Jubilee thought of himself as a royal cat: sustained by the royal and the wealthy to keep their domains free of troublesome mice.
Over the past three years the Apache had become more a threat to the Sonorans than they had ever been before, thanks to the efficiency of the U.S. Army and its crushing defeat of Cochise. The Chiricahua and Mescalero, even some White Mountain renegades, all had bolted from Arizona Territory, fleeing south across the border into the mountains of northern Sonora. It was down there that those American Apaches preyed on the tiny Mexican settlements, forcing the provincial governors to offer rich bounties for Apache scalps.
How quickly Usher had learned the way of the scalp hunter: the Sonoran officials would pay handsomely for any black scalp. It was that simple. Be it Apache warrior, woman, or child—be it Mexican peon, woman, or child, the ruins of those sundered villages made to appear the work of the Apache in turn renewing the call for some action to be taken against the marauding savages.
The gold and specie the Mexican officials paid for those burlap sacks Usher’s army stuffed with stiffened, grisly, red-hued trophies had been more than enough revenue for Jubilee to keep his small army together. In fact, the Danite leader had discovered just how easy it was to recruit more volunteers in Arizona Territory: a few breeds and Mexicans, to be sure—but mostly those who had been drawn to Usher’s band of zealots were men in need of steady work with a gun.
Jubilee kept them up to their elbows in steady work. And blood. And scalps.
When he grew weary of the hunt and the carnage, Usher ordered his army back to one of the larger provincial towns to present his bags to the local officials: Cibuta, or Magdalena, Cananea, and Turicachi. There the debt was always paid promptly, and without fail, from local treasuries. Those officials knew they were sure to be reimbursed from the provincial capital of Hermosillo. It had not always been so.
One failure to pay the promised bounty, seasons ago—and the Mexican officials came to realize just how great a mistake it would be to loose Usher’s carnivorous brigands on the countryside.
Furious that he had been refused his money, Jubilee released his hounds of war. They had pillaged, raped, and killed, burning to the ground a small village of farmers and shepherds just the way Usher’s army rode through Indian camps dotting the scrub in the distant foothills and mountains. When the government sent its soldiers against the invading army of Jubilee Usher, his gunmen turned the Mexicans around, then made slow work of the hapless soldiers over three days of a running fight, chasing the Mexicans back toward the valley towns and settlements. Although they were outnumbered by the provincial soldiers, Usher’s men clearly had their enemy outgunned. These bounty hunters enjoyed prolonging the inevitable end—eventually killing all but one, a major who spoke a smattering of English.
Leaving the man barefoot and in his underwear, Usher dispatched the major back to Hermosillo with a message for the governor and all the venal officials around him who had refused to pay the offered bounty that first time.
“Your soldiers cannot prevent the Apache from banging on your doors. If you do not pay—your soldiers will not be able to keep my army from the walls of your cities and towns and villages. If you will not give me what you guaranteed me—I will take it out in blood, crossing and recrossing your land, leveling it all with a clean swath of my bloody sword!”
It had been a message not lost on the Mexican officials.
In seventy-two Usher had expanded his operations as the Apache, no respecters of any boundary, crossed over the mountains into the province of Chihuahua, making things hard on outflung villages like Nacori, Chico, and Madera, Huachinera and Huasabas, over to Sahuaripa and down to Yepachic. Back and forth across that continental divide his gunmen rode, driving the Apache before them and in the end taking all that they wanted as a virtual army of occupation. They used the sheep herded by the poor villagers for target practice. They took girls and women with them whenever they left a jacal, using their prisoners as long as the women served their purpose—then leaving them behind in the desert to find their own way back to what was left of their dusty, bloodstained villages, or die alone and forgotten.
After the first real cold rain of autumn that clearly announced the coming of winter, Jubilee had collected the Mexican bounty and turned his army north in triumph. As always, they rode wide around Fort Bowie and Fort Thomas, especially Fort Apache. To fight the puny Mexican army was one thing. But Usher would hardly be fool enough to prod the might of the U.S. Army against him.
No less than Brigham Young himself might tempt the fates, pushing and goading the federal government to find out just how far he could go before he had to back down. But Jubilee Usher was a different sort. He knew enough about fighting and killing, enough of the blood sport of war, to stay clear of the army.
After all, such just might prove to be an admirable alliance come a day when Usher needed the help of the U.S. Army to pry that heretic Brigham Young out of his throne in Deseret.
Once more winter settled down on the central basin, and those last, short days of December waned. Again Jubilee led his long column of weary, bloodied gunmen back to the security of John Doyle Lee’s settlement at Cedar City. It was here his army rested and recruited itself each winter, celebrating their victories and spending hard-earned blood money, waiting again for the advent of spring when they could ride south, to determine if the cowed officials of Mexico were once more in need of their specialized services.
“Where else is an army such as this to go, brother?” Usher had asked the double-dyed pious Lee for the first time that autumn of sixty-nine.
Among the polygamist’s faithful the Danite gunmen had wintered until that spring of seventy, when they rode out to the south and discovered the rich cornucopia to be made in Apache scalps. Usher knew Lee was relieved to see his army of gunmen depart.
But when the raiding season ended, Jubilee had needed a place to post his brigands until the following spring allowed them to take to the blood trail once more.
“John Doyle,” he had replied in that soft rumble of his cannonlike voice, “these are Saints. My Saints. Like you, like me. How well you know we are not of the mold Brigham would want of us. But instead, we are born of the mold Almighty God has Himself made—formed us of its dust and clay—then shattered that mold into an infinite number of pieces. Charging us to go forth and do His work. You,” Usher said, snatching up Lee’s black wool lapel and leaning his big face inches from the polygamist’s, “you and me are destined to control the fate of the Church, of the faithful, of this whole earthly Empire!”
Lee had removed Usher’s hand from his coat, slowly, his fiery eyes narrowing as they rose from the grisly necklace of human ears interlaced with blackened, shriveled penises once pendant between the legs of Usher’s victims, worn front and back like a medieval church scapular.
His eyes turned up in an owlish frown, Lee told the Danite leader, “Only so long as your soldiers walk the path of righteousness. Only so long as that, Jubilee—will you be allowed to commune among us. These are gentle folk and you, your men—”
“Are rough-hewn, yes,” Jubilee had interrupted. “They are fodder only, Lee. Don’t you see? Among them are the makings of our greatness. Yours and mine.”
“Count me out of your blood work, Jubilee,” Lee had protested, wagging his head meaningfully, his Adam’s apple as big as a turkey’s egg.
Usher had laughed, a caustic sound, like ice breaking apart in northern rivers. When he spoke, his words came sharp, filled with bile, cutting with a lasting sting. “Seems I recall a great deal of blood work done at the behest of John Doyle Lee back to 1857,” he said more softly then, theatrically. “That train of Gentiles, wanting nothing more than to make their way to California. You slaughtered them all—man, woman, and child at Mountain Meadows—didn’t you?”
“What of it!” he protested in a voice as tart as pickling brine, the rangy dance of his big Adam’s apple bobbing up and down his stringy neck.
He had rocked back into Lee’s face, the venom returned to his words, licking a fleck of spittle from the fleshy curve of his lower lip as he said, “Don’t seek to preach to me about blood work, John Doyle Lee! We know where we each stand, whereof the call from on high comes. And now we share the same dream of seeing that false prophet Brigham Young removed from his temporal throne.”
“The years have brought a change in … circumstances, shall we say?” Lee replied, his face as dreary as a priest’s at a sacrifice. “I want nothing more than to live out my life—”
“The old fires dying in you, my friend?” Jubilee had asked. Then sighed. “All right. I think we understand one another. For the time, I only ask you and yours to help me embrace these men within the folds of your faithful for the coming winter. Help me teach them the true faith, John Doyle—and in return you and yours will be paid handsomely for all that we are fed, for the roofs put over our heads.”
“I cannot escape the feeling that you have brought to my doorstep an army of occupation,” Lee protested softly, his arms swung out wide as if submitting to crucifixion. “These are gentle, common people—”
“But we both know it will take an army, its arm raised in vengeance, to seize this land from the heretic. That army then to wield its sword to wrest our kingdom away from the Gentiles and their federalized government so far away in Washington City. Look out that window, John Doyle! Out there I have the beginnings of just such an army. And if you stand beside me, together we will not fail Almighty God!”
So Usher led them north to Utah again in seventy, there to sojourn another winter in the bosom of Lee’s Mormon faithful. And what was all the better, Jubilee wintered right under the nose of that heretic prophet, Brigham Young himself! Winter after winter Jubilee returned them here, leading them up from the blood plain of Arizona and New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua. From here in Cedar City, Jubilee could keep a watchful eye on the development of affairs among the Prophet’s insiders, the political machinations of the Quorum of Twelve, the pulse of the rock-solid membership from Stake to Stake. He sent those he could trust the most to be his eyes and ears among Young’s faithful. In the end the Danite chose emissaries who had never been known to associate with Jubilee Usher, new men recruited across the past few years and taught the requisite theology at Usher’s knee, told who to find and who to talk to, who to trust and who to keep at arm’s length. It was always a winter’s task, this grooming of a handful of his crude hellions, making of them men of the cloth, men the likes of Lemuel Wiser.
There were cracks in that solid wall Brigham Young had fortified about himself, cracks through which Usher made his patient, dogged inroads: waiting, waiting, waiting for the moment to bring that unsteady wall down around the Prophet. It would not be long, he told himself now as he washed the woman’s back with hot, soapy water. Steady progress could be measured, progress in the crumbling of Young’s hold on the Church and its Empire.
“And you will stand at my side, dear woman,” he told her, dragging the coarse cloth back and forth over her white shoulders. How he loved women untouched by the discoloring rays of the sun. “A most fitting life-mate for the new Prophet. How the faithful will rejoice in our happiness.”
She always sat quiet and unmoving at these times, also taking refuge in the warmth of this small room and the heady steam rising from the tub of soapy water Negro George had prepared for them. Twice a week Jubilee ordered a bath drawn, filling this large cedar tub that was itself long enough for even a man of Usher’s height to stretch out and fully immerse himself. It was Lee’s old baptismal pool, relegated to a stall of a little-used barn years ago when a new and larger one had been constructed for the polygamist by Usher’s winter soldiers. It was then that Jubilee adopted the tub and discovered its most savory use.
While other Saints might not practice the healthful properties of regular bathing, Jubilee Usher was a man who believed in the periodic, methodical cleansing of the body as much as he believed in that periodic and seasonal cleansing of his soul: the release of pent-up lusts and furies on the heathen populations with which this land was so cursed.
“If Lee ever discovers what delicious, what randy use I have made of his old baptismal,” he murmured to her as he drew the soapy cloth across the woman’s shoulders, “I’m afraid even he would raise his hand against me. To think—the blasphemy, he would cry!”
Seated outside the tub behind the woman, Jubilee gently pulled her head back and kissed her, hard and moist and long. She did not resist when he forced open her mouth. But neither did she kiss him back. He let the back of the woman’s head rest against the gunwale of the cedar tub. His cheek lying against hers, strands of her soppy hair dripped over his shoulder as he murmured warmly into the dampness of her ear. Jubilee brushed the coarse cloth up and down the round softness of her breasts, enjoying the reddening, rigid response of her nipples as he excited them. Lightly he kissed them, sucking on her breasts, as sweet as scorched honey.
Outside his bathhouse each spring arose the tremulous squeals of baby frogs in the marsh, reminding him it was time for another season of renewal. Soon would come his appointed hour to march south. Killing savages and Mexicans alike, wiping them off the face of God’s kingdom, was nothing less than ripping good fun.
He raked his teeth down the side of her neck, shifted himself, and came round to settle where he could bring one of her breasts to his mouth. How he liked this too—the way her breath caught in her throat when his hand plunged into the water and dallied between her thighs. Still, each time she composed herself after that initial surprise. Nonetheless, after so many years, he still waited for her to lose herself in him.
But he would be patient with her. The same way he had become patient with the pace of events in Deseret. Five years ago he had returned in what he then hoped would be triumph, only to find that his loyalty had been discarded, torn asunder and thrown aside by the powers of the Church. But he would be patient a little longer.
Usher rose at the side of the tub, laid aside the washing cloth, and began to push the pearl buttons through their holes in his shirt, then hung it on the back of a chair.
His faithful soldiers always left their victims sprawled in blackened pools of their own crimson and excrement, each man, woman, and child lying in their horrific wig of dried blood where the flies and beetles and winged creatures began to gather moments after his gunmen ripped the hair off the gaping skulls and stood to hang their trophies red-raw at their belts like profane pendants above the warm bodies the men would then take their pleasure on.
Jubilee took one button at a time from its buttonhole in his britches, savoring his growing desire for her, the delicious way his flesh anticipated hers.
Indeed, the cracks in Young’s defense were widening. Through them one day soon he would ride at the head of a mighty army to wrest power from that pretender to the throne.
Laying his wool britches over the back of another chair, Jubilee stepped out of his temple garments. He straightened them on a hanger. They were all he wore for underwear. Like the other faithful, Usher believed no clothing was to touch his body—nothing but these ordained and sacred garments, which served as a shield, much as the strength of his soul shielded him from the harm of evil so rife and rampant in the Church itself.
Outside he heard the rise of some laughter, a snippet of a song, and knew the men enjoyed themselves here, as they regained their spiritual strength for spring’s coming sojourn into the land of the heathen. From time to time each winter, he regaled his soldiers with flip made with imported rum and John Doyle Lee’s own home-brewed potato beer, the heady concoction flavored with cinnamon and blended with a hot poker.
He turned from smoothing the garments and looked at her reclining there in the soapy water, curls of steam rising from the tub’s still surface, soppy ringlets of her blond hair turned dark, pasted against the side of her face as her eyes watched him approach, then looked away to stare at the ceiling.
Yes, he thought, th
e Mormon faithful. They would once more respond to a charismatic leader. They could not fail to respond to his power once he made his play against Young.
As big a man of towering bulk as he was, Usher slipped into the tub with barely a ripple, settling back against the side, where he took up one of her feet and kneaded the sole of it with his thumbs. Her eyelids always fell when he did that—perhaps in some hedonistic response to the sheer pleasure of it, perhaps because she realized what always came next.
After kneading the sole of her other foot, Jubilee brought the woman’s feet together at his groin, stroking his soft underbelly with her wrinkled toes, working the feet downward, ever downward until he had them both pressed around his hardening flesh. Up and down, slowly, deliciously slow he moved her feet along his shaft in that warming womb of soapy water, studying her half-lidded eyes as he brought himself to a full erection.
Most Mormon women were flannel-mouthed and all too often kept their legs locked together so that a man could never have any randy fun for fun’s own sake. But not this one.
He could never think of giving her up.
A year after Jubilee’s army first came to winter in Cedar City, Brigham Young himself had given Usher’s father the directive to forward a message for the elder’s son, in whatever manner he could contact Jubilee:
Give up the woman. Give her back. Sell her if you must. She is nothing more than a slave for your carnal needs and will never belong in the holy company of the Saints.
Little did the Prophet know what needs this woman truly satisfied in Jubilee Usher.
Oh, Young made much of the fact that in February of 1870 Utah had followed Wyoming’s 1869 lead in granting women full suffrage rights. But in this realm of the Church Empire women served their greatest function not as political tools in the electoral process—but as repositories of future Saints. It was through the woman’s power to conceive, carry, and give birth to babies that the Mormon faithful grew. Evermore were the disembodied spiritual star-seeds required to find earthly, temporal homes among the Latter-day Saints. A woman’s greatest role on this earth, her spiritual gift, lay in giving birth to a baby where would rest another wandering, disembodied soul come home at last to Zion.
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