Righteous02 - Mighty and Strong

by Michael Wallace

  But hadn’t the prophet said that there were sins too serious even for the atonement? Denying the Holy Ghost. Disobeying the direct command of the Lord. So what did that mean? What did she have to do to atone? She’d do anything.

  His hands closed around her throat. They were strong. She pulled at his wrists. Too strong. She couldn’t break his grip.

  “Thy life shall be forfeit as payment for thy sins, Emma Green. With my priesthood, I now seal thee unto death.”

  Chapter Sixteen:

  Jacob came up with a pretext to leave Zarahemla. The name of the pretext was Sister Grace Ellen, eighty-two years old. The woman who had born her testimony yesterday at breakfast, shared her hope and desire to live until the Second Coming of the Lord.

  He rose before dawn, took his list of medications and searched for Brother Timothy. Not even breakfast yet, but most of the compound was up and working: pulling laundry, stacking adobe bricks. A girl carted a basket of eggs. Smoke trickled from a chimney and he smelled baking bread. A hammer, voices, a baby crying. But not a machine or engine anywhere.

  Jacob looked in the raised vegetable gardens north of the compound. Women and children picked weeds by hand, plucked off beetles, caterpillars and other pests, and harvested tomatoes and bell peppers for the farmers market.

  Two men double dug one of the beds for a late summer planting, and another slaughtered chickens at the pens. A squawk, the thwack of an ax against wood. No sign of Brother Timothy or Brother Clarence. He could have asked, but it seemed like the perfect excuse to explore.

  Foothills sprawled above the compound to the east and north. These foothills grew until they became the Manti Mountains a few miles distant. They were brown this time of the year, covered with scrub and dry grass. Towering cumulonimbus clouds piled against the mountains.

  Jacob left the buildings behind. A chain link fence enclosed this edge of the property, encircling what had to be several thousand acres into the foothills. Some was green with alfalfa or corn. Ditches crisscrossed the fields and gardens. The whole system was gravity-fed irrigation, like the original pioneers would have used in the 1850s.

  Even here, in the dry heart of rural Utah, land wasn’t cheap. Less so water shares, and how many acre feet did this system move? Where did the money come from? Zarahemla couldn’t generate much cash.

  He figured several dozen families in the compound. They must have owned property, held jobs before they’d joined Brother Timothy’s church. Jacob supposed they’d liquidated everything and donated every penny to the church.

  He reached the end of the fields, where an old farm road petered into a narrow trail that penetrated further into the foothills. Piles of sheep droppings littered the trail. Nothing up there but grazing, he supposed.

  Still no sign of Brother Timothy. He was about to turn around when he heard a shout. He stopped, listened.

  The wind blew down from the foothills and with it came voices. Jacob picked his way up the sheep trail. It led into scrub oak and cropped grass. Sheep rested in the shade of a rocky overhang. The voices grew louder.

  Jacob rounded the corner of a hill to see a flat space of hardpan about the size of a football field. It was set up like an obstacle course, with hurdles and mud pits. Men ran along a course, up, down, on their bellies, then swinging hand over hand from rings suspended on rails. On the right side lay the ruins of a farm house and a barn with one side collapsed. Two men with ski masks and guns kicked in the door, shouted orders to each other and at someone inside. Two more men came running around the side of the barn.

  What the hell? It looked like those homemade videos of al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan that had played endlessly on TV after 9/11.

  He turned, ready to slink off. His mind was racing. Krantz and Fayer would want to hear about this.

  “Hey, you!”

  A man came from behind a scrub of juniper to his left. He aimed a rifle at Jacob’s head. Unlike many of the men, he’d shaved his face and cut his hair short, almost Marine-style. Narrow, suspicious eyes glared from beneath a pair of bushy eyebrows.

  “Sorry, I’m on my way out of here.”

  “Don’t you go anywhere, I’m warning you.”

  Jacob recognized the man from yesterday. Brother Enid. A young man, he’d recently married his first wife and she was pregnant with their first child. Jacob had examined her, over the man’s grumbles that it was unnecessary. And when Jacob finished, he demanded to know the child’s gender, as if Jacob could have told him without an ultrasound or amnio.

  “Looks to me like it’s riding low,” Brother Enid had said. “That’s a boy, right?”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale. Could easily be a girl.”

  “Seems to me them old wives knew something. You’re a doctor, you can’t even tell me.”

  Now, glaring down the barrel of his gun, it seemed to Jacob that Brother Enid would happily pop him one for the crime of poking around his wife’s nether regions without so much as being able to determine the gender of her fetus.

  Several men had spotted Jacob and came running. Among them were Brother Clarence, and following on his heels, Brother Timothy.

  Brother Clarence pulled up a few feet away and glared at Brother Enid. “And how did he get so close, anyway?”

  The man gave an embarrassed-looking shrug. “I was watching the training.”

  “Yeah, well you’re on guard, you idiot. Pay attention. What if it had been the sheriff?” He turned to Jacob. “What are you doing, anyway?”

  “No point getting riled up.” Jacob nodded at Brother Timothy. “Just looking for the prophet.”

  “You’ve found me,” Brother Timothy said. “What do you need, brother?”

  Jacob glanced significantly at the other men. “Can we step away for a moment?”

  “Sure, it’s almost breakfast. I’ll walk back with you.” Brother Timothy put his hand on Jacob’s shoulder and steered him away from whatever was going on behind them. “You didn’t happen to see a cow on your way up, did you?”

  “No, just sheep.”

  “We’ve lost a cow. She wandered off a few days ago, and I’m sure she’ll turn up, but there are cougars, so I’d rather sooner than later.”

  Jacob wondered whether to keep his mouth shut or comment on what he’d seen. At last he decided curiosity looked less suspicious than silence.

  “Mind telling me what’s going on? Looks like a bunch of survivalist stuff.”

  “It’s the last days, Brother Jacob. How are we going to defend our families when the Lone and Dreary world collapses in war and pestilence? They’ll come here and we need to be prepared to drive them off.”

  “I take it the priesthood isn’t sufficient?”

  Brother Timothy gave him a hard look. “Are you mocking?”

  “Sorry. The thing is, people have believed the world was coming to an end forever. What makes it real this time?”

  “Don’t you feel it?” Brother Timothy asked. “The wickedness of the world? The wars? Financial collapse, skyrocketing crime, oil shocks? Perversions not just allowed but celebrated? The persecution of the saints? No man knows—not even the prophet—the hour or the day of the Lord’s return, but I know it’s close. We all know it. We’re the chosen people. If we’re not ready, who will be?”

  “How many people do we have? Three hundred? This is the sum total of the so-called chosen people?”

  “First of all, the Lord’s people are always a small group and have been since Moses led Israel into the wilderness. Second, the time is at hand for the millions of Mormons around the world to recognize the One Mighty and Strong. And after that, his chosen prophet will call the whole world to repentance. Those who don’t listen will be destroyed.”

  “You, in other words. You’re not just part of the chosen people, you’re the chosen of the chosen.”

  Timothy smiled. “The Lord hasn’t called me to rebuke the disbelievers, not yet. But if He had, you would be ripe for a smiting.”

  “I don�
��t take well to smiting. Kind of rubs me the wrong way.”

  “That’s why I’m trying to convince you with words.”

  “Well, you won’t convince me with threats. Those are exactly the wrong kind of words.”

  “I’m not threatening,” Timothy said. “In fact, I’m going out of my way to point out that I’m not the threatening type.”

  “How did you get to be prophet?” Jacob asked. “Did someone anoint you? Or did you just feel the call?”

  “A bit of both. You know, we’re not that different. I’m almost your age, maybe even a couple of years younger. I came from a devout family, grew up in Orange County.”

  “California must be a hard place to live the Principle.”

  “Oh, we weren’t polygamists,” Brother Timothy said. “We were mainstream Mormons. My dad was an LDS bishop. Point was, I was a skeptic, like you. Even after I went to BYU and then on my mission.”

  “You went on a mission? Where did you go?”

  “Scotland. Nice people, but hard-hearted. I didn’t find many people who cared. Maybe they converted anyone who’d listen in the days of Brigham Young. Baptized a couple of semi-crazy people and a family of immigrants from Nigeria, that’s it.”

  “Salt Lake is all about the missionary work. Seems like a waste of time to me,” Jacob added.

  “It’s not just about conversions, it’s about getting young men and women to commit to the gospel.”

  “So what happened? It didn’t take?”

  Brother Timothy sighed. “I came home, still not knowing. Told hundreds of people in Scotland I knew the church was true, but I didn’t, not deep down. I went to BYU as a history major. One day I was in the special collections in the library and came across an article about the men who’d married multiple wives after the church supposedly gave up the practice. I kept reading, dug up stuff about Joseph Smith and some of his prophecies that the church quietly dropped. Multiple mortal probations, the One Mighty and Strong. It was so different from what I knew.

  “It occurred to me that one of two things must have happened. Either Joseph Smith made it all up or the church was in apostasy. I pretty much decided it was all made up and so I sat down to write a letter to the honors department, tell them I no longer believed and would have to withdraw from BYU. It’s not the place for skeptics and unbelievers.”

  Jacob listened, surprised at every turn. Brother Timothy hadn’t been raised in polygamy, he hadn’t even believed that Joseph Smith was a prophet. How did one think oneself from there to here? “The night I decided to leave the church,” Timothy said, “I wrestled with an angel.”

  Jacob stopped. “You what?”

  Brother Timothy turned to face him and put his hand on Jacob’s shoulder. His face was only a few inches away. When he spoke, his voice was low, intense.

  “An angel appeared in my room, clothed in white robes, floating above the floor. He held a flaming sword, which he pressed against my face. It was so hot it singed my hairs. It said, ‘Timothy Potts, I have come to seal thy destruction.’

  “‘For what?’ I demanded. ‘For being confused? For looking at the evidence and coming to the obvious conclusion the whole thing is made up?’ The angel lifted his sword above his head. He was about to cut me in two.”

  Brother Timothy’s nostrils flared. “‘You fucking coward!’ I yelled.” He blinked, seemed to notice Jacob again, even though they were only inches away. “Excuse my language, brother. Yes, I actually used that word to an angel, can you believe it?”

  “Whatever, go on.”

  “‘You coward, put down your sword and fight me fair.’ The sword disappeared, the angel seized me and dragged me…through the roof, that’s the only way to put it. Up to the clouds, where it was so cold and wet that ice clumped in my hair. We wrestled and I gave as good as I got. Without his sword he was just a man. At last, I was on his back with my arm around his neck. ‘You wanted me to know, why didn’t you just tell me?’” Timothy stopped, caught Jacob’s gaze with a deep, almost liquid intensity in his eyes.

  Jacob stared, unable to process the story. For a moment he felt something stir, like his doubt tearing free. It had taken hold of him like an insatiable parasite, with appendages that burrowed into his soul. And now Timothy gave him the chance to rip that doubt free, cast it aside forever.

  He fought that feeling, fought to keep hold of his doubts. There were all sorts of explanations for what had happened that didn’t have anything to do with swords, angels, clouds, or wrestling. He was lying, he was deluded, he was dreaming. It was a bad reaction to medication.

  I don’t want to believe, that’s my problem.

  Jacob pulled free, physically, at least. He took a step backward. “And that’s it?”

  “Well, no. The angel visited me again, and later, I saw Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father. And the apostles Peter, James, and John appeared and gave me the keys to the kingdom.”

  “Just like they did for Joseph Smith.”

  “Yes, and I learned that I was the one Mighty and Strong, saved for the last days to fight Satan himself.”

  “Well, you beat up an angel, so I guess the Lord figured you must be pretty tough.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” Brother Timothy asked. “Even now, when I’m sharing my most sacred experiences, you insist on doubt.”

  “I’ll believe as soon as an angel challenges me to a wrestling match.”

  “Hah!”

  “I know, I’m sorry, that’s not what I mean. I want to believe you, I really do, but I can’t help thinking it isn’t fair. I’ve been asking for a witness all my life. Why should you get visited by angels and I get nothing?”

  “Be patient, Brother Jacob,” the prophet said. “Your time will come.”

  “Do you really think?”

  “I do, and sooner than you imagine. Maybe today, who knows?”

  “Maybe.”

  And maybe I just had my chance and blew it.

  “I have faith in you, Brother Jacob. The Lord told me you have a great calling in this work. You saw us training. That’s not for fun. We need leaders. You will be one of His generals during the final battle.”

  “A general? Battle? I can shoot coyotes, does that count?” Jacob reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. “In the meanwhile, I’m a doctor and I’ve got some medical issues to resolve.”

  A shadow passed over Timothy’s face. “Anything serious?”

  “Could be. First of all, I need a bigger supply of equipment, supplies. Antibiotics, vaccines, the like. A couple of people have toothaches and I’ll need to do basic dentistry. Not my specialty, but I can pull it off, I’m sure.”

  “You’ll have to make do with what you’ve got. I don’t want you leaving the compound, not now, not yet.”

  “I can make do for some of it.” Jacob looked at the paper with an affected look of concern. “The big problem is Sister Grace Ellen.”

  “She’s elderly, I knew she was struggling.”

  “She’s got congestive heart failure. Specifically, myocardial infarctions have crippled her left ventricular function. I have options. Glycosides, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors—ACE inhibitors.”

  “We’ll give her a blessing. The priesthood will heal her.”

  “Brother Timothy, is the Lord going to bless Sister Grace Ellen when we don’t have enough faith to do what we already know will work? Put it this way, if your ox got stuck in the mud, what do you think would happen if you prayed for it to free itself before actually trying to drag it out yourself?”

  Timothy looked troubled.

  Jacob said, “You know what Sister Grace Ellen told me? Her patriarchal blessing says she’ll live to see the Day of the Coming of the Lord.”

  “And she will. That day is close at hand.”

  “Is it by the end of the week?” Jacob asked. “Because she could die at any time. What’s more, she’s suffering. Her heart cannot pump enough blood and her body compensates by leaving her short of b
reath, gasping for air.”

  “I’d noticed some of that.”

  “She’s literally suffocating. Now, you either lay your hands on her head today and heal her, or you let me fill some prescriptions.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, you tell me I’m going to be a general, and I’ll take your word for it. But for now, the Lord has called me to minister to the health of His saints. That’s why I’ve spent my life in school, working and living among gentiles. Our people, they live on the margins, they’re afraid of doctors, of hospitals. They’re convinced vaccines kill babies and fluoridated water is a communist plot. And so they suffer and die. That’s what the Lord sent me to stop. You either let me treat these people or I’ll know you don’t follow the will of the Lord and I will leave.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  “Then you’ll have to forcibly restrain me. What’s it going to be?”

  Brother Timothy was quiet for a moment, then stopped and looked at him. “Thou sayest. Go, relieve Sister Grace Ellen’s suffering.”

  “Thank you.”

  Grace Ellen’s congestive heart failure was only stage two. For a woman of eighty-two or eighty-three (she’d been born in the Mexican colonies, and wasn’t sure), that wasn’t bad. Yes, she could use medication, and especially a better bed. Heart failure made it hard to get comfortable lying down. She already had to prop herself with three pillows at night to breath. But she wasn’t at particular risk for sudden death, no more than any other person her age.

  It made him guilty to think he was planning to leave the compound and not return. There really were people who needed his help. He’d have to send back something for Sister Grace Ellen. At least some Lasix. With all the tomatoes, carrots, and other fresh produce at the compound, he thought she had enough potassium to compensate.

  They were almost back to the walls and Jacob could hear voices, smell roasting meat and fresh bread. His stomach rumbled. The two men quickened their pace.