Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (36 page)

Rebecca had already repaired the windows of the house itself, and patched the chinks between the wood planks with fresh mud. Cans of paint sat on a tarp alongside the house, along with brushes and rollers.

“Pretty ambitious,” he said.

Rebecca whirled around, startled. He’d assumed she had simply ignored him as he’d ridden up, but now he realized that she
hadn’t heard him, had been too engrossed in her work to hear the clopping hooves or the heavy breathing of the horse.

“If you sent help from the big house I wouldn’t refuse it.”

Jacob tied the horse to the porch railing, which sagged from dry rot. He grabbed a pair of leather gloves from the saddlebag and came back around. Rebecca was back at work. Jacob joined her. For a time there was no sound but banging hammers.

At last he said, “I’d bring workers, but we’ve got enough to do without helping squatters.”

“Is that what I am?”

“You tell me,” Jacob said. “How long have you been living out here?”

“Since the funeral.”

“Almost a month, then. When were you going to ask my permission to move into a house on my land?”

Rebecca hammered in the last nail on the board she was fixing into place on the side of the coop, then stood to face him. She removed her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead. “Are you telling me to leave?”

“No. Doesn’t seem much demand for this old dump. Not when there are plenty of places in town with electricity, running water. Pavement, for that matter.”

“Exactly, so why do you care? The roof needs fixing, the walls need to be patched and painted. I’ve got to tear out the porch and figure out what to do about the chimney before it collapses. I guess the pump still works, but other than that, you’d be better off sending a bulldozer and knocking it over. You don’t need the house, so does it matter if someone squats on the land?”

“There’s always the land. My father still grazed cattle this way.”

“You still can.”

“The old farmland, then,” Jacob said.

“What old farmland? The irrigation ditches filled in with silt fifty years ago, and the raised beds washed away in a flood probably before you were born. There are fruit trees, but they haven’t been pruned in decades. Nobody wants this place, either the house or the land.”

“Except you.”

“Except me,” she said.

So why did she want it, then? If anything, she was understating the work. The cabin had sat in decay since 1969, when Great-Great-Grandmother Cowley died at the age of ninety-seven. Baked by the sun in summer and covered in blowing drifts of snow during winter, only the aridity of the desert had kept it from collapsing on itself. What would it take to get it livable? And never mind the structure, there was no plumbing, no electricity, no air-conditioning, and no heating system except for an old fireplace. Which would need serious work or it would burn down the cabin the first time someone lit a fire.

“Why?” he asked.

“I like it out here. It’s like living in the nineteenth century. Like it was in the days of the first settlement.”

“That’s a reason to visit, not to move in. And if you want to live out here, this place in particular, you could haul an old trailer out and it would be cheaper.”

“Do you know how Blister Creek got its start?”

“Of course I do.”

“How?” she asked.

“They were polygs fleeing from the federal government. Bunch of persecution in those days. Then, a few years later, when Salt Lake made it clear they were serious about abandoning polygamy, our people had to choose between admitting everything they’d fought for was a waste of time, or telling themselves the LDS Church had fallen into apostasy. They decided it was apostasy.”

“That’s about ten percent of the story. The warm and fuzzy ten percent.”

“What’s so warm and fuzzy about it?” he asked.

Rebecca tore off her gloves and laid them with the hammer on top of the pile of lumber. She set off for the house, and he found himself studying the supplies and wondering how much work it took simply getting all this stuff out here by horseback.

She returned with a book. It had a leather cover, battered and frayed around the edges, and at first he thought it was an old copy of the Doctrine and Covenants. Maybe she was going to quote Section 132 at him, the part where the Lord told Joseph Smith about the eternal principle of plural marriage. But when she handed it over he saw that it wasn’t scriptures at all, but an ancient diary.

Jacob flipped to the cover page. Someone had written
Henrietta Rebecca Cowley – October 19, 1890,
in a smooth, flawless cursive. There was a picture taped there of a young woman—almost a girl, really—with dark hair and dark eyes. His first thought was that she was beautiful. His second was that she hadn’t been happy at the time of the photo. There was a defiance in her eyes that glittered across the generations. It reminded him of the look Eliza had worn when Father had told her to marry into the Kimball family.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, stunned. He could only imagine how Father’s hands would have trembled to get a hold on such a treasure.

“She hid it in the house.”

“Where? The house had been scoured clean.”

“A secret cellar.”

“You knew about that?” he asked. “But I was the one who found it. We were in the fruit trees when Eliza got attacked by yellow jackets, and we—never mind that. I came back at least three more times to look through her books. I didn’t see anything like this.”

“It wasn’t for you to find.”

“Like I said to my father, you’ll forgive me if I don’t find that answer satisfying.”

“Nevertheless, it’s the truth.” She pointed to the diary. “It’s all in there.”

“What is?”

“Blister Creek. The truth. About several young women and their children sent alone into the wilderness. About the locust plague, the fever that carried away a third of the population, about the years in the desert, isolated, hiding from the world, and clawing a living out of the wilderness. Without a single man—the men had all been arrested, as it turned out, although none of the women knew that at the time.”

Jacob blinked, not just surprised, but stunned. He’d never heard such a thing. “Blister Creek was founded by women?”

“By Grandma Cowley, to be specific. A teenage girl. How about that? And then the men came back. They always do, don’t they? Thirty-four months alone, led by a young woman, the
community had survived, they were thriving. They didn’t need any man. And they certainly didn’t require patriarchy to crush them under its boot. The bastards.”

Jacob looked down at the picture of his great-great-grandmother from the front of the book. He was suddenly certain that this picture had been taken after the men had returned. That’s what that look was on her face, that’s what it meant. He looked up and was surprised to see that look mirrored by the bitterness on Rebecca’s face. He stared at her, bewildered as to how she could be so upset by something that had happened a hundred and twenty years earlier, to a woman who had died more than forty years ago. If Rebecca had been born by then, she could have been only a baby. Surely, she had no memory of Henrietta Cowley.

Rebecca pulled on her gloves. “Now, are you going to kick me out or not?”

“I’m not,” he said. “I came out to get answers about who you are and what you want. You’re welcome to stay if your intentions are good.”

She lifted a board and pounded nails with her hammer. “Thanks, that’s generous.” She didn’t sound grateful.

“But who are you?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Read the diary, Jacob. Read it and then you’ll understand. You’ll know what happened here, you’ll know who I am. And you’ll see how the world is going to end.”

And with that, she turned back to her work and wouldn’t say another word.

-end-

Photograph by David Garten

Michael Wallace was born in California and raised in a small religious community in Utah, eventually heading east to live in New England. An experienced world traveler, he has trekked through the Andes, ventured into the Sahara on a camel, and traveled through Thailand by elephant. In addition to working as a literary agent and innkeeper, he previously worked as a software engineer for a Department of Defense contractor, programming simulators for nuclear submarines. He is the author of more than a half dozen novels, including
The Righteous
,
Mighty and Strong
, and
The Wicked
.