Destroying Angel (38 page)

“You’re trying to romance me?” I jerked free and stared at him. “Is that what this is? You think a little touch for the lonely
woman, a kind word, and I’ll forget you allowed that beast to murder my friend?”

He sighed. “Do you truly fix me with such base motives? I’m mending fences with you, or trying to. We’ve been apart for so long, and I know I spent the first night with your sister wife, and then there was the unfortunate incident and…well, we have to get past this somehow.” His pitch rose defensively at this last part. “We’ll make a home out here, build it together.”

“You want a cottage—a romantic hideaway where we can live away from the others, and who the devil cares about the rest of your family?”

“Not exactly together. Of course I’ll visit, but this will be your little place. You can do with it whatever you want. Nobody will be here to tell you what to do, not even me.”

“No, thank you.”

He gestured with his hands. “It’s a good place. Look!”

“I’m not interested in living by myself, miles away. What about when I have children and they get sick? Or the Paiutes might come through. Or, worse, some drunk federal marshal. I won’t be alone—it’s too dangerous.”

“Please be reasonable.”

“What’s this about, really?”

“It’s the other men. They think you’re the cause of the trouble.”

“Naturally,” I said. “The trouble being that we built this place without your help and you don’t want anyone in the way while you steal it. It would be awkward to have me around, reminding the women how they once ran their own lives, made the decisions for their own families.”

“That’s not the whole of it, and you know it.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the priesthood leader? Didn’t the prophet lay his hands on your head before you left Salt Lake? So why are you letting Jedediah Kimball trample your authority?”

“Yes, I
was
the leader.” His face tightened. “And then I appointed you to be in charge, and we arrived to find you in open rebellion. I’ll pay a price for that.”

“And the price you’ll pay is for
me
to suffer in exile.”

“It’s not exile.” To his credit, he at least looked ashamed. “You can come into town whenever you like. Your children, when you have them, will be fully accepted into the community. You won’t be disfellowshipped or shunned.”

“And I have no say in the matter.” It was not a question.

He drew me into his arms. “Come now, Rebecca. A woman’s place is with her family, her children. Not embroiled in the nasty back-and-forth of struggle for dominance, like rams locking horns. It’s time for you to have a baby, to turn your thoughts to maternal matters. It is by raising a righteous seed that you will be sanctified and exalted.”

He pressed my head against his chest and stroked my hair. I remembered the gentle man who had courted me in Salt Lake, had sweet-talked my mother to get to me, who had promised that while I wouldn’t be his senior wife, I would be the first wife he chose for himself.

“Well?” he said.

I considered my options. None of them involved open defiance. Maude’s glossy, dead eyes reminded me of that.

“Bring me lumber and tools. I’ll build the house with my own hands.”

He let out his breath, and relief passed over his face. “You’ll have everything you need, I swear it.”

And so it happened. I built the house. I planted an orchard, cut rails for a corral. And I settled in to wait. It would only be a matter of time, I thought, before Annabelle and Laura came to me to renew their covenant. They’d tasted freedom too. It would be no easy thing to submit once more to tyrannical rule.

And I reminded myself that men are impatient. Hurry up, they say. Get dressed, get to work. Marry young, have babies right away. You must hurry, hurry, hurry to multiply and replenish the earth.
My seed will be as numerous as the stars of the heaven, and I’d prefer if we could start that process by the end of the year.

But a woman is patient. We understand the pace of the seasons because we know the seasons of our own body. Look at our lives. We marry, raise our children, and wait. A man burns hot and fierce, then withers and dies, and still we go on. Even a bad husband dies. Even a dictator like Jedediah Kimball grows old and tired.

I didn’t realize then that I would be forced to wait a lifetime and more.

Like Mormons compiling the record of the Nephites, I feel the need to summarize the hard years that followed. We lived in secret in our desert redoubt for several years, cut off from the church, except when they sent leaders to hide for a few months from federal marshals. As the century came to an end, we saw the leaders more rarely. A plague of locusts came in 1896, and we nearly starved when nobody sent supplies.

Another batch of scarlet fever hit in 1897. I had two children by then—the first born nine months after Hyrum showed me the
place on Yellow Flats. They both survived, but three of Laura’s died, one per week over the course of one miserable November. Annabelle Kimball lost two children and blamed me for it. In 1899, my husband died in an accident at the Ghost Cliffs, where he apparently tumbled over the edge to his death. I returned to live in town. Jedediah Kimball ruled Blister Creek until his death in 1928, when he was struck down by a heart attack while working on the temple.

I lost my two youngest children in the 1918 flu epidemic, but the rest of my children survived to adulthood. My daughters have married into every family in the valley, and two of my sons serve on the quorum, trying to keep the Kimballs in check.

Meanwhile, the church in Salt Lake City has slipped into apostasy. It’s easy to say now that I knew it all along, but that isn’t true. Even after 1910, when Salt Lake excommunicated our leaders for continuing to perform plural marriages, I thought it was a trick meant to deceive the world, as polygamy went deeper underground. In the late 1920s, when Jedediah organized the Church of the Lamb and began work on the temple, I joined the faction in opposition. I made new enemies. My second husband died in 1937, and the men pushed me into exile on Yellow Flats a second time. But by then I had nine surviving children and already twenty-four grandchildren, and they couldn’t keep me isolated for long. But I chose not to move back this time, knowing they would only shackle me with another husband, and I wished to live out the rest of my life in peace.

To this day Laura refuses to speak to me about those first few years in the valley, and Annabelle Kimball has made herself the enemy of me and my family since the day Jedediah murdered Maude. Her sons struggle against my own. Some Kimballs go into
Witch’s Warts to fast and claim to speak to an angel. Of the conspirators, only Nannie confided in me without reservation in those early years, but she died at the age of twenty-eight, while giving birth to her ninth child.

And so I felt I had failed. Utterly and completely.

Until two nights ago, when I came across the following passage in the Journal of Discourses, written by Jedediah Kimball’s grandfather Heber C. Kimball, who was the prophet Joseph Smith’s closest friend and a confidant of Brigham Young.

What I do not today, when the sun goes down, I lay down to sleep, which is typical of death; and in the morning I rise and commence my work where I left it yesterday.

I turned down the lamp and lay in bed, listening to the chirp of crickets outside my window, a coyote yipping away near the Ghost Cliffs, its voice as lonely as the beating of my heart, ticking away the seconds of my life, year after heartbreaking year. And I thought over that passage. Someday I would die, and then I would rise up again to begin my life anew. Did that mean in the world to come, or would I get another chance on this earth?

In answer, the Lord sent me a dream.

In the dream I stood in the shadow of the temple in Salt Lake City, a place I hadn’t seen in nearly sixty years. Tall buildings rose beyond Temple Square, like skyscrapers I have seen in pictures of New York or Chicago. The square lay deserted, and sheets of paper blew across the pavement to plaster against the windows of the assembly hall opposite the temple. There was no living soul in sight.

It was snowing, but the flakes that fell from the sky were warm and a dirty gray. The snow coated everything—buildings, benches, flower beds.

“Rebecca Cowley!” said a voice like a deep bell.

An angel stood before the front door of the temple. Not the evil spirit of Witch’s Warts, but a being of light and fire, wearing a robe that glowed with white heat. The brightness of his face exceeded that of the sun. He gestured for me to approach, and I trembled as I obeyed.

“You failed,” he said.

“Thou knowest why.”

“Because you gave up. Because you surrendered.”

“They murdered Maude. They would have killed me too. The other women wouldn’t stand by my side. What was I supposed to do?”

He didn’t answer the question, but when he spoke again his voice was kind, rather than condemning. “You have another chance, Rebecca. Not today, not with the years remaining in this mortal existence. But you will bear record of these events, and when you return to this earth, you will read the record by your own hand and you will understand.”

“Understand what? I don’t even understand now.”

“Don’t you? Look around you and understand the vision sent by the Lord. This is the world to come. Something you will face in your next probationary period. This is what you will see, the destruction of human civilization as the earth is swept clean in preparation for the coming of the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.”

“But how will it happen?” I asked.

“Look!”

It wasn’t snowing, I saw. The snow was ash, gray and fine. It flecked my skin and dusted my hair. The horizon glowed. The air smelled of sulfur.

“A fire?”

“Yes, but no fire started by man,” the angel said. “It is the earth itself, the mighty forge at its heart, burning at the command of the Lord. Man is but an insect on its skin, and everything he has made shall be swept away. His cities shall lie in dust.”

“And what should I do?”

“Prepare. In the years remaining, and the life to come. Prepare and be ready. And when you return to Blister Creek, do not bow before tyranny.”

I awoke in bed, the stink of sulfur lingering in my nostrils. I rose and threw open the shutters, expecting to see the horizon glowing with fire and ash falling from the sky. But it was a clear day, and warm. Two cows roamed in the orchard, eating fallen apples. A crow broke the still morning air with a harsh, jeering call. Seconds later, a rooster crowed.

I am an old woman now, but my arms are strong and my mind is sharp. I have many years left, perhaps decades, before this mortal probation ends. Time enough to prepare for the life to come.

Lay me up one thousand bushels of wheat.

This valley doesn’t need wheat. We have wheat in abundance, we have the bishop’s storehouse, and every man stores a year or more of food in his cellar. We have food enough and to spare. What we need is a means of protecting ourselves. And we need women and men—yes, men too—who are prepared for the coming of the Great and Dreadful Day.

And when I am reborn, I’ll bring together the women of Blister Creek into a quorum of priestesses and prophetesses. And no man will stand in my way.

Thus sayeth the Lord.

Jacob and David arrived at the burned-out gas station to find Stephen Paul already waiting. His pickup truck sat in the shade of a fiberglass brontosaurus that stood next to the road to welcome motorists. It still wore a white grin over faded green, but its tail had snapped off and someone had shot out the bulbous eyes for target practice. The sun dipped into the western horizon, and the dinosaur cast a long shadow that stretched across the highway.

Here on the extreme southern end of the valley, there was little to break the landscape except humps of black volcanic rock and gently sloping hillocks covered in sage and rabbit brush. Mountains and cliffs ringed the distant horizons. Jacob found himself eyeing the landscape with defense in mind—if they blockaded the road, would vehicles be able to cross the open desert?

Stephen Paul waited on his crutches while the brothers walked over to meet him. Heat shimmered off the pavement. Jacob and David shook the other man’s hand.

“I spoke with Carol last night about the women’s quorum,” Stephen Paul said to Jacob. “I don’t like it.”

“In principle, or the implementation?”

“Both. I trust you took this to the Lord first and He told you to do this.”

“Yes,” Jacob said, “or at least God didn’t tell me not to.”

“Not the same thing at all.”

“You know what I am,” Jacob said. “And what I am not.”

“I understand, and I respect you for not pretending. The Lord will speak to you in his own time. But listen, is now the time for big changes? A women’s quorum? The men won’t like it, especially Elder Griggs and Elder Johnson.”

“Doesn’t sound like you care much for it yourself,” David said.

“You know how women are. This is the time to be strong, not to show our kinder and gentler side. Our feminine side.”

“Feminine?” David said. “You clearly don’t know my wife.”

“Sure, there are tough women in the quorum. My own Carol is one of them. But it won’t take long before the others tell us to cooperate with this government guy.”

“No,” Jacob said. “When the time comes, those women will defend Blister Creek to the death.”

Jacob thought about the women. It wasn’t just Miriam or Carol, but Rebecca. And Lillian, who had stood up to Taylor Junior and helped rescue those people in the abandoned military base. And what about Eliza?

“If they don’t overthrow us first.” Stephen Paul sighed. “I don’t like it, but I’ve said my piece, so I’ll let it drop. Just promise me that if it doesn’t work, if the women stand in open defiance, you’ll abolish their quorum and put things back the way they were.”

“I won’t let them destroy Blister Creek. I’ll promise that.”

“You’re sure? You’re absolutely certain you can stand up to Eliza and Fernie and all the rest of them and tell them that
men
lead the church and only
men
can save our people from destruction?”