Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (2 page)

“Show us the pit,” Taylor Junior told their captive.

“The pit?”

“You know, where they put the sinners to punish them. What you told me in the apartment. It’s around here somewhere.”

“I know, but why would you want to see that? I found the trailers, can’t you—?” He stopped when Taylor Junior gestured with his gun, before starting his way across the dump again.

As the other two men followed, Kimball asked, “How do you know so much? Did you come back after that first time?”

“I sent in one of my wives. She pretended to be a follower. When she recognized Eliza, she came back to get me. I knew what was going to happen, that the Lord would destroy them all, and I needed to get my wife out before she was killed.”

“What? I thought you said she’d already left.”

“Not that wife. Eliza.”

“Oh.” He blinked and looked at his son.
Wife? Are you out of your mind?

Taylor Junior said, “I got here too late. They were all dead.”

“Except you’re not sure.”

“Except I’m not sure.”

“This way,” the injured man said. He looked back over his shoulder, eyed the truck as if gauging the distance, and then looked back to where the destroyed trailers had stood. “Wait, right about here.”

The smell seemed less strong now, not so oppressive. Kimball supposed one could grow accustomed to any foul-smelling thing, given enough time breathing it into the lungs. Taylor Junior bent to turn the twisted metal of what looked like a truck’s bumper. He pulled at a melted slag of tires, grunting and working to yank
it free, but when Elder Kimball approached to help, the younger man waved him off. At last, it came loose.

“Here it is.”

Taylor Junior worked for another minute moving garbage and revealed a pit dug in the ground. A ladder emerged from the bottom, almost reaching the top before it became a melted twist, like blackened taffy.

Taylor Junior handed Kimball the gun. “Don’t let him move.” He started down the ladder, stopping when his head was the only thing left above ground. “My wife said Caleb was going to put Eliza down here for one of the trials. She would have been down here when the Lord destroyed their cult. By the time I arrived, the fires were out of control and there were cops and firefighters everywhere.”

Kimball finally put the pieces together. “That’s why they never found Eliza’s body.”

He peered into the gloom after his son, wondering what the body would look like, if it would be cooked by the heat of the fire, or if Eliza had curled into a ball and suffocated. Over time, the dry desert air would mummify her body. A dank smell wafted up, so strong it even penetrated the acrid smell of the fires. It smelled like human waste. The injured man covered his mouth and stepped back.

“Well?” Kimball demanded when Taylor Junior emerged. “What did you see? What’s down there?”

“It’s empty.”

“Still,” Kimball said after a moment. “We can’t be sure. She might have got out before the fire but then died with the rest of them.”

“She’s alive,” he said. “I can feel it.”

“Well, what do you care? Forget Eliza. The prophet will never let you marry his daughter.”

“Abraham Christianson is a fallen prophet. An apostate. Stripped of authority to lead God’s people. This is not his decision, it is the Lord’s, and the Lord has said Eliza is mine.”

Elder Kimball kept his voice even. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a prophet or not. He still won’t let you marry Eliza. Brother Abraham has sons who will protect her, elders in the church who hate us now. They’ll turn you over to the FBI if you set foot in Blister Creek.”

“I’m not afraid of the corrupt and weak leadership in Blister Creek. The Lord will deliver Abraham’s followers into my hands. Most of his quorum are old men. The rest are weak in the mind. Abraham is strong, but he’s only one man.”

“What about his son? What about Jacob?”

“Can I go now?” the injured man interrupted. “I did everything you wanted. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t want to know.”

“Yes, you can go,” Taylor Junior said. “Thank you for your help.”

He lifted his gun and fired. The man had time for his eyes to widen in surprise and terror, and then the bullet slammed into his chest. He slumped to the ground. Taylor Junior walked to the groaning, shuddering man and fired once more, into the head. The man lay still.

Kimball stared in horror. “Why did you do that?” he cried. “You promised if he helped…”

Taylor Junior tucked the gun into his pocket. “I had no choice. You said too much. He might have gone to the police.”

He dragged the body to the pit and pushed. The dead man fell onto the ladder and then bumped and slid to the bottom. Taylor Junior covered the pit back over. When he finished, his sunburned face was flushed and sweating. He met his father’s stare.

Elder Kimball pulled his gaze away. Who was this man? He didn’t know him.

He made his decision. As soon as his son returned to the wilderness, he’d go to Abraham Christianson, bend his knee, and ask the Lord’s prophet for forgiveness. And tell Abraham everything.

Abraham Christianson was already waiting on the curb when the van pulled in behind his pickup truck. He studied the tall man who stepped out and admired the clear look in his eyes, the strong set of his jaw. The man had the kind of arms that could wrestle a steer to the ground and faith that could wrestle the devil himself.

This is the husband for Eliza.

Of course, his daughter remained single and he’d lost the ability to compel her to marry, but he knew who he’d choose. If Abraham had pushed harder a few years ago, when she was seventeen and humble, he’d have this match, but he hadn’t and so she didn’t. But maybe he’d try again now that she’d dropped the ridiculous theater of faking her own death. It had been two weeks since the fire. Even Jacob had to admit that if they meant to flush out Taylor Junior, they’d failed.

The man opened the back doors of the van to retrieve a crowbar, then stepped onto the cracked cement of the curb, to where Abraham stood eying the house. Abraham held a tire iron and wore a gun in a holster at his side, cowboy-style, in case things turned ugly when they approached the door.

Abraham gave the other man a nod. “Thank you for coming.”

“Good morning, Brother Abraham,” Stephen Paul Young said.

“There’s nothing good about it. It’s grim business we’re about.” He felt the heft of the tire iron, imagined it smashing bones. The thought gave him little pleasure. “Are you ready?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, no.”

“That’s a good answer,” Abraham said. “It’s an evil man who is ready to commit violence against another. Have you ever killed a person?”

“No, I haven’t.” Stephen Paul left the return question unspoken, but Abraham could see it in the upraised eyebrow.

Abraham nodded. “Yes, I have. I didn’t like it and have always asked the Lord if there were some other way. Usually, there is. But not always.”

“And you think that will be necessary?” Stephen Paul asked. “Killing, I mean?”

“The Lord will guide us, brother. I pray that it will not be necessary.”

“Me too. I keep asking myself how could it be His will to leave three women without a husband and twelve children without a father, and I can’t figure it out.”

Abraham put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “If Brother Stanley were any kind of husband or father, this wouldn’t be necessary.”

Weeds sprang from cracks in the sidewalk, and the flowers in the beds had withered and died from lack of water. Paint peeled from the siding, sandblasted by the winds that came off the Ghost Cliffs. The cliffs loomed less than a half mile distant behind the ranch, and heat shimmered off the dry, packed earth between here and there, unplanted and unirrigated.

Stephen Paul wore a look of disgust as he took in the scene. “My house is a house of order, sayeth the Lord.”

“The man’s house reflects his soul. I should have come this way earlier and I’d have seen it.”

“We’re ten miles from town,” Stephen Paul said. “And he never told us he was coming back. The ranch was abandoned—there was no way to know. This place isn’t even on the electrical grid.”

“Still, if I’d taken the time to wander through Brother Stanley’s house after the FBI raids, I’d have seen all this.”

“The prophet had other things to worry about.”

“I suppose I did,” Abraham said. “Come on, we’ve been spotted.”

As they stepped up the walk toward the farmhouse, two small faces disappeared behind the curtains. The same scrawny dog lay on the porch, chained to the railing, that had been there on Abraham’s other recent visit. He gave a single, hopeful thump of the tail at their approach, but didn’t lift his head. Abraham grabbed the rail with his free hand as the stairs creaked under his feet. Years of dry rot had eroded the wood and someone’s foot had punched
through the deck in one spot. He reached for the door, seeing no reason to knock, but it swung open as he approached.

Sister Agatha stood behind the screen, a baby on her hip. She opened the screen, but then her eyes dropped to the crowbar, the tire iron, the gun at Abraham’s side. One hand flew to her mouth. Her knees wobbled and the baby started to slip from her arm. Stephen Paul shot out a hand and grabbed the baby’s pajamas while Abraham caught the woman’s other arm before she could fall.

“No, oh no. Please.”

“Where is he?” Abraham asked.

“Don’t hurt him, don’t do this.”

He took her by the elbow and led her into the parlor, set her down and looked around.

The baby started to cry. A boy of six or seven came around the corner, eating an apple and wiping a runny nose across his sleeve. Agatha turned to him and said, “Find the sister wives. Tell them—”

“No!” Abraham said. “Stand by your mother, boy. Neither of you move.”

They found two more children in the kitchen, and he sent them back to the parlor with Agatha. They had wide eyes, like animals, and one wore a dirty cast on his right arm. The kitchen smelled like sour milk. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink and empty peanut butter jars and soup cans littered the counters. Fruit flies hovered over a bunch of bananas that had turned from brown to black since his other visit.

Stephen Paul ducked his head beneath a sticky strip that hung from the ceiling, carpeted with dead houseflies. “Disgusting. I
wouldn’t let my dogs live in this filth. What woman could let her home turn into such a dump?”

“A frightened woman,” Abraham said. “A woman who lives in a house without a righteous priesthood holder, a woman with a husband who has turned to Satan.”

“So none of this is their fault?”

“Yes, plenty of this is their fault.” Abraham twisted the tire iron in his fists and tried to fight down the righteous anger that burned in his gut. “But a dirty kitchen is the least of the sins in Stanley Clawson’s home. Come on.”

Stanley’s youngest wife—Sister Laura—was coming down the stairs as they reentered the hall. She stopped when she saw them, turned as if to flee back upstairs, and then stopped and met Abraham’s eyes, her face pale.

“You’ve come for him, then.” Her voice was dull, flat.

“Yes, Sister. Is he upstairs?”

“He is. Should I call him?”

“No, I’ll do that. How many children are upstairs?”

“None,” Laura said. “They’re in the other wing or out back.”

“Good. Wait in the parlor.”

She bowed her head. “Thou sayest.”

Abraham stepped aside to let her pass, then turned to Stephen Paul. “Prepare yourself.”

A curt nod.

Abraham hesitated. The tire iron felt suddenly heavy in his hands, and he wanted nothing more than to cast it away and turn from his awful task. And then he thought about the grim set to his son Jacob’s mouth when he told Abraham what he’d discovered.
What would Jacob say now, if he knew what his father planned to do?

He’d be horrified, of course, would insist that they allow the system to punish Brother Stanley. Right, and like Elder Kimball, arrested for fraud, the authorities would give Stanley a few years behind bars—assuming these wives would testify—and what kind of punishment would that be?

“Brother Abraham?” Stephen Paul asked. “Is there a problem?”

“The Church of the Anointing takes care of its own. The Lord blesses and the Lord damns. And we are instruments in His hands.”

“Thou sayest.”

Abraham Christianson, prophet of the Lord, turned toward the stairs. “Stanley Clawson!” His voice echoed throughout the house. No sound from upstairs. “The Lord sent me to call thee to account. Come down at once!”

Again, nothing, just the sound of a woman weeping from the front room and a fussing baby. A child, asking what sounded like a worried question.

Stephen Paul started for the stairs. “We’ll drag him down.”

Abraham shot out his hand to stop the other man. “No. He’ll come.” He raised his voice again and this time felt the full fury of the Lord. “Stanley Clawson! In the name of He who is holy, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command thee to appear.”

And then he came. Like a dog who has bitten a child, Stanley Clawson slunk down the stairs, eyes downcast, guilt written on his face in his downcast eyes, slumped shoulders, and cowardly posture. So different from the strutting man Abraham remembered, an ally of Elder Kimball’s, a faction now utterly destroyed in Blister Creek and the church.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Stanley stood a little straighter, but still wouldn’t look either man in the eyes. “It’s my house. I have a right to come back.”

“You were not excommunicated, and it is your house,” Abraham agreed.

At last he looked up. “Then why are you here, shouting at me like that?”

“Your wives know why,” Abraham said. “And your children certainly must. I’d call them in to testify against you, but that would be cruel to them.”

“What? It’s about that?” Stanley’s eyebrows lifted, and Abraham thought it incredible that only now did he understand. “The scripture says ‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’”

“Hold him,” Abraham said.

Stephen Paul moved swiftly to Stanley and shoved the crowbar against his neck, then rammed his shoulder into the man’s chest to pin him against the wall. Abraham leaned in his own weight and grabbed the man’s right wrist.