Destroying Angel

by Michael Wallace

  They nodded. Laura looked determined, Maude terrified. A tight, angry expression was fixed on Annabelle’s face. Her earlier cowardice had vanished, replaced by a look I can describe only as bloodlust. She would happily take an ax to the man’s head while he slept, I realized. Perhaps I should encourage it. Whisper in her ear, put the bellows to her hatred. Then, when we went into the man’s tent, hand her the gun.

  No, I told myself. You’re the leader here. If you mean to kill a man, do it yourself.

  “There will be no communal meal tonight—the four of us will cook supper alone. Maude, tell the other women to stay in their homes and wagons, and for the love of all that is holy, do not let any of the children out. I don’t want them seeing this.” We set to work.

  Van Slooten staggered out of his tent thirty minutes later. He’d stripped off his hat and boots, his shirt and pants, and stood in long underwear marked with yellow sweat stains. He held the whiskey bottle in his hand, already two-thirds gone. How the devil was he still on his feet?

  “Where’s my supper?”

  “It’s coming, be patient,” I said.

  He gestured at his face with his free hand. “You know how I got this scar?” He raised his voice. “Well, do you?”

  I was stirring a pot of soup at the fire and looked up with what I hoped was an expression of mild irritation. “Mr. van Slooten, you know we can’t cook with all of these vexations.”

  “A Mormon. Brigham Young sent him, man tried to kill me. A Danite assassin.”

  Annabelle snorted. “There is no such thing.”

  “By g–d there is. Came in the night, tried to cut my throat. I fought him off.”

  “What a story,” Annabelle said. “You got in a bar fight. It wasn’t a Mormon assassin.”

  “Annabelle!” I said in a sharp voice.

  Van Slooten swaggered over, stumbled, and nearly fell in the fire. He approached Annabelle, who shrank back, her expression suddenly fearful, and then wheeled on me. “It was 1870. Bet you wasn’t even born.” His whiskey breath roared in my face. “I been in the Dakotas, fighting Sioux and Chippeway. One night, outside Laramie, we come upon a man and his two wives. Second lady was none too happy. She wanted us to bring her and her babies to the fort, said her husband meant to take a third wife and she’d had enough. So we took her.”

  He stopped long enough to take another drink. “That night, I hear a cry from Lieutenant Huff, and I look over and seen a man in our tent, cutting Huff’s throat. I reached for my gun, but he was on me in a moment. Fought him off, but he got away. Took his woman too.” Van Slooten gestured to his face. “Left me this. Huff was dead. Some day I’m gonna find that man, and we’ll finish what we started.” He nodded. “He’d be in his forties now. Maybe he’s your husband.” He turned. “Or yours.”

  “We’ll never finish your supper,” I said, “if you don’t go back to your tent and leave us in peace.”

  “Hurry up, d—you! I’m hungry!” He stomped back to his tent.

  “How much longer?” Maude asked in a trembling voice.

  “Not much,” I said. “Twenty minutes. Then I’ll finish it.”

  And before a half hour had passed, I stood outside van Slooten’s tent with a steaming bowl and a hunk of bread on a plate. “Mr. van Slooten?” No answer. “Your supper is ready. May I bring it in?”

  Still no answer. I glanced at the other women, who stood a pace off, wringing their hands. I gave them a nod, then used my free hand to push aside the tent flap and entered.

  It was dim inside with the falling sun, and sweltering hot. Van Slooten lay facedown and naked on his bedding, even his undergarments tossed to one side now. The empty bottle lay next to his hand. Good Lord, had he drunk the whole thing? He let out a low, rumbling snore. Sweat beaded along his back and dampened his sideburns. The stench of body odor and whiskey filled my mouth and nostrils, and my stomach heaved.

  “Mr. van Slooten?”

  No answer. He was well and truly gone now, but I didn’t want to take chances, so I said his name twice more, each time a little louder. I shook his shoulder. He groaned but didn’t wake. I set down the plate with the bowl and the bread, then crept to the corner of the tent where he’d set his saddlebags, extra blankets, and provisions and clothing. There was his rifle, propped against the saddlebags, but it wasn’t loaded. While searching for the ammunition, I found his holster and pistol instead. I took out the gun. It was a Colt .45. The gun still smelled of powder from his recent shooting in the desert.

  A hand closed around my ankle. I screamed and whirled around. Van Slooten had risen to his knees and now looked up at me with a grin. “Now there’s a good girl,” he said. “Come to rob me. Or cut my throat in my sleep. Just like a Mormon.” His eyes looked at me, blurry and unfocused. That I held his Colt in my hand didn’t seem to penetrate his stupor.

  I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell. It wasn’t loaded.

  Van Slooten roared with anger as he spotted the weapon. He yanked on my ankle and I fell to the ground. He crawled on top of me, and even though he was stinking drunk and could barely control his limbs, he was too big and strong and heavy to shake loose.

  “Help me! Someone!”

  He grabbed my throat and squeezed. I brought my knee up into his groin, but he barely flinched. Sweat dripped from his face onto mine. His eyes bugged, and that same maddening smile crawled across his face.

  “Bloody Mormon. Cut Huff’s throat like a pig at the slaughter. What’s your name—Cowley, ain’t it? You know the man’s name? Hyrum Cowley. That’s your man. I knew it from the first.”

  Hyrum. His first wife was still in Salt Lake, suffering from tuberculosis. His second had run off—that must be the woman who had been trying to escape to Fort Laramie. Hyrum would have been in his early twenties at the time. It could have been my husband. It must have been.

  “That’s right,” van Slooten said. “I knew. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I joined the marshals in the first place? I’m waiting for your man. And when he sees I’ve raped and murdered his wives, he’ll go mad. And only then will I kill him.”

  My lungs burned. I tried to cry out, but the grip on my throat was as unrelenting as the grave.

  Light flared at van Slooten’s back as someone opened the tent flap. He turned, eyes still unfocused. His grip loosened, and I drew in a ragged breath. It was Laura. She threw herself on the man, but he tossed her aside.

  Van Slooten scrambled toward his saddlebags. Another gun? A hunting knife?

  But the man was drunk, and as he made his way for the saddlebags his right hand hit the soup where I’d set it on the tent floor. He flipped the bowl, and a spray of scalding liquid flew into his face. Van Slooten screamed and pawed at his eyes. I was thinking more clearly now. I grabbed the empty Colt and swung it at the man’s head. It caught him a glancing blow across the temple.

  “Shoot him!” Laura screamed.

  “No bullets! Get the whiskey bottle!”

  She snatched it up and smashed it over his skull just as I hit him with the gun again. Van Slooten crawled away from our blows. He crashed into the side of the tent and it partially collapsed. He made for the entrance.

  The battle continued as van Slooten escaped from the tent. He bled from a cut above his eye, and one of my blows had crunched against his mouth. But he was about to get to his feet and get away. And then Annabelle stepped up and hit him across the face with the soup ladle. Maude had a stick of firewood and started in on him. He screamed and flailed as we attacked him with a soup ladle, an empty pistol, a broken whiskey bottle, and a stick of firewood. It wasn’t enough. We couldn’t finish the job.

  “Don’t let him go!” I said.

  I ran back to the half-collapsed tent. While the other three women beat at him, I rummaged through his saddlebags until I found the bullets for his pistol. I loaded rounds into the Colt with shaking hands, then flipped the cylinder shut and left the tent.

  Van Slooten had regained his
feet. He held Maude’s stick of firewood and sneered at me through his ruined teeth where I had knocked two of them out. Blood streamed down his face. Laura was in the way, and I couldn’t get a clean shot. He charged at me.

  Laura ducked out of the way. Van Slooten lost his balance and fell to the ground. I pushed past the other women and approached the fallen man, who looked up at me and slurred something unintelligible as I pressed the barrel to his forehead. He tried to regain his feet. I pulled the trigger. The gun roared and bucked in my hand. Van Slooten’s head rocked back, and blood sprayed out the back of his skull. He didn’t move. The gunshot rolled across the desert. Somewhere in Witch’s Warts a crow cried its alarm.

  For a long moment we stood gasping.

  “Sweet heaven,” Laura said. Drops of blood freckled across her face. “What have we done?”

  Annabelle stared dumbly at the dead, naked man and let the ladle fall from her grasp to land with a thud on the sand. She turned away suddenly, face gray, and clamped her hands over her mouth.

  “It’s over,” Maude said. Tears streamed down her face. Then, again and again, “It’s over, it’s over.” Her voice rose to a hysterical pitch. “It’s over!”

  Laura and I grabbed her to calm her down. No women popped out of their cabins and no children looked out from the remaining wagons, but I knew that every person in camp had heard. I needed to get control before they disobeyed my order and came out to see this horrible, bloody sight. “It’s over,” Maude said one last time, her voice soft now.

  “Yes, it’s over.”

  Or so I thought at the time. But van Slooten wasn’t our real enemy. It was still out there, lurking in Witch’s Warts, doing to our souls what the federal marshal had tried—and failed—to do to our bodies.

  Jacob lowered the diary. “What are you driving at?” he whispered.

  And he still didn’t have his answer about what Rebecca was doing down at Grandma Cowley’s house at Yellow Flats. He glanced at Fernie, sleeping by his side. She’d stopped him at the point when Grandma Cowley entered the tent to kill van Slooten, asked him to read without her after she fell asleep.

  “It’s too much,” she said. “I can’t stomach it. You can read it and tell me about it in the morning.”

  He wished now she were awake. The diary left a shadow in his mind, the sort of dark, creeping dread that made him want to turn on all the lights in the house and double-check the locks, make sure the windows were securely latched.

  Daniel moaned on the floor. Jacob started to climb out of bed, when the boy abruptly stopped struggling with his sleeping bag and his breathing turned slow and regular. Jacob leaned back with a sigh of relief and opened the diary again.

  December 21, 1890

  Annabelle Kimball gave herself to Lucifer’s angel this afternoon. By the time it finished with her, everything had changed. I should tell you first what happened in the past two months.

  Pox hit the camp in late October, the day after I finished writing about Frederick van Slooten’s death. The younger Johnson boys caught it first. Sister Leticia brought the children to me at breakfast to show me their pink tongues and the rashes on their backs and arms. I ordered them quarantined.

  The boys grew sicker, and by the third evening the younger child was delirious, burning up. The older had recovered strength and his rash began to scab over. By the by, five other children fell ill, plus Sister Laura.

  I thought about going for help. Panguitch is the closest town, but there is no road in that direction, just a series of hills and mountains that might be impassable. Better would be Cedar City, which lay in the direction from which we had come, but even that would be two days by horse. By the time I returned, the illness might have passed. I stayed on my knees for an hour before retiring for bed. I begged the Lord to tell me whether to go or to stay.

  He sent His answer while I slept.

  I woke the next morning feverish and chilled. A terrible, burning itch spread down my back and started again at the ankles. Swollen balls formed at my throat and armpits, so rigid and painful that I screamed when Sister Maude touched them.

  “You’ll stay in bed,” she said.

  “How is Laura?”

  “Never mind her.”

  “And Annabelle—”

  “I’ll deal with Sister Annabelle. At least for the next few days, until you recover.”

  “We don’t have enough firewood, not since we left the cliffs in such a hurry.” I swallowed, an act so painful it felt like liquid fire pouring down my throat. “We have to go back.”

  “You’re doing nothing of the kind. Do that and you’ll kill yourself. Rest. I insist.”

  I obeyed. It was a week before I got out of bed.

  Nobody died in that first wave, not even Timothy Johnson, who’d caught the earliest and one of the most severe cases. Instead the pox rolled through the camp family by family, each bout lasting a week or longer. By December it had mostly played out, and I thought we’d escape.

  But the last case was the worst of all. Poor Walter Kimball was only three, too young to understand the pain. Annabelle tied his hands in mittens to keep him from tearing at his skin to get rid of the itch. The illness tormented him day after day, the pox still spreading even as other children began to recover, their fevers breaking. Annabelle called me last night to give him a blessing—the women are giving blessings freely now, ignoring our lack of the priesthood—and I was shocked at how thin and pale he was. His ribs stood out, and his cheekbones were sharp and fine.

  We tried to comfort Annabelle, tell her it might still pass. If only the fever would break, he would be out of danger. She nodded, eyes red and weeping. Nannie bawled in the background, looking every bit the child herself.

  And so it came as no surprise when Annabelle woke the camp with her screams this morning. Maude and Laura led her away while Nannie, Leticia, and I wrapped the boy—rigid, white, eyes bulging, and a horrid purple swelling at the throat—in white linen.

  I found a grassy rise about a mile south, and the women walked there to dig and dedicate Walter’s grave. We carried the dead child between us. Annabelle was unable to help but watched the rest of us work while she shivered, a shawl over her head and a blanket around her shoulders. I dedicated the grave with a prayer.

  We were lowering Walter into the ground when Annabelle snapped. She screamed and rushed at us, swearing he wasn’t dead, he was only sleeping. Maude and Laura blocked her path. She clawed at them and forced her way through.

  I grabbed her arm before she could throw herself into the pit with her dead child. “Leave me alone!” she cried. Maude and Laura helped me pull her back.

  Annabelle tore free again, but this time she didn’t fight toward the grave. Instead, she turned and ran back toward the camp. I restrained the others while she disappeared over the rise of the next hill.

  “You stay here and finish this grim business,” I told them. “I’ll go after Annabelle.”

  “Be careful,” Laura said. “She’s not in her right mind.”

  Annabelle didn’t stop when she reached the camp. A light snow had fallen during the night, now melting in the sun, and I had no trouble following her footprints from camp and into Witch’s Warts. What in blue blazes was she thinking? Was she trying to hide? Injure herself?

  Or was it something even more sinister than that?

  I found her a few minutes later. She lay on her back, spine arched, hands clutching at the air. Her dress hung up around her face. She bucked and thrashed as if fighting with an invisible foe.

  “Annabelle Young!” I cried out. “For the love of—what’s the matter?”

  She said nothing, made no sound except for the beating of her limbs against the ground. We were between two sandstone reefs, a narrow, sandy place maybe ten feet across. The sun was out but low on the horizon, and a gloomy pall hung over the place. I made my way forward, thinking I’d slap her, shock her out of whatever paroxysm had taken control of her body.

  A cloud passed in
front of the sun. I glanced up at the sudden darkness and shivered at the deepened winter chill, and when I looked back, a shadow lay on top of Annabelle. It twisted and curled like a thick, oily smoke. But as I stared, my eyes picked out a shape. The shape of a man.

  “Leave her alone!” I cried.

  The angel looked up and smiled. I staggered back in shock. It wasn’t a spirit I saw then, but the dead marshal, Frederick van Slooten, a neat hole in his forehead where the bullet had penetrated.

  My eyes continued to stare, and the illusion of the dead man’s spirit disappeared. And now it was something else, some man or creature. He lay naked on top of Annabelle, thrusting at her with a monstrous, bent member between his legs. She moaned.

  “Leave her alone.” My voice shook.

  “Go,” he said, his voice gravelly. “Leave us.”

  “I see thee. I know what thou art.” My voice strengthened, and a righteous anger flowed through my veins. “I rebuke thee. Get thee hence and trouble us no more!”

  He laughed. “You have no priesthood,” he said. “You have no power, no claim over me. I serve my master, and he has commanded me to take control of these parts. Turn around, Rebecca Cowley, and run for your life. Hide, if you can. When I finish with Annabelle, I shall come for thee.”

  My heart leaped into my throat. I almost turned and fled. But I didn’t. I may not have a man’s priesthood, but I am a daughter of God. I ran at him, threw myself at his throat. He let go of Annabelle and faced me with a snarl. We met and wrestled to the ground.

  I fought the dark angel today. I defeated him. And when I finished, the Lord anointed me His prophetess.

  May 28, 1893

  Our husbands arrived yesterday in Blister Creek.

  We thought they were dead. After so long alone in the wilderness, with no man to guide us, we made Zion for ourselves, broke and built this land by the sweat of our own brows. The desert has blossomed under our stewardship.

  And now the men come.