Blood of the Faithful (27 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

They came by the hundreds from all across Blister Creek, arriving on foot and horse and bicycle. They gathered at the cemetery south of town, where Jacob waited with his family at the top of the grassy hillock, surrounded by weathered, hundred-year-old gravestones.

Fernie, in her wheelchair, took one of Jacob’s hands and Jessie Lyn took his other. Children had set out blankets on the grass and sat down amidst their parents, who gathered in knots, talking and whispering.

Jacob extracted himself from the two women to shake hands with Elder Smoot. The older man looked weathered, beaten. He leaned on his black mahogany cane with its beehive handle, and for once it didn’t look like an affectation. He seemed to have aged fifteen years in two days. Two sons, taken away so quickly. A third lost last summer.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Jacob said.

Smoot lowered his eyes. “I should be the one apologizing to you, Brother Jacob. If I had been a better father, this evil never would have entered our valley.”

There was plenty of fault with Smoot’s handling of events. Jacob had wondered a dozen times how things might have turned out differently if the man had said something when Jacob, David, and Miriam confronted him at the bunker that first night. But now was not the time for accusations, not when Jacob was suffering his own guilt for letting Miriam infiltrate the camp.

“A man is only responsible for his own actions, Brother,” Jacob said. “Nobody led your son down that dark path. He chose it for himself.”

“Then you forgive me?”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

Smoot’s eyes welled up. “You are too merciful.” He stopped, unable to continue for a moment. “My daughter Lillian said . . . is it true? Please tell me it’s not.”

Jacob glanced up to see that Lillian was approaching with David. Even more awkwardly, David’s other living wife was Sister Clarissa, who had been a wife of Bill Smoot, Elder Smoot’s son killed by the drone strike last summer. David’s two wives each had ties to the Smoot family, while Miriam had been killed as a result of Smoot’s son.

Smoot glanced up, saw them coming, and turned away to join his family without waiting to hear Jacob’s answer. The Smoots were gathering around Grover’s open grave. David watched him go, face unreadable. Then he left his surviving wives and approached Jacob.

The two brothers said nothing, only embraced, looked into each other’s eyes, and embraced again. When David pulled away, he returned to Lillian and Clarissa, and the three of them walked to Miriam’s open grave. Jacob sighed and looked away.

The sky was clear and blue, as it had been for days. Unlike the cold and rainy spring months of the past couple of years, it was seasonably warm and dry. The grass was a little greener, the wildflowers fresher, but there was no question that the old climate had begun to reassert itself across the desert Southwest.

And looking north toward Witch’s Warts to Jacob’s right, with the town on his left, everything looked normal: the leafy cottonwoods, the creek carrying its reddish, bubbling current. The white spire of the temple. The salmon-pink cliffs to the north and the mountain ranges shielding the valley on the east and west. Everything was as it had been for generations.

Jacob’s father would have recognized the scene. His grandparents. All the way back to Great-Great-Grandmother Cowley, the founder of this town, whose gravestone rested under his hand, the sandstone warm and living beneath his touch.

HENRIETTA R. COWLEY—1872–1969

LAY ME UP ONE THOUSAND BUSHELS OF WHEAT

He was looking back toward the center of town at the last few stragglers when his eyes fell on Eliza and Steve. They walked side by side down the sidewalk, ignoring the stares and whispers. As the two came up through cemetery, Jacob could see people lean in to question them, no doubt wondering what they’d seen in Salt Lake. Eliza and Steve gave curt answers and continued into the cemetery.

After Eliza had finished embracing Fernie and several other family members, she came up to Jacob with her eyes shining. She threw her arms around him and he held her tightly for a long moment, overcome with emotion.

“I’d about given up,” he said.

“The business at the reservoir took longer than expected.”

“No more trouble, I hope.”

“Could have been worse,” Eliza said. “They were beaten and discouraged. McQueen was killed in the fight. He’d been single-handedly holding them together,
and they’d lost anyone else who might have taken over. Toss in the fact that they haven’t had a meal in two days. You could say they were a receptive audience.”

“So when do they leave for Provo?”

“As soon as we provide them with food and supplies for the journey. Maybe as soon as the weekend.”

That was perfect. Jacob would send up food as a goodwill gesture as soon as the funeral ended, but wait until morning before organizing a full shipment. Then he remembered what he intended to say to the gathered church members.

Eliza studied his face, seeming to notice his scowl. “Important speech?”

“You could say that.”

“Don’t do anything rash.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I know you, big brother. I can read it in your face.”

Jacob looked around to see that the crowd was all gathered. The noise of a hundred different conversations had become a low roar. It was time to start the funeral.

They began with Grover. The young man had only recently received his endowments and his family had dressed him in his temple robes. But his machete wounds had been disfiguring and it would have taken a skilled mortician to make him presentable. There was no such person, so the coffin had been sealed ahead of time.

Elder Smoot dedicated the grave, his voice breaking several times during the prayer. When he was finished, his family surrounded him, so many wives and children that he disappeared in the midst of them all. Then they lowered Grover’s simple pine box into the grave, and people shoveled a few scoops of reddish dirt onto the coffin.

Miriam’s coffin was open. She appeared almost to be sleeping, except that she was so pale behind her veil that she looked almost translucent. Her two wounds lay hidden beneath the white of her temple robes, with towels wrapped around her chest cavity to absorb any blood that might have leaked through.

David looked almost as pale as his dead wife as he leaned over to kiss her forehead before they closed the coffin. When it was shut, he folded his arms to dedicate the grave. His first words trembled and Jacob worried he would break down, join the soft crying rippling through the extended Christianson family. But David steadied himself, and said the rest of the prayer in a clear, calm voice.

When he was done, they lowered the coffin into the ground, which brought a fresh round of sobs from the crowd. Miriam’s adopted son, Diego, tossed in the first shovelful of dirt. He looked so solemn in his tie and white shirt, his black hair neatly parted and slicked down. A lump rose in Jacob’s throat. He took a deep breath to calm himself. He couldn’t lose it now.

One by one, Miriam’s family came to toss in a shovelful of dirt, including Jacob. He had recovered his emotions by this time, and when he passed off the shovel, grabbed his brother in a fierce embrace. David buried his head on Jacob’s shoulder. This time he wept openly. Jacob joined him.

When the top of the coffin was covered with dirt and rock, the family members stepped back. The two bodies were in the ground, dressed in their temple robes, their graves dedicated. Miriam and Grover were prepared to rise on the Morning of the First Resurrection.

There were two dead men who would not receive the same treatment. Chambers’s body had been recovered from the base of the Ghost Cliffs where Miriam had shot him, and would be quietly buried later. Ezekiel’s body should be reclaimed from the squatter camp, but few would be in the mood to mourn him.

The crowd hushed and gathered closer. Expectant faces looked up at Jacob. He paused to think about the past two days and everything they’d suffered. Four years had passed since his father was killed, and it felt like Jacob’s leadership had lurched from one crisis to the next.

I’m so weak. Is there no one else?

Jacob made his decision. He lifted his voice, speaking in a clear, commanding tone that could reach the back of the crowd.

“You’ve all seen Grandma Cowley’s gravestone. ‘Lay up a thousand bushels of wheat.’ Nobody quite knows what that means, except that it speaks to prudence and preparation. Maybe that’s all. But maybe not. In the past few years it was impossible not to read those words as a warning to brace ourselves for the coming of the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.

“We laid aside our bushels of wheat,” Jacob continued. “But that wheat never saved our lives. That’s the strange thing. Here we are, three years later, and we’ve barely touched our stores, because we’ve been able to grow food, even with the late frosts and the flooding. Others haven’t been so fortunate, and I can’t help but think if we’d been more generous with outsiders we might have avoided the violent confrontations that have shaken our community.”

He stopped to let that sink in. Then he spent a few minutes laying out Eliza and the governor’s plan for moving the squatters to northern Utah. To help them survive the journey, Blister Creek would surrender hundreds of tons of wheat, beans, and corn, plus wagonloads of other valuable supplies. All to buy off the squatters and send them away.

Yet nobody protested. There were no whispers, no scowls, only agreement on their faces. Even Elder Smoot nodded solemnly, as if yes, of course, this was the only possible path to take.

Jacob thought about what Eliza had said about the refugees. Beat down and discouraged. They weren’t the only ones. A few days ago many of these same saints had been so concerned about the stolen food that they’d been willing to entertain Ezekiel’s claim that Jacob was a fallen prophet. Now, after seeing how the alternative had played out—a hard, aggressive posture toward the refugees that led to more deaths—they were willing to give it all away.

“I know you’ve heard the rumors,” Jacob continued. “Two people passed me notes before I left the house, begging me not to leave Blister Creek, and I heard it half a dozen times just walking down here. More worried comments, pleas. Many of you are thinking about it right now.”

The crowd had grown tense, people leaning forward to hear what he had to say, women hushing their babies, the elderly in the back cupping their hands to their ears.

“I understand that you’re worried, and that most of you don’t want me to go. Two different women have told me that if I leave Blister Creek, they’d take their children and follow me into the wilderness. Cursing me all the way, of course, but following.” He paused for dramatic effect. “But enough about my wives.”

This brought loud laughter, way out of proportion to the mildly humorous nature of the remark. It had broken the tension, which was his intent. Jacob waited for the laughter to die down before continuing.

“I’ll set your minds at ease. I’m not leaving. This is my home, and you are my people. Of course I will step down as prophet if you want me to, but this is your choice, not mine.”

The smiles and relieved sighs turned to protests at this last part.

“No, Brother Jacob!”

“You’re the prophet.”

“We love you, Brother Jacob.”

Elder Smoot stepped forward. His face was grim; he had lost two sons in two days. But he stood next to Jacob and put his arm around the younger man’s shoulder. The crowd fell silent at this, but there were sniffles and watery eyes.

“Thank you,” he said, both to Smoot and to the crowd. “If you will still have me as your leader, I will stay on. But I have a few conditions.” He glanced at Eliza and Steve. “My sister has returned from Salt Lake with representatives from the state government. They’re up at the reservoir now, but they’ll be down in the valley tonight. Her journey wasn’t only about getting rid of the refugees, it was about discovering if there was still a state government. There wasn’t, not really. A few thousand survivors in Salt Lake, a handful of isolated communities in the Sanpete Valley. And us. Everyone else is dead or scattered.

“But there can be. Eliza and Steve met with survivors in Richfield, Manti, Ephraim, and Salina, to ask them to pull together with Salt Lake in the north. Blister Creek can join them as the final community on the south.”

More nods and affirmative responses to this, but he didn’t think they fully understood what he was asking yet. What he was claiming.

“We were prepared for the Millennium. All our food and weapons and self-sufficiency to survive the apocalypse as we waited for the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord. But here we are, and the Millennium hasn’t come. Maybe it’s right around the corner. Or maybe our children and our grandchildren will live their entire lives and never see it.

“I used to shake my head when people talked about the end of the world. People had been predicting the return of Jesus since about five minutes after he left the first time. That was two thousand years ago. But then it seemed that people were finally right. The end was here. I can’t tell you the number of times I argued with Sister Miriam about it. You can guess who argued which side.