by Adam Nevill
‘Where ye headed, fella?’ the old man asked, jittery in his hands that were busy with the pouring of his guest’s coffee, black as oil, into a tin cup from the jug sat among the embers.
The soldier never answered or moved his pale-blue eyes from staring into the fire, right into the red ashes. ‘Yer beans burnin’. Go ahead. Eat,’ he eventually said.
The old man complied. Straight from the hissing skillet and piled onto a long spoon, he shovelled beans into the dark hole within that dirty beard; all the time wary of moving his big veiny eyes from the soldier, who removed his leather gloves and held the metal mug of coffee between both hands.
They sat in silence for a while, until the soldier broke his stare from the fire and looked at the old man’s meagre provisions: a few sacks tied with rope, two large canteens, probably already empty first day out of the mountains. He’d seen others, footsore and half mad with thirst, carrying twice as much. ‘You still got five hundred miles of desert to ride. Think you can make it?’
The old man laid aside the skillet. He took a pipe from a shirt pocket as dark and greasy as the flakes that he stuffed into the little clay bowl, using fingers thick as corn cobs and nails so dirty he might have just been blacking boots. ‘Aimin’ to resupply from them Saints.’
The soldier’s face tensed; his blue eyes narrowed and hardened and the old man couldn’t look into them for long. ‘Don’t call ’em that. Saints. They ain’t no such thing.’
The old boy nodded. ‘Them sons a bitches with Brigham Young been shakin’ everyone down passes through here, I hears,’ the old man said, wary all over again, but eager to be conspiratorial. ‘But there ain’t nowhere else to get feed. Supplies. Not this far out.’
The soldier stayed quiet. Remembered the cup in his hand, sipped at the coffee, winced. ‘You come across any of them today?’
The old man looked down. ‘Ain’t rightly sure.’
‘Either you come across them or you ain’t. Which is it?’
‘Easy, fella. I see all kinds. Mind my own business. I got no beef with no one. Them Mormon Saints neither.’ He looked at the insignia on the soldier’s cap, swallowed. ‘You one of them Grey’s militia, from Missouri way? If you are, I ain’t no Mormon. I swear on the Lord, sir. Just aimin’ to buy some vittles from them so I can get to the ocean. I –’
‘I ain’t ridin’ with no militia.’
The prospector relaxed again, sucked on his unlit pipe. ‘Them Mormons all out at the dead water. Timpanogos. Since ’47, I heard. New settlement. God’s own kingdom they callin’ it. The Saints Zion. You got a beef with them, then that’s where they is at.’
The dragoon spat. ‘They ain’t all out there with Brigham Young. There’s others of a similar creed. Settin’ up on their own. Nearby.’
The old man sucked too hard at the pipe stem; a shake had come into his shoulders. The soldier looked hard at the old man. ‘You ain’t never asked my name.’
The prospector’s hands shook too now. He cleared his throat and his voice wasn’t much when it came out. ‘I learned a long time ago to mind my own.’
‘You never asked on account of you just guessing at who I am. That right?’
‘Man hears things.’
‘What they calling me now?’
The prospector started to look like his skin was full of sand. He lowered his eyes and spoke into his lap. ‘Look, sir. I’d as soon share a pipe with you and get my head down –’
‘I ain’t gonna hurt you. Long as you’re straight with me.’
‘Yessir.’ The old man dared to look up at the dragoon again. ‘Some talk about a man out here. Cavalry. The Devil’s right hand, they been sayin’. Man I hear about’s goin’ to chase Brigham Young and his polygamist sinners right back into hell. Others be callin’ him the Destroying Angel, like it’s the Lord’s work he be doin’.’ The prospector finished with a swipe of one grubby hand across his appalling beard.
The soldier smiled. ‘They’s work to be done. Whether it be the Devil’s or the Lord’s, who can say? But looks like I been chosen for it. And it ain’t Brigham Young and his congregation I’m here for. It’s them others that came this way too, and the preacher they follow.’
The fire seemed to shrink then, all on its own, and take away its glare and heat from them, as if the mere mention of a certain man was enough to put out the light of the stars. And all the blood suddenly seemed to flow out of the old man, leaving his tanned face pale as a dressmaker’s dummy.
‘Have you seen the black horse? Have you seen the black carriage?’ the soldier asked.
The old man started to shake again, like the night-time cold suddenly dropped a few degrees further at the mention of these things of black. He pulled his bedroll around his shoulders. It had once been grey, but was now just grubby with no particular colour around the holes in it. The old man nodded. ‘And I’m fixin’ to forget it.’
The soldier leaned his face further into the firelight. ‘To have seen it and still be breathin’ is somethin’.’
‘I never got close enough to parlay. No, sir. That be who you lookin’ for?’
The soldier said nothing.
The old man reached out a hand, pointed a finger at the dragoon. ‘They say an angel put a curse on them, and only an angel can take it off again. You an angel, soldier?’
‘Who I was and who I am ain’t the same things no more. One time, I was Sergeant Ephraim Lisle. Dragoon. US Cavalry. Now, you could say I truly am an instrument of vengeance. But I ain’t no angel.’
‘He took yer wife?’ the old man said, his voice not yet put back together, but curiosity had piqued over his fear.
The soldier mused that the story of their meeting and what passed between them would be told again, by other old men at the foot of mountains older than them, older than time, and the tale would change with every telling, until no one would ever know who that soldier had been. It mattered little what he said. The only truth in the world was what you saw with your own eyes, and that truth never came from another man’s fool mouth. But maybe some of his purpose, which had its business with death, should be put in the wind. Tonight. Here. He was close; and this might be his last night on earth. Ought to be, considering the odds that would be stacked high against him in the morning. Maybe a last testament was called for at these times.
‘Sister.’ And just that word in his mouth and in the air around him seized him up inside and he had to dip his head so that the old man could not see the tears that shone in his eyes; eyes that had been open for twenty-five years but had seen things that no man should ever see in all of ten thousand years.
And so the dragoon spoke for himself as much as he spoke for the old bearded fool in the desert, so that there was a chance that it might be known that when all of the black blood was let, it had been shed for a purpose pure and righteous. And the dragoon, Ephraim Lisle, began by telling the old prospector that the thing that rode the black horse, with the black carriage rolling behind it, was no longer a man.
‘Sho’ didn’t look much like one neither,’ the old man said to himself, and he now seemed uncertain about his appetite for such stories in this lonesome part of the earth. ‘I ain’t sure they’s any damn thing a man can do to hurt them more than they is already sufferin’. I heard they all had the black pox and was out here to do some dyin’. Sure looked like it this mornin’.’
‘You heard of the Second Great Awakening?’ the soldier asked the night. ‘And of the con man known as Joseph Smith?’
‘The martyr.’
‘He weren’t no martyr. He was a bum. A trickster who sold himself as a seer and a prophet to them with shit for brains in Missouri, and then Illinois once Missouri come to its senses. A dabbler in peep stones, scrying, witchery. Plenty a fool and his money were soon parted, old man, when Joseph Smith was around. As they was soon parted from their wives and daughters and . . . sisters too.’
The prospector nodded. ‘They say he got gold tablets straight from the Lord by way of the angel
Moroni in a cave, on the Hill Cumorah.’
‘Horseshit.’
‘No doubt.’
‘But Smith got something he weren’t bargaining for, sho’ enough, and in an old Indian cave in the hill they call Cumorah. He and his friend in black you saw out ridin’. Fella that went inside that cave with Joseph Smith was a man named Lemuel Hawkins. Man just as crooked as Smith. Was a time old Lemuel Hawkins and Joseph Smith claimed they could find treasure with their black magic and peep stones. But it weren’t no angel of the Lord who they mixed it with inside that cave in Cumorah.’
‘How you come by way of this?’
‘When I come back from the war in Mexico, my sister was missing from home, as well as the damn fool aunt and uncle I left her with. And most every other woman an’ girl in my home town was gone too. Cuz they were all wedded to the Prophet and on the great Exodus to find the Kingdom of God, out in this desert. Following the man once known as Lemuel Hawkins. Who claimed he was given instructions like Moses, in some cave, by the angel Moroni.
‘But before I lit out to fetch my sister back, I went and stood in that cave, looking for the divine message. And all I saw was drawin’s up on them walls. What the Indians and them before the Indians had put up there. A warning. Any fool could see it. Ain’t no angel of the Lord was ever in that place before or since. I reckon that cave went all the way down to hell. Sure smelled like it. I seen brigs, I seen jails plenty. And that’s what that cave was. A prison with no bars. Made to keep something inside it for a long time, old man, with something stronger than bars. What them fools found in that cave was nothing I reckon they were bargaining to find neither. But those fools broke it out of there.’
And the soldier remembered the place because he could not ever forget the terrible black fear that frosted his wits, like he was walking in the Devil’s own footprints. It could have been a child that had made those markings on the brown stone of the long, low cave in the Hill Cumorah. But the pictures in the damp and the dark were all the worse to look upon because of their rough nature; and what the unschooled style of the artists had scratched on stone, when viewed by lamplight, a mind given to figuring would not easily forget.
The soldier guessed it was the thing that traded under the name of the angel Moroni. So tall and thin and tatty about the head. Etched over and over again, onto the walls and the ceiling. Striding at the little figures of the Indian braves who pointed their bows upwards. In its talons it held the bodies of men. Into its spiky mouth it shoved them too, like they were corn dollies to a dog. It was able to fly like an eagle in some of the drawings too, and all the animals and men of the earth fled beneath it.
And the longer the soldier stood in that cave and moved his lantern here and there, he got to figuring that the thing the Indians had taken to drawing with such frequency and desperation, might nary have been a single deity after all; it had been drawn many times by them because there had been more than one.
In one corner of the low, dark cave that still stank of sulphur and the meat of a dead man left in the sun, he determined another clear message being imparted to him, as if those warriors of old were telling another warrior in another time that such things that preyed upon the flesh of men, and had to be shut up in caves, could be beaten. Because the little figures of the braves on the far walls of the long, low cave were using bone and flint axes to take off the angels’ heads, one by one.
But why the Indians had left one behind, alive, sealed inside a cave in the dark, was still a mystery. Because judging by the way it had dug at that floor, and thrown itself against the walls with stones in its long fingers, and then just ended up waiting and dreaming and reaching out for the minds of the men who came nearest to it, the soldier guessed it had been inside the cave for a very long time. And it had left its bones behind. Because no man walked upright on legs like that. But whatever black spirit those legs and bones had once carried must have still been deep inside that Hill Cumorah when Joseph Smith and Lemuel Hawkins found the cave and opened it up like two greedy lecherin’ fools all out of better ideas.
The dragoon sighed. ‘I reckon what folks say was the angel Moroni promised ole Smith and Hawkins it could make them gods among men. God men. And that they could take as many wives as there were cattle in the field, and as much wealth as was in all the world. So them pair of hustlers with nothing left to lose, who wanted to clean up in the Second Great Awakening, made some kind of bargain.’
The soldier paused, spat into the fire. ‘Seems they had it all too, for a while. Over twenty wives each and a parish of six thousand fools, who handed over all their worldly goods, victuals and assets to them. People who were ready to die for their prophets.
‘But when Smith was murdered in Carthage by the militia, Brigham Young took up Smith’s believers and lit out here from Illinois. Seen his own opportunity there, I reckon. But the other one who was in that cave with Smith, Lemuel Hawkins, goes by the name of Brother Lehi now. And Lehi broke away from Smith early. Started sayin’ he was the true leader of a lost Hebrew tribe, not Joseph Smith. Pronounced himself true king of the Fair-skinned Nephites. Maybe he thinks he is, but whatever he is, it sure ain’t Lemuel Hawkins no more. I reckon whatever was in that cave got hisself into old Hawkins. And it was Hawkins that took my sister, and took the whole damn town too. Aimed to bring his congregation out here. One hundred and forty men, women and children, ever’ one, came with Hawkins. Ain’t but a few left breathin’ now. I been finding and dealing with them . . . all the way in here from Illinois.’
‘’Bout your sister?’
‘Ain’t seen her since ’46. My guess, she’s still followin’ the black carriage, and the black horse.’
‘I sho’ hope she ain’t, soldier,’ the old man said, and looked into the palms of old hands as worn and beaten as boot leather.
The soldier swallowed another mouthful of the bitter coffee. ‘Woulda been a mercy for me to find her back a ways with the others. She was not yet fourteen years old when Lehi took her for his bride. What she is now only the Lord can say.’
‘They’s sayin’ you’s shootin’ Saints dead soon as you look at ’em. Running them to ground. Burnin’ farms.’
The soldier nodded. ‘Some. Sure. Them that used to be neighbours. Family too. Killt my old schoolteacher last week in Bear Creek. But it’s only them that Lehi made into Nephites that I got dealin’s with.’ The soldier looked hard at the old man. ‘I be doing them a favour, and this world too. You truly seen Lehi and his tribe of Fair-skinned Nephites, you’d know it too, old man. Devil in that cave already took ’em for his own.’
The old man wiped his mouth. Produced a small metal flask. Uncapped it, offered it. ‘They was down yonder. South of the Dead Sea.’
The soldier shook his head at the offer. ‘It truly there, the Great Dead Sea?’ he asked.
The old prospector nodded. ‘Seen it with my own eyes jus’ this mornin’ while lookin’ for Brigham Young’s place. I heard of Timpanagos back east. Nary believed a word of it. But it’s right there, just as sho’ as you is, sir. White sand of salt. A dead ocean in the middle of it. Godforsaken. A place damned in the Lord’s eyes, where the damned will surely congregate with impious ways.’
‘Where was Lehi’s place?’
‘Half a day’s ride due south. They got up a few buildings. Some tents too. I took it for Brigham Young’s Zion. Thought I was lost and all turned around from the Wasatch mountains. But I never was, and it weren’t Brigham Young’s new town I found neither. That’s north o’ here. This place must be Lehi’s. It ain’t on any map. Nor should it be. But I sees a bunch of his people comin’ through the desert this morning, out of them buildings they got up like I told you. I saw ’em through a spyglass from back aways, then lit out up here, real quick.’
‘What you see?’
‘Was like you said. Black horse. Black carriage.’
‘How they lookin’ to you?’
The old prospector looked at the embers. Studied his pipe like he was su
rprised to suddenly find it in his hand. Then looked at the soldier, and shrank further down inside his blanket. ‘What’s the worse thing you ever seen?’
In the shadows under the peak of his cap, the dragoon’s eyes narrowed. ‘Same thing as you, I’m bettin’.’
The old man nodded. ‘Seen my young’uns get took by cholera in ’35. Wife a year later. But hard as that was to see, leastways doctors say it’s the way of things. But them Nephites down there ain’t part of any way of things I ever seen afore this mornin’.’
The soldier nodded. Took out his tobacco pouch and a thin sheet of paper. Spat into the fire once he had the cigarette rolled and lit. ‘At Palo Alto a gunner in Ringgold’s artillery fired a single shell, full with shot, and it took down a whole Mexican band. They was playing to rally their side against our artillery. Nary one of them stood up agin. Not even the saviour coulda put all them pieces back together.’ He shook his head. ‘Never thought I’d see a thing as bad as that agin. But I was wrong. How many you see out yonder this mornin’?’
‘Didn’t look long enough to count. But there was him, Preacher Lehi, on his horse. And . . . and his wives in the carriage behind. Some chillun too. Six, seven maybe. Maybe more. An’ all lookin’ like the dead that rise on Judgement Day, but what’s come early.’
The trooper nodded. ‘That’s them.’
‘If they the Devil’s own, soldier, how can a man cut them down?’
Thumbing a hand back at his horse, the soldier said, ‘Eighteen-forty-three breech-loading carbine do some mean work at distance. That’s how I started the cullin’. Take ’em down, then get in close for the disarticulatin’. Afore they’s got wise anyway, and started hidin’ like Injuns. Waitin’ for me. When things get close, I got a smoothbore pistol back there too. Fires a 230-grain ball. Clusters up twelve inches wide on fifty yards. Long as it’s about they’s heads, she be fine.’ He nodded at his sabre. ‘Wristbreaker comes out swift when we get eye-to-eye. The head on a Fair-skinned Nephite got to come away from the shoulders, so Old Wristbreaker done most of them so far.’