Hashgakha pratit! Joseph thought bitterly. If only he could have given up his own measly resolve and bound it to the will of the Lord.
“Isn’t it said that if even one of the thirty-six saintly tzadikim falls, the world will perish?” The Rider went on.
The Rider referred to him by his old title among the Sons of the Essenes, who were said to be governed by the Tzadikim Nistarim, the thirty-six hidden saints, whose very existence ensured the continuance of the world. But the tzadik was a transitory position; it could be earned and it could be lost. He had left the Order for love of his Rebech, and the mantle of living saint had passed on to another—scant years before Adon had turned on them all, destroying their foothold in this new land and proving that the legend of the Nistarim was only a folktale.
“God.” Joseph wept now. “How you shame me, Rider. Perhaps it is only for that reason my family and I are alive—because these Canaanites—and these are real Canaanites, Rider—maybe they think I am a tzadik. If ever I was one, I am no longer.”
“Tell me what’s happened, rebbe,” the boy said after a moment, abandoning all venom.
“Four years ago we came to this place at the invitation of my brother, who was a miner and the founder of the chevra kadisha burial society. He had written to me about how the Jews here needed a synagogue, for they were praying in a picket shtiebl. We came with Jews from Bisbee and built a Temple. You must have seen it. It was beautiful. The Jews from Bisbee stayed, and also those who worked in the mines sent for their families. It was a good place to live, for a year.
Then...Cardin and his people came. They were from...I do not know where they were from. They said they were shepherds, and had been living somewhere down across the border in Mexico. They were hard people, you know? But it seemed to us they had to be, to protect their flocks. They were Jews, and what else was there? Hakhnasat orkhim—hospitality. They had a good many sheep, and they mingled their flocks with the sheep already here. Things began to change in town.
Cardin’s folk, they were not kosher. Cardin claimed he was a shokhet and opened a butcher’s, but the rebbe said he was lax in observing the kashrut rules and was sloppy with his knife. Cardin’s people hunted game and they sold the meat and passed it as kosher. At first the people wouldn’t buy from him, but then Vladek, the old butcher, disappeared one night. He just left his shop abandoned. There was a fire a few days later, and the old shop was lost. Some of us kept to the laws as best we could, but others, particularly the miners, got lazy and began to do business with Cardin rather than go to the trouble. Those that did this, they also stopped going to Temple.
Then the lashon ha-ra—the gossip—started. People started saying Vladek had been run off by Cardin. Others said Cardin killed him and buried him in the desert. The worst said he had cut up the old butcher and sold him as meat.
Some people started getting sick. The rebbe said it was the food Cardin sold. I don’t know if it was. My family didn’t fall ill. But the rebbe did, and he died one night. My brother, he was in charge of the burial society, you remember? They were very busy preparing bodies and working in the cemetery. But the night the rebbe died, he came to my house in the middle of the night, and he was very drunk. He told me there were marks on the rebbe’s body.”
“What kind of marks?” asked The Rider.
Joseph held his trembling fingers up to his throat and mimicked a stranglehold.
“Like this, you see? Our rebbe had been murdered! This he told me. And I asked him, who could have done it? And he told me, ‘Who do you think, Joseph?’ The next day, they found him in the river. He had fallen in drunk and drowned. That’s what they said. But I walked him home that night, and I waited with him until he fell asleep before I went back to my house, so I know he didn’t go to the river by himself. One of Cardin’s men took over the burial society, and then we didn’t see my brother’s friends much anymore. They went into town a lot to buy things. They brought back whiskey, and most nights, once even over the Seder, we could hear them singing filthy songs.
Cardin’s people never went to Temple. Now, without a rebbe, nobody did. We locked up the Temple, and I kept the Torah, because I didn’t want it to be stolen. I didn’t trust Cardin or his people. Then Y’ishmael, he was one of the Bisbee Jews, a carpenter and the gabbai at the Temple, he suggested I hold services in my house, because he knew I’d been a teacher and could read the Torah from talks we’d had. We started meeting in my home. I became ba’al koh-rey, and would read to them the weekly portions from the Torah. It was all we could do. There weren’t many of us, not even enough to make a minyan, and it seemed like every week less came.
Then…then the children started disappearing. There weren’t many children in the settlement. Not many young families. Probably, there weren’t much more then ten, from babies on to about Eli’s age now.”
Joseph paused, and he looked at his son. New tears ran down his old cheeks.
“He’s not in pain,” The Rider said, through Eli.
“I know. I know. I just...” He shook his head, and for awhile he couldn’t speak. Then he continued;
“Cardin came to my house one night after our prayer meeting. He told me...he told me everything.”
“What did he tell you?” The Rider pressed.
“He told me, and he said these things without any guilt—without any fear of God— mind you! And that was what scared me so about him. He didn’t fear God at all. He told me they had taken the children. Right there, in my house, with my son and my wife in the next room, he told me this. He told me they needed more children and they were going to take Eli next unless I did something for them. I said no. I was furious. I was outraged. I wanted to throw him out, you know, and go to the marshal and tell him. Then he said other things. Things about Rebech. Things I never imagined anyone saying. It made me angry, but it made me scared too. I knew if I didn’t do what they wanted, I wouldn’t leave the house alive, and he would do everything he said he would to Eli and Rebech when I was dead.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“I had worked with metal, you remember. For the Essenes, I taught the engraving of amulets, and…and sculpture. God...God...forgive me. I did what they wanted. Like Aaron. I built them their golden calf. It wasn’t a calf, though. It was…”
“A bull. You built them a bull.”
“Like a bull, yes! He told me it was their god. And I knew right away, when they showed me the plans, I knew what it was. And I thought, my God, the Canaanites have come and they have taken over. We called you and your master that, remember? Canaanite, because of the heathen talismans. It was in poor taste. But I never knew…I never knew. In the histories you see? To read about them and what they did for Molech, one is removed. One reads the words, but does not feel them. These were not Jews, but Canaanites. I built it for them. God forgive me. And they used it. Time and time again, for two years they used it.”
“How?” asked The Rider. “You said there were only ten children. And the children only started disappearing from the town a few months ago.”
Joseph squeezed his eyes shut.
“Do not make me speak it.”
“Tell me.”
When he opened his eyes, they were like shattered panes of glass.
“The women. They began…taking the women. Do you understand? In groups. The Bisbee Jews, Y’ishmael and the rest, they tried to fight. Cardin and the others killed them all. Right out in the street, they killed them with machetes. No man escaped. The women, they took them and kept them. Old women, young girls. The old women, if they were found to be barren, well, they were killed. And the children…the children who were born. They went to Molech. All of them. Again and again. The women were kept alive to bear children. And those who did not kill themselves eventually died in childbirth. And the babies were given to him.”
He said this to The Rider, but it was into the face of his son. And it was more than he could bear. He rose from the table and came around to kneel beside the boy.
He held him about the waist and he put his old face into his boy’s narrow shoulder and wailed.
“God! God! What I have done! They once called me a saint. They once called me a tzadik!”
He listened for the voice of his son to tell him words of comfort. He ached for his son to embrace him.
But the words were The Rider’s.
“You’re no tzadik,” The Rider said coldly in Eli’s voice. His expression was blank as a puppet’s, but Joseph could feel The Rider’s spirit recoil at his touch. He released his son and stepped back, looking down at him.
“Not any longer,” The Rider went on. He looked up, with accusing eyes. “You once taught me a man can only truly be forgiven by those he’s wronged. You can’t be forgiven by the dead. But you have also wronged God. So long as there is a God there is teshuva—redemption. Wait here, and pray. Is the girl alive?”
“I don’t know. If she is, she’s in their temple.”
“Where?”
“Beneath the cemetery. I built it down there. That’s where they keep it. But there’s no time! The Marshal and the men from town...”
“Keep the door barred and leave them to me.”
“But listen to me, Rider...Cardin…he doesn’t fear God.”
The boy looked at him with The Rider’s eyes, full of fire. “He will.”
Joseph shivered. Whether it was a draft in the night that had come through the crack under the door, or the passing of something, he wasn’t sure.
Eli blinked his eyes and looked up at him. The hard expression was gone from his face.
“Papa, where’s mama gone?” he said in the small voice Joseph had always known.
He fell to his knees again and took his son into his arms.
* * * *
The cemetery was on a low hill, staggered with jutting tombstones, and ringed by wooden pickets. The wind blasted grey stone archway rose against the dark sky. It was carved with the Star of David and the year of its erection, 1876. The ground was encompassed in a strange, swirling smoke that rolled like gray, fitful dreamers and smelled noxious and unnatural.
Passing through the open gate, The Rider took inventory of his surroundings and noticed a low stone stele placed behind the arch, its cap jutting just above the ground smoke. He stooped to inspect it and found it covered in obscure carvings—some dead language even he had never encountered. It was engraved with totemic depictions of the bull god Molech, roosting amid fire and swallowing babies. It stood out among the standing stones of the dead, etched with sacred symbols like a bullet among sewing needles.
“You don’t belong here,” The Rider muttered to it.
“Nor do you,” came a voice from the cemetery.
The Rider straightened. Where there had been no one a moment before, now three gaunt figures stood among the graves as if they had solidified out of the stinking fog. They were draped in grayish, tattered shrouds, filthy with crumbling dirt. They were spirits of the restless dead. Their bound faces and knotted shrouds had not saved them from being employed by sorcery as night wardens of Molech’s front porch. These had been Jews once, but whether they were enslaved or men of the burial society corrupted by Cardin’s influence, or members of his clan who had willingly (it could be argued, witlessly) given up their immortal souls to his will, The Rider didn’t know.
The Rider’s hand moved to float above his pistol as he faced them.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“We watch this place,” answered one whose face was covered entirely by its shroud.
“It is our task,” said another, whose face was bared, and whose beard was a nest of crawling earthworms.
“Who are you to trespass?” declared the third and tallest, that leaned on a spade like a crutch.
“One who still follows the Commandments,” The Rider answered. “Who set you to this task?”
This answer seemed to agitate the three dead men and they moved as one, moaning their frustration and bounding with unearthly celerity over the graves directly at him.
The Rider’s ethereal pistol cleared its holster, firing jets of blue mystic fire. The first shot caught the tall one with the spade in the chest and sent it flipping backwards to the ground. The second blew a pale, swaddled head to ectoplasmic fragments. The third spirit collided with The Rider and pinned him against the side of the archway, clinging to him with its bare feet like a monkey, tearing at his wispy form with jagged fingers.
The spirit’s eyes bulged, and its jaws clamped down on the side of The Rider’s weapon. Its long fingers, which ended in bare, skeletal tips raked at him, shredding his sleeves and nicking into the spirit flesh beneath, causing him actual pain and making corresponding blood stripes appear on his physical body miles away.
“The master…demands…” the spirit growled, as if explaining its own actions.
“You have another master,” The Rider told it, trying to appeal to what was left of its human soul while struggling to ward off its ferocious attack and free his pistol.
“Yes!” the spirit said, faltering, its feral expression slackening. Then instantly its features contorted once more into an animalistic mask. “No!”
The Rider spit full in the dead man’s face. The spittle of a fasting man was an irritant to evil spirits. The creature threw its head back and howled in agony as the rigid flesh on its skull seared.
Still it held on, and The Rider’s gun was trapped. With his free hand, he found the big iron knife at his belt and drew it, passing the blade through the trunk of the dead man. The spirit screamed as its lower half fell away, and it released The Rider and fell to the ground writhing, bisected. Its legs scuffled in the dust while its top half twisted about crazily.
The Rider leveled his pistol down at the spindly thing which alternately clawed its smoking face and pawed at its kicking, severed legs. It looked up at him and mewled, crossing its thin arms before itself as if to block the coming finality of oblivion.
The Rider did not fire.
“Tell Molech I’m coming.”
The grisly half-corpse slowly lowered its arms, then dipped its head once, swung around, and was gone, bounding over the graves and swinging nimbly away on the flats of its hands.
The Rider followed, racing and wending through the tombstones, keeping pace with the scuttling form. Finally he found himself at a large hole in the earth, half concealed by a heavy stone. Cut into the earth were steps, slanting down into a fathomless dark.
He could hear the slapping of the corpse spirit’s hands as it leapt down the stairs.
The Rider plunged down after it, into darkness more total than the midnight sky.
* * * *
At the Moderado, Friday night was in full swing, but business was being disrupted by the grandstanding of Cut Tom. He had commandeered one of the Faro tables as a platform and was shaking his fists and trying to stir up bored men who had only come to get drunk, whore, and lose their wages.
“Damn dirty Jews!” he hollered. “Stealin’ Christian babies out their cradles like a buncha black wolves! It ain’t to be stood for!”
Some men nodded, but most looked longingly at the girls or the forgotten cards spread on the tables.
One of the gamblers leaned back in his chair and observed the Jew Tom had dragged from the upstairs room. He was limp as a dead dog in the arms of Tom’s partner Bull Bannock. The Jew’s head lolled on his shoulders. He was strung with all sorts of fofarrow and bits of junk from head to toe.
“That Heeb don’t look too dangerous, Tom. You sure he’s alive?”
Cut Tom turned.
“He’s playin’ possum! You all seen how fast with his gun he was. He’s some kinda Jew killer, or a priest. You ever seen one like him before?”
The gambler shrugged.
“Can’t say I ever paid much attention, but I reckon not.”
“‘Course not!” Tom said excitedly, licking his lips and jabbing a finger accusingly at the unconscious Jew. “That’s cause he’s their goddamned pope, come
to officiate over their black mass, where they drink the blood of them young kids!”
“Damn straight!” Bull Bannock interjected, like he was at some kind of bent version of a tent revival.
A few of the men, mostly the herders and locals, sat or stood up at this, nodding their heads in agreement. One man stepped forward. It was Trujillo, still wearing the torn homespun his baby had been swaddled in wrapped around his fist. His eyes were grave but bloodshot in his dark face. He was thinner than anybody remembered. Some recalled seeing him sleeping in the alley behind the Mex cantina since the night he’d lost his infant.
“If what you say is so, señor,” he muttered, “he must not see the morning.”
“That’s the truth.” Tom nodded. “You see here? This man knows.”
At the bar, Dan Spector nodded too. It was not that he was caught up in all this rabble rousing; it was in appreciation of Cut Tom’s scheme to deal the Jew out legally. He would murder this man in the street and half the town would be accomplices before he was through.
The Jew had no money it turned out, just a lot of five cent jewelry by the look of him. Dan had no idea why the Jew was in the state he was in. He looked to be bleeding down his arms where the boys had handled him roughly, but no amount of jostling or slapping roused him. He had heard tell once of a man who slept so soundly he could be dragged from his bed and left in the middle of the road. Maybe this Jew suffered from the same condition. Well, it was lucky for Tom and Bull, maybe for him as well. They hadn’t yet claimed that pistol. It was still in the holster. He could see it, gleaming in the light. He wondered if it really was chased with gold as it looked, or if it was just more tin plated Jew bijouterie. There was only one way to find out. He finished his coffee and slammed the mug down on the bar.
“Hang that sonofabitch!” he hollered.
In moments the cry was being taken up all over the saloon.
* * * *
The Rider passed down the rough hewn steps. He did not know how much time passed before he reached the bottom. The stars could no longer be seen through the faraway opening, and he had quickly lost track of his corpse guide, skipping and finally rolling down the stair, heedless of harm. He could not feel the air, but knew it must be cool. His ethereal vision was not obscured by the encompassing subterranean night as mortal’s eyes would have been. He could see the bottom of the long stair and need not imagine the half-corpse lurking in the shadow to pounce upon him.
Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Page 4
