In the Beauty of the Lilies (57 page)

Toward the end of January and through February there was the lambing. Day and night, the bleating of new arrivals on this earth, and men and women coming and going into the barn with heat lamps and blankets, wearing bloody aprons
and green Playtex gloves, to assist in the muddle of birth—the little black hooves outthrust through the woolly vagina, the slippery purple-yellow placental mess, the new lamb staggering to its feet with the umbilical cord still dragging in the straw. Coyotes smelled the afterbirth and, winter-starved, came close in skulking, howling numbers, so that the men armed against the armies of Gog turned their guns against a natural foe. Clark explained to the siege headquarters in Lower Branch that this shooting was not directed against the personnel manning the perimeter, and relayed Jesse’s refusal to let a team of veterinarians ski into the Temple. “Slick, that’s how they do with them airplane hijackers,” Jesse explained. “Send in a crew to take away the rest-room shit that turns out to be Israeli commandos. ‘The treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously.’ That’s Isaiah, twenty-one two.”

The February snows were the heaviest of the winter and yet the sun strengthened each day, dazzlingly, burning bare margins of mud at the base of southern-exposed walls and outcroppings, with the first shoots, by the end of the month, of spring grass, and of snowdrops with their blue-green leaves and pearl-white hanging heads, and the probing pale tips of the avalanche lilies. Even on clear cold days a softening was felt in the air: the woodsmoke from the chimneys smelled stronger and sweeter; puffy broken cumulus replaced the leaden nimbus layers or bald steely blue of January; and the birds, the chickadees and juncos and finches, came out from the shelter of the spruces and hemlocks and peppered the air with excited twittering, sharing some news that electrified their densely programmed little brains. The tracks of small animals, squirrels and marmots and wood rats come to steal the sheep’s feed grain, multiplied in the barnyard, and in March, on an early morning when fog was lifting
from the softening snow, two elk had moved past the house, migrating up from the valley into the mountains. The male was shedding his antlers, and by furiously rubbing them against the rough dry boards of the house he brought men scrambling from bed to the windows with their guns, thinking that the long-anticipated assault had begun. Ghostly in the fog, the elk couple hightailed it upward, into the shrouded vast realm of the mountain lion and grizzly bear, the horned lark and the white-tailed ptarmigan and bald eagle. With the stirring of spring, traffic along the road at the end of the snowbound dirt road had picked up, too, while Clark found the cops and agents down in Lower Branch and even his old friend Eddie, of the gray suit and bent spine, less and less communicative.

In mid-March, Tom and Jim’s wife, Polly, deserted, with Polly and Jim’s three-year-old girl, named Fidelity. It was not as adulterous as it seemed; they had begged Jim to come, and he had seemed to agree, but at the last minute had told them to go without him. From his bunk in the men’s barracks he explained it to Clark: “It’s simple math, in a way. You know about Pascal’s bet? The odds are long, but the rewards are infinite, so the bet is infinitely worth making. I’m betting Jesse’s the real thing. Some might say it’s mighty strange for the Lord to come again in the form of a limited, gun-crazy guy like Jesse, but that’s the Lord’s style, to work in mysterious ways.” Jim added, with a sly shrug and his cool slant smile, “If I’m wrong, Polly and Fidelity are safe, and my cousin will take good care of them. Tom’s a straight guy. Dumb but straight.” Clark knew he should like Jim, but something held him back, something fishy and too easy, as if life for Jim was like watching television. Clark felt he had come a long way from home and yet here was this man who
kept slyly trying to engage him in the accent, the language, of the old country.

Not a week passed before—another miracle—their number was replenished; a party of four, who had come to Lower Branch months ago, shortly after the siege had become news, finally made it into the Temple, by snowshoeing at night through the weakest spot in the authorities’ ring, the steep rocky bowl to the northeast, having bribed the Hardens two hundred dollars to let them through on the Triple H land. “Jesse, we are yours,” they told him. “We are saved.” He bestowed upon them the names Benjamin, Medad, Mehetabel, and Elisabeth. They brought with them hundreds in cash and the certificates and passbooks to their life savings, but until the day when connections with the banks and merchants were reëstablished, they had brought mainly the burden of their bodies to the Temple, where the supplies were running low. The miracle solved nothing.

Jesse appeared disheartened and distracted. His spirit had fattened on the publicity of the winter, but the convergence of thousands of converts and untold numbers of angels, ushering in the new Heaven and Earth that Revelation promised, had not come about. Now he felt an approaching famine in things, an unease of coming change. Satellite City was almost a ghost town. The foreign networks and major papers had pulled their correspondents, and then the national newsmagazines had shifted to local stringers, and the smaller-budget and remoter radio and television stations had faded away. A reporter population once numbered in the hundreds—so vast that the Salvation Army had set up a meal truck on the Menéndez brothers’ tent-covered rise of land—had shrunk to representatives of the major networks, the Denver
Post
, and a few local papers and stations within commuting distance.
Jesse’s tapes had been played to audiences of millions, his onrolling voice had huskily twanged through any number of recorded interviews, his pamphlets of exegesis and prophecy had been publicly quoted, ridiculed, and psychoanalyzed; and yet nothing, in any cosmic sense, had happened. The world remained insufficiently perturbed. It rolled on, untransformed. Heaven expected yet more of him, and under this demand his spirit writhed, sleepless. The fringe of hair falling to his collar had whitened; his wire glasses were worn awry, or absent, so his golden eyes stared without a focus. He spent days at a time among his women, but—claimed a rumor that crept out through his bedroom walls—impotently. Meeting Esau in a corridor or before Bible study, he would ask, “How goes the battle, Slick?” and not wait for any answer. Once, as Clark was hurrying to bed after dinner so he could rise for the sentry watch before dawn, Jesse, who had not been at the table, materialized on the tilted loose boards leading up to the men’s dormitory. He looked through his disciple and in a tranced voice recited, “ ‘And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or lo, he is there; believe him not.’ Mark, thirteen twenty-one. Ha! Believe him not! Those old Gospeleers told it like they saw it, didn’t they, Slick? Here’s another puzzler: ‘Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ Tell me what
that
means.”

“Well, I think—”

“No thinking now, Slick. None of your clever PR bullshit. Too late. Too late, boy. He’s got us by the balls. Gog. Ever crush a big black ant under your thumb? That’s us right now—feel it?
Feel
it?” He squeezed Esau’s arm like a drowning man dragging down his rescuer. Esau gasped and squirmed away, obscurely, illicitly pleased to see Jesse brought low, tasting
what Clark himself had tasted those empty early L.A. mornings when he had returned from one of the clubs with a burned-out buzzing brain and gazed down the grid of lights receding over this total velvety blackness until it seemed an angelic cage door was rising up to lock him in.

Jesse’s Bible-study sessions had moved from Revelation and the Old Testament prophets, with their rageful violence, to the Gospels, as if he were looking for his own story there. “ ‘O my Father,’ “ he read, “ ‘if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’ “ His audience sat in their white robes of used sheets, holding dry stalks of high-country wheat instead of the Biblical palms prescribed by Revelation 7:9. “Now, dear friends, what’s this all about? This is a man in agony talking. ‘If it be possible.’ ‘With God all things are possible,’ Jesus has said earlier in the Gospel of Matthew. So He knows God could remove the cup if He wished. But God does not wish. Jesus looks up there from praying at His rocky cold table in the Garden of Gethsemane and says again, ‘O my father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.’ God wants Him to drink it, that’s how it will pass away. It will pass down His throat and out the other end. What else does Jesus have to drink in this gospel, a little further on in His horrible ordeal? Vinegar mixed with gall. ‘They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when He had tasted thereof, He would not drink.’ He was thirsty but He was not going to choke down that cruel mockery of wine, that unpalatable rotgut, no, not after giving His disciples His own sacred sweet blood to drink—the blood of His body, given for them! And no sooner had He taken that one repugnant sip and shook His head in simple manly revulsion than, the next verse says, ‘And they crucified Him.’

“ ‘And they crucified Him’! The Roman officials of Judaea
and the high priests and elders of Judaism and the social workers and the FBI agents and the murderous agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, they crucified Him, for bringing perfection down from Heaven to earth. They crucified the perfect Lamb. And what did His disciples do? Believe it or not, my dearest friends, they slept, they pretended they didn’t know Him until the cock crowed, they ran this way and that like sheep when the coyotes carry off one of the little lambs. And Jesus up there on the cross cries out ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ And the people on the ground taunt Him, saying, ‘Save Thyself. If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.’ And the thieves crucified next to Him join right in, razzing Him in the midst of their own agony, you can see why, for if He hopped down from that cross He just might bring them with Him, His new buddies and sidekicks. And the folks hanging around poke a sponge full of vinegar in His face, and have themselves a laugh, and He cries out with a loud voice, a
loud
voice”—and Jesse made his own voice here so loud that it cracked painfully, over all their heads, including those of the children, the youngest of whom whimpered at the noise, while those older stared, trying to see through this man’s shouting into what the world had in store for them—“and yielded up the ghost. No ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’ in this version—that’s in soft-hearted Luke. No friendly aside to the thief on the cross beside Him that ‘Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise’—that’s in Luke, too. In Matthew, He takes the cup neat, like a bolt of bitter, bitter whiskey, that makes you cough, and makes the tears come to your eyes, so you swear you’ll never take another drink as long as you live.

“Now, what was in that cup? I’ll tell you what was in that cup. The wrath of God was in that cup. In Revelation, fourteen
ten, what do we read? We read that, if any man worship the beast and his image, ‘The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb.’ We don’t want that, now do we, boys and girls? You know who the Lamb is, don’t you? You know who the beast is, don’t you? His number is 666, and if you sit down with the figures and break them down and add them up that comes out to be U.S.A., I’ve seen it calculated by experts. In chapter sixteen, now, I was reading the other night while you all were sleeping like ignorant possums, the angel has poured out the seventh vial, and a voice from the temple of heaven makes a terrible earthquake, ‘And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found,’ and there’s a ‘great hail out of Heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent,’ and men blasphemed God, which is what you all do when you sleep while the Lamb of God is awake studying to save your poor sinful hides, and Babylon, that great unholy city greater even than Denver and Washington, D.C., Babylon that unholy city where the great mother of harlots sits holding her golden cup ‘full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication,’ that city of Babylon came in remembrance before God so He could ‘give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath.’ Hear that, children?
‘The cup of the wine of the fierceness of His wrath.’
Her cup runneth over, you could say, with the Psalmist. Yea, we are walking ‘through the valley of the shadow of death’ here—that’s what this here sacred verse indicates.”

Jesse looked lost amid his texts, his many cups, sweating and pale, his skin shining like a lampshade, his body contorted as if wrestling with an invisible antagonist. “Why,” he
asked, in a suddenly conversational voice, as one small child, who had been sobbing, was shushed by his mother, in mid-sob, “why does God set before us and Jesus this cup brimming with the wine of His wrath, with fire and brimstone and hailstones the size of a talent? Why not just give us a nice Coca-Cola or cold cider? Jesus wanted it to pass. He was a young man, with a great future in preaching and healing. But He had to drink that cup, He had to be whipped and humiliated in His naked body and nailed to that cross by big ugly spikes right through the palms of His hands and hung there so He could hardly get breath into His lungs in order to take away old Adam’s sin, the sin of the world. That was the only way God His father could do what He wanted to do; He couldn’t think of any other feasible way. Sure, Jesus would have liked the cup to pass from Him. I’d like it to myself. I’m not so old, though this winter has been a long one, hasn’t it now? You—you’d like it to pass. But it won’t pass. The cup is on the way. It’s sailing through the air, friends. The cup is here.” He held out his broad hands shaped as if they held a chalice. “Drink it. We must drink it together. We must drink it because this beverage, God’s wrath bottled by Him personally, sealed so tight you can hear it fizz when you open the cap, is the liquor of eternal life. It’s the drink of Paradise. It makes champagne look like vinegar and gall. It makes milk, little ones, taste like castor oil. None of you remember castor oil but some of you older-timers like friend Mephibosheth and his missus probably do. It was nasty stuff. It was rough stuff. But it did you good. The cup of the wrath of God will do you good. We’ll drink it together, when the time comes. We’ll make a little party of it. ‘Drink ye all of it; for this is My blood of the new testament.’ What does our Lamb Jesus Christ say in Gethsemane? He says, ‘My soul is exceeding
sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with Me.’ ”