In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  It’s been a sultry summer, the worst I can remember. Late every afternoon, thunderstorms over in the west, but they don’t come to anything. The lawns have been brown since late July. So I guess they’re right about the hole in the ozone. Darlene Bacheller tells me the frogs are dying out, their skins are too thin for the cosmic rays.

  Steer by your stars, young Clark, and know that I’m pulling for you in your new commitment.

  Fondly as always,

  Grandfather Wilmot

  There were other adherents, who came and went, camping out in the unheated outbuildings and melting away as the weather turned cold; but over the course of two years after Clark’s arrival, and especially in the third year, coming and going in the band of disciples became increasingly difficult, as the scope of Jesse’s mission widened in his vision and afflicted ever more sorely the world outside.

  Without outside pressure, nothing might have changed. But what era or empire has ever failed to exert outside pressure? Even the Mormons by their remote and bitter lake had to be subdued to Gog’s domination, and accept a President’s appointed governor. The children of the Temple were the flashpoint. Why weren’t they in school? Were they being abused? The social worker whose front tire Luke had threatened to puncture returned with a state trooper and a sheriff’s deputy from Burr County. These three delegates from the land of Magog moved through the rooms and corridors, looking askance at the bleak ramshackle barracks, the obliquely branching halls, the arcane religious symbols carefully painted on doors and walls by Mephibosheth’s Mercy, an artist who also did, from Polaroid photographs, fanatically detailed watercolors of the Temple’s sweeping views and sold them through a gallery in Aspen. In the men’s barracks, Jonas was spitting out vows to kill these invaders, while Luke looked on as if snakebit into paralysis and Jim placidly, with amused side-glances at Clark, argued the fatal folly of making any resistance at this moment. “This is not the time,” Jim said. “Injure or alarm these three, and three hundred armed devils will follow with tanks and helicopters. They want an excuse to destroy us.” But for all this cool advice the simpler men felt as a fever the presence of aliens and disbelievers in their secret, sacred space, hammered and gouged together by their own hands.

  It had come to Jesse to bury an entire old school bus beneath the complex of wooden buildings, with a single trapdoor under a colorful carpet the women had made from rags: in this long hushed space, the folding doors sealed and the windows black with dirt, their guns were stored, not just the M-16s and AK-47s but handguns—Beretta 92s and Smith & Wesson .357 Magnums—and a .50-calibre anti-tank rifle and pounds of gunpowder and crates of grenade casings and more than one M-79 grenade launcher. Upon this treasure the Temple reposed; Jesse preached from Exodus 15:6: Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power. He cited Ezekiel 9:1: Cause them that have charge over the city to draw near, even every man with his destroying weapon in his hand. And he preached from the twenty-first chapter of Revelation, which describes the new Heaven and earth that will replace the old Heaven and earth—the walls of jasper twelve thousand furlongs square, and the city within, of pure gold like unto clear glass, with foundations adorned with sapphire, and chalcedony, and emerald. He read, “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it; for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.” Jesse was the Lamb: they took him to mean that even if the Temple were all buried like the old school bus his light would continue to shine in it. His light would never leave them, in that eternal temple of gold and emerald which lay beyond the horizon of mortal existence and human understanding.

  He met the three visitors in the little auditorium, with a graceful high clerestory designed and built by Mephibosheth, which served the adults for their Bible-study sessions as well as the smaller children for their classroom. There were seventeen children at the moment, some fetched here with their parents but most conceived in the years of the Temple; as many as eleven were thought to be Jesse’s own, by the testimony of the mothers. “We love our little ones,” Jesse told the three interlopers. “We show our love by teaching them righteousness, so that on the Day of Reckoning they may be transported without delay to the Lord’s abode.”

  “We’ll need a census, to see what school-agers you have here,” said the sheriff’s deputy.

  “The public schools of this country,” Jesse said, “are cesspits of thievery, bullying, cigarette-smoking, glue-sniffing, pill-taking, instruction contrary to fact, and free condoms. Sex without procreation and science without God are the watchwords. The children learn to adore the devil-gods of rock music and licentious television commercials; they worship images on a screen until nothing else means squat. All of God’s creation—the beasts of the field, the birds of the air—less than squat. I beg you, gentlemen and ma’am, don’t destroy these young souls by dragging them off to be schooled in atheism and electronic black magic!”

  The social worker, a plain plump woman with buck teeth and low-slung big breasts, said, “I was raised a Mormon, I can’t disagree with a lot of what you say. But the law’s the law for everybody; otherwise there won’t be a country. Our evidence is these children are being brought up as ignorant little fanatics. Further, there’s word of irregular sexual morality and physical abuse.”

  Jesse’s eyes darkened, so their yellow glints sparked. “Our creed is love. Love is what we feel for one another. We do not always spare the rod,” he admitted, “but any punishment is administered in love, for right reason. The children know in their hearts. Ask them yourselves.”

  “We love Jesse,” one little boy quavered, and then, the ice broken, a nervous shrill chorus of professions followed. Standing behind the children, freckle-faced Hannah, pregnant for the second time in the ten seasons since she had brought Esau here early one night as winter was yielding to spring, bent and whispered, “Shall we sing our song?” Her sweet slight voice, shaky on the first notes, led theirs:

  “Jesse is our Master,

  Jesse is our Lord:

  Jesse makes us safe within

  His blessed, blessed horde.”

  The second stanza was less well memorized and harder to understand; its last word was “sword.” Uneasily the state trooper, in his columbine-blue shirt and black-striped brown pants, wandered to the wall where a bulletin board displayed tacked-up childish drawings of a bald smiling man with a fringe of hair hanging to his shoulders, his hands together in prayer, radiating shaky hasty crayon lines of divine power. In some of the drawings, Jesse’s eyes were prayerfully closed; in others, open and oval and unevadably staring. The trooper, a muscular humorless youth with a chin so deeply cleft it seemed a scar, asked Jesse, when the word “sword” had died away, “Mister, what are you claiming to be here? God Himself?”

  Jesse in his huskiest voice, with a little smile, told him, “ ‘Thou sayest it.’ Luke, twenty-three three.”

  But the trooper did not answer, as Pilate did, I find no fault in this man. He grunted and said, “There’s laws against false claims and allegations. There has to be some limits, even in this day and age, where people say anything, right on the radio and TV.”

  The deputy, an older, smaller fellow in a gray suit and tarnished badge, interposed, “We understand a lot of your residents here have signed over all their life savings. This could be fraud, depending on the circumstances and the judge.”

  The children sensed a serious challenge and looked to Jesse to resolve it, to banish these doubters. “We of the Temple do not break laws,” Jesse told the delegation sonorously. “On the contrary, the laws that are true we recast in everlasting steel, rolled from a fire hotter than the hottest forge. ‘As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.’ Think, my friend,” he told the young trooper, “of what a second would be in the furnace of that pure fire, let alone ten seconds, let alone a minute, let alone eternity. You would burn, every cell and hair of your body would burn, the cells of your eyeballs an
d your most tender parts would burn, and each second would be reconstituted to burn again. You would beg for extinction, for merciful annihilation, for the one gift that does not lie within God’s almighty power to give. ‘Behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of Hell and of death.’ ”

  The beefy trooper’s gaze broke and he glanced away, out the window, at the sere bright day gleaming in rapidly moving waves on the long autumnal grasses, buffalo grass and wild rye, of the front meadows. Jesse sighed and in a more conversational voice said to the social worker and the sheriff’s deputy, “Talk to my brother Esau here. He’ll give you a list of the children if you must have it. Those of school age, we’ll have at the end of the road when the bus goes by. The time we got left before the Reckoning ain’t long enough to fuss over. Our little ones know God’s truth.”

  Clark had become Esau gradually. He had grown a beard, which though straggly and colorless at first had thickened and declared a surprising reddish tinge, and some wiriness to bulk it out into a spade shape. It abraded the skin of his neck and upper chest and reminded him of his new self; when he looked into a mirror—there were few, here at the Temple, but a wavery one hung in the men’s washroom, to shave by—his eyes looked mild and younger than they had before and his lips in their nest of springy cedar-colored hair plumper and more sensual, though his last sex with Hannah had been months ago. It had to be stolen sex, since all the younger women now, all five of them, were brides of Jesse. She had granted him entry from behind, lying on her side as unexcited and docile as a sheep, since she was queasy with the beginnings of her second pregnancy. How strange that had felt to Esau, his prick reaching up into her as if to push away Jesse’s burgeoning seed; the thought was blasphemous, and exciting. Having wiped herself with toilet paper and tugged her pants and skirt back into place, Hannah told him she couldn’t let him do that any more. If he got too hard up he could go after one of the others, such as Deborah or Jael, whom Jesse had been neglecting. But—her mouth stiffened like a schoolteacher’s—if he loved Jesse enough he wouldn’t need this; the other men didn’t, except sometimes Tom, and then Polly would oblige her husband’s cousin. So there was a traffic of sexual information among the women: with this knowledge, Esau’s appetite had lessened. He needed his privacy.

  He led the three visitors to the upstairs room where he was allowed to have his computer terminal and telephone. The room had been a bunkroom when this was a ranching family’s home; now it was the untidy interface between the Temple and the world. Zebulun worked at an old black-lacquered kneehole desk whose cubbyholes were overflowing with receipts, permits, bills, bank statements, ultimatums, summonses. Esau had persuaded him to invest in a computer, a Formica-topped work-station table, some filing cabinets, and a laser printer; it meant stringing an electric line along the half-mile of dirt road up from the asphalt road that led to Lower Branch. With the kerosene lamps and log fires and the generator, they had been self-reliant, Jesse and Jonas pointed out. But Esau argued that, unless they could control their publicity, they would get only bad publicity. Jesus Himself instructed the disciples, Go ye into all the world. If they were alive in today’s world, Peter and Paul would be using computers. Jesse’s pamphlets and analyses of Scripture could be beautifully worked up on the home-printing program with its variety of types and sizes and easy pictographics, and mailed and faxed out. “Hate to get it down on paper,” Jesse admitted. “Once a thought’s down, it’s dead; it can’t grow.” Passed from mouth to ear to mouth, testimony grew and enlarged and became infused with every man’s wishes and thoughts. “That wire,” he said, of the electric wire, “is the Devil’s tightrope; he’ll walk it in, sure as birdshit falls from trees.” Esau promised that his equipment, as morally neutral as an automobile, would spread the word, keep the Temple’s accounts, and hold the authorities at bay.

  The largest desk in this room—a bunkroom, once, for the seasonal ranch hands, its floors scarred with spur-marks and its walls spiky with clothes-pegs—was reserved for Jesse, but his desk stayed clean-topped and unused. He spent his time in the other big upstairs room, his bedroom, with a wife or wives, or haranguing his faithful in the auditorium, at whatever hour of the day or night inspiration struck him, or walking the perimeters of the yard, within the barbed wire the Temple had strung, gazing up at the mountains where he had once lived. As the summer waned, giant clouds with scum-brown centers poured out of the western desert onto the peaks, hiding their snow-streaked tips. “It won’t be long,” he would say to Esau, his tawny eyes glinting in amused foreknowledge. “We’re wired for disaster.” Yet thanks to his equipment Esau was now able to call up and print out in swift triplicate a list of the Temple’s children, with their ages, thus establishing a gingerly credibility with the social worker and her two protectors.

  The deputy wore a shiny gray business suit with a star-shaped badge pulling one lapel awry and a spine that made him carry his skinny body with a twist in it; of the invaders he was the least hostile, the most conversational. He handed Esau back a smaller piece of paper—several pieces attached together, with carbon-paper interleaves. “You owe Burr County three thousand seven hundred and twenty-one dollars in back property taxes,” he said.

  “We know that, we’re working on it,” Esau said, and with several taps of the keyboard called up for display a glowing screen of mostly negative numbers. “Our leader, Mr. Smith, resists the idea that we owe the government anything. We live independent here, and ask no services.”

  The deputy said, “You ask for roads to drive down to Lower Branch on, for supplies and employment, those of you that got jobs. You ask to be protected from the Russians. There’s a lot you people ask, without knowing it. If it was this simple to hide from taxes, everybody would be doing it. Everybody would go for some squirrelly religion if that’s all it took.”

  “O.K., I guess I see your point,” Esau said, stalling. “How about you, Zeb?”

  Zebulun had come in, big and waxy and foolishly, nervously smiling and blinking. He wanted the apparition of these intruders to go away and was counting on Esau to perform the magic—like pressing DELETE on the computer. “No problem for me,” he agreed, but asked suspiciously, “What does Big Daddy say?” Big Daddy was the name some of the younger wives and older children had given Jesse, and it had impishly spread through the Temple. Jesse didn’t seem to mind it.

  “Big Daddy wants to stay out of it,” Esau said. “He wants me to handle it.” To the reasonable-looking, twisted, and half-obliging deputy he said, “In principle, we pay our taxes. We render unto Caesar.”

  “There are some other problems.” The big cleft-chin state trooper, moving closer with rather menacing baby steps, said, “Neighbors on both sides been complaining they hear gunshots from dawn on, some of them, from the sound, from automatic repeaters. You know those aren’t legal.”

  “We got a right to target practice,” Zebulun said, giggling without meaning to. “It’s set up in the canyon, where there’s only rocks around.” He loved his guns with a truly feeble-minded love. He and Luke and Jonas had fierce target-practice competitions; Esau had surprised himself, taking a ten-pound Kalashnikov into his grip one day, by being not a bad shot himself. You keep steady and squint and squeeze. Two hundred yards away, a can jumps, a piece of old crockery explodes. Magic. Quick and neat as a computer key.

  Blushing behind his beard at the sweep of the attempted deception (but the tingling of his skin signalling that at least he was alive; he was playing the game of life), Esau punched some more keys and swirled his mouse around and clicked it and produced a screen listing their guns, the number of the permit for each neatly aligned beside. “There’s our armaments,” he lied. “Less than a gun per man, and all standard single-shot hunting and sport weapons. Look,” he told the state cop, and smoothly turned to widen his plea to the other two agents of Gog. “You don’t want a legal hornet’s nest. There are constitutional issues here—freedom of religion, right to bear arms—that really resonate in this
part of the U.S. Is this still a free country or not? Sure, our theology isn’t your standard Sunday-school disposable generic brand. We try to take the Bible at its word. True and Actual Faith—we try to live by the literal Word of the Lord. This is un-American? What are you telling me? We want to be left alone. Is this un-American? I say it’s real American. You heard the Big Man. He said, O.K., you’re bigger than we are. When the Day of Reckoning comes, we’ll see who’s bigger, but for now, O.K., sure, you win. We’ll give you our school-age children. We’ll catch up on our taxes. But don’t push. I’m reasonable, Zeb’s reasonable, but our Big Man here is very sincere. You’ve seen him, you’ve heard him talk. Human life to him is just a phase we’re in. A preliminary phase. If he tells us, Die, we gladly will. That’s our advantage over you guys. We see life in proportion, in relation to the last things, the ultimate things, whereas to most people—I don’t say you, necessarily—it’s something to cling to no matter what the price. Most people are afraid to die, and that acts as a stumbling block. They’re not free. We’re not afraid. We’re free. We know that no matter what happens we’re going to be saved. Isn’t that right, Zeb?”

  “That’s right. Jesse’s going to save us.”

  “He has saved us, brother,” Esau gently corrected. “We’re beyond harm. We’re living already in the light of the Temple above. ‘Whosoever will save his life shall lose it’—you folks know the verse?”

  The deputy and social worker nodded; the beefy state trooper took one of his aggressive baby steps and said, “Hey, give us a break. We’ve all heard preaching in our lives. This is a Tuesday morning.”

  “You see,” Esau concluded patiently, “you of the world are still trying to save your lives, that’s why you’re losing them. Look. I’m not naïve. I’ve lived in the world. I’ve tasted its pleasures right down to the bitter, bitter dregs. I’ve done dope. I’ve done women. They leave you worse off than you were before. I have nothing left to lose. Neither does Zeb. This is a delicate situation, is all I’m saying. You come in here with your six-shooters and your summonses and legal crap, you might get more back than you bargained for. I’m not talking for myself, I’m talking for our Big Man. The Lord’s righteousness is like unto dynamite—don’t play with it.”