Gods Without Men (27 page)

The German brothers fell to lighting a little potbellied stove and he sat and ate with them and afterward they smoked and the older one asked if he would perform a divination as to the quality of the coming amalgamation. It was a trivial matter but he felt agreeable and so he took off his hat and placed the Urim and the Thummim over his eyes and overhead the sky cracked and it was as if a wheel stood before him, comprising seven wheels, one turning into the other. The seven hubs in the middle were like one hub eternally giving birth to the rims and the spokes of the wheels, and this divine airship manifested itself in the way it had for many months and years, emerging out of groundlessness to guide him on his spiritual path. In the light of the airship he saw every moment of his life, as if the whole was presented before his sight like a tapestry, from the time of his birth at Ambrosia on Marrowbone Stream to the present instant in which he sat with the twin gems over his eyes, speaking prophecy. He saw his mother lifting him up in his swaddling
clothes to show him the true site of the Garden of Eden, there in Jackson County, Missouri, and saw himself climbing trees and fishing in the water and recalled that place as his own Eden, with orchards and ponds and hives of honey and full cribs of corn. He saw the Gentile mob tarring and feathering his father and the cabin burning and the oxen lying shot in the field. He saw the Saints run off their land and the militia riding in to Far West with their soot-blackened faces. He saw the rope and the rim of the well and the tangle of limbs at the bottom, and as all things arise from one by the mediation of one, he saw that all things in his life had their birth from this one thing by adaptation. The sun was his father, the moon his mother; the wind had carried him in its belly, the earth had been his nurse. He spake words of prophecy and afterward all was silence and darkness and void.

The next morning he awoke and began the work of amalgamation. As the older brother drove the mules, he and the younger poured water. When he judged the consistency of the paste in the arrastra bed to be right, he directed the brothers to stop while he made an assay of the mud, turning it over in his hands, noting the way it slid through his fingers: not too watery, but slick, rich, the trapped silver singing loud to him, begging for release. Helped by the younger brother—he refused to let the Chinaman anywhere near the work—he sprinkled rock salt and magistral into the mix, and made another assay. By that time it was late afternoon. They rested the mules and sat down to wait for moonrise. They smoked and drank coffee and when the white moon appeared over the mountains, waxing gibbous, he stood and turned to them and raised his hands.

“In the name of Jesus,” he testified, “I tell you this is the very Spirit of Truth. From the world’s beginning all the Saints have desired to behold its face.” The Germans looked up, tin cups gripped in their fearful hands, two mustached faces silvered by the moonlight. He showed them a flask of Almadén quicksilver, mined and purified in the Sierras, unscrewed the stopper and poured the precious fluid out into an iron tub. There it lay shimmering, paradoxical and mysterious. “As Christ is my witness, I am telling you no word of a lie. What you see is the very light of Jesus, flowing down into the darkness of matter. It dwells
in fiery form in the sky and leads Earth up to Heaven. It is the Secret, hidden from the beginning. I tell you, it transcends both life and death.” And then, as always when he spoke in this manner, he was broken up by emotion and began to weep, for, in his own evocation of the threshold, he saw again the rim of the well, the rope, the feminine arms and legs in their slop of blood and calico. Three raped sister wives, stuffed in there by the Gentiles. He was the smallest, twelve years old. They’d lowered him in a sling while his brother Jed cut the husband down from a tree. It was too much and he’d swooned and he never saw his home country again after that, for when he came round they’d crossed the river and were already in Illinois.

Together the German brothers looked upon the quicksilver and under his direction helped to pour it into a canvas bag, and he walked round the arrastra, squeezing and kneading it so that little drops fell onto the mud like fine metal rain. As he seeded the mud, he was moved to school the brothers in the Mysteries, and whether they understood or not or cared or not and whether the Chinaman overheard or not was of no importance to him, for he told of the One out of which proceeded the Three, which are Mercury, Sulfur and Salt, and how out of those three proceeded all the many substances of the World, which are truly one substance, infused and inspirited with God’s luminous love. And that was how it was for the next days and nights while they incorporated the ore pulp and drew it off and spread it out under the scorching sun for Apollo’s fire to work its influence. He preached and testified and the quicksilver sought out the precious metal in the mud and bound itself to it, drawing the comely light of the Lord out of the base nigger darkness of matter.

Every morning he made an assay, rubbing the silvery mud between his fingers, shaking sediment in a glass flask and watching it fall. They had ten mules and the Chinaman walking through the cake of ore pulp to mix it through, and sometimes its body was hot and sometimes cold, and he added quicksilver and magistral as needed to balance the two principles. Little by little, the amalgamation progressed, and they washed and rinsed and purified and reduced and daily there was less gray offal in the swirling flask and the shining globule of amalgam that
sank to the bottom was fatter and more solid and shone brighter than before. And on the twenty-third day it seemed to Nephi Parr that the final work should begin and he gave the order to light the furnace.

While the brothers waited for moonrise, he took a spyglass and climbed the peak above the mine. The sun was setting and the desert was washing its robe in red, as if preparing for some nocturnal orgy. As he climbed he wondered if death was finally overtaking him, for he thought he heard a flapping of great wings and above his head the firmament was like a sapphire throne, studded with agate and beryl and porphyry and chrysoprase. His whole left side was numb and under his shirt the skin was peeling away from his back. Do not call me to judgment, Lord, he begged. Not until I have completed this last work. He surveyed the land through the spyglass. At his feet the cliff tipped away into the void and he knew himself for a sinner whose bones would bleach out on the sands and whose disfellowshipped soul would never enter the Celestial Kingdom, clutching its scrying stone, for the light that played across the desert’s white body seemed not the singular and steadfast light of God but the mutable light of Mercury, laughter of fools and wonder of the wise. And then he dropped the spyglass and saw it shatter on the ground, for a sign had been given him: Until their magnified appearance before his squinting eye he had not known the Lost Promise mine looked down on Three-Finger Rocks, where once he had felt ease of heart and certainty of purpose, waiting with Porter Rockwell to enact salvation upon one Lyman Pierce, who had traveled very far from Illinois to atone for his sins.

The Three that arise out of the One. He had been young, unschooled in the Mysteries. Now he saw the true meaning of the place. All things had birth from one thing, and his own destiny had always been to return here, to the place of death and generation, the very cradle of the Secret.

They had ridden for weeks to reach those stones. Precious blood was crying out under the altar, begging for retribution, and Brother Rockwell had received testimony concerning the man Pierce, who was said to be at Santa Fe, preparing to lead a party of emigrants over the Spanish trail. Atonement had been Rockwell’s trade even while the Prophet
was alive, and though the California goldfields had lured him away from Zion, he’d never broken fellowship with the Saints, and was known as far as San Francisco to be the Samson of their faith. Joseph Smith himself had laid a hand on his shoulder and prophesied that as long as he cut not his hair, neither bullet nor blade could harm him; and so it had proved. Port Rockwell was called the Destroying Angel by his enemies and Lion of God by his friends, for he had put aside many sinners in the name of Jesus Christ and pulled more than one young Mormon off a barroom floor and set him to the Lord’s work. So it had been with Nephi Parr, who had not prospered on the American River and found his way to the camp at Murderer’s Bar, where Rockwell supplied whiskey and whores to the Gentiles. The man had loomed over him, looking like a mountain and speaking consoling words in his strange high voice. So of course Parr had followed and learned the secret signs and sworn with the others that he would disembowel himself and slit his own throat if he ever broke silence about the work for which Rockwell had chosen him, which was to use up this hateful Pierce, who five years earlier had blacked his face and howled and cavorted outside Carthage jail, and was said by witnesses to have kicked and spat upon and in other nameless ways defiled the Prophet’s dear corpse after he was shot to death by the rioters.

So they had ridden eastward out of the mountains and entered the great desert, where their lips cracked and their eyes were dazzled by the whiteness of the land, which at midday seemed to breathe and palpitate, so that Nephi came to understand he was riding on the white breast of the living earth and felt his mind overcome with dread at the immensity of the Most High. And after many days they came to the Three-Finger Rocks, planted by the Father in that desolate place as a sign of his blessing on their enterprise. Under the rocks was camped a ragged band of Paiutes, and Rockwell, who spoke their language, seemed to expect the meeting, greeting their chief and sitting down with them to smoke and parlay. He told the savages that the Mormonee were at war with the Mericats and enlisted their aid. The chief accepted a present of rifles and the two parties set to waiting, during which time Hosea Doyle, younger
even than Nephi, fell sick with fever and the brethren laid hands on him and rebuked his disease in the name of the Lord. After that he was well again, which all took as a further sign of favor.

Following many days of idleness the emigrant train was sighted and they clad themselves like savages, in paint and feathers, and fell upon it by night and the Lord God delivered his enemies into the hands of His servants. Lyman Pierce died hard and slow up on the Three-Finger Rocks, begging for mercy until they relented and turned him off and of his companions a third part fell by the sword and a third were scattered to the wind, women and children alike. When it was done, they laid the bodies out on the sand, scalping and stripping them to give further semblance of a savage raid, and though Nephi Parr went back to Deseret and tried to live a settled life on the Green River, sealing to himself two good wives who hearkened to his counsel and were in every way ornaments of his kingdom, he could not forget the Three-Finger Rocks or the heathen markings scratched upon them. He would sit and brood outside his cabin at the ferry, watching the passengers assemble, and it seemed to him that the world outside the Celestial City was a wicked place, full of sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters and those who loveth and telleth a lie. And soon enough all turned to dust and ashes in his mouth, for there was blood and war and rumors of war and politics or tricks as he preferred to word it, and instead of standing firm his brethren stole his wives and property and cut him loose to wander the earth, betrayed and disfellowshipped.

He left the shattered spyglass lying on the ground and trod the path back down toward the mine. The rising moon lit his way and as he neared the main shaft he saw the German brothers had lit the furnace in readiness for the last purification. Together they heated the amalgam in the fire and trapped the vapor with a copper hood, and the quicksilver renounced its subtile form and dripped back into a flask, and behind in the crucible was left pure silver. In the sky were signs and wonders and he lifted up his hands and saw the serpent with its tail in its mouth and for a moment he stood on the threshold between two worlds, bathed in an aura of
violet and green and yellow. Through his art he had released the light of nature, and before his eyes this light suffused the whole world with knowledge of salvation, redeeming it and making it once again entire.

The next day he woke to find his limbs swollen and a great hammering behind his eyes and he could not understand the words the two brothers were speaking any more than he could the Chinaman, for the Lord had stopped his ears and made him deaf. By signs, the brothers gave him to understand that he had fallen into an ecstasy and they had been obliged to hold him down as a spirit rent his body, and at last it had come out of him and he had been as one dead. While he lay in his swoon, they had poured the silver into molds and they showed him the fruits of the labor, of which he took two bars by way of payment and packed them in his saddlebags and got up onto his horse.

He rode in the direction of the Three-Finger Rocks, leaning low over the horse’s neck, for he could not sit upright. Above him circled the airships and all about was change and transformation. As he rode he raised his hand to his face and saw the bones glowing inside it and a coyote howled and the sun shone through the palm of his hand like glass. And by this he knew his body was shrugging off its animal nature and it would soon come time to make the crossing. Oh God, he whispered, hear the words of my mouth; and the whole jumble of his life wheeled round him, bare running feet cut bloody by winter stubble, a cutlass and a fiery wheel and a camel and a steamboat bolted together on the floodplain of the Colorado. He saw men compelled to eat the flesh of their sons and daughters and Rockwell’s unshorn hair and at last the airship came down and the Angel Moroni and the gods of many worlds appeared, calling him up to exaltation.

Nicky’s leg was throbbing. He spent most of the night sitting on the bed in his underpants, picking little black splinters out of his calf and watching old movies on cable. Men lit women’s cigarettes. Soldiers sacrificed themselves for their buddies. Cowboys raced the stagecoach, watched by Indians on the ridge. It all circled round and round until he couldn’t follow anymore and drifted off to sleep. When he woke, the room was too hot. The sun backlit the curtains. Someone was running a vacuum cleaner on the other side of the wall. He supposed he had to make a decision. Should he go back to L.A.? He just didn’t have the heart for it. The explaining. Rehab. The self-righteous shit Jimmy would come out with at band meeting.