Virgin River

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Late in the morning they reached the great valley that formed the artery of Utah. And here they encountered traffic at once, bearded men hurrying past, their gazes dour and dismissive. No one cared about a few Indians or someone in buckskins.

  Even as they stood, resting, beside the trail leading north to Cedar City, or south to St. George, four riders raced by, most of them holding their horses to a steady jog. They did not even nod in Skye’s direction, and kept their gazes glued to the trail ahead. It seemed odd.

  Skye watched a southbound rider draw nigh and waylaid him, stepping Jawbone out on the trail.

  “Hello, friend,” Skye said.

  A young man of wild eye drew up impatiently. The man’s horse was lathered and weary. The man surveyed Skye and nodded curtly.

  “We’re looking for news,” Skye said. “Something about a scare? Are the Paiutes causing trouble?”

  “Sir, I don’t know a thing,” the man said. “I must pass.”

  “Well, which way is safest?” Skye asked.

  “There is no trouble. None at all,” the man said, touching heels to the flank of the gaunt old plug he was riding. He began to work around Skye.

  “We’ve heard otherwise,” Skye said.

  “Sorry,” the man replied, and hastened away.

  He was plainly agitated.

  “I told you so,” said Victoria, somewhat mysteriously.

  Skye turned to her. “Told me what?”

  “He was a man with bad memories.”

  “Such as?”

  Victoria shrugged. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Who was that?” Mickey asked.

  “Some Saint in a big hurry,” Skye said.

  A farm wagon was working its way north, drawn by a pair of mules. Skye dismounted and waited. The driver seemed in no hurry. Like most male Saints, he wore a trimmed beard. His wagon groaned under a load of green melons and yellow squash. And contrary to the others, he reined in the mules.

  “Nice morning,” the man said.

  “It is. You must be taking these to market.”

  “Cedar City, yes. It’s the only place I can sell these.”

  “We’re looking for some people. There was an Indian scare and our people were rounded up and taken to safety.”

  “Indian scare?” The man peered from watery eyes at Victoria and Mary. “None around here. West, some, they was actin’ a little frisky.”

  “I’m Mister Skye, sir. We’re looking for a company of invalids.”

  “Oh, I heard tell of them. Lungers. They got the devil in’em. Bible itself says them that’s sick is full of sin. I reckon they’ll get freed up of sin, or not.”

  “Have you heard where they were taken?”

  The seamed old man chewed a straw, and finally gazed steadily into Skye’s face. “If I knew, I wouldn’t say. But I don’t. Reckon they’ll get what’s coming to them if they’re sinners. That’s how the Good Lord works. Me, I’ve never been sick a day in my life, excepting some piles. It’s rectitude. And if I didn’t eat a mite fast, I’d not have piles, either. You’ve got to chew your food slow, just as God intended. But I never quite mastered it. I got the sin of fast eating.”

  “Where would your militia take our people?”

  “Now you’ve fetched me one I can’t answer. I reckon I’d better get along to Cedar City.”

  “Would you trade those squash for anything?”

  “The prophet says, says he, not a bit of food to Gentiles, long as there’s war a-coming.”

  “I’m a Saint,” said Mickey.

  “Some Saint you are, trafficking with these,” the farmer said.

  The man cracked reins over rumps, raising dust. The mules lowered their heads, pushed into the collars, and fell into step.

  “Can you help us at all? Even a rumor?” Skye asked.

  “Well, they got to be somewhere.”

  The mules picked up speed, and the creaking wagon rumbled north. Skye watched the wagon until it grew too small to follow and finally vanished. The farmer wasn’t armed. And he was traveling alone, not in company. And he seemed utterly oblivious to real or imagined dangers.

  A faint pall of yellow dust hung in the air, until it slowly drifted away. There was only the oppressive silence of the desert and the building midday heat.

  It came to him that he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do next.

  “You got any ideas?” he said to Mickey the Pick.

  “There’s not going to be some’ospital, it looks like.”

  Skye turned to Victoria.

  “We got a few pine nuts, that’s all,” she said.

  He offered Mary a chance.

  “Go home,” she said.

  It was a good idea. “We’re done. We delivered the company to the Virgin River. We fed them while they got set up. Sterling’s joined these people here, so he can bargain. I’d have liked to say good-bye, but there’s no one to say it to.” He gazed at them. “Have we left anything undone?”

  No one said a word.

  It felt odd, not knowing the fate of the company, or saying good-bye, or making sure the contract was completed. But there was only the empty valley, the glaring sun, and the silence.

  He started Jawbone north along the well-worn road to Cedar City, and the rest fell in behind him. They struck Ash Creek and followed alongside it, glad to have water and grass for a while. But nothing felt right. This was unfinished business. He wanted a conclusion. He wanted a handshake, a sense that all would be well. But he found none of that this time.

  They reached Cedar City at dusk, worn-out and starving. They had nothing. The last of the pine nuts were gone. There was no pemmican or jerked meat. The stores were shuttered. The clay streets were empty. It was as if the town was asleep, though in fact it was not late. Skye had the distinct feeling that something was terribly wrong, but it was entirely intuitive. Still, it was odd that not one soul was visible on the streets, or sitting on a front porch enjoying an evening, or stirring within a house.

  They drifted on through, awakening no curiosity, and finally reached the north end of town. Now it was dark. In minutes it would be utterly black.

  “You blokes go up there a mile, maybe, and wait for me,” Mickey said.

  “What are you up to?”

  “No blawdy questions.”

  Skye thought he knew. Maybe it would be best not to ask. He and his weary family trudged a way up the road, found a likely spot beside a creek that watered the little brick-making town, and let the horses graze on picket lines.

  One of the ponies would do for a few days, he thought. He would slit its throat and butcher it. He’d had horsemeat plenty of times. Mule meat, burro meat, donkey meat, draft horse meat, foal meat, cow meat. These ponies had been used hard and wouldn’t butcher well, and their meat would be stringy. But meat was meat.

  Victoria, reading his mind as usual, pointed to the smaller one. “He’s no good anymore,” she said.

  Skye studied the pony, grazing peacefully under the starry heavens.

  “Ah, there you are,” said the cutpurse. “Ye can’t’ide from me.”

  He deposited a burlap sack of something or other before them.

  “They got good gardens in that town,” he said. “Old Mickey remembered that it’s harvesttime.”

  forty-four

  At Nephi, halfway to Great Salt Lake, Skye tried for food. It was a bustling little town, with a whitewashed board and batten mercantile, so Skye headed for it. Here at least the Saints were busy with their daily lives, the streets were crowded, and shutters were open.

  He found the bald proprietor behind a rough wooden counter.

  “I’m looking for food. I have a pony to trade,” he said.

  The man eyed him up and down. “You’re not a Saint, I take it. No, we’re forbidden to sell food to Gentiles.”

  “My family’s hungry.”

  The man shrugged, a frown on his forehead.

  “We’re not at war with you. We’re going
home.”

  “Home to Missouri or Illinois?”

  “Home to my Crow wife’s people.”

  “I’m not familiar with that tribe.”

  “Look, the pony’s well broke, has a good mouth, hauls a travois, can be used as a saddle horse or plow horse or a dray.”

  “You’re not a Yank.”

  “Londoner.”

  “It’s a pity. I’d trade if you were a Saint.”

  “We’re hungry. You’ll get a valuable horse out of it.”

  The skinny merchant wiped hands on his white apron, peered out into the sunny street. “Which?” he asked.

  “The one hauling the lodgepoles. You get the poles too, and the travois.”

  “I wouldn’t really be selling food to you, would I? I’d be trading a little grain and other goods for valuable meat, right? The Church wants plenty of food on hand for the war, and horse meat is better than a barrel of flour, right?”

  Skye waited.

  “Ten dollars of provisions against the pony?” the merchant asked.

  “That pony’s worth more.”

  The storekeeper wiped his hands primly. “Take it or not.”

  Skye stared at the man, who somehow smiled and frowned simultaneously. “What does ten dollars buy?”

  The man shrugged. “Prices are posted.”

  Skye did it, mostly because he was sick of surviving on what Mickey lifted from gardens and root cellars and chicken coops. Silently he undid the travois, freed the harness, and turned the pony over to the merchant, and then he bought flour, beans, a little tea, some barley, and some raisins. It wasn’t much. The merchant was enjoying himself; Skye was raging, but this was not friendly turf and a man could get into trouble fast.

  They escaped Nephi minus one travois and pony, but now they had enough to feed themselves for a few days. And they still had the valuable lodge cover riding the other travois.

  There was no more trouble. They reached Great Salt Lake City in a few days. Skye knew what he was going to do, and started hunting for anyone connected with the territorial government. Here was a blooming, busy city, with a great adobe tabernacle, a walled square, the Lion House, the Beehive House, the Council House, some of the buildings looking like transplants from the east.

  But not Brigham Young. Skye sensed he would get nowhere with the prophet, if he could even gain an audience. A federal judge if possible. Some inquiries brought him to the white clapboard home of Judge Serene Peace Thorndike, an appointee of President Buchanan.

  Hat in hand, he knocked, while his family and Mickey waited in the dirt street, just beyond a picket fence. A woman opened.

  “Judge Thorndike please, madam. I am Barnaby Skye.”

  “If it’s government business, he can’t help. The territory’s not in federal hands.”

  “All the more reason,” Skye said.

  A few moments later the judge beckoned Skye into a parlor to the left, and Skye settled gingerly on a horsehair settee with doilies on the arms. A lamp with twin chimneys occupied a cherry side table. Thorndike wore a gray cutaway coat, a certain formality about him even in his own home. He studied Skye, noting the trail-blackened buckskins and the bearclaw necklace that hung, as always, from Skye’s neck. Their gazes met.

  “You have business? I take it you’re not a Saint?”

  “No, sir; it’s about missing people.”

  Thorndike grunted. “I should forewarn you, Mister Skye, I have no power. I’m deposed. The Saints have taken over. I have no bailiff, no clerk, no marshal or constable. I might be a federal official, but you could call this house arrest.”

  Swiftly Skye told his story: employment by Hiram Peacock, taking consumptives to the desert, Peacock’s death from the brutal fist of a trail guide named Manville, Enoch Bright taking over, reaching the place on the Virgin River they had sought, only to have his company vanish in the hands of a local militia who said they were protecting the group from Paiute Indians.

  Thorndike listened intently, his brown eyes studying Skye.

  “Who are the missing?” he asked.

  “Enoch Bright, sir, a mechanic. He made the wheels turn. He encouraged and comforted the sick, and taught them to dream of a better day to come. They would not have made it without him.

  “And Anna Bennett, slim, eighteen, fevered and yet strong and willful, determined to get well. Lloyd Jones, a lunger like the others but sturdy Welsh stock, who teamstered all the way. Lloyd has a brother, David, just as sturdy as himself.

  “And Eliza and Mary Bridge, lovely sisters, seventeen and nineteen, both of them afflicted and fevered, yet they carried on, dreaming of a place where they could breathe once again. And twins, Grant and Ashley Tucker, twelve, terribly ill, but determined. And Peter Sturgeon, the sickest, the one who had to be carried all the way … Sterling Peacock, Hiram’s boy, actually the heir, the one who owns the wagons and equipment and stock, sometimes fevered, sometimes strong, rallying and losing ground. He’s a man with his father′s gifts, sir. I should add that the Peacock family lost others along the way, Samantha and Raphael. That’s a terrible sickness, sir. Hiram Peacock tried to get them all out to the desert, and bad luck dogged him all the way.”

  Thorndike stared out the window a moment. “This town’s buzzing with certain rumors that I will not divulge. Nothing has been proven and until there is evidence I will say nothing.”

  Skye sensed there was a lot happening in Utah Territory that he might never know.

  Thorndike finally stared directly at his visitor. “Frankly, Mister Skye, the chances are very slim.”

  “Chances?”

  “That they live.”

  “The Paiutes, then?”

  Thorndike shook his head, sadly. “Now, sir, are you aware that there is a territorial warrant for your arrest?”

  “Warrant, for what?”

  “Theft. It says you stole a Sharps rifle from a guide named Jimbo Trimble. The complaint is signed by another guide named Manville and a Saint named Rockwell, from Fort Bridger.”

  Skye felt a certain horror, then rage. He stood. “Then be damned,” he said. “Manville’s the man who murdered Hiram Peacock, and now he’s guiding a wagon train to California. Trimble shot at my company, killed a prize horse, and lost the Sharps in a scuffle. I found it.”

  “Whoa, Mister Skye. I haven’t so much as a constable at hand, and I probably would dismiss the warrant as groundless anyway if I had a court, but I don’t happen to be a sitting judge, courtesy of this little war.”

  Skye was poised to bolt. He had no intention of getting trapped by such accusations.

  “Sit.” A single wave of the judge’s finger sufficed.

  “Manville is simply a scoundrel. I have not administered the courts of this territory with deaf ears. And Rockwell’s fired by fanaticism. A fanatic, sir, is a man who will ride roughshod over every ethic, social restraint, or law, to further his cause. This territory’s full of fanatics, and to such a degree that I fear for my life and stay armed.”

  Slowly he drew his cutaway coat open, to reveal a small revolver at his side.

  “Your course of action should be plain. Do not go back the way you came. There are twenty-five hundred of the Utah militia near Fort Bridger, waiting to take on the federal column when it comes. And some Paiutes too. You would not last ten minutes. There are other ways to escape this territory. North, for one. It is not patrolled, but you would wish to be careful even so.”

  Skye nodded. “To the Bear River and into the mountains. I’ve been that way.”

  “Go that way.”

  “We have almost no food and no way to get it.”

  “I can’t help you. But there’s game up there.”

  “You know the country, sir.”

  “Mister Skye, I wasn’t going to tell you rumors, but I have changed my mind. The rumors are that a large party of California-bound immigrants, called the Fancher Train, was besieged by Paiutes at a place called Mountain Meadows, near Cedar City. These Indians had been incited
to attack the train by Saints. It is further rumored that the Saints offered to intercede, take the immigrants to safety.” His manner grew stern. “Then when the immigrants were freed from the grasp of the Paiutes and had surrendered their arms as a token of good faith, the Saint militiamen themselves slaughtered them, save for little children. A hundred twenty men, women, and children. It seems there were a few Missouri and Illinois people among them, though most were from Arkansas.”

  The federal judge spoke dryly, not the slightest emotion crowding his narration.

  “Of course it’s all rumor,” he said. “We are wanting the facts. But there are a few loyal men here, even among the Saints, who have kept me apprised. It’ll be something to report to the president when I can.”

  Skye felt dizzy. “What militia?”

  “The county militia there. The one based in Cedar City. The Saints have militia in every community. These were the ones who, I suppose, took away your people from their camp for their safety.”

  It was too much to endure. Skye turned his head away so Judge Thorndike could not see his face.

  forty-five

  In the clay street, Skye told his family and Mickey what he had learned. They listened somberly.

  “They are dead,” Victoria said.

  “It is only rumor,” Skye said.

  “I knew it long ago.”

  Skye had learned not to dispute her ways of knowing things. He nodded.

  The September sun lit the broad street in this gracious city, erected out of the wilderness by a persecuted people. He tried not to grieve. They might yet live. And yet, oddly, he had already grieved. They were gone and he would not see them again. Their dreams had come to an end on a healing field, surrounded by red rock, beside a babbling creek.

  He lifted his old top hat and held it in his hand, feeling the wind riffle his hair. It was loss, not grief, that he felt. He wished that Enoch Bright might be standing beside him, his mechanic’s mind repairing wagons, people, animals, and dreams. He wished Hiram Peacock might be here, his dream of healing a dozen sick young people flourishing in his bosom. He had brought them on an epic journey across a continent, looking simply for a climate that would drive the disease out of their young bodies. He had put his last penny into it, gambled that he could do it, and now there was nothing left. No Peacock survived. The family was gone.