In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  He came in the back way and the men of the Temple, having heard the shots and seeing the stalled school bus from the upper windows, greeted him in the kitchen with a gabble of agitated voices. “I can’t believe you did that,” Esau said. Luke sneered at the soft recruit’s face, which had gone pale above the ruddy crescent of its pseudo-Biblical beard.

  “You’ve been flirting with the Devil’s troop too long, Slick. Go on out to them, now’s your chance.”

  But Clark doubted that he would get very far down the road without a bullet in his back. His groin went watery at the thought; he pictured his body as terribly apt to puncture and tear in the jagged company of these hard men, hard by nature and hard by creed.

  Jesse came down from his bedroom, looking like an old woman in a loose nightshirt of striped flannel. Of late he had been sleeping the mornings away, sometimes to noon, his duties with the women and his study of the Bible keeping him long awake. The women reported in whispers how visions churned in him at night, making him shout out and break into a sweat. The skin of his face was unshaven and slack, and his bare feet below the hem of his nightshirt touchingly lumpy, chafed pink in spots and callused yellow in others, as if they had never been made to be walked on. He listened to Luke’s account and tension returned to his face, and light to his tawny eyes, naked of their circular glasses. Jesse lifted his sleeved arms now, there at the end of the long harvest table where they ate, and announced, “ ‘The days are at hand, and the effect of every vision. For there shall be no more any vain vision nor flattering divination within the house of Israel.’ Ezekiel twelve. The meaning of that, my brethren, is, the fat’s in the fire. ‘These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.’ ”

  The other mountain-men, Luke and Jonas, sent up a jubilant whoop, and Zebulun and Mephibosheth shut their faces against any course other than following their master. Esau looked toward Tom and Jim and saw there shades of his own trepidation, but then Jim, the married one, caught Esau’s eye and winked and shrugged; so Esau felt complicit. He was conscripted. He had been too young for a military draft and the most danger he had known had been from hard drugs and cars driven fast along the curves of Mulholland Drive in a fog. He was in some underdeveloped sector of himself gratified. The time had come to convert his faith into deeds. He imagined that Jesse’s sore-looking eyes had turned toward him when the prophet had spoken of vain vision and flattering divination—as if Esau’s traffic with the civic forces surrounding them had been a betrayal instead of a service, the propagandizing of the Lamb’s good news. He’d show them.

  The ruckus had drawn the women and the children downstairs and in from their rooms along the wooden corridors. “Fear not, my gentle ones,” Jesse announced to them. “The day of our glory approaches.” The women were told to prepare for a siege, and to gather warm clothes and bedding and all that was needful and to repair with the children to the underground bunker. Zebulun and Mephibosheth were instructed to fetch guns from the places where they had been hidden. Jonas and Jim were commanded to mount watch from the roof, which Mephibosheth had made accessible through building a trapdoor and a small platform behind the chimney. Within minutes these sentries shouted down that the bus driver had opened the emergency exit on the far side and was ushering her charges in double file along the road, in the direction of the neighbor a mile distant. “Shall we give ’em some lead?” Jonas asked in a yell.

  “Those are children!” Esau told Jesse.

  Jesse had dressed himself in jeans and sneakers and several sweaters and over them a bulky green vest, his Army combat vest with its many square pockets. He was moving faster, with more energy and grace, than Esau had seen for months. “Negative!” he yelled back. “Hold your fire!”

  “The man’s crazy,” Esau told him.

  “Some would say inspired,” Jesse said huskily, his eyes darting about the living room, checking the windows, the other men coming in and out, the crystalline out-of-doors. Yet he found time to minister to this one of his flock. “Brother Esau, it was bound to come. It’s all in the Book. There has to be a day of wrath to pare it down to the hundred forty-four thousand of the saved. That’s the math of it, and the truth of it. There has to be a winnowing. Scared?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been in a fight like this.”

  “Some take to it, some don’t. You might surprise yourself.”

  Jesse and Luke calculated that the bus driver would need half an hour to shepherd her children to the neighboring ranch. If she met a hired hand out in a vehicle or on a horse, the time could be less. Then allow the authorities a half-hour to get organized and drive out from the center of Lower Branch.

  Sure enough, within half an hour the phone began to ring, piercingly, upstairs in the Temple office. Esau raced to answer it, but somewhat to his relief Luke, with an olive-green cloth bandolier of ammunition magazines slung across his shoulder, was explaining in a patient twang, “Well, see, that was a kind of lawful protest against your hauling off our children and filling their innocent heads full of a lot of atheistic propyganda. Wasn’t nobody hurt, that’s the way we intended, but any armed men come around I can’t make that same promise. We got a God-given, Constitutional right to defend ourselves.”

  Esau picked up the extension on Jesse’s unused desk and said, “Eddie, that you? We’ll pay for the tires and the windows—send us a bill. Just don’t send anybody around. Things are touchy right now. The mood here is explosive.”

  “Clark,” Eddie, the sheriff’s deputy, rather languidly said, “you don’t go shooting up county school buses. That’s just not done. I’m afraid we got to bring somebody in for it. Already, we’ve got reporters on the line, wanting a story.”

  Luke broke in, “Mister, don’t pay no mind to what Slick here says—you’re not getting no tire money out of me nor Big Daddy neither.”

  Esau was not surprised that the mountain men called him Slick behind his back. At times, after an afternoon spent in Lower Branch sharing a brew with Eddie at J.C.’s or jollying up Charlie Rowe, the Burr County tax commissioner, he had felt slick to himself. But Jesse appreciated him, he knew. From each according to his talents.

  Luke was going on into the phone, “We been paying taxes like royal suckers and what’ve you morons been doing with the money? Feeding a ton of welfare freeloaders and pouring Hell’s own slop into our children’s heads.” Then he hung up.

  Within twenty seconds it rang again. Esau reached for the extension but Luke yanked the main phone so the wires pulled up the box at the baseboard, and the receiver at Esau’s ear went dead. There was a purity to the silence, and a bliss in the fact that he could do no more; he had gone the extra mile, it was out of his hands. He reported Luke’s crazy action to Jesse and Jesse smiled, a little the way Jim had winked. The prophet searched his mind for a quote and came up with, “ ‘Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away.’ ”

  Jesse seemed a foot taller, taking charge, assigning men their posts, stroking the heads of the gathered children and looking for a second into the faces of each. Before they descended into the bunker, with their blankets and stuffed toys and food supplies, Jesse asked them all, the women and children and men still in the living room, to huddle in front of the cold fireplace for a Bible reading. He read to them from Revelation 21: “ ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

  “ ‘And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

  “ ‘And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.

  “ ‘He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.

  “ ‘But the fea
rful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.’ ”

  Jesse looked up and told his frightened flock, “Those murderers and idolators, those whoremongers and liars will soon be at our gates. But, little loved ones, I am Alpha and Omega. My enemies shall be thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, and I will give the faithful freely of the water of life. There will be for us no more death, or sorrow, or crying. Children, what did God promise He would do? Who can remember what I just read?”

  He looked hopefully into the little faces, and all were silent until a scared boy of about five said tremulously, “Wipe, wipe away—”

  “God shall with His own beautiful hand wipe away all the tears from our eyes,” Jesse paraphrased. “Now, is there any more beautiful passage in Holy Scripture than this solemn promise in Revelation? Better believe it, my little ones, and allow the fear to ease from your systems. Jesse is watching over you. Big Daddy promises to take you with him wherever he goes. Amen. Now hustle your butts down below with your mommas and don’t come out till a voice you know for sure calls you out.”

  Some of the older children laughed at the sudden “hustle your butts”; the smaller ones were in a transfixed state, beyond laughing or any expressed emotion. An animal freeze reflex had rendered them numb, clustering close to their mothers; a number of their noses were running, and one little girl had a bright nosebleed from one nostril, which no one was attending to, as they all shuffled in a hush off to the bunker.

  Luke and Zebulun both had their tactical ideas but the more urbanized, younger men only trusted Jesse. The mists that had lately been befogging his spirit—from excessive simmering in Revelation and female sexual juices—had burned away; he was calm and faintly aloof and lazily leonine, the way Clark remembered him the first time they met. He sent Luke up to the roof with his telescoped M-16 and the lightweight M-79 grenade launcher; Tom and Mephibosheth were to guard the back with AK-47s, Jonas and Jim were brought down from the roof to join Matthew on the second floor, and Zebulun and Esau and himself were stationed on the first floor, the first line of defense. Jesse kept an M-16 for himself, tucked some spare rifles—converted AR-15s, mostly—and a stack of ammunition magazines over against the fieldstone fireplace, and put Zebulun in charge of the .50-calibre Browning machine gun. They mounted its tripod on the overturned bookcase, which they lifted some inches up on Bibles, behind a shield improvised from a rusty old tractor seat jammed into the half-open window. The plump Hawaiian dimpled and giggled in delight at this sign of trust from his leader; in his apprehensive happiness he kept testing different chairs in which to seat himself behind the gun, like a pianist finicking over the bench height.

  Jesse said, “Slick, here’s a special gal I know you’re going to love,” and placed in Esau’s hands a graceful old-style hunting rifle; the long blued barrel floated outward like a flexible, sensitive wand when he embraced the polished stock, of silky checkered walnut. “Ruger M-77,” Jesse said. “Three hundred Winchester Magnum. Pop the pimple on your girlfriend’s nose at five hundred yards.” It was Jesse’s teasing way to speak to his men as if they had roguishly active sex lives, when he had taken all their women from them. But one of his cryptic salutes or recognitions lay in giving Esau not a coarsely murderous military automatic but this delicate bolt-action scalpel of a weapon; he was finer, he felt Jesse was saying, than these hammer-handed rubes around them.

  The Ruger’s rear sight was an intricate leaf shape, the front sight a beaded ramp that seemed to Esau, waving the barrel through the window, to swing into its target like a ball of mercury popping into the bottom of a cup. Jesse had shown him his window, there in the living room; Esau took the creaky green-painted kitchen chair Jesse had sat on when they had first talked. He propped open the loose worn window with a stick of kindling and nestled his face into the cool smooth concavity of the stock’s cheek piece and let his gunsight follow the drifting flight of a hawk cruising the valley below. The November wind was sharp on his face and his eyes watered as he took in the beauty of the morning: the mountainside falling away in blowing grassy terraces interrupted by clumps of cottonwood and pine, the sun hidden behind an approaching slant sheet of cloud whose edges were white eddies of fish-scales sculptured like curved ribs of sand left by a receded tide, the receding valley miles beyond and below struck by yellow sunlight beyond the giant cloud so that its ragged lake gleamed a blind blue and the tilled and fenced fields in these lowlands seemed a checkerboard of nappy, nicely sewn fabrics. He did not want to give up this world but must believe that its glory was the pale shadow, the weak foretaste, of a better. If God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? He clung to his gun lightly, as if this slender machined construction of steel and wood were indeed a woman, a slim resilient mother who would bring him through this fever, this fear, this burning water above his organs of excretion. His strained nerves seemed to be lifting him off the floor, so his feet in their scuffed orange Frye boots belonged to somebody else and were as remote as the hawk he had lost sight of. He kept swallowing something thicker than saliva. He had a sudden vision of something he enormously wanted—one of those peanut-butter sandwiches he used to make as a child, of two Keebler saltines, square in shape but breakable into two, at the counter of the kitchen overlooking the swimming pool, when Rex wasn’t there and he had hours to kill before Mom showed up full of her day and dying for a Spritzer.

  Above him the men on the second floor were tramping loudly, in circles it seemed, to work off their nervousness. Each minute of waiting was so long a thousand small noises filled it. “Gog’s having a slow day,” Jesse drawled. “Must be a bake sale over in Magog City.” It occurred to Esau that Jesse had taken the two least dependable men, himself and Zebulun, under his wing here. Upon this rock.

  The footsteps upstairs went still; Clark heard the murmur of the approaching cars, a murmur so subtle it might be imaginary, like a breeze in tree branches, or the rustle of blood in your skull. Then the breach in the morning’s peace rapidly enlarged, though still out of sight, since the road was at a lower level than the pastures where sheep nosed after green leftovers in the frostbitten brown grass. Two tiny vehicles appeared far down the dirt road—a white police car with its blue rooflight whirling and a pale-blue van behind it. “Murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers,” Jesse quoted aloud in a light voice, to amuse himself or to hearten Esau and Zebulun. “The beast and the kings of earth have sent their disbelieving weasels.”

  The four-rail gate to the Temple yard, fenced off from the sheep by barbed wire, had been closed and chained with a plastic-sheathed padlocked chain. It took the three men from the state-police car—two in state troopers’ wide flat-rimmed green hats and black winter jackets, the third in a gray suit, with a bent way of holding himself—some minutes while they puzzled at the chain and the situation. One cop produced a bullhorn but Esau’s blood was pounding in his head so hard he couldn’t hear what was said. It was an urgent, barking mumble. Then came the sound of a gunshot, rather puny in this vast out-of-doors beneath that huge leaning leaden sheet of cloud crumbling above at its edges into the light of a hidden sun. The shot might have come from above, from Luke on the roof, or been one of the policemen shooting out the padlock. Very quickly, and like a film in no synchronization with the rattle of gunfire and indignant yells of men, the police car rammed through the gate, shedding its shattered long boards as it moved forward fifty yards or so and then stopped, when its windshield shattered and holes began jumping up in its hood. The two cops got out with drawn pistols and one of them immediately did a hippety-hop and fell in the dust by his back tire; the other crouched behind the car but it wasn’t giving him enough shelter. From the angle of Esau’s window, the farthest to the left, a silhouetted slice of the crouching figure showe
d through two upright slats of the porch rail. The blue-barrelled Ruger’s sight moved to place its bead on that target almost of its own snaky will. Not only was Clark’s head suddenly as clear as an adjusted TV screen but his eyesight too; he could see the buckle on the cop’s belt and the shine on his boots and the duller black gloss of his empty holster. Esau held the bead steady just above that holster and squeezed off a round; the recoil pushed his shoulder like a girl’s playful tap of flirtation and the abstract target flipped away like a tin cutout in a shooting gallery. Then it became a man, a dark shape trying to writhe to safety underneath the car, a now-hatless trooper with the round white face of a boy, not even a boy, a white-faced mammal, a frightened hurt creature staring from its burrow. The trooper was trying to lie still but something, pain, kept stirring his body around underneath the car. The car, a new white Camaro with the black letters STATE PATROL on its hood, was swaying on its springs as bullets slammed lavishly into its thin metal. Zebulun was going into raptures with his machine gun, filling the room with smoke and the tinkle of brass cartridge shells hitting the floor, and the men on the second floor were pouring a racket out of their automatic rifles and whooping, ugly ecstatic noises out of their throats, and stamping on the floor with such a drumming of footsteps that Esau tried to picture the dance they were doing. There was a fat wet thump on the veranda roof; then a split-second’s shadow such as a buzzard or an airplane passing in front of the sun casts flicked at the corner of Esau’s vision. Whatever it had been was out of sight now beyond the porch boards, where he couldn’t see. He could only see the porch rail with its upright slats, their dry paint raggedly scabbed off, and framed between them the little figures of the scene beyond.