The Rock Child (13 page)

The third factor was the trickiest: Burton suspected sometimes that he was quite mad, and that he had become a sensualist and libertine to control the madness. So Isabel’s fetters upon his indulgences, intended to ensure sanity in their lives, might well loose his demons.

He had promised her that he would abide by these principles of good sense. Then he had gone out to Fernando Po alone, irked at such an ignominious posting. For a year he had written his pages, kept his journal,
practiced his religion, dispensed with the easy tasks at the consulate, and followed his regime of sensible behavior.

Then the mission to America. In New Orleans he maintained sobriety, except for the occasional brandy. In St. Louis he had kept it up, except for laudanum. In Salt Lake he had no opportunity to do otherwise. Yet he felt his demons clanking their chains.

It is discipline that keeps a life in order,
he told himself.

First pray
. Burton washed himself in the basin provided. He got out his compass and calculated the direction of Mecca. He spread a prayer rug on the floor between the beds. He took off his shoes, knelt on the rug facing Mecca, and recited the great favorite of all Muslim prayers, the Sura 1:

In the name of Allah the merciful, the compassionate. Praise be to Allah, the lord of the worlds, the merciful, the compassionate, the ruler of the judgment day! Thee we serve and Thee we ask for aid. Guide us in the right path, the path of those to whom Thou art gracious; not of those with whom Thou art wroth; nor of those who err.

Now he went to his traveling cases and removed a phial. He held it to the dusky light. Tincture of opium, laudanum. It had the singular advantage of being easily available in America, from every chemist’s shop and every army surgeon. Since it was a usual treatment for diarrhea, any traveler would be expected to carry it. Gratifyingly, it contained two of his necessary elixirs, opium and alcohol.
As long as I keep the use under control
…

He drank deeply. He went and lay down on his bed. Before he floated away to the land of Xanadu, he pictured Isabel in his mind. He said to her,
You do not understand
.

The next morning the three travelers borrowed an atlas from Brother Young and inspected Asia. Asie was quiet as Burton and Sun Moon showed him Tibet. Burton pointed out the great mountains that define the region topographically, and the great rivers that flow from the Tibetan plateau and become the life blood of the countries below. He traced the Indus and the sacred Ganges, and told of his travels in India, the Hind, and Persia. Asie’s eyes, though, were for Kham and the long river route Sun Moon traveled across China. He ran his finger across the vast blue of the Pacific Ocean from China to San Francisco.

The afternoon Burton spent observing the Young household and writing furiously again in his notebook. Journals were his secret treasure, the ore of his books.

As a writer and spy Burton was caught in a contradiction: His life abounded in real incidents and characters he could not publish.

He delighted in jolting British sensibilities with truths they did not want to hear. Whoever had not been offended by his writing about native mistresses, courtesans, prostitutes, boys for hire, and the like, would be scandalized by his eventual translation of the
Kama Sutra
. He had told many other truths his countrymen were unwilling to hear, even going so far as to advocate passionately the idea that females could and should enjoy sex.

Yet these notes about the domestic life of Brigham Young represented his dilemma. This he could not publish. He held up his pen in exasperation.
Damn all
.

Yet Captain Richard Burton had a splendid secret. One day, when he was in the grave beyond everyone’s reach, he would tell all. All about the East India Company. All about England’s foolish, self-defeating, blind, murderous, and racist ways in India. All about the British Army. All about the Royal Geographic Society, sponsor of many a Briton’s journey of exploration. All about his colleagues and competitors in the mapping of Africa. All about the insanity of the African slave trade. And all, certainly, about his host in the City of the Saints, and his two dozen wives.

With the taste of revenge fresh on his tongue, he dipped his pen.

Surely the domestic arrangements of the world’s most famous or notorious polygamist are of interest. Brigham Young’s principal residence is Lion House, so called from the lion of stone reclining above the entrance. Here live the greater number of his wives and children. In the companion residence adjacent, called Beehive House, live at least two more wives. Additionally, wives and children live at his farm and several other residences at Great Salt Lake City or within an easy ride thereof. I gather that others yet live in residences in remote parts of the Territory
.

Though gentiles luridly imagine otherwise, the atmosphere of Lion House is not voluptuous as the harem of a sultan, conducive to carnal fantasy, or even in the slightest sensual. A male is apt to feel smothered by the femininity of the furnishings, and neutered by the sober and stark spirit of devotion. After inhabiting
there for several days, I easily believed that the Prophet, as he declared of himself, “never entered into the order of plurality of wives to gratify passion.” His purpose is purely and simply to “raise up a righteous generation.
”

(As an aside I will say that Americans generally and Mormons in particular are as misguided as we English in their view of female sexuality. In England the word is, “Lie still and think of Empire.” In America in general and Utah in particular it is, “Men have orgasms and women have children.”)

An unmistakable pecking order reigns. Emmeline Free is the queen bee. Handsome, tall, graceful, of fair complexion, she is the mother of eight of the Prophet’s children. At dinner she sits at Brother Young’s right hand at the head table, and he favors her with his conversation, his smiles, and his glances. At his left sits Eliza R. Snow, a former wife of Joseph Smith himself and therefore much honored in Deseret and in Lion House. Guests are also favored with the head table, except for Sun Moon, Asie, and me. Wishing to avoid dangerous gossip, he placed us at one of the two lower tables, as though we were guests of one of his lesser wives. I am grateful for his perspicacity, for some sense reminds me that we are not safe. (No, not safe, though the faces of my companions show a touching longing for sanctuary.)

At long tables running away from the head table sit most of the other wives and children, and the childless wives. Their menus are plainer than those at the same meal at the head table. Though I have been unable, even by devious questioning, to determine how many wives the Lion has taken to himself, nearly twenty made their appearance at dinner at one time or another during our stay, and so presumably live in Lion House or the adjacent residences, Beehive House and White House
…

“Captain Burton?” The speaker was a tall woman with a waspish mouth.

Burton got to his feet, inconspicuously closing his notebook and concealing it in a pocket.

“I’d … I’m Harriet Washer, the fourth wife.”

She identifies herself by a number!
He inclined his head as a way of accepting this self-introduction. “Would you speak with my son Oswald a little?”

The lad stepped up alongside his mother. He was fourteen or fifteen from appearance, strong-looking, and of bestial aspect, and now of downcast expression. Burton regarded the mother. She had the demeanor of a woman who has endured much, none of it in silence.

“Sit down, lad,” and Burton took his chair again. “What do you wish?”

The boy slouched up to Burton’s writing table, pulled out a chair grumpily, and clomped his bottom down onto it. He radiated ill spirit so strongly Burton could have bagged it and sold it by the pound. “Ma says I oughta find out about the real world from you.”

“Real world?” Burton refused to glance up at the mother.

She intruded anyway. “The world outside Lion House, outside Mormonism, outside Deseret. The normal world. I grew up in New York, I know what I’m talking about.”

Burton regarded her. She looked like she knew her own mind, at least, and that perhaps to a fault. “Madam, will you sit with us?” He indicated another hard-backed chair with a nod. She took it.

“What would you like to know, Oswald?”

The lad shrugged. Finding out about the “real world” certainly wasn’t his idea. He ambled his eyes sideways at his mother, and her look reprimanded him. “Wha’s it like, the rest of the world? Special the big cities?”

“What do you think it’s like?”

“The old man says it’s all whoring.”

“The old man?” Burton was scarcely prepared to believe …

“Brother Young,” put in the mother.

“Tha’s what I call him,” said the lad, “the old man. To his face.”

“What does he call you?”

“Reprobate,” replied the lad quickly.

Burton wondered whether Oswald knew what the word meant, or how to spell it.
And in the mind of an adolescent lad, does a land of whoring sound like hell or heaven?
“Um-m-m,” said Burton.
What the devil?
“Is that all of Brother Young’s description?”

“Whoring, sleeping with other men’s wives, and divorcing.”

Burton raised an eyebrow.

“And gambling, robbing, and murdering,” Oswald added.

Burton nodded. The lad had adopted Brother Young’s custom of never using a circumspect word where a blunt one would do. The Prophet’s sermons sometimes scandalized the more delicate members of his flock.

Good God, what a question! What is the world like?
Burton recalled the teaching of his Dharma masters. “The spectacle of life is vast and varied,” he said. “It has everything you can imagine in it—fidelity and adultery, generosity and robbery, self-sacrifice and murder, loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, creation through art and destruction by war. The Wheel of Life, some wise men have called it.”

The lad gave a look of disgust at his mother—wondrously unalloyed, twenty-four-karat disgust. Burton sat in admiration of so pure and riotous a feeling.

“Oswald needs to hear about books, poetry, culture, the theater, music, philosophy. You are an author,” Harriet Washer said baldly.

Burton eyed Oswald. The lad didn’t give a damn, the mother was owed nothing, but perhaps there was something to learn…. He cast his voice into a tone of quotation:

“‘This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’er-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.’”

“That’s an odd thing to quote to Oswald. Ugly, it is.”

Burton sighed. “Why have you come to me, Madam?”

“My boy needs to know there’s more, more than this.” She looked around her with contempt.

An impertinent question arose. However, Burton was first of all a writer. “Are you not content here, Madam?”

“Content?” The word sounded like a whoop in her throat. “Humbug. Mormonism, polygamy, the whole of it, the lot of it, humbug.” She sneered, showing long teeth, like a horse’s.

Burton sat stupefied.

“Are you shocked? Poor gentile. Poor John Bull that knows nothing.
Do you think none of us can see beyond the tip of Brother Young’s nose? Everyone in this house knows what I think.”

“Are many of your”—Burton searched for the word—“sisters of similar mind?”

“Pshaw, no, he’s got ’em all bamboozled.”

“You, um, are a skeptic now, Madam. Were you always?”

Harriet Washer looked sheepish. “No. I didn’t know any better at first. They don’t educate women, and they don’t want us to think for ourselves. But after a while a brain just naturally sets to work.”

The lad Oswald was staring out the window.
Not that lad’s brain, I’ll wager
.

“So your sisters are true to the faith.”

Harriet Washer nodded yes. “Which don’t mean they put up with Brigham. Not necessarily. Emmeline Free does. Lucy and Clara Decker do. They make babies like factories, every two or three years. But some of us can’t stand him.”

“Us, Madam?”

“Brigham Young hasn’t been in my bedroom since Oswald was born. Nine months before, matter of fact.”

“Why do you not go elsewhere with your son?”

She eyed him mockingly. “You know darn well. The Danites. Hear you had a run-in with Porter Rockwell yourself.”

Burton stood to dismiss them.
Damn all
. The hairs on his back and bottom prickled with the sense of danger.
To die in battle would be one thing, but to be assassinated, perhaps in sleep
…

“You’re a spy yourself, ain’t you?” said Mrs. Washer with a clever look.

Damn all!
Burton opened his mouth to speak rudely. He believed in the saying, “A gentleman is never rude unintentionally,” but now he felt sufficient cause.

Words from the opposite hall stopped him. “Captain Burton!”

Two young ladies and a chap, with Asie and Sun Moon in tow. Burton was trapped.

“I am Gracie Johnson Young.” As she spoke, her eyes slapped Harriet Washer’s face. Mrs. Washer tried to look amused. “This is my sister Ima Herbert Young and her friend Harold Jackson.”

The wife and daughter dropped their duel of eyes, neither the victor. What about this young man—was he a suitor?

“We just… wanted to meet you.” Ima Young giggled as she spoke.

Burton gave the ladies a shallow bow and shook the lad’s hand. Burton judged them as about sixteen.
Ripe for marriage, by the standards of the Saints. Brother Young’s daughters. My, wouldn’t that increase eligibility?

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Would you care to see the garden?” said Harold. “Our people are especially interested in horticulture.”

Burton eyed Sun Moon and Asie. The two had not ventured from the rooms since they arrived, except for meals. They consented with their glances. “Delighted.”