Wind Walker (23 page)

“Before you say He married them three women?”

“Christ Jesus—the Savior who came to the New World after He was crucified,” Young extolled. “He appeared to God’s chosen to tell them how all others in the land of Old Israel had forsaken Him and His promise. So Jesus left them with a new promise, and that word is told in our holy book. How Adam was God, conceived on the great star of Kolob, the site for the conception of all the gods. The most amazing story of all is told in our book, Mr. Bass.”

He wagged his head and turned back to the coals, dragging the iron strip out of the fire again and looping its crescent over the end of the anvil. “I don’t read much. Ain’t since I come out here.”

“One of the Apostles could read some of the holy book to you—”

“I got work to do.”

But Young was not easily deterred. “While you continue with your work.”

“I’m too old—”

“No man should deny himself a chance at eternal life, especially when he grows long in the tooth, Mr. Bass.”

He picked up the hammer and gave the red-hot crescent a
slam, sparks sputtering from the anvil. “I am what I am, Preacher. I see what I see, an’ I hear what I hear. No man can see or hear for me.”

“But you can see the truth, hear the truth of our word, and judge for yourself as the many who have already made a stand for the new nation of Israel.”

Again and again his hammer rang against the crimson metal he inched around the anvil, slowly tightening the crescent into a solid circle the size he would need to work onto a wagon’s wheel hub. “I been out here since twenty-five …” and the hammer rang. “I seen things with my own eyes …” that hammer rang again. “Things I’d never dreamed … back east … heard an’ smelled an’ felt … all manner of things out here … things what wasn’t really there … they’s called ghosts … or shades … or hoo-doos—”

“Spirits, Mr. Bass,” Young interrupted. “Like the Holy Spirit that will enter your bosom and seize your heart with a fire of unquenchable flame.”

“Hoo-doos or spirits … no matter what you call ’em … that sort of thing may give a man like you … the willies an’ shakes … but such ghosty doin’s don’t make no nevermind … to the peoples out here … out to these here mountains … the red folks ain’t the kind to preach an’ push … what they have in their heart … push it on me the way you preachers push … a man’s medeecin is his medeecin … so who the blazes am I … to make so little of what another man carries … in his heart … who the hell am I to say … what makes him a man? … or to say I’m a man … an’ he ain’t?”

“I’ve attempted to explain to you where the Lamanites have been judged wrong, where the Indians, the cursed ones of this continent, came from and how God turned His face from them because they turned their faces from His true word,” Young said impatiently as he stepped around the side of the anvil to gaze directly into the trapper’s face. “The Indian believes in the sanctity of his beliefs about his world because he is in a state of ignorance—he knows not the word of God, Mr. Bass. Be careful, very careful, you do not covet the ignorance of
these savages, or you are a heathen yourself, destined for the pit of fire. The reason these heathens can’t spread the healing power of their teaching is because they have no knowledge of the one true God.”

Scratch slammed the hammer down on the red-hot iron with a vengeance. “Their God is the same as yours, Preacher.”

Young’s face brightened with that benevolent smile that made Bass realize the Prophet believed he was ministering unto a lesser man, one who was every bit as ignorant as a heathen Indian, totally unworthy of salvation for the color of his skin.

“No,” the Prophet argued, “the spirits of these Indians are not the same as the one true Creator. These red savages live in a state of ignorance, for there will be no happy hunting ground for them when they die without the salvation of the word.”

From the corner of Scratch’s eye, the old trapper spotted his wife step from the open doorway of the store and stop against the building, then slowly settle to the half-log bench propped against the cabin wall. Waits-by-the-Water smiled at him, then closed her eyes and turned her face up to the warming sun. Apparently very much at peace.

Turning back to Brigham Young, he asked, “Your God an angry God, Preacher?”

For a moment, Young appeared to heft his thoughts around like a carpenter might take the measure of the grain in a piece of wood. “Yes, at times He can be an angry, vengeful God. When He alone determines He will smite the unrighteous—”

“What of all them sinners back to Missouri?” Titus asked as he continued to hammer on those last few inches of iron. “Other places too … where the folks riz up … an’ throwed you Marmons out? Why didn’t your God … smite them Gentiles … why did your God … make it so hard on your people?”

That question startled the Prophet. He quickly glanced at those followers around him with a look that Titus figured
was Young’s wondering if any of them had explained the story of their years of travail to this ignorant Gentile.

“It is not for a man to know the inner workings of the heart of God, Mr. Bass,” he finally answered. “I suppose it will all be revealed to us in due time.”

“Maybeso, not in your lifetime?”

Young finally nodded. “Perhaps not in my lifetime, yes. But just as Moses led his Israelites to the Promised Land but could not cross over, this might not be revealed to me before I close my eyes and take my final breath … then stand at the foot of the throne of God, when all things will finally be revealed to me.”

Titus sighed, “Some things just meant to be a … a mystery, Preacher.”

“Mystery, you say?”

In the tongs Bass held up the small hoop of iron that had lost all its crimson glow. Suspended between the two of them. The anointed Prophet and the dirt-ignorant old trapper. “Most ever’ kind of folk I come to know out here—man, an’ woman too—they figger what they can’t wrap their minds around ain’t for ’em to unnerstand.”

“But God has clearly shown mankind that He wants us to understand.”

“Where’s this hoop start, Preacher?”

“Why—clearly at the end you curved in.”

“Did your own hoop start when you was born?”

“My … hoop?” he asked with the sort of smile one would wear when answering the questions of a young child.

For a moment Scratch considered how best to explain that simple concept to this self-assured preacher. “The long journey your own spirit takes—ain’t it like a hoop? You’re born, live your life good as you can, then you die. So did your own hoop start when you was born?”

Young cleared his throat and reflected. “Certainly … no, it didn’t. My spirit yearned for a place among God’s faithful and chosen people at this very time in history.”

“You’re saying you was somewhere else on this hoop when you was born?”

“I don’t understand your point, Mr. Bass—”

“An’ where will you be on the hoop when you die and stand before the throne of your God?”

It was indeed a hot midsummer day—nonetheless the Prophet’s brow was sweating a little too much for a man who was doing nothing to physically exert himself.

Titus asked again, holding the iron band slightly higher, “Where will you be?”

“When I die I will be in heaven with all God’s faithful saints. Right where you can be if you accept His revealed word.”

“So you do got a beginning and an end, Preacher?”

“As do all God’s creatures.”

“Me too? A ignernt Gentile like me?”

“Yes.”

Bass lowered the hoop. “How ’bout my Injun wife and our young’uns?”

“Yes, they have a glorious end in paradise once they accept the teachings of God.” Young smiled again, as if beginning to feel more at ease.

“You take this here circle,” Titus began, gazing at that iron hoop, “why, this here’s my life, preacher. Just like my coming out here to the mountains was a part of the journey. No beginning an’ no end.”

“But in death—”

“When I die, my body goes back to the earth, don’t it?”

“That’s the way of all mortal clay, yes.”

“But my spirit goes on,” he said quietly. “Like the earth and sky. That don’t die, does it, Preacher?”

Young corrected, “Your soul goes to live with God in His heavenly paradise prepared for us.”

“I don’t want my soul—my spirit—to go nowhere,” he said with grave intensity. “I want it to stay right here where I been the happiest I ever could be.”

“There’s far more happiness in heaven with the rest of the faithful souls—”

“Maybe for you an’ your Saints, but for me I don’t wanna
be nowhere but here with these rocks and sky, here with the ones I hold in my heart. There ain’t no other heaven, no other paradise for me to be in for all time.”

“I … see,” Young stated, then dragged a single fingertip along his upper lip beaded with tiny diamonds of sweat. “Elders—we see how the Holy Spirit can only speak to a man if his ears are not plugged.”

“It ain’t that my ears are plugged,” Titus replied. “I s’pose I just hear a differ’nt voice than you heard, Preacher.”

Throwing his shoulders back self-confidently, Young said, “The devil himself can whisper in your ear, Mr. Bass. What has that evil voice you hear been saying to you?”

“It said I don’t need no other man to tell me what I need to hear, to see what I need to see.”

“Then you will not trust to the word of God revealed through his chosen Prophet?”

“Who’s telling me it’s the word of God?”

He spread his hand upon his chest, “Why, those men God has anointed as His spokesmen here on earth—in the way of prophets, the way it has been since the earliest days of man on this earth.”

“The earth was here first? An’ the sky too?”

“Of course,” Young agreed.

“Then that’s the way it must be for me too,” Bass admitted. “If the earth an’ the sky was here first, they’ll be here through the end of time. I want my spirit to last as long. The way I seen how Injuns look at all there is around ’em. Makes more sense to me than all your glory an’ Thummin’ an’ your angel Moroni blowin’ his horn.”

“He announces the coming of the—”

“I hear my God speak to me good enough in a whisper, Preacher.”

Young worked his lower jaw around several times as if chewing on the words he was considering giving voice, but finally said with great finality, “So be it, Mr. Bass. Many times in our troubled past we have been told by God that not all men will hear His call. Some have their ears plugged to
God’s glory.” He sighed and started to shamble around the anvil, his bearded jaw jutting. “Here on the doorstep to Zion—I am once more reminded that we cannot save everyone, my brothers. Even these simplest lambs lost forever in the eternal wilderness.”

Bass watched the Prophet and his Apostles turn aside and shuffle off toward the store. He plunged the iron hoop into the water. This time it barely raised a hiss or a bubble; it had cooled as he held it out before him in the tongs. Then he looked up to watch their backs as they stepped past Waits, each of them in turn touching the brim of their hats before they disappeared, one by one, absorbed by the shadows of that doorway. She turned and got to her feet, pushing a wisp of hair back from her damp brow, tucking it beneath that hair, which was pulled into one of her braids as she started his way.

“Ti-tuzz,” Waits said as she ducked into the shade of the low awning of tree branches suspended above his blacksmith shop. “Your face is troubled.”

It took him a moment to put his mind on the Crow she spoke at him, his head swollen with matters most heavenly … bringing his thoughts back to the temporal present. With a clatter he laid the hoop and tongs upon the anvil and let her step inside his damp, gritty arms.

“These men,” she said with her cheek against his neck, “they are not like any of your kind ever come out here before.”

“You are right,” he replied softly in Crow. “This is a whole new breed of horse. Not trappers, not even stiff-necked traders with their whiny ways. No, this is a high-nosed breed, woman.”

“They are not staying here at Blanket Chief’s lodge?” she asked, using her tribe’s appellation for Bridger. “They will be gone soon?”

“A few days at the most, then they will go on to a new country they are looking for.”

“Will they turn north, or south? Or go on far to the west
where Blanket Chief says the trail people always go—toward the sun’s resting place?”

“No, these are not going on to the place the others go,” he explained. “This new breed is turning south from here to find the land their god has picked out for them.”

“It is good for them,” she said with a soft smile. “The First Maker has picked out a place for every people to be. He gave the Crow the very best place.”

He smiled too at his mind’s image of an old friend. “I remember Rotten Belly telling me how Crow country was in just the right place: to the north the winters were too cold; to the south the summers were too long; to the west were enemies and the mountains were too tall; while to the east the water was not good.”

“Was Arapooesh right?”

He combed his fingers along one of her braids wrapped in sleek otter skin and peered down into her eyes. “I have journeyed far, far to the north—up near the country of the Blackfoot where the English trade. And far, far to the south where the Apache roam the mountains and valleys. I have gone all the way to the end of the land where the deep, white-ruffled ocean touches the last place a man can stand with dry moccasins. And many times you have asked me to tell you about that country where I was born far to the east. Sometimes when I think of all the country I have traveled, all the mountains and rivers, valleys and deserts I have crossed in my seasons, my head starts to hurt with the remembering of so much … far more than one man can hold in his mind.”

“Have you ever found a better place than Crow country for Ti-tuzz?”

Taking her face gently in both of his rough, weathered, cinder-blackened hands, Scratch said, “That’s what I am trying to tell you,
ua.
” He used the intimate word for
spouse.
“There is no better place, and all other country I have seen is dimmed by the beauty of that wild land we call our home.”

“I miss my country,” she admitted. “But I would miss you more if I were not with you.”