by Peter Bowen
I laughed quietlike, for Brigham was a very canny, very dangerous man.
Brigham looked at me shrewdly. “I’m sure that the theological maunderings I find necessary to a Mormon state are of little interest to you. They have a use. If a prophet speaks, he don’t get backchat. It’s lies and stupidities, and very necessary. If you would be so stupid as to quote me, my devout followers would no doubt cut your throat, all the way back to your spine, as the Word tells them to do.”
“Interesting,” I says. “Which angelic being told you that particular piece?”
“A bird in my ear. I sent a few of my finest and most intelligent men off to silence a misguided soul. They shot him six times but he lived. So I had a revelation—my fools may not be able to follow simple instructions, but they are hell on Scripture.”
He pulled a long inhale on his seegar, blew out the smoke, rubbed his eyes, and began to tap on the desktop with a thick forefinger.
“My daughter Palmyra is kidnapped by the Injuns and I want her freed,” says Brigham, “which is what I say to my followers. Actually I married her off to Elder McMullin, who turned out a bastard and she run off and she’s over somewhere in the Colorado Territory with a renegade band of Utes. It’s embarrassing.”
I didn’t do anything but look at him, bored. He’d told me lies and about a fiftieth of what I’d know before long anyway.
“I’m wasting our time,” he says. “She’s got a batch of Joseph Smith’s letters, stolen from me. She did not want to marry Elder McMullin.”
“And them letters is what you want?” I asked. I wasn’t going to kill a woman for this lizard.
“Ten thousand in gold and the Prophet’s blessing, no small thing, Mr. Kelly. Even better, I’ll baptize you myself, should you be successful.”
“Them gents dragged me here,” I says. “Why don’t you send them?”
“Unfortunately,” Brigham said dryly, “this Church I built up don’t attract folks with brains. They never do. It’s one of the tragedies of the business I’m in. Bridger and Washakie recommend you highly.”
“Well, why don’t Bridger and Washakie do it?”
“They’ve been asked. They volunteered you.”
I run on unflatteringly about my two teachers, and hoped that grasshoppers would gnaw their parts forever.
“Washakie said you were just young, stupid, and ignorant enough to look harmless,” said Brigham, picking up a Colt from his desk. “You may either accept my offer or die on the spot.”
“Half in advance,” I says.
“Done,” says Brigham.
“And what about Palmyra?”
“Palmyra, the ungrateful little bitch, may rot where she is. I am fond of her, and the simple fact that she would do such a treacherous thing tells me she is the child of my bowels. I am not overly worried about her. I am worried about the letters.”
“What makes you think I won’t just take the gold and run?”
“Curiosity,” says Brigham. “Any sane man would have run from either of those two scoundrels who have more or less made you what you are today. They did have a candidate fully ripe for corruption, tis true.”
“I’ll do it,” I says.
“I knew I didn’t have to load this thing,” said Brigham. “I hate Colts. I got my goddamned thumb caught in the hammer once, I was hopping around like a mad fool and my followers all fell on their knees. They were sure I was wrestling with the Lord.”
I left then, taking my horses south. I’d asked for directions, and gotten a jerk of the prophetic thumb.
13
WUL, AS BRIDGER WOULD say, I thought the firstest thing I ought to do was find Elder McMullin. That turned out to be easy. I come up on some freight wagons, the long two-ton-load ones called “Democrats,” and asked the driver of the lead one where the good Elder McMullin might be.
The driver, a Mormon with one of them tall black hats on, spat a stream of forbidden tobacco juice on the rump of his off ox and snarled, “Straight south mebbe three hundred miles, ter Elder McMullin’s little kingdom.” I thanked the feller and made tracks.
I was traveling light, except for my guns, gold, and pride, and needed some things built for the country. I come on a Mexican freight outfit was taking stores south, too. They had one wagon full of high boots like you see in pictures of the conquistadores. I bought a pair to fight off the thorns with. That was some country. Farther down I went the drier it got and the meaner the vegetables, and the insects all chawed on you with one end and stung you with the other. About the fourth day out I come across my first Gila monster.
This fat black and pink critter was waddling across the trail, and it was so silly-looking that I pulled my horse up and got off and walked up closer, it was a most amazing sight. It come closer, staring at me. It decided it didn’t like me one bit. So it waddled over toward me and I whipped out my Colt and fired twice, missing clean, and the lizard opened his mouth and bit on my ankle. The conquistador boots was real thick there, no doubt for just this purpose, so it got its fangs stuck, and this just made it madder, so it flopped and clawed and chewed while I tried to shake it loose. (I was to see this same sort of witless determination years later in Tennessee Claflin.) I finally got my knife blade under the roof of its mouth and pried it off. It sat there panting in the dust and then it shrugged and walked away.
When I swung up again I heard a faint breeze overhead when there wasn’t no wind, so I swung right down again and about the time my boots hit the dirt the rolling boom of a buffalo rifle rocked back and forth in the canyon. I used the horse for cover and made it to a dry wash. A slug hit a rock ahead of me and shattered it, sending bits of stone everywhere, and one stung my cheek.
Now, I felt for certain that whoever was shooting at me was someone who I hadn’t been properly introduced to. It always makes me mad as hell to have someone try to kill me when they won’t even give me a chance to talk them out of it. I was dressed poor and how could they know about the gold. So I thought I will kill these bastards and never think on it again.
The buffalo rifle went off a couple more times, the damned fools, because they’d no idea where I was and the plume of smoke from their Winchester told me exactly where they was. I started up a dry wash and then went from boulder to boulder, and finally pulled myself up a steep wash by grabbing the bushes. Then I was on a flat layer of stone, and above them.
I made my way quiet till I was just above and behind them, and looked at them for a moment. They had on them high Mormon hats, which they’d take off and belly forward a ways to look down and see if they could spot me.
So I waited till they was back and one of them was looking down the rifle and the other sort of staring at the canyon, like he did not know what else to do.
There was a little series of steps, almost in the rock, and I come down them quietlike until I was maybe twenty feet behind them. I shot the one sighting the rifle in the back of the head. The slug picked him up and carried him over the lip of the cliff and shortly we heard the thump and clatter as he and the rifle landed on the rocks.
“Git them hands up!” I yelled, my Sharps on a line to his belly. “What in the hell are you doin’ shootin’ at me?”
He was holdin’ his arms so high his shirt had come out of his pants. He was shaking and he’d fouled himself. I marched him down and yelled at him to take me to his horses, they was tied in a grove of cedars. They hadn’t off-saddled, which sure burned me. Someone had told them I was coming, and they hadn’t been up there long.
I got the shaking, smelly apprentice bushwhacker up on his horse, setting backwards in the saddle, and I tied his hands behind him and then cinched them up good to the saddle horn. If this varmint wouldn’t tell me anything, I’d go find someone who would.
Figuring to get an explanation soon I led my prisoner down the trail, and we’d gone maybe four or five miles before I come on a roadhouse. It was just a place for the freighters to get likkered up and eat a plate of beans.
The propriet
or was a dirty gent with one eye and one arm who greeted me cheerily enough. I paid for a whiskey and sniffed it and it seemed to be good old raw alcohol, the kind comes of fermenting the mash in open barrels so there was a little added tang from all the critters that had fallen in and drowned. It warmed me up considerable on the way down, blew off three toenails, and left me short of breath.
When I was finally able to croak out a few noises, I got the barkeep to come outside and squint at the gent I had ass backwards on his horse. I explained that he and his partner, unfortunately deceased, had been shooting at me with a .45-90 and did he know this stupid bastard?
“Hit’s one of McMullin’s sons,” he says. “Bunch of scorpions.”
“How many sons does McMullin have?” I says.
“A hunnert and fourteen full growed, more on the way,” says the barkeep.
That worthy flew to his shanty, scooped up his gunbelt, a shotgun, and what money he had and he saddled his mule so fast I thought he’d like to cut his hand on the buckles. He swung up and grabbed for the reins.
“ ’Fer you,” he hollered, “I’d light out and I wouldn’t stop till I got someplace ain’t no Mormons.”
I couldn’t remember when I had been so happy. If I took for the tall grass and just left I’d have Brigham after me, and he had a damn long arm I was sure. He’d have me killed, shaking his head of sorrow at the young folk these days. And on the other hand, I had just trimmed down Elder McMullin’s own personal army and he was likely to be none too pleased with me.
“Paw’s gonna skin yer Jew Gentile ass,” says the captive. Well, God knows I am a patient man, but times was rough. I untied the fool’s feet from the stirrup leathers and cut the thong that bound his wrists to the saddle horn, and knocked him gently off with the butt of my rifle. I pulled his face out of the mud in front of the horse trough, jerked him to his feet, and shoved him into the green water and held him under till his squirming went from all frantic to feeble. Then I pulled him out and let him retch and breathe.
“I’d better start hearing things make sense,” I says, “or you want another bath here?”
“We’s just told to shoot any single riders on pinto horses!” he babbled, still about half full of water.
Well, this here apprentice bushwhacker spent many an unpleasant moment down there under the mosquito larva, till finally he was sobbing so bad and the same story three times running at that, that I cut his hands free. He had deep, bleeding slashes where the leather thongs had cut him.
I kicked him hard enough to crack ribs, just to get his attention, and then I snarled, “You tell your old man I’ll be along presently, on business from the Prophet. Brigham ain’t going to be too happy you tried to kill me.” Actually, I thought Brigham either wouldn’t care or he would be positively delighted.
I needed to figger some badly so I headed up into the mountains. The ranges here is like islands in a hot rock sea—the tops of the mountains was green with firs and pines and about a third of the way down from the top the desert took over. It rained damn seldom in this country, but up high the peaks caught the snow and milked the thunderclouds of water.
There is foolish mistakes that I have made which even today cause me to blush and cuss. I’ve done many stupid and fool things for which my friends has bought me large drinks and then sat and said, “How was that exactly?” Up there above all my follies, in a class by its own self, uncomplicated by bad luck or poor weather or slippery stuff underfoot, was my going up into some pissant south Utah mountain range—an island range—having just shot one son of a man who had one hundred and fourteen of the bastards and God alone knows how many sons-in-law.
Night come and I et and slept the sleep of the just, having killed one man and tortured another, mostly working off my fury at the death of Eats-Men-Whole.
I’d thought of sending Elder McMullin a letter, asking just why he wanted me dead, but Mormons are notoriously thin on reading and writing, dangerous habits that Brigham felt might lead to apostasy and correcting his spelling errors.
The wisest course seemed for me to mope on over to Colorado and see if I could scare up Palmyra without further truck with Elder McMullin and his vicious brood. Replacement sons was no doubt popping every day, and in a week or two the good Elder’s wrath would have cooled.
I had my coffee and a seegar and packed up and found a trail down the mountain headed east, and I come out of a little fringe of timber and suddenlike noticed there was an uncommon large number of them black Mormon hats sticking up from behind rocks all over the damn place.
I loped quick back up into the timber and commenced a quiet sneak to the north, spotting only a couple of dozen on that trail—I was beginning to seriously dislike them hats—and the south and west trails was liberally coated with ’em, too.
Well, not having a single thing better to do I rode around about three times and noticed that the hats kept moving up in my absence. Clearly I would have to make a death-or-glory charge, or nobly stick my Colt in my ear and cash out, or do the cowardly and unforgivable thing.
“I SURRENDER.” I hollered from the shadow of a large boulder.
Much silence.
“I SAID I SURRENDER, GODDAMN IT!” I yelled.
Remembering that these was Mormons and “surrender” is a mortal long word I tried another tack.
“I QUIT I GIVE UP DON’T SHOOT I QUIT!”
One of the hats raised up enough so I could see the face, looking over the sights of a rifle.
“Go ’tother side of the mounting and give up to Pappy,” it said, aiming the rifle at my guts. The hat sank back down.
So I wandered over to the other side of the mountain and I hollered and yelled and whistled for a while.
“Put down yer guns and walk out with yer hands up,” screeched a squealy voice, sort of like a hog on a hook.
I set down my guns and walked slowly out, hands high. There was about forty various firearms all pointed at my vitals, and all wobbling with the excitement of it all.
“DON’T NOBODY SHOOT! I WANT THAT GENTILE JEW SON OF A BITCH ALIVE. DON’T NONE A YEW WITLESS WUTHLESS WHELPS DARE SHOOT!”
Must be dear Pappy addressing his sundry offspring, I thought.
I walked on down the hill. The skinny little bog-Irish bastard clumb out from behind a rock.
“You Elder McMullin?” I says.
“Yerp,” says he. He was about five foot tall, had on a set of one-gallus overhauls and farmer boots, and a thick silver watchchain hanging out of one of the pockets.
“Brother Brigham sent me to fetch back Palmyra,” I says, in hopes that the name of the Prophet would do me some good.
“Ya brung that poison?” he says, leering at me.
I couldn’t remember when I’d been this happy. The prisoner of a Mormon whose roof wasn’t shingled.
“What poison?” I asked.
“FER MUH TEA,” he squealed, drooling some.
“Nope,” I says. “Ain’t got no poison.”
“We’ll go to muh house and talk.”
I was given back my horse and allowed the place of honor in this shoal of McMullin’s and whatever had married into the tribe. They come in all shapes and sizes and colors of hair, I supposed from the different mothers. I wondered how many wives this weasely little shit had.
Elder McMullin’s house covered about four acres, a warren of lean-tos and log cabins flung together any old way. There was a big passel of women carrying babies and what seemed to be hundreds of small children playing in the dusty yard. What it mostly looked like was the hovels of the shanty Irish on the outs of New York towns, all jammed together as the cedar houses built for purple martins.
I follered him in a door made of old seed sacks, through a long hallway lit by holes in the roof, and into a small room had a log-and-rope bedstead and a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. The place stank thick with old sweat and sanctimony. An old packing box served as a bed-table. It had a candle holder and a leatherbound book on it. The book must
be the Book of Mormon, I thought.
Elder McMullin picked the book up and sat down on the bed and squinted at the book. He held it tenderly.
“Read the Word of the Lord,” he says, handing me the thick and heavy volume. The cover was unmarked and the gold on the spine was all rubbed off. I opened it. It was a morocco-bound volume of plays by some Frog name of Corneille. I couldn’t read Frog very good, try as I might, so there I sat thinking as fast as I could on a way out. Elder McMullin was illiterate and insane, but he didn’t have all these folks bowing down to him because of the charm of his countenance.
“Read the Word of the Lord!” he screamed. He was drooling a little and his eyes was on fire.
I paused to make a note in that black part of my brain where the list of folks I am going to kill someday is, moving Brigham’s all the way to the top and underlining it in red. This done, I commenced.
“The angel La Gomba come unto the place of the festering altar and he said unto Nephritis what, pray tell, are you doing to that poor goat? It pleaseth the Lord not to get seconds. He delighteth in the sacrifice of oily Herberts ...”
Elder McMullin sighed with pleasure and listened, eyes abrim with tears, to the Gospel According to Luther.
14
A WHOLE LOT OF perfectly good Mormon theology made right up on the spot by a desperate character went by the way on account of there not being a competent secretary within a thousand miles.
After soothing Elder McMullin’s ears with the very best I could come up with in the way of utter nonsense, I still think my tale of how the Prophet Lumpestre done built the irrigation canals once already and how the Prophet Lumpestre said they would be buried by time and feathers, and that in the latter days the seed of a “deranged, drooling, misunderstood dwarf” would uncover them in the time of the new Coming of Zion.
As night began to fall Elder McMullin began to snort and paw some and he took off into this tenement he owned in search of a wife that warn’t pregnant at the moment.