The Rock Child

by Win Blevins

  2

  “Want to see something?” Harold had a hint of a crazy smile, and I knew he’d picked me out as a kindred spirit. Without any notion of what he had in mind, I said yes. He nodded toward some chairs, and we sat.

  The family talk that came after the prayer meeting was breaking up, and wives and children were heading back to their rooms, or bedroom suites, as they were called (in those days I thought it was spelled sweets). Brother Young was just perching there in his big stuffed chair, answering a question for this one or that, dispensing and withholding, male of the pride.

  “Boobledy boo boo,” said Harold.

  I gave him a queer look.

  “Boobledy boobledy,” he said again, that glint in his eye.

  “Heckahoy,” I answered.

  He turned to a distant horizon, clicked his heels, and saluted smartly. “Ahoy, heck!”

  “Heck?” says I, scrambling to my feet.

  “Heck,” he confirmed, pointing.

  “I fear the fires of heck, but I didn’t expect them this close.”

  Both of us chuckled a bit, and looked around for some more fun.

  Brother Young stood and looked around like a man who doesn’t know what to do with himself. He fished in a coat pocket for something and brought it out in a white handkerchief, all the while looking distracted, like he was really doing something else—you know how a man taking a pee will look around like he’s doing something else? Then he fidgeted for a minute and set out down one hall.

  There were two halls, the left visible and the right out of sight. Brother Young headed down the one where we could see. “I thought so,” says Harold. “Watch this!” He sounded like it must be better than ice cream on a sultry day.

  Brother Young wandered along the hall, that white handkerchief tucked up in one hand and one end dangling. There were doors on the right and the left, doors of main bedrooms where wives slept, sitting rooms, and kids’ rooms. A couple of times, when a door was open, Brother Young spoke softly to someone inside. Seemed like the words must have been kindly, but the way he stood was kind of cramped, like a man who’s uneasy with what he’s going to do. He went clear to the end door, looked in briefly, moved his lips, and came back our way.

  Harold was tight as a fiddle string—you could have twanged him. But he kept on trying to sit relaxed and idle, like we were just two young fellas enjoying a social hour. At last Brother Young came back into the parlor and passed into the other hall. “Evening, Brother Young,” said Harold. The Lion of the Lord gave a flicker of an eyebrow as he walked by, but you couldn’t have said whether it was a greeting or not.

  “Damn,” said Harold. “I thought he’d go for Mary.”

  Not yet daring to guess what Harold meant, I just tried to keep the expression on my face from looking stupid.

  “C’mon!”

  He jumped up, but after two steps began to creep. I followed, tiptoeing along like a thief. We got up to a big urn at the corner of the hall. You idjit, you spy on the man who gives you sanctuary? That’s what I was screaming inside my head. Harold stationed himself close behind the urn and motioned me behind him. He won’t just condemn you to heck, he’ll call Porter Rockwell to escort you! I’d have run, but fear turned my legs to noodles.

  “Know what that is in his hand?” whispers Harold.

  I shook my head, though Harold couldn’t see it.

  Brother Young ambled down the hall, hesitating now and then, cocking his head upward like he was checking out the sky straight through the ceiling.

  “It’s chalk!”

  I didn’t get it.

  Brother Young acted for all the world like a man making some sort of big show or playacting. But why?

  “He’s picking out THE one. Of the night.”

  Finally Brother Young kind of sidled over to one door, turned his back to it, looked about while acting like he wasn’t, turned toward the door again, and touched it with that handkerchief. I couldn’t see if it left a chalk mark. What I remembered later was what a whipped and hangdog air he had.

  Harold whirled on me. His eyes were huge. For a second I thought he was going to pounce. “Alice!” he practically screamed in a whisper. And he ran off, going, “It’s A-a-alice!” and giggling like a maniac.

  I ran right with him. I’d spent my life scooting away from Mormon churchmen, and Brigham Young was the churchiest of ’em all. But I wasn’t every bit as fast as I might have been. What Harold had said had given me carnal thoughts, and my thing was a little heavy there in front, wagging back and forth.

  Sitting on his small daybed, Richard Burton continued his journal by candlelight.

  Human curiosity is such that readers will want to know just how the conjugal aspects of Mormon polygamy are conducted. As far as this observer can tell, every manner conceivable may be employed. The imagination of the gentiles, though, is much inflamed by speculation. This is the sort of anecdote some spread:

  “One Mormon husband and his three wives were obliged every night to sleep in the same room. The first wife required her husband to sleep with her in an upper bunk, the second and third being relegated to the lower. When the husband felt desire for the second or third wife, he simply said so. The wife gave her permission, as long as he returned to her bunk when finished. He performed the copulation and slept the rest of the night with wife number one.”

  This is manifestly nothing more than an example of the preoccupation of puritanical American culture with concupiscence. The crowing tone of the anecdote gives it away.

  First-hand observation indicates than the Lion of the Lord and other husbands in celestial marriages provide their plural wives with separate bedrooms or living suites, often with separate residences, sometimes with faraway residences. The matter of a wife’s husband’s intimacy with her “sister” seems to be dealt with decorously. My guess is that conflicts inspired by jealousy are few. In countries of Asia where polygamy is practiced they are uncommon.

  Asie and Harold came spinning up through the door, slammed it, and threw themselves on the floor, panting. “Sir Richard! Sir Richard!”

  Burton couldn’t tell which lad was talking when, the way they babbled his name.

  “We, we …,” said Harold breathlessly. The lads looked at each other merrily and burst into laughter.

  Asie had the courage. “We watched the bull inspect the cows and choose one.” Gales of laughter.

  As they told the story by turns, interrupting each other, Burton’s delight spiraled from his belly to his head. It was a good story, regardless of what Brother Young was really doing.

  “Sweet gizzards,” exclaimed Asie when they’d blurted it all out.

  Burton regarded them with a broad smile. “So. Concubine of the night,” said Burton.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” mouthed Harold, and a hint of steel edged his youthful voice.

  Stupid to put it so bluntly. Harold Jackson might be an independent-minded Mormon, but he was no traitor.

  Burton the man felt for Harold Jackson. Burton the writer knew an opportunity when he saw it. “When he goes to one of his wives, does he stay the night?”

  How much are you willing to say, young lad?

  Burton watched the mind hesitate. It flipped, flopped, and flipped over again. Harold came to disclosure. He shook his head. “Never.” A moment’s pause. “He sleeps alone in a bedroom next to his office in Bee Hive House.”

  So why are you talking to an outsider? What do you want to say, o ye son of the great?

  “I am a Saint, you know. Genuine.”

  “Of course.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a jack Mormon.”

  Burton nodded sagely. When you didn’t have a clue what to say, a sage nod was always a good trick.

  “But I don’t want to have a plural marriage.” The young man reddened.

  “Ah.”

  The young man looked hard at the ground. Up at Burton. Back at the ground. “I believe God meant man and woman to feel passion for
one another.”

  Burton regarded the young man. Yes, you are newly launched into the hot-blooded years. “Your father and his wives …?”

  Harold just hung his head.

  “My observation,” Burton put in, “is that Brother Young’s house has a spirit not of passion but of piety and duty. It is cool, bloodless, diligent.”

  “Yes. What the gentiles imagine …” The lad shrugged in frustration.

  “Do you think …?”

  Harold interrupted. “I shouldn’t be talking about this. At all.” He gave forth a veritable compendium of the body language of being ill at ease, head down, hands wringing, torso twisting, feet shuffling. “There is something I should mention to you, though. It’s about Porter Rockwell.”

  “Is he here?” asked Sun Moon.

  She stood in the doorway of her room. She seemed so vibrant I wondered how I had not felt her presence, even if I didn’t hear her open the door.

  “No, Ma’am,” muttered Harold, “he’s not. It’s something else.” Harold looked from her at Sir Richard queerly. “Father opposes the Danites. Brother Young opposes the Danites.” He looked sidewise at me and Sun Moon. “He respects Porter Rockwell but opposes the Danites.”

  “Is that so?” says Sir Richard.

  “Of course,” said Harold. “They were essential, a necessary evil in the early days of the Church. Rabble, those were rabble that hounded us in Missouri and Illinois. Armed self-protection? Absolutely essential. Anything else, suicide.”

  My mind was going goosey loops. So why is the Prophet helping us? Or is he?

  “Now, though, we Saints are safe.” I wasn’t so sure about that. “We’re established here. Our enemies lie a thousand miles away to the east or west. The Danites are a throwback.”

  Sir Richard smiled, and I could see he didn’t want to seem patronizing, which always made him seem patronizing. “Can even the Prophet always control the Danites?”

  Harold pulled a slow nod. “They are stubborn, especially Orrin Porter Rockwell. He is a legend among my people, feared and admired. He fought wisely in the Utah War. He’s hard to curb. Even for …”

  Sun Moon spoke softly. “Do you know Porter Rockwell?”

  Harold looked at her, flushed, and cast his eyes downward. “He’s a family friend. Way back.”

  “What sort of man is he?”

  Harold flashed his eyes up at her face. “I don’t know why Port would want… You’re so decent.” His face turned sheepish.

  “Why does Porter Rockwell give himself to violence?”

  She could push, Sun Moon, in her way.

  “He don’t. I mean … You know what happened to him, to Port? You know about Joseph?”

  Sun Moon shook her head. “Tell me, please.” I could feel her mind open to him to like palms, ready to receive.

  Sun Moon concentrated on the young man. She became attentiveness.

  “Port loved Joseph. From when Port was a kid and they were neighbors, I mean. He looked up to Joseph.” Harold twisted his legs together, then untwisted them. “Joseph had the countenance of a prophet, fire in his heart, and a holy light in his eyes. Port saw that, and knew he weren’t nothing like that inside his self, and he loved Joseph for it. In that way Joseph drew Port to the Church and unto himself.

  “Port helped Joseph. Eventually that help became protection. Gentiles cast themselves into opposition to Joseph. Governments raised their hands against him. Mobbers craved the blood of Saints, Joseph’s most of all. So Port became one of the Sons of Dan, the men who protected us against the rabble of Missouri and Illinois. When Joseph required particular protection, Port acted as his guardian angel.”

  Sun Moon drank the young man with her eyes.

  “Until the day he went to the Carthage jail. Joseph knew what would happen to him. In the prime of life he was offered up into the hands of his enemies. He went in peace, and he stayed the hand of Porter Rockwell. He ordered Port to stay back, to let him go undefended, a lamb to the slaughter.”

  She heard the pathos, but she also heard simplicity and truth.

  “Port took Joseph’s death hard, and his failure to shield his leader harder. Anger became a holy rage. If any of the rumors about him striking out at the gentiles are true, it would have been at that time. He may have shed blood, but I doubt that it was innocent.

  “I hear Port did some drinking in those years, and his anger festered in him, not abating even here, with the founding of Deseret. When the Sons of Dan acted again in their wrath, Port was one of the leaders. Blood was let, the blood of apostates.

  “That’s when the change come. At some time in those years as a destroying angel, Port came to believe he had violated Joseph’s law: The sins which shall not be forgiven are the shedding of innocent blood and adultery.

  “What blood is innocent? Only the Lord God knows. Did Porter Rockwell shed innocent blood? What counts is, he believes he did. And in believing so, he has condemned himself to a hell on Earth. He lives in the shadow of guilt. He believes he sinned and sinned, until he has put himself beyond even the mercy of the all-merciful God.”

  Harold Jackson’s aspect changed. He brought truth to Sun Moon. “Has he threatened you? They say so. Therefore, I ask you, I entreat you, do for Porter Rockwell what he cannot do for himself. Forgive him.” Sun Moon felt the iron band ease on her throat.

  Captain Burton thrilled at this drama. He believed the young chap’s story, for it fit the man he knew. It fit the despair, the bitterness, the blackness of spirit.

  Harold stopped, evidently wondering if he’d said too much, the youth in him desperate to say more, to explain, to justify. He stood. He shuffled his feet. He started to speak and held back. At last he said, “It’s the social hour inside. Maybe you two would like to meet some of my friends?”

  Burton deferred to Asie with his eyes. Asie considered. “Sure,” he said. He offered his arm to Sun Moon. After hesitating, she took it.

  “I wish to write a little more, and will join you soon.”

  In fact, Captain Richard Burton wanted to pray and then to transport himself to the land of Xanadu. He waited for the lads to close the door and performed his evening duty, the fourth prayer of the day. Then he lifted a stoppered flask to his lips, and drank deep. He sat back on the bench. It would not take long. Meanwhile he would watch the sun set beyond the Salt Lake to the west. It was a melodramatic sight, bloody as the Old Testament. Tomorrow I must send out to the chemist for more laudanum. A necessity for travelers, he would say.

  And when will we be traveling? Burton sighed deeply. They would leave soon. A place between his shoulder blades was itching often now, a feeling he knew well. It meant, watch your back. If Brother Young had an apostate wife in his household, he bloody well might have a spy. All the way to San Francisco with some sort of deception. It was a forbidding prospect, and he would have to face it. Tomorrow.

  He looked toward the window and shifted his feet so he faced precisely toward Mecca. As he knelt, he could already taste the laudanum.

  3

  “Captain Burton!” The lass came toward him, arms extended. Burton took her hands politely. “I’m Clarissa Angesley Young, and I’m so glad you came.” Normally, it would have seemed an exaggerated welcome, an adolescent trying to be a womanly hostess. In Burton’s Kubla Khanish state it became a mad parody. The lass was raven-haired, her skin fair and perfect as paper untouched by any pen. He imagined the poems of love waiting to be written on her face, on her bosom, on her thighs and between. The sensuous lines came to him in flowing Arabic, more beautiful than the music of water flowing in desert fountains.

  Clarissa led him by one hand toward the rosewood piano. She was radiant, she shone with an exotic fire. Her shining innocence only made her in Burton’s eyes more erotic.

  I’m squiffed, Burton told himself loudly in his mind but to no avail, squiffed by the laudanum. Every woman is a siren in my eyes. I must take care.

  The long parlor was speckled with pairs of adolescent lad
s and lasses, two on a sofa here, seated on a bench here, standing by a window there. Burton saw Asie seated at the piano, Sun Moon beside him. Burton recognized most of the lasses from the dining room. The men must be Young sons and the suitors of Young daughters—la crème de la crème of Mormon society. Some were going so far as to hold hands. The only light came from a bright lamp on the table in the middle of the room. He wanted to make a lilting song of it—la crème de la crème de la quim. A bawdy song.

  Asie clattered a tune out from the keys. Oh, the schottische. One, two, three, hop! Burton noticed that the lad had the gift—this schottische had a lilt! One, two, three, hop!

  Asie was playing some sort of dance music, Sun Moon knew. She had seen and heard enough dancing at Tarim’s tavern. She had begun to hear some sense in the music. It was crude, though, beside the music of the zithers, flutes, and great lamaist brass horns. The dance was vigorous but lacking in subtlety. Yet she could see that Asie spirit entered into the song like a proud dancer, and kicked up its heels handsomely.

  The girl with hair the color of a raven, Clarissa, led Sir Richard into the dance. He was graceful in the turns, but she recognized the mad agility of the drunk. Clarissa whirled, faced him, whirled a time and a half, and back into his arms with a gleaming smile.

  Courting, they called it in English. She remembered the courting in her own country, funny, joyful, sometimes bawdy. Tibetan women were not demure, nor chaste. That was why their sexiness was legendary among Chinese men. Which is why Tarim wanted me. The iron band choked off that line of thought.

  She herself had never been courted. She entered the convent before puberty. She had watched, she had heard her sisters tell stories … Some monks and nuns returned to their families periodically and lived ordinary, uncelibate lives. Sun Moon had held herself to the highest standards, had never so indulged.