The Rock Child

by Win Blevins

  “Brother Young,” put in the mother.

  “Tha’s what I call him,” said the lad, “the old man. To his face.”

  “What does he call you?”

  “Reprobate,” replied the lad quickly.

  Burton wondered whether Oswald knew what the word meant, or how to spell it. And in the mind of an adolescent lad, does a land of whoring sound like hell or heaven? “Um-m-m,” said Burton. What the devil? “Is that all of Brother Young’s description?”

  “Whoring, sleeping with other men’s wives, and divorcing.”

  Burton raised an eyebrow.

  “And gambling, robbing, and murdering,” Oswald added.

  Burton nodded. The lad had adopted Brother Young’s custom of never using a circumspect word where a blunt one would do. The Prophet’s sermons sometimes scandalized the more delicate members of his flock.

  Good God, what a question! What is the world like? Burton recalled the teaching of his Dharma masters. “The spectacle of life is vast and varied,” he said. “It has everything you can imagine in it—fidelity and adultery, generosity and robbery, self-sacrifice and murder, loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, creation through art and destruction by war. The Wheel of Life, some wise men have called it.”

  The lad gave a look of disgust at his mother—wondrously unalloyed, twenty-four-karat disgust. Burton sat in admiration of so pure and riotous a feeling.

  “Oswald needs to hear about books, poetry, culture, the theater, music, philosophy. You are an author,” Harriet Washer said baldly.

  Burton eyed Oswald. The lad didn’t give a damn, the mother was owed nothing, but perhaps there was something to learn…. He cast his voice into a tone of quotation:

  “‘This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’er-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.’”

  “That’s an odd thing to quote to Oswald. Ugly, it is.”

  Burton sighed. “Why have you come to me, Madam?”

  “My boy needs to know there’s more, more than this.” She looked around her with contempt.

  An impertinent question arose. However, Burton was first of all a writer. “Are you not content here, Madam?”

  “Content?” The word sounded like a whoop in her throat. “Humbug. Mormonism, polygamy, the whole of it, the lot of it, humbug.” She sneered, showing long teeth, like a horse’s.

  Burton sat stupefied.

  “Are you shocked? Poor gentile. Poor John Bull that knows nothing. Do you think none of us can see beyond the tip of Brother Young’s nose? Everyone in this house knows what I think.”

  “Are many of your”—Burton searched for the word—“sisters of similar mind?”

  “Pshaw, no, he’s got ’em all bamboozled.”

  “You, um, are a skeptic now, Madam. Were you always?”

  Harriet Washer looked sheepish. “No. I didn’t know any better at first. They don’t educate women, and they don’t want us to think for ourselves. But after a while a brain just naturally sets to work.”

  The lad Oswald was staring out the window. Not that lad’s brain, I’ll wager.

  “So your sisters are true to the faith.”

  Harriet Washer nodded yes. “Which don’t mean they put up with Brigham. Not necessarily. Emmeline Free does. Lucy and Clara Decker do. They make babies like factories, every two or three years. But some of us can’t stand him.”

  “Us, Madam?”

  “Brigham Young hasn’t been in my bedroom since Oswald was born. Nine months before, matter of fact.”

  “Why do you not go elsewhere with your son?”

  She eyed him mockingly. “You know darn well. The Danites. Hear you had a run-in with Porter Rockwell yourself.”

  Burton stood to dismiss them. Damn all. The hairs on his back and bottom prickled with the sense of danger. To die in battle would be one thing, but to be assassinated, perhaps in sleep …

  “You’re a spy yourself, ain’t you?” said Mrs. Washer with a clever look.

  Damn all! Burton opened his mouth to speak rudely. He believed in the saying, “A gentleman is never rude unintentionally,” but now he felt sufficient cause.

  Words from the opposite hall stopped him. “Captain Burton!”

  Two young ladies and a chap, with Asie and Sun Moon in tow. Burton was trapped.

  “I am Gracie Johnson Young.” As she spoke, her eyes slapped Harriet Washer’s face. Mrs. Washer tried to look amused. “This is my sister Ima Herbert Young and her friend Harold Jackson.”

  The wife and daughter dropped their duel of eyes, neither the victor. What about this young man—was he a suitor?

  “We just… wanted to meet you.” Ima Young giggled as she spoke.

  Burton gave the ladies a shallow bow and shook the lad’s hand. Burton judged them as about sixteen. Ripe for marriage, by the standards of the Saints. Brother Young’s daughters. My, wouldn’t that increase eligibility?

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Would you care to see the garden?” said Harold. “Our people are especially interested in horticulture.”

  Burton eyed Sun Moon and Asie. The two had not ventured from the rooms since they arrived, except for meals. They consented with their glances. “Delighted.”

  Gracie Johnson Young led the way, Burton at the rear. He sighed in-audibly. He was more interested in the management of the harem than in flowers.

  Sun Moon wanted very much to walk in the flower garden. She had looked and looked at it from the windows of her bedroom. Compared to her home country, the America she had seen was dry, hard, barren of life. The plains of Kham were a land of snowy mountains and verdant grasslands. Miles and miles of it were marsh, impassable to strangers. Summer was the season the convent permitted her and other young aspirants to go home and be with their families, and that was when the grasslands were a sea of wildflowers, vibrant reds, strong purples, rich yellows, delicate pinks and whites, an exuberance of color, Earth showing off her extravagant fecundity. Sun Moon felt homesick.

  She had never seen a formal garden of flowers, though. She swallowed hard, and forbade herself to remember. At the monastery in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, just a week from her family’s summer camp, were celebrated flower gardens. So she had persuaded her parents …

  No! she told herself, and felt the iron band within her throat tighten.

  She followed the Mormons into the garden, Sir Richard just behind. The August sun slapped her like a half-rough hand. It was harsh, this sun. This country seemed poor beside her home. Dry earth, dry skies. Barren plains surrounded by barren mountains. The Mormons had learned to grow flowers and vegetables by diverting the creeks through ditches along their streets and onto their gardens, which was admirable, but the land did not seem to want to be fruitful.

  She reached out to a rose. The petals were so soft, the fragrance so full. Compassion for all sentient beings. All monks and nuns dedicated their lives to such compassion. She had always felt herself deficient in this feeling. However splendidly she mastered learning, her compassion stayed more a precept of the mind than an inclination of the heart.

  She imagined the struggles of this flower, to break out of the hard shell of the seed, to lie still in the cold ground, to soften in water and expand, to form a slender stem, to accept the sunlight and convert it somehow into strength, to endure the drying, buffeting winds, to reach upward and upward and upward and finally to express the joy of living in a blossom.

  She imagined all that, rehearsed it in her mind. Yet she knew she did not powerfully feel kinship with the flower, or other creatures, or other people, even herself. For the young girl who entered the convent, who spent long hours memorizing, who was often cold, who sometimes longed to be touched and never was, she felt impatience, intolerance of weakness. For the young woman who was abducted, drugged, shipped abro
ad, enslaved, she felt… the iron band.

  She reached out stiffly and cupped the rose in her hands. She wondered what it was like to send out pollen, to receive pollen, to bring forth new creatures, to make seeds and send them out into the world, to germinate and grow. Her mind felt for her womb, her unused womb, but could not find it. And I have no feelings about that.

  She looked at the two young Mormon women chatting with Sir Richard, girls really. They would marry soon, they would procreate, they would act as vessels for the journeys of souls back into this world. They would act as the instruments of life.

  I will never find out how it feels. Her vow of chastity was sufficient reason, one of the five first vows every monk or nun takes. Now she had another reason. Mahakala, teach me that destruction is creation.

  She breathed in the essence of the rose. She noticed her breath, just as she did in meditation. With the same fine attention she noticed the scent. It felt not only sweet but moist, fruitful. Fertile.

  Something in her belly pulsed.

  “I am especially fond of roses,” said Gracie. I was alla-jump at getting to walk through the garden. Few Saints had ever been Gracie-ed with this privilege. Even when I’d been a sort-of Saint, I was a dirty Injun, and dee-definitely not a candidate for a tour of Brother Young’s roses conducted personally by his daughters. Sun Moon wouldn’t have been one either, because she wasn’t any more white and delightsome than me. So we were up against white-folkism again. Sir Richard was white. British. A man of rank. Important with a capital I. They escorted him, they showed him, and we tagged along.

  Gracie pointed out the highlights to us. I never paid half attention, stuff about blooms under two inches or over four inches or in between. All the different colors, red, pink, yellow, white, lavender, and how they were mixed together to delight the eye. The Youngs had roses that were shrubs or little trees, roses that climbed on trellises, roses that were hedges, every kind you can imagine and then some.

  Gracie did tickle me. She set out to explain how hybrids are made, especially some called hybrid perpetuals, which were the latest item on the block. “You cross roses by taking two blossoms …” And here she got stumped. I couldn’t figure why until Harold pitched in.

  “The gardener designates one as male and the other female, one male one female, it doesn’t matter which.” I could see by the wild light in Harold’s that the words “male” and “female” were just too indelicate for Gracie’s dainty lips. Harold was as tickled by this as me, and I recognized a kindred spirit. He went on. “Remove the petals and stamens from the female. When the male produces pollen, you transfer it by hand to the female. Result? Something new under the sun.” He said it like a new kind of rose was the finest thing you could imagine. But I had never eaten a flower (I’ve eat far stranger since, by your lights) and had no plans to try.

  “Stamens?” asked Sun Moon. She didn’t usually speak up.

  “The male part,” said Harold.

  “In Sanskrit the lingam,” put in Sir Richard. I don’t think any of us knew what that meant. “In Tibetan the dorje.”

  “Pollen?” Sun Moon went on, which was real inquisitive for her.

  “What comes out that does the fertilizing,” said Harold. Now he was antsy.

  And I was antsy. Not for the same reason. Gracie pointed off somewhere and said something gay to Sir Richard, I didn’t hear what. They started that way. I turned in front of Sun Moon and held her eye. I nodded my head sideways. We were beginning to get our signals down pretty well by then. She nodded yes, and we wandered off, looking for all the world like we were just turning to another bush of flowers. It was time. Or so I thought.

  “What do you think about that?” I asked, stalling. My legs had the willy-woollies. Those funny pains were saying, “No, no, don’t try it.”

  Sun Moon smiled at me. God, I loved her smile. She didn’t mean to get drawn into small talk, which was part of what I loved about her. Right now that love was bothering me. My body was near panting. Maybe that talk about stamens and pollen and breeding had hotted me up. Near feverish, I blurted it out. “Sun Moon, I am powerful drawn to you.”

  Something Jeehosaphat funny happened in her eyes. What she said was, “I am a nun.”

  That put a foot in my chest, hard. “I, I…” I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I stared at the ground in front of my feet where we were trundling along. I couldn’t help thinking, You are a nun, but are you a virgin? Do you have experience of what Sir Richard calls lingams? Do you want to? Or do you want to shrivel and die an old maid? I was and am ashamed of those thoughts.

  I flicked my eyes sideways at her and right back down. I gave myself a lecture. Probably she didn’t want any experience of lingams. Sure bet she didn’t.

  Maybe she special doesn’t like the idea of mine. Which seemed natural enough. It’s a peculiar-looking thing. No reason to think it might please anyone besides me, and pleasing me was a secret.

  “I just wanted you to know,” I said.

  “I am going back to my home,” she said in a stiffish tone.

  Somehow in those words I took a hint of hope. “I have feelings for you,” I said.

  Now she just walked along silent. Silence was one of the things Sun Moon was best at. My eyes slithered sideways like filings will slide toward a magnet. Somehow I couldn’t turn hope all the way out of my mind. Which just goes to show how foolishness will persist.

  At that moment the others came back for us. “Will you join us at dinner?” Gracie asked. “Harold is coming.”

  Burton looked at Sun Moon and me. We nodded yes. “We’d be grateful,” he told Gracie.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1

  Burton observed that “Us” consisted of Gracie’s mother, Corrine Johnson, and three sisters. Burton was seated on Mrs. Johnson Young’s left, next to Harold. Asie and Sun Moon sat on the other side of their hostess. Everyone was in place on time, perhaps forty in all. When Brother Young saw that all was to his satisfaction, he said grace.

  While large platters of food were being served (Mrs. Twiss acted as housekeeper and another wife as her assistant, or servant), Mrs. Johnson Young held forth verbally like a gusty wind. “Darn nice today.” “The corn is fine this year.” (Indian corn, that is—Americans call corn “wheat.”) “Well, those Neilsons will…” (This with an affronted eye on the Johnson clan.) “Did you know Harold is being set up for West Point?” “That Oswald.” “Green beans again.” None of this was directed at Burton or her other guests, or her children, or anyone in particular. A wind does not care what sail it fills, or whether it fills any. She simply tossed out these remarks at large, and let the world receive them as it would, gazing inscrutably into the distance as she did so.

  However, the captain pursued one comment. “West Point?” It was the American Sandhurst, so Harold must have come from an important family of Saints. “Is that so, Harold?”

  He nodded. “The Governor is arranging it, I think.” So. The United States in its wisdom had seen fit to replace Brother Young as Governor of Utah Territory, and had put its own, secular man in place of the ecclesiastical man. Then it took the politic course and offered the Saints one of the privileges reserved to rank, a place for a son of a leading family at the leading military academy. Burton noted for the sake of his government that Brigham Young was building bridges toward the U.S., not burning them.

  “Do you want to be a soldier?”

  “You bet,” said Harold. Ah, the ubiquitous affirmation of the American West.

  “For the United States?”

  Now he became slightly more guarded. “We Mormons respect authority. We know the necessity of self-defense. As long as I’m not called on to march against my own people …”

  He helped himself to meat—there were beef and mutton—and set to eating in a hearty way.

  Burton offered, “If there’s aught I can tell you, as an old soldier…”

  From Burton’s Journal:

  The rest of the repast c
onsisted of baked potatoes, corn meal mush, the detested green beans, cheese, bread, and milk. The meals tended to be much the same. Each morning as family and guests walked downstairs to breakfast, Young children could be heard chanting, “Peach sauce, peach sauce,” in protest, because it was served every day. Brother Young, however, was reported to be indifferent or impatient with such complaints. If food nourishes the body, in his judgment, that is enough to ask. Teasing tongues in the family note that he himself does not eat the peach sauce for he takes his breakfast alone in Bee Hive House, a boiled egg, milk, cream, bread, and fruit. The egg out of duty, for Brother Young believes it increases fertility.

  The meal was overcooked, but no worse in this respect than what passes for good English cooking. As we were nearing the end of the main part, before dishes were cleared for dessert, came an untoward event. Suddenly in the room rose a hush loud as a roaring wind. One of the childless wives, a frail nothing of a woman of sour face and self-effacing demeanor, rose from her seat and started toward the head table, plate in hand. Every eye in the room followed her. What does she want? everyone wondered, meaning, what delicacy from the head table that is withheld from us? When she arrived, she dared not raise her eyes to her husband’s. His glare would have felled an elephant. She helped herself to some dish she coveted (I heard later it was rhubarb) and returned to her seat.

  The room waited. After a long interval of staring, the Prophet returned to his meal. The children broke into scandalized whispers. I overheard a wife to my left say, “I’ll bet he fixes her so she don’t do that again.” Mrs. Johnson Young looked like she would gladly do the fixing herself. After the prayer meeting Brother Young did summon the transgressor into his office. She came out later like a mouse scurrying for a hole.

  Dinner is followed by an hour of rest, then prayer meeting. First the family sings several hymns, of the low-church sort and with some infusion of Welsh spirit. Brother Young then reads prayers from the Bible. Though I know him to be utterly sincere, I did sometimes get the impression that he was not so much entreating the Divinity as talking things over, one great man to another. Sometimes he even seemed to give advice. After the prayer meeting the family lingers for an hour of domestic felicity. Having wearied of the company (I have endured my share of prayer and unction from English rectors), I retired to our rooms to write in this notebook.