Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned

by Michael Wallace

  “A fox,” she said. “The skunks and raccoons don’t come until later.”

  “How about other vermin?” he asked. “No, never mind. It doesn’t matter—you won’t be here much longer.”

  “You went to Blister Creek? You met with the prophet? What happened?” She leaned forward and an anxious note tinged her voice. Kimball caught a glimpse of the Charity Orrock he remembered, the girl with the mischievous smile and the beautiful eyes, before age and disappointment had ground her down.

  “I talked to him,” he said. “I took your advice and I asked his forgiveness.”

  “And? What did he say?”

  “He rebuked me,” Kimball said. “He said, ‘You and your family are cursed. Your seed will wither and die, and your wives and children will wander the desert until the coming of the Son of Man.’ And then something about being blinded.”

  Were those the exact words? Something close, anyway.

  “Oh no,” Charity said, her voice twisted with anguish. “Why would he do that?”

  She was still thinking about Abraham, damn her. Forty, fifty years on and she couldn’t stop thinking about their foolish childhood romance.

  Once, years ago, after their toddler had drowned in a canal, he’d come upon Charity reading old letters. An icy distance had developed between them after Joel died, and they had simply stared at each other across the bedroom. Charity quietly tucked the letters back in the drawer and he said nothing, but turned around and went downstairs to split wood. Later, when he knew she was at a women-only Relief Society meeting, he returned to the bedroom to search her drawers.

  There were eight letters, well worn from being opened and refolded over the years. Silly, chaste declarations of admiration, written in Abraham Christianson’s blocky script. From the dates, he saw they’d all been written during the months between the forced dissolution of the engagement and when Heber Christianson gave Charity to Taylor Kimball instead. Nothing improper in the substance or timing of the letters. Except that she’d kept them, of course.

  A phrase in one letter haunted him especially. “I don’t care who else they marry me to now or in the future, Charity Orrock. You and you alone are my eternal companion.”

  Had Abraham once deluded himself into believing he was a monogamist? If so, that feeling had passed. He’d certainly married plenty of other wives over the years.

  Kimball had taken the letters and tossed them in the fire. He felt no guilt about it.

  Charity never asked about the missing letters. She’d probably been relieved, had held on to them out of nostalgia and known she should get rid of them sooner or later. If either Abraham or Charity had still nurtured feelings for each other, surely Abraham Christianson would have claimed her as his own as soon as Elder Kimball went to prison. After all, Jacob Christianson hadn’t waited five minutes before stealing Fernie.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” Charity asked. “Live out my days in this motor home? It doesn’t even run anymore, hasn’t moved an inch in three years. I said I’d wait, I’d honor my covenants. But you promised when you got out we could move back to Zion. I could be with my friends, my family, see my sister wives again. What about that, Taylor?”

  “I said you weren’t going to stay here, and I meant it. Get your things, put them in my car. We can be out of here in twenty minutes and never come back.”

  “And where will we go then? Zarahemla?”

  “What is that, a joke?”

  “Jacob said he’d take me in. Eliza was kind, too. Fernie lives there, she would welcome me.”

  “And live under Jacob Christianson’s thumb? I don’t think so.”

  “The True and Living Church might take us in,” she said. “And Jessie Lynn said two of my nephews started a community north of Beaver. Do you know anything about them? Maybe Colorado City?”

  “None of those places are safe,” Kimball said.

  “What do you mean, safe? Is someone trying to hurt us?”

  “It’s time for us to make our choice.”

  He stood and walked ten or fifteen feet away from the fire to where he could better see the stars. It was a clear night, and they glittered overhead, thick as snowflakes in a wide band across the sky. A chill gust blew in from the higher desert, and Charity’s tarp flapped where it had come loose. Then the wind died and he could hear the fire crackling and popping once more.

  Charity made her way to his side and took his arm. “What kind of choice?”

  “I’d forgotten how bright the stars are. Sometimes they’d let us into the yard at night, but there were spotlights everywhere. The first two nights out I spent in towns where you can barely see Venus. But here they’re so close, it’s like we’re clinging to the skin of the earth and hurtling through the heavens.”

  “Taylor?”

  He turned, looked at her face, reflected in the glow of firelight. “Abraham is a fallen prophet, Charity. The Holy Ghost confirmed it in my heart. He’s like all the others and will be swept away at the coming of the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.”

  “I don’t know about that, and I don’t care. I just want to go home.”

  “He rebuked us. Cast us down. We have no choice but to take the side of his enemies.”

  “What enemies? Will you be clear? I can’t understand any of this.”

  “We’ll retreat into the wilderness to find the true path—that’s the only solution.”

  “I already live in the wilderness, and I don’t want to find anything—I want to go home!”

  He took her by the shoulders. “There is no home for us. Not yet, not until we claim it. And we can’t claim it until we’re pure and righteous. Taylor Junior told me that. He was right.”

  Her shoulders slumped and she looked to the ground. He pulled her closer and she didn’t resist. She smelled sour, unpleasantly so, but he didn’t push her away. “You’ll see,” he continued. “It will be okay. Just trust in me and I’ll trust in the Lord, and we’ll go home to Blister Creek soon enough.”

  “But not now.” It wasn’t a question, it was a resigned statement.

  “No, not now. Now we’ll follow our new prophet into the wilderness.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jacob walked around the pickup truck, confused. It was a powder-blue Toyota 4x4, one of the older trucks from the ranch. Last time he’d seen it, the truck had been in Harmony, Alberta, but now it had Utah plates and dust had scoured the paint down to metal in places.

  “You’re sure?” Miriam asked.

  “Positive.”

  David wiped his face and the back of his neck with a handkerchief. He wore a canvas hat and mirrored sunglasses. “Come on, Jacob, there have got to be a zillion trucks like that on the road. How do you know it’s his?”

  Jacob squatted in front of the bumper. “I made this dent myself. I was coming back to the ranch one night and didn’t see that someone had shut the gates in front of the cattle guard. The truck was new then. I was only nineteen. Father called me a blundering idiot and threatened to tear up my driver’s license.”

  “Still doesn’t mean it belongs to Abraham,” Miriam said. “Old truck like this, he probably sold it.”

  He cupped his hands to the side window and looked into the cab. “That looks like a pair of my father’s work gloves, shoved behind the cup holder. And a John Deere hat between the seat and the door—I think that’s his, too.”

  Jacob tried the door, thinking to check the registration, but it was locked. He glanced at David and Miriam, who both wore frowns.

  They’d spent the morning wandering the southern perimeter of the ranges, shunning any approach that looked like it saw regular traffic. They tried a series of meandering ranch roads until they found one that led directly toward the canyons that opened like dark gashes in the high stretches of the Colorado Plateau. It took almost an hour for the Land Rover to inch the four or five miles to the end of the road.

  Red rock and sand covered the approach, and as they gained elevation, the sagebrush an
d prickly pear cactus began to share the terrain with juniper trees, their trunks like braided rope and their crowns a mass of twisted, half-dead branches. They stopped the car when they saw the Toyota 4x4, parked where a dry wash cut the road in two. Upon climbing out, Jacob had scanned the canyons, looking for a likely way in, and so it had taken him a moment to notice, with a shock, that he recognized the truck.

  He squatted and ran his hand around one of the tires, looked back at the tracks faintly visible in the hard-packed, sandy soil, and then asked Miriam, “How long has this been here? What’s your best guess?”

  She walked along the tracks, feeling them with her hand. “Not long. Maybe this morning, but no more than a day or two.” She straightened. “It’s a good sign.”

  “It’s a terrible sign,” Jacob said. “What’s my father doing up here?”

  “Even if he still owns the truck, it might not be him,” she said. “Could be one of your brothers, or even one of his wives. Someone working for Taylor Junior who needed four-wheel drive to get close enough to hike in.”

  “So a traitor. Even worse.”

  “But if you’re sure this is his truck, then we’re in the right place. It’s no coincidence, that’s for sure.”

  “Look, there’s some kind of a trail here,” David said.

  Shoe and boot prints marked the sand in a path toward the cliffs. There was no official trailhead or cairns of stone to mark the trail as Jacob would have expected had they belonged to backpackers setting off into the wilderness area.

  “Looks like we’ve got our trail,” Jacob said.

  It took some time to make sure water, sleeping bags, and cook gear had been secured to the backpack frames, to slather on sunblock, and finally to consult compasses and maps, but soon they were off. Jacob adjusted his hat against the baking sun. Felt like it was already into the nineties, and it would only grow hotter. A trickle of sweat worked its way down his side, then rolled in drops down his temples and finally soaked his chest and back.

  Ant mounds punctuated the desert floor, surrounded by bare patches, denuded of every plant or twig. Just outside one colony, a horned lizard sat in the shade of sagebrush, lapping up the ants that came too close. It lay motionless as the hikers approached, camouflaged like a stone against the sand, and if Jacob hadn’t seen that quick movement for ants, he might have missed it.

  “You okay?” Miriam asked David when he started to flag thirty or forty minutes later. She’d shed her prairie dress for jeans, hiking boots, and a long-sleeved shirt. She wore a scarf over her head.

  “I’m fine,” he grunted.

  “How is your headache? Need some aspirin?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  Nevertheless, he fell farther and farther behind until they reached the end of a stretch of slickrock where Jacob had kept his focus on the trail, studying the occasional patch of sand to see if he could see footprints. He turned to see David downhill, just starting onto the bare sandstone, his head bent away from the sun, his pace sluggish. Jacob and Miriam waited in the shade of a rocky fin that extended from the mountain to rise some twenty feet high on their left side. From here, the burnt red sandstone looked almost orange.

  “We should have left him home,” Jacob said. “He’s in no shape for this kind of hiking.”

  Miriam had slid out of her backpack. She lowered the water bottle from her mouth and shook her head. “No way. I can’t take that risk.”

  “He wouldn’t have been alone. There are plenty of women at Zarahemla who could keep an eye on him while he regains his strength.”

  “He’s an addict. If he wants to backslide, he’d find a way to lose them.”

  “He could lose you, too,” Jacob said as he shrugged out of his own backpack.

  “Not out here he couldn’t.”

  David arrived at last, panting and unbuckling his pack. Jacob, already rested from waiting, had been ready to keep moving and waited reluctantly while his brother gulped at a water bottle.

  “That’s one way to reduce pack weight,” Jacob said. “But we might not find more water until evening, so take it easy.”

  David guzzled away.

  Miriam had a pair of binoculars to her eyes, looking down at the two trucks, still depressingly close, and said, “I’ll share mine if he runs out.”

  Jacob pulled his map from a side pocket on the pack. There was something called Poison Springs ahead, which didn’t sound promising. Probably one of those alkaloid things that killed cattle. But at least a couple of the side canyons looked to have creeks that would still be running this early in the summer.

  They continued on their way, moving more slowly as the trail grew steeper. During the steepest part, it was almost like climbing stairs. David continued doggedly, without complaint, but at a creeping pace. Above the slickrock, the vegetation changed again. Juniper surrendered to scrub oak and ponderosa pine. Birds let out series of whistles, high calls, and lazy burring songs. At last, some shade. The desert released its infernal heat with the higher altitude, but Jacob knew this presaged a cold night.

  Suddenly, Miriam grabbed Jacob’s arm, then turned to signal David to be quiet. Jacob didn’t hear anything at first but the sounds of the high desert, and was about to say something when a voice caught his ear. He strained, and a moment later heard it again. A man’s voice.

  “What is it, the enemy camp already?” David asked in a low voice when he arrived a few moments later, blowing like a spent horse. “I thought you said it—”

  “Shh,” Miriam said. “I don’t think it’s the camp.”

  “Me either,” Jacob said. “We’re still too close to the highway. They have to be deeper in.”

  “They’re coming this way,” Miriam said. “Listen.”

  Jacob heard a woman’s voice now, too. She said something in a commanding voice. “We need to get off the trail,” he said.

  “Where?” David asked.

  Jacob looked around. This part of the trail snugged against a rocky ledge on their left for at least fifty yards forward and back. The right side was a steep slope of loose scree and scrub, with the occasional pine clinging to a ledge as it descended into the valley.

  “If we turn around, we’ve got to cross that meadow before you get back to the slickrock,” David said. “And even if we get past the meadow without being spotted, once we’re down on that slickrock, they’ll see us all the way back to the truck.”

  Jacob came to a sudden decision. “Keep going. Might be something around the bend. A boulder or slot canyon or something.”

  Miriam produced a gun from a side pocket of her pack. She pointed the gun down and away from the trail while she slid in the magazine. “I’ll go first.” It wasn’t a suggestion.

  He decided not to argue. “Keep the gun down. Don’t make any sudden gestures, and whatever you do—”

  She cut him off. “Let’s all stick to what we know. You negotiate, I’ll assess the threat. David, that means you stay out of the way. Come on, let’s make a run for it.”

  They continued forward, to where the trail bent around the spur of the mountain into what increasingly looked like a canyon, based on what he could see rising above the current ledge. Jacob could no longer hear the voices, but they might have been muffled by his own wheezing and the clank of pans and other gear shifting around in his backpack. His legs throbbed.

  And they came around the bend and found themselves face-to-face with two people, who drew up in surprise. One was a man about Jacob’s height, but with gym-built muscles, shoulders bulging out of a tank top, with a long-sleeved shirt tied around his waist. He wore shorts. The other was a woman, hair tied back, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. Her hair was short, but he didn’t immediately take her for a gentile, like the man. Both wore backpacks, but smaller day packs, rather than the camping packs carried by the other three.

  The two groups stood some twenty yards apart, neither making a move. The woman whispered in her companion’s ear and he nodded.

  Miriam turn
ed her head to face Jacob. She’d tucked the hand with the gun behind her back, underneath the backpack. “Look at the woman.”

  His gaze turned back to her face. He blinked in surprise.

  Sweat and dirt smudged her face, and she wasn’t wearing the tailored pantsuit, heels, and makeup that had given her such a glamorous appearance the day she’d appeared at Zarahemla, claiming to be looking for a daughter who’d been lured into the cult of Caleb Kimball. But her hair was the same brown with highlights. Now that he looked at it, he wondered if her natural color might not be blonde or even auburn, based on her complexion.

  “I have to admit, I’m surprised,” he said in a loud voice. He left his companions and crossed half the distance toward the other two people. “Allison Caliari. Do you still go by that name?”

  Of course, this wasn’t the real Allison Caliari, the mother of the girl Eliza had rescued from a pit in the desert. Eliza had escaped with Madeline and the boy before Caleb Kimball could burn them alive with the rest of his followers. And then Madeline’s mother had shown up, the real Allison Caliari. She was not this woman.

  The woman shrugged. “You can call me Rebecca.”

  “Rebecca?” He rolled it over on his tongue. “That’s a good biblical name.”

  “Maybe. So what?”

  “I don’t know why I didn’t hear it before. I was distracted by your act. It was pretty good, almost as good as what Sister Miriam can do.”

  Miriam snorted.

  “Hear what?” Rebecca asked.

  “Your accent. The real Allison Caliari was from New Jersey and you don’t hear that much around here. I started comparing it to how you speak. You’ve got a little Utah in your accent.”

  “Let us pass,” the woman said. “We don’t want trouble.”

  “You don’t? Come on, Rebecca. Why would someone come hiking in this wilderness unless they were looking for trouble? What are you doing with my father’s truck?”

  She opened her mouth as if she was going to deny it, but must have thought about how silly that would appear. “I needed a four-wheel drive. He let me take it. I didn’t tell him where I was going.”