_The Blood on the Page_
Along the level lane between the mountain ranges he went, a lane that
runs almost from Bear Creek on the north to the Colorado on the south,
with a width of twenty miles or so. But for Joel Rae it became a ride
down the valley of lost illusions. Some saving grace of faith was gone
from the people. He passed through sturdy little settlements, bowered in
gardens and orchards, and girded about by now fertile acres where once
had been the bare, gray desert. Slowly, mile by mile, the Saints had
pushed down the valley, battling with the Indians and the elements for
every acre of land they gained. Yet it seemed to him now that they had
achieved but a mere Godless prosperity. They had worked a miracle of
abundance in the desert--but of what avail? For the soul of their faith
was gone. He felt or heard the proof of it on every hand.
Through Battle Creek, Provo, and Springville he went; through Spanish
Fork, Payson, Salt Creek, and Fillmore. He stopped to preach at each
place, but he did it perfunctorily, and with shame for himself in his
secret heart. Some impalpable essence of spirituality was gone from
himself and from the people. He felt himself wickedly agreeing with a
pessimistic elder at Fillmore, who remarked: "I tell you what, Brother
Rae, it seems like when the Book of Mormon goes again' the Constitution
of the United States, there's sure to be hell to pay, and the Saints
allus has to pay it." He could not tell the man in words of fire, as
once he would have done, that they had been punished for lack of faith.
Another told him it was madness to have thought they could "whip" the
United States. "Why," said this one, "they's more soldiers back there
east of the Missouri than there is fiddlers in hell!" By the orthodox
teachings of the time, the good man of Israel had thus indicated an
overwhelming host.
He passed sadly on. They would not understand that they had laid by and
forgotten their impenetrable armour of faith.
Between Beaver and Paragonah that day, toiling intently along the dusty
road in the full blaze of the August sun, he met a woman,--a tall,
strong creature with a broad, kind face, burned and seamed and hardened
by life in the open. Yet it was a face that appealed to him by its look
of simple, trusting earnestness. Her dress was of stout, gray homespun,
her shoes were coarse and heavy, and she was bareheaded, her gray,
straggling hair half caught into a clumsy knot at the back of her head.
She turned out to pass him without looking up, but he stopped his horse
and dismounted before her. It seemed to him that here was one whose
faith was still fresh, and to such a one he needed to talk. He called to
her:
"You need something on your head; you are burned."
She looked up, absently at first, as if neither seeing nor hearing him.
Then intelligence came into her eyes.
"You mean my Timothy needs something on his head--poor man! You see he
broke out of the house last night, because the Bishop told him I was to
take another husband. Cruel! Oh, so cruel!--the poor foolish man, he
believed it, and he cared so for me. He thought I was bringing home a
new man with me--a new wedding for time and eternity, to build myself up
in the Kingdom--a new wedding night--with him sitting off, cold and
neglected. But something burst in his head. It made a roar like the mill
at Cedar Creek when it grinds the corn--just like that. So he went out
into the cold night--it was sleeting--thinking I'd never miss him, you
see, me being fondled and made over by the new man--wouldn't miss him
till morning." A scowl of indignation darkened her face for an instant,
and she paused, looking off toward the distant hills.
"But that was all a lie, a mean lie! I don't see how he could have
believed it. I think he couldn't have been right up here--" she pointed
to her head.
"But of course I followed him, and I've been following him all day. He
must have got quite a start of me--poor dear--how could he think I'd
break his heart? But I'll have him found by night. I must hurry, so good
day, sir!" She curtsied to him with a curious awkward sort of grace. He
stopped her again.
"Where will you sleep to-night?"
"In his arms, thank God!"
"But if you happen to miss him--you might not find him until to-morrow."
A puzzled look crossed her face, and then came the shadow of a
disquieting memory.
"Now you speak so, I remember that it wasn't last night he left--it was
the night before--no?--perhaps three or four nights. But not as much as
a fortnight. I remember my little baby came the night he left. I was so
mad to find him I suffered the mother-pains out in the cold rain--just a
little dead baby--I could take no interest in it. And there has been a
night or two since then, of course. Sleep?--oh, I'll sleep some easy
place where I can hear him if he passes--sometimes by the road, in a
barn, in houses--they let me sleep where I like. I must hurry now. He's
waiting just over that hill ahead."
He saw her ascend the rise with a new spring in her step. When she
reached the top, he saw her pause and look from side to side below her,
then start hopefully down toward the next hill.
A mile beyond, back of a great cloud of dust, He found a drove of
cattle, and back of these, hot and voiceful, came the good Bishop
Wright. He described the woman he had just met, and inquired if the
Bishop knew her.
The Wild Ram of the Mountain mopped his dusty, damp brow, took an easier
seat in his saddle, and fanned himself. "Oh, yes, that's the first wife
of Elder Tench. When he took his second, eight or ten years ago,
something went wrong with this one in her head. She left the house the
same night, and she's been on the go ever since. She don't do any harm,
jest tramps back and forth between Paragonah and Parowan and Summit and
Cedar City. I always _have_ said that women is the contrary half of the
human race and man is the sanifying half!"
The cattle were again in motion, and the Bishop after them with strong
cries of correction and exhortation.
Toward evening Joel Rae entered Paragonah, a loose group of log houses
amid outlying fields, now shorn and yellow. Along the street in front of
him many children followed and jeered in the wake of a man who slouched
some distance ahead of them. As Joel came nearer, one boy, bolder than
the others, ran forward and tugged sharply at the victim's ragged gray
coat. At this he turned upon his pursuers, and Joel Rae saw his
face,--the face of an imbecile, with unsteady eyes and weakly drooping
jaw. He raised his hand threateningly at his tormentors, and screamed at
them in rage. Then, as they fell back, he chuckled to himself. As Joel
passed him, he was still looking back at the group of children now
jeering him from a safe distance, his eyes bright for the moment, and
his face lighted with a weak, loose-lipped smile.
"Who is that fellow, Bishop?" he asked of his host for the night, a few
moments later, when he dismounted in front of the cabin. The Bishop
shaded his eyes with his hand and peered up the road at the shambling
figure once more moving ahead of the tormenting children.
"That? Oh, that's only Tom Potwin. You heard about him, I guess. No?
Well, he's a simple--been so four years now. Don't you recollect? He's
the lad over at Manti who wouldn't give up the girl Bishop Warren Snow
wanted. The priesthood tried every way to make him; they counselled him,
and that didn't do; then they ordered him away on mission, but he
wouldn't go; and then they counselled the girl, but she was stubborn
too. The Bishop saw there wasn't any other way, so he had him called to
a meeting at the schoolhouse one night. As soon as he got there, the
lights was blowed out, and--well, it was unfortunate, but this boy's
been kind of an idiot ever since."
"Unfortunate! It was awful!"
"Not so awful as refusing to obey counsel."
"What became of the girl?"
"Oh, she saw it wasn't no use trying to go against the Lord, so she
married the Bishop. He said at the time that he knew she'd bring him bad
luck--she being his thirteenth--and she did, she was that hifalutin. He
had to put her away about a year ago, and I hear she's living in a
dugout somewhere the other side of Cedar City, a-starving to death they
tell me, but for what the neighbours bring her. I never did see why the
Bishop was so took with her. You could see she'd never make a worker,
and good looks go mighty fast."
He dreamed that night that the foundations of the great temple they were
building had crumbled. And when he brought new stones to replace the
old, these too fell away to dust in his hands.
The next evening he reached Cedar City. Memories of this locality began
to crowd back upon him with torturing clearness; especially of the
morning he had left Hamblin's ranch. As he mounted his horse two of the
children saved from the wagon-train had stood near him,--a boy of seven
and another a little older, the one who had fought so viciously with him
when he was separated from the little girl. He remembered that the
younger of the two boys had forgotten all but the first of his name. He
had told them that it was John Calvin--something; he could not remember
what, so great had been his fright; the people at the ranch, because of
his forlorn appearance, had thereupon named him John Calvin Sorrow.
These two boys had watched him closely as he mounted his horse, and the
older one had called to him, "When I get to be a man, I'm coming back
with a gun and kill you till you are dead yourself," and the other,
little John Calvin Sorrow, had clenched his fists and echoed the threat,
"We'll come back here and kill you! Mormons is worse'n Indians!"
He had ridden quickly away, not noting that some of the men standing by
had looked sharply at the boys and then significantly at one another.
One of those who had been present, whom he now met, told him of these
two boys.
"You see, Elder, the orders from headquarters was to save only them that
was too young to give evidence in a court. But these two was very
forward and knowing. They shouldn't have been kept in the first place.
So two men--no need of naming names--took both of them out one night.
They got along all right with the little one, the one they called John
Calvin Sorrow--only the little cuss kicked and scrambled so that we both
had to see to him for a minute, and when we was ready for the other,
there he was at least ten rods away, a-legging it into the scrub oak.
Well, they looked and looked and hunted around till daybreak, but he'd
got away all right, the moon going under a cloud. They tracked him quite
a ways when it come light, till his tracks run into the trail of a big
band of Navajos that had been up north trading ponies and was going back
south. He was the one that talked so much about you, but you needn't
ever have any fear of his talking any more. He'd be done for one way or
another."
For the first time in his life that night, he was afraid to
pray,--afraid even to give thanks that others were sleeping in the room
with him so that he could hear their breathing and know that he was not
alone.
He was up betimes to press on to the south, again afraid to pray, and
dreading what was still in store for him. For sooner or later he would
have to be alone in the night. Thus far since that day in the Meadows he
had slept near others, whether in cabins or in camp, in some freighter's
wagon or bivouacking in the snows of Echo Canon. Each night he had been
conscious, at certain terrible moments of awakening, that others were
near him. He heard their breathing, or in the silence a fire's light had
shown him a sleeping face, the lines of a form, or an arm tossed out.
What would happen on the night he found himself alone, he knew
not--death, or the loss of reason. He knew what the torture would
be,--the shrieks of women in deadly terror, the shrill cries of
children, the low, tense curses of men, the rattle of shots, the yells
of Indians, the heavy, sickening smell of blood, the still forms fallen
in strange positions of ease, the livid faces distorted to grins. He had
not been able to keep the sounds from his ears, but thus far the things
themselves had stayed behind him, moving always, crawling, writhing,
even stepping furtively close at his back, so that he could feel their
breath on his neck. When the time came that these should move around in
front of him, he thought it would have to be the end. They would go
before him, a wild, bleeding, raving procession, until they tore his
heart from his breast. One sight he feared most of all,--a bronzed arm
with a wide silver bracelet at the wrist, the hand clutching and waving
before him heavy strands of long, yellow hair with a gory patch at the
end,--living hair that writhed and undulated to catch the light, coiling
about the arm like a golden serpent.
His way lay through the Meadows, yet he hardly realised this until he
was fairly on the ground in the midst of a thousand evil signs of the
day. Here, a year after, were skulls and whitening bones, some in heaps,
some scattered through the sage-brush where the wolves had left them.
Many of the skulls were pierced with bullet-holes, shattered as by heavy
blows, or cleft as with a sharp-edged weapon. Even more terrifying than
these were certain traces caught here and there on the low scrub oaks
along the way,--children's sunbonnets; shreds of coarse lace, muslin,
and calico; a child's shoe, the tattered sleeve of a woman's dress--all
faded, dead, whipped by the wind.
He pressed through it all with set jaws, trying to keep his eyes fixed
upon the ground beyond his horse's head; but his ears were at the mercy
of the cries that rang from every thicket.
Once out of it, he rode hard, for it must not come yet--his first night
alone. By dusk he had reached the new settlement of Amalon, a little off
the main road in a valley of the Pine Mountains. Here he sought the
house where he had left the child. When he had picketed his horse he
went in and had her brought to him,--a fresh little flower-like
woman-child, with hair and eyes that told of her mother, with reminders
of her mother's ways as she stood before him, a waiting poise of the
head, a lift of the chin. They looked at each other in the candle-light,
the child standing by the woman who had brought her, looking up at him
curiously, and he not daring to touch her or go nearer. She became
uneasy and frightened at last, under his scrutiny, and when the woman
would have held her from running away, began to cry, so that he gave the
word to let her go. She ran quickly into the other room of the cabin,
from which she called back with tears of indignation in her voice,
"You're not my papa--not my _real_ papa!"
When the people were asleep, he sat before the blaze in the big
fireplace, on the hearth cleanly swept with its turkey-wing and
buffalo-tail. There was to be one more night of his reprieve from
solitude. The three women of the house and the man were sleeping around
the room in bunks. The child's bed had been placed near him on the floor
after she slept, as he had asked it to be. He had no thought of sleep
for himself. He was too intensely awake with apprehension. On the floor
beside his chair was a little bundle the woman had brought him,--the
bundle he had found loosened by her side, that day, with the trinkets
scattered about and the limp-backed little Bible lying open where it had
fallen.
He picked the bundle up and untied it, touching the contents timidly. He
took up the Bible last, and as he did so a memory flooded back upon him
that sickened him and left him trembling. It was the book he had given
her on her seventeenth birthday, the one she had told him she was
keeping when they parted that morning at Nauvoo. He knew the truth
before he opened it at the yellowed fly-leaf and read in faded ink,
"From Joel to Prudence on this day when she is seventeen years old--June
2d, 1843."
In a daze of feeling he turned the pages, trying to clear his mind,
glancing at the chapter headings as he turned,--"Abram is Justified by
Faith," "God Instructeth Isaac," "Pharaoh's Heart Is Hardened," "The
Laws of Murder," "The Curses for Disobedience." He turned rapidly and at
last began to run the leaves from between his thumb and finger, and
then, well over in the book something dark caught his eye. He turned the
leaves back again to see what it was; but not until the book was opened
flat before him and he held the page close to the light did he see what
it was his eye had caught. A wash of blood was across the page.
He stared blankly at the reddish, dark stain, as if its spell had been
hypnotic. Little by little he began to feel the horror of it,
remembering how he picked the book up from where it had fallen before
her. Slowly, but with relentless certainty, his mind cleared to what he
saw.
Now for the first time he began to notice the words that showed dimly
through the stain, began to read them, to puzzle them out, as if they
were new to him:--
"But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them
which hate you,
"Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use
you.
"And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the
other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy
coat also.
"Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away
thy goods ask them not again.
"And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them
likewise."
Again and again he read them. They were illumined with a strangely
terrible meaning by the blood of her he had loved and sworn to keep
himself clean for.
He could no longer fight off the truth. It was facing him now in all its
nakedness, monstrous to obscenity, demanding its due measure from his
own soul's blood. He aroused himself, shivering, and looked out into the
room where the shadows lay heavy, and from whence came the breathing of
the sleepers. He picked up the now sputtering candle, set in its hole
bored in a block of wood, and held it up for a last look at the little
woman-child. He was full of an agony of wonder as he gazed, of piteous
questioning why this should be as it was. The child stirred and flung
one arm over her eyes as if to hide the light. He put out the candle and
set it down. Then stooping over, he kissed the pillow beside the child's
head and stepped lightly to the door. He had come to the end of his
subterfuges--he could no longer delay his punishment.
Outside the moon was shining, and his horse moved about restlessly. He
put on the saddle and rode off to the south, galloping rapidly after he
reached the highway. Off there was a kindly desert where a man could
take in peace such punishment as his body could bear and his soul
decree; and where that soul could then pass on in decent privacy to be
judged by its Maker.