always do that,” she said. “You evade the issue.”
She leaned forward; her hands touched his knees momentarily, then retreated. The heat of her touch burned through his jeans.
“Answer me for once,” she said. “Will you marry when you find him?”
“You’re asking more than that.”
“Yes.”
“You’re asking for a temple ceremony, for a sealing for time and eternity.”
“That, too.”
“You’re asking for a conversion,” Traveler said.
“I’m offering kinship with the prophet.”
Traveler hesitated, weighing his response. In the end, he decided silence was safer.
“Is it true what Willis told me,” she said, “that I look like Claire?”
“Your husband will be a lucky man. On many counts.”
She sighed deeply. “But he won’t be a man like you, is that what you’re saying?”
“He’ll be younger, closer to your own age.”
Lael shook her head. “He’s your age. That’s one thing I’m certain about.”
She stood up and kissed Traveler on the cheek. “I’ll have a Moroni of my own one day and he’ll be your namesake.”