Destroying Angel

by Michael Wallace

  Taylor Junior checked his gun. An excitement stirred in his bowels. He pictured Lillian Young—make that Lillian Kimball—on the ground with her lips quivering. Those pretty eyes would widen in terror as she offered a feeble protest, then close when he took her as she gasped with very different emotions. He would subjugate her pride.

  And then he thought about Eliza Christianson. Weren’t the two women cousins through the Griggs line? They may as well have been sisters. Eliza was young, fresh-faced like Lillian. Never married, though, probably a virgin, unless she’d spread her legs for some gentile in Salt Lake.

  Eliza, that bitch. She’d lurked in her father’s arrogant shadow and now considered herself invulnerable as she stood behind her brother’s shoulder, jeering at the true believers.

  In his mind Lillian had become Eliza, and when he threw open the door he was trembling with excitement. His groin was rock-hard and painful. A year since he’d taken a woman. It would be quick. He’d take her again later in private, and that time make it last.

  The children all sat at tables in the back of the lounge, eating again. Always eating. The women stood in tight clumps together near the television, which they’d sensibly shut off. The black screen stared down at them like an eye that was all pupil. The women whispered in nervous tones.

  “Lillian Young,” he said. “Show yourself.”

  The women parted, guilt on every face. No one met his gaze. “Where is she? Where’s she hiding?” He stood with his hands on his hips, making sure they could see the gun. “I’m losing my patience.”

  Mary Ellen stepped forward, shaking. “She ran away.”

  He crossed the space between them in three steps and looked down at her from a few inches away. “I told you to have everyone waiting.”

  “I did. I mean, I tried. As soon as you left, Lillian ran to her room. When I went after her, she wasn’t there. Sister Blythe said she climbed the ladder.”

  “Climbed the ladder?” His alarm spread.

  Levi cleared his throat. “That’s what they call it when you leave.”

  “She ran away,” Mary Ellen said. “She warned us she’d do it, she told us if things didn’t change…” Her voice trailed away, and then, when nobody else filled the silence, she cleared her throat. “She left for Blister Creek.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Grandma Cowley’s second diary sat like a brick against Jacob’s chest, tucked into a pocket on the inside of his jacket. With the Ghost Cliffs looming to his left, Witch’s Warts straight ahead, and a boulder-speckled, sagebrush-strewn plain between them, suddenly thirteen long, calcified decades dissolved and he felt as though he’d fallen through the years and into the nineteenth century. Like riding into a monochrome photograph made life-size and real. Diego and Daniel rode on the horse behind his, but Jacob heard nothing but the clomp of hooves on wet sand.

  Jacob rode in a near trance until they came upon the Jameson Young ranch, when he was surprised to see water rushing through Brother Jameson’s irrigation canals and through his cornfields, even though the ground was already damp from the snow and rain. Jacob and the boys came around the front of the house to find the old man and his two boys frantically shoveling dirt to plug a breach in the riverbank. He’d thrown open the irrigation dams, but the ditches couldn’t hold any more.

  Some of this was Jacob’s fault. With more rain predicted by Sunday, he’d sent Stephen Paul and Elder Phipps to the swollen reservoir yesterday to release an extra five hundred cubic feet per minute into Blister Creek, but the dikes must be saturated and vulnerable to collapse. They didn’t have long to avert complete destruction of the Young ranch.

  Jacob rushed inside to call for help and to send Elder Phipps to the Ghost Cliffs to lower the check gate. He returned to find Stephen Paul’s wife Carol newly arrived with her father-in-law’s backhoe and a promise that her husband was on the way. Other help poured in from across the valley. Two hours later, a small crew of men and women stood panting and muddy as they watched Blister Creek fall back within its banks.

  Stephen Paul hopped down from the backhoe and sloshed to where Jacob stood eying the damage. “We need to do something about that riverbank,” Jacob said. “And we’ve got to lower the reservoir before the storm hits this weekend. We get two inches of rain and we’ll be evacuating your dad by canoe.”

  “Any ideas?” Stephen Paul asked.

  “I’ve got ten yards of crushed rock at the house. Supposed to be the driveway for David’s new home, but we can take care of that later. It’s yours if you want to haul it away.”

  “This would be easier if my dad weren’t going it alone,” Stephen Paul said. “He’s almost eighty.”

  “He’s not exactly alone. There are still, what, fifteen people living here?”

  “Only Dad doesn’t let the wives and daughters do physical labor, and the only boys left at home are too young to be much help.” He sighed. “I guess I should think about moving back in. Plenty of empty rooms at the house. Carol won’t like it, though. None of my wives, actually.”

  Stephen Paul didn’t add that if his brothers Aaron and Isaac hadn’t thrown in with the Kimballs—and suffered violent deaths as a result—there would be two young men to put their shoulders to the collective wheel.

  “Stop by my house. I’ll give you a hand with the crushed rock.”

  Jacob left his counselor to finish the final cleanup on his father’s land and went to round up the boys and the horses, all of them splattered by mud and exhausted from the work. Upon their return to the Christianson house, Jacob stabled the horses and then came up the back stair to avoid getting sucked into the petty drama that was always within reach as his own small family mixed with Abraham’s larger one. He brought the diary into the bathroom while he showered away the mud and sand from the ride and his battle with the floodwater, curious about the hold the book exerted on his mind.

  He should leave the blasted thing alone. He had enough to worry about already: Daniel’s nightmares, the crop-destroying weather, the conservative members of the quorum, always pressing. And Taylor Junior.

  Jacob stayed under the hot spray until the heat relaxed his muscles and the mirror fogged over. When he finally got out, he entered the bedroom to find Fernie with Daniel. She sat in her wheelchair while Daniel sat on the bed, each with a copy of the scriptures in hand. Daniel wore clean clothes, and his hair was wet and neatly parted. Fernie looked up as Jacob entered and gave him a dark, worried look.

  Daniel read in his thin, high voice. “Taking the shield of faith wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of my Spirit, which I will—”

  He stopped as he looked up and saw Jacob. Fernie reached over to squeeze the boy’s hand. “That’s good for now. Would you like Daddy to give you a blessing?”

  Daniel nodded, his face flushed.

  “Is that okay?” Fernie asked Jacob.

  “Sure, no problem. Any particular blessing?”

  “The usual,” Fernie said. “Comfort, peace.”

  Jacob put his hands on Daniel’s head and gave the blessing. Something about the white dove of peace. It sounded like the right thing to say as it came out. He thought about medications as he spoke. Maybe aripiprazole or olanzapine, but, heaven help him, the boy wasn’t even ten yet. Administering psychotropics to a prepubescent brain was like opening walnuts with a sledgehammer.

  Daniel sprang up when Jacob finished. “Can I go play with Diego?”

  “You didn’t get enough of each other already?” Fernie said. “Okay, but it’s an hour until dinner, and I need help setting tables. Try not to get grubby again. And don’t leave the property without an adult. No hunting lizards in Witch’s Warts, you understand?”

  She turned to him after Daniel had run off. “He saw the angel again.”

  “What, you mean last night?”

  “No, a few minutes ago. Awake.”

  A chill wrapped itself around Jacob’s heart, as u
nexpected and unwelcome as a snowstorm in June. “Are you sure?”

  Fernie explained. About ten minutes ago she’d heard a disturbance in the boys’ bathroom. When she entered, she found Daniel in the shower, talking to himself. The water was scalding hot, sending up billows of steam. He rubbed a bar of soap furiously over his body with one hand while scrubbing with the hard-bristled tile brush with the other.

  “And he wouldn’t stop talking. Creepiest voice you ever heard. ‘I’m clean, I’m clean, I’m clean. I’m not clean, I’m not clean. I’m not clean!’”

  Jacob sank to the edge of the bed as his mind raced down frightening paths. All this must have happened while Jacob relaxed in his own shower, oblivious.

  Fernie turned her wheelchair to face him. “I turned off the water, coaxed him out, finally got him to talk to me instead of to that…other thing. I prayed for help. It came into my head that I should read the scriptures, the part in Doctrine and Covenants about the armor of God. He was calmer by the time you came in, but still.”

  “Still,” he agreed.

  “It’s getting worse. The blessings aren’t helping.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “We shouldn’t have come back to Blister Creek. He’d be safer in Zarahemla or Harmony.” Except they’d sold everything in Harmony, and Zarahemla lay in ruins, contaminated.

  “So you do think it’s spiritual?” she said.

  “No, I think it’s the Kimball curse. Elder Kimball passed his mental illness to Daniel.”

  “Either way, being in Blister Creek doesn’t help. We could go back to Salt Lake.”

  The suggestion surprised him. Fernie hated the city. She needed to be around her own people, her family, and her faith. In Zion, not in the world with its unbelievers and atomized lives. That she would even suggest a move showed her desperation.

  “I would’ve jumped at that a year ago,” he said, “but I can’t leave now, not with so many people counting on me. And it isn’t safe in Salt Lake City anyway, with everything going on out in the real word—the weather, the food situation.” He helped her from her chair to the bed and wrapped his arms around her. “Don’t lose faith. We’ll figure this out.”

  “What happened at Yellow Flats?” Fernie’s voice was pinched, as if she were forcing herself to change the subject. “Did Daniel see something that set him off?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “And you met Rebecca? What did she say?”

  He rehashed the conversation. Fernie raised her eyebrows when he told her about Rebecca’s suggestion to form a women’s presidency. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “Who is this woman?” He was about to agree when she added, “But I suppose it doesn’t hurt to take it to the Lord.”

  “Does that mean you’re intrigued by the idea?”

  A shrug. She glanced at the small, leather-bound book he’d set on the nightstand upon entering. “What about the diary?”

  “I came in here to read. This angel business put me off that. We’ve got enough to worry about without diving into Grandma Cowley’s nightmare.”

  “Unless she has answers,” Fernie said. “She saw an evil spirit too. How did she fight it off?”

  “Did she?”

  “She was ninety-seven when she died.”

  “Living alone and paranoid on Yellow Flats. She didn’t drive it off for good—whatever Annabelle Kimball faced, it’s still with us.” He opened the diary, turned past the signature page, and looked at the even, beautiful script without focusing. “Here, you read.”

  Fernie took the book from his hands.

  “October 23, 1890. The weather continues fine. No more sign of the second federal marshal. The waiting continues. Hyrum promised to be here by September, but we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of my husband or any other man. Meanwhile, the body of Frederick van Slooten waits to be found, to offer testimony against me. And Sister Annabelle is tormented by an evil spirit. Every day I pray to the Lord for guidance, but He remains silent. A solution forms in my mind, a way out of our troubles, but it is too wicked to write in these pages. Not yet, not until I am sure.”

  Jacob leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes. As Fernie spoke in her broad, rural Utah accent, he heard not his wife but his great-great-grandmother, eighteen years old, speaking to him across the generations.

  On the fateful day, gunfire sounded from Witch’s Warts as I put bread in the brick oven. The snap of a pistol, and then a moment later another shot, this time followed by the ping of a bullet ricocheting off stone. Van Slooten screamed a curse. I couldn’t see him, hidden as he was by the outer fins of the labyrinth, but the wild hope that he’d shot himself struck my breast. Then he fired again, and I supposed it was only a chip of stone striking his face.

  Maude and Laura froze at the boiling laundry with wooden panels gripped in their hands. Gretta hustled her children toward the cabin after making them promise to lock the door until she called them for dinner. I told Nannie and Hortense to gather the other women and children and get them inside. They rushed past Annabelle, who came out of her own half-finished cabin with a frown.

  “What the devil is he shooting at?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. He started to shout again. “Listen to him.”

  “You s—! I’ll cut off your g—d—head.” His sentences slurred into one long word but carried clearly enough in the dry desert air.

  “Foul language,” Annabelle said. “There are children about, doesn’t he know that?”

  The rest of us stared at her. What was she getting on about? A few strong words? The man was discharging his gun with all the care of a boy shooting sparrows with a slingshot.

  For the next ten minutes the gunfire continued at ragged intervals. After every few shots he had to stop and reload, and it took him longer and longer to resume each time. But just as I allowed myself to hope it was over, he would start up again.

  At last van Slooten staggered out of Witch’s Warts. He tucked the gun into its holster and lifted something to his mouth that glinted in the sun. A bottle of spirits.

  “Dear heaven,” I said. “Where did he get that?”

  I looked at the other three women in hopes one of them would have an answer and caught a guilty look stealing across Annabelle’s face. “Do you know something?”

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “What happened? Hurry, he’s coming.”

  “I forgot what you said. My Joseph is teething, and I put a dab of the medicinal whiskey on his gums to ease the pain. I didn’t think.”

  “And he saw you, didn’t he?” When she nodded, I groaned.

  Van Slooten looked pleased as he staggered into camp. He glanced about as if wondering what had happened to the rest, then fixed on us, and his smile widened. His gait was unsteady, but not so much as to raise hopes that he would stagger to his tent and sleep it off.

  “My enemy’s harlots. Four of them. That’s fitting, ain’t it? What I seen around here will make a good story when I’m done settling up with your husbands.” He took a swig of the whiskey. It was almost gone. Dear heaven, I thought, he must be roaring drunk.

  “Go to your tent,” I said. “I shall call you when it’s time for supper.”

  “You would like that, now wouldn’t you? I know what you do when I’m not around.” He leered. “Show each other your lady parts.”

  “Hold your tongue!” Laura said.

  “And you, all prissy-like, and your voice of a fine English lady. You’re the worst of the lot, ain’t you? I seen you last night. You and the girl you been courting.” He nodded at Maude.

  Laura’s face turned red. “You lie,” she whispered.

  Van Slooten grinned. “Do I?” He drained the rest of the whiskey and then hurled the bottle toward Witch’s Warts. It flew end over end, above the creek, and dashed to pieces against a rock. He stepped up to Laura and stroked her face. She’d stood defiant and angry a moment earlier, but now she
trembled like a jackrabbit caught in a snare, eyes wide and terrified.

  “Pretty ladies, out here in the desert without a man to protect them. It’s no wonder. No wonder at all.” Van Slooten’s hand trailed down her neck to her bosom. He squeezed.

  A white fury rose in my breast. I started toward him, but his pistol was out in an instant. “And you, stand back or I will blow out your brains, d—you.”

  “Please let me go,” Laura said.

  “I seen you,” he told her. “Just like a man. Weren’t even wearing your bloomers. Right on top of this one, like you had something between your legs. Maybe you do. It was too dark to see, though I tried real hard.” He removed his hand from her breast and thrust it between her legs. She gasped. He gave a look of false disappointment. “Nope. Them tits must be real—you ain’t a man.”

  My rage boiled over, and I lost control. I charged him. Van Slooten saw me coming and lifted his gun. I expected a flash, the roar of gunfire. A blur of pain. But he didn’t shoot, he punched me in the gut with his gun hand. I flew backward from the blow and collapsed to the ground, doubled over and moaning with pain.

  Van Slooten said, “You’ve sealed your fate. All of you, starting with this one.” He shook Laura’s arm. “Now get me food. I’m starved. We’ll settle the rest of this tonight.” And here he grabbed his loins and made it clear how he intended to settle matters.

  Van Slooten walked a few feet out of the camp and took a long, hard piss, then staggered toward his tent, muttering about Mormons. Maude stood trembling while Laura stared after the man with a gray expression, as if she were on the verge of being ill.

  “Are you all right?” she asked me.

  I ignored the pain in my gut, already fading, and climbed to my feet. “If I were a man, I’d raise my arm to the square and condemn van Slooten to hell.”

  Annabelle looked furious, but not with van Slooten, as it turned out. She turned on Maude and Laura with a snarl. “Is that true? For the love of God, you’d better deny it now and deny it quick.”