Old Glory (38 page)

“Why are you making the trip?” I asked.

“For the American people.”

“Oh … yes?”

He wanted to prove something, he said, and went into a grave recitation of slogans about Our Generation, Self-Sufficiency, Initiative and Conservation.
Conservation?
I didn’t see where that came into it. Wind power, said the man; it was the utilization of a natural resource. Oh, I said; you mean sailing? Yes, he said; he visualized the sailboat as a symbol of the posttechnological future.

“You’re not making the trip sound very much fun.”

“So why are
you
going down the river?”

“I’m having a sort of love affair with it, I suppose.”

We stared at each other over our coffees. At last we occupied a common ground. Our expressions, of total incomprehension and skepticism of the other’s motive, were identical. We must have looked like twins.

The couple went up the hill into town to buy groceries. They might have been mourners following a cortege. I returned to the harbor and went snooping over their boat. It was a lovely piece of pure craftsmanship, as slim as a pickerel, with every joint in its timber perfectly cut and glued. It must have taken years of slow, spare-time labor; of patient
fitting, sanding-down, varnishing, rigging. It seemed sad, in a peculiarly American way, that anyone should build a boat as beautiful as this, launch it on a long, absorbing voyage, then swamp it with such a dreary cargo of fashionable abstractions. All the grace of the thing itself had been submerged under these abstractions; yet without them, the boat would never have been built, the trip never embarked on. Poor boat. It was in its way a classic victim of the American language and its fatal preference for theories, principles, concepts over mere material objects and their intractable thinginess.

No one, though, would ever convert this river into an abstraction. Humped and grizzled in the wind, it was too rough to make a safe crossing to Nauvoo. I squatted on the harbor wall, looking across the water to the broad green bluff where the town was. I already knew a little of Nauvoo. It had started as a town named Commerce—a scatter of rough cabins overlooking the river. Then, in 1839, Joseph Smith had led his Mormon followers up here from Missouri. He had knelt down on the bluff and said, “I name this place ‘Nauvoo,’ which is a word from the ancient Hebrew meaning ‘the most beautiful.’ ” Snide persons, including Smith’s best-known biographer, have said that it was lucky that no one had a Hebrew dictionary handy at the time. “Nauvoo,” they said, didn’t exist in Hebrew or, for that matter, in any other language. In fact, Smith was very close to the mark. In Isaiah, Chapter 52, when the Old Testament prophet writes, ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings,’ he uses the word
na’vu
, the plural form of
na’vah
. Smith was right on the second count, too, as I could see from my perch over the river: the wooded hill of Nauvoo was a beautiful place, far too pretty to be lumbered with the name of Commerce.

It was afternoon before the Mississippi quieted and I made my way around to the landing at Nauvoo, hugging the Illinois shore. The town was not a town at all; it was a
mise-en-scène
in which every log, brick and butter pat of Grecian stucco betrayed the hand and eye of some ghostly theatrical director. The director had caused the sun to fall just so. It used the platinum top of the river as a reflector. It made the trees throw long shadows up a slope of green baize. It picked out the blacksmith’s shop and the antique bakery. It lit the fronts of the Victorian houses, each standing on its own four-acre block like a manor with a ha-ha and a park. It fell, with tasteful softness, on the horse-drawn buggies that were ferrying tourists up and down he immaculately graveled streets. I could have sworn that their wheels were going backward, in stroboscopic reverse, like wagon wheels in movies. Lugging my bags uphill, I would not have been surprised to hear a voice shouting
at me to get out of shot. I was a trespasser; too real, sweaty and imperfect for this world of cunning historical artifice.

The air felt colder. It had the chill of expensive reverence in it. For Nauvoo hadn’t been restored, like Galena, in faddish decorator’s chic; it was a holy place, a giant glass reliquary of saints’ bones and sandals. Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum had been martyred here, killed by a lynch mob outside the Hancock County Jail, and the Mormons had fled west to Utah and the New Jerusalem of Salt Lake City. They had returned to Nauvoo to buy it up lot by lot and rebuild it as a pilgrims’ shrine. It was a place to bow one’s head in and talk in whispers. Here was Heber Kimball’s house, there Brigham Young’s. In Mormon terms, it was much like being able to stroll around Saint Luke’s doctor’s examining room or Saint Matthew’s tax office.

The hotel at the top of the town was of a piece with all this solemn antiquity. Its bar was hushed and timbered. Nibbling at Nauvoo blue cheese, drinking sweet oily wine from the Nauvoo vineyard, feeling uneasily torn between the roles of postulant and tourist, I tried to read the Book of Mormon. It was tough going. The angel Moroni’s gold plates must have weighed a ton, since Smith’s “translation” of them ran to more than a quarter of a million words. A good half of these seemed to be either
ye, yea, behold
or
it came to pass
. The whole thing was got up in a repetitive pastiche of William Tyndale’s sixteenth-century ceremonial English. Indeed, a lot of familiar chunks of the Old Testament in the Authorized Version had found their way intact into Smith’s book.

There was much begetting, travailing and tribulation, and the Israelites had been given the sort of names that are universally dreaded by society hostesses. Trying to remember who was who among Teancum and Morianton and Amalickiah and Riplakish and Zemnarihah and Seezoram and Pagag and Nephihah made my head ache. Yet somewhere in the fog there was a story to be picked out. It was a Western. A mass of hopeful immigrants assembled on the shore of the Eastern world; a great ocean was crossed, and the Lord guided the homesteaders on their trek across the promised land of America where the new Zion was to be built according to prophecy.

I liked the boats in which Jared and his brethren made their transatlantic passage:

These vessels sounded like useful craft for the Mississippi. The migrants were far less troubled by big waves than I was myself:

I was engrossed by the book. It was the archetypal American epic. The equation of America with the new Zion had always been an ingredient in the religion of the country. The very first extended narrative of American history, William Bradford’s
History of Plimoth Plantation
, used the metaphor; and it was continually harped on by the Puritan founding fathers. Emma Lazarus, in the famous verse which was put up on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor …” recast the words of Isaiah when he described the promised land: “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold …” The Baptists of Andalusia had sung hymns that drew on the powerful analogy between frontiersmen and the biblical Israelites. But the equation had always been in the form of analogy or metaphor. The Book of Mormon asserted it as literal fact. The frontiersmen, the immigrants and sodbusters,
were
the lost tribes of Israel. America
was
the land of Zion. The angel Moroni’s gold plates told the classic American story of travel, settlement and salvation. At the very least, the Book of Mormon deserves a place in nineteenth-century American literature, somewhere between De Tocqueville and the Horatio Alger books.

By morning I was practically a candidate for conversion. As a bona fide traveler in a boat that was exceeding tight like unto a dish, I felt that I had a privileged intimacy with the experience on which the Book of Mormon had been based. I gulped a hasty breakfast, walked across the bluff to the Visitors Center, and put myself in the hands of
Elder Tiptree, who was conducting a party of middle-aged women around the essentials of the story and the faith.

My own eagerness dimmed a little at the sight and sound of Elder Tiptree. He was a young man with the stoop and the weak, synthetic smile of Uriah Heep. He wrung his manicured hands together as he talked. He spoke too loudly, too slowly and too expressively, making a meal of every consonant and vowel, his voice going up and down like a two-tone doorbell. He sounded as if he were addressing a class of deaf infants, while at the same time he managed to suggest that he was very, very ’umble.

We processed around a gallery of paintings of the boyhood and revelation of Joseph Smith. They had been executed by an imitator of Norman Rockwell and showed the young Joseph going about his father’s business in Upper New York State; if you looked at the child with one eye, he was Tom Sawyer, but if you looked at him with the other he was Jesus Christ. I found this configuration unsettling, and caught a warning coldness in the eye of Elder Tiptree when it fell on me. He had clearly marked me out as one of the rowdy kids in the back row. My tendency to behave with improper giggliness was exacerbated by an interesting speech habit of Elder Tiptree’s which, when noticed once, became an object of obsessive attention. His preferred style of diction was that of the Book of Mormon itself—sonorous, hortatory and pseudo-archaic. However, he hadn’t mastered the trick of ending his sentences. They would drift into a trail of dots, then finish on a limp “and such.” I waited for these “and suches” to come up and mouthed them silently in sync with Elder Tiptree.

“… then the young Joseph Smith did go out into the wilderness beyond Manchester, New York, and for three days and three nights he did meditate, he did fast, he did make prayers unto the Lord … 
and such.
” The temptation laid in my way was terrible. I succumbed.

We got on to the business of the gold plates.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but what exactly happened to the plates after Joseph Smith had translated them?”

“The angel Moroni received them unto himself,” said Elder Tiptree. “I welcome your questions.”

“It makes things more interesting, doesn’t it—if you have questions?” said the woman next to me. She had evidently sensed that a certain
froideur
had crept into the relationship between Elder Tiptree and me, and was trying to smooth things over.

“Yes,” said Elder Tiptree, smiling below his nose and frosting around his eyes; “it does.”

We moved on. The Book of Mormon had been prophesied by Ezekiel, said Elder Tiptree. Did we remember the passage where the Lord divided the world between the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph? Now, in those olden days, they didn’t have books with covers and pages like we have today; they had scrolls. There was a picture of a scroll to prove it, and Elder Tiptree showed us how the scroll was wound around a wooden cylinder—or
stick
.

“In the ancient Hebrew, we learn that the word for ‘book’ wasn’t book, it was ‘stick,’ because all
their
books, unlike ours today, were rolled up on sticks. Okay? So we can now read, not the
stick
of Judah and the
stick
of Joseph, but the
book
of Judah and the
book
of Joseph.” Elder Tiptree looked as if he’d just explained the principle of the double helix. “And the book of Judah is what we know as the Bible, while the book of Joseph …”

I could see what was coming. “Don’t you think that the word ‘stick’ might just mean ‘branch,’ as in branches of a family? Wasn’t it the family of Judah and the family of Joseph?”

“You ask any distinguished scholar of Hebrew,” said Elder Tiptree. “Are you a scholar of Hebrew?”

“No, but I’ll try and find one,” I said. I did. He identified
na’vu
for me, but could find no trace of books or scrolls ever having been called “sticks” in Hebrew.

We progressed to less contentious things and the story of the persecution of the Mormons in the United States, of how they were hounded from Missouri and led to Nauvoo. It was a tale of brute intolerance lightened at regular intervals by divine intervention.

“To that first harvest here in Nauvoo, there came a great plague of crickets and grasshoppers and such. The people fell into a state of lamentation. They saw their crops destroyed and feared that famine would come upon them and upon their children. They prayed unto God, and a miracle occurred. God sent flock upon flock of sea gulls to Nauvoo, and the sea gulls came down and devoured the crickets and the grasshoppers. And the people gave thanks unto the Lord, for He had delivered them.”

We were told how, when the Mormons were forced to leave Nauvoo, God had frozen over the waters of the Mississippi for three days and three nights, so that the people could cross with their wagons into Iowa and move on west. It was, said Elder Tiptree, exactly like the parting of the Red Sea for the children of Israel. I kept to myself my suspicion that the river was fairly often frozen over in February, the month when the Mormons made their flight. But Elder Tiptree was wedded
to a world of prophecies and miracles. He stood beside an aerial photograph of Salt Lake City.