Destroying Angel (25 page)

“That’s not it!” I sounded shrill, even to myself, and I forced myself to be calm. It was difficult, this adjustment after so long, and I didn’t yet understand. Things hadn’t yet turned ugly.

“Then what? It’s not about the temple, is it? You know I’m proud of you, of all of this. Most men couldn’t have done as well as you have.”

“No, they couldn’t,” I said. “I had seven women and two dozen young children, that’s all. We built this town in three years anyway, through drought and flood and illness. No, I think not. I don’t think one man in twenty could have done what I did.”

“Are you finished venting your gall?”

I said nothing.

He pulled me close, but I stiffened in his arms. “Rebecca. Be gentle, behave like a lady, like the future mother of my children. You don’t have to be defiant. You don’t have to be hard and proud like a man. I’m not your enemy, I’m your husband. I sent you into the wilderness with a difficult task, and you did it wonderfully. But the men are here now. We can take the burden off your shoulders. You and the others can concentrate your energy on the tasks the Lord has set out for you—bearing children, raising righteous young sons. Making your home a welcoming place for your husbands.”

“You don’t know what we’ve suffered. You have no idea.”

“Talk to me, share what happened.”

I thought about Annabelle and the evil spirit. Her child who died of the pox. I thought about Laura and Maude finding comfort in each other’s arms. And I thought about Frederick van Slooten.

“Did you kill a soldier?” I asked.

He drew back with a frown. “What do you mean?”

“Outside Laramie. There were two soldiers. You killed one of them, didn’t you? Left the other one with a big cut across his face, like this.” I drew a finger from my right ear to my chin.

Hyrum didn’t answer right away. Jedediah Kimball and his son Peter trotted past on horses, hooves clomping on the dry red soil. Jedediah tipped his hat to Hyrum but didn’t acknowledge me. Peter, however, gave me a smirk as he passed. The boy turned fifteen in two weeks and had grown six or eight inches since we arrived in the valley. But I’d never seen that look of defiance before.

“Who told you about that?” Hyrum asked after the Kimballs had passed.

“A federal marshal. His name was Frederick van Slooten. You killed a man, didn’t you? And you tried to kill van Slooten.”

“You know me, Rebecca. I’m not a violent man by nature. I prefer a gentle word, to turn the other cheek.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying there were good reasons to kill that man.”

“Your good reasons followed us to Blister Creek. The survivor joined the federal marshals and came looking for you here. He would have violated our honor, one by one. I had to kill him—do you understand that? I’m a murderer.”

He looked taken aback at this, but then he slowly shook his head. “No, not a murderer. I’ll explain to the others, and I’m sure they’ll understand.” He took my hand in his. I couldn’t help but notice that mine was rough and callused, his smooth and soft. “You did the right thing. We have to protect our way of life even if it means taking ruthless measures on occasion.”

“
We?
What have you been protecting? You’ve been hiding in your mother’s house in Salt Lake. And I’ve been here, clawing a living from the desert.”

“It wasn’t my choice, you know that. I tried to get us to Mexico. My cousin Miles Romney offered us land in Sonora. But it’s too far away.”

“I know what you’re doing,” I said. “You don’t want to go to Mexico. You think your father will get you into the Quorum of the Twelve. You let Brother Kimball convince you it was your birthright. Kimball, Cowley, Young. Future prophet and counselors of the church. If you hide in Mexico, you’ll never get that.”

“If things…
happen
, I can’t be trapped in Mexico, unable to cross the border.”

“I don’t care about that. I don’t care about any of it.”

“Why are you being so difficult?” he asked.

“Why don’t you ask yourself that question? You’re the one who put me in charge. You made the decision to take an eighteen-year-old girl and elevate her to leadership. Now, two and a half years later, you come here and you’re surprised that I’ve become a leader.”

“So what are you saying, you were better off without us?” A smile played at his lips. “You think you can run this valley without us? A passel of women and children?”

“Yes.”

“That’s lunacy.” The smile vanished. “You can’t really mean that.”

I stopped in the middle of the street, a few dozen yards short of the house, where Sister Laura stood on the porch watching us. “That is exactly what I mean, Hyrum Cowley. I want you to do
one of two things. Either you leave—you and the other men—or you submit to your wives. You do what we say, you follow our rules. In six months, when you see what we’ve done, we will take you into our counsel. And we will run this town together, every man and woman having an equal say in its affairs.”

“Now, you listen to me.” His tone turned angry, and he grabbed my wrist. I looked away. “You will submit to my will. I am your husband, and I am the head of this family. And the Lord has ordained
men
—priesthood holders—to rule and reign. Not women. And not you.”

“Have you finished?” I looked down at his hand on my wrist. His grip hurt, but I didn’t let it show on my face. “Or do you plan to beat me into submission?”

Hyrum snorted and threw my hand down, then stomped toward the house. He pushed past Laura and let the door bang behind him.

Laura hurried up to me where I still stood in the middle of the road. “You didn’t tell him. Please tell me you didn’t.”

“Tell him what?” I looked at her and saw the fear on her face, and then I understood what terrified her. “I didn’t tell him about Maude, don’t worry.”

“But what about Annabelle? You don’t think she’ll tell? Or Nannie—surely she knows too.”

“Annabelle can be a coward, and Nannie is only a child.”

“Then they
will
tell,” Laura said.

“They might, I can’t say. But by the time they do, the men won’t have the power to punish you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said with a shake of her head. “We won’t do it anymore. Maude agrees too. It was a mistake. We were
weak, and the men so far away. I know what you must think of us, and I hate to disappoint you. I’m so weak. So weak.”

I took her by the shoulders. “Stop talking that way. That’s not what matters to me—you know that, right?” Maybe before, or maybe in different times, I would have judged her harshly, but how could I now? Not with my own loneliness these past years, the bitter herb that I tasted every day.

“But what we did—”

“That’s between you and your conscience. You know what is right, you know what was necessary to survive. I won’t judge you. And I have a little money besides—banknotes I took from van Slooten before we buried him. You have choices.”

“You mean I could leave?” she asked.

“You both could. You, Maude, your children. I’ll give you the money if you need it. Forty-seven dollars—more than enough.”

That money had been my own emergency stores, but it seemed miserly to hoard it now. Hyrum would be furious if he found out what Laura had done, and I could only imagine Jedediah’s rage if he learned the same about Maude.

“No, I won’t do it,” she said at length. Her English accent sounded especially proper and clipped. “I won’t leave you, not if you need me. You do need me, right?”

“I do.”

I glanced at the house. It was quiet, and I imagined Hyrum in the bedroom, on my bed, still brooding. He would try again for reconciliation, I was sure, but he was also a stubborn man, and once he made a decision about something, it would be easier to find the largest rock in Witch’s Warts and try to dig it out of the ground than to change his mind.

A plan began to form in my mind.

“Go find Maude,” I said. “Tell her to talk to Annabelle and Nannie.”

“And tell them what?”

“Tonight we’ll hold a secret council. When the men go to sleep, we’ll gather in Witch’s Warts where nobody will follow. And then we’ll decide how to handle the men.”

Jacob put down Grandma Cowley’s diary when he heard the distant sound of an engine. It wasn’t a truck or a Humvee but sounded like a two-stroke motorcycle engine, or maybe an ATV like the ones Krantz, Eliza, and Miriam had taken into the desert. It whined for several minutes before the engine cut out.

Jacob picked up the two-way radio, intending to call Stephen Paul, but the other man crackled through first. Stephen Paul said, “I’m going to wring that kid’s neck.”

“Was that Henry Johnson?” Jacob asked.

“Got to be. He’s patrolling on the other side of the reservoir.”

“Well, tell him to patrol on foot.”

“I did,” Stephen Paul said. “He claimed he was moving his ATV over to where he could get a better view, but he’s done now.”

“That was more than moving. That was a good five minutes. No more engines. I want quiet.”

“Got it,” Stephen Paul said, and then the radio went dead.

Moments later, as Jacob was thumbing through the diary to find his place, Stephen Paul called again. “Sorry, but that lady is on the way. One of the boys told her how to find you, and she set off before I could stop her.”

“What lady?”

“That woman living out on Yellow Flats. Want me to go after her?”

“Never mind, it will be all right.”

Even as Jacob said this, he spotted a flashlight bobbing across the road. He turned up the lantern and waved it in the air to show her where he was. The flashlight swung around to his position, shining first on him, then on his makeshift blind, and finally coming to rest on Grandma Cowley’s diary where he’d dropped it on the blankets. She turned off her light, and he caught Rebecca’s face in the glow of the lantern. She set down a heavy box that landed with a metallic clank, and then unslung a weapon from her shoulder.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“An assault rifle and ammo.”

“You know I said no military equipment in Blister Creek.”

“How is that decision looking now?” She sat on the blanket and propped the assault rifle next to his own .30-06.

“We don’t need any more excuses for a government crackdown.”

“What government?” she asked. “We’re on our own tonight.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to flout the rules. You’re a guest, remember?”

“I bet Grandma Cowley wishes she had guns that day in Witch’s Warts, don’t you? Things might have turned out differently.”

“What day in Witch’s Warts?”

She thumbed the diary open to his bookmark. “Oh, you haven’t gotten there yet.”

“Her husband just came back and she called a council of the other women.” Jacob looked at her. “Is that where you got your idea?”

“For my first presidency of women? Yes, in part. Or you could say she got the idea from me. Same thing.”

“It’s exhausting trying to decipher your words,” Jacob said. “I’m not like my father, you know. Or Hyrum Cowley. I’m willing to listen, to consider all sorts of possibilities.”

“I thought you liked verbal sparring. Am I wrong about that?” She smiled. “What do you think this is about? Do you even know?”

“I know part of it. I see what you’re trying to do. You want me to sympathize with Grandma Cowley so that I’ll give you some sort of female council to balance the patriarchal power in Blister Creek. Am I right?”

“In part. Is that so bad, Jacob? Don’t you see a need?”

“A need for
you
to take over? No, not really.”

“I don’t want to be your enemy,” she said. “That was Rebecca Cowley’s mistake. Too aggressive—she should have tried an indirect route first. And the lesbian thing between Maude and Laura didn’t help her cause.” She shrugged. “But yes, that’s what I’m trying to do. There’s no hiding it, not now.”

“Fine, so I see
what
, but I don’t see why. Why you?”

“You mean why me as the prophetess, and not Eliza or Miriam? Or Fernie?”

“That too, of course. But why do you want it in the first place?”

“Because I’ve been given a chance to correct a mistake.”

“You’re trying to atone for Grandma Cowley? That’s why you’ve taken her name?”

“I’m not atoning for Grandma Cowley. In the first place, it wasn’t her fault. She was too young to understand the depth of human behavior. She got most of it right—she was a bright young woman. But she didn’t know the lengths men would go to in order to cling to power. And she didn’t recognize the weakness of all humans, men and women alike.”

“So you were simply caught up in the story, is that it? You left Blister Creek as a child, maybe with your parents or when your father was excommunicated, and then you came back as an adult, remembering the injustices. Somehow you got Grandma Cowley’s diaries and started telling yourself stories. What Blister Creek
really
needs, you told yourself, is a matriarch.”

“That would be fitting if it were true. Not too different from what you did when you came back after medical school. You were the chosen one, anointed to lead, and you laughed it off. You wanted to be a doctor, and you didn’t want anything to do with the narrow world of your childhood. Or so you told yourself. But then they started calling you a prophet, and now look at you. Here you are, calling the shots.”

“Is that how you see it?” Jacob found himself bristling. “What should I do? Walk away?”

“Of course not. But nothing happens without a purpose.” She thumbed through the diary. “I’m not trying to right the injustices suffered by Rebecca Cowley. Or correct her mistakes, for that matter.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I’m here to correct my own mistakes, Jacob.” She looked up, and her eyes reflected the lamplight. “Rebecca Cowley is me. I did all this.
Me.
I almost got it right the first time around. I’ll do better this time.”

He stared at her, blinking, unable to digest what she was claiming. She held his gaze. At last he said, “So you’re my great-great-grandmother, is that it?”

“I am.”

“You are Henrietta Rebecca Cowley, born in 1872 on the plains of Wyoming. Died at the age of ninety-seven in 1969, and buried in Blister Creek. That is you.”