Pillar of Fire

by R. R. Irvine

  “Jesus,” someone said, “nobody’s ever beat Edgar before, young or old.”

  “It’s a matter of leverage,” Martin said.

  “Bullshit,” Peake responded. “You beat me fair and square.”

  “Maybe we’d better elect ourselves a new marshal,” one of the bystanders said. “Someone older.”

  “I couldn’t beat Martin either,” Traveler said, coming to Peake’s defense. “He’s tricky.”

  Traveler tapped his father on the shoulder. As soon as Martin abandoned his chair, Traveler sat down and put his elbow on the table.

  Peake’s eyes had lost their fight. “I need a little time to get my strength back.”

  “I’ve seen you take on half a dozen, one after the other,” someone catcalled.

  Traveler put on a good show, prolonging the contest, but Peake won in the end. After that, the locals filed by, slapping the marshal on the back before returning to their tables. By then the marshal had caught enough breath to shout, “Hey, Annie, the show’s over. You can serve lunch now.”

  A few moments later the kitchen’s porthole door swung open and Annie appeared carrying a large tray stacked with plates. She served the marshal’s table first. The meat loaf reminded Traveler of his mother’s cooking, something from a can disguised to look homemade.

  Without looking up from his plate, Peake whispered, “Thank you, Traveler.”

  “For what?”

  “You let me win.”

  Traveler shrugged.

  “It taught me a lesson, that’s for sure. I owe you one.”

  “We’ll settle for some information on Moroni’s Children.”

  Peake filled his mouth with meat loaf and chewed thoughtfully for a while. “Until they came along, we were on our way to becoming a ghost town, like most every place else in this part of the state. Without them, there wouldn’t be much left open in Fire Creek, maybe not even the Escalante.

  “The Children bought a partnership in Shipler’s General Store across the street. If they hadn’t, Shipler’s would have closed and the rest of us would be driving all the way to St. George for groceries.”

  “How many Children are we talking about?”

  “All told, there’s maybe a hundred and fifty, though some say the count’s as high as two hundred. The elders have taken over some of the abandoned houses along Mormon Road. That’s their name for it anyway, even though the signs still say Parowan Avenue. But the bulk of them are spread all over town in abandoned houses. A few have squatted in Coffee Pot Springs. That’s a ghost town about a mile from here up in the foothills.”

  “How do they earn their money?” Martin asked.

  “Some say donations. Others aren’t so kind. I’ve heard stories of intimidation and blackmail, but nothing you could prove. Whatever they have, they sure don’t spend it on material goods.”

  The marshal pushed his plate away. “Going by the number of pregnancies you see, there are a hell of a lot more of Moroni’s Children on the way. Another generation or two and they’ll control this whole damn county, just like they do this town.”

  “They must have registered to vote to elect themselves a mayor,” Martin said.

  “Only the men registered, twenty or so.”

  Martin raised an eyebrow.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Peake said. “I’ve done the math myself. It works out to about five wives per man, though some of the elders have more.”

  Traveler looked around the cafe. “How do the locals feel about Moroni’s Children?”

  “That depends on who you talk to. A couple of businesses are running in the black for the first time in years. Others have changed hands, though not without some hard feelings and maybe some laws broken. A couple of locals actually tried to join up, young bucks who got their underwear in an uproar thinking they could latch on to an extra wife or two.”

  “Did they?”

  Peake shook his head. “Norm Kimball and Hank Woodruff started sniffing around the women as soon as the Children hit town. The next thing I knew, they disappeared. I alerted the sheriff and the highway patrol. I even spent some time out in the desert looking for their graves, but so far . . .” The marshal spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

  “If you found the bodies,” Traveler said, “who would you go looking for?”

  The marshal pushed his chair back and stood up. “Let’s see if we can walk off some of Annie’s meat loaf.”

  The moment Traveler stepped outside, the heat sucked his breath away, but Peake seemed unaffected as he led the way across Main Street. Traveler and Martin followed, wading through heat waves and sticky asphalt, bypassing Shipler’s for Benson’s Funeral Home next door, a single-story clapboard that looked as if it hadn’t been painted since the pioneers arrived.

  Peake tugged a key-laden ring from his pocket and opened the door. “Desert burials put old Jessie Benson out of business, but we keep the electricity on because this is the only place with a working air conditioner.”

  As soon as they were inside, Peake switched on the window unit, which rattled ominously before settling down to a constant throb. Sighing, he stood in front of the vents and raised the front of his shirt to catch the stale-smelling breeze on his bare belly.

  “I’ve known those men back at the Escalante all my life, but when it comes to Moroni’s Children and murder suspects, it’s best to keep your thoughts to yourself.”

  He squirmed, redirecting the air flow. “As for the Children, I’m not sure I trust any of them. I sure as hell don’t feel comfortable around them. They feel the same about us townspeople, I guess, because they stick together like glue. They have their own kind of government. Horace Snelgrove’s in charge, like a mayor or governor, and Orrin Porter handles law enforcement, though from what I hear all he has to do is glare and people get meek mighty damned quick. All the men vote on communal matters, the women do what they’re told.” He snorted. “You have to hand it to them for that. My wife told me to go to hell and walked out years ago.”

  Peake pivoted until the breeze was at his back. “I always figured I could take anybody when it came to a fight. A fair fight anyway. But I wouldn’t tangle with Porter, not on your life. Just looking into his eyes gives me the creeps. I’m not the only one either. Everybody in this town walks on eggs around him.”

  Traveler started to say something but Peake beat him to it. “I know what you’re thinking, that it can’t be his real name. Orrin Porter Rockwell was Brigham Young’s bodyguard, his avenging angel. So what, I say. This guy’s just as mean, if you believe the stories.”

  “Do you?”

  “If he thinks he’s Rockwell’s reincarnation, I’m not about to call him a liar. Don’t either of you try it either, no matter how good you are at arm wrestling. The fact is, I got you out here alone to warn you off. I overheard one of the Children talking about you. I think maybe I was supposed to overhear, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re on their enemies list.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, they actually have one, a long parchment scroll maybe five feet long. They keep it rolled up in a leather case. Each name is written in red ink, I’m told, or maybe in blood, to hear some tell it. Anyway, your names are the latest additions. Porter did the honors himself, I hear.”

  “We’re honored,” Traveler said.

  “Don’t take it lightly,” Peake said. “The name before yours was our missing mayor, Jake Gibbs. Nobody’s seen him since. So my advice is to get back in your car and drive on out of here before the sun goes down.”

  Martin shook his head. “That’s probably why they let you listen in. They wanted you to tell us that. You do the dirty work and their hands stay clean.”

  Peake shrugged. “If they added my name to that list of theirs, I don’t know if I’d have the guts to stick around.”

  “I don’t get it,” Martin said. “Why have they made us an enemy?”

  “Like I said, I overheard some of the women talking in Shipler’s. They claim you’re Dani
tes, here to extract blood atonement on order of the church up in Salt Lake.”

  “That’s crap,” Martin said.

  “I’m not saying I believe it,” Peake said. “Maybe they don’t either. But that’s what I was meant to hear. That you’re a Danite working for the White Apostle.”

  “There goes our cover,” Traveler said.

  Smiling, Peake held a hand in front of the air-conditioning vents. “What do you know. The air’s damn near cold. Maybe hell’s going to freeze over after all.”

  “Which reminds me,” Martin said, “in case of heatstroke, I understand you have a doctor in town. Where do I find him?”

  The marshal squinted so hard the skin around his eyes quivered. “I think I just heard a shoe drop, didn’t I. Silas Wagstaff warned me to keep an ear out for it.”

  He shaped his fingers into a gun and fired a mock shot at Martin and Traveler, one after the other. “If you want a second opinion on arm wrestling, I’m the man to come to. If you want a second opinion about a man like Jason Thurgood, you’ll have to talk to his competition. Her name’s Hanna Eccles. She’s been nursing folks around here for as long as I can remember. Midwifing, too, at least until Thurgood showed up.”

  12

  HANNA ECCLES lived at the edge of town. Her backyard was nothing but desert, twenty miles of it, all the way north to the Bull Valley Mountains. Her ramshackle house, blackened clapboard nailed over partially exposed tarpaper, sat precariously on the lip of a deep, dry wash. A rough-cut sandstone retaining wall, built as protection against flash flooding, was sagging as badly as the disintegrating wooden steps that led to the front door.

  Traveler tested the bottom step, which creaked but held his weight, then backed off to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Martin, who looked none the worse for their walk in the 105- degree sun, was staring back the way they’d come, along Jaradite Avenue past Main and Pine Streets. Like most pioneer Mormon towns, Fire Creek had been laid out precisely, with streets running north and south and avenues east and west, a miniversion of Brigham Young’s master plan for his City of Zion, Salt Lake.

  “ ‘They who believe not in the Messiah shall be destroyed by fire,’ ” Martin said.

  “ ‘For behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven,’ ” Traveler responded.

  “Your mother would be proud that you remembered your Sunday school,” Martin said as he started up the steps.

  The door opened before he could knock. The woman standing on the threshold was wearing a crisp white nurse’s uniform, bright enough to make Traveler squint against its sun- sharpened glare. One look at her told him that she’d dressed expressly for their visit.

  “Hanna Eccles?” Martin asked.

  “Tell me they’re right about you two,” she said, nodding. “That you bring the wrath of God with you.” Her gray hair was pulled back into a tight, precise bun; her gold-rimmed glasses sparkled. Her figure was trim, almost girlish, but her wrinkled face placed her somewhere in her sixties.

  Martin handed her a card.

  “Moroni Traveler and Son,” she read. “Praise God. Jason Thurgood is about to get his.”

  Martin smiled. “I use the name Martin since my son came along. I had the cards printed up before I made the change, and it seemed a shame to waste them.”

  “We’re not here in any official capacity,” Traveler said. “But we would like to find out if it’s true what they say about Thurgood, that he works miracles.”

  “They used to say that about me.” Hanna beckoned them inside.

  Her tiny living room had whitewashed pine walls, an oval multicolored rag rug covering most of the plank floor, a catalog sofa and two matching chairs wrapped in plastic slips, and an upright piano that was being used as a shelf for dozens of framed photographs.

  When she saw Traveler looking at the photos, she said, “My patients used to give me likenesses of themselves as a testament of their cures.”

  Hanna carefully arranged her uniform skirt to keep her knees from showing, then sat down on the sofa. Traveler and Martin took the flanking chairs, whose plastic slipcovers crinkled under their weight. Between them was a glass-topped coffee table covered with precisely arranged magazines.

  “Tell us about Jason Thurgood,” Martin said.

  “Did you notice the creekbed on your way in?” she responded.

  They nodded.

  “It’s called Fire Creek like the town, though some around here have rechristened the place Downwind.” She shook her head as if to deny the new designation. “Outsiders figure our town is named for the fiery color of the Furnace Mountains. The rest of us know better. It’s named Fire Creek because its runoff quenches the heat whenever we get summer thunderstorms up in the Bull Valley Mountains. We used to be able to count on one or two gully-washers every August. But the last two years have been bone dry. Some of us think it’s a punishment for going against the word of God by accepting Moroni’s Children. If that’s true, then I say Jason Thurgood is the last straw. I say he’s an agent of the devil.”

  “Not everyone agrees with you,” Martin said. “What would you say to those who call him a miracle worker?”

  “I have better things to do with my time than listen to gossip.”

  “What about his failures, then?”

  She wet her lips. “Judging by the way Moroni’s Children have taken to him, I figure any mistakes are buried out in the desert somewhere. Out there, they’re in good company at least.”

  “Do you have any proof that someone’s been buried?” Traveler asked.

  She shrugged again.

  “We hear Mayor Gibbs is missing,” Martin said.

  “For a long time now, people have been leaving Fire Creek if they get the chance. So it’s hard to keep track of who’s pulled up stakes and gone off on their own without being forced. But Jake Gibbs was like me. Too set in his ways to change, or even to try. So he’s six feet under for sure. Otherwise, he’d been in town raising hell at what’s going on.”

  “Let’s get back to Jason Thurgood, then,” Traveler said.

  “I never made much money helping people, just enough to supplement my Social Security. But he and his fancy ways put an end to most of that.”

  “Is there anyone else in town who might be willing to talk to us about him?”

  She smiled, adding wrinkles to her face that paradoxically made her look younger. “Why don’t you come out with it and ask me for the names of his enemies, besides myself of course?”

  “That would be helpful.”

  She waved for them to stay put, then got up from the sofa and moved to the piano, where she began running a finger over the tops of various framed photographs. Finally, she selected one and held it up. “You might want to talk with Ben Moffit. He left me for Thurgood for a while, but soon came back. You’d better hurry, though. Old Ben hasn’t got much time left.”

  She replaced Moffit’s photograph and chose another. “Karl Cederlof used to be an important man around here. The fact is, he owns most of the land Moroni’s Children are squatting on, not that it’s worth that much, you understand. Unless of course they hit another mother lode like the old days. Karl’s a big city man these days, living up at the county seat in Parowan.”

  “That’s Iron County,” Martin said. “I thought we were in Washington County.”

  “There are places around here where it depends on which side of the road you’re standing on, or maybe who you’re talking to. Moroni’s Children like to keep close to all the borders, state and county, in case they have to make a quick move to escape the law.”

  She stepped directly in front of Traveler and stared up at him. “I’m hoping that one look at you and Moroni’s Children will move on and take Jason Thurgood with them.”

  “Exactly what is his relationship with them?” Traveler asked.

  “It’s a pact with the devil, if you ask me.”

  “Is he a member?”

  “Not as far as I know. I’ll give him that much credit. He uses them
as volunteers, but only because they came to him and offered their help. If I’d offered first things might have been different.”

  “It almost sounds like you admire him,” Martin said.

  “I respect a doctor’s kind of knowledge. If he can heal people by laying on hands, so much the better. But I keep asking myself, why would an educated man come to a place like this when he could be making big money up in Salt Lake? Look around you. You can see I don’t have much to show for my life’s work. The people I help pay the best way they can. Most times, it’s nothing more than groceries, or maybe some plumbing work, or patchwork on the house.”

  She shook her head sharply. “There’s no money to be made in Fire Creek.”

  Martin stood up. “Would you go to Jason Thurgood if you were sick?”

  Hanna smiled. “It’s hard to say what people will do when they’re feeling bad enough.”

  13

  TRAVELER AND Martin followed Hanna’s directions, walking south on Enterprise Street to where it intersected Brigham Avenue at the other end of town. Along the way, a few front yards showed a scattering of hand-watered shrubs. There were no lawns, no shade trees to speak of except for a ragged line of cottonwoods and desert willows growing along the bank of the dry creekbed. Judging by their limp foliage, another August without runoff might do them in permanently.

  “That woman Hanna reminded me of your mother,” Martin said as gusting wind, like exhaust from a furnace, began raising a haze of fine red dust. “Hard women, both of them. Your mother used to say, ‘I want my son to be a doctor. Doctors don’t go through hard times. Even the cheapest people will spend every dime they’ve got for a cure when death’s staring them in the face.’ ”

  “One Christmas Kary gave me one of those doctor sets with a toy stethoscope.”

  “She asked me to buy you a real one once, but I told her you were too young to take care of it. ‘You’ll have no one to blame but yourself,’ she said, ‘if my boy doesn’t turn out to be a rich doctor.’ ‘In that case,’ I told her, ‘think of the good time you’ll have reminding me of it.’ ”