Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  X nodded. “But you didn’t get on the bus. Why?”

  I caught sight of movement in the distance, out on the plain below the road. The pronghorn, pressing on past the bison herd, shouldering through the tall grasses. I watched its progress for a long, quiet moment. “Everyone back home is so concerned with eternity. It’s all anyone lives for. It’s the focus of everything we do – they do. You study the scriptures. You tithe. You court. You marry and are sealed in the temple in an eternal partnership. You have children and you teach your family about eternity. You serve in the temple to earn points for eternity. You baptize the dead to give them hope for eternity. You worry that if you stole a pack of gum as a kid, or had a secret boyfriend, or don’t participate in the Church enough, or feel unfulfilled in your marriage, that you will be demoted in eternity. You’ll miss out on all the good stuff if you don’t do it right, if you aren’t perfect. I don’t think I even believe in an eternity. I’d just been taught for so long to fear what might happen to me after I die, that I might not make it to the top....”

  “That’s a hell of a way to live, always preoccupied with where you’ll go when you die.”

  “I watched you painting the temple yesterday, and I thought about the things people make. And I realized I’ve been so concerned with fitting in for so long that there was never any room in my head to wonder what it means, to not believe in God. What it means practically. Functionally.”

  “My own humble watercolor of a temple is responsible for all this deep thought? I’m flattered.”

  “It’s like this. It took the pioneers forty years to build that temple. And it’s beautiful – you saw it. They put so much skill into it. They put love into it. Some people must have worked on it knowing they would never live to see it completed. But they worked on it all the same. Forty years.”

  X lowered himself to sit on the boulder, folded his lanky legs beneath him, waited for me to go on. I joined him. The surface of the rock was warm, minutely furred with lichen. I ran my palms over it. Bits of the boulder crumbled under my hands.

  “People have this drive to make and make. We all want to leave something behind after we’re gone – a painting or a song or a book. A baby; a temple. You turned the temple into something else, something all your own. You made your own temple. And the people who saw what you did with it – they’ll remember. At least for a little while. Some of them will remember their whole lives. Some of them will see the picture you painted every time they look at the real thing. You altered the world, X.

  You changed them.”

  His broad mouth turned a little, an uncertain smile, half flattered, half confused.

  Oh, I am getting nowhere. Like a slug to the stomach, pow. “I think,” I said carefully, hoping the words were right, hoping he understood, “that’s the only afterlife we get. To make something that changes other people. Make a temple or a child – create something that has meaning to somebody else, and memory....”

  “Memory is eternity.”

  “Memory and meaning. Changing a life. A great work, whatever it is...I don’t think there’s a heaven. I think you were right about that. Now that I’m away from Rexburg I can really think about it, and I know, I know that this world is all we have. We only get one life. It’s short.” Even to myself I had never said these words. But they came to me like revelation. The simplicity of the words choked me, the beauty of them. I swallowed hard; my eyes burned with tears. X saw and took my hand, stroked my fingers with his callused thumb as if to comfort me.

  But I did not need comfort. The realization of life’s miraculous brevity filled me with a fire so hot I could not speak. I could only tremble inside, throb with the great burning pulse of it. This was the fire of the Holy Ghost, or so I had always been told – the surge in the heart that comforts, the shiver in the blood that assures. This was the thrum along the nerves, the spirit filled to brimming – but I have no spirit, and yet still I overflowed. I returned X’s touch, rubbed my hand over his knuckles, over his wrist where the skin softened, as if to push the things I could not say through his skin and into his veins.

  X, I do not know what happens after life. But I know that life is short, and life is this: larks on a hillside, and bison with diamonds in their eyes. A pronghorn tearing from its silent refuge, its hooves pounding in my heart. Life is the feel of your skin against mine, the smell of salt and grass on wind.

  Life is the lightning flash that illuminates an ecstasy of love and hope and sorrow and loss; a blink, a breath, and nothing. But oh, the beauty of that flash, when all is lit bright enough to be seen, even the owl’s tracks in the dust. And oh, the frailty of every heartbeat – how I treasure my heart now, like I never did before, like I never could before.

  The pronghorn still moved, so far away now that the colors of its hide were barely discernible against the landscape. It moved past the caked, dried shore and out onto the gleaming white salt flats where at last it found its peace. Tiny, light-limned, it knelt to rest in the sun. I held tight to X’s hand. I felt the beat of the pronghorn’s hooves beneath his skin, where the veins tracked like rivers through the earth.

  7.

  Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

  You are raised to believe this and you believe it. When your world is Rexburg, with its potato plants in neat quilted rows, with its carousel under cover – when your world is so assured of its dominion, well, even the secret non-believer feels a thrill of pride at the sight of the earth subdued in plots and acreage. No, pride is not the right word. The bespoke arability of the Bench and the Basin, the brown land’s fertility harnessed by the blood of intrepid pioneer men, the complacency of feed-lot cattle – these had filled me with a sense of this-is-right, a security and a foundation religion could not provide me. And I only realized now, going south and east, as the land we moved through shed its domesticity, that it was religion that built that sinkhole foundation after all.

  Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.

  Utah’s tamed circular fields gave way all at once to a great upward thrust of foothill and beyond that, through that, for that is where the highway led, the earth was not as docile as God would have liked. The pass between two great mountains was a mess of color. On the western slopes, every available patch of earth clamored with olive-greens and pale blossoms, too scattered and frantic for my eye to categorize. Here and there the vertical thrust of some tall, stalky, thick-leafed plant waved a banner of yellow polleny bloom, its upward gesture distorted by our speed to a horizontal blur. We reached the summit of the pass, where we stopped for cold drinks at a lone boxy gas station, the only building for miles. Inside an enormous moose head hung over the cashier’s counter, stiff and offended. I wondered where the cashier lived, why she bothered to commute all this way to the top of a lonely, wild pass with no one for conversation but the moose. We had passed no homes for at least forty miles and on the eastern slope it would be longer still until we caught the faintest whiff of a town.

  As we pressed east the vegetation yielded to barer and redder ground. Every few miles stone fists the color of clay reared above flats of scrawny sage, and far in the purple distance, the plain slanted up at a piqued angle, a break at the edge of the world, the cracking of some long, slow catastrophe.

  Fill the earth and subdue it.

  How?

  Subdue this great desert with its cunning, thorny life? How? Bring down the Tetons, fold them beneath the earth and build in their place a temple of gray stone and snow shadows, beautiful and straight between its walls but lacking the dangerous pitch, the hysterical cant of the highest peak, the dark scars in its face where solid rock has dropped away to fall like a cottonwood on a roof. Make a hundred thousand replicas of Devil’s Tower, a forest of Chimney Rocks with valley views and modern amenities. Saddle a buffalo. Give him a name. It’s all an illusion.


  In pursuit of subjugation, the intrepid pioneers built a dam of slag and mud, years before I was born, across the great silver vein of the Teton River. Less than a year later the dam failed, and a wall of noise and fear and stench went right through Rexburg, without any regard for the dominion of its citizens. It killed unimaginable numbers of cattle, swept them in rafts past houses with crushed-in sides like kicked tin cans in a gutter. When the Teton River had had its fun and the waters receded, eleven people were dead and every house not up on the Bench was ruined. Foul-smelling mud full of rotting things coated the walls of houses, six feet high, eight feet high. The stink was astounding. The mud, I am told, was rust-red as dried blood, red as the desert through which X and I traveled, and it stained everything – family photos, furniture, church floors. Homeowners painted over the stains only to see them reappear years later. The memory of the smell was in everybody’s nostrils.

  The one thing the flood could not permanently mark was the pioneering spirit of my hometown. Oh, what a wellspring of righteous pride, that we regrouped, rebuilt, found new ways to irrigate our tidy crops, kept on as God intended. What firm dominion we held, never doubting, never swaying. (The foolish man built his house upon the sand, and the rains came tumbling down.)

  Subdue this earth, with its cottonwoods and windstorms, its falls of granite, its sudden herds of bison. There is a cant to the earth’s horizon, a fierce angle, a caution to the wise. We drew ever closer to that horizon, X and I, deeper into the flood-red landscape. And I could see that in Rexburg we had it all wrong. Man cannot subdue. Man can never hold dominion over that which flies or that which springs from hiding on heartbeat hooves. Nor did I have any desire to bend a place to my will. My life is too short to live it with a whip in hand. I am the one who is subdued, and the mystery of the broken horizon is my master.

  8.

  This was a land as hot and red as slapped skin. We filled jugs with water at the park’s entry gate, pressed on past popular sandy trails and scenic overlooks in search of lonelier vistas. The road carried us upward into a forcefully blue sky; ahead, great arches of rock formed eyes of sky that watched me as we passed. I stared back into them. They were bluer even than X’s eyes. They turned to follow me until purple shadows blinked them closed.

  Cool me, shadows. Comfort me, flood-red, in all my wasted places. Beyond the boundaries of the park, stretching out to a boundless view, the wilderness was Eden, the desert God’s garden. Funny how even when you know it to be all backward, you still can’t help but experience the world in terms of religion. X was never afflicted this way, having been raised without belief, so I could not tell him what it was like to feel the sharp edge of that contrast press against my heart, the boundary between what I know and what I had been taught as clear and opposing as sky against rock. What a tickle. I could not make him understand how humorous it was, that I felt the desert landscape in terms of Mormon poetry. This was Zion, after all, a place and a concept bred into my bones. In the furnace God may prove thee, thence to bring thee forth more bright. Oh, I have always been one for irony.

  X found his lonely vista. High up near the park’s altitudinal summit we came across an empty parking lot, a short trail through the brush, an unassuming fin of red sandstone rising from the desert as serene and ancient as a whale’s back. Any rock fin is a miracle of geology far finer than the buttes and lava heaves Rexburg had on offer, yet compared to the cathedral towers and eyed arches of the rest of the park, this hike seemed to promise little. I wondered whether we might have more fun on a populous trail, tourists be damned. But X had set his heart on this simple fin.

  I followed him across the sand. It worked its way through the seams of my shoes, through my socks; soon my toes were covered in soft, cool powder. The soles and fronts of my old white shoes stained orange.

  The moment our trail rounded the fin my hesitation vanished. It was not one whale’s back but two, standing close together broadside to the road. The brush gave out. Twin lines of placed stones and wood pieces indicated that our path continued between the fins, into a cool blue gap in the rock. We scrambled over a cracked hump of stone, our sneakers slipping and hissing.

  Beyond the gap, with no warning, without even the flipping open of a hymnal, my heart ignited – my soul ignited, a fiery furnace. Katherine, this is what you felt when you entered the temple for the first time. At last I understood.

  Red stone walls towered on either side; in the space between, X and I could have held hands and stretched out our arms to brush, just barely, with reverent fingers the formless friezes carved, all arcs and angles, down the length of the chapel. Time and weather printed these mysteries on this temple wall: thousands and thousands of winters bearing the slightest traces of snow, the water seeping into the rock, the expansion of the freeze, the strange hypnotic voice of cracking stone, a language I would never understand but which rang in my heart all the same. If angels existed, if they had their own tongue, it would sound like the break of erosion in a lonely place in a high red desert. I read the violet scroll-work of ages and I tried to imagine how many angels had spoken here. Uncountable years, uncountable voices.

  Like a bright altar, a low, tenacious tree held fast to a boulder in the center of our temple – a mesquite, perhaps; I was too awe-struck to identify it. It spread across the expanse between the rock fins, defiant and beautiful, its leaves slender and fine and lit by a beam of sun that fell at just the right angle over the temple wall. Brilliant, mobile, living green, glowing, just on the verge of bursting into flame, just on the verge of singing to me in God’s voice, how my legs trembled, how my heart burned with the fire of rapture. I fell on my knees in the sand to receive my blessing.

  A wind had long since passed and softened and settled the sand, so that the footprints of those who came to worship before us were swept into shapeless anonymity. Across the implied path of a supplicant’s feet the crisp recent tracks of some small dog-like animal cut, a fox or a coyote. Near the rock wall a small splash of its urine had not yet dried. This creature of the red temple had moved here like a ghost just moments before X and I appeared. I pressed my fingertips into the tracks of its toes.

  “God,” X said, an exclamation only. Now that I have spoken these words, if you do not understand them it will be because you ask not, neither do you knock; and you are not brought into the light, but must perish in the dark. Poetry, stood on its ear – on the furred, pointed, twitching ear of the holy ghost that detects the arrival of two pilgrims and vanishes. This flame that consumed me, that shook me – this was the spirit which brought me through the red sea on dry ground. With tears burning my eyes I followed X’s gaze up into the sky. Above and between the temple walls, against a blue truer than prayer, a fast wind moved a layer of cloud thin as a veil. “God,” X said again, and I nodded because I am human, and I laughed at the smallness of the word.

  9.

  In the town of Moab, in a busy grocery parking lot where mud-skinned Jeeps clustered together like cattle in a feed lot, I made a phone call.

  James answered on the first ring. He was waiting to hear from me.

  “It’s good to hear your voice,” I said.

  “You too.” He sounded happy, almost – lightened somehow. “I’ve been praying about this, everything we’re going through.”

  “Oh?”

  “I feel like it’s going to work out.”

  X was inside the store, buying ice for our cooler and more food. He had brought in the travel mugs so he could wash out the old coffee staining their rims in the bathroom sink. He would be a while.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better about things,” I said carefully. “What do you mean by work out?”

  “I know you’re going to come home. We’re going to be able to put this behind us and go on with our lives.”

  I knew if my silence stretched on too long he would be hurt. But all I could think to tell him was the truth: that I had seen and felt something greater than God, that a holier ghost had moved in me.
That life was too short for Rexburg.

  I did wait too long. He caught the hesitation. He said, “The Spirit told me.” A rebuke.

  “James, I’m not coming back.”

  In his pause I heard him tremble. I leaned my head against the car’s window frame, watched a shadow of cloud, long and thin and fluent, glide across the face of the bluffs overlooking the town. You’re cruel, I said to the red stone. You’re cruel to reveal this truth to me. Now I can never go back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I love you, James.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I do. You don’t know how much.”

  “Then why?”

  “We need to do this for both of us.”

  “No.” His broken voice, his painful voice. If I could have held him, begged his forgiveness. I just wanted to know that he didn’t blame me. I hadn’t done this to us. Don’t blame me, James, please; I can’t bear it.

  “I want you to be who you really are.”

  He said my name. It was thin and high, a bird’s cry in the far distance, faint. The sound of it was

  a nail through my heart.

  “I’ll make all the arrangements. I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “What about our house?”

  “We’ll figure it out. I’ll figure it out. I just want you to focus on you right now. How is Brian? Is he there with you now?”

  James would not comment on Brian. “This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. The Spirit told me. I felt it. I was sure.”

  The Spirit is tracks in the sand, I told James silently. How I hated it, the idea of it, the myth, for wounding my husband. It lied to you, James. It never was there.