The Wreckage of Eden

by Norman Lock

  “My opinion . . .?” In a stupor because of the cold, I’d been only half-listening.

  “Does He reveal His features in a landscape?”

  I smiled at the memory of your school notebook, in which you’d drawn the footsteps of prehistoric beasts.

  “You find me amusing?” he asked petulantly.

  “Not at all, Ethan. I was remembering a friend.” I was silent a moment, and then I said, “I scarcely know anymore if I believe in God, much less in expressions of divine intent on earth or in the heavens.”

  He glared at me, and I was surprised by his disapproval. We’d often spoken about God and, like schoolboys, had debated His existence—more in boredom than with genuine interest. He’d assumed that I was devout, an assumption that left him free to play the devil’s advocate. I guessed that it was not my religious uncertainty that had shocked him. Had I been anyone else, it would not have mattered. Because I was his chaplain, he couldn’t tolerate my lack of conviction regardless of his own doubts. I expect I seemed to him no better than a counterfeiter. I’d abused his trust. My ministry, far from home, in the valley of the shadow of death—or, to be factual, in the valley of the Wahsatch and Oquirrh Mountains—was a fraud.

  We made small talk briefly before he walked away “to reckon the valley down below.” Gant was a good officer and well respected by his men and his superiors. His knowledge of geography also made him invaluable, and he could often be seen with a telescope trained on a distant plain or mountain pass. Whether he was earnestly searching for the enemy or a trace of Him in the folds of the snow-covered hills, I could not say. During that Utah winter, he might have yearned to prove Guyot right.

  Ten months later, I would search the crags of John Brown’s face for a sign of God’s approval and see there only what a man would show for whom martyrdom was a victory.

  I recall one other serious conversation we had that winter, whose subject engendered in us an equal and genuine outrage: the Mountain Meadows Massacre. On September 7, the Baker-Fancher wagon train had been attacked in southern Utah by the militia, which claimed that six of the party were army spies. The emigrants withstood the siege until, on the eleventh, the Mormons raised the white flag. They offered the gentiles safe passage through the valley if they would lay down their arms and promise never to return. Later on, disguised as Paiutes, the Mormons attacked the unarmed party. Save for the infants, all 120 emigrants were murdered.

  “Butchered would be more apt!” growled Gant, who had been sewing on a button. “They found hanks of hair—women’s hair—hanging from sagebrush, as well as shreds of their clothes, and children’s, too, and, for a mile along the Old Spanish Trail, mutilated corpses.”

  Feeling obliged by my office, I muttered the invocation from the Order of the Burial of the Dead: “O Lord Jesus Christ, Who wilt come again to judge the quick and the dead, and call forth all who sleep in the graves, either to the resurrection of life or the resurrection of condemnation.”

  We’d heard rumors of the massacre, but few among us could credit them. Men had yet to witness farmers’ fields harrowed by mortar shells and sown with gore and shattered limbs, creeks turned red, as though Aaron had stirred them with his miraculous staff, raw ditches heaped with corpses, muskets clutched in their blackened hands, and row upon row of sickbeds, white and crimson, like gravestones brightened by poppies.

  That’s too pretty a description for anything as ugly as war—isn’t it, Emily? There is no way to tell of it in words . . . no way to set down its horrors with ink on paper. I’d have to write it in blood, gall, excrement, mud, soot, with the rheumy discharge of the dying, with the tears of the wounded—with more blood. I’d have to take bone, teeth, and ashes and, with a mortar and pestle, turn what was human into powder. Then, like a witch at her cauldron, I’d mix those foul ingredients together, and, with that reeking ink, I’d write war on human parchment.

  “I met an infantry sergeant this morning who’d seen the aftermath of the carnage with his own eyes,” said Gant, “else I could not have believed it. You know how soldiers love stories.”

  “We all do,” I said irrelevantly. Though they are, in their embroidery, useless, I thought. Poetry even more so. Photographs like those by Brady and O’Sullivan are what’s needed to say—however mutely—what war is.

  “I would not have believed that men—even Mormon men—were capable of such an atrocity,” said Gant. Anger had misshapen his face. “It cannot be allowed to go unpunished! We must hunt them down and hang them!” he cried with the fervor of Jeremiah.

  One-hundred-and-twenty men, women, and children—this was a class of slaughter all its own, with no word to signify its enormity. We were on our way to wars of annihilation, which we had been rehearsing with the Indians and the Mexicans. Soon white men would kill other white men by the thousands and the tens of thousands. We would need a new arithmetic of slaughter, and the ledgers would grow fat with bloodred entries declaring the nation’s bankruptcy and a hunger only flesh and more flesh could appease.

  “We must do as John Brown advocates,” snarled Gant, biting off the thread and tugging at the button on his tunic. “Take ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’”

  His ferocity surprised me. I saw hatred in his eyes and a nearly overmastering rage in the tremor of his hand as he jabbed the needle into the spool of thread.

  There was blood on John Brown’s hands, I said to myself, though it might not have been innocent.

  “Well, what do you have to say, Robert?” asked Gant with a stern look.

  I suppose, because of my silence, he’d begun to think me indifferent to the carnage. You know how people can be suspicious of those who do not hate as they do. It is a perversion of John 13:34, when Jesus said to His disciples, “. . . love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”

  “I hardly know what to say,” I replied truthfully.

  He gazed at me in that mistrustful way of his, and I knew that I’d better say something.

  “I can hardly take it in.” No, that wouldn’t do. “I’ve never heard of such infamy.” Not enough fire. “I’d like to see them shot down like the dogs they are!”

  Instantly, I thought of Carlo and was sorry for the comparison, one which, loving dogs, I did not mean. The simile and the vehemence in which I’d uttered it appeared to satisfy Gant. He eased his body’s spring, which had tensed instinctively against me.

  “Yes, yes, Robert. Hanging is too good for them. Shooting—or burning them, like the heretics they are—that’s what they deserve. Would you strike the match?” he asked slyly.

  I could not meet his gaze. The odd thing, Emily, was that, in my heart, I did revile the perpetrators and did think they ought to be cut to pieces like the slave catchers at Pottawatomie Creek. There is a contrariety in our kind, however, that will sometimes insist on entertaining an opposing thought and, out of spite, on defying the majority. Most have the good sense to conceal their opinion, although there will always be some who behave like the small man who provokes a much larger one so that he can have the satisfaction of a bloody nose. The situation was grotesque. I wanted to tell Gant that the Mormons had been driven to desperate, even heinous measures by our aggression, but I kept my mouth shut. I tasted ashes; Gant was poking at the fire with a stick, whether to inflame it or his own passion, I couldn’t tell.

  As a man of the cloth, if not a Catholic during the Inquisition or a Puritan at the Salem witch trials, I was expected to denounce Mormon depravity.

  “You’re a parson—don’t you think every last one of Brigham Young’s gang of idolaters should be exterminated?”

  I wanted to ask him whether we should also murder women and children. A braver man would have asked. A true Christian would have also. But at the time, I was hardly either. I did, however, say, “Our mission is to remove Young from office and replace him with Buchanan’s man. We’re here to restore the authority of the United States and the Constitution and nothing else. The commission of at
rocities should be left to the other side.”

  Although my voice had broken like that of a boy in need of his first shave, I felt the warmth of satisfaction suffuse me.

  Gant frowned. “Reverend Watkins has something different to say about our mission among the infidels.”

  “Watkins is a fire-breathing Baptist,” I replied, “and would just as soon see us burn in hell than picnic in paradise.”

  Gant and I never spoke much after that. He was not the only soldier in the territory with a low opinion of the Mormons or of mankind in general. Morale had gone down along with the provisions and the temperature. The country was inhospitable; the Mormons were welcome to it! If we could have had a battle or two—even if we’d lost—we would have felt better for it. The Nauvoo Legion was as elusive as the Mexican irregulars had been, choosing not to engage us but, rather, to harass our flanks, cut off our supplies, stampede our horses, and deprive us of forage by setting fire to their fields. After Young ordered the evacuation of Salt Lake City, the townspeople prepared to burn their shops and houses to the ground. The farmers chose to set fire to their barns rather than to sell us so much as an egg! We were hungry, but not so that we would have killed them for their eggs. We brooded and waited. If only there’d been a battle to rouse us from our apathy! We’d have shaken off our indifference as a dog does rain.

  I think we knew well before its end that the war against Utah’s Mormons was a farce. It marked a milestone on my road to perdition, or—forgive the arrogance—another Station on the way to my Calvary. I ought to blush for shame to have drawn so overweening a comparison, but I was, by then, devoid of it. It had been drained from me like blood drawn by a phlebotomist, leaving my soul ashen.

  –12–

  ARNOLD TAUBER WAS AMONG THE FIRST reinforcements to arrive from Kansas, where he’d been posted. Still a corporal, he had no interest in promotion; his military service was a lengthy sabbatical in which he could read and write his own history of the world, as he would grandly describe the notebook in which he constantly scratched, although he never offered to let me read it. Although but recently arrived in the territory, he had already lost his mount to a Mormon-set brush fire.

  “Not even Mexicans would deliberately kill a horse!” he said indignantly. “It must be true what they say about the Mormons: They eat their dogs and beat their wives.”

  Sick to death of the Mormons and their enormities, I did not reply. Unlike Gant, Arnold was content to let the matter drop.

  He had been given picket duty on the western perimeter, above the ruins of the fort. I would sometimes keep him company. I remember an afternoon when an immense sky could have convinced an atheist to believe in a Supreme Being, not excepting Joseph Smith’s or the Muslims’ or the Aztecs’. Who can claim to know His mind? The Wahsatch Mountains, their granite shoulders bluish white, presided over a solemn reaffirmation of belief, but the moment was short-lived, and my heart would once again fill up with snow.

  “I’m damned sick of it!” grumbled Arnold.

  I didn’t know whether he meant the winter, the war, or his own weariness. The Navuoo Legion favored night raids, which kept us sleepless in our tents.

  “Have you burned ‘Rome’?” I asked wryly, alluding to his beloved Gibbon.

  “No, though I’ve been tempted: It’s a fat book and would keep me warm awhile.”

  “Private Endicott can play Nero with his fiddle if you do,” I said, hoping to cheer him.

  He stopped his pacing, put the butt of his rifle on the ground, and rested, as though it were a staff and he a shepherd overlooking a drove of rocks. For a picket to halt without reason was a violation of the regulations.

  “Johnston can shoot me if he wants,” he said. I watched the smoke of his breath leak out between his fingers as he blew into his cupped hands. “Not even Moroni could get through those snowed-in passes.”

  My eyes must have glazed over in reverie, because he asked, “What’re you thinking about, Robert?”

  “My daughter,” I replied, shaking off the memory of her mewling and puking on my lap.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Still in Amherst, living with my aunt.”

  “I have a son,” he said. “Edward Gibbon Tauber. He’s in Indiana with his mother.”

  There was nothing more to be said by either of us. Arnold shouldered his musket and began to pace the ridge again.

  Toward the end of the rebellion, I happened on a Mormon militiaman shortly after he had died. I’d heard him scream; he was horribly burned. The Mormons liked to set fire to dry grass upwind of our wagons in the hope of engulfing them. But the wind had abruptly changed, and he’d been caught by the blaze intended for us.

  I jumped from the wagon in which I’d been riding with Chaplain Watkins. He’d been boring me with a preview of his Sunday-morning sermon, when he would once again bully the men with the threat of annihilation. I knelt beside the dead man, conquering an urge to vomit, and began to cry. It was too much—it was all too much to bear! Watkins caught up to me and, having pulled me from the corpse, railed against my “unmanly display.”

  I pushed him away as a child would a parent who has said something mean.

  “He was the enemy!” said Watkins coldly, and, for an instant, I saw not the scrawny Baptist preacher from Kentucky, but Agamemnon at Troy, before he was murdered in his tub. “You should be giving thanks to the Almighty for having rid the earth of another infidel!” he thundered, as though he were in his Sunday pulpit, chastising the Danville Baptists.

  Always, always murder has ruled us—in ancient days and in the days at hand. We are born to be cut down. It is a fairy tale to say that we will be reborn as grass or as anything else. We are a burnt stick, I thought, as I smelled the Mormon’s roasted flesh.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  Much later, I understood that those two words were, in their bald finality, as pathetic as Christ’s last uttered on the cross, “It is finished,” and I felt His Passion for the very first time.

  “Even in death, a Mormon infidel is our sworn enemy and God’s!” Watkins hissed. “His pollution would sicken the river Jordan, and his unholy angel sow the Jezreel Valley with salt!”

  He was raving, and I was sick with disgust. I shook him off and put my hand into the charred rag of the dead man’s coat and drew out the Book of Mormon, bound in black leather and marvelously unharmed. Beside himself, Watkins leaped at me, and we grappled fiercely on the ground.

  “Burn it!” he shrieked like a Pharisee in a Passion play. “Burn that blasphemous book, or you will burn in everlasting fire!” I held fast to the book and managed to knock Watkins down. “Traitor! Apostate!” he shouted.

  I don’t know why I fought him. I don’t know why I held on to the Mormon’s book. It meant nothing to me. The dead man meant nothing to me. I was sick of fighting. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see my daughter. I wanted to forget all about the Mexican War, the Border War, and the Utah War.

  Watkins picked himself up from the scorched earth and came at me, this time with a heavy stick. He cudgeled me twice across the shoulders, hard enough to make me yelp. Enraged, I took the stick from him and brought it crashing down on his head. He dropped, heavy as a sack of grain. I felt his pulse, lifted his eyelid, put my ear to his chest, and I realized I had killed him. As though I’d crushed the serpent’s head beneath my heel, I rejoiced, took up the Mormon’s Bible, and turned to the final passage, which should, I reasoned, concern redemption or last things. I read the words—convinced of their futility—that I had been given in order to understand His absence.

  “And now I bid unto all, farewell. I soon go to rest in the paradise of God, until my spirit and body shall again reunite, and I am brought forth triumphant through the air, to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah, the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead. Amen.”

  I had Watkins’s blood on my hands. I wiped them on the grass the fire had spared. I ran to the wagon for a shovel, and then I dragged
Watkins by the ankles beyond a low rise of reddish dirt. I was someone else, and, as someone else, I began to dig a hole—a grave in which to dump the body. The wind rose from nowhere and said, “This is not the way.”

  It was God’s voice I’d heard in the wind—ours or the Mormon’s. Unless the voice had been my own. I was distressed—too feeble a word! Distraught, then. I felt as a man very likely does when the rope is put around his neck or what the rope feels in anticipation of bearing—to the limit of its strength—the weight of a man. Mad thoughts! But no matter whose voice I had heard, I took heed. I dragged Watkins to the wagon and laid him among bales of hay meant for the famished horses.

  I drove the wagon to Colonel Johnston’s, and, waiting outside his tent, I wondered what I would tell him: “I killed Captain Watkins,” or “Captain Watkins was killed by Paiutes,” loyal to the Mormons. I knew what I ought to say. I knew what God wanted to hear, and I knew what you would think of me if, out of cowardice, I did not say it. I also knew the consequences of having killed a brother officer, regardless of mitigating circumstances. What mitigation could there be for one who had given comfort to an enemy, whether quick or dead? Soon enough, I’d be in Watkins’s promised hell, tasting brimstone, which, he had assured us, is more unpalatable than castor oil and just as efficacious—unless the Mormons were right and I would be pardoned at “the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah” for having shown mercy to one of His elect by praying for him in the words of his own prophet.

  I was afraid, and when I was called inside to report, I did what anyone in his right mind would have done: I lied. And with the lie, I gave up all claims to God’s blessing and was, at last, emptied of faith in Him and in myself. I was Adam fallen once again, nevermore to get up.